Salvation: Part II

The pilgrims working on the body look up from their work, casting bemused, yet also suspicious glances at Spectrum.

Facelift follows the minicon to the table, and cranes his neck downward to study the unfinished body.

“…Ooooh!” he exclaims, having a revelation. He turns to his kidnappers.

“You want me to help finish building this guy?” he asks. “Well why didn’t you just say so?!”

“Corona told us that you might have been… difficult to approach,” the four-armed neutral says apologetically.


“One was sent back to Cybertron,” Corona explains. “You may know it as the Omega Key. The locations of the other four pieces, we do not know.”


Grommet walks into a lab.

“I am a licensed practitioner of veterinary medicine under the authority of the Decepticon Empire,” he recites, only partly lying, to the nurse already inside. “I need to use this laboratory and its equipment for a moment, if you’d be so kind.”

The nurse looks around the room.

“I’m not sure I can do that…” he protests.

Grommet didn’t seem to care, as he was already setting Blackbeak down on a table to examine the bird.


If Motherboard mined, she didn’t show it.

The recording played up to the moment the ceremony ended, and then shut off as it showed Motherboard turning around and beginning to transform.

“Yes, crewman Zepar, I can hear you,” Zepar would hear Motherboard droning through his comlink. Wildsong, however, would not hear Motherboard say so much as a word.

Song followed him into the room.

“OK OK… Where is Corona?”

Grommet hands Blackbeak back to Delta.

“It’ll be fine,” he says. “It just needs some time in stasis. Normally, I’d do more, but my laboratory is about a mile up in the air and in pieces.”


“Unknown,” Motherboard replies.

“I’m gonna leave for the south, there’s something there I want to investigate.” He said, “Could you have someone sent over to guard the Key?” He asked, also sending her his coordinates.


Epsilon looked at Corona, “Do you know what took Facelift?” He asked.

Spectrum walked up to one of the pilgrims standing near the table and scrambled up it’s body, perching on its shoulder. She deployed her scanning device again and scanned the body.

“Affirmative,” Motherboard replies. As Zepar sends her his coordinates, she sends him the location of the two active ground bridges on the spaceport, in turn.


“Yes…” Corona says hesitantly.

“I… had him brought here.”


The pilgrim tenses, and the rest regard Spectrum with an air of suspicion. They seemed ready to attack her if she made a wrong move.

The body on the table, the scanner would affirm, was lifeless. Some of its inner components were about a million years old.

“For what?” Epsilon asked, “And why kidnap him?”


Zepar nodded and waited for someone to change the guard. Shadowraker was taking a nap at her little nook in the room.

“And when you say more you mean…?”

“For slag’s…! Do you have any recordings of Corona past the ones you already showed me?”

Spectrum hopped down from the pilgrim and looked at the others.
“Ne-e-ed h3lp?”

“I told my followers to enlist his help, not abduct him,” Corona says defensively. “I only hope no-one has been hurt.”


Driftburn/Scrapshot was present, giving Zepar freedom to leave.


“Well, I’d fix him, of course,” Grommet says. “But this place doesn’t have what I’d need.”


Motherboard displays a few recordings taken from her time flying around Salvation earlier. They showed Corona talking to Actaeon and Driftburn as the spaceport.


.[quote=“meepinater, post:3393, topic:49995, full:true”]
Spectrum hopped down from the pilgrim and looked at the others.
“Ne-e-ed h3lp?”
[/quote]

“That’s what we brought him for,” the male guard says, indicating Facelift, “but if you can help, too, I don’t see the harm in it.”

Spectrum claps her hands together happily.
“Y@y!”

“So… If he stays in stasis for a while, he would be good?”

“Who are those two guys?”

“He got shot by some kind of stun weapon when he was taken, if the screeching sound from his comlink is any indication.” Epsilon said.


Zepar walks towards Scrapshot/Driftburn. (@Jcton)

Facelift had already begun to examine the body. The other pilgrims back away to let the hecatian have space to work.

“Nice…” he mutters. “Not bad… a couple oversights here and there, but I guess that’s what you guys brought me here for…”

“Uh-huh,” the male guard confirms. “Corona saw that this sort of thing was your specialty.”

“That it is,” Facelift brags. “Though I haven’t built a body from scratch in a couple centuries…”


“That was not what I told them to do,” Corona says. “Please believe me.”


“Yes, he should be,” Grommet affirms.


“Crewmen Actaeon and Driftburn,” Motherboard identifies the two. The video disappears as two profiles- one for each of the aforementioned bots- are displayed on Motherboard’s visor.

Epsilon thought for a moment, recalling how some of his…fellow neutrals sometimes did a bit of overkill when hired to collect a target. “They did what was right by them; granted, a bit overkill.” He said, believing she was being honest.

“What did you need him for?” He asked as he kept following the tracks.

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“We need his skills as a hecatian shell-maker,” Corona explains.

“For the past seven thousand years, my followers have been building a body for a great warrior, who, I have foreseen, will take up arms against the forces of Chaos and defeat them. We came here to use the planet’s energies, left over from the Omega Lock’s destruction, so that we could bring him to life and deliver him to you and the rest of Salvation’s crew.”

“What else do you know about this guy?” Epsilon asked, “If they’re destined to oppose these forces of Chaos, they must be pretty good.”

“He is,” Corona affirms. “…Hopefully. His strength in battle in indisputable, at least.”

“…This hero… is Nova Prime,” the prophet admits with great reluctance. One could tell she knew d*mn well how absurd that sounded.

Epsilon tripped when heard that, “Okay, that name rings a bell but I’m not sure why.” He said as he got up, all he knew was the reluctant way Corona said that name made him feel like she was nervous for some reason.

“You’ve likely heard of him in the historical records,” Corona says. “Nova bore the Matrix of Leadership for a short period roughly a million years ago. He was an angelicon, like Zepar.”