Gronius nods his head.
Many doorways, which would lead further into the ship, were locked. Delta, Alterion, and Redstocker could be found standing before a spherical doorway at the end of a long hall.
■■■■■■■■■■■■ wordlessly gestures toward the door, and the sentinel standing before it.
The door slides open with a hiss, and Sprocket could be seen poring over the remnants of a golden machine. Grommet was nowhere to be found.
Grommet was, in fact, on the surface of OL-2-C, studying the native wildlife in the mountains. Beside him, Thrift had landed his ship on a cliff, and rests against it as he passively surveys the landscape.
“Kinda empty-feeling, this place,” the junkion comments.
“Yes,” Grommet absent-mindedly agrees. “I’ll wager we’re the first intelligent lifeforms to visit this planet in ages. Present company excluded.”
Thrift doubles over and clutches his chest, feigning a jolt of deep pain.
“Oh, agony!” the merchant cries out. “My fragile spark!”
Facelift, meanwhile, was getting some fresh air- that’s what he had told the insecticon queen, anyway. In all honesty, he was just looking to spend some time away from her hand her brood.
“If Topside wasn’t such a nice guy, I swear…” he mutters.
Topside was, at that moment, unknowingly nearing the mysterious spire with Flyby and Broadband beside him.
The deactivation of the Omega Conflux had momentarily put a halt to Shockwave’s plans, and so the cyclops wanders the ship, drawing up new designs for his lab on his datapad.
Lurch walks along a catwalk on Salvation’s exterior, fuming.
Obsidian sighs as he deactivates a comm terminal, having just endured a blistering reprimand from Bludgeon. One Autobot and her turncoat friend shouldn’t have caused so much trouble, especially for him. Obsidian had failed, and he didn’t need Bludgeon’s condescension and holier-than-thou attitude to know it.
The general was not the only target of Bludgeon’s wrath, however.
“How long has that artifact been present aboard my ship, corrupting the minds of my scientists?” the warlord growls, glaring at a hologram of Lockdown.
“Long enough to put its effects to use toward your crusade,” the bounty hunter coldly retorts. “This isn’t my first time handling Dark Energon; the proper measures have been taken to mitigate its effects.”
Bludgeon scowls. To think that Lockdown would go behind the back of his employer… perhaps he’d been to generous in his initial assumption of his character. The longer this chase endured, the more the warlord became aware of such insubordination.
“Have you considered the effect it will have on your payment, bounty hunter?” he chastises Lockdown.
“What payment?” the mercenary scoffs. “Nearly two months into this job, and I haven’t seen so much as one shanix of what you promised me. Both parties must keep their end of the bargain, Bludgeon…”
“…Otherwise,” Lockdown continues after a pause, lowering his tone, “well… the outcome wouldn’t be pleasant for either of us…”