Ep1 - Motuo, China - 'Reset' - Closed

Cleaver stepped through the groundbridge into an overgrown jungle, feeling utterly unprepared and entirely overwhelmed. Her last encounter with Megatron had instilled her with a new fear of the warlord, and to face him alone again with no comprehension of what he was trying to pull frightened her to the core.

She did not expect him to look relieved to see her when she set optics on his glowing red ones in the dark, plates tightening at the flare of his field across her. He moved before she did, massive pedes carrying him forwards down the mossy and vine-tangled slope, only stopping with a frown when she took an unconscious step back. The medic waited, the sound of her own systems deafeningly loud to her audios.

The Decepticon warlord cast his optics about, his brow still heavily drawn, before cocking his helm at the smaller femme. "Where are we, Cleaver? And what has happened to me?"

Cleaver twitched her helm in the negative, optics still wide as she threw every scanner she had forwards onto the mech. Massive processor damage, largely around his memory core. Evidence of several seizures and system-wide stress. The confusion was genuine, edged with sincere anxiety and disorientation.

"I don't know," she uttered carefully, chancing a step towards him, her blades raised in a near-defensive posture. "Without examining you, I don't know."

((Tag to Cat. She can either make herself noticed, or else Megatronus is gonna notice her.))

When the warlord continued to make absolutely no threatening moves (aside from standing there being Lord Megatron of the Decepticons), Cleaver chanced another step, then another, finally coming to stand just to one side of the enormous mech. His optics followed her silently, obviously perplexed but yielding to her authority in waiting for answers.

She motioned with one blade towards the ground, still not taking her gaze from his. Watching for that warning flicker of violence she was so accustomed to seeing. "Come on: Let me look at you properly."

A tense pause before he obeyed, optics shifting downwards with great scepticism to watch the organic mess of plantlife and soil crumple and dent beneath his knees. Cleaver waited, stunned by his compliance, then came to stand behind him.

She activated the search lights around her chassis and took in the deep scorch marks covering the entirity of the back of his helm, branches of black and blistered paint arcing out down his neck struts, into his collar faring and across the uppermost planes of his back and shoulders. Close-range shot from behind. Only hours old and still hissing with residual heat where the coolant lines that should have been funneling heat away had been flash-burnt.

"You got shot with a blaster," the medic announced flatly, blades transforming to lay hands on his helm plating. Not seeing his face made it infinitely easier to still the tremble, as was the flow of trust/reliance/yielding filling his field atop the expected tension and pain. Her scanners read easily into his systems, familiar but disastrously wrong. "Whole mess of other problems, but that's the most recent. I'll need to open you up to see the rest."

The warlord rumbled a short sound of acknowledgement, helm tipping back to face the night sky when he felt Cleaver's hands move to his collar faring. "Where are we?"

Cleaver found the medical port exactly where it had been millions of years ago, tapping it with a fingertip before extending a dataline from her wrist. "Little rock called Earth."

"Have I been in stasis?" He showed no outward sign of paying attention to being jacked into, his optics tracking the constellations for any familiar marker. There were some distant, faint points of light that he almost recognized, but they seemed to have drifted somehow. "Was I brought here?"

Memory core was fragged like it had been core-locked, shutting down and partitioning in an emergency response to the power overload and the cascade of system failures that had followed it. Cleaver catalogued it all, bringing up his old Kaon schematics and files automatically, though they were hideously outdated. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"Coming to you after Crashmaster." He brought his hands to his chassis, touching the tips of his claws to his central seam. "Though it seems that those... repairs are complete."

Cleaver reset her optics, withdrawing from looking over the scrolling list of errors she was copying from him to her CPU to stare at the back of his helm. "Crashmaster."

The dumb repetition of the sadistic towerling's name triggered an irritated rumbled from the industrial-sized vents. "How much time has passed?"

Withdrawing the data line, Cleaver came around to stand in front of the kneeling mech. They were at almost optic height with one another, the mingled lights in the dark shifting queasily from the refractions of emotions and confusion. "What year is it? Right now."

With the assessment apparently over, the mech shifted one pede forward ready to rise. "Why are we on Earth?"

Of their own accord, Cleaver's arms slid back into their natural configurations and hung like weights at her sides. "What's your designation?" she asked quietly, firmly, already certain of the answer but just needing to hear him say it.

He rose abruptly with an engine roar, crowding the stocky medic with field and frame, growling directly into her faceplates. "Answer me, medic!"

Cleaver's optics flashed, one blade coming up to make jarring contact with the thick helm whilst the other planted into a hip seam and forced him back down to his knees the ground. "Mind me you slag-sucking heap of scrap, or I'll shatter you for parts!"

Her spark blanched a nano-klik later, seizing so hard it felt like it was going to snuff itself.

She almost breathed a sigh of relief, becoming more relaxed as their conversation carried on. Not because she was succeeding at going unnoticed (though that was something she would certainly celebrate later), but because even now there hadn't been weapons raised. Whatever was going on, whatever was wrong with Megatron for whatever reasons, they seemed to be familiar enough to trust. Familiar enough for him to contact her, injured and a little bit confused as he was.
That little dominance battle aside, things seemed to be settling on their own. Being okay. …As okay as they could be, all certain big, giant things aside.

With luck, she'd be able to slip back into the ground bridge undetected by either of them. She shifted slowly at that time, for a group of young, crowded trees to hide, wait in. 'Til the focus shifted. His focus. She should have known better. Luck liked to offer her a chair and pull it out from underneath her.

She froze, back going straight as it had been before, and attempted to grab at one of the thoughts swarming around up there in her head. He was looking at her, she noted, much the same way she would look at a giant spider: With a cannon.
She shot a brief glance to Cleaver, and inhaled deeply.

"Hi." She blurted.. small clearing of her throat. "I'm a human." It came out far more steady than she felt. "I live here… One of the natives, here on Earth." And perhaps from anxiousness, she added a short "…Welcome." in much the same way one would say Sup? With a wave of her hand to the misty forest around them.
'He's either going to flip or pause to say 'what the fuck' and then flip.' She couldn't decide which she preferred.

"And that'd be very much appreciated," Cleaver drawled, reeling both from the relief that he hadn't just outright killed Cat from where he knelt and that he had called himself Megatronus... "Primus on a piston. Give me that arm - and start turning out your subspace if you've got the means to. Cat, over here, now."

The medic split her optical focus to watch Cat make her way across the uneven ground and come to stand a little way from her left pede, her hands busy prying the massive weapon from the gladiator's arm. It figured that the weapon had become a part of the warlord's frame, impossible to take off without a cutting torch.

She rested his arm across her knee, rapping on the welded plates holding the whole structure together. "Gonna have to cut through these to dismount it. Ties into a blade underneath, and I think the whole thing will come off in one piece. Won't hurt - just stay still."

Megatronus rumbled assent over the sound of his shoulder and upper arm hydraulics locking to keep the limb skill, his optics fixed with intense scrutiny upon Cat. Cleaver did not follow his gaze down but kept at her work, the light of the cutting torch flashing in the dark as she began to pry apart the solid armor.

"Cat, pray tell - what are you doing here? Willfully endangering yourself by wandering into an unknown situation when I told you to stay put?"

Simultaneously, Cleaver opened a comm. line to Sideswipe back at the base. ::'Sides - got an injured Decepticon I'll be bringing back with me real soon for the Medbay. Since you don't get on nice with them, I want your aft out of there now. 'Bridge out for a few breems.::

"Well that's… fan-fucking-tastic." It was muttered, on the wind of a laugh that was both nervous and relieved. She felt about a hundred pounds lighter, shoulders more relaxed than they maybe should have been, and moving in a way that look like she enjoyed navigating through roots, rocks, and shrubs. Cleaver could be scary.. but she knew at least that she wouldn't be outright squished. "Yes, Ma'am." She muttered on an exhale, pausing beside her pede for a brief glance up at her and her work.

Megatron towered. Even more massive than Cleaver, looming, and here he was only kneeling. Without a fuss letting Cleaver do her work, and regarding her much the same way someone might a little bird; a pet. For some reason… she just imagined something more snarly and insane, to fit the description of someone that could tear into two mechs like he did. Apparently, if Cleaver's hesitation was anything to go by, it was a lot different than what she was expecting, too. 'Name change might have something to do with that one.'

She took a slight step, towards a fallen tree. She wasn't feeling near calm enough to sit comfortably, but she did lean back on it and stared up at the one staring back, responding late to his introduction.
"Nice… to meet you, Megatronus." 'Only not fucking really.' " 'M Catherine. Cat, if you like."

'Ah, hell.' Wincing the second her name was repeated, head tilting to the side almost dramatically with a sigh. "That's a good question." She said, revealing a bit more hardness in her voice than she intended, hinting that she would have liked to ask Cleaver something similar. She looked away from the medic, correcting herself. "Seemed like a good idea-" 'the right thing to do' "-at the time."

“Fine. Fine. I’m followin’,” drawled Sideswipe, lazily curling his knees to his chest. “No need t’get tetchy, Master Commander. I’ll go take a fuckin’ spin. Twelve hours gonna be long enough for ya or you plannin’ t’coddle the Con for a day or three? Vegas is nice I hear.”

He rolled forward, rocking to his feet with his usual warrior-frame fluidity, strolling out of the rec room and into the main atrium. He stretched a little, arching his back strut and scrunching his face a bit as the linkages in his back and shoulders hummed and whined at the sudden change. He wandered over to the groundbridge control and, instead of turning it and going the hell through it like he said he was going to, the commando just folded his arms and leaned up against the back of the console facing the arch of the groundbridge.

“I’ll be out of here in a klik.” He smirked, pulling a handheld holo-game from his subspace and resuming his last session. "In juuust a klik."

Cleaver didn't have the processor space in this instance to parse over Sideswipe's response, just trusting that he was obeying (Primus help him and the rest of them, otherwise) and sending back short-hand glyphs for twelve hours and thanks. Hopefully Megatronus wouldn't be in the base long enough to cause serious problems, though she didn't have high hopes for a quick turnaround.

His processor was slagged, and he believed the events with Crashmaster had just happened.

Primus...

The mechs weaponry and and possessions secured in her own over-stuffed subspace, Cleaver shifted back to watch him stand before turning to Cat. Until she knew what had happened, and had had a long talk with the young woman, she wanted the two of them interacting as little as possible. Not for the first time she wished that Cat was Cybertronian and could just receive data packages and silent communication over the air.

She knelt with an outstretched hand, feeling Megatronus watching them quietly. "Come on, Cat. We'll get back and... try to sort some of this slag out," she uttered, her mouth a thin line of worry. "Not gonna tell the others what's going on, alright? Too dangerous."


<<OOC: Tag to Cat, and then to Sides if you fancy it, Stark. Cleaver will lead them through the 'bridge, come to a halt when she sees Sides, and then Megatronus will just follow on none-the-wiser. >D>>