(DONE) Ep.1 - Close Encounters of the Cybertronian Kind [FW]

[Deleted]

//ooc// Set three days before Like A Stray.

Soundtrack: Red Dead Redemption OST - Born Unto Trouble

("Stars Over the Sierra Nevada", by jcookfisher)

Sleep.

Since when had Sarita been able to experience the bliss of proper, honest-to-god sleep? Not in a while, not in what she could remember. The Craigslist gig hadn't worked out — someone had pulled the job out from under her at the last minute. If she had been in Jasper a day earlier, she would have had money for a motel room and to feed herself. That meant driving around to find a safe place to camp, all while trying to conserve gas — for three days, no less. What little she had left was going to be bled dry by the Sedan, "Sheila".

Alas, on the fourth day, fate relented. While searching around an old, abandoned section of industrial estate — booming in the early 2000s, lost to the financial gutting of the 2008 stock crashes — Sarita came across an unusual sight. Smack dab in the middle of the estate, there was a fenced-off area mostly untouched; even the nightly scrap-pickers avoided it. Their tire tracks and footprints concentrated around the perimeter of the place, with enough traffic that defined the boundaries of where they ventured. Such a fact should have pinged on Sarita's radar, especially as she was sensitive to the movements and patterns of people and places.

When one was sleep-deprived and frustrated, however, logic could be eclipsed by a "fuck-it-all" attitude. It wasn't too far from Jasper — only ten minutes, really — so for the past three nights, Sarita had parked there, navigating Sheila through a car-sized hole in the aforementioned fence. (It looked like someone had either smashed through it, or cut it with metal-cutters and pushed it backwards — someone with the same idea as her, maybe?) Her car tracks were glaringly obvious in the undisturbed sand, so every time she came in at night, she would take an old shirt, and smear the tire marks into oblivion. No one bothered her, no one came for her, and after the second night, Sarita found herself crashing into sleep.

Sleep. Sleep. Blissful, undisturbed REM sleep, the girl curled up in a series of blankets, only a head of black hair poking out from beneath them. Though the back seat made for a narrow mattress, anything was comfy with her current exhaustion, and the girl was used to sleeping on such. In fact, not having that edge of anxiety — always gnawing at the back of her mind about thieves, carjackers and other such things — dulled her to the sensation of scratchy fabric, of dusty blankets and the smell of her own sweat. Anything unclean and uncomfortable was forgotten, lost in the rich tapestry her dreams vibrantly wove.

[Deleted]

On the roof of the warehouse behind the car, Fairwinds perched like the massive bird of prey that she was and scowled at the human female curled up all innocent-like in the back of a 'beat-up' car. She wasn't being fooled. The industrial estate was large and with easily jammed security cameras - plenty of places for the human to go. There had only been one warehouse that the cassette was interested in, and had been visiting in the middle of her slightly-doctored patrols. Walmart's excess stock were always worth hitting in the day between storage and delivery.

Fairwinds had been coming here for four nights stuffing her subspace with memory cards, nail guns and enough epoxy to kill an elephant. That car and that human had been camping out here for three nights.

Coincidence? Fairwinds believed not.

She'd been held captive, hacked and tortured in the past - such was the life of a recon and data recovery cassette. Those few occasions she had been in enemy care had been learning curves at worst, and additional opportunities to gain intelligence at best - such was the perspective of a throttled processor linked to a cheery spark.

But her time at MECH had left her rattled in a way that she wasn't used to. The humans had, for decades, been easily evaded and manipulated, and ultimately outgunned should the need arise. Fairwinds had never truly entertained the thought that they might be a threat, and had been rudely alerted to this fact by MECH only weeks ago. Privately, she was ashamed as much as anything else. Mostly, though, she was indignant.

The meatsacks had bullied on her and super-lovely Roulette while they were doing nothing wrong (for once), and then tortured Roulette and shoved her in a tube and tried to play stupid mind games over Notepad. And now this human thought she was oh-so-smart, playing dumb and inoffensive in that car (which probably had rocket launchers and an EMP hidden behind ten inches of lead) was trying to take her back into MECH's clutches.

Well. She'd show the fleshling what a stupid idea that was.

Fairwinds snarled, a rough sound most unlike her, and spread her wings wide. The moonlight caught the slim, blade-sharp edges of her plates, and she cycled a vent through the pose before leaping from the roof.

She glided down to land as silently as she could on the trunk of the car. The metal groaned as it dented beneath her talons, and the car sank on its suspension when her full Cybertronian-dense weight settled. Flaring her wings past the width of the car, she extended her neck to rest her beak against the glass of the rear window.

The fleshling continued to sleep in its primitive bedding. Fairwinds dialed up the glow on her optics and pecked the glass hard enough to crack it.

"Knock knock!"

[Deleted]

The groan of metal and shift in the car wasn't enough to fully rouse her. Sarita remained in the throes of sleep, dreaming of medieval palaces and ladies in elegant dresses. The lilt of an unseen bard twirling through her dreams, the sound of Sheila in distress blended together with the strumming of a lute. Sarita was coming down a red-carpeted hallway, hair bound up with braids and flowers, wearing a dress of red, opals and gold —

The lute was off-key. The musician in her dreams never played off-key. Sarita gave a sharp intake of breath, both in reality and in her mental landscape, and sluggishly opened her eyes. Still on the edge of sleep, but far enough through REM to be roused, the woman gently turned her head; a blanket slightly moved. It revealed her eyes, warm brown and heavy, which came to rest upon the fiery-red optics Fairwinds possessed.

Eye contact was made. Sarita stared, unsure of what was going on, until Fairwinds's beak met glass. The loud crack of the splintering back window, now decorated with a spider web as if from a bullet hole, caused Sarita to stiffen. Her face was one of shock, Fairwinds could see the whites of her eyes, and all the woman could register was the shadow of a monster.

"Knock knock!"

Sarita screamed, equal amounts of surprise, horror and terror in her voice. She flung herself away from the window, adrenaline and the wake-up call enough to nearly smash her into the dashboard. Caught halfway between the front and back of her car, flailing around the seats and tangled in her blankets, the busker threw a random coffee cup at the back window. Then a shoe. Then a heavy can of something, which was actually the mace from her purse, and which rolled into the back seat after further cracking the window. Sarita let out another couple of screams, mind whirling as she tried to process the...the...thing that was staring at her.

"OhJesusChrisWHATTHEFUCK!! What the flying FUCK?!"

[Deleted]

"Flying fuck is right, meat sack!"

Bobbing and weaving around the rear window, now being thoroughly pummeled by random objects that didn't so much as crack the glass, Fairwinds flared her helm crests with a hydraulic hiss. She opened her wings to give her thrusters room for low-level bursts, and lurched onto the driver's side door. Her talons pierced the metal to find purchase on the side-impact braces inside, allowing her to continue to fill the window with her body as she looked inside.

Standing on the ground and peering over the sill would not, she felt, have had the correct level of menace.

"You think you're oh so smart, hiding here in plain sight, all innocent-like. But I'm on to you," the cassette trilled, optics darkening as the framing plates clenched and narrowed. "You so much as think of calling for backup, your bozo buddies'll be picking you up with a sponge. A small one.."

She watched the human scrabble around for another ten seconds, thinking very hard about her time in that steel tube. Of the camera held to the single window, the human behind it keen to capture every flinch as she inevitably overrode the programming locking her body.

Then, her voice modulated to a pitch closer to that of her Master's, Fairwinds uttered, "Get out of the car."

[Deleted]

Oh God. OhGodohGodohGodohGod —

Sarita flinched and turned her head away from the sound of the driver's door crunching. The minuscule layer of plastic and metal that separated her from...from...from that creature outside was buckling, torn into by what ungodly claws the thing had. (At least, she assumed it had claws, biased in her thinking from Earthen folklore about talon-wielding monsters of the dark.) Sarita fell into the crevice between the front and back seats, whimpering in terror.

"You think you're oh so smart, hiding here in plain sight, all innocent-like. But I'm on to you." The words of the beast were snarled, bitter, and full of barely-contained rage; it sounded like the monster was about to rip the Sedan in half. "You so much as think of calling for backup, your bozo buddies'll be picking you up with a sponge. A small one."

Sarita felt a disgusting warmth crawling out from between her legs. Either her time of the month had come, or she had just wet herself.

"Get out of the car."

Sarita, frozen in fear, could barely get her jaw to open. A pained, hoarse cry of disbelief wrenched itself from her throat, fading into a whispered babble incoherent and childish. She felt so small, all trapped in her blankets and on the floor, and the beast's eyes pieced through all. Sarita was between feeling trapped and desperately trying to think of a place to hide in.

"I...I..." she began, her voice tight. "I...I don't know what the hell you are...."

[Deleted]

The human, this specimen of an inferior organic race who were somehow managing to subdue Cybertronians, cowered. No way was she falling for the 'innocent and harmlessly ignorant' routine.

A month ago, before her stay in casa-de-MECH, Fairwinds would have been torn between a dozen different film quotes with which to answer such a protest; your worst nightmare, chief among them. She had absorbed this world's popular culture with the same fervent zeal as she had Cybertron's, and delighted in the rare opportunity to throw it back at the natives.

Now, however, she glared at the cowering human in silence, closing the talons of one clawed foot around the locking mechanism inside the car door. A momentary burst of heat from her thrusters, and the door creaked open on its labouring hinges.

Fairwinds then hopped up onto the roof of the car, landing with a thud and making a sizeable dent. It was a dare, of sorts. Her sensors were primed on the interior below, ready to respond to weapons-fire if it shot throught the roof. If it fled, she would be more than happy to pick off its kneecaps from behind. She was quite confident that humans didn't need their knees to talk.

One optic remained upon the open door whilst the other scanned over the warehouses as she swiveled her head, confirming visually that there was no ambush. Satisfied, Fairwinds rose to her full height and beat her wings.

"Out, now! Or I'll drag you out through the sunroof without opening it first."

[Deleted]

The top of the car buckled inward. Sarita shrieked, pulling the blankets towards her face like a shield. Her heart beat like a drum in her chest, her whole body shaking from the ordeal she was experiencing. Sheila's roof was dangerously close to giving, and she had the mental image of the car pancaking on top of her. That alone was enough to make her start fumbling, slowly and carefully untangling herself as she crawled out of the car.

When she reached the driver's door — How the hell did it open? she wondered, somewhat deliriously — she felt out with a yelp, only to scramble to her feet out of instinctive panic. Hot tears began to fall, the woman shuddering with such intensity that her movements jerked. Her knees were so weak, she could barely stand up, and to make eye contact with the monster made her feel nauseous. She stared hard at the ground, her long, black hair tangling and unkempt, swaying lightly with every twitch she made.

That night, she was wearing a marbled blue shirt, faded and worn with a few tears around the edges. Her skirt was a plain, navy corduroy, and she looked ready to be up and off to business at any moment. It had small tears going up the sides, like it had been ripped in the past, possibly deliberately for movement reasons. What Sarita wore could give the impression she could walk into a building at any time — if she weren't so ragged.

And she smelt. God, she needed a shower, especially now that she realized she had pissed herself.

[Deleted]

Fairwinds settled back on her haunches when the human finally fell out of the car. She was, honestly, a little puzzled. It didn't look like a highly trained operative of a secret military force tasked to attack, dissect and destroy Cybertronians here on Earth. Certainly didn't smell like one, either, her olfactory sensors were quick to point out.

She looked pretty damn pitiful, too. Usually Fairwinds enjoyed humans looking pitiful; it suited their baby organic status. This specimen had pushed right through 'funny' into 'tragic'.

Though she was still suspicious (this human could still be being used as bait by MECH), Fairwinds eased back the harsh whine of her engines and edged forward on the roof. Her talons closed around the edge, the sheet metal behind her creaking as her weight moved, and she cocked her head. She began another sensor sweep, searching for heat signatures in general, now.

"You're not," she began slowly, skeptically, "military, are you? And if you are, you suck."

Her scans popped up the location of fourteen rats, a bird's nest, one cat and the human in front of her. Even the car engine was cold.

They were alone. No incoming helicopters, fighters or weapons fire.

Fairwinds settled on her undercarriage, arranging her wings along her back, and thought about how to proceed. She'd basically exposed herself with no need to an ignorant native, a pretty thorough breach of the 'stay under the human radar' directive that Lord Megatron had laid down. Though her attire and accommodation suggested that she wouldn't be believed if she told anyone, Fairwinds wasn't prepared to just fly off and leave things like this.

The simplest, most effective solution would be a shot to the face. She could be quite certain no one would miss her. But then it was all pitiful and small and stupid and wet. It'd be like shooting Bambi over his mother...

"So." Fairwinds leaned forward and peered into the car, then tried to catch the human's eye. "You got any weapons hereabouts I should know about? This is, like, your one chance to surrender them, cuz if I find so much as a wire cutter I'm gonna make you eat it."

[Deleted]

"You're not...military, are you? And if you are, so you suck."

"N-no," Sarita whimpered, shaking her head. She still didn't make eye contact. "I...I sing. S-singer."

She was shaking even more badly now. Was it smart to tell the thing what she did for a living? Probably, considering that "military" implied her Sedan was full of weapons and hidden compartments. Sarita hated, hated having Sheila searched by police, and almost lost her shit whenever someone so much as scratched the car, so for what the monster had already done? There would be lots of weeping and screaming later.

Key word here being "later", if Sarita even managed to survive at all.

The thing's voice startled Sarita, making her jump a little. Pulling her arms tightly to her chest, she replied, trying to make her voice as clear and confirming as possible, "I...I k-k-keep a kn-knife and m-m-mace in th-th-the c-c-car. S-s-some t-tools an-and f-first a-aid an-an-and s-such as w-w-well. It's...i-it's n-n-not a-always s-safe t-t-to tr-travel...."

She swallowed hard, trying not to make her teeth chatter. Oh God, please don't kill me for telling you this —

"An-and...I-I d-don't m-m-mean y-y-you, h-honest. P-people c-c-can be cr-cruel, e-especially i-if y-you're a s-s-single f-female t-travelling-g alone. I don't — "

She bit back a sob here, her knees starting to bump together from how badly she was shuddering.

" — P-please d-don't r-ruin m-my car...'s'all I-I g-got left...I l-live in it...."

[Deleted]

Fairwinds had to replay the human's speech back to weed through the sobbing stutter, and once she had, she wished she hadn't. In conjunction with all the leaking happening out of its face, the story wasn't helping to maintain the steely cold hate in her spark.

"Alright alright, just shuush with the noise and the tears. I'm not gonna hurt you, or your stupid dead car."

The cassette hopped down from the car, ignoring the high screech of metal and the sound of laboured suspension springs. Was the car 'ruined'? Not by her standards, but by the human's it looked more than a little dinged up. It was still sniveling, and Fairwinds had a horrible feeling that she'd still be hearing it crying/wailing from inside the warehouses.

"Look, fleshy, if I fix your car, will you stop crying and being all wet?" she asked, a little too sharply to be called concerned. "And what do I call you, anyway? Not like I don't have, like, a ton of synonyms for meat sack."

[Deleted]

Sarita almost, almost screeched What do you mean "stupid dead car", but held her tongue. Her head jerked towards Fairwinds, reflexively about to answer the question about her identity —

And Sarita stared. Puffy, red-rimmed eyes wide with shock and fright, it took her a few moments to process what she was seeing. There was a bird, it was the size of a small plane, it was made of metal, and it looked pissed. There was a bird, an honest-to-God bird.... Made of metal.... In her face.

Giant bird. Metal. Angry.

She couldn't help but blurt out the next words, the tone a mixture of fear and shocked incredulousness.

"Are you a god?"

Her brain caught up with her a moment later. Name! Name, name....

"Well, um...some people call me Rita...."

Good, good! Anything but the True Name. If it was something supernatural, it wouldn't be able to do much (except maybe physically rip her apart, of course) without Rita's True Name. All the fairy tale/urban fantasy books and shows she had indulged in shared that as a common literary trope. The idea had to come from somewhere, right?

[Deleted]

"Pffft, no," Fairwinds scoffed, neck curling back and optics bright with not-at-all-concealed amusement. "But if I was, you can totally bet there'd be more giraffes and volcanoes and sea dinosaurs around."

She cocked her head at Rita, beak snapping thoughtfully. "You can bow or kneel or give me presents if you want, though. If it'll stop the whimpering, I mean. Just stay there, yeah? Yeah."

Quite satisfied that the human wasn't any threat, Fairwinds toddled about to face the car and stuck her head through the open door. She ran a critical optic over the interior (gross), scanned the engine block (painfully primitive), the confessed weapons (mace might put a bit of a twist on energon gummies - have to try that at some point) and then turned her attention to the roof. The metal had been quite dramatically caved in by her weight, and though she'd not done any mechanical mischief to the vehicle, Rita seemed remarkably upset by the cosmetic damage.

Her crests twitched, trying to gauge if she could press out the dents without shoving her head straight through the roof. She began to tentatively press the flat top of her beak against the split and stained upholstery.

"You still awake? Not done this with a human before. Always figured they'd faint. Maybe it's cuz I'm god-like that you're awake. Ready to worship." Fairwinds continued the ugly-sounding task of bending the metal back out, her tone conversationally light. "If you run or shout for help I'll mash you, kay? So don't."

[Deleted]

"Um...I didn't plan on doing that...."

If she did run for help, there were two options she had: the place's non-existent security, or the scrap-pickers that frequented the edges every night. If the first existed, it meant a quick trip to jail; the latter was.... Well, Sarita didn't want to think too hard about the number of people she recognized as getting methadone from the local pharmacy, or who had meth sores. And God forbid if any of them had criminal records....

"Th-thank...thank you for fixing my car," Sarita said, apprehensively. "I...I really appreciate it. I live in it, so...um...yeah." An awkward silence passed, and Sarita wondered if she should keep talking. Then again, saying the right thing had got her this far, hadn't it?

"Who, um...are you, if I may ask? I'm...afraid I don't have experience with your — " Kind? Race? Breed? "...Species. Are you, um...a form of security for this place? Or is this your home? Because if it is, I am terribly sorry for intruding, I never meant to anger or frighten anyone...this is just the safest place around here to sleep.... But if it's yours, I will gladly leave when this is done."

Please don't kill me. Please, please, please don't kill me.

[Deleted]

If she hadn't consumed thousands of gigabytes of cable television via direct uplink and traditional big-screen-flopped-out-on-a-metal-mesh-beanbag viewing, Fairwinds would have wondered if the whole species waffled this much. Rita was so darn earnest.

And homeless. And probably crazy. Likely Lord Megatron wouldn't be too mad about divulging a teeny bit of information to a squishy sort-of functioning on the outskirts of society, who peed herself spontaneously and was overly emotional about dents in her car.

Furthermore, the more time Fairwinds spent talking, the less time Rita spent talking. And she was damn good at talking.

"I'm an alien. And if you're all disappoint that I'm not a fleshy grey googly-eyed alien, then you're a bigot." She mashed the flat of her head into the middle of the car's roof, popping the worst of the dent back out. Then, with a horrendous amount of noise, she began scuffing her helm back and forth to smooth it out.

"My name's Windy, an' I'm a super elite of the Purple Mighty Squad. PMS. No, wait - Ninjas. Purple Ninja Squad, and we're here just, y'know, catching up on Friends reruns, mining up some minerals you ain't gonna miss, and flying around in our awesome spaceship."

The super elite cassette swiveled her head about to grin (horribly) at Rita. "You've probably seen loads of us and never known it. We can transform into telephone poles and soda machines, yo."

Once she was done here, she was totally gonna gut the engine and swap out the silly bits.

[Deleted]

Sarita could be an odd woman. She never would say she had an "explosive temper", but damn if she couldn't wind herself up like a spring. Whenever she encountered a terrifying or upsetting situation, if she allowed her emotions to escalate, she would waffle back and forth. It was the sudden burst of anger, fear and all things negative, followed by a quick burnout that returned her to an all-too-formal way of presenting herself. Out of nowhere would come the madness, and then, Sarita could swear that she had never gotten upset at all.

Such was the case now. As she calmed herself, slowly beginning to allow the thought that the bird wasn't going to kill her, Sarita flinched. It was as if she and Sheila were mentally bonded, and every dent and ding in the car was felt in equal measure by Sarita. She had to look away as Fairwinds manhandled the vehicle; she couldn't stand the thought of the Sedan being "beaten up". That was her house, her livelihood, and if the bird was too rough with it, Sarita didn't know if the alien could comprehend how badly the singer was screwed. Listening quietly as the thing chattered on, Sarita nodded ponderously, thinking of what to say next.

"You...can transform into telephone poles and soda machines?"

Now that sent a paranoid spike through her heart. Sarita forced herself not to show it, a look of contemplation on her face. What she said next was probably the silliest thing she had ever said, to anyone:

"...Does that mean your kind uses the change and electricity as fuel?"