[ti]Ep 2[/ti]A Decepticon and an Autobot walk into a bar... [Bluestreak]

[Sparkplug]

Episode 2 | Week 4 | Day 5
Location: Rehoboth Beach, Delaware

The last dying light of the setting sun cast gleaming gold reflections from the glass windows of the hotels lining the long stretch of beach, the sun's reddened disc slipping behind the low, inland hills and casting final fingers of light down the straight avenues that reached for the darkening sea. The town was moderately busy, but that evening, there weren't so many cars around as to choke the roads. The air was growing cooler, though it would still be hot for some hours to come, and a breeze off the Atlantic kept it from growing stifling.

It was, in short, perfect cruising weather.

What it was not, on the other hand, was dripping with ancient alien secrets, just waiting for the finesse of a Cybertronian's emissions to show itself. Sparkplug was slowly, with some degree of reluctance, coming to this conclusion for herself as she rolled leisurely down the waterfront, engine rumbling a low, unhurried tone.

It had seemed so promising! A strange, fluttering little pulse on a Cybertronian wavelength, an old, deprecated channel that could have been the last dying signal of some ancient piece of long-buried technology. Nothing to take too seriously, nothing more than obscure hint, nothing that the Nemesis would have sent out a serious response for... but just enough to tickle Sparkplug's interest. Or at least, to get her out of the ship for a while, where she was beginning to feel like she was being entombed in its dimly lit grey corridors.

She resolved to treat it as the paper-thin excuse it was to give her tyres an airing, and not get too excited about the possibilities. Then she'd spent considerably longer speculating about all the juicy lost technology that could be in a stray cache, and managed to thoroughly disappoint herself when - to the best that she could determine - the signal seemed to have originated from a dying electric sign finally shorting out next to a local radio station broadcast antenna.

It had got her out among the humans, though.

She'd been listening a lot to their radio transmissions, listening to the weird tonal structures that were their music, and reading up on the unclassified human data in the Nemesis database. Information on their singers, and bands, and the instruments they used, and the concept of 'albums'. Her research had spread, in the rambling, roving way that a heavily linked database tends to encourage, until she was reading about the mysterious and opaque reporting of human interrelationships, which made little sense to her. Probably built on a whole slew of social signifiers she couldn't untangle.

One thing she hadn't read up on were human rules that guided the movements of their mindless vehicles. That had taken her a while to figure out from context, and some of the humans had seemed pretty upset about something. But she'd used her holomatter avatar to wave at them and call out the human greeting, which went 'Hello! It's very good to meet you!', so that was probably fine. And now she knew why her alt-mode had those orange and red lights on the side and rear!

Anyway. She was pretty certain now that there was simply nothing to be found on this settlement by the corrosive salt-ocean that wasn't primitive, baseline human technology. It was probably time to go and report in, call for a ground bridge, and go back to bolting together workbenches. Inwardly, she pulled a face.

Orrr... as she rolled down the road, she spotted a brightly lit human structure (dwelling?) with a large, tarmac coated space all around it that was filled with the mindless transport vehicles. Music and the sounds of revelry floated out over road and out over the water. The contrast between the structure and the dim, grey, silent halls she was contemplating going back to couldn't have been more striking.

It was fine to go in. In fact, she could consider it research, she told herself virtuously, and - remembering to signal! - she turned off the main beachside road to enter the car park. Slotting her six-wheeled chassis neatly between two large vans, she cut her engine, and focused on her avatar.

Gripping the edges of the driver's window - the altmode she'd chosen didn't actually have articulated doors - Sparkplug's avatar swung out into the open and landed lightly on her booted feet. She was of slightly shorter than average height, with forest-green hair pulled up into a high ponytail. Freckles spattered across the bridge of her nose, highlighting her alert, attentive green eyes and pale skin. She wore a white tshirt, with just one sleeve of gauzy, transparent grey fabric that reached down to her wrist on her left arm, leaving the other bare to the shoulder. A large Decepticon logo was splashed across the white fabric, slightly distorted by the prominent frontal curves beneath which human media seemed so fond of. Knee-length black shorts nearly met black boots rising up from her ankles, thoroughly criss-crossed with laces.

Closing the window behind herself - the bifurcation of her own sense of presence was very odd, especially with the scale difference - Sparkplug circled around the clusters of stationary vehicles, glancing over each with cheerful interest, before strolling up to the open door of the building. A blast of music and bright light struck her, and she stood there for a moment, taking it all in, before finally, in a spirit of delighted curiosity, she vanished inside.

[Bluestreak]

"So. Delaware."

Bulkhead's voice rumbled across the comm-line.

It was a question he'd asked several times over the course of the day. From the time the ground bridge had opened to when they were driving down several small roads, trying to pinpoint that signal that had blipped onto the monitoring gear. It didn't appear to be an Autobot beacon of any sort.

There had been a discussion over what it had been, that it was probably nothing. Yet... the unspoken concern was there. What if it was? If it was an old supply ship or even a crashed crew ship, they couldn't afford for it to fall in Decepticon hands.

So they had sent Bluestreak and Bulkhead through a ground bridge, and the two of them had spent the day winding their way through seaside towns, driving next to the blue span of the Atlantic Ocean and wide white sand dunes. Large old beach houses with dozens of windows.

Bluestreak had been smitten by the architecture. So many triple story houses with weatherworn wood, painted two or three crisp colors. Picket fences made out of washed up driftwood, tufts of tall grass framing light and airy porches. Green yards with rounded, soft trees and neatly planted flower boxes. So different than the squat, heavy concrete ones of Nevada, and the sharpshooter found himself distracted here and there by a hundred things. Amazing how Earth was so different from one side of the country to the next. That sort of thing really wasn't quite the same back on Cybertron.

The blip proved to be nothing.

One one hand, it was a bit of a disappointment.

On another, it was a good thing.

Bluestreak hated to admit that if there had been a ship with a crew in stasis? The Autobots couldn't quite afford to have any more systems to fuel. Not with how they were already having to ration things back at base. The space in the silo was limited, things needed constant repair, they had to shut down some of the more power hungry systems so that they could shunt power back to themselves.

Trying not to dwell on that, the silver Nissan zipped smoothly down Highway 1, keeping a polite distance between himself the rest of the traffic. Settled comfortably on his own driver's seat, Bluestreak's avatar rested comfortably against his own seat. His right hand settled loosely on the wheel and his left arm resting on the sleek frame of his open window. The air blowing through the cab of the car held the sharp tang of salt and brine.

"I like it."

"What, Delaware?"

"Yeah."

Bulkhead chuckled. "Not me. Give me the back country of Nevada every day instead of this little city with crosswalks every fifty feet."

"It's gorgeous. The houses have so much charm," Bluestreak insisted. "I mean look at it. It's so different than Nevada, you have clouds and you have beaches and you have all that water out there."

The Nissan twitched his mirror to indicate the ocean. The waves were softly frothing against the long stretch of sand, he could see it between the houses. Wonder what it would be like to live in those houses, to look out on the ocean every day, to be part of a quiet little community like this, where the humans all seem to know each other and wave and go through their days and man, Carly would love this place. Maybe she'd been here before. He needed to ask her. Maybe I should try and grab a picture or two, and send it along in my next email, she might like that, but huh, I guess the Atlantic Ocean is the same as the Pacific one, is there a way to tell them apart from a picture of the ocean...

"One's wet to the East and one's wet to the West," Bulkhead said thoughtfully.

"What?" Bluestreak said, thrown out of his thoughts.

"Oceans," the green SUV replied. "That's the difference."

"Oh! Got it- oh wait was I talking out loud again?"

"Dunno if you ever stop buddy, but don't ever change."

Bluestreak laughed at that. The Nissan gave a little hop as if it had hit a pothole, and then settled back down on the curve of the road as it gently slowed and moved between a bunch of small businesses. Idily, the mech flicked out his sensors, a casual little once over that he was doing automatically as they drove along.

The car jumped again and this time, his mirrors pinned back slightly. Inside of the cab, the blonde man shifted.

"Bulk," he said. "You picking up a Cybertronian, or is that just residual ping or something weird?"

[Sparkplug]

If it was a Cybertronian signal, it was a relatively short-range. The signal strength rose, peaked, and then began to diminish again relatively quickly with their movement, implying that if they were an appreciable distance away, they wouldn't have picked up anything at all. The origin was somewhere within the forest of parked vehicles surrounding a human recreation structure, hard to pick out with any more accuracy than that.

Unaware of the probing antennae seeking out the emissions from her systems, Sparkplug's main focus of attention was on her avatar, seeing the world from the holomatter figure's viewpoint. It was strange seeing the native structures from such a tiny elevation; it made her paradoxically feel more at home. What had been strange, miniature dwellings, toylike in their tiny complexity, became large buildings that she could easily stroll inside and explore.

The door hinged inwards under her hand - manual doors! Made of processed plant matter! These people were so backward - and she stepped into the recreation shelter, or whatever the humans would call it. It was actually pretty busy with inhabitants. Many of them were gathered around small circular tables, made out of more shaped plant matter, and drinking different coloured fluids that mostly came in shades of amber from glass receptacles. These seemed to be dispensed from a long counter, in exchange for some kind of local tokens of value. Well, she didn't have any of those, and it wasn't like she'd get anything from pouring fluid into her avatar, so that was probably something to stay away from.

The other half of the room, though, was far more inviting. Flashing lights in multiple hues blinked and flickered from a booth, where an organic was playing with complicated controls. Sound boomed and rolled around the room from a half-dozen heavy speakers, quick and energetic, and the local organics were dancing to it. This species danced! A fairly common trait, but not always a given. She felt herself warm to them slightly.

Stepping forward, Sparkplug mingled with the edge of the shifting, moving crowd, and began trying to join in with the rhythmic movements. Okay, so they were timing their movements to the slower beat of the low frequency sounds, rather than the rapid, more sporadic higher sounds, she got that... but almost none of the organics seemed to be doing the same dance, which made it harder to follow along.

Picking a female human a short distance into the crowd, Sparkplug began mimicking her movements as best she should, finding herself grinning as she concentrated. Her high ponytail flicked this way and that as she swung around, bouncing on her booted feet. It was pretty fun! She was drawing some glances, which could be due to her inexpert dancing, but could also be from the hair colour. There were plenty of different epidermis colours on display across a spectrum of pink-brown-black, but no one had forest green hair like her own.

Shrugging away the thought - she'd seen humans with all sorts of coloured hair in their online data network, so it couldn't be that strange - Sparkplug put her full energy into dancing.

[Bluestreak]

The big green vehicle drifted slightly between the white lines on on the roadway. His windshield wipers flicked a bit as he shifted his scanners and searched for the signal that his silver companion had met with concern.

"Huh," he said. "It's someone. Pretty sure it's someone. If there was a pod crashed in the middle of a seaside tourist town, Fowler would have already been out here explaining how it's just a weather balloon, eh?"

"They aren't far," he said.

With a sharp rumble from his massive hood, Bulkhead lumbered into the passing lane to run alongside Bluestreak. "Don't know why a Decepticon would be out here. Don't see this as their type of town. They tend to like stuff a little more... remote."

Bulkhead had been about to quip something else. Namely that they liked their cities a bit more razed to the ground. Arcee would have chuckled dryly at that, and Bumblebee would have probably agreed and that was it; truth in grim humor. However, he remembered who was next to him and realized that that joke would have struck way too close to home for Bluestreak.

Luckily, the silver mech didn't seem to notice his hestitation or equate it with anything except that it was a seaside town on a long stretch of coastal highway.

"No kidding," Bluestreak agreed. "I mean this sure doesn't seem like the sort of town that would have a supply of energon buried in an old mine or have something they want to steal unless they suddenly had an urge to re-purpose an old cape style home for antique hardware. Doesn't really seem like a Decepticon, no."

"Antique hardware? Well, that makes maybe some more sense actually. You think that's what it is, that they've found some Cybertronian antique that ended up in some human museum or something?"

"Uh... no. I was thinking more like door handles and hinges on houses. There's some really neat old ones you can repurpose in places like this. If you take painted hinges and drop them into a pot of boiling water, the paint will be easily scrubbed off and you can polish them up and re-use them. Some of those hinges are collector's pieces."

"Oh, a human thing, gotcha! Well, let's hope it's just an Autobot who's lost or maybe even a neutral mech out for a spin," Bulkhead replied as he shifted gears. "Lemme take the lead here, and we'll see if we can figure out what's going on."

--- 

It didn't take them long to find the signal, and even less time to spot the building. It certainly was different from everything they'd come across so far out here in that seaside town. The exterior was brightly lit in the growing dark, and the parked cars in the lot reflected sharp dollops of color across the windscreens.

Bulkhead's engine growled softly as he downshifted and coasted softly towards the building. Behind him, Bluestreak's mirrors were twitching slightly as the bigger vehicle attempted to work his way past a poorly parked Toyota without scratching the paint.

Then, the Nissan's mirror angled outward, even as his avatar frowned and pointed to the parking lot. Not that Bulkhead could probably see the gesture.

What the---

Whoa, someone really got an interesting alt mode, didn't they, he thought. Okay, scanners, scanners are telling me that- well, they're just telling me it is Cybertronian. Not much more than that. Great. It can't be a Decepticon though, what would they be doing at a place like this and they'd sure have sensed us coming and moved. Don't see many neutral folks out there really, but hey, would be neat to run across one.

Since he was never going to set foot in their place in Africa.

The very idea of a DMZ set the sharpshooter on edge; he didn't want to be friendly with Decepticons. In fact, the idea that they could go somewhere, hang out, and not have any repercussions for anything they'd done? They could kill an Autobot, then waltz in and drink with them? Maybe other folks could deal with that, but not him.

Top that off with the very idea of giving up his rifle and not being able to access it? No. Never.


"Well, there's the mech," he murmured over the comm to Bulkhead. "I don't recognize them at all. Do you?"

[Bluestreak]

"Nope."

The big car had come to a halt in the road. His headlamps were focused on the Toyota before he wobbled on his wheels and tried to edge the other way and came within a breath of hitting a mini-van covered in Grateful Dead stickers.

Bulkhead was a wide, massive vehicle. He was built to climb canyons and off road in deep Arizona washes, which he did on a regular basis. His alt-mode could take amazing amounts of punishment (also good, since he threw himself into the thick of things on a regular basis. Well, Miko helped, but that was a given.)

What he was not meant to do was deftly maneuver his way through a crowded, narrow street and then find a place to stop in a lot that was primarily designed for compact vehicles. In the battle of 'able to park in any space imaginable' the Prius was king.

"I can't get through here," Bulkhead grunted over their connection.

"Huh?" Bluestreak replied. He'd already threaded his way through the road; the sharp blink of his left tail light shimmered in the dark. His avatar actually turned around in his seat and the blond man craned his neck out the window, leaning his hand on the side of the door as he braced himself.

His mirrors twitched and angled so that Bulkhead was perfectly reflected in them. "Why? What's wrong?"

"I'm goin' to scratch someone's car if I keep trying. Last thing we need is someone to see me do it."

"Yeah, I remember what Arcee said about that-"

"Don't get caught?"

"Well that too, I guess, sure, but more the part where Fowler will have to cover for everyone and you know what happens when that happens and I don't want to be the one making it happen, thank you, because I don't want to upset him."

Truth, Bluestreak did not want anything to do with that. He liked the man, and he respected him. He'd worked with him a few times in the past and he appreciated wholeheartedly the ends that he went to to keep the Autobots safe and undetected. He might have said that it was just to keep the crazy tinfoil hat X-Files folks out of the way, but really... no.

He was just a decent soul.

Bluestreak knew from galaxy-wide experience that those were often few and far between when it concerned Cybertronians.

"Yeah, me neither," Bulkhead mumbled. He shifted his tires back and forth and finally vented out a long sigh from under his broad green hood. "Okay, well, you can get through, Blue. I'll back up and see if I can come in the other way, but I don't think I'm going to find a place to park in the lot that fits my brawn anyway. You okay to go in by yourself and check it out?"

Inside of the Nissan, Bluestreak's avatar shifted his hands nervously on the wheel. The man's broad shoulders shifted into an uncertain angle. He brought up his hand and ran it through his perfectly cut blonde hair. It barely ruffled and then went back into position; as neat and perfect as a fashion doll straight from the box.

"You can't use an avatar from that distance?"

"Can't use an avatar right now," Bulkhead admitted. "It's got some calibration issues that I can't seem to work out. Sorry buddy. Hey, besides, you're the guy who's got skills with the whole avatar thing. I mean last time I tried, my face froze and I think I made a little kid cry."

Air vented softly through the interior of the silver car. A little leaf on the floor mats stirred and fluttered.

He couldn't transform. He couldn't get to his rifle. No one else was with him, his only backup was unable to park nearby.

"Yeah," he said suddenly. "Yeah, I got it."

"Call me if anything happens, okay?"

"Right. Will do."

Finding a parking spot to tuck himself into after that was easy. Unfortunately, it was across the lot from the other car, and Bluestreak didn't think that wandering over to go and look at it in the dark would have been appropriate. So instead he sat crouched over his tires and debated for a long moment before opening his driver's side door and sliding out of it.

It was always odd getting out yourself from the inside. That strange disconnect shifting your field of vision to relate to the world on a very human level. It was so, so different, but the more he did it the more he found he was getting used to it.

Okay, he kind of liked it.

The heels of his well-polished cowboy boots scruffed against the dark parking lot. He eased his way carefully around the cars, even as the bass thump of music trembled the air and rumbled the ground.

Even as he pushed open the door, he knew exactly what this was.

A bar. Huh. He hadn't been in one for a very long time. Even back home, he wasn't much of a bar sort. He didn't mind them, he loved to hang out here and there with friends and have a drink or two, but he wasn't there every night, like some mechs he knew.

He did love music though. All kinds of music. Sure, he listened to a lot of country. The beat rolled up and as he carefully passed a table, he could see the liquor in the glasses jump. There were people everywhere, and it sort of overwhelmed him, but only for a moment before his delight came rushing back in.

Humans. Doing wonderful human things on their world that wasn't like his. They were just going about their day- well, night, and as his blue eyes focused on the half of the room where there was dancing and whirling, he found himself fascinated and drawn in. He edged his way past a few more tables and then found a spot at the edge of the bar where he could lean and watch the dance floor.

His thoughts were bouncing as much as the humans, and for a second he forgot why he was here and his worry and his fears.

Instead he totally had this crazy urge to send Carly an email when he got back to the base and say, hey, uh, so I was in Delaware tonight and there was this bar and they're all dancing and I was kind of thinking about you--

A flash of purple took that thought and threw it right out the window.

Decepticon sigil. On the shirt of the green-haired woman.

Bluestreak's gaze flattened. His broad-shouldered avatar drew itself up stiffly, he took a step away from the bar. His one hand dropped to his bracelet; he began to worry the bead there, flicking it against his fingers the same way he would have tested the trigger on his rifle. Well, that ruled out the neutral hope right away.

Also, uh, yeah, apparently the Decepticons totally were fine with plastering their sigils all over themselves. So much for worrying about being seen... Wait, maybe she's human? Do they have humans with them, like we do? It's possible... hate to admit it but it's possible. 

With all the activity in here his scanners were useless. He couldn't get a bead on if she was real or an avatar like him. Environments like this were terrible for that sort of thing; the more people and electronics in a confined space, the harder it seemed to get. Quietly, Bluestreak took a step forward, and then another. The muscles in his arms and chest stood out for a moment under his faded grey t-shirt; his frame tapered down to long legs in well-tailored jeans. 

Easing his way around a group of people standing there drinking, Bluestreak attempted to get a better view of the dancer and her outfit.

[Sparkplug]

It would take a lot to distract your average Cybertronian from the spectacle of Bulkhead's vast greenness trying to squeeze past the elderly Toyota, like a camouflaged hippo trying to slip surreptitiously into a supermarket. To not notice the presence of both Bluestreak and Bulkhead, as their sensors bounced off her chassis and their own signals swept the car park, required a level of wilful blindness that went past happenstance, and into dangerous levels of inattention.

Or, for instance, being so wrapped up in a holomatter projection that her regular senses were virtually dormant. She hadn't used her projection system in a little while, and now that she'd 'left' herself in the parking lot, her sense of self was fully inhabiting the avatar.

Besides, she was busy enjoying herself.

"Everybody, dance! Clap your hands, clap your hands," she sang along with the music, gyrating around the dance floor, her pigtail bouncing with her exaggerated movements. She was definitely revising her opinion of the local organics. This was fun!

Okay, they were still weird, tiny primitives, but they had one thing which she hadn't experienced in an unfathomably long time, which was novelty. Their culture produced all sorts of bizarre things, and all of it was wonderfully strange, unlike any work of art or music from Cybertron. There hadn't exactly been a vast upswell in entertainment since the war broke out, a time so long ago that she could barely remember remembering it.

In fact, it was more than just novelty, she decided as she swung around in a circle, trying out a weird whirling motion of her hands that another human was performing with rather more style. It was optimism. No sane member of her own kind saw the future as anything but more of the same, a long, long slide into extinction, just like their homeworld had endured. But these creatures saw the future as something that was better than the past.

She was just about prepared to like them. Provisionally. As long as they didn't get in her way. And still with a comforting feeling of smugness, because they thought she was one of them, and she wasn't. Why, they had no idea her species even existed!

Which was about when she noticed a blonde man in a grey t-shirt, staring at her chest. She glanced down at herself, taking in the purple sigil across the white fabric, somewhat distorted by the human-femme curves beneath, then looked back up to see him making his way around another group of dancers towards her. He must be looking at her top, wondering what it meant! Poor, silly human. Still, if he was going to ask, she might as well have some kind of explanation.

Her green eyes flicked to the speakers as a new song began, and grinned.

Skipping over to the blonde man, having to look up to meet his gaze but quite used to that sensation, she greeted him cheerfully, "Hey! Curious about my shirt? It's a band logo. It's from this band from the 80s, probably don't know it. The Decepticons. Oh, yeah, they have this fantastic album, 'Planet-wreckers'."

She nodded, her grin growing as she invented freely. "There's... five people, in the band, right? There's Soundwave, he plays electric piano, and Shockwave, who's the meanest on drums, aside from when he misses once in a while. Lost an eye, you know, no depth perception. Anyway. There's a couple of front-man singers, Starscream and Knock Out, and they're always competing over who's the prettiest and the furthest up the stage, but they can't compete with the guitar player. His stage name is Megatron, doesn't talk much, but he does the most kick-aft riffs, just blows the competition away. He has this guitar, he calls it his arm cannon. They're great."

Stepping back, still bobbing her head to the beat cheerily, she finished up, "Anyway, that's what that is, okay? You should get dancing, it's the best."

[Bluestreak]

Bluestreak wasn't a good sneak, and he was the first to admit it. His job was to provide support from a distance. 

The music thumped and chimed. The young woman's words bubbled cheerfully across the space between them.

He forgot.

He forgot about calling Bulkhead to tell him, yes, that blip was a Decepticon.

Every single thought of the here and now went out of his head as he stared down at her sigil. 

Bluestreak's hand started to lift. His index finger curled, as if pressed to the trigger of his rifle, before he dug his fingers into his palm.

Her response had been so offhand, bright and cheerful, flippant and humorous.

Planet-wreckers. Fantastic album.

Blithely referring to the fact that her faction had ruined their their home. That everything on Cybertron was dead and grey and then they went from world to world, galaxy to galaxy,  leaving a trail of hurt and death behind them in their quest for conquest. That they were the reason that so many species hated them, loathed them, ostracized them and attempted to kill them on sight. 

Now, this- this femme was attempting to ruin music. Music. Equate her murdering commanders that had broken so many lives behind them to a band. A band.

Music thrummed around their avatars. It rose and lifted in pure joy. The humans danced and the beat twined and lifted them. Lights flickered and shimmered in a multitude of colors, glowing up her pale shirt with the ultraviolet strobe.

Unbidden, a memory of his apartment window and Praxus at night, shining and bright and beautiful and that was all it took for so much more to come flooding back with the force of an open-handed, vicious blow.

Darkness.

The only illumination was from his pale blue bio lights. In his shock and pain they were dim and dull, reflecting off the ragged, rebar-torn edges of the slabs and cables tombed around him. Every rasping intake he gulped brought with it the sharp acrid smell of burning metal; both from the ruined bridge and worse; the slowly smouldering frames of his fellow Cybertonians.

Something was leaking onto his face and he squirmed against the brutal, pressing pin of a huge girder, fearful at first that there was a transport above him carrying fuel, and that one of the still red-tipped bits of metal would set it ablaze.

That wasn't it though. It was energon, half processed and sticky sweet, leaking down from bodies crushed around him. Broken and smashed between the bridge. The only reason that he was not crushed into deactivation was the way someone's corpse had fallen above him when the platform collapsed.

Every time he twisted his neck, he could see up into the dead mech's eye sockets; shattered empty by the pressure, the corpse's mouth twisted into a rictus grin.

Bluestreak recoiled as much as he could; struggling and fighting, but all he could do watch as more and more half-processed fuel seeped through the cracks and slabs all around him. It drooled long, viscous strings onto his helm, his plating, crawled down his face, towards the corner of his mouth.

All could do was spit and heave and spit again because he couldn't get away from it.

Minutes faded into hours, into days. Trapped in the pitch dark, not a living noise except for the own whirr of his systems, because his comm calls for help couldn't penetrate the sheer amount of rubble.

He didn't dare open his mouth to shout and scream and call out even when he thought he could hear muffled sounds above him because oh Primus, the taste, the taste--

His world remained brutally silent, except for the settling death groans of a once living city. Not a word, not a comm for help, nothing. For a mech that had lived his whole life among the constant background noise and chatter of a busy downtown sector, it was unbearable. It crept into all the places in his mind and chewed them apart.

Finally, in desperation, he'd started to sing. All the songs he knew. To fill the empty spaces in the dark, to drive away the silence, to find something to hold onto so that his mind didn't shatter completely.

Once he'd run out of those, he was left with his own words. He babbled to himself out loud about how he was going to fix that window, change out the counters of his apartment, get that built in display case he'd wanted but had decided he really couldn't afford what the heck might as well splurge now...

The taste didn't matter then.

In fact, it finally became bearable.

The sharpshooter flung himself back from those memories. He snatched at that cheerful beat around them, anchoring himself from drowning in those depths of memory with the music. The Decepticon had stepped back, she was grinning, bouncing her head.

All Bluestreak could hear were the echoes of those names she'd jokingly tossed between them.

Names that were synonymous with so much death, so much ruin. So many things he'd loved and lost. 

Even worse all of a sudden to him was that this femme was equating these names- her Decepticon leaders - to the humans.

Those mechs didn't deserve to be given that privledge. They were not human. Not Agent Fowler, who worked tirelessly for his people. Not the kids; not the solid, caring Jack and his mother, or brave, bold, brash Miko. Certainly not thoughtful, gentle Raf.

They did not deserve to be spoken of as if they were like Carly.

No way in hell.

A knot of disgust roiled within the silver car in the parking lot. The vehicle's hood lowered as it focused on the six-wheeled car nearby. Bluestreak's headlights brightened and then dimmed into a cold, pale, seething glow.

His scanners flicked out, searching around the area for the highest point, reading the wind, the air, the distance, the trajectory needed. A hill would be ideal. Even a grassy knoll would do just fine. 

"No," he said slowly, deliberately. A slight nod of his chin, indicating those vicious purple lines. "No. It's not."

Under his shirt, Bluestreak's broad shoulders were tense. Every muscle in his chest and arms stood out. A barely perceptible tremble was rising through his frame. His avatar was a tall man, and right now, he was up on his toes in an effort to hold himself still. 

The lights surrounding him and Sparkplug flickered and flashed. Bright purple, hot pink. Shimmering yellows and golds. The dust motes kicked off the floor by the whirling, spinning, laughing humans gleamed between the two avatars.

"That is no more a band logo than you belong here dancing among these people whose home you want to destroy."

His tone was flat. No inflection, no raise of voice. Each word was deliberate, slow. Calm and low so that the humans around them would not hear this conversation. 

"I think you need to step outside, Decepticon. Now." 

[Sparkplug]

The human's reaction was weird. He sort of stiffened, his eyes looking right through her like he was focused on something further away, so convincingly that she glanced behind herself to see what he was looking at. Was this what humans did when they were confused, or confronted with unexpected information? Her green brows drew together, and she began to look puzzled.

Then he addressed her, and it all made sense. He wasn't human any more than she was; he knew exactly what she was talking about. Even through the flatness, his tone was accusatory.

Oops.

Her avatar paused, glancing to the side in a distracted kind of way as she refocused her attention on her chassis. Oh, yes, there it was. Definitely another Cybertronian around somewhere in the parking lot, presumably the one that was running the man in front of her. In front of her avatar, anyway. Split location/perception was weird. Could be an Autobot, could be a neutral. With the truce in place, neither should be shooting at her anyway, but she kept a thread of awareness linked to her chassis sensors as she turned her focus back to her avatar.

Animation returned to the girl's face, and she blinked at the man now towering over her. "Oh hey, you're one of us! Not us us," she clarified, gesturing offhandedly at her shirt, "but one of Us." She pointed upwards to the ceiling, circling her finger vaguely to indicate the planet beyond the sky above.

Pursing her lips, she shook her head after a moment's contemplation. "Nah. I kind of like it in here. Culture, you know? A different one to ours. Never heard any of this music before. If we spent more time doing this, might be a few more of us around." She shrugged. "What're you gonna do."

Why did he want her to go outside, anyway? Was he afraid of being overheard by the locals? What else could it be? It wasn't like he could threaten her avatar with his vehicle mode out there; treaty again. As much as it bewildered her that Megatron had signed it, even authored parts of it, she had to admit it certainly made it easier to travel the planet's surface without fretting about being set upon. If not for that, well, she'd have probably been running as quick as she could manage at that second; her avatar was an awfully complicated piece of kit, and she shuddered to think of the damage it'd do to her cognition if a remote node suddenly got trashed. Like taking a shot to the central processor.

Drawing slightly closer, and dropping her voice a little so it was harder for others to hear her over the music, she went on, "Guessing you're here for that weird little chirrup on the old systems protocol wavelength? Don't bother; it was this trashy little neon sign, shorted out right next to a radio antenna. I can give you the coords if you want to check I'm not spinning you a line; I'm not going anywhere. And besides," she added with a small, reproving frown, "no one said anything about trashing the planet. Take this place - the town, not the recreation hub. Not a single thing here either of us could want badly enough to go stomping all over it."

[Bluestreak]

The woman's puzzled expression took Bluestreak aback at first.

Had he messed up? Was this just an ordinary human that had been told something, seen something that was totally a lie? His scanners were bouncing all back all sorts of info and none of it could give him an absolute. Had one of the Decepticons stumbled across her and was she perhaps a total propaganda pawn? They'd done it before, on other worlds.

Was there really a band out there--

No way. Starscream would never allow himself to share the stage with anyone that might be competition.

Even an Autobot sharpshooter knew that much.

Then she opened her mouth. Kept talking.

One of us.

Standing in front of Sparkplug, the man somehow went even more still, as if the relay between the avatar had frozen and might be in need of a swift reboot to start working again. Then a muscle jumped in his jaw; he appeared to be grinding his teeth in a surprisingly human gesture.

"Never one of you," he muttered. "Never, ever, ever one of you, and I'd never want to be one of you."

As she drew closer to him. Both car and avatar froze again. Something cold and uncomfortable crawled up his relays, and he lifted his hands slightly to ward her back from him. The idea of a Decepticon thinking she was welcome to walk up that close to him?

No. Absolutely not.

His left hand curled into a fist. It wasn't a very good one as far as fists went; he'd tucked his thumb on the inside of his hand and his knuckles had gone white with tension.

Get away from me-

Outside in the parking lot, the silver Nissan rose up on all four tires. The wheel turned back and forth. A stream of static hissed out of the radio as the car's headlight beams brightened. The sport's car engine ticked softly before it turned over and growled softly into life. The sloping hood seemed to measure the distance between itself and the six-wheeled vehicle.

Bluestreak's blinker flicked slowly. His brakelights flashed and then released. The car quickly began to back out of the spot he was parked in.

There was a place. His sensors told him there was. Up on a nearby hill, a dark section of road with a perfect, open view of the bar's parking lot.

Easy shot. Simple shot. One he could do with one optic.

He'd done far, far worse shots like that before.

All she had to do was sit there. Sit there in the lot.

Or stand out there.

Actually, you know what, standing there would be perfect.

Her voice prattled on. Usually he loved voices to fill moments like these, fill the space between his own fractured thoughts. Right now, every word the femme offered up was like talons on a sleek metal surface. It grated and clawed as she threw out phrases that made him more and more upset.

Culture, a different one to ours-

Well of course it was different, they're humans, not Cybertronians.

If we spent more time doing this, there'd be more of us around--

Doing this? Taking over other planets and draining their resources?

What are you going to do-

What I can do, get you out of here before you hurt these people or anyone else, how about we start with that, lady.

Then she was bouncing on to say something about a radio antenna. What the heck was she talking about- oh that signal, okay, right, that was weird, but huh-  in a way it made perfect sense that a neon sign could cause some feedback that would be picked up on. Vegas threw his sensors totally out of whack. Too much neon, too much to process...

He liked it though. It really, really reminded him of home. Well, just the lights and the traffic and the constant murmur of voices. The thought of the big city steadied him. Or maybe it was because he was thinking of Wash and what Wash would do. What would Wash do? 

Probably punch her in the face. Which he was good at. Wash, not him. Bluestreak totally knew hand to hand was so not his skill-set by any stretch of the imagination. 

Her little frown caused him to immediately glower at her. "You didn't have to say anything about ruining this world," he told her, his voice equally quiet.

"Consider it's pretty much a given, based off of what you're flaunting on your shirt."

He couldn't believe it though. how she just totally shrugged off his request. At the time it was even a polite request. As much of one as he could muster.

She won't, she won't, she's totally going to ignore you and think, Blue, think, how do you get her to go. You've got to get her to get out of here, she's dangerous to these people. This isn't my thing, it's not my thing, I'm not good at this- I mean I'm good at talking, I guess. That's it. That's it. Keep her talking.

Under the taunt fabric of his t-shirt, his chest lifted as if he was taking a shuddering breath. Then he steadied.

"Okay," he finally muttered. "Alright, alright. You said you're not spinning me a line, so here's your chance to prove it to me, sure. Sure, we can do that. You give me those coordinates. I don't want them in here though, because first off, there's too many people around us, and second - there's no way I'd let you ping them to me, period. Not going to happen."

"Outside," Bluestreak said, with a tilt of his head. "Only way. We go outside, you tell me and I verify."

The man's blonde bangs ruffled a little bit and then went back perfectly in place.

[Sparkplug]

The other bot's human avatar froze up again. Sparkplug raised an eyebrow, waiting patiently for him to reconnect to the remote node and shaking her head slightly. How did he expect to go unnoticed among the organics if his projector was this glitchy? There was something wrong with the jaw, too. Oh, well.

He muttered something indistinct as she stepped closer, then seemed to freeze up again. Honestly, she wasn't exactly practised at wandering around in human habitations, but the way this avatar was acting, she was a paragon of stealthy infiltration by comparison. She'd have patted him on the hand, but for all she knew, his glitchy avatar would let her hand pass right through him, and then it'd be really hard to explain if anyone noticed.

She didn't know what the standard human reaction would be to finding one of them was a stammering intangible semi-statue, but it would probably be noisy and inconvenient.

Her attention was drawn back to her chassis by movement. The other Cybertronian signal was shifting, at the same time as a sleek silver vehicle pulled out of a parking allocation zone and rolled towards the exit. Well, that identified him pretty clearly. Nice lines, honestly. No obvious faction symbol at first glance, but you'd have had to look at her own chassis pretty closely to pick hers out, so that didn't mean much. Why was he leaving? Was he just giving up on his avatar altogether? That'd be a shame; she was honestly pretty curious about the mech, and when the truce ended, there wouldn't be much more in the way of friendly conversation.

Then his avatar unfroze, long enough to equate being a Decepticon to automatically wanting to ruin every planet they stepped on. That was pretty unfair. Still didn't mean he was definitely an Autobot, the neutrals had some pretty sour feelings about both, but she was leaning towards Autobot anyway. Her hopes of having a civil conversation were wilting when he added that okay, fine, he'd accept her coordinates to check on the sign, but he'd like to talk outside.

That was rather more promising. After all, if he simply wasn't going to trust her, he wouldn't go near coordinates she handed over freely, and he'd already got his main chassis out on the road, so obviously he was going to check them out the moment she communicated them. Besides, now she'd seen how much difficulty he was having with the avatar, maybe it was better to go outside, where they'd be less likely to be noticed.

Still, she paused for a moment, cocking her head towards the speakers as another song came on that she wasn't familiar with, and would now miss. "Well, if you're sure. Shame though, I don't know this one either."

Making her way out of the tangle of dancers, she went on, "Looks like you're having some trouble with your projector there; you should get that looked at. If you keep freezing up, some of these locals are gonna notice. And as for my sigil meaning anything like what you just said, that's plain not right. No one's here to wreck the place for fun. Sure, between us, places have suffered in the crossfire, but there's this human expression I picked up when I was looking up music. Refers to dance moves, with a partner? 'It takes two to tango'. No one's blameless."

She stepped out into the cooler night air, enjoying the sensation. With her remote projection system emulating a human's responses to stimuli, the temperature change felt so much more intimate and immediate. She glanced towards her own chassis, feeling odd to see herself from the vantage point of one of the tiny locals, then stepped out into the open vehicle storage area, away from the building. "There. Don't reckon any of the squishies will overhear us now. If you take this structure as your zero point, you want relative coords-" and she rattled off a quick stream of digits in base sixteen. She could have given absolute planetary coordinates, but that system wasn't fantastic for specifying very small regions, and she wasn't completely sure the Autobots or neutrals or whoever would be using the same zero point definition as the Decepticons were. Finishing up, she added, "I'm Sparkplug. What's your name? Seeing as we're being all friendly."

[Bluestreak]

Bluestreak had backed out of the spot and aligned his hood with the road.

She'd agreed to leave the building.

He had expected the Decepticon to balk. To turn around and find a place to move to in the builing; cut off her avatar without being seen. She did none of those things. Bluestreak waited for her projection to pass him before he followed a step after her, careful not to run into any of the other people in the bar.

The Decepticon kept talking.

Somewhere deep in within the Nissan, there was a growl that did not come from any mechanical turn of his engine.

That strange sense of disconnect; it was sometimes hard to keep your concentration on both places at once as you moved. Which was fine in a way, it kept his attention on the road and moving past all the cars on either side of it. He was just following the road, knowing where he had to go, where he had to get to - go to high ground, go to high ground...

The music muffled as he stepped after her into the lot. There was no one out here, just the two of them. He glanced at the six wheeled vehicle in the parking lot, but really, that wasn't Bluestreak's main focus right now.

Her avatar was.

He knew from Wash that avatars were incredibly vulnerable in some respects. Damage to it could result in massive damage to the user, a feedback loop that could cripple you in an instant...

His cowboy boots scuffed against tiny pebbles. A crushed bottlecap bounced off the toe and skittered across the lot.

The silence didn't last long though.

Normally, Bluestreak loved chatter. He loved conversation because it was so, so much better than silence.

Yet he was finding his brain tossed into dark places as it tried to make sense of her attitude.

The man blinked. His mouth opened. In the cool darkness of the lot outside, the pink vapor lights cast soft circles against the grey pavement. Moths drifted past; there was the frantic flash of wings beating senselessly against the glass.

"Don't," he snapped, and the one word burst out of him as if someone had blasted a hole in a dam.

The words, all the words he'd been holding back, bottling up, trying to speak to her as little as possible because it was the only thing that he could try and do to keep himself from absolutely losing his grip right now. 

"Do you even listen to what comes out of your mouth, Decepticon? I mean, I sort of have my excuses, and even then I don't like to say they're excuses because there's a whole lot of folks who have dealt with far more than I did, but hey, you're the one who brought up that places suffered in the crossfire. Places? Places?! Sure, okay, tell you what, when you're done slumming down here, you go back to your safe black ship up there in the sky and realize you've got a lofty vantage point to look down on the world.

"Then I want you to go and study up Praxus. Dunno if it's before your time, but humor me, look it up. I'm sure the information is in your library systems, with the perfect political spin on it, but hey, worth a try. You look up how much my home tangoed. Then after that? You download all the planets your Warlord has left behind in his wake, and take some time to read about them and maybe then you might just have the tiniest, tiniest glimmer of understanding in your processor about suffering.

"It's not even places," he rushed, thrusting his palm out flat in front of him to shut her up, even though right now not even the most experienced campaigning politician shouting down from a podium could have interjected.

"Not places, because you know what, you can rebuild a place, you can make it better, you can add in amazing windows and put on a second story and maybe even put a pretty glass fire pit on the back porch, but it's the lives. Guess what? Most of them absolutely were blameless. They just wanted to get up in the morning, say hi to the folks they loved, and head to work, and they weren't political in any way. Your faction took that away from them for no reason other than to prove a point. They  treated lives and living with absolutely no importance."

"You can say everything about I'm not right about your sigil, that it takes two to tango, that no one's blameless. You can totally throw a single human expression at me in an attempt to prove how smart and clever you are right now, totally just enjoying their music and this planet at face value, but you know what?

"The moment you called them squishies? When you basically referred to living, intelligent beings in a demeaning way, labeled them as things you can kill casually underfoot?  That moment?"

The man shook his head. Where his eyes had been flinty and cold and distant- for a brief second, there was something else. Disbelief, perhaps. Frustration. 

Resignation. 

"Sparkplug," he echoed. "We aren't friendly." 

[Sparkplug]

Don't?

Sparkplug was confused at first, the single blunt syllable not seeming to fit into the conversation. The torrent of words, the bitter rant, took care of that. Her lack of understanding melted into understanding perfectly, and with the non-stop stream of accusations came a growing anger that tightened her small hands into fists. Her green eyes grew sharp and hard, and she rose up on her toes slightly, as if to try to close some of the height gap between them.

"Yeah?" she spat, "You could have told me that inside, and I wouldn't have wasted my time coming out here for your lecture. Now you listen here, you sanctimonious stuttering hypocrite, and let's talk atrocities. Let's start with, oh, I don't know - these creatures." She jabbed a finger at the brightly lit building. "The ones that have been kidnapping us and cutting us up? Them. I had a look at the state of their weapons tech, and they're a nicely inventive little bunch, I'll give them that. Fission and fusion warheads, in the tens of thousands. If they dropped one here, you'd need a spectrometer to find our vapour. And they used them."

Sparkplug gestured angrily with a sweep of her hand, her left arm held at an odd angle as she paid less attention to the different form of her human projection. "They were at war, and you know what they said? Let's destroy a city, completely, to prove we can. Sound familiar? Fission warhead, killed everyone. But that didn't get the message across, so they waited a whole pair of planetary rotations before they did it again. And they would have kept doing it until the other side surrendered - which they did, unconditionally. It's your faction that are working with these people, you shiny silver slagbucket, so don't you get superior with me!"

Her avatar was breathing hard now, and her chassis rose on her six wheels, tensely furious. Her voice dropped a notch, lower and harder. "But those cities, those places, did get rebuilt. You know why? Because after the war, more of them came along, ones that didn't even live through it, and they worked together, and they built it again. But that won't ever happen with us. So let's see, why might that be? Oh yes. Your boss murdered our entire race."

She jabbed a finger at the sky, laden with stars now as the ragged clouds drifted overhead and the glow of the sun vanished to the west. "It took Primus to make us! But it took Optimus Prime to say, 'I'd rather throw the All-Spark into the void forever than suffer a temporary military disadvantage by letting the Decepticons have it!' And that was that. No more of us, ever. There won't be a people that come after the war, that fixes everything, because we won't exist at all. I used to make bodies for the new sparks! I gave life a place to live! But you know, I won't ever get to do that again, because we're on a one-way slope to extinction, no holds barred, no stops!

"There should be millions of us on this lousy planet!" she raged. "Your boss called for every last one of you to come, and so where is everyone? I bang around a half-empty ship like a loose nut in a gear housing, and you - how many of you are there? Tens of thousands? Thousands? Hundreds? Ten? That is his fault, the Great Unmaker, the murderer of unborn sparks! He decided to kill our species, and one by one, he's gotten his wish. Our planet is dead, and it's never coming back. There's no one left to fix it. And you think Praxus means anything to me? It was one city that was slightly ahead of the curve. That's it."

Her arms dropped to her sides, as if her fury had used up whatever force was animating her. Her voice was flat now. "I was having fun before you showed up. Now I'm going back inside. Why don't you go find an oil fire and stick your faceplate in it, you obnoxious, moralising heap of Unicron slag."

She turned her back on the other avatar, and began stalking back towards the building, scowling blackly.

[Bluestreak]

It was one of the things about Bluestreak.

For all of his vaunted ability to talk about absolutely nothing at the drop of a hat, he didn't interrupt Sparkplug's tirade. The tall man actually drew back as she approached him, seemingly uncomfortable with being within striking distance of her hand or foot.

His hands stayed at his sides though, he did not lift a fist or threaten her.

Out in the street, the silver car had turned a corner. It stopped at the stop-sign in the darkened road. Only the cold white of the Nissan's headlights flickered and then dimmed into low, faint beams.

MECH. She'd mentioned MECH, and with that one little word came the cold, terrible wrench on his insides, along with a horrible memory of Air Raid, lying on that table, the slow, low beep of the medical equipment the only thing assuring them all that he was not dead. The flier didn't move, didn't respond. He hadn't after all this time. For all intents and purposes Air Raid was brain dead. 

Bluestreak knew about the others too; not personally of course, but there were rumors; weapons testing and things whispered about that were far, far worse...

I was going to shoot her, he thought in growing horror. 

The truce. I just- oh Primus, I forgot.

No, I just didn't care. I walked in, saw someone wearing a Decepticon sigil around a bunch of humans and I freaked out. I did. I nearly- I almost-

He drifted in a state of numb. There was a truce. A cease-fire, and he had been utterly willing to break that truce. If she hadn't mentioned MECH at that very moment, he would have simply driven up that hill, transformed and aimed from within the protection of the dark buildings.

Not at her vehicle mode, no. Her avatar.

One crackling bolt of electrical discharge from the rifle. No doubt the feedback would have stunned her instantly, if not worse. Frozen her vehicle mode in the dark, quiet lot. A simple, practiced flip of his thumb, a squeeze of the trigger. Careful placement of an armor punching round. Over and done. He knew the power of a single bullet.

Broken the truce. Put terrible pressure on the one mech he respected above all others. Optimus Prime. He'd worked so hard to get them to this point. Whatever Bluestreak personally believed about the truce, however he emotionally felt about the whole idea, it didn't matter.

An Autobot should not be the one to do that, because that stepped right into the places of Decepticon territory.

The fact that he'd gone there shook him right to the core. Too close, too close, I almost messed up, I almost - I almost got us all in trouble and I nearly disappointed Prime, I can't believe I did this. You'd be the lowest of the low, Blue, lower than this nasty piece of work in front of you, even. You started this whole mess, when you confronted her...

No. She started it the moment she totally tried to pass her murdering bosses off as a band, ugh. Stop it, stop thinking about it.

She was still yelling at him.

Well, at least it filled the spaces in his head with other things besides his own miserable voice.

The man's avatar silently stood and listened to her flow of words. Her accusations.

"I admit it," he said when she gave the tiniest of pauses. His voice was surprisingly quiet. "I admit when I don't know, and I don't know how to answer you about the state of human weaponry. Nor do I have the appropriate context or knowledge about their reasons for using it. I'm no weapons expert, and I'm certainly not someone who spends my time studying the wars and conflicts of other planets. How you explain it is familiar, yes, but the difference seems to be... their world is still here. Living and going forward."

"MECH is not even a fraction of a fraction of the humans," he insisted. "They're a threat to their own too, as they work to get what they want. Not just Cybertronians."

They consider us beneath them, he wanted to say. Feels pretty scary, doesn't it?

He didn't even know if she recognized he had said anything. She was going on, going on about things he understood, but he did not interrupt her tirade. No, it wasn't a temporary military advantage. It was a terrible choice. One that Prime would carry with him forever. One by one they would fall and with it, their civilization, their people, and no more would be created to take their place. No more bodies for another eon of conflict.

Her selfishness grated on him. Me. I. Me, it's all about me. I did this, I did that. I won't get to do it again. Prime's fault, it's all his fault. No admittance now that it took two to tango, all right then.

No realization on her part that an awful lot of souls never got to do what they wanted again because of this conflict. Cybertronian and otherwise.

At her comment on Praxus, the car out on the dark road stiffened. The man's avatar merely focused on some point in the distance, and took in the warm lights of distant buildings.

Yes, he could have yelled back at her the words that were beating against the frantic confines of his mind. I've chosen my place in this conflict. I'll defend Prime and his decisions, because- he has always given us the ability to speak out against them. He is a good, good mech. Do I agree with everything he has ever done? No, but I- have the right to say I disagree, and that's more than you'll probably ever get with Megatron.

Instead, he simply pulled at memories, tried to shove other ones away. All he could do was find one oddly perfect moment to focus on, so far away from this dark parking lot. A clean sweep of kitchen counter. Carly pouring soda into a glass, soda he couldn't drink, but the idea of it had charmed him so, so much. Here he was a random stranger in her home after a pretty awful moment, and she was treating him with honest, open kindness.

That's what he would stand and defend. Didn't matter how many of them they were down to, really. This was it. This place, this world, this people. If he died here, he was okay with it. Good place.

Out in the darkened road, the Nissan sagged over his tires. He crept slowly to the curb and nosed in to an open parking stop.

A low, haggard groan drifted out from somewhere deep within the silver vehicle.

"Maybe, just maybe..." the car and man both murmured. "There shouldn't be millions of us anywhere. We're sure not good neighbors."

By then she had cut him off and was walking away. He had no idea if she heard him.

Then he glanced at the building. The avatar's shoulder's heaved as the car shuddered from bumper to taillight.

A crackle flicked through his comm. It made him jump in both places at once.

"Blue? Bluestreak? Everything okay. You moved? Is there a problem, or not a problem? What's up, are you all right?"

Bulkhead's voice, breaking into the empty spaces. He about sagged in relief.

"No," he admitted, his words rushing together. "I'm not. Sorry. I- I almost did something really stupid, Bulkhead. Really stupid. I almost put everything in jeopardy. I'll go and tell Prime when I get back, I'll go and totally put myself on base work, not out here, something, I don't know. I mean, I don't go to the DMZ, you know, the whole thought of it just strikes me as awful and terrible and wrong, but I can't avoid it when it's going to be around every corner. I can't screw up like this, I can't."

There was a moment of silence.

"Whoa, buddy. Easy there. Easy there."

"I was going to shoot her!"

"Who, wait, what, whoa. Shoot who?"

"The Decepticon."

"What Decepticon?"

"The one in the bar."

"Okay, glad we've got that established. Decepticon in a bar. Well, I've punched a few of them in bars myself over the years. Kind of a given."

"We're under a truce!"

"Riiiiight," Bulkhead rumbled. "Yeah, don't do that. That's bad. So wait, where's the Decepticon now?"

"Uh, heading back to the dance floor, I think," Bluestreak said, and then hesitated. "In her avatar, not as a car."

"Glad you explained that. So, what's the plan, Blue?"

The tall man shuffled the soles of his boots against the dark pavement underfoot before he focused on the retreating back of the femme's avatar. His chest heaved, as if he was taking a deep breath.

"Well, it's not the best plan. In fact, I think it's a terrible plan, but hey, it's all I can do." Bluestreak said, even as the choice became clear in his mind. Long strides carried him across the lot, back towards the light and the music.

"Guess I'll be standing her to keep an eye on her until she decides to leave on her own. Gotta make sure these people stay okay while she's here."

"Seems like a- wait, like all night?"

"I hope not."

"Me too, because I didn't bring a magazine and the only radio station I'm getting out here is a pop one. Don't think they have heavy metal here in Rehoboth Beach. Oh well, what can ya do. I'll let base know what's up with that signal."

"Thanks. I'll drive to your position in a minute. Contact you back shortly."

With that, Bluestreak quietly trailed after the Decepticon as she stomped back into the building.

[Sparkplug]

So he didn't even know anything about the organics he was so fiercely judging her over. That wasn't much of a surprise. Sure, they might be too short-lived to sustain the kind of planetary conflagration that had consumed Cybertron - at least, not for more than a few vorns - but they made up for it in their constant intercene warfare. It was a rare planetary cycle when they weren't killing each other in an organised fashion somewhere on the world - she couldn't imagine them being able to sustain an age of peace and plenty like Cybertron's Golden Age for more than a wet afternoon. Like their lives, their attention spans were too short.

Still, he had at least admitted that ignorance.

His parting murmur, though, nearly had her spin on her heel and deliver another rant. How miserable was it to just decide your whole species was better off dead? The paucity of vision, the poverty of imagination! There were so many things she wanted to throw in his face, a fresh wave of anger fuelling her. She wanted to shout that actually, she didn't want to die, she didn't want their whole race to die, but she had never been given the choice. It had been made for her. The rush of hot fury felt familiar, burning in her chassis as she tasted bitterness in her mouth. Come back in a few million years, and see if these magical humans had turned their planet into ash, or had died out completely.

But this bot wasn't Optimus Prime. Autobot or not, he was just another one of her dying species, and he hadn't gotten to make that choice any more than she had.

She kept walking.

The warmth of the human habitation folded around her again, strange, mingled scents hitting her like a wall as the sound assaulted her ears; a flood of sensory impulses. She tried to take solace in them, let them distract her, but this time it wasn't nearly as fun. She took to the dance floor once again, aggressively dancing, throwing her elbows and hands around with abandon that cleared a small space around her in the throng. It took her a while to exercise the stress and tension of their confrontation away, keeping a wary thread of consciousness back to her chassis, but she didn't detect the other Cybertronian again, and slowly she relaxed. The music began to be fun again rather than an excuse to keep in motion; maybe the evening wouldn't be a complete wreck.

Then, naturally, her gaze landed on the mech's avatar, sat gazing steadily at her as if his presence alone was stopping some kind of massacre. Rolling her eyes and huffing in annoyance, she went back to dancing, but now she was aware of him, she couldn't stop glancing back to where he sat. It was spoiling her rhythm, making her self-conscious.

Finally, she gave up. Throwing up her hands in exasperation, she walked off the dance floor and dropped into a seat opposite from where he sat, keeping enough distance that just maybe he wouldn't either flinch or yell at her. Crossing her arms across her chest, her human face assumed a stubborn look, brows drawing down over her green eyes.

"Hey. Silently staring nameless Auto-stalker. Look, I did not come out here for an argument, and I definitely didn't come out for a fight. Truce, etcetera. So either stop staring at me, talk to me about something other than whose fault everything is, or - I don't know, call sometime else to watch me that is less whatever your deal is and a bit more talkative." She sighed. "Maybe someone that doesn't treat 'hello, nice to meet you' as a declaration of war, that'd be a darn start."

[Bluestreak]

Bluestreak had quietly sat himself at one of the tables. His long legs unfolded underneath as he crossed his feet over each other. His brown cowboy boots were buffed to a soft polish.

The sort of look that absolutely indicated that their owner had possibly never been within miles of a horse.

When one of the servers came over to see if he wanted a drink, Bluestreak hesitated. Bars back home on Cybertron were similar. Actually most establishments across the universe were; if you were taking up space somewhere, they wanted to to at least buy something for your time.

He didn't have any money on him right now; the wallet Wash had handed him after the whole debacle with MECH was sitting in his glovebox. Sure, he took it out and carried it when he went to the mall, but the rest of the time it just sat in his vehicle mode along with his avatar's ID. Luckily, he had never been pulled over by a cop.

Bluestreak still had no clue how Wash had done that. That's why he was not a spy or a liason. His idea of thinking on his feet - well, that was how today had sort of ended up at this moment. Where he was sitting at a table, trying to watch a Decepticon avatar dancing out on the floor among the humans.

She was certainly making a good go of it too. Bluestreak wasn't entirely sure if she was dancing or if she was using her moves from her last training spar. Apparently the humans didn't want to get an elbow or toe to the face either and were sort of naturally easing out of the area of contact. 

Quickly, he threw the service woman a friendly, easy smile and immediately apologized about leaving his wallet in the car. If she needed him to move, he'd certainly do that.

Kindly, she reassured him it was fine and asked if he wanted a glass of water.

"Sure," he replied. "Thank you."

Luckily, she had brought him back the glass the water and was long gone helping other patrons before the femme's avatar stopped dancing. At first, Bluestreak was hopeful that she was done for the evening and was going to wander on home back up to her great looming ship of death in the sky.

No such luck. Like the way this evening had gone so far, start to finish.

Her avatar slumped down in the chair across from him. The worn wood of the table stretched between them. There was no way either of them could reach the other without standing up and being incredibly obvious.

Bluestreak eyed her, and then looked down at the glass of water in front of him. He curled his hands around it. Condensation rolled down the thick edges of the cup. Absentmindedly, he drew his thumb through the water droplets and then glanced back up at her.

"Silently staring nameless Auto-stalker isn't arguing or fighting you," Bluestreak replied. "I'm sitting. At this table, taking a break and listening to the music in a bar. You just happen to be out there dancing. Truce, right?"

A shrug. "Sorry. Whatever my deal is, I honestly can't think of anyone else out there who's usually more talkative than me. Plus, no one else can get out here and take my place. So guess we're both stuck looking at each other for a while. Also, dunno where 'hello, nice to meet you' ever came up to start us out. Think actually the first remark you made was something about your bosses being in a band, remember. The album called the Planet Wreckers?"

He raised an eyebrow. "So yeah. Feel free to start a conversation about something way, way different, that's just fine with me."