Ep. .5 - Texan Wastes - Ow, My Ego - Closed

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"Come on, Buck, don't do this to me."

If he survived this fiasco, Moonshot was going to kill someone.

"Just a few more kliks, you can do i-"

BANG.

...make that several someones, starting with the piece-of-slag salesmech who'd sold him this deathtrap-on-wings.

"Okay, maybe you can't."

The gunner's words were nearly lost in the sudden screech of multiple alarms. His rattletrap conveyance- affectionately dubbed 'The Rustbucket'- had held together for vorns without complaint, as loyal and reliable a teammate as he could hope for- and now everything was breaking all at once. Three of the thing's engines were just... gone, too damaged by atmospheric reentry to handle the stress of wind shear and heat strain. The lone holdout wasn't much better, if the incessant chuntering and pinging from just outside the cabin was anything to go by. He had, if he was lucky, three or four kliks to find someplace soft to crash-land, provided that the deathtrap's severely-compromised hull plating didn't give way before then, and- Oh Primus, was that a fragging mountain range trying to reach up and snag them out of the air?!-

The downside of toeing the thin line between allied forces: You had abso-fragging-lutely no one to cuss at when things went pear-shaped. For once in his life Moonshot found himself ruing that long-ago and far-away decision to walk away from alliances at large. If he was gonna die, he fragging well didn't want to do it alone.

That 'three or four kliks' proved to be a ridiculously-hopeful overestimation. Three thousand feet above the most barren wasteland he'd seen in vorns the shuttle's last engine gave a despairing wheeze and fizzled out. In the dead silence that followed Moonshot spat a last stream of vitriol and mentally kissed his aft goodbye.

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Buried inside her own long-ago-crashed-and-since-buried ship, Cleaver felt more than heard the impact of something big and metallic hitting the sand far too close to her location. She cast a quick sensor sweep towards the surface and confirmed that the holo-emitter for the energon scanner was still operating, then, and against her better judgement, sent a wider scan out towards the impact zone.

Energon. Fraggit.

The strength of the crash suggested an orbital drop, and either a very big mecha or a shuttle giving up the ghost and 'landing' wherever gravity deemed to put it. Which was, unfortunately, on her doorstop. Pacing a step, the old medic tapped the flat edge of one arm-blade against her thigh in thought. The cloak on the ship would keep its presence disguised from most scans, and her by extension. If it was a Decepticon landing, then that's exactly what she wanted to happen. If it was an Autobot she'd comm. Ironhide. If it was another Neutral, then they were probably in sore need of some help. Likely medical.

Huffing iritably at herself, and wishing she had someone else to blame for the math that up until meeting Ironhide wouldn't have mattered at all, Cleaver lurched open the ceiling-hatch door to the ship and climbed up out onto the sand. The trap-door's disguise of scrub-bush and sand snapped back down into place, and with a grumble, the medic started off towards the rising smoke of a Cybertronian wreckage.

Twelve kliks walking, and Cleaver was growing more apprehensive with each step. One of the biggest disadvantages of being alone was that there wasn't anyone to know what you were doing and cover your back, even if it was just to check up when you didn't come back from something on time. If whatever had survived that landing was trigger-happy (and faction really had little influence over that), then she'd be in the Well with no-one any the wiser. She briefly thought of sending a short comm. to Ironhide, but wrote off the notion as 'all kinds of ridiculous and stupid' just as quickly. The big lug would probably 'bridge straight in and make her go home whilst he investigated the crash.

The side of the shuttle was crumpled as well as scorched, and it took some hard prying with her blades to prise the door open and get inside. Coming to the bridge, she vented a thick wave of relief to find that her close-range scan was confirmed: one occupant, unconscious, half-slagged but not critical. Squatting down next to the mech, Cleaver elected to make sure he was thoroughly disarmed before beginning to administer triage.

Just in case.

[Deleted]

Moonshot came to.

That in and of itself was surprise enough to make his processor splutter indignantly, citing the improbability of his current location- and the pain zinging through his limbs like some demented medic's idea of electroshock therapy- as Very Good Reasons You Shouldn't Be Alive. Offhand he couldn't remember just what had happened- something about a flight, maybe, or a fight, or something-

-and then someone touched him.

For the second time in as many hours, everything went straight to the Pit.

Black hands and red optics and wires and chains and why did they have him here, he didn't know anything!-

Mechs weren't supposed to teleport, but that was really the only word to describe the vanishing act Moonshot performed. One moment he was slumped across the nav-station, the next halfway across the shuttle and fumbling weapons from subspace. This wasn't the field he would've chosen, far too cluttered and confined to be of use to a mech whose fighting style relied so heavily on speed, but it was the only one he had, and-

Only when one of his knees touched floor did Moonshot realize his fluid crouch had turned into a listing slump. A nano-klik later the flood of error messages started. Internal gyroscopes fragged, coolant lines snarled, one optic busted to the point of nigh-unusability, spinal relays screaming in protest of the abuse they'd endured-

This, Moonshot, is why you never introduce your face to a steering column at velocities in excess of five hundred miles an hour.

"The Pit happened?" That's what he meant to say, anyway- whether anything was decipherable amidst all the static was up for debate. Hopefully his look of utter bafflement communicated what his long-disused voice couldn't.

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A generous lifetime of parsing out what damaged mecha were static-spitting had Cleaver cock her head, elbows resting on her haunches from where she was still semi-crouched by the pilot's chair. "You crashed," came the dry remark. "Then you moved, so sit that scrap down and let me tend before you put yourself offline."

Leaving no time for the mech to even contemplate a retort, Cleaver forced herself back up and moved to sit directly in front of him. Stabilising and fluid loss were the priority, and she rumbled a warning note when he dared move as she put her hands to his torn side. A quick patch to stop the worst of it, and a reroute of coolant and fuel lines to preserve as much as possible from the threatening leak. The rest, scans informed her, would take significantly more work.

"My name's Cleaver," she introduced, looking up briefly to meet narrowed amber optics as she soldered off a semi-crushed line until it could be replaced. "'fraid you're gonna need more than I can do for you right now. You got friends down here?"

[Deleted]

Cleaver's snark proved more effective a wake-up call than any swarm of errors could ever hope to be. It also had the perhaps-unintended side-effect of cooling him the frag down. No red optics, no black armor, and most importantly of all, no great honking sigil declaring allegiance one way or the other. Had he been even slightly more coherent- or slightly less of a touch-me-not- Moonshot might well have kissed the femme for saving his sorry aft. The best he could do under current circumstances was a rusty grimace perhaps intended to be a smile and a hoarse-but-understandable, "...No. Not really."

...Oh. Right. Introductions were typically meant to be reciprocated, weren't they? Belatedly the gunner added, "Er... I'm Moonshot. Neutralist. Apparently lost and hopelessly confused on top of being slagged." Another pause, then a subvocalized, "...and thank you."

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That drew a smile from the old femme, and Cleaver's hands gentled a little to a slower, though still efficient pace. Her field emptied of the trepidation she'd been bowing under since deciding to approach the crashed shuttle. "Welcome. I'm a Neutral as well, so, you've got at least one friend on this rock."

She felt Moonstrike watching her work, letting her concentrate on stabilising his systems enough that he could move if he needed to without causing much damage. It gave her time to think - a Neutral with no allies on this rock was a situation she'd become intimately familiar with, but no ship was a slagfest she'd been lucky enough to be spared. She couldn't leave the surface in her ship, but everything aside from its thrusters worked and she had a fairly comfortable living space down there. Cleaver wasn't an engineer, but she could tell that Moonstrike's ship hadn't had the semi-gentle belly flop of a landing she'd been graced with. This thing was more likely to spontaneously explode than distil energon.

"If you want," she began awkwardly, very aware that she was entering unfamiliar turf with a mech she didn't know. "My ship's got an extra berth you can let your autorepair run on until you've got your processor straight. Maybe even repair your ship."

[Deleted]

Wholly focused on stilling his twitches and tremors- and on ignoring the shrieking 'MOVE YOUR AFT!' warnings still bouncing around in the back of helm- Moonshot very nearly missed the offer of help. He stiffened the moment those unexpected words wormed their way through the static clouding his processor, shock- and more than a touch of suspicion- spiking through his field. Neutral though this femme may have been, there was no such thing as 'no strings attached' when it came to helping others. If she helped him now, he'd owe her a favor, and favors out in the black usually came back to bite you in the aft.

-but this wasn't the black, this was Earth, and he didn't exactly have much of a choice in the matter. Damaged, alone and unarmed- or what passed for unarmed where Moonshot by the gunner's standards- he'd be a perfect punching bag for the first torqued-off allied mech to pass by. The thought of winding up some 'Con's playtoy rankled more deeply than accepting freely-offered assistance.

"I'd be grateful," He muttered at last, equal parts mortification and gratitude coloring his tone. "At least until I can see straight."

[Deleted]

Cleaver nodded fractionally, wary to come off as overly keen on this idea. Satisfied that the on-site job would do for now, she sat back and transformed the tools of her hands back into their normal bladed configuration.

"It's not far - buried just a ways off, really. You got any kind of cloak or hologram to cover your shuttle for now, or are we gonna have to throw sand over it?"

[Deleted]

"Neat trick."

...well, if he was feeling well enough to be a smart-aft, he must not be in danger of offlining just yet. Moonshot took some small solace in that, at least, even if he did still feel like he'd been stomped on by something large and ill-tempered.

"Used to. Not sure if it survived reentry, but..." He rose, engines growling at the way the world spun, and carefully picked his way towards the nav-station. (And studiously ignored all the bits and pieces of his face still smeared across the thing.) A few button-presses, an electric snarl and a yipped curse later Moonshot was on his aft for the second time in as many minutes, this time trying to wiggle feeling back into shocked fingertips.

"...presumably smelter grenades wouldn't have the desired effect?"

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"Not if you want to keep the gear and tech," Cleaver replied, dry and flat from already feeling the coming aches in her struts from that much work. Moonshot wasn't really hurt from that shock, so the medic shifted about to sit against the wall with her arms resting on her raised knees. She looked about the cockpit again, absorbing the specs of the shuttle. "Could dismantel it and store it in my ship's bay. If you think it's a write off, anyway."

[Deleted]

"Thought not." A pity, really, he'd been looking forward to blowing the Pit-slagged thing sky-high. Not that that'd be the most tactically sound thing to do, given his current status as 'nearly-friendless transient grounded on alien-infested backwater', but it still would've made him feel better. Explosions always did.

"Do we have *time* to rip it apart before we get swarmed by... whatever-the-Pit lives here?." That oversight proved a painful reminder of the fact that, oh, right, he'd been the universe's greatest fragging glitchwit and come into this practically blind. What information he had on Earth and its occupants was rudimentary and fragmented, bits and pieces gleaned from unshielded transmissions and the like. Its integrity was highly suspect, especially where numbers were concerned. (Seriously, what species had six billion members?!)

[Deleted]

Sticking the tip of one blade into the ground like a cane, Cleaver got to her pedes and came alongside the slighter mech. "Actually you managed a bit of luck, there. This far into the desert is uninhabitable to the natives. Should have at least two cycles before a satellite picks out the landing site."

She nudged Moonshot's arm with the edge of hers when it became obvious that he was quite intent on internally berating himself. "The humans have an information network called the Internet. It's rudimentary stuff, and you should stay away from anything massively misspelt or .gif heavy, but it'll give you a good overview of the species."

[Deleted]

So crash-landing in the middle of a Primus-forsaken wasteland was luck? Moonshot didn't stop to consider the implications of this; his processor ached enough without adding another contradiction to the pile. At least they didn't have to worry about organics sprouting up under-pede for the moment. With any luck- ha, what a concept!- he'd be patched up and on his way before the locals crawled out of their holes to investigate the ruckus.

...where he was going to *go* from here was still up for debate, of course, but he'd figure it out eventually. He always did.

For now he contented himself with a last look around the Rustbucket's mangled interior, fighting off rebellious stabs of what felt entirely too much like betrayal. Leaving his oldest and most loyal... 'teammate' behind wasn't quite as easy as he'd thought it would be. Resolving to come back and fix this- or at least put the poor thing out of its misery- the white mech flicked his attention back towards Cleaver.

"Surprised they've advanced far enough to have global communications," He grumped, easing into sea of zeroes and ones that comprised Earth's data repository. Pictures flickered across his processor, brightly-colored pictures accompanied by squared-off runes he supposed must be a form of written language. Another jump and he immersed himself in maps and graphs detailing the myriad eccentricities of the mudball's structure. More pictures, these ones moving, displaying organic life-forms writhing and flailing and emitting noises that belonged on a battlefield-

-and then he found YouTube, and everything else ceased to matter.

Moonshot blasted techno all the way back to Cleaver's makeshift base.

[FIN]