Flashback - "Goode Direction" - [Closed]

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The last time she had checked her inner chronometer, they were just leaving the ship Tellius and its crew. At the time their fuel tanks, their supply… had seemed adequate. Adequate enough, all things considering; more than enough, knowing it came from Tellius's own stock. Between the two of them they had no real plan other than half-hearted searching through the systems for some Decepticon outpost, if only out of habit. It had been, for the longest time, the only thing they knew… but whatever ties, whatever closeness they had with Megatron's cause vanished with Excellon.

Alert and online she pulled her ration from their stores, contemplating the weight of the energon cube in her servos. Despite her attempts to avoid calculating vorn, though, she found herself keeping track of time with rations. They had almost halved their supply when they passed a lone, icy planetoid her last recharge cycle. She shifted her optics down into the half drained cube… Adequate. For two frames in a low-activity period without the need to power their own flight or battle systems. Adequate to survive, she settled.

But for how much longer?

Shearwind was already sitting in the pilot's seat when she emerged from the berth, the blast shield left wide from one side to the other. Blackness stretched out on the other side, stars billions of years away not but faint specks in the void. It would have been maddening if not for the constant, gentle thrum of Shearwind's presence with her mind, her spark. But she could feel something tight in hir field… a restless almost in her very own servos. "You have not recharged yet…?" More a statement than a question. Storm settled herself into the co-pilot's seat, optics tracing the lines her hir helm. "You should take your rations, too…"

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9.04% of Shearwind's not-inconsiderable processing power was turned outward, wading through the sea of information the shuttle's sensor suit relayed in and flagged as relevant to their current nearly-fuelless-and-probably-lost situation. Another 12.63% was directed inward, sort of, slowly sifting through the vast store of information that Nightside had ever-so-kindly uploaded to the shuttle's kernel before his temporary shipmates had set off. A further 8.22% was occupied in etching creative glyphs for boredom- or perhaps it was 'madness', the two glyphsets weren't entirely dissimilar -into the ship's nav-station. The remaining 70.22% sat there idle, and frankly that simple inactivity was driving hir bonkers.

This has to be what going insane feels like.

Storm's well-timed mental 'nudge', thickly layered with reproach/worry/'what the everloving frag are you doing', effectively put an end to Shear's sorry attempts at self-amusement. Neither of them really expected to see the shuttle's owner again- Nightside was half a universe away and happy as a scraplet in a pile of scrap-metal with that state of affairs- but Storm had taken exception at her twin vandalizing the engineer's minor-miracle-in-transport-shape. A thread of guilt worked its way into Shear's field, a cold flash of emotion amidst the generalized stir-craziness and anxiety that had become normal since they'd left Tellius. It was, their ex-teammates would've been happy to point out, an emotion very few mecha ever saw, and only one could summon on command.

"'Course not," Shear muttered, wingtips flicking down in a movement equal parts embarrassment and defensiveness. "Didn't want to wake you when you were finally resting easy." Of missed meals and recharge zie made no mention; there was, after all, nothing to be said about hir deplorable self-maintenance habits other than 'STOP. NOW.' "Besides, there's nothing new or interesting to see out here. You should get back t-"

...and then a proximity alarm went off. Something out there in the blackness of space was moving in ways space junk didn't.

"...the Pit?"

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'Course not.' Zie said. The notes trailed upwards with a familiar feigned sense of comfort; notes that some other mecha might have easily believed… but she could read the underlying weight of it all, that nervous buzz of embarrassment and hard, stony texture to the defensiveness that tried to hide it all. She let the concern ripple outwards through her field without reservation, her brow ridges pulled together and upwards in a rare display of facial emotion. She knew… and she knew that zie knew. The little bits of energon zie skipped here and there some vorn back had gradually grown into missing entire portions when Storm wasn't looking, which didn't help hir already fitful recharges. They both knew. But for formality's sake, perhaps, she said nothing. Looked away when she knew she would be looking away in silent respect of personal boundaries that, already thin to begin with, had become practically non-existent together in such close quarters for so long. In respect of that deep, low hum of protectiveness that needed soothing. She had felt the ache of it in her struts since they left into the unknown, and for her part did what she could to soothe it, but…

She couldn't hide the growing anxious glyphs in her field at what she was attempting to respectfully ignore. Shear needed fuel… zie needed to recharge. But just as she was about to reboot her vocalizer and calm her fidgeting to address it, Nightside's frankenshuttle chose to intervene.

Stunned… she looked to the dash, her audios almost not registering the sound of a proximity sensor. How long had it been, since that thing had gone off? How long had it been since they had heard anything other than the hum of the engines and their own spark? "I-..it's…" She looked to the front shield, activating her long disused optical targeting systems. It sent a delightful vibration through her frame, like a good stretch after a cramped rest. It was moving at a cruising speed, far too small to be a ship or even a full-sized Seeker build, and not in direct path of their shuttle but close enough it prodded her into quick action. "…closing in. Shutting down." Her vocalizer clamped off the words with an uncharacteristic tenseness as instinct and programming kicked in. Unidentified object approaching proximity of their small transportation shuttle in deep space. 'Blend in. Avoid confrontation.' She thought on reflex, digits flashing over the dash, the systems of the shuttle shutting off suddenly with loud clicks and low-pitched whirs until they were floating powered down in silence and darkness…

She waited a few kliks. ::It appears to be a probe.:: Small though the object might have been, where sensory devices were concerned, larger ships often followed. And in their small shuttle, with limited fuel and fire-power…
Calming her rousing battle systems she felt through their link, waiting patiently for zie's reaction, direction. ::Too far away to identify properly.:: She offered.

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It was a bit like watching an explosion go off, really, the way hir world flashed from black to stark white in the space of an intake. Shear didn't remember spinning in hir seat in time with Stormbreaker, could never recall keying in all the long-ago memorized sequences that offlined their ship's nonessential systems and plunged them into darkness as deep as the void between stars. In that moment their surroundings were immaterial, the allegiance of the object hurtling towards them utterly unimportant- nothing mattered but the heat of weapons systems spinning up to speed, the animal violence racing through hir lines like fire, the spark-deep need to guard/protect/SAVE-

::It isn't ours.::

Two mechs could keep a secret only if one of them was dead, and when said mechs were spark-splits, two halves of the same whole, all bets were off. Shear could no more have masked the modifiers in hir comm than zie could have raised the dead, unpleasant ugly glyphs for not-of-us and not wanted/needed twisted in among the more standard markers for Decepticon and allied. The subharmonics a proper Seeker would've used were conspicuous only by their absence, and Shear couldn't bring hirself to care. This object- this puzzle- was infinitely more fascinating than the mechs who had left them to their fate on Eta-3.

...especially because the glitch-facing thing didn't look one bit like Cybertronian technology. What in the everloving frag...?

::... really, really not ours.::

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It was moving almost peacefully through the space in front of them, as if completely unaware that it was somewhere billions of years from everywhere else. It looked lost, insignificant and alien, but at the same time the only thing in this universe that had their full attention apart from themselves.

Kliks passed, the satellite lazily moseying along some distance from their shuttle… what she suspected to be its lens remaining stationary and pointed away. Her systems began to cool and idle, active thoughts slowly creeping back into her processor as she noted with passing intrigue at their reactions. Before they had known what it was, their instinct was to avoid and, perhaps because it was the only thing they knew, the instinct guided them to Autobot/Decepticon/Cybertronian. Even now… that they noticed it wasn't Autobot, that split second where it might have been Deceipticon, they avoided it. She couldn't help the passing sequence of glyphs ghosting into space at that realization-- what did that mean for them?

::It… appears to be free-floating.::

With the shuttle powered down they wouldn't be able to bring up a detailed image of this object, and she was loathe to put them on the map this soon after sighting it. Just because it wasn't Cybertronian, didn't mean whatever species sent this probe out lacked weapons that could damage them. They could sit idle, wait for it to pass and move on hopefully unnoticed. But that was no guarantee… and this probe meant life, in some direction or another, some planet that could have been near. And one planet held more possibilities than the nothingness of space...

All of this she pinged back to Shearwind underscored with glyphs of advisory/suggestions and queries of what should we do now? ::We could disable it…:: She hesitated… if they had remained unseen, the disabling of the device (pinged back to wherever its home was) would likely be seen as an encounter with debris, or loss of power. Too many unknowns…

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Wild animals jabbed awake with pointy sticks didn't settle back into hibernation easily, and neither did the monster of instinct and coding-gone-wrong lurking unseen in Shear's hindbrain. Creative firewalling stilled the worst of hir frenzy before it could properly materialize, but strut-rattling tremors worked their way across hir chassis and straight down to hir servos all the same. It was, of course, nothing Storm hadn't seen a hundred times before, but that didn't stop her from subjecting Shear to her best 'y u do?' face.

::Disable it,:: Shear echoed, unconsciously slipping back into the scout-cant their unit had so heavily favored. It felt odd, specialized glyphs for status unknown and backup unavailable intermingling with standard make safe markers, but nothing less could properly communicate the tank-clenching fear that innocently-gliding object inspired. Fear of the unknown, certainly, but also the everpresent fear of failure that kept hir awake when zie should've been out cold. ::We don't want to be seen. Not by that. Not by whatever made that.::

Storm was a master at radiating emotion without ever letting it so much as touch her face Even if she hadn't been, there was no way Shear could've ignored the little pulses of worry, fear, love- or the titanic weight of the knowledge that her life was in Shear's hands.

"Stay here." Verbalizing it made it somehow more concrete- made what even Shear had to admit was a frag of a bad idea seem that precious little bit less asinine, and somehow that mattered. The next instant airlocks hissed, long-disused doors creaked open and Shearwind flitted out into the abyss, optics locked on that otherworldly hunk of metal.

Three, two, one... go.

Hir blasters weren't meant for low-power or precision work, but at this short a range none of that really mattered. A flash of white light and a few chunks of charred metal later and the Twisters had a new playtoy offlined and prime for the toying-with.

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The simple word of command sent a familiar thrum through her spark that shimmied out through her frame, causing a reboot of her optics as she stared after Shearwind. The sudden entrance of a curious little probe, the closest thing to their shuttle since the rusty-red icy planetoid, had startled their idle systems into roaring online… but the rearranged layers were a strange combination over a familiar base of protect at all costs. Something almost like what went through them back near Eta-3.

But the probe wasn't Eta-3. It was a primitive device they were well away from, with all the advantages of a simple disabling maneuver. Not Eta-3. Venting slowly she began to calm the numb pit of anxiousness in her struts. Zie was a mix of predatory focus out to destroy the threat, and what zie needed most now was to eliminate that threat… not the probe. The probe was innocent… but the cold, vast void of the unknown and all the uncertainty it brought had been building, and now there was an outlet. She didn't need to see the white burst of energy rip through the main body, the particles of that minor explosion bullet into space-- she felt it. Felt the relief, the feeling of success, of all that energy at least for this moment evaporating.

She let herself smile… and mentally picked out a few spots on her wings for the etchings that would inevitably come with hire improved mood. ::Your targeting is… off a few degrees.:: Her own field, had lightened considerably as she came to hover in the open doorway, her systems having already compensated for the freezing change. ::You could have at least preserved it for better study.:: It felt good, so good to activate her thrusters and join her sister, stretching her hydraulics, her wings, her plates until she came to hover directly over hir.

::It appears… primitive. Very primitive in its manufacturing. Its materials… foreign, some of them. No sign of encounters with debris… :: Maneuvering around the long, grated probe to the other side. ::…Save for your lack of control here.:: She touched the remnants of what was once part of the large disc that composed most of its gold body, and.. a camera? ::These instruments… appear to be for scientific study. I would suggest that.. this is not far from its original launch point.::

…What is that?:: Every curious new-spark-like glyph pinger her field as she rotated around to stare down at a golden disc, no larger than one of their digits, etched in a foreign, no doubt intelligent, language.

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It wasn't the hardscrabble fight-for-their-lives hir every system was primed for, wasn't even the cyberbat-out-of-the-Pit flight that would've put every blasted bit of troublesome coding at ease all at once, but it was- just barely- enough. The red haze of impending violence and zeal that had drawn hir out of the frankenshuttle and into the black vanished as rapidly as it had come, leaving Shear blinking bemusedly at the raggedy remnants might once have been a perfectly serviceable observation device. Primus in the Pit, if hir cohort ever got wind of their prodigal youngling's abysmal shooting zie'd never hear the end of it...

::My AIM is perfect. It's my fragging servos that don't want to cooperate.:: That much at least was true, as the frantic shivers chasing themselves across and through hir fingers could attest. If combat was ugly- and any fight involving a pair of lightly armored flight-frames and anything meaner than a lone Aerialbot was a nightmare waiting to happen- the aftermath was worse. Shear had long ago accepted the fact that zie'd be a sick, shaking mess for a solid few breem after one of hir fits, but that didn't mean zie had to like it, or that zie couldn't ball up hir servos and pretend nothing was wrong. ::As for this thing...::

Storm called it primitive; anybot less diplomatic would've called it a blight on the face of technology at large. The probe was as imbalanced and gawky as an aerialist's first stumbling attempts at flight, squared-off and clunky and flat-out wrong in every sense of the word. There was no elegance to its creation, no telltale flourish of design left by some artisan proud of their work. The sheer utilitarian plainness of the thing reminded hir in some obscure way of the drones that formed the bulk of Decepticon ground forces. This... invader from beyond the stars was just as mindless, just as devoted to its task, and just as easily destroyed.

Let Storm have her bit of gold; Shear had more important matters to attend to. Matters like hauling the probe- or what was left of it, at any rate- aboard their shuttle. Between the two of them they might well be able to glean some shred of information from the twisted mess of scrap and melt-metal.

The airlocks safely shut and minimal power restored, Shear had time to think, and thinking promptly led first to cringing, then to comming. ::...In retrospect that was probably a really bad idea.::

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"Perhaps. But…"

But, this was not their first horrible idea, and most certainly not their worst idea and… definitely would not be their last questionable action. And, and this one, like all of them, had its uses. There was a motivation for it, a point to it all, and maybe in some ways necessity.

And true of almost all their actions, entertainment just happened to be a positive consequence.

Stormbreaker left Shearwind to tend the shuttle, instead staying to circle this new toy, tidying up the debris left from Shearwind's shot. The bulk of its body was a wide open dish attached to a golden, boxy base. The instruments it used sprouted from the golden base, one nearly as long as Storm's entire shin plate. But what she was after, what she was really interested in, was embedded just on the other side of the golden plating. A package, that looked like it needed toying with.

But…

"…This may be able to tell us something about this system… More than we have had. …And…" Something to do. "Did you notice..? These etchings..?"

She reached out, carefully, very, very carefully, plucking the casing and the disc within between thumb and forefinger and bringing it up for closer inspection. Each corner was etched with… directions. She narrowed her optics, examining each right and left corner. Directions to extract the information imprinted on the cartridge. "Shearwind."

She adjusted the thing carefully in her palm. A stylus, upon a close look-over, already in position from the outside. "Whoever created this…" She blinked, "Is very small…"

Extending her palms, as if holding the most fragile datachip ever, she offered her hands to Shearwind, field rippling with excitement, wonder, and a slight smile, would you like to go first/do the honors to see what's inside?

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Not their worst idea, not their last bad idea, and certainly the bad idea with the most interesting results in recent memory. Careful examination merely confirmed their first, admittedly bad impressions. Whoever- whatever, more likely- had made this craft had only the vaguest and most basic idea of how spaceflight worked. Try as zie might zie could find no evidence of internal or external propulsion units, no hint of weaponry, nothing more than a startlingly-simple sensor suite and- as hir twin pointed out- a disc. A very, very small disc crafted from some unfamiliar and startlingly nonconductive metal. A very, very small disc clearly crafted by some race making their first bumbling attempts at spaceflight and trying to discern whether they were alone in the universe. A tiny, alien object so very small that Shear almost didn't trust hir servos when the time came to pluck that fragile golden disc from hir twin's servo and divine its many mysteries.

It wasn't written in Basic, was even more simple than the machine code of old, but held a frame of reference so very simple Shearwind nearly overlooked it. Ultrafine lines carved into the thing's- case? cover?- shell formed a shape rare on Cybertron, but not quite rare enough to be unknown. It was, Shear spluttered, a carbon atom- and right beside that vaguely-familiar shape was what looked for all the world like one of the instructional diagrams the 'Cons had ever-so-helpfully started using when drone soldiers came to the fore.

Push button, receive... something?

Sound- rich and vibrant for all that the recording quality was abysmal- filled the cabin the moment said button was pressed, and in the dead silence that followed Shear turned optics full of wonderment on hir twin. It was a look that needed no spark-deep bond to translate, required no words of explanation. Awe, after all, was universal.

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They started high, the notes. Went up and up and dropped and shifted as quickly as any aerialist in the air. As quickly as she and Shearwind at play. Multiple sounds all in sync together, playing together, to create one unified piece that practically fluttered. She could pick out different instruments, some airy and deep, some light, some higher pitched coming from things she couldn't name. All things she'd never heard before, yet so so very similar.

"…Music."

Her field was a mix of bubbling giggles at every flutter of airy notes and awe that matched Shea's own, eventually coaxing a few of the light feelings in her field to audible giggles. I enjoy this. I love this.'
As it played through Stormbreaker shifted until she was leaning against Shearwind, her helm resting at hir shoulder and leaning entirely into hir field, hir frame.

How long does it last…? Unspoken, but clearly present, underscored with something that at its base could only be sad. This song, in particular, was coming to and end, she predicted, if the repeating notes and the way it almost became rapid was anything to go by… and then, with a sinking feeling, she heard the last notes slow, draw out, flutter… and silence again.

They waited, for only a few kliks, the record turning slowly inside the cartridge underneath its needle.

Then… Thnk, tnk, tnk, thnk. Like tapping something blunt on a metal drum… And there were other things there, some things that sounded similar to the instruments in the last song, and some things new entirely. But most of all, the sound of something more complex than any instrument heard so far. She raised her head with a start, leaning closer to Shea's palm. "Voices..." More than one. A choir of them… chanting, singing, a language. Hands folding in her lap she leaned so closely her face plates nearly rested on Shear's digits, her field pulsing with quiet excitement and intrigue, as if whatever species was singing would be hidden inside the record itself. What were they saying? Who…?

Grinning, inside and out, pulsing this spark-fluttering excited fascination, she turned her head, grinned up at her twin. Could feel her own similar fascination, what wasn't openly reflected between them already. Someone/something else out there.