[ti]Ep 3[/ti]Aces High [Thundercracker and Sundance]

[Sundance]

Sundance knew Avalanche was doing her best, but each jarring footstep hurt. She could only grit her teeth so hard and grip so much as she fought to not faint from the pain. And the longer she fought the shock from taking her, the more the pain in her legs built up and fractured nerves started to get signals through to her processor. If she was prone to expletives, she wouldn't have even been able to gasp them out now. 

Thankfully the pounding of peddes didn't last long as she was brought back into Omega Outpost by her rescuers. But the pain barely subsided. Any attempt to make humor was now completely drained from her, the natural light of her spark now failing to shine though due to the damage to her chassis as her crumbling internal world was engulfed in fire and darkness.

Only once she knew she was through the ground bridge did Sundance relax her grip on Avalanche. After a moment she violently coughed, purging energon from her throat. The brutal shaking motion to her head exacerbated the pain from her facial injuries enough to tip the scales and send Sundance into unconsciousness, her body slumping limp in Avalanche's strong arms.

[Avalanche]

Thank the Primes for Patch. The young medic didn't hesitate an instant; instantly breaking into a dead sprint across the tangled forest floor towards the swirling vortex of bridge energies, without so much as glancing back. Avalanche pelted after her, slower to come up to speed with the sheer inertia of her heavy frame, her audials pricked for the first sound of incoming aircraft - or the sharper sound of missiles.

Patch vanished, with a flash of light. Three strides later, Avalanche ploughed into the bridge behind her, feeling the bizarre non-texture of the unreal space beneath her pedes. Ahead of her, Patch broke from the mouth of the tunnel, leaving a growing circle of artificial light clear. Avalanche burst out into the control room, trying her best to slow down, her boots striking sparks from the concrete floor.

There was a sharp, heaving cough, energon spattering across her chest armour. And Sundance went limp in her arms.

"Shut it down!" Avalanche roared. No guarantee that they'd gotten away cleanly until the bridge dispersed, but she couldn't turn and look, not yet. All she could do was listen as her momentum carried her across the floor, barely slowing down enough to avoid ploughing into the far wall, and twist to the side to carry Sundance through the wide medical bay doors.

"She's unconscious. Coughed up energon," Avalanche said tersely, bending her knees to lower Sundance as gently as she could onto a medical bed. No further sounds of incoming combat, and the rumble of the bridge died away without incident. Good.

On a basewide comm frequency, the big femme broadcast ::Sundance recovered from the field. Severe injuries. No remaining allied combatants on site, do not approach.::

For an instant, she'd intended to continue, to specify that there were two enemy combatants inbound to the site they'd recovered Sundance from, but she stopped herself. The last thing she wanted or needed were hot-headed mecha heading out to 'teach those 'Cons a lesson', especially when they were walking into a decently planned ambush and too angry to think straight. In another base, she wouldn't have hesitated, but here... that was better kept for an after action report.

[Patch]

Loud pa-dunks rang out across the concrete floor as the young medic -aware she was breaking the rules- jogged across the control room. She cocked her wide frame sideways to get through the opening doors of the medical bay. Mind racing, she rushed to the back of the room and grasped two poles- that of a large light and that of a monitor. She jogged them over and plugged in the objects, flicking on the computer beside the slab just as Avalanche entered the room with her patient.

She cupped the back of the flier’s helm as she was lowered, as not to let it hit the slab. Watching the cuts and protrusions carefully as she steadied Suni’s forehead with her palm. Once down, Patch turned to slam open a drawer under the terminal and pull out a length of tubing with a stiff curve at the end, and fitted it to an empty canister on the wall.

The light hiss of suction cut the silence as Patch leaned down with the device and swept at the accumulated fluid in Sundance’s intake with a crackle. Making certain she could continue to cool herself without in-venting any fluid. A splatter of blue flicking the bottom of the cylinder up and beside the slab's head.

Control the leaking, that was her plan. Get and keep enough energon in Suni to let her organs circulate it; but first, Patch wanted schematics. She wanted to see precisely Where her patient was leaking inside, as well as a real-time display of her bio-circuitry's status.

“Pass me that?”

The young femme spoke lowly as she deftly hooked the aspiration device to a mount beside the container. Extending an arm across the flier’s body towards Avalanche, for the cables to the scanner.

[Sundance]

In the darkness, half whispered dreams flicked memories of checkered flags and battle strewn corpses. Joy and victory danced with guilt and loss. Forgotten voices of friend, lover and enemy twisted madly vying for intangible reality.

They all danced around a spark beat that was slow, steady and strong against the ultimate challenge. Somewhere an energon pump ran smoothly, undefeated, undeterred.

In the darkness, there was still light.



Sundance was many things, and truthfully, not all of them were positive. She had tried her best to be diligent. As was the case with her medical records. Prior to the start of the war, these records were kept up to date by professionals. They were extensive. They were exhaustive.

Some things hadn't changed since the cycle she came online, like her spark type - Solarus positive - or her neural circuit voltage. But most everything else...well. Fuel line pressure and flow rate, hydraulic pressure, fuel tank size, power output, and numerous performance metrics had all been upgraded from their base lines.

She was originally little more than a customer service droid - a fancy one for fancy customers perhaps. But that wasn't the track she had chosen for herself. Over the course of a million and more years, she had had herself rebuilt into a racer. Piece by piece, year by year, she had been remade faster and more efficient, sleeker and more agile.

The vast majority of the design work was signed off by someone using the moniker "Nitro". The largest minority of the system manufacturing was likewise signed by the same. It was a lot of high quality work, and still Sundance only ranked as amateur. There were other racers with backing Sundance couldn't even imagine.

Once the war started, the records took a dive in quality, due to the fact that Sundance herself was the one adding to them rather than expert medics and doctors who had a severe shortage of time. They covered every event, from when Sundance had a comm reset and a new harmonic crystal, to almost every injury and crash.

The schematics attached were exceptionally detailed beyond the ordinary, valuable data for any medic working on the flier though perhaps overly complex for someone not familiar with racing jets, they were even updated with Sundance's earth altmode.

[Avalanche]

Patch was already setting up before Avalanche came barrelling into the medical bay, with the kind of efficiency the big femme had come to expect from her. Having laid down Sundance's mangled form, Patch cradling her helm to avoid it moving suddenly, she stepped back a little and watched as the medic applied suction to clean up the mess of energon Sundance had coughed up.

“Pass me that?”

Avalanche nodded, murmuring, "Understood," in a brief but important audible confirmation she'd heard and grasped the request. Picking up the scanner with care in her massive, scarred hands, she handed it over, ensuring no cables dragged across Sundance's damaged chassis in the process.

She wasn't a medically trained mecha, not by a long shot, her anatomical knowledge limited to the kind that came from violent disassembly with her bare hands, and she didn't even know where the various medical devices Patch might need were stored. Yet, for all that, she stood ready to assist if she could, staying near-motionless as she watched the med tech work.

It made her feel just a little bit less helpless in the face of Sundance's injury.

She was really badly messed up. In the earlier cycles of the war, back on Cybertron, Avalanche had seen others recover from worse. She herself had undergone a serious rebuild after a bad encounter with a minefield. But as the war dragged on, as Cybertron's flame guttered, injuries that could have once been fixed easily became difficult. Procedures that called for replacement parts mutated into trying to cajole existing components to limp along a little longer. Some repairs - many repairs - just weren't possible anymore.

She wasn't a medic. But as Avalanche's gaze tracked over the damaged femme, she couldn't help but think that here was damage that might not be fixable.

Metal creaked as her fist tightened at her side. She stayed still. She stayed quiet. And waited.

[Patch]

Already energon pooled on the table- hot thick blue from the cuts and gouges. Glowing under the laboratory’s stark white lights. The warmth of another flicked on above Suni’s face as Patch drew it over her patient and peered at the damage, assessing what needed to stop bleeding first in order to keep her alive.

She begun to take off the other femme’s scarf- a quiet rush to her movements. A steadied, flustered focus, more alive, more present in the thin, stagnant air of the emergency than usual. Nimble, now fuel covered digits took the scanner’s extension from the larger femme’s hand, and seamlessly settled it’s magnetic latch against the metal above the femme’s spark. A few other monitor cables drawn in, and down and placed along her chest with practiced care.

Patch wanted to know where this energon was coming from- where all of it was coming from, especially that which had come from her intake.

Her gaze flicked up to Ava, as her digit flicked down, silently, as if to say ‘look after her’ before she turned away. A few soft bloops and pings of buttons as the terminal beside the berth was flicked on.

“Alright Suni, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I want you to let yourself relax, okay? You’re gonna be just fine.”

A softened downward hush cut in.

“We’re right here.”

Patch didn’t wanna up and tell Sundance she was about to put her into stasis; her patient was not of sound mind at this moment, it wasn’t her decision to make… But Patch also didn’t want the femme to panic. Didn’t want her to be without understanding that this was okay, and deliberate- that she was allowed, and encouraged to let herself rest, for now.

That she would be safe. And that she WOULD, wake up.

Not only would induced stasis keep her from experiencing the trauma of surgery first hand- it would also slow her pulse down. It would slow the energon loss dramatically; and that was exactly what the both of them needed right now.

Patch couldn’t stay- the seconds mattered. She needed a line started, now. And so- the very instant the young medic saw that the power-down sequence was initiating, back into the rest of the room she pushed. The sound of cabinets and clattering tools on rolling trays as the world began to waver.

“Avalanche, this isn’t gonna be enough, I’ma need energon.” A lowered voice from across the room as the colors of the lights began to separate and dance. A tilting whirl of vertigo-

Then every bit as suddenly… The hours had been eaten...

((To Be Continued!!!))