Ep 1 - Checkup - Closed
Oct 1, 2012 16:49:06 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2012 16:49:06 GMT -5
<< takes place immediately after Rise >>
Ironhide watched Megatron - Megatronus - retreat back into the depths of the mine and couldn't, for one klik, even make himself move. His sensor feeds were a cacophony of lurid high priority threads across his HUD, tracking the warlord's frame, his potential ranges and angles of attack, his own clear shots, his Prime's frame, Cleaver's, the hot burn point of her chassis, a thousand trajectories, tens of thousands of calculations per nanoklik, all cascading through his neural nets in a burning rush of primed circuits and surging fluids feeding into hydraulics.
And then Megatron had... walked away.
It took Ironhide several long seconds to scale back his targeting algorithms and aggrotech enough to push his systems into a fragile all-clear state. Prime was already in motion, Cleaver after him, neither of them - NEITHER of them - hurt or damaged or in danger. No other threats. No other targets. Nothing, except...
...Except the towering figure of one of his worst nightmares looming over his bitlet's head, and Shadow, Shadow, he had a bead on Optimus and another on Cleaver and Shadow was... was....
She hadn't been hurt when she retreated, he knew that, logically, sensibly - a perfectly reasonable move on her part, even welcome, as it had removed one more set of target tracking from the variables he had already been monitoring. She had assured him she was alright and had gone...
He didn't know where she had gone, and she wasn't in optic range, wasn't anywhere in the main atrium, and Ironhide felt his spark lurch within his protomass, unpleasant and sickening, because there was a Decepticon Warlord walking as he pleased through the base and Ironhide did NOT know where his bitlet was.
A rushed flurry of location pings later got a response and Ironhide let out a ventilation he hadn't been aware of holding, half jogging across the atrium to the smaller offshoot that her ping had come from. "Shadow? Bitlet, luv - yeh alright?"
Ironhide watched Megatron - Megatronus - retreat back into the depths of the mine and couldn't, for one klik, even make himself move. His sensor feeds were a cacophony of lurid high priority threads across his HUD, tracking the warlord's frame, his potential ranges and angles of attack, his own clear shots, his Prime's frame, Cleaver's, the hot burn point of her chassis, a thousand trajectories, tens of thousands of calculations per nanoklik, all cascading through his neural nets in a burning rush of primed circuits and surging fluids feeding into hydraulics.
And then Megatron had... walked away.
It took Ironhide several long seconds to scale back his targeting algorithms and aggrotech enough to push his systems into a fragile all-clear state. Prime was already in motion, Cleaver after him, neither of them - NEITHER of them - hurt or damaged or in danger. No other threats. No other targets. Nothing, except...
...Except the towering figure of one of his worst nightmares looming over his bitlet's head, and Shadow, Shadow, he had a bead on Optimus and another on Cleaver and Shadow was... was....
She hadn't been hurt when she retreated, he knew that, logically, sensibly - a perfectly reasonable move on her part, even welcome, as it had removed one more set of target tracking from the variables he had already been monitoring. She had assured him she was alright and had gone...
He didn't know where she had gone, and she wasn't in optic range, wasn't anywhere in the main atrium, and Ironhide felt his spark lurch within his protomass, unpleasant and sickening, because there was a Decepticon Warlord walking as he pleased through the base and Ironhide did NOT know where his bitlet was.
A rushed flurry of location pings later got a response and Ironhide let out a ventilation he hadn't been aware of holding, half jogging across the atrium to the smaller offshoot that her ping had come from. "Shadow? Bitlet, luv - yeh alright?"