Sightseeing, Blackstar Style
Stepping back across the veil between the worlds, from the place wholly outside of this place, to the space between here and there, Blackstar slips invisible and intangible into existence in the skies above Autobot City. Having been released from Frostbites Office with a full set of the appropriate navigational maps, Blackstar opens up his thrusters and heads, cross country, for Scotland.
Having never been there before, and without an anchor, he can't simply shift himself there the way he can from here to Cybertron, or even the old base out in Gallen Sector. He's reduced to flying there direct using the maps Frostbite had given him. Not that he minds, really. For all that it's an organic world, this Earth place is rather kinda compelling. Interesting in its way, and it isn't as if he's restricted to normal air speeds, anyway. As long as he can still make sense of the landscape flashing past below him, he can go as fast as he wants.
Now, if he could only feel the sweet drag of wind over his wings as he slices through the air, it might make this little jaunt actually pleasurable, rather than simply a necessity.
Mountains and plains, hills and trees, cities and rivers, lakes and roads flash far below him, dizzying in his unnatural speed. Soon enough, he is over another wide and featureless sea. Behind him, the sun is setting rapidly as he leaves it in the shadow of the planet's curve. He'll arrive in Scotland at Castle Destro in full dark, just a couple of hours lacking before the dawn. Not that he needs to cover of night to do his skulking, but this world seems more active during the daylight hours. Perhaps the spaces he will be checking may be less occupied in those wee hours of pre-dawn darkness. Perhaps not. If necessary, he'll wait until the next setting of the sun to do the snooping he's been sent to do. With both Starscream's and Frostbite's warnings still fresh in mind, he has no real pressing desire to run into this Mindbender personally, if he can help it.
He slows as a rocky coast rises before him, jagged edges thrusting up out of the dark water like teeth, frothy foam of the surf clinging like spilled energon. He banks wide until he spots a landmark, familiar against the data provided by Frostbite's maps. As the stars wheel slowly overhead, the forbidding bulk of the massive castle looms before him. More obvious than the bulk of dark stone against the dark sky, however, is the thick wall, brightly glowing to his Sight. A clinging, sulfurous yellow shifts in disturbing whorls before him, denying him entry. Blackstar draws to a halt, hanging invisible just beyond arms length of the sharp wall, rising like a pillar high into the dark night sky. He frowns, studying the wall for long moments, eying its height as it soars into the atmosphere.
Inefficient, that. A dome would have been more appropriate, and likely protect better. Blackstar has the sneaking suspicion that the sickeningly whirling wall spears, hollow and open, up to where the thin air of this world's atmosphere fades away, conquered by the hard press of space. Blackstar turns his gaze down to where the wall sinks into the ground, a slow, wicked smile spreading across his features. If the wall shoots straight up, indicating a lack of foresight in closing it up, what are the odds that it's enclosed along its bottom edge? Bet the Caster had been counting on the rock the castle had been built on to protect anything below the shieldwall, too.
Only one way to find out.
If anyone who could see into that space between the worlds where Blackstar walks had been watching, they would have seen the ground slowly swallow the still-wickedly-smirking Seeker up as he let himself drift down, down, down below the Earth's surface. The stone and earth and rock are solid to his Sight, but so, too, is the shieldwall, which continues to glow brightly before him for almost his entire height.
And then it abruptly stops. No bottom floor to it, no tapering to a bubble or a point. It simply stops, cutting a pillar into the stone that is open along the bottom rim. Blackstar cannot help but snicker nastily to himself for a moment. Only a moment, though; he's not about to get too cocky just yet. This may yet prove to be a trap.
Cautiously, Blackstar steps forward through the stone and earth and lets himself drift back upwards, now within the area contained by the shieldwall. Almost immediately, his head breaks through the bottom floor of the castle's lowest levels, the lowest point shielded by the shieldwall-
Into a laboratory filled with almost equal parts electronic equipment, and artifacts which shimmer in his Sight, filling him with faint unease.
Looks like this is the place, all right.
Blackstar pauses, half in, half out, peering around himself carefully, looking for the places that make him the most uneasy. He's rather large, even as a spirit, and none too keen on accidentally setting off a weapon or a pet or an alarm or something because he hadn't been paying attention to where his insubstantial wings are. Beside him, there's an odd diagram, a circle with dozens of dizzying symbols ringing and interweaving it, chalked into the floor. On the far side, there's a gap in the rim of the circle, and a faint dusting of chalk that looks as if it's drawn in and brushed away often. Just to be safe, Blackstar shifts a little further away before rising fully into the room.
Now that he can see everything fully, most of the strange artifacts shimmer only faintly, the unease fading as he sees that, for the most part, few of them are potent enough for him to even feel or See, let alone harm him. A long staff topped by some sort of construct made of a misshapen skull decorated with other organic bits that look like vanes from a wing. A scattering of stones with odd symbols scratched into their surface. A few scraps of thin paper, and slightly thicker hide with illegible fragments of alien words and symbols burned and painted into their fibers. Those scraps made of the hide material seem to glow more brightly; Blackstar makes special note of their location. When he's done scouting the location, he'll come back and retrieve some of this to take back for Starscream. No sense tripping any sort of alarms this early into his snooping, after all.
On one workbench lies the disassembled remains of a weapon that looks suspiciously like a scaled down arm cannon, refitted to be handheld. Blackstar drifts over and examines it closely. He's no engineer, but even he can tell that with the way it's currently wired, it'll never work. There are scatterings of diagrams and scribbled notes spread around the disassembled and non-functional weapon, as well as a few tools. That may have to vanish as well. It won't work now, but there's no sense in giving the humans any more opportunity to figure out Cybertronian technology than necessary.
Little else in the lab catches Blackstar's attention, although he takes another quick tour through, committing everything to memory before letting himself continue drifting through the structure. Along corridors cut into the bedrock the castle sits upon lay smallish rooms, cells for holding prisoners, if Blackstar is any judge of such a thing. They're all empty as he drifts through. A disappointment, that. Would have been too slagging convenient for that Spike guy to be here. He could still be somewhere in the upper levels, though. With that thought in mind, Blackstar lets himself drip higher, checking each level, room by room.
Human and robotic guards in strange, matching uniforms prowl the hallways and corridors, though not are equipped to spot him. In a few of the most upper rooms, rooms that, even to his Decepticon optics look quite well appointed, even opulent, a few humans sleep, all unaware of their ghostly spy. None of them match any of the files that Frostbite had shown him, or the images Starscream had given him. Blackstar sighs, disappointed. There's only a handful of rooms left to check, and nothing really interesting has popped up ye-
Hold on just a micro.
That's a familiar looking face sleeping blissfully away in that there rather too large bed. Across the room, an equally familiar, and highly desired, dangerous book rests under a fancy glass case. Blackstar's wicked grin has returned ten-fold. He takes a few moments to examine the case first, looking for any sort of alarm. There's always some sort of alarm, and with the fancy shieldwall on the castle, Blackstar's expecting something just like that to be on the case and book.
All he can see, however, is a rather mundane electronic keypad on one side, and a couple of sensors to alarm if the glass is shattered. No Seal, no shield, not even a faint incantation. Nothing.
Blackstar glances back at the sleeping man, Dr. Mindbender, and cautiously reaches through the glass, touching the book with a fingertip. Nothing happens. It gives him a vague shiver, a touch of other that tells him that what's inside is... not to be fooled with by the likes of him. Otherwise, little else. It takes concentration, and he has to utilize a quick shift into his own peculiar version of subspace, but with a bit of focused thought, the book vanishes from the glass case.
Nothing happens. No alarms, no bright flashes of light, not even so much as a puff of smoke. Mindbender doesn't even offer to roll over in his sleep. It's too soon yet to grin with triumph, but Blackstar does allow himself a thin smirk as he withdraws his hand. Mindbender continues sleeping blissfully away. Firmly locking the scene into his memory, Blackstar lets himself sink back through the floor, pausing for a moment to slip quickly through the last few rooms. No one and nothing of note. This Destro guy must really trust Mindbender to let him have pretty much full and unsupervised access to his castle.
Like a leviathan in the depths, Blackstar sinks back down, heading for the lab on the lowest level once more. He drifts slowly, though, watching for anything else he may have missed. Beyond the castle's walls, the sun is rising, bright rays of light piercing through the windows. Some of the humans are beginning to stir. He'd best speed things up then. While being around to see Mindbender potentially freak out when he notices that his precious book has gone missing would be very cool, and give him an awesome story to share with Starscream, Blackstar does not want to take the chance that the human night have a few more tricks up his sleeves in regards to halting the escape of one sneaky dead Decepticon.
One more quick tour through the cells to make sure he hasn't missed anything, and then it's back to the lab. The notes and diagrams scattered around the modified arm cannon are quickly gathered up and tucked away, as is the cannon itself. Next comes the scraps of hide with the fragments of symbols, as well as a few of the papers with similar symbols and fragments of writing. The other artifacts seem rather simple and unimportant, nothing truly powerful. They're mostly macabre relics and bits of "flash" - much in the way of shimmer, but little substance. A sword bolted to the wall, dark blue black and very cold to even his limited sense of touch, however, does get his interest. It almost hurts to touch it, and it feels heavier in his grasp than anything that small has any right to be. He doesn't like the feel of it in his grasp or in his subspace pocket, but it feels too dangerous to leave here. Too much like something that could really hurt him. It, too, gets tucked away. He wants to be rid of it as soon as possible, though.
Finally, when nothing else remains that catches his Attention, Blackstar turns to the banks of computers that take up almost all the space along one long workbench. Tucked away down here in this dark lab, buried deep in the bowels of this old castle, surely their contents must be interesting. With the wicked smile he's been fending off since finding that Book, Blackstar skims down the line, pulling cables and cords loose and subspacing the computers as he passes them. As the last few cables part ways with the computer, an alarm starts blaring loudly, claxon echoing against the stones of the walls. One last thing to do, while there's time.
With a brief flicker of concentration, Blackstar shifts, stepping invisibly into the room he'd noted before where all the security cameras feed into, and the room next door where the footage is archived. Spectral fingers spread wide, skimming through the screens and consoles, leaving shredded wreckage in their wake. Swift as thought, he's in the archive room, amidst the vast banks of hard drives and memorybanks that house the countless hours of footage. Next door, he can hear the panicked shouting of humans as the equipment begins to smoke and spark from the shorts he'd instigated. That smile is wide and vicious again as he grabs as many of the drives and compact memorybanks as his subspace pockets can handle. The rest get the same treatment as the consoles and screen from next door. Spectral fingers tear the fragile datadisk to shreds in their carefully shielded shrouds.
All potential visual evidence of his presence here now so much smoke and sparks, Blackstar swiftly drops, propelling himself deep into the stone until the brightly burning shieldwall is nothing more than a memory far, far above him.
Then he shifts, and is no longer there.