I believe this could be called a rare pairing... at least if you squint ;)
As always part of my Imperfection 'verse, so there will be changes to cartoon verse or comic books. Hope you still enjoy!
TITLE: Amalgamation, part 1
SERIES: Imperfection Deviation
VERSE: movie
CHARACTERS: Will Lennox, Ironhide, Rodimus Prime, Beachcomber, Seaspray (Seaspray/Beachcomber)
AUTHOR: Macx
RATING: PG-13
DISCLAIMER: None of the characters belong to me, sadly. They are owned by people with a lot more money :)
FEEDBACK: Loved
SUMMARY: New-arrivals on Earth. Nothing new, except one's not happy to be here, one's actually something very old and rare, and one might be called a loose canon...
WARNING: Genderbending!
Note: the general shape and looks of Seaspray are based on the ROTF drawings of the Nuclear Sub/Carrier Attack by Ben Procter. It was never realized. Seaspray is of course a lot smaller! The pic can be found here:
http://www.transformers2.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/ben_procter_nuclear_sub.jpg And yes, Seaspray is male in the cartoons. I know. :P I took artistic liberties with the characters.
They had come in hot and heavy, the ship barely holding together, but it spoke of the skill of the pilot that they didn’t just crash and burn somewhere on the planet. Actually the pot-holed wreck had touched down almost gracefully, considering the shape it had been in. The area of Norway known as Finnmarken now featured a long groove in the middle of nowhere, had lost a few trees, had a few psychotic reindeer, but all things considered, it had been a good landing.
Three mechs had walked away from it.
The Ark’s sensors had picked up the ship when it had entered the solar system and while communication had been a hit and miss - because the comm unit had been one of over two dozen malfunctions in the cockpit alone - Blaster had managed to establish a working link.
Will Lennox sank deeper into the seat of the truck cab he sat in, though it wasn’t because of the cold outside. He was rather immune to weather. The discomfort of the cuttingly cold wind was barely perceived. He was wearing gloves, a hat, had a scarf wrapped around his neck, but mainly to hide as much skin as possible from prying eyes.
Not that there were many.
This part of Norway, in the middle of the Arctic winter, was deserted. Aside from the scarce wildlife and maybe some crazy soul who thought ice hiking was fun, he was the only one around. At least the only one remotely human. With him were a massive black truck and a sleek sports car that no one would have thought could cross this snow-covered land at all.
Ironhide had reconfigured himself to adapt to the adverse landscape. Inches of ice underneath feet of snow made driving for a normal car treacherous. He had to plough through snow drifts and the roads had almost disappeared under the latest snow fall. Rodimus Prime usually stayed behind him. He had improved his tires and with them their traction abilities, and he could change his alt mode to fit the environment if things got worse.
Optimus Prime had left with the pilot of the crashed ship while Rodimus, Ironhide and Lennox had decided to look for those two who had immediately slipped off and disappeared. Seeking shelter; looking for a place to hide. Their trail was still visible, but since it would snow again tonight the fresh showfall would hide their tracks.
They had headed toward the coastal area and would reach it before morning. The cover of night - and the fact that right now sunlight was at a maximum of only an hour a day - would help them hide. At least they had acknowledged the older Prime’s call and were willing to talk to Rodimus and the others.
“Know them?” Will asked into the silence, eyes on the darkness outside.
Ironhide grunted. Snow flew up left and right of the Topkick. “No.”
Will grabbed for a hold when Ironhide bounced over something hard. Intel was scarce to non-existent and the fact that both mechs, clearly Autobots, had immediately made for the coast hadn’t really put them in a good light. Then again, according to the little they knew, neither was a warrior.
The ship that had crashed - and was currently under guard by Arcee and Sideswipe - would be dismantled soon since it was in no condition to ever fly again. Will doubted even the Constructicons would be able to make something workable out of it. Its parts would end up as spares and raw material. The ship’s pilot had been a mech called Wheeljack. Ironhide’s reaction had been one of horror and soft muttering about signs and portents. He had warned Optimus to bring in Stark or even let the human Prime meet the new-arrival. Somehow, while Optimus had looked amused, he had also silently agreed. Lennox had yet to understand why.
Well, the drive was long enough.
And he was good at badgering his partner with questions.
* * *
He had been a scientist all his life. He had been at home in labs and research facilities all over the planet. He had never handled a weapon in his life, nor had any contact with warriors, soldiers or the leaders of Cybertron.
That had changed with the war.
Beachcomber had been dragged into something that he had never wanted. He had kept out of the political discussions, had evaded politics most of his existence, but they had caught up to him in the worst way. His colleagues had started to take sides, talk about the civil unrest that had first befallen their planet. Beachcomber had listened, but he had tried not to become a part.
Then the attacks had started. Unrest had escalated into fighting. Mechs were injured and even killed. The war had broken out.
And with it his life had forever changed.
Beachcomber, unwilling to become either Decepticon or Autobot, had declared himself a Neutral and almost literally painted a bull’s eye on his back. The Autobots accepted Neutrals, but the Decepticons saw everyone who didn’t join them as the enemy. Neutrals were taken off-line if they didn’t join them.
So he ran.
He ended up a fugitive, without the sigil that identified him as either one or the other, and while the Autobots offered refuge, joining other survivors of raids would most likely brand him an Autobot as well. When things got really ugly and Megatron’s troops burned to the ground what they couldn’t keep and defend, Beachcomber went underground - in every sense.
The scientist had long since had an interest in the underground structure of Cybertron. It had been a hobby as a young mech and he had never really stopped reading up on whatever he could find. The underground was largely unexplored and a mystical area. The ancient Cybertronians had kept records of the underground levels, but soon the newer generations had lost interest. It was a maze and it was dangerous, with maps that hadn’t been updated in millennia. Noone had any idea what was down there, and exploration teams had already lost people in their quest to find out more about this unknown world.
Beachcomber hadn’t been able to grab much. He had downloaded what he had stored on his personal computer and erased everything, then he had disappeared.
The world below had been eerie and scary, terrifying and incredible, wonderful and fantastic. It was a place of legend, of unknown levels and rooms and what appeared like whole cities that were now nothing but ghost towns. He had found relics of ancient machinery he didn’t understand and devices he could make no sense of. The deeper he went the more otherworldly Cybertron had become.
Until he had met the first living thing in what appeared like ages.
He had met Seaspray.
*
Seaspray had never known anything but the world underneath the thick metal surface of Cybertron. All her life she had been underground, and she had had a long life already. A very long life. She had been born as what others called a troubleshooter today, but that had been at the beginning of time, it seemed. She had seen generations come and go, and she had remained down here, taking care of a planet that was growing and changing above, but staying the same below. Her job was to monitor the vast network of fluid aqueducts that nourished the planet. The network was unknown to the mechs above and aside from four others like her, called sentries, she had never met another soul.
The network functioned independently from the rest of the planet. It was dependent on the Allspark like everything else, but its existence was legend. The ancient Cybertronians had taken care of securing the network, keeping it running. They had installed the sentries. There must have been hundreds once, Seaspray had once mused. Maybe thousands. Only five had remained in her vast sector at the beginning of the war and those five had disappeared.
When she had been brought online, a sector had been small and shared by two sentries who took turns in caring for the installations. Then the sentries began to dwindle. Her sector grew with each passing millennium. One day she still exchanged information with Cobalt, the next time she was gone. Armorhide had been the last Seaspray had ever talked to, and he had vanished without a trace.
Seaspray hadn’t connected to anyone in the millennia after that. She did her job, she kept the network operational, and she enjoyed the freedom she possessed.
The sentry had never taken any kind of alternate form. She swam within the huge aqueducts, brushing over the walls now and then, scanners always on and aware of every change around her. She didn’t know who or what Decepticons or Autobots were. She listened to the distant warble and shriek of frequencies that she picked up, but she never surfaced.
The last Prime she had met optic to optic had perished long ago. She had never met any of his successors.
Who she met after millennia of a secluded existence was a mech by the name of Beachcomber. She had been aware of his presence within the aqueduct system for a while and she had curiously tracked his progress, but there had been no intention to find him - until he found her. With wide optics, looking a bit ragged and dirty, he was staring at her through a transparent duct wall. Seaspray floated within the reddish liquid that filled the network, gazing back.
For a first contact it was quite unspectacular.
Due to her age and the fact that she had rarely communicated with anyone other than the sentries she had met, she had trouble understanding him at first. Her systems adjusted to the dialect after a while, though.
Beachcomber appeared strangely familiar to her, as if she had met him before, but his youth and his apparent lack of understanding as to what he was looking at and talking to begged to differ. He had never been below the surface, had never seen a mech like her. Their way of communication turned from verbal to something that was almost like small bursts over a comm line between them. Like scrambled messages only they understood. Conversation was finally easier than before.
And still, the familiarity never ceased.
Like the war didn’t cease either. The surface broke in places and Decepticons started to invade the levels below, looking for Autobots, looking for the Allspark. Seaspray felt distress at the destruction they caused. The network was overrun by alarms, but aside from her, no other sentry responded. And finally the Allspark was launched into space, plunging Cybertron into darkness and the fluid network into stagnation. Seaspray was shocked, almost unable to process the fact, and if it hadn’t been for Beachcomber who had dragged her nearly physically to safety, she would have fallen victim to a gigantic explosion. It turned out that one of the Decepticon ships had crashed into the suffering planet’s surface and ripped a gaping wound into the metal shell.
In the end she had to surface, literally. She left the fluid network forever, her streamlined form strangely ungangly on solid metal ground, and Beachcomber found them shelter. That it was with an Autobot was simple irony. They had had to choose and the Dececpticons would probably have killed them, so both chose the lesser evil: the Autobots. The one in question, the one who repaired the worst of their damages and took them with him in his antiquated ship, was called Wheeljack, an engineer and scientist, too.
Before the war. Now… now he was a warrior in addition to being a scientist.
The ship had made it to the planet called Earth, a planet where the signal from Optimus Prime had originated from. A planet filled with organics, with humans, as they called themselves. It had been because of Wheeljack’s skills that they had even made it this far. The ship had suffered a lot during the launch and flight from Cybertron, and Wheeljack had gunned to the max to keep them from harm; in turn he had harmed the engines.
Now they were here. And they were no longer alone.
tbc...