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Starscream woke in unfamiliar surroundings, already standing, at the edge of a platform, surrounded by smoke and fumes and intolerable heat and noise, the roar of furnaces and flames. --where am I--?! Startled, he automatically lurched back a single step, and impacted a wall. Inadvertently scraped the rough surface – pain flared through his back. His balance was off. He felt like he was canting too far forwards. Mass was missing. Wings? Where were his wings? Before he could dwell too long on it, unseen hands delivered a shove. He stumbled forwards, just catching himself on his knees before he could nosedive over the edge of the rough concrete ledge. A yellow-hot lake of splashing, shifting molten metal loomed up beneath him- where am I oh what the frag Alarmed, he threw himself backwards onto his aft, then scrambled back to his feet, trying to find a satisfactory balance

Slipstream spent a significant portion of the following orn in a distracted haze, unable to focus and ending up on the sharp end of his sergeant’s tongue at least twice. Normally a good scolding would have focused his mind for at least a handful of breems, but he just couldn’t keep his thoughts on his work today. He’d already added two plus two – holes plus toothy cryptid equals bite, right? – but didn’t much like the direction he was heading in. Surely she’d know if she’d been bitten by a giant fragging monster. Right? Right? And why wasn’t she talking about it? He sighed and twiddled a well-chewed stylus between his fingers. Perhaps it wasn’t related at all. Perhaps it was a coincidence and he was just… chasing sprites. There was a reason his immediate family hadn’t ever gone into investigative jobs. It required actual brains, that could be used for stuff unrelated to getting safely from point A to point B. After staring through his report for three whole breems without

Megatron has one more job for you. “What?!” Optics rounding to horrified saucers, Skywarp looked weirdly pale. He lurched up off the stool, as though preparing to run, but had to catch himself against the scanner, off-balance in more ways than one. …he didn’t get the chance to dwell too hard on his problem. Sensing his wingmate was about to bolt, and probably to somewhere inaccessible, Starscream jerked up his arm, and shot him. Nullrayed into total unforgiving paralysis, Skywarp slowly heeled backwards until he’d passed his centre of mass, then gravity sucked him down the rest of the way. The impact as he hit the ground made the walls rattle. The noise drew Skyfire staggering out of the laboratory, crashing into a doorframe in his haste and making almost as much noise as Skywarp. “What in Primus-… is everything all right?!” Starscream realised he was still cringing away in anticipation of the very large boom that hadn’t come, and gingerly straightened up. “We have a

The wind and rain persisted until late morning, alternating unpredictably between gusting drizzle and vigorous downpour. Slipstream hung around at home for as long as he could get away with, partly as he wanted to be sure Footloose was all right, and partly as she was a convenient excuse that meant he could avoid going out in the wet. But eventually Thundercracker got wise to it and kicked him out, with the strong ‘suggestion’ that he ‘might’ ‘want’ to help his colleagues get the district back under some semblance of order. Then it was all hands to the pumps – in some cases literally, draining flooded basements and helping repair ruptured utility pipes. Clearing debris and reopening roads wasn’t precisely in his job description, but Slipstream put up with it with a surly good humour. The quicker the roads were open, the quicker he could get back to chasing crims along them. Besides. It helped keep his mind occupied, and less likely to return to the horror of the previous night.

If Ramjet had been anyone else, that punch might have taken his helm right off. It sent him sprawling backwards, limbs flailing, and impacted the ground with a crunch that made most people wince. …but not Celerity. Fired up and with murder in her optics, she pursued him across the dirt, already pulling back for another blow. Ramjet made an ungainly effort to scramble away from her on all fours, mostly on his aft. Finally galvanised into action, Skywarp leapt for her, joined from the left by Nightsun. Thundercracker could only watch, intentionally paralysed by the sparkling in his hands. Celerity was forged tough – and strong. It took the combined strength of both mechs to make any dent in her forward motion, and even then she dragged them across the dirt with her. “Ease up, eh, Lara?” Skywarp growled, with no small amount of effort. His thrusters scraped along the ground, throwing up sparks. “He brought her back of his own accord.” “After taking her in the first place-!”

Teleporting blind was hard to define to anyone who wasn’t a teleport. Worst that could happen is you crash into a wall, they’d say. Haha, look at Skywarp, how clumsy, stuck in the furniture. What an idiot. But it’s only a wall. Why are you so upset. Just detach that bit, and carry on with your day. It’s really not a big deal. What no-one seemed to realise was that it was never just like bumping into a wall, and never just a minor body part. More like… throwing yourself through a doorway where there could be anything on the other side – like the boiling inside of a volcano. And you wouldn’t know anything about it until you were already dissolving your spark in lava. This insanity went against every instinct he possessed. He was only mostly confident that there was only air at the other end of his careful triangulations. Air was fine. His pre-materialisation field could push air out of the way. Liquids were… mostly fine, too. (OK, maybe except lava.) But solid objects – like walls,

As storms went, the off-season doozy pummelling Deixar right now was an absolute howler. Rain fell in sense-blinding curtains – roaring across the ground and dense as fog, turning roads into oil-slicked torrents. Deafening thunder rolled across the district in explosive shockfronts, setting up painful vibrations in anyone caught too close by. The static charge in the air left everyone signal-blind, too, communications inoperable, unable to see outside their own static envelopes. And just to compound it, a badly-placed bolt had knocked out the bulk of the city’s power grid. Everywhere was dark, save for the small battery-operated lamps twinkling in windows – and the supercharged bolts that briefly lit the sky as brightly as daytime. All anyone could do was find shelter, hunker down, and wait it out. …at least, anyone with any common sense. Not a trait that a large proportion of Slipstream’s family had in any abundance. The young mech was right on the wrong side of their home

Remind me why I decided this was a good idea, again. Starscream hadn't been home to Vos much over the last few centuries, and every time he did, the city-state seemed to look worse than he remembered. Not that he remembered Vos looking especially good recently. Even in the early skirmishes of the war, the city-state had been looking particularly run-down; dirty and ill-tended, her residents too tired, too fractious, too angry to want to spend precious resources on buildings when their own health was suffering. Now, after centuries of abandonment – near abandonment, he corrected himself – it was hard to tell a city had even been here. Just… miles and miles of destruction and desolation. Brave scavengers had stolen anything worth saving. Sun and rain bleached out any remaining colours, washed decorations down to the deepest bedrock. What was left of the broken buildings had settled groundwards, the concrete weathering and crumbling, columns and walls and floors all disappearing into

Starscream hadn’t been gone very long – just long enough to see Skyfire off at the spacebridge, and grab an early-morning pick-me-up and flaky blue treat on the way home – but when he returned to his home office, it was to find Skywarp doing… something… with his current lab setup. The dark wings were facing him and their owner apparently hadn’t noticed his arrival yet. “What are you doing.” It wasn’t even really a question. More an accusation. Skywarp glanced back over his shoulder. “Oh, hey. I thought you’d ended up going to Earth after all.” He tucked the last loop of wire round behind the glowing central column and gestured at the setup. “I was just having a look at what you were doing.” “You’re supposed to be getting your gate serviced.” Starscream shooed him away, aggressively. “Not… fiddling with what doesn’t concern you.” He got as close as he could to his intricate equipment setup and examined it, minutely. “Yeah, and I am? Sepp took the bit out that needed looking at.