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All Plans Askew, Chapter 3

By: Varyn

Hours had been passing with the strange, slow, slippage that was Time.

The soft hiss of the CR chamber door opening seemed more hushed than ever before, as if it was unsure about disturbing the many night-sounds of this unknown world.

Metal clinked upon metal in odd harmony with the crickets as Trowena stepped forth, alone in the command center of her singed shuttlecraft. She watched the dented door fall back into its place, seeing her reflection glaring back at her. She was startled to see that she now, much like the ‘bots she had been fighting, had a beast mode. One of her crew, she guessed, must have recovered enough to initiate the scan. Her alternate mode was a deadly looking Dilophosaurus, ebony with orange sienna stripes like slashes of fire running from nose to tail. The signature dilophosaurus eye-frills enhanced the deadly scowl of this beast.

Nearly all of her robot form was also dark, a stark jet black. Her optics were a deep, enigmatic garnet-red. Utterly unreadable.

She was taller than many cybertronians, most likely due to the fact Maximals and Predacons had been becoming much smaller than their predecessors in more recent years, and she was by no means a recent model. When she had been created, she had been very diminutive in comparison with her Decepticon ancestors. Now she was something of a relic, belonging to an age of war, an age of experiments.

She sighed, knowing that such advancements came at a price...At least her spark had not been overly tinkered with, as was the case with the one now gone before...

Once again she met her own mirrored gaze; the highly advanced optics, one of which was a monocle. A useful thing--if she needed to see clearly whilst firing her eye-lasers, she could divert all the power to that monocle and let the other optic remain for sight. It could also switch to completely motion sensitive vision, night vision, magnification, and many other modes--all independent of the other eye. An advantage, now, but it had not always been so.

On the day of her creation, her unveiling into this world, she had been totally blind.

An irreparable glitch in her circuitry, they had said. She would have been her creator's greatest achievement, his life's work...His ultimate contribution to the Great War…A war in which he was not a fighter, but a thinker.

Instead, she had been useless. They sent her to do the work of a drone in a factory, for which she needed only basic programming and no real sight. Predicons shook their heads mournfully over the what had been known as Project Dark Angel...And then quickly hid the unfortunate result from view, hoping only to forget what would--nay, should--have been a triumph if not for the failure of one would-be high-ranking Predicon scientist.

Meanwhile, the heir to failure slowly slipped from memory, assembling weapons she could not see.

But she had not had her original programming erased--nor her spark. Some part of her longed for battle though none had ever bothered even to tell her what war really was, or indeed who she really was. Those long years of ceaseless darkness and confusion, at first being led, blind, through a world she did not know; hearing voices surround her, speaking of her in shamed tones as though she was not even functional...Then, the long silent time, repetitive motion day after day, and an end to voices of any sort.

At some point during this time, the one who gave her life, her father, terminated himself.

She was never told of his passing; no news of the outside world ever interrupted her monotony. The new program they had hastily laid overtop of the old did not let her cease her work; her arms moved to their task without being bidden by her conscious thought. She could not escape, could not move outside of her new function for even an instant.

Throughout all these years, an anger grew within her. She knew not at what she was angry--only that something simmered ever more violently within her as the hated days passed without record from her unseeing eyes.

Then, at long last, came the light...And it came in the form of a 'bot named Cythadris.

She was a factionless female--neither Maximal nor Predicon, but she earned her living doing fairly low-risk spying assignments for the Maximals. Alas, her heart was not in the work or the war, and when she saw the enslaved 'bot in the gloomy factory she could not do anything other than help, regardless of her present task. She had heard how the Predicons sometimes used irreparably glitched 'bots--often those who had taken too much damage in battle, and were beyond the CR chambers of that time--as drones, or simply recycled them into spare parts for new warriors. She could not stand it. All sparks, regardless of form, deserved their share of sanctity.

She left her then-current mission behind, and never looked back. With the utter stubborness so inherent in her nature, she hauled the much larger bot out of the factory and out of the hands of the Predicons, running now from both sides of the war, and into obscurity.

There was a secret network created by the factionless ones—a place where they could find safety, belonging, when the rest of the world seemed too torn for reckoning—or when their own faction-switching ways and webs came back to ensnare them. This was something of a common occurrence—those who lacked a side tended to go where they were needed…Or where they were paid.

It was into this underground that Cythadris took the thing that she had found, took her and taught her how to live and function, to have vision without sight.

After having her factory-drone programming was removed, Trowena busied herself with what she could—particularly with the fighting skills she knew she would never be of any great use with--but still, much time was spent running from one place to the next, working the underground for all it was worth.

And yet Cythadris knew, for all of her charge’s gratitude, that this strange ‘bot was built for more and, deep down, craved more. Cythadris became ever more determined to find it for her—so much so that she risked revealing herself to the maximal authorities in order to seek out the aid of a renowned maximal spy and technician. It was madness—he no doubt was one of those who were sent to find traitors and bring them to justice—why ever would he aid the likes of her in restoring the capabilities of a Predicon? And yet, miraculously, he understood, and risked himself in turn to help her. He gave her the program that would restore the needed sight—and fled.

After this, the newly-seeing warrior began to learn ever more rapidly, her skills all the more devastating because she had learned to use so many of them without sight.

It was well that she devoted herself thusly, for in less than a year, Cythadris was dead.

Those that followed her had found her, and were now demanding the location of the Predicon war machine she had taken and tried to restore. In the end, her silence cost her her life. Not all Maximals were so merciful as they seemed, though many were.

After this, Trowena had quickly forgotten that it had been a Maximal working long hours to return her vision, for with the death of Cythadris, all the anger that had been stored within her found a sudden vent.

She left the underground to become a soldier. A Predicon soldier.

She was welcomed, now, for she was what a Predicon should be: formidable, deadly, fearless…And without a single weak point.

The word ‘contract’ reminded her, quite suddenly, of her present situation. There could be no contracts here, not with him, that rogue scoundrel Megatron. She knew he pursued the rather common Predicon goal of a second Great War, but with his ideals he would have a victory without a fight, rather than her own wish for a chance in battle, a chance to prove her skill and earn her ends as she deserved them until she finally met with death completed.

How many, she wondered, were in his forces now? She had seen only two present at the last battle, one of which was now terminated, but there was no possible way to tell how many more lay in wait. She had only three, and did she even have those? She had not had a proper chance to see if they were knocked offline temporarily or permanently, and as such she wasted no time in going to check now.

Aranis Mecha, her scientist, was nowhere to be found. Not her body, not bits of her, nothing. This made Trowena more than a little nervous…Aranis, for all her brilliant mathematical and scientific skill, was a guiltless, self-serving creature at best. She was most beneficial when kept in plain view.

Giving up on Aranis for the moment, Trowena went in search of her other, far more favored, lieutenant: a young and unflinchingly loyal mech who had been in her service for some years.

Within moments she found him, or rather his dead shell, lying almost concealed in a hole where the wall had been sundered near its base. At first she simply assumed that he had perished in the crash, but upon closer inspection she found a poisoned dart, one of Aranis’s most chosen weapons, buried deep in the back of his neck.

* * * *

Blacharachnia had defected. Tarantulas was doing what he did best: be unavailable for service. Scientists were in short supply, and he had next to know idea how to save his clone. The TM2 device had gone with that witch…He had a blank protoform, a charred hunk of metal, and five cycles in which he had to somehow make a whole robot out of this mess. He knew how to create clones, sure enough, but this was turning out to be a little more…Complex.

"Hopeless!" He growled to himself.

Just then he felt something coil around his legs, nearly buckling him at the knees. In half an instant the eyes of a large red cobra were staring onto his own as a soft, slightly cunning, female voice oozed:

"Need some help with that, my angry purple friend?"

With that she dropped to the ground and transformed in one fluid motion, adding:

"A little more of that clone’s original DNA might spice up the cocktail, Megs"

Megatron did not act at first, too startled by the radiant red and black snake-bot who had seemed almost to appear, in a flash, before his very eyes. She stood there, tall, stunning, and utterly serpentine, as she waited for him to aid her. He may never have moved at all if the voice of TM2 Dinobot’s internal computer had not warned:

By the time he had returned she had set up an almost mystifying system of tubes, wires, and machinery around the protoform and the clone, she seemed almost to be rerouting Dinobot’s spark. Delicately she was adding cubes of stable energon for what was sure to be a huge blast of power.

He handed her the DNA and she took it without a word as the internal computer blared another warning. Half a cycle later as she clicked incessantly away on a keyboard, a picture of the original Dinobot flashed onto a nearby screen.

"So that’s what you looked like, eh?" She murmured to herself. "You may not be reborn as a TM2 but it is better than the alternative…"

With that she flicked a switch, there was a blinding flash of light, and a resounding crackle.

When Megatron stopped shielding his eyes, he saw the mysterious femme standing over a functional, perfect recreation of the original Dinobot as he lay in the stasis pod.

"All I can say is it is most fortunate I could get at the clone’s spark so easily…Saved some serious time. So, what do you say, Megs? Need a new scientist? Aranis Mecha, at your service." She looked over at him with a sly sideward glance.

"You’re hired" Came the reply.

* * * *

Trowena transformed into her beast mode and left the base, stalking into the nearby thicket of dense tropical forest. Birds, frightened at the approach of this large carnivore, lifted from the treetops in droves and scattered upon the four winds.

She watched them run, knowing she would never do the same…

Her feet would not leave the ground that was to be her grave. She would stay below the leafy shroud that was to seal her doom.