Fandom Transformers: New Moon

[Ferociousfeind]

- CYBERTRON -​

This is a cold rock, distantly orbiting a violent blue star, in a quiet corner of the galaxy. Just underneath its frigid surface is innumerable veins of a volatile, cobalt-blue material commonly known as Energon. Millions of years ago, a miracle occurred and life developed on this rock, beginning a complex dance through the ages, all the way up to the present.

---

Today is a sad day in Cybertronian history, following a long and drawn-out war between two ideological factions that sprung up just a few thousand years ago. The prideful Autobots espouse freedom and equality between bots, demonstrating honor on the battlefield, though really it seems as if they are fighting for the uncomfortable status quo. In recent years, their tactics have turned sour, and their use of energon supplies leads many a civilian bot to worry for the future of their world. Meanwhile, the brutal Decepticons campaign for an efficient society managed from the top down. They never fought particularly cleanly, attempting to undermine Autobot authority and destabilize their military chain of command. They make very public their efficient use of limited energon supplies, and claim political victories just as often as military ones.

You, though, you're neither.

Neither world the factions fight for sounds particularly realistic, especially with the rapidly-depleting supplies of energon worldwide. With local supplies running low, you're considering abandoning Cybertron altogether and searching the stars for more fertile ground- more energon. Right now, you work for an intelligence branch of the faction, monitoring communications between Central Command and various hotspots of activity. Your main job is receiving communications, recording them, and relaying them down the line, but you also occasionally aid the other bots in decoding encrypted messages picked up by listening across frequencies for the enemy's messages- decoding takes a lot out of a bot.

Your radio communicator is silent- combat has been in a temporary lull all across the planet for days, and now you cannot see anyone else in the room, so you are presented with a choice. You could excuse yourself from your post and adventure out into the Cybertronian environment, or you could stay dutifully at your communicator's side to be ready for anything that may come by. Leaving now may be one of precious few opportunities to find a way off this planet, but it is risky. You may be found by a superior officer and grilled until your circuits are friend, or a wandering hostile battalion might catch you off-guard and transform your combat-unready self into a nice little pile of useless slag.

1. Leave your post and heed the call to adventure! It's your only chance to escape this planet.
2. Stay for now, and play it safe. Perhaps you could even recruit a fellow rebel to help you later?

The choice is yours.

 

[Thepotatogod]

1

 

[Ferociousfeind]

1. Leave your post.

Of course. There is no other way off this planet. You have to leave, now. You look back and forth, holding the communicator receiver to your audio receptors one last time, just in case. No sound comes. It's just static. With a tense sigh, you stand up, drop the communicator output to dangle from its cable, and briskly walk out of the room. The tense atmosphere lingers and grows as you make your way through the quiet building, pretending to have something to do, just in case.

The abandoning goes well until it doesn't, and a fellow officer approaches you- "Nightlight! Well met." You tense, and then relax, turning to Halfwire.

Halfwire is a bulky general in charge of ground assaults. He is a rusty bronze from optical sensor to position stabilizer, with silvery grey shoulder pads and heavy metal helmet. Under his shoulder is a nondescript cylinder with a little slit drawn horizontally through its side, with a slightly-indented panel on the opposing side. Who knows what sort of device it could be. Maybe it's something important?

"Why aren't you at your post?" He grumbles. You tense again, ready for a major write-up... Halfwire is usually a grump, half of the time. "Let me guess- nothing to report? I get ya." You relax again. Emphasis on half, today it seems.

What a wild ride. You nod timidly, explaining that the situation across the planet seems to have reached a calm, and so you're going for a walk, exhausted by the nonstop surveillance responsibility.

"That makes sense. A bot needs their beauty sleep to stay on top of the game. Just be sure to get back soon, Nightlight! The enemy will take every advantage they can get. Help fight the good fight, and all that." He waves you off, and you continue hurriedly out of the building.

Once outside, the tension dissipates greatly, and you're more or less free to go. It's easy to get lost on Cybertron if you don't have a map, and it's not a crime to not have a map... Now, as for a way off this desolate rock. You will need some starship or space vessel ready to take off to star-jack. You could search across the surface world, or among the subsurface mechanisms...

1. Search atop the surface. Most operations are surface-side, who's to say a space program isn't among them?
2. Search under the surface. A space program might be worth trying to hide until it's too late to intercept.

 

[Thepotatogod]

1. Search atop the surface - Who's to say a rocket isn't flying right at this moment?

 

[Ferociousfeind]

1. Search atop the surface.

Now there is an idea. Perhaps someone else has already had this thought, and is already prepared to leave Cybertron. Maybe you'll be able to hitch a ride, though your chances may be diminished if they are already crewing the starship, and even lessened if they're already off the ground. You set off, not looking back, across the surface of your dying planet. You keep your eyes to the sky, but as of now, there aren't any in-flight rockets at this moment. The place is quiet. So very quiet.

After a while, the cold and unforgiving nature of the unkempt surface of Cybertron makes itself known, metal braces and synthetic plates creaking under your footsteps as the intelligence center shrinks into the distance behind you. Unlike the clean and pristine depictions of Cybertron, outside of well-inhabited sectors of the planet, the surface is a jungle of biotechnological outgrowths, both dormant and active. Cables snake along the ground, bulbous colonies of techno-organisms hide under unassuming sheet metal, globs of softly-glowing meta-mold cover particularly dark and damp sections. You nearly trip over something that, after a moment of searching, appears to have completely disappeared. Freaky.

The more you walk, the further you get from your responsibilities in the intelligence center. Hopefully, you'll be able to rocket away from them at the speed of light, and never, ever look back. Your walking brings you deep into the Cybertronian jungle, where an old door rests, hiding unseen for perhaps centuries. It's rusted and looks like it'll be difficult (and perhaps quite loud) to open. But what are the chances anyone is nearby? But if you really are that paranoid, there's always simply moving on and keeping the search up. As always, the choice is yours, and yours alone.

1. Try to open the door. What is lying in wait behind it?
2. There's no time, this door likely won't lead to a rocket.

 

[Thepotatogod]

There's no time - That thing's probably busted anyway

 

[Ferociousfeind]

2. There's no time​

Even if there was some ancient relic hidden in there, it's probably too old to be useful in any way. You'll have better luck stumbling upon a poorly-hidden space program than jerry-rigging an ancient space probe to get back into space. You brush cables back over the old door and quickly move on. There is more to see.

Making your way through the rest of the old, untamed Cybertronian jungle, you transition to the metal plains, where trees grow more seldom and the faint light of Cybertron's parent star can strike the surface beneath your feet. With you so out in the open, the clunking of said feet is a little more... awkward, and unnerving. There are few other sounds, and taking a moment to stop reveals just how eerily quiet this place is. Yes, the communicator was silent, but those were radio frequencies, the electronic buzz of cybertronian-made machines, and included nothing natural. This place lacks even the whooshing of cool air across the landscape or the synthesized zapping of the smaller cybertron wildlife flitting about. Turning your attention away from the unnerving atmosphere and towards the horizon, you can't see anything poking out of the surface layer that might betray the position of a rocket readying to leave, like you'd hope. This just means you have to keep searching.

You set back out, following the border between thick heavy forest and wide open plains, watching the horizon for buildings that stick out to you, and occasionally peeking into the impenetrable foliage you keep behind you. You spend some time searching, following the sway of the forest boundary, until something characteristically bullet-like whizzes past your sonic sensors. A gun? Here? Who's shooting at you? You look more closely towards the horizon, and spy some soldier- the mark is unclear from here. They seem to be reloading their arm-mounted weaponry. Uhh, quickly!

1. Try to flag them down, talk some sense into the solider!
2. Try to run away, back into the forest!
3. TRANSFOOOOORM!!!

 

[Thepotatogod]

Transform! - I don't know what our vehicle form is but lets hope is durable and fast enough!

 

[Ferociousfeind]

TRANSFORM!​

What!? But that's only something the warbots are taught and trained to do!! You could maybe try, based on watching the platoons transform and move out, but you've always been so holed up in the intelligence center for the higher-ups to consider your sector worth teaching how to do it. There were guards around the place for a reason. You're an I.T. guy, not a component of the war. Anyways, you've seen war camp, transforming takes a lot outta a guy! You don't even know how they drive around once in there, and you might get flipped over or stuck in vehicle mode if you do. What if they're a good shot anyways!?

Okay, some of those are just excuses. You're being shot at, you could lose your spark at any moment, it's at least worth a shot to try. You hold your arms against your chest and kneel down, willing your body to change its shape, but the loud clanging that follows is just you falling over onto your side. Maybe it's confused the soldier enough to afford you a chance to escape, but who knows. You stand back up, shaking proverbial dust off of your chest, looking back to the soldier on the horizon. They paused, but their weapon seems just about ready to shoot again. One last time? The choice is yours.

1. Try to talk some sense into them! It might be more difficult to get to them now, though.
2. Try to hide in the forest! It's not too late to turn tail just yet.
3. Really, TRANSFORM!! It's the only way!

 

[Thepotatogod]

I'm gonna get myself killed either way so--

Transform.

 

[Ferociousfeind]

TRANSFORM!!​

Alright, fine! Maybe you'll try one more time. You can't exactly think of anything else to do, anyways. You close your eyes and concentrate really hard. You press your arms together, trying to pull your head into some imaginary cavity in your chest, and magically form into some vehicle. Maybe a troop transport. Maybe a flying vehicle. Maybe something that's really heavy and scary and able to mow down that soldier for opening fire on you! But, still, it doesn't come. You recollect what some of the soldiers you know transform into, from tanks and oversized guns to big sturdy walkers and high-velocity transporters. You imagine transforming into any of those- maybe it's a mental processor thing- but that doesn't work either.

You imagine the rocket you're looking for, hopefully something sleek and roomy on the inside. Plenty of storage for extra energon rations, plus a cryo chamber for the long wait times. And, of course, a fusion drive to coast across the galaxy in search of a better planet. You don't need anything else, really! You bring your arms together one more time, and to your utter surprise, it seems to work. You can feel some unused organ in your chest tingling and twisting, as your arms and legs flatten into steel plates. You twist and contort, metal scraping against metal until you've become a towering cylinder of carbon-fiber and steel.

Your engine roars to life and you blast into the sky, quickly gaining altitude until you can transform back to look down on the Cybertronian landscape. Undeniably, it's pretty. It is illuminated by the faint light of its star, glowing a bright brilliant blue. The impenetrable forest grows to a peak density and extends for a long while to your left, and the barren plains extend to your right. The soldier, now like an ant on the surface, seems utterly astounded, dumbfounded by your sudden transformation and blasting off. You don't think anyone was expecting that.

You'll be coming down to the surface soon, too. How... are you going to be getting down...?

You're having trouble thinking of anything specific, the specific circumstances have you a bit lost for words...

 

[Ferociousfeind]

No response...

(Also, it's been a tough writer's-blocky month, sorry. I have more pre-planned, I promise.)

It's beautiful. You're simply awe-struck by the distant beauty of the landscape from even this modest altitude, watching the horizon, parsing out details of the landscape at such amazing distances, with your own optical sensors. You occasionally look straight down, but that's frankly not as fascinating as the sheer size of the horizon all around you. Oddly enough, no ideas come to you, and things become gradually more dire as Cybertron's gravity slowly drags you back to the metal plains. Perhaps you're simply awe-struck by the distant beauty of the landscape from even this modest altitude, maybe the threat of becoming scrap metal is an entirely new feeling to you. Whatever the case, you remember a word tossed around occasionally by the jocks.

You tuck one knee under the other, and pull yourself into a spin, moments from slamming into the cold cybertronian steel. You roll and roll, collapsing into a pile of exhausted robot in the fields, but at least you don't seem very hurt. You're also exhausted- that small jump used up a ton of energon, so even if you could escape on nothing but your own jets, you'll need all the energon you can get to have any hope of escaping. You'll just have to stash it somewhere safe while you gather it, until you're ready to leave. Before you start stashing energon, though, you still have that soldier to deal with or get away from.

The soldier looks to be utterly dumbfounded by what you just did. Of course, it was a strange thing, virtually unprecedented. The Decepticons normally field cheaply mass-produced jet-formers, and the Autobots aren't shy about copying that battle plan, but an actual space-worthy craft isn't something anyone is known for being able to become. This changes... a lot. Except for the energon. You will still need that. How are you going to get sizable energon reserves?

 

[Ferociousfeind]

No response...

(I have returned! For real this time. I think I can just churn this out on my own, but I will still be open to suggestions. That's where my improv skills would be put to the test, after all!)
(PS, I have been meaning to write for this for a while, and you cannot stop me.)

You climb your way back onto your feet, coughing from the exertion and still disoriented from the combat-roll. It was described as a maneuver that would save you from the brunt of potential damage from falling from a great height, but it certainly doesn't feel like it... You probably shouldn't do that again for a while, lest an armor plate fall right off your chassis. You've always been more of an egghead than any kind of athlete.

The soldier seems to have left- likely to spread the news of your unprecedented vehicle form. With any luck, they won't be back for a while, leaving you to explore the landscape of Cybertron undisturbed. First order of business, really, is that door you saw. Although you'll likely have plenty of time before one or both sides makes a move, it'd be better to get as far away from the scene as you can. After all, you don't want to be captured by anyone and interrogated, or experimented on. It'd be, basically, a fate worse than decommissioning.

Retracing your steps eventually brings you back to that one spot, deep in the metallic jungle. An old, rusted door, sunken partly into a slight incline, hidden beneath a few layers of robot-fauna, itself hiding who-knows-what. Possibly stores of Energon, if you were feeling especially lucky. Maybe an old war machine, given just how long this conflict between the suffocatingly-authoritarian and righteous Autobots and the dirty-fighting freedom-fighter Decepticons has been going on. Maybe it's a research outpost, holding an old infectious robot-disease that'll turn you into a couple hundred mindless, metal-hungry, self-replicating drones. Maybe it's just Energon though! Hopefully it's Energon. You're hungry.

You wrench at the door's hinges, unfurling your big bulky robot hands into a dozen intricate tools to try to remove or cut the hinges, but the rust is simply too much for your fine-grained toolery to hack at. You resolve to simply pounding on the door until the metal gives, buckles, and collapses inwards for you. That was... easy? Not as secure as you had expected. Beyond the door's frame is a long winding hallway, pristine in opposition to the rust on the door, air composition from the downward-sloped corridor rich in inert nitrogen gas, in contrast to the chemical cocktail of the thin atmospheric conditions of the rest of Cybertron. Certainly someone wanted to preserve the insides of this place for eons, if they used nitrogen to do it.

Walking down into the corridor- having hastily replaced the door to maybe give the outward impression of maaaaybe not having been meddled with on a passing glace?- you eventually come to a chamber with level ground. Old- and you mean old- electronic screens line the walls and pack the desks. Is this some sort of observation bunker? Alongside the multiple screens and consoles you could try messing with, there is a door at the far side you could investigate instead.

1. Try to boot up the systems. Who knows what this base could've been keeping track of or calculating?
2. Try to open the far door. It could be faster to just look around with your own optical sensors.

 

[Thepotatogod]

Try to boot up the systems.

if it works, then we'll have a hotspot for energon refills if ever the base turns out to be nothing more than just a fortress with no defenses.

 

[Shawdios]

Try to boot up the systems. Who knows what this base could've been keeping track of or calculating?

Boot it up! Curiosity is killing me

 

[Ferociousfeind]

(Oh, I thought it'd take longer to get more attention. Whoops! I am still here)

1. Try to boot up the systems.
Of course, that's only natural for a technician like yourself! Well, at least, if this stuff had been built in the last thousand years or so. It's kind of primitive...

You flick a few switches, press a few buttons, looking for some way to power everything on. The screens occasionally buzz with indistinct swirling greens and blues as you approach- probably because of what energon is still flowing through your tubes- but they aren't turning on, no matter what switches you flip! Eventually, though, your optics pick up an embarrassingly large lever embedded in the wall. Obvious lever is obvious... Giving it a hearty pull sends electric arcs across the room, and some lights in the ceiling actually flicker on! Progress!

A screen bursts to life, with some slightly-archaic cybertronian texts inscribed in it. Something about authorization, it says? Without thinking you put your hand on the screen, and before you can react the screen turns green in response. You... suppose you're secretly an authorized user? Maybe? The door at the back hisses open as the green screen flickers to an old style menu with multiple sub-options, reading "SECURITY", "ATMOSPHERE", "ENERGON", and "PROJECT DATA". That "energon" tab sounds promising, to say the least. However, there's an obvious choice...

1. "Security" tab.
2. "Atmosphere" tab.
3. "Energon" tab!
4. "Project Data" tab?
5. Leave the console alone and check the door that just opened.

 

[Shawdios]

Security, maybe we can see what could be used against us if we go further?

 

[Thepotatogod]

I'm curious about [Project Data]. What are they using this place for anyway?

 

[Ferociousfeind]

1. and then 4.

Perhaps it is best to check [security] first- learn what's going on behind the scenes, before learning what's going on behind the scenes, you know? While tapping doesn't work on the screen, jabbing the buttons on the console below it seems to do the trick. You jab your way to the [security] tab and enter. The menu zooms out to show a rudimentary (projection of a) 3d wireframe approximation of the landscape outside the door and what you could guess are the internals of the base.

The chamber you're in now is perhaps 10% the depth of the deepest sections of this base, which is strangely intricate and expansive for something this crazily old and filled with inert nitrogen. There are multiple hidden exit points across the surface of the base- eight by your count- all of them being perfectly vertical shafts straight to the surface. There are a few chambers a little deeper down you could check for, for example, energon? They at least look the part in wireframe form.

Yellow triangles appear across the model, emanated from what are most definitely security cameras, showing the coverage of the base over the outside, and what areas inside are and aren't under surveillance. This would probably be useful to know if you weren't fairly certain cameras this old would've fallen into disrepair by now. In red, dots appear scattered throughout the upper echelons of the base, denoting where other security measures are in place- crushers, lasers, missiles, automated turrets, old archaic junk like that. Then, in varying shades of green, brown, and red, lines are drawn from certain deep-down chambers to all the nooks and crannies of the base, most likely representing the power supply throughout the base. Not energon per se, more likely to be electrical wires, but in an emergency you could create raw energon by siphoning what power remains in the base.

Though... that's pretty much it for the security tab. The power grid seems in very poor condition, the cameras seem to be functioning but you have your doubts, the defenses inside aren't really worth risking checking whether or not they still function, and you know the layout of the base beneath your feet.

As for the [project data]... You navigate back to the menu and switch instead to that tab. What project? The terminal complies, processing the request for a few seconds. A really inconvenient time to be processing, huh? Eventually it responds, bringing up several documents to leaf through, complete with diagrams and even a few animations. You decide to skip the sob story and read the latest document.

It begins with various orbital views of Cybertron around its host star, then the text begins proper-

The final stages of project SATURN are progressing mostly smoothly. Nothing to report about subject classes, all seven scored highly. Phase 2 was a huge success, and phase 3 will be ready in a few megacycles. All subjects accounted for and ready for dispersal. Subjects Hitch and Vermin have been especially rowdy with the others, which necessitates a slight change to the dispersion pattern, keeping those two away from the others on deployment.

Attached are demonstrations of possible exit trajectories, depending on the time it takes to ready the subjects for departure of Cybertron, and the section of sky they will be aiming for.

Bad news is our measurements came back negative, meaning we have to expand our search further out for viable candidate star systems. Even 88-B, the favorite, was not a good enough match. There are some promising initial results from other regions, the Orion Arm options especially. A quiet neighborhood, far out but still vaguely accessible from Cybertron, and the window for transfer is closing, which means they won't be followed.

In 5 megacycles we will check in on the subjects and potentially ready them for departure.

It raises a few pertinent questions, like what's with all this departure stuff? Who's departing, and to where? The orbital diagrams suggest a big departure, maybe even as big as you're hoping for? By the age of this base, these notes must be very old, and the window of transfer must be closed by now- Orion may be inaccessible today. But who knows? Maybe the window closing was, like, on a cosmic scale of teracycles, and it's more beneficial than ever to try to escape this way.

But you're getting ahead of yourself. How were they departing? What (or, who) were these subjects? You flip back a few virtual pages, skimming for important details.

Flight plans, so many flight plans. Slow and steady banking turns, long discussions of energy efficiency, multiple competing winglet designs, and precise coordination of visual landmarks and index codes for transitioning between segments of said many flight paths. Then, fairly early on in the whole list of documents and graphics, you come across a short document with a list:

The subjects have chosen names for themselves, which will be used for them instead of their designations, face-to-face and in these records. For posterity, the names have been correlated with their designations here:

AJ-72-2: Quicksteel
BF-47-1: Lightstream
IV-11-7: Hitch
JJ-56-1: Afterburn
TX-11-2: Vermin
UR-08-9: Aurora
XS-09-3: Nightlight
ZR-63-5: Depthwire

On the surface, this may seem fairly innocuous, but something about this list seems... not quite right...

 

[Thepotatogod]

Now I don't know what I'm supposed to be selecting here, but in case the names are supposed to be interactable...

Let's check what's up with UR-08-9, Aurora. Maybe that'll give us a companion?

 

[Ferociousfeind]

(Oh, you're totally right, I am not writing the choose-your-own-adventure clearly enough. There is a plot thread that connects to previously-mentioned information hidden in that list that's supposed to be The Big Reveal(tm) but I think it needed another 20k words for it to be the payoff to the buildup I wanted it to be. However, it's still a good plot anchor that I can use for encounters later on!)
(P.S. meant this to be at least a christmas gift, but apparently I am incapable of writing??? And so it is late even compared to that)

Investigate "Aurora" (designation UR-08-9)

That name certainly  seems familiar... Holding it in your memory banks, you tab through more of the secret military documents. Personality readouts, incident reports, surveillance microphone transcripts, they all begin to paint the picture of a natural-built leader, a strong feminine bot who don't-need-no-man, and who definitely acted as the peacekeeper when things got heated. It seems the staff bots in charge of the operation often collaborated with Aurora in strategic decision-making, especially the "hiding the big secret base" aspect. She seemed to grow smug and snarky as the timeline of documents progresses. It seems she is not currently at the base, however.

Perhaps looking into the other names will reveal more about what's going on at this ancient run-down facility? Before you can tab through more files, the terminal you're poking and prodding at produces some sort of long-winded error, and then opens a program, all on its own.

"Excuse me," the terminal's struggling audio modules beep at you, "Excuse me XS-09-3."

You raise an eyebrow at the device. You don't know any XS-09s.

It emits a bitcrushed sigh in return- "'Nightlight'. YOU! The trained operative staring at the console. You're late!"

Late?

"You're [7.1121 gigacycles] late for your deployment. We will have to use a backup, backup-backup flight plan, because... in the time it took you to wake up... The stars moved. All of them. Now come on."

Wait, what? Are you some sort of sleeper agent? One of the subjects you've been reading about, meant to leave Cybertron on your own two wings? You don't even have wings! They're entirely decorative and non-functional! Also, the whole Energon thing. You can't run away without a generous stockpile. There are still, of course, the vaults that probably contain reserve energon deeper in the base, or you could interrogate the A.I. in the terminal about it, or you could perhaps try investigating more of the subjects involved in whatever Project or Initiative the base was built to carry out. Or, you could take a moment to process the revelation(s). What course of action appeals the most to yourself right now, anyways?