Prompt 5 response
Title: Ion Storm
Continuity: IDW,
Rating: PG
Character: Sixshot, ref Sixshot/Jetfire
Warnings: none,
A/N: refs to events of Stormbringer.
Prompt: In a banned location
Wordcount: 910
Time: 45 minutes.
Banzaitron hadn't been kidding. The radiation at Thunderhead Pass was...more than Sixshot was used to. Not more than he could handle. It scoured his armor, but that was mostly numb anyway. It did make his optics ache, but more irritatingly, it foxed almost all of his scans. Which meant finding anything in this twisted wreck of a landscape was a slow thing, pacing across the landscape, keyed to visual.
Wind screamed past his audio, a harsh staticky hiss, ions scraping over the feed, shooting red lines over his video. Dead place. Sixshot had seen battlefields before; caused carnage on a planetary scale. But this was somehow...eerie. No noise of anything beyond wind, no sight beyond broken landscape, heaved and rent and torn.
No bodies. That's what had been eating at Sixshot. All this deadness, and no death. Emptiness. Void. Like the Dead Universe. It had that...stink to it.
Sixshot crouched, hating to admit to uneasiness, metal dust gritty under his footplates, swiping the grey-black-brown powder from the surface. Black charring. More recent than the others. This must be the start of the battlefield. Thunderwing against everyone.
Sixshot snorted. That must have been something. Autobots and Decepticons, working together.
Banzaitron's directionals had been fuzzy to begin with, so this was actually...not at all helpful. He was supposed to be retrieving the axis cradle which was somewhere underground. Somewhere. Which covered a lot of underground.
Sixshot pushed onward, clambering over the twisted ground, optics searching for something, anything, that looked less aged and dead.
There-a shape too rounded, too smooth, to be the landscape, large and silver-scoured, even under the harsh conditions. Newer. Not an opening to the underground, but something. Shelter, maybe, for a few moments, enough to get out of the wind, to think. Something to look at other than unchanging emptiness. Something that didn't remind him of the Dead Universe.
Part of a ship, he realized, as he approached. Only part-like everything here, like it was some new Natural Law, the hull was torn, battered, ending in a raw amputation. Still, it had something. He pushed his way through the dangling struts, the long-dead snapped wires and cables and into something like shelter.
It wasn't less quiet here-the wind simply howled over the surface of the hull, dust hissing over. But his vid feed cleared, his audio emptied of static. Better.
Better check weapons, while he was at it: Sixshot pulled his guns, and did a quick tour. The telltales blinked operating status. Good. Hate to run into a Sentinel with only his fists.
No, wait. Could probably handle that. Just more efficient this way.
He looked around, studying the broken components. Some dust skirled along the floor, probably enough to jam any controls, even if he could get power going. Still it was something to do other than squat down and admit to the relief of being out of the elements.
Sixshot squatted down, hauling at a floor panel. There: auxiliary power. Autobots were obsessed with having power redundancies in their ships, and the battery looked functional. He flicked it on, a screen on the console lighting up, sluggishly. He swiped an impatient hand across the screen, to read the cursor text. Frag. Demanding Autobot authorization.
Demanding...Jetfire's authorization.
He hesitated. Jetfire. Here. His optics swept around the place with a new focus. No, older than that. This ship had crashed way before...Jetfire. And he and...whatever it was between them.
Before his time. Jetfire's fine. He'd contact you if he needed you. A scenario where both sides were working together? Jetfire had sense.
And there were no bodies. Jetfire, if injured, had been healed. Something Sixshot could never manage to do. His skills were...on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Stop. Sixshot. Stop. Not who you are. Not going to get weak.
He growled, slapping off the battery, snatching up his guns and storming out.
Know what? Nothing here on the surface that mattered. Those guardian Sentinels were allegedly still online, functional. He hadn't run into any yet. Then again, he'd been trying to be stealthy. Yeah, ironic. Stealth in a place where no scanners read anything anyway. He could have dropped the Devil King flat on the surface, all guns blazing, and probably been fine.
No matter. Probably good practice. Big inserts had their place, but no sense getting too used to making such a dramatic entrance. That was normally for effect and he...didn't really care what a non-sentient drone thought of his stylish arrival.
But he was getting tired of creeping on the surface, looking for some secret ingress to the interior. Stupid, Sixshot, he told himself. Wandering around looking for a door to knock on. Make your own door. Always have. And right now? He needed to shoot something.
He stepped back, kicking at the charred mark, the metal underneath already brittled from the heat. He pulled both of his guns, aiming them at the center of the blackened mass. Right. Knock knock. A blast of plasma, white-yellow and hot, cutting through sound, sight, blaring with light and noise and energy-everything entirely the opposite of this place.
Thunderous noise, the metal blasting inward, a small avalanche of broken soil tumbling down into the space below the surface, falling into darkness, roaring, rumbling, and angry torrent of sound.
Only the dead could hear.