Shadows Given Form

[air_n_darkness]

Month Four, Week 2, Day 6

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It is a very simple message. Essentially, it is a mere string of numbers, which would mean little to the average person. The numbers are sent when Hellbender is already planetside, conveniently enough, and there are actually two sets of numbers.

The first is a command override which only one person should know. Hellbender himself may not even know it, but he will certainly recognize it.

The second set of numbers are coordinates which, if followed, will bring Hellbender to a remote, mountainous area, and a ledge overlooking a lightning-burned forest, the landscape not unlike that which proved the backdrop for the worm and his master's first tete-a-tete.

Coincidence?

Comments

[headless-seeker.livejournal.com]

Hellbender recognizes the first code; it sends a shiver through his circuits as the numeric phrase unlocks a suppressed bit of memory: This is the top-level priority code: should you receive it, what follows overrides all other orders, and is to be acted on immediately.

It's not technically irresistible; if Hellbender were capable of rejecting all authority and orders, of rebelling against his creator and committing treason, he could just ignore it. Optimus Prime is technically capable of becoming a cruel tyrant who puts non-Cybertronians in death camps, too. There's a difference between what one is physically capable of doing and what one is psychologically capable of doing. Hellbender cannot ignore the orders of his master/creator/father/superior.

He takes a shuttle, flies cloaked, and puts it down in a deep canyon many miles from his destination. Hellbender doesn't know what's going on, but if there's an injured Shockwave here, he may well need the heavy transport. If there's intrigue afoot--and the hidden message to himself all but screams that there is--the fewer who know where he's gone and what he'd done, the better. He carefully camouflages the shuttle and locks it to his personal code... and Shockwave's.

The coordinates are just a set of coordinates until Hellbender emerges from the access tunnel he dug from the shuttle and flies slowly in robot-mode to the target. It's only when his feet settle on the mountain ledge that he realizes that the view down the valley resembles that from the hills above the Decepticon base on Gillanan III. It only lacks the abandoned mining town with the huge crater blasted in it; instead, there's a blasted forest.

"Hellbender reporting," he growls, then tries a weak call on Shockwave's personal frequency: // Hellbender reporting as ordered, priority code Aleph One. //

He listens intently for a reply on the radio, and listens even more intently to the world around him, feels the texture of the dirt and rock under his feet. What might be moving out there? What songs does the rock sing?

Several days later...

[air_n_darkness]

Victoria was not joking about how little contact Hellbender would have with people other than herself. Nor was she merely dangling the promise of his final upgrade before him in an attempt to sway him to her side. Once the worm is settled into her very private and very secure workspace beneath Kao-Nic Technology's main research facility in Detroit, Victoria dives right into the work.

She is still reserved, as Shockwave was, still formal. Yet, there is something different. She can't quite hide that she is happy for Hellbender's presence, happy to be working for hours upon end upon his systems. She does not rush the work, at times being as critical and exacting as Hook. As she works, she sometimes talks, telling Hellbender some aspect of her time-displaced journey. One might think she has been starved for an equal (or a near approximation thereof) with which to interact, evidenced perhaps by her tendency to merely distance Hellbender's consciousnesses from his body, rather than take him fully offline for the work.

At the moment, she is tweaking the worm's entire subspace array, and telling Hellbender of her time spent in the gentle care of Sector Seven's laboratory.

"In truth, I've little memory of most of the period. Sometimes, like in a dream where one almost reaches the edge of wakefulness awareness would almost penetrate... I know from the information I recovered after my awakening that I was their captive for almost a century."

Her lips twitch, "I enjoy sending them on various wild chases from time to time."