Subject: [FANFIC 6/10] Lord of the Flies Starring the Transformers Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 00:00:00 GMT From: David Filip Organization: University of Washington Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers Lord of the Flies Starring the Transformers by David Filip Part Six: Little Black Box "I'm telling ya," Thrust pointed down "this isn't a joke. I want a flexible replacement leg. Is that too much to ask for?" First Aid finished his modification to Thrust's body. "I don't think it's a joke, but this peg leg will help you to move around when we hunt the beastie next time." The medic's clinical voice changed to one of rapture. "And then we get to taste his EnerMeat and EnerBlood...you know how I love the taste of Quintesson flesh...and probably beastie meat too..." Nearby, Skids also ignored Thrust's complaint and moaned in ecstasy. "Sweet, juicy, EnerBlood..." Beachcomber also added his own deliriously tasty thoughts. "EnerBlood...so succulent...so delicious..." Thrust felt like a human pirate with the unarticulated metal pole attached to his hip socket, and still thought it was some sort of joke. He knew there were other resources on the island to create a perfectly working leg, but First Aid didn't focus on his work now that he thought about food. This made Thrust angry at First Aid, but moreso at the creature who caused the damage. "Oh yeah, beastie's gonna pay..." "And he'll pay soon," Afterburner added. "I've already taken the liberty of converting the particle beam comm system into the heat ray. When he comes by next time--" "BLAP! He's gonna SWANK wish he never came to this island!" "Maybe Warpath," Thundercracker said solemnly, "but what about Windcharger, Huffer and Starscream? What can we do for them?" "There's only one thing we can do," Skywarp said with a smile, "get revenge." "Maybe not!" Bumblebee pointed to the sky. "They're back!" Everyone gathered around their leaders as they returned from their trip. Windcharger held the black box above his head. "Okay everyone, we didn't get the beastie, but we found our ship's flight recorder!" With Bumblebee as the only notable exception, all the boys cheered as if the mission had been a complete success. "Now we can find out why we crashed!" Beachcomber thought aloud. Brawn folded his arms. "We'll be able to blame Magnus! I've got a feeling he's the one responsible for all this." "Wait!" Bumblebee broke in. "What happened to Huffer?" He was the only robot visibly distressed not to see the full team return. Windcharger and Starscream exchanged glances yet again. They knew it was bad to have their leadership questioned, but they knew it would be much worse if the kids learned that a coup almost succeeded. Starscream spoke for both of them. "Uh...the beastie got him. But it was a good death. A warrior's death. Yeah, that's the ticket." The littluns seemed unfazed by this remark and begged to hear the little black box's message. "All right then," happy to move the subject away from Huffer's death so soon, Windcharger lifted the device. "We'll activate the flight recorder. Here goes..." He pressed the hologram activator and a projection of the shuttle's bridge appeared with Magnus at the helm. "This should show us the last few minutes of the flight." Ultra Magnus stood up from his chair and walked to the bridge's door to pick up something slightly smaller than a littlun. It appeared to be Starscream, of all possible people. Skywarp and Starscream both chuckled as they watched the hologram. "Oh no Starscream? What's happened to you? You've never been this small? How did this happen?" The hologram experienced a brief glitch, but reactivated with a scene of Magnus shaking the shrunken Starscream. "I'm...uh...the last survivor," the little Starscream said. Skywarp and the real Starscream let their giggling intensify as they watched the hologram. "It's the evil monster on board this ship! It's the Shrinkoid Gremlin! He did this to me!" Ultra Magnus' voice seemed very concerned. "You're going to sing for the peace accord between the Tirolian Council of Elders and the Invid Regent in only a month! This could be very bad for our negotiations! And what of the summit with the Vorlon Empire? And the dinner with Lord Feff?" The small Starscream shuddered, then weakly whispered some final words. "First it shrinks, then it kills. You must survive...agh." Then the tiny rubber robot became lifeless in Ultra Magnus' hands. "Noooooooooooo!" The SchoolMaster yelled, then dropped Starscream and held his hands over his face. "If all of the students have been attacked by this Shrinkoid Gremlin, then none of us are safe." He sat still, emitting binary weeping noises while Skywarp and Starscream reached the height of their laughter. The two decided to quiet down when they noticed their images walk onto the bridge of the shuttle. This hologram would certainly have to go in their home video collection. Ultra Magnus didn't notice their entry and continued to weep. "What can I do to stop the Shrinkoid? I can barely send these kids out on a decent field trip as it is! Maybe I can escape, yeah, I'll detonate three quarters of the ship and use an escape craft. I'd be labeled a quiter, but at least I'd be able to warn the Cybertronian Intelligence Agency--" In the hologram, Skywarp jumped on Magnus' shoulders and yelled "I'm the Shrinkoid Gremlin, and I'm gonna shrink you!" Starscream and Skywarp laughed and exchanged high fives as they watched this scene. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGGGGGGHH!" Magnus yelled, standing up and then tripping under Skywarp's unexpected weight. By the time he noticed that Skywarp was there, he noticed Starscream. "What's going on? Why are you alive?" Skywarp jumped off his shoulders. In the hologram, Starscream laughed in response. "There's no Shrinkoid Gremlin. That's just something I made up." He noticed Magnus' unchanging facial expression. "It was phony. It was just a joke." "Well I didn't think it was very funny!" Ultra Magnus yelled at the two musicians. "And how do you explain this?" He asked while holding up the tiny Starscream that spoke earlier. "Oh, that's just a decoy. Every Transformer should have one." Magnus shook his head and threw Starscream's decoy in the shuttle's glove compartment. "I certainly know the Transformer who's going to have THIS decoy; Megatron, the SchoolMaster Disciplinary Office Commander. How many times do you have to be sent down to his office until you learn that these stupid practical jokes aren't funny?" Skywarp fielded this answer. "What else are we supposed to do? This is a long trip, after all, and we're stuck in--" Starscream cut him off. "That's the worst part! We are the mighty Cybertronian Boys' Choir, and we're stuck in COACH! We always get first class seats on our trips! Why don't we have them now?" "Return to your seats, gentlemen. Your coach seats," Magnus told them sternly. "If you want to be a part of the Cybertronian Boys' Academy, or the very special Cybertronian Boys' Choir, you'll have to learn to live by the rules. We used the first class section for our extra cargo. It's all a part of our Soylent Green treaty with the humans that we get to remove their toxic waste in exchange for...other valuable items. I'm not willing to break that treaty, and I won't allow you to either." The two boys replied in a bored tone, "Yes Mister Magnus," and returned to their seats. Starscream and Skywarp high fived each other again, pleased to see a lasting record of their brilliant practical joke. As the hologram wore on, they noticed several of the instrument panels which measured heat started to rise, but Ultra Magnus was busy reading another issue of Modern Cybertronian Vice Principal. Eventually the controls in the cockpit started to spark, and this caught his attention. "Primus H. Tron!" Most of the littluns gasped because they never heard Ultra Magnus swear before. "The toxic waste is leaking into all our systems! I'd better put the fires out and start sealing it up!" While the Vice Principal checked for a fire extinguisher, the guidance system failed, and the ship soon veered off course to Quintessa. The automatic distress signal system was already affected, and may not have sent a message across subspace radio waves. This made the astute boys nervous. Magnus eventually found the fire extinguisher's protective casing, but was unable to open it before the ship spun off towards the mountain. In his panic, he didn't notice the latches on top of the box, and tried desperately to damage the box by smashing it against the control panel at first. As his panic intensified, he pounded it with Starscream's rubber decoy and spoke his last words. "Open, damnit, open!" By the time he discovered the latches, his body, pieces of the bridge, and the holograph projector slammed through the old lava tunnels of the mountain. The hologram ended there. * * * The novelty of the hologram wore off quickly, and to the biguns, the task of killing the beast became more important than ever. Few options were available, and even several hours of discussion yielded no help. After those hours it became twilight again, but only a few biguns remained to talk. "What about my hunters?" Starscream loudly asked into the megaphone. "Are you saying they aren't good enough?" "The boys with knives?!" Windcharger responded with equal loudness. "All I am saying that we didn't have much of a chance to do anything back there, and I don't see how it would help to go out on another attack. We have trouble following the beast because it doesn't always leave tracks, and this is more than a hunter's job." "We didn't have enough hunters to fight the beastie that time!" Windcharger pointed to the robot at Starscream's right "But Skywarp did! He even had Laserbeak and Warpath with him at the time. If your hunters can't do anything better than lose a leg and run, then what do you think the rest of us are going to do?" Thrust frowned and looked down at his poorly crafted substitute peg-leg. Bumblebee shook his head. "Now you've done it! You've insulted his hunters!" "So what? I'll insult somebody else! What were you thinking Afterburner? Why did you turn our only form of communication into a weapon? Doesn't anyone want to be rescued?" Most of the boys just looked away, muttering to each other, and Afterburner finally asked to take the megaphone from Starscream. "It doesn't matter," the Technobot spoke with an uncharacteristically shaky voice, "with the beast on the mountain, we can't go back to put the beam up anyway." Starscream turned his back to Windcharger and spoke solemnly. "We should just think about this for a while. Until we come up with a good plan." He walked away and spoke quietly to Skywarp and Warpath. Bumblebee barely caught the megaphone as Afterburner carelessly threw it over his shoulder and walked off in a different direction. The assembly scattered in a matter of astroseconds. Bumblebee quietly stated the obvious. "He's mad at you Windy." "Yeah, a lot of them are. I think they care more about the beast than being rescued." He uttered a short, humorless laugh. "Maybe I'm just like them. Maybe that's why I forgot to tell Afterburner and First Aid to change the heat ray back into the P-beam. Maybe I'm just not cut out to be the leader." "Oh Primus, no!" Bumblebee grabbed Windcharger's arm. "Don't talk like that. If Starscream's bunch were in charge, we'd ignore the comm system and hunt Quintessons here until we died." In a scared tone, the half-blind robot spoke to the vague image he saw by the beach "Who's there?" "Me. Thundercracker." The blue robot stared out across the sea, smoking his EnerWeed silently. He had a distant expression of sadness on his face, but it didn't seem related to any of the immediate events. "A fat lot of good we are," Windcharger said. "Three blind miceatrons. I'll give up." Bumblebee's voice rose an octave higher. "No! What would happen to me?" Windcharger replied nonchalantly. "Nothing." "Starscream and Skywarp hate me, I don't know why. If you weren't the leader, I don't want to think about what they'd do to me." "You spoke against them a couple times when we had that last meeting," Windcharger thought to point out. "I had the megaphone that time. It was different. If it came to a real fight though, you have the magnetic beam in your arm. You could hit them harder than I ever could. I'll tell you something else; Starscream hates you, too." "Why? Because I'm the chief? Because I stopped his gig when we put up the shelters? Because I complained when he took Ramjet off duty with the particle beam?" Bumblebee nodded. "All of those and more." Windcharger refused to believe it. "But he's, he's...Starscream, chief chorister of the Cybertronian Boys' Choir. He can sing C sharp!" Bumblebee went on. "I've been doing some thinking. I know about people. I know about me. And him. He can't hurt you, but if you stood out of the way, he'd hurt the next person. Me." He sighed. "Oh, I wish my Auntie were here." Thundercracker removed himself from his silent personal suffering to offer advice. "Bumblebee's right Windy. There's just you and Starscream. Go on being the chief." Bumblebee nodded to Windcharger and left to check on some of the Micromasters, so Windcharger sat nearer to Thundercracker. Wave after wave, the alien ocean's orange liquid crashed on the shore. If one watched this view from the mountain, thoughts of rescue might come forward. From here, facing the miles of endless division between their current lives and the way they lived at home, the boys only felt clamped down, helpless, condemned. It didn't help that so many Micromasters (like the one who first suggested there may be a beastie) were missing, or that yesterday, on this very beach, Dead End decided that he didn't even want to bother with rescue and drove off into the ocean. Windcharger hoped against hope that the world's native Sharkticons didn't eat the depressed Stunticon at sea, but knew it was in vain. The fact that it was a suicide attempt had been upsetting enough; without finding the remains of Dead End's body, Windcharger felt a doubly extreme and unsettling lack of peace. Thundercracker took a brief draw on his EnerWeed and broke the silence first. "I don't think any of us have to worry about Dead End. He was a very unhappy individual, and I can't help but feel he's in a better place now. You shouldn't worry about yourself, either. You'll get back to where you came from." He sat kneeling on one knee, looking down from a higher rock than Windcharger. Puzzled that they shared thoughts of the same robot at the same time, Windcharger searched Thundercracker's face for a clue. "Maybe there's something in that EnerWeed you shouldn't be smoking. Look out at the ocean, and the sky. It's so big--" "Sometimes I think EnerWeed helps me to see the future. All the same, I think you'll get back all right." "Do you transform into a star spanning ship?" Thundercracker smiled at Windcharger's remark. "No." "Can you fly into space from your regular jet mode?" Thundercracker giggled twice. "No." "Then how do you know I'll get back?" When the blue robot didn't respond, Windcharger continued. "Professor Wheeljack said that drugs are bad for us, and they make your brain go batty. That EnerWeed is going to kill you." Thundercracker shook his head. "I'm not batty." "Well what's it like to be on drugs then?" As Windcharger asked this, he opened the box he found with Magnus and decided to give Thundercracker a tile of Soylent Green. Thundercracker accepted it silently and went on. "It's difficult to describe. It's like I'm in a giant metal cube that's spinning around, and sometimes I'll get a flash of the future, or I'll find what people are really thinking. It scares me sometimes, but I don't feel like I can stop looking. I see things clearer now than I've ever seen anything before. I just think YOU'LL get back all right." For a moment nothing more was said. Then the two smiled at each other. * * * "Hey Brawl, what are you doing?" Powerglide walked over to the green robot who shifted and gyrated strangely. Brawl straightened up and a ball bearing fell to the ground. "Sorry if this looks funny, man, but I'm worried. Do you think I'm...aerodynamic enough?" Brawl picked it up again and continued his bizarre body shifting as the ball bearing rolled across the seams in his joints. Ordinarily, Powerglide would have said that tanks weren't supposed to be sleek, but poor immature Brawl seemed gravely concerned with the answer. "Uh...you look fine Brawl...that ball bearing test really shows off how...er...aerodynamic tracked vehicle-based robots can be." "Really?" Brawl's loud and grainy vocal component rarely sounded this anxious. "I want to be lean and mean when Windcharger gives the go ahead on hunting the beast again. I bet we'll just rip it up this time!" Powerglide patted Brawl on the shoulder. "It's a good thing you feel that way big buddy, because Starscream wanted me to let you in on a little secret..." * * * "What do you mean, 'they're gone?'" Windcharger asked nervously. Bumblebee's axle was clearly giving him problems. "They're missing. It's just you, me, Laserbeak, the twins and him." He pointed to Thundercracker. "Some of the Micros are also here, but they didn't see anything. But most of the biguns, they're...just gone." "What could make them disappear? I don't understand it?" Thundercracker frowned, remembering that he originally thought the beastie was an imaginary figment of the youth's newfound urge to kill. "Do you think it could be the beastie?" The yellow robot shook his head. "I don't know, but I sent Laserbeak out to look for the others. He was asleep in his bunk at the time, so he didn't see anything. We can trust him to return, if he survives." Bumblebee tried to decide on a new course of action. "I didn't talk to the twins yet, though..." * * * Frenzy put his comic book down to look out the shelter's window. "Ah, what a glorious, carefree spring day." He noticed his brother was reading a script to Star Trek: Voyager and decided to start a conversation. "What do you think of Captain Janeway?" Rumble didn't even look up from the script. "I liked her better the first time I saw her. Back when she was a man named Jean-Luc Picard. Heh heh heh--" Frenzy laughed. "You're funny bro. Huh heh huh huh--" "What was Dirge saying when he was here?" Rumble asked. "He said they were looking for people to hunt the beast, to outnumber him and kill him 'nd stuff. Just like Powerglide and Warpath were saying outside." "Uh..." Nervousness hit Rumble rather suddenly. "Wouldn't Windcharger, uh, call an assembly first? Then we'd hunt and kill 'nd stuff." "I'm sure Dirge and the others didn't leave without permission..." Frenzy's voice trailed off as he jumped from his bunk and looked across the shelter. No biguns were to be seen until Bumblebee walked in the door. His axle's grinding could be heard quite easily. "Rumble! Frenzy! Do you know what happened to the others?" The urgency in Bumblebee's tone was unmistakable. "Aren't they off to hunt the beast?" "Isn't that what Windy was doing?" Thundercracker and Windcharger soon rushed in the door. "Hunting the beast? We didn't decide on any plan for hunting!" "We also noticed that they took the particle beam and the welding fuel!" Thundercracker added. The twins tried to deliver the details. "Well Dirge came in here, and he asked--" "If we felt like, uh--" "Hunting 'nd stuff--" "But, we...uh, like said--" "No, we just want to sit back and finish our reading first. Besides, they said they were taking the heat ray too, and we just didn't want to bother ourselves with lifting something big like that." Windcharger nodded his head gravely. "Dirge doesn't have any initiative of his own. He must have been told to spread the word by his leader." Windcharger's head hung low and realized that Starscream left to lead the boys. His first plan would be an attack on the beast, then Windcharger knew Starscream's leadership schemes would expand to usurp his own leadership completely. "Something stinks here," the Autobot grumbled to his remaining allies, "and it isn't the rotting Quintesson corpse in the corner." -----David Filip------------------------ grimlock@u.washington.edu ----- Are you tired of conformity on the internet? You can rebel against the culture of the net in four easy steps! 1) Thank and encourage crossposters. 2) Discuss politics politely. 3) Support censorship. 4) Praise Apple Computers, Intel, Microsoft, AOL and the entertainment industry for a job well done.