Chapter Text
Have you seen the Ghost of John?
Long, white bones and the flesh all gone!
— Kristen Elise Lawrence “Have You Seen the Ghost of John”
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“And where do the two of you think you’re going?” Cliffjumper was not a high-ranking Autobot on Cybertron. He supposed he might have been on Earth — Prime’s team and all, even if his presence was more chance than earned — but not on Cybertron. As such he’d never had the chance to engage the Decepticon second in command personally before the day he’d met Arcee and together they’d broken Shockwave’s space bridge. Still, Starscream’s voice was more than familiar enough from Decepticon propaganda that it grated now.
Grimlock’s on the other hand was only marginally better, for all that he at least had been a well-known Autobot in Cliffjumper’s own world. “Taking the newbie down to feed the ghost.”
In other words, prank the Autobot from a different dimension. Cliffjumper held some small hope that the Decepticon Air Commander would put a stop to it before he was bodily dragged to wherever this “ghost” was and ambushed in an attempt to “scare” him.
No luck. Starscream just looked them over critically and nodded. “Carry on.”
Grumbling about nasty Decepticons who were only slightly different than their alternates, Cliffjumper followed Grimlock.
This part of Kaon was quiet, almost abandoned. Their own footsteps echoed in the darkness. Whoever was behind this prank had planned it well, at least. Buildings crumbled, rusting away where their metals had not been scavenged to support the War or make repairs to more vital areas of the city. The air was thick with the dust of various oxides. So thick was the dust in some places, that it was obvious what paths the Decepticons used since it wasn’t as thick in those areas.
The large dull green bot stopped at an intersection and gestured one direction. “The old gladiator pits are down that way. There’re ghosts there too. Dead gladiators, mostly, but some others. Megatron takes care of them himself, so you won’t ever have to go down that way to make offerings.” Cliffjumper scoffed quietly and the dinobot shrugged. “Don’t have to believe me. Just do what you’re told.”
“I will.” No matter how stupid it was when energon was so scarce that Grim couldn’t even transform into his dino form to waste energon feeding the local wildlife.
“Good. This way.” They followed the other path through the dust.
The scent of slag and old fires grew stronger as they approached the abandoned smelting pit. None of the automatic doors worked anymore as they made their way toward the pit. Lights flickered as they triggered motion sensors, but ultimately failed to turn on. This didn’t seem to surprise Grimlock, just telling Cliff to use his headlights if the dark bothered him.
“It’s not the dark. It’s the Primus-damned flickering,” he snapped back, irritated with himself that the smelting pit was getting to him, despite his determination to endure the prank stoically.
Grimlock just chuckled and led him to the largest of the empty crucible-pits. The catwalk the had once spanned the great pit had long ago rusted to nothing, but a crude table of debris had been set up at the edge. On it was an empty energon cube and pair of depleted light-crystals.
Perfunctorily Grimlock cleaned up the altar (it couldn’t really be anything else) then set out a new cube and pair of crystals, then without so much as a prayer, turned away.
“That’s it?” Cliffjumper couldn’t help blurting out.
“Yeah,” was the laconic answer. “Ain’t a prank. Just another duty. War’s made a lot of ghosts and we just don’t have the resources to put them to rest all nice and proper. Mostly they ain’t nowhere close enough to bother living mechs. Soldiers that’ve died on the battlefield and stuff like that, but these’re close enough to prey on the mechs back at base so we do our best to just keep ‘em quiet.”
“Huh.” They walked in silence for a while, making their way out of the smelting pit and back to where the two trails through the dust diverged. He paused and looked down the one Grimlock said led to where Megatron himself went to appease the dead gladiators. “So what’s up with the ones at the smelting pit?”
Grimlock hesitated. “Sure you want to know?”
“Back home,” a nice, neutral way of referring to another universe entirely, “we’ve got all sorts of ghost stories, but no one believes any of it.”
The dinobot just nodded like this made sense. “You’ve still got your gods. They protect you, I bet. We lost ours a long time ago.” Cliffjumper wasn’t sure what the gods could have to do with relative reality of ghosts, but he didn’t argue. For all he knew it could be true. “Let’s get back to base before I tell you about the ghosts. We need to be somewhere away from the dust or they’ll hear us and it’ll attract their attention.”
“Dust?”
“When we get back.”
It was a quiet tense trek back.
The only room of the Decepticon barracks that met Grimlock’s definition of dust-free was the officers’ conference room. It took some cajoling to convince Soundwave to let them in, but apparently educating the newbie about Kaon’s supernatural dangers was a good enough reason to let the two into an otherwise restricted area, with supervision in the form of Laserbeak.
Grimlock set out three cubes of the weak low-grade that made up the Decepticons’ rations. “So, ghosts.”
“Why couldn’t we do this in the rec room?” Was Cliffjumper’s first question. “What the Pit does dust have to do with ghosts?”
“Not all ghosts. Just these.” He stared moodily at the cube before taking a draft. Grimlock, because of his size and energy intensive greatsword was accorded larger rations than most of the rank and file, but it still wasn’t enough for him to be able to transform into his even more energy-intensive predacon form. “Should start at the beginning. The Autobots’ first major attack of the War was intense, well-coordinated. Orion-Optimus had convinced most the world the Decepticons were violent terrorists. Probably some truth to that, in the beginning, so the council, the world, believed it and that first attack was an overwhelming strike. Vicious. We wasn’t going to give up our city to a betrayer. Not easily. Battle lasted ninety-seven day and night cycles before the Autobots took the city and occupied it. Lots of soldier ghosts left behind, but we still had the resources to take care of them proper then; they ain’t what the story’s about."
“Anyway. Battle lasted ninety-seven days. Autobots occupied Kaon for a hundred and ninety-nine days. And after holding the city for forty-three days, Optimus threw one-thousand and thirteen mechs, prisoners of war, resistance fighters, civilians, in that pit and smelted them. Then after forty-seven days, he did it again. This time a thousand and thirty-one. Prime, numbers, see? Was a big wake up call for a lot of Cybertronians. Lotta mechs joined the Decepticons after that. Had enough soldiers to take back the city. But that wasn’t no comfort to those mechs smelted into one solid piece."
“‘Cause their bodies were just one piece of slag, we couldn’t get their spirits out properly. They’d fused. Their embers became one with the metal. Tried remelting the metal, but it was no use. Couldn’t use it, neither. Besides being haunted, it was impure as slag and the chunk that was left in the crucible-pit was cracked and brittle and would just crumble in your fingers. Rusted through real fast too. And the spirits, fused into one ghost by the smelting, followed the dust. Really nasty. They—it started causing problems everywhere, anywhere the dust could get. Finally figured out it was still centered on the smelting pit and it liked crystal lights. Left a couple there and it didn’t wander too far, long as they weren’t hungry, but talking about them can catch their attention. Like someone calling your name from across the room, and we don’t want them wandering too far from the smelter.”
A giant clawed finger tapped Cliffjumper’s cube and suddenly reminded of it, he downed the energon in one long pull. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but this didn’t sound like the sort of stories common back home. Those were all about remote locations and told by mechs whose stories couldn’t be corroborated after the fact. Grim was talking about a widespread haunt that had once affected most of Kaon. The Decepticons probably had records…
Cliffjumper shivered. “And the gladiator-ghosts?” he asked when he had control of his vocalizer again.
Grimlock hedged. “Those’re older, and you gotta ask Megatron about them if you want details.”
Yeah. That wasn’t ever going to happen. He made a note to avoid the old gladiator pits anyway.
***
He wasn’t in the brig, and for that alone Cliffjumper couldn’t really complain. These Decepticons wanted him on their side, so no brig. His indoctrination came in the form of polite appointments with Soundwave, which, yeah… It was Soundwave, but all in all everything really could have been worse. And he’d done cleaning duty before. He hated it, but there wasn’t a single bot in the history of ever that didn’t so it was just another unpleasant task in a long line of them. That he wasn’t complaining about.
Even if the janitors were weird as slag.
“What the Pit is that?” he snarled, gesturing to the macabre decoration hanging over a bank of security computers.
“Pit?” Particle, the janitorial shift supervisor, who was here helping and supervising because this was sort of a restricted area, said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one as a cuss word.”
“It’s —" hard to explain to an atheist. “Never mind. What the frag is a dead turborat doing hanging here?”
Particle looked over, optics going to the twisted, rusted corpse, then the computer directly beneath it. “That’s Snoopy — because it monitors sub-operating system activity in the other base computers for unusual occurrences, viruses and stuff, one of that fragger Jazz’s favorite hacking tricks; it snoops. Snoopy… right.” He fidgeted a bit. “Sorry. I saw Cliffjumper on the battlefield once and it was,” he shuddered, “so I’m just babbling because I’m nervous.”
Now Cliff felt bad for even talking to him. “S’fine. Don’t worry about it. Just tell me why you’ve got a dead turborat here?” A really dead turborat. This thing was more rust than metal at this point.
“Right?” Apparently deciding the best cures for nerves was work, Particle went back to polishing the computer banks. “So when we first installed Snoopy, it was top of the line. One of the last of its kind to roll off the assembly lines. Irreplaceable. Except it crashed, constantly. Took less than a breem to bring it back up and no one could ever figure out what was wrong with it. If it weren’t so fragging irreplaceable someone would have slag well replaced it. Finally… and this is according to Afterglitch’s notes on it…as a complete joke, he brings a turborat in and after fixing the slagging thing, stabs the rat and hangs the corpse above the computer. Reenacting one of those ‘religious rituals’ you see in cheap pornloads about ancient barbarian-mechs that never existed. Thing was, Snoopy stopped crashing after that.
“At least until a new janitor came in and cleaned up the ‘mess’. Less than a breem later… crash. IT sent up a really irate Afterglitch who fixed it, did the whole thing again and etched ‘don’t touch my turborat’ on the wall right there.” He pointed to a section of the wall above the computer, where it could be clearly seen by anyone contemplating the dead turborat. It was blank, but there clearly had been something etched there a long time ago. “Couple thousand vorns of scrubbing kinda erased it since it wasn’t etched very deep, but now literally everyone knows about Snoopy and the turborat so we don’t need the sign anymore. Thing hasn’t crashed since, even a couple of times when all the others were practically slagging their own circuits with the number of Autobot logic bombs crawling through the networks.”
Cliffjumper stared at the turborat for a long moment, then muttered, “Primus you people are weird,” before going back to his own scrubbing.
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tbc