Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Planet Cybertron, Lanayru District, the city of Hyrule. A metropolis of sprawling buildings floats at the center of Lake Hyrule. Three bridges span the soft, green energon of the Lake, linking the city to the major highways that criss-cross the planet. Small boats dot the energon, dragging up nets of metal shavings, thrashing fish made from those same metals, or trash from the city itself.

On one boat, a lanky gray robot cranks their net up, over the side, and dumps their haul of fish into the below-decks storage compartment. One of the fish was much larger, colored green instead of the reds and blues of all the other fish, and immediately this fish folded into itself, twisted and turned, and stood up. Now a green robot stood, waist-deep in thrashing fish, and it shook a fist at the other robot, who let out a bark of laughter then lowered a ladder.

At the center of the city, a spire of black stone juts up from the metallic city around it. Stone is not rare on this planet, of course not, but here it stands out among steel and glass. Holes bored into it allow access to its hollowed center, and it is here that twelve robots sit at a circular table. One robot is vaguely feminine, with a red and blue color scheme and the build of a dancer. Another is almost cube-like: twice the size of the previous, white and transparent blue marking its colors, with a massive plow blade slung across its chest. One is the color of void, with a bowling-pin-shaped body, and only comes up to the knee of the first bot, and could fit comfortably in the palm of the other’s hand.

The Primes of Cybertron, an elected Senator for each of the twelve districts of the planet, gathered as they did every day to discuss the struggles of this world and come to a consensus on how to solve them. For generations this had been how Cybertron’s government was structured, and peace, justice, warmth and compassion, these were the tenets that guided them all.

Well, some of them.

~~~

Zelda Prime sat up straight in her chair, elbows tucked into the back of the arm rests, head held high. Purples, blues, and grays colored her lean, tall frame. At seven feet tall, she was larger than most residents of her Lanayru district, but smaller than most of the Senate around her. Metal cable dangled down from her head, held in place by a circlet with armor plates that came down to frame her face. Metal panels from her fan-boat alternate mode clinked and clattered as she shifted her legs, the dress they formed moving flawlessly over her seated lower body. The three blades of her propellor-like fan jutted up from her back, two over her right shoulder and one over her left, the ends twisted into handles.

The Goddesses’ Blessing she’d received when she was sworn in as Senator for Lanayru had turned her into this, and while she’d had this form less than half as long as the one she’d been created in, it felt more natural now than her old form ever had.

A sharp sound from across the table drew her bright blue optics, and Zelda focused on the bowling pin-shaped robot sitting in a tiny chair mounted to the edge of the table by a C clamp. Barely 2 feet tall, the Oocca senator from Luna, the name of the District that encompassed the two moons of Cybertron, was one of the smallest of the Senate. She had chirped briefly, a quiet cough, and then her red optics darted over, very briefly, to the Senator from the Gerudo Desert. Clearly Ooccoo Prime wanted Zelda to see something only she had noticed so far.

Ganondorf Prime was a dark, olive green. Brown highlights and rust-red transparent elements dotted his hulking frame, he was a ten foot tall warrior raised on the border between the Rust Sea and the Gerudo Desert District. The front wheels of his alt mode were just visible behind his shoulders as he slouched in his chair, one elbow resting on the armrest of his chair, cheek supported by a curled fist. The treads of his alt-mode ran down the outside of his legs, and the armored spikes of his grill jutted out from his forearms. He was, at this moment, only watching the Senator from Iacon through one optic, the other shut tight. His other hand was turning some sort of coin in his fingers, over and over. He was clearly bored, and Zelda rolled her optics. Of course he was. Her processor then keyed back into the Iaconian Senator. She’d have to play back the last ten seconds of his conversation later.

“- condensing the energon reserves one point eight percent. If we begin augmenting our infrastructure to support the new filters the Iacon Research Brigade has developed, we could see the elimination of this discrepancy within thirty five years.” Stuntiplex Prime, the dark blue sports car bot from Iacon, paused then, clearing his intake behind the cosmetic faceplate that hid the lower half of his face. During this gap, Ganondorf Prime suddenly spoke out. Well, he laughed first, then he started to speak.

“This is an absurd waste of our time, Stuntiplex. Eliminating this ‘discrepancy,’ which only your District has been able to recognize, would generate nothing but good press, and only your District would benefit from the economic stimulus of the thirty billion rupee price tag associated with it.”

Ganondorf Prime didn’t sit up, didn’t even open his closed optic. He just ripped Stunitplex’s proposal apart. A handful of amused titters rounded the room, and Zelda couldn’t help recognizing, once again, that Ganondorf was good at this… even if he was a blunt brute. Stuntiplex hadn’t even mentioned the cost of such an undertaking, which meant Ganondorf had read through the proposal prior to this meeting. It was expected for all to do so, but few ever actually did.

“The Senator from Gerudo City is correct.” The voice that rolled out from the hulking, white-and-blue Yeti from Plurex Flats, was deep and laced with vibrato. The largest of all the Senators, Arcurus Prime was also the eldest. His body creaked as he leaned forward, levering himself out of his seat with much clicking, ratcheting gears, and groaning plates. “I move to dismiss the Senator from Iacon’s motion, before it has even been brought out fully. Your numbers need work, Stuntiplex Prime. Bring this back to us after you’ve found a reason for us to do it.”

Properly admonished, Stuntiplex sat back in his chair, and the sleek purple visor that spanned his face in place of two optics dimmed. He did nothing so uncouth as cross his arms and snap his head around to stare at Ganondorf Prime, but the energy was there. Ganondorf, however, smirked openly and lifted his head just enough so he could wink at him. Stuntiplex stiffened, and Zelda rolled her optics once more.

“Now, if we could focus our attention on more pressing matters?” Arcurus Prime called, rapping his three-fingered hand on the table. With a flick of the digits, the screens in front of Stuntiplex deactivated, and new ones appeared in front of Arcurus Prime. “There’s been renegade activity in all districts lately. Each seems to ask for something distinct. The Astro Hunters in Iacon claim we should be arming ourselves and taking to the stars. The Kalis-based Crypticons feel the senate is occupied by Immortal Demigods changing faces, and would like to return to separate city-states. The Maximals, Mithril Sea, think we should forgo vehicle-based alt-modes, and so on.

“It is frustrating. None of these groups poll well, especially not in the regions they’re terrorizing, but their actions are disruptive and people are being hurt. The Senator from Gerudo City has already posited one solution, but-”

“You all really should take it seriously.” Ganondorf’s interruption drew everyone’s attention. Unlike Ganondorf’s previous jab, it came mid sentence. It was exceptionally rude in all circles on Cybertron, and even more so in the Senate Chamber. The Senator from Kalis covered her mouth, the Senator from Volcanica actually sputtered out a “now see here!” Zelda Prime, however… felt a single chill run up her back struts.

He was still sitting, looking half bored, but now his hand had closed tight around the coin in his hand. There was no more tension in his form than had been there before, but still Zelda felt a rush of energon into her extremities. Energy crackled briefly around her suddenly clenched hands, fingers digging into the metal arm rest and power systems kicking on with a faint whine. It was inaudible under the half-dozen vocal responses, and no one looked at her, all staring at Ganondorf Prime.

“My proposed solution, I mean.”

“Turning our military forces inward is not a solution, it is the first step to fascism.” Arcurus Prime’s response was not angry or passionate. It was resigned. Like this argument had been had many times, in and out of the Senate Chamber.

“Shame, then.” Ganondorf Prime closed both optics and straightened up, stretching both arms up, and then flicked the coin smoothly across the chamber. Arcurus Prime moved, servos whirring as the old warrior moved with a speed that looked almost unnatural in his massive limbs. Arcurus Prime turned the coin over, frowning at it. He moved his hand, palm up, as if weighing it. Then he closed his hand around it and looked back at Ganondorf.

“What is this supposed to be?”

“A distraction.”

The doors slammed shut, metal shutters rolled down over all but one of the windows, and then things happened very quickly.

First, the coin exploded in a puff of powder pretty much directly in Arcurus Prime’s face. He screamed, recoiling as his head and neck were suddenly covered in rust. The Senator from Kaon was also caught in the cloud, and tried to leap away from it. She didn’t succeed completely, and rust started to flow up one of her arms.

Second, Ganondorf leaped across the desk, spikes jutting out over his fists. He landed practically in the lap of the Volcanica Senator, and drove the spikes jutting over his left fist into his optics. The other hand came in low, spikes sliding behind an armor plate, into the seam directly above the Senator’s spark chamber where he was still recovering from a delicate surgery. The spikes smashed through the weakened metal and punctured his spark chamber. While the Volcanica Senator’s spark, his primary reactor and his soul, was intact, the trauma, the severing of the delicate components surrounding the spark chamber, and the damage to his head was so severe, he immediately shut down.

Third, the window shattered from the outside and twin shots from a ballistic weapon, railguns perhaps, smashed into the Senator from the Argon Sea, and the Senator from the Kalis region. The first’s head detonated, and the other screamed as their torso was torn apart, the mounts for both of their alt-mode wings blown clean off.

Energon splashed and everyone hesitated for a single instant. During that moment, Ganondorf spun around, hand ripping from the Senator’s face and morphing into a cannon, and he fired directly at the small Oocca Senator. Her head and upper torso exploded into shrapnel.

At that point, everyone started to move.

Arcurus Prime clawed at his own metal as his head rusted out and crumbled to dust. He kept moving, operating on impulse, until his entire upper torso had fallen away, exposing his spark chamber and the rippling, spiraling blue-white ball of pure energy within.

The Senator from Uraya and Stuntiplex Prime leaped to their feet, hands twisting into weaponry, and opened fire on Ganondorf. However, the powerful bot shrugged off their shots. First, he twisted one arm and pulled, ripping the Volcanica Senator’s spark chamber free of his damaged body. Then, he leaped across the table and with one hand, ripped Arcurus Prime’s spark chamber from his still thrashing form.

Zelda Prime, the Senator from Altihex (a foot-tall robot), and the Senator from the Mithril Sea, got to their feet next, weapons forming. The three newest Primes, untested in real battle, had hesitated longer than the other two remaining primes. When they saw what Ganondorf Prime did next, they hesitated still.

Ganondorf Prime tilted his head back, still showing his heavily armored back to them, and lifted the two spark chambers up, one in each hand. The sparks within flickered and pulsed, agitated and fighting for life now that they were cut off from the bodies that nourished them. Ganondorf dropped first one then the other, straight into his horribly distended maw. The remaining Senators froze, staring in horror… and watched Ganondorf snap his jaws shut, then clench up and thrash once, then again. He twisted, smiling at the remaining Senators, and breathed out a long exhale of pure frost from his nostrils. Flames licked at the corners of his mouth afterwards.

Then he drove his hand through the still thrashing Kaonian Senator’s chest, ripping her spark from her form. He shoved it into his maw next, ignoring the rust still dripping and spreading across her body. Once again he thrashed, then he laughed, raucous and riotous, and started to stalk across the table on hands and knees.

All the senators opened fire now, Zelda adding bolts of energy thrown from her hands to the barrage while the Senator from Altihex raced over to the energon-leaking Senator from Kalis, to see if, maybe, he could do something…

Despite the increased barrage from four Senators, Ganondorf did not slow, and he lunged onto Stuntiplex Prime. Ganondorf tore him open, ripping him in half from groin to the top of his helm, and bit down on his spark casing before it could fall more than an inch.

Zelda couldn’t follow with detail what happened next. She fought, drawing out her two shorter swords and slicing at Ganondorf while the Senator from the Mithril Sea drew a long spear and the Senator from Uraya drew a curved scimitar. At some point during the fight, Ganondorf devoured the Altihex Senator whole. Then Ganondorf killed the Uraya Senator, pouring flames into her mouth until her face had melted away. Zelda had never seen anything like that, and she trembled from helm to foot.

After that, the two inexperienced warriors were toyed with: they blasted Ganondorf, stabbed him and sliced him, and he took their hits, smacked them around, and pulled sparks from their comrades.The sparking, stuttering, mortally wounded bots met this fate, one-by-one, and each time he laughed, screamed, and grew stronger.

Zelda’s face was streaked with energon from a head-wound and tears, and her body was dripping with coolant as her system tried viciously to cool down. She wailed as Ganondorf backhanded her, then he ran the Mithril Sea Senator through with his own spear… then bit the end of the spear off to devour the spark impaled upon it.

When Zelda looked around from her position splayed out across the table, she saw that she was the only one left. Everyone else had been devoured, and as she, shaky and disoriented and wounded a dozen times over from glancing blows, tried to sit up, she knew she was next.

He leaned over her then, teeth dripping with energon, manic smile on his face. The flexible metal that made up his face and allowed for smooth, delicate emotional expression had ripped at the corners of his mouth, turning his smile into a grimace that exposed mechanical components not meant to be exposed.

“I liked you, Zelda Prime.” He said, soft and quiet. “I’m glad you’re last.” His hands reached for her throat, closing around her neck. “I’m going to pull your head off. Any last words?”

Zelda had many. Why? What are you? How have you done this? How long have you wanted this? What was to happen to this land with no one left to rule and no one to protect it? What would happen with Ganondorf as ruler?

Once again, she felt that rush of energy, of power crackling within her. It was different from the rest of her strength, and with it came a whisper at the back of her processor.

“You must survive,” it said. Zelda felt claws closing around her throat, crushing intake pipes with a creak of metal. Immediately, her internal temperature began to spike, unable to draw in air to run through her cooling fans. She grabbed at Ganondorf’s wrists and squeezed, denting the plating… but it would do nothing. He just squeezed…

She closed her optics and rerouted reflexively, opening up slits on the underside of her chest, to suck in breath. Ganondorf heard it, paused, and looked down at the side of her chassis.

“Oh you’re clever. I forgot you were Hylian.” He released her neck with one hand, opened it up, and lifted his clawed hand above her chest. “Fine. Goodbye Princess.” He used her old title, diminishing her role as Prime, and lunged.

Zelda had to survive. She had opened up other intakes, reworking her internal systems in an instant, and… She knew what she had to do.

The pain of his claws digging into her form burned, but she disconnected her pain systems. She broke lines, motors, and panels. She forced internal organs and mechanisms roughly, messily together… and then out her back.

A spark chamber, a processor, a transformation cog, a few panels of metal, and a handful of other minor systems that came along for the ride, skittered across the table… and then fell off the edge. Ganondorf stared, confused for a brief moment, and then saw the entire mess of Cybertronian vital systems bounce, fold around each other and into a pill shape roughly a foot in length… and then fall out the blasted-open window.

“NO!” Ganondorf howled, leaping, discarding the empty cybertronian shell. His clawed fingers scratched the casing of all that had made Zelda Prime herself, but it fell, and not even the two snipers standing in a hovering bus sixty feet away, could reach it in time. They weren’t flyers, after all.

The pill bounced off the side of the black stone spire, across a rooftop, and then fell into the energon lake.

Chapter Text

“No please. Don’t do this to me Link. I have a family. Please.”

Link ignored the pleas. He raised his hand, pulled back the other, and stared intently into the eyes of his target.

“Link. Link, I’m your friend. You can’t. Please.” The other sobbed, fingers dragging at Link’s abdomen, his thighs, plaintive and begging.

Link’s lips quirked into the slightest of smiles, his enjoyment clear, his intention impossible to miss.

“PLEASE!” One last gasp. One last wail. Then Link released, and an explosion erupted right between the eyes of his target.

“Link you aft-eating slag-sucker!” The begging bot, a small Autocon named Talo, stared at the tin-can sixty feet away. The cartoon monster on the can’s label had been thoroughly destroyed by Link’s slingshot, and Link slowly relaxed his posture to stare down at Talo. Link’s lips remained curled into a grin, and he folded his slingshot back into his right forearm. He held out one hand, palm up, in front of the kneeling bot’s face.

“I don’t have a hundred rupees right now,” Talo said, shoving LInk’s hand away and getting to his feet. “I bet you can’t hit it from a hundred feet away. Double or nothing, Link.”

“I think I’ll just go home. I have actual work that pays actual rupees.”

“Boo! Lame. Keep helping me fish junk out of the river.”

“So you can get paid for my work?”

“Exactly. Then I can pay you your hundred rupees.”

Link rolled his eyes and turned back to the hover sled that was loaded with junk and trash pulled from the Ordon River. He flicked a finger against it as he walked past, heading back for the small village through the trees (metal spires with broad solar-panels at seemingly randomized heights and spreads, twisting slightly to keep the angle to the sun at its most optimal).

“Come on. I’ll give you treasure.” Talo got to his feet and lunged forward, twisted his arms up over his head and extended his legs back. Wheels folded down and seams locked together until Talo was now a peach-colored four-wheeled vehicle. It had very large wheels and an overdeveloped suspension, clearly an off-road vehicle of some kind. Talo then backed up against the front of the cart, locked it into place, and started to trundle after Link.

“It’s trash, Talo.” Link said it light-heartedly, patting the top of Talo’s vehicle mode as he drove up next to him.

“But it’s cool trash. I mean, look at this thing! It’s got the Triforce of Leadership embossed on it.”

“Yeah right, there’s no way that-” Link stopped as Talo twitched, a panel in his cart snapped up, expertly flipping something out of the pile of garbage and over in front of them. Link caught the object, and held it up to the light.

It was a pill-shaped object, about a foot long, with a perfectly sheer surface, save a single long scratch that ran up its length. There was indeed the triangle-within-a-triangle shape of the Triforce of Leadership embossed on its middle.

“Huh. That’s…”

“It’s cool right? Caught it in my net a few hours before you showed up.” Talo sounded pleased with himself, and his suspension rocked, causing him to bounce erratically. Link laughed a little and shrugged, then moved to slot the object back into the cart, but a panel snapped out again, knocking it back into Link’s hands.

“Keep it. Now we’re even.”

“How do you know this is worth 100 rupees,” Link asked, an eyebrow arching high over an optic. This was not the first time Talo had given him some piece of trash from his stack though, so Link reached over his shoulder and pressed the Pill against his back. A few panels slid open, forming a groove that the Pill fit into perfectly, and then they closed around it to hold it in place.

“I don’t. But if anyone can fix it or figure out what it is, it’s you. All this other stuff? I know what it’s worth, what it is. But that? No clue.”

“Oh so you’ve given me a job.”

“No, I’ve given you a business opportunity!”

Link laughed a little and then stepped out of the woods and onto the paved road winding through the hills that led back to Ordon Village. He stepped out of the way, giving Talo space to roll out of the woods and onto the road, then Link took two fast steps and leaped forward.

Legs folded at the knee, feet tucking in against his rear end. Panels on the outside of his legs folded up and forward. The metal panels that looked sort of like a floppy hat dangling off the back of his head flattened out and merged with the panels from his legs to form the sides and top of the front half of his vehicle mode. At the same time, he swung his arms in front of his chest, right fist over left elbow and left fist under right elbow. Then his forearms twisted, fanned open, and linked together to form part of the front of his vehicle. His chest also pushed forward and twisted one hundred eighty degrees. The soft green panels of his upper chest linked with his forearms, while the semi-translucent yellow components of his belly pressed up and connected to the roof of his vehicle mode. The wheel that jutted out from his left shoulder in robot mode twisted down and around to under the center of the front of this vehicle mode, while the wheel at each knee flipped down to support the back half.

Link kept his momentum, rolling away at speed on three wheels. He was a small vehicle, not as tall as Talo’s vehicle mode but longer. He had a flat bed that the triforce-emblazoned device was sitting in the center of.

Talo sped up, matching Link, but Link sped up past him, wheels screeching, and Talo laughed. They raced back, two youngsters without a care in the world.

They didn’t notice the black jet that shot through the upper atmosphere, miles above them… but locking onto the little object in Link’s truck bed. They certainly didn’t hear the message it sent through a triple-encrypted channel.

“Ganon Magnus, I have eyes on the target.”

~~~

Chapter Text

Link flopped onto the soft couch set in the corner of his living room. Freshly scrubbed down now that he’d finished the work in the garage below him, Link let himself settle down. Exhaled, internal fluids reoriented, optics shuttered close, he shifted… then he felt the tiniest twinge of pain, and then a warning flashed across his processor:

“Energon Drain in segment seventeen, scapular vein.”

He frowned, sat up, and reached over his shoulder, fingers brushing over the object Talo had given him earlier that day. He gripped it, pulled, lifting it up and around, and saw a cable extending from the center of the triforce symbol back towards his back.

“What? You’re…” he flinched as pain shot through his back, more readouts and warnings flashing in his mind. Energon, oil, coolant, all of his vital fluids drained sharply, and then with the twang of metal snapping, the cable yanked a six inch square piece of his back right off. The cable and component withdrew, whip-fast, into the pill.

He dropped the object and stepped back from it, a little woozy. Quickly, he tapped into his emergency reserves to top off some of the stolen fluids, and he folded some of his back plates in and around the torn-out bit of his body. Not good as new, but he could worry about that later. His optics focused on the object, which was now spinning furiously on the ground.

His slingshot came up, but then a holographic projection appeared above the rapidly spinning device. His optics widened, eyebrows high, mouth open, and the flexible antennae that jutted out from either side of his head lay down, surprised.

Zelda Prime, the elected Senator for the Lanayru district, for the Hylian people, loomed inside his home, half-transparent and in shades of blue.

“Hello, if you’re seeing this, then I am badly wounded and in dire need of help. Ganondorf Prime has slain the other Senators. You must take me to Impa, in Kakariko Village, Uraya District. While I am in hibernation, I will be trying to come up with some way of stopping Ganondorf Prime, but the materials I borrowed from you were enough only to display this message.”

There was a beat of silence, then the holographic Zelda shook slightly, hands moving up to grip her own biceps.

“Please. Help me?” Then silence and darkness as the projection faded and the device stopped spinning on the ground.

Link stared at where Zelda’s face had been, still stunned. His first thought was suspicious. This could be a trick. A prank. Talo would do something like this, but he’d never have hurt Link to do it. His next thought was of worry, as he recalled that the Senate had been in closed sessions non-stop for the last week. No one had heard from them, their security forces had not left the Stone Obelisk. Link’s coworker Hubcap had been talking about it non-stop for the last few days. If Ganondorf Prime had killed all of them, that would explain the silence. Link mulled these two thoughts over for a little while, then carefully picked up the weird device, cradling it gently in his hands, and then made his way for the door.

He’d take it to Bore, the village elder. He’d know what to do with this. He took two steps out the door, onto the balcony that overlooked the village, turned for the ramp, and… was immediately struck in the side and knocked back through the door, shattering the metal. The pill rolled under the couch and he tumbled across the room, warnings flaring across his mind and a dent in his side.

With a crunch, a six foot tall angular bot stepped through the ruined door frame. Arms so long they almost dragged on the ground, stubby legs with small wings jutting from the thighs and shins, massive boosters and fluid-tanks on his back, he was clearly some sort of flyer. He was dark blue, almost black, with a maw full of sharp teeth and four glowing red optics. On his chest was a faction symbol of some kind: a curved scimitar inside of an equilateral triangle.

“Where is it, hylian trash?” The deep, rumbling voice snapped out, and he lunged forward, wrapping a hand around one of Link’s ankles and lifting him up into the air upside down. “I know you have the Zelda Core!”

Link clutched his side, wincing as he was yanked up into the air, but that was a mistake. The other hand of the robot lunged forward, smacking his hands away and dug into Link’s frame, peeling metal apart.

“Here? Ha, you probably don’t-” Link kicked sharply with his free leg, hitting the robot in the chin. Then he snapped both arms up. Slingshot out, drawn, fired, a small detonation against this robot’s face. It didn’t do more than scorch some plating, but it startled him enough to drop Link. Link rolled awkwardly and came up in a crouch.

“What do you want? Who are you?” Link asked, aiming his slingshot again.

“You’re a tough little thing, aren’t you? I am Mobile-tron. First lieutenant in the New Cybertron Army, most loyal of all in service to Ganon Magnus! Now, I’m going to kill you, find whatever remains of Zelda and bring that back to my master. Any more questions?” Mobile-tron didn’t wait, and leaped forward, falling to all fours and digging clawed hands into the floor and propelling himself towards Link.

This told Link several things. One, Ganondorf Prime had renamed himself Ganon Magnus, and had probably killed the other Senators, or was at least in some way attempting a coup. Two, this dangerous war bot thought that whatever Link had was indeed connected to Zelda, and would bring it to Ganon Magnus. Third, Mobile-tron was going to kill him.

Link was not a war machine, but he loved learning new skills. He had spent time with Rustle training to fight, but until right now it had always been almost a game, a fun way to get his energon pumping and build up reflexes and piston-memory. Still, it was combat training, and he was going to use it. When Mobile-tron lunged, Link’s optics narrowed, he pulled in a breath through his nostrils, funneling cooler air into his fans… then moved.

Roll forward, right under the larger bot. Rather than get to his feet, Link transformed into his vehicle mode, wheels propelling him faster across his floor into the opposite corner, where he slammed into a barrel full of various household tools. Umbrella, a few walking sticks, a half-finished foam reproduction of the waraxe wielded by Optica Prime, the heroine from a fantasy adventure film.

And a dull training sword.

The barrel broke apart, and he recoiled from the impact, transformed, and wrapped his hands around the hilt of the sword and spun.

Mobile-tron had careened directly into another wall, extricated himself, and rounded on Link almost immediately. He wasn’t far from Link when the small bot lifted his blade, and Link barely got it up in time to shove Mobile-tron’s swiping claws up, over his head.

Mobile-tron then kicked sharply, smashing Link into the wall. Plating dented and the wall buckled, and Link spit up some dark blue energon. Not good. Link grit his teeth though, and dodged to the side when Mobile-tron swiped downwards at him, then stabbed the sword forward, catching Mobile-tron in the side of the knee. Mobile-tron yelped and backhanded Link again, throwing him across the room once more. This time he hit the couch, knocking it away, and the Zelda Core rolled out from under it and into sight.

Mobile-tron roared, drew a large gun from a compartment that opened on his thigh, and lifted it in Link’s direction. Link, however, dove for the Core, caught it, and came up in a roll with it. Mobile-tron was already firing, but he’d followed Link with the gun, and when he saw Link holding the core, Mobile-tron snarled “NO” and forced his arm higher, blasting through the roof instead of Link’s torso.

“Give that to me, and I’ll leave. I don’t have time to kill your slippery little self.” Mobile-tron’s demand was spoken through gritted teeth as he tried to keep weight off his leg. Link’s sword had dug in deep.

Link believed Mobile-tron. He could read in the man’s posture that he was already tired of this battle. Still…

“How do I know you won’t just shoot me as soon as I put this down?”

“....... Fine.” Mobile-tron then hucked his gun off to the side, out of reach. It hit the ground with a thunk, and Link stared at it for just a second before he snapped his optics back to Mobile-tron.

“What about your other gun?” Link had no idea if the bot had one, but Mobile-tron huffed, drew his other gun from the other thigh, and tossed it out a nearby window.

“Now, give me the Zelda Core.”

Link looked back down to the core, then back to Mobile-tron. He could do it. It would be easy. And really, Cybertron’s leaders changed regularly. So Ganondorf Prime was calling himself something else? He was just one bot, there was no way he could do anything too dangerous. He’d be ousted quickly enough.

Link couldn’t win this fight. This bot would pull him apart with his bare hands, guns or no guns.

But if he handed over the Zelda Core, if Ganon Magnus found her, she was going to die.

He’d never met her, never seen her outside of holo-vids and television screens. He didn’t owe her anything, really.

But if he handed it over, she’d die.

Link’s optics narrowed, his brows furrowed, and he lifted the Core. Over his shoulder it went, then he clicked it into place on his back once more. Panels from his chest and sides pulled away from his body and folded up and over the Core, wrapping her in his armor plating and exposing some of his own more delicate infrastructure.

Then he lifted his training sword in two hands, point leveled at Mobile-tron.

“You want it? Come and get it.”

Chapter Text

Mobile-tron snarled and took a fast step forward, lunging and swiping with a clawed hand. Link ducked again, then he leaped backwards to avoid the upwards swipe of Mobile-tron’s other hand. The bot towered over Link, almost two full feet higher, and with his longer arms, Link knew it would be difficult to get in for a solid strike.

He dodged again, twisting and stepping away, and Mobile-tron kept coming, until claws sliced along Link’s shoulder and tore a piece of armor plating off. The twang of snapping steel and the sudden rush of energon from dozens of tiny broken connections were followed by Link’s yelp. Mobile-tron pressed in, reaching for Link, but the grab was a little slower, more carefully aimed, and thus Link got an opening. He stepped in and stabbed upwards, the point of his sword driving into Mobile-tron’s elbow joint, and the bot roared and pulled back, clutching at his damaged limb.

Link sucked in deep breaths, cooling his overheating internal components as quickly as he could in this break, while Mobile-tron swore and stamped his feet, then winced as the knee Link had skewered before twinged.

“To the pit with this!” Mobile-tron shouted, turning his back fully on Link and walking away… and towards the discarded pistol on the ground. Link’s optics widened and he ran forward, jumped, trying once again to move between Mobile-tron’s legs and beat him to the gun, but the bot stopped, reached down, and plucked Link up by the back of his neck, and yanked him into the air once again.

“Thought that would get your attention,” Mobile-tron hissed, lifting Link up. Apparently on reflex, Mobile-tron started to turn him around to face him properly, and Link watched the lower two of his optics flick to the side. Thinking.

Link saw only one opportunity. If Mobile-tron spun him back around, he’d be unable to stop the bot from ripping his back open to get at the Zelda Core. So, Link took the only opening available to him. He drew back his sword, gripped it in both hands, and screamed right in Mobile-tron’s face.

“HYAH!” He yelled, shoving his weapon forward and directly into one of those optics. The pointed blade was not very sharp. Link was not very strong. Mobile-tron was a war frame, specially reworked and modified to shrug off harm.

But a knife in the optic, even one of four, was not something anyone can just ‘shrug off,’ and Mobile-tron… was not the best and greatest warrior of all time. Thus, he immediately roared, stumbled back, and clapped both hands over her face.

The training sword was ripped from link’s hands, buried six inches into Mobile-tron’s face. Sparks flashed and energon gushed from the wound, the latter splattering onto Link as he landed between Mobile-tron’s feet.

“I’m going to rip you inside out Hylian gutter trash!” Mobile-tron heard rather than saw Link transform, and reflexively kicked out in the direction of the noise, thumping against Link’s rear bumper. Still, Link avoided losing control as he raced away, through his broken door, and down the ramp leading to the road away from his home. The front of his house exploded as Mobile-tron gave chase, leaking and stumbling, a spike of metal to the processor disorienting him. Unfortunately, he had recovered his weapon from the ground, and he fired twice more at the fleeing Link.

Link swerved, dodging the first and taking the second in his left tail-light. The impact was glancing, but enough to send his swerve into a furious spin. He yelled as he twirled, transforming and rolling, then skidding, across the ground.

Mobile-tron ripped the blade from his face with a roar and then leaped from the balcony, transforming in mid-air into a wedge shaped jet fighter, the two barrels slung under his wings. The one gun he had thought to bring was lengthened and extended at the front of one barrel. The jet peppered the ground with rapid-fire energy bursts, forcing Link to jump away, rolling and dodging, but a shot hit him in the leg, sending him back to his knees. Then Link transformed again, fish-tailed slightly as he spun, and drove away as fast as he could.

Link was just going, driving in an erratic, serpentine pattern to avoid Mobile-tron’s aerial bombardment. Even just one solid hit would blow Link apart, he knew that, and in his alt-mode he had less flexibility in protecting the Zelda Core. It was clamped down in the center of the bed of the small truck, visible from the air he was sure.

Link couldn’t do this forever though. Mobile-tron would get a lucky shot, or Link would tire and slow down enough for Mobile-tron to swoop down at his leisure. His energon pump beat hard deep in his chassis, his engine-block revved, the air he was managing to pull in only just barely enough to keep him from fully overheating. He needed something!

Then a pair of head-lights clicked on a mile up the road, and Link’s spark stopped spinning for just a moment.

No.

The headlights moved up strangely, then merged together and a beam of bright light flared across the road.

He transformed.

The beam of light panned up the road, onto Mobile-tron, then focused in on the weapon system. Mobile-tron noticed and stopped firing at Link, his afterburners flared, and he rocketed forwards even faster, straight for the new target.

“No! I have what you want!”

Link gunned his engine. He forced the plating of his front-end to warp, sharpen, presenting a different face to the wind. It hurt, dragging his components into a new shape like that, but the new shape caused the air to push down on his frame, tires digging into the road harder, and he managed a few more miles an hour.

An explosion of light and Link screamed, certain that his friend Rustle was dead. He was most likely to hear the faint booms… and the only one in Ordon Village to recognize the sound of a firefight.

Link stopped screaming when the light cleared and a massive smoking wreck was all that was left of Mobile-tron’s weapon system, his wing badly damaged, and he was spiraling. He shot right over the light source and crashed, slamming into the road and bouncing up, hitting back down, transforming, and skidding across the ground on his face.

Link slammed on his brakes before he careened into Rustle’s thighs.

Rustle was seven feet tall, and broad-shouldered. He turned into a heavy-duty box truck. Two or three Cybertronians, or half a dozen of Link’s size, could fit into his storage compartment, but mostly he used it to haul supplies up and down the mountains to the other villages in the immediate area.

He was also old. One of his hip joints had loosened up so much the leg sometimes simply popped off. He had rust in spots he couldn’t bend to clean anymore. He sometimes transformed into his alt-mode and couldn’t change back for a day or two while he let his transformation cog recuperate. That was part of why he liked the delivery jobs. He only had to transform once every few days.

And here he was. The front of his alt-mode had fragmented across his chest, tilted and twisted, and the entire bumper and head-lights and grill assembly had been popped off. That was why two lights had merged into one. They’d turned into a massive sniper rifle. Link had never seen that before. He’d only seen those components turn into a cane, which is what the large weapon twisted and warped into as Link approached.

“Rustle! I, he just, he came out of, I had to-” Link sputtered out, and Rustle reached down, gripped the smaller bot’s shoulder, and squeezed. Hard.

“It’s alright, little one. How badly are you hurt?” His voice was deep, kind, and the familiar, dark red and gray face, mustache and all, was twisted into the same mischievous smirk he wore whenever he hid prankster sparklings under his chassis, or whenever some uppity census bot from Hyrule got rude about the number of unlicensed residents in town. Link gulped, nodded scrubbed his face with both hands, and looked around Rustle at Mobile-tron.

“I… I can still fight.”

“Not what I asked,” Rustle’s grin hardened, teeth flashing behind his mustache: jagged, sharp, and his eyes flickered a darker green. “What’s he after?”

“Zelda Prime.”

Rustle blinked, frowned, and Link waved a hand. Mobile-tron had gotten up, and he was taking stock of himself. No ranged weapons, compromised limbs, eyes damaged, just his claws. He stomped his feet, and started to run towards Rustle and Link.

Rustle turned then. He’d ask Link later. He planted his feet, leaning on his cane, and stared at Mobile-tron. Then he glanced back at Link.

“Where’s your sword?”

“He has it.”

“Why?”

“I stabbed him in the face with it.”

“Hmm. He seems mad about that.”

“He’s mad about everything.”

“Good. A mad foe-”

“Is a bad foe.”

“I’LL SHOW YOU BAD!” Mobile-tron howled, having closed in on the two of them. He leaped, both arms up high, aiming to land atop Rustle.

Rustle shifted his weight with a grunt, shoving himself away with his good leg, landing cane-first, then twirling on it slightly to get both his other legs under him. Mobile-tron landed with a crack of stone and dirt, then back-handed Rustle, who leaned back, good leg planted behind him, and swung his cane up to deflect the back hand down and against Rustle’s side, where Rustle trapped the arm with his own, hooking his hand under Mobile-tron’s elbow.

Mobile-tron, however, was strong, and despite his injuries was still extremely dangerous. He used the sudden trapping of his arm to pull himself around, twisting, and punched Rustle across the face, then wrenched his arm out of the old-bot’s grip. He stepped back, locked his fists together, and hammered them down on Rustle’s shoulder, knocking the bot down to his hands and knees. He then lifted a knee, but before he could kick Rustle, Link’s slingshot pellets blasted against Mobile-tron’s face again. Mobile-tron stepped back, slightly off-balance, and Rustle swiped his cane behind Mobile-tron’s balance leg, knocking it out from under him. With a loud curse in old Iaconian, Rustle rolled forward, getting his feet under himself and forcing himself back up. The roll caused Mobile-tron’s clumsy punch to miss, and now Link and Rustle were on their feet facing Mobile-tron as the combatant forced himself back up to his feet.

“I don’t know who the two of you are, but when I kill you, I’m going to lubricate your processors with my depleted energon!” Mobile-tron flared his claws again, and stalked forward, slowly, two eyes on Rustle, one on Link. The moment Link lifted his hand to aim his slingshot, Mobile-tron covered his face with one hand and lunged for Rustle and aimed a short, low roundhouse kick for his cane. However, when Rustle stepped back to evade, Mobile-tron shifted his weight and punched a fast jab directly into Rustle’s stomach. Then he stepped around Rustle, putting Rustle between himself and Link. Link groaned and tried to dart around, to get a line on a target again.

Rustle had been caught off-guard with that, but he wasn’t done. He spun his cane, holding it in a grip more akin to a sword grip, and smacked it against Mobile-tron’s helm. Mobile-tron growled and reached out, catching the cane just above where Rustle held it, and then threw another punch solidly into Rustle’s midsection. Something in the bot snapped and Rustle heaved, optics going wide. Mobile-tron smiled, but the smile stopped when he felt a sharp pop of pain in the side of his wounded knee… and then felt a sudden wrenching agony as Link, in vehicle mode, crashed directly into the leg.

Mobile-tron stumbled away from Rustle, who reared back, holding his cane with both hands, and swung it hard into that same wounded knee. Mobile-tron’s shriek as his knee shattered and his shin and foot fully broke off his frame was loud, keening, and Rustle flinched, ever so slightly.

Supporting his weight on the point of his stump, Mobile-tron swung his good leg, mirroring the cane swipe from before, and caught Rustle behind the knees, knocking the large bot to the ground. Then he rolled onto his hands and knees, shoved himself forward,and transformed. He blasted away, thrusters sputtering intermittently and his body swerving sharply to the left before he corrected himself and kept flying.

“I’ll be back!” He shouted back at them, voice echoing over trees and down the road. “Count the cycles, rust-heap, miniscule insect!”

Link, on his side, leg-shaped dent running up the front of his alt-mode, tires still spinning idly, groaned and transformed, sat up, and rubbed at his helm. Rustle, however, just remained there, chest heaving.

“You alright, Rustle?”

“I can still fight,” Rustle’s voice was pitched higher, impersonating Link, and Link giggled. He stared after the smoke that Mobile-tron had been leaking, and his giggle twisted into a sharp sob, then back to a giggle. Rustle, however, forced himself to sit up, reach for Link, and pull him in against his chest.

Link was crying in earnest now, water and coolant dripping from the corners of his optics. His systems were firing at peak capacity, his frame boiling hot, and he hurt everywhere.

“Alright kid. Let’s get you back to town.” Rustle made no attempt to move, and didn’t until Link’s shaking frame started to still. Link pushed back, clearing his intake and wiping at his face, and Rustle gave him a little nod, then he folded in on himself.

He transformed back into his alt-mode… save his leg. His entire bad leg just popped off, leaving a portion of his under-carriage, his cargo-room, and his left rear wheel just missing.

“Ah scrap. A little help, kid?”

Link gave another watery laugh, then moved to grab the leg, and started folding it roughly into shape…

Chapter Text

Rustle’s engine roared as he took off down the road back towards Ordon Village proper. A few dozen houses clustered around an energon tributary that came off the river, it wasn’t much, but it was home. A handful of other villagers stood on their balconies, looking up the road as Rustle rocketed into town. Rustle didn’t slow down, didn’t bother offering explanation, and just kept going, swerving around the two or three stragglers out for an evening drive.

Rustle screeched to a stop in front of his own house. Link jumped down out of the back of his alt-mode before he’d fully stopped moving, and then Rustle transformed. It was a slow morph, with scraping metal and creaking gears, but eventually he stood up, panting heavily, and clutching at his side where metal had buckled. The brawl and the multiple transformations had taken its toll.

“Alright, Link. Let’s get inside and you can explain what’s going on.” Rustle limped his way forward, stepped into the elevator that had replaced his ramp long ago, and then Link jumped in, hit the button, and they started their way up.

“I don’t actually know exactly what’s going on. A piece of trash Talo gave me tapped into my systems while I had it locked in place, and then a holo of Zelda appeared. She told me… she told me Ganondorf Prime had killed the other primes, and that she’d only barely escaped, and got a message out somehow-” Link opened the door to Rustle’s house while his other hand reached back to remove the Zelda Core. Rustle held out a hand as he moved past Link into his own home, and Link didn’t hesitate for a moment to slap it down into the old bot’s hand.

Rustle looked the device over while he stepped across the living room of his home and lowered himself carefully into a massive arm-chair. With a groan, he flared his external plating, taking tension off of damaged components and aching joints, and leaned back in the chair.

“That guy, Mobile-tron,” Link continued, shutting the door and settling himself on the edge of the coffee table. “He wanted it for someone called Ganon Magnus. I think Ganondorf Prime has renamed himself, and needs Zelda to die before he can… I don’t know. Something. And this will lead him to her.”

“Did Zelda ask you to take this to the Shieka?” Rustle’s voice had dipped lower than Link had ever heard it. Link’s optics snapped up to Rustle’s.

“How did you know that?”

“I’ve seen this before.” He held the core back out to Link, who took it and smoothly sheathed it once more along his spine. “You know that Hylians can tweak their frames in ways other Cybertronians can’t.”

“Yeah, we can grip objects, climb things, shift armor plating.”

“We can do a lot more than that. Zelda literally abandoned most of her body and built herself a new one in seconds to protect her core systems. However, that took a lot of energy, energon, and will-power. She had to go into stasis-lock almost immediately, and when you linked to her, she was able to tap into your systems and regain enough to communicate.”

Link’s optics flared, opened wide, and locked on the pill. That was Zelda. It wasn’t a communication device, it was actually her.

“Oh… that… that’s incredible.”

“Not many Hylians can do it. Fewer still can recover from it. The Sheika would improve her chances, since they’re able to sync up with other bot’s systems remotely. They may be able to connect with Zelda in it, hook her up to more robust communication and life-support systems, and get her higher-functions restored.”

Link chewed his bottom lip, a frown creasing his face, his brows. “Okay… but if I go, and Mobile-tron comes back, the town could be-”

Rustle laughed a little, leaned forward, and rested his hand on top of Link’s helm.

“You didn’t even think about NOT taking it. Just jumped straight to the towns-folk. You’re a good kid, Link. But we’ll be fine. Mobile-tron isn’t going to say that he got his aft beat by a mini Hylian and a rusted out box truck.”

“How do you know? Have you met him before?”

“No but I know his type. He’s going to circle, probably come back for his missing parts, and do field repairs.”

“So the town is safe?”

“No, but we’ll be alright… if you go. He’ll follow you.”

Link flinched, his frown deepened. He crossed his ankles, worried his fingers together, and stared down at the metal floor of Rustle’s living room. He didn’t speak, so Rustle kept going.

“Link, if you take on this task for Zelda Prime, then Mobile-tron and whatever else Ganondorf Prime, Ganon Magnus, whatever, decides to send, will be coming for you. But I’ll be scrap metal eroding in the pit before I make you go alone.” Link’s optics snapped up to Rustle’s faceplate. “You call Doctor Tire-tracks, tell him to bring every bit of energon he can spare, and have him make a house call. We’ll get patched up, and leave in the morning.”

Link smiled slightly, then Rustle patted his helm one more time before laying back again. Link hopped off the table, moved over to the chunky computer set into the wall by the door. He climbed up onto a stool, dialed in the number for Doctor Tire-tracks, and waited for the call to go through.

~~~

About seven, eight hours later, dawn hadn’t quite come. An internal alarm woke Link up, and he rolled silently off the couch in Rustle’s living room. Rustle snorted in his sleep and shifted slightly in the armchair. Link was pretty sure Rustle had chosen to recharge there so that Link wouldn’t be alone in the living room. Link smiled at the old man, then flipped open both packs. Out of Rustle’s pack he grabbed the long coil of rope, the small knife, and a few more of the palm-sized cubes of energon. He clipped the rope to the pack, strapped the knife to his hip, and stuffed the remaining energon cubes into the smaller pack. Then he closed it up, slung it onto his back, and moved to the door.

He wasn’t going to drag Rustle on this… quest. Doctor Tire-tracks had patched up Link’s damage as best he could, but a day of rest or in his alt-mode would finish off the repairs completely. But Rustle… he’d told Tire-tracks to relay the information to his systems directly, rather than convey it verbally. Link was sure Rustle had been trying to hide the extent of his damage, but Link had heard the instinctive grunts and worried ‘hmmm’ sounds the Doctor had made.

Rustle was badly hurt, and he was going to come with Link all the same. Link wasn’t going to let him get hurt. Wasn’t going to let him risk his life like that. Even if it meant Link had to step into the dawn alone.

Chapter Text

Link let out a long, low groan as he leaned back against the concrete pillar that supported the “Highway Agoraton - Marker 28” sign. He reached down, legs out in front of him, and pressed his knuckles against the tires that formed his knees. He squeezed, pressed, and kneaded the rubber.

“Ooof… I’ve never driven so far or so fast.” His clumsy massage started up his thighs, armor flipping up and out of the way so he could get at the synthetic muscle fibers, pistons, and hydraulic lines that allowed him to move. “My suspension already aches…”

He glanced over at the Zelda Core.

“Still. I’m excited. We’ll reach the rest stop before sundown, unless Mobile-tron was able to track us through Ordon Forest.” Link grinned and leaned back again, wiggling his feet to loosen up the mechanisms in his ankles.

“I bet he’s still trying to get his leg put back together and looking for his gun. There’s a TrashSnatch that I’ve been fighting with for months, and anything that drops on the ground around my house always ends up in its nest.” Link frowned a little, reaching up and pulling the wheel on his left shoulder down for a massage of its own.

“Then again… Mobile-tron might have friends in the area that he can get weapons from. Maybe they’ve got a medic.” His frown deepened and he buried his face in his hands, groaning. The coolant, grease, and dirt that pretty much covered his entire body at this point just smeared even more so over his hands.

“I can’t think about that. Rustle said he wouldn’t come after Ordie. I have to believe that, or I’ll just run back.” He peered through his fingers at the Zelda Core. It was sitting on a rock next to him, sunlight beating down on it. It had been secured inside his frame the entire trip so far, and… he didn’t want her to feel trapped.

“Oh, we call Ordon Village ‘Ordie.’ You know, in case you ever get a chance to go there. And can hear me.”

Link breathed out a long breath, then got slowly to his feet, stretched his arms up high, and winced as something in his chassis popped and pinged.

“Oh, ouch. Alright Senator Zelda Prime. Let’s keep moving.” Link reached down, hefted up the Core, and walked over to the Highway. He turned south, transformed, and peeled out.

~~~

“Oh wait, there are some equibots on the road. I’m going to walk for a while until I get around them. Engines tend to spook them.”

~~~

“AH they’re spooked anyway!” -frantic transformation noises and smell of burning rubber-

~~~
-slurping sound-

“Oh, there’s cobalt flakes in these Energon cubes. Doctor Tire-tracks must have brought these from his home stock. His husband always mixes cobalt in their Energon Cubes because Tire-tracks can’t consume cobalt alloys. He’s allergic. The armor plates in his chest lock up and he can’t transform until he flushes the alloy out.”

~~~

“We should have gotten there by now. My map is- Okay wait. Wait wait, umm… My nav system is not scaled right. I have to recalculate.” -furious fan spinning and cpu cycling- “I missed a decimal point. Ah wow. That makes a lot of sense. Whenever I’ve gone to Truckton or Vice County, I always arrive earlier than I intended, but now that we’re so far from Ordon Village, the distance is inverted.” -bloop ca-lick-

“That is MUCH further than I thought it was. Alright, I’m going to keep driving, and then nap under the highway tomorrow afternoon when it’s hot. My tires are melting.”

~~~

“I’ve camped before but never this far from Ordon Village. My sire took me to the Mithril Sea when I was small, but she had a jet mode so we got there in a few hours, then came back that night.”

~~~

“Did you know your sire?” A few minutes of silence.

“I know you were a princess of Lanayru before you were a prime, but is the current king your sire?”

~~~

“Good night Senator.”

~~~

-buzzing of the electricity within nearby trees-

-whirring wuff wuff wuff of the helicopter blades of bugs-

-the soft whine of a jet engine as something large and annoyed rocketed a few hundred feet above the highway, searching, searching, searching-

-the whine dying away-

-wuff wuff wuff-

-buzzzzz-

-Link snorting on the folding, metal recharge slab, his sleep uninterrupted-

~~~

-tiny claws clattering across the ground-

Chirp chirp weeeep… chrrrr?

-clattering gets louder-

Mrrrr…

-claws on metal, quiet engine revving-

Chapter Text

“That was actually pretty comfortable.” Link stretched out on his slab and sat up slowly. As he moved, he used one hand to disconnect the wires and tubes running from one hip into the slab.

“I’ve never recharged on a portable slab before. When I recharged on Rustle’s couch last night I woke up with low power in my hands, but not this time. And it only used up a little more energon than my slab at home.” The whole time he spoke, Link was stretching out, rotating his torso and flexing his fingers, elbows, rolling shoulders. Then he rolled onto his hands and knees, stood up, and reached upwards.

“Have you ever slept on a portable slab? I -” Link stopped when his optics drifted over the stack of supplies next to his slab. On top of the neat pile of energon cubes, rope, extra joint components and external plates, was supposed to be the Zelda Core. It wasn’t there.

Link’s fans stalled, his spark reversed direction, and his engine revved loudly.

“Senator?!” He yelped, lunging forward to start pulling the stack apart, searching for the core. “No no no, where did you go!” He lifted up the recharge slab, flipped over a rock, and walked out from under the highway he had slept under, searching through spiny grass and bushes.

“Okay… okay there’s no way you just got up and walked away. I mean… I don’t think there’s a way you could have done that.” Link stopped, sucked in a deep breath, held it inside until the air had cycled through enough times to be almost as hot as his internal temperature, then exhaled it out until his fans were spinning in a near-vacuum.

He pursed his lips together, clapped his hands, laced his fingers together, and then started looking again. He flicked on the headlights on his right arm and pointed them at the ground. With the sun setting, the space beneath the highway was cast in deep shadows, so he needed the extra light.

After a few minutes, he found a pair of narrow tire-tracks through the grass, much too small for a standard Cybertronian (but maybe a minish or oocca). He frowned, traced the twin tracks, then sniffed once. The smell of exhaust and the slightly-rancid smell of long-depleted energon flooded his system, and he groaned.

“The TrashSnatch? Really?” He took a step forward, folded into his alt-mode, and took off after the tracks.

~~~

Link followed the trail, driving quickly and muttering quietly under his breath the entire time. He twisted around large rocks, upthrusts of ancient metal, large trees and bushes, and even through a shallow stream of energon. However, the dense metal spires of the foot-high grass made following the trail very easy. He heard the creature’s by-now-familiar engine long before he saw it, so he slowed down, quieted his own engine, and tried to catch up without panicking the creature.

Were it not for the fact that it was tamping down some of the grass as it drove, Link never would have seen it. The creature’s body was suspended between two large wheels, each about a foot in diameter. The body was wedge-shaped, slightly taller at the back than the front. A head, with a pointed snout full of sharp teeth, flipping ears, twitching nose, had its focus straight ahead. Three flexible tendrils extended from its back, each ending in a three-pronged gripper claw. Those three claws were holding tight to the Zelda Core, the device as large as its body, but thicker, heavier, slowing it down slightly.

When Link was only about thirty feet away, the thing sniffed, the wind changed, and the TrashSnatch caught his scent. It squealed and revved its engine, twin exhaust pipes flipping out from the back end of its form, head forming a thicker third wheel. Little flames burst from the exhaust pipes, and the TrashSnatch sped up.

“Oh come on!” Link wailed. He shot forward as well, swerving around a bush that the TrashSnatch drove right under. He started to get closer as they entered a flat stretch of land, closing distance, and he unfolded one of his arms from the front of his alt-mode and reached…

Then the TrashSnatch slammed on its brakes and Link shot past it. He tried to turn back around, but spun out, twisting around in circles before he managed to stop and get his bearings. The TrashSnatch had turned around and was now shooting back the way it had come from, the light of its flaming exhaust pipes giving it away. Link shot back after it, wheels kicking up grass and dirt behind him.

The snatch was going faster than Link had ever seen it go before, and he didn’t catch up to it until he was almost right back to the highway. They shot out of the grass onto a stretch of rough stone, and Link lashed out, snatched the Zelda Core, and lifted the TrashSnatch off the ground.

“Ha! Got you, you stupid rat.” Link transformed, fingers wrapped tightly around the core, and held the TrashSnatch out away from his body. He gave it a little shake and the creature wailed. Its front wheel morphed back into its head, its wheels broke apart to form a pair of forelegs and hind legs, each ending in long claws, and Link yelped when it sank its teeth into his wrist.

He dropped it, but reflexively kicked out with a foot, hitting the snatch in the side and knocking it onto its side. Link dove after it, but the creature was already on its feet and racing up the side of a support strut for the highway. Link jumped after it, catching one of its hind legs, and pulled it back down. The animal snarled and turned, falling on his face, and for a moment there was silence.

Then it started to scratch and claw at him.

~~~

Link lay on his back, tiny cuts and scrapes on his face, neck, chest panels, forearms, and hands. He had one hand wrapped around the Zelda Core, armor plates folded down from all up his arm to turn that hand into a dense, armored claw that the little thing couldn’t bite down on.

The TrashSnatch was also covered in dents. It was tired out as well, body temp very high and huffing in rapid breaths to cool off. One of its wheels was formed, stuck in that shape after Link banged it against a rock and the impact had caused a reflexive partial transformation.

“Will you… just let… go!” Link hissed, shaking his arm weakly. The animal hissed in reply, tightening its gripper claws, and pointedly refused to do as bid.

Then a sudden rush of sound, an engine on the nearby highway, as someone raced along it at incredible speeds. Link and the TrashSnatch both squeaked and recoiled, their grips loosened, and they both let go of the Zelda Core at the same time. The TrashSnatch, worn out and overstimulated, rolled onto its wheels and took off, leaving behind its prize. Link rolled over and grabbed the core, and immediately slotted it back into his chassis.

“Alright… I won’t be leaving you unattended ever again.”

Link went back to his recharge slab, plugged into it, and went back to bed for a short nap.

Chapter Text

“I don’t think it was the same TrashSnatch. The red and brown color scheme was the same but… why would it be all the way out here?”

It was the first thing Link said after his encounter with the TrashSnatch. Between the chase, the fight, and the short nap afterwards, they hadn’t left until it was almost midnight, and something about talking while he careened down the highway in the dead of night felt strange. Until the silence got a bit too much for him.

“Maybe it missed me. But there are holes in my house and energon left out and scrap all over the place. You’d figure it would be busy for a while?” He fell into silence for a while longer, then flicked on his radio. Just because he could, he turned his audio units outward. Music rolled out from him rather than playing in his audials, along the highway, the thrum of his engine as he rocketed forwards adding an extra depth to the song.

He was singing along now, the lyrics meaningless to him, just noise that he echoed. It was something popular, peppy, about being Young and Changing and Growing, but it was a distraction.

After a few hours, his vocalizer was sore, so he stopped singing. He turned the music down low and flipped back to internal only, private and just for him. Now the music felt like it was surrounding his processor, filling him up. Plating vibrated, and he tried to sync his energon pumps and intakes to the music.

That kept him entertained and in silence for a few more hours, and when the horizon ahead started to lighten, he decelerated. For a moment he thought about hitting a transformation at full speed, but the thought of crashing at a hundred miles an hour because he accidentally unfolded his face before his legs gave him pause. Something to practice, though.

Still, he unfolded at slightly faster than walking speed and landed in a run that he maintained for a few minutes before he slowed down to a jog, then a walk. Then he walked over to the edge of the highway, hopped up to sit on the edge, and paused for a snack.

Another Energon Cube, a bottle of half-water, half-coolant. He eyed the bottle of oil in there, then he brought up his maintenance program on his HUD.

“I’ve got some oil, but… I think I’ll fill up at the rest stop.” As he tipped the contents of the energon cube into his mouth, swishing it around to clear out the last of the hot-air-and-burning-coolant taste left behind after his long drive in his alt-mode.

“I’ve got enough rupees to afford a full oil change, and I’m about due for one anyway. Might have enough for a quick tune-up too.” He pulled out the Zelda Core and stuck it upright in the top of his pack, which was sitting between his dangling, kicking feet. He was quiet for a few minutes, nursing the bottle of water/coolant.

He sat there, cool metal against his rear plating, wind blowing in from the west. The smell of the Ordon Forest rolled over his olfactory sensors. He closed his optics, lowered the priority on his auditory processor, and trapped a bit of that air in a loop, basking in the smell of home. For a minute, he thought he could smell the Ordon River. The specific axle grease that Fanbelt used in his workshop. Talo’s sire’s caster-role (NOTE - a play on casserole).

He didn’t find any of those markers in the bit of air he’d caught, though. He vented, reset his other sensory systems to their default levels, and stood back up.

“I don’t know why I miss it so much already.” His voice was quiet, barely louder than the wind. “I spent a week in Vice County a few years ago. I’m further away, sure… but…” He scooped up the pack and gave the Zelda Core a squeeze, then set her back in his chassis, nestled up between one of his fans and an energon processing station.

“I think it’s going to be more than a week before I’m back home.”

He transformed as he walked towards the sun, which was now just barely poking over the horizon. He took it slow, paying close attention to where each component shifted to, every piece of himself he had to pull out of the way, deliberate and methodical rather than relying on automated algorithms. When all three wheels touched down, he maintained a slow speed, barely more than a few miles an hour.

Then he stopped, a slight disruption in the gleam of sun on horizon. A few spires, barely anything. He checked his map then, the image of it filling his vision. If his calculations were right, that was the rest stop. He was close.

“It’ll be one hell of a story when I get back though.”

He revved his engine and shot forward, pushing his systems hard to get up to speed as fast as possible. Any reluctance, any worry, he buried down under the wail of his exhaust, the thrum of his engine, the burn of his tires.

They’d be there when he got back. They’d have to be.

~~~

Link pulled off the highway, taking the long, curved exit rather than just vaulting off the edge. The rest stop was a cluster of buildings from long ago, repurposed for the modern era. Two buildings were both parking structures, ten stories tall. They were cracked, plants growing up the structures and through the levels themselves. Thousands of cybertronians could have parked there, but now the two buildings were just markers, a silhouette on the horizon for travelers.

Link drove past three maintenance garages that had been gutted of ancient, out-dated, incompatible technology and filled with new tech and living spaces for the bots that lived here. A refueling station, where a massive tank stood on struts directly above the building, had been converted into a diner of sorts. As he drove slowly by, he saw two Cybertronians sitting within, another wiping down a table. He made a beeline for an automated washing station, honked a wordless greeting to the young bot manning the station, and settled in for a thorough power-washing. He wasn’t going to walk into a diner dirty. That was just plain rude.

Chapter Text

Link let out a low sigh as he settled back in the stool in the diner. He’d just devoured a full portion of turbo-scramble: an entire turbofox, smelted down around magnetic shavings and iron-carbide strips, still partially molten as he tucked into it, all with a cube of grade 3 energon hooked into his intake. Grade 3 was too pure to go in with the food, he’d just have to filter it out, so he had it connected to a secondary intake. Direct line into his Energon systems. He hadn’t hooked into a cube of Grade 3 in days.

He shut his optics off and rested his hands on his abdomen. He could feel his internal mechanisms breaking down the scramble, separating out the components to be filed away for use on his more intimate and intricate internal systems. It felt good to be topped off for the first time in a few days.

Somewhere in the diner, a radio was playing. After a few minutes, though, the other cybertronian customer (the second had left somewhere between Link ordering and receiving his food), got up and walked over to shut the radio off, then turn up the news station playing on the television.

“-with a seven percent chance of acid rain. If you don’t have a pulse umbrella, get one. Now, back to you, Technos.”

“Thank you Brakepad. Important updates from Hyrule City. The closed session of the Senate, a stalling tactic? Ganondorf Prime has revealed that two weeks ago, the senate was attacked by agents unknown. The only survivors, Ganondorf Prime and Zelda Prime, though Zelda Prime has been wounded badly. In the interim, Ganondorf Prime has granted himself the emergency title of Ganon Magnus. This morning, he had this to say:”

Link started, sitting up sharply and turning to stare at the screen. A silver and blue mech was sitting at a metal desk, speaking into a camera, but that changed almost immediately to a wide shot of the Senatorial Publicity Platform, where the Senate could give statements to press and public alike.

Ganondorf Prime stood in his usual place three podiums to the left of center. He was clutching his podium, optics closed and face calm. That face was also covered in signs of recent component replacement, and dozens of small patch-jobs covered his frame. A pair of crutches leaned against the wall behind him as well.

“It is with heavy spark, I bring this announcement to you, Cybertron. With this devastating strike against our government, I think it necessary that we remain vigilant, and strong.” He opened his optics and stared into the camera for a second before sweeping the gathered press representatives.

“I do not take this title as a bid for power, but as an emergency measure to make certain that we transition seamlessly into a new senate. Until new elections can be held, I will keep us safe. I’ve already implemented improved security, and have implanted agents I trust completely to oversee the search for the perpetrators of this heinous crime. My Demicons-” He gestured to the side, and the camera clicked to a cluster of diverse frame types, with the same symbol Link had seen on Mobile-tron emblazoned on their chest: curved scimitar inside an equilateral triangle.

“- have been granted emergency command of the security details assigned to each previous Prime. They will be tracking down our scant few leads, and they will uncover the truth.”

Ganondorf, no, Ganon Magnus turned back to the camera then.

“To whomever did this, we will find you. We will make sure you can never hurt anyone ever again. And we will come back from this stronger.” Ganon Magnus turned away then and reached for the crutches, and Technos reappeared on the screen.

“Troubling words. Dangerous times. Until new information is gleaned, though, we will have to take the word of our remaining elected officials, and hope that Zelda Prime makes a speedy recovery. We will-”

The Cybertronian flicked the volume back down with a groan and turned the radio back on. Link stared at the muted news anchor for a few seconds more, then turned back to the counter, stomach trembling.

Confirmation. Ganon Magnus had made his move. He’d given authority to his minions. And it would take time for Cybertron to realize that things weren’t… right. The longer it took him to get Zelda help, to return her to power, to bring Ganon Magnus’ crimes to light, the harder it would be to unseat him.

He hopped up, slapped six rupees down on the counter, and headed over to the garage.

~~~

“Hello?” Link stood in front of the garage set up for Cybertronian maintenance. The bot inside, a gangly one with a towing winch and cable running down the length of one arm and four tires on the other arm, looked up from where she was sitting, feet up on a desk while she watched a small screen.

“Welcome to Grunge’s Garage. I’m Grunge. Don’t make jokes about it being too dirty, not dirty enough or whatever. Heard them all.” Her voice was twinged with an Iaconian accent, a little lilting and twisting.

“Right. Um, I need a tune-up. I’ve got a lot of driving ahead of me and I’ve never done this before.”

“Alright.” Grunge swung her feet down and got up, almost twice Link’s height. She nudged a scissor lift with her foot. “Drive on up, let me take a look at you.”

He was lifted almost six feet off the ground in his alt-mode. That way, she was able to get a good look at his engine block. She crouched underneath to inspect his undercarriage, prodded at his tires with a wire scanner that extended from one fingertip, and even had him pull his exhaust systems to the side so that she could take a look at his energon cycler and a hydraulic pump that would have taken an x-ray to see otherwise.

She pulled back, tapped the lift controls with her foot, and he transformed as soon as the lift was back down on the ground.

“Alright,” she started, sitting on the edge of her desk. “Your alt-mode ain’t up to snuff for long hauls, and your hydraulics, power converter, and coolant systems aren’t built to handle it either. The last bit you can fix on your own, just need to know how, what with you being Hylian. I get country autocons and sheika who don’t know what they’re doing and end up burning out their own lines. Gotta replace tons of components, and that’s expensive. But you just started out, should be able to get by on some pointers.”

“What about my alt-mode?”

“You’ve got a small frame type, shouldn’t take too much work to tweak it. You’ll need new tires, but most of your other bits look good.”

Link nodded along. Then he pursed his lips and drew his eyebrows, and he asked “What’s the recovery time look like? I can’t be- don’t want to be in one place for too long.”

One of Grunge’s eyebrows raised, and she sank back down into her chair. That put her a little closer to eye-level.

“Between machining the parts, taking the proper measurements, install, and recovery time? You’re looking at twenty four hours of actual work I have to do. Two days, maybe three if there are any delays. Four if you want to take some time to get used to the form before you hit the highway.”

“And… cost?”

“At least a hundred fifty rupees for parts alone. You’ll need entirely new wheel mounts, tires, and a fourth one. Three-wheelers just aren’t meant for the long road. That’s more connections, more lines, computer connections, and entirely new wheel management programs. Then there’s labor, housing, gotta patch you into my own energon stores. I can check the official numbers, but five hundred rupees. Six hundred if you want me to rush it a bit.”

Link let out a low groan when she finally stopped, leaning the edge of the scissor lift heavily. He didn’t have to check his bag to know he didn’t have that many rupees. Grunge seemed to recognize his plight.

“Sorry about that. We don’t get many folks out here that need that kind of stuff, so it’s expensive work. You could probably make it to Hyrule City if you pace yourself and have enough energon, they could do it cheaper. Too bad we can’t just scan a new form like our ancestors could, eh?”

Link nodded, straightened up, and started to walk out, trying to figure out something. Even if he COULD scan a new form from someone else or something else, he’d need to find something in his size. He’d need to get the tire replacements, maybe they’d still work on his frame type? He’d -

“Hey, wait a minute. Do you have any technical experience? Like fixing stuff, working on bots, whatever?”

Link turned to look back at Grunge, who was leaning forward, elbows resting on her knees, fingers steepled in front of her face.

“Yeah, why?”

“I could put you to work for a few days. I’ll waive storage and energon costs, let you crash in the garage. Once you’ve helped me out enough to cover the cost of parts, and you’ve gotten me ahead of some stuff on my backlog, I’ll get to work on you.”

Link cocked his helm to the side, staring at Grunge intently. He narrowed his optics, suspicion clear in his face-plate. Grunge frowned at him, straightened up, and gestured vaguely with one hand before turning back to the screen she’d been watching.

“Or whatever. Just an option.” She lifted her feet up, dropped them heavily back on her desk.

Link’s expression relaxed as Grunge tried furiously to conceal her attempts at helping him out the only way she could.

“Thanks, Grunge. I’ll take it. I… could really use the help.”

Grunge looked back at Link, nodded once, then nudged a tablet sitting on her desk with the bottom of a foot.

“Alright. You take that, and we’ll get to work.”

Chapter Text

Link spent the next three days running around the rest stop. The people living here just called it Gulp Town, on account of the large sign on the side of one of the parking structures. It just said GULP, with the rest of it obscured by plant growth or eroded away. There were twelve people living here, and Link learned that one of the parking structures had been repurposed into a multiple story garden.

He worked in Grunge’s machine shop, making parts and hammering dents out of metal plates left behind by other bots. He stripped paint, peeled wires apart, sorted nuts and bolts. He helped Grunge tune up one of the other townsfolk. Grunge even sent him to help other people with their stuff too. The owner of the Diner had him head into the woods and bring back some energon cubes from Trundle-berry bushes. He’d had to fend off a very large bird to get them, and came back a little scraped up and dented.

He fixed irrigation systems, and he caught escaped turbo foxes, cuccos, and the equibot sparkling that kept jumping its fence. The lights in the diner tended to flicker on and off when it rained, and the pulse shield built into one of the other garages (which had been repurposed into a general store) had failed last season. He spent six hours upside down in a tube carefully replacing delicate components that had been eaten by some kind of bug.

Each day, though, he got a little more agitated. He was always polite, he worked hard to get whatever job he was tasked with done, but each time an unfamiliar engine revved down the highway, whether it slowed down to stop or not, his shoulders came up, his optics narrowed, and he ducked into the nearest shadow. He spent hours pouring over the upgrades Grunge was planning, like he could shave off time just by rereading the specs.

“What do you think, Grunge?” The bot that ran the diner poured a bit more piping-hot oil into the mug Grunge was holding.

“It’s like he escaped from prison.” Grunge blew on the oil, then sipped it carefully, let out a little engine rev of delight, and took another deep drink. “The way he watches the skies, it’s like he expects a squadron of Elite Guard to swoop down and snatch him up.”

Grunge looked out the window of the diner, where Link had just run past holding one of the town Cucco’s over his head. The birds could sort of fly, but not very far and not for very long. Still, the scrappy green one Link was carrying was a notorious escape artist.

“If eggs (Elite Guard -> EG -> egg) show up looking for him-” the diner-bot started, but Grunge cut him off.

“They won’t, no one looks around here for anything. If he managed to escape a prison, he wouldn’t be dumb enough to stay here so long, free meals and upgrades be damned.”

~~~

Link was elbow deep in a half-dismantled engine-block. It wasn’t a Cybertronian engine block, it came from a hauler that someone had traded in for a month’s supply of Energon. His audio receptor, jutting from the side of his head, suddenly flicked up, and he heard it.

Another engine, ear-splittingly loud, and getting closer. He paused, waited for it to start fading away… but it didn’t. It revved down, slowing, the pitch shifting as it drove along the turn-off from the highway, and he frowned, pulled out, grabbed a cloth to wipe his hands, and moved to a window to peek out.

It was a dark green and purple muscle-car of some kind. Huge wheels, slightly bigger in the back than the front, an exposed engine-block jutting up from its hood, long pipes running along its side. Spikes and a bladed grill adorned it… and a scimitar inside a triangle was emblazoned on the side of the vehicle mode.

The car unfolded rapidly: the front wheels and their wheel-wells extended down and inside, smashing together underneath its form. Hood and front twisted around, forming arms that smashed into the ground, pushing up and into a bipedal posture. Rear wheels and undercarriage unfolded, forming digitigrade legs that ended in long claws, and a tail unfolded from the trunk.

The bot that stood up from the muscle car was another with a less ‘classic’ Cybertronian shape. Long torso, short arms and legs, and a pointed, animalistic snout. Spikes from the wheel wells and hood had rotated inwards, giving it crushing jaws full of razor sharp teeth.

It was stooped over, its tail keeping it from falling forward onto its face. Optics, bright red, scanned the buildings, and Link ducked down, turned, pressed his back against the wall.

A demicon. Here. Crap.

“Hey there, welcome to Grunge’s Garage.” Grunge sitting outside, washing off a stack of carbon plates harvested from the town’s garden, had been there, watched the demicon show up and transform. “You-”

“I’m looking for a small bot. Hylian. Three wheeler with a short bed.” The demicon continued to look around, optics scanning, scanning, scanning.

“Uh… Hylian? Three wheeler? A three wheeler wouldn’t last long on these roads. What’s your name? I’ll buy you some grade 3 and you can explain a bit more? Like who you are, what your authority here is, and who you’re looking for.”

The demicon locked both optics on Grunge, who didn’t look at it. She kept her optics focused on her task, scrubbing and wiping. She set the clean plate on the stack next to her, then reached for another one. Before she could grab it, the Demicon wrapped a clawed hand around her wrist, pulled slightly, and moved its snout very close to Grunge’s face-plate.

Grunge’s optics widened and the wheels on her arm suddenly spun, all four doing a few rotations while her engine revved. Link fought down the impulse to jump out and interrupt the scene, certain that they’d both end up dead if he did that… then let out a breath of relief when the Demicon released Grunge and spoke.

“Hmm… fine. Lead the way.”

Grunge released her own breath, stood, and turned her back on the Demicon and Link’s hiding place. She hoped she’d bought him some time…

~~~

Link waited five minutes after he heard the faint ring of the bell on the diner’s door, then hit the button that shut the door to the garage. Then he started pacing, fingers twisting together, as he thought.

“Okay, there’s a Demicon here. I’m packed already. The Zelda Core is right here,” he patted at his chest. “I just need… to get away. But… I can’t just go. My tire’s will shred after a few hundred miles, a third of the way to Kakariko.” He worried his lip, then brought up the diagrams and blueprints of his upgrades on his internal HUD. His optics moved side-to-side, taking stock of them.

“Maybe… maybe I could just take the parts? I could swap them out later. I could do this, I think.” His energon cycler sped up, his engine spun, and he squirmed, temperature rising, as he got more and more agitated.

“But… I can’t machine the other parts. I could get close, maybe, but what about the gaskets? Those need special tech to craft. And it would take so long!”

He felt a sudden, sharp pain in his chest and yelped, and watched his energon levels dip suddenly. Immediately, he recognized this as the Zelda Core draining him slightly, like it had right before generating the Zelda hologram.

“What is it? What do you-” information flooded his processor and he yelled, clapped his hands over his helm, and stumbled back. Zelda’s voice pulsed across his mind, powerful but under-strain, as if she were speaking while hauling a heavy load.

“I can help. Get what you can.”

“Zelda?” He gasped, the pain receding. However, the pressure of something heavy with data weighed down his processor, waiting to be unleashed. “I… yeah, okay!”

Chapter Text

Grunge and the Demicon sat at stools at the diner, the latter still scanning every nook and cranny with its bright, red eyes.

“Mudguard, some grade 3 and a mug of oil please.” Grunge didn’t take her eyes off the Demicon while she placed her order, and only allowed a brief twitch to nudge the cube of energon towards the stranger, and then to take her mug. “So you, uh, were going to tell me who you are?”

“I did not promise that.” The Demicon took the cube and tossed into its mouth, crunching once with its massive jaws, then swallowed it down. A bit of the energon dribbled between its teeth, down its bottom jaw, and onto its lap. “But if it makes you more likely to help, so be it. I am Lug-lock, of Ganon Magnus’ Demicons.” She tapped at the insignia on one of her shoulders, the brown scimitar inside an equilateral triangle.

“Oh, right. Well, we haven’t gotten any official documents that your organization is legitimate. So… do you have papers or anything?” Grunge again didn’t make eye-contact, sipping her mug while Mudguard, the bot running the diner, busied himself back in the kitchen.

“Hm. No, not really.” Lug-lock smiled, the corner of her mouth turning up sharply. “But you don’t care about that. If you didn’t know who I was looking for, you’d have said so.” She reached back, and drew out a blaster, set it on its side on the counter, and not once took her optics off of Grunge’s face-plate.

Grunge’s fans whirred on as her temperature spiked. Energon pulsed through her, but there were no weapon systems to arm, only senses to speed up and a processor to over-clock, on the off-chance she needed to react faster. She was in danger, and so was Link. This Demicon, dense with armor plating and muscle-fiber and hydraulic lines, may have been a full foot shorter than she was, but Lug-lock would tear her to shreds. And she had a gun.

“I… look. He’s just someone who has been doing some chores around town. He needed some rupees. I… I think he’s working in the gardens today?” Coolant popped up on Grunge’s frame, and her hand clenched on the mug of oil. “I could show you the gardens?”

“Hmmmmmm…” Lug-lock drummed her clawed fingers on top of the gun, then started to stand. “Sure. But first I’m going to check out your garage. You seemed so eager to get me away from that place, and if I’m going to kill a Hylian and level this podunk little waste of metal-” She gestured vaguely around her, implying the diner but possibly implying the entirety of Gulp Town. “-I figured I’d at least top up my energon levels first.”

She took the gun, turned, and headed for the door. Grunge hustled after her, the clear threat not enough to make the bot leave Link to his fate, even if it did chill her energon better than a super-charged water-cooling system.

~~~

Link stood over the stack of parts. Four tires, a pile of nuts, bolts, pipes and tubes, a metal container of hydraulic fluid, some more oil. A large cube of Grade 3 Energon. A dozen pistons. Rubber gaskets too big for his frame but all he could find.

“Alright Zelda, now what?” He clenched and unclenched his fists, bounced from foot-to-foot, nervous energy in every panel, every flap, every transformation seam. “Zelda? We-”

“Open it!” the Demicon’s voice called from the other side of the garage door. Link’s optics widened, his body went completely still, and then Grunge said “I can’t Lug-lock, I don’t have my-”

A gunshot, a hole punched through the garage door, energy shot right over Link’s head.

“Should I adjust my aim, Grunge?”

There was a moment of silence, and then the door started to roll open.

“ZELDA!” Link yelled, stepping back, improvised and casually-designed combat subroutines activating, hand closing around a heavy wrench.

Several things happened in quick succession.

First, the door opened the rest of the way, and Lug-lock, blaster still leveled, stared at the now revealed Link.

Second, Grunge dove, rammed into Lug-lock’s side, picked her up, slammed her onto the ground.

Third, Lug-lock’s gun skidded across the garage floor and thumped into the pile of supplies on the ground.

Fourth, Link’s body hummed with power, and he screamed as his transformation cog and processor were both overwhelmed with instructions they’d never dealt with before. He fell into the pile of supplies.

It only took eight seconds for Lug-lock to knock Grunge’s feet out from under her, roll onto her chest, straddling her body, and then drive two quick punches directly into Grunge’s face-plate. Grunge was unconscious immediately. Then she looked at Link and recoiled, horrified and fascinated.

Link’s systems had reached out for the raw materials. Metal plates, designed to scissor comfortably past each other mid-transformation, moved faster than they ever had before and sliced through raw carbon sheets, cutting them into new shapes. His processor burned so hot that the rubber gaskets pushed next to it melted, and were poured into improvised molds formed by what had been a hand. His old tires were shredded apart, discarded, while the new ones were pulled inside, sliced apart by razor-thin wire, and hooked into transformation components, then pulled back together.

The entire time his engine roared, pieces of his old body and new parts bulking it out. New metal panels were pulled up against his body, sliced apart, reconnected. Lines broke and he sprayed hydraulic fluid, oil, energon, and water across the ground. The fluids were replaced by the extra he’d piled up and that were stored in his pack.

He twisted in on himself, then stood up, disoriented, and stumbled back. He shook his helm, clearing the dizziness away, just in time to watch Lug-lock raise a second blaster at him. She fired, and Link dove to the side, his burning hot brand-new body straining to move him while he built new movement programs on the fly, purely on instinct. He felt Zelda there, lending him some help. She didn’t build the programs, but she shared with him the helper widgets that had come with her own transformation into a Prime, then her consciousness drifted away, back into the Core.

The Core he was supposed to protect. Another blast and he felt it wing his shoulder, causing him to spin as he fell behind a large tool-box. He looked down at himself while he listened to Lug-lock getting to her feet and approaching.

He didn’t look that much different. He didn’t have a wheel on his shoulder anymore. Instead he could feel the extra weight of the two new tires in his elbows. His torso was a little broader, arms a little bulkier, but that was about it. The control widgets Zelda had shared were helping bridge the gaps between his old body and this new one, reconnecting analogous structures to old programming.

He did feel something new, completely, and when he activated it, he stared in shock as his left hand folded inward, and a gun barrel extended from where it had been. He could still feel his sling-shot in his right arm, but now he had this.

Lug-lock reached around suddenly and snatched him up by the right bicep, yanking him out of cover. She wasn’t as big as Mobile-tron, only about five feet tall, but still she was powerful. She squeezed, claws digging into his arm, and her voice was quiet, a low hiss.

“I don’t know what the slag you just did to yourself, but Ganon Magnus is going to enjoy learning what it was. Now, come with me and I won’t bite your head off.” She snapped her jaws once, emphasizing the reality of the threat.

“Ummm… no?” Link pointed his new gun hand at one of her feet and fired. Energy pulsed through him and a bolt of bright blue light shot out and into the clawed toes, and Lug-lock let him go, snarled, and stumbled back.

Link shoved her, ran around her, and jumped forward… and transformed.

His legs still twisted into his back half, wheels flipping down out of his knees. This time, though, his back half was not a truck bed, but a smooth, more aerodynamic car body. His arms still folded in front of him, but rather than side-to-side, fist to elbow, he tucked his fists together, elbows touching, and tucked his head into the crook of his arm. Wheels pushed out and to the side of his elbows, and panels from his back and his skirt folded up, seamlessly forming a sleek, green car.

Then he drove, fast, swerving around the prone Grunge.

“Come and get me Demicon!” He called out, and Lug-lock obliged. She ran, jumped clear over Grunge, transformed as she touched down, and shot after him.

Chapter Text

Warnings flashed all through Link’s HUD. The g-forces of his rapid acceleration were causing fluid to build-up along the curves of his pipes and hydraulics, the pumps unable to keep up. Then with a thought he twisted the pumps into a different configuration, routed a little more energon to them, and the alert faded. His horsepower was higher, and his computer told him it was an error. He set the maximum alert to 500 horsepower, just to quiet it. He didn’t know how fast he was now. The pressure of the air on his frame was high, and his automated systems alerted him that there must be an error, there was no way his frame was so dramatically altered, and a pop-up kept flashing in his HUD, trying to run diagnostics.

He shut it all down, then finally minimized his entire HUD. None of his displays were accurate anymore.

He shot through town, heading for the on-ramp to the highway. He hit ninety eight miles per hour, his previous top-speed, in half the time he had before, and he just kept going. He let out a yell, noise barely louder than his engine, screaming as he took the curve of the on-ramp at a hundred and sixty five miles an hour. He skidded slightly, too fast for the turn, but the angle of the road under him kept him from spinning out entirely, and soon enough he was back on the highway, racing for Kakariko Village.

But Lug-lock was right after him. He didn’t patch his optical sensors into his tail-lights to see behind him, but he could hear her engine, bearing down on him in the open air. It sounded vaguely familiar, and he thought about his fight with the TrashSnatch, how it had been interrupted by an engine racing down the highway. This engine.

She must have come from this direction looking for him, and circled back for some reason. If he hadn’t been brawling with that animal, he’d have been on the road, and she’d have run right into him.

She’d have run him down in seconds. He had a chance now, at least. He didn’t have a head start, or an ex-military war frame to bail him out, his inner mechanisms were still hot from being smelted into shape, and he couldn’t run this hard for too long… but she hadn’t caught him yet.

She was gaining, a few hundred feet behind him, but he kept his engine cycling, and concentrated. He opened up a few vents on his roof, just enough to let some air in. He rerouted that air through his frame, trying to cool off the new parts.

For five minutes he did this, racing down the highway while she slowly, slowly closed distance. Two hundred feet away. One ninety. One seventy. He shut the vent and his speed increased just a little, the slight drag having made a difference.

With his more delicate components cooled down and set, no longer likely to snap if he strained them too much, he turned his attention to his current external problem. His pack was gone, his supplies used up in whatever the hell the Zelda Core allowed him to do. The Core was nestled in his frame, alongside something else- oh, the wrench. That had ended up in him too. So he had two weapons now, and his sling-shot. Good. No supplies, but a few weapons. He’d have to forage on the side of the road on the way. He’d left all his rupees on Grunge’s desk, so he wouldn’t even be able to buy anything if he found another rest stop or some other travelers.

A hundred and six feet.

None of that was relevant. Link had to fight. He looked ahead, setting sun behind them and casting orange and purple light across the highway… and the next exit. They’d passed a few while he was trying to cool off his new frame, but this one would have to be the one he took.

“Alright… here we go.” He swerved towards the exit, making it clear what he planned to do, then slowly unfolded one arm from his front. Immediately, the interrupted air-flow increased drag (sixty feet), but he didn’t need it for long. He slowed, but he had to do that anyway to take this turn. What he really needed was the gun.

His hand twisted, his new pistol formed, and he fired off a few shots, peppering the ground in front of her. She slowed just enough so as to not immediately catch up to him when he tapped his brakes and took that turn. He put his arm away, then hit the old roads the off-ramps connected with… then slowed further, spun, and erupted back into his root mode, skidding on spinning-wheel knees and his palms to eat up some of that momentum.

She was so close. Even with his blasts forcing her to slow, her experience in that mode had allowed her to catch up, and he had no time.

She hit him going fifty miles an hour, half-way through a transformation. His controlled slide turned into a vicious roll, and she sank claws into his chassis as they spun. They had barely stopped rolling before she lunged, jaws opening and snapping shut on his shoulder.

He yelled as she stood, twisted, and hurled him back down the road. His minimized alert program was pulsing, double-digit unread warnings rapidly approaching triple digits. Still, he came up as quickly as he could, dragging his training with Rustle to the forefront of his processor.

She kicked him in the stomach, knocking him down, then punched him across the face as he sat up. He rolled onto all fours and transformed, but she grabbed him by the wheel-wells of his rear tires. She lifted him up and once again twisted to throw him with a grunt. He went end-over-end, but this time he went further, and she ran to get to him. That gave him a few seconds to transform, land on his feet, and pull out the heavy wrench.

He raised it up, bracing himself like he had with his training sword, and she stopped. Then she pointed and laughed.

“Really? A wrench?”

“It was all I had on hand!” He said, stepping slightly to the side. She shifted, keeping him squarely in front of her, but she didn’t immediately rush in. He chose to keep the talking going as long as he could. He was tired, and he needed time to get used to being in this augmented form. “And I lost my sword.”

“Oh? Did you drop it when you turned yourself inside out back at the garage?”

“No, I stabbed Mobile-tron in the face.”

That gave her pause, and she narrowed her optics. Her amused, quirked lips shifted into a slight frown.

“He said the old war frame did his optic in. That was you?” She leaned forward slightly, tail lashing and hands making contact with the ground. She wasn’t a full quadruped, but clearly her frame was flexible.

“He picked me up, I took the shot. So to speak. Didn’t have a gun then.”

“Ah. I’ll have words with him. His report was… inaccurate, it seems. Anything else I should know before I pull your legs off?”

“Can’t think of anything, no.”

“Good.” Claws dug into asphalt and dirt, and she came for him.

Claw swipe, lunging bite. These Demicons fought like animals, which was good. Link was used to getting away from and dealing with animals. He side-stepped, ducked, slammed his wrench into the side of her knee. She twisted into the blow, forcing it to make contact with her armored thigh instead.

Then she punched him in the abdomen, and headbutt him in the face. So much for fighting like animals.

He pulled back, and she let him. Then pain in his ankles as her tail swung around and knocked his legs out from under him. She lifted a foot and stamped on his chest, but he rolled and her claws just scraped across his chassis. He jabbed with the end of the wrench like it had a point, and knocked it against her chest. Didn’t do much, but kept distance. She swatted the improvised weapon with the back of a hand and waded in.

Link took a punch in the side, then managed to get an arm up to block the one coming for his face. More pain in his foot as she stamped on his toes, claws digging into metal, but he used the opportunity to slam his wrench against her shoulder. She roared, stepped back, swung her tail, but he jumped over it and swung his wrench again, this time into her side, just above her hip. He pulled back, extra vents opening on his sides to pull in extra air. She stepped away from him as well, growling, circling him. Now he had to turn to keep her in line.

“You’re better at this than I thought you’d be.” She said, soft and thoughtful. “But how long can you keep it up?” She smiled, reached back, and pulled a long, telescoping shaft from her chassis. One of the spikes that adorned her alt-mode jutted from the end. A spear. Her other hand swung back as well, and pulled off a piece of her back, the roof of her alt-mode. A large shield.

Link’s fans stalled and he wilted, wrench drooping as he stared. He wasn’t sure where these moves were coming from, but… he’d never fought anything like this before. He wasn’t even sure where to start.

“You need terrain advantage.”

Zelda’s voice pulsed through his processor, strained like before. Like talking to him took everything she had. He blinked, stepped back slightly…then smiled.

That’s where the moves were coming from. Now that he thought about it, he could picture himself practicing some of these combos, these dodges, but it wasn’t his body moving. It was a purple and gray form with long, thinner limbs and a floor-length skirt of metal plates. She’d given him a little more than her own helper widgets. She’d snuck in a few combat subroutines to shore up his amateur ones.

“I can keep this up long enough.”

He flipped the wrench into his right hand, then pointed his blaster at her and fired three beams of blue light at her chest. She brought the shield up, energy scattering across and scoring the curved metal. Then he turned and ran, taking off into the woods on the side of the road.

Chapter Text

Link ran into the post-sunset near-darkness that consumed the wilderness. Lug-lock came after him, the whine of servos and thrum of engines chasing Link into the trees, but Link did not look back. He just shot forward, trying to put distance between himself and her. That wasn’t a plan though. He couldn’t lose her in these wilds. He had to stop her from chasing him, from going back to Gulp Town and hurting Grunge, Threadbare, Mudguard, anyone.

But how?

Link heard something change in the rising volume of Lug-lock’s breath, her fans, her engine, her steps, and threw himself to the side. The spear scraped across his back as he turned, slicing through plating, but the weapon passed him and sank deep into a tree. He glanced over then, optics bright in the darkness, to see Lug-lock still about fifteen feet away, as she’d thrown her spear at him while she ran. He sped up, jumping over a rock, then a fallen tree. He heard the spear as it was ripped out of the tree.

“Come on, little one. I’ll only hurt you a little!” She screeched. Link turned sharply, cutting behind a large tree, but she was after him all the same. He couldn’t break her eye-line long enough to hide, to get away.

A thought not his own flashed through his processor.

“She’ll have targeting software. It locks onto a heat signature, I can’t escape her that way.”

Link shook his head, stumbled, fell. He rolled down an embankment and landed in a shallow stream of Energon. The thought had come with it a vision: his alt-mode, careening through a swamp, skipping across murky water at great speed, dodging trees while someone above rained fire on him, and while he knew it had to be something else from Zelda, he hadn’t expected to… live a moment of her life.

“Stop, you have to stop. I can’t think with… with you doing that!” He said, voice raised, panicked.

“Then stop thinking!” Lug-lock leaped down at him, shield raised and spear poised. She sank the spear point into the ground as he rolled away, but when she landed she swung the shield at him and knocked him down again. Something in his chassis twanged painfully, a strut snapping or a transformation motor collapsing, and with his alerts minimized he had no idea what it was. He just felt the pain.

Lug-lock ripped her blade out of the water-saturated dirt and strode towards him, stalking, grinning. With an easy twist, the weapon’s haft twirling around her fingers, she rose it up into a throwing-grip, weapon held high.

“You can run, or you can sit there and let me skewer you. Those are your two options. Now-” Link snapped up his hand, gun forming, and fired it at her. She blocked it, threw the spear, and he yelled as, this time, he didn’t roll fast enough. It slammed into his left shoulder, drove through it, pinned him to the ground. This time, he let the alerts through, scanning them in a fraction of a second, just to check if this wound was fatal. It wasn’t. She’d have impaled his spark-chamber if he hadn’t tried to move, but now here he was, stuck, and she stalked right up to him.

He couldn’t raise his gun hand, so she didn’t bother lifting her shield up. She took her time, then planted her foot on his chest, bore down, and grabbed the spear-haft.

“That was fun.” She said, voice low. “You’re scrappy. I like that. Mobile-tron said you had the Core, but left out how… clever you were. He’s going to pay for that. Look at my foot!” The foot on his chest had one of the toes blown clean off, servos slagged by his shot back in Grunge’s Garage. “I wouldn’t have let you do that if I’d known you’d have the bearings to try.”

“I… I’m not going to-” He winced and clenched up, pain racing through him as he flexed his arm, trying to raise his gun. She laughed, then pulled slightly on the spear haft.

“You want me to take this out? I don’t care if you have that neat little rerouting trick some of you Hylians have. You’re not going to be shooting me with that gun.” Her other foot moved then, pressed down on the barrel of the weapon. For a moment while she shifted her weight, he held her entire weight on his chest, and metal buckled, support struts in his chassis bending. One went out, adding more alerts, more pain… But she’d given him an idea. It had worked on Mobile-tron before, and if he really hadn’t told Lug-lock about him…

He shifted his weight a little, reached up, gripped her knee with his good hand.

“Yeah… can’t shoot you with the gun.”

Lug-lock tensed, optics darting to the weapon, then his face, his touch. Back to his gun. The moment the bright spots in the center of her optics moved from hand to gun, he unfolded his slingshot. He forced a metal spike to jut up, snagging the band, and screamed as he forced the slingshot to move away from it, tension on the band building up a ball of kinetic energy between the actual arms of the slingshot. Normally he’d use his other hand to pull back the band, but he couldn’t do that here.

It happened in a flash, but he released the tension, the ball shot out, and struck her in the face. She stepped back and he pushed, hard, and she fell on her aft in the mud. She didn’t let go of her spear, so it ripped out of him, and his optics shorted out from the pain, but he was already moving. He transformed, driving over mud and rocks, just long enough to force his components back in working order. In his alt-mode, it was easier to rearrange mechanisms, and when he flipped out of his new alt-mode, his other arm was working again.

Lug-lock was on him, her own alt-mode equally ill-suited to the terrain, but clearly with less experience moving in mud. He kept his lead, at least until he raced back up out of the stream bed and into the trees once more.

He was wounded, and back to square one. Well, square two, if you counted square one as the highway. Three, if the brawl on the dirt road was two and one was the highway. Did the highway count as square one though? Did-

“Hush, Link.” He was panicking, and Zelda’s voice pulsed through his mind again.

“Right!” He kept running, she was chasing him, he glanced back just in time to see the spear flying at him, and he ducked and accidentally went head-first into a tree. The spear stabbed into the tree again, and he pulled back, she was right behind him…

He grabbed the haft and fired, blasting through the metal of the spear and leaving only a few inches of metal handle exposed, the point still stuck in the tree, and he spun, back against the tree, optics wide, trying to pull his gun in line and still holding the broken off handle and she was RIGHT THERE -

She hit him in a full tackle, and the broken haft sank between a seam in her chassis, erupted out her back, and she locked up long enough for him to twist, throw her off him, and take off again. She ripped the metal out of herself, energon gushing, and took two seconds to stare at her spear-head, stuck, with no handle to pull it out from that she could properly grip, so she took off again, shield at the ready.

Link had made good time with that little trick, so he stopped, turned, lined up a shot and fired. Zelda’s targeting protocols were active again, the only reason he’d hit anything so far, but this time he could see how they worked, how similar they were to his sling-shot experience. He fired, but she blocked, and he turned away again.

“The shield is big, but not that big. How does she always block it perfectly!” He didn’t really expect an answer, but the question was out, muttered quietly as he ran.

“She’s watching your weapon. There are only so many places it can aim based on posture and position.” Zelda’s voice again, responding as best she could.

“Great. I can’t stop her from looking at me, and if she looks at me, I can’t shoot her?” As he said it though, he remembered a lesson with Rustle. Rustle brought up a recording of a battle he’d been in, where Rustle was using thermal imaging.

“Wait… she can’t see where my gun is pointing if she’s using thermal. It’s just blobs of heat!”

Link glanced over a shoulder to see her closing on him again. Her injury wasn’t slowing her down much and hadn’t stopped her, but… it was something. He planted his feet, pivoted, and opened fire. He aimed high, at her face, then ran behind a tree. As he did, he unfolded his slingshot and fired low, at her feet.

It worked. She blocked, tracked him, slowing in her run to deflect his blasts, but she didn’t see him change weapons, change targets, as he passed behind the tree. It didn’t do much damage, but the impact knocked her off-balance, and Link ran forward and rammed his good shoulder directly into the shield.

That knocked her back a step, but she planted her feet and reversed her momentum, swinging the edge of the shield at his face. He ducked, fired his gun point-blank into her already wounded foot, and she snarled as a few more toes came off. She punched him in the face with her other arm, then kicked with her wounded foot, knocking him back against a tree. He ducked the sharp edge of her shield again, and she upper-cut him in the chin.

He fell to one knee, bell thoroughly rung, and she grabbed him by the throat and slammed him against the tree. She moved fast, yanking back with the shield for a blow he couldn’t dodge, aiming the sharp edge of her shield for his neck, just above her own grip.

As she pulled back, though, Link’s optics flashed, flicked, searching. He had a split second to move, to attack, to break the grip, but nothing he had would do it. Her armor plating was good enough that one shot wouldn’t be enough. He’d only gotten lucky with the sling shot, with the spear haft, and -

The wound in her chest, the accident from earlier with the spear-haft, drooling energon but not life-threatening. Link shoved his gun into the wound, tilted his aim, and fired.

Blue light pulsed in the seams of Lug-lock’s chassis, and she froze. Her optics flickered once, then again, then a third time, but on that third time one of them didn’t go back on.

“What did you…” Her arm tensed, lifting the shield, and Link fired a second time.

Her body thrashed, she stepped back, and she let him go. He dropped onto his aft plates, sucking in deep breaths, unable to take his optics off her.

She stepped back again, stumbled. She caught herself on a tree, gripping it, and stared at him. Her disbelief was all over her face.

Then her one remaining optic went out, she fell on her face, and Link sat there for five minutes, staring at her corpse.

Chapter Text

Hello! I'm going to post some artwork I had done recently, and provide a few announcements:

1) Check out this artwork I had done by Granatu888 over on Twitter! you can find their twitter at this link: Granatu888 @ Twitter

Here's the work they did for me

2) Next Friday, July 19th, I will begin the next series of postings of chapters! I hope you guys are excited, I really like this stuff. The next batch is meant to conclude the sort of... introductory arc of the story, and get Link on his proper quest! See ya'll then.

3) Bonus Artwork: I drew this a year ago when i was initially exploring this premise!

Chapter Text

Link didn’t speak much over the next four days. The Zelda core was completely silent, the faint, barely-detectable thrum of its internal mechanisms the only sound it made, and he was only aware of it at all because it spent those four days pressed up alongside his spark chamber.

He’d said a few words to Grunge when he went back into town for repairs. She fixed him up and he left as soon as the welds were cool enough to take his weight. He didn’t say goodbye, though. She left him recharging in her garage, and she woke to an empty slab. She asked lots of questions, and the only thing he offered was “You’re in more danger if you actually have information. You might try to lie, to help me… again.”

He didn’t take anything with him, so after a day of moving at top speed, he pulled off and slipped into the woods to hunt. That was the next time he spoke: too swear as he struggled to find his balance.

He used his slingshot to knock energon cubes from the taller trees. He bent carbon plates peeled from the trees into a rough replacement of his backpack. He shot down a GlideWatcher, a kite-shaped creature that used mesh to fly high and collect atmospheric energon and water, tethered to the ground by a length of razor-fine cable. He got some grade 2 energon out of that, and used the mesh to make a lid for his pack. Link had learned to hunt from a handful of folks in Ordon, and he put every one of those skills to the test out here.

Over those few days, he got used to his new form. He was faster now, for sure. He had trouble in the wilderness that his bouncy wheels from before hadn’t, but the roads were much more comfortable. His suspension system worked better, his engine didn’t heat up as fast. His engine was twice as powerful, easily, and his pumps, fans, and hydraulics had extra pressure and strength.

He didn’t have just a tweaked alt-mode. All of this made him faster, stronger, and able to run and work harder, longer, in both forms. Zelda had somehow completely overhauled his entire form in a handful of seconds, using scraps and raw materials.

That she could do that to him was almost as scary as what he’d done to Lug-lock.

~~~

Even after several days, he still felt emotions burning up at the base of his processor, deep in his core programming. He clenched up, servos and pumps and fans stalling for just a moment, but he forced up another mental partition, cutting off those feelings again. Then he got back to work, reaching into the mouth of the fish he’d caught.

“You’re not a murderer.” Zelda’s voice rolled suddenly through his processor, causing his hand to slip as he twisted a bolt off of his latest catch. He was dismantling it, trying to keep its grade 3 Energon reservoir intact, and he swore as he punched against sensitive inner metal. Something snapped and fluid poured out over his hand, but it was black: oil.

Good, he hadn’t accidentally broken through to the reservoir. He pulled his hand free and let the oil drip off his fingers into a piece of metal he’d pried off a Pulse Flower yesterday and was using as a bowl.

“I shot her in the spark. Twice.” His voice was quiet, barely more than a whisper, and he brought up his internal monitors on his HUD. Yup. Energon, Transmission Fluid, Oil, Water, all his vital fluids, dropping slightly. At least she’d waited until he was well fed and healed up to start speaking again.

“No, you didn’t.”

“I saw her die.”

“You saw her go offline. That isn’t the same thing.” Zelda’s tone was just as soft as his own, but there was something… firm within it. Like she knew what she was talking about. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to kill one of us?”

Link frowned, flicked his fingers to clear the last of the oil, then leaned back to look up at the sky. He thought about responding, but all he could picture was Mobile-tron yanking his cannon out of line last minute. His own body opening up and exposing his innermost mechanisms while he screamed in pain. A spear through his shoulder, a clawed hand around his throat. He certainly didn’t feel difficult to kill.

“You didn’t kill her. She’ll be back.”

Link huffed, closed his optics, and flopped onto his back.

“I don’t… I don’t want to think about that right now.”

~~~

Link was silent for the next six days on the road, swerving off to collect resources whenever he saw something promising. He could already feel the hard-mineral build-up from the Grade 1 Energon he was primarily consuming, but he couldn’t stop and forage for three or four hours every day to find the plants budding with naturally occurring Grade 2 cubes, and getting Grade 3 out of the animals took work and time, and he had to FIND them first. He’d gotten lucky the first few days, but he had to stay on the road. He wasn’t stopping to recharge as often either. He didn’t have a recharge slab anyway, so the best he could do is rest in fits and starts, trying to program energy redistribution by memory. His processor relished the time to cool off, but the rest of him… wasn’t enjoying it.

“You’re sure she isn’t dead?” He broke the silence after he passed the first sign that had Kakariko’s name on it. The village name was painted on recently, compared to the rest of the highway. The highway had been made eons ago, before the Senate had even been formed and the districts knew each other, by the civilization that preceded their own. The laser etching on the highway signage? That was from the last few centuries.

“I didn’t want to kill her. I just… I just didn’t want to die. But if I didn’t kill her, would she have gone back to Gulp town? She didn’t seem like Mobile-tron. Didn’t seem like she’d… leave loose ends.”

Zelda didn’t respond. Link slammed on his brakes, skidding noisily across the highway, a streak of burned rubber behind him. Before he’d come to a stop he transformed, leaping out of his alt-mode and landing in a run. He immediately tripped over the altered profile of his feet, hit the ground hard, and spent a few seconds laying on the hot metal-and-concrete road.

“Why do you talk to me when I’m trying to think, but never answer my questions?” He rolled onto his back, covered his face with both hands, and shut his optics. He pressed his palms against them, the pressure forcing a few extra micrometers of contact against the processing stations behind each optic, and echoes of previous light flashed through his mind. Meaningless color and shapes.

Like his thoughts. Meaningless shapes. It didn’t matter how he felt. He just… had to keep moving. Had to keep going.

He got up, transformed, and set out again.

~~~

Link slunk into Kakariko Village fifteen days after he left GULP Town. Nineteen days after leaving Ordon Village. Not even three weeks ago, he’d been at home. Safe and quiet.

And now he’d driven almost 2,500 miles. He’d left the Lanayru District behind, and entered the Uraya District, home of the Sheika people. He’d driven past three other towns and villages, but this time he didn’t stop. He camped out in the underpass or a half mile past the tree line. Finally, a small sign and a narrow town sandwiched between two hills came into sight. He pulled over by that sign and didn’t bother transforming into his root form. He just sank into unconsciousness in his alt-mode.

Chapter Text

Link came out of his improvised, mid-tier recharge groggy and a little disoriented. His oil filled with contaminants, his energon reserves nearing critical levels, his processor full of little quirks and misfiring programs. His power distribution was wonky, and his processor hadn’t run through its boot up systems. Something had woken him up.

“Hey!” something prodded Link’s rear left tire, and he yelped, jumped, unfolded, and spun. He didn’t draw a weapon, he wasn’t so jaded that his first response was to open fire, but still he lifted his hands up, curled into a fist.

The stooped, elderly bot, roughly his height and a muddy orange in color, blinked her optics once, then leaned back onto the walker she’d poked him with.

“That’s better. What are you doing, napping under our sign?”

“Oh, um.” Link straightened up, lowered his hands, and looked up at the sign. “I got in last night and was too tired to… go anywhere else. So. kind of just fell asleep.”

The bot turned partially and pointed about a hundred yards down the road:

“Motel - Cheap - Detailing Included” was emblazoned in neon on a large sign above a two story stack of ten garages. Link winced.

“I don’t have any rupees,” he said, fingers splayed apart and palms facing forward, as if that was some sort of explanation.

“You must be in some kind of trouble, and we don’t like trouble in Kakariko. Scat. Shoo!” She waved her walker at him, took a step forward, waved it again. Link stepped back, frowning, while the elderly bot chased him, one step at a time, from her village. Now that it was day, he could see the sprawling zig-zag of buildings in the cleft between two large hills, but now he had to get around this woman.

“I can’t! I have to talk to Impa. I… we need their help.”

At this, the elderly bot stilled. The wheels that made up the bulk of her torso had started to spin, but the brakes sent them to a screeching halt.

“Impa? What do you want with that old bat?” The voice was suspicious, as it had been the entire conversation so far, but now it was curious. “No one comes to see Impa.”

“Well, I have to. It’s an emergency, and I don’t…” Link frowned, planted his fists on his hips, and did his best Imperious Prime glare. “I don’t know you, and you’ve been rude, so I don’t want to explain anything to you. I’ll explain everything to Impa themselves.”

The bot returned Link’s frown, looked him up and down, then reached to her side. She pulled out a large, clunky communication device of some kind, with an alpha-numerical keyboard of all things, and her thumbs flew across the device, typing out a message. Then she giggled, slotted the phone back onto her hip, and focused her attention back on Link.

“Alright, stranger. Let’s go see Impa.”

Link froze, brows furrowing.

“Just like that?”

“Yup.” The elderly bot popped the ‘p’ sound, then turned away. Her torso unfolded, flaring her wheels out, while her arms and legs folded up into a suspension system for them. Panels from her thighs and back formed the sides of the vehicle-mode, and the walker turned into a roll cage. Where the old bot had been, there now sat a chunky dune-buggy.

“Come on then.” She started to peel out, kicking up dirt as she spun her thick tires, splatting Link’s knees and thighs. He kicked off the worst of the dirt, transformed, and sped after her.

~~~

She at least gave him her name when he caught up to her. Shunt. He also learned it from a few other townsfolk, who greeted her by name as they drove by. Usually with the word “Mayor” right before it.

Mayor Shunt drove him through her little town, pulled up to a municipal building, and drove right into the adjoining garage, then transformed back into her root mode. He did the same, and followed her into the building. As soon as they entered, people snapped around and began to hound Shunt for attention..

“Mayor Shunt, I have Chief Pogo on the line, he’s got-”

“Not now.”

“Mayor Shunt, you have a conference call with-”

“Don’t care. Busy. reschedule it.”

“Mayor Shunt, your son is here. He said something about-”

“I know what he wants, and I’m not retiring. You guys are going to have to pry my rusted carcass out of that office before I give it up. You hear me Hexdrive!”

This last bit was shouted at a pleasant looking bot with a similar face shape and ‘four tires stacked on top of each other in his chest’ mold. Hexdrive was standing on the other side of a half-wall, and frowned.

“But mother, I just think -”

Shunt had already stepped into her office and slammed the door behind Link who had, rightfully, intuited she wanted him to hurry up and get inside.

“Sit!” She said, pointing at a chair in front of her desk. Behind it was another one that she carefully set herself down in, half-folded her walker, and leaned it against the desk. Then she opened a drawer, pulled out a large revolver, and pointed it in his face the moment he sat down.

“Now, tell me how you know about Impa, and what you’re after, or I’ll scatter your processor over my wall.”

Chapter Text

The dark points of lights at the center of Link’s optics that helped catch and direct light to his more sensitive inner processing stations were slightly crossed, staring at the point of the large ballistic weapon thrust into his face. Combat subroutines flared, and he felt a warm rush of anger and panic and fear that wasn’t his while his fluid levels dipped. Zelda, rising to full consciousness, prepared to share her systems and experiences with him…

“Enough!” Link hissed back handed the weapon away from his face, lunging to his feet. Fury rushed through him, bright and boiling over, shattering partitions in his processor that were keeping his emotions in check. He didn’t even notice as Shunt pulled the trigger and a gunshot blew a chunk off of Link’s helm. The bullet winged his face and tore along his helmet, forcing him into a half spin. He sank a hand into his own chassis and pulled, popped the zelda core out of himself and dropped it onto the desk.

“I’m tired of people pointing guns in my face!”

Shunt, who had already realigned her aim, thumbed back the hammer on the old weapon, and started to tighten a finger on the trigger, paused. She looked down at the core, fully prepared to blow a hole in the young man yelling in her office, narrowed her optics at the Zelda Core… then every bit of kibble and armor plating on her form clenched up. The light of her optics dimmed, energy redirected to other systems, and then she looked back up at Link, tuning back into his diatribe.

“...I don’t even LIKE driving! And now I’m a muscle car and I need new tires AGAIN and I’ll be spending a WEEK scraping the build-up out of my intakes, and I’ve been shot AGAIN!” He was bent over, one hand pointing emphatically at the core and the other curled into a fist, energon dripping from the glancing gunshot wound on his cheek.

The door to the office was yanked open, and three attendants piled in, including Hexdrive, but they took in the scene before them and froze, confused. Link paused then too, shuttering his optics and turning, then looked back at Shunt, who was still pointing the gun in his direction, smoke rising from the barrel. There was a moment of silence, and then Shunt spoke up sharply.

“I’m taking a vacation. Go fetch the paperwork, Grill. The rest of you out.” Shunt was, as she spoke, slowly putting the safety back on her gun and stowing it away. She shook out her wrist (the recoil was killer on her joints) and eyeing Link, who had straightened up and had just reached up to touch his cheek. “Except you. You sit. Again.”

There were a few moments of quiet again, and Shunt ran her optics back over the stunned, silent trio in her doorway. She coughed once, then reached back for the handle of the drawer. The three took the hint and were gone in a flurry of steps, wheel-screeches, and clacking claws. Once the door was closed, she focused back on Link.

“They’re going to enact a coup, you know that right? I’m going to have to claw my way back to power because of you. Thanks for that.”

“I… didn’t know that. I’m… sorry?” Link was unsure, but he sat back down, fingers digging into the torn metal mesh that made up his face to slow the drip of energon. Shunt pulled open another drawer and the bot tensed, but she just pulled out a first-aid kit and slid it over to him. He flipped it open and set to work tending to his wound while Shunt leaned back and steepled her fingers.

“Don’t worry about it. Keeps me young. Now, explain. From the beginning.”

Link’s optics roved over the old bot, his concern evident in the curves of his face, his posture, the way some of his armor plating didn’t lay flush the way it was supposed to. Grooves and seams where there should be smooth lines, smooth lines where joints should have clearance to move, all indicating that he was in a body he didn’t know how to manage, fight or flight responses ready at a moment’s notice… But something in her stare reminded him of Rustle and he felt an ache deep in his spark.

“Okay. So, I’m Link. I’m from Ordon Village, in Lanayru? I was with my friend and he found this thing in the river fed from Lake Hyrule, and…”

~~~

Food, energon, water, and oil were brought up, and soon Link was talking while he ate. It took almost two hours for Link to get it all out, and if he took a few minutes sometimes to grab at his helm and try to stifle sobs, Shunt didn’t say anything. When it was done, he slumped back in his chair, scratching at the patch on his cheek and feeling wrung out. Despite the refueling, he felt drained.

“I’m… just so tired. And I don’t want her to die, or anything. I just… I just want to go home. I got her here. That’s what she wanted me to do. So… is she safe now? Can I go home?”

Shunt hadn’t changed her expression during most of his story, but at this, Link saw a flicker of something in her optics, a twitch of her fingers, and he knew her answer before she actually said it.

“She’s not safe, Link. She won’t be safe until she’s been restored, and Ganondorf eviscerated.”

Shunt didn’t say he could go home. Shunt didn’t take this burden off his shoulders. Link felt another rush of heat flood through his spark chamber, wash through his processor. Pressure built behind his optics, prickly and stuffy… but he pushed it back down. He sat up a little, shoulders slumped but back struts stiffened.

“Okay. Okay Shunt, what… what do we do next?”

Shunt watched him for a few seconds longer, and he shifted awkwardly. Then she reached out, brushed her fingers against the Zelda Core, and then nudged it back towards his hand. The core rolled across the desk and he picked it up, slotted it back into place, and felt a single message flash through his processor.

“That was rude, Link.”

He scoffed, rolled his optics, and then focused on Shunt again. Red rage that wasn’t his own pressed against his mind… then it faded to something else before Zelda settled in to hum silently against his Spark Chamber. Link frowned a little, but didn’t press.

“So, Link, you came here to find Impa, so let’s go see it.” Shunt levered herself out of her chair, grabbed her walker and snapped it open, then turned towards a large filing cabinet behind her desk.

“See… it?”

“Yes. Impa isn’t a bot. Not like us.” Shunt pulled open one drawer of the cabinet, then pulled another out slightly farther, then pushed the first back in all the way, then reached into the second and pressed her hand against something on the top of the inner cavity. With a click, a section of wall slid open, revealing a small round chamber that Shunt quickly moved into.

Link followed and looked around, and then blinked in surprise at a faded bit of text on the wall, not visible from the outside.

Intra-planetary Management and Processing Artifact

“I… M… P… A?” Link sounded out, an eyebrow raised.

“A bit forced, but it works out. IMPA is an ancient intelligence the Sheikah uncovered. The entire Kakariko town cropped up around this elevator.” Shunt reached out, hit a button that Link hadn’t even noticed, and the door shut and they began a rapid descent. “Now, not many people outside of Kakariko know about IMPA. Part of why I won’t retire: I can’t find anyone I trust to run this town and keep this secret.”

“What is so important about IMPA?”

“IMPA is millions of years old, Link. It knows things about this planet that nothing alive could possibly know. Secrets of war, of destruction, of space travel, of medicine. But interfacing with IMPA isn’t easy. If bots like Ganondorf learned about it, the Sheikah would be forced to extract everything, possibly killing us and IMPA in the process. Instead, we take it slowly, carefully, pulling bits out when we can, then hiding those secrets in other places for people to find.”

“That’s… so weird.”

“It was IMPA’s idea. It’s a bit… quirky.”

Link stared at Shunt, who noticed out of the corner of her optic, grinned, and said “Yeah yeah, I’m one to talk. But IMPA is on a whole different level. If anyone knows what to do next to restore Zelda and defeat Ganon Magnus, it’ll be it, though.”

The elevator came to a stop then, and the door slid back open. The two stepped out and into a long hallway, lined with doors and windows. Through the windows, Link saw row after row of computer terminals, dense and chunky. The floor hummed, probably lined with ducts that kept this place so cold Link shivered. Every now and then, Link saw a Sheikah at one of the terminals in one of the dozen rooms they passed, hands hovering over but not jacked into ancient ports. Data flashed across the screens, too fast for Link to make sense of it, but he could see the coolant dripping along the bot’s frame, see the strain on their faces, the shake of muscle and tendon.

“IMPA says that this was one of many places that our ancestors used to manage the planet, before it was an ecosystem that could manage itself. Hundreds of stations, filled to bursting with bots, scanning and tweaking equipment that doesn’t exist anymore, all to keep our planet habitable. We’ve found two others, but they aren’t running. For some reason… this one was preserved. In here.”

They’d reached the end of the hallway, where a door sat directly opposite the elevator door at the other end. Shunt pushed it open and they stepped into… a strange room.

It was a perfect sphere. They stepped onto a metal grate, with the bottom half of the sphere underneath the grate, the upper half curving over their heads. The bottom half of the room, just inches below their feet as they stepped onto the grate, was filled with coolant, heat sapping out of the air between feet and surface so quickly it almost hurt.

The grate spanned the entirety of the room, save a thirty foot diameter circle in the center. In that circle, another sphere floated, slowly spinning and twisting in place. Dozens of thin wires brushed over the surface of the sphere as it spun, jutting down from the ceiling, while the lower half of the sphere was submerged in the coolant.

“That’s… a processor.” Link spoke quietly, almost reverently as he stared at the brain of something… something ancient and huge and… incredible. He took a step forward, optics taking in every detail, and Shunt followed along, smiling slightly. “This is… I’ve never even imagined something like this could exist.”

Shunt nodded, then stepped up, pressed a hand to the small of Link’s back, and guided him forward, up to a small terminal hanging from the ceiling. It was too high for him to interface with, but a plastic step-stool was set up in front of it; the strangeness of something so modern tucked under ancient technology almost made him laugh.

“You’re not like us. You’ll need to interface with IMPA directly. Are you good at that Hylian trick, with the…” she gestured vaguely at him, waggling fingers. Link frowned slightly, however. He’d never really thought about it before. He thought about altering his alt-mode’s profile to increase the downward push of air-friction as he drove, of rerouting components around a spear wound, forcing piston and plating to pull back on his sling-shot.

“I suppose I’m… pretty good at it, sure.”

Impa nodded, then gestured to a small, bright green circle on the control console. At the center of the circle was an interface point, but even a slight glance revealed that it was of a profile unlike anything Link had ever seen before. He frowned, shoved at the hat-like metal flaps extending up and back from his head, and pawed at his scalp. A panel flipped open, a metal spike jutted up, and Link carefully grabbed his data-jack by the insulated rubber base and pulled it free, trailing a length of fine cable.

He eyed the opening, then his jack, then the opening again, closed his optics…

Tiny motors flexed and pressed, pulling and straining. His jack warped, bent, a key-like form replacing the thin, smooth spike, and then he let out a breath. The new shape twitched then settled, remaining in the new form. He took a few more breaths, opened his optics again, and found Shunt staring intently at Link.

Shunt’s mouth was twisted into a grimace, but there was light in her optics, and Link figured she was somewhere in the emotional range of “horrified but also fascinated.” He shrugged a little… then slotted himself into IMPA’s data port.

Chapter Text

Link’s attention was suddenly split down a thousand branching pathways. Many of these pathways were only pain. Dead-ends that thoughts rode down, and never returned from, so whenever he could, he referenced the intricate map of circuits and systems he could shuffle his mind through without losing it. That, however, required him to return to his nexus, his core processor, and start the journey over again.

He wanted to speak. To talk to all the little things crawling on and around it, on and around the world he’d been born to safeguard, but he couldn’t. His thoughts moved too fast sometimes, too slow in others. By the time he registered someone was linked to a system he had access to, a century had passed. It was all luck, recurring signals.

All the packages the Sheikah people had deciphered and shared, they were on loop. Automated. He couldn’t-

Oh. that was new.

Something had slipped in directly. Link leaned in, vast and swirling, in a sea of boiling ones and zeros, towards the tiny thing shaking and twisting and-

That was Link. I am Link. This is IMPA. Wait wait waitwaitwait - wawawawa - wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww-

A corona of purple energy flared out from Link, then solidified into an opaque bubble, and everything was silent and dark. Link, hovering in the center, could feel his body: hands clutching the interface console, his data jack resting snugly in the contact point. The weight of the wire tugging just so on the side of his head. Plastic under his feet from the step stool. The cold air around him.

At the same time, though, he could also feel nothing. He reactivated his optics, but… there was no mechanical shift. He didn’t feel the shudders move. The channels that light passed through did not lighten. He was just, suddenly, aware of this bubble, and the intense weight pushing down on it. The awareness of something else.

“I can’t hold this for long, Link!” Zelda’s voice rattled through his mind, and for a moment, she was there. Taller than he, limbs straining, holding this bubble up. “Either disconnect and get us out of here, or come up with something.”

Link took only a second to decide. He could pull out and separate. Whatever he’d been for an instant, was unable to interface safely with him. If he left, though, he wouldn’t be able to talk to IMPA. He wouldn’t be able to learn how to help Zelda. The entire point of this adventure, half-cocked and dangerous, wouldn’t be reached.

So, instead, he thought.

His awareness had been IMPA’s, he was sure. For a moment, he’d been her. Then she’d noticed him, and he’d snapped back into himself. He scanned through his mind, forcing programs and communication requests onto his HUD. His real body remained rigid, locked, temperature rapidly climbing, but this… mental projection of himself, sitting in a bubble with the weight of an ancient intelligence trying to get in, looked like he was playing a symphony and cleaning a dirty window at the same time. Hands flipped and flashed, dragging interesting programs to the forefront and sending familiar verification codes off the display.

“There! A handshake protocol. She needs… she needs an interface system. I bridged the hardware gap, but that just slots my brain into the same space as hers. I need… I need something for her brain to interact with, keep the brunt of her power focused on generating stuff that my mind can process. But I don’t have anything complex enough for that in my system! Maybe if we-”

“Wait, generating stuff?” Zelda’s voice was strained, both in the way that extended conversation tended to leave her with AND with the effort of manifesting this protective barrier. “I have a- listen don’t ask any questions about this but here-”

Once again, Zelda’s physical form reappeared, twice his size, and took a hand from the bubble. It instantly caved in partially, forcing Zelda into a bent, twisted posture. The weight of the bubble was now resting against the curve of her spine and shoulders. Still, her hand moved, and a swirling icosahedron appeared, a 20-faced shape, each face marked with code.

Link had so many questions, but there was no time. He grabbed the icosahedron and pulled it into the handshake protocol, and Zelda screamed with the effort of holding this moment together. Link grabbed the communication program that IMPA had used to drag him into her mind, ran it through this shape… and then the bubble popped.

~

Link’s optics snapped open, but he knew they were only open in the sense that his awareness had reactivated. He was… sitting in an open field. It stretched endlessly in every direction. Dark brown metal spires, so thin that they whipped about in the wind, barely rigid enough to stand, flowed out in every direction. This ‘grass’ was about mid-thigh-height, but laying in it as he was, the sea of it was right at eye-level. Everything had a strange, pixelated look to it, artificial but in an artistic way. Something about the style looked familiar.

Then, suddenly, a mountain of black metal erupted out of the ground, miles away. It made a slight rumbling sound, and there was something artificial about the sound. Something… stock. He’d heard that sound before. A ravine opened, another mountain. A lush forest. As Link watched, the flat horizon around him morphed into a world similar to his own.

And then, directly in front of him… a large chair appeared, one of those over-designed, barely-comfortable ones that only professional video-game streamers acquire. And then, a desk. Under the desk was a beastly computer rig, all whirring fans and LED light strips and a water cooler, everything. It was big enough that Link could have curled up inside it with room to spare. .

Link stood up, climbed into the chair, and his feet didn’t even touch the ground. This was a set up for someone much taller than he was. He pulled himself closer to the desk, nudged the mouse, and the monitors in front of him lit up, asking for a password.

“The password is n-a-y-r-u-b-e-s-t-g-i-r-l-1-9-9-8.”

Link cocked a brow as he turned to look, once again, at Zelda. She was standing next to the chair, arms crossed, expression… strained. Link looked back at the console, then back to her, then typed in the password. The computer finished booting up, the world around them still being created. The mountain eroded away into a canyon. The space between two hills became a lake.

The monitors went dark, a pulsing lime-green cursor in the top left corner. Then words appeared.

“Hello Link. Hello Senator Zelda Prime. I am IMPA. Thank you for providing me with this interface. I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

Link looked back to Zelda, who shrugged.

“Can you hear us, IMPA?” She asked, straightening up and looking around as new features appeared around them. Vast forest swallowed them, and then they were underwater as the lake turned into a sea, though this little circle around the desk remained untouched by any such changes.

Link reached out and tapped Zelda on the arm, and she turned back to look at the screen. New words had appeared.

“I can hear you, but this method of interface cannot continue. You should pull free and allow me to use this tool to prepare for a more suitable conversation.”

Zelda seemed to dislike this. Link’s optics narrowed as the tall woman looked around at the world, with its familiar art style and recognizable sounds. She looked at the computer set up and breathed a heavy sigh, and then faded away, back into her core.

Link took one last look around, then hopped out of the chair.

“It… was nice meeting you, IMPA.”

The screen flashed.

“Likewise. Thank you!”

~

Link pulled free and fell back, except he didn’t fall. He just flailed. He was FREEZING. He squirmed, coolant flying everywhere as he splashed in it, disoriented. Shunt hooked her hands in his chestplate and gave him a shake, and he settled down.

A section of the grate had been sliced partially free, then bent, submerged in the coolant a few feet from the rotating processor. He was resting on this piece of metal, his body dropped into the coolant.

“You were burning up, kid. I had to do something and-” Link didn’t hear the rest of it. His data-jack released from the interface point, slotted back into his head with the sound of a spool winding back up, and he dunked himself completely into the ice-cold fluid.

Chapter Text

Link didn’t sink into full recharge. He really should have. This was the first time he’d had an actual recharge slab to rest on in weeks. The portable one he used on the road was alright, but this was the first time since he’d been… changed… that he was able to offload the complex process of transforming his recent memories into neatly stored files at the back of his processor. It was the first time he was able to filter the lower grade energon through charging machinery to load it up with the extra potential energy it needed to properly power his systems. It was the first time he was able to pull the lubricants and oils and fluids that kept his form functioning, moving, cooled, and powered up and then run them through REAL cleaning machinery.

Most of the mechanical stuff he could feel happening, but his body wouldn’t let it happen too much while he was conscious. It could hurt, and if he chose to move and one of the dozens of small connections his body wanted to make with the slab broke, he’d leak fluids all over the place. So. he managed it in pieces while he stared up at the ceiling, unable to drift off into real sleep.

The slab was comfortable, at least. Shunt’s guest room was cozy, with art on the walls and a desk with a beat up computer on it in the corner. Laying there, fingers laced together over his abdomen, he waited. And thought. And tried not to think. He really didn’t want to think about what he’d just… gone through with IMPA.

Well, no past? Think of the future.

“Senator Zelda Prime? Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Link. My higher functions are more manageable while attached to the slab.”

“That’s good. Could we talk?”

There was a beat of silence, and Link shuttered his optics. The hesitation wasn’t… unexpected. He hadn’t exactly been very nice the last few times they’d interacted. But then…

“Of course. I don’t know when our next chance to talk without sapping your resources will be, so we had best make the most of it.”

Link let out a low sigh of relief, and opened his optics back up. He inhaled, ready to speak… but she beat him to it.

“Do you hate having me here?” Her voice, whispered against his mind, didn’t technically have any of the audible signifiers of emotion, but there were other ways Cybertronians communicated such things. Not all had the same body shapes, same flexibility, same facial features, so while other species used body language and facial expression to communicate, the Cybertronian people just… broadcast their emotional range on a wavelength others could pick up on. A field of colors, a series of smells, subtitles manifesting in their field of vision, the interpretation of this data varied bot to bot, but the result was almost always the same: emotional knowledge about the one you were communicating with. Zelda simulated some of that, sharing her concern, a bit of fear…

Link frowned and scrubbed at his face, pressing down on transformation seams and hidden pistons. How to answer that? He thought about everything that had happened lately. The fact that there were so many people that almost got killed for being near him. The couple of times he’d almost been killed. The changes he went through.

He had a new body. He’d never been reformatted before, it wasn’t really something normal folk ever experienced, and it was a terrifying and strange and exhilarating and horrifying experience. He sometimes felt pain in one of his front wheels when his systems detected the fourth wheel and tried to figure out where it came from. The sudden reattachment of a lost limb hurt, apparently, and his body kept on telling him about it!

And it was her fault. Kind of. It was Ganon Magnus, mostly, but she… she didn’t have to ask him for help.

Mobile-tron loomed over him, demanding he hand her over, and he refused. Mobile-tron came for him. That had been his decision. Link chose that.

Link chose this.

If she asked for help again, he’d say yes.

“No. No I don’t hate having you here, Senator Zelda Prime.”

“.... Ugh. Just… Zelda, please. When you say the full title your voice drops an octave and you enunciate too much.”

Link barked out a laugh then covered his face, worried about Shunt. She’d said she’d staple his mouth shut if he woke her up at any point in the night. Against his spark, Zelda’s core radiated a pleased heat, probably because he’d laughed so suddenly. Everything Zelda had said before was clipped, careful, controlled. This was… not that. It was more friendly.

“Alright. Zelda.”

They shared a few moments of silence. Not because she was in hibernation again, just a companionable quiet. He could feel her humming against his core, active and warm. Link broke that silence.

“Oh. Right, I asked if we could talk, not you. Um.”

“What is it, Link?”

“We’re here, IMPA is… more awake, I guess? Do you know what we’re doing next?”

Zelda didn’t answer right away. Again, they sat in silence, until Zelda broke it.

“I’m… not sure. I had hoped that Impa could help me get back to my body. Or at least… help me be better able to communicate and interact. But after that, I don’t know.”

Link frowned, shifting plates and twitching fingers with his agitation.

“You mean you don’t have any ideas about what to do?” His voice ticked upwards a bit, volume and tone rising.

“I… I didn’t… I was panicking, Link. He was going to eat me. I didn’t exactly have a plan in place, or have time to come up with one!” Her own agitation felt hot, fumes in his gears, ash in his optics. He blinked, pawed at his face reflexively, and tried to come up with a response… and found none.

“I guess that’s fair. We’ll just have to figure it out together, I guess?”

“So you won’t rip me out of your chest and drop me on the ground again?”

There was venom in her words, hurt and fear that she wasn’t able to bite back in such an intimate, processor to processor communication style. Link flinched a little, and for a moment he thought of IMPA, trapped in a system that allowed her awareness but no real communication. He’d spent cycles, fractions of a second, living her life and it had almost melted him. Zelda… must be in a similar state.

“I’m sorry, Zelda. I won’t do that again.”

“.... it’s alright. You’ve been through a lot. You weren’t constructed for this, what I’ve asked of you.”

“No, I’m just… a little guy.” He let the words come out in an almost whine, and this time it was Zelda who snorted out her laughter, right up against his heart. He grinned in the darkness and settled back against the slab, letting more lines and connectors latch him to the surface.

“Just a wittle guy.” Zelda suddenly said, voice high in his head. He snickered.

“So small.”

“Smol.” Zelda flashed an image of a tiny yellow face with enormous, tear-filled optics, and Link had to turn off his mobility drivers to keep from sitting up, covering his face, and shrieking with laughter.

Senator Zelda Prime was fluent in internet-speak. He thought back to the gaming rig in the field of pixelated nature that Zelda had given him to bridge the gap in IMPA’s interface protocols. That was hers. It was HER gaming setup. Senator Zelda Prime was an internet gamer.

“Talo won’t believe this.”

“No one will. That’s why I’m not hiding it!” Zelda’s humor was infectious and Link shook with laughter.

“Diabolical!” He hissed through gritted teeth.

“Mmhmm. Goodnight Link.”

“Goodnight Zelda.”

~

“Wait, was that a Minecraft texture pack you were working on?”

“GOODNIGHT LINK!”

Chapter Text

“I’ve been gathering data and running it through reactivated higher brain functions since yesterday,” IMPA said, voice calling out from the speakers of one of the dozens of computers in the underground space Link had passed through yesterday to get to her processor. With the game system interface providing her a template for modern computer hardware, she’d rebuilt her own programs to allow her to interact with this old technology. It wasn’t efficient, but it turns out that using Minecraft Redstone to program herself was just the right way to keep her massive mind occupied.

“I have identified several key concerns for the planet, and for Zelda and Link personally. Which would you like to hear about first?”

Link looked to Shunt, who drew a circle with one finger in response. The world. She wanted to hear about the planet’s troubles first… but Link shook his head.

“I want to know what’s going on with Zelda first.”

“Very well.” A screen near the computer IMPA was using to communicate popped on and showed the pill shape that Zelda was now in. “Zelda is dying. In her current state she will not last more than a few months. Link’s frame is not capable of keeping a second Spark stable, and Zelda lacks the components necessary to keep her own Spark stable while in hibernation.”

As IMPA spoke, the screen showed the Zelda Core pill clam-shelling open to reveal components: the transformation cog spinning and twisting, providing the intense centrifugal forces necessary to power transformation pistons and motors and hydraulics. The Spark chamber wrapped around a pulsing ball of blue light, her Spark. Zelda’s processor, all bronze with wires trailing from it and connection ports empty where it would latch into a body’s nervous system. The T-cog then twisted in on itself, crumpling. The processor burned out, sparking and cracking. And the spark… the spark dulled, dimmed… then went completely dark. Then it was gone.

Link’s ear antennae flapped down, his hat lost some of its tension and flopped against his skull, and armor and paneling across his frame flexed. That was not good. He started to stand up, mouth opening, and he felt Zelda whirring to life in a panic against his spark chamber, but IMPA started speaking again after only a moment of stillness.

“There are some solutions, but all of them are quite invasive or difficult. The easiest solution is to remove the processor, spark chamber, and t-cog of a living Cybertronian and replace them with the ones in the Zelda Core.”

Link flinched back into his seat, and Shunt looked like her paint was going to peel off.

“We’re not doing that, IMPA.”

“Very well! The next simplest solution would be to find her original body and reattach her to it. Provided it is in the shape necessary to support a spark, it should hold reasonably well. There may be some side-effects, but with enough rehabilitation and medical attention, she should be back to normal in a few weeks.”

Zelda pulled from Link’s reserves, just enough to say “Ganon Magnus has my body.”

“Slag,” Link swore, making Shunt twist and glare at him. Link looked a bit sheepish. That was a nasty swear, especially in mixed generation company. “Zelda’s body is with Ganon. We don’t have any way of getting to it, or know where it might be.”

“That is unfortunate!” IMPA chirped. “There is a third option. We could reformat a host body to support a second spark. Technically all bots are capable of doing this for a short time. It is how you all reproduce now!” IMPA’s main screen was filled with clapping hands emojis and the sound of applause rolled out of the speakers. “That is incredible. Towards the end of the Great War, the remaining bots were convinced they were the last of your species. They had no means of reproducing prior to the Great Reformatting.” Shunt sat up sharply at that, and Link’s jaw dropped.

“But… how did we create new life before?” Shunt said, speaking with the slow, measured words of someone who was asking a question they’d never thought to ask before.

“That is a fascinating question! You see, new sparks would sometimes appear in great fields on the ground, and they were harvested by an elite team of-”

Link winced as more of his energon reserves were siphoned off to the core, and he spoke Zelda’s question almost as soon as the words seeped into his mind.

“IMPA, how do we reformat a host? What does that mean?”

“Oh, yes. With several small surgeries, we could alter an existing bot’s frame to enter into its penultimate reproductive stage, and insert the Zelda Core into the frame to be supported. The bot would need to be well fueled, and of course should not go into any dangerous environments or situations. This would allow us to keep both bots stable until such a time as either of the above two options can be made available, or Zelda is able to rebuild a sparkling body around herself.”

Link sat back down and rested his face in his hands. So the options were A) kill someone and replace them, B) recover Zelda’s original body, or C) make someone surgically pregnant with Zelda.

“None of these are good options. Who would we even reformat? And could Zelda communicate in that state? I don’t know her that well, but I don’t think she’d want to sit in isolation waiting for someone to save the world from Ganon Magnus.”

“Unfortunately, without a Prime, these are the only options.” IMPA said it softly, trying to bring her flat, synthesized voice into something kinder.

Zelda cycled noisily in Link’s chest, and he frowned, looked up at IMPA.

“What was that about a Prime? Zelda is a Prime.”

“Well yes, but she’s the one in danger. We would need a different Prime to be able to support a Minicon.”

“A Minicon?” Link’s voice was lilting, questioning, wracking his processor for information about that word, but he didn’t know it. “What does that mean, exactly?” Link asked. “Is it like the Minish?”

“No, not really,” Shunt said, speaking up. She was quiet, reserved. Almost hesitant. “Minicons are bots bound to another. They usually turn into weapons or armor, or some other kind of tool.”

“Why haven’t I heard about them before?”

“Simple.” Shunt spoke a little faster then, optics shut as she dragged up ancient knowledge. “It hasn’t been used in… two million years? During the Integration Conflicts, the Ascendant Conclave were forcibly turning prisoners of war into weapons. After that, it became illegal to engage in the practice, and since then the technology has been lost.”

IMPA vibrated in response, screen flashing as she pulled up historical documents to support this. She appeared to be corroborating that story, flicking through eons of memory to bring that understanding to the front of her consciousness. Link glanced between the screen and Shunt as the old bot spoke and the ancient mind thought… Then he frowned.

“Okay… but what does that have to do with a Prime? And Zelda?”

Shunt clasped her hands behind her head and stretched, twisting slightly in her seat rather than respond. IMPA, however, flickered her screen and started to speak.

“The process of making a Minicon requires a bot to be synced to another bot’s energies. Generally, this only works if the Minicon has a far weaker spark and a simpler processor. That’s why the Ascendant Conclave’s crimes were so abhorrent. They were functionally lobotomizing these people. However, I have schematics and information on how to do this process without reducing the Minicon to a feral, instinctive creature… but the host would need to be exceptionally powerful. Only a Prime could support something like Zelda’s consciousness.”

Shunt looked at the screen as IMPA explained, leaning forward to rest her chin against the top of clasped hands, thinking intently.

“So, we need a Prime to save a Prime.” Shunt said. “Where would we find someone to undergo the Trials? And the nearest temples of any of the three Goddesses are in Hyrule City, which is way too close to Ganondorf.”

“That’s not entirely true, Shunt.” IMPA’s voice dipped low, conspiratorial, and a little pleased with herself. “There are more temples than you might think.”

Link and Shunt both sat up sharply, and IMPA sounded smug when she continued.

“The nearest temple I’m aware of is not far from here. It’s why my core operating system was stored here, and why I was able to remain functioning for so long. One of my primary functions was to maintain observation and analyze the Forgotten Temple.”

Shunt nodded, but Link frowned again.

“Did the Sheikah build it?”

“Oh, no,” IMPA said. “This is a temple dedicated to a deity from a previous Cybertronian civilization.”

“Why would Pre-Reformat Cybertron build you to study one of their own temples?” Shunt’s voice was a bit shaky, certain something was about to be revealed to her that Link wasn’t catching.

“You misunderstand me. At my creator’s best estimation, the Forgotten Temple has existed in its current abandoned state for almost a hundred and fifty million years.”

The number was too big. Link could barely process what it was like to live as long as Rustle, who had been drafted into the last Cyber War when he was Link’s age. That had been eighty five thousand years ago. Rustle was falling apart, and he wasn’t even a hundred millennia old. This was… fifteen hundred times that old.

“How… can a thing like that… still work?”

“I have no idea!” IMPA’s voice was bright, fast, excited. “I’m so glad my systems are functioning again. I can’t WAIT to see someone take the trials! None of its mechanisms were operating until the Great Reformatting, but now it’s positively BRIMMING with light.”

Link tensed, sat up, and buried the existential crisis that was simultaneously the recognition of his mortality and the incredible life-span of a Cybertronian.

“Right. We need to find someone to do the trials. Someone who can help Zelda stop Ganon Magnus.”

“Yes indeed, Link. We need someone who can hold their own in a fight.” IMPA’s voice was measured, careful suddenly.

“Yup.” Shunt popped the ‘p’ sound again. “Someone proven to keep their head when in danger, too.”

“Someone courageous!” IMPA added.

“Someone who won’t ever give up.” Shunt nodded as she spoke, scratching her chin.

“Exactly. And of course they need to be able to think on their feet!”

“A creative problem-solver?” Shunt asked.

“Yes.”

Shunt turned slowly, meeting Link’s eyes. IMPA put a pair of cartoon optics on her screen, then played a long, slow animation of the eyes shifting to Link.

Link looked between them, frowned, and opened his mouth. Shut it. Then his optics widened and he stood up.

“You want ME to take the Prime Trials?”

Chapter Text

“You want ME to take the Prime Trials?” Link’s voice was loud, sharp, and accentuated by a sudden leap to his feet. “That’s… that’s… are your processors corroded?!”

Shunt held up her thumb and pointer finger about an inch apart, but IMPA said “No, Link. You undergoing the trials would raise our odds of solving some of the issues facing both you and the world, on top of helping Zelda.”

“Then why wasn’t that the FIRST thing you mentioned,” Link snapped back, planting his fists on his hips. He said it like he’d caught her in a trap. “If you thought it was the best option, why wouldn’t you say it first?”

IMPA was quiet for a few seconds, and Link, who’d lived her life for a few seconds, knew how long that was for her. Thousands of thoughts could pass through that colossal processor in five seconds, which meant she was thinking long and hard about a response. Link waited, but was not patient with it: he started pacing. When she finally broke the silence, he rounded on her monitor.

“I did not mention it first because there is no way to reverse a Minicon’s formatting that I am aware of. Zelda would never regain a form analogous to her own. She’d be a Minicon forever.”

Link froze, eyeing Shunt now, who nodded silently. Link straightened up then.

“I… I don’t… We can’t do that to-”

“I’ll do it.”

Link winced when Zelda hummed her emphatic response directly into his mind.

“She says she’ll do it. And… if she’s willing to do that to herself? I…” He sucked in a deep breath, scrubbed his palms against his faceplate, tugged at the armor at the base of his neck. “I won’t let her do it alone.”

He straightened up, settled his shoulders, and stared at IMPA’s computer console.

“What do I do?”

~~~

The elevator doors peeled apart. The set inside the elevator opened smoothly, but the outer set struggled, rumbling in fits and starts. When they failed to open all the way, Link tapped at the call button.

“I see,” IMPA said. “I’ve locked down the elevator until you reenter, so you’re safe to shove through.”

Link slid between the doors, planted the back of one shoulder against one door, his palms against the other, squirmed a leg through, and pushed. The doors strained, whined… and something buckled in the ancient machinery and the door against his back came loose. He fell back, twisted, and landed on his side just outside the elevator.

In the dim light from the elevator’s open doors, Link got a look around the slightly-rounded chamber surrounding the elevator column. Ahead of him, a tunnel cut through the rock, moving slightly downwards, disappearing into darkness, with recessed lights running down the center of the floor. The tunnel was slightly rough-cut, as if dug out with metal tools or claws rather than the modern laser emitters. As he looked out, the blue lights started to flicker on. IMPA probably, worming into old computer systems. The lights worked, mostly. A few of them had burned out, leaving gaps of shadow and pitch darkness.

“Good luck,” IMPA said, the voice echoing from inside the elevator.

~~~

At the end of the tunnel was a door. Link punched in a code IMPA gave him, and the door slid, slowly, open. It was old, like the outer elevator doors, and it opened with just as much grace. Clicked, crunched, something inside the mechanism started to burn. Still, these doors, twice Link’s height, opened enough that he could walk through comfortably.

Beyond the doors was an asymmetrical space, carved from ancient stone. Cracks ran up the walls and along the floor. Opposite the tunnel entrance was another door, but this one was a single slab of slate, rather than metal double doors. Two tunnels on the left, one on the right, jutting at odd angles.

Link had seen Virtual Tours of the three Temples in Hyrule, Cybertron’s Capital. He’d seen older styles, from when the 12 people of Cybertron had been separate, in movies and cartoons and video games. They’d all been… deliberate. Different aesthetics, sure, but everything was neat, with sharp lines and careful shapes. But this place? It was just a cave, with a few motion-activated chemical lanterns set into alcoves along the wall.

He approached the large, strange door. It was covered in markings, etched into the slate. Link narrowed his optics, taking in the swirling, geometric shapes from a distance before moving closer to get a more detailed look.

He stared for a few minutes, tapping at the slate, tracing the patterns with his fingers, before he stepped back, fists on his hips, and announced to no one:

“I have no idea what any of this means. But I don’t see any handles, or any control mechanisms. So.” He scratched at his chin, stepped back, and took a wider look around the space.

“Alright. So big door. No controls. This is supposed to be some kind of test. There are three tunnels out, not counting the entrance. And…” His eyes roamed, scanning walls, floor, ceiling…

“There are… grooves. In the ceiling. Come off the door and go to each tunnel out. Alright… maybe there’s something down each tunnel.”

Link set out then, picking one tunnel at random (the tunnel on the right side of the room) and shifting into his alt mode to take the winding tunnel at speed. After a few minutes of twisting, winding stonework, the tunnel opened up into an oval-shaped chamber. He skidded to a halt and transformed, optics up and following the ridge in the ceiling to the opposite end of the chamber.

The ridge ran down from the ceiling to about twenty feet above the ground on the back wall. There, it expanded into a perfect circle a few feet across, with dozens of smaller ridges spinning and twisting and bending off the circle. They fanned out across the walls, then across the floor, then connected to a large triangular depression.

“Okay. So triangle, to circle, then across the roof, back to the door.” Link kept poking around, sometimes literally. He prodded at the lines on the walls and floor he could reach. He climbed up a bit on the back wall to run his hands over the circle shape. He felt a weird tug at his fingers, and his eyes narrowed. He shifted a metal plate down over his hand, peeling the armor from his forearm, and the tug strengthened, pulling his arm towards the circle.

“Magnetic. Okay.” The armor folded back into shape and he pushed against the circle; it depressed slightly. “And an impact plate.” He pounded a fist against the circle, and it rocked just a little, then back into place.

“Okay, a magnetic impact plate, positively charged. If I was… bigger. I could probably lean my weight onto it. Or hit it really hard. Clinging to the wall, I can’t get the leverage.” He moved over to the Triangle then, and knelt down next to it. Again, he poked and ran his hands over it, but didn’t find anything interesting. However, when he leaned his weight onto it, the entire triangle sank a few inches into the ground.

Immediately, the triangle started to vibrate, and Link heard a faint thumping underneath. Link’s brows furrowed and he climbed off. The triangle popped back up, the thumping stopped, but it took a few thumps for it to die off. He stood on it again, let it start thumping, popped off. Let it die down.

He looked to the circle, back to the triangle, back and forth.

“It reminds me of that old trundler. You had to prime the engine before…” His optics widened and he focused on the circle. “Before you inject the fuel. It’s a kinetic capacitor. Prime it here, hit the magnetic impact plate there, and it uses the kinetic energy to power something. Like that door!”

Link squatted next to the Triangle on the floor again, grinning. This he could do. He just needed to put something on this triangle primer and weigh it down, or find some-way to hit the circular impact plate while standing on the primer.

“Even if I could weigh the primer down, I can’t hit the plate while clinging to the wall. I need to hit it from across the room. But I need to hit it with something magnetic, opposite the plate.” He scanned through his data-banks, searching for something. He could shoot his slingshot, that blaster he got during his encounter with Lug-lock. Wrench.

Wait… he unfolded the blaster, slowly, piece by piece, watching the components fold out and slip around… THERE.

“The blaster uses a magnetic field to hold in the plasma pellets! I just need to-” he set to work then, one handed diving into his own components to twist something into shape…

~~~

Just before coming down the elevator…

Link pursed his lips as he sank a hand into his chest to pull out the Zelda Core. He curled both hands around it and pressed the front against his chest. He exhaled, long and slow, and looked up at Shunt, then past her to the IMPA processor.

“When you have returned, Link, Zelda should have the drivers and protocols to initiate the Minicon transformation.” IMPA spoke softly, barely louder than the slight humming of her own brain. “She’ll be fine here.”

“I just. Last time I let her go, a Trash-snatch took her. So I don’t… I said I wouldn’t let her out of my sight.”

“If you take her,” Shunt said, patting Link on the shoulder, “she might get damaged during the trials. Is that worth it?”

Link huffed again, then handed the Core over to Shunt, who slotted it into a machine hooked up to the IMPA primary interface console, in the chamber with her processor. The machine was a hodge-podge thing, cobbled together by Link, Shunt, and two other old Sheikah, but it would have to do.

Link twisted his head side-to-side, rolled his shoulders, and looked back to Shunt.

“Alright,” Link said. “Take the elevator down. Use the code. Get in. Figure out how to get the Blessing. Come back. Zelda’s a minicon.”

“And we’ll figure out what’s next after that.” Shunt sat down on the fold-down flap of her rocker, and Link gave her a nod. “Good luck, Link.”

~~~

Present…

Link’s gun was completely disassembled and removed from his frame. He’d also flipped out his sling-shot, augmenting that weapon heavily as well. The sling-shot couldn’t actually flip back into its storage mounts but… it would work, hopefully. It now looked like he had a long barrel stuck in the V-shaped arms of the sling-shot, with multiple cables, fuel-lines, and metal rods connecting the internal systems of his arm, the sling-shot, and the blaster.

He slapped a metal plate he’d pulled off his thigh to the end of the barrel, triggered the polarizer, and stood up. He got on the platform, let the thump thump thump of the primer build up while the capacitors in his arm powered up, echoes in his frame of the machine he was standing inside… then released.

The metal panel launched off of his arm so powerfully that he was knocked off his feet and thrown off the plate. The panel hit the wall, a complete miss, with a resounding SMACK.

“Slag!” He said, getting to his feet to go collect his ammo. Then he had to try again.

It took him six tries before he figured out how to stand without falling over. After that, twelve attempts to aim. Then, on his nineteenth try… the metal panel slammed into the impact plate on the other side of the room, propelled by an intense magnetic field around the panel and the one he was forming in his arm. The impact plate set into the wall on the other side of the room slammed into place, and a great rumbling started, the machinery around him vibrating to life.

“YES!” Link shouted, jumping up and down. “Something happened!”

Light formed in the triangular primer he was standing in, then spread out across the lines to the circle he’d just hit. The depressed plate inside the circle glowed bright blue, then that color started to flow up along the ridge in the ceiling. Link gave chase, on foot instead of in his vehicle mode, the awkwardly tweaked weapon that his right arm had now become held against his chest, with his elbow cupped by his other hand.

The light beat him down the hallway, and something crunched, vibrated, pulsed up ahead. He exited the tunnel at a run and skidded to a halt in front of the immense, slate door. The upper third of the door was gleaming with energy, the symbols carved into it illuminated with the same soft, blue light. The light grew dimmer as it ran down the door, losing power.

“Got it. It takes three of these energy sources, generators or whatever, to power this door. Alright, so I-” there was a scraping sound, and then an immense THUNK behind him. Link frowned, turned slowly on the spot… and saw the door he’d entered originally from begin to move. It slid shut, and something hopped down from the upper seam where the door slotted into the wall.

It was a disk, basically. Four feet wide, maybe a foot thick, it was supported on four long, multi-jointed limbs, putting its ‘front’ at about eye-level with Link. At the front, it had a gleaming orange sensor that ran around the edge of the disk between the two front limb joints. Slung along its underbelly were a dozen smaller, curled limbs, each ending in tools and grippers of some kind.

The top of the disk was also not metal. It was stone, and Link saw a perfectly round section of the stone wall that was missing. Underneath was some kind of clunky machinery, twitching and pulsing with the same light he’d just turned on. The damn thing had been hidden in the wall!

The thing had landed a few feet in front of the door, and it scuttled around, making a strange “tek-tite-tek-tite” sound as its limbs clicked on the floor and its joints ratcheted noisily. That orange sensor faced Link, flared red… and the thing shot towards him.

Chapter Text

Tektite-tektite-tektite-TEKTITE the thing rattled, launching itself towards Link, before it bent low and leaped, the many limbs slung under its belly jabbing and snapping as it fell towards him.

Link yelped and leaped back, just barely evading the thing, the… the Tektite. It rounded on him and swiped with one of its legs, smashing Link in the thigh and throwing him to the ground. It leaped, and Link rolled away, once again barely dodging the drone. He got to his feet and took a few quick steps backwards. The Tektite skittered around to face him again, and started moving towards him more slowly, that red light scanning back and forth.

It was reformulating, thinking, and Link took the time to do the same.

“Okay… okay so some sort of… ancient repair drone? You… you fixed the main door. And now…hup!” he launched into a roll underneath the machine as it, once again, jumped towards him. It landed exactly where he’d been, and Link came up, his awkward cannon limb held tight to his chest.

“I’m not sure why you’re attacking me, I-” He dove again, rolling under the leaping Tektite for a second time. It shuffled its legs, turning slowly back to face him. He looked up towards the circle in the stone high up on the wall, where the Tektite must have appeared from. His optics narrowed briefly, and he leaped backwards as the scuttling drone swiped at his legs again.

“Activated when the power comes on. Power comes on to test… alright this is another test. Fine.”

There were another half-dozen close calls as the Tektite leaped, or skittered then swiped. Link adjusted his rolling technique, his jumps, keeping his distance, and he was pretty sure he had it down now. It was swiping when he was close enough, but otherwise it would jump on him. When it squatted down, he braced himself for a roll.

But then… the Tektite remained slightly-squatting, and Link frowned… then it jumped. He dove under it, but when the bot landed, it immediately leaped straight backwards. This time, it didn’t leap in a large arc, but just hurled itself straight backwards.

It caught Link in the side as he turned to face the drone. He was fully bowled over, and the drone slammed the underside of its disk-body onto him. It jabbed him with a dozen small tools, screwdrivers, scrapers, and blades. He yelled and squirmed, and it lifted up off him, giving him the room to roll onto his back, grab one of the legs, plant his feet on the hind legs, and shove himself out from under it before it could slam down on top of him again.

He forced himself onto his feet, backing up again. The thing was learning, so he had to learn faster. And… he had to actually do something about the thing. He pulled the large wrench out from his thigh and gave it a powerful upwards swing, smacking the thing as it turned around. The Tektite recoiled and snapped a leg out at him, but Link twisted the wrench, awkwardly slapping the limb away with the unbalanced improvised weapon.

Link hefted the wrench, pointing it at the drone and circling it. The Tektite stepped, and Link noticed that it took a while to turn. It had to move all four of its legs to reorient itself to face him.

He started moving left to right, half-circles around the Tektite, feet shuffling. He dragged up memories of training with Rustle, tracking his feet so that he was never crossing himself up. He fell into a rhythm, forcing the Tektite to turn over and over to track him. Then…

Unable to line itself up properly with him, it leaped sideways, a best guess shot, and he only had to twist a bit to avoid it. Then he swung the wrench into a massive overhead arc, striking the Tektite’s top. Stone cracked and the central disk slammed down onto the ground. One of the limbs bent awkwardly, trying to stop the downward motion, and the joint took the brunt of the force and bowed out.

“Gotcha!” Link yelled, only for the Tektite to swipe with one of its undamaged limbs once again, knocking his ankles together and dropping him. The damaged Tektite shoved itself forward, right on top of Link, little limbs gripping at the armor on his chest and thighs.

“SCRAP!” Link said, kicking his legs to try and get distance, and smacking the thing with the wrench. He was denting the plating, but he couldn’t get a proper swing. “I NEED A BETTER WEAPON,” he added, underlining each word with a CLANG of the wrench.

Then he remembered that he had one, awkward and unwieldy as it was. He jammed his modified blaster/sling-shot against one of the drone’s limb joints, and fired.

The magnetic pulse separated the two of them, sending him sliding along the ground to slam head-first against the far wall while it launched the disk into a spin and across the room. The Tektite bounced against one wall with a CRUNCH, folded partially down the middle. Still… it forced itself up onto its four limbs and started moving, slowly, towards Link.

Link rubbed his helm, wincing as he sat up to watch the drone approach. He grabbed the wrench, forced himself up onto his feet using the wrench to take his weight. He was getting really tired of getting beaten up as often as he was.

“Come on then… come on Tektite…” He planted his feet, lifted the wrench up to sling it across one shoulder, and stuck the point of his cannon against the top of one foot. When he lifted the cannon back up, Link winced as it tugged on the metal panel that curved over his toes. After a second of tension, the metal panel broke off, energon oozing from the broken lines, but he didn’t brandish the weapon. Not yet…

Link inhaled as the Tektite squatted down. He exhaled as it leaped. He held his breath when he launched into a roll underneath it once more. When the Tektite landed where he’d been and launched itself backwards again, he was ready for it. He came up, kneeling, the wrench abandoned. He lined up, fired.

The metal panel, an oblong piece of his own plating, launched at incredible speeds at the Tektite’s underbelly. It struck, dented, and broke through, erupting out the back of the machine in a spray of energon and metal shrapnel. The Tektite’s momentum was thoroughly ruined, and it fell straight down, a few feet in front of Link.

Link glared at it… then dropped down onto his rear with a huff.

“Why’d I think I could do this!” Link groaned, flopping onto his back, arms outstretched on either side.

Chapter Text

“Why’d I think I could do this!” Link groaned, flopping onto his back, arms outstretched on either side.

~~~

Hours earlier…

“Alright. So I’ll take the trials. We’ll get Zelda reformatted. She’s a minicon and I’m-” Link gulped. “A Prime? But then what?” Link’s foot was tapping rapidly, arms squeezing at his biceps. He needed to think about something else now.

“Yes, the wider problem is, of course, Ganon Magnus.” IMPA’s voice was tense. Something in Link resonated with that, and he settled himself down, staring at her primary screen.

“Uh, Shunt? You might want to sit,” Link said, and the woman frowned, then turned her walker around, flipped down the side panels, and sat.

~

“Thirty one million, four hundred and sixty seven thousand, two hundred and sixty nine years ago, this planet became embroiled in war. The cause of this war, if you ignore political nuance, was over power. Then it became a fight over dwindling resources. Over the span of four million years, Cybertron was brought to the brink of extinction. All means of creating new Cybertronians were lost. The planet’s Energon had been completely depleted, and the infrastructure to re-energize it did not exist.”

Images appeared on her screen. Ancient, grainy, fragmented and color-twisted pictures of Cybertron from old satellites: barren, burned, scarred. Cybertronians with odd frames that didn’t fit any of the frame-types Link was familiar with, battle-scarred and brandishing weapons made from metal, flame, and plasma.

“Their world, one of complete science, could turn other fuel sources, like Sunlight and Motion, into usable energy, but they could not replace Energon, and without any means of leaving the planet, the last two hundred and thirty eight Cybertronians realized that, whomever won this conflict… there would be nothing left after. All they had was each other. The fighting ended, and the Cybertronians, grieving for their world, for themselves, stared at the end of their existence, and were unsure what to do.”

More images: cities turned to rubble. Dull gray metal stretching out to the horizon. A red desert that Link realized was just… a sea of rusted metal.

“Then, the three Goddesses, as you call them, stepped forward. They were survivors of the war. Mortal Cybertronians who refused to let themselves die, to let their friends die. They dove into the Well of All Sparks, the place where all Sparks for all Cybertronians in existence, had originated. It had gone dry eons ago, but it connected to the core of the planet, the source of ALL life on Cybertron.”

Three Cybertronians, frames blurred or blocked, moving about others. Three figures, standing at the edge of a giant hexagonal (six-sided) pit that dropped into complete darkness. A tower of light blasting from that pit.

“I am unable to… describe what happened next. My systems were rudimentary then. But these three were reborn, and erupted from the planet’s core with a new vision. They scoured all traces of war from the planet. They seeded it with energy. They built systems and fail-safes to make sure that, never again, could this planet run out of Energon. It could not be hoarded, safe-guarded, mined or stolen. Now, the world gives Energon, repairs Energon, and gives it again.”

Modern images of a world, green and black with living metal. With plants collecting raw energon from the air and water, transforming it into higher grade Energon. Beasts consuming that higher grade Energon. Cybertronians hunting the beasts, harvesting their Energon.

“We’ve already discussed this, but this is also when your people became able to create life on their own. This is a process that the ancient Cybertronians were experimenting with called Budding, where-” as soon as an image of the complex factory systems folded up inside a Cybertronian abdomen appeared, Link flushed and waved both hands, while Shunt snickered.

“We don’t need to see that! We can move on, IMPA. I think we both know how Sparklings are made.”

“Alright, Link. The Great Reformatting process was… fast. The living Cybertronians were given a limited amount of time to choose where they wished to live, and once settled they were put into a state of rapid evolution. A handful of generations later, Cybertronians had diversified into the dozen or so different frame-types that now populate it.”

A handful of silhouettes appeared on the monitor. Those blockier, bulkier frame types from before spread out over a Globe of Cybertron. Then they scattered to different parts of the world, and the silhouettes warped and changed. Longer limbs and massive shoulders and immense height appeared, representing the Yeti people of Plurex Flats and the Gorons of Volcanica. Bodies shrank, stockier frames with dense limbs: the Twili of Kaon. Two grew long and lean, one with extra long limbs and short legs, engines on their back, and the other with a helm that extended down their back, flexible and tail-like. The Rito of the Argon Sea, and the Zora of the Mithril Sea, respectively. Some remained mostly unchanged, but varied in height and build a little: The Autocons of Iacon, the Sheikah of Uraya, the Gerudo of their Desert, the Hylian people of Lanayru. And then a few more silhouettes appeared from nowhere: the bestial Kokiri of Kalis, the extremely tiny Minish from Altihex, and the Oocca, from Luna 1, one of Cybertron’s moons.

“Nayru, the Goddess of Wisdom, was the one who seeded the world with Life. She was the one who saw that this world could not be left only in the hands of Cybertronians, who were rife with flaws. Plants, Beasts, Weather, all of this, she created, so that the world would be cared for by more than just Cybertronians.”

More beasts, plants, vast swaths of the world untouched by Cybertronians, viewed through satellite, drone, and ancient surveillance equipment.

“Din, the Goddess of Power, was the one who created the cycle of Energon. Depleted Energon is eventually carried to Plurex Flats-” a globe appeared, and a section of Cybertron is highlighted: an immense glacier that stretches a quarter of the way around the planet “-where the Plurexian Energy Field uses sunlight and the motion of the particles through the atmosphere to recharge the Energon. Now, unless Cybertronians begin leaving the planet and taking vast amounts of Energon off the planet, the world can never run out.”

“Farore, the Goddess of Courage, oversaw the restructuring of the world. She pulled most of the vast weapons of war into the Rust Sea, where they would be impossible to recover, and would eventually be eroded back into trace minerals to be returned to the planet. She then helped the Cybertronians to find new places to live.”

An animated segment appeared, of a figure made entirely out of green light reaching out, grabbing a warship the size of a city out of the sky, and slamming it down into that vast sea of rust, where it sank and was ripped apart by rust, monsters, and the ravages of time.

“This is information that is widely accepted by Cybertron.”

Link and Shunt both glanced at each other here. The story of the Three Goddesses was widely told, and some believed it to be more metaphorical. Shunt was not one of them, and Link had never really thought about it.

“My limited capacity at the time means I cannot confirm much, but I was aware as time passed. My instruments detected and tracked several things lost to time. First, the three goddesses erupted from the planet’s core at specific locations. Nayru came up from the bottom of the Mithral Sea. Din broke through into a vast cave system under the south pole, near the ancient city of Kaon. Farore came up in the center of the Rust Sea.”

A blue pulse of light blasted up out of stone and through water, boiling it. Red slammed through the crust of Cybertron, lava following it. That same green figure from before climbed out of the sea of rust, sending a cloud of shrapnel into the upper atmosphere.

“In each of these places, infrastructure similar to the Well of All Sparks appeared. It was not as vast and could not create Cybertronian Sparks like the original Well… but it was still a conduit that led straight to the primordial power at the center of this planet. And before the Great Reformatting, it was exposure to that power that turned Cybertronians into Primes.”

“The people living in those areas built temples over these wells, to safeguard the power. These Primordial Temples… for the first few million years after the Great Reformatting, people would journey to them, to take the trials, to be deemed worthy by the Goddess of their choosing, and to receive their Blessing.”

More hastily sketched animated imagery: a Cybertronian, standing at the edge of an octagonal pit. A pulse of light, first blue, then red, then green. The Cybertronian shaking, growing larger, stronger, more armor.

“These ancient Primes led their people in times of strife, and when the Hylian people began pushing for unification, they created the Triforce of Leadership. This would allow them to create Primes, one for each of the different peoples of Cybertron, without traveling to the primordial temples and going through those dangerous, often deadly, trials. These new primes would lead the world as a whole. These representatives, Senators of the world, have led Cybertron for almost fifteen million years.”

“When a Senator retires, their power is returned to the Triforce, to be passed on to another. When a Senator dies before returning the power, it takes time for the Triforce to regain the power necessary to empower another. The power cannot be taken by force, and must be surrendered willingly. Then, when a new Senator is elected into office, they undertake a rigorous series of tests and trials, attempting to identify not only if they have the will, temperament, and capability to be an effective leader, but which of the Goddesses’ Three Blessings best suits them. Then… it grants this power.”

Sparring matches between Senatorial hopefuls. A bot pushing itself between two angry, larger bots as they argued, defusing the situation carefully. A race-track obstacle course, Cybertronians swerving to avoid hazards and each other. A bot leaned over a data pad, stylus carefully scribbling out words, possibly writing an essay? Link wasn’t sure.

Then… a bot with a purple arm reaching out, viewed as if Link was looking through her optics. Fingers slipped into a field of blue, green, and red light, and the limb tensed, and drew out the Triforce, gripping it firmly by the bottom-left triangle. Then a flare of blue light…

Link realized… he was seeing through Zelda’s optics, watching her as she received her blessing, and the image faded quickly. He turned his attention to the Zelda Core inside him, but Zelda was silent.

“The Triforce is a powerful artifact, created using technology and, possibly, the guidance of the Goddesses themselves. It is a symbol of them, as well as a symbol of a Cybertron healed and united once again.”

The triforce appeared on the screen: Three equilateral triangles, glowing gold. Twelve Cybertronian sparks circled it, bouncing and bobbing in a strange rhythm.

IMPA fell silent then, the humming of the machinery all around them deafening in the absence f her voice. After a few moments of quiet, Shunt leaned forward.

“Thank you, IMPA, for that story. Some of it was news to me, and that’s… not something that happens often.”

Link remained quiet, thinking. The Three Goddesses, he knew that. The ancient temples that could create a prime, he hadn’t known about those. The Triforce as a symbol of the Goddesses, he’d known about that, but as a physical object? He’d never really… thought about how Primes were made.

Link blinked suddenly.

“Wait. If the Triforce can make Primes, and the three places that the Goddesses came from can make Primes, where am I going? That isn’t one of the three Primordial Temples, and you mentioned the fourth goddess.”

“Correct, Link. This one is actually older, as I said, but it does link to the same power source. I only used the Fourth Goddess explanation to put it into terms that I felt would resonate with you and Shunt most easily. In truth, the deity is likely meant to be Primus, or possibly one of the first 12, the Cybertronians created by Primus at the dawn of time. Some ancient Cybertronian civilizations revered them as gods. Regardless, this Blessing will not be… the same, as the others. But I think that it will be just what we need to stop Ganondorf, and save the world.”

Link frowned, sat up, and exhaled heavily.

“I’m not going to enjoy what you have in mind, do you?”

“I suppose not, unless you enjoy long journeys that will take you all over the world, where you will meet many fascinating strangers, see many amazing sights, and face incredible danger!”

“That last one is a bit of a problem for me, really. Any way we can eliminate the incredible danger part?”

“Nope!”

Link sighed again. Wonderful.

~

Present…

“Amazing sights, my fender.” Link heaved himself back up to his feet, snatched his wrench, and nudged the mangled metal of the drone. When it didn’t move, he turned towards one of the tunnels on the left side of the room, and started on his way.

Chapter Text

“Amazing sights, my fender.” Link heaved himself back up to his feet, snatched his wrench, and nudged the mangled metal of the drone. When it didn’t move, he turned towards one of the tunnels on the left side of the room, and started on his way.

~

Link muttered a few curses as he stood in the entrance of the next chamber. It was laid out the same as the previous chamber: oblong, ridge down the ceiling, triangle on the floor. However, cutting the chamber in half, was a partially transparent wall, with a gap only a few feet wide on either side. Link could fit, but he definitely couldn’t stand on the Triangle and fire at the circular impact plate… which was on the ceiling instead of the wall.

He stood on the triangle and let it cycle up, thumping away… then he ran off it, sprinting furiously towards the gap between the clear wall and the outside wall. He clipped the former, twisted, and banged into the back wall. The thumping also stopped.

“Damnit.” Link marched back to the triangle, and started the cycle again.

He made the run three times before he realized that, even when he pivoted just in time to avoid slamming into the back wall, the thumping of the triangle-induced power primer stopped. He couldn’t just… run it off. He wasn’t fast enough.

“Maybe if I could transform I could-” he started shifting, twisting into his alt-mode, and managed most of it. A portion of his front, however, didn’t form. Instead, his right arm jutted out from his undercarriage, the wheel folded halfway out of his elbow, and the augmented cannon jutted partially upright. He drove a few circles around the front half of the room, but he couldn’t really build up the speed he needed. The awkward alignment of one of his front wheels made maneuvering difficult, and brought his top-speed down.

He drove over to the gap, though, and thunked his front against the gap, unable to fit through it.

He backed up, accelerated gently into the gap again. He sat there idling for a few seconds, then backed up and hit it one more time, before completely cutting his engine.

“This is bunk.”

~

A few minutes later, Link heaved the body of the drone off of him, dropping it into a crumpled heap on top of the triangular primer. The thumping started up, and Link took a few moments to breathe heavily. With his new alt-mode, he didn’t have a truck bed anymore, and he couldn’t keep the thing on his roof, so he’d had to half-drag, half-carry the drone back into the room.

Once recovered, he walked back over to the gap, squeezed through it, crouched, and aimed straight up. This time, a piece of the drone’s metal underbelly was stuck to the end, and Link only missed twice before he nailed the circular impact plate on the ceiling.

The second engine coughs then roars into life, the building rumbling around him. He felt another thrill of victory, straightened up, and headed for the exit back to the main room. After a few steps, he transformed again, once again taking it slow so he doesn’t accidentally swing his weapon back into his body and crush it. As he drove along, slightly faster than a full sprint but nowhere close to his top speed (in this twisted close-enough alt-mode), he muttered quietly to himself.

“Probably gonna have to… jump over a sharkticon-infested pit. Or… or fight Ganondorf. Just gonna be hanging out down here, waiting for me.” His voice dropped a few octaves as he trundled along. “Bleh, I’m Ganondorf. I eat people, Bleh Bleh Bleh.” He paused then, the only sound that of his engine roaring and his wheels rolling over stone.

“That’d be my luck. Stupid vampire warlords.”

He drove out of the tunnel, turned sharply, and yelped as another Tektite dropped down in front of him. He swerved, cursing, spun out, and thumped against the wall between the two tunnels on the left side of the room.

The second Tektite, identical save for the pattern of stone on its back, started turning steadily to face him, and Link’s vehicle mode twitched, deflating slightly. Then…

“At least it isn’t Ganondorf. Welp, I’m not dragging your ass into this next room, come on then!” He accelerated, avoiding the leap of the Tektite just in time, and turned into the last remaining tunnel. The Tektite’s leaps after Link faded quickly enough as he put distance between himself and it. Either it would catch up, or it wouldn’t.

~

Link turned into the next room and transformed without fully stopping, landing in an awkward jog. This room was laid out exactly the same with one dramatic change. The groove in the ceiling leading out and back to the door Link was trying to open did not run along the length of the room and down the back wall. Instead, it veered off, ran down the left wall, and then along the ground, where it met a circular shape on the floor. Then, lines twisted off the circle and all over the floor, but they all converged on the back wall, where they met a triangular shape about ten feet off the ground.

It took a few minutes of pacing back and forth and exploring the room for the faint echoes of something skittering down the hall to finally reach Link. During that time, he’d ironed out the real specifics of the situation.

1 - He had to either hold down the triangular primer plate with his body weight OR hit the plate to start the priming process.

2 - Assuming the primer worked the same way as the other two, he would have a few seconds after the full press before the primer stopped working.

3 - While the primer was active, he had to strike the circular magnetic impact plate as hard as he could with something magnetically charged, opposite the plate’s charge.

4 - With the primer on the wall, and the impact plate on the ground sixty feet away, Link could not get a good line on the impact plate even while in contact with the primer plate. It’d be like trying to hit the center of an archery target on a third floor balcony while standing directly below the balcony.

5 - Another Tektite was coming down the hall, and he had to deal with that. It appeared after he activated the second room. He assumed a third would show up back in the main room when he activated this one.

He was out of time. The second Tektite scuttled into the room, limbs tek-tite-ing over and over as it raced inside. Link twisted out of the way of it, and it started to turn, but he was on it, fast.

He stepped in, smashed it in one of its leg joints, and then kicked the damaged leg, hard. The Tektite flopped, unbalanced, as the limb was knocked out from under it, so Link swung the wrench up and over, hammering it in the back, much like he’d done the previous Tektite.

When it swiped at him, he jumped backwards, and took a moment to catch his breath after the flurry of blows. The Tektite used this time to get its wounded leg under it, then squat and leap, jumping for him. He rolled under it, came up with his back to the wall… then had an idea.

Link narrowed his optics and scooched along the wall, forcing the Tektite to turn a little more to line up with him, then jump. Link rolled to the side, then jumped up, dug his fingers into grooves on the wall, and held himself three feet off the ground.

The Tektite, facing him again, hesitated. It moved side-to-side a little, then squatted and jumped. Link dropped down and jumped backwards, and the Tektite scrunched against the wall a bit, having re-oriented itself in mid-air to point its underbelly at Link up on the wall. The Tektite hit the wall and bounced off, falling on its edge, and had to flail its legs a bit to keep itself from falling on its back.

“Huh. Okay…” Link looked over his shoulder at the triangular plate, then back at the circular magnetic impact plate across the room… “Okay!” He baited the bot into a few more jumps. It started doing the same backwards leap after he would roll under it, so he had to roll sideways right after. The paint on his shoulders and back were scraping off, but he was getting pretty good at this dodge roll maneuver.

He put the wrench away, and pulled out one of the metal scraps he’d taken from the first Tektite to use for ‘ammo.’ He jumped backwards to avoid a swipe of one of the Tektite’s legs. Then… he turned and ran, slotting the metal into the end of the jury-rigged magnetic launcher on his right arm. He heard the thing racing after him, but he had to get some distance. He pulled ahead, a little faster on foot until the thing built up momentum, and jumped up. Again, he grabbed at the wall, and struggled furiously to haul himself up, using improvised grippers on his cannon arm to help him.

Once he was able, he planted his feet on the bottom edge of the triangular depression the primer plate sat in, and turned around to face the Tektite, balancing precariously.

Coolant dripped down his face, into transformation seams and behind armor plating. He was ten feet off the ground, almost twice his own height, and while a fall from here wouldn’t really hurt, he definitely didn’t want to do it with the drone RIGHT there. Plus, the plan was stupid, and he’d probably only get one shot at this.

“Come on, come on!” He shouted, as the Tektite stopped a few feet from the wall and tilted its rim-sensor up towards him. It wriggled, tamped down its feet, and Link tried not to project emotion onto it. It looked… annoyed. It stepped back a few steps, moved side-to-side just like it had before… then squatted down.

“Come on come on comeoncomeoncomeon-” Link muttered, tensing his limbs. He was only held up by the slight grip of his fingers, his feet only making contact on the heels. The cannon limb was thumping, building up its charge, and then… the Tektite launched itself.

Link yelled something between “AAAAH” and “HUP!” kind of a… “HYA” and jumped up. His feet kicked, made contact with the edge of the Tektite as it closed, and he was able to get a few extra feet in his leap. He pointed his magnetic cannon, limbs moving torturously slow as he tried… there!

At about sixteen, seventeen feet in the air, and five or six feet from the wall, the angle on the circular impact plate was not as severe. If he landed this shot, there’d be enough impact, hopefully, to set it off. He just needed-

The Tektite slammed belly-first into the primer plate, causing it to slot into the wall. The moment Link heard the THUMP, still in the air and starting to fall… he fired.

The recoil sent him spinning in the air and he didn’t see it, but he heard it… and then heard the machinery sputter to life, power coursing through the forgotten temple and lighting the space up further.

He smashed head-first into the ground, and saw a different kind of light.

Chapter Text

The recoil sent him spinning in the air and he didn’t see it, but he heard it… and then heard the machinery sputter to life, power coursing through the forgotten temple and lighting the space up further.

He smashed head-first into the ground, and saw a different kind of light.

~

Hours earlier…

Link had been quiet for almost a full minute after IMPA made it explicitly clear that he’d have to go on a dangerous quest to save the world somehow. Head in his hands, optics shuttered, the armor plates and panels clenched against his frame*, he couldn’t break free of the sudden spiral of panic in his processor.

Danger. More time away from home. More fighting. He didn’t even have a way to defend himself! Well, he had a gun, but that wasn’t defense, that was offense. He couldn’t stop someone from hurting him with that, only hurt them first. And he didn’t want that to be-

Shunt put a hand on his shoulder and gave a sharp squeeze, the points of her fingers digging into a seam under the armored components. The pressure snapped Link, briefly, out of this twisting loop, and he turned his head up to look at her.

She wasn’t looking at him. Instead, she was focused on IMPA’s primary screen again.

“Alright, IMPA, what is Ganondorf doing that requires us to save the world?” Shunt’s words were calm, but there was steel in them, an implacable willpower that only someone who had been able to keep a secret like IMPA for as long as she had could have, and she put particular emphasis on ‘us.’

Link took in a shaky breath and straightened up a little, also looking back to IMPA.

“Ah, yes! That is an important detail. I don’t have all the information necessary, but based on Senator Zelda’s report and what I understand about Primes, I think I have enough to hazard a guess.”

She cleared her throat.

“The energies that transform a bot into a Prime, and the exact nature of the transformation, are well documented. While we cannot replicate the unique radiation and programming blocks that carry out the change, there is a large body of research in the Iacon Research Institute and the Cybertronia Pax Secret Projects Division that-”

Link flinched as Zelda suddenly cycled up, and shouted in his head.

“That’s highly classified information! How does IMPA have access to those projects?”

Link rubbed at his temples, aching from the sudden drain on his energon reserves.

“Zelda wants to know how you can access that, IMPA.”

“Oh! I’m a highly advanced computerized intelligence made from ancient technology. It turns out that the many anti-hacking defense mechanisms in modern Cybertron are not equipped to repel me. In the last few hours I’ve been scanning through as much as I can until someone notices and finds a way of keeping me out.”

Shunt snickered. “So you’ve got access to every dirty little secret the government’s kept over the last few million years?”

“Exactly. It’s how I’ve managed to piece together what Ganondorf is doing. He’s been funding research into containing and redirecting the unique energies the Triforce gives off. His goal is to return all the energy to the Triforce at once, by executing the entire Senate, and then take all of it at once.”

Shunt and Link both frowned, looking to one another then to IMPA’s screen.

“But… that wouldn’t work. You said earlier that the powers can’t be stolen or forced,” Shunt said, sitting next to Link now.

“I said they cannot be taken away by force. Ganondorf has also invested in personal upgrades that allow him to house multiple sparks in his frame.”

Link perked up a little.

“Zelda said that Ganondorf went out of his way to swallow the Prime’s sparks whole, and that each time he seemed to get stronger.”

“Exactly, Link. Based on some of these projects that he’s invested in or transferred off the main network, he has the ability to take in a spark and add its power to his own. The Senators are, in some fashion, still alive. They are powering his frame, or at least, powering specialized weapon systems.”

This time, a crudely animated image of Ganondorf appeared, one hand transformed into a comically large cannon of some kind. Ganondorf pulled a lever, trying to fire the weapon, but it just vibrated, twitched, and spat out a bit of smoke. Ganondorf then turned around, grabbed a blue ball from behind him, and put it in the barrel of the cannon, and when he pulled the lever, a massive line of fire shot from it, propelling Ganondorf off screen.

“Were he to acquire Zelda’s spark,” IMPA began, once the comical sound of Ganondorf squealing off screen faded to nothing, “he’d be able to return the power of all twelve primes to the Triforce at once. Normally, the Triforce only holds enough power to change three primes, one for each blessing, and it must spend time gathering the energy to make more. But this return of 12 blessings would supercharge the Triforce, it would become unstable, and the protections that prevent it from giving any one person more than one blessing’s-worth of power would break. Ganondorf would take on enough transformative power to make 12 primes at once.”

A silhouette of an average Cybertronian frame. A second silhouette appeared, slightly, larger and broader, with PRIME written underneath it. Then a third silhouette, slightly larger than the Prime, with PRIME x2 under it.

“As far as I am aware, no one has ever received a second Prime blessing. The Triforce simply does not give out that power… but Ganondorf has, possibly, found a way around this. The spark-powered weapon systems and upgrades alone have made him more formidable, but if this works he would become something never seen before on Cybertron.”

Shunt frowned, chin resting on an upturned hand while she listened, and thought.

“A power hungry Ganon Magnus, who has just tricked the world into buying that he’s their last legally elected leader. He’d not just be a God, but a God with the entire planet’s resources to defend him.” Shunt spoke softly, worried. “And Ganondorf Prime has been an avid supporter of expanding the military, and planetary colonization. He wants an empire, and no one would be able to stop him.”

IMPA was quiet for a few moments. Shunt said nothing, mulling that over. Link saw that whirlpool of panic in his mind once more, and for a moment, thought about casting himself into it. Sinking to the bottom of his processor, he could just wait, again, for someone else to pull him out and point him in a direction.

“But you’ve got a plan, don’t you IMPA?” He asked, trying for some of Shunt’s steel in his voice. “What exactly do we do about it?”

Present…

Link shoved himself up, shaking his head furiously. That hurt. Who could have predicted that a few more feet could turn an annoying fall into a borderline knockout? He dragged up his HUD, scanning through damage reports, but other than some of the servos in his neck and a nasty dent in his helm, he seemed alright. Mostly. He just-

TEK-TITE-TEK-TITE.

Link heaved himself into a forward roll. Almost on auto-pilot, he reloaded the magnet cannon, spun, and fired, the plate spinning and slicing through the Tektite’s sensor array and deep into its internals. It flinched and rocked, limbs moving awkwardly, and Link freed his wrench, stepped up, and slammed hard on the protruding metal, driving the wedge deeper into the Tektite’s inner mechanisms.

It twitched once more, then collapsed in a heap.

Link sucked in a deep breath, something inside his chest twisted and snapped, and his systems crashed again.

Chapter Text

It took a few minutes for Link to wake up this time, and when he did, his systems were sluggish, booting up one at a time. He sat up, hand pressed to his helmet, and his other hand against his side.

Warnings flashed on his HUD; bright red alerts listing a lot of minor damage that had all added up, causing his processor to stall. That fall had really taken it out of him, more than he’d thought, and fighting the Tektite right after had not helped.

“Uuugh…” Link groaned, shaking his head a few times. Something rattled around in there, clicking and clacking, and he winced. Link spent the next ten minutes taking stock, moving slowly to let damaged joints and mechanisms repair themselves, but he’d need a lot more time to get back to full operation. He then spent two hours using the Tektite and prying off pieces to improvise tools he could use to effect better repairs, and siphoned off what usable fluids he could.

The tech was old. The lubricants, oil, and processor fluid was fine, but the energon had strange particles in it, crystals of some kind. His improvised filter did not get rid of them, but he needed to top off. He’d have to risk it, and hope his internal filters could cope.

The moment the crystals entered his system, though, his HUD flared with giant question marks. Link arched his back, tension filling his frame. The crystals fragmented into nano-machines, mixing with his own internal nano infrastructure.

“Woah!” He gasped. The more serious warnings in his HUD started to flicker and roll back to lesser versions, as his body set to work repairing itself from the inside out. The energon still in the Tektite’s system diffused into vapor, and it chewed through the Tektite, breaking pieces of it down and flowing into Link’s open fuel lines. The raw materials were used to patch holes in his fuel-lines, to stitch together damaged panels. He felt pistons and clasps and ties his automated systems had used to stop bleeds get forced apart, returned to storage points in his frame.

Once he hooked into the Energon of the Tektite, he recovered as if he’d spent a few hours on a recharge slab and got some actual medical attention, which he hadn’t had since… since Ordon Village, with Rustle and Doctor Tire-tracks.

The relief of tension threatened to knock him back out, but not with pain or system shock. He just felt light-headed, like he’d just taken a deep breath after holding it for just a bit too long.

“That… was a trip.” He said, softly shaking out his hand and rolling his shoulders where he sat. He fidgeted a little, once more taking stock of his system and refreshing his damage alerts. Not perfect, but better than he had been. He’d have to siphon off the energon of these things, maybe find a canteen and store it somehow.

He got up, pushed a few exposed components on his cannon arm back into place, stocked up on metal scraps to use as ammo, and then transformed to head back to the main room. He came in at speed, barely slowing down. He noticed the new Tektite almost immediately, so he circled the room once. The Tektite was turning to face him, but he wasn’t hesitating anymore. A little exhilarated from the repair Energon, he drove as fast as he could directly at the Tektite, angled the cannon and fired while still in vehicle mode. The Tektite jolted, taking the hit in a leg joint. Then Link hit it, smashing into the thing and bowling it over. That hurt, denting the front of Link’s alt-mode, but he transformed, sliding on his knees, and lined up another shot. The recoil sent him into a half spin, but he let himself go, the wheels in his knees partially exposed to let him move.

He completed a full turn and was on his feet. The Tektite was missing a limb from the second shot, the metal plate shearing the leg off just a few inches from the disk-like body. Link pulled out his wrench again, stalked forward, and dodged an awkward stab with one of the legs. Two hard swings at the sensor plate on the front edge of the disk, and the Tektite shuddered to a stop, leaking Energon and other fluids.

This time, Link didn’t pass out. He just grinned, and readjusted the armor plating on his knees to protect the wheels.

“I’m getting pretty good at this,” Link said, pulling out a bowl-shaped hunk of metal he’d slotted onto his back. He set it under the Tektite’s partially-collapsed body, to collect the Energon. Then he turned towards the huge slate door.

The geometric symbols covering it were now fully illuminated, everywhere. All down its length, it gleamed with power, and Link stepped towards it. The slight upward slant of the room’s floor leveled out about ten feet from the door, and as soon as he stepped there, the door made a loud whirring sound. Without any of the strange, mechanical-failure noises from the previous door, this door started to move. It slid easily on hidden tracks, up into the ceiling. Link could have walked under the moving door much sooner, but he didn’t, watching the massive door slide smoothly up.

The room on the other side was as large as this chamber, but with a hexagonal pit in the middle of the room. The pit was a hundred feet wide. At its center, was a platform, a smaller echo of the six-sided shape of the pit. Walkways, barely wide enough for a more typically-sized Cybertronian to walk across, but more than wide enough for someone as small as Link, connected the platform to the edges of the pit. From this distance, Link could just barely make out some kind of console or device on that central Platform, and he grinned, stepped into the room, and made for the first walkway.

Immediately, the door slammed shut behind him, crashing down with an echoing SLAM. The only light was now from the pit, illuminating the space from below. The light shifted in quality, though, from white to orange, and Link frowned. Then…

Tek-tititititite. Tek-tititititite. The sound of a Tektite limb colliding with a surface, and then the ratcheting of joints as it moved, echoed about the space, but it was deeper, heavier.

Then a Tektite, nine feet tall and fifteen feet wide, dropped from the ceiling in front of the walkway he’d been approaching. It wasn’t the faded, almost-blue gray color of the others. Its underbelly and limbs were a bright red with orange accents, and slung under the belly, instead of tools and grippers, was a massive gun, a little flame flickering at the end of a spike in front of the open barrel.

“Oh no.” Link said, optics widening and shoulders drooping.

Chapter Text

The Mega-tite took one step forward, then launched its limb forward at Link, who jumped aside. Then it swiped to the side, catching him in the chest and launching him away. Link hit the ground, rolled head over heels a few times before he came to a stop on his stomach, groaning. That hurt.

The Mega-tite turned towards him, moving with the same slow, shuffling gait. He got to his feet and backed up while the immense machine stalked forwards, following Link as he moved around the circumference of the room. Yawning pit to his left, wall to his right, monster in front of him, Link furiously spun up his processor, thinking.

He had his twisted sling-shot / blaster magnet cannon. He had a lot of ammo for it, though after about five shots he’d have to start ripping pieces of his own armor off. He had his wrench. He knew how these things moved, but this thing was bigger and had a flaming gun that-

The Tektite had stopped moving, and was tracking him with the gun, and suddenly it tilted back… and a wave of burning plasma launched across the room. Link yelled and jumped to the side, onto one of the walkways, and ran across it, the heat of the plasma scorching his back but not doing any real damage. He hadn’t been hit by it, after all.

Right before he made it to the central platform, he heard the Tektite leap, and it landed, limbs perfectly planted on the various walkways, cannon pointed point-blank into Link’s face. He yelled again and ducked underneath it, around the center console, and out the back, forcing the Tektite to shuffle, swinging its immense limbs out and over the pit and onto other walkways to face him.

He was only about two thirds of the way across when he heard the click of the flamethrower, so he transformed and shot forward, swerving out the far end just as the plasma fired down the walkway and scorched the wall.

He drove in loops, the Mega-tite turning its cannon, but it couldn’t really… line up a shot with him driving circles around the outer perimeter. Finally, it stopped moving, squatting over the central platform, motionless, which gave Link some time to think. He slowed down a bit.

He started looking around more carefully. The walls were stone, the ceilings were far, far above them. There was a patch of stone missing from the very top of the dome-like ceiling, directly above the central platform. The inner mechanisms of the temple were exposed there. That must have been where the Mega-tite had been waiting.

Carved into the walls were more of those geometric shapes. And… oh, those were pillars. Spires of stone, hexagonal themselves, a few feet across and narrowing to sharp points at their tips some sixty feet above the ground, positioned in line with each of the walkways.

“Okay… okay!” Another plan was forming, an idea that would, probably, just get him baked into ash.

~

Hours earlier…

“But you’ve got a plan, don’t you IMPA?” He asked, trying for some of Shunt’s steel in his voice. “What exactly do we do about it?”

“You will first have to venture into this Forgotten Temple, and receive the Blessing from it. This will, if my meddling works, prepare you to house the rest of the Blessings. Once that is done, you’ll return here and we’ll reformat Zelda into a Minicon, allowing her to help you more directly. After that, you’ll have to travel to the three Primordial Temples to gain their Blessings. No one has ever held all three Blessings at once, but the Forgotten Blessing should make it possible. Once you’ve acquired all three Blessings, you’ll be able to stand up to Ganon Magnus and stop him.”

A Globe appeared, highlighting the four temple locations: the Forgotten Temple here, in the Uraya District, the Primordial Temple of Power, at the South Pole, deep in the Kaon District. The Temple of Wisdom, on the other side of the world, at the bottom of the Mithril Sea, and finally the Temple of Courage, far to the north, in the center of the Gerudo Desert. Then a cartoonish Ganondorf appeared on the map, at Hyrule city, in the heart of the Lanayru district.

“You will likely have to deal with Ganondorf’s Demicons, as well as all kinds of wild creatures and other dangers while traveling to these locations. You may have to get help from the locals if you’re to navigate their territories. While you could visit the three temples in any order, I’d recommend visiting the Temple of Power first, and the Temple of Courage last. The Temple of Power is furthest from Ganon Magnus and the people of Kaon have never been… particularly receptive to the influence of the Senate. You may need the Power and Wisdom Blessings to get to the Temple of Courage; it is in the middle of Ganondorf’s original domain.”

Link nodded along as IMPA spoke, flashes of photographs and 3D models appearing to indicate potential threats.

“Alright. South Pole, bottom of the ocean, middle of the desert, fight a warlord. That’s… how is someone supposed to do all that? I’m just… even if I DID manage the Forgotten Temple, and came out… primified or whatever, I barely made it the two thousand miles between Ordon Village and Kakariko. You’re asking me to travel around the entire planet!”

IMPA and Shunt were both quiet for a moment, but it was Zelda who broke the silence. Her core cycled up, hummed against the side of his spark chamber. Then…

“You won’t be alone, Link. I’ll be right there with you, every step of the way.”

Something hot and and painful pricked at the back of Link’s optics and he tensed as the fluid built up at the edges of his eyes. Shunt saw this and reached out, gripped his shoulder tightly, and leaned in, almost touching her forehead to his.

“We’ll help you, little one. There are Sheikah all over, and I’ll send the word. You’ll have friends all over the place.”

IMPA trilled an agreement then, and flashed an animated image of two immensely armored and powerful limbs clasping their hands together.

“And I’ll give you every bit of information I can think of, and try to find a way to communicate with you more regularly. You won’t be flying blind. Do Cybertronians still say that?”

Link looked between these two new friends. He touched his chest where the third new friend whirred noisily just to get his attention without draining his vitals.

The moisture at his eyes dried up, and he stood up. He opened his mouth to speak…

~

Present…

“Let’s get started!” Link shouted coming to a skidding halt at the edge of a walkway and starting to run down it. The Mega-Tite turned, lined up its cannon, but Link jumped back and off, diving for cover. The bot turned slightly to face him and fired, forcing him again to throw himself to the ground to avoid the actual shot. Coolant flash-boiled on his frame, and a few lines ruptured under his plating from the sheer heat. He transformed again, cursing. He needed the tite to fire RIGHT down the walkway, but if he went down too far, he couldn’t dodge the fire.

He came up to the next walkway and swerved onto it in his alt-mode, screaming as he tried something else absolutely bonkers. The Mega-tite turned and pointed its flamethrower at him again, and he waited… waited… click click WHOOSH.

Fire shot towards him and he transformed, kicked off the ground, and grabbed the support for the guard rail on the walkway. He swung out and under the rail, off the bridge, hanging by one hand. The heat flashed over his hand and his general terror-filled scream became one of pure agony as the metal melted.

His momentum carried him right back around to the walkway, and he transformed back and drove back the way he’d come, down the burning hot metal. The Mega-tite hissed and clicked, but couldn’t fire again… so it jumped.

It landed right at the edge of the walkway, inches in front of Link, and he transformed again, dove under it, and just barely missed as the thing slammed its full weight onto the ground where he’d, moments ago, been.

The reverberations from this slam caused the stone spire to wobble, the half-melted base twisting… and giving out.

With a colossal SCRUNCH the pillar fell on top of the Mega-tite, several tons of stone crashing on top of it. The thing slammed back into the ground, pinned, and started kicking and flailing its legs.

“YES!” Link shouted, coming up a few feet to the side and ducking under a flailing leg. He grinned, stepping back out of range.

There… he hesitated, unsure of what to do. The thing was shifting its weight, legs moving with more coordination, so he turned and ran, transforming halfway through a step, cannon still hanging awkwardly out the front of his alt-mode. He raced down the next walkway, towards the center platform to investigate it.

At that point, the Mega-tite screamed, and there was a sound like… hundreds of scissors opening and closing. Link stood up and turned, watching… as the Mega-tite stood up and turned.

The disk-like body’s outer edges folded inwards, giving it a pair of parallel sides instead of it being perfectly round. This swung the legs so that they attached more towards the middle of the thing’s outer edges. The two ‘hind’ limbs bent at the middle, the blunt feet coming in and attaching at the ‘hips’. New joints formed, giving it knees in the logical place, and feet folded down out of the front of the legs. It stood on those legs, while the front legs did the same thing. They folded at the middle, the ends slotting in at the ‘armpits’ as three fingered, clawed hands sprouted from the new end of the limb. The sensor array at the front of the bot extended up and away, then folded into thirds, forming a triple layer of sensor array attached to a long neck.

Finally, the robot-mode Mega-tite reached up, detached the flamethrower from its belly, and held it in both hands. Now, instead of a nine-foot tall, fifteen foot wide disk with legs, it was a fifteen foot high, slouched, gangly figure.

“Holy SCRAP!” Link shouted, ducking behind the center console AGAIN as the thing ran down the walkway, brandishing its flame cannon. When it reached the center and loomed over him, pointing the gun down at him, he jumped between its legs and drove off, wheels bouncing as he hit the walkway awkwardly.

“Shit shit shit shit-” he muttered, listening as the thing turned and gave chase. When he reached the end of the walkway and turned, the thing leaped right off the walkway to land in front of him, and he crashed into its feet. Immediately, it reached down to grab the top of his alt-mode, but he transformed just before it could get a good grip and it ended up just ripping a hunk of his roof plating off. A section of his ‘hat’ was missing, and energon dripped from the damaged panel.

He landed on its foot again, and he did the only thing he could think of. He pointed his cannon up and fired, a hunk of tektite plating slicing up into the thing’s abdomen.

The Mega-tite shrieked and stepped back, and Link used his reprieve to skitter on all fours then transform, driving back the other way. He heard the click-click-click and yelled. All he could do was keep driving, but there was nowhere to go. Just a huge stone pillar blocking the path.

He reached the pillar and transformed, vaulted, transformed as he fell, flames hot on his tires. However, once again he was just in time. The plasma hit the pillar and splashed upwards, momentum ruined, and he kept going. As he rounded, he watched the thing transform back into its Mega-tite mode, and leap back into the central platform, turning its cannon once more to track him.

He did a few more laps, leaping the pillar each time he came to it. His tires were not doing good with the heat of the plasma, he had a dozen minor injuries, and the hand he’d used to hold onto the railing before hurt a LOT, though the time in his alt-mode was helping his body effect emergency repairs on it.

He couldn’t see any way out of this place. He figured he’d have to defeat this Thing to get out of here, but he’d dropped a few tons of rock on it, and it had just gotten mad.

Then again…

There was a huge dent in its top plate, the stone cracked and shattered in some places. Another hit like that… plus, the thing’s sensor plate was definitely a weak-point. It used all the same hardware in both modes. If he could find some way of luring out another fire blast, another jump, and drop another pillar on it, he might be able to get a good shot on its sensor array while it was pinned.

He’d have to do it again.

He swerved down a walkway, directly opposite the first one (just to give him as much room to maneuver without two giant pillars blocking the path). The Mega-tite hesitated for only a minute before it turned its cannon on him… and fired. He swerved off the path, transformed, grabbed the guard rail… and felt a wrenching pain.

His optics locked on his hand as he lost his grip, damaged fingers unable to lock down properly. His circular motion turned… more linear, as he was launched out into open space over the pit that went so far down the orange light source wasn’t even visible.

Then he started to fall.

Chapter Text

His optics locked on his hand as he lost his grip, damaged fingers unable to lock down properly. His circular motion turned… more linear, as he was launched out into open space over the pit that went so far down the orange light source wasn’t even visible.

Then he started to fall.

~

Link didn’t scream. He just felt… empty as he realized he was about to die. He started to fall, and he relaxed his limbs, shuddered his optics… and felt a tiny tug at the tip of his right hand.

He triggered his weapon, activating its intense magnetic charger, and was sucked to the underside of the walkway, dangling by the end of the gun over a drop onto what looked like the surface of the sun. Link stared straight down, confused… and then let out a shocked, startled laugh.

Then the Mega-tite leaned over the walkway in its robot mode and reached down, scrabbling for him. He yelled and kicked, knocking one of its grabbing hands away, then he grinned. The next time it reached for him, it got a grip on one of his legs, and it tugged. When it tried to then immediately drop its prey into the abyss, a strange magnetic disruption latched Link onto the thing’s elbow, and it stared at him, arm elevated so that Link could hang from its arm like some kind of Elbow-Leech.

There was a moment of stillness, then Link slammed a foot directly into the thing’s sensor plate, and the little bot detached himself, hit the walkway with four tires, and shot towards the center console.

The Mega-tite chased him, but Link swerved around the console, transformed, skidded on his knees again, and fired his cannon this time. Another chunk of scrap metal lodged in the Mega-tite’s body, this time slicing into a thigh, and it screamed and pointed its flamethrower as Link retreated down a walkway.

The fire chased the small car, and Link felt it licking at his bumper. He screamed, just to give himself something to focus on before he swerved off again, driving out into nothing while he transformed, curled, pointed his cannon limb, and was yanked back towards the walkway.

He made contact for only a second, momentum swinging him towards the other side, and he detached himself again. He was flung into open air again, but this time he was moving upwards, and when he reached out to grab the guard-rail, he swung himself onto the walkway, landing awkwardly and falling on his back.

“Holy Frag, that worked!” Link’s systems were overclocked, so frightened, so over-stimulated, that he felt… he felt everything all at once. There was a bit of a daredevil edge that Link had never indulged in before, a need to push himself, to test his limits. It had driven him to learn sword-fighting from Rustle. To watch the races in Iacon City whenever he could. It’s why he’d gotten so good with his sling-shot: it was just something to push himself to learn something new, and here?

He was learning a LOT.

Link rocketed around the circumference of the room, the Mega-tite once more in its alt-mode. The Tektite shape shifted around, tracking him with sensor array and cannon, but it couldn’t quite keep up with him. Then he made his next move.

Swerve onto the walkway. Accelerate towards the pulsing flames. He turned sharply off the walkway, transformed, swung under. Magnet, pull himself up, flip, roll up behind the flames. This time his footing was only slightly awkward, the flames ahead of him and growing further away. He grinned at the Tektite and ran towards the end of the walkway.

Once more, it leaped, landed, and slammed down, but this time, he leaped backwards, arms swinging up, carrying him into a full back-flip.

He landed a little off-balance, stumbling back, but the Mega-tite slammed into the ground, and another stone pillar started to fall towards its back. Its sensor array, locked on Link, didn’t see it. Then… crunch again. Thirty feet of stone slammed onto the Tektite’s back, cracking and crunching and crumbling into rubble around and on top of it, just like the other. Stone slammed onto the walkway alongside Link, and he only barely shoved himself against the guardrail, yelping as it scraped along his front, buckling some plating and shearing off some paint.

He breathed a deep breath of relief when things finally calmed down, save the thrashing Mega-tite. With another deep breath, Link focused on it, and marched towards its front. He ducked a flailing leg, side-stepped another one, and stopped in a crouch in front of the Mega-tite’s sensor array. He raised his magnetic cannon, only an inch between the bright red, angry light of the array and the twisting metal being magnetized.

One more deep breath, a release, the faint sound of Link’s slingshot buried under a small sonic boom. The visor-like array cracked down the middle, the metal buried several feet inside the machine. The Mega-tite flailed furiously a few more times… then its joints ratcheted one last time, locking up completely. The light in the visor faded, and the flame at the end of the enormous flamethrower guttered, flickered… then died.

Link remained tense, charging up another pulse of the cannon. He stepped back, slowly, towards the center console. One step, two… three.

Then it moved, lunging, and Link yelled, hurled himself backwards, crossed arm and cannon over his face for some amount of protection. However, the Tektite didn’t attack. Instead, its mangled body, crushed under stone, warped and transformed. It’s hands curled in, dove into its own chest, and tore itself open with one. The other reached in, grabbed something, and yanked it out. Then it fell, limb extended, hand inches between Link’s slightly splayed legs.

In the hand was a strange, oblong shape. It looked like glass. It had two rounded bumps on the top, and the bottom came to a sharp point, and it was flat, only a few inches thick. It was two feet across and tall, and almost completely transparent. In the center there was a reservoir of some kind, a bright pink Energon. The clawed hand unfolded, and the object floated on its point, slowly turning in place above the creature’s palm.

This thing, in its death throes, had used the last of its energy, the last moments of its life to rip itself open and give him this. Link, confused, stood up, and reached out to take the crystal container… the heart container. He wasn’t sure how he knew that word in this context, it didn’t look anything like what a Cybertronian heart looked like. But… it was right. He lifted it; it weighed nothing, and he looked at the brutalized, beaten thing he’d slain.

Link felt a rush of sadness. How long had this thing been here, waiting? Programmed to destroy anyone who approached the center console, and… to give this to them if they beat it. Link gave the drone a deep bow, holding the heart container to his chest.

“Thank you, and… I’m sorry.” Link turned towards the center console, and marched towards it.

Chapter Text

Link felt a rush of sadness. How long has this thing been here, waiting? Programmed to destroy anyone who approached the center console, and… to give this to them if they beat it. Link gave the drone a deep bow, holding the heart container to his chest.

“Thank you, and… I’m sorry.” Link turned towards the center console, and marched towards it.

~

Link stepped up to the center console carrying his prize. The console itself was a massive, rectangular slab of black stone. The top was at eye-level with Link, and he frowned. He slid the Heart Container on the top of it, then leaped up, grabbed, hauled himself up onto the surface, staring down at… carvings. There were two of them. One was an outline of the heart container. Without thinking, he nudged the container with his foot until it fell neatly into the groove formed by the carving. The other carving was a hexagon, and… a hand-like shape. It had seven fingers, each one ending in a lengthy point.

Link hesitated for only a moment, and planted his hand in the carved out hand print.

The orange light coming up from the pit underneath the platform shifted hue to a brilliant, blinding white, then flicked between green, red, blue. The light flared, searing into Link’s optics. Every nerve in his body burned, and he felt that strange sensation from before, when he was forcibly reformatted by Zelda back in Gulp Town.

He grimaced as his body was limned with brilliant light, red and green and blue and white and gold lifting him off the console. He arched his back, opened his mouth, and the light poured in.

First, the pink energon inside the heart container atomized the container, and flew into his form. Instantly, he felt every wound, every ache, every quick repair in his form, vanish in a flash. Armor thickened. Rubber gaskets resealed, toughened up. He felt the internal skeleton of his innermost frame thicken, grow slightly denser.

Then, the rest of the power, probing and questioning. He felt a trill of fear roll through him, the terror of being forced into a new shape, like what Zelda had done to him to get him away from Lug-lock. Whatever this was, it threatened to change him again. Already he was… more… but he didn’t like how his new form had made him feel.

There was something in that, though, some pressure against that thought, and unbidden the memory of that first drive returned. Not his immediate flight from Lug-lock, no. After a day recovering in Gulp Town, he’d head out on his own. The smooth acceleration. The way his chassis shaped the wind to push him down, harder, for better traction. He got up to speeds that would have redlined his engine before in seconds, and then kept accelerating.

It had been wonderful.

No, it wasn’t the new shape that had terrified him. It was… the feel of someone else pushing him into a new shape. Hands not his own shaping his steel, foreign programs slipping into his mind like they belonged there.

Then… then there was a flicker of amusement not his own. Something warm and immense pulled that memory away, and shrank it down, then slotted it back in his mind.

The power flowed through him, on him, all around him. It sought paths in, and where he recoiled it pulled back. When he relaxed, it slid into grooves and transformation seams. It wanted permission. Guidance.

He looked at his right arm, twisted and warped and barely holding together. Instantly, the power saturated it. Metal pulled from the Mega-tite slotted into his frame, twisted and melted and reforged in an instant. With a twitch, the weapon was gone, replaced by his hand. Then his sling-shot folded out, then the new, augmented magnet cannon. Then back to the hand. He smiled… then the cannon flipped out again, he caught it in the other hand, and it folded into that limb. He could switch it on the fly!

But there was more. The Mega-tite’s flamethrower twitched on the ground, scooting towards him. Link thought about what Zelda had said, about Ganondorf breathing fire down a Prime’s throat. He thought about the Mega-tite’s sensor array lighting up, focusing on him as Link pointed his cannon into its face.

He recoiled, and the flamethrower remained where it was. No…

He thought about trying to put together, on the fly, the interface program in IMPA’s mind. He thought about having to undergo surgery to swap out his wheels. He thought about the satisfaction of rigging up the magnet weapon, of finding new and interesting uses for it.

“I… I need to be more flexible. I need to be able to… to adjust myself more. To-”

Link’s body was suffused with power. He felt it settle in the small of his back, where his T-cog was. It began to spin, to slice and scissor around itself, and his body twisted, wracked with pain as new lines and connections formed. Pistons and seams where there hadn’t been before, rubber seals and redirection-points for his internal fluids that didn’t exist until now, these formed out of nowhere, and then… the light faded. The chamber went dark, completely.

Link fell to his hands and knees, optics shut tight. Then, he opened them, and they gleamed with light for just a moment. Then he stood, shakily, looking down at himself.

He felt… bigger. He was. He looked at the console, and noted he was now maybe an inch taller than it, rather than slightly shorter than it.

“Huh.” He took a few steps, but this time… this time he didn’t feel unsteady, like he had before. He flexed his hands, and his magna-launcher appeared on the left, his slingshot on the right. He put his hands together, and the slingshot folded back into himself, and the gun moved to his right hand, freeing his left. He pulled out his wrench again, and noted it was a little lighter now.

With a rumbling pulse, the door slid back up into the ceiling. Smiling slightly, Link turned back towards the door and left the Forgotten Temple behind.

Chapter Text

First off, I got another commission for Link!

Look at hiiiiiim. You can find BlasterB0t at her Ko-fi!

Also, I've got some stuff describing the Forgotten Temple! First, we have a picture of Link entering the forgotten temple and looking at The Big Door!

Picture Alt Text: A robot looks away from the camera, only visible from the middle of the back and up. Ahead, there are several steps leading up to a large door covered in geometric patterns. The patterns spread out from the door and up the walls and onto the ceiling. several hallways splinter off from this room on either side of the image.

Then we have some really, really rough diagrams of the rooms he had to solve!

Picture 1 Alt Text: Chamber 1: A sketch of the back half of a room. On the ceiling is a line that then runs down the wall, where it connects to a large circle. the line then continues, splits in two, and continues down to the floor. the two lines meet a Triangle on the floor. Text describes these sections as well: the circle on the wall is described as "Magnetic Impact Plate (button)", and the triangle is described as "Primer Plate (must be held down)"

Picture 2 Alt Text: Chamber 2: Another sketch of the back half of a room. A circle on the back wall is labeled "Impact Plate (Shoot it)". A large wall cuts the room in half, but is transparent. it is labeled "Large indestructible clear wall". A line connects the circle to the triangle on the floor, but has to swerve to avoid the wall. The triangle is labeled "Primer Plate (hold down)".

Picture 3 Alt Text: Chamber 3: Another sketch of the back half of a room. There's a circle on the floor labeled "Impact Plate (must be shot)." Lines splinter off the circle, most of them going off 'screen.' One of them is labeled "out, up walls, merge on on ceiling." One of the lines goes towards the back wall, where it goes up the wall and connects to a Triangle. The triangle is labeled "Primer Plate (must be held down)."

Finally, I drew a Tektite!

Tektite Alt Text: Tektite - A mechanical thing with a vaguely spider-like shape. it's body is a flat disk, with four legs attached around its circumference. grippers and claws are attached to the underside of the tektite. At its back is a label that reads "Stone Camouflage Back". Label pointing towards its 'face' says "Sensor Array". Label pointing at its underbelly says "tools". Label pointing at a leg says "4 legs"

Now, as for the updates:

I'm not feeling as much drive to write this. It was tough getting through those last few chapters. I think I need to focus on other stuff right now. This summer, I'll take another crack at writing out the next Arc, but in the mean time I'm going to focus on my ttrpgs, on writing on commission, and messing around with other creative stuff! see ya later :D

Chapter Text

Hey everyone! I've hired a beta reader and will be reposting this fic in a slightly modified format! keep an eye here for when Draft 2 starts posting ^^