Chapter Text
Opalescent freckles of stars covered as much as the eye could see. Between these pinpricks of light spanned the great vastness of space rendered pitch black in its void. An infinite array of worlds lay unknown to her, awaiting the Decepticon’s rule, and Thunderblast was eager to look down at it all from above once all was said and done.
Before this was to be so, Thunderblast took her place within the Decepticon ranks beside Megatron, or whoever held the most power at the moment. This mission, evidently, wasn’t worth his personal attendance; instead she was joined by other Decepticons. She had never taken a photon sailer — a pirate ship! — before, but there was always a first time for everything. Her trigger finger had been itching for some action.
She aimed her missile launcher according to her inter-optical reticle display and shot the unsuspecting captain’s wooden wheel.
“Greetings from your new bosses, space fish!” she called out into the void as smoke from the blast’s explosion blanketed the helm. Her voice auto-transmitted to her targets via the built-in communications system that all similar mechanisms possessed.
And to the Space Pirate Seacons’ misfortune, they received her announcement too late.
Blasts from the Decepticons pelleted the ship, raining down on the top deck as if it had the misfortune of being strewn with lightning rods in the midst of a storm. At times like this, Thunderblast wished space had wind to carry the screams and booms to her audio receptors, but she was able to grin just imagining the marvelous cacophony. A vista of explosive carnage could satisfy her.
Too hasty, she tempered herself, this battle had only just begun. Transforming, she flanked the ship in her speedboat mode. If the cannons were taken out, then the pirates would be defenseless.
“You!” a voice snarled in her audio receptors.
It froze her fuel pump. Being only a transmission made in the vacuum of space, its source had no discernible direction, but she didn’t miss the word being laden with all the threat a pirate could promise their foe.
Thunderblast steeled herself and surveyed the side of the ship. Smoke shrouded the top deck, and from above blasts were still hailing down as if it were storming. From the explosions leapt out one of the Seacons wielding her cutlass. That vicious voice surely wasn’t from this bot, who was plated in metal so pristine it was difficult to believe she was a pirate? The midst of battle allotted no time to ponder this.
Landing atop the speedboat, the freeloader tried to slash at her.
“Hey! Get off of me and surrender, you mollusk!” Her missile launcher spun wildly with the Seacon — known to her crewmates as Scylla — clinging onto it with her stubborn tentacles and suckers. Those serrated suckers dug into her metal well.
“Not a chance,” Scylla retorted, gripping her cutlass tight. “Call off your wretched goons before this gets messy, and I might go easy on you.”
Thunderblast laughed, bobbing up and down. “Oh, you think I’m the leader of the Decepticons? Do I give off that kind of air? I’m flattered, really!”
“The more you talk, the more I can tell you’re too self-important to be a leader. You’re just an annoying goon like the rest, aren’t you?” she raised her cutlass and brought it down on the speedboat, slashing viciously, “I’d be able to enjoy this a lot more if you and your ilk weren’t blowing up my crewmates!”
Pain stung sharply across her bow, eliciting a shout from her. She swiftly transformed and used her transformation sequence to throw the freeloader off. Thunderblast readied herself to fend off the incoming attack. Instead, the pirate used this momentum to bring herself back to the ship.
Thunderblast made a megaphone with her hands as if she could amplify her voice in the vacuum of space, “Scurrying off so soon?”
“Ha, not a chance! You’ll regret screwing with the Space Pirate Seacons. Count on it,” the pirate looked behind her shoulder with a smirk. Her red eyes fit well with her smug expression, and Thunderblast couldn’t wait to wipe that look off her.
“By coming into perfect missile-launching distance for me? So small-minded, but I suppose that’s just something all pirates are. Can’t see the world beyond simple treasure.” Thunderblast aimed her missile launcher and fired.
Dodging, the squid used her tentacles like a lasso around the ship’s cannon to swing herself into the lower deck. The blast didn’t manage to tear through the ship’s hull, but it weakened its integrity.
"Get back here so I can finish you off!” Thunderblast shouted, shooting the ship beside the canon to make an entrance for herself. She welcomed herself in, now more or less standing inside, with the gravity lessening thanks to the breach in the hull.
Seeing a sliver of Scylla’s gray tentacles disappear around the corner, Thunderblast ran after her and dropped down to a lower deck, ignoring the ladder. “Well, if termination isn’t appealing to you, I’d love to hear you beg and bargain for alternatives. I can be amendable.”
But she found herself standing in an empty room, save for the crates. “Coward! Come out and fight me!” Thunderblast called out.
“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” a voice sounded, taking advantage of her voice being received from an unknowable direction.
She pounced on the invader from above. Thunderblast, in her ignorance, couldn’t have even whipped around to face her, much to her frustration at the pirate’s cunning.
Those annoying large gray tentacles wound themselves around her, “Didn’t you think to look up? I think you’re the small-minded one.”
Carefully, Scylla turned Thunderblast around so they could see each other face to face. The room shuddered from unheard explosions and attacks from above and outside. Scylla was scowling, and that befitted her ruby red eyes. In her hand by her side, she held a curious golden device.
“I’ll blast you.” Thunderblast gritted her teeth, struggling against her stupid tentacles.
“Not unless you’re intending to make this a murder-suicide. If you are, then you really are stupid. This is where we store our gun power.” Scylla glanced off to the side briefly. “Call off this attack, or else I’m terminating you.”
It would be a pitiful fate, if the squid was true to her word, but a grin spread across her face. “Oh? I see what this is. Your fish pals are in dire straits, being so weak, so you’re trying to take me hostage as some kind of last ditch effort. Am I right?”
Scylla did look distracted. It must be communications received from her comrades on the top deck.
“Not at all. My crewmates are doing just fine,” Scylla glared, “They’ll be so happy to see I’ve plucked your missile launcher from you.”
“You’ve what?” Thunderblast started, seeing her missile launcher now in the clutches of the pirate. When she looked back up, Scylla was grinning smugly at her, eyes glinting.
Her circuitry ignited in hot rage at the audacity, kicking and thrashing against her restrictive bonds. “Give it back or else you’re really going to pay!” She nipped at the tentacles.
“No. This ends now,” Scylla said, flipping her over her back and climbing up the ladder to the upper deck.
Thunderblast grunted at the motion, now upside down.
“It’s ridiculous you’ve done this. Haven’t you ever heard of the Space Pirate Seacons?”
“No. Who’s ever heard of some lousy spacefaring fish?”
Scylla scoffed. “You ran into a fight not even understanding your opponent?”
“Scylla, hurry!” a voice called from somewhere in the smoke.
No! She couldn’t let her foe convene with her comrades. Quickly, Thunderblast bit down hard into the metal of Scylla’s tentacle and tore. This wince loosening the tentacles for just a moment was all Thunderblast needed to grab her missile launcher and pull its trigger.
Scylla shrieked and her tentacles withdrew completely. It looked as if the blast had only fired upward, missing either of them, but Thunderblast took advantage of this confusion and nabbed the golden controller from Scylla’s grasp.
“Wait, you don’t know what that is!” Scylla called out, eyes wide with alarm as she reached out in a futile attempt to retake it.
“This nifty device is now belongs to me!” Thunderblast smirked as she held the device away from her clutches.
Suddenly, a bright beam from the sky came down at Thunderblast, but she sprung forward to evade it just in time. At the same time, the pirate had attempted to pounce on her. She knocked into her and they collapsed together, Scylla atop her on the wooden floor, and she immediately made for the controller that had tumbled away.
“Don’t mess with that!” Scylla shouted, and in the heat of the moment Thunderblast missed the sincerity in her warning. Her plea. If she had noticed it, she would have disregarded it anyway in her desire to deprive Scylla of this coveted thing.
Either of their hands clasped and grabbed at the device as they elbowed and struck each other in a fashion that was too cartoonish for Thunderblast’s liking. Scylla’s tentacles wrapped around her again, trying to pin down her arms, but she was unsuccessful.
“You look funny scrabbling for this thing.” Thunderblast chuckled. “If it’s this important to you, then I must have it. Who knew stealing from pirates was so fun?”
Thanks to Scylla’s tendrils, they were nearly pressed together. The device, amidst their fighting over it, clicked as if something had been activated.
Thunderblast turned it over to look at it, “Huh? That didn’t do anything.”
“Scrap,” Scylla gripped Thunderblast’s arm tight.
Thunderblast looked up at her as if demanding an explanation and suddenly the world around them was replaced by green and pink and white swirling around them. In this confusion, Thunderblast let go of the device. Instead of remaining relatively stationary in the vacuum of space, it was swept up.
Gravity? But they were in space.
Were.
Thunderblast and this pirate found themselves free falling in the sudden gravity that pulled them down.
“I told you not to mess with it!” Scylla shouted, jabbing a finger into her chest, and Thunderblast was surprised to hear the voice out loud, muffled by wind.
“Why would you even grab something like this in the first place?” Thunderblast shoved her back.
Suddenly the world revealed itself to them. It wasn’t filled with smoke, grounded with wood, nor even on a backdrop of space. Gravity urged them downward, and beneath them all that she could make out was an endless expanse of dull green until it swallowed them up.
Down, down, down they descended into the ocean. Scylla gripped her shoulders and bubbles tumbled out of her ranting mouth. Thunderblast heard none of it; her auto-filtering system — a useful mod to tune out the annoyances she had to work with — was blocking out excessive profanity over her communications.
Earth! They had warped to Earth!
Thunderblast grinned up at her and transformed to break free of her tentacles. She had missed being in the depths of the ocean, but she wasn’t free just yet. That pest was hot on her stern.
She dove underneath the water and transformed beneath Scylla. “Isn’t it time to let bygones be bygones? Jeez, you pirates never know when it give it up.”
“You don’t have a clue what you’ve done,” the pirate whipped around and slashed at her with her cutlass. “Not a clue,” her furious eyes narrowed.
Thunderblast scoffed. “What I’ve done? You’re the one who made our getting here possible. So, thanks for that.” She kicked away from Scylla’s swipe, dodging, and grabbed her wrist. “Actually, let me give you my thanks personally.”
“Let go of me!” Scylla’s tentacles swatted at her, but Thunderblast was able to maneuver herself behind her and lock her legs around her waist.
She put her mouth close to Scylla’s audio receptor, a gesture for show in its impracticality underwater, and said, “I’ll admit that your efforts to combat me have been impressive.” Her grip on her wrist slid over to her clasp on the hilt of her cutlass.
Scylla’s tentacles wrapped and squeezed around Thunderblast’s limbs. “Get off of me!”
At last, Thunderblast had gotten her where she wanted her. With her other hand, she grabbed Scylla’s chin and thrust it up. Eyes like rubies were fitting for a pirate, being treasure-lovers and all that.
“Look up at me,” Thunderblast smirked down at Scylla’s furious countenance. There had been so little time to really take a good look at her amidst their fighting, and what a sight to behold she was! Her helm, Thunderblast thought, was remarkably pretty and unique in the way it was designed: boxy, but with horizontal indents from either side that almost looked like stylized wings. It was a pity that they had wound up on opposing sides of the battlefield.
Poor Scylla for what Thunderblast had in store for her, but she discarded any sympathy as she managed to wrest the pirate’s cutlass from her. She raised it above, before a tentacle could retrieve it, and slammed the pommel down into one of those precious rubies, shattering it.
Bubbles churned out of the pirate’s mouth in an scream that was audible underwater, and she grabbed uselessly for her cutlass. It was horrific, really, what bots could do to each other. What bots did do to each other. Power over another was how they functioned; in a sense, it was like a language to them. Thunderblast understood this well, so she thought to help this pitiful pirate understand it too.
With her tentacles, Scylla managed to pry her cutlass back from the wretched Decepticon. But before she could slash, Thunderblast kicked away from her and pulled out her missile launcher.
It was tempting to aim for that remaining big round ruby, but she needed to end this now. Her missile launched and hit her side. She couldn’t see for the smoke, but she imagined that she was screaming again. Soon, the smoke of the blast dispersed and she could make out that she had struck a fuel line.
The most beautiful spillage in the depths — energon. Pink was the most vivacious color one could see at this depth, thanks to its short wavelength. The way it billowed up like smoke as its host drifted downward was magnificent.
Thunderblast smirked at the battered sinking bot and offered her a parting wave. “Enjoy sleeping with the fishes, pirate!”
Enough time wasted. She transformed and flitted across the top of the ocean. It took longer than she would have thought, but she finally came upon a rocky mountain peeking from the surface. She transformed into bot mode and landed.
“All right, now where am I?” she spoke to herself and looked up at the thousands of stars freckling the night sky.
That couldn’t be right. Why were the stars laid out in the wrong pattern?
She couldn’t recognize the stars as belonging to the Milky Way. She looked down to the Galactic Positioning System she had pulled up on her forearm, but it didn’t ping her location. She couldn’t find any information about this place or her location.
This wasn’t Earth!
Her yellow eyes darted to the horizon. For miles she could only see ocean and more ocean.
She pressed two fingers to the side of her helm. “Hey, this is Thunderblast, does anybody read me?”
Silence.
“Come in! Answer me!”
Silence again.
“It’s Decepticon Thunderblast, someone reply to me!”
She tried some more times, and some more, but all attempts yielded no response. It was as if her communications were being blocked.
Usually in her times of need, she could just use somebody else to get her out of it. But did anybody, or anything, even live on this planet?
She thought back to the late pirate, reviewing their interactions for anything of note. Something about being clueless, but that offered nothing.
She looked up at the stars again and clenched her fists. Surely someone would come looking for her? She could be self-sufficient. She didn’t need to wait around to be saved. All she needed to do was either find out where she was on a galactic map and leave, provided she wasn’t reasonably far from a Decepticon outpost, or find out how to get communications off the planet.
Easy.