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(0)
Elita-1 stood silent as the night, staring out at the mess of shattered metal and crumbling rock that acted as the final curtain call on her perfect mining record. The sub-level shook with faint, recognizable tremors as the entire tunnel settled from the collapse, the panicked murmurings of her mining team spreading like a gas leak as they all realized that they hadn't made it.
"This is all my fault," Wheeljack whispered from behind, horror and disbelief rolled into one as his optics darted from crack to crevice—wishing, hoping for a miracle. Or perhaps a sign that they were still alive, just out of reach.
When the excavation team arrived, maybe they'd find a pocket that they had taken sanctuary in. They had been so close to the exit, that it warranted a search and rescue or a recovery.
But Elita didn't douse her process in misguided hope. She knew that their survival simply wasn't possible, having logged the exact moment that Orion Pax realized that they weren't going to make it. He had stared out ahead, optics blazing with a simmering hope that dwindled rapidly as bracer after bracer snapped, the weight they upheld coming sharply down on their helms.
Yet, despite that… him and D-16 barreled forward with Jazz hauled between them, not giving into despair or throwing in the washrag as other miners might have. They pushed on and for a brief moment… Elita-1 and Orion met each other's gaze. Time froze as their optics met, as he stared at her—and then he was gone. Their line of sight broke as the threshold unraveled and all three were gone.
Twisting her helm away from the collapsed entrance, Elita-1 clenched her fists and fought to control her expression as her facial sculpt began to twist. Unable and unwilling to acknowledge the disaster before her, Elita put her focus toward the survivors.
"Everyone ok?" she asked, a mounting attendance list accumulating at the forefront of her computer. From the crowd gathering around her, she scanned their faces and noted who in all was from her group and who had wandered tentatively over after all the commotion settled to help.
Tearing her eyes away from the casket of stone allowed Elita to anticipate Darkwing's arrival. The supervisor landed in a furious thunder, practically an ion storm in the making as he surveyed the scene. Various miners were receiving care from the on-sight medics, not everyone escaping the cave-in intact—the shock wave knocked a fair few flat onto their bumpers and flung them out from the entrance.
But, with no mech grievously injured and with the casualties self-contained, Darkwing scuffed and turned to Elita. "Elita-1, you'll accompany me to Overseer Dreadwind where you will give your incident report. This incident will be going on your permanent record and you'll be knocked down a tier as the responsibility falls under you. Understand?"
Thirty units of energon. That's all that Elita had needed before being up for promotion to supervisor. They would have more than that in this one excursion had it not all gone to the wastes. A demerit of this nature… Elita-1 could have been dealt worse.
"Yes, sir." Mentally, she calculated her new goal—she'd need 260 units of energon ore successfully mined and processed to return back to her current tier. And from there, merely 1200 units and the promotion she fought so hard for would be in sight once more.
Darkwing took off, his pace a tad glacial to give Elita time to activate her jet pack and catch up. From below, she took one last look at the blocked entrance. Wheeljack had lingered by, even as the other mining squads either dispersed—her own, primarily—or returned to their shift. He placed his servo on the rubble and bowed his helm.
Spitefully, and ignoring the guilt pawing at her chest, Elita-1 mentally reprimanded Orion and D-16. If only they had followed protocol… They'd only have one casualty instead of three.
(1)
Before the night cycle ended, Overseer Dreadwind demoted her down a tier. Cave-ins—whilst an unfortunate and real blow to overall production output—weren't an unusual occurrence down here in the sub-levels of Cybertron. The veins of Primus were weak at certain points and closed sporadically, which was precisely why they had a firm and extensive guidebook for cogless leadership.
Overall, they kept her punishment light. About eighty-five percent of the calculated energon ore from the lower channel successfully made it out of the evacuation, which was eleven-point-one percent more than projected for her team at the onset of the shift. Yes, three miners died and she had to fill out extensive incident reports about it where she emphasized and highlighted Orion's abject disobedience to her orders but… At the end of it, Elita-1 was still permitted to lead her team the same as she did any other shift.
Management would keep an optic on her and her performance, however. Any more slip ups… And she could kiss her promotion goodbye.
All of her emotions boiled into one by the time that she reached the barracks and slotted into her standing berth. Her joints locked together and Elita-1 slipped into a restless recharge.
When she awoke, the day started like any other. Perfection more than ever was demanded of her, which was her excuse for not noticing—or rather, not mentioning—the glitch in her chronometer.
The date reflecting back to her on her HUD read as the cycle before.
But with their schedules and quota digitized in every barrack, Elita-1 resolved to privately get her clock fixed when she didn't have the cogged supervisors venting down her neck. So long as she kept her helm on a swivel and ensured no flaws from her or her team, she could recover. Her life wasn't in shambles, it wasn't ruined, it was…
Confusing.
"Good morning, Captain!" Wheeljack greeted her cheerfully.
Elita-1 stared at him unabashedly as he continued past her to the train station. For a mech seemingly so broken at the loss of life from the day before, Wheeljack hardly seemed fazed today. In fact, nobody cared to even mention it. Secrets were oft a fools' game amongst the miners since they slept, ate, worked, and played at all the same spaces—and yet, not one soul even dared to quietly mourn the loss of three of their own.
Deaths weren't uncommon for miners, they worked the hardest and most dangerous job on Cybertron second to Sentinel Prime's entourage but… They weren't sparkless. They weren't drones or little worker circuit-bees—more often than not, they felt the deaths of their comrades more deeply than their own.
And perhaps they didn't want to mention it to her, knowing how the cave-in was a black mark on her otherwise perfect record. Maybe they didn't want to remind Elita about her demerit but…
Thoroughly disturbed, Elita made it onto the same train car that she took every day and pushed the strange lack of reaction from her mind. Who was to say that miners all coped in the same way? Even she wasn't particularly expressive in her grief over Orion, D-16, and Jazz—and make no mistake, she did grieve them.
But with the stakes of her future rising with every infraction, Primus forbid Elita-1 for not shedding tears at the idiocy of those two troublemakers. As for Jazz… There wasn't much she could have done for him. A classic case of wrong time and wrong place, he didn't deserve to go like that. More than anything, the lack of open regards for him bothered her more than Orion and D-16.
Her life only got more confusing when she disembarked from the train, stepped out into the mine depot, and stared across the refinery conveyor belts to see all the aforementioned bots walking in her direction.
"What the hell," she exclaimed, optics refreshing every couple of seconds as she watched D-16 reverently smooth down his new decal that he had gotten from somewhere the day before. Orion stared adoringly at his friend, even jerking his elbow against the bot to get him to pay attention to where he was walking. And beside them Jazz diligently carried his drill, focused on the shift ahead of him and barely anything else.
Her pedes moved before her conscious mind could compute the impossibility of their survival. Did… Did the search and recovery teams find them, truly? Why did nobody interrupt her recharge to inform her, why hadn't Overseer Dreadwind rescinded her punishment, why–?
"Elita-1! Or rather, Captain Elita-1, sir!" Arcee stepped into her line of sight, holding out Elita's pack. "Not to rush you, Captain but… Our shift is about to start!"
Elita's helm swam. Her priority subroutines went into effect as she grappled with the onslaught of contradicting information, thanking Arcee idly as she took the jet pack and slotting it onto her back strut. The background fear of besmirching her shaky standing with upper management propelled her into corralling the mining team, all the way she stared incredulously at Orion, D-16, and Jazz.
Seeking a way to ground herself, Elita-1's hand graced her tier badge. She had avoided staring at it from the very moment that Overseer Dreadwind removed a bolt from it, not wanting to face the proof of her setback but now…
Her digits counted all the bolts of her previous tier—just one away from swapping to the supervisor badge.
Heaving suddenly, Elita-1 nearly careened sharply to the left which would have sent her mining team directly into the path of a separate one. Clarity made it's way into her processor, suggesting that she had merely… dreamt the whole thing. Despite the glaring holes in that logic, it was the only thing that made sense.
Even though it had felt so real, it couldn't have been because Orion reached out to her the second her pedes touched the ground of the mining quarry, "Elita– I mean Captain. You are looking especially shiny this morning. New polish?"
Her spark lurched. Her chest tightened as the echo of his words resounded in her mind. He had said the exact same thing yester… In her dream, the intense feeling of repetition set off warning signs in her recognition network.
Unlike before, Elita-1 didn't answer him as a sudden intensity forced her to call out, "Listen up, rust buckets! We are going to do this following protocol as though it were the letter of the law. Absolutely no deviations! And no," she whirled around furiously to the shocked Orion Pax and the equally perplexed D-16, "Backtalk or disobedience! Light up that wall, let's go! Ten seconds!"
So taken aback by her unprompted scolding to his attempts at kissing aft, Orion turned to D-16 and muttered, "She's in a foul mood today."
"Mhm…"
He didn't attempt to proclaim cockily that he could take lead on the excursion as though she would ever allow such a thing, especially not now. "Ready positions, let's go!"
Elita-1 tried to shake the feeling of looming disaster off, not wanting to let some dream prevent her from doing her job. Thirty units of energon. That's all they needed and while she typically strived for more than their exact quota… Elita would rather they make under than to risk the whole tunnel from collapsing.
As it always did, the wall to the mine parted to allow entrance to the miners. "I'm only going to say this once so you better listen—this one won't stay open long so when I say brace it up I expect you all to brace it up!"
They hurried in, the glowing walls to the cave practically closing in on Elita-1 as her spark spun faster and faster in its revolution. Miners activated the bracers around her as she kept track of the receding lower channel. Walls tinted blue from embedded ore filled her vision as Orion, D-16, Jazz, Wheeljack, and so many more whizzed past.
Tools roared to life as the sounds of drilling filtered through her audials. From the top of the channel, the flash of white sparks as they all cut away rock to get at the valuable marrow beneath eats at her senses.
Elita-1 stays vigilant as a sentry, directing cart after cart of energon safely out of the tunnel. Intimately she knows that they are barely half a cart away from meeting quota, but still she radios out to her team, "Alright, that's enough for this shift. Start filing out."
A chorus of vocal confusion meets her. After all, Elita-1 was an achiever, she pushed them to keep mining, and mining, and mining until the last possible moment for extraction. Her team, all of them knew that they could keep going—their energy hadn't even begun to wane and yet… They listened, because she was their leader.
All except one, as Wheeljack called out, "But I just tapped a vein!"
And that's how it starts—the sputtering of his tool as it hit an unstable deposit. The frightened yells of her miners echo in the tunnel as streams of purple light reach the top of the lower channel. One by one they start flying out as they hastily evacuate, abandoning the carts full of energon ore at the bottom.
Elita-1 whirls around her as the bright purple glow from her dream—could she even call it that at this point?—proceeds the orange sparks of equipment exploding as the crumbling tunnel crushes them under chunks of rock. Primus shivered as his energon brightened like flashing lights all the way to the egress, right before pure energy cascaded across the tunnel. The force of it knocks her miners out of the air and like an oil trail sets off an explosion of plasma.
When she had first lived through this experience, her back had been turned to the catastrophe in the making. This go around she witnessed it all firsthand, seeing the pulse of purple approaching like a swarm of petrorats toppling over each other as they escaped execution by fumigation.
No amount of bracing herself could prevent the power behind the billowing act of defiance from knocking Elita-1 back onto her aft, scrabbling to get her pedes under her as the nightmare played out.
"Evacuate! Everyone out! Evacuate immediately!"
She ran, using her pack to jump that last little bit out as the words flowed from her mouth by rote, "I repeat, the tunnel is closing!
Elita turns, cataloging her team and searching out for three specific facial sculpts. When she sees neither hide nor finish of Orion, D-16, and Jazz she whirls back toward the entrance with a fire lit under her, "Orion! D-16! Jazz! Get out of there now!"
Blaring red, the bracers at the front of the mine illuminate the lack of the trio. The abyss calls her to action, but Elita cannot begin to head its call when she waits in trepidation. From deep within, now that she puts all her focus into listening, she can hear Jazz call out in agony.
Then, the call came in, "Elita, we've got a trapped miner! I'm falling back to assist."
Same as before, everything was the same as before.
Furious, spark beating faster than it ever had in her life, Elita retorted, "Negative! Don't you dare break protocol! Evacuate now!"
He ignored her, just as he had ignored her the first time—first time, what did she even mean by that when she thought of her premonition in such a way—and Elita gnashed her denta together.
"Do you two want to die?!" Breaking away from the script set out for her, Elita-1 cannot help but let out a yell. Her team behind her flinch, having never witnessed a break in her composure at such a harrowing moment.
A secondary explosion, a distant blue embrace answered her. And followed by it, the final shock wave. It knocked them all back, her pedes scraping against the ground as she withholds her own.
The window of failure creeps ever faster as the fractal walls meet each other in the middle. And she could see them: Orion Pax and D-16 with Jazz's arms slung around their backs. He was dead weight to the two, slowing the both of them down as they raced ever onward.
Orion Pax met the enraged gaze of Elita-1. His face crumbles and he staggered under the weight of her judgment. Stumbling for a moment, he pulled down D-16 and Jazz both—not even making it as far as they had the first time she had witnessed their demise.
All three of them disappear from sight, crumbling rock and shattered bracers filling their grave. The sub-level shook with the aftermath of the cave-in, but not nearly as hard as her frame trembled with frustration.
"This is all my fault," Wheeljack whispered from behind her, painting a bright target on his helm.
Elita-1 straightened, her frame taught with restraint. "It is, isn't it." Whipping around, she pointed a digit at him and jabbed him sharp in the chest, "I told you—I told you!—that we were done for the shift. Do you think I give out orders because I feel like it? You broke protocol by disregarding my command and now look at what you've done!"
Knowing he had what was coming to him, Wheeljack didn't dare try to hide or run from her. He bowed his helm, optics strained and haunted with every word that she flung his way.
"This goes for all of you!" Elita-1 snapped at the gathered crowd. "Do you see this?" Pointing blindly behind her, she reinforced her words with proof of the very thing sworn to protect them, "Protocol exists for a reason! When you flaunt the rules, when you bend orders or cut corners people die!"
Darkwing would soon arrive, would soon tell her that this incident would go on her permanent record, where she would head over to Overseer Dreadwind, who would soon give her a demerit resulting in her getting knocked down a tier.
But this time, she wouldn't go alone as she snarled at Wheeljack, "As for you, you're going to explain exactly what was going through your empty-headed helm when you ignored my extraction orders, got it?"
"Yes, sir."
(2)
Forcing Wheeljack to report his inadequacies did little to lessen her own punishment. But it did result in his immediate termination and subsequent assignment to waste management. Elita-1 tried to find pleasure in witnessing an even worse demotion than her own, but can't.
Because her processor turned over obsessively that moment where Orion tripped. He hadn't done that in her… whatever it was. If there was one thing that Elita-1 could claim about that walking disaster it was that he truly never gave up. Always she could hear him spouting that firm belief of his that the cogless were meant for more than just mining.
In a world full of those who would rather see the ration cube as half-empty, he found it half-full and managed to snag a couple handful more from those elite gatherings he always managed to stumble upon anyway.
And yet… And yet he stared out at her and acted as though she struck him through optics alone.
It didn't sit well with her at all. That look on his face followed her into recharge and when Elita-1 woke again she found herself even more distracted than the previous day.
Elita made her way to the train station, spark heavier than ever and brewing in regret.
"Good morning, Captain!" Wheeljack greeted her cheerfully.
Stopping in the middle of the pathway, Elita-1 stared at him in disbelief. Wheeljack did not stare at her as though she had forced him to face the consequences for ruining his own and many others lives. No, instead he gave her a jovial head nod and continued onward to the train.
Her servo flung to her chest plates, feeling for her tier badge and noting in a daze that she was only one bolt away from supervisor.
Horrified, she stumbled back—accidentally bumping into Kup behind her.
"You alright, Elita-1?" he asked, helping to right her.
She swiped her arm away from him, staring out into the crowd of miners carting their tools or pushing trolleys full of the damn things. Elita searched and searched until she spotted Jazz's helm bobbing in-between the crowds as he playfully gave Prowl a smack on his shoulder, grabbing him to shake the annoyed miner.
"Elita?"
"I'm fine." Elita-1 staggered away from Kup, making her way to the same train car that she took every day. "I'm…"
"Are you sure?" Persistently, he followed after her. He didn't often take the same car as her, but let it be known that miners didn't abandon their fellow cogless when noticing something amiss. "If you think that you've caught a virus we can make a quick pop down to Ratchet's office. You know he'll take cogless patients on without much notice."
And she thought on it for a moment. It was entirely plausible that Elita did in fact catch some virus that forced her to relive the same simulation out over and over. How could she hope to successfully lead her team if her ability to defrag during the night had been dampened?
But then again, how could she know that she wasn't in another simulation again? What made this cycle so different from the last two? Everything about the situation was pure nonsense; it made her helm spin.
At the very least, if she did go to urgent care perhaps they might find some sort of anomaly in her processor to explain why she kept living the same day over.
"You're right. I've… not been feeling well," she admitted to him. The last call for the train sounds, but neither of the two of them board. Already set on this path, Elita-1 nodded her helm, "I'll get checked out. Have them run a diagnostic."
She'd likely get a demerit for no-call no-showing to her shift but…
"That's how I know you're not doing too hot, because it's a cold day in hell when you actually admit to not being at one-hundred percent optimal functioning," Kup exclaimed. As the train passed, he gave a brief wave through the window at his peers before gesturing for her to sit down. "The next train heading toward Iacon Medical should be here in a moment."
Maybe without her there, the shift would go differently. Without her leadership perhaps…
(3)
The two of them waited for the results of Ratchet's scan when the news filtered in.
A cave-in. Ten miners dead. Of them, Orion Pax and D-16 were included, but Jazz miraculously survived.
Instead, Prowl took his place amongst the offlined and so did Brawn, Sideswipe, F-501, Arcee, Red Alert, Inferno, and Q-2.
"That's a crying shame," Kup muttered, a servo over his mouth as he shook his head mournfully. "By Primus… When will enough be enough for these supervisors…"
And as though sensing the worst time to arrive, her scans came back inconclusive. Ratchet wasn't quite sure what to make of the disturbance to her recharge nor her claims that she felt as though there was a stutter in her ability to process information.
"There's definitely something disrupting your spark's energy field," he groused, staring down at the datapad. "It scrambled the equipment something fierce. Either that or it's time to replace the old thing—because no matter which culprit it is, the carbon-dating for your frame is just flat out wrong."
Elita barely reacted to the results. Instead she sat on the bench and stared at nothing—with the impending feeling of being way over her helm pounding away at her computer, as her frazzled tactile network cried out in disarray.
"Come on," Kup helped her up. He probably thought she felt the same amount of guilt as he did for surviving, but he couldn't have been further from the truth. "Let's head back to the barracks. You know, this isn't even the worst cave-in we've experienced. It might've been before your time, but I remember at the start of my career that…"
Kup's words fell upon muted audials as they boarded the train heading away from the sub-levels. At this hour of the day, and with the accident that befell their ranks, the car was empty save for them.
And for perhaps the first time in her life, her berthing station called to her like a siren. Ten miners dead. Thirty units of energon until her promotion. All of those numbers filtered from her mind, sand pouring from the gaps in her digits.
Without thanking Kup, and finding very little to thank him for anyhow, Elita-1 made her way to the standing recharge station and plugged herself in. She allowed the darkness of stasis to wrench her from the horror of the accident and awoke later in the time before it occurred.
First things first, she checked her badge tier. Even though she hadn't spoken to Overseer Dreadwind, the confirmation that Elita was ever one bolt away from her promotion soothed her spark somewhat.
Having Wheeljack cheerfully greet her with, "Good morning, Captain!", further confirmed that the day had indeed reset.
Elita stalked toward her train car, walking past Kup who raised his servo in greeting. She would see no doctors this time, not when the death toll rose without her there to prevent it.
Skipping her speech, and moving away from Orion when he attempted to flatter his way into a better standing with her, Elita-1 approached Wheeljack. She grabbed the power tool right out of his servos, ignoring his shocked squawk at her abrasive action, and shoved a bracer into his arms.
"You're on cart extraction today." Tone brokering no argument whatsoever, Elita-1 stomped toward the entrance to the mine.
While she hadn't been present during the third cave-in, Elita-1 would have been damned before she allowed Wheeljack to cause a fourth.
"We do this safely, or we don't do this at all, got it rust buckets?"
"Yes, Elita-1!"
(4)
Here's what Elita-1 swiftly learned:
It didn't matter who she sent down to the lower channel—Primus saw fit to have that mine collapse time and time again.
Because even with Wheeljack upfront directing the full mine carts out with energon ore–
"I found a vein!" Kup called out, tool jamming as it embedded in the rock.
(6)
Victorious, Ironhide announced with a laugh, "Found a rich one over here!"
(10)
"Look at the size of that vein, Sunny!"
"You're telling me! It–"
"Oh no."
(14)
"Orion! A little help over here," hissing, D-16 did as he always did and reached out for his fool. The slip in his attention caused his drill to hit the energon at the precisely wrong angle. "Scrap!"
"D!"
(22)
–the mine always collapsed.
Elita had tried over dozen combinations, subbing in and out miners based on their performance reviews to random selections to even demanding that only one miner go in at a time.
Their quota fluctuated with each match up, Elita-1 quickly abandoning aspirations of just thirty units of energon for sleuthing out a way to get every miner out of the shift alive. Her biggest obstacles in doing so took the form of Orion Pax and D-16, who somehow always managed to wind up at the scene of the crime no matter how hard she tried to keep them away.
Benching them at the start of the shift did absolutely nothing but exacerbate the disaster–
(27)
"Hold them back!" Elita-1 yelled out at Ironhide and Brawn who stared at her as though she had lost her mind.
Their inaction allowed Orion and D-16 to slip past her guard and rush straight into the lilac explosion of energon ore.
(31)
"That sounds like Kup!" Orion announces as he darts forward with D-16 hot on his heels after Elita-1 tumbled out of the mine, vision spinning from the force of the impact.
(39)
"We gotta go back for Wheeljack!"
"Orion, no!" Already half-way through the tunnel, Elita-1's servo reaches out to grab Orion—attempting to wrench him back—but only succeeds in dislodging his jet pack from where it magnetized to his back strut.
(45)
"Orion, what are you doing?!" D-16 called out, chasing after his partner.
He gasped out in pain as one of the braces snapped and sent one half flying straight into his abdomen.
Orion skidded to a stop, torn between going after Arcee who had been pinned down underneath a full cart of energon ore and his best friend. His indecision ultimately led to the destruction of all three of them.
(56)
Orion twisted and turned, looking out at the crowd of his peers and found it lacking. "Elita-1, Jazz is still in there!"
Only a caustic fool would tell the desperate bot, "I know." And yet she found the words slipping past her lips and dealing a blow to Orion.
But at that moment, Elita-1 fought to cut her losses. She had done the best that she could to minimize the damage incurred by the cave in, and part of her felt as though it fit to have the mech that started it all to perish in the way that he originally should have had everyone followed protocol.
Her spark practically rebelled, aching to free itself from the detested frame of hers. Elita-1 did not want to see Jazz dead anymore than she loathed to sacrifice any of her mining team, but if that was what it took for this damnable shift to end then she would do what was necessary.
She had seen peer after peer disappear behind that red-stained tunnel. Heard their cries, watched the life leave their optics as they submitted to their doom.
There was only so much death she could take before she broke and Elita-1 couldn't afford to break.
He stared at her as though he didn't know who she was, and truly he didn't. They weren't friends, they weren't even compatriots at the end of the shift. Ultimately, they were two sides of the same coin—both saw an opportunity to rise above their class, but only one of them took it. Orion carried very few bolts to his designation and Elita had about the most that any cogless in her position had ever managed.
Orion felt as though the system itself needed to provide leeway for them to prove their worth, Elita grasped it wherever she could by following the books.
Elita had tried so hard, to the point where it felt as though all she ever did was try with no result or reward—just failure after failure.
And so he stared at her, unable to ever see things from her point of view, and steeled his expression.
With the conviction of a Prime, he told her, "A good leader leaves no bot behind. Not if they can't help it."
(63)
–and Elita-1 found that she couldn't bear to see Orion's disappointment ever again.
His words stuck in her helm each cycle after that one.
(65)
"Happy to take the lead today, Captain," he hauled his saw over his shoulder, "I'm feeling like I have enough power in me to drill down and touch Primus myself."
She stared at him. A good leader leaves no bot behind.
"We'll see about that."
Not if they can't help it.
What did Orion Pax know about leadership and the weight of holding the lives of his subordinates up on his shoulders? What experience did he pull from nowhere to challenge her after she led successful excursion after successful excursion?
(66)
"Let me ask you this, Pax, if you think you're ready to leave," she snarled, unable to battle the hurt at seeing the living dead walking around her—entirely unknowing about their fates in another disastrous cycle. "What would you do if a miner got trapped during a cave-in?"
Orion took her hostility in stride, actually considering her question in depth instead of interpreting it as barbed wire transformed into a garrote to wrap around his neck so that it may be freed of her own. "I'd do whatever I could to get them out. Even if it meant risking my rear axle, I'd do everything in my power to save them."
"And what if it wasn't enough," Elita got close enough that they were nearly olfactory sensor to sensor. Glaring up at him, she asked, "What if Primus was simply out to get you for crimes you couldn't possibly absolve?"
Orion's optics whirled, D-16 nervously glancing at him as he awkwardly stood to the side.
"I don't think there's much that Primus wouldn't forgive," he answered. "What's this really about Elita?"
"None of your business." Skulking toward the detested tunnel entrance, Elita-1 went through the motions of tragedy. "Here we go…"
(68)
And really, she hadn't quite taken the time to direct her rage at the endless cycles of death toward Primus.
It felt so… pointless to do so. Having enmeshed herself within the lower sub-levels, most miners found an odd relationship to their creator. They fed from his remains, harvesting what they could and offering little in return.
The body of Primus so often consumed the lives of their own that Elita hadn't even considered why one of his veins would collapse, merely knowing that the eventuality happened more often than it didn't.
Especially as each well dried out. They were stripping Primus' bones bare, why wouldn't he retaliate in some way?
Yet… No. It felt intrinsically wrong to interpret the tectonic actions of their deceased creator as malice. The movement of the walls of the mines were sporadic, mindless. Primus' bones were no more alive than the ground that they walked under and if he sought retribution then Iacon would have crumbled cycles ago.
So then… why? Why her? Why this shift? Why make her relive it over and over again, when the changes that she tried just didn't work?
What was Elita-1 missing?
(84)
Elita-1 hadn't gone down into the lower channels herself since her promotion to captain. Directing her mining team and logging their output had taken priority away from getting her servos dirty. She didn't oppose putting in the same amount of work as her team did, but her responsibilities were different.
But, having thoroughly exhausted her options, Elita-1 delves deeper into the channel. She still guides her team into drilling and pushing out the energon ore, but she also stood at the precipice of calamity in wait.
Her miners are definitely curious as to the reason for her seemingly random micro-managing, but they work efficiently regardless. In fact, they work better than expected—the output of energon finally climbed back to the percentage she first reached the very first time she went through this contentious shift.
And from this position, she can see the exact moment that Wheeljack mistakenly misjudges the structural integrity to the vein. Before the miners down at the bottom of the channel can react to the groan of the channel, Elita-1 activated her pack and radio'd to the entire team to, "Fall back now! The tunnel is collapsing!"
Everyone heeds her warning, dropping their tools and backing away from the wall as they scurry to activate their jet packs. The electric pulse still ricochets down the tunnel, but with the head start more of them are able to avoid the explosion from the abandoned equipment.
The team at the entrance to the mine were long evacuated, preventing frames from crashing into one another as they hurried to escape.
Elita-1 doesn't dare to hope that this might have been the change needed to break the cycle, as many times before their desertion of the channel had gone smoothly up until–
"Agh!" Moonracer called out in pain, a chunk of wall having rapidly closed in on her position, knocking her jet pack clean off and trapping her arm. Frantically she struggled to wrench it out, but the rock claimed her limb and without any sort of intervention… It would claim her life this cycle just as it had in previous ones.
And Elita-1 witnessed the whole thing, jolting to a stop at the yell. Miners raced ahead of her, following protocol and leaving her to her fate.
Were she to do the right thing, Elita would follow right after them. Orion Pax, D-16, and Jazz lagged behind all of them and she bet that those two if not all three would attempt to rescue Moonracer—upping the casualty count to four.
Were Elita-1 to follow protocol, she'd have to look Moonracer right in her optics as she pleaded for survival and turn her back on her. Just as she had before, again and again and again.
Elita-1 warred with herself, warred with the rules and regulations she had served her whole run cycle, and worse than that she warred with Orion's now unspoken words about what merited a good leader.
Because it wasn't the amount of bolts one held on their tier badge or anything like upper management spouted.
A good leader left no bot behind.
Springing over to Moonracer, Elita-1 supported her peer with a firm but comforting, "I've got you."
Moonracer looked gobsmacked at her, but together Elita-1 managed to wedge her servo into the rock and find the disengaging lock that allowed her to disconnect her upper arm from the lower half. Wires still tore and she still screamed out in pain, but Elita had her.
Scooping the younger miner into her arms, Elita-1 activated her jet pack without a second thought to how she had broken perhaps the most important rule written down in spilled energon. Up ahead, she noticed that for once in this dreadful shift Orion Pax, D-16, and Jazz finally managed to make it out of the tunnel of death.
The same however could not have been said for her and Moonracer. The other cogless did not weigh down Elita nearly as much as if she had to haul her between her frame and that of another, but her jet pack sputtered into a fall—forcing her to try and make the last leg out on her pedes alone.
"Captain!" Orion Pax stared at her, as their optics met. Elita-1 in some aspect resigned herself to her fate.
How many times had she been on the other end of the threshold? Watching as her miners desperately raced toward freedom just for the walls to close in on them and snuff their sparks? She didn't even have a contingency for if the cycle would break upon her death.
Was this how Elita-1 wanted to go, if that were so?
Glancing down at Moonracer, she looked up at her captain with a wet gleam to her optics but… Admiration. Disbelief. And hope. Because Elita-1 did not falter in her mad dash to the exit and more than that Elita-1 had gone back for her.
"They're not gonna make it!" D-16 exclaimed, searching around for something that could possibly help them.
Elita-1 tore her optics away from Orion and used her possible last seconds to note the harrowing emergency lights on the bracers propping up the mine shaft—bent from enduring the strength of a dead god. The metal squealed and sparked before breaking, the wall closing in faster with every bracer that snapped.
Orion joined him, growing frantic as an uncharacteristic helplessness threatened to drag him down. "They just need a little more time! We need to–"
(85)
Elita-1 had never died before. In her opinion, dying did not suit her in the slightest. Nor did it provide her comfort nor a promise of rest.
She did not return to the beacon of sparks that her own had birthed from. The Well did not greet her like an old friend.
Rather, she felt an impression of a silver and gold decorated gauntlet grasping an hourglass—Rhisling the voice of Vector Prime whispered to her in a secret that she would forget come morning—to turn it ever so slowly.
And then Elita-1 woke up.
Wheeljack greeted her with a cheerful, "Good morning, Captain!" And Moonracer smiled at Arcee as they gossiped on their way to the train.
By miracle, she managed to bluff her way through her original speech. Distantly, she refuted Orion's attempt at cozying up to her before requesting he be given a chance to lead:
"Consider carrying your own weight before you carry the weight of leadership, Pax."
And when the electric pulse of Primus cried out throughout the lower channel, Elita-1 felt ready. She still demanded that the other miners follow protocol, still scrambled to evacuate herself.
But when it came time for Orion Pax to haul Jazz—over his back, a change occurring without Elita-1 even trying—with D-16 smashing his way through encroaching rock, she found herself ready.
Protocol would dictate that Elita-1 leave them to their fate. Either they would gain the speed necessary to make it out before it completely caved-in or they wouldn't.
But her servo found the missing piece, the last little bit of perspective that she needed as she grasped the abandoned bracers left behind at the front of the tunnel.
Elita-1 threw them as though they were javelins, straight into the heart of the collapse. They sprung into place, preventing the walls from prematurely closing in on the three buying them ever a little more time.
When they were a breath away from safety, she hauled up one last bracer and activated it right at the entrance. She bore the weight of her decision to break protocol–
And ensured the survival of every last miner on her team.
At the expense of the energon refiners behind her, the tension from the bracer having flung it toward the back wall—crashing into the refinery and contaminating more than a measly thirty units of energon.
But they all made it out of the tunnel collapse and as Elita-1 knelt, staring at Orion Pax and D-16 in front of her whilst Jazz received medical attention well…
The cycle broke with her.