Nexus Point Part 1-14

Cassie’s mother had taught her at an early age to never, ever play with weapons or sharp objects.  From the time she could walk Artemis had gone over gun safety rules with her – most importantly, to never touch Mom’s shotgun and to run and tell an adult if she ever found a gun.  And though she had often helped chop wood, clear undergrowth, and clean fish at the resort in the Cascade mountains, even at a young age, she always did so with her mother’s words of caution in her ears.

So it was probably for the best that her mom wasn’t here to see her playing with her ax.  She would probably burst an important blood vessel or something.

Sparkcleaver spun through the air over Optimus Prime’s desk, flashing with ruby-red light.  Cassie eyed its trajectory, trying to calculate where it would probably land, then hurried forward and extended her arm.  With a satisfying smack the weapon’s handle struck her palm, and she grinned and hefted it in her arms to strike a pose.  She wasn’t overly worried about losing a limb or worse – it seemed that no matter how she threw the ax, she always managed to catch it handle-first instead of blade-first.  Even when she’d deliberately made a bad throw just to experiment, the shaft of the ax had always found her hand.

Perhaps further experimentation was in order, she figured, and she flung the ax at the wall.  Sparkcleaver sailed toward what looked like a holo-painting of a Cybertronian landscape, but before it could strike she stuck her hand out.  If she was wrong about this… well, she doubted Optimus Prime would step on her, but he certainly wouldn’t be happy.  Maybe she’d get a stern lecture, she didn’t know…

The weapon looped back around like a boomerang, and again the shaft struck her palm.  Interesting... though this bore further testing…

A half-dozen throws later, and she figured her theory was pretty much fact.  No matter which way she threw her weapon, it would come back to her hand if she wanted it to.  Perhaps the weapon was psychically linked to her now, or perhaps her internal circuitry had some kind of homing chip in it that the ax could pick up.  

“Awesome.”  She gave Sparkcleaver another little toss and caught it again.  “Hmmm… I wonder…”  And she drew her arm back and flung the ax with all her strength.  If she threw it with the intention of actually hitting something, would it still come back to her hand?

Sparkcleaver struck the doorframe of the office blade-first, embedding itself in the metal and sticking there… just as the door opened to admit Optimus Prime himself.  The Autobot leader regarded Cassie with a look of bemusement, then gazed at the weapon gleaming in the wall.

“Hello, Cassandra,” he greeted, his voice deep yet oddly warm and benevolent.  “I hope that was unintentional, seeing as we haven’t been hostile to the Blades at all.”

“Uh… yeah, that was an accident.”  Her face flushed bright red under her helm, and she thrust her hand out to recall the weapon.  “Just… testing it out and got carried away, sorry.”

“Apology accepted, Cassandra.”

“Cassie.”

“Cassie.”  He nodded and went to sit at the desk, his gaze never leaving her.  She returned his stare, not bothering to disguise her awe and amazement.  She’d always had a soft spot for Optimus Prime, even mentally adopting him as a surrogate father of sorts – unlike her biological father, he’d always been there for her, even during her roughest points in college and her struggles to get her bipolar under control.  But seeing him in the flesh… er, steel was indescribable.  It was one thing to admire someone on a screen, quite another to be in their physical presence, to appreciate them as a being of substance rather than just an idea or an image.

He’s freaking tall, she thought.  Taller than I thought he’d be.  Somehow all the cartoons had failed to get across the sheer size of these beings – not that most of the cartoons had worried too much about such trivialities as proper scale.  It wasn’t just his height, though – he was broadly and powerfully built, and beyond his physical presence he seemed to exude an aura of calm authority.  He didn’t flaunt it openly, but it was there all the same.

“Sir,” Cassie said softly, “can I just say it’s an honor to finally meet you?”

Prime chuckled softly.  “The pleasure is all mine, Cassie.  I never thought I would meet the Blades of Primus in my lifetime, let alone be asked to train them.”

Cassie shrugged.  “Life’s full of surprises, I guess.  Though Primus said that most Cybertronians don’t believe in the Blades anymore.  I’m kinda surprised that most mechs here do.”

Prime’s optics darkened slightly at that, and even through the mask Cassie imagined he looked… sad.  “There is a difference between knowledge of a concept, and believing in it.  Most of Cybertron believes you’re a myth.  A fable, passed down through the generations to give our kind hope – hope that the Blades will return and restore peace among our kind.”

Cassie looked down at Sparkcleaver, brushing a smear of paint off the crystal blade.  “That’s not exactly why we’ve come back.”

Prime nodded.  “Unicron… even he is regarded as nothing more than a nightmarish fairy tale.  Our kind has forgotten their origins, it seems.”

“Which just seems stupid,” Cassie admitted.  “I mean, you’re robots.  Shouldn’t you guys have this encoded in your memory banks or something?”  She blushed and ducked her head.  “Sorry, that came out rude.”

“Not at all.  And unfortunately, having data in your memory banks and knowing something deep down in your spark are two very different things.”  His vents gusted warm air in a deep sigh.  Then he shook his head.  “But we’re getting off track here.  We were to begin your lessons today.”

She nodded.  “I’ve got no idea how it’s supposed to work, though.  Something about energy manipulation?  Kinda like Firebending or Lightning-bending from Avatar, I guess.”

“I’m not sure what you’re referring to, but I suppose we’ll find out as we go along.”  He reached under his desk and pulled out a shimmering pink cube.  “I thought we would start with energy in its most concentrated form, and see if you can absorb and manipulate that.  In theory it shouldn’t be toxic to humans… but I got the lowest possible grade just in case.”

Cassie “oohed” softly in amazement as she approached the energon cube.  She’d never quite figured out how the stuff would look in real life, but up close it looked thick and luminescent, like the substance inside a lava lamp.  And like a lava lamp it gave off a soft glow, as well as an aura of noticeable but not uncomfortable heat.  

She pulled off one gauntlet and, out of sheer curiosity, pressed her palm to the side of the cube.  It was like touching the world’s biggest plasma ball – a tingle of energy tickled her palm, and she could feel the hairs on her arms trying to stand up.  If she weren’t wearing her helmet she was sure her shaggy brown locks would be sticking out in every direction like Doc Brown from Back to the Future… could she mention that?  That movie came out before 1987, right?

“Cassie?”

“Oh, sorry.”  She pulled her hand back.  “Got distracted.  Um, how do we get started anyhow?”

Prime’s optics flickered, tilting slightly up at the corners as if he were smiling.  “I think you were already starting on your own.”

“Huh?”  She glanced down at her palm... and nearly jumped right out of her boots.  “What the freak?!”

The skin of her hand was glowing where she had touched the energon cube, a faint but visible pink luminescence that seemed to flare brighter now that it had her attention.  As she stared at the glow it slowly faded away… but the tingling remained.  Said tingling flowed down her arm and into her chest, where it seemed to gather into a tight kernel of energy and stayed there.

“Whoa.”  She stared up at the cube, then flexed her hand and placed it against the side.  As if she had just turned on a spigot, the energon level began to drop immediately – slowly, but noticeably.  At the same time her arm glowed with energy, and the tingling in her chest became a full-on burning as the power built and blossomed, filling her entire torso and spreading to her limbs…

“Careful,” Prime urged.

“Pssht, careful’s my middle name,” Cassie replied.  “Actually it’s Hecate, but you know what I mean…”  She pulled her palm away briefly, cutting off the flow of energy, focusing on the burn of fire in her own body.  She felt… powerful, like she could make something disintegrate with a touch.  And when she looked down at herself, her entire body shimmered and glowed with energy, a vibrant aura that illuminated the entire room.

“Wonder how high this can go,” she muttered, and she touched the cube again.  This time the flow of power felt like a river, surging through her body, filling her until she couldn’t contain it all and it began to spill over…

“Cassie, stop, you might-” Prime began.

Whatever he had to say next was cut off as her body, unable to hold another iota of energy, convulsed and ejected her entire store of power.  Light filled her vision, and a splitting pain ripped through her skull as if Sparkcleaver had just landed on her head and split it in two.

When her vision finally cleared, every inch of her body felt bruised and sore and she had a raging headache.  Though at least she wasn’t dead and, though her armor was singed at the edges, she was still in one piece.  The same couldn’t be said for Prime’s office – the explosion of a power-overloaded Blade combined with a volatile energon cube had blackened the walls and shattered the holo-picture, and the desk she stood on was now a half-melted, charred mess.  Prime himself coughed and waved a hand in front of his face to clear the smoke – though why a robot needed to cough was beyond her – and with a sinking feeling in her gut she saw the explosion had turned him almost completely black.

For a long moment Prime and Blade regarded each other, then surveyed the wreckage of his office.  Finally, Prime spoke up.

“Perhaps we should move this exercise outside,” he suggested.

“Yeah… good idea.”  A tingle of energy wormed its way through her chest, down her arm, and exploded in a fizzle of sparks from her fingertips in a final hiccup of power.  “Sorry about your office.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve blown up my office,” he admitted.  “And it won’t be the last.”  He carefully scooped her up in his palm.  “It seems the absorption of energy comes naturally to you.  Now we just need to see about managing and controlling it…”

***

“Let’s try that again.”

Krysta sighed and lowered her hands.  “There’s got to be a better way to teach me this than ‘turn on your shield generator.’  I don’t even know if I HAVE a shield generator, much less how to turn it on.”

“Your shield’s got to come from somewhere.  It doesn’t just spring to life like magic.  And really?  Surely you humans have some way to regulate your internal systems.”

“We don’t come with on-off switches on our internal organs.”

“I’ll never understand humans.”  Trailbreaker didn’t sound exasperated when he said that – if anything, his smile never wavered.

Krysta and the bulky black Autobot stood in a room Trailbreaker had explained served as a common room.  It looked vaguely similar to the cafeteria from her college days, with tables and chairs and an energon-dispensing station not unlike a soda fountain in the back.  A large viewscreen played some kind of news broadcast at one side of the room, though no one seemed to be paying it any attention.  A group of winged mechs that must have been the Aerialbots were playing a card game on the far side of the room, but she and Trailbreaker had this end entirely to themselves.  

“I asked for us to have a little room to work and practice,” Trailbreaker explained.  “Not that I think anything’s gonna go catastrophically wrong or anything, but you know, better safe than sorry.”

“Shields don’t normally blow up, do they?”

“Not in my experience.  Unless it’s the shield generator blowing out, which can be messy, but the likelihood of that’s pretty slim.”

Krysta grimaced at the mental image.  “That’s reassuring.”

“Okay, let’s do this again.”  Trailbreaker gestured in a circle around himself – more for dramatic effect than anything, Krysta supposed – and a transparent dome of energy formed around him.  “Now you try.”

He made it sound so easy… and maybe once she got the hang of it, it would be.  But at the moment he might as well have asked her to use the Force to levitate an X-wing out of the swamp.  She had no idea what she was supposed to be doing.

Well, she wasn’t going to be getting anything done just standing around, was she?  She raised her hands, focusing as hard as she could on making a dome of energy appear around her… willing it to happen…

Shield, she thought with all her concentration.  I need a shield… make a shield… shield…

“You can do it!” Trailbreaker encouraged.  “Just try a little harder!”

I’m trying as hard as I can, she thought angrily.  It’s not happening!  How was she supposed to access a power she’d never had before and had no idea how to manipulate?  It was frustrating to no end… and reminded her all too much of her countless discussions with her family’s pastor, and how he was convinced that all her questions and problems could be solved simply by praying really hard.  How were you supposed to “pray hard” anyhow?  It wasn’t exactly a strenuous physical activity…  

“Is she okay?”

Krysta glanced up sharply at the Aerialbot who had stepped over to investigate, her concentration shattered.  “What the…”

“Oh, sorry.”  The white-and-red mech backpedaled a step, hands raised.  “I didn’t mean to bug you!  I just saw you were scrunching up your face and grunting and that usually means something hurts in humans!”

She sighed and lowered her hands.  “I’m okay, Mr…”  Which one was this?  She’d never really bothered to learn which Aerialbot was which, seeing as she’d always been “meh” toward the team, and some of them looked too much alike to figure it out at first glance.

“Fireflight,” he replied with a bit of a smile.  “No Mister needed, just Fireflight.”

“Fireflight,” she repeated, nodding.  One down, four to go.  “I’m okay.  Just trying to train here.”

“She’s under my charge,” Trailbreaker explained.  “She’s going to be a shield generator, like me.”

“Likely story,” another Aerialbot huffed, this one the same white and red but with an amber face and visor.  He stepped up to stand between Fireflight and Trailbreaker and folded his arms across his chest, glaring down at Krysta.

“Come on, Slingshot, don’t be like this,” Fireflight pleaded.  “I don’t think Primus is gonna be happy if you start making fun of his Blades…”

“Blades,” Slingshot repeated, spitting the word out as if it were something sour.  “Just another fairy tale made up during the Golden Age when mechs got too bored for their own good.  And even if they DO exist, why are they squishy humans?  How is THAT-”  He pointed at Krysta.  “Supposed to combat something as powerful as Unicron?  She’ll get crushed within a millisecond!”

A non-believer, Krysta thought.  Primus warned us we’d run into these.  Still… we just might have something in common, Slingshot.  Aloud she said “That’s why Primus granted us our sigma powers – to level the playing field a bit.  Now could you scoot, please?  I’m in the middle of something here.”

“A sigma power you don’t even know how to use,” Slingshot retorted, ignoring the request.  “If Primus wanted Blades in the first place, why didn’t he just pick Cybertronians?  At least then we wouldn’t be playing babysitter to them.”

“Hey Sling, chill out, will you?” another Aerialbot demanded, pulling at his arm.  “Leave her alone already.”

“Hands off, Air Raid,” Slingshot snapped, jerking his arm free.

“Could you guys back off and give us some space?” demanded Trailbreaker, patting at the air with his hands.  “I’m sure she almost had it before you interrupted.”

“If you seriously wanna show her how to make shields, just having her stand there and make stupid faces isn’t enough,” Slingshot pointed out.  “She’s gotta have incentive.”

Krysta frowned.  She wasn’t sure she liked where this was going.

“You’re not suggesting…” began Trailbreaker.

“Theoretically, it makes sense,” a black-and-red Aerialbot put in.  “A lot of sigma powers are activated by pure instinct.  If she’s a shield generator, perhaps she’ll come into her powers by responding to a threat of some kind.”

“Don’t give him ideas, Skydive!” Air Raid griped.

“Well, it’s not like I recommend it…” Skydive went on.

“Why not?” Slingshot asked.  “If it’s the fastest way, why not give it a shot?  Besides, if she’s really a Blade, she can block it easy, right?”

“Slingshot, if you do what I think you’re going to do-” Trailbreaker protested, all cheerfulness gone from his voice.  

Slingshot raised one arm, and a panel set into his forearm slid open to release a thin but deadly-looking arm-gun.  Shouts filled the common room, and Fireflight swung one arm out as if to swat the weapon away, but Slingshot batted the limb aside.

A hard knot of shock formed in Krysta’s stomach, filling her limbs with ice.  It was as if time were moving in slow-motion – Trailbreaker’s hand moving out to snatch her in a rescue that she knew would come too late, the machinery within Slingshot’s gun shifting and tensing in preparation to release its payload… she even swore she could see the first projectile emerging from the muzzle…

SHIELD!

Something clicked on inside her chest, humming to life.  Without thinking, before the shock could erupt into full-fledged panic, she flung up a hand.  The humming intensified, and an electric sensation jolted across her chest, down her arm, and out of her raised palm in a flow of brilliant silver-white light.  The light spread out in a gleaming transparent barrier between herself and Slingshot, like a pane of rippled glass, and hung there as his gunfire smashed into it with a muffled thumping sound.  The projectiles shattered upon impact, the fragments hanging suspended in the field of energy before dissolving into dark granules, then vanishing entirely.

For a long moment she, Trailbreaker, and all four Aerialbots just stood there, mouths hanging open, staring at the long swath of silvery energy hanging before her.  The buzzing in her chest became an obnoxious vibration, and belatedly she dropped her hand.  As if on cue, the shield flickered and vanished.

The gathered Autobots erupted at that moment.  Air Raid grabbed Slingshot around the neck and shook him furiously, roaring that someone named Silverbolt was “gonna rip your wings off for this!”  Slingshot bellowed back, but whatever he had to say was drowned out by Fireflight and Skydive babbling in amazement, pointing at the area where the shield had hung and their optics gleaming excitedly.  Trailbreaker joined Air Raid in chewing out Slingshot, though there was a quirk to his mouth that suggested that all in all, he was pleased with how this scenario had turned out.

Krysta, for her part, just sat down, feeling suddenly shaky but triumphant.  She’d done it… she had created a shield.  Her sigma power would come when called, or at least when she was in danger.  Now if she could just learn to summon it at will, so that she didn’t have to be staring death in the face to call on her power.

Wish you could see this, Astrid, she thought idly.  You’d have liked all this.

***

“Lore, are you paying attention?”

Lore glanced up from her laptop.  “I am, I promise!  I’m just taking notes.”

“Look up from your notes once in a while,” Ratchet advised.  “A lot of this is visual, and I expect you to learn as much as you can while you’re under my charge.”

She did her best not to sigh and let her gaze settle on the holographic diagram.  Ratchet frowned – though it could have been a neutral expression and that V-shaped crest of his just made it look like a frown – then turned back to jab a finger into the chest area of the diagram.

“In here are most of the vital systems to keep a Cybertronian functioning – save the CPU, of course, which in most mechs is located in the cranial unit.  So in that sense, we’re not that different from humans.  The placement of our components isn’t the same as the corresponding organs in a human body, however.  For example, the fuel pump is located in the center of the torso cavity, unlike the human heart in the upper-left side of your chest…”

Lore felt a yawn brewing in the back of her throat, and struggled mightily to suppress it.  This was like vet-technician training all over again.  At first it had been exciting to learn the ins and outs of the Cybertronian body – or chassis or what have you – and she had sat rapt with attention as Ratchet had taught her the purpose of each component and how best to repair it.  But after four hours of sitting through his lecturing, the novelty had long ago worn thin, and now Lore was itching to get to the hands-on part of the training.

She knew better than to complain about it – the first time she had meekly asked about actually learning to use her power, he had taken her to task.

“What do you think I’m doing here?  There’s more to healing a mech than just wiggling your digits and going ‘bippity-boppity-boo’ or whatever it is you do!  You’ve got to learn HOW to heal a mech, and that includes knowing WHAT the frag you’re healing!  What happens if you go in blind and accidentally fuse a mech’s catalytic convertor to his transformation cog?  Or rupture whatever it is you’re trying to fix?  You’re going into this educated or I’m not training you at all, end of discussion.”

His tone had been pretty harsh in her mind, but she had to admit he had a point.  She knew very little about how Transformers actually worked, and if she was going to be healing them, it was probably best if she was familiar with their systems.  That didn’t change the fact that for all his healing skill, Ratchet was a frigging boring teacher.

Still, she would be a good student.  She wanted to learn, and even if her power was the weakest on the team, she wanted to be useful.  

“Hey Doc Hatchet!”

Ratchet groaned and jabbed a finger at Lore.  “Stay there.  Don’t go anywhere.  I’ll be back.”

The command struck Lore as a bit dippy, seeing as she was perched on a mech-sized table and couldn’t exactly go anywhere without breaking a leg, but she just nodded in reply.

“Doc, we know you’re in there!”

“Fraggitall, get your afts in here!  What is it THIS time?”

“You act like we only come in here to annoy you,” Sideswipe retorted, strolling in with an air of nonchalance that looked completely faked to Lore.  Sunstreaker stalked in behind him, looking sullen and with one of his arms separated from his body at the shoulder joint, the severed limb slung over one shoulder as if it were merely luggage.

Lore couldn’t keep her gaze off of the yellow Lambo as he sat down with a heavy thump on an examination table.  Gods… he was even more stunning in real life than he was in the fanart…

She shook her head and returned to furiously typing out her notes.  No gawking!  Even if G1 had been pretty open about mechs falling in love with humans and vice versa, she didn’t think Sunstreaker would take it well if he saw a human girl making puppy-dog eyes at him…

“I don’t even want to know how this happened,” Ratchet growled as he inspected the yellow mech’s shoulder.

“Good,” Sunstreaker grunted.  “Don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Why not, it was awesome!” Sideswipe hooted.  “Seriously, no one else has lasted that long against Grimlock!  Everyone’s gonna be talking about this for orns!  Not to mention this means Smokescreen finally lost a bet…”

“You guys bet on me arm-wrestling Grimlock?” demanded Sunstreaker, optics flashing.  “I swear, Sides, if I had both my arms-”

“Can it, you two,” Ratchet snapped.  “And in my professional opinion, those who arm-wrestle with Dinobots deserve the inevitable consequences.”  He took Sunstreaker’s severed arm and inspected the wires jutting from the limb.  “Hmm… seems like a fairly clean break, actually.  I wonder…”

A thrill of hope shivered through Lore.  Was he going to give her a shot?

“Well, I can’t see how you could screw this one up beyond my ability to repair.”  He turned and shut down the holo-diagram.  “Close the computer, Lore.  We’ll see how you can handle a simple joint repair.  You were paying attention when we went over joints, right?”

“Of course, sir!” she replied, grinning from ear to ear.  “I can do this!”  She hoped, anyhow… she hadn’t tried accessing her healing ability.  But she was fairly confident she could do it.

“Oh wow, we get to watch a Blade in action?” Sideswipe gushed.  “Sweet!  You picked the best day to get your arm ripped off, bro!”

“Stop acting so excited that I lost an arm, you sick freak,” Sunstreaker retorted.

Lore just giggled and minimized OpenOffice on her computer… and gave a gasp of horror as she slammed the laptop shut.  Oh god, of all the pictures to have as her wallpaper…

“What.  The.  Slag.”

Her heart plummeted into her innards.  She’d forgotten Sideswipe was standing behind her.

“Open that up again,” Sideswipe demanded.  “I wanna see.”

“I’d rather not,” she squeaked out.

“Come on, I wanna make sure my optics aren’t glitching!”

“Stop hassling her and let her work!” Ratchet barked.

“Aw, come on!” Sideswipe protested.  “I wanted to make sure I really saw Megatron making out with Starscream!”

Ratchet’s optics rebooted several times, as if he were blinking in shock.  “Megatron… Starscream… what?”

“Okay, I gotta see this.”  Sunstreaker stood up and went to stand behind Sideswipe.  “Open up.”

Lore’s face burned with embarrassment, but she opened the laptop back up to show the wallpaper – the most recent IDW incarnations of Megatron and Starscream, looking as if they were about to lock lip plates.  The pose was far more sensual and suggestive than outright explicit, but the intent was clear enough to even the dimmest viewer.

“Ha!” Sideswipe hooted, pumping the air with a fist.  “I knew it!  And I always suspected there’s a reason Megs kept the Screamer around.  Couldn’t be his brilliant track record on the battlefield…”

“Primus,” Sunstreaker groaned, pinching the bridge of his olfactory sensor.  “I need to go scrub my optics with acid…”

Curiosity finally claimed Ratchet, and he moved to peer over Lore’s shoulder.  A strangled sound emerged from his vocalizer, and he stared at his human student with optics brilliant with… not exactly horror, he’d probably seen far worse as a war medic, but certainly a great deal of bemusement.

“So… you humans really think this of Megatron and Starscream?”  His lip plates quirked in a smirk.  “I can’t decide if that’s hilarious or just wrong.  Who do you think tops?”

Lore slammed the laptop shut and buried her face in her hands.  Jesus Christ on a bike, there was no way in hell anyone else was having a worse training session than her at the moment…