Rekindling Flight

[Pluralsword]

15/13/1,201,356 Allsparked Cycle (AC), Rallying Age. Starday, 3:35 Hours Dialgem Local Time, Caminus.

I love spaceports, but I feel so terribly alone right now, I thought as I watched the 15-kilometer-long sleek winged rod shaped PPA diplomatic vessel Embracement, light yellow with blue trim hue, rocketed into the stratosphere on four clustered cylindrical energon impulse engines that left a bright blue torch of a trail in the starry and ship-traced night sky. I held on hard to Lancer's back and waist, anchoring me in the optic of my storm of fear. Forearms pressed close to my sibling Sideswipe's own arms.

She held me and Sideswipe hard too in the same way, our stout bodies together in worry, clumped right by Velocity, Skids, Brainstorm, Eulogian, Basalt, Admira, Centrifuge, Solidstate, and Lamander. Hot-Rod and Flamewar held each other between us.

=Get some sleep, be careful, please= I commed my family departing to Cybertron aboard Lodestar: Aileron, Galvatron, Arcee-Daniel, Anode, Lug, Nautica-Parsec, Road Rage, Nightbeat-Muzzle, Rung, Grimlock, and Solus, along with members present on the ground with me. =I love you. Said that more than a few times this morning, but I love you. We all do. Don't let vitriol or pedestaling you might face make you feel like you're not.=

=We will, dear beloved mentee, wheel-blossom= Aileron replied. =We know you'll all have your hands full too. Look after Caminus, just as Caminus will look after you. The ongoing choice we make together to flare and kindle with the cosmos. We love you all very much. Be strong, and let yourself feel.=

Bright green light enveloped the Embracement, and the ship and luminescence immediately disappeared. Safe journey in quantum space, I thought. I'd keep talking by pinging through the Dialgem FTL comms hubs, but we all have things to do.

My head turned away from the sky, down to the dazzling busyness of the spaceport around me. In the distance to both sides of me stood flame shaped control and docking towers and terminals softly lighting up the immediate surroundings with flickering constellations of blue, green, pink, orange, white, and red, in conversation with ship crews and flyers both. Where the Embracement had been, the gray and hard as diamond composium metal landing field four kilometers away sat empty, save for strips of landing mark lights. The clamoring sounds of talking and milling about from bots in the distance did not escape me either, a perpetual circumstance for the largest spaceport on Caminus.

My frame turned to face Lancer fully, looking up at her face, her mouth slightly ajar, optics in the distance.

"How long do you think until there's a big fight? =Before the PPA Navy reaches the Unicron wrecks the Decepticons are working on, at least?=

=A week, at best, dear mentee Gauge.= She moved her lips closer together to smooch my forehelm, and energon tears streamed onto my helm soon after. =We had hoped you wouldn't have to face this so soon, that you'd at least have a few millennia. I promise to be there for you. We all will.=

My frame tried to seize up to cry and speak out, but I couldn't. My mind fell away from my frame, deep into worried strains of thought: I'm twenty, I don't even have two centuries worth of combat training, yeah sure I live near a Titan, but what's Tryp going to do against a defecting battle fleet? What am I going to do? It's not fair to us young folks but it's not fair to our elders either. I- I can't believe mentor Arcee is going to have a thirteenth war, and a reckoning no less with a bunch of false strength bots who misconstrue her words and that of so many more, and the very frame of our societies. I swear-

My frame moved, stepping away from my loved ones.

"I swear to the cosmos and by the meta ethos beyond our grasp, I won't rest until our autonomous remarkability is left in peace!" I bellowed at full-volume, fists clenched, aching to hold an arming sword and a dagger.

Then I curled up, collapsed onto the silver-grass ground, and sobbed my spark out.

Lancer's familiar sturdy hand found my shoulder, and patted the excavator arm on my back. "Maybe you shouldn't go to work today dear, you've got a lot on your mind, we all do."

=I think you're right; I'll call in, they'll need me tomorrow anyway= I pinged Lancer back while I continued to extricate optical fluid, and found her arms and hands of those I loved who were here on my frame.

-The long nights of nightmares and cries, days dulled by rejection of questioning, emotional journey, pluralistic broadness of belief, and free discussion. Only their Primus, their plenary, their emphasis of prescribed functions, their 'holy' works- I waited out the intrusive reflection on awful memories, encouraged myself to be more mindful and perceptive of the caring touch on my body and the loving presences around me, that I my hearth was free and I was too, to live making myself and in dialogue with the world around me for the sake of that heals and assures that what came to pass can be faced more readily. Heal bravely and softly.

Slowly, not feeling so outnumbered against fate, my face dried out. This is going to be a long week.

---

19/13/1,201,356 Allsparked Cycle (AC), Rallying Age. Rivetday (PPA galactic calendar), 8:35 Hours Dialgem Local Time, Caminus.

Corner turned, I rolled along on my treads and wheels down 89th SW St., a metal road flanked by tall bark-like organic trunks and their vibrant hues of leafed branches alongside hexagonal and square panels of solar bushels and trees. Transformer bots shorter than me to as tall as some of the five story buildings behind the trees walked, hovered, and rolled about on the sidewalk. Along with them were a small number of fellow species, green, clothed, and bipedal amphibian A'ovans, the compact and varied form ice pick armed glacbots, crawling long vine footed scaly and leafy lyssern flora-mollusktiles, and slow stout gem studded durrel lithoids among several other species. Peoples whose origin worlds' historical communities and countries had not joined the Cosmopolity out of solidarity with our PPA, bless their souls.

My flow into traffic came easily, a built-up reflex, that reminded my legs of their want to run freely and happily, on the exercising treks I did with friends and family.

The blue triwheel carbot Monoscribe in front of me flashed red rear lights and pinged on the polity transit database feed that they were slowing down, so I slowed my enginepower to not crash. They pulled over onto the streetside lane and transformed, walking onto the sidewalk. I barely noticed the transformation and walking, focused on the activity on the road, and they slipped past my view as I sped up again back to 55 kilometers an hour. Now I was behind a blocky rose-gold six-wheeler dome turreted with four long path-autocannons.

That went on for ten minutes, with us stopping for a red light and paired halting datafeed signal on streetlights and from transit conductor Signal Lancer on the traffic conduction feed team respectively, likely in a nearby management station. Only ten minutes, though, the time it took to get from my travel away from the large motorway Trither Highway to reach my stop most days.

While I flashed my own rear lights, raised my excavator arm vertically, and messaged on the feed =stopping onto ssw side sidewalk in 100 meters= I slowed down, and pulled over into the lane kept empty for stops, and unfolded in my transformation, gladdened by the familiar metal clanking sounds, and stepped into the sparse treeline.

Before I could step further, a bright pink electric blue accented amicous blossomus winter flower bud touched my left audial outcropping, fallen from it's silver trunked green leafed organic tree native to Caminus. I turned and gently caught it in my hands to keep it from falling further.

What a nice bit of casuality for today , I cupped the bud in my left hand, and waded into the bustle waving at tiny slender orange and monowheel legged Lickety-Split as she passed by with a simple delivery satchel slung on her shoulder.

She waved back with a grin, and rushed along down the street =Good to see you Gauge! Good luck at work today=

=Same to you!= I waded further towards my destination, and casually waved and commed at people I knew from growing in the polity and datafeeds I frequented, not wanting to be late even though hugging or clasping palms would be nice.

Several paces in front of me after I crossed the wide sidewalk was the dome shaped building, the one I tended to work over the last fourteen orbit cycles, when not in the field. Soft waves of red, purple, and green in walled hue and wide inner windows lining the floors of the place, the local autonom anchor. By it in a cyberflower meadow that ringed the building was a 982-year-old metal sculpture beloved by me and many denizens of Caminus that drew my optics this morning: Engines of Hope.

My optics fell on it, and I walked close, taking it all in. The art piece was composed of a stout pillar, twisting persons of multiple species stylized with fiery shapes across their bodies danced together, sparred, wrote, harvested food, labored over people and crafts alike, embraced with stilled passion, and nurtured one another with body warmth, regurgitation, joined roots, nipple feeding, and fuel cable exchange, depending on the species.

I put my left hand over my spark, and felt it expand inside my chest armor in tandem with the wistful love I was reminded of by this work of art. Of the deep ethereal trust and experiential feedback I had from my family, from my friends, from the polity and Caminus, from remarkability, for absurd hope, and the cosmic myriad of different lives and practices joined autonomously if they wished. That our PPA and Cosmopolity were both supposed to uphold, that I in part remind them to through what I work on. The Camien Assembly distributist government at least, I can count on. I worry for Cybertron, Velocitron, Corritan, and Gorlam...

Here's hoping we get another day before the big fight looming around the corner.

Then I strolled up to the autonom entrance, parallel with the bumps for tactile sense sticks and past the dot embossed button posts that called out "press to hold the doors open for extra time." The doors that towered over me slid apart while announcing their opening, and I made my way inside. Like every day I had come in for the last month, the rounded outer hall was full of people sitting and talking at tables, benches, and the floor, some drawing or engaging in board games, or sitting quietly connected by gestalt patch cables with each other, between paintings that hung on the walls. I saw some of my facilitator colleagues among them, and a dozen or so of the people greeted me in passing, which I returned. The inner walls were clear, to give some visibility to the inner workings for those visiting.

I turned left to another doorway marked with glyphs in multiple languages reading: Regional Convocation and Library , and entered after the halves split with a swish. With a few steps, I was inside a large rounded room with multimedia shelves, along with tables and chairs flanked by art supply shelves. My interest though, as much as I love to read and draw , was in the round table conference rooms that half-encircled the back of the room's walls.

After I made my way to the one across from the entrance, I linked up with the room's commsfeed with my own, and knocked. =Good morning, did I miss anything before the meeting's start?=

=No no, nothing out of the usual, come in, Gauge= Firestar replied.

The doors made way for me, and I sat myself next to her taller, curvier and thickset red and orange frame, and fire decaled silver helm. The other transformers present were Boater, Clipper, Terradrive, Excellion, Escargon. Besides them were two burgundy embroidered violet robed A'ovans: Cep'wolz I'ark and Ren'affik Y'nd, a curled up cyan orange lyssern: Tem-hach Greenfrond, and rounded lavender green glacbot Up-Tic Root-Twelve.

Our heights varied widely, the much smaller A'ovans and Up-Tic sat on an elevating ramp bench together, the three of them less than a third of my height each, while tubelike deep blue Terradrive was by far the tallest at 32 meters.

"Good morning folks," I put my left hand over my spark. "Good to see you."

"Good morning," the rest from my work group responded with a difference in nanoseconds at their speech and varied intonations of excitement and return of the gesture, Tem-hach with <Good sunrise> in quembass, ots language, lazily licked ots jaw with a forked tongue, matched by flapped spine leaves.

I placed the flower I had carried inside on the computer laden table, next toblocky blue white and red Boater, and grinned at him. "Hey, I know you collect these, this one fell on my head this morning just outside."

"Aw thank you Gauge," he scooped it up in his large hands and gently placed in a side waist compartment, their light gray faceplate shuffling up and down happily. "I'll be sure to add this to the arrangement I'm working on." He then turned and faced the group. "Now that we're all here, shall we start?"

All typed or thought onto the datafeed with votes of yes.

"Motion carried. We've got our usual caseload of advisement and mediation requests in this awaiting crisis situation, and stratocratic violence has worsened," Cep'wolz started, lighting up the computer screens of the table around us. "There is at least the continued ascent of seeking access to the newest previously obscure technologies of collective and reflective aesthetic engagement since the convocations surrounding and leading up to the enactment have boosted its recognition and value in the general populace, and people speaking about it on behalf of the reunification have certainly helped. The results of the two- have left a lot of emotional processing that needs doing. As the philosopher Li'hast Nol'vir would say, 'a new beginning waits in every epilogue.'" Cep'wolz paused to dig through pers computer terminal on pers little clicking scroller-car in hand, and then Cep'wolz black eyes fell on me.

I had taken the moments prior to look through my various autonom colleagues' assignments to the hundreds of requests around this district and the polity at large. It left an uneasy feeling about the dozens of reports of violent scuffles with various armed micro-actors called the Justicial Division who the Decepticons had officially disavowed, not that doesn't mean you scrappers aren't supporting them anyway, based on the countless times we find out some faction rep or staffer has ties to them. Just like how I suspect the Reversionists who took me when they besieged Dialgem are connected to you somehow, that you really are neo-Functionist shills-

Memories overwhelmed my thoughts: the third month of my life, lived under the watch of guns trained on me, being told by harsh and cruel bots of the Reversionist cult that my form had a purpose for Primus by digging up energon lines to make a new world from, that my experiential launch delvedare aesthetic wasn't important, that that part of me and my signifiers did not matter as much as my form, that I was a tool of divine portent who had to know her place or be removed from cognitive experience of the divine.

Painfully away from the family and society that made me feel special, remarkable, that offered that to everyone in a healthy way.

I never forgot that their motto was 'divide the unholy by descendant justice.' I don't know how many times while I wept in my mentors' arms and surrounded by the soldiers who helped them free me, that polity agent code names were exchanged by the higher ups and their contacts, that a heavily rewritten Towards Peace was one of the group's texts. Still searching for contacts, military tells me.

"Gauge?"

"Oh right, sorry," I met Cep'wolz's orbs with my optics. "Just uneasy taking a look at the data."

"That's all right, we all are," per smiled with a nod. "You'll have time to go over it. I thought I'd suggest that it might be a good idea for you to shore up the neighborhood three blocks down south, you know the one, Boreulum. They had a rough night dealing with some DJD bruisers. We have people on hand already but I thought they could use that special touch of yours."

"Right," I nodded back. "I can do that. Was my specialty in psychology after all, trauma. Is there anything of note from the local or polity agencies or the Camien branches that we should know about?"

"Yeah," boxy triple helm crested pink and white Clipper crossed her arms. "Word from the Camien Executive Council is that the military is on high alert as of eight hundred hours this morning. We're expecting something big from the Decepticons and are already taking preventative measures," =which is to say that special operations are already being conducted to avoid a larger fight while the PPA fleet closes in on the Unicron wrecks.= she commed to each of us individually rather than through the room datafeed. "Public demonstrations of Decepticonism have been banned for decades now here but it should come to no surprise to any of you that word is afoot about a large gathering from what few of the people here care for it. So, be careful."

"I don't need to lecture you on being a target-" Up-Tic started before I cut shom off.

"I should not get special treatment just because my family is in close orbit with the esoteric core and spirit of Autobotism and a bunch of them are veterans, in the military or in government," I put my palms forward. "A guard retinue won't save me from a sniper, and there are no combat experts here much older than a millennium among the Decepticon ranks, I can take them, and there's always a fellow soul willing to lend a hand around here. Military resources are better spent elsewhere."

"See, it's that sniper thing that Councilor Red Wing was concerned about," Terradrive leaned forward. "If you're willing- Crosspath will transport you when you need to get home, and you'll tune in on video comms to help out the boreulumites remotely. I know we're asking a lot of you, since you like to be in the open, more than anything because if there is a fight you want to show your life isn't worth more than someone else's."

"I-" I balled my fists. "Fine- if it gives everyone less of a headache." My hands relaxed, tension spent, as I tried to calm myself thinking of something Aileron said to me when I was young, the way of the open sword and hand is only useful when there is action or purpose to be done, to leave your limb hanging in the open makes it easier to strike, and veritable threat of such should be considered. "What else is on the agenda?"

---

Once the meeting was over and we had gone over our logs, and some preliminary heads up to the boreulumites I made my way to a side room and settled in behind a computer terminal with a video camera, and talked to the CPU's task manager module with my comms after finding its signal. =Mu 4274.333.44.1, initiate boot sequence code rad#resonance44X2!4332Z412A&34=

=User Gauge Root 239-u43 recognized. Should I address you differently?= the computer screen came on, changing from black to a pinkish burgundy forest, populating applications and toolbars upon it.

=No, thank you= I smiled at the question one I left enabled out of fondness. =Establish two-way video link with Refraktor Root 849-r23=

The computer terminal's camera and audio blinked on, and my screen was suffused with a view of forty-three people, thirty of them transformers, all of them seated around close together, some held each other or hugged hands, shined under sunlight in a cybertree grove.

"Hi Gauge!" ridge-modulated wheel shouldered red and white Pīpō waved at me with a grin, though their blue monovisor seemed to be stuck in a droop. "Nice of you to join us."

Their frame was dotted with repair patches as were a dozen other bots.

Trying to keep up good cheer as always, I thought. "Hey folks, I know you've had some help this morning, I know you went through some tough stuff. I went over your notes and what you've all agreed your comfortable talking about and hearing, and it seems like this is something you want to talk about together, so let's start. How'd like to go first?"

"I will," a bot sitting in a comms stand black and blue box alt mode whispered, Phreaker. particularly large metal cast surrounded the center of their communications console. "I was resting outside on the night shift in case someone needed long range comms handy, and the car bot Cutoff pulled up and walked up to me, talking about making a call, went to pick up the comms phone- and ran a wrist blade right through me, hitting my spine just as I heard gunfire. I don't remember the rest, went into stasis. I felt so helpless and unhelpful when I awoke after surgery and resuscitation, and right now until I heal enough, I'm stuck in this mode- that I got stabbed in."

"Oh Preaker... I'm so sorry," I closed my optics for a moment. "That sounds awful. We can't always do everything to protect each other, but we can do what we can. You're very brave to be here right now with your neighbors." I paused, watching their biolights blink in agreement. "I know it's hard, but taking a day at a time to accept yourself important. I had a hard time when the Reversionists nabbed me and pressured me to expose explosive energon veins- saying that-" I shuddered. "That it was my function to dig for the glory of Primus, on pain of disabling cognitive functions, a threat I didn't know they didn't have the skill or time to carry out. Finding a way to accept my body and hearth again was hard- but you can do it by doing something that gives respite with yourself, even if it is just thinking on what you do like."

"I... I want to not live in fear, and I appreciate you saying that, it does help, to think about what I like about myself in spite of what happened to me." Phreaker made a string of ringtone beeps before continuing, some of their neighbors smiled a little at the sound, as did I. "The big philosophical things aren't my way, I'm just a person who likes to sit down for a good game of fiber voyage, seeing to the garden, or catch on the latest Cube match, or spend time cuddled up with friends and family. Politics scare and exhaust me, Gauge. Those big forces of people colliding, waves to heal and hurt, with spiral after spiral of obscure and common wisdoms or action/theory whatever- is it called praxis?"

"Yes," replied the stubby frilled and claw-beared black magenta metal avian rezzoc Ristorv, "That's right."

"Yeah that, thank you Ristorv." Phreaker lit up a little. "I like talking with people about our experiences and wants for ourselves on a small scale- but the big stuff, I worry that big hopes and fears are gonna go to war again. Feels like I have no choice but to do something or face it though, though. War is growing like it did twenty years ago on a smaller and briefer scale."

There were murmurs of agreement among the group, along with trembles and cries.

Choose your words carefully Gauge, I don't think they want to be vanguards of advocacy or soldiers but they clearly don't want to continue as they are as if nothing happened. I nodded slowly. "I understand, how you feel, really. I'd say that if what you're expecting does come to pass, solace can be found in planning accordingly without diving into apocalyptic worry. "I know you might not want to get involved in the upper echelons of the cause or go to war, but you all already do things locally to sustain each other right, and all the folks you interact with from all over? People you exchange ideas with, and objects of affection or that you can't get at home, sharing experiences together autonomously."

Nods, vocal agreements, and brimmed lights were the reply I received.

"Yeah, that's true!" cylindrical cyan and yellow winged Snipe nosecone head grinned. "The lil' toolmaking and repair industry I and some of my coworkers here do mostly distributes locally and in the polity, but we get some exchange and gift requests sometimes because of the abstract fish detailing we do, and then there's the quantum wrench order workin' on one an orbit-cycle at a time, you know how it is, getting it calibrated for FTL diagnostics and all. I remember when your tutor Nautica was only fourteen, they came in told me they had read about my group's work in engineering journals from the other side of the galaxy by engineers who copied our construction techniques and iterated into new ideas and deconstructed it to mix with their own pre-contact tech, and she wanted 'one from where it all started' to retrofit for herself the sweet bot! So, there's something to what you said. Being in this together already. We just-" their red optics flickered, "-want to do more without overstretching ourselves and burning out. We're planning on taking more self-defense studies, but that won't stop what happened from starting again."

"Aw, that's such a cute story, I didn't know that one," I couldn't help joining the beaming expressions with my own little smile. "And you're right, it won't, the best we can do in that regard is combat the view that violence is a solution to all problems, when we already know from our own history and so many others that it's not. I'd say maybe what you can do is embrace the absurdity of hope, of caring for each other and yourselves, and if you want to add to that I'd say you could look into joining regional stuff to look after and build mental health and joy, to encourage speaking out and careful reconciliation. Should I dive into your options there, or would someone like to go next?"

"I'd like to speak and ask some things," a bony and creased light green Nebulan with red half-shaven hair in an orange flared knee-high dress and thick purple boots raised his hand, Acryll Soultab, a distant relative of Muzzle. "It was a hard night for me, was my first experience of combat duty, suddenly all my armor felt as if it would only slow the inevitable if I got it hit…"

We went on for two hours, all of us taking a half-hour break in between, and eventually the points I touched on in the beginning were revisited by the group rather myself as the main takeaway. Looking at the exhausted faces full of thought, I thought I'd bring up something else of use before I needed to decompress. "One more thing, you've probably heard about some of the technologies finding their way out of obscurity recently, there are a lot of options, but maybe you'd want to try doing some psyche patch art together? It may help to process."

My neural cluster pulsed with memory at my words, of channeling my feelings in psyche-automotive iteration through the paint spray linked to my brain module through the patch on my neck, with my family after I got home, painting around each other's illustrations on onto metal sheet paper, illustrations that changed as we took in each other's own, adding audio into the mix with the spray's speakers, one by one, before we were worn out and clumped into an embrace.

Blood and pain words and hugs, hopes and grievances, healing and sorrow, swords and books and shared meals and flowers, all from our souls together… something I'll never forget, just like how I'll never forget that over the next five years, healing from other things, our drawings got happier.

"Oh?" sleek and ridged grey red white shoulder-wheeled flame decaled Carzap asked, yellow optics wide. "I've heard about that from some of my other trans siblings, technological extension of subconscious art principles from all over the galaxy yeah? If you've got time, I'd love to hear more."

 

[Pluralsword]

Earlier that day… 19/13/1,201,356 Allsparked Cycle (AC), Rallying Age. Rivetday, 9:30 Hours Iacon Local Time, Cybertron.



My mind's focus ticked on as I cut off the metal refuse on my side of the wall with my cyan rounded and green trimmed plasma cutter, and I remembered for a moment when it had been handed down from my grand mentors when I took up repair work as they had.

The plasma down the barrel hummed quietly, as I methodically held a blue metal piece being cut, stopped when it was loose, put it down in the metal recycle bin beside me, and carried on, and eventually kneeled on the scaffolding to finish the job. With each drop, I marveled a little at the more and more apparent electric tangle of cables that lined the lower part and upper interior wall within.

What got you all jumbled, little buddies? Did the air hammer that hit your wall have remorscrappers that tried to clean you up?

A flutter of tiny silver wings and a back fin caught my optic among the cables, and I immediately fished out some rusty bolts from my toolbox and stuck it in, one end held.

Quickly, a chubby silver green claw legged remorscrapper slithered around the bolt, nibbling at the rust, and looked up at me with big orange optics.

I pulled the bolt out, bringing the critter up with me, and grabbed more bolts to make a pile in my left hand. "Hey buddy, we'll find you a big critter friend, you must be lonely huh?"

"Tsch-Tsch," the avian fish cawed back at me with big gulpy expressions.

"Hey Bulkhead, you're past your work hours, you have a break, old torq, wanna spend it with-" Rust Dust paused and peered with her small squarish head at my hand. "Aw you made a friend! Lucky you, we'll have to go find a fauna to return this one to, there's a meadow near here at that hub you like."

"Sounds good to me, you and Pyra tagging along?" I smiled at the stout red and aquamarine motorcycle bot the size of my ankle.

"Yeah! We missed you since you took your vacation," she smiled. "Come on, we got our stuff put away, I can hold our pal while you take care of yours."

"Sure," I gently placed her the pile of bolts and nibbling remorscrapper into her cupped hands, and put my welder away in my toolbox and shut it, to turn around to see Rust Dust imitating the critter's gulps with her sharp teeth.

"Tsch-Tsch-Tsch," she cooed, and the animal hopped up her dextrous arm to curl up on her shoulder, mouth, legs, and ventral length planted with suction onto her armor, wings folded onto their own plating.

"You always had a way with animals, didn't you," I grinned.

"As you know, I grew up in a Camien village in a valley of the Smithy Mountains," she looked wistfully into the Iacon polityscape, stout and colorful buildings, rails, and roads among pentagon leaved blue solar panel tree groves, blossoming cyberflower meadows, silver metal grass fields, and bright pink energon rivers, all of which together stretched out as far as the optic could see.

"We may have no practiced concept of cities for our polities like human history and many others, but big polities just aren't the same as home. Back in Cressellia, we are the few happily outnumbered by fellow orders of life and astro bodies." Rust Dust let out a long series of cacophonous caws after she spoke.

"CRAAW CRAAW CRAAW," the booming sound of an air hammer caw replied to her, and I saw one massive blue hammer headed and golden winged creature sitting in a meadow ten blocks from where we looked on, near the old hub Flare's Haven tucked away on the bottom floor of a boxy warehouse .

"There's your friend's ride," Rust Dust walked towards the mobile elevator. "You ready to go?"

"Yeah!" I chuckled and strolled after her. "Let's go rest up." I then commed superivsor Xeeriq's comms phone to let them know I was heading off on my break, and waited by Rust Dust as the elevator rumbled up to us.

=Cool! Thanks for helping out Bulk= Xeeriq left an emoji of a lyssern spine with flapping leaves.

The cylindrical window covered elevator stopped in front of us, Rust Dust and I stepped in and soared down. I barely processed the repair crew at work below and around us, but did see Pyra when reached the bottom, and clasped hands with the torqwhy's brawny boxy and tall teal and red visage, with traces of energon cleaner and lubricant wetness across her.

"How's the sewage repair going?" I let go of her hands.

"It's a mess," she laughed. "That air hammer tore through a kilometer of piping before coming back up," then her face clouded. "Seems to have had a panicked flight, almost as if running away from something."

"What could scare an air hammer but a war?" Rust Dust asked, and we all fell silent at that.

"Ah, the times," I shook my head. "Let's roll and talk it over if we want. I hear Arcee's giving her big speech or something today for that book she's been working on."

"I'd rather not get heady today," Pyra Magna transformed into her long fire truck mode, and Rust Dust and I followed suit into our clunky motorcycle and cargo truck modes respectively, and we rolled slowly out of the construction site to join with the road and traffic. "But I will say that's good news- I've been looking forward to hearing what a fellow veteran like her has to say about our next steps."

We took a relaxed pace through the traffic, and I noticed hundreds more people everywhere on sidewalks and the road than usual. Iacon, a hub of galactic activity again finally.

=Hey, looks like we might go back to having more maintenance work from wear and tear again= Rust Dust commented as we stopped at a streetlight.

=Yeah, it's exciting! More stories to exchange too.= I replied and started to roll forwards again.

=You two attending any talks after work, or leaving early for one?= Pyra queried as we signalled taking to the sidewalk.

"Was thinking about it," I transformed alongside my pals. "I wanna go hear the joint talks this afternoon about reinitiating coalition construction projects- megastructure proposals will be floated, might be the next big thing for me." I started my stroll into the silver grass and blooming cyberflowers that shone in the morning sun.

"Oh damn, leaving Cybertron someday? We'll miss you," Rust Dust touched my forearm as we approached the watching air hammer Rust Dust had called to.

It stirred, watching us sidelong from one gold speckled azure optic head-side, big circle patterned wings covered in cyan biolights flapping softly.

Rust Dust cooed at the air hammer in imitation of one it's calls, one I knew signified asking to come close.

The creature gave her a look and mewled back quietly, neck creaking. I saw bronze rustmold growths scattered across its frame.

"Poor thing, they've spent a lot of time in atmo," I whispered as Rust Dust walked up close to the space shuttle sized creature that dwarfed us all.

"Yeah, seems like it," Pyra looked on with me. "Wonder if they have a nest nearby."

Rust Dust nuzzled her head on the neck of the air hammer, continuing to chirp softly, which the air hammer returned, the two singing together.

I sighed with a grin, and watched as she picked up the remorscrapper from her shoulder, and placed it on one of the rust spots before patting the larger creature, and cawwed a farewell.

The air hammer turned as the scraper started to nibble, and brought its head side close enough to Rust Dust to touch her, the four energon and ion engines on its rear rumbling for a moment.

"She really has a magic with them, huh?" I watched as Rust Dust laughed and hugged the air hammer's head before walking away towards us.

"One of the things I love about her," Pyra smiled. "She's that soft with me too, certainly charming."

I chuckled, and waved at the creatures, "Goodbye, big and small friend," and looked over at Rust Dust. "You did good, is one going to be enough even with parthenogenesis?"

"Oh I commed some scrapper feeders to bring some remorscrappers over," she showed her fanged grin. "The air hammer will have some more help with the growths on their circuits."

We walked away and crossed the street up to the entrance to orange-red walled Flare's Haven , soft blue lights glowed on over the stoically ornate hub seating inside, some bots seated and milling about with drinks and food platters in hand.

Pyra opened the door, and I stepped in after her, to see dextrous and short Flareup stepping towards us out of her chair waving from around the boxy hubtending counter.

"Friends! Good to see you again, how's your morning?" she beamed at us, her orange, silver, and red frame gleaming in the Hadean's sunlight.

"Ah, you know, busy busy with work," Pyra smiled back and pressed hands with Flareup. "Looking forward to some collective questing later this week, these two said they'd join in. You interested?"

"Oh I'd love to!" Flareup leapt with excitement and laughed. "Getting away from routine and working on a simulated project while radiating a prideful aesthetic with gusto would be nice. Just around the district all neighborly or you rolling out somewhere?"

"Around these parts," I sighed, remembering the sensation from two bulbous arms around my waist accompanied with engineering monologues, such a charmer. "Wheeljack's in town, because of, you know," I gestured with an open palm to the outside. "The whole galactic-get together. He's going to partake in the quest after so this is where I want to be."

Rust Dust and Pyra chuckled.

"Aww, well I'd be glad to see him again," Flareup clapped her hands. "Send me the details later, first, tell me what y'all want to eat."

---

"So then I told aer," Pyra Magna guffawed from her booth seat across the table from me. "That if aer's a bot who really wants to be a Torchbearer, ae have to get in touch with the flame in aer's soul, starting with alt mode lessons with Rust Dust to rethink transformation."

"Oh come on!" Rust Dust cackled with the rest of us while she leaned on Pyra. "You're never going to let me live down the adventures that usually follow my driving lessons huh?"

"Only if you want me to sweetspark, so no," Pyra wrapped her arm around Rust Dust's frame.

"I've been meaning to pick up some advanced techniques," Flareup mentioned as she walked by. "Maybe you'd teach me some driving as a gift, Rust Dust?"

"Been meaning to give y'all something for all this lovely food," Rust Dust took in the last bite of her energon hexacookie full of aluminum chips. "Check my network calendar for an available day and we'll call it a deal."

"Yipee! Let me grab these from y'all," Flareup gathered up the plates and mugs of my two friends onto her previously back stowed tray, and to look at me. "You done with yours, Bulky dear?"

I took another large spoonful of tangy zinc ingots with bright pink energon from my bowl, and shook my head. =Will be soon though, thank you Flareup for your kindness.=

"Of course, thanks for keeping the neighborhood together, attentiveness goes both ways, partner." she touched my shoulder with one hand gently that fell away as she left and strolled off into the depths of the hub tableware in hand.

I sighed, missing Jackie, she's a little like him after all, isn't she.. .

=You got feelings for her, Bulk?= Pyra smiled at me. =Your symbiosis and mutuality never struck me as one that extended to zoomdares.=

I laughed loudly. =I'm demiconjuxic dear Pyra, and while that is usually for more torqy, asking, plunging, holdy, vroomy, and wooshy folks, there are some exceptions.=

While we chattered a little more together, across the window my optics tracked eight wheeler, repulsor, and tread bots veer off the main road into the side street between the warehouse we were in and the residential hall over, heavy with guns. I ran through my memory of the multibarreled and long thick barreled shapes. Triple ion cannons, X-series scrapmakers, fusion cannons, not typical issue for all members of a guard squad.

Pyra and Rust Dust's faces fell as my jaw tightened.

=Bulk? What did your optics follow just now?= Pyra stood.

=Trouble, I think eight bots armed to the teeth with non-integrated artillery guns and squad weapons.= I got up and made a run for the door. =Sorry Flareup, can't finish the meal, have to look into something and call some military contacts, keep an optic out for heavily armed instigators.=

"You got it Bulk, see ya later!" she called as I ran out the door, Pyra and Rust Dust behind me.

 

[Pluralsword]

Earlier that day… 19/13/1,201,356 Allsparked Cycle (AC), Rallying Age. Rivetday, 6:31 Hours Iacon Local Time, Cybertron.

At least Aileron has time for the spark echoing therapy with me today. I've definitely missed doing it with her.

You're worrying about Gauge and Sideswipe. Wouldn't lie if I said I wasn't either.

Of course I'm worried, Daniel dear. Even just counting groups we know, like the Circle of Light, Autobots, Decepticons, Unicronists, obscure Neo-Functionists, Vosian and Darkmount secessionists, and the returned radical embrace vs. the myopic chauvinism defense committee divide of the Cosmopolity factions, and whatever the theoretical precursors doing, we have a number of groups that do not get along during a particularly turbulent period. If I lose her again I'll- my hands' circuits throbbed, holding my thermal energy sword and dagger hilts on the table, body and module circuits as tenseas my spark. We will probably leave a bloodier trail than last time. If all my anxiety right now was rendered into kinetic force, it would explode this habsuite poor Lodestar was kind enough to give us, it's a good thing her Titan frame is much larger than this room.

We had to be here [Let's try stowing those, yeah?] I checked the ignition button safeties one more time, and moved my arms to store my first saber and dagger pair into my inner back stack compartments, and then the second pair, all in interior grooves, external armor plates shutting on them after. Arcee love, you know we had to, and we both know it is likely something will happen here. Caminus is the best place for Gauge and Sideswipe to be right now, they're always well watched out for, and you can trust Lancer and Greenlight to look after her. What happened two decades ago wasn't something we could do anything about, and you were there. It was a planetary defense protocol problem.

I'd rather not remember when a chauvinistic theocracy got the slip because of double agents who compromised hazardous material detection procedures and allowed the raiders to let loose EMP bombs all over Dialgem to try to pull off a mass abduction. My feet shuffled and I stood from my seat, arms painfully not holding my mentees. I think the Admiralty would also rather not remember the berating we gave them about ensuring multiple-factor trust either when folks along with Nightbeat, Muzzle and us put the pieces together. But thank you for reminding me we're being practical.

Fair enough- gosh she is always pretty, you two painting each other was nice, yeah? My optics gazed easily at the beloved sight of Aileron stretching her arms with a yawn in the doorway to the berthroom. Her usual orange, white, and dark jet gray armor now painted over in deep green in the shoulders, cheek guards, upper chest, and thighs, knees and lower chest vents fronted with deep pink. Light blue covered her ankles, neck, audials, and lining her wings, and a line of orange on her light pink face between her chin helm armor and lips, all by my gentle and well-acquainted hands five days ago. Daniel and I smiled remembering every brushing...

Just as she had largely painted me in black and silver with ridges of pink, slowly working on my face with a coat of white swished with streaks of the heavier pink my frame normally had from CNA pigmentation. In both her case and mine, there were minutes of talking and waiting for paint to dry, before we smooched each other.

"Admiring how you painted me, dearest?" Aileron leaned on a side of the door and blew me a kiss. A green scabbard for her solid ununtrium thermal cutlass was magnetized to her left hip.

"Well- admiring you, too, the paint is complementary and the act an intimacy," a smile creased on my face while I strolled over into her arms, leaving a long osculation on her mouth with mine, before getting a look at her dreamy, agape expression that met my optics after. "Which I guess you could say is something that does appeal to me, to have willingly labored over each other as we do in so many other aspects of life. To know your wings in a different context than all the others I know them by."

A large grin surged across her face and she laughed full of spark. "Someone's in a mood today I see," she softly grabbed my chin that hung near her head, and fondly rubbed it with her thumb.

A tiny keen and shudder strode out of my voicebox and frame.

"You're looking forward to sharing observations and reifications of aesthetic narrations with me, aren't you?" She ran a hand across my cheek while the other patted my back stacks in alternation.

I clung around her upper back and shoulders, letting what tension remained simmer away, except that which I adored for a sense of battle readiness and savvy intrepidness in a steady flow of time and space, in the back of my mind. "Well yes, that was what I was thinking about earlier… and reminding myself we're in the right place at the right time."

"Ah, I see," She nuzzled her head up against mine. "We are dear, odds are in our favor, you convinced me of that after countless of hours of strategic discussion over the last few centuries. Even if this plays out badly, we'll find a way, and have our moments to heal, just as you have yours this morning soon. Let's eat, shall we? Don't want to keep the folks we're doing this with waiting."

"Right," I returned her nuzzling and turned to walk towards the hallway door, past the simply adorned and to my mind cozy kitchen. I stopped for a moment and put my hand behind my neck. You wanted to get back out for a while, yes?

Yeah, I do. The background sense of the closed loops Daniel kept distant from my mental processing mostly dissipated: his genders, some of his private thoughts, the blended engagement of personalities, knowledges, and perspectives only remaining in my circuitspace as a plural rendition from my own mind, used to her presence.

Neural and nourishment cables unplugged, anti-concussive compartment plating split while my lower head hatches opened in tandem, and xey crawled out into my waiting hand. I brought xem around to make sight contact, smiling at the human in curved deep pink armor, wrinkled pale face green in prominent veins from energon consumption, short shaggy hair that was usually white currently bleached in prismatic shades. His armor was overlaid with a knee-high green dress trimmed with blue and orange, sewn to allow free movement of her legs.

"Hi you," I smiled, feeling the persona left in my mind embrace me while he touched my thumb with her hand. "Was good to reconnect a little after your shower huh?"

"Yeah, it was," xey looked up at me, brown irises surrounded with gray from bionanite fluid that copied and bolstered her cells. "You wanna drive me there- Good morning Aileron haha that tickles!"

Aileron fingers that had been stroking Daniel's back stopped to gently encircle her torso while leaning to kiss xeir forehead. "Good morning dear. Going by alt mode sounds lovely."

She opened the door, and I knelt, setting Daniel down, and transformed into my armored convertible form, sleek and robust like my robot form, cyan wheels inside outcropped armor.

My steering wheel inside my dashboard popped out, and I opened my left door and beeped quietly. "Hop in pal!"

The roar of Aileron's retro thrusters came on behind me after the tsche-tsche sounds of her transformation, and I looked through my rear optic cameras to see that she was in a hover, a dazzling sight to my spark of a personality so sweet, brave, and stalwart, full of nuance, idiosyncrasy, and gentleness. I barely perceived when Daniel's metal legs settled-behind my steering wheel, hands at rest on it, but I did catch his sly bemused face in my rear-view mirror while Aileron blinked her lights at me in dot-dash to say that she wanted to cuddle up close to me, kiss to our content, and immerse in each other's minds for a few days.

My idle engines purred in reply.

"You two can't get enough of each other, can you," xey chuckled.

=Nope!= Aileron commed to us. =Before we end up not leaving, let's zoom onward.=

She rocketed off down the large central blue-gray hall on her twin air-breathing energon rocket engines, fired intermittently so I could keep pace. There was some minor commotion around us of people about: crew, participants, visitors, along with military and diplomatic guard detachments from our Planetwell Polity Alliance and allies along with the Cosmopolity, over a hundred species between us down the two kilometers towards our destination, talking and mingling among each other as I had been used to for most of my life before the Functionist coup. Save for the almost fervent excitement at joining the Cosmopolity being centered on us, rather than on alien polities we made contact with in millennia past.

That and I was not going to ever get used to the fact people I didn't know well or at all occasionally cheered at the sight of Aileron and I or merely grew silent and waved with smiles, brief song notes, crystal chimes, chloroplast flares, among other greetings. All I've done is doing my part over the years to labor, heal, teach, fight, and rally, and being lucky to have done it well and not died in the process, besides writing on aesthetics a little and not knowing what to do with what it means half the time.

I still blinked back lights and beeped lightly; I had the mental energy at the moment to do so.

=I never wanted to be a hero or remembered and still don't, just for what goodness I've caused to last and grow= I messaged to Aileron and Daniel while we started to slow down, near arrival to breakfast. =If people would see in themselves their own remarkability as much as they see mine…=

=It's complicated, isn't it loves?= Aileron came to a stop in front of the open hall airlocks and hovered down to transform onto her feet, in front of the Mineral Lode, as Lodestar called it. =I think in some ways, many see themselves in us or look to us for wisdom and want to celebrate us, but others still also/or see a way to not have to make as much effort by leaving it up to us and not participating in structural change, a paradoxical pedestal, especially for you and the lineage of thought and engagement we are part of.=

=Ugh, at least that's changing now.= Daniel replied while I rolled to a standstill. =galactic politics move horrendously slow, but the whole experience of the attempted Functionist takeover after the Unicron War seems to have been a rude wake-up call.= She opened my door and stepped out. =Our thinker colleagues over the years were right about the cycle of existential violence being overdue, which is a price I'd rather we hadn't paid.=

=A price we are still paying.= I transformed to a stand. =I only hope that we can consolidate on the determination, peacefulness, and joy making enough in combination with strategy and material for the fight ahead. At least, people are listening more to the collective efforts of subalterns to emphasize each other as well as everyone else, it's not quite the narrow-focused reverence that there was after the war. This better last through the next one.=

We walked into the busy module dotted with vases bearing crystals, gems, minerals, and stones across shades from Cybertron's Hadean System and gifts from visits all over the galactic cluster. Between them were a variety of tables low and high busy with people talking and eating, and along the sides of the circular room were buffet stands. The usual waft of food smells was rather muted, to accommodate toxic and allergic response from many different persons munching present.

I spotted our friends and family present we planned to sit with and waved and looked down at Daniel. "Catch you at the table, enjoy yourself with some human food."

"Sure thing!" He waved and walked towards the labeled stands on the leftwards side, while Aileron and I went right, gathered trays and fuelware, and proceeded to pick foods from various buffet tables intended for transformers.

Stars, this all looks so tasty, I thought, seeing the energon and metal pastries, rods, sculpts, gears, soups, and sparky warm and cold drink maker machines, the faint smells of savory, spiced, and sweet acute enough to make my fuel tank rumble. I paid my respects to and shared pleasantries with the nearest cook, a therduvlian purple wrinkle-skinned and trapezoid shelled mammal as tall as me, whose claws cutting up our metal bars for our breakfasts. Then I filled the bowl I had placed on my tray with copper bolts, and poured in warm mid-grade energon spiced with zinc, and picked up a single large iron cookie with beryllium ingots. On my way back to the table where our friends sat, Aileron rejoined me, a platter with an energon filled steel rhombus and aluminum square cuts in hand.

When Aileron and I set our trays down, the group's chatter with Daniel while the lot munched away paused, besides a human friend of mine the new arrivals got up, along with Anode and Lug, who had snuck away from their berth early to attend a meeting of rogues from around the galaxy, which Grimlock had also joined. Galvatron, Nautica, and Road Rage grinned while taller than me and squarish truck-former Yellow Splendid Convoy held me in a firm hug, which I returned while Aileron greeted one of our other pals.

"Arcee, Aileron! Good to see you," Splendid's red optics softened looking at the two of us. "Missed you a lot."

"Missed you too," I smiled at her faceplate that wibbled between her helm, nuzzled up on my face for a brief moment. "We'll have to catch up."

A blue gray stocky winged bot, Thundercracker, and his signature near permanent smirk greeted me next, "You're sure you don't want to get written into a holiday comedy this decade?"

"Ha!" I chuckled. "Far too busy. But thank you, I'll let you know if I change my mind," and after Thundercracker I embraced the round limbed gem freckled blue stone lithoid Trebulq and eir's partner Ruir-xest, a lanky amber leaf-scaled organic, whose snout's breath on my shoulder was warm. "Glad you two could make it too."

<Wouldn't miss our first chance to see your home with you in it> Trebulq chimed out eir's mouth in seditalk.

"Yeah, darling's right, it's nice to be able to meet on one of our treaty effected worlds finally," Ruir-xest hissed.

"Indeed friends, talking with you over the FTL-nets about teaching no longer needs to be solely accompanied by meeting on a treaty unaffected world," I held them close. "We'll share a conference some year together huh?"

<That sounds nice> Trebulq hummed, and Ruir-xest nodded, and I let go, to turn to the second human in the group after a brief mutual hold with Anode and Lug, with whispers over hanging out in the evening with Aileron.

"Marissa, hello!" I hugged long red-haired and armor padded deep blue dressed Marissa in her chair as gently as I could, feeling her arms return the gesture across my front width.

"Good to see you both," she smiled up at me, putting a hand on my thumb before getting a hug from Aileron, while I greeted Splendid and Thundercracker in turn. Then I sat, and took a long swig of my unflavored energon.

"Would have made it sooner, but I was in negotiations with the Circle of Light and the Primus Venerance. You know how it is." Splendid made a hand tossed gesture. "A bit of introspected Matrix wisdom goes a long way with them."

"Well it's good matters of archaeology and techno-faith haven't completely kept you away yet," Aileron smiled. "How are you, aside from that?"

"Quite well, all things considered. Been learning the ancient art of the human curling sport. Yourselves?" Splendid slurped on some beige zinc mix energon.

"Drowned in paperwork and committees at the Cosmopolity capital campus for the last three months until last week," Marissa noted between bites into her oatmeal. "Thundercracker here saved me by appealing on the grounds that I had to be present for the cultural zeitgeist that it would be poignant for me to be here, which is true and the desire of the Anarchaeum. Nice to know a transformer's words still carries weight in the arts to the galactic halls of delegation."

"Haha, old Amica, you are too kind. People wanted you and your group to take a break and cycle in different delegates as is expected." Thundercracker slurped down some of his drink. "Though I will admit it has been a strange experience to help direct and write well-received films despite being told not to visit the majority of star systems that watch them until recently. At least human and nebulan pre-contact worlds flouted those rules, aye?"

"Ha, yeah," Anode grinned. "Would be a shame to not be able to see friend descendants on Nebulos, Centauri, and Earth."

"Pff, you also get a kick from the arc of aesthetic expansive history with them darling," Lug laughed. "We're direct links to the humans' past over 690,000 orbit cycles ago."

"Yes well, have a bunch of aliens show up to say hello with different gender systems and some of the robot species all being equivalent to trans by our use of the word did have an affirmative impact on our hopeful peace at the time." Marissa grinned at us; her eyes quickly almost made contact in that way some public speakers are skilled in. "Or so history classes, recordings, and recollections of older folks tells me." She ate the last morsel on her empty plate. "Things may be very different now, what with me being a paralunar from the stellarium in descendance from the old Galactian Alignment System, but that realization as a toddler was partially informed by you all- generally speaking."

My spark convulsed in tandem with my brain in the midst of a whirl of wordless appreciation and gladness for her, quaintness, and a mountainous pressure – I am part of the face of a deeply actuation engaged species who once were among many more similar and different from us in welcoming vastly varied kinds of life into friendship – even with no attempt to pressure, contextual comparison and exchange was inevitable – and then we fell from grace in more dramatically interstellar way than most… I did my best to smile back, to be hopeful. Stars I feel so sad… the occasional collapses of other Cosmopolity members and various species composing them were bad too but at least they were a bit easier to have solidarity for and didn't last so long… at least ours did not and cannot undo what we were part of.

I didn't have the fuel tank to speak to all of this at the moment, and it was not as if people here didn't know.

"Aww, gosh, that's – that's so sweet, you know, that's understandable," Aileron gently grabbed my hand to caress the back of it while I put one of my own in the vicinity of Daniel's, knowing he would be feeling what I felt too. "When I was young, I was rather fascinated with the ancient human concept and ongoing history of <sword lesbians> and some other comparable iterations like the nebulan <glaive jiquxui> and zeurthoid <shovel wavarthieb>. It did help me understand my own mutualism and being a zoomdare a little better to step back from my own most immediate context, and well- the aesthetics ranges therein are pretty and dashing too. I've been reading your spar-embrace poetry talking about your paralunarity as you feel it at various points in life, I really like it! Have you thought about doin' more with it?"

"Hah, sometimes, but I'm so busy right now," Marissa laughed. "Maybe once things have settled in with the PPA and fellow polities waiting for your reunion to join are firmly back in with the rest of us after several years."

"I keep joking with Marissa that we ought to do an autobiographic film of her life," Thundercracker smirked. "She has a pulse for things. My understanding of my zoomseek is simpler, never really felt like speaking to it on that scale of history."

"Aww come on, saying that basically precludes one of us reminding you that you're awesome for that," Splendid unplugged the cable from the fuel box that ran to the fuel port on their chest. "Nothing wrong with being more personal."

"What Splendid said," Ruir-xest gnawed down on xeir jerky. "Your love for flight and how that overlaps with your questful vigor is very beautiful."

"Suppose that's true," Thundercracker grinned, bearing sharp teeth. "I guess I also just am more interested in telling stories other than my own. Punch/Counterpunch sent me half a script 50 megacycles back about a Paradonian Cube mystery match comedy based on his time in it, and I got really excited about it."

"A what now?" I asked, curious. "I haven't heard of that rules variation of Cube."

<You're very lucky, Thundercracker> Trebulq quietly chimed. <Finding out about the mystery Cube practice on Paradon is exceptionally difficult, it's a game that avoids news coverage and whose audience is rather quiet about it. I was able to partake once when I promised to teach some players pebble glisten on an obscure net forum when I took a break from teaching.>

"Ah yes, was a lovely surprise," Thundercracker's optics shone with delight. "I've been to a few since then- A WHAT- you taught them – where did you learn—"

<Aha, so you have been hiding an obscure sports interest from us all these years> Trebulq's chuckles echoed rumbled stone joyfully. <Your secret seeking, hmmm?>

"Well y- no-! but!—" Thundercracker stammered, and looked at the rest of us smiling or watching him intently. "Oh fine, I'll admit it, you euphoric amplifiers you, lying about sparktion beyond omission around you all has always been hard. More than meets the senses my wing, you're the senses who draw out the 'more' with you kindness and love…" they muttered, before we all broke into guffaws.

"Please, I can't," Lug beamed while a little droplet fell from her optic. "'you need to write that into something, Thunker- oh whoops I did the thing..."

"Ah, a suggestion for Thundercracker, that can only mean-" Grimlock, Nautica, and Road Rage almost sang together.

"That my sibling and I are to be reminded of the tally of suggestions until they reach a hundred and Thunker and their team does them all, as long as it happens within a sibling duo… - musical - with Arcee and I as the main characters." Galvatron grumbled with a flat stare. "Can't believe I agreed to this twenty orbit cycles ago- I know I could back out but my honor compels me, plus it's a good excuse for my sibling to exercise that full range of adventurous emotion she likes."

"I can almost hear you saying that I'm a lot like Backpack," I whispered, thinking of those bots I felt so much kinship to whose sparks and minds talked with mine when I did spark echoing for long enough. "I'd have to agree—" at the perception of my sensors randomly prickling and sending erroneous data, my mind focused on the lovely near gestalt built and revisited over the last year, both of review of my own life and those who echoed with me, and theirs I had that special kinship with so far from me I wasn't sure we'd ever meet beyond this if they were real.

The sensory wave of hot and cold and dislocation broke on the metal rock that was my focus on conversations, memories, and warmth while I was completely quiet, not taking in any data from around me. More successful than my last evening on Caminus, when my module's blurred hyperfocus at the time had struggled to use the right tools on my own.

Wisdom in love and prowess, in reciprocal quests and remarks… I feel happy…



"Arcee?" Aileron rubbed my back stacks while she looked into my optics with hers open wide, mouth small. "You made it okay? Did you just-"

"Yeah, remembered today," I kissed her lips. "Thank you for checking in on me."

"Of course," she nuzzled her head against mine while I saw that all the trays on the table and their contents were gone, and everyone sat around and talked quietly. To make me feel not too waited on. How sweet.

"How long was I out?"

"Seven minutes." Her rubs became a hug. "You ready to go meet Lightbright and Lodestar for the spark echo with us?"

"Yes, I am." I stood. =Lodestar, Lightbright, we're headed your way.=

---

After traversing four kilometers inside Lodestar's halls, we stepped into a small lounge room, where Cityspeaker Lightbright was dancing to the music of her mentee, the Titan we were in. She twirled and leaped, shook about and threw herself about with her limbs, a short and limber teal and bronze bot with long side horn-audials with red Cityspeaker paint on her blue opticed face. Then she saw us and waved, and stepped towards the bench surrounded table that had a large prismatic polyhedron upon that warbled and with tides of electric blue pseudoplasma on its surface, spark and mind compatible energies ignited on Matrix of Leadership principles that still amaze me after all these millennia .

"Dears! Good morning!" Lightbright waved as Lodestar turned off the music.

[Welcome honored denizen nexuses] Lodestar added.

The lot of us gathered around Lightbright to hug and greet her, and each of us gave the table rim or leg a soft squeeze to acknowledge conversation with Lodestar.

"It's been lovely to do this with you all and your other pals when they can since you arrived," Lodestar grinned, and her audials' end tassels wagged. "Us knowing you all for these last ten millennia since our diplomatic tour of the galactic cluster has been lovely. Shall we begin?"

"Yeah, let's start," I smiled back.

The rest of us agreed, and Nightbeat, Thundercracker, and I knelt for Muzzle, Marissa, and Daniel to climb onto our shoulders. Muzzle and Daniel clambered inside of their sockets in Nightbeat and I, and I felt my binary bond partner's mind touch and blend with mine again. The lot of us held hands, while Marissa leaned on one of Thundercracker's tall back vents, and Lodestar set an instrumental version of an ancient song from my menteehood, Archival Sword Quest Amorism , soft metal harp notes and keyboard chords building up to join and alternate with cybtar riffs. Memories cane back of discussing the lyrics with Galvatron and my mentors when the plasmcore band Upquark Errant Mutualites released the song, and dancing to it with Anode and Lug while it played on a hand stereo, - and when I learned enough of your language from then over a century later, being able to appreciate it as you first heard it . The first few lyrics came easily to us:

Quests of - the - soul,

How we find ourselves in one anothers',

Learning blade and episteme,

and finding my frame and mind with yours.

We strive for the constellational hope!

We tap into the knowledges around us,

and write our fates together!

"Oh how lovely-" Lug and Anode said together.

Anode nodded at Lug, who continued: "That's a nice old song, you remembered that we love it so much..."

[It speaks to deep desires of mine too... and gladdens me to connect with something exponentially older than me, and to enjoy it with you...]

"Yeah, we love it. Learning the Polynary Axibo language of the original sung version was also lovely <brings to mind resting in variation>" Lightbright slipped into the old tongue of my youth.

[<to sing-dance and starshine daily even when it is difficult>]

"<what a bloom-memento, Lightbright and Lodestar!>" Galvatron's optics shone with delight on his smirked face. "You two have been studying, picking up the compound terms."

"Gives a totally different meaning to language being affected by aesthetic, neutral but experiential and combinative." I chuckled, as did everyone. "Save for the transness that could be what humans long ago called a buffalo."

"We can be pretty stuck up," Marissa's smirk paralleled the mischievous look of my Amica Endurae and my sibling. "Using the term form instead has been a very unique er- form of protest for the last twenty years... " groans and laughs were heard, myself laughing as Marissa went on. "I do enjoy seeing the more distrusting folks of the galactic alliance wince with guilt or being constantly reminded of leaving you out, or looking silly by ignoring it."

"I mean, they'd hear or read it fairly often, many of the species of the Anarchaeum do enjoy- what do you kids call it, spontaneous median communication," our binary bond's words poured out easily, I thought it was funny, and I thought it was amusing.

"Ha, yes, that is what we 'kids' call it," Marissa chuckled. "Shall we?"

The rest of us gave words of agreement, and Lightbright turned up the spark echoers outward connection range with a dial. I felt my spark pulse and warm inside me, tapped into the paracausal machine and somewhat aware of the souls around me, and my mind started to experience a rehashing of memory and desired futures:

-in mentor Gallium's arms with Galvatron while he and I were still growing, only a week old, while mentor Feldspar read to us Errant Origins by Letter , one of my favorite stories, about an errant bot on aer journey to reconnect with history, aer's trans sparktion, and family after a long war in the Thunderhead Mountains of Cybertron. "And there did ae encounter a one-way crossroads ruined by armies ae had led, on the jagged and geometric metal face ae called home, and ae recycled aer's sword and rifle there for material rebuild homes lost by collateral fire, and labored by hand to help repair Electrotown with no care for aer's rank, reputation, or the former allegiance of those who lived there, where once ae had danced in festivals of the valley when ae was younger…"

-kissing with scale mail clad Llyra on the lips with my hands in on her green cheeks surrounded by her zigzagging purple hair after we did our commitment vows, my electrician tool belt and wind billowed dress up against her armor, and I was unable to help bringing in the passion Arcee had when she danced lips with Greenlight and Aileron…

-I remembered exchanging a flurry of blows with the massive bulky red-orange Sentinel Prime, each thrust, slash, block, feint, riposte, punch, kick, dodge, and parrying strike, the twenty-minute duel in the now dismantled gold and blue Functionist Senatorium to restore the colorful Senate building in Iacon of old. Slowly and steadily, I assessed his somewhat unpredictable pattern of moves built on top of the late Golden Age Hadean Naval Style- heavy strikes and quick jabs, while I kept changing through assembled portions of thousands of my learned martial art forms with the battle meta in the back of my mind. All the while through the exchanges of odd conversation between us about his respect for me and my disdain for his attempt wrestle power over the Autobot revolutionary movement from our horizontal democratic leadership. I remembered the sense that I had driven my sword through his spark for people like me, but I was not entirely unsure why, which still bothered me today as his last words did, but in the spark echoing I felt a sense of resplendent intrepidness, of peace.

-Recollections emerged of going on a long drive with Velocity, Arcee and Marissa across the Lithium Flats, talking about our hopes and dreams, and that Arcee had to pull over and stop all of a sudden when her sensory issues came on. I remembered when I hugged her hand then, and Marissa gave soothing words and knowing empathy while Velocity put some circuit soothers on her-my neural cluster, and that we rested there in the flatness that afternoon, and welcomed bots who stopped by.

-The strongest memory that surged forth was taking Gauge and Sideswipe to their first aesthetic hang-out, with Greenlight, Lancer, Aileron, Anode, Lug, and ourself. Of their enthusiasm and wonderment in the open air plaza in the Old Dialgem neighborhood where the Titan Caminae rested, of hearing and opening up about feelings of sensory experience of different modes and their shapes, of daily life, of playing with pronouns to choose one, of poetry and illustration along these moods and vibes. The day Sideswipe first tried and stuck with she pronouns, and we told her her namesake would be proud.

All this and a thousand other memories aglow, with dreams I had:

-In old age and deep peace, our remaining loved ones gathered around us in a meadow on Caminus at the time of year Cybertron's nearby star shined brightest, and to let our duo's systems shut down, heartbeat and sparkpulse leaving in slumber, after some sweet words at the end of a party in honor of our moving on, after a year of joy just for family and friendship.

-Sometime soon, not an end to the potential of conflict, that would never happen as long as any sort of life existed – but an ascendance of motion and thought, of loving trust and reciprocity, questing for the sake of it and to hold onto meaning- myself (describe her doing these things), as part of daily life in an Autobot Golden Age.

-My two mentees, full of vivacity and knowledge, going their ways whether close to home or far, taking us old folks on adventures once in a while, content with finding new chosen family beyond the ones they had accepted early in their lives, us.

I hoped they'd outlive us, unlike our human and nebulan family, who never opted for cyborgification and passed away of natural causes generation after generation until we were estranged ancestors. That was the life they wanted, to not risk the increased creep of existential dread and societal dislocation, and because they felt they'd find closure sooner, but we still miss them.

-There was also the splendid dream of my three Conjunxes, pair of Amica Endurae in love with each other, and my third Amica Endura, each doing recommitment vows with me in our own time, a small affair of close friends and family before passionate, adventurous, and cozy zincmoons to our favorite places in the galaxy, near and far.

The spark echo started to sing high and low chimes, and my cycles of thought started to perceive and experience the lives and memories of those joined with me, and the emanations of their own hopes in illuminated dream: of Anode long ago in a pleasant archival frenzy, searching for a book to give me through the halls of a media exchange on Eukaris. Eager Nautica nervously and gently holding hands with Velocity for the first time after concluding a successful first round of treaty negotiations, Thundercracker sitting through a film theory class in a distant space station while lazily writing a script half-asleep, Splendid Convoy cozy on a bench with her Amica-Conjunx Stardrive on the porch of an apartment in the polity of Axiom Nexus… Galvatron and Grimlock laughing as they sparred sword and axe together on the bronze shores of the Mithril Sea, Marissa as a toddler declaring her aesthetic aloud to her family, Splendid meditating on the Matrix gestalt within her that whispered wisdom, and the magnitude of Lightbright and Lodestar's joined presence of their dancing minds during a farflung voyage through a triple star system whose asteroid belts shone so brightly…

We in turn were a daydreaming joining of sparks. It felt so good, all of it, a vortex of contextual anchors, and my spark of course drawn to those of seven in particular here, and sorely missing the others I was closest too - we shared our warmth of memory and companionship, a wordless familial respite from the world.

Then there was something else: memories not exactly mine or theirs, largely vague in my inner perception visually.

-Rolling, in blue, a small leaping bladed dancer of death - in a war where the roots of my side made me uncomfortable but I found peace in what we became in the end

- someone back stackless and more flat and boxy but still happy with actuation, addressing a crowd with vows of post war reconciliation, hoping to take up a Matrix

-writing a document from and on realization found by the transformations of organic beings, full of hope and wondering if anyone would take me seriously - and awash with feeling at the revolution after to embrace and connect with what I wrote, that I helped make other people happy

-adventuring with a dear friend on a moon, full of glee at interacting with animals different from my species to take in the thrill of life and learn. She was different, but I loved her for her own sake-

-teaching children and sharing family moments at the end of a series of convoluted conflicts millions of years in the making I had helped end, finally happy with myself and my connection to other people, reunited with two lost friends, and now far more ancient than I was

-the embracing, hopeful, and sad resolve after a last stand against imperialist apologists in order to depart with family and allies from a world I had only left once in my life, and a strong sense of not wanting to repeat losing my mentee as I almost had then

-fighting onward for survival and hope with daring and kindness, many stars apart from my binary bond friend who pushed the line between self and adopted child except when I had the chance to visit Earth again for rest and battle

-someone nearly lost to violence for violence's sake whose side had been vanquished, who I tried to impart a mental reminder of how wonderful she could be, before her skein slipped away from me

-a handful more wading time travel plots, embracing friendly magic, intrepid alliances for collective good, involved in the stuff of myth and cosmogenesis, and several others trails I had felt before when I echoed were there, out of dozens- hundreds- billions beyond my capacity to count. Ones that also included gestalt experiences with one or many persons, of entities the size of larger than citadels, of ones as tall as my binary bond partner.

I reached out to two among the billions, the old errant warrior teacher and the adventurer, the eldest of us. Hiya, is now a good time?

Hey Zoomy! Nice to hear from you- you have a human in your hea- ah I see-

I felt the mind of the one we who had been in touch had nicknamed Backpack touch mine, our data brushing past causality, if we were really talking at all.

Well nice to meet your other half. And you as well, Prof. Backpack extended warm wordless thoughts to us, and we replied in kind.

Hahaha really always liked that nickname, given the human degrees I have and am already doing my best to deconstruct, haven't exactly assimilated into their academia, and there's my famous professing too. Lovely to hear from and feel you all. How are you doing?

Congratulations! I thought. I'm a bit strained in the wheels, have a speech 1,000 years in the making that I'm very nervous about having a breakdown from the emotional overload it will elicit being too much, or worried I'll mess it up.

Ah, that one you've been working on from your writing. Backpack's wheels whirred with perceivable interest and empathy as if my own circuits. You can do this- I've lived a very, very long life, and in that time I've seen people try to bring together much of everything they love most to put words to. It's not easy, it's a torrent of emotions, but you can do it. You have a diplomat and warrior's composure, rather than let your feelings stop you, let them flow to express how you feel when it best gets across what you mean. I stood up to a Quintesson Judge in a similar way- I simply turned to sassy humor to buy time against them, because there was no point in doing nothing and waiting for death and defeat!

She paused for a moment, her spark shivering slightly with nervousness that touched my mind as she went on. I was so scared when I told them to strike me down- but I did it because I felt fury and protectiveness in every bit of me. I know you do too, and I will simply say that if you keep from it derailing into just your personal trauma it will be easier on you, especially if people don't listen, but don't hold back on your personal story if it's needed.

That's- that's very helpful advice, thank you Backpack- our minds hugged in an exchange of thoughtful code and bodily sensation. Prof, I just worry- it's not in time, that my world is going through another death and I haven't done enough. I want a rallying cry.

I cannot tell you how much I know that it is exhausting to put yourself out there again and again when you've been misunderstood and lonely, Prof's code lines encircled my mind with gentle touches to my databanks- concrete validity and rush of poise from my life started to coalesce at her gentle embrace. But we as sapient entities are both always alone and yet are also never alone, there are always people trying to connect and love even if they aren't the same, and you've been cognizant of that longer than I have been with many more years on you. Speak your truths as you know they can be communicated through story, with your variable firmness and daring- people who have taken up contexts to be prepared to listen by this point will hear what you have to say, and you will leave seeds for many others. I've only known you a year, but you're an inspiration and friend to me, both of you…

=Connection is going to drop soon.= Lightbright commed. =Folks, say what you need to say, and there's always another call.=

Prof, I know you've taken in a lot about yourself recently, you doing okay? We love you so much, and all the linkages you are. I thought immediately.

What Zoomy said, Backpack pushed warmth of code towards Prof. And in my case, it is an honor to share galhood with you, I'm so glad Zoomy connected us.

Aw dears, Prof's spark communications were resplendent in adoration that made my own quiver with a warble of tenderness in my frame as she thought on. Yeah, ever since I dug back through my past to help the Ratchet and Nautica I know, I honestly have never felt better- I'm happy- I live in stride, I love you sister and zoomling!

My spark energies expanded partway into elsewhere across gaps I couldn't feel while focused on the nestled trinity of us three overlapped with everyone else I echoed with on their own journeys and waystations of souls… my own pseudoplasma roiling spark thought-formed lips, and kissed the two on the side of their orblike cores, which they returned-

The thoughts grew more distant, but intensity and kinship remained as our mind and sparks fell away from each other, from the myriad oneness unlike any I had known-

WE LOVE YOU! was the shared thought, and the connection dropped.

Lodestar turned off the music as we all made our way back into perceiving our bodies and immediate material world, alone together.

We formed a large cuddle pile with shivers, laughs, pats, and sighs, Lightbright herself hugging Lodestar's table, as a rush of the cosmos roared in my memory.

I can do this. There is always more, no matter how it goes- and there is the love we want.

"Well, I feel ready for the day," Splendid's optics crescented. "Spoke with some really cool parallel iterations."

"Me too," I chuckled. "Galvatron, when you're ready to roll out…"

"Ready when you are, Arcee sibling dear," Galvatron reached across our pals to pat my shoulder.

 

[Pluralsword]

Later that day… 19/13/1,201,356 Allsparked Cycle (AC), Rallying Age. Rivetday, 11:28 Hours Iacon Local Time, Cybertron.



"Who might you be?" We shook hands with a lankily blocky blue, cyan, silver, and yellow bot in a large orange and red room of the restored Delegatory Fields of Iacon.

Iacon, home to convocations of consensus I much prefer to the bloody holdover Senates of Iacon and the Hadean both.

While I thought for a moment, the lanky bot replied to me: =My name's Shutter, she/her, PPA Intelligence Branch - Operations, pleased to meet you= she commed to Galvatron and I privately. =Jazz assigned me and my team to watch over you and your sibling during your public political engagements today.=

=The IBO? Do you all suspect something?= Galvatron looked over from his chatter with a dozen rifle bearing Autobot rear guard volunteers and twenty from the Anarchaeum of Stars' Joint Operative Guard Interstellar Entente detachment.

=A bit of a last minute discovery that some stealthily armed Unicronists are likely in the area. So, I'm here to ask if you'll call off but I think already know the answer.=

=No.= I responded. =We do this, and we can handle them. The community and our colleagues can spot a pointed or primed weapon in the crowd, and we're not rusty.=

=Agreed. We do this. This Arcee/Daniel's big declaration. We acknowledge the danger and thank you for the trouble we are putting you through.=

Shutter sighed. =Of course, I expected nothing less from the Dethrone Twins. I'll be watching from the door, Ginrai is running local command.=

I chuckled. =Someday we'll meet this Ginrai, hmmm? I've heard stories about his ops the last few millennia, starting with the Point Swordfall evacuation of the Cosmopolity capital during the Unicron invasion.=

=Someday.= Shutter smiled back. "Go dance your words, and let me just say that you've been an inspiration to me since I first started reading about errant history."

"That's sweet of you to say," I patted her shoulder and reached out to the door handle. "I'm sure you have an admirable career ahead."

I opened the star covered blue door and walked out onto the flat green softmetal solar plated ground of the Old Iacon Fields the place had been met upon since the polity's emergence, before my time. I looked out to the gathered crowd under the blue sunny sky: hundreds of thousands of people of hundreds of species were gathered, seated and standing for kilometers among the recreated and new sculptures and small hexagonal parking sites… dozens of entities that dwarfed me in height and length of armor, leaves, wings, claws, tendrils, and spinal spikes, among a vast majority of organics and inorganics alike close to my size or nearer that of Daniel's body nestled in my head. The tall Iaconian polityscape loomed in the distance, low metal spires and bays across the spectrum of colors half encircled our meeting place.

Too many possible sniper positions, guards must be overworked, something will probably slip.

I nodded at hand sign translator truck bot and bioluminescent translator organic: a leluchondrix frilled with moss. Then I took a quick scoping of the mass of people as the two greeted me. It did not escape my notice that many bore Autobot or Cosmopolity insignia on their body or clothing and had melee weapons sheathed or in hand, and that Galvatron was beside me, hands close to his axe at his hip. Nervous.

I waved as I neared the microphone stand and networked with all the Delegation art pieces and resting places, and drew one of my guard hilt thermal swords from my back stacks with my left hand to ignite and salute the gathered peoples with the flaming blade across my chest and spark-

Quiet cheers, waves, stomps erupted across the crowds, a tremendous drizzle of languages and words passionately soft and adherent to the needs of such a multispecies gathering.

My spark and Daniel's heart pumped rapidly, as l felt a roar of momentum in our minds - the time and place and people, our lives leading to here. We dare to dance.

="Peoples of the worlds we know and whoever else is tuning in today or tomorrow,"= I disignited my orange blade and stowed it on my outer thigh, speaking both vocally and on public neutrino comms.

The crowd quieted.

="Today- we share with you an intergenerational iteration that we have had the humble honor to contextualize with the help of billions in our long life directly and around us: today, we two as one tell you of the transformative, specifically, intentionally actuative might of daily practiced and considered story! These are not new ideas for many of us, for some nearly as old as our history, but we will touch on the new ways technology has enabled strengthening such ways of hope."=

I took the microphone off the stand and started to stroll around the room-sized space the crowd had left me, looking into the distance, to let them look into my optics and see me at least meet their general direction.

="In the last five twelve Hadean orbitcycle millennia, more and more subaltern members of our transformer species and those living nearest to us psychologically in contact finally began to recognize that we were slipping, that the pace of varied and pluralistic intervention and reconciliation was, and perhaps always had, not fully understood all the emergent reactionary scheming and outbursts, and moreover, that rest of us generally felt a bit lost. The looming dull regularity that made all our remarkability and marvelousness feel paltry had spread far beyond people in dire social straits and our dedicated thinkers who tried to grasp the big picture and the existential. People wondered without finding the holistic empirical responses of pluralism to be enough, what are we doing?

We can't share and learn other stories much further than our galactic cluster in a reasonable time frame. We live on and on but take forever to find closure to move on, we have a loving peace without knowing what looms, and for what? Are we really prepared, and can't we do something else with our lives that rarely knew economic strain or encountered true belligerent military threats? Why do we strain over and over to embrace, deescalate, and even die for the sake of one life rather than share our galactic alliance's glory by force without invitation or plea? Are our stories and autonomies rather than our might really so special?"=

I paused in the dreadful silence, and saw lowered heads, eyestalks, leaves, and frills.

="I, old and uneasy, both human and transformer, and trans in both regards, was terrified at how commonplace this myopia I just spoke to had become. You dear folks with shorter life cycles know better than us what even the least of this enables when unanswered: complicity and complacency to a rise of hierarchy and hegemony. I knew it, too. I saw, fought, and dismantled the horrors of the formessentialist takeover of Nova Cronum long before most gathered here were alive. Every war I have taken part in since even when hegemonies fought had a longer and more extensive hold for intergenerational lies, brutality, and genocide, still had those myopic components too. The ambivalent nihilism, feeling powerless, just going through the motions of life, reinforced by fear, separating us from collective action and mutual imagination. Those of you who have sensed the response of my Autobotist siblings and my own thoughts on it, what is the phrase for our reply to this loss of ways and meaning?"=

The words "Actuation of myriad story and praxis!" resounded from many of the hundred thousands in their stomps, lights, signs, comm signals, and sounds, and I grinned.

="That's right! That is the hope we started to piece together, cemented in the fight for our survival against the Unicrons and the rise of Functionism, which our gentle strength and wisdom then overthrew with determination and the beginnings of these iterated anchors that survived their purge! While there are many tools that arose at the end of the Golden Age and after, such as psyche patch art, entanglement poetry, reification anchors, and singularity puzzles, today I want to tell you about spark echoing and collective questing! As some of you know, spark echoing is a technology for sharing memories between persons via our paracausal spark expressions across all species, even though not all of your sparks are actually visible like those of us transformers. It also lets us have a rush of repose for our lives, show futures we want, and let us feel close to each other as we reach to and converse with other iterations of ourselves in other stories, whether real or not. It's… a glimpse at plurality that nearly anyone can enjoy, but also a present in the moment anchor that is almost tangible, a reification: that you are enough, that you have value for being alive! That we are in this dance together! For me, it reminds me daily of how all our lives transform in step with the universe, together, the many as one!

Cheering once more erupted among the many around me for kilometers, and I felt a smile stretch across my faces, both the one facing the audience, and the one stored inside the back of my head.

I waved my hand down to signal we had more to say, and they quieted once more, and I carried on: "So too is the point of collective questing, that I have done many a time before among my kindred galactic subalterns and those who wished to try, but did not grasp the full storytelling meaning until recently hearing from someone older than me, grand mentor Solus Prime. The collective quest… offers a different experience than that of the expansively existential, instead an opportunity for the physical everyday practice of community: to make memories or sustainable material or story craft in the short or long term for the sake of working together and to realize something together. A time to let our long considerations and worries take a backseat to celebratory projects, a reveling in the aesthetic of community itself, when we express in a range from exuberant loudness to proud quietness along with cheer of both and neither. In this, I have helped build ships, be part of a dance festival, take part in a fungi harvest, construct an archaeology simulation, dance and spar the night away… to some, this sounds familiar. Life itself, exaggerated with joy. This is no accident! The context in the real even in fantastic and far-out imagination helps bring a story home and empower us to do the same, to step in and out of our epistemes!

For as long as sapients have been around, there has always been ritual, and attempts to assemble trust and reciprocity… It is the way of those who take into consideration our lives together in transformation to want to share such love! Expansive people and people at large before Daniel and I have traveled these paths with other technologies and practices, and so shall people after us! To reimagine ourselves, and hold onto the flaming spark of who we are beyond our capacity to fully know! The Errant Leapers of ancient times of Crystal City… They tried to heal in ways like these, after the first bouts of uprisings against what our history was so lucky to embrace that they defended. In their time with their socioeconomics, that was a question of filling in needed upkeep while adoring the assemblage of persons and the universe, growing our understandings of that.

Even with all our industry or rejection of it depending on the polith you are from, we are not so distant from them, what with the issues of the last four thousand years, our overcoming of two galactic threats to our autonomies. For me, with my struggles with traumas therein eventually rising into a full blown psychological reactivation of my sensory and mental side effects of my reformatting surgery, this was all a bit hard to grasp in the fog of clinging, loss, and rebuilding day by day, while my other half felt more distant than ever from people long past away. Autobotism operates in these terms too, when the needs are entirely for mutuality and support. I and so many survivors both veteran and civilian alike have been received in the counsels of affirmation and hope, that to reify a single thing in our daily life that feels good is enough, that we can still love ourselves in our wounds, and I spent a lot of time teaching, and nurturing a chosen family, to come to grips with it all as I grieved. It is to all this basic and fulfilled that that we speak to! Actuation of myriad story and praxis!"=

Quiet cheers, talk, and cries crested in the crowd, and I kept on, deep in my emotions, here now, this is our moment, our touch and embracing sword.

="We often dramatize things to make something more engaging, but in truth that everyday life does not always have heroic, tragic, intellectual, academic, athletic, or slice of life vigor and so on with any mode of story and experience, but that does not mean it has to be dull! When we take time to anchor ourselves in moments and reflections, backed by our singularities and collectivities, we thrive in everyday variance as things and people emerge, change, actuate, grieve, pass on, or are remade. We are worlds unto our own - a cosmos of ecosystems that share space and physics' iteration. It is in that - and our dreaming, that the technologies and techniques we speak to flourish the most. They are not panaceas, they are additional opportunities for reflection, rest, ritual, practice, epiphany, experience, and joy! Long after our life has ended, there may be other ways, for the daily that together makes vast tides and flares of history us never over, but it can continue non-linear growth. To sustain! That is what pluralism is about, the philosophy of a variety of non-monopoly non-universal practices and theories of persons, communities, and polities growing as they want with respect for autonomy and in solidarity together, and these transformations we named are another step! Our pluralism is indefatigable-"=

Galvatron tackled me and the soar of a railgun firing screamed past us in mere nanoseconds, exploding the star cluster statue behind me and continuing on until another boom, and then silence.

Projectile must have intercepted the shot - we thought as screams and yells rose among the crowd as people caught up with what happened. Galvatron got off me and we heard his ax clash with a sword -

I scrambled up immediately at a crouch with my linear guarded sabers drawn and ignited, and spotted a burly car bot with a blocky railgun leveled at me get promptly brought down to ground by the surrounding crowd -

Daniel: [Next threat analysis]

I swung my head around to get a look, and saw a cybernetics covered lyssern teal leaf sprouting mollusk slithered out of the legs crowd to my right and leapt on four legs me with a rocket fired from their maw-

Host Binary: [Gauging trajectory emergency arm velocity]

I cut down the rocket in half with practiced point defense ease of my projectile prediction capable brain module and honed program line martial meditations, and then, slid into a skid across the green paneled ground and came under my foe's legs, and cut my swords through their body, lighting their epidermal foliage aflame as their head rolled off, light green blood spilled on my head.

I kicked away their torso and quickly stood on my legs, and found Shutter at my side with a drum barreled energon battle pistol and an ax in hand, and a dextrous feathery four winged therivian landed with a large particle shield generator crate in their claws that they switched on. Immediately bright blue shimmering particle shields forming a half sphere from the shield projected trunk surrounded us, the translators, Galvatron, the two hacked corpses and two with bright pink energon bolts through them, and six Autobots who had formed up around us with rifles.

"Why haven't the floor particle shield layers engaged?" I yelled out over the clamor.

"Engineers or engineering must be compromised!" Shutter whispered back while announcements came on

"This is Commander Ginrai - I have reports that all currently known enemy combatants have been defeated up among the gathering, everyone not reporting to joint guard units, please follow your nearest civilian evac guides out and please connect with our on staff therapists if you need to. Thank you, this message has just been reported and will repeat. This is Commander Ginrai - I have reports that-" a heavy and slow paced voice continued loudly over the speakers I had been using moments ago through the microphone.

"Siblings, do we go underground to help out, or do we question our nearest alive assailant?" Galvatron put a hand on my shoulder that grasped softly around it's round shape with electric discharges sent there from him to say chirolinguistically /Are you okay?/

=We are okay, thank you dear.= I nodded at him.

"Please, no more heroics you two," Shutter snapped.

"Shutter, we make it our business to not put ourselves above the people we advocate for and live alongside. I am not commanding an army right now, but I will heed your request that we not go into the breach. We'll talk to the railgunner." I smiled at her: "Did you expect anything less?"

Shutter opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. "...No, and I will admit that how you handled yourselves demonstrates that you are perfectly fine for either choice with backup of sappers and scouts at least." She smirked back.

Galvatron and I laughed.

"Well said,'' I disignited and stowed my blades, and walked over as the first and second ring of gloor particle shields came on around us and the nearest dispersing crowds, leaving only soldiers immediately near, save for the bots who had tackled the assassin.

We came to a stop in front of the railgunner car bot, who sneered up at me while Shutter pulled out a multispectral scanner stick that covered the bot in cyan light for a few moments.

"Clear as I can tell, no more weapons" Shutter put the stick away. "You must have put all your effort into hiding the railgun," she looked over at the pitch black long rectangular gun on the ground guarded by an orange motorcycle bot with a halberd and Autobot insignia. "Stealth scan paint eh? Not easy to produce."

"Your fight to maintain pluralistic autonomy alongside sustainability in a slowly decaying universe is foolish," the bot growled. "Better if it all goes out with a bang, a united brutal cause to be free in." They looked at me. "What do you want, refuser of Unicrons?"

"Let them stand or sit," I looked over at the dozen bots who had tackled the Unicronist. "No need for duress with our numbers and skill."

The volunteers got off slowly and stepped back to form a circle, and those with melee weapons drew them and stood quietly.

The Unicronist, blue and violet, sat up, cradling one arm in the other's grasp.

"Sprained actuator?" I asked.

"No matter," they winced. "You'll waste resources for it later. Why are you spending your time engaging me? It's not your way."

"I want to know-" I sat in front of them cross legged with sword hilts still in hand, "Are you working with Decepticons? You are likely not the only ones who will make a move today, and I know you will not benefit from having more military units hunt you than we already do in the situation where they win the coup."

"The question you should be asking, though we are no friend of theirs," the bot laughed, head thrown back, and I thought I recognized their jagged gray helm. "Is how long until they become us or use our teachings? They aren't as far off as people think."

My optics widened with recognition of the ex-PPA intelligence analyst. "Excisor? We worked near your circles before the war, before you quit. Why-"

"I won't be answering any other questions, Arcee. Go do your thing, and be wary of the glare of the light," Excisor crossed their arms and made a small wave with their free hand.

Daniel: What a weirdo, how sad.

Arcee: At least we know they're worried about the Circle of Laser too, could be a false lead.

I got up and turned to Shutter. "You got this from here?"

"Yes," her pink monovisor shone as she looked at me. "Half the guard that was attached to you here will go with you and your sibling to wherever it is you need to go."

My knee started signaling a sense of falling, while I still felt my feet firm on the ground. Dammit. "I better get some rest, thank you for all your help, best to you all." I transformed and rolled towards the door back to the old hallway leading to the metro line to Lodestar's current parking spot in the Citadel District.

"Look forward to working with you again," Galvatron stated, and I looked out my rearview optics to see him shaking hands with Shutter before transforming into his treaded tank mode and following me, while six of the Autobots around formed up alongside us on the ground or hovering low in the air. The eight of us went back through the room and the next open door, to the lift down to the rail line, and parked inside the simple star speckle walled elevator.

=Metro floor, please= I commed to the elevator.

The lift closed its doors, and sped the eight of us down.

"You two did good out there, sorry your speech got cut off, it was really moving, when you have the scoops you should check the filework threads, there's tons building on your words already," a silver blue buggy across from me chirped. "Name's Check-Off, they/them."

"Pleased to meet you, and it really moves our sparks to know it was so well received" I dilated my cyan headlight brightness in greeting, and sighed, full of focus and concern about the rest of the day as emotions churned inside me, sailing on solar winds I helped accelerate today. "Glad you liked it, and we're worried this won't be the only interruption today. If there's anything we can do to help, let us know."

The lift reached the destination floor, and the elevator doors opened: we launched out onto the ancient bronze tinted tunnel platform, headed for the metro cars, with two PPA guards each inside each of the four linked cars. They waved at us, and went back to their watch. The eight of us traveling piled into the second car, and transformed. I sat next to Galvatron in an aisle seat, and hugged him.

"I knew this would happen, the moment I stepped on the Fields," I whispered. "Too many security risks. Thank you for being there," my head rested on his round purple shoulder.

"Oh siblings," Galvatron put an arm around us and put his head on ours. "Of course. Your loves here on Cybertron had something to say elsewhere for this galactic blossoming of reunion and imagination, whereas I, though I have my thoughts, felt I had to be here for your moment. I'm so proud of you... We'll probably get comms chatter soon from the family now that we're out of combat. Please keep being your intrepid, nurturing, and vivaciously savvy self." He sat up, and I looked to see his optics had started to silently release streams of energon byproduct. "I don't want to lose you, I can't imagine what life would be without your exuberance and sass."

"Aw, Galvs," I clonked shoulders with him. "You're so sweet-"

Comms messages came in on the family neutrino thread:

Anode: =Hey, you three okay? Lug and I can meet you wherever you're going, Aileron unfortunately has her hands full having been pulled for military duty.=

By FTL transmission, Sideswipe: =Wish I was with you right now mentors and tutor, that was terrifying to see *hugs* when can you come home?=

And Lancer: =You were so brave, we love you. Please be careful. Worried sick at work, tempted to leave early and gather up the family on Caminus.=

I yelped, and held my head in my hands, I almost gave up my life with my loves to say what I said, I really did that…

"Everything okay, aesthets?" the burgundy tank bot to my left asked.

"Just, coming to terms with how I risked my life today," I smiled at their monovisor mouthless visage. "Thank you." Then I messaged my family back: =We're okay, more or less, no wounds, guarded, on our way back to our quarters to rest. I suspect though I will need to raise my sword again before the day is out, but I promise to be careful. Still healing anyway, and I don't want to lose you all. At least- I said what I had to say. Love you all so much.=

We messaged for the rest of the train ride, and I felt at home in a totally different way than the comfort and ease I felt in battle- both with a sageful and compassionate core.

---

"Youuu like herrr," I teased, and laughed as my sibling's face clammed up before unclenching.

"Shush," Galvatron looked away as we walked through Lodestar's halls towards our quarters, through a busy hubbub of people.

"I know your spectrum, not too far from mine, and just the way you looked at them and were so pleasant in that scoundrelly way of yours," I elbowed his arm. "Difference is for me it's more mutuality and for you it's more symbiosis save for the rare how or why person."

"Zoomdares and dares are generally hot just as similar assemblages are," he stated flatly.

"Shes…" I flourished my hands, looking to the sky.

"He/xem bladedares…" he blew a kiss in the same direction.

"I like it when they," I sighed. "But I know for you it's also because she's a total snark who can outdrive you, keep up in a fight, actually likes your prideful personality. That and she likes elegance, which you show when you trust someone a lot."

"-Truly sibling, it's as if you grew up with me, or something." He guffawed and put an arm around my shoulders. "Mind giving me some advice? I'm a little rusty at the whole relationship thing…"

"Arcee! A question, if you will!" I turned around to see white and pink shoulder-wheeled Andromeda, with a datapad in hand. "I know you've just been through something difficult and dealt with it heroically but I wanted to put things in perspective."

Dubious. I know the reputation of your recent 'journalism' compared to your ex Cassiopeia's stellar work with epistemically cognizant and analytical writing- you do carefully subtle attack pieces for data visits and clicks.

"I'm all right, need to take a moment to gather my thoughts, thank you though-"

"I just thought to help with YOUR reflection on today it would be poignant to ask about how you feel about your past. Specifically your deployment command to the Cybertronian polity Nova Cronum in 454,387 during the Heg-Accumulation War. How would you feel if I told you that I was told this morning that some of the reactionary ideological works associated were not found or even known by your forces and attached mediators. Thanks to investigation by historical specialists such as Lio Convoy, I was told this morning that those made their way lurking inter-generationally into proto-Functionism in ways we haven't been able to account for? You dropped the Cube on that conflict? How does that feel, on this day when the revolution you're part of is still under threat by you mista-"

Andromeda's voice was promptly drowned out by the crowd's riled bickers towards her, but her words hit hard. I looked down and shivered.

"Come on, Andromeda, we already knew from the get go that we missed things, that there was reactionary carryover in secret and seeking out steps taken before. That's not new information."

"Is it? Lio Convoy is certain that those missing texts even reached a Prime or two who found them agreeable and helped usher in the fall of the old harmony." She stared at me, face grim.

For once, I believe your question is genuine and not out to start a controversy for engagement in your content.

"Leave my sibling alone, please! Can't you see she's been through enough!?" Galvatron growled.

I put out my hand in front of him. "Easy sibling. I've got this." I looked up at the crowd that had formed around us.

"I can say that I wish I had done better, that I wish we had found all of it, been able to account for the ideas. But we are not perfect. We miss things. It would be a historical travesty of the highest pedestaling proportions to suggest that our fate rests in my hands most of all!" I felt my face tighten, engines revving, Daniel's heartbeat increasing. "Maybe you weren't thinking it, but it is what you're saying! I balk at that. I am sure you found that from just a basic study of history that other things elsewhere slipped through the cracks less obviously, and just from fear, jealousy, and dread left untended. So proportionally, I am sorry deeply, but it would be foolish to guilt myself into thinking that I missed the chance to stop things from happening at all. That would ignore the proven thoughts of my peers that these things rise anyway. I can't believe we're having this discussion after I almost got shot-"

I stumbled, seeing Andromeda's wide optics and dropped jaw before my optic sensors went haywire and I lost my sense of location and altitude, barely able to hear around me. Until the warm paracausal spool I was joined with by echo, stronger each day reached out on a level of spark to and through spark to buffer my senses, helping my systems quickly reboot and recalibrate themselves.

I stood from my fall with Galvatron's help, looked on at the staring and whispering crowd, and sighed. "I wouldn't have been able to do that for a while if it weren't for the spark echoing I've been doing for the last year that helped build this connection and feedback loop in the last week, to heal me. Evidence enough, I think, to my point, that I am but one system with limits. No more questions for now. Be safe, and care for another." I turned away, and transformed to roll off, and cried inside my forward frame, headed towards the retreat of my quarters. I'm too tired right now for this whirlwind of daggers hidden among respect and love, and the expectations to solve everyone's problems! Nobody should have to deal with this! Why can't I just have some peace!

I stopped at my door, and looked up hearing a jet engine approach, and saw the familiar visage of Anode's biplane form come to a hover in front of me and transform to embrace me, Lug changing modes off her back to join my hug.

"Hey darlings, it's gonna be okay, we're here, we love you, and don't expect anything of you more than you do and love, you are enough and you alive is a wonder," Anode smooched my cheek quietly, and I felt my tears continue to stream as I kissed her back while patting Lug's head.

"Let's get some rest shall we? Before something else happens," Lug stepped aside and opened the door.

"We love you both with all our souls," I leaned down to kiss her forehelm, and she caressed my helm with the back of her hand.

 

[Pluralsword]

"We are in position, Megatron, the Unicronists are beginning to play their hand and seemingly don't have much to show for it, which I don't buy. Functionists so far are a no show or already handled by PPA forces," I sat down in front of Astrotrain's FTL communicator holodisplay inside his train mode crew cabin, and looked on at the simply squarish gray helmed face of Megatron.

"Moreover, petty journalism did us a favor by showing the Autobot way is not brutal enough to squash reactionary uprisings," my vocal vents rumbled sadly. "It's too bad that doing so had to stain the reputation of a war hero who has contributed and shows so much to our way of life."

"There will be uncomfortable usurpations of what is dear to us in the name of security and peace of mind, Strika. All collateral wounds we deal to our actuative spirit will heal in personal liberty under our protection, don't worry," Megatron smiled at me, optics aide and aglow. "Are you ready to rally the ascension?"

"Yes," I pounded my fists together. "I only worry about the amount of soldiers and warriors watching our every move in the open. It will be bloody."

"A necessary cost. I know we can count on Tidal Wave to run the naval support." Their optics narrowed. "Try to interrogate some Unicronists if you can, they would likely deploy a weapon of mass destruction during the chaos, I think, and I want to find it first and stop more deaths. Good luck, for stratocracy!"

"It will be done. For stratocracy," I put my right fist over my chest.

The holodisplay flickered out, leaving only a purple table, myself, my eight bot guard squad, and the dozen command staff present.

"Heavywait," I called out as I stood.

"Yes, exec?" the bulky red tank bot looked up at me, meeting my optics from our nearly equal height.

"I want you to deploy the Striders, get to the bottom of the Unicronist problem. Oversee their command, can I trust you to do that?"

"Yes Strika, of course," she saluted me with a smile, and turned to her tactical console.

"The rest of you, Demolisher, Clobber, Lugnut, Vertebreak, Howlback, ready your divisions for action, and Diabla, tap our friends in the military ranks to go after my declaration. Keep Tarn out of this, I want no Justicial involvement." I clenched my fists. "This must be done honorably, both for the sake of it, and for winning Starscream's favor. Soundwave is running Executive Operations in my stead while I make our rallying cry against the tsunami the Autobot's own subaltern elites have fomented and instigated." I drew my engineering hammer, a gold covered ununtrium tool passed down to me across the long lineage of the Vigilant family, and felt my spark warm with ferocity, immersed in my torqueboom I was trying to save and give some privacy. "Our cause is just! Are you ready?!"

"WE ARE READY, EXEC STRIKA!" Arms were brandished in a flourish by my colleagues before returning to their duties.

My face's vocal vent box creased happily. "Guards, with me, Astrotrain, set course for the largest Decepticon gathering around here, at the plaza of the Translucentica Heights."

"That's where things are most tense, Strika, brawls are regularly breaking out between the Autobots who transformed the place into a solarpunk paradise, and our militia gathered there for the symbolism," Astrotrain's internal speakers declared in heavy tones as his wheels churned and they drove along.

"Precisely," I looked out the window to see us pass away from our hangar bay onto tunneled railroad tracks, catching comms chatter Astrotrain patched to me about train rerouting to accommodate them on their false passage outside of Iacon.

Thank you Rumble for your service to the cause by managing train lines, I thought, and sat down to review battle plans, waiting for our emergence. Flapjack, Vigilem, and the Nemesis are our all or nothing to see this through quickly.

---

I stepped out of Astrotain's long purple frame out of a side airlock onto their ramp, and took in the view of our thousands of clamoring Decepticon militia present at arms in the streets of the Translucentia Heights, faced off by a similar amount of soldiers from PPA military units and far more civilians neck and neck with our own unarmed rabble. I looked up at Iacon's few remaining skyscrapers around, from the Functionist era, now covered in mechanical and organic foliage and street art, not a single gun battery upon them. Pity, that.

"Decepticons and loyalists to martial oversight against hegemony, and all people of the Planetwell Alliance!" I boomed my voice as loud as I could on my speakers. "Long have we made our case that we cannot trust peaceful revel and prioritization to be enough of a new mechanism to keep us from falling back into the same descent into madness that autonomous pluralism sets itself up for! If we wish to safeguard our variety in personal life beyond matters of state then we must uphold the legacy of our freedom fighters across the ages, even if not all of them recognize it must be this way!"

Cheering and epithets rose from those aligned and opposed to my words among the tens of thousands.

"We cannot afford to do anything less than recognize that if as the Autobots say, that we are always at war with reactionary patterns, we must have military governance to meet the enemy!" I raised my arms upwards. "Do we want to face the bearing down of apocalypse and totalitarianism at our door without military industry as the center of our economy? Or do we want to be free watching out for one another with utmost capacity! A soldier's freedom!"

"A soldier's freedom! A soldier's freedom!" fellow Decepticons chanted-

-Against our opposition's outcries and chorus of "actuation of myriad story and praxis!" while a nebulan among them began to make their own declarations.

I gulped seeing them, standing in a car bot's palms, in green battle armor, flag pole in their own hands with a constellation sequence flag of across hue stars scattered haphazard on a black background, a long-standing favorite in nebulan aesthetic history, and a pretty one.

I knelt and brought limbs together to form my double barreled photon heavy cannon tank mode. A necessary cost, sparktion forgive me for what I must do. "I bear Megatron's plea, that we join the places of delegation, and ascend!" I quickly aimed at the nearest large PPA soldier several hundred meters away, a trainbot with a rifle in hand, and opened fire on their center mass.

My dual violet salvo tore through their armor, and they fell grasping their exposed flickering spark.

The Astrotrain's guns boomed streams of projectiles from behind me, alongside the cacophony of arms and limbs firing and clashing, yells and screams.

Particle shields went up among the Autobot crowd and PPA forces, blocking our fire, and I saw melee weapons and shotguns drawn, as our position was charged upon. Bots unarmed ran off the streets.

Dammit. While firing away at our attackers, I looked up with my dorsal sensors to see a blocky turreted blue green corvette of Eukarisian design jump in to low atmosphere above us, emblazoned with the gold polyhedral insignia resembling the AllSpark, the PPA's symbol.

"Moment of truth, Captain Archadis, do your duty," I whispered.

Flyers departed the corvettes hangar, and its twenty ventral artillery turrets opened bursts of yellow photon, purple energon fusion, and blue energon rounds on the shield generators, tearing through them and hundreds of bots inside them alike in an instant.

="Advance in a spread! We need to fortify here quickly before we get overwhelmed! I want the Heights locked down! Let the civvies go, and if troops surrender, honor that. We take no more blood than we need to."= I rolled diagonally onto the street down the intersection, and fired on the bulbous green Cosmopolity tank several blocks down before taking cover behind one of the high rises.

A dozen Decepticon miliita commanders commed back with affirmation, and I looked above again.

=Pass this to up above: Thank you Archadis, and all the compatriot crew of the Treestrand. = I commed to Astrotrain, and then transformed, and drew my ion rifle cannon from my back. "Guards, move up with me, shoot and scoot."

"Copy that, we're with you," my medic Tankor replied from behind me.

=Archadis thanks you on behalf of his crew for doing the difficult thing by starting the fight.= Astrotrain commed to me while unleashing blasts down the street I was moving up on.

I ran up along the high rise's wall, rifle raised and swung about across my left, no guns facing me, and I peeked out to the right on the building's corner, seeing five bots running towards me.

I fired a volley of three blue ion bolts into a tall car Autobot who leapt at me with a slash of a sword on my rightwards chest, and energon rounds from a pistol tearing through my waist plating.

They fell dead from my center mass shots, and I bled from sharply painful surface wounds, and plowed forward into their group, hammer drawn. "AAAAAAAAGH!" My pain turned to rage, and I bashed in the head of a truck bot with a blow, while taking two solid slug scatter blasts to the torso.

I heard my squad open fire around me, and the three Autobots collapsed, armor torn.

"Ah- aaah, ugh," I sat, my pink blood streaming onto the road.

"Strika, lie down, I need to treat you," blocky blue white Tankor came alongside me, placing a small pain dampener on my neural cluster on the back of my neck.

The sharpness of my wounds receded, and my mind slowed. I laid down, to see sorties of flyers above me, and colossal naval ships in the sky exchanging fire, with the massive hundred and fifty kilometer long wide orange and green Vigilem jumping into low orbit, shooting cometlike streaks in the sky against the closest dreadnoughts of equal size.

"It begins…" I laughed while Tankor stuck metal healing patches on my torso wounds. "Finally, we can attempt to end the threats to peace."

 

[Pluralsword]

Earlier that day… 19/13/1,201,356 Allsparked Cycle (AC), Rallying Age. Rivetday, 8:30 Hours Iacon Local Time, Cybertron.




"Bum Sprout! Good morning," I grinned and clasped hands with their claws, and smirked. "How much filework do you have today, Chief Executive Councilor Elect of the Planetwell Polity Alliance?"

Bum Sprout tightened their long chompy jaw and shut their yellow optics, likely feigning a cringe at my use of their full title , red torso and tail at an angle, solar panel back foliage flapping.

Then they laughed, "Oh Windblade, you wound me so, can always count on you for a jarring reminder of reality," and hugged me around the waist briefly. "Too much to do, you know how it is. Good morning to you all as well, Chromia, Nightbeat, Muzzle, and Rung!" Bum-Sprout briefly held their hands in turn as we exchanged pleasantries outside the Planetwell Delegation campus's main hall across the airfield from Lodestar's parking spot. I closed my optics for a moment to listen to the busy hubbub of thousands, and smiled at the sounds while tuning in to the local burgeoning filework threads enough to have a general gist: excitement, relief, celebration and discussion across public postings.

"You ready to go in, champion of horizontal dialectics?" Bum-Sprout patted my forearm.

"Yes," I smirked again. "Let's ratify the future."

We stepped into the brightly painted towering rotund hall's side door in front of us, and walked through its people-filled thoroughfare, wide and carving covered. Exchanging greetings with passersby we strode onwards to the massive multi-tiered delegatory floor, full of all of Cybertron's 171 Senators, and many more direct voters and delegates from across the PPA alike alongside visitors. Cheers and waves rose quietly, and Bum-Sprout returned a laughing roar as we waved back in turn, walking through the path between the seats to join the rest of the eightfold executive council, such as the giant duobot gestalt Councilor of Defense Overliege, and dear Councilor of Diplomacy Nautica. They were among thirty Primes, fifty four other members of the diplomatic service, the ten delegatory hangar speakers. I put two hands over my spark towards none other than our opposite numbers from the Cosmopolity and worlds allied with us. More than two thousand people filled the Cube field sized floor in total, along with a holo projection of Lightbright synced up by cables with Lodestar.

They waved, lit up, hummed, signed, and oscillated in reply, and I walked up to Nautica, commed to her asking a question that had ached in my spark of late, and acted on her affirming reply: I my hand around her head in an embrace, and smooched her lips, feeling her reply in turn on my own and around my waist.

=Been waiting for you to do that= she commed as awws spread around us. =What inspired finally asking?=

=Wanted to celebrate this deep and dear friendship we have, our depths of love for each other, soul for soul and trans for trans I love you," I squeezed her hand and stepped back as Nightbeat-Muzzle and Rung reached out to hold hands with Nautica and Road Rage.

=You wanted to kiss them too, didn't you?= I hugged Chromia before we also gradped each other's palms.

=I do, but it can wait- ah she just asked me,= Chromia laughed briefly and then shut her optics as her lips embraced with Nautica's.

"In true fashion of many of our peoples, reunion and hope bring out some of our deepest affections," Bum-Sprout spoke into the microphone in front of them at their podium with metal thread sheet and digital copies of the reunion treaty. "We have worked day-in and day-out for a millenium for this moment, and I can only say," they extended their hands towards the chief executive councilor of the Cosmopolity, a luminescent wide branched and red leaved derinthiathite cyborg with circuitry across their limbs, and Bum-Sprout met their dozen eyed gaze with their own two: "that I too look forward to joining stories and hands again. The time of closed borders and largely only remote contact ends today, with our council's signing of the Realignment Treaty passed by all our delegations to join the Cosmopolity once more! With no further ado, I sign," they picked up a pen and stylus in turn to sign their name.

Cheers rose, with abrupt dances and embraces as our council members took turns approaching the podium to sign. Us diplomats standing about hugged, congratulated, and cried with warmth and joy.

"It's been an honor to work with you advocating for us," I gently held a tendril of Xilderramc, and their metal cylindrical torso bobbed up and down on their feet.

"Dear Windblade, I can only say the same, what are we diplomats without a dream for tomorrow?" They hugged me in turn.

"That's right," Rung tapped my shoulder. "We build dreams, at best. Remember you're speaking first for the celebration meal dear, Nautica goes after you."

"Ah yes, that's right, thank you dear friend," I hugged him around the shoulders.

---

"Of course I'll keep writing, I wish you all could be here. How's the mining op going?" My wings flapped softly in my room's lounging chair inside Lodestar as I looked at the faces projected on the datapad screen in my hands, spark all soft as my optics shared contact with my mentoring family on the other end, the three mentors and four siblings who warmed my spark.

"It's excellent, Windblade, we've really got a nice piece of asteroid to work with," mentor Deepwing's beak cackled.

"We really got a nice one," round headed Songwheel's biolit audials shimmered. "It's rich in palladium that scans and samples didn't pick up until we dug deep. We've got plenty of work to do!"

"Please be careful Windblade, dear sibling," Arbonova's bushel helm of fire shaped leaves ruffled nervously. "We've heard rumors and read the news- the capital of Cybertron is full of unrest that could spill into war at any moment. Wish the PPA would just shut down the Cons outright if it weren't for the Senate…"

"I know," I looked down, but met her three green optics again with a half-smile. "We can handle them. I've been ready for this day for a long while. I won't keep you all any longer, you need to dream cycle, good night!"

"Good night!" the seven called out, and my spark warmed a little as I pressed the disconnect button.
I laid back in my chair, looking out the large rounded window at the busy sky and streets, and sighed. "If only Cybertron would learn from Pinroot, then maybe my family wouldn't have to worry…"
"If only indeed," Chromia's footsteps were followed by a hand on my shoulder. "Your hometown has a lovely understanding of things. I'm really glad the Bulwarks crew of Cargohold decided to stay together and make a home… otherwise the you I would have met wouldn't have grown up the way you did," she sat on my lap, and wrapped her arms around me, her blue plating up against my red, gray, and black, her head on my chest. "I'd still love you though."

"Aw darling," I put a hand on her stubby audial and put an arm around her waist, plopping a smooch on her helm's wide flat crest, and chuckled as her red biolight at the front of her helm and on her shoulders flashed. "It's true, my ancestors and elders finding love and kinship and that nearly all of them realized new contexts of themselves on long away missions for transport and diplomacy is something that I find very beautiful." I gave her a squeeze. "The deeply layered multitudes of hope and amorousness made stationary polity on Caminus near the end of the Golden Age, revitalizing the planet, reminding us of our common story in a new light, fueling the amazing societal flame you and I grew up with. I always liked the classic song I Found My Aesthetic and Put the Words Together Passing Resolutions With You, you've heard my family sing it countless times."

"Never gets old," Chromia laughed and placed a smooch on my central armor protrusion of my chest, before turning to meet my face, her own with a smirk and drooped blue optics. "Sit up a bit would you? I want to smooch you up here."

"Hmmm, this morning so far wasn't enough for you huh?" I leaned up and kissed her nose, smiling at her warble in reply, and held her around the back, my other hand clasping a back wheel of hers gently. "Me neither."

I dipped my head in optics shut, and plucked at her lips with my own, and she replied in turn. Circuits across my body roared from her touch and closeness as we leisurely opened and closed our mouths on each other. Her hands wandered around my wings and turbines with each osculation, rubbing and patting. I did the same across her back, and I gripped her wheel armlets in my hands when she held onto my upper lip a little longer, and as she murmured I kissed back, holding her lip in turn, and then left my mouth open.

Her tongue wandered softly, dancing with my own, as we hugged each other close, wings flapping and wheels whirring slowly, before sharing one more kiss, and I opened my optics, circuits abuzz.

She looked back at me, with her smile I found so endearing, a plain stretch with her optics blue light ablaze.

"That was lovely," I ran fingers down her cheek, and chuckled as she shivered. "We ought to kiss more."

"If we take a vacation, yes, I have a bad feeling though," Chromia lodged her head on my shoulder, next to mine. "Arcee speaking today, and you and Nautica too along with Ultra Magnus and Airazor and so many more, you're all so prominent, transformations so lovely with so much to say, and the treaty got signed today… my old bodyguard career in me and the diplomacy I do now tells me something is going to happen."

"Sweetie-" I kissed her cheek guard. "We do our best, we do what we can, I have to try even if it's a risk-"

My comms lit up with a message from Rung in the group log we had with Nautica and her Amica Endura: =Darlings, I just- I just saw a videofeed of Arcee getting shot at during her speech and taking down her assassins with her sibling's help, guard forces, and the crowd. She seemed to be okay before the recording ended, something's happening! Wish we were there to help.=

"-scrap!" I felt droplets stream down my face while I wrote up a reply, =We can't bother them yet. Once we know that they're out we can, after their immediate family gets a chance to talk to them. Chromia and I should go to the bridge to help out, of all of us in this group of friends we are two of the six out of ten with the most military experience.=

=Was just about to say, if you could give the diplomatic guard units a hand with getting a grasp on the unfolding situation while threats are investigated, that would be great, Bum-Sprout literally just messaged me about it.= Nautica also sent an old photo of the ten of us hugging each other in Luna 1's Sculpture Valley a century ago. =You can do this, we believe in you.=

="Aye aye, darling diract"= Chromia got off me and offered a hand, which I took, and stood beside her before we both gathered our weapons off the weapon rack; my pistol and ignitable sword hilt, her shotgun, solid thermal sword, and halberd. =I told our unit outside what's going on, Windblade, they'll follow us to the bridge.=

="Don't diract me, you flirt, we're anarchists, it's not like I don't take group thought into account."= Nautica's voice remained stern.

="Sure, but you're tapping us in for a military situation, no, so there is at least slightly more command precedent than usual?"= I ran for the door while holstering my weapons, opened it, and then leapt into folding my limbs and turning my torso to bring my head into my airplane bow, and formed up my ankle thruster engines behind my rotor bearing wings. I parked on the hall floor on my wheeled landing gear, and saw Chromia close the door, and dived beside me into her heavy armored motorcycle mode.

="Well yes, I'm trusting your judgment here, duly public approved diplomats of the PPA, so consider it a passing of authority.=

During Nautica's messages, we rushed down the hall, as did the six guard bots who had been waiting outside. The pink flyer guard Maxima and I kept ourselves slow enough to stay with the group, only at 185 kilometers per hour.

=Qualitatively speaking, the Decepticons could not, and perhaps will not ever, have a better time to strike. I know you two tuned out the datafeeds to relax this morning but you should know that galaxy is conversing, as more than in the past few thousand years, about Autobotism, and what was supposed to be a capstone rallying call has been magnified hundreds fold by violence, and by the speaker rejecting heroism. The amount of scuffles and fights we've had over the last week have left many pondering our future and scared old threats will get in the way.=

=Yeah, if they don't strike now,= I turned a corner, and commed a large turbolift ahead to stop at our floor. =They're giving us a chance to solidify and take away whatever base they could have. Do we have any leads on how much of the military will defect, and who?= The turbolift doors opened, and I slowed to a bot mode landing inside, people standing aside within to give me space. I waved nonchalantly while my group caught up.

=Not a whole lot. Director Jazz and Commander Ginrai and regular military are still up to their necks trying to confirm leads of people planning violence, relieve people of duty, arms, and FTL access, and hand evidence to reparation councils to deal with sorting out. Nightbird was able to prove the treason and get the surrender of Admiral Razorclaw's staff, but Razorclaw himself is missing… Comm Jazz and Generals Novastar and Elita One if you need to get filled in, they said they'd make time. Lodestar is at the center of our diplomatic efforts and a willing symbol, so those folks will help however they can. Good luck.=

The turbolift doors closed, and I wrapped my arm around Chromia's as we rose, and took in the scrunched faces and tense limbs. "Well folks," I smiled at the few dozen folks in the elevator, a bit forced, while also very much out of my love for my friend who almost died. "If I might be completely candid not in my position as a diplomat, but as a person and an Autobot, we're going to get through this okay, and I know that because giving our best for ourselves and each other has shown over and over to be enough for love to survive. I know no higher honor than that, for which I join words, share time with family, draw my blade, toil over ironing out political details, and more."

Some relaxed, a few smiled, all optics and eyes were on me.

"Delegates Windblade and Chromia?" A tiny teal framed five wheeled livinae AI looked up at me with a big optic, between two larger stout livinae of four and two legs. The wheeler rolled up to us. "You really think we're going to be okay? I've been hearing rumors that the Decepticreeps are going to challenge Autobots over the treaty." The little bot kept opticsight on me. "I lost a bunch of my friends to Justicials, I don't want to lose anymore or have anyone else die…" the bots wheel legs folded up in disarray. "I only came online eight years ago. I know enough to understand kinda why we're here, but I don't want it. Can't we give up on having a Senate if it's not working anymore?"

I let go of Chromia, and we both sat down next to the bot, and I gestured an open hand. "I do, on both accounts. We already do a lot without the Senate, I don't think that body will exist in a year, and the Decepticons just don't have the numbers or wisdom to actually succeed in a coup."

"She's right, I've run the strategies in my head nights on end worrying about the same thing," Chromia grinned. "And I've come to the same conclusion. At worst, the Decepticons run away and bother us occasionally, but the street brawls and Justicial micro-violence will end. Just love and be careful-"

The five wheeler hugged Chromia's arm.

"-aw," she chuckled. "It's gonna be okay."

<We will, Chromia,> the four legged one twinkled four little green lights on their face to show agreement in Livinae lightspeak, as did the other two. "I'm sure you have work to do, we were picking up our little one before calling it a day."

I looked up at the thick blue gray turbolift's dashboard display. One floor away, and then back at the three bots, digging through my memory, recognizing the larger ones from the frantic days after Cybertron's liberation and our exile from the Cosmopolity. "You're Bortex, they/them, right, and your partner is Asvelt, she/they?"

"That's right," the two legged bot chirped. "You remember us! We're in the language department-"

"Ah, right, you helped draft the post war Anti-Functionist Interstellar Doctrine," Chromia's optics softened. "That was wonderful work to do together, and congratulations on being parents. What's your name, kiddo?"

"Sturnzamia," the smallest one looked up at her. "I still don't know what signifiers I want in my first language, much less in Eclipse Cybex."

"You have quite a journey in store for you, as we all do," I put my hands over my spark. "Let it be the happiness you find in yourself, however long and many tries it takes, the euphoric journey is what matters." I stood up, just as the doors opened. "Take care," I nodded at the doors. "Let's go folks."
"Good luck, awesome zoomdares!" Sturnzamia waved arms at us, and everyone else in the elevator chuckled, the two older livinae putting their arms around their child.

I smiled and walked away, happy tears streaking my face, and did my best to regain composure. Come on Windblade, you need to catch up with contacts. I strode down the busy hall towards Lodestar's bridge while comming my team, along with Jazz, Novastar, Elita, Lightbright, and Lodestar. =Give me a sitrep on the known loyalty situation onboard folks, that's the first step so I can help in keeping our precious peacebuilding intact.=

=Funny you should ask. The zoomdare Seeker who leads Lodestar's aerospace squadrons had them all launched out of security concerns around the same time the deep space Hadean naval forces lost track of Vigilem. Why don't you go ask her what's up in a tactfully aggravating way?= Jazz replied immediately.

=Slipstream…= I sighed. =This better not bring out some internalized anger from her over me not staying with the local Seekers back home.= I tried not to remember when my frame used to look a lot more like hers and my time doing astro surveys in my youth.

"We've got your back Windblade, don't worry," blocky Slammer caught up with me, tank cannon in hand. =And the strategy room the bridge is has plenty of friendlies.=

---

I took point wading into the round display covered and people-filled room flanked by Slammer and Maxima. I had insisted, giving Windblade precious time to talk with the Cityspeaker-Titan's crew captain Hammerstrike to ascertain trust behind me.

I caught sight of Slipstream, among a number of flyer guards. In deep purple she curved more than the typical Functionist enforced seeker build I remembered she had during the Anti-Functionist war, and had a more rectangular pilot pit, bright blue.

=Stop here, I want to face her.= I told Maxima and Slammer.

=Sure thing= Maxima fiddled idly with her photon burst rifle's scope.

"Slipstream," I approached the Seeker captain, her three narrower or squarer flyer guards gave me a nod. "How's our security? Lodestar mentioned your squadrons took off in a hurry to double check our airspace and of the High Council Pavilions. Is something wrong? More Unicronists?"

"Good morning Chromia, oh just rumors that something's amiss, just like every other day this week," she sighed. "We've been riddled with Neo-Functionist and Unicronist threats this week, I wish they were non-factors, and I'm sorry Novastar, Jazz, and I didn't catch the assassins before they tried to go after Galvatron and Arcee." She looked down at me from her tall height, twice my size, and shut her optics a moment. "They don't need to deal with that kind of stress, they've done enough, and Arcee shouldn't have to speak to the historical precedent of Autobotist thought. We should be past all this now!"

Genuine regret and odd phrasing, but understandable frustration. Something irked me, and I tried not to panic when Elita messaged that Strika was making a coup speech at Translucentia Heights. Focus, Chromia. "I see, just rumors... You are accounting for the Decepticons and Justicials too, I imagine, you've seen the armed coup threateners in the streets just like me. Stand-off is pretty bad right now." I saw her nod slightly, her weight on her legs shifted as she stood tall, towered over me more. "I'm sure the two bots appreciate your remorse, and yes it is sad and angering that we're dealing with this. But having to remind people of remarkability and less theoretical engagement's importance is something we all should do when we have capacity and inclination, yes? Slowing or stopping the cycle. I do my part as a launch too."

=Captain's clear, and she's suspicious of Slipstream= Windblade sidled up next to me, waving at Slipstream.

The expression of Slipstream's guards was unreadable, except for dropped optics of sadness, just like Slipstream's own gaze.

"Of course I'm on the look-out for Decept actions, and you are right, new Autobot and old age values have their place informally, to be certain. I'm just- fed up." She clenched her fists. "So what if I realized a personal transformation or if anyone like me or any person for that matter does? What's the big deal, publicly, that I realized I'm a zoomdare and not a zoomseek, or that one of your partners did too? I don't know, I feel like we're recycling the same old thing with self-admitted absurdity! I find Arcee and Aileron's military legacy and that of folks like them of interest in how aesthetics informs it, but I tire of feeling like my personal experience has to be part of the democratic process." She sat in the command console chair behind her, resting her head on her raised fist. "That weight on all of us should be lifted by the regime, not be it."

=Novastar, Jazz, Elita, Windblade, Lodestar, Lightbright, we seem to have a problem with Slipstream. She's rather understandably upset about - the exhaustion of the Autobot way of doing things in terms of aesthetics, but she just denounced aesthetics having a role in public life to our face saying so, and uh, she didn't say hi back to Windblade, which was weird.= I was very aware of my halberd and sword on my back, and my scatter blaster magnetized to my left ankle, within a moment's reach, and the very large null ray guns on her shoulders.

"You know I'm right here, right? We've worked together for years?" Windblade balled a fist. "I'm upset too but you don't need to treat me like that."

=Press. We need certainty. This unfortunately is a good indicator you're on the right track.= Novastar replied.

=Slipstream's silence to me despite pointing out her rudeness speaks volumes.= Windblade tensed near me, light on her feet.

Scrap, this really is going to go down. I gave the softest look I could, hoping we were wrong about her, as I spoke to Slipstream, "I get that Slipstream, as much as I can at least, but Windblade and Arcee have a right like any of us to bring the radicality not intrinsic to how they or we are but of their constructed episteme into the theater of politics. You're right that not everyone should have to do that that way, I'm sorry if I misspoke." I dipped my head, and Slipstream smiled slightly.

Now I press. "But I like the aesthetic meetings, the talks, that are some of our oldest practices, and enjoyed ones with you, and I - I find hope in reminders of the depth of realization and transformation in all our lives, from thinking about it and doing things to connect to it when we want to. Our and other societies crumble when they forget these things." My arms hung loosely, ready to ignite my energon forearm buckler and unsheathe my solid thermal sword as much as the thought revolted me. Gods saying all this out loud I feel terrified. Her next words will be a fight unless I show that I know, and then she'll slip away. I noticed some of the naval staff nearby at their desks in the corner of my optic had slowly stopped what they were doing to listen.

=We're taking notice with people we think we can trust. Elita's deploying air squads to match Slipstream's.= Jazz's message confirmed my concern further.

"I don't agree with that calculus," Slipstream stood and ignited an energon sword and raised a null ray cannon arm in a swift motion as she spoke, and I barreled into her, locking blades overhead as her guards opened fire around her. "And Windblade's a traitor -urk," I sliced deeply into her lower torso by willing the edges of my energon pseudoplasma shield to sharpen, while fighting broke out in the room.

"Don't you dare talk about and to her like that!" I growled as I twirled around her left leg past her null ray blast to deliver a quick stab to her lower back. "Don't you understand that the might of arms and bureaucracy alone has not and will never save us?"

As she yelped, I sidestepped away from her swiping sword going under the blow, only to receive a powerful kick to the waist that slammed my frame into the console behind me.

"Aaah…" I struggled to get up from the wreck, back armor scraped up and pushed in, bleeding.

Slipstream was about to run me through when I saw Windblade leap onto her with her pink curved sword Stormfall in hand that came in for a stab just below the neck.

Slipstream's second attempt to zap me with a null ray was thrown off course as she struggled with Windblade with both arms, her sword's parry cut into her own shoulder from the force of Windblade's strike, and a scream came out of the captain.

I got a look around at the chaos in the room, about a third of the forty bots exchanging fire and blows with the rest. The guards assigned to Windblade and I were on the advance in two fire teams releasing close quarters fire and melee bashes, a clear path cut to Windblade and I through the infiltrator lines. I sprinted forward to the guard on the right aiming at Windblade and delivered a slash across them at the waist into the spine: Skyrocket's optics flickered off, and a null ray from the next guard Closeair hit me into a near instantaneous blackout and stumbled stasis.

---

"Chromia!" I sliced towards Slipstream's hand in rage, cutting off cleanly around the palm, and she punched me up with her right arm.

I used my turbines to reverse direction and stay aloft, sword directed to her chest armor holding her spark while her large null ray cannon barrel nudged against my chest.

We were still for a moment, optics narrowed.

"Decepticons, retreat!" She howled, covered in blood. She transformed into her tetrajet form and soared out towards blast doors that shut on her, and she slammed her nose cone directly into the door, yelping in pain, transforming into a bloody mess on the ground on all fours.

="YOU WILL NOT LEAVE TO CAUSE FURTHER SORROW UNTIL YOU GIVE UP YOUR FIGHT."= Lodestar boomed over comms and her speakers.

I leapt over, and put my sword to her neck. "You all better listen to the Titan. Surrender or die, starting with your commander who has no respect for me. You're outnumbered."

"Grrr- you-" Slipstream looked up at me.

A massive fusion blast tore threw the door, Lodestar's voice thundered in pain, and my body was thrown back along with Slipstream's into the opposite door. She landed on my torso and crushed my own from the velocity into the wall.

"Correction, you and your treasonous acts against the rule of state-" Overliege stepped out of the purple smoke, detonator in hand along with a railgun cannon, dozens more bots behind them.

"WE BARELY HAVE RULE OF STATE, SCRAP-BRAIN," I yelled, diverting attention from Slammer and the ten other heavily armed loyalists who immediately raised cannons and fired into blue helmed and crimson eyed Overliege's head, exploding it in a multicolored crescendo. The duobot split into a bleeding tank mode and their thick left shoulder armor pauldron came off to help form an angular high speed plane, who promptly retreated: the room turned into a firefight with the corridor outside.

=Jazz, did you get all that?= I tried to push unconscious Slipstream off of me, and crawled lethargically for cover behind a console, blearily spotting a PPA medic rushing towards me.

I kept my hand tight on my sword hilt.

=Lodestar gave me the play by play, you kept Slipstream from giving any orders to her squads by riling her up, so thank you. Elita's forces are intercepting them now. Status?

I got a good look at the bot who was asking me take it easy and offering medical help. She was mostly aquamarine and cyan, and had a curving frame with a blocky car hooded chest and large ankles, car side armor forming thin back stacks, and a currently stern audial bunned face.

A familiar iteration- hmm wait- this the Lifeline I keep hearing about. I noticed her chest bore a triplicate insignia of the red blocky faced Autobot symbol, the golden PPA one, and a teal Paradon cube.

"Guess I'll trust you not to shoot me," I winced a smile. =Injured badly, but theoretically in good hands.= I flipped myself to sit resting on the console that had been in front of me. "You're Lifeline, right? You probably need surgery to treat all this, but do what you need to do."

"Windblade," her gaze softened as she started to patch up some of my broken exposed energon tubes. "Right now I need to keep you from going into stasis. I know you commander types like to be in the field, and I also know your brain is needed to keep the fight going. Save your energy."

=Hey uh Windblade, now might be a bad time but= Nightbeat commed. =Um, the Cosmopolity is already thinking about ejecting us as the overdue war unfolds across the PPA systems, and um, I crossed paths with Bulkhead, the laborer? He thinks he found a Unicronist plot.=

=Give me a few hours and I'll catch up with you. Tell the representatives this specifically: I am bleeding out for peace for my world. A peace that understands that the cycle continues even when it is slowed, and that they would do well to remember that we transformers are not some inconvenience nor are we the answer to all your problems. If you would like to talk to me while I heal you are welcome to do so. Can you send them that?= I did my best to tune out the pain with the dampener Lifeline gave me.

="Windblade, I think you just reduced both your speech and Arcee's to a bite-sized, grizzly paragraph. I think she'd approve, and I hope you feel better dear."= Nightbeat sent a smooch sound along, and I chuckled.

"What's so funny?" Lifeline asked while finishing with my waist.

"Oh, my friend pointed out a terrible trans pun I hadn't intended, that's all." I whimpered as she turned me over to work on my back, pain searing near my wing joints. "The wings joints hurt doc- but we need humor to live, don't we?"

"We do, and I'll take care of those once I can get you out of here. We've got reinforcements in, just rest." She gently placed cold, soothing gel on my right wing's seam. "This will seal temporarily for a bit to keep stuff from falling out, your nose cone is smashed up too, and then I'll deal with the smaller stuff."

"Sounds good to me," I looked around at the dozens of bots to my left who I could see from leg down or crouched height. "Thank you, for helping me before things were clear."

"It's what I do, I dunno, I'm a real dare junkie," she laughed. "I'm sure you understand."

 

[Pluralsword]

Moments later, 19/13/1,201,356 Allsparked Cycle (AC), Rallying Age. Rivetday, 14:07 Hours Iacon Local Time, Cybertron.

"Dammit, Overliege!" I scrunched my fists after reading Hammerstrike's report of the battle at the crew command center inside Lodestar. ="Wrecker Battalion 4, go help Lodestar's command deck!"=

Twin Twist: =Copy that, Aileron, we're moving!=

"Well, this tosses our plans to evacuate people into Lodestar out the window," I looked up at the dozen PPA Guard, Wrecker, Intelligence, Naval, and Marine command staff present along with allied world personnel who were listening across our battlemap table focused on the northeastern hemisphere of Cybertron. Iacon was squarely in the middle, while the table ran a high atmosphere and orbital battle tracking map. "So, we are left with doing the predictable thing of bringing civilians into the High Council Pavilion's Citadel, while mounting a counteroffensive into the points of violence filling our ranks and polities across the planet. Would anyone like to offer a change in strategy beyond primarily shutting down Decepticon command planetside?"

"Well Aileron, the tactical nightmare of the situation could be eased by Titan deployment to quickly move masses of infantry to needed areas," the crimson sleek exosuit armored human Captain Scarlett of the Joint Operative Guard Interstellar Entente pointed on the map towards the Iacon Central Transit Hub. "Here in particular. Securing and using the metro lines is key to winning this thing, particularly for mobilizing non-gigantic forces such as some of our esteemed company here, like you." Her brown eyes beamed with her half-smile.

The twenty commanders around affirmed agreement, as did I.

="Blaster, Nightbird, deploy Chela and Cam-Inus out of low atmo to the Iacon Central Transit Hub, get infantry and fighting vehicles to fortify and move out from there to the coordinates I'm comming to you,"= bulky ridged blue red Ultra Magnus tapped his audial stub with a hand. "Roulette is currently leading the assault on our- I mean Overliege's," his face tightened while he fumed. "Headquarters in the Citadel. I'm in the middle of some troop movement calculations and orders, so keep talking."

"Of course, acting Councilor," curvy purple Guard General Stiletto flapped her metal feather wings. "We still have the emerging Decepticon fleet problem. Thousands of armed civilian ships unaccounted for, and our 4th and 5th fleets are about to intercept the Decepticon's shipyard out in the Zerek System. We know two fleets worth of the military have shown they are on their side, so we need Nightbird and her Titan Elliptical to get the Navy to respond to their strikes. The enemy has no choice but to hit the Camien shipyards, and attempt to behead fleet command. As such, we should put our flagships into minor conflicts across our systems, bleed their forces."

Stars, I hope the family stays okay.

"Excellent idea! Comm Admiral Nightbird for me, on my authority," Ultra Magnus pulled out a datapad and typed with fervently speedy thumbs. "Aileron, Scarlett, Quig-Siren, I'avos, Ureliab, I need you five to lead your units to link up at the Undergrid with Arcee and -Orion Pax's ad hoc special forces unit that we're calling Anchor, and strike at the the triple quarreling Unicronist, Functionist, and Circle Laser threat going after the Allspark. We need you to reinforce the central chambers, there's only so many troops we can fit in there."

Grumbles and mutters broke out, and my head ran with heat while I crossed my arms. So she and the librarian and whoever the scrap of our old contacts are doing this made a case for a new branch anyway?

"All due respect diract, what the blazes is Arcee doing in the field?" I stared up at Magnus, whose optics went wide, mouth slightly open. "She's in no condition for this! She's still healing-"

"Do you have another suggestion for a strategic commando operative who helped rewrite the modern understanding of war across their society-long lifespan who is currently available?" Boxy and bird decaled deep blue helmed Thunderclash stared back at me, arms on eir hips. "She knows the risks. This is collective do or die right now, soldier, you've done this dance countless times."

"But-"

"Thunderclash is right. Rear-General Aileron, why the smelt do you think I'm deploying you?!" Ultra Magnus regained his sternness, and attempted a smile, only a slight lip crease. "Your partner is sometimes an extremely stubborn bucket of bolts who frankly terrifies me, which I'm glad for, but I need someone who can keep her from throwing her spark away charging headfirst when I can't! I couldn't talk her out of this." His face fell flat again and he whispered. "Do we understand each other? I need you, just like I did when we made landfall a thousand years ago."

"Understood, Councilor," I put my left hand on my spark, and then turned to sprint for the door. "Let's move it people!" =Wrecker Battalion 24, join me at the Citadel's Undergrid entrance!=

Ricochet: =Aye, Aileron, we'll be there!=

A rifle shouldered lyssern stood on hind legs and opened the door for me, and I turned around to see stout blue silver Siren, rocky jagged limbed durrel Tlzaltwe, and Scarlett with plate vest armored a'voan I'avos in hand striding after me.

I nodded. "We'll sort out joint command on the way there-"

"You take the lead Aileron, experience and all that," Scarlett caught up to my legs on her own armored ones, her crimson helm now over her head. "Give me a ride, would you?"

______________________________________________________________________________

I soared down the Citadel Thoroughfare in my chubby spaceplane mode, away from the booms of artillery and high screams of cruise missiles and bombs, towards the bangs and chooms of gunfire and small booms of explosives, and the yells of orders, information, and pain, into the underground streets with the organized downpour of civilians and two-way flow of soldiers. I wasn't focused on the colossal Titan-sized walls both new and ancient mosaics and paintings, but instead on the immediate airspace, and my command datawork my brain was tapped into. Following me were two battalions of motorized JOG forces and a mix of Wrecker motorized infantry and flyers- over 2,000 and four flyers who were part of my flight unit.

=I'avos, Quig-Siren, and Tlzaltwe, how are your pushes into the secondary access tunnels?= I signaled with my ventral lights to my battalion behind and alongside me to keep pushing forward, kilometers downward. =We're about to hit showtime ourselves.=

Tlzaltwe: ="It's a real plasma barrel, Circle of Laser brought out all their best shock troops, it seems! We're making some headway, cut them off from the metro."=

I'avos: ="Unicronist units are sparse but deadly, small squads. Still ascertaining their tech- never seen anything like it in action, gravity weapons of some sort. We're halfway down."=

Quig-Siren: ="Can confirm, Unicronist lances are hard hitters. Don't know why they aren't using this stuff in the Threshold. Can't seem to stop handheld railguns though, no defensive tech in that regard. We're three quarters in."=

="Damn, so the Unicron War tech is back, request reinforcements, I sense trouble. Tlzaltwe- get Kappa Supreme down there, I think you'll need her."= I dove closer to the ground, a few hundred meters above. "Scarlett, ETA on Elita's artillery reinforcements?"

"They should be on our tail in a few moments," Scarlett loaded her blocky plasma autocannon with a plasma fuel canister while in my pilot bridge's front seat. "I know it's bad to say, but us folks in the Joint Operative Guard could see this fight coming from years away, but you all could. Glad to help you out."

"It's certainly appreciated, Scarlett, that the Anarcheaum and JOG are pulling through for us as you always have," the fighting came into view beyond just my scopes: divisions of Autobots bunkered behind rectangular angled blue-gray metal barricades on two sides of the tunnel with swathes of Functionists bearing the gold blue gear winged insignia in between.

Those opponents had set up through broken tunnel walls, hunkered down inside two blocky tracked drill-breacher dropships' side openings in total taking up the hall, out of the holes they had drilled. They were laying down automatic and volley fire of kinetic and energon plasma rounds, along with missile and artillery just like how our lot was, along with sprays of bullets and spontaneous flames between the two sides from point defense system interceptions of projectiles. Railguns peppered explosions right through cover, landing still unsafe , and we planned for this.

"I knew those ships… the Sincere and Triangulum , served on both to plunge into Unicrons during that awful war for survival, Functionists disappeared with them after they were overthrown," I veered towards the colossal left blast door edge where the Autobots had bunkered besides, with only combat forces around this far in. "Bloody shame to take them down now, but there's no other way."

"Their spirits would probably thank you Aileron, for presiding over their passing," Scarlett touched my dashboard. "Seeing off old friends out of the clutches of being tools of hierarchy and hegemony against us and everyone we love. Speaking of that, the guns are coming in now, getting set up in two minutes."

"That's true, they would do that," I came in for a landing on my wheels with energon thrusters off, and opened my topside airlock. "Out you go, make sure your forces are ready." ="Wreckers, give cover fire to help our friends peel off towards the blast door frames!"=

"You got it, exec," Scarlett scurried out and hopped off me with ease, her rifle aimed and firing as soon as she landed by the walls edge, before ducking behind again.

Meanwhile, as my officers affirmed over that they had heard me, I transformed, thruster engines splitting halfway to form my arms, drew my silver ion carbines from my wings, and fired both with no recoil down ahead of a heavy Neo-Functionist flyer launching from one of the dropships, an interceptor flight following them. My blue blasts caught their nose cone and their underside as they turned away, spun out, and crashed into the wall.

I tumbled behind the cover of a barricade before the four other flyers bore down on me yelling epithets about frame betrayal over open comms, and were gunned down by my own flight on the ground near Scarlett, and the four Autobots next to me… including blocky and sloped red gray van Major Ironhide, who gave me a nod.

=Help me out with the ground armor and cqc rushers as we move out, would you?= He raised his rotary scrapmaker over and fired a burst before ducking down.

=Sure thing= I looked behind me to take a look at our ground forces on the way: the Wrecker and JOG ground vehicles and runners were a few kilometers out, long range weapons and point defense firing, the group splitting into two columns to get behind the frames. Far in the distance, I could see the blips of two blocky gray gun turrets towering over everyone else.

Elita One :=All local units, Four minutes to destroyer railguns firing!=

Ironhide: =Copy, Citadel Guard, peel! Peel!=

I looked up to briefly fire a burst at a tank bot firing artillery cannons at close range while speeding towards us. Scrap. I ducked down and briefly saw Ironhide's troops beginning to retreat to the frames, starting from the middle of the tunnel. I pulled out my thermal fusion grenade from my left thigh, primed the timer, and chucked it underhand to roll it under the incoming bot, and ducked down again, and waited.

A few seconds later, a loud boom and an almost instantly cut off scream went off, and I looked up to see the tank bot's turret blown out, body covered in purple flames.

I brought my head low after spotting an autocannon blazing jeep squad roll around them, headed towards our position.

=Whirl! Fire your payload on the squad to my left!= I readied my guns.

=Copy, firing!= A soaring chorus of rockets rushed down past my barricade.

Whirl: =Three down-=

A red plasma bolt tore through immediately after.

Moonracer: =Targets eliminated. Returning to counter sniper fire=

I briefly glanced at the blue chopper Whirl and aquamarine wheeler Moonracer who sat behind a mobile barricade behind the frame. =Thank you both.=

We kept up our blaze, the bloodied Neo-Functionist push reaching our now empty central line, using the barricades to fight us.

I promptly ran with Ironhide's team into the safety of the mobile shield generators that started projecting behind me clumped up behind the frame, the tunnel line now ajar except for reactionaries who looked about with confusion, and then stared up the tunnel while our back lines out of the blast zone kept up the defensive fire.

Elita One: =T minus ten to firing delayed HE naval railgun rounds.=

Yells and scampering carried out among the enemy, who scurried back towards their stolen ships.

=Audio off and ears covered people!= I turned off my audials. "Dear Sincere and Triangulum, may you find rest knowing that you are keeping me safe, one more time," I tensed, trying to hold my composure together, and I looked to the rightwards door frame, specifically to settle on Arcee, Anode, Lug, and the tall boxy red blue Orion Pax, whose heads turned towards me. I hope Arcee doesn't begrudge me voting for her. "Thank you for helping us have our future-" I couldn't hear a word I said, but my mouth and voice box knew the words, while I paid attention to Elita's countdown.

Elita One: =Firing.=

Two bright streaks went by in an instant followed by two floor shaking explosions, the silence of what would normally be cacophonous reminding me of the lack of noise in ship-side space combat.

Ironhide looked over past the gate, and declared =Go, we're clear of ships!= while I brought my audials back on to cries and screams of injury and shock.

=Flight Plasma, with me= Tired disappointment ran through me, and I ran around the side of the door frame, soared into a leftwards turn back into the fray, above the caved out smoldering wrecks of the ships I had once called home.

No fire met me, as our ground forces surged into the ruins, my Conjunx at the dizzying shot deflecting and frame cutting head with her orange blades alongside dozens more with close quarters arms. The devastated enemy lines began to crumble before my visual sensors looked away.

This wasn't how things were supposed to be, this bloodshed, but us winning the day is how things should be.

I dove and landed inside the Threshold proper, a vividly painted room I did not have time to appreciate. At the center sat the massive golden dodecahedron AllSpark, wired into a fountain of energon and liquid cybermetal, and defending it on all four openings, all with blown out doors, were hundreds of Primal Guard warriors across species, and forty three Primes at the head, including Solus, Splendid Convoy, Alpha Trion, and Override, guns and melee weapons in hand roaring with bright energies of their Matrixes in their torsos as fire and blow met the enemy-

In front of me, that enemy in two tunnels was composed of a multispecies exosuit front resembling miniature Unicrons, utterly tasteless , bearing down with turret after turret of gunfire, and in the tunnel to the left were bots with tall two handed Great Swords, hacking and tearing with abandon into our line, trampling over their fallen.

I gave my wing soldier Cyclonus a glance while our bulky flyer colleagues Rotostorm, Six Knight, and Topspin formed up, rifles and cannons ready, looking to me for my word. "You ever see anything like this before while you were with the Circle of Light?"

"Only during the schism, and working with the IBO," lanky lavender Cyclonus gripped her Great Sword in both hands, armor skirts flushed out, wings still. "Both groups have a bad habit of hijacking tech in ways we didn't think were possible. Orders, Aileron?"

"Let's see what Solus has to say," I nodded at the blacksmiths, cityspeakers, and engineers rushing around and working on the AllSpark fountain terminals. "My guess is that we'll need everyone we can get to keep the AllSpark from being turned against us." =Solus, we can reinforce your lines- is that the right move?=

_____________________________________________________________________________________

="Aileron, Scarlett, Ironhide, get turrets and batteries up behind us as soon as you can!"= I took another swing with the massive Star Saber in upper cut at the blazing onslaught of Unicronists. Cyan-white Matrix plasma erupt from the blade's hilt and my frame, following my strike to absorb the blaze ahead of me and my warriors, and with a moment of shutting out everything on my senses around me to focus on the wave, I directed the eruption back down into the Unicronist line, slicing heads and torsos alike until I willed the wave to explode.

All fire fell silent, cheers erupting on my side, but heavy footsteps continued in the distance, unseen. Scrap this. ="Quig-Siren, do you copy? Marine Division 12, Do you copy?"=

Silence was my reply.

Aileron: =No word from them, I'm afraid, I tried too=

="Dammit. Override, Primal Prime, with me. My dear guards, remain. We're going to scout ahead. Orion, lend me three of your best."= I readied my blade and stepped forward into the dark, willing my broad bladed greatsword to shine its light.

"Hmph, if that's what you want," aquamarine red wheeler Praesidia Magna tossed a flare ahead of me, which was about as effective as our searchlights or my blade. "We will wait."

"Here, Solus," towering red blue shoulder stacked four-changer Primal Prime leaped beside me, in gorilla form, and Override raised her double barreled gun ahead.

Orion Pax: =I can give you that except for Aileron attempting to talk Arcee out of joining you. Filch, Buzzsaw, and Scylla will be there.=

=I can accept that,= I began my march in, hearing a pair of wings and four sets of legs with me. Maybe someday my grand mentee will do what she has to end this quickly, or she'll just stick to the long route to heal… "Lend your Matrixes please, arms on me. We can't see or sense a thing."

The enemy nears… unmaker… my two Matrixes whispered to me, the conflagration of sparks in the galaxy blocked out of my perception.

Primal and Override put an arm on my back, and their Matrix energies joined mine, our minds in concert many as one, light our way… the tunnel lit up to the nightmarish sight of an orange cloud eating across it in the air and walls, the vague shape of a winged figure bulky and with a with cone shaped head between back stacks floating off the ground inside, if that even is a floor anymore.

DEFEND I pointed my blade forward, and whispered to the Saber's Matrix, once that of my love, to shine their ever changing transformative fury.

A nearly sunbright beam cut forward, catching the cloud on fire and melting a hole through, striking the figure, enveloping, and then with the thought cease fire, petering out.

The dust fell to the ground, and the conehead winged shape looked up at me with a cackling grin. "THRUST SAYS HELLO, FOOLISH PRIMES."

"Aw bolts," Buzzsw chirped, and a rocket seared past my head at ?Thrust? how can that be, Windblade's sibling died in the Unicron W- oh. Thrust's head, and exploded it into more dust on impact, leaving the bot headless.

"Back away from the dust!, now!" I ran back, bloody gray goo situation, I bet. When we reached my warriors once more, who were yelling and firing, I turned back around to see the dust had taken the shape of a massive cannon that filled and lined the entire tunnel. A terrible green light built up inside it.

Goodbye, Matrix Amalgamous, I love you always, droplets ran down my cheeks as I ran the sword into the metal floor, hearing my Conjunx's derived memory composite in the Matrix reply, never stop loving and changing. I quickly drew my golden Forge hammer and stuck the blade as the green blaze screamed towards us- and a roar of starry light met it, burning and singing chemical formulae and program lines of adoration.

I knelt, and waited in front of the broken Saber and crushed Matrix within, agonizing over what I had done, all the caresses of mind and talks in repose now a memory to carry… and saw the tunnel ran with multicolor speckled gray and poetry I could not bear to start to read, the dust now gone.

"Two family members lost… what am I doing?" I stood, Forge in hand. "Thank you for helping, folks."

"I… I'm sorry, at least I can lend my tentacle guns if there's anything else," tall gold white Scylla stepped beside me, tentacles aimed ahead. "Speaking of," she snarled and fired on the sight of a Unicronist exosuit squad ahead, my colleagues around me joining their firepower. "Solus, you're an engineer, you knew what that was before we did- you should be with the AllSpark. Let me fight here."

"She's right," Primal Prime raised a palm and fired a Matrix blast. "Go. Primes will shore up here to make up for you stepping back."

I stood, and my body started to take in the shock. I staggered away from the fighting, a powerful shot catching me in the left shoulder, and I stumbled to the ground, no mark from it on me.

Pink, light green, red, and deep green armored hands reached out to me, pulling me up, to the sight of four loved ones still alive sitting in front of me, pulling me into a hug, before Aileron scampered away with commands flowing from her mouth. Too out of it to process-

"You both did the right thing," Arcee burrowed her head into my shoulder. "Sometimes we have to let go to keep loving."

"I appreciate your words, dear. Anode sweetie, would you pass me a cable to the AllSpark? I need to make sure things are okay in there beyond what my team is already working on." I put a hand on her shoulder, looking over at her, Lug, Aileron, and one of my grand mentees I had raised. "Where's Galvatron?"

"Sure, Solus," Anode nodded and got up, and ran towards the nearest terminal. "Galvatron is in the thick of it up against Flapjack on the surface."

I resisted the urge to comm him. "Arcee, there's something I need to talk to you about…" I can barely contemplate what just happened, and I don't want it to again. I have to be the one.

"Got the cable," Anode sat down next to me. "Should I put it in one of your head cables?"

Arcee had a tiny half smile on her somber face. "Should this wait?"

"I suppose, yes-" I sighed and sat up with alarm as the yells of battle grew louder, voices I knew, one after another.

"SOLUS- aw scrapping smelt," Ratchet's optics widened with horror, and I turned around to see an odd metallic figure of white and gray with a cloak and a wide helm at the head of Circle of Laser warriors, our forces around the rest of the chamber circling up and firing- the ones that been defending the leftwards tunnel, dead, dying, or crawling away.

I yelled with rage, and leapt up, Forge in my good hand, Anode rushing from my side towards the AllSpark, and I charged on the Circle Laser forces, forging plasma firing from the top of my weapon. How can someone slay near a dozen Primes in a near instant without mass destruction bombardment?

"You misuse the Biotects' gifts!" the cloaked figure roared, and brought forth a palm to erupt a fusion blast squarely at me, that I let hit me, bracing my knees.

"You think you can best the first bot to take up ununtrium coating, hierarch? Think again," I transformed into my spaceplane mode, and flew forwards, burrowing cleanly through them and the bots around them, blood drenched all over me-

The broken cloaked figure grabbed my thrusters and crushed them in their hands, and I spun out into the wall with a clattering boom, actuators and internal frame fractures all over my front. I was stuck in my mode.

"Foolish creation," the figure crawled off me, and I fired my broken thrusters in their face, blowing my internals there out, screaming in pain as the blast enveloped them.

"AAH- AAH- ARE THEY DEAD DAMMIT?!?" I couldn't stop screaming and couldn't see through my own heated smoke.

="Their spark is still going mid air under fire! It's surrounded the Matrix and powering up their warriors and messing with the planetary structure! What do we do?!?"= my head blacksmith Lightspead yelled over the cacophony.

"DRAG ME OVER THERE AND HOOK ME UP TO THE DAMN ALLSPARK-"

=That won't be possible, it's like fighting miniaturized Titans in here= Alpha Trion's manyfold laughing voice sang, and I felt Matrix energies from him and the remaining few dozen Primes touch me, and joined the flow with the AllSpark, one of my old friends energies dimming and disconnecting one at a time, one moment after the next. Be quick.

With all my might in my suffering, I followed along my connection to the AllSpark, cutting past the feeble talking and shouts among the passed on denizens, my outer vision lost, my mind's optics seeing a churning sea of cyan, pink, gray, red, and gold, visual and audible fragments of memories of billions in upheaval, a deep sadness of tens of billions of souls weighing on my consciousness. Pushing against the oppressive crush of a light I could not name, seeking to churn and delete.

I cut past all that, thinking of my love I missed most, whose spark rested here, and found their form changing ridge plated gray embrace while the awful light chased me. Help me, please, starlight. Lend me your half of the equation.

Of course, sweetspark. Amalgameous spat out code in thought that neither of us understood but had found in our Matrixes, and I gave mine in turn, lines of superpositional glyphs and numbers constantly changing places joining together-

A deep pink space yawned open, and enveloped the nameless light. All was still, and for a fraction of a moment, I saw Nautica's spark shining brightly in the pink sea, before it shut and disappeared, and I could bear no more, and started to lose consciousness in a tender embrace of billions, falling away from them. Someone else will have to tell Arcee and Orion, they better not wait for me.