Work Text:
Very early on into this excursion, Etho discovers a simple truth.
The ice drill had one purpose, and it will nearly always fail at that purpose.
Etho watches in exasperation as the drill clunks, stuttering to a stop. It makes a hissing sound as gas rapidly expells into the air. Groaning, he throws a glare into the sky. Staring at it, unfortunately, hadn't worked to stop it from breaking.
Kicking it lightly with his pede, he shouts over his shoulder. "Doc!" Nothing. Etho sighs. "Doc, get out here!"
Doc doesn't come out. Etho stomps towards the tent, treads clicking back and forth on their gears as he walks. Despite Etho's efforts, he shuttle has not left the tent since they got here. Beef watches him walk, amusement rolling back and forth in his EMF. He starts, "You know, I could just… Call the Hermitheus crew and ask them to send us a less annoying engineer."
He shoots him a look and doesn't warrant that with a response. Beef's been obnoxious this entire excursion, and Doc secluding himself hasn't helped.
Sliding through the flaps, Etho scans the interior of the tent. Bdubs sits, silent in his altmode. He's deep in defrag, as he should be, while Doc is in the back of the tent fidgeting with something. Back is turned to the tent flaps, his armor visibly twitches as Etho steps through.
"Doc. The drill broke again."
The shuttle exvents heavily, hot air visible in the cold air of the tent as he twists to look at Etho. "You're serious?"
Etho shrugs. "It's making that grinding sound again. You know I'm terrible with mechanics."
Coming to his feet, Doc shakes off a layer of frost that has started to settle onto his chevron. He has to duck in the tent, just barely to tall for it. Etho lets him pass, following close behind.
The shuttle circles the drill while Etho watches, faceplate visibly twisted with annoyance. Beef observes from his position on an ice outcropping, casual and relaxed. Etho looks to him, twitching one of his finials. Beef makes a face, his turret rotateing slightly in response before he looks away from Etho, towards Doc.
From his perch, Beef asks, "So, what's the prognosis Doc?"
That doesn't get a response as Doc sticks his hands into the mechanics, fiddling with some wires. It takes a moment before he looks up, annoyance very, very clear on his face. "It's burnt out." He says gruffly, stepping away from the drill.
Silence reigns. Beef sits up slightly straighter. "…What, do we need to drive back to get new parts?"
Doc shakes his helm, resting a servo on the apparently broken machine. "Not that simple, someone needs to drive back and haul back a whole new drill."
They all sit with that for a moment. Etho looks towards the horizion, overlaying a map until he manages to locate the Hermitheus. Still 150 klicks southeast. Still through ice, snow, and some of the worst glacial splits he's ever had the displeasure of navigating.
"Well, slag." Beef says into the silence.
"Yeah," Doc grumbles, "I can't fly low atmosphere like some shuttles can, Etho snapped a gear while navigating that one gap, and Bdubs is a minibot." He looks expectantly to Beef, who collapses his faceplate into his hands.
"Yeah, I know. Slag. I'm a tank, man. Slag. Etho's the one made for this weather."
None of them deny it. One of Etho's gears spins against nothing, clicking as it skips against metal. Beef waves a hand at the drill, leaning forward on his perch. "Do I need to drag that back as well?"
He gets a head shake, and Etho shifts his focus away from the conversation as Doc starts explaining some of the logistics. His optics, instead, land on the horizion.
The darkness smearing the perpetual sunrise catches his optic, stewing storm clouds where there shouldn't be. Etho tilts his head, and steps to the side to get a better view. They're just a dull grey, like the other ones have been. Probably another inch or so of snow, but…
Contemplating the storm, his finials flick as Bdubs steps out of the tent. Staggering slightly, he looks around bewildered as Beef and Doc discuss. There's not much to be bewildered about, but Etho's never met a bot who comes out of defrag quite as confused as Bdubs consistently does.
"Why's the drill down?" Bdubs asks him, voice buzzed with sleep. Etho shrugs.
"Dunno," he responds. "Ask Doc." Together, they glance at Doc and Beef. They seem to be properly arguing now, for reasons Etho doesn't bother to try and unravel.
He spends the next little while plodding about camp, reorganizing what bins he can access and finding tools where they shouldn't be. Their inability to keep anything in place irks him more then a little bit, but..
Most of the time, Etho's not much better himself.
Pausing, he stares out at the horizon line over Bdubs' shoulder. Bdubs gives him a little wave, realizes he's looking past him, and looks over his own shoulder. The clouds in the far distance, brewing their way through the sky, have darkened significantly.
Etho squints at the stormfront. "Hm," he says to himself.
Doc and Beef keep arguing, oblivious to his observation. Etho straightens up more, tilting his head at the swirling black clouds. "Hm." He says again, and glances at the two of them. They haven't quit bickering.
The storm looks slightly more aggressive then it should. Etho turns to the two, and speaks up. "Oi. Hey." They don't notice him. Exasperated, he calls again, "Oi!"
When they don't turn to look, Etho blares his horn. Bdubs jumps, letting out a slightly bewildered laugh. It's nice, having a good excuse to hit it. He hasn't for a while. With their attention firmly fixed on him, Etho continues. "Beef should get going. Looks like we've got a bit of a stormfront coming from the north, he can probably get halfway there by the time it catches up."
They all look to the stormfront, Doc lifting a hand to judge the speed of the clouds. "Damn," Beef says, "Yeah, you're probably right. How many inches do you think that's gonna be?"
Bdubs shifts to look at the storm, squinting at it. Etho lets him do the math, crossing his arms as he looks at the stewing clouds. Tentatively, Bdubs speaks up. "It's hard to say, but probably closer to a foot then what we normally get? It's technically a desert, and all, but…"
Sometimes, the storms are stronger. It's hard to predict, and the crew does their best. Foreign atmospheres are hard to predict.
It takes them barely 20 nanocycles to get the trailer hooked up, and Beef ready to go. The trailer is effective for it's purpose, but damn annoying to move across the jagged glacier. Beef will probably have to connect and reconnect it several times, and he seems more then a little reluctant to go.
They hurry him along anyways, tag teaming the process of getting him ready and hyping the tank up. By the time he leaves, Beef's field buzzes with an undercurrent of confidence.
The three of them watch Beef roll off into the plains, trailer and all. They stand in silence, and Bdubs is the first to speak up. He looks up at Doc and asks, "You up for a game of Triad?"
They're four rounds into Triad when the stormcell hits. It's fortunate for Etho, because his hand is so bad he's instead opted to torment everyone else. It's even more fortunate for Doc, who has a look on his faceplate that tells Etho he has a very, very terrible hand, and is about to lose to Bdubs
The first part of the stormfront hits with all the gusto of a light breeze. The wind meters outside spin and spin, depositing data into the local feed for them to parse.
It's insignificant, calm winds. It's ignorable, until the first proper wind hits. The entire shelter shakes, and they all look up at the same time as the center bar makes an ominous rattling sound.
"I'm sure it's fine," Bdubs says brightly. Outside, something bangs against the ground with a cacophonous thud. Doc groans, dropping his hand onto the table. Etho leans over to peak at it. It's absolute slag. He definitely could've won with it, however. A few well placed bets…
"Oh no, Etho saw" Doc says, "I guess we're going to have to restart this round. What a bummer."
The three settle in for the long haul, Doc dealing another hand of Triad after a scuffle over if he's really been rigging it. He has. Etho argues against it, Triad is more fun when it's rigged.
With a stumble, Etho collides with the back of the bot ahead of him- Fortunately not Bdubs. Doc takes the blow like a champ, stabilizing himself with ease despite Etho's weight.
The ice and snow under his pedes is easy to slip on, and he only allows himself to think about transforming for a moment. It'd be so much easier, the traction his treads would provide. Bdubs taps his leg when he doesn't keep moving, his field bristling with annoyance.
He doesn't take it personally, it's cold as Unicron's bones and all of them want out of it. Etho starts walking again, careful to pace his steps so Bdubs can continue to use him as a shield.
The sheer winds cut straight through Etho's thick plating, and he tries to duck his head further into his transformation seams. Ahead of him, Doc laughs into the blurring snows- his field swirls like the snow with a wild but controlled mania.
Over time, Etho has learned a simple fact: Nothing thrives more in the unknown like a shuttle does.
Especially a crazy one like Doc.
This sampling excursion out of the Hermittheus was supposed to be a simple one. Despite the tempermental weather. Only 150 klicks one way, 150 klicks back. Six orns sampling the ice, then return to the warm shelter.
Unfortunately, the storm had spiralled rapidly out of control. The blizzard slowly overwhelmed them at their base camp, and finally forced them out of the open when the tent collapsed. Doc's scanners read a hefty cave formation 30 klicks to their northeast- So they force their way through the snow.
It became apparent very quickly that Bdubs couldn't keep up with the force of the wind. Doc's long strides could keep pace with Etho's refitted altmode as long as he used his hull to stabilize himself, but Bdubs… The minibot can't withstand these winds.
Etho shudders again as the wind cuts through and cools his protoform even further. He checks his internal temperature every 30 nanocycles, if he does it more frequently it becomes a nervous habit with a vengeance. Doc's plating is built for the chill, being a space-shuttle he's practically in his element.
…The water, though. It'll be a pain to get Doc to remember to clear out the water that got between his plating.
Etho, technically, should have cold weather plating. Technically, his altmode is a snow-based vehicle. He's built for this. In spite of that, it cuts through him as easily as it would Bdubs' armor.
The mountain ahead, as Etho trudges on, gets steadily closer. They'd considered tying Bdubs to Etho's hitch, but then Doc had pointed out that they'd have a good possibility of freezing Bdubs' energon in his lines doing that.
So instead Etho shoves forward. It's easier not to think, even as Bdubs and Doc converse over his head in their shared comm group. It's much, much easier, to concentrate on the way his axles grind with each step, and the way the melting snow seeps into his protoform. It saps the heat away, but he has more of it to spare then Bdubs does.
Through the roar of the snow, and through the sensors covering his body, Etho hears something. He feels it, to. Underfoot, the ground groans as something shifts. Etho stumbles slightly, but doesn't topple this time.
Doc nor Bdubs react. They continue to argue, words flying back and forth.
::No, so here's the thing, the whole concept is flawed-::
Slightly jarred out of his meditative state, Etho is forced to concentrate more on walking then he was prior. The noise was unfamiliar, glaringly inconsistent with tetonic movement. It's nowhere in his data, not even buried in the vorns he's dumped into campaigns and service. He's never downloaded a datadump from a bot that heard it on an excursion.
He doesn't know what it was, and his companions remain stoutly oblivious.
::It's not possible! You don't know the specs that are required for that, you just know what it takes to grow those crystals, it's an absurd ask-::
Etho's processor buzzes around the new data from the vibration, and he hopes the sensors they left on the icedrill picked it up- He needs to know the origin. And they say warframes aren't inquisitive.
::But has anyone tried, though, like we could try it out-::
He decides, glancing up as Doc as the bot's wings twitch in irritation, that he won't tell either of them what he felt. Bdubs will get nervous, he's sure of it, and Doc will be just as curious as he is- Perhaps even curious enough to demand they stop and try to pick it up with their spare equipment when it happens again.
No way. He'd rather go back to the last desert world he was on then plant himself down in this storm.
His still fans collect snow in his systems, and he tries to decide if it's worse or better then the time he had them on for an entire campaign. That planet had been so hot.
Etho, theoretically, should be well adjusted to the snow. Etho, theoretically, should handle it better then he does. The issue is, even with the reframe, his sealing hasn't been completed. When he… left the planet, his reframe wasn't even close to being completed.
::-I just don't see the benefit in a full scale production like that, I don't even know if Wels would be interested and he's a damn spiritualist-::
The wind impossibly picks up, and Etho stops to let Bdubs brace himself against his leg. Doc stumbles, digging in his pedes to brace himself as it slams into them. They all stand still for a long moment as the wind howls. When it passes, it takes them a few moments to pick up walking again.
And it takes only slightly longer for their arguing to pick up again. It's consistent, at least.
The earth groans again as they walk, and Etho doesn't even wince this time. He plows through the snow, clearing a better path for Bdubs as he walks.
He falls back into the zone, each step grinding up snow in his internals. His protoform barely manages to keep itself regulated.
When the next one rolls through the earth, Doc and Bdubs notice it. Doc's head twists around, and he asks, ::You guys feel that?::
::Yeah, I felt that. What do you think it was??::
Etho rolls his optics to the stars, looks towards where his compass thinks Cybertron should be, and sends a plea towards Primus. May his idiot friends not insist on hunkering down to catch the next one on sensors. Amen, or whatever it is the devout say these orns.
::That's the third one I've been able to sense. It's not familiar to any of my data.:: He sends over.
None of them visibly respond to the comm, but Doc's field surges with a faint hint of excitement. Before Doc can speak, Etho pushes forward. ::There's sensors planted at the ice-drill site, when we go and recover it we can go check them- Seriously, Doc. We're freezing back here.::
::Damnit, Etho. Fine, fine.:: Doc very loudly lets his plating sag, the noise just barely catchable as the wind pushes it towards Etho. He resists the temptation to roll his optics or poke Doc with his field.
He's a very strong-willed bot, he swears by it.
It's when his gyroscopes have to react to the next shudder that he starts to properly worry. He glances towards the ground beneath his feet like it'll tell him the solution, and Bdubs' field pulses with worry.
::Do you think this planet has abnormal earthquakes?:: Doc shoots at them. He doesn't stop walking, wings tilting back to rid them of the built-up snow.
Bdubs grabs onto the back of Etho's leg to stabilize him as his gyros overreact to the vibrations through the earth. ::I doubt it?:: Bdubs says ::By all means this place shouldn't be that different then most planets of this type, I don't know why they'd be-::
The minibot doesn't get a chance to finish his sentence as the ground shakes properly, and Etho stumbles with it. He shouldn't have, his gyros should've steadied him, but as he begins to fall forward, something becomes apparent to him.
His foot had gone right through the ice. Despite Doc being in front of them, Etho's foot went through a sheet of ice. There should be nearly 10 klicks of ice between them and the ground below, but his pede slides right into a cavity and he starts toppling forward.
Bdubs still hangs onto his back pede as he topples forward. Etho runs the math as the ice gives out below his knee, and it comes to the conclusion that it's highly unlikely his torso will hit a stable shelf- The icesheet already came out of nowhere, Doc had walked past it with nothing like this.
He needs to get Bdubs out of here. Etho twists his torso on the transformation seam, using it to angle his arm to grab the minibot by one of the bars on his back. Bdubs lets go the moment Etho grabs him, a coding reflex. As Etho's other shoulder slams through the snow into the icesheet, he throws the minibot.
His processor stops running velocity maths, and he falls. Etho plummets, optics flying back and forth as he tries to identify the walls surrounding him. The wind has cut out, the sound of the blizzard distant as he tries to reorient himself.
The same vibrations he sensed earlier are stronger here, and his gyro's can't keep up with the sensation. Unable to find up, he spins in the air, trying to use the wall to slow his descent. It's ice, but it conceals something underneath. He only really gets a second to acknowledge it before he slams into a hard surface with a cacophonous thud, some of his kibble audibly cracking.
He lays there for 14 ticks, the blizzard roaring on faintly above him, trying to get his gyros to stop spinning.
::What the frag, Etho?!::
Docs comm reaches him, barely close enough on the local network. Bdubs' comes close after. ::Are you alright? Etho?::
He forces himself to sit up, snow tumbling off his plating. ::I'm alive. Undamaged, mostly. That was weird.::
::Weird is… One way to put it. What's broken?:: Bdubs asks.
Etho takes stock of himself, but finds himself almost immediately distracted by the sprawling floor beneath him. He brushes away the snow with his servo, revealling more of the delicate tiling he's crushed with his fall.
He looks up, optics scanning the hall around him.
It's not a glacial shaft. Or, well. The bit above him is, but the rest of this.. Arches, carefully constructed, sit on the sides of the glacier. One of them, thick and sturdy, is broken at the top where it previously stretched across the gap. All the ice and snow it supported came down with it, and Etho sits right at the end of the fallen ice.
It came down when he stepped on it. Doc had stepped right over it. Stupid shuttles and their long legs. He curses him, and glares up at the hole.
::Etho. Damages.:: Doc demands. Etho, broken out of his glowering, notes the pause between this and the last comm, and concludes they've constructed a separate comm frequency to talk about all the ways Etho is probably lying to them without him finding out. They're slagheads.
He sighs, rolling his optics to Cybertron again. ::I'm fine, I said I was fine, there's just- I think I fell into a temple?::
Silence reigns over the comms. Looking around cautious, Etho pulls himself to his feet to get a better look at the pillars that stretch overhead. The dark doorways, taller then Etho stands, almost seem to suck in the light around them.
A thought washes over him, and Etho looks around. His optics flick back and forth across the ice, trying to locate a light source. The blizzard was too thick for light to penetrate, the three of them had been using alternate sensors and floodbeams-
There shouldn't be light down here. He pivots on his foot as another comm washes is sent.
::I don't know how to get you out without causing more collapse. We need another flyer, or for the storm to be gone.:: Doc's glyphs are reluctant, and one of the last ones is tinged with guilt. Etho glances at where the hole is, at the snow blowing straight through. He can faintly see a form peeking over the edge and struggles to identify it as Bdubs or Doc.
Etho checks his internal temperature. ::It's more insulated in here. You two go to shelter, I'll be fine.::
This time, he pays attention to the eletrical signals. He's not close enough to hijack it, but he can faintly feel the signals being bounced between Bdubs and Doc overhead. He shifts his pedes in the snow, feeling them scrape against the tiles underfoot.
::You promise me not to move, Etho.:: Bdubs sends down, ::I need you to not be stupid. Don't go exploring or I'll- I'll-:: Bdubs struggles to find glyphs for a moment, the last ones he sent stammering over themselves. ::I'll take your fabricator!:: He threatens.
Etho laughs to himself, stepping slightly out of the snow drifting down from the hole. ::Oh no, whatever will I do without my fabricator… I suppose I have no choice. You're a cruel one, Bdubs.::
The only thing he gets in response is an aggressive glyph with four modifiers of various degrees of seriousness tacked on. Etho steps closer to an overhang, fully intending on tucking himself away in a light defrag cycle until the storm washes over.
As he starts to transform, treads shifting into position in preparation, Doc sends a comm on a private channel.
::We're going. Etho, I'm serious. Stay there. We'll be back soon. We won't leave you.::
Etho sends back a confirmation glyph, tinged with something to rib at Doc's concern. He doesn't get anything back.
Etho continues his transformation sequence, not as quickly as usual. His gears shift and grind, water freezing as it becomes exposed to external air. He falls onto his treads, giving them a quick back and forth to test if anything has jammed in the cold. Nothing sticks, and he maneuvers himself carefully into the overhang.
::Stay safe, brother.:: Etho sends over the siganl. It's closer to fellow soldier then it is spark twin, but he knows Doc understands his intended meaning. He always does.
Doc and Bdubs disconnect from the comm channel, and Etho is left alone in the silent chamber. He tries to settle in to a defrag cycle, turning new data over in his processor. Lulled into stasis, Etho sleeps.
"Hey, Etho!"
Pause's voice rings loud and clear through the halls of the barracks, and he looks up as the seeker jogs up to him. "Hi, Pause." He says quietly, voice careful and measured to not wake anyone.
He'd discovered very quickly that the platoon they're being deployed with is very particular about their defrag cycles. Rubbing his shoulder plating, he tilts his head at Pause.
"Er. What do you want?" The seeker beams at him, pleased by even being asked a question.
"There's an astronomer doing a walk through the upper halls to the targeting computer to use the tracking for some asteroid, cmon, if we're quick-"
Etho rolls his optics, looking away. "They'll what, Pause? We're warframes, we'd be lucky to get spat on."
All the same, he doesn't resist Pause when he snatches his servo and starts dragging him down the hall. He guides him with a confident stride, wings twitching with every step. Etho follows behind, watching the dull barracks walls pass by.
The hallways aren't much better, cool steel with harsh lines of paint. They're louder, at least, bots hustling past the two of them as they slide past the heavy door.
Once they step through into the crowd, Pause speaks quietly to Etho like he's unraveling some sort of conspiracy. "I hear they're a warframe." Etho's helm shoots up, finials twisting backwards.
"You're pulling my turret," He says, glancing back towards the barracks. "There's no way a warframe got frame exemption, you try telling that to Beef and he'll sock you in the face."
"I know, that's why I grabbed you and not him."
The halls seem longer then they should, steps that should take Etho closer to his goal stretching on and on. He doesn't arrive any quicker, wrist clamped tightly in Pause's grip.
It's when they pass the same door again that his processor stirs. He looks to Pause, as clear as ever, and tries to make out the faces of the bots that hustle past. None of them are visible, blurring together.
Etho's in a memory surge. It usually doesn't take him so long to notice, but-
Pause tugs him forward faster. They still don't arrive any faster, on and on through the busy halls. Pause is here, and he tries to focus in on his face. It's away from him, but it's as familiar as it's always been. He clings to it, desperately.
He knows, how this surge ends. The first few times he didn't gain awareness, but this time, when Pause's grip slips… He knows what to expect.
The grip slips, and Etho is slammed into the ground by a bot running into him. Pause vanishes into the crowd, and he watches him go, waiting for the crack of-
With bang, Etho's forcefully yanked from his defrag cycle. A rock tumbles to the ground across the room as the vibrations shake the chasm once again, and his plating spasms as it tries to pull a non-existent turret around at the rock. He shudders slightly at the uncanny sensation, and tries to focus in on the source of the sound.
Something is off when he scans the room. The rock, by all means, fell from the already struggling pillar overhead. There's nothing there to cause alarm, but despite this knowledge…
He scans the room with his sensors again. Nothing comes up, and he rocks his frame back and forth on his treads.
The silence is worse then something actually being there, he concludes. If something was there, he'd have something to target. Something to defend against.
Instead, he has to settle with being repeatedly awoken by the faintest sounds. Etho revs his engine, testing the heat levels. It's something to occupy himself with as the storm rages on overhead, something to think about besides the sourceless light that bounces through the room off the ice.
It's completely illogical. He can't string together a reason for there to be light, and yet…
Etho triggers the defrag sequence again, meticulously sorting through new data files. He disregards and accepts files into deeper storage. Parts of his processor slow and stall without activity, frame steadily emitting heat into the air around him.
A vibration rumbles, as deep as the others. It resonates up into his frame. Something hits the ground again, and Etho slams out of the defrage cycle trying to jerk his turret. There's still nothing attacking.
This time, though, it's not a rock. He does another pass of the room, and finds nothing new. Etho exvents heavily. He wishes they'd properly ripped his old coding with his frame, that way he could get some damn rest.
Instead of attempting it again, Etho backs out of the overhang. Transforming in an easy pivot, this time he slides through the process as naturally as it comes. He's not freezing anymore. He scans the room around him, and eyes the nearest doorway.
It still looms over him, higher then most sapient organic species grow to be. Taking a hesitant step towards it, he glances up at the hole where snow blows through.
It's not really breaking his promise to stay in place if he stays inside of the same connected system, right? He considers, pacing back and forth. It's the next vibration that makes the choice for him, washing over his frame. The pebbles on the ground shake in a little wave outwards, making it even more clear that the vibrations are coming from that way.
Fully knowing that this is quite possibly the worst loophole he's ever invented- Joe wouldn't even try to defend him with legalese, he'd be insulted if Etho asked- Etho steps up to the doorway.
He doesn't hesitate as he steps through, floodlight flicking on as he uses his other sensors to feel further. Etho was certain of this route the moment he picked it, and hesitating doesn't make the shadows less likely to swallow him and never spit him back out.
…Beef's probably right, he does talk to organics far to much.
Striding down the hall, he scans the walls. The stones themselves are intricately carved, but with no coherent order or sigils. It's just the work of a craftsman, a talented one, but no messages from what Etho can gather. It's delicate work, orns of carving lines into stone slabs while maintaining their integrity.
Etho steps around a corner, and gazes up the ceiling. It bends upwards into delicate arches, crystals baked into the stone catching and reflecting the light of his floodlight.
The hallway has no branching paths, just a sprawling walk with carefully and thoughtfully carved stone.
It's just when Etho begins to consider turning around that the holes start appearing.
They're gaping in the walls, carved into the ice and rock with as much precision as the stones themselves were. They're intentional, careful, but in such a different style then the rest that Etho stops to kneel. He runs his fingers over the carvings on the side of the hole, sharp and right angles to the soft curves of the hall itself.
He twists his head down to look in the hole. It barely comes up to his knee, and when he gets his head level with it some of his parts complain at the strain.
Etho ignores it, staring into a black void that stretches on farther then his limited sonar- compared to Doc's- or floodlight can reach. The carvings, though, continue as far as he can see. A brackish residue sticks to the walls, and he reaches out with a hand to try and use some of his tools to get a sample.
It looks goopy, like it's still a liquid, but when he scrapes the instrument installed in his wrist along the rock, it comes up with nothing.
Etho pulls his arm out, and forces himself to his feet. He'll need to find one with residue closer to him to properly drill a sample. His hydralics could barely get his arm to those, and as he stares down the hall, he figures he'll have plenty of chances to try again.
There's holes the whole way down, his sonar picks up on them one by one as they stretch endlessly into the rock. Their sizes vary wildly- Ones he can barely fit his arm into, all the way to ones he could probably crawl into.
He walks slowly, checking the ones he could reasonably drill. The ground vibrates as he strides on, a little louder every time. He only finds the residue in half of them, and none of is close enough to reach. Etho runs his fingers along the edge of one of the holes as he walks past, feeling the carvings under his fingers as his floodlights illuminate the tunnel ahead.
Two civilizations, independently in this same structure. Perhaps the holes and temple were built by the same species, but the emptiness of the place makes him suspect otherwise. It's long dead, here, and the holes are fresher- even if just by the standards of a Cybertronian.
The hallway ahead ends abruptly, the holes peetering off slowly the closer he gets to the blackness swallowing the end of the hallway. His pedes scrape against the floor as he stops, and he thinks to check below his feet for tile.
It's rough stone.
Hesitating momentarily on the threshold, he cranes his neck to try and scan the room. As he tilts his floodlights upwards, the light doesn't reach a ceiling.
Etho glances back at the hallway behind him before lifting a foot and stepping through. He turns slowly as he walks, to scan the wall he's walking away from. It's blank as the ground under his feet, the intricate carvings ending abruptly at the threshold. It's oddly unsettling, and he twists back around to keep walking.
The next vibration that hits is deeper, and he knows very suddenly that he is where it comes from. He can't identify why, he chases the feeling and loses it promptly. It is in this room, and he knows it. Etho cannot explain why, but he knows it.
The room is vast, but as he carefully traces it with his floodlight, he finds himself making a map. The light, as faint as it sometimes is, bounces back just enough information to get an assessment as he approaches the center.
It has to be a center, stairs circling a pedestal. Once again, the stairs are almost perfectly sized for a bot his sized- Just a little large, they'd probably be more comfortable for someone like Beef.
Etho pauses at the bottom, trying to get a good idea of what lays in the middle. The light bounces back incoherently, he can tell there is something there, but he could never describe to someone what. It's scrambled data, like someone bitflipped half of it and then passed it over to him to try and make sense of it.
He doesn't walk up the steps, circling the structure slowly instead. Etho checks his energon reserves, and finds them as expected- Well over 80%, he's at no risk of going empty down here.
It becomes more apparent as he circles the perimeter of the entire room that there's nothing in this room besides the pedestal and the source of the vibrations. There's other doorways, stretching on and on, but as he stares into their depths he finds nothing but similar holes to the ones before.
Etho makes two circuits of the room before he overlaps the data of the hallways and realizes they're identical.
Oh, the hallways have differences- places where a hand slipped and chipped off a little to much, a strange print where someone larger then him stumbled into a plaster setting. The holes, though.
They overlap exactly. The placement is identical, and when he steps into a hallway to scan the internals, he finds that the carvings are as well. The placement is perfect. The only real difference is the residue, and it's so minimal to be almost unnoticeable.
Etho finds himself stewing in something akin to fear. Warframes aren't coded to feel fear, but he's always been told they most certainly do. They just aren't given the programs to identify and verbalize it.
It's easier to think it's not fear, though. He paces between door and door, stopping in front of the one he came in through occasionally.
It's easy to tease Doc for being curious, endlessly inquisitive, but the reason he fled the war machine was his own curiosity.
Etho wanted to see the stars.
He stops, this time, in front of the stairs. He scans them again, the gibberish data bouncing back like it did before. Every scan he does, even entirely still, comes back completely different.
It makes no sense. He takes a step forward, pede bracing on the bottom stair as he stares up at what he cannot see. Even his optics struggle to make sense of the light being bounced back, no matter how many times he adjusts his floodlight nothing coherent returns.
Etho takes another step, and slowly makes his way up.
Nothing clarifies, the gibberish data only seeming to worsen as he works his way to the top. His treads shift on his legs with each step, and he carefully cuts off his processor from overworking the scrambled data.
Etho can't see, can't even feel his way through this, but at least he knows how stairs work. It's easy to lift a foot one by one, and as he gets closer to the top, his mind gets more distant from the thought of turning around.
Not many things can scramble a processor like this. It's a difficult thing to do, mess with a bots processor. Not many things are built to do this, it's such an obscure way of handling information spread, and it doesn't even affect most organics.
His foot comes down far to hard, expecting another step, and he lurches forward onto flat ground. Etho's frame shifts around him, hard iron plating adjusting itself as he reaches forward blindly.
His servo doesn't find anything but empty space as he grasps, fingers closing on themselves. With a careful step, he drags his foot to avoid stepping on anything.
The dead air around him flows through his frame as his fans click on to compensate for his overworked processor. The data is still scrambled, but with every step there's a little less of it. With every step, everything clarifies a little bit more. It's mostly the dead space around him, and where he knows something must be is still completely incoherent.
Etho's foot bumps into something, and he looks down.
It's not something he can make out, blurred and unclear. He kneels, carefully feeling out the shape with his servo. Fingers meeting a hard metal edge, he follows the shape carefully. His other hand rests on the ground as he leans forward, trying to maintain his balance.
It's when his hand hits a new part intersecting the other one that the suspicion sinks in. Etho's helped dislodge debris from a flyer's wings many times, and as his hand follows the new structure up and up, he knows what he's going to find.
Despite knowing it, he jerks his hand backwards when it lands on the bottom of a bot's faceplace, the hydraulics that move the neck cold against his fingers. Holding his hand close, he exvents heavily. His fans tick up a notch, and he tries to turn them down.
They turn back up immediately. He suspects not even trying to use his visual or sonar sensory data is… Scrambling him, a bit. Just a little bit, though.
Etho's found many a corpse, but as he starts tracing the form again, he thinks this might be the first time he's found a Cybertronian on a planet with no recorded expeditions. Oh, sure, the Second Quintession War eradicated millions of years of data, but usually there's a hint.
And this corpse, as he intentionally finds the rotors of the flightframe below him, is suspiciously unrusted for a sparkless bot in such an organic planet.
He reaches for the face again, tracing the shapes he can find. Masked, has optic guards on. It's a little less disturbing then actively tracing a dead faceplate, but it's definitely something he'd still get slag for from the more superstitious members of the crew. Etho tries to find a chevron, sensory horns, perhaps even finials. But the helm of the bot is smooth, just the occasional decorative ridge.
It's a point to an older design, it's a little bland for a bot to have no decorative structures.
Moving downwards, he lingers over their chest. The plating here curves out, in places it shouldn't. The edges are far to sharp, and Etho finally fully retracts his hand.
He's not superstitious, but he'd rather not stick his hand in a bot's sparkchamber- Dead or not. Etho gives the bot a pat on the shoulder, and rises to his pedes. The blob of scrambled data at his feet doesn't clear to become something familiar, but he sorts the physical sensory data he got from his hands into something he can relay to another bot.
This entire thing is a little unbelievable on its own.
Turning to the center again, Etho continues to drag his pedes to walk forward. He doesn't want to step on a dead bot.
The dead data ahead gets closer, and he grasps the empty air again. Etho tilts his head, trying to discern any pattern in the scrambling. Finally, as he creeps forward, his hand comes into contact with something.
It's hard metal, the sensory input putting it as very firmly warm. Another thrum rips through the ground, but this time, Etho can feel it in his frame as it vibrates through his arm.
The origin is completely indistinguishable from the rest of the room. He glances towards the walls, his floodlights still illuminating the door in the distance clearly. Etho steadies himself, reminds himself he has bots waiting for him, and keeps investigating.
The metal is rounded, but not a sphere. Rapping once on the side, he listens to it reverberate- Hollow. As he tracks the shape, he struggles to make sense of it- Where he should find sharp edges, he finds curved ones. And where he should find curved ones… Sharp edges. Every time he thinks he knows what it is, he stumbles over himself again as he slowly circles the object.
When Etho's fingers catch across a hinge, he stops walking. He traces it carefully, and follows the seam. Another hinge, and he tries to find something to make them move- a lip, or a clasp. The seam, instead of giving way to some gap, only seems to flatly run along with no lip in sight.
Pausing, he seeks upwards. He still doesn't find any lip, but his hand slips right into a hole as he goes further up. Etho freezes, and carefully draws it back, tracing the sides from the inside.
He finds familiar jagged carvings, and the edge itself is sharp metal- Warped like it was torn open. It's hard to tell if it was torn open from inside or the outside, though. Each piece he finds bends a different way, erratic and senseless.
Etho pauses. He has a very terrible idea. Doc would execute him for this very terrible idea. Every superior officer he's ever had would make him mop the rain for this idea.
Sticking his arm in to the elbow, Etho reaches down into the hollow container. His fingers find nothing, and he doesn't really let himself think about how the hole was perfectly shoulder level when he slides his arm the rest of the way in up to his shoulder.
His fingers graze the bottom as Etho squints into the void overhead. He feels blindly, trying to find anything at the bottom of the container. It's oddly lumpy, and he doesn't understand how the vibrations were coming from this.
It's hollow. There's nothing in it. Etho starts to pull his arm out, fans whining as he tries to put it together. He can't observe it. It vibrates, with no origin. It's… Extremely oddly shaped, and from trying to feel it out he struggles to mentally map it into a coherent object.
Etho steps back, and glares at the wall of flipped bits and incoherent light readings. The lump of unknown data on the ground, the dead seeker, lays sprawled just where he can see it in his floodlight.
His processor follows logic tree after logic tree, it chases the rabbit around and around, and he lets it. Etho doesn't understand, and it's annoying him. There has to be a solution, and it has to be apparent in some way.
Instead of staring at the wall of data- it's straining his processor, glaring at it for so long- Etho turns around to scan the room again with his floodlight.
It's thankfully still mostly empty. Pillars stretch from four corners on the platform up to the ceiling- Which he still can't make out, which doesn't make any since considering he didn't go up or down on his way, and he should still be in the glacial plain. The floor is bland, cold stone, and the walls are entirely uninteresting.
The pillars, even, are just hunks of rock that were dragged out of the earth. It's all an impressive architectural feat, despite the… lack of carvings. There shouldn't be uninterrupted rock here.
Etho is standing in a glacier, surrounded by rock. It's nonsensical. His processor finally gives up, spitting a confused line of numbers in his direction instead of anything useful. He exvents again, glancing at the wall of gibberish.
The entire walk was futile, then. There was nothing to stop. He just found something… Something far worse. Far odder, really. The fear has mostly washed over, it did the first time he touched it.
It leaves behind a protoform deep curiosity. Etho looks up at the stretching ceiling again, and tries to use his weaker sonar to find the top.
The sound never bounces back, and he's left standing silent with no usable information.
He could keep messing with the… thing, but he doesn't even know for sure what he'd do with it. Etho hadn't reached up, he supposes. If he heads back and waits for bit, he can get Bdubs and Doc in on this mess. They'd have a lot to say, he's sure of it.
Nodding to himself, Etho steps back up to the thing, and jams his arm in without hesitation. When he maneuvers it upwards, his fingers actually scrape something. It's wet, dripping down his arm and across his servo.
Involuntarily, he tries to jerk his arm backwards from the feeling.
He lurches to a stop halfway through the moment as the wetness tightens and goes still. It's not running over his servo, it's wrapping around his servo. Etho stays very still as it loosens the grip, and slides down further.
His fans click up a notch. They basically scream in his sensors, and his processor whirrs. As it slides around his elbow, he tries desperately to decide what to do. It could just be exploring him, he's encountered plenty of seemingly dangerous species that are just curious.
Etho tries to delicately pry his arm out of the hole, and in response it tightens again. One of the tendrils, wrapped tight around his wrist joint, digs into a spot where his sensors bundle up to allow for better tactile input from his hands.
It digs in perfectly, and white hot pain lurches up his arm. Etho braces himself against the metal thing, and his treads grind as he trembles his way through the pain. He tries not to make a sound, cancelling the connection to his vocializer. When it passes, he regrets his choice to do a reframe for a brief moment. Bracing his helm against the warm metal, he shutters his optics.
Warframes aren't lucky enough to have sensitive hands. Etho, however, was given donor hands for his reformat in hopes of better concealing his origins. The tendrils around his arm loosen when he stops moving, and start creeping again. His luck makes him feel every inch of progress it makes.
He misses not having many sensors, the limited pain that came with being a warframe was an advantage, damn what all his friends say about it being barbaric.
Processor grasping for a solution, he flies through the possibilities. He can try to transform, and maybe cut it off, but every time he twitches his arm it tightens, and with it comes pain.
It finds a seam in his arm, and creeps between his plating. Etho makes a gutteral sound when it touches his protoform, and gasps weakly as he tries not to move. The dead bot on the ground seems a whole lot more like a bad omen.
It was always a bad omen, who is he kidding-
Etho lurches backwards as it sinks into his protoform, digging in. He doesn't try to cancel his vocalizer this time, letting loose a guttural scream. The pain surges through him, several of his circuits blowing out as he crumbles to his knees.
He hangs, held up by the tendrils inside of the thing, plating shaking and trembling as the pain wrecks his body. It doesn't stop this time.
It lulls, briefly, and then comes back with a vengeance. Etho slams his head into the thing, and lets his vocalizer wreck his harmonizing crystals. His fans scream, and the mechanics in his arm seize and jerk as the thing digs and digs into his protoform. It burrows, and he tries to claw at his shoulder.
Some old coding rears its head, and Etho automatically grabs for a weapon in his subspace. The pain makes him miss multiple times, and the only thing he pulls out is a pistol.
It's useless for what he needs to do, as the thing crawls up his arm through his protoform, rapidly approaching his shoulder joint. Etho used to carry a sword, one with chipped edges and some rust, but it was a sword all the same.
He left it on the Hermitheus, he manages to remember through the pain. Etho digs his servo into his arm, finding the gaps in his plating he knows are there, and tries to detach his arm himself.
It just adds to the pain, the hydraulics in his arm seizing again and again despite his efforts to cancel the processes causing it. His helm spins, and his optics struggle to focus as he digs through his arm.
Etho can't outpace the thing in his protoform, despite his best efforts. He only manages to get the damn thing to stop seizing uncontrollably by tearing half the energon lines. His vocalizer peaks again and again, the pain forcing random signals to jolt through his body with every tug he inflicts upon his arm.
It burrows through his protoform, and it breaches into his torso. With his hand still buried into his shoulder, Etho's optics offline. He stops thinking about anything but the pain as it wiggles around, the only thing he can notice through it all.
Every time it moves, he knows exactly where it is. The pain burns where it started, where it sits, and it scalds where it moves. It spreads like roots through his protoform, and he makes a weak guttural protest when it starts wrapping itself around his spark chamber.
Etho tries to squirm away before his processor gives up on trying to send signals to the rest of his body, and he slumps like a sack of bricks. His fans whirr as his head lulls to the side.
The pain still burns, and Etho's protoform grinds with a sob. The sensation on his plating is distant, the only thing he can even notice being the pain resonating through his protoform. Oh, his frame is dead weight, but his protoform seizes as it's entangled with something else entirely.
Etho begs. Not to anything in particular, he just begs. Some of the crew have their beliefs, and Etho doesn't think Primus can come down and save him, but-
The pleas leave him anyways. And so do the ones asking Unicron to hurry up and come take him. He wonders, for a brief stuttering second, if Pause will catch him.
Etho stops thinking.
With a sick, wet snapping sound, the tendrils release his arm, and Etho slams into the cold stone below. He lies there, still, as his processor one by one onlines frame functions.
He doesn't try to move as his frame burns. It's not a broiling like the earlier pain. He doesn't know when it began to dull, but he can still feel it in him. It's settled into stillness, content and mundane.
It burns. Etho's fans click on, and he doesn't know when he stopped thinking enough for them to stop. He feels numb, besides the pain. Etho onlines his optics.
Etho blinks blanky at the stone floor in front of him. Nothing has changed about it, besides the energon slowly creeping forward across the floor. His arm sits limp against his chest, and he forces himself to concentrate on it.
There is energon leaking across the floor, and Etho needs to fix it.
Once, Etho was a soldier. Once, Etho spent vorns upon vorns on far away planets, fighting wars he didn't want to fight for a cause he didn't believe in. He didn't die there, and as he forces himself to roll over onto his side, he decides he isn't going to die here either.
It'd be a stupid way to die, anyways. After surviving having a bomb go off in his face? Pause would never let him live it down if that's how they reunited. Also, Doc would be pissed. He promised Bdubs' he'd be alright, and… Well.
His energon levels sit at 46.2%, and drops decimal point by decimal point. It's far to fast.
Etho lurches upright, energon pouring down his front as he blindly grabs for his arm. The hole, where he'd mangled himself trying to stop it, is perfectly shaped for his hand. He takes a moment, and shuffles off what little panic has seeped through the numbness into a quarantine zone in his processor.
His fear can bubble up into a crash later.
Unfortunately, it's not wide enough for the sort of maneuvering he needs to place clamps. Etho grabs at some of his plating, and with steadying pause, yanks it loose.
Despite the burning of what hit him earlier it still hurts, and he lets out a stuttering whine from his overclocked vocalizer. Etho sits with a chunk of his own plating in his lap for a long moment before he tries to rifle around in his subspace. There's a lot of junk in it, random scrap he's picked up with one bot or another in mind.
It takes far to long to find the medkit, and when he pulls it loose, he glares at it in his lap. It's got two latches holding it shut. Inconsiderate.
Etho struggles with the latches, and tries not to check his energon levels again. When they finally come free, he goes fishing for the clamps.
He finds them, buried in the kit, and he triumphantly pulls one loose and immediately starts trying to get it into his arm. The issue is, really, that he didn't even pull all of his energon lines. Some, towards the backside of his arm, are still pumping energon through where they can gush out where he tore them on the other side. He has to clamp lines on both sides of the hole he tore.
Past him wasn't very thoughtful of his ability to move his wrist at strange angles.
It takes him a while to seal all his lines. He sets the clamps down to pull the energon lines out further where he can reach, fumbles his way through the ones that are closer to his shoulder socket, and tries very hard not to look at the black residue left on his plating. He fails at that last one, multiple times.
It's disgusting. It's familiar. He wishes he'd gotten the chance to take a sample. Etho supposes he's a walking sample now. Every time he moves to quickly, the thing in him sends a shock of pain through his protoform, and he's left shaking for nanocycles after.
It was a slow process.
Energon finally successfully clamped, Etho stares blankly at his pedes. He'd been laying there, offline, for an entire orn. The storm had likely slowed. He needs to get up.
The attempts burn every time. It aches and hurts as he tries to force himself to move, the dread of the pain between each attempt being fully justified when he tries again.
Finally, Etho manages to hauls himself to the side, rolling onto his stomach with a whine as the pain hits again. It's impossible to ignore, digging in with each quick movement he makes. Etho drags himself forward and up, staggering to his pedes.
He stands still for a long moment. He shudders repeatedly, armor trembling with the force of the pain. Etho's optics stray, and land on the blob of dead data he knows is the dead corpse.
He wonders if the bot, to, had this thing drill into them. Etho wonders why he lives, and they do not.
Etho wonders if he really is that lucky, or if he's really that unlucky.
He takes a step forwards, then another. The concentration it takes to stay stable almost doesn't seem worth it as he jerks forward, swaying with every step.
Etho summons the voice of his old drill sergaent in his head, and imagines the old torn bot screaming at him to keep moving. He wonders what the bot would say if he could see Etho now, quivering in a cave with the consequences of his own curiousity drilling into his frame.
He'd probably laugh. He told him again and again to not humor his mind, to not investigate, to not risk it. Risking it gets a good warframe killed. Curiosity gets a good warframe killed.
Old bastard was always right.
The hallway hadn't seemed this long when he'd come this way. It actually isn't very long at all, he knows the exact distance. Every time he takes a step too hard, though, pain spasms through his protoform and he has to brace himself against the wall for a long moment. It's lurching, slow progress.
Etho forces a cooling cycle through its entirety, and stumbles around the final corner. Light creeps across the floor, and the very familiar open space ahead awaits him.
The relief is dominated by the sinking feeling of dread that grows and grows in his chest. Even as Etho pushes forward into the room, staring up at the skylight, he can't escape the sensation. The walls he set up are crumbling, and when he eases himself to the ground he finds himself staring blankly at the wall across from him.
The energon on his frame is beginning to form into a crystalline structure, growing across him like a web. The thing in his protoform is completely still, and he tries to ignore the fact that he can still feel it in there.
It's impossible to ignore.
Etho shutters his optics and tries to prevent a crash as his thoughts start cascading. The panic bubbles up and up from where it's been waiting for him to relax. He fights the crash, because Xisuma is all the way on the Hermitheus and he knows for a fact that Doc is awful at pulling people out of crashes.
With the cascading trees, the best he can really do is delay the crash. And so he does, he pulls on a thread and stops it from proceeding. It'll be worse, when it hits.
Etho has very little choice in the matter. He tilts his head back, and stares at the ceiling overhead.
There's no longer snow drifting through the gap, just a soft light from the planet's sun. It's reassuring, but when he forces himself to look away, all he feels is the dread.
How's he going to explain this? Can he explain this? Is it that simple, will he be able to lay this out as the facts? Etho lets a tremble shake his frame, tries not to take the fear to deeply. They'll be here soon. It can't be that long of a walk back, now that the storm has calmed. Unless Bdubs' protoform froze on the way there, they shouldn't take very long at all.
Watching his chronometer tick by in the silence, Etho sits very still. It's steady, careful, and consistent. It doesn't vary, and it goes uninterrupted by the thing that ravels itself through the framework of his body.
When a comm signal connects to the local signal, Etho moves his head slightly to look back up at the gap. It takes another 12 ticks for a second comm signal to connect, and he tentatively pokes the link.
::Hey::
::Etho! Hey, hi-::
Snow shifts up by the hole and drifts down as a small head peeks over the side. Etho can't make out the form clearly, but it's small enough to be Bdubs. This time, there isn't snow to obscure the colors and the lack of silver tells him his guess is probably right.
::-That storm was long wasn't it? I didn't even realize that this planet had storms like that, Joe said it's atmosphere was to weak to uphold the kinds of winds we used to see back on Cybertron, but here we are!::
Etho doesn't respond to the long comm, but his field spikes with amusement against his will. Bdubs' delight at the strange weather patterns is sharp contrast to his own situation, and he tries to shelter himself in the feeling.
::Etho, I have a system in my subspace I'd use in flight as a shuttle- It's a tether system like the one we have on the Hermitheus, I just need you to secure yourself. You said you're undamaged earlier?::
He lulls his head further back to squint at the ice behind him and lets his frame run another cooling cycle automatically. The plating is cold, but his protoform and processor burn hot from stress. ::I did say that didn't I.::
The silence that follows is very firm. Bdubs pulls out of the gap and Doc's head peeks over the edge. He's probably nervous about causing more collapse, but is taking the risk to.. glare at him. Etho can feel it. ::Etho. Did you lie to me.::
It's not a question but Etho answers it anyways, ::I wasn't damaged when you asked the question! I didn't lie.::
Bdubs butts into the transmission, strongheaded and an undercurrent of deep annoyance on the comm signal. ::How did you even get injured after falling?! You're alone in a pit!::
Etho doesn't respond. He watches his pedes in silence, and tries not to move as the thing twitches slightly in his frame. The pain burns like it did earlier, but he doesn't have the energy to squirm from the pain. He just sits and waits for it fade away again.
Overhead, snow sprinkles into the cave. Voices, distant enough that he can't make them out, argue. Despite the gap, the tone is very clear. Doc keeps throwing in grinds of his protoform, as he always does when he thinks he's in the right in an argument.
::Can you secure yourself in a space tether harness?:: Bdubs asks.
Glancing at his arm, Etho tries to visualize the harness. Usually, for his frametype, he'd be using his shoulder as a place to take some of the weight. Not an option. It's pretty modifiable, though… Maybe he could…
His processor lags behind, dragging out the thoughts longer then they should. He struggles to think through the process, about the way he'd have one strap on one shoulder. Where would the rest of the weight go? He doesn't want to spin as they pull him up…
Glyphs outwardly annoyed but deeply tinted with worry, Doc asks, ::Hey. What are you doing down there?::
::My arm's fragged to Unicron's bones. I don't… If I try to use the usual setup I'll probably tear my arm off with my own weight.::
Snow tumbles into the gap again, and Etho wonders what the hell they're doing up there. He shutters his optics, and tries not to think to hard about the thing.
Or about the hallways that stretch off into the distance, or the holes in the walls, or-
::I'm sending Bdubs down.::
Etho jerks. ::What!? Wait, wait-::
::I can't believe you want the empty, boring cave all to yourself, Etho.:: Bdubs says, ::It's actually really selfish of you, I want to see the cave and I'm coming down whether you like it or not-::
::Doc, Doc it's not just me, Doc it's not an empty cave-::
::All the more reason.::
::I can handle myself! Come on Etho, you know I can.::
Etho trembles involuntarily. His head jerks up as Bdubs slides slowly down the slope, harness tight on his frame. The moment Bdubs leaves the flat ground, suspended in air, Etho winces. It's a long drop, if Doc's grip slips.
::Be careful.::
He watches the descent, and it goes as smoothly as it can. Bdubs slowly spins on his way down, the tether not quite strong enough to prevent the steady motion. Doc eases him down bit by bit, and Etho kind of thinks he's being a little too careful.
Bdubs' pedes hit the ground running, and he skids to a stop in front of Etho. With Etho sitting down on the ground, they're almost eyelevel. He tries not to laugh, but one slips out anyways. Bdubs frowns at Etho.
"Slag, bot." He says. Bdubs reaches forward, taking Etho's shoulder in his hands and twisting it slightly to get a better look at the wound. "Yikes. What did this?"
Etho doesn't warrant that with a response, vocalizer sputtering slightly as he forces himself to speak. "What's- What's the plan? How are we gonna haul me out?"
He gets a nervous grin as Bdubs lifts a harness in his hands. "I've gotta get this rigged to you without straining your arm. So sit still, mister." He moves forward before Etho can offer any complaints, fidgeting with his frame and yanking Etho's arm this way and that. Etho lets him, staring blankly at the wall past Bdubs.
The vibrations had stopped. He'd noticed it, in the back of his mind, but they'd entirely stopped.
It makes no sense, so he glances to the doorway. It looms as it did earlier, taller then any organic should ever need it to be. Finials flicking, he lifts an arm to give Bdubs better access.
His processor is slowing. He noticed it, earlier. It's probably the corrupted data rattling around, making it difficult for his frame to defrag any information at all. It's not something he can clear out himself, he probably needs Xisuma to do it.
Xisuma is all the way at the Hermitheus. He curses his luck. Bdubs secures another latch, and steps back to squint at his handywork. "Dangit," He says, "I don't know if this is going to work."
Etho looks down at his frame. He tilts his head this way and that, at the way the harness is in the shape it'd be for someone of his frametype with a solid working arm, and concludes that Bdubs is right. It's not going to work.
He blindly reaches for the clasp, and Bdubs undoes it for him. Etho forces half of his frame through the transformation process despite its many, long complaints. It groans, but it gives Bdubs a solid position- One of his treads migrates further up his arm in this configuration.
Bdubs follows his lead, quickly rebinding him. Once he's finished, he stares directly into Etho's eyes and lets their fields overlap thoroughly. Bdubs is worried, but trusts Doc to pull Etho up. He hopes Etho can trust Doc with this to.
Etho almost scoffs. Of course he does.
He zones out while Bdubs resituates the harness again and again, field jumping every time his servos get to close to the hole in Etho's shoulder. Etho doesn't twitch, the dull pain from his protoform being enough to distract him from pretty much anything.
Bdubs definitely oversecures him, hands nervous retracing the same paths over and over again before he decides Etho's good to go.
::Alright!:: Bdubs says, ::Pull him up!::
Snow falls down, and Etho is yanked off the ground. His feet dangle, and he involuntarily makes a pitchy sound in his vocalizer. He lets the motion happen anyways, clinging to the harness with the arm that isn't dead weight.
It hangs at his side, energon crystals catching the light as he inches closer to the top. When he arrives, some are scraped off by the ice sheet. He's dragged up into the snow.
The tether loosens briefly, and Etho slips. He jerks, involuntarily, but he lurches to a stop before he can plummet back into the pit. Doc's servos caught him, tight on his armor.
Forcefully, he's reeled the rest of the way up by Doc's firm grip. They collapse into the snow, Doc's vents hissing with air as his fans overwork themselves. The shuttle pulls him to his chest, and holds him there for a long moment. Etho doesn't try to struggle free, even against the freezing plating.
The thing in him doesn't squirm. It's illogical that it doesn't squirm, doesn't try to cause him pain as it has all the past attempts.
Doc shakes him, much more gently then he normally would. "-Etho? Etho." He says through the buzz in Etho's audials, and Etho latches on to it. He looks at Doc, and mumbles a response.
"Hey, Doc." He says. Doc gives him a strained smile, field overlapping and tangling with Etho's. There's relief in it, but worry surges up as he starts to investigate Etho's arm.
"Slag. Bdubs said it was nasty... Well." Doc pauses. "He said gnarly." With the words, he twists Etho's arm to check the backside. Etho lets the shuttle maneuver him, limp in his grip.
Doc's fingers trace down Etho's arm, following the black tarrish residue. His optics scan Etho, intent and knowing.
He shutters his optics, to stop seeing the way Doc easily dissects him with a look. He lets Doc grab his working hand, poke at the energon crystals that had begun to form, and run along the older ones.
Doc doesn't say anything. Etho knows he knows, regardless.
Grabbing him gently, Doc lifts Etho off the ground. "I'm going to set you down over here," he says, "And get Bdubs out. Then we meet Beef at the drilling site, alright?"
Etho musters a humm of his harmonizing crystals as Doc sets him in the snow, far gentler then he's ever known Doc to be. How bad does it look to eyes that aren't his?
Doc steps away, and Etho is left alone. Doc is right there, his field brushes Etho's occasionally as he throws the harness back down, but he struggles to grasp it. The thing in his protoform sits very, very still.
How does he tell them? Doc has a guess, he's sure, but even Doc couldn't deduce what he has in his frame. Not in the worst urban legends Etho heard pass from mouth to mouth in the army did he hear anything like this, and yet-
And yet, here he is. There's a cold frame in the halls of a dead temple, and a wall of data he cannot perceive. There is something in his frame, trying to go unnoticed, and all Etho can do is tilt his head towards where Cybertron should be in the sky at this time of day.
Etho's not particularly religious, but there's a comfort in knowing where home is. Where the Well of Sparks once sat, even if it had sputtered out an eternity ago. Where, supposedly, Primus slumbered.
If the myths of Unicron's Bones being a planet are true, he thinks this place is enough of a hell to be it. It's wrong enough to be them. But the halls were out of place, they didn't belong there, in the ice. The light didn't belong there, the structure didn't belong there.
The thing, most certainly, doesn't belong here.
It's the only thing he can really know for certain, so he sits with it and tries to decipher his thoughts in the snow. Doc's pedes scrape at the ice under layers of snow as he drags Bdubs up, with much more ease then the way he'd struggled with Etho's weight.
Shuttle he is, he's supposed to carry bots through space. Not haul them up against gravity stronger then that of Cybertron's.
"Hey Etho." Bdubs leans over him, harness still secured around his frame. He squints up at Bdubs, and pulses his field in a faint hello. Bdubs pulses his back, and starts to struggle to get the harness off. He tightened it wrong, in his haste to retrieve him.
Was he that worried? Or are the halls that unsettling?
Etho musters a question, "Bdubs? Did you… Did you notice?"
The minibot tilts his head at Etho, optics readjusting to the light of the sun peeking over the horizon as he does a little circle trying to get the harness off. "Uh," he says, "That it was a structure? Yeah, it's actually fascinating, I think Joe and Cleo are gonna go nuts over it, they're gonna be delighted." He pauses, seeming to realize something. "Not that you're injured! Just that-"
"No," Etho interrupts, "No, the- it was wrong."
Bdubs stares at him. Doc shifts in the background, stepping forward from where he was rewrapping part of the tether. The shuttle looks at him, optics sharp. "Bdubs," he says, "Let me get your harness off. We need to start moving."
Glancing up at Doc, Bdubs sticks out the arm he's been struggling with. Doc attacks it with a vengeance, pulling Bdubs out of the harness fairly easily. Neither of them follow up on what Etho said, a caution in Bdubs' field he's unused to.
He doesn't know how to tell them. They aren't listening. Doc hauls Etho into his arms again, not even asking if he thinks he can walk. Etho doesn't know how to tell them, and he lets his head lull against Doc's frame.
They need to know that there's something in his protoform, that something is deeply wrong. He tries to sort his thoughts into something coherent, the collected data from the attack into a file he can just… send over, instead of struggling to verbalize it. The thread is lost halfway through, and he's left with nothing to show.
The only thing the process manages to do is lull Etho into a light stasis, the rhythmic sway of Doc's stride tricking his gyro's into thinking he's on a convoy. That he only has so much time to sleep until he's under gunfire again.
Etho can do very little to fight it.
Beef's voice cuts through the air stirring him from stasis. The words are sharp and a little scared. In all his vorns at Beef's side, through engagements and fleeing Cybertron- He's only heard that voice a few times.
Etho lifts his head, optics onlining to the blinding light of the snowdrifts. Doc's green and silver frame catches the light perfectly to refract it into Etho's optical lenses, and he twists his head to get it out of his optics.
Moving his head gives him the right angle to see Beef, hovering only a foot or so away. He's Etho's height, so not quite tall enough to reach Etho in Doc's arms. He humms at his friend, pulsing his field in reassurance.
Past Beef sits the encampment, a trailer parked and mostly clean of snow. Beef is frowning. Bdubs fusses through one of the crates Etho hauled in the far background, yanking out one of the emergency medical kits with an ah-ha!
There's a lot of puzzle pieces in front of them, and none of them make any sense. They're all vaguely puzzle shaped, and he knows they fit together somehow, but when he tries to the best he can do is make a pile of clues on the ground.
Through the fog, he acknowledges he shouldn't be this confused. He should know what's happened. This isn't right, not at all, but it's going to have to be what it is. He hates it.
Etho persists anyways, humming a single tone at Doc. Doc hums it back as he places Etho down on the trailer, just large enough for his frame.
Why not the tent? He twists his head, scanning the area, but he finds no tent.
::Tent?:: Etho pings out. It doesn't head in any particular direction, but all three heads twist in towards him. They exchange a few words, and he gets his explaination from Beef.
::The storm blew it over, it's buried under a few feet of snow. Etho, do you remember leaving the drill site?::
He thinks on that. It's blurry, events that are chopped together. The thing in his protoform hasn't drilled into his processor, so he thinks maybe the pain of the attack overwrote the memory in his short-term memory quartz.
Etho tells Beef this. He receives a blank stare back.
::Er. I got exactly none of that. Did you just dump a thought process directly onto the comm line?::
Etho reviews what he sent. So he did. The glyphs are jumbled and more then incoherent. He tries to resort them, tumbling his way through the glyphs and sigils and subglyphs.
It's still rather incoherent when he finishes it, but this time, he's managed to get the memo of attack across. Bdubs stiffens when he sends the comm, and Etho watches him intently as he glances over his shoulder at Doc and Beef.
Beef speaks, and this time, Etho can gather the words through the fog. "You guys see anything?"
"Nah," Bdubs says, "It was actually- There wasn't even any energon on the ground from his arm, which there should've been."
The three burst into discussion, and Etho lets the sound slide into the background. His arm aches. It has, this entire time, but the pain is different this time. It twists and aches, not burning.
The torn cabling prevents any attempts to move it, so instead he turns his head to squint at it. The black residue is where he expects it to be, unmoving as it should be. What's different is the torn up plating by his wrist and elbow twitching. It's slight, but his protoform moves it against his will.
Etho doesn't look away, watching as his arm moves without input. It jitters and twitches, his fingers spasming and his plating moving with his protoform.
It really shouldn't entrance him, but it does regardless. Etho heaves a cycle of air, frame shuddering the whole way through the process. The arm is only a dull ache, and he can't feel the thing in it anymore.
It's definitely there, he can feel it in his protoform, where it wraps around his spark chamber, and the exact route it takes to the bottom of his pedes. The places it intersects and overlaps with his energon lines, and where it skirts raw iron beams in his body.
Etho shifts his head back to the center of basecamp. Beef and Doc's voices rise and rise into a crescendo, the erupting argument getting aggressive. He watches Beef slam his hands into Doc, the shuttle barely moving despite Beef's bulky warframe.
He twitches involuntarily. Etho notes it. His leg spasms slightly, jerking in its place.
The tendrils around his spark chamber… They squirm, and Etho's vocalizer offlines. No signal is sent from his mind to do it, it jerks itself offline in a single moment. Etho squints across the clearing as a new burn aches around his sparkchamber.
They wiggle, and the pain is still nothing like it was in the temple. It's faint, and he shutters his optics as it bubbles and worsens. It's probably a bad sign that he can't panic. He tries to panic, tries to think about feeling fear, but the only thing he musters is a blank confusion.
He's confused, while everything is as obvious as it could be. There is something wiggling at the seams of his sparkchamber, and he's just letting it.
Grasping for the comm frequency, Etho transmits into a conversational lull. ::It wants in.::
Heads swivel to Etho. All three of the bots stare at him for a long moment. ::What's that mean? Etho?::
Unable to identify the ID tacked onto the end of the transmission, Etho lets his optics shutter again. It's not worth the effort of recalling. They heard him, they know what it's doing, and they'll do something. They always do something to help him, even when he's at his absolute worst there's efforts to do something.
Etho spasms properly this time, processor misfiring as true pain spikes up from his sparkchamber. It feels distant, like Etho's watching the pain happen to another bot. His frame shakes, and hands latch onto one of his arms.
A tendril finds a proper seam, and starts pushing. White hot burning floods his frame, and Etho's processor cuts off his frame again. He stops spasming, as there's nothing to escape. He can't escape it, not with it in his protoform.
The fear he should've been feeling surges. The panic he should have been feeling slams into him with it, and Etho's field writhes as the thing writhes.
He doesn't have anything to do but wait. Bdubs field overlaps his, a false calm lingering in it. His audials pick up sounds, but he doesn't bother to try and decipher them. There's nothing helpful in the data.
Etho isn't sure when is vocalizer turned back on, but he can feel it now. The scream rips through his frame. His friends yell at eachother over him, fields tangling in eachother until it's one mess of raw panic.
All Etho can feel is the fear. The pain is secondary to the fear, oh, the pain overrides his every thought in every moment, but all he can feel is the fear. It's in his spark chamber.
He can't feel the movement in there, it simply writhes about. He doesn't know what it's doing, just that it hurts. Etho will die here, or die later, and he's certain of that.
When he regains control of his frame, he's stopped screaming. His processor ticks through processes one by one, and voices exchange rapidly overhead. Information passes through the local comm field as a servo peels away the plating on Etho's arm.
He doesn't try to struggle as they pull away the armorment. Etho knows it didn't protect him against that, and despite all odds, his spark still circulates.
Servos pat rapidly at his frame, trying to gain access to his medical ports. He doesn't disengage the covers, even as Beef repeatedly pings him. It gets more and more persistent, more pleading the longer Etho holds off.
No matter how much he trusts him, he doesn't want Beef rummaging around in his files. He already has something in his protoform.
Etho forces an ventilation as servos tap at where his protoform wraps delicately around his frame skeleton. He pulls the protoform back reflexively, but can't recoil it go as far as it should. He onlines his optics to glower at the bot touching his protoform. Doc looks back, unimpressed.
In contrast to his face, Doc's field whirls with uncertainty and fear. Etho tries to relax him, pulsing his field with dim reassurance.
All he gets back is a grimace. His efforts are ineffective. Etho lulls his head to the sky, squinting up into the planet's sun. Doc's fingers trace where the thing lingers, his field churning with emotions- to many of them for Etho to pick one out and be done with it.
Etho wheezes, and tries to think straight. It's futile, his mind swirls around the same thoughts longer then it should, it struggles to come to the simplest conclusions. Time crawls on seemingly without him as he chases the rabbit around and around.
He's so tired. His energon sits at 35.9%, and he's very tired. His nanobots try to fix up some of the damage, but they fight a losing war. Every bit of progress they make are beaten back by the thing, and his protoform aches like nothing else.
Etho lets himself float, for a while. Beef and the others can keep him safe.
They always do.
"We need to go back to the Hermitheus," Doc whispers like Etho can't hear him. Beef makes a clucking sound, vocalizer rolling around some words before he speaks.
"Is he stable, though? Can we take him back?" To be fair to Doc, Etho's spent the last few cycles struggling to respond to any questions. His processor feels clearer now. The dead data still sits there, a gaping hole in his head, but it's not as…
It's not as disruptive. It feels more like being stared, versus how it felt like he was being sat on earlier. He can actually think.
"I don't know, it's- Beef, I don't know what's in his protoform. I don't know how long he has, if this is lethal at all."
Bdubs' voice is quiet, but it cuts straight through the others. "We can't send a signal to tell them to come to us, so we have to go to them."
The silence that draws out between the three of them is long, and Etho's protoform twitches as the thing moves. It's doing something new, again. It only moves every once in a while, settling into his protoform.
It hadn't even twitched when Doc touched it.
Etho listens to the three go in circles, waiting for them to land on the obvious conclusion- That they'd head back, and drag Etho with them.
He's not willing to accept that risk, though. The Hermitheus… The crew is too large to risk whatever's in his frame being around them. He'd accept the risk of bringing someone here, that's their choice to make.
This, though. Etho refuses it, and plans.
The crux of the issue is moving. He needs to move, he needs to get far away. That, or he needs to convince them moving him is to risky. Etho rolls the thought around in his head, considers the dead circuits that litter his body.
He could probably inform them it's in his sparkchamber. That'd probably do it. But the three of them would still be right there, right in the potential blast zone if it all goes to hell.
The thing in his frame shifts slightly again. Little pinpricks of pain, like stepping on shrapnel, ripple through his protoform.
It's planting itself. The smaller branching paths work their way deeper into his protoform, bit by bit, securing themselves in place. A whine leaves Etho, vocalizer ringing.
The arguing cuts out. A servo braces on his crook of his neck, Beef's voice close. "You okay?"
Etho gives up and onlines his optics, fixing them onto Beef's faceplate the moment he can find it. "Beef." He says surely, and considers his next words carefully.
Beef seems to think this is all he has in him, which is more then a little insulting. "Yeah, man. Hey. You've been out for a while."
Letting out another whine as the tendrils creep out further, Etho shakily says, "Beef, I don't think you can get it out." The bot stares at him for a moment, mouth opening and closing on words that don't leave his vocalizer.
Etho doesn't let him find his words. "It's in my sparkchamber." He says, optics focused on Beef. He urges him to get it, and Bdubs' guttural involuntary gasp tells him at least one of them did. He doesn't look away.
He gives Beef a moment, waiting for him to understand. Beef does, he can see it in the way his plating shrinks in on his frame, in the way his turret spins on itself. His field, though, swirls with denial.
"You're gonna be fine, man." Beef chokes out. Etho looks away from him, to Doc, who stands shadowed against one of the ice pillars.
Doc knows. He's grim, arms tight where they're crossed. He can hear Doc venting air as his tacnet works overtime to try and come up with a solution. Doc knows, so why doesn't Beef? It's the most obvious conclusion, the way this will end, and yet-
His Amicae leans over him, bracing his helm against Etho's frame. He shudders, and tries to not move to much. Beef shakes, slightly, in a way he hasn't felt Beef do since Pause.
"I'm going to get help," Beef says raggedly against Etho's frame. He's careful, delicate with Etho as he hangs onto him. Beef pulls himself up, finally, fingers pulling off from Etho's frame as he forces himself to let go.
It's like someone is prying him from Etho. Etho watches him go through struggling optics, and wonders if he'll be alright with Etho gone. Pause was hard. Pause was hard, and then they had eachother.
The fog is coming back, rolling over his processor like a wave. He struggles his way through it, fighting to parse it as it seeps in around his ankles.
They're arguing, again. Doc and Beef. They're yelling, this time. It's jarring, and he twists his head to try and follow the conversation.
Instead, he finds Bdubs. The minibot settles down next to him, holding Etho's arm. It's not like how Beef had held it, it's tighter, as if he lets go Etho will slip right out of his grasp. He stares at Etho, and his plating twitches against his frame.
Etho watches back, slowly venting air through his systems. His protoform is putting off an abnormal amount of heat. It's irrelevant to Bdubs' distress.
Steadying himself, Bdubs pats Etho's servo. "I'm, um." He stammers, "I'm going to set up the tent for you, I don't- It's getting dark, and it's going to snow again, and I just… I don't want you out in the snow."
Etho cycles a thought, and watches it spin off. He doesn't know why his first urge was to ask to stay out, to see the stars. It has no influence on whether he lives or dies, and he knows this for certain.
Voices rise again, then cut out. Etho looks past Bdubs, optics struggling to focus. Beef is striding away, Doc stands tense and still.
Beef hits the ground running, and Doc lets him go. His shoulders sag, and his hands come up to cover his faceplate. Etho hears him mutter something, and knows he's either cursing Beef or Primus himself.
Doc looks at the two of them, red optic contrasting sharply against the snow. "Bdubs," he starts, "You said you wanted to set up the tent again?"
The minibot rises to his feet. "Yeah. Beef really?-"
"He thinks he's-" Doc's eyes flick to Etho, "-helping, somehow. I don't know. I think he thinks…"
Beef thinks Etho can be saved. All three of them sit in silence, knowing they've accepted that he can't be. His protoform aches.
Once, he knows, Beef used to be the one who would drag people off the cooling frames of their friends. He was the one who would yell that they were already dead, that it was time to go.
Etho knows this, and he cannot understand Beef's denial.
Etho wheezes into the dark, fans desperately working overtime to try and counteract the heat of his protoform. Despite the fact that he lays there, still as he can be, it emits more and more heat as time passes.
At his side, in the reassembled tent, Doc sits. Nothing is said, but his field tangles with Etho's. Doc's field is always calm, but moving. It reminds him of the ebb and flow of the waves on the shores of Cybertron- sitting with potential for lethality, to surge into something wild and uncontrollable.
Lethal as it is, it's soothing. It pulls him in and he lets it. It's cold in a way only the EMF of another bot can be, a sensation that doesn't actually soothe the heat. Etho hangs in Doc's presence, vents shuttering and reopening to suck in cold air to his systems.
His arm's protoform still sits exposed to air, for better observation. He knows the silvery mass is slowly shifting colors, from when he's forced a glance at it.
It's almost turning grey, the metallic dulling and becoming washed out.
It's probably a really terrible sign. He tries not to think to hard about it as Doc's field pulls him deeper under, yanking him out of the thoughts. He's trying to reassure him.
Doc's attempting to muffle Etho's pain, the best way he can. He tries to suffocate it, to bury Etho and protect him in his grip. As his body seizes slightly, jerking in place for a few ticks, Etho tries to make his gratitude clear.
He gets back more of the soothing cold, more of an urging to let himself sink.
Doc wants him to forget that he's dying.
Etho doesn't know if he can.
"Hey."
Bdubs' voice shakes on the word, the small bot braced next to Etho's berth. Bdubs has a deep, trembling fear in his field, that he struggles to hide from Etho.
Reaching out, Etho brushes it with his own, and a distant acceptance. Bdubs chokes. "You can't be- Etho, can't you fight it?"
He thinks about the struggle as it wormed its way into his protoform, the burning agony as it rooted itself in where no bot could tear it out. The heat aches.
Etho doesn't respond, and the way Bdubs sobs makes him regret not trying to lie.
It's different, now. The heat obscured his ability to feel his protoform, to sense the way it moved and shifted. It's not gone, as much as he wishes it were. There's still the base roots, the ones that planted themselves initially.
But as the heat clears, Etho knows that it's different. He can't find the words for it, just like he can't find the words for the cluster of data that sits in the corner of his mind. He tries not to think about that to hard, either.
It's not useful to linger on it. It just makes it hard to think, so he resorts his processor and settles back on the thought of the thing in his protoform.
The roots, he thinks, feel different. It feels less like a foreign invader, like a piece of shrapnel stabbed into his gut. It reminds him of the time he stuck his hand into his own protoform to pry out a chunk of rebar.
It feels like him.
Beef should be back by now. They all know he should, but Bdubs and Doc try to hide it from him. They whisper to eachother, frantic, in the corner of the room, and stop talking when they notice Etho staring at them.
He knows they know it. He doesn't think they know he does.
The heat burns on, but it doesn't bother him as much anymore. The cold air is just the right amount of soothing for his protoform, and he thinks it always should have been.
Etho thinks differently. His thoughts stutter around, bumping into eachother in their efforts to ignore the dead data. That needs fixed. He traces the edges of the bleeding data, following the barriers he set up to stop it from breaking into other parts of his processor.
Does he really need to fix it, though?
The thought is unprompted in his head. It settles right in, a sparkdeep urge to let it be. Etho can leave the barriers up, ignore it. It's not that much of a nusiance, anyways. His thoughts tumble into eachother again, and Etho stares up at the tent ceiling.
A light sways from side to side, every time one of his companions bump the canvas it sways even more. It's easy to focus on, soothing. Etho is reminded, critically, of the entrancing nature of Cybertron from a distance- The planet is so vibrant in the void of stars, framed perfectly with a glow.
Doc taps his shoulder, breaking him from his thought. The bot's field flickers with worry, and as he leans forward his chevron blocks out the light overhead.
Etho shudders through an exvent, and brushes up against Doc's field. It's difficult, his field straining to make a distance that it should make with ease.
"Hey." He musters, optics on Doc's faceplate. The shuttle gives him a strained smile.
"Etho, the um-" Doc's shoulders sag, all gusto draining out of him like it was never there. "Etho, Beef should've been back by now."
"I know," Etho mutters. His optics slide back to the ceiling, focusing in on some of the flaps and the way the wind buffets them, swaying back and forth in the breeze.
Leaning backwards, Doc sits down properly next to Etho. His field is a scrambled mess, even though Etho can only feel the edges.
Etho leans into it. He forces vent after vent through his frame, cooling his boiling protoform.
It'll be alright, he thinks. Etho knows it feels… It doesn't feel wrong now. It settles in, like it's always been there, and he struggles to remember why he was so frightened.
Entangled in his frame, entangled like he tries to do with Doc's field, it sits. And it burns, in a new way now.
The fear was silly. He didn't realize, how right it would feel.
Etho twists his head to the side, past Doc, to the tent flaps.
He wants to see the stars again.
The wind buffets Xisuma's armor, nearly knocking him from his place on the icewall. He digs in his pedes better, and sucks in air through his vents. It's freezing air, and one gust is all he needs to clear the heat growing in his systems. He glares up at the icewall and the ice screw he's secured in place.
Slowly, he works his way up. Placing ice screws one by one and using his icepick, he drags himself through progress. The crampons strapped to his pedes are the only thing keeping him in place.
Wind hits him again, and the submarine hisses to himself. His plating is made to block out water and grit, but the bots below him aren't all as lucky. False stares up at him, seeker plating shielding her from the wind. Joe, on the other hand, still on the ground, is using Cleo to shield himself. The Junkion has no complaints, watching the horizion with keen eyes.
Xisuma drags himself further up, bracing his pede into an outcropping and testing its durability. It holds, and his head pops over the top of the glacial wall. The empty plain greets him, and just like the last point he scaled there's no sign of any life.
Plating clamping tighter to himself, Xisuma swings a leg over the edge and secures a final relay point. False had argued to let her fly ahead, but the lack of any signals from the crew just affirmed Xisuma's certainty to not let any of them go ahead without him or backup.
What risks he has his crew take are risks he takes himself, even if he's only a Captain in name to better deal with the armies of Cybertron.
Standing, he looks away from the small cliff and scans the horizion with a slightly higher vantage point.
It's very still, despite the wind. Snow curves off the ground like sand does in the dunes, ruining the further visibility that they'd been spoiled by earlier in the decacycle.
"Stewing, X?" He glances over his shoulder as False's head pops over the edge, and she hauls herself up next to him.
He laughs a little, pulling his field in close so his emotions don't leak into False's. "No, no. Did you use any of the screws I placed?" She stares at him, unimpressed, and he gives her an awkward finial twitch. "Yeah, I figured."
Cleo and Joe take longer, noticably slower progress as they work their way up. Without the wings of a seeker, neither of them are willing to scale it like False just did. She has a backup that they don't, if they fall.
Xisuma scans the horizon over and over as they wait, and watches False pace the edge. She scans for any sign of life, despite the wind smoothing over their own tracks within nanocycles of leaving.
Their two other members join the party, gears grinding. Cleo pulls Joe up, and the smaller beastformer shakes off his plating. Grimly, he glances to Xisuma. "I was running the math, I think we're within a klick of their basecamp. X…"
He grimaces under the visor, and looks out towards where it should be. Where his Hermits should be. "…No way of saying now, lets not call it here."
Xisuma moves forward, the others behind. He can still feel the tingle of them sending internal comms back and forth, conversation purposefully excluding him. He knows it's a long shot.
It's a very long shot. He has to try.
They move steadily through the snow, the slowest of their numbers being Joe and his slighter frame. He follows close in their tracks, and they all drag their legs a little longer then they normally would to clear the snow. Joe could lap them all in beastmode if he wanted to, bounding over the snow, but if he wasn't outright running he'd be even slower then now.
Xisuma refocuses his optics, trying to make out any new colors besides blue and white. For green, or brown, or the neon orange of the tarps they usually use.
He doesn't catch a glimpse of a thing.
::Xisuma?:: It's Cleo, their glyphs confident and steady.
He pings back acknowledgement, and drags a leg forwards.
::Listen, I wanted to… Xisuma, I'm worried about what happened during that storm. Half the Hermitheus lost power, Mumbo can't explain it, Tango can't explain it, none of us have any ideas.::
::I know. I don't either.::
Cleo speeds up, slightly, and catches pace with Xisuma. ::X, I don't know how Beef could've made it back through that storm. He might've fallen into one of the chasms, I haven't seen a sign of the trailer.::
He shutters his optics for a moment, letting his processor cycle the thought. Finally, he lands on a response. ::Even if we've lost him, I need… We need to at least check to see if anyone at the drill site is there.::
They both let the silence draw out, and Joe butts in. ::None of us are sayin' we shouldn't, X. I think we're all just a little worried this whole thing is bigger then it looks.::
He twists his head sharply, optics focusing in on Joe. ::What, artificial storm?::
The silence is disturbingly telling. False's wings twitch behind them. Xisuma huffs, looking back forward to focus on his steps. ::You'd need something orbital to get one of those, and there's nothing in orbit. The only thing we found in orbit were a bunch of dead satellites, you can't tell me-::
"Oi." False cuts him off verbally, and all their heads jerk up to stare towards their destination.
Something orange flaps in the wind, just barely visible through the snow. They only freeze for a moment, Xisuma's legs lurching forward as False slams through her transformation sequence.
Her jets roar as she shoots off overhead, twisting to circle the site overhead.
Xisuma runs as Joe, in beast mode, plows through the snow. He bounds with ease, shrinking the distance like it's nothing.
When he comes tumbling in behind the faster two, Cleo at his heel, the encampment is still. The trailer sits empty, a drill is halfway through the process of being replaced. Xisuma circles the signs of life, the tent that's hastily been re-erected.
Cleo positions herself on the perimeter, patrolling the area and scanning for signs of life.
False is the one to find the arm plating, scattered underneath the trailer. The black with hints of rich green are Etho's, and a strange black chars some of the green markings. It's probably blast marks, or soot of some sort, and Xisuma rotates the plating in his servos.
There's crystallized energon on some of the plating, sticking out against his fingers. He runs a finger down the edge, and grimaces. He looks up, visor locking with False's optics. Shrugging her wings, False steps out of the tent.
Nothing. Just some energon coated plating, and signs that someone was here. It's unhelpful.
"At least we know Beef made it back," Joe says, running a hand across the railing of the trailer. He gives a strained smile to Xisuma before his optics fix onto the plating. Xisuma hands it off to him before he can even ask, circling around to False again.
Stepping up to her, he asks privately, ::Are there any signs of a struggle, or are we just looking at a desertion of the camp?::
She looks at him, goggles over her optics to prevent snow from watering the lenses. ::I don't know. It looks like a desertion, but the only one I can imagine thinking that's a good idea is Bdubs.:: After a pause, she adds, ::Not that he's stupid, he's just not… Beef and Etho are or were warframes, and Doc is older then all of us. Besides Joe.::
They both look at Joe. He spins the plating in his hands, giving it a solid sniff. Xisuma decides he doesn't want to know, looking away to the tent. ::Think you could've missed anything?::
False shrugs her wings again. ::Maybe. Two bots are better then one, give it a shot.::
Passing her, he pushes the flaps aside to step into the tent. It's dead silent, and he stands still in the middle for a moment. The desk has a scattered set of tools, left abandoned. A game of Triad is scattered on the floor, hastily kicked out of the way. He walks slowly, looking for any hint he can.
A puddle of water on the floor, frozen into a sheet of ice. A berth, pulled out from its concealled position under some of the crates. Xisuma runs a hand along the surface, and pauses.
It's the exact same color, the exact same glossiness, but his fingers come up with a substance clinging to them. He twists his hand, watching the runny liquid drip from his fingers.
Xisuma checks the temperature again. -40. He looks at it again.
He knows what this is, or at least what it should be. Xisuma wishes he didn't.
::Joe, can you come in here?::
::Mhm! One moment, X.::
In the silence, he braces himself against the berth and tries to calm his thoughts. Maybe he's wrong. He hopes he's wrong.
Joe slides into the tent easily, movements smooth and graceful as he steps up next to Xisuma. He simply shows Joe his hand, and Joe's optics trail down to the berth. He runs his fingers across the surface, and tilts his hand to better catch the light.
::It's not what I think it is, right?::
Joe grimaces, his field sucking into his plating to try and conceal the disgust and undercurrent of dread.
Despite knowing what he's thinking, Xisuma asks again with waver, "Joe?"
"It's uh…" Joe glances towards the sky, optics locking onto where Cybertron is with ease. Xisuma doesn't know why he does it, why any of his crew does it. But it seems to steady Joe for the most part, and the bot forces out a response. "It's definitely dead protoform, X."
Xisuma shutters his optics.
They stand together, without exchanging words for a long minute. Thoughts spiralling, Xisuma glances to the tent entrance. Voice wavering as he tries to suppress the emotion, he asks, "Joe, what're we going to tell them?"
Joe looks up, delicately wiping the protoform off his hand with one of the clean pieces of fabric. "The truth. I'll- I'll tell them. It's fine. I won't make you do it."
He doesn't leave room for argument, exiting the tent before Xisuma can say a word.
Xisuma stands alone in the middle of the tent, and wonders which of his Hermits died on that berth.
Joe trots in beastmode across the snow, head twisting one way and then another in an attempt to catch a single hint of a mech. Even the scent of energon would give him a lead, but the wind gives him nothing.
Coming to a stop, he flicks his tail in irritation as False's jetmode screams overhead. He's down here looking for bodies.
Whoever was… Leaking protoform, they didn't just get up and walk away. They couldn't have. So where did they put the body? It doesn't make any sense, even as he carefully compartmentalizes to not think to hard on a dead friend.
He's here looking for their body, and Joe can't think to long on it. He'll have time later. Joe's lost a lot of mechs in his life, and putting the grief aside comes too easily.
Joe's head swivels as False abruptly changes direction, the jet twisting in midair. She begins to circle, gliding around a point. He breaks into a run again, bounding through the snow best he can.
Joe tears forwards, optics fixed on the point False circles. He can't see what she's circling, so it must be low to the ground. Their comms connect to eachother with a click, and Joe doesn't slow as False sends over a message.
::Hole, about the size of a speedster, looks recent. Snow is mussied up, something happened here. Recent, after the storm.::
There's no wildlife. Joe hurries up, pushing his legs the slightest bit more.
When he arrives, he plumes snow up into the air as he comes crashing to a stop. The hole is something he never would have found on his own- It's likely only visible from the air, from False's unique vantage point.
Glad she talked her way onto the search team, he circles the hole with his tail flicking while trying to get a good glimpse into the depths. It's hard to make anything out, but his optics find a crumpled shape on the ground. It's a bot.
Joe doesn't hesitate, leaping into the hole. False can pull him out easily with her jets. Using the walls to slow his descent to the ground below, Joe lightly lands on the stone floor.
His optics fix onto the form in front of him, and he darts towards it.
Bdubs lays sprawled, silent and still. Joe slides through his transformation sequence, skidding to a stop in front of him. It's hard to check a bot for a spark signal, especially since the war begun forcing bots into heavier armor, and he scans Bdubs' frame frantically for his biolights to pulse instead of any of the old options.
They do, once. Joe's shoulders sag, and he kneels next to Bdubs. He checks over his armor, not finding any obvious damage. ::False, I've got Bdubs. Alive.::
::Roger. Look for signs of others. Doing a 2 klick perimeter scout, will be out of range.::
While he scans the chamber around him, the jet roars out of earshot overhead.
It's still, and eerily dark. The only light is provided by the hole overhead, and as he slowly walks, he finds no clear signs of life. Joe runs a hand across a rock outcropping, and squints at the rock after a pause.
They're in a glacier, it should be almost entirely ice. He looks around, optics flicking back and forth more thoroughly this time. There's a few doorways, all collapsed in on themselves. The frames are old and weathered. It's all handcrafted, though, delicately carved. When he circles the room again, he finds more clear signs of past life.
Nothing recent, though. The tiling and crumbled pillar tell him little to nothing, no matter how much he wants them to.
Joe looks down at Bdubs as False comes back into range, and sends a comm. ::Nothing. It's an old temple, though. Do you think-::
::Joe, I found Doc.::
He straightens, head twisting to the gap like it'll show him proof. ::Where!?::
::Two klicks north. No idea where he was going. I was going to haul you two out and head back to get him.:: Joe nods, once, firmly to himself.
::Roger that.::
The medical bay is completely still. Two frames lay unresponsive in their berths, sparks beating on despite everything else. Cleo watches them closely, listens to the soft whirring of their fields.
Nobody else can hear it, she knows. Cybertronians, despite all their sensory arrays, feel fields instead of hear. It's hard for her to imagine, but they can get the gist of someone's emotions from the sound. She still misses a lot.
Two frames lay silent, singing just to Cleo. The absence of two more is glaring.
The Hermitheus hums around them, the ship chugging along through empty space. They hang in the orbit, and she shifts to their pedes to look out the window.
The planet, white and encased in ice, catches the light of the sun with more vibrance then she'd ever see Cybertron or their own home planet manage. Cleo steadies herself against the wall of the ship, and rests their helm against the windowframe.
Below them, the planet spins on in uncaring silence. It spins on, with the corpses of two of her friends buried in snow. Oh, Cleo hopes they live, but without energon…
They only decided to leave when it became obvious that the two would've already burnt themselves dry. None of them really wanted to leave. Not one of them could offer a decent argument onto why they shouldn't. Cybertronians have never been particularly sentimental about bodies.
Cleo looks back to the berths, at Doc and Bdubs, and wonders how furious they're going to be. Doc is badly damaged, missing an entire arm while Bdubs is almost entirely untouched. Neither of them awaken when they should, and they're all left waiting. Left waiting, left to watch and hope that they recover.
It's not a guarantee. They're understaffed, the last time they had a licensed doctor on board was on their first voyage, and they lost half that crew. It's stabilized since, but… All the licensed doctors left alive on Cybertron these days are either dead or have already picked a side.
Being neutral is a strange position to be in, sticking them into a hellish limbo. Waiting to see if they wake up from a sleep they cannot identify the causes of.
At least they won't have to deal with a grieving third of an Amica Endurae, the last part of a trio left alive. At least, they think to themselves, Etho and Beef went together.
They probably would've preferred it that way.
The snow never fragging ends.
It goes on, and on, and no matter how far Beef walks, it never ends. Every step he takes doesn't get him closer to anything, the mountains he could once see in the distance at the drill site nowhere to be seen. It never ends.
He moves on, regardless. A long time ago, he learned if he ever stopped moving he would die. He learned that lesson when half their platoon died, he learned that lesson when they lost Pause.
So Beef never stops moving. He walks, and he walks, and he walks. The sun graces the horizon for only snippets of time, cresting it for an orn before dropping back down where it came from. When it does, it lights the snow up like fire.
It reminds him of to many fires to name, to many lost lives to list them all. Beef's list of the dead could go on for hours, if someone asked him to recite them all in his rememberances.
He refuses to let go easily, he refuses to let a single name slip. Beef keeps walking, keeps trudging through the snow, knowing he's one of the only bots alive who knows these names.
They won't stop dying.
Optics struggling to focus, he staggers slightly before his gyros regain his balance. With his energon low, it gets more difficult by the moment to walk straight. He doesn't even know which way is north. The internal compass spins on and on, unable to pick a direction.
Walking on and on, not knowing if he's going the right way.
Beef shudders involuntarily, plating rattling against the cold. He puts off enough heat to keep himself mostly warm, just enough heat to prevent his energon freezing in the lines. If he stops walking, they'll freeze.
His gyros get worse by the minute, steadily spiralling like his compass had. Slowly loosing their ability to keep him stable on his feet. Their one job.
It's entirely luck, entirely coincidence, that Beef was walking this way when the sun glances the snow. It's luck that his optics hadn't unfocused to much, that he was able to see the way the sun beamed off of something far to his left, a glacial wall just jutting out of the ice.
Invisible without the sun, rock peaks through the snow. The stone almost seems to be part of the ice, entangled thoroughly with it.
He pivots, and pushes towards it. Step after step, Beef staggers towards the rock. The closer he gets, the more it clarifies into something he can grasp- a doorway, planted firm and steady. It waits for him, and he pushes forward harder then he ever has before.
When he stumbles in, Beef hits the rock like a bag of dry concrete. He lays there, gyros spinning as he plants his face into the cold hard stone, and tries to remember where he was trying to go.
It's shelter from the snow, from the night that chills his plating down to his protoform. The Hermitheus is an unknown, no matter how hard he tries he can't reorient himself. No matter how hard he tries, he can't retrace his steps back to the mining site.
It all seems to loop in on itself, an endless white plain with jagged walls of ice. It's futile. All his effort is futile, unless he manages to find something to orient himself.
A doorway in the ice is not the way to do that. Beef pauses on the thought, and turns it over in his processor. His optics remain offline, helm pressed into the cold ice, but he investigates the thought over again and again.
That's not natural. He knows this. It's a doorway, politely oriented in a glacial wall. That's not natural.
Beef lifts his helm, and forces an arm under himself. He has to get up. There might be threats, something isn't right here and he knows it like he knows his own frame.
Gyros spinning uselessly, he faceplants into the rock again. He groans. It's useless. It's all useless. He forces himself to try and get up again, slipping each time with a greater failure.
It's a little pathetic. Beef forces in a vent of air to clear the heat from his processors, and tries one more time. He manages to get onto his forearms this time, optics onlining now that there's something to see besides a stone floor.
Beef looks up, and locks optics with Etho.
He throws himself backwards, slamming into the wall and trying to scramble further back. There is no field, there was no footsteps, he just stands there. Entirely still. Beef doesn't scream, doesn't make a sound, but presses himself into the nearest defensible corner as hard as he can.
He's so still. Etho stands upright, almost identical to how he saw him last. Not noticeably reacting to Beefs alarm, his head tilts minutely to the side.
The optics focus and refocus on Beef. There's a piece of rebar, sticking out of his chest, and crystallized spilt energon splattered across his body that would've had to come from another bot to get the splash pattern it has.
"…Etho?" Beef forces out. The bot between him and the empty, deadly plains sways on its feet. There is no field to brush against, to look for emotion, just an empty wall.
The rebar in its chest would graze the spark chamber, he thinks dully. Not pierce it, but it was a near miss. A very near miss. His optics slide down to the exposed protoform across Etho's arm, and he knows immediately something is deeply wrong with it.
It innocently drips from his arm slowly like it's just another fluid, slowly shedding the silverly protoform. It's a dull color, now. It's not- It doesn't even resemble the protoform of an Insecticon.
Beef tries to take a step away. He forces out another sentence, more of a plea this time. "Etho? Mech, is that-"
The bot lurches forward, and Beef's shot gyros do nothing to help him evade. He tries to dodge the grasp, but the only thing he manages to do is get himself into an even worse position. Slag it all to Unicron, the shell catches him by the back of his neck and twists him easily.
It's the same way Etho would wrangle him, he thinks dimly through the panic. The bot uses his weight against him to slam him into the ground, and he gasps involuntarily as he's pinned.
The only thing it does is hold him there. It pins him down, and he listens as it vents hot air into the room. It sits ontop of him, and waits for something. Beef tries to orient himself, lifting his helm to get a better look at the hall he's cornered himself into.
There's more hallways. They stretch on and on, into the depths of this place. Light creeps along the floor from behind him, the exit out of view. He thinks hard about the way the snow looked under the sun, of the stars.
A thrum cuts through the ground, vibrating into Beef's helm and through his plating. The walls don't shake, even as they should. Beef tries not to move until it passes, optics flying across the snippet of hall he can see. Nothing changes.
With no warning, the shell ontop of him hauls him up with jerky motions, and he's forced to let it. His turret is empty, his gyros are shot, he can't even tell what way north is.
Beef is as good as dead. The thing wearing Etho's frame makes a soft clucking sound, its wrong protoform popping against the frame. It walks slowly with lurching steps, not well balanced, and silvery dead protoform from its arm drips onto Beef's frame.
The bot drags him down the hall to something unknown, and Beef can do nothing but squirm.