Disclaimer :

Note : No, you're not imagining things. Yes, this is an update. You may now stop pinching yourself. I am not exactly happy with this chapter either, because of a multitude of things. First of all, I had this awesome thing written with Arad messing with Tank about getting revenge, but my home computer had to crash and take all my writings with it. I was so pissed off. And then this thing called real life decided to smash my face in for a while, what with preparing to leave for College, my boss changing my schedule on me every other week, and having to drive my younger sibling to tutoring. Second, I got writer's block for the longest time.

The Dark Side of the Sun

Chapter Fourteen

Ratchet had planned a lecture concerning the multitude of reasons why a frying pan should not be applied with force to a human skull and had launched into it the moment Arad was within hearing range. It was a good rant, filled with just enough anger and sarcasm that it should have prevented any sane individual from crossing the medic for a long time afterwards. Unfortunately, his audience happened to have a pre-invested interest in things of a scientific nature, so when the subject of human anatomy came up there were questions.

It was then decided that, maybe, just maybe, it wasn't such a good idea to mention the numerous ways a human could die on accident. There was something about that strange gleam in the blonde's eye that hinted that the line between 'accidental injury' and 'purposeful injury' was microscopically thin. So the CMO, cheated out of his lecture by that tricky thing called ethics, told her to go bother somebody else while he made sure that O'Neil didn't have anything worse than the large bruise on his forehead. She had then proceeded to where Tank and Ironhide were keeping watch, a slightly suspicious smirk on her face.

"I don't like it," Ratchet muttered, shaking his head as soon as the girl was out of audio range. They had met up outside of town, in a secluded area just off of a maintenance road near the highway, so there was little chance of being seen. "She's getting out of hand, Prime."

"I know," Optimus responded with a sigh. "Perhaps she will act better when Kate arrives with the Twins."

"I highly doubt it."

"Just how many of you are there?" O'Neill asked, now clutching an ice pack to his forehead. They looked down at where he was currently sitting, which happened to be on a large rock that may or may not have been a distant cousin to the one in Arad's front yard. Optimus had added further details to the explanation the skinny blonde had provided earlier, and, while the general had promised to at least get them an audience with the current head of the Stargate Program, he had advised that there might be some difficulty in getting government people to cooperate. Upon seeing the looks thrown his way, he gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Curiosity."

"There are eight of our kind currently on this planet," Optimus answered, kneeling down for a better look at the general. What little he could see of the bruise on the older human's forehead had turned a strangely disturbing mix of dark blue and green. It apparently wasn't something to be overly concerned about, considering Ratchet was no longer griping about broken capillaries and whatnot, but still, he found it disconcerting. "Are you sure you are alright?"

O'Neill took a moment to consider this, lifting the ice pack off to poke at his forehead, wincing only slightly. He then glanced up again, seeing what looked like an expression of deep concern. It was surprising and a little unnerving to see all the same ranges of emotions on a purely mechanical face, but it did serve as a reminder that they weren't just plain machines. He took a moment then to consider the question, recalling various instances in the past that had inflicted much more damage than a simple bruise.

Then he shrugged.

"Meh, I've had worse."

"Okay, you know what? Stop it!"

"Stop what?" Arad asked innocently from her perch on Ironhide's tailgate. The faux innocent expression she had pasted on her face would have been extremely convincing, but Sam knew better. He didn't know how she was doing it, especially since he was sitting on Bumblebee's hood and the golden Camaro was parked three spaces down from the massive black Topkick. All he knew was that he'd set the container down to take a sip of his soda only to pick it back up half empty.

"Stop stealing my fries!"

"How can I still your fries, you're way over there!"

"I had a full thing of fries like two seconds ago and now there's hardly any left!" Sam yelled across the rows at her, holding the fry container up so that it was clearly visible to both of them. "And you're the only other person here who can actually eat!"

"No, I'm not. There's the General."

"Arad, he's still over there talking to Ratchet and Optimus."

"Oh yeah."

The blonde put on a thoughtful expression as Sam examined his fries again.

There were now only three left.

"Okay, that's it! I don't know how you're doing it and I don't want to know how, but you owe me fries!"

"Didn't she pay for those anyways?" Wrench inquired, from his spot parked next to Bumblebee. Sam threw an annoyed expression at his windshield, but the Delorean kept on talking anyways. "I'm pretty sure she did, I mean, she was the one who spoke with the humans in the window and-"

"That's not the point!" Sam protested, crunching up the now empty fry container. "The point is, it was mutually agreed, before we even started eating, that those were my fries. And she just stole them! If she wanted fries she should have bought another order of them!"

"But I didn't want that many."

Sam smacked his palm against his forehead, the crumpled fry container crunched into an even denser ball in his other fist. And then he threw it, with surprising accuracy for something made out of oil-soaked cardboard. It managed to hit her leg, but ricocheted and hit Ironhide's bumper before coming to a rest on the grass.

"I HAD THREE!! THREE!! FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE BOX TOO!!"

"Isn't there a five hundred dollar fine for littering in this state?" Arad asked, not even caring in the slightest that she was being yelled at. She pushed her glasses into place with one finger, nose crinkling slightly as she looked at the crumpled box on the grass. "Or maybe that's just Florida..."

"Guys, a little help here."

"I'm not sure I agree with your assessment," Wrench volunteered, shifting slightly on his axles. "She did use her own monetary supplies to obtain both of your meals, therefore it should be her decision who gets the fries."

"Thanks, Wrench," Sam muttered with a sigh. "You're a real pal."

Tough Luck, Tough Luck, Tough Luck, You have…Tough Luck, Tough Luck, Tough Luck, You have…

"Damn, you too?"

You're asking for my sympathy, I'm sorry for you my friend

"That's it, I'm not sitting here anymore."

Sam went to grab his burger and hop off the hood, but the half-eaten double cheese had disappeared. He stared at the place where it had been, then turned to glare at Arad. She hadn't moved an inch, but there was a mustard stain on the left side of her mouth. Sighing, he walked around Wrench and Tank, picked up the crumpled fry carton and glared at her.

"Why?"

"I was hungry."

"You could've gotten more food while we were at the drive-thru!"

"Yeah, but sometimes I can't eat it all and I don't want it to go to waste," she whined, wiping the mustard off her face with the back of her hand. "You know there're starving kids in Africa and all that."

"There's a starving kid right here!"

"Really where?"

"ME!!" Sam snapped, waving his hands in the air. "Because YOU ate MY food!"

"Will you shut up about it?" Ironhide growled in annoyance. "And you! Get off my bumper!"

"I'm not on your bumper."

The tailgate promptly clicked loose and slammed down, knocking Arad onto the grass with a muffled thump.

"HEY!! That wasn't nice!"

"I'm not nice."

"Are we there yet?"

"FOR THE LAST TIME, NO!!"

"All right, all right," Kate muttered, slouching in her seat. "Don't need to shout."

"Well, you don't need to ask me every five seconds!"

"I though Lamborghinis were supposed to be fast cars."

"It's not my fault there's traffic!" Sideswipe snapped back, thoroughly annoyed. "Why the slag did we have to take this route anyways? Oh yeah, that's right. Because my brother's an idiot."

"Can it, glitch-head," Sunstreaker grumbled over the comm. "If we'd gone your route we would have encountered 'tolls'."

"If we had gone my route, we'd be there already."

"Oh, knock it off," Mikaela muttered, sounding just as irritated as Sideswipe. "There are only five more exits, we're not that far."

"How do you know that?"

"I've been paying attention to the road signs."

"There are road signs?"

She groaned at that, and Kate couldn't help but giggle.

"You mean to tell me, we've been driving for the past four hours and you guys haven't been paying attention to the road signs!? How the hell do you know where you are right now!?"

"Same way most of the other vehicles here do -- GPS," Sideswipe replied. He sounded as if, had he been in robot-form, he would have been shrugging. "Of course, ours is more advanced and pretty much automatic--"

He was cut off by several car horns sounding from somewhere ahead of them where a off-white jeep had just tried to cut across the lanes but was deterred by non-budging the far right side. There was some angry shouting out of windows, and from Kate's vantage point, one strategically well aimed finger. She noted that, somewhere farther ahead a few cars had pulled onto the side in order to cheat and cut ahead of the traffic line. This she felt, was probably a very dishonorable tactic, so she pointed it out to her current comrades.

"Sounds good to me," Sunstreaker said, revving his engine and turning off the side of the road. "You said five more exits, right?"

"Yes," Mikaela answered as they took off down the side of the roadway. The asphalt wasn't as smooth and a lot of the drivers they past threw them dirty looks, but at least now they were moving. Sideswipe drove after them, ignoring the angry horns blaring out but taking note of any curses thrown his way for future reference.

As they neared their appointed exit however, something made Kate look out the back window. She saw two specks on the horizon, growing larger at a substantial rate. It was all the warning they got before the roaring sound of dual jet engines ripped threw the air barely a few hundred feet above the freeway.

"HOLY SHIT!!"

"What the hell was that!?" Kate shouted, leaning forward to look out the windshield. In the sky, two fighter jets banked off to the right, roughly a mile or so ahead of where they were situated. "Those were Raptors but...Starscream got hit by lightning, he could barely fly so--"

"It's those fraggers, Skywarp and Thundercracker," Sunstreaker spat out, increasing his speed. Sideswipe followed suit and they hit the exit nearing one hundred ten and still rising. The yellow Murcielago took the curve with squealing tires, managing to look impressively awesome in the process of almost spinning out. Sideswipe went more carefully, mainly because Kate was yelling threats concerning the robotic equivalent of certain anatomical pieces. There was also the secondary reason of digging through his processors for a certain comm. frequencies. "HURRY UP!!"

"Shut up, Sunny! I'm trying to reach Optimus!"

"Well, tell him to hurry up too!"

There was an explosion of rather epic proportions, in that it was fiery, fairly large, and caused a lot of damage to things within a hundred foot radius of the blast zone. If there had been a seismograph present at the scene, it would have registered an abrupt collection of extremely zig-zaggy lines if it managed to survive upright and intact. It was followed by gunfire and much cursing by those who had been guarding the front gate, mainly because the gate house was now in two pieces, located in a tree and on someone's once brand new car. The broken black and yellow pieces of the gate itself were scattered across the pavement and there was a length of barbed wire topped chain link fence resting in a mangled pile somewhere in the bushes.

The source of this disturbance, if really such a word could be counted as an adjective for the current situation, was currently inspecting the crumpled remains of an air conditioning unit. Having arrived a few minutes earlier than he was supposed to, Blitz had taken a lot of people by surprise when he'd simply driven up on the wrong side of the road and plowed through two pedestrians and a stop sign. Some of the humans were still shooting at him, but they'd taken to calculating their aim instead of the panicked random fire that had occurred when he'd first transformed.

He'd been ignoring them, at least until the explosion drew his attention.

At first he thought one of the humans had fired at him with some primitive explosive projectile, but closer inspection and secondary explosion a few feet away led him to believe that this wasn't the case. The fact that the aim was extremely off decidedly limited the list of sources, and since Blitz knew exactly who was supposed to be in play right then, he was able to take a wild guess.

Grinning, he looked up.

"About time," he yelled up as one of the circling jets dropped down. Metal slid apart just in time to reveal a form similar enough to that of a certain other jet that some might've actually made the mistake of confusing the two. The grey-blue color scheme was a blatant give away, however, and even more subtly, the posture. Starscream usually stood straighter, head held high in that stupid arrogant way of his whereas Thundercracker tended to slouch a little more. He also had that resentful glare that seemed reserved just for Blitz. Apparently he had not forgotten the last time the orange mech had been assigned to the same task as him. "What?"

"Where's Starscream?"

"He got struck by lightning."

"What!?"

"No, really, he did."

"Where?"

Thundercracker's narrowed glare didn't even wander away from the smaller bot as he pulled out one of the smaller machine guns from subspace and fired it in the general direction of the humans that were still shooting.

"Eastern coast of this continent, in a state labeled 'Florida', you can't miss it."

"And Scythe?"

"On his way to this location, along with Barricade," Blitz answered, watching as Skywarp dropped in on the parking lot, smashing several cars in the process. A smaller two door car was kicked aside with unneccessary force. "So...you two gonna stay for the fun?"

"Depends."

"On what?"

"How far up do you think I'd have to fly for one of these things to go splat by dropping them?" Skywarp asked, before Thundercracker could answer the question. The violet schemed jet was holding up one of the humans by its leg. It was screaming what Blitz recognized as being a string of explicatives in the language known as 'English'. "Fifty feet maybe?"

"Better double it."

"You sure?"

"Well, it says on the human information network that there have been freak occurrences of them surviving falls from higher up than that," Blitz admitted in a thoughtful tone, scratching at his chin. "Maybe two hundred feet? Just to be safe."

"You are so not going to believe this."

This statement was met with perplexed gazes, mainly because, despite the fact that alarms were blaring and the entire facility was shaking as if a sizeable earthquake had struck, Mitchell was grinning. It was the grin of someone who has just seen something that, in their opinion, was probably extremely cool, like that of a comic book nerd discovering the perfect super hero cosplay. He waved a hand at the nearest computer screen, which was apparently connected to the feeds from the security cameras that monitored the parking lot.

Right now they were showing that, contrary to what had been true earlier that morning, there was no longer a parking lot.

"Is that my car?" Daniel asked, leaning in to peer closer to the bottom corner of the monitor, which showed approximately half of what may have been a small sedan. "That is my car!"

"I don't think that's what we're supposed to be looking at," Carter said, tapping his shoulder and pointing at the middle of the screen. There, amidst the remains of several other vehicles, was, what appeared to be at first glance, a strange looking assembled stack of car parts.

It was only when it started to move and turn towards the camera itself that Daniel saw what it actually was.

"That's a robot."

"Yeah!"

"It destroyed my car."

"Yeah!"

"Why are you happy about this!?"