Little drabbles/one shots of an AU that may or may not eventually tie together relatively cohesively. I dunno. They're all pretty much connected and leading up to this one particular scene I have in mind. Yeah.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and lose power over a man's self. – Francis Bacon, Sr.

It was over before it began. And when it was over, it left everyone bewildered. Everyone – except the giant robots with red eyes. Pockets of resistance remained, scattered across the globe. Amazingly, Earth was relatively unharmed by her extraterrestrial visitors – by her alien conquerors. However, this was not the main focus of humanity. Humanity was more concerned with the fact that these giant robots seemed to view them as little more than exotic animals; exotic animals with a minimal intelligence that allowed them to perform menial tasks of servitude.

And so it came that the human race became little more than exotic servants to the alien mechanoid one. They were systematically collected; by sex, by race, by age, occasionally by displayed talents. Once collected, they were separated again within each original division – male and female, grouped by age and race. And from there, they were shipped to a place the robots called 'Cybertron'.

But again, pockets of resistance remained. Humans who wanted to fight back joined these resistance groups, working to free others from the collection cages, to keep some humans from even being noticed by the 'domestication squads'. The tensions quickly escalated to the point where the domestication squads traveled with what were obviously soldier robots, solely intended to engage with the human resistance factions.

It was a bloody struggle.

And far away on Cybertron, hardly anyone even knew that the new, wonderfully fascinating tiny organic beings were there against their wills. The idea of their sentience was dismissed, though the occasional mech would proclaim with pride that his human was particularly intelligent for a pet.