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koilungfish20/3/07 - 620 words on Blood & Diesel
21/3/07 - 500 words on The Lintel of Hesioch, Ark Visit, Stormhangar & The Gods of the Glowing Pools
22/3/07 - Fail
23/3/07 - Fail
24/3/07 - Fail
25/3/07 - The Lunatic Cabaret, pt. 1 [TF:G1, pre-Earth]
Skywarp teleported into the Grand Hall of Tielemount and, when nobody shot at him, felt disappointed.
Below and to all sides the Grand Hall was a disorder of running, scurrying, shouting Decepticons, all of them clear occupants of the lowest of the lower echelons, most of them carrying crates, some carrying lamps and the rest yelling contradictory orders at everyone else, who ignored them.
After thirty seconds of looking and grinning, someone threw an empty crate at him.
"Oi! You! You're late!" bellowed an officious voice from a huddle of shirkers on a gantry. Skywarp pivoted in mid-air, surprised at this, since nobody was expecting him. Below, there was a cry of protest from whoever had been hit by the crate.
"Where's your leakin' instrument?" continued the voice. Skywarp connected it to a mid-sized purple Decepticon with little guns and big wheels.
"What instrument?" Skywarp called back.
"Your leakin' instrument what you are 'ere to play!" the officious goon continued.
"I'm not a musician," Skywarp said, "but if you sing me a tune I can stamp it."
"Who in leakin' Iacon are you then?" the officious one bawled. "And what are you doing 'ere? This area's restricted!"
"I'm Skywarp, I -"
"Never 'eard of you! Clear off out!"
"I can't, I was sent!" Skywarp hollered. "The boss wants me to check everything's in the right place for him."
"Who? What boss?"
"The boss!"
"What? Who are you?"
"I told you, I'm Skywarp, I'm Megatron's pilot. He sent me on ahead."
There was a small hush from the gantry. "Megatron's leakin' chauffeur," the officious Decepticon grumbled. "What's 'is leakin' chauffeur 'ere for?"
Skywarp maneuvered closer to the gantry so he could look down at the idiot more easily, remembered too late that scaffolding made anti-gravs unstable, and fell from the air, landing with loud unceremony on a passing unfortunate bearing crates.
Atop his pile of crates and swearing unfortunate, Skywarp looked up at the officious Decepticon high above, hearing the sniggering of his associated shirkers, and wondered if he could get away with snapping their necks some time after the event. The heaving of the unfortunate below interrupted his happy thoughts.
"Get off me, you great lump!"
Skywarp lumped off, dislodging crates.
"Who do you think you are, falling on people like that?" The unfortunate was short, red and also bewheeled, possessing an inordinately well-chromed set of grill-bars, distinctly at odds with his rough-surfaced hull.
"I'm looking for whoever's in charge," Skywarp said. "Tell me it's not that short-wire in the gantry."
"What, him?" The unfortunate rubbed his head where Skywarp had landed on him, then started gathering up his crates. "Nah, he's the music director. Going loopy since half the musicians aren't here. The big boss is probably in the back somewhere, hacking up oil."
"Problems?"
"Nah mate, overdid it last night. Come to think of it, he never stops overdoing it." The unfortunate, bent double under his crates, stumped away amongst the cables, the crates and the shouting. Somewhere overhead, a saw started up, drowning the yelling in the scream of shredding metal. A gentle rain of sparks pattered down around Skywarp, and he dodged out of the area before something exploded or fell on him.
Skywarp looked around. The Grand Hall was about a mile long, half a mile high, and a third of a mile wide. There were three deep bays in each side of the room, big grand doors at the south end, a big dais at the north end and a bigger platform in the middle. All the way around the walls ran tiers of balconies in various stages of scaffolding. The ceiling was clustered with big lamps, all pointing in different directions. Banners hung from the top balcony - the massive imperial Decepticon flag behind the dais, the sector and city and high councilor's banners down the left side, the banners of the local warlords down the right.
"What a shambles," he said aloud, turning in a circle to review the scrum of activity. Decepticons were climbing the scaffolding, assembling new scaffolding, disassembling old scaffolding, squabbling over scaffolding, hanging lights, adjusting lights, fixing lights, dropping lights, cleaning up broken lights, cutting holes in the roof and the walls, bolting supports to walls and ceiling and probably each other, and some poor hopeless fool was trying to polish the floor.
A finger pinged his wingtip.
"Oy!" Skywarp cried, rounding on whoever. It turned out to be a big dark-grey armoured car with a big grin on his big armoured face. Skywarp wondered if he was in for a fight "Do I know you?"
"Don't think so," said the whoever. "Are you really Megatron's pilot?"
"Yeah," Skywarp replied cautiously, still expecting trouble.
"Really?" the armoured car asked, almost as if it was a thing beyond belief, like energon falling from the sky.
"Yes, you loser," Skywarp snapped.
"He's going to be here tonight, right?" the armoured car continued to grin.
"Yes!"
"Does he ... like oriphoniums?"
" ... what?" Skywarp asked, bemused.
Shyly, the armoured car raised his right hand. He had enormously long arms, reaching well past his knees, and in his right hand was a gleaming golden oriphonium. "I've always wanted to play for the High Commander."
"The boss hates music," Skywarp said, noting with pride the way the oriphonium-player's optics lost their sparkle. "Come to think of it, he hates things like this all together."
"Then why's he having it?" the other asked.
"Because ... " Skywarp stalled. "Well, the official reason is because he wants to congratulate the local big three on a job well done, kicking the Autobots out of the state. The unofficial reason is because the big three are uppity twits and he's come to knock heads together. The really unofficial reason is because your Monitor's a groveling little bootlicker who begged for the chance to throw this bash, and the geek who runs M-Section took his bribes." And the real reason is because that Air Wing prig Starscream just made himself Air Marshal, and Megatron wants an excuse to visit the state to 'congratulate' him.
"Sounds about right," the oriphonium-playing armoured car said.
Skywarp quickly commed the building computer for an ID-check on the oriphonium player, found it to be offline, swore silently and said, "Anyway, who are you?"
"Horn-of-the-East," was the reply.
Skywarp burst out laughing. "What?"
"Look, it's a stage name, okay? The Monitor here wouldn't take on a musician with a name like Bogpool."
The first laugh going down met the second laugh coming up. Skywarp blew a breaker in his vocaliser and doubled over in fits of resets.
Horn-of-the-East apparently lost his temper at this, as he leant over Skywarp, blotting out the glare of the wheeling, malfunctioning stage-lights, and blew a colossal tri-tone blast from his oriphonium into Skywarp's face.
Skywarp croaked, stumbled and fell over backwards laughing. Horn-of-the-East followed him, chortling into the facepiece of his instrument, making weird bwug-ouga-bouuug noises spurt out of the three bells. He leant over Skywarp, oriphonium squeezing out bwounk-oung-uuung sounds, and Skywarp lay on the ground and laughed.
"Hoy! You two!" A harassed-looking Decepticon - beige and blue, Skywarp noted, armoured and wheeled for some denomination of small fast running-away-type vehicle - was bearing down on them with a gun in each hand and another one mounted on his shoulder. "Get back in the musician's loft, before I fetch you one somewhere sensitive!"
"It's not finished," Horn-of-the-East complained. "When I went up there, I fell through the floor."
"Well, go and find the rest of the musicians and stay with them!"
Skywarp picked himself up. "I'm not a -"
"Well, find the director of whatever you're here for, then. I'm the director of technicians and I know you're not one of mine. Clear off, before I call the music director over."
Skywarp and Horn-of-the-East exchanged glances, looked up at the director of musicians, and cleared off.
"Anything worth doing around here?" Skywarp asked Horn-of-the-East.
"Not really," Horn-of-the-East said, fiddling with his oriphonium. "The cooks are locked up in the preparation room and the oil-store's under guard, everything worth scavenging was scrounged out two days ago, and I can't get over-energized before the performance!"
Skywarp pondered just leaving for a quick scud around the city, but he was under orders to ensure that things were arranged to Megatron's liking, which meant no leaving - he replayed Thundercracker's explanation of his orders for clarity - until someone arrived to tell him he could go. Skywarp reviewed the mental list of specifications he'd been given by Soundwave, read the first two items and lost interest. "I guess I need to find the director of directors."
"The producer."
"Right. Any ideas where he is?"
"Bent over a bucket, hurling," Horn-of-the-East said. "Been oiled up to the vents for the past few days."
"I need to talk to him," Skywarp screamed over the sudden howl of the saw. Yellow sparks began to rain down over the stage.
"He'll be in the back," Horn-of-the-East bellowed over the same roar. "This way!"
'In the back', Skywarp discovered, constituted a series of small rooms intended for other purposes now full of very busy Decepticons moving objects from one place to another. Mostly it was technicians and cables again - What are they doing, wiring the place to self-destruct for an encore? Skywarp wondered - but there was some loon juggling landmines, another pair of idiots painting each other orange and a captive Autobot in a cage being poked with bits of rebar by bored technicians. Each room came complete with an ineffective twerp who thought he was an officer trying to organize everything, at least one shirker very industriously doing as little as possible, and a high probability of re-encountering the loose wingnut with the floor-buffer.
After fifteen rooms of shouting and idiots, Skywarp turned to Horn-of-the-East and asked, "Where is he?"
"They must've moved him," Horn-of-the-East shouted over the din of what was either a gong-tuning session or an impromptu realignment of a solar reflector. "His aides move him around regularly, to stop people finding him and giving him a nervous breakdown."
"What a geek," Skywarp groaned. He grabbed the nearest wannabe-officer, a scruffy midget with a huge black wingnut on top of his conical head, who was busy trying to herd a shambolic collection of idiots into one group. "Where's the producer?"
Unsurprisingly, the response wasn't what he wanted. "Are you the replacement singers?"
"No," they chorused. Horn-of-the-East wiggled his oriphonium at the apparent choir director.
Skywarp picked the midget up by the wingnut. "I am Skywarp, First Battle Fleet, attached to M-Section, personal pilot to the Lord High Commander, and I've been sent to speak to the producer!"
There was a sudden hush in the room, broken by an equally sudden "Oh, screws!" from the choir.
The choir director pointed nervously back the way they'd come. "He's been taken outside for some, err, quiet. He's very highly strung."
"If I don't find him soon I'll string him up myself!" Skywarp said, getting angry at the chaos, wanting an empty sky or Thundercracker or a big cube of energon or a really big rocket launcher, and dropped the choir director. He strode off, elbowing technicians aside, and three doors later found himself in a room with no other exit.
Horn-of-the-East caught up. "Lost?"
"The pin-shearing local network is offline!" Skywarp cursed.
"Yes, the Monitor switched this building off this morning because the scaffolding was causing interference and giving him headaches. It works fine outside."
"Then get me outside. I need to find the producer." He didn't want to find out what the scaffolding might do to his teleportation.
Horn-of-the-East took him back to the Grand Hall, both of them tripping over the brainless fool with the floor buffer no less than three times, after the last of which Skywarp kicked him across the room. The Grand Hall now contained more people and fewer cables, and squeaky honk-ooong-hurnk noises were coming from the platform above the lighting rig.
"Loft's up," Horn-of-the-East said, "I'm in for it soon."
"No you're not, you've been commandeered," Skywarp said. "Temporary attachment to M-Section until I find the producer."
They tried the grand doors, found them firmly shut, found a side-entrance and emerged onto the entrance plaza of Tielemount. Half a mile square of open plaza, low walls studded with life-sized statues of local heroes, a heroic ramp leading up from the confluence of the city's three main roads, impressive view over the big towers and the outer wall of the fortress, all crenellated with gun-batteries.
Skywarp took in the vista, turned to Horn-of-the-East, and announced, "Your Monitor's a total poser."
"Yes, but he likes music," Horn-of-the-East said, looking worried. "Does M-Section have an entertainment section?"
"It has Constructicons with trumpets. We're a Battle Group, not a Sector Group. We don't scud around playing music and painting walls!" Skywarp spotted a knot of Decepticons. Since they were in a circle around someone and weren't hitting him or laughing, he suspected he'd found the producer. He marched over, Horn-of-the-East in his jet stream.
Eight more scruffy, gangly, feeble-looking bottom-of-the-smelter "entertainment section" loons all looked up as he arrived - half their height again, twice their width and four times as heavily armed - and parted before him. A Decepticon was leaning over the wall, retching oil. Skywarp could hear it splattering on the fortress walls below.
"Are you the producer?" Skywarp asked.
The Decepticon straightened up enough to look over his shoulder. From the looks of him, the thickset body and the hefty treads, Skywarp guessed him to be a half-track, possibly a battlefield mop-up sort. He was mostly orange, partly pale blue and all wretched. "Yes, I'm Oilblitz. What do you want?"
"I'm Skywarp, from M-Section. The big boss sent me to make sure everything's fit." Well, Soundwave sent me, but the effect is the same.
"Oh Primus," said Oilblitz, and turned around to retch over the wall. Skywarp grimaced. "Someone deal with this."
"My instructions were to deal with the producer only," Skywarp insisted, smirking.
Oilblitz groaned and tried to retch but brought up nothing, then theatrically sank his head in one hand. "What do you want?" he moaned.
"I have a list of specifications to which the event is to conform or be destroyed," Skywarp said, getting muddled as he tried to translate Soundwave's technical terms into normal words.
"He wouldn't blow the stage up, would he?" Oilblitz asked, sounding faint.
"He'll blow the whole Grand Hall right off fortress if he feels like it," Skywarp replied, hoping Megatron might indeed do so. It'd be more interesting that watching these seventh-rate slag-chips try to be interesting. Possibly we can shoot them...?
"Oh Primus," Oilblitz moaned again, turning to Skywarp with exaggerated caution. "Give this list to one of my aides. We will deal with it shortly."
"Oh no, not getting out of it that way," Skywarp smiled, wagging a finger at the malfunctioning producer. "Inside. Then I'll tell you what's wrong."
Oilblitz moaned, protested, but was assisted upright by his aides - many of whom bowed under his weight - and they half-carried, half-dragged him back to the Grand Hall.
Inside, the top tier of balcony had been stripped of its scaffolding, so the poor fools working on the lighting rig were moving their lights and crates back and forth by throwing them. There were broken crates and shattered lamps all over the floor. The goon with the floor buffer was working around them in a haphazard fashion.
High above, strained noises issued from the musician's loft, mostly from instruments but some apparently from a hapless musician the director was beating for playing out of tune. The unseen performance ended with a crescendo scream as the director hurled his victim out of the loft.
A twisted gorephonium followed, striking the musician on the head as he cried over his shattered arm.
"Oi! You down there! I know you, get up here!" came the cry of the music director above.
"Gotta scramble," Horn-of-the-East said, punching Skywarp gently in the shoulder and dashing off. Skywarp watched him climb the scaffolding, swinging his way up using his long left arm, clasping his oriphonium to his chest with the other.
"I didn't know he was so well connected," one of the aides muttered thoughtfully.
"He's liable to be disconnected if he does that again," Skywarp said, reviewing the list of what Soundwave considered necessities, such as no R-27 audio-buffers, whatever those were. This is all circuit groping, Skywarp thought. If I start reading this off I'll look like a total twerp. He looked around quickly, casting his mind back to previous events he'd suffered through. "Right, first problem is there's no throne for the Lord High Commander."
"Throne?" asked an aide.
"Yeah, big shiny chair for him to sit in," Skywarp said, pulling a what-are-you-stupid face.
"We were informed by the Monitor that he'd stand on the balconies, like everyone else," another aide said. Oilblitz stood silently, looking stunned and miserable.
"The Lord High Commander needs a throne because he isn't like everyone else," Skywarp said mockingly. And because he likes to be able to retreat to the high ground when things get boring.
"But - but we don't have a throne!" an aide wailed.
"Could he make do with crates?" came the suggestion.
"Let me guess, your name must be Deathwish," Skywarp replied. "Look, send someone down to the nearest foundry, get them to cast something big, simple and solid, and then have it gold-plated. That should cover it."
"Thank Helex," Oilblitz groaned, holding one hand to his head as he used the other to point out an aide, who set off running.
Stop overacting, Skywarp thought. "That should cover it for the throne."
There was an assembled groan.
"You need to jack the stage up so Megatron can see it over everyone's heads."
"Is that really necessary?"
"Not unless you mind Megatron removing heads in order to see," Skywarp smiled, knowing perfectly well that Megatron couldn't care less about the stage and would spend the entirety of the entertainment planning what to do to the local warlords, and probably the local Monitor as well at this rate. "Also, the banner for Prototrack should be on the other side of the one for Steelcoil."
"But Steelcoil is senior!"
"Megatron doesn't like Steelcoil," Skywarp lied, having fun. Another aide went running. "Do you have any oblivion-plate dancers?"
"Yes..." Oilblitz groaned. Another lamp fell from the ceiling, bursting with a crash and a shower of glittering lens-fragments. The ground underfoot was becoming interestingly crunchy.
"Make sure they come on before the Autobots are tortured, otherwise the boss'll shoot them," Skywarp ordered. A third aide was dispatched. "How long is the phonium section playing for?"
"The phonium section aren't playing on their own..." Oilblitz said, as the fool with the floor buffer went past again.
"The big boss likes horn music. Give them a slot, and make sure it's a long one." Horn-of-the-East, you owe me one. It won't get you into M-Section, but it might get you out of this madhouse.
Oilblitz dispatched another aide, waving vaguely towards the musician's loft.
"I think that's almost everything," Skywarp said brightly. "How many Autobots are there for torturing? And who's doing it?"
"We have one..." came the feeble response. Oilblitz was swaying.
Skywarp groaned. "Tell me you have a good torture artist."
"His name is Crossgrain."
"Never heard of him."
"He was only built fifty vorns ago," Oilblitz said, croaking.
"All right, but if he stalls out, someone from M-Section will step in to keep the big boss happy."
There was a worried silence.
"Yes, I mean he'll torture whoever was responsible for the mess." Probably this Crossgrain, but any of you would do ... Skywarp thought happy thoughts for a moment, and was interrupted by the sound of Oilblitz trying not to retch. A smirk started to form on Skywarp's face. "Sounds like there's plenty of aromatic oils. Do you have any of that really thick cinnabar oil? The stuff that clings to the inside of your ingestion conduit on the way do-"
Oilblitz retched explosively.
Skywarp jumped back, laughing, colliding with someone else who was laughing. The entire Grand Hall was filled with laughter, drowning out even the howl of the saw. Oilblitz doubled over gagging, glaring and groaning. His aides tried to quell the crew with glares, but failed and had to settle for half-dragging Oilblitz back outside again.
Above, Skywarp could hear the music director screaming at the unfortunate aide. Steelcoil's banner fell from the balcony, catching on the scaffolding and snagging with the sound of delicate plastic tearing. Around him technicians were still laughing and pointing at the vanishing producer. Skywarp heard the sound of more retching from near the doors, and a fresh wave of laughter went up.
From overhead came the brassy sound of a phonium section bursting into a sudden triumphant chorus, and amongst the origolohorns and polygratigons, there came the sound of an oriphonium blasting out a glorious onk-tawnk-waooo of joy.
21/3/07 - 500 words on The Lintel of Hesioch, Ark Visit, Stormhangar & The Gods of the Glowing Pools
22/3/07 - Fail
23/3/07 - Fail
24/3/07 - Fail
25/3/07 - The Lunatic Cabaret, pt. 1 [TF:G1, pre-Earth]
Skywarp teleported into the Grand Hall of Tielemount and, when nobody shot at him, felt disappointed.
Below and to all sides the Grand Hall was a disorder of running, scurrying, shouting Decepticons, all of them clear occupants of the lowest of the lower echelons, most of them carrying crates, some carrying lamps and the rest yelling contradictory orders at everyone else, who ignored them.
After thirty seconds of looking and grinning, someone threw an empty crate at him.
"Oi! You! You're late!" bellowed an officious voice from a huddle of shirkers on a gantry. Skywarp pivoted in mid-air, surprised at this, since nobody was expecting him. Below, there was a cry of protest from whoever had been hit by the crate.
"Where's your leakin' instrument?" continued the voice. Skywarp connected it to a mid-sized purple Decepticon with little guns and big wheels.
"What instrument?" Skywarp called back.
"Your leakin' instrument what you are 'ere to play!" the officious goon continued.
"I'm not a musician," Skywarp said, "but if you sing me a tune I can stamp it."
"Who in leakin' Iacon are you then?" the officious one bawled. "And what are you doing 'ere? This area's restricted!"
"I'm Skywarp, I -"
"Never 'eard of you! Clear off out!"
"I can't, I was sent!" Skywarp hollered. "The boss wants me to check everything's in the right place for him."
"Who? What boss?"
"The boss!"
"What? Who are you?"
"I told you, I'm Skywarp, I'm Megatron's pilot. He sent me on ahead."
There was a small hush from the gantry. "Megatron's leakin' chauffeur," the officious Decepticon grumbled. "What's 'is leakin' chauffeur 'ere for?"
Skywarp maneuvered closer to the gantry so he could look down at the idiot more easily, remembered too late that scaffolding made anti-gravs unstable, and fell from the air, landing with loud unceremony on a passing unfortunate bearing crates.
Atop his pile of crates and swearing unfortunate, Skywarp looked up at the officious Decepticon high above, hearing the sniggering of his associated shirkers, and wondered if he could get away with snapping their necks some time after the event. The heaving of the unfortunate below interrupted his happy thoughts.
"Get off me, you great lump!"
Skywarp lumped off, dislodging crates.
"Who do you think you are, falling on people like that?" The unfortunate was short, red and also bewheeled, possessing an inordinately well-chromed set of grill-bars, distinctly at odds with his rough-surfaced hull.
"I'm looking for whoever's in charge," Skywarp said. "Tell me it's not that short-wire in the gantry."
"What, him?" The unfortunate rubbed his head where Skywarp had landed on him, then started gathering up his crates. "Nah, he's the music director. Going loopy since half the musicians aren't here. The big boss is probably in the back somewhere, hacking up oil."
"Problems?"
"Nah mate, overdid it last night. Come to think of it, he never stops overdoing it." The unfortunate, bent double under his crates, stumped away amongst the cables, the crates and the shouting. Somewhere overhead, a saw started up, drowning the yelling in the scream of shredding metal. A gentle rain of sparks pattered down around Skywarp, and he dodged out of the area before something exploded or fell on him.
Skywarp looked around. The Grand Hall was about a mile long, half a mile high, and a third of a mile wide. There were three deep bays in each side of the room, big grand doors at the south end, a big dais at the north end and a bigger platform in the middle. All the way around the walls ran tiers of balconies in various stages of scaffolding. The ceiling was clustered with big lamps, all pointing in different directions. Banners hung from the top balcony - the massive imperial Decepticon flag behind the dais, the sector and city and high councilor's banners down the left side, the banners of the local warlords down the right.
"What a shambles," he said aloud, turning in a circle to review the scrum of activity. Decepticons were climbing the scaffolding, assembling new scaffolding, disassembling old scaffolding, squabbling over scaffolding, hanging lights, adjusting lights, fixing lights, dropping lights, cleaning up broken lights, cutting holes in the roof and the walls, bolting supports to walls and ceiling and probably each other, and some poor hopeless fool was trying to polish the floor.
A finger pinged his wingtip.
"Oy!" Skywarp cried, rounding on whoever. It turned out to be a big dark-grey armoured car with a big grin on his big armoured face. Skywarp wondered if he was in for a fight "Do I know you?"
"Don't think so," said the whoever. "Are you really Megatron's pilot?"
"Yeah," Skywarp replied cautiously, still expecting trouble.
"Really?" the armoured car asked, almost as if it was a thing beyond belief, like energon falling from the sky.
"Yes, you loser," Skywarp snapped.
"He's going to be here tonight, right?" the armoured car continued to grin.
"Yes!"
"Does he ... like oriphoniums?"
" ... what?" Skywarp asked, bemused.
Shyly, the armoured car raised his right hand. He had enormously long arms, reaching well past his knees, and in his right hand was a gleaming golden oriphonium. "I've always wanted to play for the High Commander."
"The boss hates music," Skywarp said, noting with pride the way the oriphonium-player's optics lost their sparkle. "Come to think of it, he hates things like this all together."
"Then why's he having it?" the other asked.
"Because ... " Skywarp stalled. "Well, the official reason is because he wants to congratulate the local big three on a job well done, kicking the Autobots out of the state. The unofficial reason is because the big three are uppity twits and he's come to knock heads together. The really unofficial reason is because your Monitor's a groveling little bootlicker who begged for the chance to throw this bash, and the geek who runs M-Section took his bribes." And the real reason is because that Air Wing prig Starscream just made himself Air Marshal, and Megatron wants an excuse to visit the state to 'congratulate' him.
"Sounds about right," the oriphonium-playing armoured car said.
Skywarp quickly commed the building computer for an ID-check on the oriphonium player, found it to be offline, swore silently and said, "Anyway, who are you?"
"Horn-of-the-East," was the reply.
Skywarp burst out laughing. "What?"
"Look, it's a stage name, okay? The Monitor here wouldn't take on a musician with a name like Bogpool."
The first laugh going down met the second laugh coming up. Skywarp blew a breaker in his vocaliser and doubled over in fits of resets.
Horn-of-the-East apparently lost his temper at this, as he leant over Skywarp, blotting out the glare of the wheeling, malfunctioning stage-lights, and blew a colossal tri-tone blast from his oriphonium into Skywarp's face.
Skywarp croaked, stumbled and fell over backwards laughing. Horn-of-the-East followed him, chortling into the facepiece of his instrument, making weird bwug-ouga-bouuug noises spurt out of the three bells. He leant over Skywarp, oriphonium squeezing out bwounk-oung-uuung sounds, and Skywarp lay on the ground and laughed.
"Hoy! You two!" A harassed-looking Decepticon - beige and blue, Skywarp noted, armoured and wheeled for some denomination of small fast running-away-type vehicle - was bearing down on them with a gun in each hand and another one mounted on his shoulder. "Get back in the musician's loft, before I fetch you one somewhere sensitive!"
"It's not finished," Horn-of-the-East complained. "When I went up there, I fell through the floor."
"Well, go and find the rest of the musicians and stay with them!"
Skywarp picked himself up. "I'm not a -"
"Well, find the director of whatever you're here for, then. I'm the director of technicians and I know you're not one of mine. Clear off, before I call the music director over."
Skywarp and Horn-of-the-East exchanged glances, looked up at the director of musicians, and cleared off.
"Anything worth doing around here?" Skywarp asked Horn-of-the-East.
"Not really," Horn-of-the-East said, fiddling with his oriphonium. "The cooks are locked up in the preparation room and the oil-store's under guard, everything worth scavenging was scrounged out two days ago, and I can't get over-energized before the performance!"
Skywarp pondered just leaving for a quick scud around the city, but he was under orders to ensure that things were arranged to Megatron's liking, which meant no leaving - he replayed Thundercracker's explanation of his orders for clarity - until someone arrived to tell him he could go. Skywarp reviewed the mental list of specifications he'd been given by Soundwave, read the first two items and lost interest. "I guess I need to find the director of directors."
"The producer."
"Right. Any ideas where he is?"
"Bent over a bucket, hurling," Horn-of-the-East said. "Been oiled up to the vents for the past few days."
"I need to talk to him," Skywarp screamed over the sudden howl of the saw. Yellow sparks began to rain down over the stage.
"He'll be in the back," Horn-of-the-East bellowed over the same roar. "This way!"
'In the back', Skywarp discovered, constituted a series of small rooms intended for other purposes now full of very busy Decepticons moving objects from one place to another. Mostly it was technicians and cables again - What are they doing, wiring the place to self-destruct for an encore? Skywarp wondered - but there was some loon juggling landmines, another pair of idiots painting each other orange and a captive Autobot in a cage being poked with bits of rebar by bored technicians. Each room came complete with an ineffective twerp who thought he was an officer trying to organize everything, at least one shirker very industriously doing as little as possible, and a high probability of re-encountering the loose wingnut with the floor-buffer.
After fifteen rooms of shouting and idiots, Skywarp turned to Horn-of-the-East and asked, "Where is he?"
"They must've moved him," Horn-of-the-East shouted over the din of what was either a gong-tuning session or an impromptu realignment of a solar reflector. "His aides move him around regularly, to stop people finding him and giving him a nervous breakdown."
"What a geek," Skywarp groaned. He grabbed the nearest wannabe-officer, a scruffy midget with a huge black wingnut on top of his conical head, who was busy trying to herd a shambolic collection of idiots into one group. "Where's the producer?"
Unsurprisingly, the response wasn't what he wanted. "Are you the replacement singers?"
"No," they chorused. Horn-of-the-East wiggled his oriphonium at the apparent choir director.
Skywarp picked the midget up by the wingnut. "I am Skywarp, First Battle Fleet, attached to M-Section, personal pilot to the Lord High Commander, and I've been sent to speak to the producer!"
There was a sudden hush in the room, broken by an equally sudden "Oh, screws!" from the choir.
The choir director pointed nervously back the way they'd come. "He's been taken outside for some, err, quiet. He's very highly strung."
"If I don't find him soon I'll string him up myself!" Skywarp said, getting angry at the chaos, wanting an empty sky or Thundercracker or a big cube of energon or a really big rocket launcher, and dropped the choir director. He strode off, elbowing technicians aside, and three doors later found himself in a room with no other exit.
Horn-of-the-East caught up. "Lost?"
"The pin-shearing local network is offline!" Skywarp cursed.
"Yes, the Monitor switched this building off this morning because the scaffolding was causing interference and giving him headaches. It works fine outside."
"Then get me outside. I need to find the producer." He didn't want to find out what the scaffolding might do to his teleportation.
Horn-of-the-East took him back to the Grand Hall, both of them tripping over the brainless fool with the floor buffer no less than three times, after the last of which Skywarp kicked him across the room. The Grand Hall now contained more people and fewer cables, and squeaky honk-ooong-hurnk noises were coming from the platform above the lighting rig.
"Loft's up," Horn-of-the-East said, "I'm in for it soon."
"No you're not, you've been commandeered," Skywarp said. "Temporary attachment to M-Section until I find the producer."
They tried the grand doors, found them firmly shut, found a side-entrance and emerged onto the entrance plaza of Tielemount. Half a mile square of open plaza, low walls studded with life-sized statues of local heroes, a heroic ramp leading up from the confluence of the city's three main roads, impressive view over the big towers and the outer wall of the fortress, all crenellated with gun-batteries.
Skywarp took in the vista, turned to Horn-of-the-East, and announced, "Your Monitor's a total poser."
"Yes, but he likes music," Horn-of-the-East said, looking worried. "Does M-Section have an entertainment section?"
"It has Constructicons with trumpets. We're a Battle Group, not a Sector Group. We don't scud around playing music and painting walls!" Skywarp spotted a knot of Decepticons. Since they were in a circle around someone and weren't hitting him or laughing, he suspected he'd found the producer. He marched over, Horn-of-the-East in his jet stream.
Eight more scruffy, gangly, feeble-looking bottom-of-the-smelter "entertainment section" loons all looked up as he arrived - half their height again, twice their width and four times as heavily armed - and parted before him. A Decepticon was leaning over the wall, retching oil. Skywarp could hear it splattering on the fortress walls below.
"Are you the producer?" Skywarp asked.
The Decepticon straightened up enough to look over his shoulder. From the looks of him, the thickset body and the hefty treads, Skywarp guessed him to be a half-track, possibly a battlefield mop-up sort. He was mostly orange, partly pale blue and all wretched. "Yes, I'm Oilblitz. What do you want?"
"I'm Skywarp, from M-Section. The big boss sent me to make sure everything's fit." Well, Soundwave sent me, but the effect is the same.
"Oh Primus," said Oilblitz, and turned around to retch over the wall. Skywarp grimaced. "Someone deal with this."
"My instructions were to deal with the producer only," Skywarp insisted, smirking.
Oilblitz groaned and tried to retch but brought up nothing, then theatrically sank his head in one hand. "What do you want?" he moaned.
"I have a list of specifications to which the event is to conform or be destroyed," Skywarp said, getting muddled as he tried to translate Soundwave's technical terms into normal words.
"He wouldn't blow the stage up, would he?" Oilblitz asked, sounding faint.
"He'll blow the whole Grand Hall right off fortress if he feels like it," Skywarp replied, hoping Megatron might indeed do so. It'd be more interesting that watching these seventh-rate slag-chips try to be interesting. Possibly we can shoot them...?
"Oh Primus," Oilblitz moaned again, turning to Skywarp with exaggerated caution. "Give this list to one of my aides. We will deal with it shortly."
"Oh no, not getting out of it that way," Skywarp smiled, wagging a finger at the malfunctioning producer. "Inside. Then I'll tell you what's wrong."
Oilblitz moaned, protested, but was assisted upright by his aides - many of whom bowed under his weight - and they half-carried, half-dragged him back to the Grand Hall.
Inside, the top tier of balcony had been stripped of its scaffolding, so the poor fools working on the lighting rig were moving their lights and crates back and forth by throwing them. There were broken crates and shattered lamps all over the floor. The goon with the floor buffer was working around them in a haphazard fashion.
High above, strained noises issued from the musician's loft, mostly from instruments but some apparently from a hapless musician the director was beating for playing out of tune. The unseen performance ended with a crescendo scream as the director hurled his victim out of the loft.
A twisted gorephonium followed, striking the musician on the head as he cried over his shattered arm.
"Oi! You down there! I know you, get up here!" came the cry of the music director above.
"Gotta scramble," Horn-of-the-East said, punching Skywarp gently in the shoulder and dashing off. Skywarp watched him climb the scaffolding, swinging his way up using his long left arm, clasping his oriphonium to his chest with the other.
"I didn't know he was so well connected," one of the aides muttered thoughtfully.
"He's liable to be disconnected if he does that again," Skywarp said, reviewing the list of what Soundwave considered necessities, such as no R-27 audio-buffers, whatever those were. This is all circuit groping, Skywarp thought. If I start reading this off I'll look like a total twerp. He looked around quickly, casting his mind back to previous events he'd suffered through. "Right, first problem is there's no throne for the Lord High Commander."
"Throne?" asked an aide.
"Yeah, big shiny chair for him to sit in," Skywarp said, pulling a what-are-you-stupid face.
"We were informed by the Monitor that he'd stand on the balconies, like everyone else," another aide said. Oilblitz stood silently, looking stunned and miserable.
"The Lord High Commander needs a throne because he isn't like everyone else," Skywarp said mockingly. And because he likes to be able to retreat to the high ground when things get boring.
"But - but we don't have a throne!" an aide wailed.
"Could he make do with crates?" came the suggestion.
"Let me guess, your name must be Deathwish," Skywarp replied. "Look, send someone down to the nearest foundry, get them to cast something big, simple and solid, and then have it gold-plated. That should cover it."
"Thank Helex," Oilblitz groaned, holding one hand to his head as he used the other to point out an aide, who set off running.
Stop overacting, Skywarp thought. "That should cover it for the throne."
There was an assembled groan.
"You need to jack the stage up so Megatron can see it over everyone's heads."
"Is that really necessary?"
"Not unless you mind Megatron removing heads in order to see," Skywarp smiled, knowing perfectly well that Megatron couldn't care less about the stage and would spend the entirety of the entertainment planning what to do to the local warlords, and probably the local Monitor as well at this rate. "Also, the banner for Prototrack should be on the other side of the one for Steelcoil."
"But Steelcoil is senior!"
"Megatron doesn't like Steelcoil," Skywarp lied, having fun. Another aide went running. "Do you have any oblivion-plate dancers?"
"Yes..." Oilblitz groaned. Another lamp fell from the ceiling, bursting with a crash and a shower of glittering lens-fragments. The ground underfoot was becoming interestingly crunchy.
"Make sure they come on before the Autobots are tortured, otherwise the boss'll shoot them," Skywarp ordered. A third aide was dispatched. "How long is the phonium section playing for?"
"The phonium section aren't playing on their own..." Oilblitz said, as the fool with the floor buffer went past again.
"The big boss likes horn music. Give them a slot, and make sure it's a long one." Horn-of-the-East, you owe me one. It won't get you into M-Section, but it might get you out of this madhouse.
Oilblitz dispatched another aide, waving vaguely towards the musician's loft.
"I think that's almost everything," Skywarp said brightly. "How many Autobots are there for torturing? And who's doing it?"
"We have one..." came the feeble response. Oilblitz was swaying.
Skywarp groaned. "Tell me you have a good torture artist."
"His name is Crossgrain."
"Never heard of him."
"He was only built fifty vorns ago," Oilblitz said, croaking.
"All right, but if he stalls out, someone from M-Section will step in to keep the big boss happy."
There was a worried silence.
"Yes, I mean he'll torture whoever was responsible for the mess." Probably this Crossgrain, but any of you would do ... Skywarp thought happy thoughts for a moment, and was interrupted by the sound of Oilblitz trying not to retch. A smirk started to form on Skywarp's face. "Sounds like there's plenty of aromatic oils. Do you have any of that really thick cinnabar oil? The stuff that clings to the inside of your ingestion conduit on the way do-"
Oilblitz retched explosively.
Skywarp jumped back, laughing, colliding with someone else who was laughing. The entire Grand Hall was filled with laughter, drowning out even the howl of the saw. Oilblitz doubled over gagging, glaring and groaning. His aides tried to quell the crew with glares, but failed and had to settle for half-dragging Oilblitz back outside again.
Above, Skywarp could hear the music director screaming at the unfortunate aide. Steelcoil's banner fell from the balcony, catching on the scaffolding and snagging with the sound of delicate plastic tearing. Around him technicians were still laughing and pointing at the vanishing producer. Skywarp heard the sound of more retching from near the doors, and a fresh wave of laughter went up.
From overhead came the brassy sound of a phonium section bursting into a sudden triumphant chorus, and amongst the origolohorns and polygratigons, there came the sound of an oriphonium blasting out a glorious onk-tawnk-waooo of joy.
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Date: 2007-03-27 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 12:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-27 05:27 pm (UTC)I need to write my Golden Age Skywarp. Or maybe just some stuff between him and Starscream. People get easier to write ICly, the more time you practice writing them.