Here's an idea: Miko meeting Whirl. Neither side would survive the resulting chaos. (Whirl would LOVE his new Wrecker Daughter!)
“Your hair. Is so. COOOOOOL!”
The little girl - a few years younger than Miko, as far as she could make out - glanced up, one big amber eye looking startled… actually, more than that. Genuinely alarmed. Miko wondered if the girl wasn’t supposed to be out on the playground by herself, or something (honestly, grown-ups!), but on second thought, she couldn’t imagine parents who’d let their daughter dye her hair blue would be too strict about supervision.
The girl glanced around, and then, when she seemed satisfied that no one was listening, leaned in with a sly smile. “That’s nothing,” she whispered. “Wanna see my laser guns?”
Miko beamed and nodded, ready to indulge the girl’s game of make-believe, and then beamed so much harder when she found out it wasn’t a game.
(”She had actual laser guns and you still thought this was a normal kid?” Jack would groan later, much later, after the whole story came out, and Miko would shrug. The world had thrown stranger things in her path.)
The little girl was there in the playground every day after school, and every time, it seemed, she had something to show Miko - a toy, a drawing, a clunky but working wristwatch (”made that one myself, s’not real good,” she said, digging her toe into the sand, and turned bright red when Miko pronounced the watch “totally lit”), a secret trail through the surrounding hills that led to a hidden cave. Miko didn’t care that she didn’t know the child’s name. She called her Aneki (”sis”) and smuggled her candy and taught her to play the electric guitar, and she came to look forward to their adventures almost as much as to her regular trips to see Bulkhead. (Once, they stumbled across a small energon deposit, and Miko hurried the girl away, not wanting to attract Decepticon attention to the child. If she hadn’t been in such a rush, she might have noticed that her friend was trying to lead her away just as hastily.)
So it came as a shock when, one day, a party of Vehicons landed outside the playground, Miko moved to shield her friend… and the girl vanished.
Miko looked around frantically, just as the thrum of helicopter blades grew to a crescendo above her, and a tall, long-limbed Cybertronian with a rifle in each hand dropped out of the sky.
She stared up at the newcomer. The sight of the red badge was a relief, but that wasn’t what caught her attention. Instead, it was the single, wide amber eye, that as she watched slowly closed in a wink.
The new Autobot said softly, “Now wanna see my proper laser guns?”
And Miko let out a delighted squeal, before picking a stone off the ground and slingshotting it at the nearest Vehicon’s visor, blinding him long enough for her friend to finish him off.
(The squeal was nothing compared to the shriek of joy that came when she found out that her new friend was a Wrecker. After weeks hiding out on Earth, Whirl finally reported for duty to Ultra Magnus that afternoon, with Wheeljack with an arm around his shoulders on one side, Bulkhead on the other hugging him around the waist, and Miko perched gleefully on one of his rotors.
Ultra Magnus’s optic didn’t stop twitching for a week.)
