It was supposed to be a routine hunt for more mining sites. Starscream had been working through his checklists--the ship inspections, flight drills, maintenance reports, updating weapons stocks--all such responsibilities of the second in command. He had streamlined the process. Efficient. Swift. As were his very footsteps down the flight deck as he advanced against a high sun, eyes focused neatly on the opening ground bridge before him. In a magnificent flash, the forward sky was torn in two, and the shapes beyond the portal twisted in a most peculiar fashion, stealing daylight hours away.
He took on his falcon form. Alive as ever the jet engine burned, and he sped with increasing velocity, wings straight through wind, the glare ever brilliant in the wake. Flying was always an escape for him. For though he took great pride in his line of work, he could not deny the more tedious facets--so necessary, and increasingly dull. Like unpolished metal, the heavy weight he had to bear, all in order to keep a war machine oiled and running.
But these searches were different for the Seeker; he could be alone, and in his element--the vastness of sky, unmatched and unstoppable--unraveling secrets of Earth, and of shadow. All the places where no shortsighted soul could dream. Incomparable! Exploration, covert operation, and the simple bliss of aerial supremacy. If for a moment. Then time stood eerily still...
The moment he entered the bridge, there was a surge--a flash of most unholy light that covered the entire spectrum and which shook the structure so violently that he lost all essence of place. A blinding whiteness, navigated with the dashboard instruments, which seemed to last too long. Senses numbed temporarily, he reverted to his robot form, attempting to alter the flight path, swiping at the void with his claws--trying to catch, to hold his position and backtrack.
But there was nothing to be done about it. He fell. And in the falling finally acknowledged that something had gone horribly wrong.
Where he landed, the air was stagnant, and broken. All airfoils quivered, struck with a sudden shift in atmospheric pressure, in the scope of his surroundings. He scanned the area with furious optics, turning, glancing over and around and past his stiffened shoulders. There were the stars above, and a surface below, and the rest seemed out of place, as if scattered about from the deepest coils of a nightmare. From different worlds. He did not fully process it at first.
Three times he tried to contact the warship. Never answers from over the line. His subsequent attempts--four, five...--met only with the faint ring of static, chilling his inner circuitry and the very tips of his claws. The silence stung, and settled ungracefully across an uncharted plain. Another scowling sweep of the area could turn up no better understanding of what exactly had unfolded.
All he could say for certain was that the ground bridge had closed, and that his comm line was either malfunctioning or disconnected completely. Something in the heavens seemed to weep, and heave, and suffocate, but he could not know for sure. A thunderclap? Or a trick of the mind? Oh, if this was someone’s idea of a joke, he thought, they were going to be terribly, terribly sorry.
Yet he knew better--he had experienced some sort of anomaly during transit. The light, the noise, the blinding sensation when he crossed through the bridge... it must have meant something. And indicator, pointing in all the wrong directions.
It soon became apparent to him that he could not pinpoint his location from any reference material in his databanks. There was no fault in his own systems, or so he could interpret from his scans, and so no certain solution to his predicament. He crossed both arms, lost in thought and troubleshooting still, racing all theories and possibilities. Time did not stop now but sped surely on, each tick a resource wasted which he could not control.
He needed to determine his position--exactly where he was, why the bridge had malfunctioned, how he was going to return. His neural net beat and burned with such questions, mapping his options. It was only after with deliberating it that he finally began to proceed--with caution, in a guise of most elegant calm, and a quiet that rivaled that of his surroundings. And when his gaze drifted skyward, he released the tension in his wings, across his shoulders into unnamed and unknown horizon. He could make his way there; he could try to make some sense of all this.
Fueled by such resolve, he began re-calibrating his flight instruments, eyes focused into the expanse to try to locate something, anything familiar. For a place to, once again, begin.
