It was mid-afternoon. The lone sun of this single star system hung lazily in the pit of the sky, dragging over the circumference in its slow descent towards the horizon. After vorns of desolation away from living Cybertronian kind, the atmosphere healed over: thick smoke stacks of ever-burning factories dissipated, and the orange hazy smog that once layered thick the entirety of Kaon vanished. Mid-day heat was no longer a sweltering, miserable affair that burned into top plating and seeped right into the groves and seams.
Shockwave finds that traveling through the city and its perimeter to be less taxing on his frame. Before, it was impossible to step outside and return without a layer of ash and dust veiling his featureless mask for a face, obscuring his already limited vision. Now, he was granted full visibility well over 20 meters on his forward path, bypassing the need to waste power on directional sensors. Clearing the full length of Neo-Kaon, he crossed over the border to travel down into a neighboring land: the Deadman's. An entire sector carved out into a straight fixture of mining facilities entrenched into the topography of the desert.
What was once empty flatlands now steeply dropped into a subsurface plateau. A sophisticated network of tunnels and refineries winding even deeper than what could be seen.
Stepping dangerously close to the corner edge, the logician peered down into the caverns, casting a wide glance over the forgotten architecture that forever sleeps in this hole. He could still hear the loud crash-bang of the drill pips dropping their full weight into the pits with their strapped pulleys laboring them up the derrick for another plunge.
His destination lies within the middle building, beyond the refinery, and deep into the caverns itself. There existed no functional electric grid, leaving the facility to lay dead as Shockwave passed through it, forcing him to cram a crowbar into air-tight locks and break the seals for prohibited entry. There exists enough strength in his only working arm to jam the curved end of his tool into hydraulic doors and pry them open wide for his broad form to slip through. He repeated this process several times before he dipped into the actual mineral deposit. No need for any gadget to ping the strong, chemical scent of raw energon that his own starved body could recognize.
A faint iridescent glow shined over one of the drops in this cavern, leading Shockwave towards it. He only intended to carve a sizable batch to synthesize for a half vorn. At least, he had outlined this straightforward plan up until he crossed the threshold of when the glow saturated the cavern walls to meet a dark rigid shape disturbing the ethereal ambience.
There was no mistake — it was a bot. Shockwave couldn't discern any visual specifics other than they were present and it appears they were not a new arrival, on account of their lax, non-urgent frame language.
Cradling what meager amount he managed to gather into a single servo, he ripped his vocoder to life with an alerting scratch before his voice projected from it, " what are you doing here? "
Closed — @doddering-egoist