@seekerofintegrity
The little sparkling came back online to the sound of screaming klaxons and thick, dark smoke permeating the cabin of the shuttle, and she was frightened.
She immediately began looking around for her creator, her EM field instinctively casting out in search of his comforting presence, but she did not see nor feel him. The sparkling (a seekerlet, incredibly young, still in her initial chubby protoform-frame, with wide crimson optics and silver plating accented with conservative blue highlights) trilled fearfully, calling out for him, but he did not answer.
Tiny fingers fumbled with her safety harness, struggling to undo the clasps that kept her safely anchored to the seat. Where was her Creator? He was not in her sight. The last thing she could remember was that he had been sitting at the controls, trying to control their freefalling craft as they descended into the atmosphere. Where had he gone? Once free of the harness, she clambered down from the seat to look for him. Frightened and in pain from the numerous dings, dents, and ugly scratches she’d gotten from their crash landing, she inched her way through the warped shuttle.
She found a broken body further back in the cockpit. It was beyond her knowledge how he could have gotten there, but there was something terribly wrong with how still he laid, how his normally bright red optics were dull, how his mouth was frozen in a terrified snarl. There was a pool of energon, bright blue, gathering beneath him. She did not see the shrapnel embedded in his chest.
“Papa,” she whimpered, and crept to his side, her hand shaking his shoulder. When she got no response, she shook it again, more insistently, “P-Papa! Wake up!”
He laid there, unmoving, and this frightened and upset her. She was young, and naive, and had no concept of death, and so perhaps this confusion was to be expected. She shook his shoulder again, but he did not awaken. She reached out with her EM field to him, but did not feel the familiar, comforting buzz of his field against her own - she felt nothing, nothing at all, not even the dormant presence of a bot in slumber. She bit her lip, fearfully pondering this, but decided that he must just be in a very deep recharge. Why else would he not wake up?
Well. She would have to wait for him to wake up, now, wouldn’t she? The seekerlet settled in close to him to wait, a tiny ball of silver tucked next to his red-and-orange side, blissfully unaware of the danger she was in as the fires grew closer and closer to the fuel tank of the craft.
