When Swoop regained consciousness, he was disoriented in the extreme and literally couldn’t recall, for a moment, what had hit him. He easily recalled the battle that had been fought, although he didn’t really remember the reason for it. He recalled Tracks, flying far above his recommended maximum altitude, trying to take on, along with Swoop and Air Raid, four Seekers, in the hope of holding them back until the rest of the Aerialbots arrived on the scene. Swoop remembered Tracks going down in literal flames, a victim of Ramjet’s usual blunt-force battle strategy. Spiraling out of control, he had headed straight toward the forbidding slopes of the largest mountain in the immediate area.

Swoop had had to make a choice between staying in the fight with Air Raid or following Tracks down and rendering the aid that he would quite obviously need, thus leaving Air Raid to deal with the Seekers alone. The Aerialbot had assured Swoop that he could handle it, knowing as he did that his brothers would arrive in a matter of a minute or two. In fact, he had urged Swoop to go after Tracks so, in the end, that had been what Swoop had chosen to do, breaking off his dogged pursuit of Dirge and looping around to follow Tracks down.

Now, as recollection of what had happened after that came slowly back to him, he was almost wishing that he’d chosen the other course of action.

Thick coils of storm clouds had been moving in as Swoop had approached the summit of the mountain, fierce crosswinds and vicious downdrafts pushing relentlessly at him every which way, but he’d at least been able to pinpoint and commit to memory Tracks’s exact location, not far from the mountain’s summit. Swoop had almost made it to his location but had been forced to land short of his goal by weather conditions that seemed to worsen by the millisecond. He’d had a very messy landing, plowing into the snow. He hadn't had the time to transform, but he’d fortuitously ended up only a few hundred meters below Tracks’s crash site. Once transformed and standing, he could see the flames that still rose fitfully from Tracks’s body. They served as a beacon in the whiteout conditions, snow falling and blowing and swirling around him, deep cold brutally biting into his systems. Swoop knew that it was a little before 8AM, local time, but it might as well have been late in the evening; the storm clouds and the snow were blotting out most of the light. Still, despite the environmental conditions, Swoop had a mission, and he needed to keep moving.

He had been laboriously making his way toward Tracks, slowly plowing his way through snow that buckled under his weight, consistently miring him thigh-deep in the stuff, and fighting the 60-degree slope when an almighty, deafening crack had sounded. It was obscenely loud in the thin, high-altitude air, easily loud enough to be heard above the howling gale-force winds. The crack was immediately followed by a rumble that sounded like a close-by freight train and then only increased in volume with every passing millisecond, rumbling in counterpoint with the screaming winds. Mere seconds later, a gigantic wall of snow, ice, and rock had plowed into Swoop, and seconds after that everything had gone black when his body had smacked into something that was larger than he was, very hard, and completely unforgiving.

Now here he was, an indeterminate amount of time later, obviously still buried in snow. There was nothing but impenetrable blackness surrounding him and the sensation of tons of snow and ice pressed against him and weighing down on him. Occasionally, a rumble or a stray, resounding crack passed through the snowpack as it settled, but other than that there was no sound. It was a claustrophobe’s nightmare, really; Swoop was quite literally buried alive.

On the plus side, Swoop currently had plenty of energy to spare, and his diagnostics told him that, for the most part, he was functioning perfectly adequately. There was a persistent, lingering ringing in his head from the impact with whatever-it-had-been, but that was of little concern. His left shoulder and the wing nestled behind it had taken some heavy damage from the initial impact and then from being carried along and buried by the avalanche. He wasn’t sure if the wing damage would be enough to prevent him from flying, but at the moment that wasn’t his highest-priority concern, either. He wasn’t going to be flying anywhere any time soon. Everything else, aside from some dents and lacerations, appeared to be operational. He was a Dinobot and, though not nearly as massive and heavily built as his brothers, he was, nonetheless, physically tougher than just about any Autobot. His comm system appeared to be working, but when he tried to call out, there was only whistling static. So either it wasn't working as well as he thought, or there was interference, or he was simply buried too deeply, so…no help there, at least not for now. He set the system to send out a periodic distress call, hoping that, if the system was working at all, someone would hear and answer his transmission or at least pinpoint his location.

The real challenge of the situation, meanwhile, would be moving whilst buried under tons of snow. On-board gyros at least told him which way was up, so he knew which way to dig, assuming that he'd be able to dig at all. At the moment, his feet were facing toward the surface and freedom, so he was basically “standing” on his head. Unfortunately, other sensors told him that he was about seven meters below the new surface of the snow. It would take some time and effort to dig himself out. He had a sense of urgency about it, though, not really for his own sake so much as for Tracks’s. The flying Corvette had quite obviously been badly damaged, and if he’d been in the path of the avalanche as well…

A shudder ran through Swoop’s body at the thought, but then he determinedly put that scenario out of his mind. He couldn’t think about that now. There was nothing he could do for Tracks unless and until he dug himself out of the snow and ice in which he was entombed, so obviously that problem had to be the priority. Experimentally, he tried to move each of his limbs in turn. He found that he was packed in very tightly for the most part, but he also found that he could move the lower part of his left leg just a tiny bit. It was a place to start…

*****

For perhaps the first time in his life, Swoop was thankful for the fact that he was smaller, lither, and more flexible than his brothers. He’d slowly and laboriously created an egg-like cavern in the snow- and icepack that surrounded him by systematically moving limbs, using simple friction to melt the snow, and then eventually wiggling his whole body back and forth to create room to maneuver around him. Turning around in the cavern he’d created, so that his head was pointing upwards, had been neither easy nor painless, thanks to his damaged shoulder, but he’d managed it, progressively contorting himself into intensely uncomfortable positions until he managed to create enough space to shift himself to a slightly less-uncomfortable one. But, once he had himself oriented correctly, and once he had an arm more or less free, he’d been able to use his weapon, set to its lowest power setting, to melt the snowpack above him. He’d caused numerous cave-ins along the way. The snowpack still unstable in the aftermath of the avalanche, and he was aware that he was risking setting off another avalanche, but it was a risk he'd chosen to take. He’d almost completely depleted his weapon’s charge in the excavation process, but the end result was that he was free.

Then again, once he’d poked his head above the snow’s surface, Swoop felt an instinctive need to dive right back down into his little cavern, where there was shelter from the raging elements.

He’d thought it had been windy when he’d landed on the mountain, but that was as a gentle breeze compared to what was blowing now. As he’d emerged from his crawlspace, he was nearly flattened by the wind that pounded at him. It was still snowing, too, and it was pitch-black; Swoop’s chronometer told him that it was only 7PM, local time, but the storm made it seem as if it was much later than that. Nevertheless, it had taken him eleven hours to dig himself out of his situation, most of it spent simply in the effort to turn himself over.

Now, external sensors told him that it was -38 degrees, without factoring in the wind, certainly cold enough to have an effect on his systems if he was subjected to long-term exposure; he would need to keep moving while exposed or else first his joints and then his various systems would begin to lock up and freeze. And he knew that it would only get colder as the night progressed. For a moment, Swoop looked longingly back at his crawlspace. The only thing that kept him from diving back into it was the knowledge that Tracks was out there, injured, and that he’d perhaps been exposed to the brutal elements for every one of the hours that it had taken Swoop to unbury himself. Swoop shivered, and it was a shiver that, for now, had nothing at all to do with the cold.

Running a sensor sweep to pinpoint his current location, Swoop discovered that the avalanche had dragged him more than 1,000 meters down the mountain from his original landing site. He had quite the climb ahead of him now to reach Tracks, and it would be very much a trial and error process until sunrise or until the storm cleared. For now, there was no light. Infrared revealed nothing to him, either, since there were no sources of heat. Swoop could guide himself only by sensors that would not necessarily reveal to him the pitfalls that might await him on any course that he chose to follow until it was too late to do anything other than turn around and try again. He would be climbing blindly, but there was no help for it. Flying was out of the question. He could barely stand in the wind without being knocked down by it, much less accomplish anything resembling controlled flight even if his wing hadn’t been damaged.

Swoop’s only consolation was that he knew where Tracks was, if he’d been out of the path of the avalanche. If it had caught him, too…Best not to think on that, Swoop decided. Rather, he did the only thing that he could do under the circumstances: Pointing himself at Tracks’s last known location, hunching down to offer the smallest amount of wind resistance possible, Swoop began to head up the mountain, hoping for the best

Okey-dokes. Set up is done now, so it’s time for the “fun” stuff. Yay for disaster stories! ;)

Then again…We are moving (FINALLY!) and although we’re physically living in our new place now, we still have TONS of unpacking to do. Plus, we have no intertubes at the new place yet, so I have to do ‘Net stuff on the sly at work. But, I wanted to get this up, anyway, short as it is.