Chapter I
Collision
By: Landray Depth Charge
It was bright.
Very, very bright.
Barricade's muddled mind had yet to finish booting up, even so, it was trying to assess where it was that he'd wound up.
Fuzzed sensors turned online with all the speed of dialup Internet, slowly sweeping over his current surroundings. Once he got past the blinding light and his optic sensory array adjusted to it, the first thing he saw was what appeared to be a workbench to his left. To his right, another car, one he didn't recognize. That wasn't what startled and worried the Decepticon; it was the fleshbag humans working on the other car that did. More systems rebooted, and with each one came a little more of Barricade's consciousness. He was in a garage, beneath lights. Vaguely, the Ford Mustang likened it to being on the operating table back home, and he remembered just how pleasant those moments tended to be. Having ones innards pulled out and worked on while one was still very much awake was not an experience Barricade ever wanted to relive. Like a gunshot, it hit him as his internal computer resumed full working capacity:
He was in a garage.
Someone was touching him.
And, oh sweet Primus above, the pain.
The man draped over the Ford's backseat paused as the vehicle shuddered, literally, underneath him. Sitting up, he reached up with a well worked and well-dirtied hand, plucking the smashed cigarette from between his lips as the grease monkey slid back out of the car. "Awake finally, eh?" he drawled, accent heavily New York.
Barricade just sat there, still.
Mike's coworkers didn't even look up. "Looks like ya took quite the hit," the
repairman continued, undaunted by the silence. "I juss got ya in here an' I'm workin' on
th' pass'ger side, hammerin' out th' dent. Though 'dent' is a bit of 'n' understatement."
The fleshling was speaking to him.
Why, for the love of the Allspark, was it speaking to him?
"Whatever got you, got you good, man, let me tell you." Mike Romano paused long enough to meander behind the police cruiser and up to the workbench where all of his tools were located. "Found ya last night in Queens," he said over his shoulder at the driver's side. "Motorin' in circles blind. Ya really got to sayin' some weird shit, man."
Barricade continued to play the part of the unintelligent automobile. Agony throbbed through his nuerocircuitry, but his computer couldn't pinpoint exactly where it was coming from, creating the sensory illusion that his entire body ached. The muscle car kept his nonscrambled arrays firmly on the carbon-based life form despite, watching Romano as he picked through tools, organizing them. To Barricade, some of those things on the bench might as well have been primitive torture devices, especially when he got a good scan of the multiple saw blades hanging on the wall. Interesting decorum. The Decepticon's anxiety only keened after spotting the torches and grinders.
Picking up a small rubber sledgehammer, Mike tossed out the cigarette and sauntered back around, this time circumventing the bashed-in front end of the soundless Mustang. "Aw, c'mon. Ya ain't hidin' nothing by not talkin'. I'd like t'know what in hell ya got yu'sself into that screwed ya up this bad."
It was bad. There was no denying that fact. Barricade himself had trouble remembering what had caved in his passenger side so severely, and didn't recall what it was precisely that he'd struck after the initial impact that had crushed his grill and ram guard.
Oh, wait.
It was a garbage truck.
If it was possible, the Ford, for all intents and purposes, wilted at the realization that he'd fallen victim to being t-boned by a garbage truck. The second collision, as he began to remember, had been his front end connecting rather violently with a cement light pole, or something of similar construction, some time later. Not only had be been owned by a trash retrieval truck, but apparently he'd taken off after the wreck, lost consciousness at some point, and smashed grill first into a pole. Oh, the embarrassment. Romano peered again at the passenger side of the Ford Mustang sitting in his garage. It was trashed from front fender to rear, bowed in grotesquely from some severe, probably high-speed impact. He hadn't been able to get the panels to disconnect from the rest of the car in order to bang the monstrous dent out, but he blamed that on the Ford's presumed unique physiology. Th' thing's bein' stubborn. Wonder if it's been wand'rin' N'York for long, Mike Romano mused to himself as he lit another cigarette.
Personally, Danny Fowler thought his boss had lost his mind. There was a lot of weirdness to be seen in all parts of New York City, but happening on a car that drove itself was just beyond the mechanics ability to comprehend. Seeing Mike jabbering on to that cop cruiser wasn't helping matters any. Leaning over the engine block of the red Honda Del Sol, Fowler just stared at his boss, blonde head tilted ever so slightly to one side. Strange enough it was for the N.Y.P.D. to send over one of their wrecked cruisers to Greasemonkey's at all, but add the odd behavior on top and that made for one fruity cake on a Saturday morning.
"A'ight," Mike continued, still examining the damage thoughtfully. "Ain't gonna talk, I'll just work in silence 'til ya decide ta chat, eh?"
He'd work more on the chassis later. Dropping the sledgehammer back on the workbench, Michael Romano rounded the front of the Ford and took a good, hard look. The ram guard would need to come off and be replaced. The grill needed to be hammered back out. Who knew what sort of engine damage had been done; the radiator was probably trashed.
Well, never a better time, right?
Rough fingers dug beneath the lip of the jet-black hood, searching for the release latch. Barricade tensed, focused entirely on this insect and his hands. The last place he wanted those greasy little fingers was his engine compartment – where his spark was, buried beneath layers and layers of other essential circuitry and equipment. But this guy was a mechanic. He took engines apart for a living. Mike grunted and heard a satisfying click; a release in tension on the heavy metal covering was the reward for his efforts thus far. Turning his hands palm-up, he lifted the hood and peered in. For the two seconds Romano had the engine exposed, he was impressed with the amount of clean chrome he saw, but that blinking surprise was quickly overtaken by shock as the car below him made a sound akin to 'HUARG!' and the hood in his hands yanked free, violently slamming back down.
The entire garage had gone silent.
"Ya all right, boss?" Fowler ventured to ask.
"M'fine," Michael muttered, staring down at the police cruiser.
It was the first proof that he'd truly gotten aside from the night before that what he was dealing with was real. There was always that possibility that what he'd seen last night had been a product of an over consumption of Crown, but not now. I'm totally sober, an' this car juss moved on its own. His coworkers were still eyeballing him as if he'd grown two heads as Mike Romano scratched at the back of his cranium, thinking. Now what? I got me a talkin', self-movin' car. Now what the fuck do I do wit it?
"Okay," Michael started unsurely to himself, biting his lower lip. "I'll start workin' on this a little later."
Someone else spoke up. "Ought'n we have it done for the N.Y.P.D. as soon as we can?"
"This thing ain't belongin' to any cop station, Manny," replied Romano. "Not this one. I dunno who he belongs to, but it ain't the fuzz."
If only you knew, bonebag.
Who is Survival: Earth?
The answer is simple.
We are a close-knit, friendly community of transfans who have all gathered together from different corners of the world, united by one single fandom: Transformers 2007/2009. We started back in 2007, August to be precise, and have continued to play to this day. After the 2009 movie came out, seeing as how the board itself had taken onto it's own continuity, we took elements and characters from RotF and added them, gaining Starscream, the Nemesis, all the hatchlings on it, and characters such as Sideswipe, Mudflap, Skids, Rampage, Grindor, and Jetfire.
We are a well-educated board, delighting in posts full of rigor and depth that read more like a fanfic than an RPG forum. In this, we pride ourselves greatly.
But!
We still have many canon characters available for play! Come one, come all, we welcome and desire new RPG players to enter and involve themselves in one of the most well thought out, well-rounded RPG boards you'll find (I know. I've managed 4 boards myself so far and been an active member on over 12).
Bumblebee, Jetfire, Skids, Mudflap, Chromia, Demolisher, Scalpel (the Doctor), Rampage, Epps, Graham, General Moreshower, and Mikaela Banes are all still available for audition! Come out and meet us!
http:// survivalearth. yuku. com/