Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I find it fascinating,” Tarn begins, to a captive audience. “How our musical tastes might… ossify, over time.”

Sideload dangles from metal chains in what was once a slaughterhouse, used to farm a long-extinct beast of burden by a long extinct alien species. Both types of skeletons piled up in the ashen wastes outside, all life on the planet having been eradicated in an extinction event over a thousand years ago. Sideload came to the planet as part of the Autobot security detail on an expedition of explorers investigating whatever kind of calamity had befallen the planet that all life blinked out so quickly.

The D.J.D. had taken up residence on the planet some time later, and set about restoring the structure to its original purpose.

Tarn had extracted none of this information from him directly. But the NAILs had their uses.

“I imagine, if you still had a functional throat, you would say something along the lines of ‘just kill me already, don’t talk to me about music,’ but I find these conversations to be... an oddly necessary part of my work.”

“I do.” Sideload spits hot oil at Tarn’s frame, which is an impressive feat for someone who has just had a sublight drive hooked up to his spark casing, and continues with “And you can go—” before launching into a string of curses so utterly visceral that Tarn was certain every other M.T.O. in his batch must have felt it in their spark.

If any of them still functioned, anyway.

Tarn wipes the oil off his faceplate, unphased.

“At the core, one might almost mistake music for a science. Something that can be rotely memorized, and perfected through sheer single-minded repetition. Regimented notes written on the page, played without deviation.” Tarn says. He’s sure Sideload would agree, were he not presently in the process of being electrified. “But so much of music lies in the listener, not the performance. One develops a certain hostility to music created after a certain point in the development of their neural cluster. Even a piece one loves can elicit smaller and smaller reactions, until you find yourself growing sick of it.”

Tarn kicks the sublight drive into recharge mode, granting Sideload a reprieve from the ceaseless agony of a starship’s engine coursing through his spark.

“There’s a piece I used to love myself, until I grew so familiar with it that I could only hear the imperfections. The notes unplayed. I became so acquainted with a single song that I found myself almost comforted by its absence.” Tarn says. “I imagine you’re also familiar with it.”

Tarn walks to the far corner of the room, where a large crate sits. He digs his hands into the crate, rummaging around for an object.

“But I reserve a certain place in my spark for… individual expressions. Twists on an established formula. Did you know those humans you Autobots love so much recorded a tribute version of the Empyrean Suite?” Tarn says, producing a vinyl record that seems tiny in the phase-sixer’s hands. “I found the irony most amusing. Shall we listen to it together for the first time, Sideload?”

The Lost Light,
Deep Space
Earlier.

“No, Swerve.” Ratchet says, palm firmly pressed his forehead. He slumps over his drink, considering the magnitude of stupidity involved in Swerve’s latest ‘quest,’ and how best to dissuade him of it. He settles on: “Just no.”

“C’mon!” Swerve slams his hands on the bar, as he usually does when he’s unnecessarily devoted to a terrible idea. “It’s a good song, and I ain’t gonna let those cog-munchers in the D.J.D. act like they’ve got a monopoly on it.”

“You don’t even know who’s on the ship.” Ratchet says. “Rodimus just shouted on the P.A. that we have humans on board.”

“Attention everyone!” Rodimus had called through the Last Light’s intercom system. “We have a few unexpected, cough-human-cough, visitors on board after a slight ‘teleporter not-our-fault-this-time’, so everyone please watch where you’re walking and make sure all choking hazards and sharp pointy bits are squared away and accounted for. We don’t expect them to be on board the ship for longer than a couple hours.”

“Wait for it.” Swerve said, pointing up to the speaker.

“Til all are one. Rodimus out.”

The crowd at Swerve’s started hooting and hollering.

“There’s humans on board.” Tailgate says, conspiratorially, doubled over from a panicked run from the hallway.

“Human celebrities!” Swerve points out, waving Tailgate over to the growing conspiracy huddle at the bar. It consists entirely of him and Ratchet, so it’s not much of a huddle yet, but Swerve lives in hope. “Or else he wouldn’t be making the effort.”

“Or ambassadors, or dignitaries, or Skywatch.” Ratchet offers.

“I’m more partial to Unit E.” Swerve shrugs. “But my money’s on Ryan Reynolds.”

“Who?” Tailgate asks.

“I don’t think he even sings.” Ratchet says.

“Well, root for me anyway, because I’ve got a hundred shanix on it.” Swerve smiles. “But even on the off chance I’m wrong, I’m still going to ask whoever it is to get involved in our cultural exchange project for the good of Cybertron.”

“This ship is the size of New York. Is anyone watching the humans?”

“New York?”

“The city Megatron destroyed--”

“I’m more partial to Philadephia.” Swerve says. “You see that show Always Sunny​? It’s a riot. I like to think of us as The One Where They—”

“Swerve.” Ratchet says, holding up a hand. “You’re being evasive.”

“Rodimus said he was taking care of it.” Swerve says, and goes back to cleaning the bar.

“Lets see.” Drift says, shuffling the database and picking out the holographic portraits of all unaccounted-for personnel. Humans on board his ship was one thing. Having to update three hundred personnel records to account for their potential ‘human-mangling risk’ was another entirely. But Magnus demanded a safety report, and none of them were particularly willing to tell the little-big guy to drop it. “We’ve got recent location data for Spoke, Lockstock, Outrage, Stormchaser, Metalhead, Auxcord and… Jet-flix?”

“Run that last one by me one more time.” Rodimus says, tossing the combat knife in the air with one hand and effortlessly catching it with the other.

“Light blue. Seeker. Unwarranted levels of self-importance.” Drift says.

“Aw man,” Rodimus says, bringing a hand to his forehead. “I thought that was Slipstream.”

Drift stares at him for far too long. “Why would you allow Slipstream on board?”

“Come on, who wouldn’t want to have a seeker on the team?”

“She’s Slipstream.”

“Anyway,” Rodimus claps his hands together, changing the subject. “Unless it turns out we have another six or seven stowaways we picked up on Hedonia, it sure sounds like that might be everyone on board the ship. So, we’ll ping the data over to Magnus and he can do the rounds making sure they don’t poke anyone’s squishy, organic eyes out. Sorted.”

“And the, uh, Holograms?”

“We’ve got Team Rodimus looking into whatever kind of accident dumped them on our vessel in the first place. If the brain trust can’t figure it out, I don’t think anyone can.” Rodimus offers a carefree shrug. He likes it when his problems resolve themselves. It makes him feel like a good leader. “In the mean time, Whirl volunteered to mind them until we can figure out what’s going in with their teleportation problem. Says he picked up a love of, uh, Earth music back during his Wrecker days.”

Drift pauses for a moment. His optical receptors blink once, and then again.

“Rod, run that one by me one more time.” Drift begins, incredulously. “You left the fleshy, fragile humans aboard our ship in the care of the Autobot unstable enough to get kicked out of the Wreckers.”

Rodimus sits there for a moment, unblinking.

“The Autobot literally made out of knives.”

Rodimus makes a face, pushes off his desk, and runs for the doorway.

Chapter Text

The Lost Light
2014-ish.

Rodimus is lying on a table, covered in wires, hoping that a combination of potent hallucinogenics, Drift’s spectralist mantras, and a medically-induced Voluntary Shutdown Module plugged straight into his spark might induce a the kind of spiritual clarity that will show him the true face of Primus.

Maybe that will be the thing that leads them straight to the Knights of Cybertron. He figures that maybe, just maybe, everyone deserves a quicker resolution to their quest.

Also, the process is excruciating, and Rodimus doesn’t like himself.

That part is the part that most springs to mind when he awakens to find Rung staring over him, fussing over whether he’s alright.

“Never better,” Rodimus grunts, forcing himself upright and yanking out the wires.

“Well, it might be a better idea to do this in the M.A.R.B.¹ next time. As much as I enjoy having visitors in my office.” Rung quirks his mouth into a slight smile. “Though if you want to speak about your efforts to induce a sort of retroactive primus apotheosis, I do believe we can sit down and have a fascinating conversation togeth—”

“Maybe another time.” Rodimus glances around. “Is Mags still walking laps around my office?”

“Cataloguing all the new arrivals, yes.” Rung offers. "I've heard Riptide could use a hand with the datawork, if you're—”

“Sure, I'll help with the rubsign. Plus, I better…” Rodimus says, trying to come up with a plausible excuse to walk out. He fails miserably. “Make sure Magnus includes Blaster.”

Rung takes off his eyeglass and wipes them down with a cloth, and Rodimus feels like he’s about to have his face on the next edition of the information dump they give to MTO Therapists.

“And Toaster.” Rodimus offers, finally, and walks out without another word.

It turns out Magnus had accounted for both of them, alongside members of that family tree that Rodimus has never heard of, let alone allowed onto the ship, which becomes a whole logistical nightmare and a half when it turns out Blister’s alt form chews up engex like it’s nobody’s business. So after that was resolved by a few trips to Swerve’s, it’s just him and Magnus and Chromedome and Rewind in his office, trying to figure out whether they're done for the cycle.

"Just," Rodimus feels his joints groaning as he slumps down in his chair behind the desk. "Tell me we're close to finished."

“That's everyone accounted for.” Rewind says. “Except the co-captain. Should we...”

“Ha! Don’t worry about it.” Rodimus says. Deep down, he still doesn’t want to acknowledge that Prime shunted Megatron onto his ship and usurped his authority on little more than a pinkie promise for good behavior and a salvaged Autobot badge. “We can clean that mess up—”

Later.

Rodimus is running down the corridors with the urgency of a situation so bad that even the second-in-command he appointed to be a Yes Man knows the plan is terrible.

He runs there so quick, in fact, that he doesn’t actually know what direction he’s going in. So he pulls up an interface and gets to swiping fast enough to put together a frequency.

“Rodimus.” Calls Minimus, maintaining his armor in the fuzzy little message screen.

“Minimus! I need to borrow your location data for a tiny clean-up of a not-problem.”

“Rodimus," Minimus says. "I shouldn't have to remind you that mass surveillance of the crew by someone who is not an appointed officer of the Law is—”

“There's humans on the ship and they're trapped in a room with Whirl.”

Minimus Ambus stares blankly into the interface. He says nothing, the location data of the humans appears on Rodimus’s HUD in short order.

“Thank you.” Rodimus calls.

“I expect you to file the requisite—”

Rodimus ends the call. He bounds a corner and comes to a brief stop at the hangar bay door and realises, in one sad, defeated moment, where they had trapped the almost-certainly-dead humans.

“Aw, man.” He mutters. “Not in the Rodpod.”

“—anyway, once I realized it was burned out beyond all reasonable repair, I decided to indulge in one of life’s great pleasures: chucking something expensive down a long hallway.” Whirl ends the story with a dramatic flourish, sat behind a grand piano that looked remarkably un-scratched for being played by someone with knives for hands. “Hey boss, I was just showing them my take on Arethra Franklin.”

The humans look confused, but decidedly un-mangled.

“Hum-- Holograms!” Rodimus claps his hands together as he corrects himself, dusting his chassis down before leaning all casual-like on a doorframe the size of a skyscraper. “And-- You’re not part of the band.”

Stormer, who has introduced herself to Rodimus three times, offers a little wave. He still doesn’t remember her name. “I’m just here with my—”

“Junxie.” The red one clasps her hands together, energetically blurting out: “Which is a way cooler name than what we call it.”

Well, the cultural exchange is going better than he expected.

“All, uh, good?”

“...Yes?” the bright pink one says. Well, they all look bright pink, but one of them makes bright pink her entire thing. “We’re fine, Rodimus."

“Cool. Cool, cool cool.” Rodimus says, trying and failing to look like he’s in control of the situation. “I’m glad you’re making yourselves acquainted with Whirl, formerly of the Wreckers. You’re onboard my personal shuttle, the—”

“Podimus!” the red one says.

Rodimus pauses for a second, narrowing his ocular receptors. It’s a better name, which is the worst part.

“While you’re on board my Podimus, I hope you’ll make full use of the onboard amenities. There’s a Fullstasis table in the back, plus a Basketrek hoop, and—”

“Really, we’re fine.” the pink one says. He thinks she’s Jem, and the others are the Holograms. “Just, eager to get home.”

“All limbs still attached? Still, uh, breathing organically?”

“Really, Rodimus.” Whirl offers. “This isn’t my first time minding squishy flesh-sacks.”

Hearing that doesn’t really put anyone at ease.

“Anyway,” Rodimus claps his hands together. “Let’s get this mess sorted out as quickly as possible. How did you all get here?”

The 113, Santa Monica
Yesterday

Pizzazz is sprawled out on the couch in the green room, tuning her guitar before the gig, when the portal opens.

“Oh, hey Storm.”

“You’re always so normal when I show up.” Stormer laughs. “It’s like I’m expecting torches and pitchforks—”

“You’re literally my best friend.” Pizzazz shrugs. “Just, with a friggin’ cool robot arm.”

“And a few years of rough living.” Stormer offers a nervous laugh, flexing her prosthetic. It whines loud enough to remind her that she needs to feed it oil. “So cool. But it’s good to see you, too.”

“Other Me acting up?”

“Worse. Turns out there’s a hidden subroutine in Synergy called Silica, and—”

“I think we got that one already.”

“That’s why I’m here.” Stormer smiles. “Go fetch your girlfriend?”

“Don’t boss me, Storm. How’d you lose your arm, anyway?”

“You get to the Inhumanoids?” Stormer asks. “Or is that a, um, spoiler?”

“Don’t think we have those. Jetta caught a Fatal Fluffy while we were scouting around looking for an evil lair, though.”

“...Kimber’s right. Your timeline is busted.” Stormer mutters. “You do deserve a lair, though.”

Finally, Pizzazz thinks. Someone gets it.

Pizzazz folds her arms as Jerrica explains the rest of the story. From there, it was a straight shot to assembling the Holograms, Jemworld Stormer explaining that they needed to teach the rebels on Jemworld how to fight Silica’s mind control tactics, and another painful dive through a portal until they woke up in a ship that looked like the cube from Cube with giant robots looming over them. More giant robots arrive in the meantime. Both of them had introduced themselves to her with less... showmanship. Nautica was... intense, and very heavy on the technobabble. Drift had spent about an hour explaining how he believed their arrival was a portent for his religion, which appeared to be based primarily on color theory, which Kimber is about ninety percent of the way to becoming a semi-ironic adherent of.

“Synergy, how are we still live?” Jerrica asks, the thought finally striking her.

It’s a pertinent question, because when they were teleported to Jemworld it took hijacking a local SynergyHub before she could project Jem again. She’s Jem, now, which at least deserves some explanation.

Synergy appears in her holographic form, all teal and purple like a special edition Game Boy Color, because there’s little reason to hide her presence on a city-sized ship filled with alien robots. Nautica hovers around her trying to study the technology that powers her.

“I rerouted power to boost my effective signal range during the last shutdown, the day you returned from Jemworld.” Synergy pauses, calculating for a moment. “I did not expect it to boost my range this far.”

“So we’re still in our universe.” Jerrica says.

“Just a long way from Earth.” Rodimus offers. “Unless these other versions of you are around to get shunted back into your places.”

“They’re...” Jerrica purses her lips. “Very dead.”

“Except for Kimber and I.” Stormer says.

“We got schlorped when other us jumped over.” Kimber says, with a sort of frantic excitement at getting to explain all this that belies the fact she’s talking about being sent to a glitter and gold post-apocalypse. “The people at Bordertown were so nice, even if they wondered how I cut my hair so quickly.”

“...And how my arm grew back.” Stormer offers, with a laugh. “But… we’re here.”

“So organics do work off the same rules.” Rodimus says.

The Holograms look confused, so Nautica tries to explain: “Think of it like… Omega's Conundrum. Or Chromedinger’s Box, pick your metaphor."

Kimber winces. She always hates hearing about what they’re putting that poor cat through.

“Someone from our crew must have been sent over.” Rodimus scratches his large metal robot chin, visibly pretending to be deep in thought. Even for a car-sized robot, it’s clear that he’s mostly just confused.

“But, who?” Drift asks. “Rod, everyone on this ship’s accounted for.”

Rodimus pauses for a moment, before it hits him.

“...Except the co-captain.”

Jemworld.
Now.

Megatron stares out upon a wasteland of burnished gold towers, glittering in the fires of revolution.

“Feh…” He spits, as soon as the realization tugs upon his spark-wires.

He has seen this world in countless forms, and would recognize it in countless more: Earth. Of all the planets to be stranded upon in another dimension, it has to be the singular planet that has so disrupted his destiny.

“Ah, Rodimus. What are you playing at this time?” Megatron tosses the Rodimus Star, and catches the faintest glimpse of a smirk in the reflection of the burnished gold as he holds it in an outstretched palm. “...and why must the burden always fall upon my shoulders?”

Chapter Text

Humanity.

One hundred thousand years of convergent evolution. Which, admittedly, places them among the very least developed sentient species in the galaxy, but it provides enough time for a species to learn decorum.

Yet the best that this planet, a planet and people that have thwarted him an utterly embarrassing number of times, can manage... is tying him to ground with cables.

They’re not even good cables.

If he still held his full potential, this would have been a trivial predicament to escape. But months of ingesting only Fool’s Energon at the behest of the Lost Light’s doctors had taken its toll on his systems. Even without it, he was not exactly as spry as he used to be.

Were that his mind any less sharp.

“That’s, uh—” Calls the leader of the group. A rebel leader, he knew, having grown very good at identifying dissident elements within a planet's population over millennia of war.

Organics. A large group of them; some fighters and more just there to gawk. Gives him Atrophosia just thinking about it.

“Definitely Megatron.”

“Who were you expecting?” Megatron asks, flatly. “Jem and the Holograms?”

Stormer scratches at her cheek with her prosthetic hand.

The Lost Light
Now.

Kimber dangles her arms over the diagnostic equipment, having snuck out of the watchful gaze of the Knife Chicken in the Podimus to keep Synergy company while Nautica analyses her for any indications as to ‘extraterrestrial origin’ of the technology.

Apparently, they’ve had more than a few run-ins with holographic tech.

Kimber barely understands any of what they’re doing or saying, but it’s deeply cool to take all the alien technology in as they display data in their cool robot languages that weave together like cogs turning in a machine. For her part, Synergy’s holographic avatar is very blue and ‘sat’ very patiently on the medical bed, acting as a conduit so their technology can analyze her mainframe back on earth.

“She’s a cool alien robot, right?” Kimber asks, expectantly.

“There’s next to nothing in here that suggests her origins are anything but human in origin.” Nautica pauses, looking over the readout a second or third time before making her final conclusion on what Synergy was really made of. “Some high-level similarities to what you'd find in a holo-generator, but there's only really so many different ways you can project light."

“If she was, we’d have destroyed her on our way off-planet.” Ratchet, who introduced himself as the chief medical officer, offers. He carries himself like the oldest person Kimber has ever met, or at the very least the most tired. “Prime’s orders.”

“The truck one.” Kimber nods, having picked that up through a combination of osmosis and remembering the news reports of him fighting the big gray robot with a gun on his arm when she was very young. “Convoy.”

“Optimus.” Ratchet corrects her. “But I do have an explanation for some of the similarities, even if it might not be a particularly satisfying one.”

Kimber claps her hands together, excited.

“Kimber Benton.” Ratchet thinks, trying to place the name. “So, your father was Dr. Emmett Benton?”

“Yeah!" Kimber nods, with the same breathless enthusiasm that drove her down the rabbit hole of combing through hundreds of hours of home movies for hints that she might've been adopted a few months back.

“I had contact with him, a couple of years before we got thrust into the spotlight on Earth.” Ratchet says. There’s a slight twitch to his hands as he taps at the display, and once Kimber notices it, she can’t stop focusing on it. “Our holomatter disguises were lacking, we never quite got the faces right, so I attempted to make contact with practitioners of similar technologies on Earth. Dr. Benton was closest, and among the best.”

“...Oh my god.” Kimber blinks. “Dad knew alien robots.”

“Only briefly.” Ratchet offers a quiet laugh. “He just told me what he told all the other interested parties: that his technology wasn’t for sale.”

“…Yeah,” Kimber says, glancing down. She understands the secrecy, even if she thinks it was one of about a dozen factors that led to her father’s health declining. “He always used to get, like, real worried about what would happen if someone got a hold of it.”

“He was right.” Ratchet says, and glances over to the shimmering hologram on the medical bed. "But a few days later, we received a care package of references from an unknown source. Observation data, human phrases, and good habits to pick up if we wanted to negotiate a better relationship with humans. All neatly packaged up and translated into a language nobody on Earth should've been able to decipher, let-alone speak."

Synergy, sat on the bed, offers a non-committal shrug of her shoulders, just like she and Kimber had practiced.

"...And I'm starting to figure out who that was." Ratchet huffs, amused.

“Can you do me next?” Kimber asks.

Nautica makes the closest Cybertronian equivalent to a blink, which Kimber finds hilarious. “Pardon?”

“When you’re done analyzing my cool, not-alien robot sister.” Kimber reaches up with her hands, opening and closing them. “I’ve kinda always felt like… not one-hundred-percent human.”

Ratchet looks over to Nautica while Kimber stares expectantly, hoping they’ll at least humour her.

"...She would've melted upon contact with the teleporter." Nautica offers.

“I know. Cross-reference her cellular data with the fusion tube batch of infiltrator units, anyway.” Ratchet says, shaking his head. “It’ll be under File SF-11-3. I can’t rule out the Decepticons getting sloppy with their infiltration protocol.”

It turns out it’s really hard to play basketball when the ball is taller than you are and, more importantly, also a robot , so Aja sits on the sidelines with the erstwhile Captain while playing a particularly interesting version of her favourite game to play at parties: So, Who’s That Guy?

Rodimus seems pretty content to humour her while the more human-sized robots are figuring out some kind of holographic solution to making the Rodpod’s basketball court more human-accessible. Aja’s not getting involved in the technological side of things right now, because she’s pretty sure she’ll get thrown in a black van and interrogated by the Men In Black for knowing too much if she ever starts to work the alien robot car tech into any of her regular car projects. She's not getting involved in the spiritual side of things, because Rodimus's samurai second in command is walking around the ship telling everyone that'll listen that the 'rainbow-colored saints of Spectralism' are going to lead them to unlock the mysteries of the universe. And while being the saint of a weird space robot religion sounds really cool, Aja's a homebody at heart, and she'd rather get back to her garage.

So, who's that guy?

Swerve. Bartender. Metalworker. Talks too much. Tailgate is a ten billion year old garbage disposal bot. Cyclonus has a cool sword. Rewind films too much. Minimus? Magnus? Little guy with a big moustache, barely taller than she is.

“Dude.” Aja says, after a while of Rodimus listing out his crew members. It’s around when he gets to the ones that aren’t around any more that she feels the need to change the subject, because the robot’s getting a bit wistful and sad and regretful. She’s been sitting on the perfect change-of-topic for a bit, trying to see whether Rodimus would bring it up unprompted. “We’ve literally met before.”

Rodimus stares blankly.

SAN DIEGO COMIC CON
Years Ago.

It’s during the brief period between ‘everyone on the planet hates us’ and ‘everyone on the planet hates us even more ,’ where Optimus Prime was concerned with making the Autobots more palatable to human consumption. Kibble was in fashion, because it reminded humans that they transform into things that are palatable to him. Most of the personable bots, the ones who were the least visibly affected by four million years of fighting the war, were brought to the front.

Great time to be Bumblebee, Rodimus remembers.

They were there to help humanity, so they needed to come across a little more ‘cuddly and friendly robot pals’ than ‘giant robot conquerer.’ That’s not how Prime said it, his exact words were ‘peace is won and lost through public opinion,’ but that was how it came across to Rodimus at the time.

Of course, Rodimus volunteered. Prime needed something done, so he was going to do it, but he wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect.

So Rodimus (and he was Rodimus already, then) found himself sat at an oversized but still way too small for the average Cybertronian table at an overcrowded convention center, fiddling with the pen they gave him and drawing a map on the blank side of the posters the convention printed for him to sign. He remembers the crowd on the other side of the convention hall, where Bumblebee had set up shop, and how small the six or seven people who were looking for his autograph felt in comparison.

Like he said, great time to be Bumblebee.

“C’mon, Shana. He’s the cool one.” Someone calls. But the rest of their group are already making a beeline for the My Little Pony vendor on the other side of the hall.

The human just shrugs, exhaling air in a deep huff that blew her… what was it called? Hair? Out of her eyes.

“My sisters ditched me for ponies.” She says. He remembers her explaining that she likes all the ponies, but she’s not gonna go queue up to buy them when you can get them just as easily from whatever a ‘Walmart’ was supposed to be. “Can you make it out to Aja?”

“Cool name.” Rodimus asks, and her eyes light up. “Like the Hologram?”

“You listen to the Holograms?”

“I mean, I like anything that’s got that eighties feel to it.” Rodimus scribbles with the pen, trying to get his English down. It’s such a weird word-form, compared to Cybertronian script. He signs: TO AJA. TRANSFORM AND ROCK OUT! YOUR PAL, RODIMUS. “That How You Play The Game song? Been in my sound player for the past couple weeks.”

“Jem!” Aja calls down the aisle, grinning like an absolute buffoon. Hearts and minds, Rodimus remembers. “Get over here, he’s a fan of our work!”

“Still have the poster in my garage.” Aja shrugs. “Tried to make a hot rod that looks like your car mode, but couldn’t get the flames right.”

“It’s a lot to live up to.” Rodimus says, patting the flames on his chest. “Feels like the last time anyone on Earth put up with us was a lifetime ago.”

“You’re telling me. We didn’t even have a record deal, back then.” Aja blinks. “How’d you know about our songs?”

“Prime got a crash course on Earth culture from these kids who got swept up in everything. Hunter, Jimmy and… Verity, I think her name was.” Rodimus shrugs, again. “Never got much face time with them. Me and Hardhead were fighting Decepticons in Brasnya.”

Aja’s so distracted with trying to figure out where she knows that name that she doesn’t even have time to tell Rodimus that she’s pretty sure Hardhead has to be a made up name, or that she does not believe that Optimus Prime could have listened to their music before. It all floods back to her once she has the name to help her sort through the memories. Verity Carlo. One of the other kids at the House, a couple years older than her and Shana and Lucy, the girl who taught her how to do a stick and poke but was too scared to get one done to herself. Aja remembers telling her to keep checking in, when she got moved to that place in Ohio after The Fight, because their band was gonna be huge one day.

It makes her feel good that Verity remembered her and Shana. It also makes her feel a little terrible that she had, and that Aja had never reached out to try and contact her in the years since. She was a kid, she remembers, so it’s not awful that she couldn’t remember her exact name, but the fact she only thought to call her when a robot told her…

Well, she could when they got home. Definitely gonna have interesting stories to swap, that’s for sure.

“Small world.” Aja mumbles. Small galaxy, apparently. “Anyone around here know what happened to her?”

“You gotta ask the little big guy.” He points to Minimus. “They’re friendly enough that she’s his holomatter avatar.”

“Cool.” Aja says, and hops off the too big seat like she’s climbing off a stage and waves her arms as she crosses the basketball court so nobody inadvertently turns her into roadkill.

Then she stops, and laughs, because she bets there’s a robot out there with the name Roadkill.

"No Nega-Core energy, so we can rule out polydermal grafting." Ratchet says, scratching at his chin. "First Aid could probably take a better guess, but he's no good with organic anatomy at the best of times."

"We could ask Lotty to analyze this." Nautica pauses, thinking for a moment. "Or... Hoist spent some time on Earth, didn't he?"

"Lotty?" Kimber asks, squirming on the medical bed while Synergy pulls faces at her to try and make her laugh, like Kimber taught her and like her mom used to do whenever Kimber was nervous at the doctors. It's the most profoundly uncomfortable surface Kimber has ever laid down on, which is saying a lot because she prides herself on her ability to fall asleep under literally any circumstances.

"Velocity. My [bestie]." Nautica says, and Kimber just blinks because her translation is starting to get incredibly weird, like all the alien phrases are in a language she's spoken her entire life.

"Your, um, amica endura?" Kimber says, and then she's starting to hear them slightly differently, like all the metallic grating of their robot voice modulators is actually this familiar sing-song hum, and she's feeling something like a cosmic edible in the distance and also impossibly close that's binding them all together in some kind of mystical programming code, and the universe is nothing but lights and the points in-between and its so genuinely beautiful to her, now that she really sees it this way, that Kimber just starts wiping tears from her eyes that she can't even realize why she's crying. 

"Yes!" Nautica says, noting some changes to the readings down on her datapad. "She's one of the other medics on the ship. Ratchet, should I call her up?"

"Let's keep this whole thing low-key unless we find something worth reporting." Ratchet decides. "Anything on the scanner?"

“There’s some kind of anomaly here,” Nautica says, waving a handheld scanner over Kimber's stomach. “But none of the protein markers you'd see in an infiltration unit, and deep tissue scans show she's definitely not holomatter. Which means we've ruled out anything but... a facsimile construct. Or a Simulacrum. Or, a very good eighty-nine class facsimile construct. What did they call those?"

“‘Pretenders,’ I believe they settled on.” Ratchet shakes his head. “But the Nega-Core energy would kill anything organic on the ship, unless you had so you're not that either.”

“No, this is something else. Possibly an anomaly from the transwarp, which is… normal, and entirely reversible.” Nautica says, before launching into a weird story the crew told her months ago about how a robot got stuck in the engines, which does not make Kimber feel any better about any of this. “Kimber, hold still for a second. I’m going to—”

She proceeded to explain, entirely through the means of complicated technobabble, which fired the tiny little panic module in the back of Kimber’s brain that somehow convinced herself, despite all reasonable logic, that she was about to find out that Stormer had gotten her pregnant.

“Ohmigod, I am so not ready to be a mom.” Kimber says, as the diagnostic unit scans her stomach through her tank top and she snaps back to reality. “I ate an entire tub of ice cream before bed last night and didn’t even brush my teeth. I can’t be trusted with that level of responsibility.”

“I don’t think it’s a sparkling.” Nautica blinks, again. That reassured Kimber somewhat, both because the fact that the robots had robot babies and a whole cute robot-y name for them was something to focus on over the initial panic. “It's more like…"

"...A photonic crystal containment vessel.” Ratchet adjusts the holographic interface. “Nautica, tell me that’s not what it looks like.”

"We do seem to have a surplus of them lately." Nautica offers.

But Nautica doesn’t explain what it is, and neither of them tell Kimber what they found before they rush out of the room. She gets to sit there with Synergy as they frantically run to the Podimus to report their findings to Rodimus.

JEMWORLD
Now.

“Clean of Silica’s influence.” Calls the Techrat, fiddling with their crude diagnostic equipment. A ‘rift anomaly’ was the term they used. Megatron was sent to their universe, the Holograms to Megatron’s point of origin, and something undetermined had been sent to the Starlight Music offices in their stead. “Operating on too low of a power cell to activate his weaponry, but don’t mistake that for this rat telling you to trust him—”

“Megatron.” Stormer calls. He turns his eyes to look at her, and the scowling red-haired creature folding her arms beside her, being unable to turn his head any further than that. “You killed a lot of people on this planet.”

“Hopefully, nobody you miss.” Megatron offers.

“You, um, stepped on my mom.” Stormer says, scratching at the back of her head with her prosthetic hand.

“I assure you that I did not step on any organic during my conquest of Earth.” Megatron says. “Such methods of war were not befitting the Decepticon cause.”

A cause he no longer believed in, due to its own ideological failings and the barbarism of monsters like Tarn who continued to wage war in his name, but he would not allow his legacy to be tarnished as a leader who would destroy his enemies in such a manner.

“This Megatron did.”

“Then perhaps it is best that he fell, and I stand in his place.” Well, he lies there in place, but to comment upon that irony was far beneath him. “I imagine it would bring you no comfort to learn that I have renounced my allegiance to the Decepticon banner, in the years hence.”

“It really doesn’t.” Stormer says.

“Then let me put it this way.” Megatron says. “You’re fighting a war, against an enemy you do not fully understand. I know how to win such a war without firing a single bullet, or taking a single life.”

The bespectacled man with a gaunt face, hidden behind a ragged beard, finally makes his presence known. “What do you propose, Megatron?”

“Your transwarp teleportation technology is crude. Imprecise.” He pauses. “Prone to malfunctions, and interference. Better technology exists on Earth, because we left it behind.”

“I propose,” Megatron continues. “That we access it, resolve whatever anomaly misdirected your intended targets, and then launch this Silica into a hole from which it will never return.”

They look to the doctor.

“That… could work.” He admits.

“Then untie me,” Megatron says. “And let us hope that Bombshell was more successful in constructing his sky bridge than he was in my universe.”

Chapter Text

LAKE TAHOE
About Six Weeks Later.

"So." Aja says, shouldering the bag full of fishing bait. She's just about the only person in the family who can be trusted to open that can of worms. "Wanna talk about the tomato movie?"

"Shut up." Jerrica says.

When the chaos is mostly over, but not all over, Aja arranges a family fishing trip on Lake Tahoe. Shana is the only one who’s particularly pumped about it, and even then it’s mostly because fishing is something she’s inexplicably great at, and partly because she hasn’t seen her sisters in so long that a weekend hanging out with them would be the best thing ever even if they were sat in a featureless gray box watching paint dry. Jerrica’s picking at her nails the entire drive out from Santa Monica thinking about how much work she needs to get done as soon as they get home, and how much work she had to do to get them all a fishing license valid across two separate countries, and Kimber’s still dealing from the aftermath of surgery to really be up for it, but she tags along anyway because it’s better than the alternative of sitting in her room eating ice cream with Synergy for another weekend and re-watching Gray’s Anatomy for the thirty-seventh time.

For her part, Aja’s mostly stoked about the by-products of it more than the sitting around part. She’s gonna grill so much fish. But they’re heading off from the van Jerrica borrowed from Pizzazz (and Pizzazz is not invited on account of being a big league Hollywood star dealing with all her broken-up band drama now, and also because this is a family-only trip with one notable plus one, even when Pizzazz promised repeatedly that she would behave and Jerrica is probably still going to spend half the weekend on the phone with her) while Kimber is promising a somewhat-frantic Stormer on the phone that she’s not going to overexert herself on the boat while Jerrica talks things through with the boat rental place.

Jerrica tosses Aja the keys. Aja throws them from one hand to the other as they load their things onto the ship. They picked the biggest one they could possibly find on account of their guest, but as he starts driving up the road Aja’s doing eyeball math and figuring they probably should’ve invested in a trawler or something. But, still, Rodimus tsche-tsche-tk-tk-tks his way into robot form and offers them a wave, robot-sized fishing rod in his free hand.

“We are so going to need a bigger boat.” Aja says, lowering her sunglasses.

The Lost Light,
Now.

“—sounds ridiculous, but I’ve always wanted to go fishing.” Rodimus explains, before being called over to the doorway by Ratchet and Nautica.

“Dude," Aja grins. "We can so take you fishi—”

“Rodimus.” Ratchet says, straight and to the point, ushering the blue-haired human away from the co-captain. “Where’s the Matrix?”

“My half?” Rodimus furrows his brow, trying to figure out whether that was a stupid question, or just a smart question he was too stupid to answer. “In my chest, where I—”

“…Left it.” Rodimus says, feeling the Matrix’s absence. “Tell me you know what’s going on.”

“We think the transwarp anomaly, coupled with the temporo-spatial displacement that created this duplicate of the ship, may have itself displaced parts of the Lost Light that…” Nautica says, venting air after running from the repair station into the Rodpod. “Resonated with the intended dimension our passengers were supposed to be transported to. Due to their own paracausal origins.”

Rodimus scratches at his kibble, pretending he understands. “So where does that leave us?”

“Hopefully, nowhere. The Matrix you carry is a copy of a copy.” Nautica explains, with uncharacteristic clarity. "Couple that with Megatron’s own temporally displaced origin…”

“I thought that was supposed to be a jumpstart situation. That it's destined to, uh, happen because we made it happen.”

“In our timeline.” Nautica says. “Here, we’re interlopers. Nothing’s for certain.”

“Cool.” Rodimus says. “So, grab the Matrix and sort the problem out, right?”

Nautica rubs her hands against her face, trying to think of a good way to say it.

So Kimber is staring at a big red and blue robot truck crouched in the middle of the medical bay, and she’s been so attuned to not viewing any of this alien robot stuff as weird at this point that her first thought is just: Wait, you’re not dead?

“This is… unexpected.” Optimus says.

“This is a hallucination, right?” Kimber says.

“You are having a vision. That does not mean you are hallucinating.” Optimus Prime says. "We are communicating through Infraspace."

“Cool.” Kimber offers the not-dead-not-real robot, like any of that wasn’t super cryptic. “What did I eat, what does it do, and how do I remove it?”

“Those are pertinent questions.” Optimus Prime says, and then proceeds not to explain anything until the vision fades away and she’s lying on the with the worst case of indigestion she’s ever had. “For now, just trust that it can be removed without harming you.”

Sentio Metallico tests and other signs of affinity are giving... mixed results, but they need to rule out the obvious solutions before moving to surgery. Kimber doubles over with a pain in her stomach.

"I thought I was made of sterner stuff." She whines.

“Primus apotheosis. In a human." First Aid says. "Now I really have seen everything.”

“It’s not Primus Apotheosis if she actually possesses the Matrix.” Ratchet says, pausing for a moment to really ponder how ridiculous a statement that was. “Unless we keep this quiet, it could kickstart another war.”

“Lucky we’re in the middle of the nowhere galaxy.”

“Do not tell Drift.” Ratchet retorts. “He’s already running around the ship trying to declare the Holograms 'Living Gods' of Spectralism.”

“Maybe she’s the chosen one.” Whirl jokes, raising his claws aloft dramatically, and waving them about. "Here to save us, in our hour of need!"

Ratchet just tells him to get out of his repair bay. He doesn’t know where Whirl has been, but he knows for certain that Whirl will never be sterile enough for an operating theater.

Jerrica is pacing back and forth on the sidelines of the basketrek court, growing increasingly agitated. Beside her, Pizzazz is standing with her arms folded, whispering like Lady Macbeth that maybe they should just smash the robots like the car from Street Fighter and just fight their way out of there, but Jerrica just keeps telling her to behave like a guest, and they’ll be home soon.

Even still, Jerrica’s patience for their gracious hosts is wearing thin.

“There’s something they’re not telling us about Kimber.” She says.

“Dude, I know.” Aja says. “Maybe we can just... get answers."

One of the smaller bots looks at them. Tailgate, she’s pretty sure.

“Can you tell us what’s going on with Kimber?” Jerrica asks.

“She ate—”

Another, Swerve, jumps in: “We sure can, if you agree to help us record the greatest cover song in the galaxy before you—”

“This isn’t funny, Swerve.” Jerrica says. “We’re really worried about our sister.”

“She ingested the most holy relic of our people and is seeing the face of Robot—” Swerve pauses for a moment, trying to think of an appropriate pop cultural analogy. “Jesus! That’s the guy. She’s seeing the face of Autobot Jesus.”

Jerrica just blinks, and asks the assembled robots whether any of them transform into a car. Half of those present raise their hands.

And honestly, despite the situation, Rodimus just has to laugh. Team Rodimus have assembled in his office to compare notes.

“A human with the Matrix.” He laughs. “If Getaway was still alive, he’d be pissed.”

“Getaway might be alive.” Nautica offers, which immediately bursts Rodimus’s bubble. “That’s the problem.”

“I will inform the humans aboard of the situation immediately.” Ultra Magnus says, fully armored up. “Without any such—”

The small fleet of alt-forms came to a halt at the doorway.

“Rodimus.” Jem says, clambering onto the back of Tailgate’s alt-form and flattening out her holographic avatar’s skirt. “We need to know what’s going on.”

“Ratchet is prepping Kimber for surgery to get the debris out of her.” Rodimus says, tracing a line on the map drawn on his desk to where his last teleporter mishap, in another universe, had gotten his future-past self killed and the crew slaughtered by the D.J.D. “Routine teleporter mishap. We’re well used to dealing with situations like this.”

“Take us to her.” Jem insists.

In the operating theater, Kimber is getting prepped for the removal process. Stormer rushes to her side, which takes like a solid five minutes because the architecture in this ship is not built for humans.

“If I survive this, we are so getting married.” Kimber shoots the most defeated finger guns possible over to Stormer on the too-big uncomfortably-flat operating table.

Stormer laughs, nervously. “This is so not how I expected to get proposed to.”

“I’ll do a real proposal. As a total surprise. With a whole school of dancing sharks or something—” Kimber says. Ratchet is placing a mask over her, which means Kimber is like seventy-five percent sure she’s about to get anesthetized. "Anmgh a fghkngh hghh bhfgh."

But then there’s just a slight schlorp sound as the machine overhead adjusts itself , and the glowing energy ball just pops right out of her. Rodimus takes it and, with a singular motion, schlorps it back into the casing hidden behind the big flame-patterned car hood on his chest. Kimber looks down to her stomach for the gnarly scar she expected to get, or any sign that it had been removed at all, but there’s nothing. Ratchet takes the mask off of her. He says that the oxygen mask was a precaution, because the zero-point machine has a tendency to suck the air out of a big bubble around it. Survivable for sentient robots, but a great way for the human brain to leak out your ears like a toothpaste tube.

Ratchet didn't describe it like a toothpaste tube, but that was the image that came to Kimber's mind.

“Just like that?” She asks.

“Just like that.” Ratchet offers. “I mean, you’re not Thunderclash.”

"Who's he?"

"The last person who had to have the Matrix removed." Ratchet shakes his head, remembering it fondly. "It really liked him."

"Ohmigod, the glowing orb liked me." Kimber says, bringing her hands to her mouth. “Do you have, like, post-doctor candy?”

“Nothing safe for human consumption.” Ratchet pauses, before ducking under his desk to retrieve a comparatively tiny box of candies and toss them to her. Kimber flips over the box to open them up, and is only kinda slowed down by the fact they expired in 2012. "I meant to give these to Verity, back when she was with the Wreckers."

“...Cool.” Kimber says, munching away. She also struggles to sit up, but that's mostly due to a combination of nerves, exhaustion, and a dull ache just under her ribs, and not the fact that she's chewing on a nearly decade-old gummy bear. “Is that, like, everything I need to get out of me?”

“You’re probably going to want to have your Appendix removed within the next thirty-six hours.” Ratchet says, pointing to a kind of early warning system for medical emergencies and a read out of everything she should probably worry about within the next ten years. “Book that in when you get back to Earth.”

Jemworld,
Now.

“Ha!” Megatron gloats, as the control module for Silica is jettisoned through the Los Angeles sky bridge to bother some other civilization far, far away in the multiverse. “I have to say, I think I’ve beaten my personal record for planetary revolution by a few hundred years.”

People are starting to return to normal now that Silica itself is out of effective range. Well, that, and Megatron had decided to take a page out of his old protege’s playbook and fight music with music.

He could be quite a rousing tenor, when he wanted to be. It was among his lesser known skills.

But the organics upheld their end of the bargain, and so he upheld his, and stood down once the sky bridge had achieved its purpose and rid them of their oppressors. He glances out to the command team, and offers them a smile that had nowhere to go but looking a combination of triumphant, sinister, and plain smug.

“Build a statue of me, will you?” Megatron laughs.

“Absolutely not.” Stormer says, fiddling with the Cybertronian interface. “How do I... operate this thing?”

“Pull the left lever.”

“That’s not doing anything.”

“You’re opening communications.”

“Hu—” Rodimus blinks. She’s pretty sure she only knows his name because Megatron has been talking about him the past six hours. That, and she’s pretty sure Aja has a giant poster of him in the garage. “Aren’t you on our ship right now?”

“I’m, um, the one with the robot arm.” Stormer offers. “I have your co-captain. We’re ready to send him back.”

The Lost Light,
Now

“One last thing before we send you off.” Rodimus says, as the Holograms all line themselves up on the teleporter. It was in Swerve's, which Rodimus figured was entirely due to Swerve having some ulterior motives for raising his profile in the human pop cultural ephemera he loved so much. “We don't have time for an official ceremony, but I wanted you all to know that you’ve all acted with a bravery and mettle befitting any member of my crew. So it’s with the utmost admiration that I name you the first human recipients—”

He produces five silver crests that could be best described as ‘hastily cut down’ to be roughly the size of human hands.

“Of the Rodimus Star. Our, um, second-highest honor. For being the least unruly passengers we’ve ever had.”

“I helped.” Whirl says, with a proud bow, still picking burnished gold from his knife-hands.

"I want it on record that I would've been the coolest queen of the robots." Kimber says, gleefully taking the medal of Rodimus's grinning face and holding it to her chest. "The coolest Prime."

The crew decide to humor her with a toast of glowing blue space fuel to Kimber Prime, first and last human to be chosen by the Matrix in a telewarp accident.

“So,” Swerve says, arms folded behind the bar as Jerrica watches the others get teleported back to Earth. “You willing to hear me out about recording this cover song before you hit the road?”

And Jerrica just sighs, and asks if he has the sheet music for this song anywhere.

"I want a producer credit." Swerve says, giving her an alien tablet about the size and shape of a Sci-Fi iPad. It's surprisingly intuitive to use.

"Executive producer." Jerrica haggles.

She's never seen a robot happier in her life.

"EMPYREAN"
by JEM & THE HOLOGRAMS

The record plays. Tarn listens. As he listens, he finds that the music stirs emotions he believes he has long buried.

And when the song has finished, Tarn stands there, pondering what he has just heard. If nothing else, the saccharine synth pop has ruined the mood.

“Pah. Covers.” Tarn growls. “They always change the meaning of a song.”

Sideload just utters a pained, metallic laugh. “Sounds pretty catchy to me.”

“Do not consider this a reprieve, Autobot.” Tarn retorts. “Your inevitable demise has just been… postponed for a cycle.”

As Tarn’s hulking frame retreats into the darkness of the compound, Sideload slips his wrist loose from the bindings, and completes the code he’s been tapping into his wrist-computer in between zappings. It pings the ship above, a silent distress beacon to any Autobots within distance that one of their own was in need of a rescue. Six pings on the response, each one an incoming ship en route to the system. The sun was coming up in the next few hours, and help would soon be on its way.

Chapter Text

Starlight Music,
Now.

“—so I’m just like ‘Normally, I’d be cool with this, but she literally tried to kill your sister not even five years ago so I feel like you might be in way over your head. And that's not even getting into the time she blew up the 5x5 masquerade ball.’” Rio shrugs, feet on the coffee table. He was supposed to be helping the Holograms soundproof their new recording set up, but then they all decided to ditch him, so he’s just been watching the place until they get back. “I just feel like she’s being manipulated here, and all I get is people telling me I’m paranoid.”

“That sounds verrrrrrrrrry inconsiderrrrrate of herrrrrrrr.” D’Compose gurgles, his gigantic skeletal frame struggling to fit on the couch. “It might be betterrrrrr to cut ties. If she trrrrrruly carrrrrrred about you, she would not trrrrreat you like a serrrrrvant.”

“I guess you’re right.” Rio sinks into his seat. “I don’t know, It just feels like sometimes I’m the only one handling this breakup like a responsible adult, because their entire life just seems to be food fights and band drama and forgetting everything that—”

When he turned his head, D’Compose was gone.

Aja runs out first to get her car running. She offers a wave and a 'crisis, can't talk' kind of greeting.

Jerrica kisses Pizzazz on the cheek as she walks back into the room, tapping her earrings to make herself Jerrica again with a kind of ease he never saw from her when she was dancing around the issue the entire time they were dating. Pizzazz, for her part, is rummaging through every drawer in the break room looking for the First Aid kit in case Kimber’s spleen ruptures on a particularly bumpy stretch of LA highway or they get stuck in traffic for long enough that she gets sepsis or a million other catastrophes that Stormer has been regaling them with since she got close enough back to Earth to page Dr. Google about the crisis. Pizzazz has taken her phone away from her now, and has her arm around Stormer with Stormer's head on her shoulder as she's trying to reassure her that they have everything under control, but the damage is done.

In the meantime, Jerrica’s eyes widen when she spots Rio in the break room. She seems slightly frantic, like she’s misplaced her keys. Which is understandable, the whole thing seems like a bit of an emergency.

“Rio.” She sighs.

“What’s up?”

“Kimber needs her appendix out.” She says, like that explains any of what’s just happened. “Have you noticed anything strange around the building?”

“No, nothing.” Rio offers, putting his hands in his pockets. “Just an unannounced visitor, but I showed him the door.”

“Thanks.”

“You need my car?”

“Thanks, but Aja’s handling it.” Jerrica offers, pursing her lips. Which means on some level that Aja really wants to show off her new car, even if it’s an emergency. “Thanks for watching the building while we were gone.”

With that, the mad panic to ferry Kimber out intensifies because, as he would later learn, the second transwarp jump really started to agitate her appendix, and Rio is left in the break room with a long deep sigh and a promise to talk about it when the emergency has passed.

“I’ll never forget you, D’Compose.” Rio mutters, wistfully, and then follows them out to the parking lot.

Chapter Text

The Lost Light,
Earlier.

“Time phone.” Kimber says.

“Time phone.” Aja agrees.

“Well, I suppose I can’t stop anyone from calling it a time phone.” Perceptor says, slightly disappointed in them. “I won't bore you with the details, but your teleporter mishap has recreated a macro-cosmic environment within which which the barriers of time become more malleable. It would be remiss of me not to allow you to make the most of this opportunity.”

"So we can call our past selves and give us advice?" Kimber asks. “Is this like, Back to the Future rules?” 

“Slightly. Parallel timelines, and such. I would advise you not to try to make significant changes to your personal time stream, but only because it causes all kinds of interference that means your message won’t go through.” Perceptor shrugs. “So just try to nudge things in a particular direction, if you must try and make changes to your personal timeline.”

Pizzazz and Stormer are hanging back, letting the three of them have their moment. When Jerrica tries to drag Pizzazz into it, she just shrugs and says there’s nothing she’d want to change about herself.

Jerrica feels like that’s a lie, but leaves her be.

“Cool.” Aja snatches up the opportunity to be first on the time phone. “Go back to the tree house and tell Shana not to be a coward when I was doing those stick and pokes.”

“You didn’t even invite me to those.” Kimber whines, folding her arms and pouting like someone had just opened up a well-healed wound. “I was cool enough to get a tattoo.”

“You were thirteen,” Jerrica laughs. “And we were grounded for a month. Shana, be meaner to Aja when she tries to cut all her hair off after every bad breakup.”

Kimber pauses. “Do you think we can, like, talk to dad through this?”

“Back to the Future rules, Kimber.” Aja offers.

“I’ve seen that film, I know about the whole bulletproof vest thing.” Kimber glances over. “Jerrica?”

Jerrica pauses for a moment, finally nodding in agreement. "Synergy?"

Synergy appears with a shimmering hum. "...You wish to know when the 'best time' to call your father would be."

"Yeah." Jerrica nods, pursing her lips.

"September Eighth, Two Thousand and Eight. 

"Oh, dude. Shana's fifteenth." Aja says. "You remember how happy she was to get a learner's permit?"

"Ohmigod," Kimber says. "She literally drove me to the mall and back so many times that Christmas."

"Synergy?" Jerrica asks, inputting the day and time. "It's asking for a time."

"At precisely three minutes past eleven in the morning."

Jerrica dials in the time, calls through, and then puts the phone on speaker.

“Dad?”

“Jerrica,” he laughs. “I told you to stop calling me at work.”

She wishes she called him more, now, because it was close to the only times they got to really talk after mom died and dad became consumed by the project that eventually became Synergy.

“Sorry.” Jerrica says, quietly, before composing herself. “Would you believe me if I told you we’re calling from the future?”

“That’s a good one.” He laughs, louder. “Better than the time you told me you got abducted by aliens.”

Jerrica glances over to her sisters, then up at the ceiling of the alien spaceship, and then purses her lips.

“You gave us access to Synergy.” Jerrica says.

There’s a quiet pause.

“...What did you use it for?” he asks, finally.

“Her.” Kimber corrects, before pausing to realize that Synergy as she knew her might not even have existed yet at the point Jerrica dialed. “We became rock stars.”

“Kinda the biggest act on the planet.” Aja shrugs, before glancing around to the robots. “Or, uh, multiple ones.”

“We met aliens.” Kimber says. “Also another you invented portal technology and we, uh… saved the world or something.”

“Is Shana with you?” He laughs. "Wish her a happy birthday for me."

“Shana’s in Milan.” Aja says, with a laugh. Their dad probably figures she just chickened out of the prank call. “She got accepted to Fashion school. Istituto Marangoni. Quit the band because it meant more to her.”

"What about the rest of you?"

"Kimber just proposed." Aja says. "Before an operation. So dramatic."

"But it wasn't super official," Kimber offers. "So I'm gonna do a proper one once I have my appendix out."

"I finally got a Grand National after we met a guy at the Indy 500." Aja says. "Spent weeks putting it back together. Jer?"

Jerrica thinks back to everything that's happened over the past five years, combing it over through all their hardships and triumphs, the long nights in the studio and the longer nights putting together the company, and with all of that churning through her brain the only thing she can settle on telling her dad is: "I picked up skateboarding again."

"Skateboarding."

"To impress a girl." Jerrica mutters, glancing over to Pizzazz. She's calming Stormer down after Stormer made the mistake of looking up appendicitis complications on the alien robot equivalent of WebMD again. "I think you'd like her."

Jerrica pauses, adding. "...Eventually."

“Well, this is either the most well thought-out prank you girls have ever played on me,” he begins. “In which case, I’m proud of you.”

They pause, waiting for him to continue.

“Or this is all true, and I’m even prouder.” He says. “But in that case, I’d need to get back to work before you spoil any more of the next twenty years for me. Synergy isn’t gonna build herself. Love you, girls.”

“Love you too, dad.” Jerrica says, and hangs up.

She takes a moment to compose herself, before holding the time phone out.

“Anything else?”

“I’m good.” Aja shrugs. “Figure the only thing I’d tell myself to do is swoop in last second to win some eBay auctions I’m still mad about.”

“Kimber?”

Kimber grabs the time phone and holds the over-large receiver up to her ear, dialing into herself from a week ago. “Okay. Okay. Brush your teeth after you eat that whole tub of ice cream. Do not let them cut all your hair off because you think it’ll make you look ‘soft butch,’ and definitely do not joke to Stormer that she’s going to get you pre—”

They drag her away from the time phone.

“Pizzazz, are you coming with us?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Pizzazz says. She remembers one of the real talkative robots, the one with the visor, telling her his rule for new technology: You really gotta think what Ryan Reynolds would wanna do with it. “Just gimme a second.”

A McMansion in Santa Monica,
Two Months Ago

By October, they’ve settled into something resembling a routine.

Jerrica’s running a hand through freshly-dyed hair in the bathroom mirror while Pizzazz squeezes back into the red dress she hasn’t worn since the Music Awards. Jerrica’s regretting dyeing it, she tells Pizzazz, the black makes her think too much of the time she spent with Silica rattling around in her head, but Pizzazz says that’s all the more reason to take it back and make it something she’s doing on her own terms.

That’s a lie: the first thing she does is ask Jerrica to zip her up, because the zip is just jammed or something, and she can’t crane her neck round far enough to see what the problem is without feeling like she’s a step away from becoming the girl in the Exorcist.

“I can’t believe this stupid event won’t even let us go in costume.” Pizzazz huffs. “It’s Halloween. I should be a space demon ghost right now.”

“Pizzazz, it’s for charity.”

“Yeah, and I’ve schmoozed at enough billionaire ‘charity’ events to know where those donations actually go.” Pizzazz touches up her makeup in the mirror while Jerrica tries to untangle whatever mess Pizzazz caused with her dress. “What kind of creep is running this thing, anyway?”

“Richard Xanthos.” Jerrica says, growing increasingly frustrated by the zipper snagging, if her face in the mirror is anything to go by. “He was close to my father, before everything happened. Hopefully, I’ll have a chance to talk to him about it.”

Pizzazz concedes defeat about the same time Jerrica does, and Jerrica is the one that stomps out of Pizzazz’s bathroom this time.

“Fine,” Pizzazz calls out the bathroom door. “But if this is all a scam to get me to buy a timeshare near Lake Tahoe, I’m smashing the place.”

It’s not domesticity. Pointedly not. Two weeks of living under the same roof would cause Pizzazz and Jerrica to kill each other, and probably both of their bands in the process, so they settle somewhere between ‘clandestine weekend getaways’ and ‘you can never come back to my D&D group again’ and shape it into something that feels equally comfortable and comforting even as it also starts to settle into feeling like Jerrica is making an effort to keep Pizzazz at arms distance just in case she can’t be trusted to keep the Jem secret long enough not to call attention to herself in a public situation. It’s a fear that Jerrica has expressed, in the early hours of the morning, a few days after Pizzazz made bail for the 5x5 Records stunt. Even free of their labels, Jerrica insists, all it would take was for Pizzazz to act differently around Jerrica in a way that causes questions to bring the entire Jem-shaped house of cards down before they can fully get Starlight Music up and running.

For her part, Pizzazz feels like her own house of cards toppled over months ago. Someone snitched on them for the 5x5 hack. Pizzazz doesn’t know who, it could’ve been anyone in the band, but the messages from their group chat made their way into the hands of the LAPD, and they constructed a case so airtight that even her father’s expensive lawyers couldn’t get her out of the consequences of it. It was only the timely intervention of Jem, who managed to get a sweetheart deal that saw her doing a hundred hours of community service teaching music to the girls at the Starlight Community Center, that saved her from a stint in jail.

Pizzazz doesn’t care who in the band snitched, which isn’t a lie, because she would kill and die for any of these losers no matter what they did. She does wish whoever did it would just own up to it, because it feels like whoever did is just sitting there bottling everything up because she doesn’t want to get yelled at. And Pizzazz probably would yell, she knows, which is the worst part, but then they’d all go their separate ways for an hour or two, cool off, and the band would be back to normal.

Instead, everything has been weird since the the trial, and since she’s been spending more time with Jerrica both for court-mandated and not court-mandated reasons, and because it’s also been ages since she’s managed to get the whole band together for a proper thing, just venturing out into the world to cause trouble under the flimsiest of pretenses like they used to do before things got all weird and complicated.

Her phone buzzes on the counter, showing an unknown number. Against her better judgement, Pizzazz pulls it to her ear.

“Talk to me.” she says.

“Pizzazz, listen.” her own voice says. “You're going to—”

“Ugh. What kind of loser do I even have to be for—”

“Nobody snitched. Riot made the whole scandal up to break up the Misfits."

"Why?"

"Uh, to try and get between you and Jerrica. Obviously." the voice says. "Come on, me. That guy's a car with one gear. You really think he'd leave that be?”

“That assh—”

“Have fun.”

Starlight Music Offices,
One Month Ago

In the bowels of the Starlight Music offices, the four of them finally strike gold.

This Benton man was a genius engineer, that much Techrat knows for certain. Even through a remote interface, the machine outdid everything Techrat assumed was possible with computers, and to have access to that technology decades before anyone else could develop it… well, it spoke to a level of individual talent and secrets that were left buried for a reason. It’s played on Techrat’s mind since they interfaced with the machine, before Silica showed the true danger of playing rock star with technology you don’t understand, and grew like a poisoned seed as they realized that all it would take was a suitable distraction to get on-site and override the machine.

And when their routine attempts to hack into Synergy showed a curious recurring error popping up in the code like a meshwork pattern leading them to exactly where the Holograms hid their secret weapon, not quite unlike that one insignificant flaw that brought Silica into being, Techrat knew that it was time to make a move.

So Techrat, with a makeup brush, dusts down the keypad, plugs the digits into a pattern analyser on their wrist to determine how they fit together and, finally, inputs the override code. They take a moment to appreciate the handiwork, as the system lays bare to them without so much as raising the automated security alarms.

Unfortunately, Techrat knew that interfacing with such a machine required a musician. The Misfits were… compromised, on this matter, which meant that external help was required.

“Be careful with the interface,” Techrat hisses. It’s not their computer, but their reverence for the machine is absolute, even as they’re about to take the digital equivalent of a sledgehammer to it. “It is extremely delicate.”

“Stupid American,” Minx pulls off her gloves, setting her hands on the keys. “Do you think this is the first time I have fingered a beautiful woman?”

“Phrasing, darling.” Rapture offers, looming in the doorway.

“I said what I said.” Minx insists, with a huff, looking to Techrat for their instructions on how to use the machine. Instead, their phone starts to ring.

“Techrat.” Pizzazz says, through the receiver.

“Pizz—” Techrat stammers, attempting to correct themselves through gritted teeth. “No Pizzas here, thank you.”

“Drop what you’re doing and walk out. I'll double what the Stingers are paying you, and I've got some cool alien tech I want you to take a look at.”

"Well, when you put it like that... how can a humble rat refuse?"

A McMansion in Santa Monica,
Five Months Ago.

They’ve set up a makeshift skate ramp on her balcony, and Pizzazz is watching Jem start skateboarding again for the first time in years with the stupidest infectious grin on her face, and Pizzazz is trying to coach her through it like she’s any better at it.

Pizzazz hears her phone buzz on the railing, and pulls it to her ear.

“Storm, I promise I’m doing okay—”

“I figure you’re like, seventy percent of the way to figuring it out at this point, but they’re the same person.” Her own voice says through the phone. “Eventually, she’s gonna tell you. Act surprised when she does.”

“Huh?” Pizzazz calls.

“Time travel.” Future Pizzazz offers. “It sucks, but you get to talk to your mom for the first time since she walked out, so it evens out. Now, the main thing is that Jem’s gonna steal your favorite pair of Converse this weekend, and you’re not even going to notice until—”

Pizzazz hangs up on whatever that was.

“Pizzazz,” Jem says, winding down from performing the best heelflip Pizzazz has ever seen. It’s frankly disgusting how perfect she is at everything. “Is something wrong?”

“Huh?” Pizzazz says, lost in thought as she studies the contours of Jem’s face. Maybe there was something to it, but that was Jem’s business, not hers. “Nah, we’re good. Think I’m just late for a dose of my rich girl pills.”

The Lost Light,
Relatively Speaking, The Present.

"Storm. I'm keeping this one short because you're standing next to me—"

"Hi, me." Stormer laughs into the receiver. "Don't worry. You still have no idea what's happening when you're on the other end of this call."

"When are we calling for you?"

"Can we get them not to do the documentary?"

"We'd have to go back and call ourselves about all the stuff we worked out that week." Pizzazz offers. "It's like trying to erase Misfits in Hawai'i."

"Can we do that?" Stormer groans. "That's... just a net positive for humanity."

"Only if you wanna fight me 'cause it'd wipe out a really good weekend I spent with Jem."

"...Hold on. Set it to January 2003."

"Rough time in third grade?"

"Kinda."

Stormer takes the time phone from Pizzazz and, with her hands trembling, pulls the receiver to her mouth.

"Um. That show's never coming back." She launches into what she planned to say. "And you're gonna feel so weird about it because half the cast members turn out to be terrible people ten years from now, so you should just really let it go."

Stormer tosses the time phone back to Pizzazz, covering her head in her hands. Perceptor just blinks at the humans, visibly wondering at what point he should take the time phone away from the two of them.

“And Jetta, tell Roxy to take those friggin’ reading classes already, and get her to say something if how we organize the place confuses her. We're all gonna support her, 'cause she's our friggin' friend. And stop hiding the fact that you and her are a thing already, because other me was joking when she said nobody in the band was allowed to date in the industry. I mean, half that band charter is written in Hungarian. None of you ever read it.” Pizzazz says, on the sixth or maybe seventh call. “And don’t get me started on what happens when you eat those gas station tacos and Clash gets norovirus—”

“That’s…” Perceptor mutters, almost impressed. “An incalculable amount of damage to the regular flow of time. I've never seen anyone but Brainstorm do something so reckless in the pursuit of science.”

“I’m not letting fate tell the Misfits how to live our lives.” Pizzazz shrugs, looking over to an increasingly concerned Stormer and holding out the time phone. “C’mon, Storm. Wanna tell your brother not to get those tattoos you hate?”