Doug's Home On The Web "Now monochrome monitor compatible!"

by Jason R. Ligon

   Author's Notes: -- If you didn't like Meltdown, you're gonna hate
   this! This story was inspired by R.A. Jung, and he deserves the credit
   for doing as much. His story "Sunweaver" proved to me that not every
   TF story has to be a battle. Continuity: This takes place just a few
   weeks after "Meltdown" did, partly cuz I like things to mesh, and
   partly cuz there were leftovers from that story that need to be dealt
   with. It takes place around 2013, but don't be anal about it, okay?
   Default continuity is comic unless something indicates otherwise
   Purist notes: I don't know how old Arcee was in the cartoon, and I
   don't think she ever appeared in the comic. If anyone knows, tell me,
   but don't bite my head off for making it up. I also wasn't sure how
   long she'd been on earth before the movie, but since TFG2 is over next
   month, I figgered since '95 was safe.

Bloodlines

     Daniel stepped into the unfiltered light of day for the first time in
three weeks. The Brazilian air was warm and a little humid, but smelled
good after all this time indoors and on Cybertron.
     He walked through one of the parks in Ciudad Del Fuego, and marvelled
at the mesh of organics and machines that the Autobots had created. If he
kept his gaze low, all he saw was lush green grass and trees, but if he
looked skyward, he could see Ciudad's massive two-ton gun turrets and
towering communications spires that pointed in all directions. The
occasional flying Autobot or earth helicopter would fly by overhead, to
land in what had to be the world's only international airport without a
single runway-- Just pads.
     Approaching one of the massive integral steel structures, he slid a
card through it's slot and submitted to a passive body scan. The steel
door slid open.
     "greetings Daniel Witwicky. you have all access" the computer said.
It wasn't Ciudad's voice though-- it was one of his lower subordinate
intelligences.
     Dan walked to one of the lifts and pushed the button for his 75th
floor penthouse apartment, and was whisked there via priority-- no stops
for others-- in about ten seconds.
     Stepping out into his living room (he occupied the entire top floor)
he looked over to the massive veiwscreen which dominated the north wall of
his room, and saw that he had an incoming message.
     "Computer! Open a channel." He spoke into the air. The wall
immediately lit up with the ten foot tall, computer generated face of
Ciudad, startling the hell out of Daniel.
     "Buenos Dias, senior!" Ciudad said, smiling. He didn't have
Metroplex's booming voice, but a more friendly one with a Spanish accent.
"How you feeling, holmes?"
     "CDF?!" Dan choked. Ciudad rarely spoke to any human face to face.
"I- I guess I'm fine. Everyone says I'm fully recovered." He looked at his
new left arm. It obeyed his every mental command, but he felt no feedback
from it, other than the chip on his optic nerve that told him it's status.
it was totally numb.
     "Kewl. Glad we could patch you up. I read the reports of what
happened. Said Laserbeak nailed you."
     "Yup." He said. though his memory of it was fuzzy, he distinctly
remembered Laserbeak's silhouette soaring off into the sky just before he
passed out.  He shuddered and flexed his arm.
     "Look, G. How long we known each other?" Ciudad said from left field
     "Geez. You were activated back in 2006, and I was there for the
`switching on' as it were. That was seven years ago."
     "Right. We known each other quite a while. You have taught me a lot
about humans and human life."
     "But we have only spoken like this maybe twenty times in seven
years!" Dan protested.
     "Well, yes. but your journals are invaluable to me."
     "What?? You read my journals??" Dan fell back into the sofa and
looked at the face. Ciudad took on an expression of embarrassment, which
switched to a smile.
     "Hey. Prime may be leader, but around here, I am God."
     "I see" Dan said, making a mental note to go buy a notepad.
     "So anyway, I know all about you and you know all about me. So be
straight with me here. Are you okay?"
     "Well I don't know that you know EVERYTHING about me--"
     "Wanna see video of you and Meggan--"
     "NO. Okay. Point taken. Geez talk about big brother..."
     "So how do you really feel?" the image on screen morphed into the
figure of a man, standing about six feet tall. It still had Ciudad's face,
and a very robotic aspect.
     "I don't know" Daniel sighed. "Like... Like I am slowly becoming one
of you."
     "That so bad?"
     "In a way. My uncle was killed trying to stop Megatron because he got
too involved with the Autobots."
     "You mean Fortress Maximus?"
     "No. His name was Spike. Howcum no one remembers that?"
     "He was a Headmaster. They became one in the same creature." Ciudad
said, genuinely unknowing.
     "Not to us. Not to humans. I never even got to meet him." So many
have died, Daniel thought. He couldn't count them all.
     "What about Meggan?" CDF said, sitting in previously nonexistent
chair. The images on screen reflected more of Ciudad's moods than a
concious action. The constant morphing and changing was part of his
nature. He saw nothing as having a constant form.  "Dan?" he said when he
got no response.
     "She's hurt." Daniel said. "Worse that we thought at first. Broken
ribs, concussion, and a fractured wrist. Lots of internal bleeding."
     "Scuze my ignorance, Amigo, but is that bad?" Ciudad looked confused.
     "Check your files in MedBay seven. The one for humans."
     "Okay." He seemed to look inward, "Yipe. That kind of chassis damage
can be hard to fix properly, and you guys can't just replace the parts,
right?"
     "She'll live."
     "Naturally. We have excellent facilities here if I do say so myself."
     "Yup. With all that she still dragged me back into Skylynx and saved
my butt. Just like a good little soldier."
     "Dan? You don't look so good."
     "I ain't. Do me a favor and locate Arcee."
     "He's in his quarters on level forty one of this structure." CDF
said, still unadjusted to calling a select few Transformers "She".
     "Thanks. I'm gonna jump. I'll see you." He grabbed his jacket from
it's resting place on a nearby chair and threw it on, walking to the door.
     "Don't do anything crazy, Dan." Ciudad said after the doors slid
shut.
     "Come in!"
     The thirty foot tall door slid open to reveal Arcee pouring a mild
acid into her knee joint as she sat in a transformer-sized chair.
     "Hi Arcee. Sorry. Am I bothering you?"
     "No. Just relaxing a bit." she said, smiling. A black sludge dripped
out from a valve in her lower leg. "Geeze.  That much dirt in one day?
I've gotta slow down" She collected the black sludge in a bucket and
flexed her knee joint, seeming to take great pleasure in having been
relived of the grime.
     "How you feeling, Dan?"
     Daniel had sworn that if anyone asked him that again, he'd rip their
head off, but well, this was Arcee.  "Pretty lousy, really."
     Arcee took off her armor plates and began to clean them.  The big
boxy chestplate was first, and, though he had seen it before, Dan was
still fascinated by the ability to see a transformer's more intricate
workings. Hoses pulsed with fluctuating pressure, the normally silenced
whine of servos and cable movements was now audible. The centerpiece was a
glowing power regulator, which was the Transformer equivalent of a heart.
     "I know. I've been hurt pretty bad in the past." She said, tapping
her left leg where the color of the plates didn't perfectly match.
     "No. It's not that." Dan said, "Well it is, but that's not what I've
been thinking of.." He picked up a rag as big as a bedsheet and tore of a
piece. He dipped it in a diluted container of the same acid and helped her
clean her face. She accepted the gesture and leaned forward.
     "So then what? You worried what people with think of you and your new
arm?"
     "Well maybe a little. Don't you worry about what people think?"
     "How do you mean?" Arcee finished cleaning the chest armor, but opted
to snap on a lighter piece for lounging around her quarters.
     "Well for instance the whole `female thing'."
     "That again?" She smiled. They both knew everyone had asked her a
zillion questions about being a female robot.
     "Well not that specifically, but I wonder why you don't get sick of
people asking, paint yourself over in black and get a new voice chip?"
     "I like my voice. I've had it for four hundred and seventy two years
now." She smiled. "Humans choose to call me female because I am not as
bulky as the other Autobots, and because they say I am more sensitive and
less rowdy than the rest of them. If that is so, then I take the pronoun
`she' to be a compliment." She leaned back and looked in a mirror,
inspecting Daniel's cleaning job on her face. "Besides, My old voice could
split hydrogen it was so shrill."
     "Yeah. Kup told me they practically held you down and tore the
vocorder out of your mouth."
     "HA! Well Kup isn't exactly in line to be an opera singer."
     Daniel laughed, thinking of the old Coot's gravelly voice. He looked
at the twenty five foot tall pink robot before him for a moment before
changing gears.
     "How do you feel about me, Arcee?"
     "Hmm?" She looked puzzled.
     "How do you feel about me?" He said. "You've known me since the day I
was born. I am curious."
     "I promised Jesse I'd be your protector that day, too, Dan.  Over the
years I have come to love you as much I've ever loved anyone."
     "Thanks." Daniel said, but he had deeper questions. "But you've only
known me eighteen years. I'll be dead in another eighty or so."
     "And isn't that a short time for an Autobot to know someone?" Arcee
finished. "Yes it is. I knew Optimus Prime for about ten years, and his
death affected me in ways I couldn't have predicted. I've known Kup for
over a thousand years, and he's one of my closest friends."  She stopped
and thought a moment. "Why are you asking me about this?"
     "Because someone like you who cares so easily must have a hard time
seeing so many of your friends die."
     "Yes. I've seen a lot of people disintegrated, melted, and I even saw
one of my closest friends in the galaxy tortured to death. His name was
Banshee."
     "How long ago?"
     "Four hundred years. I was next. That is the real reason my vocorder
was replaced. Straxus took Banshee apart bolt by bolt with a laser scalpel
while I was chained next to him."  She drifted into sadness at the memory,
"If it wasn't for Kup and the guys, well... Well I hope you live a lot
longer than eighty more years."
     "Ha!" Dan smiled. He always felt more comfortable around Arcee than
any of the others. He took off his jacket.  "Y'know, I've thought about
it."
     "It?"
     "Becoming one of you. Maybe a headmaster or maybe a whole new
transformer. Ratchet says he can do it."
     "Ratchet says he can do anything." She said with a grin.  "But would
you do it?"
     "I can't get up the nerve. I am stuck between my love for Meggan and
my desire to stop the Witwicky line."
     "You can't love Meggan as a transformer?" She said.
     "No. You don't understand." He sighed, "My father explained to you
how humans make new humans?"
     "Yes. I witnessed the end result." She mussed his hair with her pinky
finger.
     "It can't be done If I become a Transformer. There are also other
complications."
     "Oh. That wasn't covered in my short lesson." She said, then seemed
to replay the earlier statement, "Why would you want to stop your line? Do
you not want to see the logical progression of your design? My design can
be traced back to Alita-1, and I'm sure she'd be as proud of it as I am."
     "You don't understand,"  He said.  She'd known him all his life, but
this was the first conversation they'd had as equals. "If I have a kid,
what kind of life will he have? Look at me.  I haven't had hardly any
human friends.  Meggan was, to tell you the truth, the first girl to come
along.  I don't want to doom my kids to a life of war and seclusion.  I
can't ever leave this place!" He walked to the edge of the table he was
standing on, and looked out Arcee's window. It was getting dark.
     "You can leave whenever you like, Dan." She said, seeming confused.
"If you like, I'll call Jazz tomorrow and let him know you want to leave.
I'm sure Prowl or Ratchet would be happy to escort you to--"

"That's what I mean. What if I want to leave here and live out in Boston?
NOT New Fort Max, but BOSTON. All by myself with no Autobots?"
     "We can't allow that. The decepticons would hunt you down and kill
you just to spite us."  she began to see...
     "And I ain't dumb enough to ask." He said, flexing his arm again.
     Arcee understood finally.  She gave Dan what was known as a
`transformer hug' by touching her face to his. He hugged her helmeted head
gently. Her head was as big as an automatic dishwasher.  The steel was
hard, but it was warm and gave off an aura of life.
     "Here.  I'll show you something."  She said quietly.  She got out a
small container of some kind of goop. It was as big as a fifty gallon
drum, but fit easily in her hand.
     She gave Daniel a clean rag, "Rub some of this into your arm and work
it into the joint."
     Hey obeyed, rubbing the whitish compound into the plastic and ceramic
covers on his arm, and they began to gleam ultra-glossy white.  "Well, I
guess it helps to have it look good."  he said.
     "You want to go out?" She said.  Daniel was surprised-- she didn't
normally do that.
     "Where to?"
     "I've heard a lot about the Auto Shop."  She grinned. "Largest one on
earth is here in Ciudad..."
     "Okay.  Maybe it'll take my mind off things."
     Arcee transformed to car mode, and Daniel hopped in.  She drove out
the door and onto the spiral ramp that occupied the center of the
building, and drove a few miles out into he night. As the door closed
behind them, a pair of computer- generated eyes appeared on the large
veiwscreen that dominated the east wall. The scaled back to reveal the
face of Ciudad Del Fuego.  He smiled.

                        FIN

New Transformer: Cuidad Del Fuego

        Ciudad Del Fuego (City of Fire)

        Alliegence: Autobot

        Function: Southwestern quadrant defense HQ

        "WHOOMP! There it is!"


CDF is the largest autobot built since the war, dwarfing the likes of
metroplex and trypticon. He is nearly ten miles across at his widest
point, and 80 stories tall. He has four modes: Normal City,
Battlestation, a mobile battlestation mode for movement across land, and
a mile-high robot form which is usable only in microgravity.
        He is naturally gregarious and curious in nature, and often Disk
Jockey's at the AUTO SHOP, a club within his confines, and his face is
known to pop up on video screens wherever something interesting is
happening. His face is known and liked by all his residents, even though
he has a heavy reputation for snooping.
        In all forms, his primary weapons are a set of two batteries of
three guns each, whcih can hurl a two ton antimatter shell for one
thousand miles, and leave a crater the size of Detroit. In Battlestation
mode, he is equipped with fifteen surface-to-orbit ballistic missiles,
rated at forty megatons each (conventional).

STR      Int          Speed        END   Rank   Courage    FRP   Skill


10       5             1            10    3       9         10    4