Starscream Chronicles


Early Years: Chapter 5 Black Glass

Cybertron, Vos, Golden Age, Cybertronian Great Glaciation
Fledgeling age – Year eight hundred and twenty – late midwinter

He glanced at the twinkling stars as they shimmered in the deep darkness of a night that seemed to last for months, perhaps even years. It had been so long that he had nearly forgotten what the sun was like or remembered the warmth it produced. He shivered as a blast of chill air blew in across the plains over the chasms. He glanced down into the inky depths, then back up at the sky. He was grateful for the warmer air that rose out of the abyss.

The geothermal pipes and power conduits he had based his little home around kept him from freezing into stasis lock; also they attracted retro-rats that wished to take advantage of the pipes themselves. Being that it was too cold to hunt on the surface, he set traps and snares to capture the rats and kept himself sustained, albeit, not very well.

The city, although close, was too far away for him to travel safely in these conditions. It would have provided adequate shelter for the fledgeling as it was protected by a forcefield dome that cut out the biting winds, but to get there he would have to cross open ice fields in that very same horrendous cold. He had almost frozen a couple times, trying to get there, and finally decided to remain in his tiny warm lair.

Most travel done by the citizens in the city was taken underground, using pneumatic tubes to travel across the semi frozen planet. Much of the Southern hemisphere was locked in the icy winter, the northern areas were somewhat warmer than the southern pole. The drastic winter was due to the recent Grounder - Seeker war that had caused Cybertron to fall into a drastically elliptical orbit every few hundred thousand years. The orbital disruption was caused by the impacts of the six Seeker Sky Cities; Vos was the only one to have remotely survived its crash.

The fledgeling Seeker drew back inside and pulled the scrap metal door to block the entrance and forged deeper into the cavern. There were fewer drafts near the pipes that passed through the floor and the ceiling. It was warm, pleasantly warm and he hung nearby. His wing tips prickled as warmth finally made its way back into them. He looked at the drawings on the walls and made a new mark with a chunk of charred metal. An effort to keep track of days, which was funny, as the small Seeker was largely ignorant in the ways of reading, writing and arithmetic. But he had an instinct to try to record what he could, and mostly it was drawn in pictures.

He huffed heavily as he looked at the drawing. He was bored and restless and was unsure what to do. He spent a lot of his days in power down, curled up on some foil sacks next to the warm pipes, sleeping days away, conserving his energy. Other times he spent hours working on making improved weapons.

The small Seeker sat on the floor looking wistfully at the door, he wondered if warm would ever return. As he sat, he felt a small draft blowing across his thigh. He looked down and noticed a small hole in the wall near where he sat. It appeared the retro-rats were trying to make a new passage in, but this one felt different. The air was warmer, and smelled a bit stale. He sprang to his feet and reached over at his work table to grab a flattened metal rod that he then used to widen the hole.

He lowered himself to his chest and squinted in, there was no light and he could not see in. He continued to poke into the space with his rod. Enlarging the hole until he can see in a little. It appeared to be a much larger cavern beyond. He renewed his efforts and finally the wall broke away and crumbled. He shoved the rocks into the black hole and stopped. The light from his fire-reed lamp illuminated the space, it was a large cavern alright, but also extended well beyond the glow of his feeble lamp. Nervously he flicked his wings back and took his lamp off the wall so he might explore what appeared to be an extensive cave system.

He paused and looked at the entranceway to the system- he needed to mark this somehow so he could find his way back. Getting lost could be dangerous. He took a second lantern in hand and then climbed down the rough slope to a lower level and glanced upward. Warm light shone through the space above. That should be enough of a guide on its own, but he placed the lantern next to the ramp. At least that way he could find his way up.

The rock walls nearby had thick veins of magnesite, the ore he used to make fires. He was running low and was happy to find himself a new supply to replenish his stockpile. There were traces of other ores and metals and strange rubble scattered around, like metal or glass.

The tunnel before him was tremendously long and high, going in both directions. He chose to walk in what he thought was west, only pausing to make rock piles indicating which way to go home. He kept these piles to his right so he knew that they would be on his left on the return. As he walked along he noticed that the surface rock to his left was very different to the wall rock on the other side. While the ground was made of a type of hard granite, the wall to his left was solid metal– almost like smooth iron.

He brushed his fingers along the smooth surface trying to understand it. It had a strange shape, an almost cathedral pattern, that seemed to be more of a crystalline structure than what would be seen of most metals.

As he progressed along the wall, the scattered debris became more concentrated. Glass, metal girders, plastic and concrete were scattered over the ground. He wondered how it got there, there did not seem to be any entrance nearby, not as far as he could tell.

He continued to examine the rubble for a half an hour before he came across a corpse crushed between a massive chunk of concrete and the stony floor. It was the body of a Seeker, well preserved, an expression of fear frozen on its face. Head and upper torso were on the path, hands outstretched. The other half looked as if it had been smashed between the two surfaces. The young flier took a step back.

After a few moments he walked up to the body, and curiously gave the outstretched hand a small nudge with his foot. The nudge caused the hand to crumble, as it did the whole body began to disintegrate, to dust. The small Seeker gasped and leaped back. He had not previously encountered a dead Seeker before. He wondered how it happened, and if the crumbling was normal.

As soon as the body finished its disintegration, he discovered some items, coins, a few tools and a large, smooth flat tablet. It had buttons on it, and a shiny black glass surface.

As he looked at it, he could see himself being reflected back in the dimly lit area. He wished for a moment he had brought along one of his salvage bags. He never expected to need it but he should have realised he might find something useful. Instead he piled the finds in the centre of the room and would pick them up as he passed either later or another time.

He continued along the pathway until he found fragments of some buildings blocking his route. It entirely filled the space between the smooth wall and the rough natural rock. He considered climbing into it, but he felt that it looked wholly unsafe. He wondered how the buildings got into the cavern as there appeared to be no logical reason for it to be there.

He backed away and then began to run. He had an unsettled feeling about the place. He paused briefly by the corpse to grab what he could and then ran with them tucked against his chest. His feet echoed, then re-echoed in the darkness, giving him a sense of foreboding, as if he was being chased. He ran hard, squeaking fearfully, until he found his lantern marked ramp. He grabbed that in his teeth and fled up the path until he got inside. He dropped the objects on the floor and hauled a large sheet of metal then blocked the new passage. He leaned against it panting heavily, shuddering and shaking. He sensed that something terrible had happened there and was not sure he wanted to know.

He hung his lanterns back up and then collected some of the objects out of the pile. He placed the coins in a heap by the painted wall. He usually disposed of them there; they were shiny bits of pretty metal that had no actual use to him. He sat down on the floor, his back against the thick power conduit cable and then turned the black tablet over in his hands. This object was interesting, it showed him his face. He sort of knew what he looked like from staring into pools and puddles but he had not seen liquid water for years. He had almost forgotten how he looked, and what he saw was not quite what he remembered.

His face was leaner, his head appeared smaller compared to the jutting intakes at his shoulders. As he looked at his reflection he pursed his lips, stopped for a moment and then made faces in it, giggling at his expressions. He grimaced, then smiled, then stared at the silvery plates in his mouth. He studied his expressions as he made them and giggled some more.

After several minutes of making faces he became aware of a light that had begun to glow on the corner of the smooth surface. He had not realised it but the nearness of the conduit that warmed his home also powered the object wirelessly.

He poked at the glowing light and the mirror-thing flashed and then turned on; he almost dropped the tablet in his surprise. After a moment the datapad displayed pictures and squiggles. He understood the squiggles meant something, but he was unable to read them. But the pictures, he felt he could understand, and used those to navigate.

He sat down for hours and poked different pictures until finally he accessed moving images. Without realising it, he had somehow managed to access an active Vossian public network.

He instinctively understood the language, he was born with that knowledge. He had to use words from time to time, communicating with the full sized beings when he needed something. He had never realised that the words spoken were also words written. Somehow he had managed to turn on captions and could listen to the speakers and over time he began to associate the spoken words with the language displayed.

Over days, weeks and then months in his lonely isolation he sat with the talking tablet and watched the goings on, learning, absorbing. From time to time the spoken language changed to a different dialect and the first written language remained, and a second written language appeared. The little flier was rapidly absorbing the information, and in short order he had picked up an understanding of the second language, both spoken and read. He was learning Vossian as well as Common Cybertronian.

He learned through this process that the language itself could also be written. As he worked his way through the datapad reading what he could, trying to understand the more complicated words. He finally found a section that opened up a file and had a bunch of small squares with the letters that made up the words he had seen. He realised after a while, after that these letters were not words to be read, but parts of words to be created, it was a keyboard. He looked down and formulated a sentence based on what he had often seen and read on the screen. Most presenters had introduced themselves with the phrase “my name is” and then continued to introduce themselves with a designation.

He wrote out the words “my name is...” then paused for a few moments. What had he been called? He was sure he did have a designation. Everyone had a name from what he saw.

The terms he was often referred to were, maggot, rat and scraplette. He understood that these were not his name but tremendously rude insults. He shuttered his optics and thought hard; what other terms had he heard others calling him. Hatchling? No, he had an understanding of what those were and they were usually a Seeker who was only a few years old. He had long since outgrown that term and was now a fledgeling, or at least since the first time he took flight.

He thought further back, was it Whelp? He was not sure what word that was supposed to mean. He did remember that the tone used when it was being spoken meant it was probably up there with rat or scraplette; it wasn't polite.

There was another word in a very distant memory. Perhaps one of his earliest memories, he did not know for sure. The word was Starscream. It was made up of two separate words, which confused him, it sounded like one word when it was spoken. He knew what stars were, he saw them sparking in the night sky, beautiful, bright, attractive. He wondered what they were and where they went when the sun shone, if it ever would shine again. And the other word, scream, which was the sound he made often in fright, or as he launched into a kill. He wondered if stars did scream. He had seen shooting stars and fireballs in the sky, sometimes the latter roared as they passed through the atmosphere.

But these were two separate words as far as he knew, the way this word was used, it was spoken as one word, not separated, there was no pause between them. He tipped his head and thought. A presenter on a program that featured an art form that they called music was named Soundwave, and that was two words made to be one. He nodded, Starscream was probably a name; his name.

He turned his gaze back to the blinking cursor on the screen and finished the sentence 'my name is starscream' he wrote, and with that, it felt real. It lacked punctuation, it lacked grammar, but it was his first written sentence.

Slowly he looked up at the painted walls around him, he grabbed a chalk rock and scrawled under the picture of him fighting a beast and wrote in the same letters he had on the screen 'my name is starscream' as he did, he spoke those words out loud, slowly and carefully, making it his.

His voice was high pitched and rough from disuse. He decided to make it a point of reading what he could out loud so he could hear the words spoken by himself, or repeating words that people said in the moving images.

Through these moving images he learned there was a lot that he did not know or understand. It was up to him to educate himself in all areas he was lacking, the datapad was his doorway into education. His curiosity and passion to understand the world around him was being ignited. He also learned that he was not a wild beast, but a person and was determined to make himself better and civilised.

One thing he learned was that outside weather was called winter and this period of ice and cold would last a few hundred more years. The worst of it was over, and very soon the sun would be rising once more, taking Vos out of its seemingly everlasting darkness.

As the wind howled outside, he could hear the distant melody of the sonic canyons as Cybertron sang its winter song.