Tales of the Intermezzo - Howl A Transformers Universe Story copyright 2006 by Dave Van Domelen based on properties owned by Hasbro =========================================================================== "intermezzo - n. A brief entertainment between two acts of a play." - American Heritage Dictionary As Lugnutz drove along the long lonely stretches of Route 66 in the deserts of the American Southwest, he had a lot on his mind. Crosswise would find him again soon, he always did. It was a game of theirs, the Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus and the madman bum, catch and escape, over and over. Each time hoping to find something to hold onto, some archangel of the soul to tide him over through the long cold nights of the foetid prison. And in a man named Allen, he'd found that syntax and measure of poor human prose, a howl of anguish against the nighttime of death and life, an absolute heart of the poem that would last him a thousand years if it had to. Watching what he expected to be his last freedom miles rolling past, Lugnutz tried to translate a human's desperate cry into one of his own.... I've seen the best sparks of my generation corrupted and monstrous, caged captured stasis, held in prisons of ice and madness and darkness, struggling for angry freedom, monsters and madmen, sinners and loners, burning for the ancient primal energy in the machinery of their hearts, who bared their sparks to Primus in the night and found only chaos gibbering back at them, who sought their own paths only to find the path blocked by rules and hunters and death, who were exiled from Cybertron yet found no freedom on Earth, screaming their defiance to the uncaring, who cowered in unfamiliar forms, disguises that only compromised their souls and never hid them from harm, who got busted by a robot in black, with a slip of Energon under their chestplate and a human scream in their ears, who ate fire in human cities or drank turpentine to stay alive, stay with death, stay in sanity, with dreams of conquest, dreams of freedom, dreams of darkness and endless falling tumbling into the night, AllSpark stillness between incarnations in cities of bronze and corroded green, Energon drunkenness over the skyways, Iacon gateway hologram flashing neon Autobrand giddiness of the glittering moons overhead, vibrations of magnatrams, dead ender rantings and an Optimus Prime state of mind, who flung themselves on the spaceways for the endless trips between the five worlds, racing and hunting and building and ending, until the infinite silence and emptiness broke down the barriers between brain and spark and madness, who sank, down the sub-levels where the core throbs and no one respectable goes, and drank the stale oil of the bar with no name, listening to the crack of doom on the iridium beastbox, who vanished into nowhere mystery planets leaving a trail of echoes and attenuated radio signals and Omega Lock hums, who wandered around and around at midnight in the Kaon shuttle pads wondering whether to go, and where, and how, and why, who teased all the men with her flirting act while secretly wishing them all dead and broken up for parts in the Istoral Trench, who studied Metallikato and cyber-telepathic intuition because the voice of Unicron rumbled through their bodies in Polyhex, who thought they were only mad when the stars gleamed in patterns of otherworldly complexity and called out to them to abandon it all and conquer, who lounged hungry and lonesome through the human cities seeking hope or endings or Energon, and followed the uncharismatic boor to talk about Cybertron and Infinity, a hopeless task, and so welcomed their recapture, who disappeared into the jungles of Mexico leaving behind nothing but mysterious carvings and a message that no one would ever read, who broke down crying in gray scrapyards, naked and trembling before the skeletons of other machinery, who shot Autobots in the face and shrieked wild with delight as they were dragged off to prisons of ice and light for committing no crime but their own wild call to freedom, who let themselves be rammed in the skidplate by saintly motorcycles, and screamed with joy, who faded out in vast sordid holograms, were shifted in time, woke on a sudden Alaska, and picked themselves up out of a hole in the ground hung over on dreams of power and iron and horror, and stumbled to find a place in a new world, who created great suicidal dramas on the tenement rows, gods and monsters and boogeymen in the night fighting a lone knight self-appointed of justice and crowned in self-righteousness, who plunged themselves under tank treads looking for a drop of oil, who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the magnarail window, jumped in the filthy Istoral, leaped on Mini-Cons, danced on broken datachips smashed holocubes of nostalgic pre-War Autobot photosculpture slammed back their oil and keeled over groaning, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal stardrives, who barreled down the highways of Velocitron journeying into a race that never ends and has no real winner but everyone's lost it at least once, who ran through the jungles of the Beast seeking nature and finding only nurture, the cold nurture of the Wire Mother whose love ends in murder, who hid between the Giants in their ever-taller spires of steel and class and cruelty, who came at last to Earth, their final freedom and their final prison, and sank into the sleep of death in the ghostly forms of ghouls and monsters who had been judged evil by the darkness, their own hearts unknown and trapped and bound for a thousand years. =========================================================================== Author's Notes: "Howl," by Allen Ginsberg, is considered one of the archetypical "beat generation" works, so it would make sense to have influenced Lugnutz (the toy, anyway...the cartoon version is a bit too "surfer dude"). So why couldn't he have escaped from Crosswise's prison and gone _On the Road_? http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jng2d/enlt255/texts/howl/howl.htm is the version of "Howl" I referenced for this piece. You'll notice some pieces here and there either lifted entire or closely paralleled. Mind you, this is Lugnutz reinterpreting "Howl", so it's only natural for him to keep the things he thinks translate well. It's also a lot shorter than the real thing, which is probably for the best. Finally, in case the "Route 66" reference isn't enough of a placement, this story takes place in the late 1950s or perhaps early 1960s. After the publication of "Howl" but before the interstate system cut Route 66 to ribbons. How does Lugnutz know about the spacebridge network? Well, Cybertron plays fast and loose with what counts as ancient, but I figure most of the imprisoned Decepticons would likely be old enough to remember the old network.