Author's note: Prior episodes of this story and its predecessor may always be found at Feedback is always appreciated. It might lead to the next episode of this story getting written sooner. :) TRANSFORMERS GENERATION 2 and BUBBLEGUM CRISIS STRANDED II: TRANSFORMATION IN MegaTokyo Part Two: Encounters By Christopher E. Meadows Leon McNichol slumped into his desk chair and sighed exhaustedly. "This has _not_ been one of my better days." "I know what you mean, pard," Daley Wong said, leaning back in his own swivel chair, arms crossed behind his head. "I saw the headlines, too." "'Three die, four critically-injured in Boomer attack. Where were the A.D. Police?'" Leon shook his head. "Fighting the Griffin and those weird battlemovers, that's where. Just can't win for losing, these days." "Maybe this'll take your mind off things." Daley passed a sheet of paper over to Leon. "I doubt it, but I'll give it a shot anyway." Leon took the sheet of paper, scanned it with his eyes. "Hey, this's from Nene-chan." "Yep." Daley leaned back again. "She finally got that trace to go through on who bought Gibson's nightmare machine off our impound lot...and how. Looks like it wasn't switched onto the 'sale' list by a random computer error after all." Leon read the paper twice through, then folded it up and put it in his pocket. "It was deliberate. Someone hacked our systems. The Griffin was bought by Hallowell Industries...and five'll get you ten that's a Genom front company." "I always thought that thing was more Boomer than car anyway," Daley opined. "Maybe it's gone to a family reunion?" Leon snorted. "Fat chance. Is Nene around?" "No, she's off today," Daley said. "Why?" Leon shook his head. "Never mind. Just wanted to ask her something." He drummed his fingers on the desk, thoughtfully. "If Hallowell is a Genom front, that'd explain why there's always a Boomer incident in another part of town whenever the Griffin shows up." "And why it's packing assault weapons now?" Daley added. "Yeah. Of course, I just bet that when I follow this up, Hallowell'll either say they broke the Griffin down for scrap, or it got stolen." Leon shrugged. "Well, I guess it's a start, anyway." "So I guess this is where we hit the streets?" Daley inquired. "Might as well. They're paying us for something, after all." Leon stood up, grabbing his jacket. Daley followed suit, grinning. "I just _love_ it when you talk like that." Though the sun was still high in the sky, it was nearly dark in the Timex City district. Timex City was always dark and gloomy, even at high noon; buried deep in the crevassic Fault region opened by the second Kanto quake ten years before, Timex did not get as much sunlight as the rest of MegaTokyo. It was not the best place to live for sun-worshippers, which was why it was largely zoned industrial, for factories and dumps. Except for Raven's Garage. Raven's, originally built in a bit of empty space left over by a surveying accident, had become a rather well-known establishment over the years it had been in business. However, one of the most interesting things about it was known only to a select few... Nene stepped out of the elevator, shrugging out of the A.D. Police jacket, rolling up her sleeves, and unwrapping a chocolate bar. Down here, three levels below the street, was the main Knight Saber repair facility, and where the mysterious orange battlemover had been brought for a full examination. It was sitting in the middle of a vacant repair bay now, supported by a concrete block where it was missing a wheel. And it was not alone--Mackie was standing in front of it, running a hand over the motor whose gleaming carburetor poked out of the middle of the hood. "Like what you see?" Nene asked. Mackie grinned embarrasedly and looked up. "It's quite a machine, whatever it is. Musta been built by a hot-rod freak. I mean, look at that motor...I wonder how fast it can move?" Nene opened the driver door, and slid into the seat. "Who knows? We might just find out." "We could use a good chase vehicle if we're ever gonna catch that Gryphon," Mackie pointed out. "Last time, Priss trashed my bike just getting to it...and that was _before_ someone gave it plasma cannons and gatling guns." Nene reached over and opened the laptop she had put in the passenger seat earlier, and started connecting cables to the dashboard. "Mm-hmm." "I guess I'd probably better let you work in peace, huh?" Mackie said. "Mm-hmm," Nene said, already half-distracted. She hardly even noticed when Mackie left. As Nightracer cruised along the city street, she suddenly became aware she was being watched--not in so prosaic a fashion as "feeling" somebody's eyes on her, but by her own active scanning detection systems triggering. Someone is pinging _me_? Nightracer thought. Curious, she ran her own scans on the source--one of the humans standing just within the shadows of an alley. No, scratch that--not a human at all. Nightracer became all the more interested when her sensor scan painted this figure as some sort of biomechanical construct. Not on the order of a Cybertronian, but much more advanced than the humans had been capable of manufacturing on the Earth she knew. It had even compressed portions of itself to fit within a living human-skin disguise. "Remarkable...a cyberdroid, pretending to be a human," Nightracer mused. "I wonder if there might be a tactical advantage in engineering Decepticons for such a purpose." It would be something to consider, if they ever made it home. Intrigued, Nightracer ran a quick full-perimeter sweep, and the scan revealed three more of these androids in disguise closing on her position. From their movements and formation, it seemed they were attempting to surround her. Nightracer was amused to realize that they intended to try to capture her. The sheer audacity of it... Admittedly, it might be advantageous to cooperate with the power that could construct such androids...but if so, it would be as an equal, not as a captive. Nightracer fired a laser from within her front bumper that precisely disentigrated the head of the one who had scanned her, and had transformed before its body had even hit the ground. A pair of wrist-rockets blew the second one to bits before it could even react--then the other two exploded out of their human guise and streaked forward, firing laser beams from their mouths. Nightracer somersaulted and rolled forward, under the beams, and came up with a blaster rifle in each hand, blazing away at both of them simultaneously. Her beams hit them in the thruster packs before they could even turn around, and they both exploded and fell from the air. "Very impressive," a female voice said from nearby. Nightracer turned, bringing up her rifles. A woman with blond hair leaned against one of the buildings, watching. A quick scan revealed that she, too, was one of the disguised cyberdroids, though of a subtly different type, and with a much more complex cranial processor. "We aim to please," Nightracer replied sardonically. "As well as to blast you to fragments should it become necessary." "It will not be," the woman said, smiling slightly. "I do not intend violence. In fact, I have been authorized to offer you...a deal." "A deal, hmm?" Nightracer mused, smiling behind her facemask "Tell me more..." Nene sat at a table behind a protective barrier of concrete and blast-proof glass, right elbow on the table, right hand cupped under her chin, as she gazed at the monitor on the laptop in front of her and sipped a cup of coffee in her left hand. The alien symbols streamed up the monitor, making about as little sense as they had on the dashboard of the car itself, while in an inset window, the output of her decryption/translation program also scrolled up, more slowly. The linguistic routines weren't having a great amount of success. She glanced up at the car, into which the cables that snaked out of her laptop and across the sixty feet of intervening floor, led. The symbols were so...so _alien_. She'd never seen anything like them in any of the modern idiographic languages. The closest she could come would be ancient Egyptian, and that only based on the stylistic _feel_ of some of the images. This either had to be in some sort of code, or else... Nene shook her head. It wasn't unheard of for the operating systems of military battlemovers to be encrypted, as protection against the vehicles falling into enemy hands, but encryption would have looked like an alphabet-soup of ASCII line-noise, or else raw static...there could be no purpose to installing a whole new symbolic alphabet just for the encryption coding. Onboard computers for combat mecha were usually programmed under a strict "Keep It Simple, Stupid" philosophy, lest the jarheads who were assigned to pilot them find themselves trying to figure out where the "Any" key was in the middle of a battle. But the only other possibility was... "...an alien language?" Nene murmured. "No...couldn't be." She stared at the screen for a while longer, then it hit her...there was a way to find out. She jumped up and walked back over to the car, sliding into the driver door again, and leaned forward to look at the dashboard. If the control knobs and buttons were labelled in the same language, then... Nene frowned. The dash was by and large a touch-sensitive display screen, with buttons and such that were part of the screen itself. Their labels were also pictographs, but that could be part of the encryption programming. She looked around the car's cabin, trying to see something, anything, that might have actual writing or embossing upon it...but she didn't see anything. "Internal parts," she muttered. "Maybe..." She leaned forward, reaching under the dashboard to look for access panels, fuseboxes, whatever. She found a panel that slid open to reveal a bundle of insulated wires or cables of some sort, and grasped it to try to pull it into the light to take a look...and that was the last thing she remembered for some time. First there was darkness. Then there was light. Not a big light, or a lot of it...just the little blinking green light, the cursor for his onboard computer subsystems. It blinked there at him, mockingly, insofar as an inanimate object can be said to mock. Windbreaker wasn't sure what to do about it for a moment, then he remembered. "Diagnostic." The information appeared. It was worse than he'd hoped, but not as bad as it could have been, given that the last thing he remembered was a nosedive off of an elevated highway, through the roof of a warehouse below. It would take some time for the internal systems to repair, so he might as well get started. The next thing he noticed was a light touch to one of his interface ports. He tried to see what it was, but optic processing was still offline, so he'd have to wait. It seemed to be a computer interface of some sort, but it was only reading...not inputting, or responding to any of the queries he sent its way. It certainly wasn't Cybertronian, he could tell that much. Weird...Windbreaker began to wonder just where he was, but it would still be some time before sensory input was back online. What else, what else...his superstructure had survived relatively intact; most of the cannon shots had been glancing, and the roof had broken his fall. The shredded wheel would have to be replaced, but that could be swapped out. And then...something else was touching him now. He reached out to interface with it... Windbreaker came back to full awareness some time later. There was a diagnostic message blinking urgently in his field of view... "NEURAL NET BREACH DETECTED. POSSIBLE DATA CORRUPTION IN MAIN MEMORY. RESTORE FROM BACKUP (Y/N)?" Windbreaker answered in the negative. Over eons of living with it, he'd come to know that the onboard computer's cranial diagnostic subroutines _meant_ well, but ultimately couldn't be trusted by themselves. He'd have Skram examine him later... Skram. That reminded him...something had happened. Where was he...? Focusing his sensor sweep beond the glowing letters, he found he seemed to be in a garage, probably underground. There were cables trailing from his open door to a protected table nearby...presumably that first connection he'd sensed. And in his driver's seat...Windbreaker's sensors blinked. He...knew this human, though he knew he'd never seen her before in his existence. She was...a technician for a police force, leading a double life as a warrior--a soldier of information, though not the best physical fighter. But...how did he know this? He tried to remember... "nnngh..." Nene groaned, opening her eyes. "...oh, my head..." Where was she? She began to remember... "Must've touched a live wire...should've known better," she muttered. "Sylia'll have my hide..." "Are you all right, Miss...Nene?" The voice came from the console in front of her, and Nene nearly jumped out of the seat. "...Windbreaker?" She blinked. "W...wait. What...happened? Who are you? And...how do I know your name?" "I don't know...I don't know how I know you, either." A light on the dashboard flashed in time with his speech, like an audio recording level indicator. "Maybe my system log..." More of those strange but now oddly familiar symbols flashed up on the screen. Nene squinted. "Could you...put that in kanji, please? "Huh? Oh...sure. Running translation program now..." The screen flickered and changed, and Nene blinked. "'Neural net breach'?" "That means I must have come in contact with an unauthorized data source somehow. Like a virus, or..." He paused. "...or me?" Nene leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. "I think I just found out more than I bargained for." Windbreaker was silent a moment longer. "I...think I did, too." Not far away in altitude, but a few miles away in distance, two sports cars and a truck pulled into an abandoned underground area that had once been part of the Tokyo subway, before the Kanto quake had reduced it mostly to rubble. It was a good meeting spot, for all of that; the tons of concrete and steel and earth would hide their power plant signatures from anyone who happened to be looking for them, and no one but a few vagrants would notice their presence. "Report, team," Rapido ordered, as they all transformed to robot mode. "What have you found?" "I checked the newsprint services I could download, and accessed the police computers," Skram said. "They haven't got Windbreaker, at least not that they've said in their unclassified database. And there haven't been any reports of Nightracer either." "I haven't picked up either of their Energon signatures, though I'll admit I didn't cover that much of the metro area," Turbofire said. "But I did find our Energon converters can handle local electricity and petrochem, and there are several junkyards that look like they could provide fair raw material sources." "I've never built a spacebridge from scratch before, though," Skram said gloomily. "I'm not even sure where I'd start." Rapido nodded. "I covered a fairly good area of this...this MegaTokyo, and I didn't pick up Nightracer or Windbreaker's signatures either," he said. "There were traces of a truck near the warehouse, which means he must have been removed somewhere...but if the police don't have him, who might?" "Genom might," Skram said. Rapido glanced to him. "Genom? I noticed the name..." Skram nodded. "They're a big corporation that provides a lot of the society's mechanical and technological goods and services--most notably the 'Boomers,' biomechanical constructs used for hazardous duties. It's hard to find anything _solid_, but from the opinion columns in the papers, they seem to be responsible for a lot of crime and terrorist attacks." "Like Microsoft, only worse?" Rapido posited. "If you can believe what I've read, a thousand times worse," Skram said. "And their Boomer research department--" "Would probably love to get its hands on one of us," Turbofire finished. "We'd better hope that doesn't happen," Rapido said. "So, let me get this straight," Nightracer said. "You want me to kill these four humans, and in exchange, you will provide for my resupply?" "That is the deal I propose, yes," Dr. Miriam Yoshida replied. He was leaning on the railing of a catwalk above one of Genom's battlemover repair bays, at head level with Nightracer, who was standing up. The female Boomer who'd brought Nightracer to this place was at his side, impassive. "The one that you propose..." "...is that I deliver you the Autobots who arrived here with me, for your research division to study, and in return you will build a spacebridge to return me home." "We will _attempt_ to build your, ahem, 'spacebridge,'" Dr. Yoshida corrected. "I cannot guarantee we will succeed. However, with the technical data you claim these Autobots have, we _might_ have a chance." "If I can deliver them intact, yes," Nightracer said. "And I _will_ try...at least for the one who has that data." "Good...good." Dr. Yoshida nodded, rubbing his hands together. "Are we agreed?" Nightracer nodded. "We are." "Excellent." He nodded to a subordinate. "While we've been talking, my team has been analyzing your weapons. Let's see what we can do for you." The subordinate nodded. "Sir, we have examined the weapons completely! We cannot recharge the energy weapons at this time, but can tell you more after further study! However, the shells used by the D.D.'s gatling cannon can be adapted to the automatic cannon rifles, and we have already begun to set an assembly line to make the modifications!" "Don't worry about the energy guns; I can recharge those myself," Nightracer said. "The cannon shells will do just fine. Provide me with one thousand rounds, and I will be ready to hunt." She turned her attention back to Yoshida. "All that remains is to find these humans and eliminate them. Mmm...it hardly seems sporting." "Oh, I doubt that." Yoshida shook his head. "These 'humans' have long been a thorn in Genom's side, defeating the most powerful Boomers we could throw against them." Nightracer smirked. "Which isn't saying much." Yoshida shrugged. "Even so, I believe you will find them to be quite a challenge." Nightracer nodded. "And you undoubtedly know _where_ I can find them?" "Not _precisely_." Yoshida tapped a key on his wristwatch pager, and a door at the end of the bay slid open. Behind it, the silver wedgelike nose of the Griffin could be seen. "But I know what will draw them out." "Aha." Nightracer nodded. "I believe I can appreciate this plan. I will follow at a distance, and when the humans show up, eliminate them." "Precisely." Miriam nodded to the female Boomer. "Nagisa will accompany you." "Hey, now hold on just a minute," Nightracer protested. "I work alone." Yoshida shrugged. "Consider her...my observer, and my personal agent in this matter. If the situation should...change, in the field, she will be authorized to renegotiate for me. Otherwise..." He shrugged. "...you might never get home." Nightracer looked at him. "Are you threatening me?" Yoshida shook his head. "Merely stating a simple fact." Nightracer frowned. The Boomer woman gave her the creeps...but it was such a small point on which to stick. "All right, then. But she stays out of my way, got it?" Nagisa nodded. "I will not interfere with your job. That is my job." "As long as we understand each other." She transformed back to a sports car, and Nagisa leaped down from the catwalk to slide into her passenger-side seat. Yoshida slowly grinned. "In that case...let the hunt begin!" The Griffin's motor thrummed to life, and its headlights and spotlights gleamed. AUTHOR'S NOTES: I'd like to thank the Academy... Actually, what got me started writing Stranded II again after so long a hiatus is...none other than _Beast Machines_. Vehicular Transformers are so cool...they got me thinking about my own vehicular Transformers story, and the plot I had in mind for it. I'm not sure whether II will go all the way to ten parts as the first Stranded did, though I hope it will...but I actually have the plot roughly sketched out, as well as that for Stranded III. IV may or may not happen... Those who've read the original Stranded (all two of you :) may have noticed that I fit that story in between two actual episodes of the show, instead of setting it after the show as most other Robotech fanfics went. However, the BGC fans among you may also have noticed that this story is set after BGC 8, rather than during the span of time covered by the show. Why not within the show? Well, partly because Dr. Yoshida, the villain I wanted to use, was only featured in the last episode...and partly because I couldn't think of any way in which the presence of the Transformers would _not_ heavily alter the subsequent events in the timeline, thus making the episodes that came after it not happen. (This way I just end up making Crash! not happen, and we all know it actually didn't anyway, so... :) However, future Stranded stories may or may not be set within the timelines of the particular shows with which they cross... Please send along feedback! You never know, if you have questions they might be answered in a future author's note... ;) "Stranded II" is copyright 1999 by Christopher E. Meadows. Permission granted for free electronic distribution via Usenet and associated archival, as long as no fee is charged and this notice remains intact. For further permissions, such as inclusion in "Con-Quest" or on an archival webpage, please contact the author, he would likely be more than happy to oblige. :) The Transformers, Rapido, Windbreaker, Turbofire, and Skram are registered trademarks of Hasbro and Takara, and Nightracer is a trademark of Raksha and Plumed Serpent Productions. Their unauthorized use here is not for profit, and not meant to infringe upon those trademarks. This is _not_ an official Hasbro-endorsed story, please don't think I'm trying to pass it off as one. (There, that should make the Hasbro lawyers happy. :) Bubblegum Crisis and A.D. Police are copyright 1987-1990 by Artmic, Inc. and Youmex, Inc. The Knight Sabres, Leon McNichol, and other associated trademarks are also their property. Their unauthorized use here is not for profit, and not meant to infringe upon those trademarks. This is _not_ an official Artmic/Youmex-endorsed story, please don't think I'm trying to pass it off as one. (And that should make the Japanese lawyers happy too! :)