Born of Risen Apes

It was after the concert that Dahlia's smile faded, and the woman sagged forward, alone with the last instrument to be retuned.

Diego Garcia was a military base, and it showed in the austerity of the temporary storage area for her instruments. There were a lot of instruments; Dahlia had been a collector of them. Every single instrument had to be isolated for Ratchet to scan and rip off bits of Cybertronian metal, where they had somehow integrated into the strings or the general structure of said instrument.

Dahlia blinked, looking at her hands and gripping the stringless acoustic guitar. "I blacked out in the middle of a Celine Dion improviso," she echoed slowly, looking about her. "That does not happen. The strange metal objects in my house is explainable given time for me to reason the situation away, but given the current situation, its facility and my instruments indicate a certain conspiracy at hand. Now it remains to see if Arkham's or Occam's Razor is the most relevant here. Which is it?"

"..."

"Mission City?" Dahlia cocked her head. "I was there a few days after the mess there... ignited gas leak, they called it, or something."

"..."

"Wait, so it's not time, it's... my perception. I was there...?"

"..."

"...I'm living with you, then. What's wrong?"

"..."

"...wow, you're going to use me as a meat puppet to sabotage your enemies, who are presumably tuned into most aspects of human society for numerous decades, which I am not guaranteed to survive, and exposes me to many dangers instead. What makes you think that I won't take this to a professional at once?"

"..."

Dahlia drew a breath, slowly exhaling it as she closed her eyes. As she opened them once more, one eye remained shrouded in the shadows that fell across her face as she smiled. The other eye glowed a celestial blue.

The guitar collapsed into a heap of writhing wires, the silvery mass of ductile metal rearranging and plaiting themselves into a portable electronic keyboard, and Dahlia set it up before playing a song, a song great and terrible alike, an overture to the next phase of the Autobot-Decepticon War.

An overture ringing with something akin to wrath.

Diego Garcia should be the oasis of calm. Being an overseas base in the middle of the Indian Ocean meant that it was subject to Island Time. Rather than an official time, Island Time meant that days tended to be long, lethargic and laggard. Will Lennox had fallen out of bunk with such expectations, between weapon maintenance and training regime.

His expectations had died quickly when he went outside to be faced with more news. With the fact that somehow, one way or another, a completed song had travelled to the end of the Solar System.

"If the Decepticons didn't know about the gestalt signal generator, they do now," Ironhide started, aggravated as the small welcoming committee kept arguing. "And if no one got Prime's message to the stars, trust me, any Cybertronian would have gotten the giant hail of music. I thought you removed every bit of Cybertranium from those slagging instruments!"

"I did!" Ratchet defended. "Do you have any idea what those acoustic instruments contain? Nothing that suggests a gestalt, until I inspect the strings and find the Cybertranium circuits! You try scanning an entire orchestra before yelling, cannon-mech!"

"Ha! What use are those bloody sensors when we couldn't even hear the song going around!"

"Regardless," Optimus finally broke in,, looking towards the DC-3's only civilian passenger. "We must figure out what had happened, and to do so requires us to derive a theoretical mechanism to fix this problem. Ms Su?"

"Call me Dahlia, since we're going to be a while," Dahlia was typing into a PDA with impressive speed. "Okay... if this works like D&D magic or something, then bardic spells by definition have a set time limit. They aren't explosive or AOE, but they... hang around. Like a song in your head. I'm no programmer, but think of it as... a virus in the background, or something like that."

"And what does this virus do?" Will tentatively enquired.

"It is a call," Sideswipe commented through his radio. "Erm... like a gian' foghorn through space, something like tha'. Damn persistent, too."

"What to do..." Dahlia sighed, strolling over to pat Sideswipe's hood before wandering again. "But it means that more autonomous robotic organisms from the planet Cybertron will be coming."

"Autobot and Decepticreep alike," Sideswipe agreed. "Doesn't differentiate, my main gal. Say, you brought the bellows?"

"They aren't bellows," Dahlia explained. "They're an accordion. It's a completely different function."

"Eh, close enough," Ironhide scoffed. "Play something, won't you?"

"Frag you." But she set it out anyway. "Who knew you guys like music so much?"

Conversation was temporarily cut off as the strains of an accordion spread through, lulling most of the soldiers, aliens and even the lone civilian who was tagging along only to decipher the musical notation of the signal from last night. If any had bothered to look outside, they would have seen an F-22 Raptor fall back, swinging from side to side in the slipstream. Above, an alien masquerading as a satellite in geosynchronous orbit placed three transmissions on hold to listen closely over the air transmissions from a known NEST transport plane.

The song ended when the plane was about to touch down, and the Autobots rolled out onto the Australian outback. Neither the NEST soldiers – and one reluctant-looking Captain David Graham – nor the Autobots present thought about how Dahlia's hands started trembling.

"I thought you said that we were supposed to keep distinct personalities."

"I did," Dahlia's lips moved as her eyes flashed into celestial blue. "That was your public persona, and a bit o' mine too."

"When you blend our personality aspects, it makes it harder to tell when you begin and I end."

"Ain't you sweet," she snickered. "Reminds me of a mech, ya know?"

"The one with a surprising propensity towards law and order? But a hidden wisdom behind his spark all the same?"

"Prowlie, yeah," she sighed, her left iris twitching in the relative gloom of the empty hold. "You're a lot like him up there. Why'd you choose this?"

"Tactics and strategies are for amateurs," Dahlia frowned. "The United States military chooses to focus upon logistics instead. And, my strategic skill, as you claim, is studied from every science fiction story ever derived from mankind. We can only dream about what we do not know."

"I won't know," her lips moved as she tentatively fingered the accordion keys, giving it a tentative squeeze to drag out a long note. "We've never had accordions on Cybertron."

"Focus," she hissed.

"You're really taking this very calmly, ya know," she continued.

"I was named for a historical concubine said to have been possessed by a fox demon and who destroyed an ancient dynasty." Dahlia stated. "You can say that I am a believer that my name divines my fate, although I didn't anticipate that it would take place so literally."

"I can't hack your head, Dahlia."

"You tried to hack my thoughts. If you do that I won't be happy."

"You're an organic fleshling."

"You're the alien trapped with the organic fleshling. We're sharing the same hardware."

Dahlia's teeth flashed. "Agreed. Thanks for the signal, by the way."

"It is to call the other player we need," Dahlia answered. "Prowl, that was his designation. So you want him to be the Duke of Qi. I think we can arrange that after I set my affairs in order."

"You're a scary human, and if there's more of you the Decepticreeps are gonna regret ever coming near this planet."

"I am sure that your faction shall regret it too, in time..." Dahlia's eyes flashed as the accordion unfolded, transforming into a familiar keyboard before it disassembled itself to reform into a many-tailed birdlike creature. It dropped onto the hangar, stretching its wings temporarily as Dahlia's face scrunched, dark eyes beginning to shimmer into a blue so unearthly as to not even be human; the only other blues it could, and would, ever match belonged to the optics of the Autobots.

Her neck cracked.

"Ouch," she winced. "DJ Jazz is in da house, and chez Dahlia is flippin' out at me afta tha' extended stay of a coupla months. Fraggit, how'm ah supposed ta tell anyone?"

The story ends here, since I was just sketching out the idea. I'll expand it further in another fic, so please look out!

Fini.

Critiquez, s'il vous plaît!