Disclaimer: I do not own The Transformers. They are owned by Hasbro, a much richer bunch of people than my poor self. I do own Elaina and Arrowhead! So if you like them please ask if you can use them!
Chapter One
The harsh, Eastern Oregon, desert sun baked everything as the crew tried desperately to stay cool. Quick-Shade pavilions covered some of the site where the ground was even. An occasional breeze would drop the 100+ degree temperature a little, but not enough to make a difference. More than often it just blew more sand where it wasn't wanted.
Scattered across an area of no more than ¼ acre were a dozen men and women kneeling in the dirt and rock. About half of the group was centered around a large plaster encased ribcage, digging under it with small picks.
Elaina stepped out of the tent that was off to the side, among the rocks. She looked over the site with a grin. It was rare for her to be in charge of so many people around her own age. She wasn't used to it. Of course that's what happens when you graduate with a Masters at such a young age. Currently she was continuing on for her PhD in Paleontology, and helping teach at the same time, as well as working for two local museums. She was only 25, but felt like she was much older sometimes.
The wind picked up, blowing the dirt around in swirls. She was suddenly glad that her hair was long enough to pull back. She didn't exactly want a red wavy mass blocking her face. She grabbed her sunglasses from her vest pocket and placed them over her emerald eyes. "Damn it's bright out here today," she muttered under her breath.
"Professor Johnson, there's something strange here…" One of the young men called to Elaina from the rib cage.
She sighed and walked over. She wasn't a Professor yet, but she couldn't seem to get them to stop calling her that.
"What is it?" Elaina asked as she stood over his shoulder trying to see what he was pointing at in the hole he had made under the sauropod ribcage. In the light she caught a strange glint coming from the general area.
"Don't know…" He whispered as he moved out of the way for her to see. The glittering light was coming from a large formation of crystals that appeared to be growing where the dinosaur's stomach would have been in life.
She reached down and touched them cautiously. They were warm to the touch, not cold like most crystals. Reaching around she grabbed for the small pick that was lying on the ground and clipped a piece off. She held it up to the light and was amazed at the beauty of colors that swirled inside of it.
"Get the rest of that out of there and bring it to my tent. I'll take it to town to analyze it later today," she requested to anyone that was listening. The young man that had discovered it nodded and moved to start working on it.
A few weeks later she was in the news. Not the big national news that makes top headlines, but the news that was important to those of her profession. She had discovered a new type of crystal. That was a big thing for geologists and paleontologists alike.
Her new type of crystal was being featured in the upcoming rock exhibit at OMSI with a big picture of its newly famous discoverer. Elaina was thoroughly embarrassed. She worked part-time at OMSI in the paleontology lab, as well as at the new dinosaur museum in Eastern Oregon. She was busy, but was free to take time off whenever she needed. She wasn't working for the money.
There was no need of more money in her life. Elaina had inherited a small fortune from her parents when they were killed in a car crash a couple years ago. The pain of it still gripped her heart from time to time, but they had made sure that she would never want for anything when they passed on. So now she owned a nice amount of property in the mountains over looking Portland, Oregon. That's where she was currently hiding out, until the rock exhibit next week.
She had just bought a nice Pace Arrow RV. She had seen it sitting on the lot that she passed to get home from the store, every day for a week now. Finally she broke down and bought it. It was about time that she got out of the tents when she was at dig sites.
It was a nice sunny day so she was out with the RV making sure that it was stocked with all her stuff she needed for digs, and the occasional camping trip. It was a 1980's model, with green and brown on the outside and khaki on the inside. She loved the way it looked and didn't plan on changing anything color wise on it. She was pleased to find that it had a lot of different storage compartments. She had already stocked most of it with various camping necessities.
With her long red hair pulled back, and an old baby doll green tee-shirt on, she looked a bit like a poor college student. Her jeans were faded and had holes in the knees. She was covered in dirt and dust from cleaning the inside completely. Now it was time to wash the outside.
She hauled over the hose, a bucket, and the soap she used to wash her cars with. "Time to get you cleaned up…" she whispered to the RV as she turned on the hose and filled up the bucket with soapy water.
After filling the bucket she turned the hose to the RV and started spaying it thoroughly. She lost her focus when she thought she heard a noise. To her it sounded as if someone had said "That's cold." She looked around but didn't see anyone except for her wolf-husky mix, Diablo.
She eyed the dog suspiciously. "Was that you?" She asked jokingly as she let him lick the water from the hose. He just snorted the extra water from his nose in response.
With a shrug she turned the hose back to the RV. She walked around to the front and started getting the windshield soaked. Once again she stopped because she heard a voice say, "Seriously, that's really cold!"
She dropped the hose for a moment and walked around the RV, looking for the source of the voice. "Hello… Is someone out there?" She called out to the surrounding forest.
She looked at Diablo, who was lying on the cement driveway next to her old Landrover. She knew if someone was lurking around he would be up and growling, to defend his territory. With an exasperated sigh she returned to the hose and the RV.
She aimed the hose high, trying to hit the roof without having to climb the ladder around on the back. "Okay, that's enough! At least warm the water up first!" The voice exclaimed.
Elaina dropped the hose in shock as her RV started shaking the water off. Then it did something that she could never really describe. It moved, but not like a vehicle. It transformed, reforming itself into a rather tall robot with a vaguely human-like appearance in structure.
In fear Elaina backed away from the robot, stepping into the bucket of soapy water and falling soundly on her ass. She sat there in stunned silence, covered in soapy water, as she looked up at her RV-turned-robot.
With a definite grin the robot looked down on her and said, "I'm Arrowhead. I'm your guardian."
Like the rest of America, Elaina had watched the news from Mission City a few months ago with the giant robots that had torn up the city. The government was calling it an experiment of new defense technology, but she didn't believe a word of that nonsense. She had seen the footage and believed that the robots were intelligent, possibly alien by their design. She hadn't counted on purchasing one of them from a used RV lot.
Arrowhead had explained to her about the Autobots, and their existence on earth as well as their war torn past. She had listened half in shock, and half enthralled.
The whole thing was more intense that she could have ever imagined. He had also explained why he was her guardian. It all had to do with the crystals that she had found.
Apparently they gave off a power signature that was detectable by the Autobots. He explained that if they could detect it, then their enemies, the Decepticons, probably could as well. So he was sent to her as a guardian.
"Wait… If you were sent to be my guardian, why did I pick you out at the RV lot? What would you have done if I had chosen another RV?" She asked him, feeling clever as the thought came to her.
Arrowhead grinned at her question. "I didn't copy that RV until I was sure it was the one you were going to pick. I was hiding in the trees next to the lot as you haggled with the dealer. The original RV is now in that grove of trees." He said with a proud tone to his voice.
"That's going to be interesting when someone discovers it…." Elaina muttered as she thought it over.
Arrowhead smiled warmly at her comment before explain that his leader, Optimus Prime, and the other Autobots were probably going to keep an eye on everything as well. This was to make sure that the Decepticons didn't get their hands on the crystals.
"We don't know what the crystals will do if one of us gets a hold of them. It can't be good if the Decepticons get a hold of them, considering the level of power that can be detected from them so far away…." Arrowhead mused as he looked towards her two-story fake log cabin.
Elaina had a very nice, lodge style, fake log cabin that had been built for her a year ago. She could have afforded real logs, but didn't want to deal with the upkeep on something like that here in the Oregon wilderness. It rained way too often for her to want to have real wood siding in her house. She did have a real wood deck on the second story. From there she could look over the entire Portland area at night.
In the basement of the house she had an office where she kept most of her rocks, and a few fossils that she worked on. There was a large safe in there. A section of the crystal formation was secured in there for the time being.
"You mean that you could sense the crystals that are here, at my house, from Mission City?" She asked in sudden intrigue. She had studied the crystals for hours and hadn't found any trace of an energy signature on her equipment. Yet these robots could sense them from thousands of miles away.
Arrowhead noticed her fascination and sighed. "Actually, we could sense them from Tranquility CA, which is where our base is, and even further away. I was in orbit when I sensed them and contacted Optimus about it." His concern was in his voice when he added, "If I could sense it from space, then it's safe to assume that the Decepticons could easily do the same thing."
At the confused look on her pretty human face he smiled. "Yes, I was in outer space… Waiting till Optimus needed me."
"Tell me more about these Decepticons and this Optimus Prime you keep talking about," Elaina said as she settled onto her park bench that she kept in her yard. She was still damp, but the sun was making fast work of drying her out. The Autobot was sitting awkwardly next to the bench.
"I don't know how much more I can tell you, other than Megatron is their leader. He's pretty much the ultimate personification of evil. He makes your Lex Luthor look like a person who raised puppies at the end of a sugar covered rainbow." Arrowhead explained with a nervous chuckle. It was apparent to Elaina that he was genuinely afraid of this Megatron.
Elaina looked up at him with compassion. There were things in this world that she feared a lot. She did the same thing of covering it up with a bit of humor. "So how do you know who Lex Luthor is? That's a human thing…" she asked.
"The same way I know how to speak your language. The world wide web is a great tool," Arrowhead answered with a completely blank face. He was surprised that this human hadn't figured that out already. She seemed very intelligent to him.
Elaina shook her damp hair out for a moment as she tried to wrap her head around everything that he had told her so far.
"Okay, let me see if I have this all right so far… My crystals send off an energy signature that you could sense from orbit. These Decepticons have the same kind of sensors that you do, so you are assuming that they have sensed the crystals as well. The leader of the Decepticons is the ultimate evil bad guy, and he will want to get his hands on the crystals for whatever reason… You were sent to guard me in case these bad guys try to get to the crystals. There are others like you that know what's going on and are waiting with this leader of yours, Optimus Prime, to what…."
She paused dramatically, letting her point come to conclusion. "See if you can defend me and my discovery by yourself against an evil so bad it makes comic book villains seem like model citizens? That doesn't make much sense!" She ended her rant with an exasperated raise of her hands in the air.
Arrowhead laughed a little at her rundown of the whole thing. "Not exactly," he said with a chuckle and a shake of his own head. He thought it was cute that she believed that he was sent to guard her from all the Decepticons. He was a warrior, but not that good of a warrior.
"Optimus sent me to watch over you for now. He is trying to keep an eye out for any movement on the part of the Decepticons. So far they have been in hiding since the incident in Mission City. Most of the Decepticons that were on earth were destroyed in that battle anyways." He told her with confidence. "The humans dumped the body of Megatron into the deepest part of the oceans. I don't believe that he survived that, or the Allspark being shoved into his spark."
Elaina nodded her head to indicate that she understood. He had explained about the Allspark earlier and a little about the battle at Mission City. She was still amazed about the whole thing. It was like living in a science fiction movie.
She looked up at him and realized that this was the longest conversation she had been in for a couple of years now. She really kept to herself, and her work. She felt almost like she was starting to become friends with her RV. A really amusing thought when she let it cross her mind. She couldn't stop the light laughter that followed that thought.
Arrowhead looked at her in confusion. He couldn't see that anything he had just explained would be cause for laughter. "What's so funny?" He asked her with in indignant tone.
Elaine stopped her giggle by swallowing hard. She shook her head and answered, "It's nothing that you said. I was just thinking that it was funny that I was having this conversation with my RV, that's all." She didn't tell him the rest of her thoughts, because they were very personal. "So tell me about Optimus Prime. You really seem to have a lot of respect for him. It's in your voice when you mention his name." She said to change the subject quickly as he looked at her with curiosity.
Arrowhead straightened up as he started to talk. "Optimus is our leader. He's the supreme commander of the Autobots. He's intelligent and a very capable warrior in battle. The best of us all, really…" His voice held the awe of hero worship. "Yet at the same time he is a very honest and kind being. He's very compassionate as well."
Elaina listened with interest. She wanted to meet this Optimus Prime. If he was really as great as Arrowhead described, he would be a nice robot to know. She wondered if anyone could really be that great in reality though. She stood up and stretched as she realized that the sun was starting to set. She had been outside most of the day, and had spent about half of that with wet clothing and hair.
"I'm going inside to shower and eat. Do you eat?" She asked Arrowhead with concern. She didn't really know what to cook for a robot.
Arrowhead laughed heartily before answering. "I don't eat in the way you think. We consume energy sources." He said wistfully thinking of energon, which he hadn't had in a while now. "Your human food always smells good though. I wish I could eat that."
Elaina stopped before the side door to the house as he spoke. She hadn't realized that robots could smell things and she said so to him.
"We have sensors that work in the same way that your biological senses act." He explained quickly pointed to his face. "I can smell things, hear things and see things in a similar way to you."
She understood what he was saying. "You just can't taste things like a biological creature, right?" She asked as she thought about it. His nod of confirmation made her sad. She couldn't imagine not being able to taste things. Of course she was a food fanatic. She watched Food network all the time. Which was why she could cook as well as she did.
"What can I do to help?" She asked. She didn't want to make him hungry by cooking, knowing that he couldn't eat like she did. "Do you want me to plug you into the house for a while? You can get some energy that way. Just don't take so much that you blow the breaker." She added the last, realizing that she didn't know how much energy he would need to keep going.
"I'm fine for the time being. I don't need energy. It just takes the edge off the hunger that I sometimes feel when I can smell human food." Arrowhead sighed.
Elaina shrugged and pointed to the outlet on the side of the house. "If you feel the need, the outlet is right there." She smiled at him and then went inside the wash up.