TRANSFORMERS ANIMATED

Grey Matter – Silver Lining

At the same time as Megatron reawakening, a girl falls to earth and Sari manages to convince her Father to let the new girl - Emma - become her nanny. Emma doesn't talk much, and she's ESPECIALLY not saying she's from a different world! But, when the All-Spark is shattered, her origins are questioned, and her importance becomes key to the tides of the war...PxOCxJ

~Parental Warning~

This chapter contains the following, which may not be suitable for young people:

. Low level coarse language

. Low level animated violence

. Adult themes

. Implied drug-use.

CHAPTER ONE

Prologue

A young woman stood on the station platform alone, wearing a backpack and listening to music through her MP3 Player. Every so often, she would check her watch.

She couldn't afford to be late. After all, today was a very important day. Today, she would finally be handing in all of her assignments, and hopefully they would all be okay. They had better be okay. She had practically pulled an all-nighter just to get them finished, going to bed only in the small hours of the morning right before she had to get up an hour later. It was the tiredest she could ever remember feeling, and not even the coffee could save her now.

Her name was Emma Paradiso, and she was the tiredest twenty-one (nearly twenty-two) year old art student south side of the Swan River, Western Australia, the cloudy Friday morning her life truly began. If anybody had been looking at the young woman dressed all in black, then they wouldn't have guessed that she was destined to have a great adventure, one that would begin momentarily and that would change her forever. She was a small woman, short and petite, with shoulder-length dark brown hair dyed a dark red, and hazel eyes that had dark circles under them. She yawned occasionally, and shifted from one foot to the other. Where on earth was her train?

The song on her MP3 Player finished, and Bachelor Girl began to sing Buses And Trains. Perhaps it was ironic (take that, Alanis) but maybe it was all part of a greater plan?

Emma heard the train approaching, and looked to her left expectantly, to see the familiar white and green train coming around the bend in the tracks. She couldn't help but smile – she was, after all, a hopeless train-spotter.

The driver of the train looked at the girl standing on the platform as the train glided towards her. He had already applied the brakes, and it would take the train its usual fifteen seconds to stop completely, so the driver could do nothing about what happened next.

A figure seemed to appear out of nowhere behind the girl, and it was the strangest-looking human being the train driver had ever seen. In fact, the train driver wasn't even sure that it was a human-being – it had looked more like a robot, really…

A black, evil-looking robot…

One that had placed both its hands…err, claw-thingies, on the girl's back, and pushed her, really hard.

The train driver yelled out as the girl fell into the path of the oncoming train and, more than anything right then and there, the driver wished that he could swerve, or go in reverse, or something…

Something that would stop him from killing that poor, innocent girl.

In fact, he was so busy grieving about this as the train's brakes screeched on the tracks, that he didn't even notice the blue light that appeared where the girl had vanished, and he didn't know that it swallowed her up long before the train ever hit that spot on the tracks.

But, it didn't matter one way or the other because, as the driver looked up again, the creature that had pushed the girl appeared clinging to the wind-screen, and the driver couldn't help but scream.

The thing was something straight out of a nightmare, a human-sized robotic organism with huge claws, black leathery wings and piercing red eyes. It opened its beak, which was filled with razor-sharp fangs, and screeched a terrible sound, one that was worse than any nails on any blackboards could ever be. It then drew its arm back, before punching it straight through the train's wind-screen, its claws killing the train driver instantly as they pierced through his head, slamming the corpse up against the door to the cabin as the train finally slowed to a stop.

As the red blood stained the white door incarnadine, the thing retracted its hand, as the dead driver slumped to the carpeted floor of the train. The thing licked the blood clean from its claws, before spreading its wings and taking flight, disappearing into the shadows on a nearby wall…

And, somewhere, Emma Paradiso was falling, through time and space, unconscious to everything except her own thoughts…

Two years ago…

"Do you know why you didn't get that job?" Leonie "Lee" Paradiso asked her youngest daughter, arms folded across her chest.

"Why?" Emma's hands were on her hips, and she was glaring right on back at her Mother. Though they didn't look a thing alike (Lee was a larger woman, with olive skin, platinum blonde hair and dog-brown eyes), their glares were mirror-images, as were the tones of their voices. Emma's, however, threatened to go high-pitched, which had earned her the nickname "mouse" within her family. "Is it because I didn't study my questions? Yeah, I know, Dad keeps saying…"

"No!" Lee interrupted her, and a spark of annoyance flashed through Emma's eyes. "It's because of this!" She swept her arm across, motioning to Emma's room. It was messy, with clothes slung across a desk-chair and books stacked messily against the bookcase, which could not accommodate them any longer due to the large number of Transformers action figures that were there. "How can you expect people to employ you if you continue to act like a little child? If you do that, then people will treat you like a kid!"

"That's what you and Dad keep saying, but you're wrong!" Emma exclaimed, trying to keep her temper. She was usually pretty good at it, unless she was upset. She'd been trying to get a job for months, and it just wasn't working out for her. If only she hadn't messed up on her TAFE course last year, then none of this would be happening. If she hadn't failed her parents and lost their respect…if she hadn't been on that medication…if she wasn't so worthless…

"You need to spend more time learning about the world, instead of watching these fucking cartoons and wasting your time drawing pictures!" Lee yelled.

Emma bristled, and shut off, the way any young person will when their parent speaks to them this way. It was a mark of the amount of respect Emma had for people that, despite living a very messy and disorganized life with next to no social skills and a habit of daydreaming all the time, she would never use certain words or insult people the way she was used to being spoken to. Her parents were just concerned about her life but, at the time, this wasn't making any sense to her.

Lee pushed past Emma then, and grabbed a pile of artwork off the floor, along with a Transformers action figure (Blackarchnia). "What is this shit, and why is it on the floor?!" Lee didn't understand how Emma could live in this way – didn't she realise that it was nearly snake season?

"Hey!" Emma yelled, lunging for the precious items, and managing to grab Blackarchnia. "Give them back, they're mine! You have no right…"

"This is my house, and I say that if things are on the floor, then I do this to them!" Lee shouted and, with that, she began to rip up the pictures, all of the painstakingly detailed drawings of characters like Prowl; Bulbasaur; Sanji and Sailor Mercury. "This. Won't. Get. You. A. Job." Lee snarled with each rip, as the first-ever picture of Prowl in his alt-mode that Emma had ever drawn was destroyed forever.

Emma watched in horror, before turning and running, her feet carrying her down the hallway at a pace she'd never have been able to run at if she wasn't upset. She clutched Blackarchnia to her chest, and didn't stop running until she reached the shed out the back of the five acre bushland property. There, she collapsed into the seat of the ride-on-lawnmower. Leaning her head over the steering wheel, so that her then-brown hair covered her face, Emma Paradiso began to sob…

In the present time, that same girl almost smiled. What a fool I was but…Mum…you were wrong, too…