The Fall and Rise of An Ancient (GOTP story)

3. The Attack

The next day came with plenty of fresh experiences for Megatron. By the following day, he could walk with limited limping, and it was then that Scribe and Stonereader guided him from his resting place and down into the rest of the city for a proper tour.

The old warlord stuck out like a sore digit here; not only being so much taller than the natives, but also because he had become something of a community marvel; an ancient figure from their distant past that had been sleeping for three years, and now, in a matter of days, he had awoken and was now walking among them.

Telensi came out of their homes and businesses in droves, watching them pass and staring in awe. They ranged in size and shape just as dramatically as the various frame types back on Cybertron, but none of them came close to his size, and there was something else he noticed: There was not a single wheel or jet wing to be found on them. Instead, their robot modes were adorned with horns, ears, tails, wings, even what appeared to be scales on a few of them. They all possessed beast modes, not vehicle modes.

He supposed he shouldn't be surprised. With the local terrain being jungle and forest, not streets and towers of metal and glass, it would make sense for them to scan the native wildlife. Was this fact responsible for their smaller stature as well? Did they simply not have anything large enough to scan to match him?

Thus far, he hadn't tried to transform into vehicle mode himself. The room where he rested was not large enough to properly attempt, and thus far, there had been no need to fly. If he was completely honest with himself, he didn't have the strength to get very far at this point.

He also noticed something else- their sparks were visible. Not blatantly, but each of them had a shape on their chest, different colors for each, that seemed to almost be a window into their frames, allowing the light of their spark and its pulsing to be visible at all times.

Homes and shops bunched together, and smaller telensi rushed about the streets with toys made of stone or wood. Spinning tops and hoops, balls that rolled and bounced on the cobblestone, some even etching pictures onto the stone with softer minerals, like Megatron had seen humans do with chalk back on Earth.

They were so small, so innocent. Was this what he had initially envisioned for the new-sparks of Cybertron when his campaign had begun? It had been so long ago, he'd almost forgotten what his ideals had originally been; before the war, before his own rage had destroyed it all.

"Ancient..."
Megatron snapped from his thoughts as Stonereader spoke, his guides looking to him with concern. "You are... Troubled?"

"Yes... But I will not share it now."

The telensi nodded in understanding, and then they continued on their way. They pointed out shops that sold the fabrics they wore over their forms, the smithies where their weapons and tools were forged, and public spaces for festivals and such. 

As the day went on, Megatron's processor was listening and learning, and he was finding himself able to understand their own dialect more and more. It wasn't so different from the old dialects of early Cybertronian he'd heard long ago in one of the data streams Orion had smuggled to him, but it did have its own accent of sorts.

And the Telensi were not the only living things in the city. Wildlife skittered on the ground and fluttered overhead. The flying creatures settled on the rooftops and were scattered from the ground by running protoforms and toys, and others scurried from one alley to another, looking around as if searching for scraps of food to consume.

But one important question kept surfacing in his mind as he looked at all of the little bots wandering about. Their silvery forms, so much more flexible and almost pudgy than those he'd known of protoforms before, almost as if they were not fully hardened.