Scream of Solitude

Trapped in the Dark

Over the course of the next two months, Starscream began getting more used to his new life style and home - and his partner, Turbo the turbofox. Now that he had Professor Helix' lab to live in, as well as having somebody to live with, life became easier on him. As the days passed, Turbo and Starscream both recovered from their respective wounds, thanks to a daily diet of Energon and metal, as well as changing the bandages and patches on the wounds.

Every day, Starscream and Turbo went out to gather Energon. While they had plenty of cubes in the lab, Starscream was still bothered by that dream he kept having, and it didn't take long before he realized it would be a good idea to have more Energon as backup, just in case.

Starscream always brought three empty Energon cubes with him when going out. He would either go to the river in the osmium forest, the lake in the manganese forest, or other deposits he found in other areas on Cybertron. Considering the osmium forest had apparently been visited by other Cybertronians than himself lately, Starscream was concerned about running into them and decided it was best to go to different places.

After filling the three cubes with Energon, Starscream would go to some random spot, either in one of the abandoned cities, in the forests or mountains and make a small cache where the cubes could be hidden. In the cities he would hide them among rubble or in small rooms of still standing buildings; in forests he would dig holes in the ground and bury them; in the mountains or canyons he would find small caves or hollows to put them in and cover with rocks and boulders; and the rest would become part of the main stash in the lab.

Even so, the majority of the Energon gathered ended up in the smaller stashes. Each cache consisted of five to ten cubes, and each stash had to be at least one klik's distance apart from each other. Both factors were to make sure the stashes did not give off too strong energy signals so that other bots would find and steal them. But even if bots did manage to raid a stash, Starscream made sure to make plenty of them, so he had plenty of backup.

Starscream spent a lot of time every day gathering Energon and stashing them away. If he didn't have any empty cubes in the lab, he would go into the abandoned city ruins and look for intact cubes until he got three cubes. There were a lot of empty, intact cubes scattered across the ruins, though finding them took longer and longer time as the days passed and the caches grew larger and spread across the planet. Finding three cubes could take a few minutes to several hours. Starscream made a rule to gather at least thirty cubes every day, doing at least ten rounds of gathering Energon every day before he could do something else.

Other than gathering Energon, Starscream and Turbo also went hunting together on occasion. Since their prey varied in size, they didn't hunt every day or every other day, but at least once a week. Turbo hunted the small mechanimals like dexi-squirrel, lilleth, razor snake and even an erinacon once, while Starscream could somewhat handle medium-sized beasts like porcineacon, cyber-hawk, astroturkey and the like on his own. When it came to large mechanimals like titanium moosebot, singlehorn and even large predators like krystar iron-bear and nitrotiger, the two of them had to work together to take them down. They would share the large kills whilst only letting the other take one bite of their own kills. As such, both got metal to eat, and both worked to feed themselves and each other.

Starscream ended up convincing Turbo in the beginning that they should only hunt one of each kind of mechanimal, so Starscream could gather samples from as many species as possible to store away for the future. While Turbo did not seem pleased to be restricted at what she could and could not hunt, Starscream assured her it was just until he had gathered enough pieces of the mechanimals, so she went along with it.

Starscream and Turbo shared the edible metal across a few days, while the inedible metal was stored away for different purposes. Starscream had studied the organs of the dioptas-stag a bit closer with the help of the science books in the lab, to see if he could make any use of them. He found that once the organs were off Energon and the host was dead, they were pretty much useless and could only really be melted down for materials.