Ghosts of the Present (Rescue Bots AU)

51. Long Stories...

"Welcome to our humble abode..."
Blades gestured to the interior of the bunker, "This is where we bots spend a lot of our time when we're not rescuing."

"So you're still hiding down here." Sideswipe muttered.

"It's called having our own space, okay?"
Blades walked over and plopped down on one of the crates, "Cody, would you be so kind as to wash this-" he pointed to some cybertronian graffiti spray-painted onto his back, "-off of me?"

"Sure thing, Blades."

"What's it say?" Dani asked.

Chase shook his helm, "You do not want to know, trust me."

"Alright, so why don't you tell me how you guys got here and why Bee never mentioned you before. How long have you been here? Did ghost Optimus send you here too?"

"Ha! No... No, we've been here since before the end of the war and Bumblebee went back to Cybertron." Heatwave informed.

"Well... Sort of." Boulder muttered, "...Let's start from the very beginning."
They all took seats, "So the four of us were assigned to patrol one of the more dangerous quadrants back before the war even started-"

"You guys are that old!?"

"Yes yes, now don't interrupt. Anyway, we were about finished with our patrol when we came under attack by an Energon Eater, and we had to put our ship in sleep mode and ourselves in stasis to keep it from destroying us and our ship trying to get at our energon. Our ship should've been awakened within the solar cycle when we missed our check-in-"

"But then the war happened and suddenly four missing bots in the Quintessa Quadrant weren't so important." Heatwave muttered with a growl, "We free-floated for who knows how long, before finally getting a wake-up call from Optimus, which brought us here to Earth. Since we didn't have any battle training and it would have been too costly to try and provide it, he assigned us to work here with the Burnses as our partners. During those first few years, we went through a lot of weird stuff, but one of those was that we picked up an energon signal and searched in some glacial caves for it... And found Blurr and his friend Salvage's ship locked in ice."

Blurr took over for this next part, "Salvage and I crash-landed here during a meteor shower long before the war, and then had to put ourselves in stasis to protect ourselves from the onslaught of meteors hitting the planet- After heroically saving some cave-people, of course-"

"Ahem!" Heatwave coughed with a glare at the racecar, who glared back.

"Anyway...!" Blades responded, "Optimus requested we train Blurr and Salvage to be rescue bots, which we did, and then they were assigned to help in another location."

"What happened to Salvage?" Sideswipe asked.

"Oh, he's fine. He's back at our HQ on the Mainland."

"Which brings up the question of why you're here on Griffin Rock in the first place." Heatwave remembered, looking to him with a raised brow.

"I was going to ask if we could borrow a Subterranian Vein Finder, but then you guys were AWOL and then that minicon showed up! Where were you when I got here!?"

"We'll get to that later in the story." Blades assured, "Anyway, so then Blurr and Salvage were off on their own, and we moved on as we had been, until the fateful day the four of us died."

This bit seemed to be what Sideswipe was most interested in, as he leaned closer.

"So, Griffin Rock had a festival where they dug up an old time capsule, which is a tradition humans do where they bury mementos and stuff in a box in the ground and then people dig it up later and get to learn about the people who lived there in the past. Anyway, we dig up the time capsule from seventy-five years before, except a woman had replaced everything in the capsule with a teleportation crystal- a crystal that then teleported the entire island to the Arctic!"