Going Green

Chapter 24: Fragging Scientist

"Starscream?" Verdant muttered, looking over her daily schedule. "Why him?"

Soundwave basically had Verdant stationed was every officer on the ship during some part of her day. She was to help Shockwave in the mornings and to participate in combat training with Starscream and the predacon.

After finishing checking her systems for errors, Verdant approached the door and pushed her way out. Soundwave made it seem lighter than it was. She headed for Shockwave's lab, the path to which was highlighted on a partial map Soundwave left on the datapad.

Every so often, she passed a patrol of vehicons, and instinct told her to duck down and run the other way. Instead, she stared at them timidly and they stared right back.

By the time she reached Shockwave's laboratory, Verdant was exceedingly nervous. The unusually large doors slid open to allow her entry and Verdant walked in just enough before stopping to look around.

The room was massive, littered with tables and machinery and quite possibly anything else a mad scientist needed to clone predacons. A few crates on synthetic energon caught her optics. The responsibility must have been passed on after Knockout's incident.

"Verdant," the scientist himself approached her, and she finally realized why this room was so massive. Of course, Verdant had seen him before, through images and heat signatures, but none of that prepared her for the sheer size of this massive cyclops, blaster attached to his arm, no intake.

He looked more like the experiment than the experimenter.

"Soundwave informed me that you would be here to assist my work," Shockwave stared down at her menacingly. "Welcome to my lab."

Verdant cleared her throat. "Thank you."

The scientist turned away. "You were stationed in Polyhex during the initial Decepticon assault."

"I was," she sighed. She already knew where this conversation was going.

His was a response was somewhere between a hum and a growl. "And it was you that caused the power outage that disabled the entire Decepticon communications network."

"Yes."

Get to the point Shockwave.

The scientist gestured to a device sitting on his counter before looking at her critically. "I have been working on a device that can replicate what you did for some time now. The goal is to create a targeted EMP blast that can leave one's home base and only affect enemy systems."

"On an airborne warship?"

"Most work has been done in my lab on Earth, but high command agreed it would not be optimal to trust you outside of the warship."

Verdant frowned. "I didn't use an EMP in Polyhex."

Shockwave stared silently. "You didn't?"

"No."

He grabbed the device and threw it at a giant, battered trash can across the room before turning to her. "How did you do it?"

"On accident," Verdant looked at the trash can and had a vision of Shockwave yeeting her into it. "It was mostly due to a malfunction hacking into the powergrid while accessing the rockets systems."

"Why would you hack into a rocket through the power grid?"

"Because everyone else was hacking through the obvious channels," Verdant shrugged.

"But you can't hack a powergrid if it's disconnected from your systems."

"Which is why I was trying to connect it."