milliways_bar | (no subject)

Prime is playing his guitar when Ray comes in. He's also singing quietly, so as not to disturb too many people. (Other than those who would be disturbed about Optimus Prime expressing the desire to look for his lost shaker of salt, as he informs them that some people might state a female is responsible for his issues, but he is aware that the only source of his problems is himself.)

He sees Ray and Francis, and the faceplate shifts.

"Ray!" he says, giving a wave. "Good to see you."

They don't make Hawaiian shirts big enough, otherwise it would really be kind of entertaining to see the big guy at a Jimmy Buffett concert. One gets the feeling the Parrotheads would be more accepting than most.

Ray looks up and waves back. "Hi, Optimus," he says. "Wow, it's been a long time- how've you been? Still working on the guitar, I see."

"WHURF," says Francis, takka-takka-takkaing forward to get a better sniff at the new entity on his sensors.

"Oh- this is Ecto's pet Francis. Francis, be nice."

Wouldn't it, though? He's sort of pondering getting clearance to attend covertly. Park nearby... anyway.

"A long time... only a few weeks. I assumed you were busy with a project. And yes, still working on it. A little blue character called Stitch showed me some tricks, and that sent me to Hawaiian slack-key, which is really fascinating in how they use guitars. I seem to be more interested in music like this than, as humans put it, 'heavy metal'. Ironic, isn't it?"

He reaches down to gently pat Francis like he's seen humans pet dogs. "Hello, Francis."

Then he regards Ray. "What have you been up to?"

"No, I mean a long time by human standards," says Ray. "I got expelled from the Bar by forces or entities unknown when I tripped during a lightsaber demonstration and hit my head. When I opened my eyes I was on my good friend Garion's world, only it was two hundred years before Garion was born. I sort of spent forty-seven years there before anyone managed to find me and bring me back."

Francis would wag his tail at the patting if he had a tail. An enthusiastic but polite "WHURF" and a blinking of the yellow light that takes up the space where a regular dog would have eyes and forehead will have to suffice instead.

"So, uh, that's more or less what I've been up to. I mean, I got switched back into my own body, obviously, that happened before I got sent to Garion's world- Ecto says 'thank you thank you thank you thank you' for the hands, too."

"Interesting," Prime says thoughtfully. "I had the same thing happen to me. I was out back, and suddenly I was somewhere else. It turned out to be Sergeant Wells' world, but about four hundred years before, well, now. I found a cave, went into stasis lock to wait for some kind of civilization to arise, and was woken up when he drove a plow into my foot. I wonder if these are connected."

He nods. "Ratchet remains pleased at his work - he said it was a pleasure to see human handiwork that showed such care. I think he found the core design very attractive, but he wouldn't say that out loud. I'm glad I was able to help, and equally glad to see that you are yourself again."

"Really? Huh," says Ray. "I didn't have the stasis lock option myself, but I was lucky enough to arrive at a university, so I at least had a place to work and try to figure out what was going on. I suppose it's possible that they're connected- it really looks too similar a set of events to be much of a coincidence, especially given that I'm told one of the other patrons got disappeared from out back and found himself translocated to Earth during the Bronze Age."

Optimus frowns. "That is troubling. We should gather up the other person, then find if other people are missing. If we can find a common thread, a similiarty, we can determine what's going on, and then stop it." He sounds firm, determined. He sounds like Optimus Prime.

"Who was the person who was sent that far back in time?"

"His name's Ronald Witherspoon," says Ray. "He's a werewolf from England in the early twenty-first century. Mostly he goes by 'Spoon', though." Then he frowns a little as the rest of the conversation with Donighal comes back to him. "Oh, man. Uh, you said Harry Wells found you? Because Michael Donighal said that he's disappeared too."

"Oh, I know Spoon. He was with Sergeant Wells when the Sergeant found me. He had some fascinating trophies - if I understood the biology properly, some of them would be a challenge for a Cybertronian to take down, and I complemented him on his skill."

Oh, that's more of a frown.

"I owe a favor to Sergeant Wells for helping me get back. I think it is time I took action, now that I know there's something going on." He lays down the guitar. "Perhaps it might be best to start with where we each disappeared; we can ask Spoon where he was when he disappeared later. That together may start to give us a clue as to what is going on."

Ray nods. "I have my PKE meter with me, and a couple of other scanning devices that we use in detecting spirits and extradimensional entities," he says. "I'll show you the spot outside where it happened. I've been meaning to examine it more closely anyway."

Optimus stands up. "All right. Let's go." He turns to the door, then stops.

"You should go first - you know where you're going and I don't."

His right arm clicks, and then plates fold and unfold, parts shift, and the entire right hand is replaced by a fairly sizable gun. No point being unprepared, after all.

"Right," Ray says.

He doesn't light up his 'saber until they're out the door. A, he remembers that there's a general agreement among the Jedi in the bar that they're not to ignite their sabers inside, and b, six and a half years in Salmissra's palace would be enough to make anybody of the squishy persuasion want their own protection available as swiftly as possible.

"Over here,' he says, heading in the general direction of where he'd shown his form off to Glorfindel. "I started by demonstrating what the saber could do against rocks, and then I started up the training drone. I fell when I put my foot wrong trying to back away from the drone. Wonder if Glorfindel picked it up..."

Optimus follows, sensors alert in the way that only someone who was a partisan for an amount of time measured in Earth by centuries could. Sometimes he swings around, to see if something is coming up behind.

It's a time like this that may show to Ray that the friendly, guitar-playing robot who resembles the robot of his childhood dreams may, in fact, actually BE that Optimus Prime.

"All right. Look around - see if you see anything that might be unusual." Because a lot of things in an Earth-like environment remain unusual to Prime, and they might ping as unusual to Ray.

Ray can live with that. He really can. Frankly, that's reassuring on a level that no amount of words could ever manage. It's been said that Ray's basically ten years old at heart, and even after fifty years in Garion's world that's still pretty true... and you will never, never, ever manage to convince the ten-year-old part of him that once certain entities are on the job, things aren't going to turn out all right in the end. There'll probably be a hell of a struggle first, but they mean you have a chance.

"It doesn't look as if the landscape's altered appreciably from what I remember," Ray says, moving to circle the practice area for an initial examination. "I seem to recall putting my foot in a dip in the soil and losing my balance that way. Right about... yeah, over there." He indicates the direction with the lightsaber. "Hang on a moment."

He keeps a spare set of Ghostbusting equipment in his room upstairs, including his goggles. The ectoscopes get pulled on as best he can manage with only his right hand (he's left-handed, but that's where the saber is, and you won't get him to turn it off any time soon).

"Commencing residual PKE and planar juncture ionization rate scan," he says as he flips the 'on' switch. "Remind me to add a background dampener to this thing when I get the chance."

"Noted," Optimus says tersely. Prime is watching whichever way Ray isn't looking, keeping an eye out for, well, anything at all moving.

He doesn't like the idea of things that can sneak up on you and send you far away and centuries back from everything you've known. For an Autobot, that's simple to deal with: like him, you find a safe-ish kind of place, and go into stasis lock. For a human...

Rarely since coming to Earth has Optimus Prime felt the sheer difference between a human and a Transformer, and it reminds him - again - what it is the Autobots fight for, and fight against.

And his vigilance increases.

Ray frowns a little, scanning the area. He reaches up and taps a button on the goggles, then does another pass, another tap, and another pass, cycling through vision modes. "I'm not getting anything especially unusual in the energy ranges my equipment's built to study, unfortunately," he finally says. "You'd think it'd have to be something fairly powerful to overcome the native energy fields and pushing against the entropy gradient. The energies involved must be somewhere outside the standard electromagnetic and psychokinetic spectra. I'm sorry."

He doesn't sound especially sorry, mind. The opportunity to build something new and highly highly technical makes him a very happy little geek indeed, even- especially- after nearly half a century in the medieval milieu.

It really was a pity that Ecto's body had to be offline for the installion of the manipulators; Ray and Ratchet could have had such a conversation. Unfortunately, Ratchet had shoved Prime out of the room, saying he didn't need help, which left Optimus bemused, but when you had a good medic you didn't mess with his quirks.

But he nods. "Right. Let's get back to the bar. I can get a map of the area, and we can start plotting points; from there, we might get an idea as to what's causing this."

Again, Optimus lets Ray go first, guarding the rear.

The ten-year-old inside Ray is probably spazzing out completely, going 'OMG Optimus Prime is guarding my back OMG OMG'.

The narration gives him too much credit. The ten-year-old inside Ray is going "SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" and hasn't stopped for anything more articulate than that in a while.

Ray nods once and makes his way inside, digging through his memories to see what he can come up with about some of the sensor data he's going to have to build devices to look for. He's probably going to have to raid Romana's TARDIS for some of that, honestly. Although that does remind him-

"Say- I realize you were in stasis lock during your time in the wrong time, but there isn't any chance you have some kind of sensor data indicating, I don't know, physical evidence of the passage of time? I ask because I don't seem to have aged during my period in the past on Gara."

"Well, my internal computer was running off trace energies in my system, and my internal clock is very accurate - I was in stasis lock for four hundred fifteen years, two hundred sixteen days, seven hours, four minutes, and three point seven two seconds, taking into account global precession. I can give you the records, but I'm afraid it would be the human equivalent of, "second one, heart beat. Second one point five, stomach released some acid. Second two, heart beat." Not particularly exciting, but I can transfer them to media for you."

The last part makes Optimus pause.

"Not aging. That's very unusual." Then he pauses, and snaps his fingers, with a curious 'clang' noise. "There's this, as well." He reaches into one of his chest plastrons, going behind it, and pulls out a circle of metal.

"I was going to give it to Sergeant Wells - the date on it indicates I was found in the cave about fifty years after I went into stasis lock."

It is a coin. The coin is stamped with the picture of a man in armor bearing a sword, and above 'DG MAG BRIT FRAN ET HIBER REX'; reverse shows the legend RELIG PROT LEG ANG LIBER PAR in two lines - The religion of the Protestants, the laws of England and the liberty of Parliament, with three plumes and the value numeral III above the declaration and the year 1642 below it, the whole being surrounded by the legend EXURGAT DEUS DISSIPENTUR INIMICI -- Let God arise and His enemies be scattered. It appears to be made of gold.

Congratulations, Ray. You are holding a British Triple Unite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Unite_(English_coin)) from the English Civil War in your hand.

Ray peers at the coin and whistles softly. "Wow," he says. "Now that's impressive. I don't think I've ever seen one of those outside of photographs, not even in museums." He hands it back respectfully- he's not a coin collector, but he's handled enough artifacts to know that you need to be careful even with stuff that's way more damage-resistant than you.

"I don't really need the data records. I was just curious. I've been living in a fundamentally medieval time frame for the past forty-seven years, so the medical technology necessary to verify whether I was or wasn't aging isn't really there- but I haven't experienced any of the signs of aging that a human being should exhibit by my current age. I've also been bitten by venomous snakes a couple of times and not needed antivenin, although it hurt like faulty logic until the stuff worked its way out of my system."

THAT, Optimus gets immediately. "That sounds extremely unpleasant. Unfortunately, I don't really have any kind of comparative to tell." He shrugs, then tilts his head. He mutters, "Carbon 9, Hydrogen 8, Oxygen 1", then looks perpexed.

"Cinnamaldehyde? Where did that come from?"

Ray covers his face with one hand.

"Aaaaand something's permanently altered the chemical content of the gaseous output of my digestive system," he mutters.

Wow, he turns as red as a Weasley when he's embarrassed.

Optimus Prime cannot help it. He laughs.

"What a universe. Well, Ray, unless you've started consuming planets, it would appear that whatever happened to you is, in general, positive. Expanded lifespan and one of the prime social issues resolved? It may be somewhat disturbing now, but once you get used to it, you may enjoy it."

He's not laughing at you, Ray. He's laughing at the whole weird universe.

"No, no, no planets," Ray says hastily. "I'll leave that to the entities with the experience to do so. And I don't know that I exactly mind the concept of not getting any older, given that my fiancee is from a species that lives a good two thousand Terran standard years each and tends to regenerate into new bodies when they die. I'm just going to need some time to get used to it, that's all."

"Although, um, speaking of planet-eaters, I assume you know about the one who visits here? Big, cranky, tends to assume a form about half the size of one of the mountains out back?"

He's almost certain the answer's going to be 'yes', but it's NOT the kind of thing one wants to make a mistaken assumption about.

That stops the laughing.

"Yes. I encountered the Nullspark, and spoke with it." Frowny face! "I am uncertain how to react to it, but I followed the rules - even if the worst enemy of my race, which it would be - appeared in here... and I did not take any action other than to speak."

But oh, that was hard.