Satellite of Cybertron

      He was running. Again.       Green crystalline trees whizzed past, metal ferns whipped around the hull, and cable vines tried to get under the servo.       But it wasn’t the first time he’d been here either.       From behind, the slow, loud stomping and noisy venting of the pursuer could be heard. The vegetation around him reflected the violet glare more and more vividly.       He was being caught up. As expected.       Spark pulsed excitedly, heating up his chamber and accelerating the energon pounding in the audials. Optics in battle mode scanned the surroundings.       Up ahead, amidst all the kaleidoscope of green, steel and purple, the native blue lights appeared.       In time. He was already beginning to tire.       Suddenly, as always, the forest was replaced by the bare bank of a shallow but wide river. He was immediately transformed.       The two wheels made sure to make contact with the ground, and he quickly picked up speed. Using the familiar rocks as a springboard, he managed to fly over the obstacle and land softly.       He braked sharply to avoid crashing into the blue crystalline thickets and transformed again, but he was unable to steady himself on the servos and rolled over. Now he was lying on the aforementioned energy-blue crystalline vegetation and mentally counting the new dents on his hull. Well, as an unnamed seeker-researcher had written: ‘If you remain conscious after landing, the landing is considered soft”.       Violet mech groaned and stood up, rubbing his bruised helm. When he regained consciousness, he retrieved two cases from subspace with a single manipulator movement. First, he checked the long and narrow case, opened it, and with a sigh of relief ventilated it: the brush and paints were in order (which was a good thing, considering how difficult impossible it was to find replacements for them in these places). The second case turned out to be a book — opening it, the motorcyclist checked the fresh inscriptions on the bound pages, which were safely hidden by the metal cover. Fortunately, the characters were still legible, though slightly smudged. All that remained was to quietly update them, and all would be well.       Flicking through the previous entries, he stopped at the very first page. The young Cybertronian’s optics were not on that page, but on the inside of the cover, where the large handwriting read, ‘Notes of a novice explorer,’ and in smaller print, ‘Liber, doing Vector’s Feats'.       Closing the book and carefully placing the important things back into subspace, Liber looked at the opposite shore. The creature that had stalked him had not left. It was following him closely with its bright purple optics, whose colour was diluted only by the darkness in the middle, like black holes surrounded by the light they sucked in. Though the beast was not clearly visible from behind the green thickets, the fur knew its appearance well. A powerful giant, many times larger than him, a silver body, two manipulators, two servos, a pair of horns and wings each, as if made up of a single endoskeleton, capable of flashing flames the colour of the creature’s optics. Something that shouldn’t live, no, exist on Cybertron.       Cronid.       A species descended from Unicron himself, the bringer of Chaos.       And yet there it was, and it was about twenty-five mechanometres away, never having left its teritorium.       Satisfied with the job he had done, Liber walked slowly into the blue forest, looking for signposts to get back to the settlement. Knowing that he would not be attacked (the cronid himself had never crossed the river, all dangerous animals had been scared away by him), he found himself daydreaming about the next time he would learn about this creature. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------       The creature sighed as it looked at the robotic motorbike. Wasn’t he tired of following her and then running away? On one hand this behaviour annoyed her, on the other…. it was refreshing.       This purple stalker was the first intelligent (?) inhabitant of this world who hadn’t tried to kill her after his first encounter with her.       Though the fact that he always came back was a little tense and reassuring. How curious/crazy do you have to be to come back to her every time, knowing it would end in a mad race?       But, come to think of it, one didn’t prevent the other.       Sighing once more, she turned away from the river and walked back to her house.       This day was exhausting without metal weirdos lacking the instinct for self-preservation.