#brakeline

Dear Mushroom Master,

Indeed they have! You may recall the Maximal starship Dianosk and its many deep-space colonization missions—here is the story of one such adventure…

Several solar cycles after departing Starbase Rugby with a fresh complement of thirty protoforms, the four-man crew of the starship Dianosk—consisting of captain Updraft, engineer Ratchet, security officer Regulator, and ensign Brakeline—arrived at a red planet somewhere on the spinward edge of the galaxy. While the planet Dykayra had been known to Cybertronian astronomers for some time, no Transformer had set foot on the planet since before the Great War, many millions of stellar cycles ago.

Although the Dianosk picked up no signs of extant intelligent life, orbital scans picked up vast forests of skyscraper-sized mushrooms, whose toxic spore clouds would choke out any organic lifeform in nanokliks. More intriguingly, their sensors detected rich veins of subterranean energon, as well as signs of extensive prior habitation—the tips of ancient, crumbling towers poked up through the red fungal canopy, while abandoned maglev lines and crumbling superhighways criss-crossed the planet. Intrigued at the prospect of discovering a lost civilization, Updraft ordered his crew to land their ship in an abandoned spaceport; to better explore the planet’s treacherous, fungus-based ecosystem, he decided to activate a protoform to assist them in their endeavors, whose native alternate mode would allow him to better explore the terrain. The scanning process yielded FunGus, a gregarious young Transformer whose unusual mycelium alternate form allowed him to easily navigate the planet’s terrain.

The five-man exploration team established a temporary command post as a beachhead for further exploration of the city. As they picked through the detritus, the team uncovered many strange clues regarding the planet’s prior inhabitants—garments they surmised to be hazard suits of some kind, and an abandoned botanical research lab where dozens of brightly colored mushrooms had long ago burst from their holding tanks—perhaps, they surmised, the source of many of the strange, colorful mushrooms that seemed to form the ecosystem’s primary basis. Before the team could report back to Updraft, however, they were attacked by dozens of strange, humanoid fungi! Although the creatures only wielded crude melee weapons fashioned from old lead pipes and rusted nails, they were numerous, and difficult to deter—worse yet, amidst the chaos, FunGus abruptly turned on his crewmates! The terrified crew dragged the wounded Brakeline to safety, even as FunGus escaped into the overgrown sewers beneath the city along with their attackers.

Unsuited as they were to trekking through the dangerous fungal jungle, it took several more solar cycles before the rest of the team could locate their escaped ensign; when they did find him, it was in a series of abandoned catacombs, where a network of glowing tendrils connected him and hundreds of other fungus-creatures to an enormous, building sized fungus. As one, the aliens moved in on the Cybertronian explorers… but, before the encounter could descend into violence, FunGus announced that Queen Mycellium, ruler of their collective, had chosen him to serve as her mouthpiece. Millennia ago, she explained, their race began as parasites: a freak lab accident created a race of aggressive spore-based lifeforms who reproduced through unwilling hosts, until they and their progeny had choked out everything else on the planet, including the original civilization responsible for creating them. In the intervening years, however, they had attempted to move past their ignoble beginnings, and her collective hopefully marked the beginning of a new era of peace and understanding. She and her minions had mistaken FunGus for a wayward member of her own tribe, and attempted to “liberate” him from what she perceived to be alien captors; their unique form of spore-based communication had accidentally driven FunGus into a frenzy.

His spark was flaring in his chassis while energon flooded through his lines as he raced towards the site, this was not something he ever wanted to deal with as Breakdown even managed to speed past him but he knew that the larger mech was just as frightened as he was. By the time he reached the designated area Breakdown was already hunched over the prone form while the sparklings were ushered away by the sparksitting vehicons to give enough room. Knock Out took a deep vent despite the shaking of his entire frame as he made to step closer. It was only a short time before they were doing a simple patrol route while keeping in contact with the five sparklings that insisted on being able to go outside and enjoy the human infested planet they were on. He recalled the comm both he and Breakdown were sent by their sweet little femme, Brakeline that had taken so much after the crimson medic himself.

:Sire! Carrier! I can see everything up here! An’ ‘Gazer an’ Treads an’ Perius are all flying around! I’m gonna fly wit’ them!:  That last line startled both mechs until a screech of pain and a resounding crash were heard before the comm link went dead and both were spinning their tires to get back fast enough.

There was a loud rattle of Knock Out’s frame as he continued to move closer even if it seemed at the slowest pace one could ever comprehend. ‘Just deep vents and distance yourself from what you’re feeling, triage the damage just like Flatline taught you all those vorns ago when dealing with emotions on the battlefield.’

A quick scan of his optics and he saw the extent of the damage and was thankful to Primus that it wasn’t far worse. Leg tires were out of alignment and one was torn apart due to her crash, her one arm was badly damaged and out of the socket along with one doorwing nearly wrenched off its’ hinges completely. Brakeline was gathered up into Breakdown’s arms and Knock Out could feel his spark breaking as he looked over that tiny damaged frame, this wasn’t her fault and she was going to need lots of repairs and possibly an explanation.

They space bridged back to the medbay with Breakdown immediately assisting in an energon drip into the petite femme’s lines along with pain suppressors while Knock Out continued to be the medic he had to be rather than the frantic sire he wanted to be. Hemostatic clips were clamped onto various lines to keep Brakeline from bleeding out the remains of her energon supplies while he disconnected wires to remove the damaged protomesh and frame that was tossed into a nearby recycling bin to be disposed of later. It was going to take some time to forge new plating to replace the broken pieces but the new protomesh was easy enough to replace with the stores they had due to the Nemesis still being stocked as a warship. The damaged doorwing had to be completely removed and repaired later which would be replaced with the newly forged plating and even if Brakeline wasn’t going to be happy about it, it had to be done this way. Her tires were easily replaced and the struts repaired since they weren’t as damaged as Knock Out had worried they would be, vorns of medical training on the fields of battle were helping him get through this but the aftermath was what he dreaded the most.

 “Brakeline, how’s my little sweet spark doing?” The red racer looked in on the femme in her tiny habsuite that she shared with her spark sibling just off the habsuite that belonged to her creators. He saw they tiny frame shift on her berth and he took that as a signal that he could come and check up on her more. His servo gently rubbed her back strut once he was close enough, seeing her frame relax slightly into the touch despite how quiet she was being.

“I can’t fly...’m nothin’ but scrap...” Hearing Brakeline call herself scrap hurt Knock Out but he could see why she was feeling like calling herself such things.

“Sweet spark, you’re not scrap, you just don’t have a frame built to fly even if you do have adorable wings of your own.” That single remaining doorwing twitched in irritation when he mentioned her so called wings. He vented hard while he continued rubbing her back strut and hearing the tiny rev of her engines in appeasement, she wanted to fly and every bot she seemed to know could fly but she was unable to and he could see how much it was hurting his sweet little femme.

“I wasn’t always a racer like you, sweet spark; I used to actually have a flight alt mode and in all honesty I hated being able to fly. I saw grounders like your carrier and thought that they were perfect, they could feel the ground beneath their treads and could go at impressive speeds even without being able to fly. I hated being a flier so much that I had gone and ripped my own wings off just so that I wouldn’t have to use my alt mode and after that I had looked into changing my frame so that I could be a grounder but my CNA still carries flier coding and it might be part of why you want to fly...” He hated that he was mostly to blame for Brakeline’s injuries and her desire to fly and be like all of those around her. Even his own past didn’t prove that she could be proud of who she was since Knock Out had been ashamed of his own alt mode in his past.

“You’re not mad at me for falling?” That sweet and innocent voice was what the red medic needed to hear and he smiled when Brakeline and shifted around to face him even with her arm still bandaged with the healing protomesh and the welding plate over her missing doorwing; she was a fighter, she was strong and could overcome anything.

Knockdown’s family, in the most traditional sense, was Brakeline, the big grey bruiser who was one of the few ground-based Decepticons.  Brakeline was one of the few bots who could coax a little twitch of a smile out of Knockdown or make him scrunch his face up in response to a terrible pun.

That’s how it was when Brakeline was around.  Knockdown is more aloof these days.

Now Knockdown regards the medics and his patients as a sort of extended family. Bots no longer mention Brakeline when they’re around Knockdown, as they know it’s a painful subject for the doctor.