Ideally, the ship would have set down automatically with no difficulty whatsoever, its autopilot handling the descent better than nearly any living pilot.

But, as most can attest, life is seldom ideal. The ship was old; older than its occupant, older than her parents, older than their parents... Older than the mech and femme who had set off from Cybertron to the planet from which the occupant came, fleeing the shadow of the Cast System and the newly Prime'd Zeta Prime's rule. It had been old even then..... Cybertronian technology was built to last, but lack of maintainance had taken its toll over the aeons, and among other things, the auto-pilot did not function. At least not to full capacity; the ship was landing, but touchdown protocols were not activating.

Instead, the craft smashed into a lake at a speed that was completely unsafe, as well as very impressive......

The impact picks up every ounce of water in the lake and either scatters it or turns it to vapor, gouging up a huge geyser of rock, the craft's nose crumpling and sending chunks of metal hither and yon. For a moment, the thrusters sputter, making a keening noise, then they flicker out as water and rock begins to rain down across the lakebed, ship, and beyond......

Smoke billows from the sizable crater the impact created. The ship creaks and pings...... Animals flee, and the wind shifts. Miles away, the sound rolls out to wake human beings and their pets from their sleep. A dog barks and a women comforts her child. Another calls the police....

Inside, Kryse's optics flicker alight.

The ship creaked. Kryse's optical sensors cycled once, twice, three times. The femme bot slid free of her stasis-berth with a rasp of metal against metal, peds striking the floor with a soft click, her vision swimming.

She was... She... Where was home? Where was she? The family ship....? The cylindrical length of its main room stretched out before her, the doors of the cockpit blinking with Amber light ahead. Yes. She was on the family ship..... She... She had been fleeing. From Decepticons.

The small femme took two stiff steps down the ship's length, stopping abruptly at the sound of a rummaging. It came from outside, and as she watched, the ship's starboard doors blinked; someone was trying to get in.... Still unsteady and woozy, she thought it must be an Autobot. An Autobot come to save her, with her (dead) parents, (they were) smiling (dead) and waiting for her... The small femme teeters, optics flickering. She felt funny. Slow. Dimly, her mind recognized that she was low on energon, and instead of opening the door, she moved to a cabinet across the room. There was energon there, though some had been spilled by the crash.

As she gulped it down, her processor settled, mind evening out, senses no longer spinning.

She was alone, her family captured, her world a thousand light years away..... And someone was knocking on the door. She moved haltingly to the door console, triggering the mic there and speaking into it.

"Hello?"

To Soundwave, her voice would sound oddly inflected, deeply accented, the pronunciation of the greeting twisted, stilted, almost.... Archaic.

The words should have been comforting, but the tone.... It made every inch of her chassis freeze with dread.

That voice was not normal. It spoke with a strange lilt. And it sounded... It sounded utterly uncybertronian. Kryse pictured some vast, hulking thing with glaring yellow eyes across its whole body, and black wings that went on forever. She blinked. She needed to snap out of it... Clearly her processor was still a goddamn mess. Her ship wasn't exactly a fortress... If they wanted to hurt her, they could hack their way in and do so. Especially since the crash had turned the thing into a crushed tin can. Kryse cycled her intakes, her wings shuffling against her back.

It was an Autobot, or another neutral. It had to be. Slowly, she reaches out, pressing the hatche's release..... But she stops before she completes the motion. The voice sounded wrong, way down deep in her spark. She spoke again.

"Who are you?"

Kryse nodded. Something was most definitely wrong here. The voice spoke like something trying too hard to sound like it wanted to help you. Kryse thought that was what the huge, armored sharks of Helios might have sounded like, if they could talk.

"Come out, little one, so I can grind your bones", they would say. There was no violence in the voice, but a certain coldness, a certain practiced, clinical precision that alarmed Kryse just as much as the freakish, multi-faceted nature of the voice itself. Kryse didn't think the owner of the voice would kill her for sure, but she doubted it would have much reservation about doing so if it thought she needed killing. Somehow, the crisp, cold, blankness of the voice was scarier than any Unciron-esque bass could have been.

Kryse backs away from the door, making sure her footsteps are as soft as possible. She turns to the ship's other hatch, and, silently, thumbs the release, climbing free, frame flexing noiselessly as she hugged the side of the craft, sidling towards the far end...

Kryse starts, gasping and quite literally falling on her ass in the mud, dirt and sludge splattering across her pristine, engraved armor, intake going wide with surprise and fear. She scoots back a few feet, then sighs.

"Kryse, my name is Kryse."

The femme's tiny waist bends and she pulls herself smoothly to her feet in a single motion, the hand not braced at the ground raised in an appeasing gesture, with her wide hips, pinched waist, and thick legs, Combined with the moth-like wings on her back, it was very clear Kryse was some sort of Insecticon. But she did not speak like any Insecticon alive today on Cybertron, and her frame looked elegant and exotic, like that's of a winged faerie, in contrast to the bestial sharpness of most Insecticons. Her silvery optics glowed brighter than was normal, faceplate stiff with fear.

Kryse shrinks back, grimacing at the silver Decepticon logo on the mech's chest. The Decepticons who had landed on Helios had not exchanged greetings. They had killed Theldum, the trader who supplied many of the 'bots on Helios. Strung the mech up by barbed-wire. As they had landed, one had tipped his helm and declared that none of this would have to had happened if everyone could have summoned up the generosity to share, then he had pulled a huge gun off his back and opened fire. Her parents had been hit; several rounds had struck her father in the stomach, peeling back armor, punching through actuator-muscles. He had said he was fine; they had run with Kryse and the others who had not been mowed down or captured.

But of her family, only she had escaped. She had watched as the same Decepticon from earlier had swaggered confidently, smoothly, into the old launch at in which they kept their ship...... Kryse was already seated inside, as her mother disengaged the ship's support-clamps, wounded father clasping at the wound in his side, sitting beside her. There had been a shout, a cry of defiance, then a whole salvo of gunshots. Her father had lurched to his feet, pressing Kryse back into her seat, telling her to stay inside.

As he lurched towards the hatch, he engaged the ship's launching protocal..... She had watched in horror, in dread, as her father walked outside, drew a pistol, and shot the Decepticon in the head. The mech turned from Kryse's dead mother, head oozing energon, one taloned hand rising to pick at the wound there, as though he didn't believe it was real. Then the mech pounced forward and plunged a hand into her wounded father's side.... As the hatch sealed, Kryse tried herself to seal out the screams of pain that were still audible as her surviving parent is dosemboweled. The pistol rings out twice more, and the Decepticon gives a shout.

...................

Kryse blinks, forcing the memories back. She does not take the mech's hand. She had no desire to shake hands with a monster. A small voice inside of her told her she was assuming that all Decepticons were murderous psychopaths. She should.... Another voice told her that if she rejected this mech, he might very well just shred her on the spot. She made sure not to move her optics from his face as she appraised the massive rotary gun on his shoulder. It could take her apart, she guessed, her...... But only if she was in range. And only if he was facing the right direction to use it.

For now, she offered her hand.

Kryse didn't know the names "Shockwave" or "Nemesis", but she knew what a flagship was. She knew it meant she was in deep, deep slag. She also knew that any chance of getting away was slim...Especially if the bit about the Autobots being in hiding was true. For now, the best odds lay with going along with this Soundwave character, no matter how much he creeped her out. The way he had held onto her servo like that..... It made the whole thing even creepier. He had stared at her up and down, likes she was some sort of exotic plant. Kryse didn't want to think any more on that line.... If he did try anything... Try to force himself on her, or something like it, she would die before she would allow herself to be debased like that.

Kryse's faceplate does not show any of her inner turmoil; there's more than a hint of fear there, but none of her anger, none of her suspicion, none of her hurt is readily apparent. She nods; if the mech was going to do something creepy, he would have done it.....

"Alright. I will go with you."

Kryse moved forward, staring, mesmerized by the glowing green tube of energy..... He wanted her to walk through that? Kryse regards the tunnel in the middle of the air for another few moments. It was a space bridge. A miniature space bridge. No. No. She wouldn't do this. She wouldn't go into the base of the rabid animals who had killed her family and driven her from her home. Kryse turns, as if to speak, but instead, the barrel of a weapon extending from Kryse's forearm is suddenly thundering, the air rippling as its invisible power surges at Soundwave with the force of a locomotive. The weapon was not really designed to kill, but it sure as hell was capable of stunning. Even as she fired, Kryse was transforming, body spinning and expanding and contracting in a series of twirls and flips that left behind a large, silvery moth-like insect, which leapt into the air, metal wings spread and beating, repulsors at full power...... When she wanted to be, Kryse was very, very fast.

Kryse darts and flits as she hears the mechanical whine and the whirring sound of the chaingun..... She knew enough to know that it was likely the noise of the chaingun spooling up. Kryse is a excellent flyer, and very fast, but she is not a soldier, and she has never been under live fire before.


She manages to evade the blistering stream of energy for a few moments, but just as she thinks she's home free, the weapon's line of fire pans over her abdomen, pounding through her armor and causing energon and bits of her own metallic flesh to geyser out of the wound. Kryse cries out in pain, and her thrusters stutter and fail... The moth's line of flight grows crooked and listless, and though she keep moving, she begins to tilt towards the ground, life blood pouring out.... She might have managed a chuckle if she'd known that Soundwave had been aiming for her wings, and only her frantic dodging had lead the weapon to play over her body.

Desperate, knowing that it could just as easily call more Decepticons to her trail, Kryse activates her comm, shouting into it.

"Help me!"

Even as she loses more altitude, transforming and landing roughly on her hands and knees approximately a mile away from Soundwave, the backs of both her thighs badly torn and punctured.