#reservoir-bombshell

[losinmortalesperdidos]

“Heyyy...“ he turned from the laptop when the bathroom door opened and she walked into the room, splendid as always even wrapped in the towel and with her hair wet. The last job was pretty big and went just perfectly, but now the two needed to lay low and spend all the time on the outskirts in the little cottage rented under some fake name and paid for by Joe. They were alone there, except once in a few days some of Cabots’ men dropped the food and other stuff they needed on the driveway, and that was good, but after a while, it started to get boring. Not the company of each other, of course, it was more than pleasant, but four walls around them. “I’ve been thinkin’,” he said blowing out smoke, “How ‘bout a long vacation? I know a guy who can make us passports and shit, with all the money we have now, we can afford that and more. Let’s go to some islands, buy us a place a little bigger than this one. New names, new looks. Hell, we might even like it. Whaddya think?”

@reservoir-bombshell​

[mariacallous]

Sergey Shoigu’s nearly 12-year tenure as Russia’s defense minister ended unexpectedly on Sunday when President Vladimir Putin removed him from his post and reassigned him to the country’s Security Council. Then, in a move that surprised even government insiders, Putin nominated Andrey Belousov, a longtime presidential economic advisor, as Shoigu’s successor. Belousov is a civilian with no direct military ties, raising questions about the rationale behind his appointment. Some observers have speculated that he may have been brought in to overhaul military spending and ensure the Russian army is adequately resourced for the ongoing war in Ukraine. The independent outlet Verstka spoke with government insiders and political scientists to get their take on what Belousov’s appointment could mean for the future of the Russian military. Meduza shares an English-language summary of Verstka’s findings.

On May 12, Vladimir Putin nominated Andrey Belousov as Russia’s new defense minister, replacing Sergey Shoigu who had held the job since 2012. The appointment came as a surprise to many government insiders since Belousov, often described as Putin’s protégé, has no direct ties to the security forces. Often referred to as an “economic ideologue,” he served as Russia’s economic development minister and later as a presidential aid; sources once described him to Verstka as Putin’s strategic counterweight to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. One member of Russia’s parliament characterized Belousov as “subtle, intelligent, and diplomatic” and expressed shock at his new post.

Only one source, a member of Russia’s Federal Assembly, didn’t seem surprised by the choice. “Well, what were you expecting?” he asked. “We have something akin to military Keynesianism in our economy, right? Here’s someone with a Doctor of Sciences who’ll be in charge of the economy of the ‘special military operation,’ not moving pins on a map. Let the General Staff handle the front. Besides, someone needs to watch the rear. [Rostec head Sergey] Chemezov and [Deputy Prime Minister Denis] Manturov were already wielding full control of the military-industrial complex, and now [the new head of Russia’s Industry and Trade Ministry Anton] Alikhanov has been brought on board. A true Putin loyalist will keep an eye on them.”

“Belousov is a proponent of the mobilization model,” said political scientist Konstantin Kalachev. “He has [the president’s] trust. He knows how to manage money. He’s perfectly suited for that position.” According to Kalachev, the new defense minister’s priority will be “optimizing expenditures and aligning them with achievements,” as well as making sure that “for every ruble spent, another square meter of territory is added.”

At the same time, Kalachev continued, Belousov’s appointment is a “bombshell” and a “break from convention.” In his view, the reshuffle lends credence to the speculation that followed the arrest of Shoigu’s deputy Timur Ivanov on corruption charges in April and suggests that Shoigu “really was under suspicion.” One government insider commented that “Shoigu’s ambitions, not just his wastefulness, played a role against him.” Political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya said that with Shoigu’s move to the Security Council, it’s become something of “a reservoir for Putin’s ‘former’ key figures — people who can’t be let go but also can’t be placed anywhere else.”

Political scientist Ilya Grashchenkov also called Belousov’s appointment unexpected. “It was assumed that Belousov would move somewhere quieter, perhaps become the rector of Moscow State University or head some kind of development institute. As an ideologue of state economics, this would have aligned well with Belousov’s strategic interests, because Belousov is undoubtedly an economist,” he noted. He added that Belousov was greatly influenced by his father, Rem Belousov, who was a champion of Alexey Kosygin. “Belousov has incorporated these concepts of state and market symbiosis into the Russian economy,” explained Grashchenkov. “This has undoubtedly injected a distinct economic influence into what was once considered solely the domain of the [Defense Ministry].”

According to Grashchenkov, the Russian Defense Ministry is currently focused solely on military operations in Ukraine, rather than the financial aspect of war. “Belousov can now concentrate on fundamentally changing the methods used to manage all ministerial executive agencies, particularly everything related to front-line support, logistics, and so forth,” Grashchenkov added. However, it remains to be seen how much this unexpected appointment will alter the Defense Ministry’s structure or improve its functionality. Meanwhile, there’s still the question of whether or not Belousov will be liked in the army. “Mostly likely, he won’t be,” Grashchenkov surmised. “But Putin doesn’t need [him to be]. He needs an effective manager, which Belousov is.”

When Putin announced that Belousov would take over as head of Russia’s Defense Ministry, many Russian pro-war bloggers lauded the decision, saying that a military outsider and Putin loyalist might be just the person needed to reform the Defense Ministry. However, comments from readers left under these posts have been less optimistic. Many followers wrote that they were having “Serdyukovian flashbacks” — a reference to another civilian defense minister, Anatoly Serdyukov, whose tenure from 2007 to 2012 involved radical reforms and reductions in military numbers that led to widespread discontent within the Russian Armed Forces.

[xtruss]

The Bombshell Political Report So Shocking A U.S. President Tried To Pretend It Didn't Exist! LBJ Tried To Torpedo The Official Kerner Commission Record. Instead It Became A Bestseller

— May 10, 2024 | Jelani Cobb

President Lyndon Baines Johnson listens during a meeting in the White House Cabinet Room, March 26, 1968. LBJ Presidential Library.

When President Lyndon Baines Johnson created the [Kerner] commission in July 1967 it was tasked with understanding what had happened up to that moment. Nearly two dozen uprisings or, in the antiseptic language of the report, “civil disorders,” had occurred between 1964 and 1967, with the largest and most destructive taking place in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles over the course of five days in August 1965.

Kerner has endured not simply for its prescience but also for the breadth of its analysis of the moment when it was conceived. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which became more commonly known as the Kerner Commission—a reference to then-governor of Illinois Otto Kerner, who served as its chairman—was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11365 on July 28, 1967. The order was issued as entire stretches of the city of Detroit lay smoldering.

On July 23, 1967, a police raid on an after-hours bar in Detroit sparked an explosion in which residents hurled rocks and bottles at police and culminated in a nearly week-long uprising marked by arson, looting, and forty-three deaths. Just eleven days earlier, the city of Newark had detonated following the assault on John Smith, a Black cab driver, by white police officers. The reactions in the community were immediate and incendiary. In the chaos of social retribution that ensued, twenty-six people were killed and hundreds more injured, while the city sustained an estimated ten million dollars in damage.

Newark and Detroit were just the most notable of more than two dozen American cities that ignited in revolts in that summer of 1967. It appeared as though a valve of the city reservoir had been opened. An apocalyptic fury, the response to decades of discriminatory policy and centuries of racial exploitation, suddenly spewed out in American cities.

Johnson charged the eleven-member Kerner panel with answering three questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?” These were Johnson’s precise words. Addressing these questions, however, would mean answering dozens of subsidiary questions the roots of which lay deeply tangled in American history and public policy.

The members themselves represented a cross section, albeit not a representative one, of domestic interests. Chaired by Kerner, the second-term Democratic governor of Illinois, the commission included two of his fellow Democratic elected officials, Congressman James Corman, the fourth-term representative of California’s twenty-second district, and freshman senator Fred R. Harris of Oklahoma. They were joined by three Republicans, New York City mayor John V. Lindsay, Rep. William M. McCulloch of Ohio’s fourth district, and Edward Brooke, the freshman Massachusetts lawmaker and the sole African American serving in the United States Senate at the time.

By current standards the commission was overwhelmingly white (nine of the eleven members) and male (ten of eleven). Katherine Peden, the commerce secretary of Kentucky, was the sole female commission member. Roy Wilkins, the political moderate and executive director of the NAACP, joined Brooke as the only Black people at the table. In addition, I. W. Abel, president of the United Steelworkers of America, represented labor in the proceedings, and Herbert Jenkins, the police chief of Atlanta, Georgia, represented law enforcement. Charles Thornton, the CEO of Litton Industries, spoke for the manufacturing sector.

President Lyndon Johnson (seated, center) shakes hands with members of the Kerner Commission. July 29, 1967. White House Photo Office Collection, LBJ Presidential Library.

What differentiated the Kerner Commission from the outset was the historical scope of the investigations: the members were not seeking to understand a singular incident of disorder, but the phenomenon of rioting itself. Despite the heterogeneity of interests, if not the bipartisan backgrounds, of the members, the concluding report spoke with a strikingly unified voice about the problems that the various committee participants sought to understand. And that voice was an unabashedly integrationist one. Their most immediate and salient observation was that, even though the police had been involved in these most volatile incidents, American cities were not simply facing a crisis of policing. Rather, police were simply the spear’s tip of much broader systemic and institutional failures.

[T]he Kerner Report noted that the “problem” had been, first and foremost, inaccurately diagnosed. The so-called Negro problem was, in fact, a white problem. Or, as the report noted in one of the oft-quoted sections of the summary, “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

In a best-case scenario, Kerner would have become a kind of guidebook for the War on Poverty policies then being enacted by the Johnson administration. In more practical terms, the commission recommended new community-based guidelines covering how police needed to interact with citizens of “the ghetto,” as Black communities were dubiously classified in the report. It devoted an entire chapter to the ways in which justice should be administered in the course of riots; it suggested a national network of neighborhood task forces, local institutions that could bypass the bureaucracy and red tape of city administration and head off problems before they erupted into crises. It suggested “neighborhood service centers” to connect residents of these communities with job placement and other forms of assistance and proposed expanded municipal employment as a means of diminishing chronically high unemployment in these areas.

Perceptively, its members suggested that the monochromatically white news media that reported on these uprisings was also a symptom of the bigger problem. That social upheaval that had been created by overwhelmingly white institutions and maintained by said white institutions was then investigated and reported upon by yet another overwhelmingly white institution constituted, in their assessment, a racial conflict of interest. They closed with a raft of specific recommendations for housing, employment, welfare, and education. Kerner was possibly a victim of its own meticulousness. The report brims with suggestions. One reason why its proposals were not realized might be that it simply made too many of them.

The commission could not have known when it released its findings in March 1968 that it was issuing a preface, not a postscript. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated the following month, and more than one hundred American cities exploded into just the type of violence that the Kerner Commission had sought to understand if not prevent. [T]he Report was fated, from the moment it reached shelves, to operate more crucially as a forecast than a review. “Our Nation,” it warned in 1968, “is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

— Excerpted From "Introduction" By Jelani Cobb, From The Essential Kerner Commission Report, Edited By Jelani Cobb, With Matthew Guariglia.

[upcomingtradera]

[dertaglichedan]

His jumping off point is the bombing of the Kakhova dam... by Putin himself, if you believe the western media because 'he is evil and evil people do evil things... even to themselves' (despite the detailed explanation below of why that is simply farcical).

By way of background, and helping explain why it absolutely, positively, without doubt must have been Putin that blew up the dam </sarc> Antiwar.com's Kyle Anzalone notes that the dam was built by the USSR during the 1950s and, for over a year, has sat on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine. It is nearly 100 feet tall and over 10,000 feet wide. The dam was constructed as a hydroelectric power plant and created the Kakhovka Reservoir, which is over 2,000 sq km. Europe’s largest nuclear power plant – the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) and the Crimean Peninsula receive water from the reservoir.

The attack on the dam will impact a core Russian concern in Ukraine. Through the 250-mile-long Northern Crimean Canal, the Kakhovka Reservoir feeds water to the peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014. Before the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin regularly issued demands to Kiev that irrigation systems supplying water to Crimea remain open.

But you should believe it was Putin, as Carlson explains:

"You've got to be lied to over a period of years to reach conclusions like that...and of course, we have been..."

Carlson then took the media to task for ignoring yesterday's "bombshell of the millennium,' in which a government whistleblower revealed that craft developed by non-human intelligence has been recovered by governments around the world in an 80-year race to reverse engineer materials for geopolitical advantages.

[mxttlemxde]

Random Dialogue Prompts! - ACCEPTING

@reservoir-bombshell said: “is this how you flirt with everyone?” // from eddie, to ashley bc she is a sarcastic fuckwit 😌

---

Her lips quirked into that SIGNATURE Ashley smirk, the one that you had no issues imagining on TV or the stage or in front of any crowd. She placed a hand over where her heart was, palm flat as her head tilted. This was the perfect moment for a snarky comeback, this much she knew, and she considered letting it flop.

Oh, that mischievous look in her eye promised all bad things.

"Nah, mate. Not everyone," Came her accented words, beginning accompanying a small nod and a letting go of the lapel of his battle jacket ( a playful grab earlier meant not to intimidate or annoy! ) and smoothing it down instead. "JUST the handsome ones," A pause. "And my dungeon masters."

Shrugging softly with a small chuckle ( it wasn't even really funny ) , Ashley created more distance by stepping back and taking perch upon a fallen tree trunk in the woods they found themselves. She glanced him from head to toe, making a very exaggerated show of it.

"Y'know, Eddie... you're not as bad as the rumours suggest. You're certainly no Prince Of Darkness," Ah, always with the references. "I'd say you're more... The Brady Bunch?" This time, she flashed a toothy grin while she dug into her own jacket's inner pocket for her pack of cigarettes. "Minus the whole, y'know, selling drugs and living with your uncle. Which you still haven't told me why yet."

[hellopersimmonpie]

Kak Dea kapan hari di twitter sempet share parfum House of Medici. Recommended nggak? Kakak sekarang pake parfum apa aja?

Kalo urusan per-parfum-an, @martabakkeju lebih tau sih wkwk.

Saya sekarang lagi pake The Body Shop yang White Musk, Nigritella sama Victoria Secret yang Bombshell. Nggak abis-abis. Ada juga Carl and Claire yang Cherish ama Delicate. Tapi udah abis. Kayaknya ga bakal beli parfum dulu sebelum ngabisin yg masih ada.

Kapan hari saya dikirimin parfum House of Medici sama @martabakkeju . Ada varian Paradise Reservoir, Agape of Jeanne D'Arc sama Maria de Constantine.

Saya cuma bisa mendeskripsikan dua parfum soalnya yang Agape Jeanne D'Arc nggak familiar. Jadi sampai sekarang belum bisa describe.

Paradise Reservoir itu baunya fruity. Dominan jeruk. Wanginya bukan yang unik banget sampe memorable gitu sih. Tapi masih enak banget buat dihirup.

Kalo yang Maria de Constantine dominan coklat sama kopi. Lucu banget baunya. Pas lebaran kemarin, saya pake Maria de Constantine. Orang di sekitar saya bilang kalo parfum saya kayak snack coklat 😄 Kalo kamu suka parfum beraroma gourmand, mungkin Maria de Constantine menarik buat dikoleksi.

[twitchesandstitches]

Story commission for Clonecomando, who asked for Arcee from Transformers Prime turning into a super busty giantess alongside Airachnid!

--------

The moon, as far as they knew, had no name. Arcee knew well that so much had been lost in the war for Cybertron and its fall, the senseless destruction waged by the Decepticons wiping out eons of hard-won knowledge, history and cultural memory.

In the years since the end of the war, the rebirth of Cybertron and the reunion of all the scattered Autobots, figuring out what they actually had at hand was the important thing, and normally a moon would be fairly low on that list, save that over the past few months it had been sending out stronger power signatures, nearly blacking out some of the orbital scanners, and when Arcee had asked permission to investigate and bring Jack with her as part of his training, Optimus (nearly bedridden after the strain he suffered reactivating the Allspark) had agreed.

Arcee was mildly surprised to find that the moon had an atmosphere, its metal surface of the same biomechanical form as Cybertron, and as far as they could tell, uninhabited. At least, there were no visible dwelling signs, and no buildings or evidence of survivors holding up here, like in some of the cities that had been protected by Sub-Commander Grimlock during the exodus.

Nevertheless, as she and Jack approached a strangely artificial site, she felt watched, and remained on high alert.

(And, in the distance, they were watched.

The great hulking masses of Insecticon hive-soldiers waited beneath the metal soil. Templated descendants of the Bombshell, the Hardshell, and the Kickback - most of them, Hardshell kin, but Bombshells vlew and Kickbacks waited to spring into action - lurked in the shadows, shying away from the light.

Most of them, particularly those who had been most recently supped upon by the Mistress, were burned by the light. It seared hot, piercing through their frames and their altered Sparks screaming at its touch. Fear moved in their fuel lines now, need and desire subordinating all higher impulses save the voice of the Mistress.

She was the hive queen, and her will shaped them, gave them purpose, protected them from the terror.

Her thoughts moved through them, and she flew above them in the shape of a flying vehicle from a distant world; a long, bulky thing with a rotating saw crowning it. They felt her curiosity, and she saw through their eyes as her rival, and her rival’s prized subordinate, came upon a strange ruin. They spoke to each other for a time, about this evidence of habitation, and that it was old indeed. The Mistress had said as much in the past.

And the Mistress watched, and she waited. Here, her thoughts said to the hive, was her own way into its secrets, at last.

The blue Autobot placed her hand upon the wall, and it seemed to her surprise as much as anyone’s, a wall slid away and revealed a passageway.

Into it, the two went. The Insecticons waited obediently as the Mistress radiated curiosity and interest as she followed, crawling along the walls like the predator she was. The hive obeyed her commands, and retreated. And alone, she followed after her prey into the dark.)

-----

Arcee led the way down the ancient steps. More accurately, she grabbed the hand of the mech Jack operated to stay on her level and she dragged him behind her, the stumpy legs of his mech waddling fast to keep up with her. Eventually, she slowed her pace, mostly because he kept getting pulled up.

His mech was not significantly smaller than hers; modeled after the armor Starscream and then Miko had employed, though not quite as refined as the work of the legendary Solus Prime, it was a squat and bulky thing, though still slimmer even than Arcee. That said a lot; duowheel platforms like her didn’t have much body mass in relation to their size. But she was far stronger than she looked, and Jack’s mech paled compared to her brief bursts of armor-shredding power.

She paused, her struts clacking on the ground. Her head turned, blue optics peering through the canopy towards Jack, who was looking a little overwhelmed. Her face clicked into a softer look, and she lowered him to the ground. “Take the time you need,” she said, and waited.

When he was ready, they set off again, and Arcee had a hard time resisting the urge to just take hold of his hand and escort him. It had been years since he’d become a fully grown man, as the humans reckoned such things, and though he was certainly competent and capable, he was just so… small. And Arcee was well past the point of ‘just’ being attached.

Deeming an alien one’s conjunx endura, the most intimate and close of Iaconian romantic ideas, was certainly atypical, but not unheard of. It was just rare for Autobots to settle down anywhere to get close to an alien. And for Arcee, a partner was as close as it got.

They descended down, into the ruin, and Arcee had already suggested that it was much older than any potential resident might have been. Soon it became clear, as they descended down, that this was a temple of some sort. Arcee supposed it was, at least; the elaborate carvings, the deep hieroglyphs shimmering faintly in the walls, the strange angles in the walls spoke to old sacred geometries of Cybertronian worship. Or then again, perhaps this had been a storage facility. She recognized some of those hieroglyphs from Iaconian Energon reservoirs, and supposed this might have been such a place.

But it was old. Glyphs like the ones carved into the walls had not been actively used for many thousands of years since before any modern Cybertron city-realm even existed in a recognizable form. Their languages changed only slowly, but even so Arcee found these glyphs so hard to read, so distant from her own languages, that it was mildly disorienting.

Jack looked at them, pausing to study them. Arcee waited beside him, doing her best to look stoic and cool and not at all miffed that he was doing a better job of translating them than she did. “I think this bit kind of looks like the old Iaconian High Pentamatrix glyph for ‘god’,” he said, looking pained. It must have been a very rough translation, then; his studies into Cybertronian language were progressing well, better than her own had during her brief and terminal attempts to work with linguistics. “But it’s, I don’t know. Weird. Some bits of it look like they’re representing sounds, not a given idea. Or, um. Does Cybertron have things like, sign posts?”

“Sign posts?” Arcee repeated.

“Yeah. You know, images where you see it and you instantly know what it means without context? Like a sign post that says ‘danger!’ on earth. I know what that would mean, even if it had nothing on it.”

Arcee rolled her optics. “Course we have those, Jack. Memetic information and ideas aren’t exclusive to humans.”

“Right, I know. I thought I’d be sure, first. Didn’t want to just assume and us get hurt over it.” He frowned, his mouth moving as he extended his mech’s hand over the glyphs. “I can see hints of something that looks a bit like the Iaconian glyphs for ‘fast food’, but that can’t be right. And this bit here, it looks like old Simfurian Claw-Scratch. I don’t have the right words to explain what they sound like, but it sort of looks like its suggesting… danger? No, its more like… cautioun. Like a ‘careful where you step’ sign?” He shook his head. “You sure this is a temple?”

Arcee glanced up and pointed. Right above them were two small statues mounted into the wall: the more monstrous of the two was a grotesque thing, almost like a robotic centaur but with a strong dragonish air. The lower half was a low-slung beast, paws tipped with claws and a long tail curled around it calmly. From the waist up, the statue was more humanoid but barely so, too broad and armored to read as anything but a monster. Multiple arms were crossed over a body that some ancient sculptor had endeavored to suggest was both mech and femme-aligned, and the triangular head was that of a beast. And yet, for its monstrosity, it emanated wisdom and serenity; its many eyes were closed, its great jaws held primly shut in an expression of sage calmness.

Across it was a statue more recognizable; it was indisputably a fembot. Definitely a fembot; the sculptor had made that very clear. Energon tanks swelled out from the chestplates to unreal extremes, the hips were impossibly massive, and Jack seemed unable to look directly at its curves without getting embarrassed. The statue’s head had been carved to look as much flame as it was metal, and her expression was a wild, fierce joy. ‘Maniacal’ might have been a good word, too.

“Onyx Prime,” Arcee said of the bestial shape. “And Solus Prime,” she said, pointing to the curvy one. “Two of the original thirteen Primes. Optimus’ predecessors, you could say. They were worshiped as gods in ancient times, and you won’t find statues of them in just any facility.”

“Why build a temple on the moon?” Jack wondered.

“...Good question. That’s usually something you do to keep it secure.”

They began to go down the stairs again. Arcee noticed that they were strangely shaped, with multiple sizes and shapes for someone to ascend. There was a set just the right size for them to go down, bisected by an even smaller set perhaps for minicons. And besides them were increasingly bigger stairs, for ‘bots in Optimus’ size range, and then Grimlock’s… and then who knew? Perhaps the likes of Omega Supreme.

Arcee did not notice that the walls themselves, towering as they were, swelled up even bigger than that. Those were also stairs, for something as big as Metroplex. Or larger still.

Down they went, and behind them someone followed. Someone very much like a spider.

-----

Downwards they went, and the stairways looped in a loose spiral, in a fairly linear path without additional branches or chambers. This ruin led somewhere specific, and Arcee suspected its purpose was not purely spiritual.

The strange arrangement of steps they’d noticed continued, all the way down, and though there were no more ancient lighting arrangements, it was still brightly illuminated. Cracks webbed up and down the wall in a surprisingly harmonious arrangement.

As they went down, further, they came to an raised platform the glowing cracks encircled like a directional sign. When they stepped on it, it creaked faintly, with the sound of mechanisms around them that sounded like an old calculating engine going to work. Something clicked, and the platform slid away, and descended on down.

“Whoa!” Jack yelped. “Did we just hit a trap?!”

“No, no!” Arcee patted the dome-shaped seal over his seating. “It’s just an elevator.”

Down they went. Jack stared blankly. “...An elevator.”

“Yes. What’s weird about us having elevators?”

“...Arcee, I’m who-knows how many lightyears away from Earth, on a planet that had a thriving civization millions of years when the dinosaurs were still alive. You guys having something as mundane as fricking ELEVATORS is a little weird, okay!?”

“Fair enough, but guess how I felt when I saw that your planet had created vehicles that were an absolutely perfect match for our natural alternate forms. I’m just saying that the freaky feelings go both ways, you know.”

In this manner, they idly talked the nervousness away, aware of a dim glassy substance around them. A tube, perhaps, the means of conveying them downwards, and they could see outwards.

For whatever that was worth; the elevator moved surprisingly fast, nothing but dark groundmetal visible, and they were descending many miles every second, a trick of pressure keeping this from having any adverse effect on them. (Not that Transformers needed to worry about that kind of thing, but it was still a concern for Jack. Arcee kept glancing at him, concerned.) Jack kept close to her, extremely embarrassed by his mech acting on his true desires by clinging fearfully to Arcee’s leg. She put a hand on top of his pilot seat, comfortingly, as they came to a stop.

The illumination had grown brighter, and as they stepped out, more complex. Dimly, her optics took note of a vast expanse around them, a faintly lit horizon outlined into an outward curve. A great dome extending in every direction, as far as they could see. They stood on an island of sorts, and around them was a vast lake, shining a faint pink against an oilly surface, meeting the distant wall. The lights became more regular, shaped into hieroglyphs, and stretched across the entire chamber so that it illuminated the distant curving horizon. Jack squinted as they stepped onto a raised podium, perhaps an altar, and Arcee patted him briefly. “Ease up, Jack. Not gonna ask for a translation. You’d need binoculars or something first. Besides, I think I got a pretty good idea of where we are now.”

“You do? THat’s more than I got.” With every sign of reluctance, he parted from Arcee, and she found him missing his close proximity with a surprising intensity. He looked up, towards a distant ceiling, and a faintly visible tube they had apparently moved down through. The entrance above looked like a tiny hole, just barely lighted. “How far down are we!?”

“If I had to guess? Probably in the center of the moon.” She tilted her head. Judging from the religious iconography…” She pointed at the altar, which extended for a considerable distance, as if some very big things were expected to sit there. In the distance, she saw a large tower, and it looked old; ancient carved lines flowed with pink light, and set into the very top of it was a large crystal. “Yep. See the little statue things on ‘em? Kind of look a bit like the Predacons? Denizens of ancient Simfur. And, let’s see what else we have here.”

She shone a light, and took a step back in shock as liquid power shifted welcomingly in front of her. Blackness gleamed, somehow bright, and pink glimmer shone like solar flares. The liquid flowed, frosted steam rising up, heavy crystals slowly rising up here and there in places where it was thickened into a solid mass. And far, she saw the pink and black mass gushing out of the walls, being made by some mysterious internal processes, and she saw the hints of ancient machinery about her and in the walls.

The crackle of electricity fell over her, the taste of power was bright, and she at last understood. “Oh,” she said softly.

Jack took a sharp intake of breath. “Is that… energon?!”

The blessed life blood of their people, the fuel that kept them alive, that kept them immortal over the ages, and the rarest substance in the known universe. And here was an entire lake of it, being made on the spot. “Yeah,” Arcee said, numbly. “But I’ve never seen this kind before. And, okay. I get it. This moon. I think, I think the ancients hollowed it out and built something in it. This was a, an energon production facility! And it came online not too long ago…”

She felt woozy, a bit distant, and she felt very hungry indeed.

Jack gave her a concerned look. She put a hand on him, steadying herself. She thought weakly of too many eons of going hungry, of rust growing in painful patches and bits of her aching. “Why’s it black? And pink?”

“Energon used to come in different varieties. Aspected to the different original Primes; the kind you’re used to is attuned to Prima, the first of the Thirteen. Pink probably means something to do with Solus Prime, and black…”

“That’d be Megatronus, right? The one that betrayed the rest.”

Arcee gave him an unamused look. “Don’t think your color expectations apply here, Jack. Black means Onyx Prime. Red used to be for Megatronus.”

“Sorry.”

Arcee bent down. “Well, this would explain the power readings; there’s a damn lake of Energon being made down here, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop any time soon. We absolutely… uh…” She put a hand to her forehead. Her vision flickered. Arcee wasn’t aware of it, but just for a moment, her optics glowed bright pink. And above them, something spidery was patiently crawling down.

Thoughts of what they absolutely should do went out of Arcee’s head. Her processor pounded; lightning moved in her, a feeling of lightness was making it hard to stand. She stumbled, her exoframe shifting. She felt… not itchy. She felt hot, cold. Both at the same time, and with an irrepressible feeling that was intolerable. It was like firing up a transformation cycle and then holding it, until it hurt…

Something was sinking into her, fusing, and gently reconfiguring her, and it was then she realized it.

Energon radiation. Like transwarp mutation. Just being near this stuff was changing her! And non-Primian Energon, like Dark Energon, could do things to you.

Just for a moment, she looked up, at the crystal alighting the tower, and she felt the power flowing from it. That was no Energon crystal. It was something… older. Something power, as ancient and mighty as the Star Saber had been, or the Forge of Solus.

Even as her fuel lines blazed with a sudden and ferocious pleasure, Arcee shouted, “Jack! Get back!”

He complied, scuttling back all the way to the elevator, unaware of the shadow crawling closer from above the both of them; he was too fixed on Arcee, his eyes wide and afraid. She stumbled forward, her optics wide, glowing pink… and then, so did the rest of her.

For a moment, Arcee’s slim frame turned a glossy black. Not for long, and Jack had to admit it didn’t look ominous like the purple of Dark Energon, and then her usual colors asserted themselves.

Then her frame began to shift, and grow bigger. As soon as her colors appeared, Arcee began to grow larger, slowly swelling up bigger than Bumblebee was. She kept growing, and swelled up even taller than that, soon reaching the height of the likes of Knockout or some of the bigger Vehicons.

And her body shape was changing. She was getting… not muscular, given how Autobots were built, but she was getting broader. Her torso was expanding notably outwards, her waist a bit moreso, and her hips sprouting outwards.

She kept getting bigger, her proportions growing so fiercely she looked as proportionately beefy as Optimus was. And her thighs expanded outwards, with such ferocity that a better word might be exploded. They plumped up and grew, and grew and just kept growing, her armor fusing into a malleable and less rigid form to absorb attacks; her servo musculature swelled into place beneath it, even as her thighs got bigger than her torso and her waist!

And then, the swell where her hip-joints met her waist plate grew, Energon collecting there and producing new mechanisms and growing them to immense size; two enormous swells, plated in more deflect metal and the jet black of her undercoating, grew into a gargantuan backside; Arcee hissed, an undercurrent of pleasure as it bloomed outwards, her body creaking as her plating adjusted to a butt projecting outwards like a shelf, or an ant-insecticon’s abdomen.

Pink and black flashed around her body as her butt kept growing bigger, pumping in more mass, flashes of light shining around her. She tottered forward, more extreme heel struts forcing her stance into something awkward as she struggled to compensate, and it was harder to walk; she was getting taller, growing upwards too, and the gradual changes to her size were shifting her balance almost as badly as her new assets. Her energon tanks began to grow, wobbling larger with each step, hanging off and providing heavy weights, dense Energon settling into them and making them grow faster.

But not as fast as Arcee herself was growing. Her shoulders were broader, her overall body significantly more amazonian, and her hips nearly as wide as she was tall. And she was growing upwards faster than all of that anyway; her legs lengthened, heel struts stabilized into ultra high heels, her thighs clamping together as she wavered in place, and she shot up twenty feet all at once. Arcee yelled, her head dizzy with a surge of power and a delighted thrill, and flailed her arms, trying not to fall over even as she grew taller than even Optimus was. She got bigger, she kept growing upwards. Another fifteen feet, with no signs of stopping.

And another twenty after that, and then another; she was more than twice the size of even the likes of Grimlock, the single biggest bruiser in all the Autobot ranks short of the likes of Omega Supreme, and she was still growing upwards, shooting towards the ceiling.

It felt so right; the Energon burned bright in her, her entire body felt filled with a sweet flame, and though she was aware of changes in her mind, certain inhibitions falling away, she didn’t mind. The straightforwad nature of Onyx Prime, and the wild mania of Solus Prime touched her, influencing her, and she liked it. She certainly didn’t mind as her energon tanks expanded, tripling in size with a single wobbling flux. Her torso plating was completely absorbed, energon tanks totally fluid and wubbling and pure black, now descending somewhere around her waist and projecting out nearly half her total length. And they were still growing, swelling outwards, filling with more energon. They fizzled, gleaming from within so that a pink light was visible within them, and she felt more mass being generated and pouring into her tanks, making them bigger.

And on the ground level, Jack gaped in shock as Arcee kept growing, a true giantess even among the Autobots. Her high heel-shaped feet clattered forward, her entire body jiggling in a way he wouldn’t have thought an alien robot could. She was still growing, her exoskeletal armor fused into a squishy and soft hull like metallic latex, and he couldn’t help but think that she looked kinda beefy. Her shoulders were wider, her waist was tiny, but her limbs were much thicker than before, her thighs dominating his view, and her butt was swelling out so much she was toppling forward. Her butt was almost bigger than she was by now, two hge hills swelling up and gradually forcing her downwards, and her breasts (possibly not the right word, he knew, but damn they were so big) slamming into the ground, now absolutely bigger than Arcee herself, so that Arcee was sinking into them with every sign of pleasure.

She kicked a leg up, groaning softly. Arcee turned her head around, her optics glowing pink. “Jaa-aack,” she sang softly, a whirring noise as she focused for him. “Where are you? Where are you!?” She reached for him, pinned by her breasts. “Come here…! Now!”

Jack timidly stepped forward. Something in her voice sounded… different. He wasn’t sure he trusted this raw, wild intensity. It felt like something had been scraped off her.

Before he could get too far, though, something swooped down, and perched on Arcee.

Arcee turned as Jack recoiled in horror at this familiar threat. Arcee’s stupified self-satisfaction faded as she recognized her old foe: “Airachnid!” She shouted.

On the left swell of Arcee’s backside, there stood Arcee’s oldest tormentor and nemesis, Airachnid herself. A tall and fearsome Decepticon, built on broadly the same lines as Arcee, she was nonetheless a spider-type Insecticon, a rare hive queen. Her body had the plated, spiky look common to the Inecticons, and her rear dominated by a heavy spider abdomen (not dissimilar from Arcee’s new backside, in fact). Where Arcee was blue and black with a hint of pink, Airachnid was purple, black and deathly grey.

And something else was… different about her. Besides her dancing up and doing trying to avoid sinking into Arcee’s super soft mega butt, that is. That rather spoiled the intimidating effect.

Arcee swatted at her, while Jack rushed over in a very bad attempt to fight her. Unfortunately, Arcee’s butt was simply too large for her to reach, and her arm smacked off her own endowment. Arcee maneuvered her leg into Jack’s way, and a wall of metal cut off his route. Airachnid laughed. “As I thought! You could open the way into this place, with all its treasures, and all its power! And at last, here you are… so helpless.”

Arcee squinted. “Say what you want, little bug,” she said, her voice smoother than normal, and with a sudden pleasurable awareness of how… puny Airachnid was. “You’re looking pathetic now. Come here, so I can crush you!”

Arcee’s arm transformed into weapon mode; instead of the slim pistol-grade shooter, it swelled up into a ridiculously massive cannon. She blinked, shrugged, and aimed.

Airachnid bounded away as a wall-annihilating flood of pink-black force almost obliterated her. “Perhaps I have bitten off more than I can chew. But then again…” She grinned, and her face split open. Long fangs extended, and a horrific feeding tendril extended. “What an interesting idea!”

“Arcee!” Jack shouted from below. “Get her off you, now! She’s a Terrorcon! She’s a decepticon vampire!”

“She what!?” Arcee felt a sudden pinch on her butt. “Ow!”

Airachnid bit deep… and as luck would have it, it was basically like a mosquito biting Arcee. She was too small, and Arcee too large, and even as she drank her fill, the lost fraction was too small for Arcee to even notice.

There was a brief pause as Airachnid bloated up, filled to maximum capacity by even this small sample, and rolled right off her backside. As she fell, towards the Energon, she was visibly growing curvier in the same way as Arcee, and doubling in size in even the brief moment between the fall-

And the splash, into the energon. She was heavy enough now to crack through the frozen layer.

Arcee paused. Rubbing the small bump on her backside, she frowned, her lips notably plumper than before. “This seems like a, a bad thing to me.”

“You think!?” Jack yelled.

Arcee paused, noticing him. “Ah. THERE you are~!” She reached towards him.

And at this point, interrupting her attempts to be cuddly again, something arose from the energon. Something… big.

Mostly they saw two very big somethings, wobbling and bouncing in place right in front of them, and rising up towards the ceiling. There was a lot of purple, and a brief sight of exoskeletal armor fusing and morphing into a new shiny form. A broad waist like the side of a mountain, broader than Arcee’s curves, hips dominating everything in front of them. The splash of a monstrously huge metal butt growing so fast it slammed into the energy and made tidal waves, and more splashes as gargantuan breasts swelled up as much as Arcee’s head, hitting the Energon…

Arcee looked up, and up, and up to see Airachnid towering over her, growing even faster than she had, as large as a Metrotitan and still growing bigger.

Airachnid laughed like a noblewoman, her horns glinting as she tilted her head back. “Oh, oh, this is just perfect! You do the hard work to come in here, and I am the one who reaps the most benefits!” As she spoke, she was visibly growing up towards the ceiling, and her horns rammed into them, her breasts and backside competing to fill up as much space as possible. Arcee squeaked as purple metal squashed into her.

Airachnid pressed forward, submerging her in squishy metal, and still laughing, let herself keep growing into the ceiling. She kept growing, soaring upwards, more metal fembot body filling up as much as space as possible, and her optics fixed on something; she bent down and plucked the ancient device Arcee had observed earlier, right off the grand podium at the very center of the chamber. It was a small thing; a crystal of the deepest and brightest light, like a piece of the sun made solid and safe. Black and pink laced around it, infused into it, and clearly it powered the whole facility, for as soon as Airachnid took it away, the room became dark. The hieroglyphs, speaking their mysterious wisdom and words of the ancients, became dim, and then all was dark.

All, but for the pink glow of the Energon. It grew fainter as Airachnid’s body continued to absorb it, fueling her growth. By now, she must have been over a mile tall, and she was still growing. Her butt was now so large as to be nearly a separate thing from the rest of her body, rising as high as her elbows and low as her mid thighs, her whole form monstrously curvy. Spidery limbs extended, growing larger, and all manner of kibble materialized on her body, suggesting far more than just one possible alternate form. This was evolution, ascension beyond the limits of modern Transformers.

She peered at the crystal. “Interesting,” she said, after a moment. “A relic of Solus’ own work, I would imagine. And some of the handiwork of Onyx too. And married to energon harvested from the very heart of Primus, to amplify the effects of their creation. Making Energon to uplift… no, transform and upgrade us. Supercharging, in fact. Oh, if only it had been active during the war… then I could have crushed that short-sighted maniac and taken over in a snap!” She snapped her claws for emphasis, and the shockwave tore vast chunks out of the walls, and knocked Arcee all the way to the other side of the chamber, in an instant; she made an ultra curvy impact crater, and slipped into the Energon.

“Arcee!” Jack turned to her, freezing and unable to decide; run and hide, like Arcee would want, or figure out something to do. Anything at all! And then, the sky went dark, and huge metal claws closed around him. “Ah. Arcee’s little beloved. What fun,” Airachnid said smugly. She pressed Jack into her cleavage, a small hatch appearing to receive him and then locking him away, vanishing him into her body. She then considered the artifact.

Will was usually the answer. She concentrated upon it, letting herself be a vessel for its power, and it wanted to flow. It’s boundless essence flowed into her, and it was important to know that the Energon it had made… that was not the limits of its power. That was what the grand mechanism around them had been built to do, transfer its power into a consumable form. Airachnid received, instead, the full and unbound force of it.

She gasped, almost indecently, and her curves surged, fluxing several sizes bigger, and then she grew upwards, soaring towards the ceiling. Arcee emerged from the Energon, to see Airachnid growing thousands of feet in seconds, almost instantly filling up the entire facility, her monstrous breasts slamming into the rooms, an oppressive weight above them, and she was still growing bigger-

There was light, and the ceiling cracked. It fought against the weight of Airachnid’s body, and soon lost as her strength was boosted as much as her size, and with a vague thrust of her shoulders, she smashed right through solid metal, and kept growing upwards. Almost instantly, Airachnid’s head disappeared into the gap, then her shoulders. Her breasts, low-slung and projecting out as much as they did, carved out even more, and then so did her backside as she grew so much her hips soared through the ceiling. Her thighs grew; she had to be over five miles tall by now, and her thighs alone filled the whole room, slamming Arcee into the walls.

And, at last, the pressure was gone, as Airachnid broke through the surface of the moon and hauled herself up, on pure reflex.

As silence fell, Arcee felt a brief surge of relief, the sheer terror of Airachnid being so big fading away. Then, a fresh terror came to her. Airachnid had been here the whole time, she was loose. She was larger than a Metrotitan, she was supercharged by a Primal relic. And then:

She had Jack.

Arcee, with a lot of effort, forced herself to crawl forwards. The Energon’s surface had been cracked, and she sank into the liquid depths. It swam and coursed around her, caressing her every expanded inch, and she barely felt the thrill of it being absorbed into her metal body, or that several tons of Energon were being sucked into her every second.

It had a purpose, and it wanted to fulfill that purpose. Here was Arcee, as suitable a host as any.

But all she could think of was Jack; her partner, her beloved. She was responsible for him, she wanted him, she needed him safe, it was her fault he was there. Her enemy had him, and he was totally in her power, and she couldn’t let him be hurt. She forced herself forward, with no clear idea of what she could possibly do; she yelled in frustration, and again, she raised her arm, and willed it into weapon form.

Out came the cannon. She aimed it upwards, towards a vast purple mass that looked suitably jiggly, and she fired. The resulting beam of power would have made Megatron’s fusion cannon look puny, and it could have one-shotted the Nemesis at the height of its power.

Airachnid didn’t really even notice the blast, but she did feel a sting. Dazed by euphoric pleasures, and the enticement of her own growing body, the shock of the sting was enough for her grip to loosen, and the artifact fell out of her hand.

Arcee saw it’s shining light fall, and drop into the waters. She grunted, her body reconfiguring into an alternate form; a long and low slung vehicle, with as much resemblance to a two-wheeler form as a tyrannosaur bore to a sparrow; it was TECHNICALLY the same thing, but the details were notable. Not even pausing to wonder why her alt mode had changed, she revved into the waters.

The Energon soon vanished, poured into the ideal vessel that was Arcee’s body. The entire chamber was totally dry.

And then she grabbed the artifact, and her drive to beat Airachnid was all the way in it needed.

Very, very quickly, Arcee found the ceiling getting rather closer.

--------

On top of the surface, the Insecticon hordes bowed to their queen, as she stood to her full size.

By now her size had stabilized, and there was a gaping hole in the moon where her body had torn its way through, big enough for a hyper curvy fembot now standing one hundred miles tall; she was so large, her body extended well into space off the moon, and she was plainly visible to the Autobots on Cybertron. Indifferent to what threats might come her way, she laughed softly, delighting in the feeling of power radiating in her.

She felt as though she were a goddess; every movement could break a continent, her exhalations raise a hurricane. The power coursing in her satisfied even the ravenous hunger of a Terrorcon; for the first time since her transformation, she felt satisfied.

“Come, my children,” she said sweetly, a sudden burst of generosity in her. That felt odd, and for a moment, she felt somewhat concerned. But then it was soon gone; the urge to not think at all, to simply do as occurred to her, felt much more satisfying. And it felt… good… to do things like this.

Perhaps later, she might worry about the influence it had on her, or if her mind was changing.

The Insecticons clustered around her, feeding reverently. One by one, they scuttled away and through her psychic link, she felt them at last satisfied. And something in them… changing. The dark hunger, the same as Unicron, was still present, but… dimmed. Or tamed?

Much like her own. Something, certainly, was changing her mind.

She considered the human currently sealed inside her, and she rather thought she enjoyed the feeling of him wriggling there, and not just because she’d denied Arcee a prize.

Hrm. Where was Arcee?

As the last Insecticon drank their fill from her, she felt the mad hunger fade from them, and plenty of them curled up to nap. “Missing your bike?” Airachnid murmured to Jack, of a mind to taunt the organic speck, and paused, not even noticing any reaction from him.

The Insecticons sensed something approaching. Something big. Airachnid leaned towards the rift her body had torn into the ground, peering into the black depths there, and she saw movement-

And then a fist as large as her own, large enough to tear islands from their roots, clocked her in the face.

The impact hit so hard, it rearranged the atmosphere, and the shockwave from it changed the geography of the moon. New mountains rose up from that punch, and the Insecticon horde was scattered to the wind.

And Airachnid was actually staggered by it.

Arcee stood up, strutting out of the pit, and she stood eye to eye with Airachnid, just as big as her, easily 100 miles tall.

She walked forward, her steps making islands on the moon. Each swing of her hips moved enough metal to make entire continents, and Airachnid was floored at how massive those hips were. Thighs packing more mass than cities slammed together, intricately interlocked squash plates mashing together, and her hips produced their own weather systems, flashing with pink and black energies. Her hips were easily wider than she was tall, and her backside so massive that the two globes rose higher than her elbows, jiggling and wobbling with each step, so broad they were visible from the front. Mostly black metal, interlocking into the transformed blue of her leg greaves, the light caught on her metal butt and she was jiggling so much the effect was like a disco ball. Behind her, her backside projected out like a tremendous shelf, an awe-inspiring sight.

Her breasts were not quite so large; if Airachnid had to guess, Arcee’s hips were larger than her own, but Airachnid had the bigger energon tanks.They still descended to, perhaps, her waist, dipping further, the black teardrop-shaped masses sticking outwards for a shocking distance, enormously wide, and so as Arcee advanced, her breasts slammed into Airachnid’s. They docked at first, and Airachnid was surprised at the pleasure of it, the shock of warmth in her. The full weight of it pushed her back, and Arcee rushed forwards, almost knocking her down; the massive weights dense enough to actually push her forwards.

Arcee actually leaped; her new form was significantly more bulky and powerfully built, and just as strong as Airachnid, and she flew into the sky, easily flipping and landing a kick square into Airachnid’s face. The Insecticons, at least the ones on different parts of the planet, had since recovered from her explosive arrival, and rose in a great mass to descend upon her. Arcee simply punche at the air, indifferently, and the shockwave again washed over the moon, knocking them away.

Airachnid commanded all her Insecticons to her; recognizing that they would be no use in this fight, she instead produced many openings in her body, as though she were a living ship. Her insecticons entered, hiding away inside her, and she allowed herself to draw power from them, and comfort from their simple adoration of her. And, annoyingly, she sensed that the human inside her knew Arcee had arrived, and was already rejoicing. Out loud, she said, “How did you reach my size!?”

Arcee smirked. There was something wilder about her now. She was moving differently. It was a sexual kind of ferocity, unhinged and even savage. What had the transformation done to her? “You left the artifact to me. And the rest of the Energon was mine. Easy enough to outdo you!” She smacked her massive butt, for emphasis, making a noise somewhere between rubber being slapped and a metallic clang.

Airachnid scowled. “...I’ll take it from you, once I finish beating you down.”

Arcee, having already swallowed it for safekeeping, doubted that. “You can try.”

“And I suppose now, Autobot, you’ll demand I surrender.”

“Mmm.” She made a mocking kissing sound. “Oh, you won’t have to surrender,” Arcee said, grinning in a truly terrifying way. Her plump lips slid back over rows and rows of long and cruel fangs. It was a feral smile, a bestial Dinobot kind of smile. “I’ll just beat my Jack out of you, and then I’ll keep on pummeling you until I get bored!”

For just a moment, Airachnid felt a flutter of uncertainty. “Wait-”

Arcee swung, a surprisingly graceful movement that put her massive bulk into the air, her heel strut landing square into Airachnid’s face. With that, the battle was properly joined, and Airachnid was plunged into a new valley carved out by the force of the kick. Another one, as Arcee spiraled down, struck Airachnid in the right boob, but the enormously dense metal absorbed it handily, and Arcee hopped in place, her foot stuck.

Airachnid’s spider limbs, much longer and bulkier than before, produced a number of nasty drills, hooks and other combat attachments. They dove forward, with such speed and force the air tore around them, and when they hit it produced a massive blast making more cracks in the moon. Unfortunately, most of them slammed into Arcee’s boobs, and the only one that didn’t hit a glancing blow on her butt, with all damage absorbed.

“Well, what do you know,” Arcee panted, a thrill in her optics. “These new features aren’t just fun. It's better than armor!” She headbutted Airachnid with a wild scream… and then promptly reeled back, dazed and woozy.

“Pity you don’t have the headgear for that kind of move!” Airachnid headbutted her, and with her horns, she was actually able to pull it off. Arcee stumbled back and Airachnid pressed forward, ramming her head into her again and again, chipping off bits of Arcee’s head plates and armor with nicks of her sharp horns.

Arcee recovered gradually, ducking back just enough to avoid another headbutt, and ducked low, leaning onto her breasts and affording herself enough leverage to kick out. Airachnid howled with pain as her shin joint locked up from the blow, sinking into a hole made by the impact. Arcee leaped up, and levered her massive weight into a brutal slam down onto her.

Airachnid escaped, and transformed. For a moment, she had some dreadful uncertainty; she felt not one potential alternate state, but many. It shocked her; she had not just one alternate form now. And the instincts of them all felt ready to direct her mind. The form of a spider, all predatory skill and violent speed. A two-wheeler form for pure speed, not so different from Arcee’s native form. Her original helicopter form, but scaled up…

She folded up, her curves compressing and providing far more cybermatter to make an even larger form, and she flew out as… well, as a spaceship. For a moment, it occurred to her she could simply leave, right here and now, with her prize. She rose up, engines firing…

“WE’RE NOT DONE HERE!” Arcee roared, her voice positively deranged, and her hands extending into wicked claws. Another arm became weaponized, turning into an absolutely massive cannon, and fired, the blast knocking Airachnid’s ship mode out of the sky.

Airachnid landed in the form of an enormous mechanical spider, raising forward multiple bladed limbs, and she charged. Her blades clattered ineffectually against Arcee’s armored breasts, but they were more effective against the rest of her, slicing at her forearms.

And so the two continued to fight.

Across the entire moon, their battle raged, assuming a multitude of forms as they did. Both of them fought far more aggressively than they might have before, though it had to be said: Airachnid was fighting for just enough space to retreat, perhaps recognizing that she needed more time to plan. Arcee fought for Jack, and to finally put down Airachnid, and she fought with a completely wild, ferocious savagery in keeping with the likes of Onyx Prime’s modern disciples; she clawed, she bit, she roared like a monster.

“SHOW ME SOME BLOOD!” She snarled, assuming the form of a gigantic creature not dissimilar to Earth’s wolverines, with a hint of velociraptor in there.

“We’re robots! We have no blood!” Airachnid retorted, in her ship form again, evidently an evolution of her original alt mode.

“SEMANTICS ARE STUPID! HOLD STILL AND DIE!” Arcee assumed a two-wheeler form, though now resembling a battle barge with treads, and rocketed into her. As she bounced off, she transformed back into biped form, producing a set of blades on her forearms and enthusiastically swinging at Airachnid, and began parrying Airachnid’s bladed spider-limbs.

Below, on Cybertron, the Autobot host assembled, waiting on instructions. Optimus Prime watched solemnly, doing a good job of hiding his complete bafflement on Arcee’s transformation, but he gave the order; make no move, unless Arcee was hurt. The battle was too large to risk collateral damage.

After all, the two fembots were still growing. Somehow, the radiation continued to affect them, and though they were too deep into battle to realize it, they had nearly doubled in size, to two hundred miles tall.

They continued to assume a dizzying variety of new forms, each one feeling as natural as two-wheeler and helicopter had before. Arcee barreled into her as a speedy tank, Airachnid resisted the attack as a combiner swarm. One became a living city and brandished turrets in a massive firearms attack, the other dug under the ground as a digging insect. One ran circles around in multiple speedy forms, the other simply assumed increasingly tougher and resilient ones. Even as Airachnid became a ship once more and rammed her, intending to piledrive her all the way into Cybertron, and Arcee became a space station, extending many weapons and firing point blank, dazing Airachnid so that they both floated in space, now orbiting Cybertron.

And, for that matter, both of them now larger than the moon they had been battling upon; their breasts and backside remained the roughly same proportions, but their enormous roundness looked like stellar masses from ground level. Their energon tanks slammed together, jiggling enticingly, as they clung to one another.

“Just… give me the artifact!” Airachnid hissed. “I’ll give you back your precious human! Let me achieve… perfection!” Her voice took on a slightly desperate air. “It is the key! To become as grand as Solus herself! I know it is!”

Arcee grinned in a truly frightening way. “It’s worth keeping it from you, just for that. You’ll have to live with that, forever! I took something you wanted! That you decided was yours! Try and live with THAT, Decepticon scum! See what it’s like!”

Airachnid hissed. “Mine… mine! Give it back!” She lunged.

And, unfortunately for her, it was very poorly timed. Arcee was a more experienced fighter overall, and while Airachnid was a deadly schemer, a vicious ambusher, and a cruel torturer, she battled best when she could surprise her foe. And Arcee was a scrapper by nature, and this was exactly her element. She rammed her tanks into her, using leverage and mass to her advantage; with her bigger hips, and larger backside. She had much more force to offer.

Airachnid leaned back, both stunned by the impact and strangely aroused. Arcee lifted herself up, wrapping her monstrously big thighs around Airachnid’s waist, and was pleased by how her old foe grunted in dismay. And she squeaked, putting all her planet-cracking leg strength into it. Airachnid gasped, with a satisfying cracking noise. As her monstrously huge breasts floated up in the vacuum of space, Arcee took her opportunity, and struck!

Her claws sank into the base of Airachnid’s torso, right to the join of cleavage and torsoplates. She missed the Spark chamber, though whether through mercy or sheer accident… hard to say. But she found what she aimed for, at a spot she had been focusing on the whole fight, and her claws popped it right open.

Her hands closed around Jack, still safe in his protective mech. And, for him, the entire world was the goddess-like grandness of Arcee. Her cleavage could have sheltered continents, her eyes burning stars, and her mouth swallow his home whole. She grinned with a wild and possessive air, and with no preamble, she scooped him up. Right above her Spark casing, she produced a suite suitable for the care and housing of an organic sweetheart, not unlike a luxury spaceship might have, and she plopped him in there. Multiple armatures stripped him out of the mech, to enjoy the comforts of Arcee more directly, and by some strange tweak of her internal shifting, it wound up in her mouth. She spat out the empty mech, indifferent to its cost.

She noticed, in a vague sort of way, his clothes were also there as well. Perhaps she got a bit overzealous, and then grinned as she thought of him naked there.

Still dazed, Airachnid moved. The motion drew Arcee’s attention, like a cat seeing a mouse move, and she grinned even wider. “I can think of one thing to make this day even better,” she said sweetly, drawing her arm back. It grew a massive blade, and she pointed it right at Airachnid’s chest. Airachnid’s eyes widened, because Arcee wanted her to know what was coming. Arcee swung, straight at her Spark-

Airachnid headbutted her again and Arcee detached. She was so stunned by the blow that one of her compartments opened, and out flew the artifact. “No!” She yelled, but Airachnid was faster, and she caught it. “No, no!” Airachnid ignored her, transforming into her ship form once again, and this time, just revved her engines up. The heat of them grew intense, sub-light systems manifested and engaged. Arcee roared in fury, and transformed as well, but her form blurred. She was so angry, so awash in pure bloodthirsty intent and thwarted revenge for so many lost friends, that she couldn’t settle on the right alt mode.

Normally, it would only have been several seconds of hesitation. And it was enough time for Airachnid to accelerate free of Cybertron’s orbit, breaking away from Arcee and out of her reach.

Arcee fired at her, but by now, it was a performative gesture. Airachnid, in ship mode, accelerated, and shifted into other realms of existence; she jumped, and then-

She was gone.

Arcee stared where she had been, for a long, long time.

And then her screams of rage made all of Cybertron shrink back in terror.

“Arcee…?” Jack said meekly within her, completely nude and quite self-conscious about it, but a lot more concerned by her thrashing. “Arcee! Please! Talk to me!”

It was a little frightening how fast Arcee’s attitude instantly calmed down. “Oh. Jack. You’re okay…” And mine, mine, MINE, some jealous and vindictive part of herself roared, and she purred in personal agreement.

“Arcee? Are we… are we okay?”

Arcee looked where her foe had gone. At least for the moment, Airachnid was gone, the last Decepticon holdout of any notable throat no longer an immediate concern. Jack was safe. And Acree herself…

She felt a thrill of power, such that she could tear worlds apart with barely any effort, and she gloried in the unfettered might of it. “Yes, we’re okay.”

She turned, regarding Cybertron, and she focused her attention, her optics zeroing in on the otherwise minute specks of the ordinary Autobots.

Her expression was...strange, for a moment, and briefly, unsettlingly like Airachnid when she regarded the brief and irrelevant humans she so looked down upon.

Then Arcee smiled sweetly, though fiercely, and wiggled her claws in greeting. “Hello down there,” she said coyly. “How do you all like the new me?”

------

It was several months later.

The moon had, by and large, been repaired, and now colonized. The facility within it could no longer produce the empowering Energon without the artifact it had hidden to do so, but it could still produce ordinary Energon, and was now presently feeding Cybertron and even its allies. Grimlock wasn’t too happy about his moon getting wrecked, but it amused Arcee to argue about it with him.

Arcee herself had kept growing for some time even after the fight, stabilizing until she was a little smaller than Cybertron. Given that the planet was largely hollow, her overall mass was probably equal to it. However, it was a bit boring hanging about in space with herself, Jack and any nearby space-capable ‘bots, so she worked out a way to displace her mass and become smaller, though she disliked getting too small; presently, she liked hitting Metrotitan size, and spent some time as her own city in what had once been the Sea of Rust.

Jack and her were now even more inseperable than before; she was becoming very jealous and possessive of him, and he was so enamored and won over by her that he meekly obliged her every whim, and simply lived in her full time. Some speculated what, exactly, they got up to in the complexity of her body, but the general opinion was that it was their own business.

Anyway, upsetting Arcee by being too nosy about it seemed… dangerous.

Not that she came off malicious to the other Autobots. She had changed, yes, but she was still an Autobot; compassionate, honorable, and vaguely insane at the best of times. (They had… unique recruiting practices. But you didn’t stick with the Autobots if you were a normal robot.) Optimus seemed to trust her, at least, so that was probably a good sign.

But she was a lot more wild than before. Enamored with her own power, preening and even vain.

“You’re… sure you don’t feel very different?” Ratchet said dubiously.

He sat atop her finger, which was big enough for him to stand upon with ease. Arcee sat upon her territory, one massive thigh posed dramatically, her energon tanks sloughing onto the ground around her, a number of Autobots happily curled up in there. Sometimes she cooed over them in a surprisingly maternal way. “Not really.” She smirked. “People think I do, huh?”

“You’ve been more… discreet, in the past.”

“You mean restrained.”

“Hmph. Yes. Suppose I do.”

Arcee leaned back. Her butt arched up into the sky, even with her laying back on it like her own personal mattress. “Doesn’t feel right anymore. I just like going with the flow. Anyway, planning’s hard. I guess. Easier to just… do whatever pops into my head.”

Ratchet looked worried. “But you don’t feel… less intelligent!?”

“No, no!” She waved a hand calmingly. “Not at all. I just don’t like… planning stuff out. Making things too complicated. It gets frustrating and, I don’t know, unnecessary.”

“Hrm.” Ratchet considered that. “Well… I do have some interesting news on that front. You know I was originally from Simfur, yes?”

“Thought you were Iaconian, doc.”

“Ethnically, yes. But I was raised in Simfur. When I was with Wheeljack, we raised Grimlock and his other, hah, reprobates.” He said this with greater affection than he used with anyone. It was a little weird, actually. “I learned much of the legends and stories of the area, particularly since Grimlock became a true believer in the religions surrounding Onyx Prime. You should know that this sort of… impulsiveness, is closely associated with the way Onyx Prime was described in the older legends.”

“I thought they was all wise, enlightened and that other slag.”

“Well, yes. But Onyx was also the first beastformer and progenitor of the Predacons. Their default solution to a threat was to bite it’s head off.”

“Hah!”

Ratchet eyed Arcee’s pronounced teeth and claws. “The… physical traits are more subtle than expected. Historically, anyone exposed to Onyxian Energon becomes a mutant beastformer. I suppose the presence of Solus’ influence affected it… though based on her legends, you ought to be even more unhinged.”

“Oh yeah, she was a bit wild, eh?”

“I think a more honest term might be ‘mad scientist’, Arcee.” Ratchet sniffed. “...Do you like being this large?”

“I’m gonna level with you, doc.” Arcee leaned in. “I have no idea how I could stomach being… puny. I’m never being smaller than this, I promise!”

“And the…” Ratchet gestured vaguely in a way that indicated outsized chest ornaments. “Those?”

“They’re Solusdamned sweet, is what!”

“...To each their own. I don’t judge, you know. Out loud.” They went through a variety of other topics, briefly covering Jack (who was quite happy, if increasingly agoraphobic and disinterested in non-Arcee vistas), Optimus’ mild approval of Arcee’s state on the basis of ‘if an Autobot wants to be something, it is that Autobot’s right to do so’, and Grimlock’s continuing attempts to arm wrestle her fingers for fun.

As Ratchet’s check up came to a close, with a report on his findings on Arcee’s changes, which were frankly alien (among other things, she was apparently multidimensional now, and her T-cog was now distributed throughout her whole body), he brought up one other matter. “There’s been no signs of Airachnid.”

“I didn’t think so.” At Ratchet’s glance, Arcee continued. “A giant fembot Terrorcon as big as a moon with an artifact like that would make some news.”

“If she’s even just the size of a moon now,” Ratchet said grimly. “The two of you had access to that… whatever it was, for less than a megacycle, and you’re bigger than Unicron when you want to be. Now…? We may need to look for solar systems disappearing when she’s feeling peckish.”

Arcee actually shuddered. “Don’t even say that, Ratchet. Don’t like to think about those cute little aliens getting… hit, by her.”

Ratchet glanced at her. ‘Cute’ was a new sentiment from her. But regardless. “I don’t know if even your increase in power will be able to cope with whatever she might have become. But, at the moment, barring some unusual breakthroughs in universal combining technology, you’re our best option. Megatron turned himself in, Starscream is in hiding, and most other Decepticons have either been captured or have submitted to trial. Airachnid is the last remnant of that sorry chapter of our lives.”

“More’s the pity I couldn’t kill her when I had the chance!”

“Well, you may just get your chance. You AND Jack.” Arcee gave him a surprised look. “Tell me, have you heard of something new the biological experts are looking into?”

Arcee tilted her head, with the clouds shifting in response. “Nope. I’m interested, though.”

“I’m not clear on the specifics. Xenobiology has never been an interest of mine. But we’re working on a way to resonate Sparks with the physiology of certain bonded aliens to amplify our power. It’s similar to combination, but without a physical transformation. But you need a close bond to make it work…” He gave her a look, or perhaps Jack’s permanent residence. “A VERY intimate bond.”

“...Oh~?” she said sweetly.

“A symbiotic link, amplifying an Autobot’s power, and potentially size. They’re calling it the Headmaster technology, I believe… or Powermaster, not sure which. What do you think? Would you and Jack take a look into it?”

Arcee almost drooled at the thought of being even stronger, and allowing Jack to help bring down Airachnid once and for all. “I wouldn’t mind~!”

[fredheads]

me? trying to shake off the cobwebs by writing pool smut? ending up with different smut instead? its more likely than you think. 

pool smut is coming. i swear. 

don’t click the read more if you don’t want to see exactly what i just described. @fredsythe 

When Fred's seemingly endless search for a summer job had led him to lifeguarding at the town pool, FP had assumed that he would be out of a job again within the month.

It wasn't that he didn't have faith in his best friend’s ability to perform rescues and remove splinters and keep little kids from wiping out on the deck. It was more the question of whether Fred, already mopey because all the lifeguarding slots at the public beach had been full, had the patience to go through with the training once he learned how few babes (his self-professed reason for coveting the position) frequented the small outdoor pool in the centre of town.

Surprisingly, FP couldn't have been more wrong. Fred adored being outside for hours in the sun, and his firm-but-friendly way with the kids meant the denizens of the public pool were happier and more well behaved than FP had seen it in years. He'd also accumulated a gaggle of adoring preteen admirers who served as a kind of miniature pool patrol, snapping at kids to walk, not run, and ensuring Fred had very little to do at work but wave at eight-year-olds and soak up the season.

Not that he didn't take it seriously. It was astonishing - and adorable - to watch Fred treat the position with reverence, wearing his plastic red whistle as seriously as a lieutenant and even snapping at FP for littering once while he was visiting Fred at work. That Fred had once been the most obnoxious, rule-breaking nine-year-old at this exact pool was completely forgotten.

“Man, they love you,” FP comments from the base of the lifeguard tower as he watches a girl of about twelve rush back to her mother's waiting minivan. She'd just presented Fred with a homemade friendship bracelet that he was laboriously tying on his wrist, as importantly as one might perform surgery.

“Who, Stacy?” Fred replies, admiring his wrist. “She's the sweetest kid.” He drops his voice to a whisper, leaning down a bit from his chair toward FP. “And her older sister's a total bombshell.”

Ah, there they were. The babes. FP scowls and stares at the lapping turquoise water. Fred Andrews could find a girl to hit on in the middle of the desert. And she'd want him back. And have an annoying friend for FP, so he couldn't complain.

“When are you off?” He asks, shielding his eyes from the sun and taking the excuse to gaze up at his friend. He never got tired of seeing Fred in uniform - if a tiny pair of red swim trunks that clutched his thighs for dear life could be considered a uniform. There was a matching tank top, but Fred never wore it. His red whistle was nestled snugly against his blond chest hair.

“Right now.” Another lifeguard is approaching them from the changerooms, and FP raises his hand to wave at Sierra. His classmate had no reason to resent her job at the public pool - she and Tom Keller were secretly going steady, and were completely infatuated with one another. That was a load off FP’s mind too - no worries about Fred and Sierra picking up a summer romance while supervising the kiddy pool.

“Get lost, Andrews,” Sierra teases Fred, rattling the base of the lifeguard stand. “My turn up there.” She turns her gaze to FP. “Hi, FP.”

“Hi.”

“Hold your horses.” Fred jumps down as Sierra pops on a pair of huge sleek sunglasses, smoothing her hair down with her free hand. “Bye, Sierra. See you tomorrow!”

She waves from the tower as they head out, Fred stopping at his locker to retrieve his bag and car keys. He tosses his towel around his neck and hops into the beat-up red convertible he and Artie had restored back in June. Fred, rather than being tired of water and sun, was now intending to tear off to the beach to spend the last of the day on the sand. FP eases himself into the passenger seat, along for the ride, and they speed off.

Fred’s talking as they drive, taking the scenic route down the coast, but FP isn’t hearing a word of it. Instead, his gaze is fixed with nuclear intensity on the thin blonde hairs that run along the inside of Fred’s very exposed thighs.

Fred, who would be naked if it wasn’t for those tiny shorts.

His tan is as even and as smooth as butterscotch - his flat stomach against the waistband of his shorts is the same gold as his gangly arms. But it’s the crotch that FP’s zeroed in on - and below that, the tiny crescent moon of pale skin that’s just visible where the leg of his shorts had ridden up an imperceptible millimetre. The shorts were so short that the crescent was almost in line with his -

“FP?” Fred must have realized he’d lost him, taking his eyes off the road for a moment to glance at his friend. “Earth to FP? You okay?”

“Pull over,” FP says, before he can think too much about it, his heart thumping in his throat. He can feel the same pulse beating in the front of his shorts, and his hands are going damp. He unbuckles his seatbelt.

“What? Why?” Fred asks, brow furrowing, but obediently eases the car to a stop at the side of the empty road. “Why?” he asks again, more urgently, probably because the last time FP had asked him to pull over he’d vomited all over the inside of the car.

But that’s not his motive today. FP wastes no time in climbing over the centre console into the drivers’ seat, letting both of his warm hands land on and squeeze the thighs that had been torturing him since they’d sat down.

“Because,” he grunts, feeling his back hit the steering wheel as he maneuvers himself to straddle Fred’s lap, already eyeing the place where the pulse throbs in Fred’s neck, longing to put his mouth there-  “you look fucking scrumptious right now, that’s why.”

“FP!” Fred yelps, surprised, as FP moves his hand to the front of Fred’s swim trunks, grabbing him through the thin fabric. There’s a pop as Fred reaches for the door handle behind him in a panic, the door flying open and Fred tumbling backward out of the car.

FP sits up worriedly, momentarily anxious that he’d gone too far. Fred’s standing tanned and barefoot on the side of the road, clutching his towel in front of him, looking all the more naked for it. His hair is mussed from the fall, and FP barely keeps the urge in check to lunge for his friend and sink his teeth into Fred’s lip.

“Are you serious?” Fred asks, gesturing wildly to the car, and then to the surrounding pavement. He drops the towel, which puddles at his feet. “Right here?! By the side of the road?!”

“Why not?” asks FP plaintively. All the blood is rushing away from his head, and he can’t come up with anything better to say. His tone is insistent, not aggressive. “What the fuck am I supposed to do? You’re sitting there practically naked next to me, you have no idea how good you look-”

“You’re a fucking freak,” Fred replies, and FP’s stomach runs abruptly cold. A thousand apologies bubble up to his lips in the space of a millisecond, but before he can even get one of them out Fred’s climbing back into the car and slamming the door behind him, diving into FP’s lap and wrapping his legs around the back of FP’s knees like a needy octopus.

“Fred?” FP gasps, but that’s all he gets out because then Fred’s kissing him, his mouth and tongue as hot as his sun-warmed skin, one of his hot little hands sneaking down to yank FP’s shirt out of his waistband.

“Backseat,” he whispers against FP’s lips, grinning like a jack-o-lantern on Halloween. “At least we can lie down and no one can see us if they drive past.”

FP doesn’t have to be told twice. He pulls Fred into the backseat with him, laying his friend down on the second-hand upholstery and straddling him again. Fred reaches out and grabs another towel off the floor - in the summer his car became a reservoir for beach equipment - and lifts his hips to lay it out under him.

“New car,” he says, and grins. The Ford may have been new to Fred, but it had probably had about fifty owners before it ended up the heap that he and Artie had pulled from the junkyard. FP laughs and kisses him again.

He knows it’s risky. But he also has a feeling it won’t take long, and that anyone speeding along this road on a day like today is probably in an awful hurry to get to the beach. Besides, they’ll be able to hear approaching cars. Theoretically. One of them would probably notice.

“Tell me again how fucking scrumptious I look,” says Fred urgently, hooking his bare legs around FP’s waist.

“You jerk, I thought you were really mad at me,” FP complains, squeezing one of Fred’s thighs in his hand. Fred had little thighs but they were all muscle - lithe and firm under his palm. His hands are sweating, but his mouth is as dry as the Sahara. With Fred laying down under him like this, he can see the trail of hairs leading down from his navel to below his waistband.

“You’re so stupid,” says Fred teasingly, reaching out and tangling a hand through FP’s hair. His voice drops an octave. “Tell me what you wanna do to me.” It’s a command, not a plea.

“Take those fucking shorts off,” FP replies instantly, bending down to press his hot mouth against Fred’s neck. His hand slides up slowly until he’s fingering the hem of Fred’s swim trunks, torturing himself. With his free hand, he scoops it under Fred and squeezes his ass. “Wanna put my fingers in your ass.” His voice is low and breathy, warm air against Fred’s jugular. He whispers the next one. “Wanna put my tongue in your ass.”

Fred moans, a red flush climbing over his cheeks that has nothing to do with the sun. FP gently slides Fred’s thighs apart, pushing them open with his hand and pulling himself higher against the other boy so that his crotch drags over Fred’s.

“Go on-” Fred pleads, thighs shaking just a little against FP’s hips.

“Wanna taste you,” FP growls, kissing his neck, one hand trailing down to slip under the waistband of Fred’s shorts. “Wanna eat you up.”

Fred moans and lifts his hips up off the backseat, his hands coming to the sides of his swimsuit and helping FP drag them down. The hair on his chest is bleached blonde from the sun, but his pubic hair is darker, brown like his head. There’s a patch of white around his groin where his skin has never seen the sun. Fred gets his swimsuit all the way down to his ankles before he reaches out and grabs FP’s head again, pushing him down toward his crotch. FP wets his lips.

“God,” Fred moans when FP takes him in his mouth, all the way down his throat. FP makes the most of his tongue- he’s talented with it after years of chewing gum in class - lapping at the underside of Fred’s cock, playing with the head. Finally, he readjusts himself, taking Fred further into his mouth, and the stuttered moan that escapes Fred’s lips makes the hairs rise all the way along the back of his spine.

Fred’s ankle scrapes along the back of his hips, his legs crossed above FP’s ass, the two of them pressed so tightly together that FP’s sweating from Fred’s body heat. Fred’s yanking his hair hard enough to hurt, but FP focuses on the task at hand, rolling his tongue around Fred’s cock, hitting all the places he knows from practice Fred likes best.

“FP-” Fred whimpers finally, and FP grabs the hand that’s not holding his hair, squeezes tight. Fred’s ankles dig into the backseat and he arches his back as he comes, straight down FP’s throat. FP swallows, closing his eyes after and trying to commit every detail to memory - the sun on his skin, Fred’s thighs around his hips, Fred’s slick chest underneath him, the heat of the car, the way he tasted, the ache from kneeling, the chlorine on his skin.

Fred’s gone limp beneath him on the backseat, gasping for breath. FP buries his nose into Fred’s neck and breathes in the chlorine smell, sneaking his arms underneath him and helping him sit up. Fred leans against the door and gestures to the bulge at the front of FP’s shorts. “Let me-”

“It’s okay,” says FP, reaching down into his underwear and beginning to stroke himself off, building a rhythm. “Just keep looking at me.”

Fred nods, holding his eye contact with a smirk. The hickey FP had left on his neck is swelling into a red bruise, and something about the thought of Fred going home with a reminder of FP’s mouth on him sends him over the edge in record time.

“Fred,” FP chokes out as he comes into his hand, the name sweet in his mouth, his eyes never straying from his lover’s long eyelashes, the golden skin on his face.

Fred surges forward and kisses him before FP’s even withdrawn his hand, still completely naked in the backseat. He grabs the towel from underneath them and pushes it into FP’s lap, moving his hands to either side of FP’s face so he can kiss him properly.

FP cleans off his hand while Fred holds his shoulders and kisses him over and over on the mouth. When he’s done he sets the towel aside and presses back into the kisses, running his tongue along Fred’s teeth and bumping their foreheads together.

“Let’s go home,” says Fred between kisses, reaching for his abandoned swimsuit, which had fallen under the seat. His arm is too short and he just lets his hand hover, focused more on swapping kisses than getting dressed. His voice is breathy and hoarse. “Get you all cleaned up.”

“You mean shower together?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Love you,” FP murmurs, savouring the taste of Fred’s lips against his. His heart pulses the way it always does when he admits those two words, as though waiting for another shoe to drop.

“Love you.” Fred smiles and their teeth bump. He turns his head away as he finally grabs his swimsuit off the floor, sliding lower in the seat to pull it up over his hips. Cracking another grin, Fred climbs back into the front.

“I’ll drive.”

“Okay,” FP echoes, watching dazedly as Fred slides back into his vacated seat, readjusting the rearview mirror. He moves slowly as he climbs back up into the passenger side, eyes glued to Fred like he’s drinking him in.

Fred steers the convertible casually back on the road, and FP closes his eyes for a moment, letting the clean summer air whip through his hair as they pick up speed.

[timeoutotour]

Clear Sky, 27°C

Pantano de Peñarroya, 13710, 13710, Cdad. Real, Spain

Monday 27th May 2019

Reservoir dogs

The title seem to sum up the last couple of days. As we have moved ever closer to the interior regions of Spain , so the temperatures have started to increase ever so slightly each day . Not so you would notice if looking at the weather stamps on the journal but you can feel it , and there is no respite to be had other than perhaps the shade of a tree. This morning we were one of only two vans to have stayed at the reservoir overnighter and our young German friends were on their travels before we had even thought about serving breakfast. Still, we didn't have a young baby as a wake up call , and for that we are grateful. So apart from the occasional runner we had the place to ourselves until the cars of optimisitic fishermen started to arrive at about 100ohrs. We were need of services and I had identified a free aire about an hours drive away which I thought may suit us well. Whilst driving along the dual carriageway we came up behind another van that in my opinion was making fairly good progress so I saw no need to overtake. I pretty much stalked this French registered vehicle up to and including the point when it turned off onto the slip road and into the town. I commented to Rhian that the van was probably going where we were going, and despite a difference in opinion by our respective sat navs, where we parted company for a short while, we arrived at our chosen aire to find the same French vehicle already in situation. I acknowledged the driver as I pulled in and he did likewise but probably also reached for his wheel brace , thinking me to be a homicidal stalker ! We tended to our services and then had a light lunch before I walked to a nearby (5 min walk) Lidl for some bread. When I returned, we had a long 'chat' with the very nice French couple Jean jacques and Louise , who were on their way home to the Bordeaux area after spending the winter months touring Morroco. We enjoyed trying to make conversation despite the fact that their English was on par with my French i.e. Not great , but Rhian also got involved using google translate. After about an hour with our new French friends we were once again on the road and 45 minutes later found ourselves once more at a reservoir in view of a castle. I feel that this will be a recurring theme whilst we we traverse central Spain. Tomorrow morning we have made a date to swim in the reservoir before it gets too busy and on that minor bombshell I wish you a very

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[losinmortalesperdidos]

hello darling it's @reservoir-bombshell ♥ starter from vic vega for charley, if you're still writing for him? (he's on your blog so i wasn't sure)

Yes, I'm still writing him, no worries. Will do. <333

[sarcasticcynic]

“U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered scientists employed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to stop acquiring new human fetal tissue for experiments ... The suspension, imposed this past September without a public announcement, came as the government launched a review of all fetal tissue research funded by the federal government. ... The order expands the scope of the Trump administration’s interventions into federally funded research that uses human fetal tissue from elective abortions, which is legal but fiercely opposed by antiabortion groups.”

Why would the Trump administration do such a thing?

“Congressional Republicans have tried to ban all fetal tissue research for years to appease the religious right. ... The ban has long been a goal of the anti-abortion industry and has been part of the most recent attacks on Planned Parenthood. The group was falsely accused of selling aborted fetuses earlier this year.”

Ah. As usual, Trump is happy to order via executive fiat what Congress refuses to enact into law. But surely saying this “shuts down HIV cure research” is an exaggeration, no?

“‘We were all poised to go and then the bombshell was dropped,’ says HIV researcher Warner Greene, director of the Gladstone Center for HIV Cure Research in San Francisco, California, who was collaborating with an NIH laboratory that received the order. Researcher Kim Hasenkrug had prepared humanized mice for a trial of an antibody that the researchers believed—based on promising lab dish studies—might prevent HIV from establishing reservoirs in the human body. ... On 11 September, Hasenkrug informed Greene and Thomas Packard, a postdoctoral student of Greene’s, that he had obtained needed reagents and the mice were ready. Packard responded that they were excited at the prospect of getting the study started, and would immediately send Hasenkrug a batch of the antibodies. ‘I’ll not be able to get [the antibodies] on the 3 PM FedEx today, but I’ll ship [the antibodies] to you tomorrow, so you should have it on Thursday,’ Packard wrote in an email. On 28 September, however, Greene received a message from Hasenkrug that left him stunned. The email, which bore the subject line ‘HHS directive,’ read in part: ‘[HHS] has directed me to discontinue procuring fetal tissue from ABR, the only source for us. I think that they are the only provider of fetal tissue for scientists in the nation who don’t have direct access to aborted fetal tissue. This effectively stops all of our research to discover a cure for HIV.’ Hasenkrug had not yet launched the experiment, Greene says, and his supplies of existing mice were too small to conduct the repeated experiments required to reach convincing scientific conclusions.”

Guess not. Well, maybe it’s only temporary.

“The NIH’s actions have already slowed down progress on a cure. ‘If we were given the green light right now, it would probably take us a year to get back in the position we were in when the ban was put in place.’”

Hmm. Sucks for all those gay people, amiright? Good thing it won’t impact religious conservatives who devoutly support Trump and the GOP!

“A third laboratory at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is also affected by the agency’s temporary ban on acquiring new human fetal tissue ... The third laboratory is at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which is pursuing a ‘project on cancer immunotherapy, which will need tissue by January 31.’”

Oops.

[the-daily-tizzy]

Something else to stimulate your imagination...

Ian Rutherford Plimer is an Australian geologist, professor emeritus of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne, professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide, and the director of multiple mineral exploration and mining companies. He has published 130 scientific papers, six books and edited the Encyclopedia of Geology. ====×==== Where Does the Carbon Dioxide Really Come From? Okay, here's the bombshell. The volcanic eruption in Iceland . Since its first spewing of volcanic ash has, in just FOUR DAYS, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet - all of you. Of course, you know about this evil carbon dioxide that we are trying to suppress - it's that vital chemical compound that every plant requires to live and grow and to synthesize into oxygen for us humans and all animal life. I know….it's very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up till midnight to finish your kids "The Green Revolution" science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, vacationing at home instead of abroad, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your 50 cent light bulbs with $10.00 light bulbs…..well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just four days. The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in just four days - yes, FOUR DAYS - by that volcano in Iceland has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And there are around 200 active volcanoes on the planet spewing out this crud at any one time - EVERY DAY. I don't really want to rain on your parade too much, but I should mention that when the volcano Mt Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth. Yes, folks, Mt Pinatubo was active for over One year - think about it. Of course, I shouldn't spoil this 'touchy-feely tree-hugging' moment and mention the effect of solar and cosmic activity and the well-recognized 800-year global heating and cooling cycle, which keeps happening despite our completely insignificant efforts to affect climate change. And I do wish I had a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud, but the fact of the matter is that the bush fire season across the western USA and Australia this year alone will negate your efforts to reduce carbon in our world for the next two to three years. And it happens every year. Just remember that your government just tried to impose a whopping carbon tax on you, on the basis of the bogus 'human-caused' climate-change scenario. Hey, isn't it interesting how "they" don't mention 'Global Warming' anymore, but just 'Climate Change'. You know why? It's because the planet has COOLED by 0.7 degrees in the past century and these global warming bull artists got caught with their pants down. And, just keep in mind that you might yet have an Emissions Trading Scheme - that whopping new tax - imposed on you that will achieve absolutely nothing except make you poorer. It won't stop any volcanoes from erupting, that's for sure. But, hey, relax... ...give the world a hug and have a nice day!"

[sonoda-oomers]

had a buck fucking wild dream where kurogane of clamp’s tsubasa reservoir chronicle fame was revealed in a magazine to be a potential playable character in mihoyo’s honkai impact

the magazine had like a whole short story for him featuring other trc characters and everything. and he was supposed to be a herrscherr too. and for some reason it was like also a poll where he was competing against other male characters to be in the game (but there was a clear bias as his face was plastered all over that magazine)

also i was in highschool. and despite the typical dream inconsistencies dream me did do the typical real me thing of not knowing bombshell info related to my interests till last minute

[blog-cosmosuniverse1]

‘Sky News’ Documentary: What Really Happened in Wuhan?

Australian journalist and “Sky News” host Sharri Markson’s explosive documentary, “What Really Happened in Wuhan?” features multiple experts who believe beyond any reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China In October 2019, the World Military Games was held in Wuhan, China; reports emerged of athletes becoming sick with a respiratory virus and symptoms that are now well recognized as COVID-19 It would be months before the U.S. took action, but evidence strongly suggests the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in August or September 2019, and that U.S. intelligence had knowledge of a problem occurring in Wuhan in November 2019 WIV’s online virus databases disappeared from the internet beginning September 12, 2019 — 22,000 coronavirus samples, gone That same day, WIV heightened its security and issued a tender to replace its air conditioning system. A month later, a communications blackout occurred Three people working at WIV became sick with COVID-like symptoms in October 2019; WIV also bought a coronavirus PCR testing machine November 6, 2019 If officials had reacted quickly, said David Asher, former COVID-19 investigator for the U.S. State Department, “The whole world would have been different. It would have been like stopping 9/11 before it happened”

In October 2019, the World Military Games were held in Wuhan, China. Reports emerged of athletes becoming sick with a respiratory virus and symptoms that are now well recognized as COVID-19.1 It would be months before the U.S. took action, but evidence strongly suggests that U.S. intelligence had knowledge of a problem occurring in Wuhan in November 2019.If they had reacted quickly, said David Asher, former COVID-19 investigator for the U.S. State Department, “The whole world would have been different. It would have been like stopping 9/11 before it happened.”2He was speaking to Australian journalist and “Sky News” host Sharri Markson, whose explosive documentary, “What Really Happened in Wuhan?” features multiple experts who believe beyond any reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan.3The illness circulating at the World Military Games, among athletes who later returned home to more than 100 different countries, is just one piece of the evidence that, cumulatively, may solve the mystery of COVID-19’s origins.First Cluster October 2019: Three WIV Scientists Became Ill A series of events occurred in late 2019 that point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) as the epicenter of the virus. According to Markson, three people working at WIV became sick with COVID-like symptoms in October 2019. This is believed to be the first cluster of cases. Markson also spoke with former President Donald Trump, who stated there were reports that body bags were seen outside of WIV.4 Mike Pompeo, former secretary of state, told Markson that he’s seen data suggesting SARS-CoV-2 may have leaked from the lab in late summer — July or August — 2019,5 while other information suggests the leak may have occurred in September. WIV is well known for its controversial gain-of-function (GOF) research on bat coronaviruses.Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., the director of WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, also known as “bat woman,” has been studying bat-borne viruses since 2004, including SARS-like coronaviruses.According to the World Society for Virology, “One of her great contributions is to uncover genetically diverse SARS-like coronaviruses in bats with her international collaborators and provide unequivocal evidence that bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV.”6Part of WIV’s GOF research involved using humanized mice for experiments to determine which coronaviruses could infect humans, as well as research to make viruses that weren’t able to infect humans do just that.7According to Markson, it’s stated that over more than a decade, Zhengli’s research team collected thousands of bat samples in China and Africa, “searching for the origins of SARS, as well as isolating and characterizing many new viruses.”8 But WIV’s online virus databases disappeared from the internet beginning September 12, 2019 — 22,000 coronavirus samples, gone.9That same day, WIV heightened its security and issued a tender to replace its air conditioning system. A month later, a communications blackout occurred, during which there was no cellphone or signal activity for about two weeks. It’s a circumstance that’s difficult to explain — unless the Chinese government was trying to deal with a disaster before it became public.10 Also difficult to explain is this: WIV bought a coronavirus PCR testing machine November 6, 2019.11 Increasing Evidence of COVID Origins Coverup Markson spoke with Chinese defector Wei Jingsheng, who spent 18 years in Chinese prison for standing up to Beijing and then defected to the U.S. He maintained his contacts, however, and said he knew the Chinese government was doing experiments with biological weapons and thought they might use the World Military Games as an opportunity to spread the virus, since many foreigners would show up there.Jingsheng passed on this information to U.S. intelligence as early as October 2019. Asher, a veteran weapons investigator who led a U.S. taskforce into the origins of COVID-19, uncovered information that Washington sat on classified intelligence

information from November 2019. He learned of the information in November 2020 — a year later.Meanwhile, many of the people who were most involved in the initial days, either having been infected or reporting on the scene, have disappeared. In early 2020, a journalist in China was sending out reports from hospitals on a daily basis; he heard the government was covering up illnesses, so he started posting videos. Then he disappeared.There’s also Huang Yan Ling, a researcher at WIV who worked closely with Zhengli. Many believe Ling is patient zero for the COVID-19 pandemic, but she’s now missing. Her profile and biography are missing from WIV’s website, but, after rumors surfaced that she was presumed dead, the Chinese government posted a notice on WIV’s site saying she’s alive and well.12No proof was offered, however, and if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wanted to stop the rumors, the first thing they would have done was have her schedule a public appearance.Speaking with Markson, Miles Yu, former principal China policy adviser to the U.S. State department, said it would have been a triumphant thing for the Chinese government to let Ling speak, but she never did. She disappeared.“Anyone the government doesn’t like, they disappear,” Yu said, adding that the CCP is a regime not only capable of doing these things, but they do them with great pride.13 John Ratcliffe, former director of U.S. national intelligence, also spoke with Markson, stating:14“If there was really no blame here, if this were really some naturally occurring virus because someone ate a bat from a wet market, China wouldn’t have done the things that they did. The Chinese Communist Party would not have shut down Wuhan. They would not have silenced doctors and scientists and journalists and disappeared some of them.”Proof of Live Bats at WIV World Health Organization investigators, including Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance president, claimed the suggestion of live bats at the WIV in China was a conspiracy theory.15 The dismissal was part of the rationale used to bolster the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is a natural virus that jumped from animals to humans, possibly due to a wet market in Wuhan, China.Anyone who suggested otherwise — including that the virus may actually be a manmade product that escaped from a lab — was censored, discredited and called a conspiracy theorist. Markson revealed another bombshell, however — proof via video footage taken inside the facility that WIV kept live bats in cages.16Meanwhile, Daszak has close ties to WIV through EcoHealth Alliance, which funded GOF research at WIV17 and Zhengli, which is why his participation in the WHO investigation into COVID-19’s origins was highly conflicted from the start. Further, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, gave funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn funneled it to WIV.18While investigating her book, “What Really Happened in Wuhan?” Markson discovered that Daszak was invited to brief the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence February 3, 2020, during the early days of the pandemic. Ironically, misinformation was a key topic at the meeting, Markson said.Fauci Lied About Funding Wuhan Coronavirus Research In an April 17, 2020, White House press briefing, Fauci said the science was "totally consistent with a jump from an animal to a human."19 Two days after this press briefing, Daszak wrote to Fauci thanking him for his help in deflecting the lab origin theory.20 Not long after, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement April 30, 2020, saying that "SARS-CoV-2 was of natural origin.”21Many aren’t aware that Fauci has long supported controversial GOF research, which he spoke openly about at a hearing before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs at the U.S. Senate, held April 26, 2012. Fauci spoke favorably of dual use research of concern, or DURC, stating, “the

risk-benefit ratio of such research clearly tips towards benefiting society.”22According to Markson, Fauci was “up to his neck” funding coronavirus research at WIV, with 60 such projects funded. “Then he wrote a paper where he said gain-of-function research was worth the risk of a pandemic, and that he had even funded coronavirus research in conjunction with the Chinese military,” she said.23Daszak, meanwhile, was also the mastermind behind the publication of a scientific statement published in The Lancet in March 202024 condemning such inquiries as "conspiracy theory,"25 which was then relied on by the media to "debunk" evidence showing the pandemic virus most likely originated from a laboratory.Daszak then ended up on both the WHO investigation into COVID-19s origins and The Lancet's COVID-19 commission,26 despite the glaring conflicts of interest.Increasing questions are also being asked about what type of research was being conducted at WIV, which relied on French experts to build the laboratory, which was supposed to be a center of international collaboration. However, France has no role in running the facility27 and, according to Markson, “the French were immediately kicked out” of the lab after it was built, raising alarm bells with French intelligence.28It’s believed the French were pushed out because of the Chinese military’s interest in the work being done at WIV, which suggests that they were working on biological warfare or biological warfare defense.29 According to Asher, “My concern was that the Chinese were doing research in, as we learned later, quite uncontrolled circumstances that was most definitely related to biological warfare ambitions in the future."30SARS-CoV-2 Is Modified to Infect Humans Markson also spoke with Nikolai Petrovsky, professor of endocrinology at Flinders University College of Medicine in Adelaide, Australia, is among those who has stated SARS-CoV-2 appears to be optimally designed to infect humans.31His team sought to identify a way by which animals might have co-mingled to give rise to SARS-CoV-2, but concluded that it could not be a naturally occurring virus. Petrovsky has previously stated it appears far more likely that the virus was created in a laboratory.32According to Petrovsky, SARS-CoV-2 is better adapted to infect humans than any animal, including bats, but his paper was rejected over and over again, without even being looked at. “Science is not about politics. It’s not about only finding nice things,” he told Markson. “It’s about finding the truth. What are the facts?”33Taken together, the facts are becoming overwhelming and, Pompeo said, “cumulative evidence points singularly to WIV.”34 Markson also brought up the fact that the World Health Organization is beholden to China.COVID-19 Origin Investigation Conflicted In February 2021, WHO cleared WIV and two other biosafety level 4 laboratories in Wuhan, China, of wrongdoing, saying these labs had nothing to do with the COVID-19 outbreak.35Only after backlash, including an open letter signed by 26 scientists demanding a full and unrestricted forensic investigation into the pandemic’s origins,36 did WHO enter damage control mode, with director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and 13 other world leaders joining the U.S. government in expressing “frustration with the level of access China granted an international mission to Wuhan.”37WHO’s allegiance to China was secured years earlier, when China secured WHO votes to ensure its candidates would become director-general. A Sunday Times investigation also revealed that WHO’s independence was severely compromised and its close ties to China allowed COVID-19 to spread in the early days of the pandemic while obfuscating the investigation into its origins.38Academics and public health officials have staunchly defended the natural-origin theory for SARS-CoV-2 since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, until finally, in May 2021, the U.S. government ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to look into COVID-19’s origins and, after 90 days,

produce a preliminary report.The classified report was delivered in August, but its results were reportedly inconclusive, with intelligence agencies unable to pinpoint whether COVID-19 has a natural or laboratory origin.39 But as Ratcliffe told Markson, there’s still more intelligence suggesting SARS-CoV-2 came from WIV that has yet to be declassified:40“And so I think the time has come for the Biden administration to declassify additional information. Again, more evidence — if you need it — that the Chinese Communist Party officials acted badly, bullied international officials, covered up intelligence and reporting on this.There is more intelligence out there and I'd like to see it declassified because it will create additional pressure not just on Chinese Communist Party officials but others that still continue to deny that China is the bad actor here."Investigation is also needed as to why intelligence agencies with access to this information didn’t act on it, which could have led to an entirely different outcome during the pandemic.

[sciencespies]

A network of hidden lakes has been found under the surface of Mars, scientists say

https://sciencespies.com/space/a-network-of-hidden-lakes-has-been-found-under-the-surface-of-mars-scientists-say/

A network of hidden lakes has been found under the surface of Mars, scientists say

The surface of Mars is renowned for its aridity. The entire planet is a dusty, barren desert – a wasteland of rock and, in some regions, ice; but of liquid water, not a confirmed drop has been found.

But in 2018, scientists unveiled a bombshell discovery – they’d found evidence of a colossal underground reservoir of liquid water at the Martian south pole.

Now, they’ve taken that discovery a crucial step forward. There’s not one, but an entire network of multiple lakes under the southern polar ice cap. And that means that the first reservoir was not a one-off or a freak of Martian nature.

“The existence of a single subglacial lake could be attributed to ad-hoc conditions such as the presence of a volcano under the ice sheet, or some other situation unique to the specific location where we found the first subglacial lake,” explained geophysicist Elena Pettinelli of Roma Tre University in Italy to ScienceAlert. She led the research alongside colleague Sebastian Emanuel Lauro.

“The discovery of an entire system of lakes instead, suggests their formation process to be relatively simple and possibly common.”

The first subglacial lake was announced just over two years ago. It was discovered using the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument on the Mars Express orbiter.

This uses the same technique we use to find subglacial lakes in Antarctica – bouncing radio waves off a surface and measuring the echoes, looking for changes in the signal to characterise a topography.

These radar sounding investigations initially revealed a single subglacial lake 1.5 kilometres (0.93 miles) under the southern polar ice cap, measuring 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) across.

“Some types of material reflect radar signals better than others, and liquid water is one of those ‘materials’,” one of the researchers, planetary scientist Graziella Caparelli of the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, told ScienceAlert.

“Therefore, when the signals coming from the subsurface are stronger than those reflected by the surface, we can confirm that we are in the presence of liquid water. Radars are used on Earth (where we can directly verify the results) for the same purpose, so we are certain that the technique is reliable.”

Since then, the team has performed more investigations on a dataset spanning almost a decade, from 2010 and 2019. And, in a new analysis of those data, they found three new brightly reflecting patches.

In other words, a network of subglacial lakes separated by regions of dry stone, hidden away under the south pole, not far from that initial lake.

Map of the radar data. Blue regions are highly reflective, indicating liquid water. (Lauro et al., Nature Astronomy, 2020)

“In a terrestrial subglacial environment such strong reflections below the ice are associated with the presence of basal water; there are no other physical mechanisms that can generate such a strong anomaly, as far as we know,” Pettinelli said.

“Importantly, we have obtained the same results using more advanced data processing and analysis methods than for our 2018 paper, and the fact that, having run such a rigorous data analysis process, we confirmed the presence of that lake, and found other lakes, makes us quite confident about our interpretation that the liquid is water.”

Moreover, if it is liquid water, it’s likely salty water. Extremely salty water. Mars, you see, is very cold, and even though the interior is warmer than the surface, it’s still cold enough to freeze fresh water. In 2018, the team estimated that the lake they found would be around 205 Kelvin (-68.15 degrees Celsius, or -90.67 degrees Fahrenheit).

But salt lowers the freezing point of water, and can do quite significantly. As the team note in their paper, water imbued with salts of calcium and magnesium can remain liquid at temperatures as low as 150 Kelvin, for very long periods of time. And Mars, as we know from exploring the surface, is rich in salts of calcium and magnesium, as well as sodium.

So the discovery of additional salty subglacial lakes is very significant. It means that they can form easily and hang around for geological timescales – which is an important piece in the longstanding puzzle of Mars’ water and climate history. And it also has important implications in the search for Mars microbes.

“These lakes have probably existed for much of Mars’ history,” said planetary scientist Roberto Orosei of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, and principal investigator for MARSIS.

“For this reason, they could still retain traces of any life forms that could have evolved when Mars had a dense atmosphere, a milder climate and the presence of liquid water on the surface, similar to the early Earth.”

It’s possible, even, that microbial life may still be thriving in those lakes.

We know that such can live in some of the most salty, inhospitable places Earth has to offer, as well as subglacial reservoirs. Of course, we’re a very, very long way from making such a detection, and studying Mars water up close may contravene the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. But it’s worth thinking about.

The next step the team is taking is to search for water elsewhere on Mars. It’s unclear whether underground reservoirs could exist at lower latitudes, but the north pole has a hefty ice cap of its own.

“It is not implausible that basal lakes also exist beneath the north polar ice cap,” Caparelli said.

“Data analysis of a few data acquired in the same way we acquired those that allowed us to ‘see’ the south polar subglacial lakes has only just begun, however.”

So we’ll be eagerly awaiting to see those results when the team has analysed them. Meanwhile, in an ideal world, Pettinelli would love to send up landers to conduct seismic monitoring to plumb the depths of those reservoirs.

“Active seismic prospecting techniques such as those commonly used on Earth to discover oil reservoirs would be best and have been used in Antarctica to detect the bottom of the lakes. These techniques could shed light on the water depth and the geometry of the water bodies,” she told ScienceAlert.

However, as Mars landers are difficult and expensive, and the seismic monitors would be challenging to set up, we may be waiting a long time for that one.

The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

#Space