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keferon · 10 days ago

Note

Odds of Survival Part 3

Unstoppable forces meets immovable objects.

Or Prowl finds new reasons to be concerned.

———————————————————————

While Prowl had destroyed the bombers attacking their end of the bridge, the other side had no such saving grace.

The opposite end of the sky bridge had broken off from the Commerce Tower and was now swinging downwards, creating a miles long ramp to obliteration.

There was a 4% chance Prowl could technically survive the impact. However he’d almost certainly be reduced to a sputtering spark trapped in a compacted pile of scrap that had once been his frame. Without instantaneous medical intervention, he would most certainly perish even in the event of the 4% survival chance occurring.

4% halved to 2% when Tacnet registered Jazz magnetizing his hands to Prowls frame.

Tacnet spun wildly and without traction. Whatever actions Prowl could have taken to mitigate the incoming damage was removed by Jazz’s inescapable hold. Every possible strategy terminated instantly in a flurry of error messages as Tacnet tried to factor for the impossible.

Physically, Prowls servos moved on their own, driven by some core deep coding for self preservation that had him frantically clawing at Jazz’s back for either a hand hold or escape as Tacnet spat out a single coherent plan:

(Brace For Impact)

The Praxian briefly wondered if he’d crash before they crashed.

The mechs jolted as Jazz made contact with the bridge turned ramp. A fountain of sparks spraying from his pedes as Jazz hit the bridge upright and began skating down the buckling surface.

Jazz wasn’t just passively sliding along either. Prowl felt powerful legs tense and thrusters make quick adjustments to narrowly avoid lethal splinters of braking pipes and metal sheets.

Odds of Survival 5%

Odds of Survival 6%

Prowl watched the impossible as Tacnet slowly ticked upwards. Through some stroke of insanity, Jazz was controlling their descent. Analyzing the white mechs motions, Prowl concluded they were practiced. Unbelievably, Jazz somehow had previous experience with similar circumstances.

On what Fragging planet does somebody regularly go careening down incredibly steep slopes at high speeds with only their own athleticism to keep them alive?!

Skill alone wasn’t enough however, because Jazz was slowly loosing control. As the sky bridge swung inexorably downwards, their ramp was steadily becoming steeper. Prowl could feel one of Jazz’s legs beginning to involuntarily shudder under the continued strain. The obstacles kept coming faster and faster, the visored mech barely keeping pace.

If he dropped me, Jazz has a 23% chance at saving himself.

Prowl caught sight of a chunk of bridge breaking outwards that spanned the total width of it. No getting around it. The jagged edge lifted just high enough to bisect him just below the wings. Prowl turned away.

Jazz leapt.

The deafening vibrations of metal on metal grinding suddenly stopped. An instrumental segment filled the gap.

Gravity ended their short reprieve.

This time when they collided with bridge, Prowl felt Jazz land wrong and then suddenly the sky was whipping past his optics.

Stars, moon, bridge. Stars, moon, bridge. Stars, moon, bridge. Stars, moon, bridge.

Tacnet greedily took in their current velocity, rate of rotation, and angle of the sky bridges decent to inform Prowl that Jazz and his combined weight would land on his helm.

Thank you Tacnet, I hate you.

Jazz shifted and Prowls vision went white.

Despite Tacnets certainty to the contrary, Prowl was not unconscious or dead.

ERROR, moon, ERROR. Stars, moon, bridge. Stars, ERROR, bridge, rubble. Stars, moon, bridge, rubble.

They were flipping through the air again.

Jazz landed on his feet this time but couldn’t stop their rolling. Prowl felt fast painful scrapes against his servos and peds.

Stars, bridge, rubble. Stars, bridge, rubble.

Tacnet took in their velocity and rotation again. Calculating their distance to the wreckage at the end of their fall.

Impact Survival 74%

Impact location Doorwings 87%

At least his doorwings were already offlined.

By then, the two mechs were no longer bouncing, but rolling fully across the remains of the bridge. Prowl locked himself around Jazz and braced for impact.

Collision was instant and deafening.

Prowls sense of balance was rubber banding. The instant stop after what felt like vorns of spinning out of control was just as disorientating as the fall itself.

In a lapse of memory, he onlined his doorwings.

Prowl remembered why he left them offline a click too late and sucked in a vent.

Except. They were functioning. The edges stung and the tip’s were badly chipped but both sensors were fully operational.

Blunt helm trauma. He must be having a severe processor malfunction. Prowl unlocked protesting joints and looked over his shoulders at his doorwings.

They were only lightly damaged, fully functional, and only a servos width from the pile of rubble he was being held above.

A black and white arm extended past his wings, buried wrist deep in the wreckage.

Jazz still had a death grip around his waist, visor pressed into Prowls shoulder.

“Jazz?” Prowl tried. If he put his vocalizer against his audial, the sound should carry. The music played out its final notes, leaving the silence of the moon in its wake.

“Jazz?” Prowl tried a little harder, pulling at the servo still magnetized to his back, unhooking his peds to kneel on the rubble. They had fallen into the 90 degree crook of the second cylindrical extension. The bridge had come to rest at last, kicking up enough moon dust to obscure their survival from any searching quintessons. For now.

Jazz slurred something in his native language, before repeating in common, “Gimme a click. I’m gonna throw up real quick.”

Prowl flared his wings, scanning the area. It was a relatively short drop to the moons surface. Once there, Prowl could transform and carry the both of them at speed to the outpost. Clearly, Jazz had no trouble holding onto him.

Speaking of, Jazz finally, slowly began to uncurl from Prowls frame.

He looked terrible. His visor had splintered crack’s across one side, the isolated fragments independently flickering. One horn was stuck pinned against his helm, sparking where shrapnel was jammed into the gap. He was visibly wobbling, and even with an em field Prowl could tell he was badly disoriented.

Jazz stared at Prowl for a while, before looking to his hand still buried in rubble. He tried pulling it free gently and when that didn’t work, got a completely ruined and mostly toe-less ped braced next to it and yanked

Jazz’s hand came free. At the same time something important looking snapped and fell out of his shoulder. The limb going limp.

Prowl didn’t have the bandwidth to process that at the moment.

Instead, he plucked up the chunk of shoulder into sub space. Tacking that onto the growing list of injuries they’d both needed tending to.

Cautiously, Prowl reached up to gingerly touch the back of his helm, fully expecting to feel exposed and crushed circuitry. Instead, he felt several dents, aligned in parallel. Very tender, but most certainly not as damaged as it should have been.

How?

Tacnet answered by mapping the contours of the dents, drawing Prowls optics to the back of Jazz’s obliterated servo.

The remains of the sky bridge shuttered.

Odds of Survival 45%

Prowl got Jazz’s attention and began pulling him towards the ledge they’d need to descend. Effectively deaf, probably blind, down an arm and forced to walk on two severely injured peds, Prowl only felt some relief when he finally wrangled Jazz to rest on top of his alt form.

Watching him struggle down the ledge was utterly disturbing to watch. Jazz limped along as if he was completely desensitized to pain, behaving as if he was more annoyed by his injuries than agonized.

Package secured, Prowl gunned it for the outpost. Even injured, he trusted Jazz to stay magnetized to his frame with whatever he had left to hold on with.

Out of the dust cloud, Prowl was intimately aware of how exposed they’d be. Confident he wouldn’t loose Jazz, Prowl focused entirely on plotting the most efficient route to the outpost.

The moment it came into view, Prowl pushed his engine past the redline as he registered sniper shots firing just past and above them.

Pursuing quintesson wreckers 78%.

Sure enough, a dead wrecker crashed into the moon dirt a short distance to their left.

Prowl managed a drifting slide past the out post gates, losing exactly enough momentum to match the speed of a running mech, then transformed back to root mode in the same maneuver. An exceedingly useful technique when chasing criminals and a damn effective way to shoulder someone on your roof through a door in the most efficient manner possible.

[Bluestreak, I’ve made it inside the outpost. I have an injured mech with me.]

[Heya Prowl! I saw you tearing it up out there with your backpack buddy! I’ve got a few more stragglers to take care of but you’re welcome to use the medic case I’ve got with me in here. I’ll ping the door for you.]

The primary medkit should be in the outpost storage closet. That is unless Bluestreak pulled it into his snipers nest to tend to his own injuries (22%). Or because Bluestreak pulled it there to force Prowl to bring his “backpack buddy” within conversational distance (92%).

He felt a tap at his shoulder, “Are we safe here?” Jazz yelled in the thin atmosphere. Visor flickering worse than before and visibly making an effort to stay balanced upright on eviscerated peds.

Priorities.

Prowl ignored his annoyance. He hit the trigger to pressurize the airlock and pulled Jazz’s good arm over his shoulders to stabilize the other mech. He had easily a dozen lines of questioning queued up in the backlog of his processor, every single one tagged with Jazz as the subject line. As much as Prowl itched to piece together the puzzle of why he was “Like that.” It’d have to wait until they were both in more stable condition. At least now his vents could actually do something to start cooling his overstressed processor.

“For now. We are somewhat safe.”

Prowl muttered quietly in addition, “Against all odds.”

———————————————————————

Bluestreak, seeing Prowl with some very obvious hand prints and very specific paint scratches: “What in the pit did he do to you?”

Bluestreak, seeing Jazz walk in after him with a broken arm, busted horn and an utterly torn up paint job across his back: “What in the pit did YOU do to him?!”

Either one or two parts left, next up Jazz pov.

-SSTP

OH HELL SSTP LET ME HOLD YOUR HAND REALQUICK THIS IS A FIVE STAR MEAL FOR MY SOUL FKKDJFG I JUST. I NEVER FUCKING GET TIRED OF THE WAY YOU WRITE I know I'm probably repeating myself at this point BUT IT'S JUST WHAT MY TRUTH LOOKS LIKE OKAY. EVERY TIME I SEE AN ASK FROM YOU AND START READING IT I GO "Oh M A N the author cooked so hard they should've made Ratatouille 2 about this way of placing words."