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The sacking of the Primal Basilica was going swimmingly. Zeta and his retinue had packed up and left not two groons after the first gate fell, as expected. With the abruptness of his departure having left gaping holes in the chain of command, his army flounders— also expected— and soon finds itself overwhelmed by the far more coordinated Decepticon troops.
What Megatron hadn’t expected, upon setting foot into the treasury, was for someone to come swinging at him with their entire spark out.
He averts his gaze on instinct, which saves him from the first slash, and quickly tries to get his bearings about him. As expected, the room is blindingly opulent, crammed full of statues and carved obelisks of precious metals and— were those crates full of energon in the back? He'd have to be careful around those, then. He hasn’t much time to take in any more of the surroundings, however, too busy dodging another attack.
He anticipates the next swing far more easily, aided by the other bot’s obvious inexperience with the weapon, moving swiftly out of the path of what he now recognizes as the Star Saber (?!!?); its wide arc sends the other bot stumbling over their pedes, and the blade flies out of their hands and embeds itself hilt-deep in the wall. For a nanoklik its one-time wielder and Megatron just stare at in a silent moment of shared disbelief and secondhand embarrassment before the other comes at him again, aiming a fist at his helm.
He catches the other’s wrist and shoves them back with a kick that isn’t as forceful as it could have been, due to a last-minute course-correct so that it doesn’t land square on the other’s exposed spark. They skid a few feet back with a surprised puff from their smokestacks, rubbing their newly-dented abdomen with a wince but seeming otherwise incapacitated; mildly impressive, considering the direct blow to their fuel tank. As a result of the new distance, Megatron gets an unwanted opticful of their chassis again— and then he can’t stop looking. Not just at the other’s spark— a spark which, he realizes, is exposed not because their chest plates are open but because there IS no chestplate, they’re stripped down to protoform from waist to neck— but at what looks stunningly like the fragging Matrix of Leadership clamped squarely over it.
He might plead ignorance on some things relating to the Primacy, a consequence of growing up in the mines, but he’d have to be a slagging moron not to recognize THAT.
So busy gawking is he that he misses the strange mech scrambling away and snatching something off the ground. He dives to the side a nanoklik too late to avoid being nicked by an oversized bust of Nova Prime; one of the sculpted finials clips his helm, causing an unpleasant ringing in his audials.
He gets an inquiring ping from Soundwave, no doubt asking as to his status. He ignores it in favor of ducking a vase probably valuable enough to pay for the army's rations for half a stellar cycle. The entire army.
“Enough!” he roars, standing to his full height. Only to find that the mech he’d meant to address has somehow vanished, which seems impossible, given that the one and only door to the treasury is at Megatron’s back and had sealed itself shut the moment he’d stepped over its precipice.
Which is an issue he’ll deal with later.
“Who are you? Why are you here?”
A rattle and a shuffle from behind a pallet of palladium bars, and then a beautifully-made globe of the planet in its Golden Age sails through the air to smash at his feet. “I might ask you much the same!” a voice calls back.
Rather than start immediately towards the source of the voice, Megatron begins to slowly and carefully circle round, wary of further projectiles. He almost stumbles over something, and looks down, annoyed, to see that he’d nearly tripped over— some sort of low table? One astonishingly similar to the one in his and Soundwave’s apartment, in fact. He looks over, baffled, to see what appears to be a small, modest living space carved out amidst the sea of treasures, gleaming figureheads having been scooted aside to make room for a slab and a chair and a small table piled high with datapads and empty cubes.
Was someone living here?
Slowly he begins to piece the fragments together— the Prime, in his trademark paranoia, had forced some gullible sycophant to take up residence in the treasury to better guard its contents; the most valuable treasure of all, the Matrix, they would guard with their very frame, a living vessel capable of escaping with the precious artefact in tow if need be. Or, in case of capture, there would be no way to remove the device without destroying the mech attached to it and vice versa. Shockwave would probably call it a stroke of logical brilliance.
Good. This was good. A guard could be paid off, or convinced, or persuaded, especially one who had already been subject to imprisonment and horrific mutilation.
…Of course, he realized, any guard actually willing to submit themselves to such horrors might be a lost cause. Still, regardless, he’d need to proceed with caution. He could not risk damaging either the vessel or its precious cargo.
“I am Megatron,” he declares, in the rough direction of where last he’d heard the voice. “Your Prime has fled Iacon, abandoning his people. Will you stand with one who has shown your life means nothing to him?”
A pause, and then from behind a gigantic rough-cut gemstone on a pedestal comes flying an antique motherboard, followed by some kind of spiky decorative sculpture and a case of energon goblets. “I do not know who you are, but I know I must not let the artifact fall into your hands!” This statement is punctuated by a smattering of yet more treasures raining down on him.
The response sounds so completely sincere that he almost fails to dodge a heavily filigreed scepter, snapping it at the last second. How long had this mech been down here?
“You are in no danger from me,” he says in an attempt to appease, lowering his voice to a quiet, confidential rumble, as he often did for his speeches. “I see you have clearly suffered. My people can find you a new occupation, a new—GAH!”
His alarmed shout was elicited by the strange mech— having somehow managed to creep up behind him— nailing him in the back with a heavily bejeweled replica of Liege Maximo’s helm. He whirls around, enraged, only to see the mech vanish into the stacks of treasure once again.
Alright, he reasons, prying one of the snapped-off horn tips from his left pauldron, this is fine. He has this situation under control. Sooner or later, the other mech would tire, or run out of treasures to toss, or both. Surely.
This turns out not to be the case, he quickly learns after about half a groon, because when the small, easily throwable trinkets run out, the mech simply turns to the bigger ones.
“You do not understand what is at stake here, you, you—”
“Orion Pax!” the voice supplies, helpfully, as a statue of Zeta gives a very final sort of wobble.
“— Orion Pax!” Megatron finishes, rolling to the side and blasting the statue with his fusion cannon, sending shards of it raining down.
It’s astonishing how the treasury isn’t any less full despite all this. Wretched Primes and their greed.
Another ping from Soundwave, more insistent this time. Realizing he’s a good several kliks past check-in time, he hurriedly answers the comm. ::Busy, Soundwave.::
::Megatron: required to report status in sufficient detail. Megatron: set these rules.::
:: Busy, I said! Now, make yourself useful and look up everything you can find on a warrior by the name of “Orion Pax!”::
::Query: Orion wh—:: He shuts off his comm.
“Do you even—” he moves in the direction of the voice, only to nearly slip on smooth gemstones scattered across the floor, “—know what it is? What it means? Every moment you guard it at the Prime’s behest, you only perpetuate his corrupt empire!”
“I know exactly what it is!” is the heated argument back, accompanied by a loud clang and a crystalline mace flying past him. Oh, Primus no, they’ve found the weapons. “And you have given no indication that you would wield it any better! Besides, Zeta can’t use it anyways,” they add, almost as an afterthought.
He can’t? “Then whom are you guarding it for?”
Some several dozen meters away, he sees a shining blue optic peeking at him through the holes in an ancient cloak hanging in a glass case. “It was Zeta who gave me the duty to guard the Matrix. But as I have come to understand its true nature— to understand his— I finally realized the truth.”
They step out from behind the case, and now Megatron can see that they hold nothing less than the Forge of Solus Prime in both hands. For as frail as their form must surely be with so much of its core support removed, they seem almost aglow with power, optics hard-set and shining above their battlemask. “Whomsoever desires to possess such a thing cannot be entrusted with it.”
With that, they launch themselves at him, hammer held high.
Several nanokliks later, Megatron is looking down at an unconscious mech splayed out on the floor, a little disappointed. Such a good running start, too.
He opens a group comm line to his commanders. “Status report?” he says aloud, the words automatically transcribed and transmitted as soon as they leave his vocalizer.
::Megatron: can demand a report at a moment's notice, but refuses to let others do the same?:
He staunchly ignores Soundwave. “Shockwave?”
::The security systems remain under our control, my lord.::
“Starscream?”
::Fine, aside from the fact that my wings are charred to the Pit and back and someone is too stingy to pay for the good polish.::
::Query: what did Megatron mean by “Orion Pax”?:: Soundwave butts in, cutting off a Starscream Rant preemptively.
“The guard stationed inside the treasury. That was their designation.” He looks down at the form of the mech still faceplanted on the floor, only the occasional wheezing puff from their pipes indicating they were still functioning.
::There is no soldier with that designation,:: Soundwave says, baffled. ::Orion Pax: dockworker. What are you talking about?::
Megatron resets his optics. “So the Prime grafted the Matrix of Leadership onto the spark of some random laborframe?”
A very long and gravid silence descends over the group comm line.
::My lord.:: Shockwave says, a little too calmly, ::stream the feed from your optics, if you would?::
Now a little worried, Megatron does so, the feed currently showing the tips of his pedes and the back of the other mech’s head.
He has to turn them— him, Soundwave supplies— over so Shockwave can examine him, and even with his chassis armor missing, the mech is heavy, likely some kind of hauler. As soon as he’s been flipped onto his back, he turns his optics to the center of his chest. “See? They’ve mutilated him. The lengths Zeta will go to just—"
He reels back as the comm line explodes, all three of them yelling at him at once.
::My lord Megatron, that’s—::
::How could you not recognize—::
::That’s the Matrix Bearer, YOU DOLT!::
His optics cycle wide, gawking at the artifact merrily twinkling from the unconscious mech’s chest, “But it’s— it’s fused into—”
::That’s how they’re all supposed to look!:: Starscream screeches. ::Haven’t you ever seen a history holo?::
::Locking configuration: very distinct.::
::The alloy which comprises the outer ring of the Matrix is highly unstable and has never been successfully recreated. Any and all attempts to forcibly combine it with the metal of an incompatible sparkchamber have simply resulted in the artefact falling loose or the death of the subject.:: Shockwave adds. ::I should know, as I was commissioned to help with one such attempt, many vorns ago.::
The thoughts "I punched out the True Prime?" and "the True Prime is a dockworker!?" war for dominance in Megatron’s processor.
"I punched out a dockworker," he says, miserably.
::You did, :: says Starscream, gleefully, ::which means, the moment someone sits him down and explains the Decepticon manifesto to him, he'll think you're the biggest hypocrite on the planet.::
He groans.
Orion Pax is a very pleasant individual, as it turns out, much to Megatron’s embarrassment. He takes to waking up in a Decepticon encampment surrounded on all sides by strangers with astonishing dignity and calm. Although, quite frankly, it seems as though he’s just happy to have company, as he soon reveals he’d been alone in that vault for a little over a vorn.
He is also in adamant denial of his status as a True Prime.
“No, no,” he says, shaking his helm, “that can’t be the case. It was an accident, that’s all. I’m just looking after it until it can be safely removed.”
“Accident?” echoes Frenzy, half-hanging out of Soundwave’s chest along with his twin, both looking skeptical.
“I was hired to transport some cargo to the Basilica along with several of my coworkers. A shipment of Rejuvian ores, very fragile, very volatile. We brought it into the treasury, and I must not have watched where my pedes were going, because I tripped and, well…”
Starscream’s jaw drops. “You FELL on the Matrix of Leadership?!”
Orion smiles, sheepishly— he’d managed to finally get his battlemask retracted; it had gotten stuck in place at some point, he’d explained, and his efforts to communicate with the drones that delivered his energon had not yielded much help— and scratches a finial. “It would seem so.”
The Air Commander seems to find this hilarious, as do Soundwave’s charges. Shockwave looks intrigued, his optic almost blinding, no doubt planning all manner of experiments and tests already. Megatron, for his part, feels only trepidation. He does not know what to make of this strange new Prime, a Prime so different from the pretenders of the present and the tyrannical demigods of old, for all intents and purposes someone he very well could have run into at Maccadam’s.
Their gazes meet, and Orion's smile widens, optics twinkling with mirth, as if to say isn’t this all so ridiculous? And Megatron catches himself smiling back, despite the dread settling low in his spark.
“So,” Starscream wipes cleaner fluid from one optic, “what Prime name did it give you?”
Orion looks puzzled. “P— name? It didn’t give me a name.”
The makeshift chestplate he’d been given explodes open and a beam of light shoots out of the Matrix, projecting the glyphs O P T I M U S P R I M E on the opposite wall.
“Oh,” Optimus Prime says in a very small voice, the weight of it seeming to hit him all at once. His pauldrons sag.
Megatron sighs deeply, steeling himself, and turns to the utterly distraught-looking mech sitting on the edge of the medical berth.
“Allow me to introduce myself properly this time.” He extends a servo. “I am Megatron of Tarn, leader and founder of the Decepticon faction.”
The other regards him for a few nanokliks. His mask slides shut with a quiet snikt that may as well be deafening to Megatron’s audials.
He takes Megatron’s servo, the worn, cracked metal weathered from vorns of hard labor warm against his own.
“My name is Optimus Prime,” he says. “And I do not know what a Decepticon is.”