fateandfortune

"I'm okay," she answers absently, patting herself down with gloved hands to be sure she was all in one piece. The absence of her phone was noticed immediately at his next words, which made her start. She'd just been texting someone, and she distinctly remembered returning the device to her pocket.

"So is mine. It was just in my pocket..." Which, speaking of. Looking around at all the green, she's even more confused. There's too much of it. "Why is it summer all of a sudden?"

Perhaps not summer, but at least spring. She knows that corn is planted and harvested in warm weather, which her thick coat was definitely not made for.

Something unsettled works its way down his struts, coiling in his tanks. He doesn't like this. Even when the Porter acted up and threw uncanny scenarios in their way, their possessions had remained. And she was right: it was winter, or at least, his chrono told him it was supposed to be. Any place that grew corn this expansively should have been buried in snow at this time of year.

In fact the only time he'd ever found himself in a different month was when...

... he'd been Ported through that first time, when he became an imPort.

The repair algorithm he'd set to reconnect to the government satellite responsible for the imPort network blinks up its result on his HUD: Error: Connection not found. Suspected Cause: Satellite not present.

"There's a house," Knock Out says tersely, lifting an arm to point in the direction for Rogue's benefit; the corn stood taller than she. He'll lead, pedes pressing flat a path for her to follow. Green stalks brush past him, getting caught in the seams of his armor.

"Perhaps we can get some more information there."

Rogue's thoughts follow a similar path, though she doesn't have the same type of reference point. Her Earth had been in such an incredibly different state than the one they'd both been brought into by the Porter, but even then she'd entered with everything she'd had on her at the time she was taken. (Which hadn't been much, of course.)

She's suddenly even more grateful that he's with her now in this strange situation as they start for the house — she might have wandered in the complete opposite direction for who knows how long without someone tall enough to easily see over the rows of corn. Plus, it sure is nice to be able to follow that path he's making instead of fighting her way down the rows. She's unsteady enough on her feet as it is.

"Do you see a road nearby, sugar?" she asks, raising her voice just a little to make sure he can hear her. "Even just a driveway?" After just a second, she adds, "I'm only asking cause you might want to change into your other form just in case they're not used to imPorts." The last thing they need is someone repeating the scene she'd made at their first meeting.

"A driveway," he confirmed, seeing the two-rut gravel track that crested the same hill the house sat on. It was smart of Rogue to bring the suggestion up; he hadn't considered it, having gotten perhaps too complacent in his status as an imPort where he was admittedly an oddity among them, but a recognized one.

Knock Out stops at the edge of the field, casting his sensors around before determining there was no one in the area, and then stepped out of the corn to fold down into his alt mode, his bold red paint a vibrant contrast to the ocean of growing green behind them.

The house seems quiet with no one about. It's weathered with age but looks well-loved, with a wrap around porch and a garden patch to the side.

"Rogue," Knock Out says after a moment, having rolled forward to situate himself properly on the driveway. His turn signal blinks twice, indicating the direction for her to look: an old farm truck, wheels flat and rusted out. "The truck has Iowa plates."

It's never anything less than completely fascinating to watch him switch from one form to another like that. For him to rearrange his metal body so completely as to seemingly become something else is just... She marvels at the sight of it for a moment, walking up to stand beside him as he settles on the driveway, only pulled out of her staring when he calls for her attention.

"...how in the Sam Hill did we get to Iowa?" The southern comes right out of her in that exclamation. Sure, she'd wondered at their location, neither of their home cities being near to where corn might usually grow, but it was a different matter entirely to have her suspicions confirmed. Stepping over to the truck, she leans against the windows, cupping her hands to peer through dirty glass and finding no answers within. There's just more rust and dirt and old cracked leather.

"I'm gonna try the house, see if anyone's home." Just because it's quiet doesn't mean there might not be someone inside. Or maybe Iowa would prove to be like the South where only city folks locked their doors and she'd be able to use their phone.

Knock Out had no answer for her question, no explanation for how they'd both found themselves half a country away from where they'd been located just before waking up. Nowhere near any of the Porter cities (indeed, they seemed to have landed ironically about as far away from one as they could be, barring a different country entirely).

"All right," he agrees to her statement, pulling up to the end of the driveway nearest the house and parking, his processor awhirl with any possibility he could think of that might explain their current predicament.

Out of curiosity, he rotated his comm codes back to his Earth defaults, pinging out to both Decepticon frequencies and the satellite uplinks which Soundwave had curated for them, but all came back negative. It was a rudimentary test, but it seemed to disprove the slim possibility that he'd been Ported back to his universe. Not to mention, all the literature that they had suggested they wouldn't recall their time in another world, and there was no reason that Rogue would also be here. And finally, this was definitely not the time nor the place he'd been pulled from.

Perhaps Rogue would have better luck with the house.

As she took the creaky steps up to the front porch, Rogue pondered the possibility that they'd been Ported out as well. Maybe something had glitched and they'd somehow retained their memories, but she and Knock Out were from different universes. It would make far for more sense for the Porter to have sent her to his universe than back to her own since it effectively no longer existed, at least not in the way she'd left it. But for so many of those variables to so perfectly align — the odds were too great to be true.

Knocking on the door, she waits a few seconds, listening closely for any sound of life within. A second knock, louder this time, and then she calls out, "Hello? Is anyone home?" It's only when no one responds that she tries the door, finding it serendipitously unlocked. With a glance back at Knock Out, she slowly steps inside, calling out again. "Hello?"

Silently begging the pardon of the unnamed occupants, she moves further into the house, past a well-worn but cozy living room and to the phone hanging on the wall next to the kitchen. It's old-fashioned compared to all the gadgets they're used to in the Porter cities but it makes sense to find such in a place like this. Quickly dialing the number for Hux's phone, she frowns at the message stating it isn't in service. The number for their office is answered by an employee at a pizza shop asking whether the order was for delivery or takeout.

Her hand stills before she can dial another number, her gaze catching on a newspaper lying folded on the kitchen table beside an empty coffee cup. A single word in the main headline sends ice down her back, and her hands shake as she returns the phone to its cradle. It's with a very firm grip that she grabs the paper and hurries back to the front door.

Knock Out watches Rogue disappear into the farmhouse. Without his uplinks he feels blind, cut off from the easy familiarity of having data at the ready. He sources the nearest cell tower and signals it, but everything's tightly encrypted... moreso than he recalls. He's about to take another crack at it when Rogue comes speedily out of the house clutching a newspaper, and his sensors reorient on her, noting the change immediately.

"Your biometrics are elevated," he observes, concerned. "What happened?"

She practically runs down the front steps, giving a frantic look around and catching sight of another car coming down the long driveway. Taking a few deep breaths, she forces herself to calm, shoves the panicking part of herself deep down as the car draws near.

"I'll tell you in a minute, someone's coming," she answers him, her voice a bit breathless. Remembering the stolen paper in her hands, she quickly pops the driver's side door and tosses it inside where it won't easily be seen.

The car that rolls up is dusty with the hallmark of country roads in summer, pulling into an obviously well-used spot next to where Knock Out is parked. The woman behind the wheel appears about 50 years old, greying but neatly kept. "Hello," she greets Rogue as she gets out of the car, smiling with an air of perplexed curiosity. "Can I help you with something? I don't think we were expecting guests today..."

From the back seat of the dusty sedan, a young boy wearing a baseball uniform and about 12 years old climbs out and bounces over to circle Knock Out excitedly. "Aunt Heather, look at this cool car!"

Placing her hands gently on Knock Out's hood, she silently urges her friend to stay quiet as the boy approaches, cursing at herself for not thinking to give even a few words of caution before the house's owners had pulled up. Please, please don't say anything...

"I'm so sorry to trouble you," Rogue begins with a friendly, bright smile, letting her accent flow thickly over the words to soften each and every vowel. It's a combination that usually works miracles with putting people at ease and she can already see it doing the job on the older woman. "I was trying to take a shortcut and got completely turned around. I was wondering if you could tell me how to get to the highway?"

"You have gotten turned around," the woman replies with a bit of a laugh, the explanation accepted without question. Pointing back down the driveway, she explains, "If you take a left at the road and go about ten miles to Melvin, you'll see the signs for the highway."

Knock Out either understands the unspoken entreaty, or he just correctly reads the situation, because there's not so much as a tire twitch while the women are speaking, not even when the boy begins tracing his fingers across the arc-line decals on his side panels.

"Joey, stop touching the lady's car," the aforementioned Heather scolded. After ascertaining that Rogue needed nothing else, the two head into the house and Rogue reopens his driver's door and gets in.

His interior is unchanged from the few times Rogue has had cause to sit inside his vehicle form, with the exception of some corn chaff in the footwells and in the backseat. There's no key in the ignition, but his engine turns over after she closes the driver's door and pulls a half-round to get back on the driveway, ambling down it in what he deems an appropriately non-suspicious speed.

"What happened in the house?" he asks again. They reach the end of the driveway and he turns left per the woman's instructions.

Bless him for being the brilliant being she's always known him to be. He doesn't say or do anything and somehow, by some miracle, they manage to get out of there without raising suspicions. All it would take is a single phonecall to...

She rests her hands on the steering wheel purely out of habit, grateful that Knock Out is the one in control; they'd have still been sitting in the driveway if it were up to her. Reaching down to pick up a few bits of chaff from beside her feet, she too carefully moves it to the backseat, trying to gather her thoughts in the few seconds it buys her.

"I tried making a few calls but none of the numbers worked," she answers finally, eyeing the newspaper on the passenger seat. "And then I saw the paper and—" She covers her eyes with a gloved hand. "I don't understand how this is possible."

The road is narrow, surfaced with chipseal and no painted middle line, and his tires hum on the rough surface as he drives. Giving her a few moments to collect herself, he finally prompts -- gently, and with a wry bit of humour -- her to speak again.

"Perhaps I can get you to read it to me," he suggests. "Seeing as how my optics are subspaced at the moment, and my interior sensors aren't really configured for print media."

Edited (One too many words ) 2020-01-26 15:00 (UTC)

"Right," she agrees with a worn smile and something like amusement in her voice. Sometimes she forgets that he does have some limitations and is not entirely superior to her in all ways (just most). With another slow, deep breath, she reaches over to pick up the offensive paper.

"The date says it's, uhm... It's July 11th, 2023," she reveals first because somehow that's the easier discovery to swallow. "The article begins: State officials in Des Moines have announced a new—" Her voice falters but she continues on. "...have announced a newly renovated holding facility for Iowa's mutant population, with nearly double the capacity of the previous location. This second facility will allow state authorities to comply with Sentinel Services' updated guidelines on mutant containment, as well as meet the growing number of citizen-reported sightings."

For a long moment after Rogue stops reading, there's only the sound of his engine, the faint clatter-clack of loose gravel kicked up by his tires as he drove. Mutants. Rogue's world. He ran the possibility again, but parameters were too vague. For every data point that suggested this could be a Port-Out situation, another was there to contradict it.

The silence stretches until Knock Out finally says, "We don't know what this is yet. We don't have enough information. It wouldn't be the first time the Porter has played with hallucinations."

"You're right," she agrees softly, still holding the paper but no longer seeing it. And she hopes that so desperately that this is just a hallucination they're sharing. That there's something wrong with the Porter again and that soon they'll be back home in a world that doesn't want to hunt her like a wild animal. But what if...

"My world wasn't like this when I left it. The year is the same but..." She looks out the window at the road stretching ahead of them. "We should find a city. We'll probably get more information there."

Knock Out murmurs assent, and the road flows under them. They come into the town of Melvin before long -- Population: 232, Osceola County, "The Biggest Little City in Iowa!" proudly proclaimed on the signage -- and past a small bank, a grocery store, a library, and alongside a small park with brightly coloured playground equipment. It's every small town America condensed into a single main drag and sole flashing stoplight.

As part of his three years of energon scouting, Knock Out had dedicate-cached extensive maps of North America, ones that didn't require his comm link to be working, so now that he had a point of reference, he is on more familiar territory. He turns south onto Highway 59 and finds it pleasantly light on traffic. More fields of corn roll past on both sides of the highway.

"The closest city of relative size is Fort Dodge," he says after a moment's research. "Approximate population of 25,000... two hours drive away. It's still well north of Des Moines." He could make it in less than two hours, but not if they were keeping a low profile.

"After that... Maurtia Falls would be the closest Porter city, but De Chima's only longer by an hour or two."

"We're so far away from everything," she comments absently, her voice still quiet, tone far more subdued than usual. Despite the reminder that they had no idea what was happening, that their present situation could have all sorts of explanations, she was feeling weighed down by the one possibility that she's always dreaded. So many imPorts dreamt of returning home to their previous lives but she'd never been one of them. Her life had been hell, absolute utter hell, and the world she'd left had been nothing short of a nightmare.

She leans back against the seat, resting her head against the support and turning to look out at the seemingly endless miles of corn surrounding them. "I'd rather try De Chima of the two, if you don't mind."

She'd rather try to go home.

Rogue has never talked much about her world to him, but it's not hard to detect the heaviness in her voice and in her manner, at the possibility she's been returned to it.

"De Chima it is," he agrees.

Two hours later, the afternoon sun has set by the time they reach Fort Dodge, but the sky still lingers a beautiful dusky gold as the streetlamps begin flickering on. Knock Out follows the flow of traffic, winding their way through the downtown core so they can get a measure of the place. It's wide and flat and spread out the way midwestern states tend to be, with a mix of century-old brick buildings and newer, cheaper constructions.

He pulls off the main road and into the parking lot of a convenience store advertising everything from movie rentals to lotto tickets, but Knock Out is focused on one particular poster in the window. "I need you to buy a cellphone. The sign in the window says this place sells prepaid ones."

Those two hours feel like two days, fear and uncertainty churning in a violent storm within her through every mile they travel. She has to make a conscious effort to keep herself from sinking into full-blown panic every fifteen minutes when the realization rises yet again — that she is going to be hunted again. Her days of living in peace are over, gone as quickly as they'd arrived.

But at least she isn't alone. That's what keeps her from breaking down emotionally, what allows her to hold on to the hope that there's something else going on and this isn't what it seems. Because her dear friend is here and she trusts him completely.

She stares out the glass at the convenience store for a long moment, weighing the possibilities and deciding that, yes, she can handle this. She has money, she can use this as a way to find out if the currency is the same here, and if not... well, she can make up an explanation on the fly and they can try something else. She's got this. It'll be fine.

"Okay," she finally agrees, taking a few deep breaths and forcing herself into that calm place she'd learned to find years ago in training. "I'll be back in a few minutes."

Thank goodness she manages to climb out without her knees shaking. Slipping off the coat she's been wearing all this time, she leaves it in the seat, closing the door before pulling off her gloves as well. They're tucked into a pocket before she heads inside, casually wandering the aisles and picking up a bottle of water and a protein bar before approaching the counter. She puts on her best smile and sweetest demeanor as she acquires one of those cellphones, and somehow manages not to keep that smile in place as she hands over the money. The man takes it without question, counting each bill before inputting the total and counting out her change.

The relief as she stepped outside was enough to almost make her cry. It was enough to make her forget about her gloves, her fingers touching the smooth metal of the handle for half a second before she pulls back, startled, and tugs down her sleeve to try again. It hadn't been long enough to make a connection, thankfully, but more than enough to send her heart racing again.

If Knock Out notices anything amiss in the ungloved touch, he doesn't comment on it. Once she's reseated in the driver's side, a thin cord of supple mesh extends from the dash, and as she watches, the end shifts and reshapes itself, altering in micrometers until it perfectly matches the charge port on the phone type she's purchased.

"I'm not a comms mech," he offers by way of explanation. "Or Spec-Ops. And unlike Soundwave -- who can decrypt something just by existing in its general vicinity -- if I'm to get any kind of access to the satellite networks, I'm going to need a back door in. This will probably take a few hours, but in the meantime..."

His radio clicks on, the dial spinning digital numbers on the dash. He flips though stations almost too fast to catch what they are -- although there's a lot of country music even in that short span, but this is Iowa -- until he settles on a news channel recounting the day's events. There's a recap of the same story that she read in the newspaper about the holding facility in Des Moines, a few local crime stories, sports scores, a weather forecast. Knock Out spins the dial again, impatiently.

"Where's the police band? Mm, no, that's CB... here we go." Radio chatter, idle and unhurried, crackles across the speakers. "You know for a species that needs external hardware to detect RF bands, you have surprisingly good spectrum management, grouping everything together the way you do."

He pauses, quiet except for the radio, red lighting from the dash muted. He feels her agitation, her turbulence... both physically because of his sensors, and something deeper. She's afraid.

"Rogue... I won't let anything happen to you. Whatever the Porter's done--" Whether this was some trick, or whether they were really in her world. "--we'll deal with it."

Edited (missed a word) 2020-02-02 07:33 (UTC)

Her gloves are tugged back on as she settles inside again, carefully hooking the phone up to the port he's created so he can get things started. A few hours feels like a lifetime to wait and yet also not very long at all — she'd waited years for answers before, what was a few hours now. But as he flips through radio signals, a dozen different voices pouring out information on things both unfamiliar and not, her anxiety and fear levels slowly begin to climb, like ascending a steep spiral staircase.

At his incredibly sweet and surprisingly comforting words, she leans forward to press her hand to the top of the dashboard, giving him a gentle pat like how she used to back in Jeopardy whenever she'd pass him in the driveway. The words are thick on her tongue when she speaks and heavy with emotion. "Thank you, sugar. I really mean it."

But then she leans back and lets her hand fall, looking around the parking lot. "We should probably get a move on before someone wonders why we're just sittin here."

His engine starts again, backing out of the parking space in front of the convenience store, and turns onto the road again. The lateness of the hour surprises him; at almost mid-July it's basically high summer, and sunset hadn't occurred until nearly 9pm.

Knock Out's set a course for De Chima that swings them southward before turning east so that they'll miss major population centers like Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. They can skirt St Louis if they really need to -- he'll keep an audial on the radio and police frequencies -- but they're going to be passing through during the wee hours of the morning so he hopes it won't be necessary.

He doesn't let the silence fester this time, but he fills it with things that are easy for her to tune out or listen to, depending on what she needs. He keeps the topic away from their shared Porter world, recounting some of the more outlandish Vehicon repairs he'd had to do, sidelining into some scathing commentary on his fellow medical professionals within the Decepticon ranks, and then finally settling onto recounting the sets of events that led to his own arrival on Earth.

"So we've just set down the ship and I discover that what I thought was solid land is actually... a swamp. An absolute bog. My first steps on this planet and I sank about a meter down and it squelched. I wanted to leave right then! Of course Breakdown's having a fine time with it, and off he goes tromping through this decaying mire. Of course we're still in the process of integrating our planetary informational packets, so we've got some of the concepts but not all of them yet, and Breakdown comes back through the muck holding this thing.

'Knock Out', he says, 'I found a dog!' 'What's a dog?' I ask, because I'm still sorting out the fact that your planet is currently using three separate systems of measurement for the same things.

And he answers, 'A puppy! Humans keep them as pets!' and then he wants me to pet it. So I do. It should be noted that neither of us had finished disseminating the subfile on organic wildlife at this point, that kicked in about a breem later."

He pauses for effect. "... it was an alligator."

She's so grateful to him for sharing those stories, far more than she could possibly explain. Silence is hard for her to handle right now, the weight of it pressing down on her chest and squeezing her heart to the fear is even more prominent in her mind. For three years, she'd had nothing but silence punctuated by screams during each new series of tests and procedures, day after day of the same until it all blended together into her own personal version of hell. So to now have Knock Out's voice filling that silence... It keeps her memories from bleeding into the present, grounding her to the here and now so she can stay focused on their situation.

So she listens, and she smiles, and after that oh-so-effective pause she even laughs. It felt so good to laugh, that spark of joy spreading warmth throughout her very being, and all because of him.

"An alligator?" The laughter increases, turning into full-fledged giggles, and her cheeks hurt from smiling so widely. "Oh sugar, that's adorable. What did you think of it when you saw it?"

Because obviously that's the most important question to ask.

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