050715 - Raiding the Hall of Record

The Hall of Records was one of the buildings spared by the joint Autobot/Decepticon assault on by Megatron's explicit orders. Why? Because now there are several Decepticons that are preparing to open the doors to the Hall. Doors that have been heavily barred and blockaded. Even welded shut. Every entrance seems to be like this, except for a pair of small access panels that is used mainly by the maintenance staff that comes and goes after hours. 
It is not a good time to be an Autobot. It's an even worse time to be an Autobot last seen as part of Zeta's security forces. Does it help that Vision helped Wheeljack's crew blow up a Destructor? No, not so much! No one knows about that! She put a lot of effort into making sure it stayed that way!
Alas.
One of the few who may be aware that while she was one of Zeta's Autobots, she wasn't one of /Zeta's/ Autobots is Cascade, who she helped slip past the Autobot guards to hit the Destructors. So maybe Cascade won't refuse when Vision reaches out to her, asking for help identifying and retrieving important data from the Hall of Records before the Decepticons can break in and destroy it. She knows a good way in! That's what comes of scouting, you see. She waits now by the access panels. She is stunningly nondescript.
Cascade knew the turth about Vision and what she helped them do. The assault would have likely failed without her help and Zeta would still be online. That is not the case however. Cascade had been planning to attempt save what she could on her own. Working with Vision would up how much data could be saved and how much could be taken. So here she was just arriving and lookint to Vision. 
"We shouldn't waste any time on this."
A maintenance drone rolls out of the smaller than mini-bot sized entrance and pauses as it bumps into Vision's foot. It chirps at her in a non-descript manner before rolling back and heading on it's merry little way. 
Off in the distance, a pair of seekers on patrol start to approach the Hall of Records from the skies, their engines alive with the roar of success. They aren't expecting trouble, after all. But they are getting close to where the two femmes are attempting to break in. 
"Oh, thank Primus." Vision notably relaxes when Cascade shows up, and she offers the other Autobot a quick smile. "Yeah. Decepticons at the gates, right? Follow me!" With that, she pops the access panel and dives on in. Forget the Seekers. She doesn't plan on lingering, and she's awful quick to enter. You can always rely on conveniently placed ventilation.
Vision has done her homework: she knows the layout of the access tunnels, and how to follow them to get to the central data stores. But the cramped quarters mean that they get nowhere at speed, so she diverts them to the first room so that they can proceed through hallways, instead. She has a quick confidence in her sneaking that speaks well of her scouting skills.
Cascade is going to move in and she doesn't plan to linger ither. Cascade worked here briefly so she has an ioea of how to get around. However Vision knows things better and she's able to get in quickly. Cascade follows along and is a pretty passable scout too. It's why she was drafted after Kaon fell to the cons so long ago. She's also clearly carring some extra datadrives with her. She really wishes they could have got someone with a dataslug alt mode to help. Maybe she can find Hot Rod's friend later?
As the two femmes come into the first room, there's a rattling in the middle of the room. Then at head height for the two femmes, a pair of large glowing orbs come to life. "So you 'Cons finally found my invitation! I ain't going down without a fight!" The large headlamps of the mech's chest light up as Bulkhead's lumbering steps bring him forward, his blue optics bright in the dark as he starts towards the two, determined to crush them.. just to come up short. 
"Huh??" he asks, looking confused as his brights reflect off the two femme forms. 
"You're a little.. small.. for a Decepticon kill team." he says, as he tries to come to a halt and stumbles over his own two feet, crashing forward and knocking over a statue of Solarus Prime. 
"Oh, I'm sorry!" 
The bright blue glow of Vision's gaze as she looks back at Bulkhead suggests ... she's probably not a Con. /Probably/. "We're not a Decepticon ki-- careful!" She leaps forward to catch the statue when it wobbles, steadying it with greater strength than it seems she might possess. She considers the statue regretfully -- it's much too big to sneak off! -- and then looks back at Bulkhead. "Like I was saying, we're not a kill team -- unless you've got something to tell me," she teases over her shoulder at Cascade. "My name's Vision. We came here to retrieve as much as we could before the Decepticons destroy it. Who are you?" She must not follow politics.
Cascade pauses as she hears a voice, it's not a con from the sound of it she sees a mech with a massive frame that dwarfs her by quite a bit. She looks up she stares and down goes the statue of Solarus Prime. 
"We're note Decepticons!" 
Thankfully Vision is closer and able to make the dive for statuie. It seems to be taking a moment to scan the statue however. She then turns to Bulkhead looking sheepish. 
"Cascade, I used to work here and wait?! Senator Bulkhead?!"
"Good catch..." Bulkhead offers as he is still flat on his face on the floor. There's the familiar tch-tch-tscch as his wrecking ball hands protoform back into their regular form and he places his hands on the floor to push himself up. "Bulkhead, Engineering Guild head. I helped build this place. And I ain't letting any 'Cons come in here and ransack it without a fight." Or him, for that matter. He's a senatorial member. Which makes him a target. 
"Nice to meet you, Vision, I uh.. didn't bring anything to gather information with but ah.. uh.. I CAN CARRY A BUNCH!" he offers helpfully as the large mech pushes himself to his knees and finally back to his feet. 
Then a dull /thud/ rattles the structure and some dust drifts down from below. "Explosives." Bullkhead comments, a glance towards the front of the Hall. "Not high yield though.." he says, and then pauses as Cascade speaks up and he almost blushes. "More like.. guild leader.. uh, it's a long story, I'm probably not the best choice for a Senator.." he tries to explain. 
"Uh. Anyway. You better hurry. Cause they're knocking harder now. I can't really run." 
"You certainly can." Vision sounds properly appreciative as she watches Bulkhead stand (and stand!). She smiles again and says, "Sounds like we're all on the same side, then. Although getting you out of here might be kind of tricky." She looks between Cascade and Bulkhead. Hopefully, she asks, "If you worked here, and /you/ built this place -- any way to get out other than access tunnels we took to get in? Because you're /not/ fitting in those," she tells Bulkhead somewhat regretfully.
Even as she chatters, Vision is already moving. She does a quick prioritization of the data in the room, and double-checks what might be most important against Cascade by holding up the title to her with a questioning tilt of her head. Important?
Cascade nods to possibly the last senator left alive as she hears what he said. "So you helped build it what do you know of the blueprints. I know there were a few loading areas for larger shipments of items to the archives but those are likely watched, they are hard to miss and even someone with no experiance here would notice them from a patrol or two of the compound. 
"Look you were played by Zeta like we all were. We can't leave you for scrap here. As for yes, Vision get all that, that's a archive from the Age of Wrath, get all of it."
"I know. I figured they'd only be able to send in one at a time and I could bash 'em." Bulkhead says with pride. Each of the doors into the building are blocked by large statues that Bulkhead had moved into place along with welding the doors closed. 
"Wait, I know!" Cascade jars the mech's memory, "There's an entrance to bring in items by air." he looks upwards towards the roof. "There's an access elevator for freight, but.. uhm. Aren't there seekers' out there?" A tinge of worry touches his voice as he looks between the two. "I wouldn't want either of you getting hurt 'cause the 'Cons are huntin' me." 
"Right, got it." Vision happily does as she is told: she downloads the material to highly compressed data storage. She gives Bulkhead a concerned glance and says, "That might be a good way to get us out, but where will you go from there? I can't fly, and you don't exactly look like you can, either. I can set a diversion to distract the seekers if you've got a way to get down from there."
Cascade says "I should have thought of that we could get you out that way, one of my modes ia a Rotor-craft I can give some cover from the Seekers. We'll have to think of something. Not going to leave you like this. The cons will rip you apart if we do. Well Vision if your hot stuff as your alt mode you could stunt your way down the building. KEep your optics open for cabling, we might be able to use it to climb down as well." 
Cascade does all this as she's going to start downloading information as well. 
"Thankfully none of this stuff is high level, and should be easy enough to grab copies before someone notices."
"The building's kinda shaped like this..." Bulkhead says thoughtfully as he cups his hands into a clam-style shape. "I can probably try to drive down the side of the building, it'll be probably a really bumpy ride!" he admits with a nervous laugh as the mech wrings his hands. 
Watching the two femmes as they work, he glances up as a louder /thud/ sounds out and light comes in through one of the doors. "Uhoh." he says with a frown. "That won't hold up much longer." he admits as he finally makes up his mind and protoforms into his vehicular mode, the large and imposing vehicle opening up in the back to show where prisoners are usually kept but can be used for cargo in a pinch. "Maybe.. this will help?" he offers helpfully. 
"That will definitely help." In fact, let's start with that statue he almost knocked over! Vision glances up and frowns in distracted thought. Looking back between Cascade and Bulkhead, she says, "If you two can get out through the roof, I'll take care of the Seekers. But -- uh, just how bumpy a ride do you think it will be? Are there any other options? Maybe we can sneak around them and just take a door out after they break in. I could help with that, too." She sounds confident of her ability to deliver on that, but who knows: she could just be all ego. "I'll have to speed out of here pretty fast, though, so I don't want to be loaded down with anything. I'll focus on pure data retrieval, and Bulkhead -- you carry out any artifacts, okay?"
Cascade is contiuning to download information, as she goes, she's got several tracks going at the moment as she converse with the others. 
"That could be a possiblity to get out. This is as good a plan as we can have, air or ground escape for myself doesn't matter. I can out manouver seekers but not out run them." She keeps working, files contiune to download to the dataslugs she has with her.
With Vision's help to load up some statues in Bulkhead and Cascade downloading files, things seem to be going swimmingly until there's one last /thud/ and the doors to the Hall's main entrance fall forward and a pair of seekers stand at the doorway, shining lights into the darkened hall. "Who's in here?!" one of them calls out, his weapon setting on the end of his arm as he makes his way over the statues and into the hall proper. 
Bulkhead's engine rumbles nervously as he waits for Vision to finish the loading. "Time to go..." he says, "..uh, ya know. If you're ready." 
"Let me. If they follow you should be able to just leave -- but if they are just distracted, at least you can hit them with a surprise attack and /then/ get out. I'll try and buy you some time!" Vision finishes her loading and then slips away from the pair without waiting for an answer. She lean out and take a look at the seekers -- scouted! Now she just needs to distract. A moment later, she transforms, slipping into alt-mode so that she can whip out in a tight curve and race down a side hallway, away from Bulkhead and Cascade. She's impossible to miss. She wags her taillights in mocking salute before slipping around another corner. /Racing in the library/. She would be in so much trouble. If -- it all weren't about to go to hell, anyway.
Cascade has managed to get a good selection of information. Not everything she'd like to get but some is better than none, right and if they get slagged here it won't matter how much or how little they got. A few smaller historical artifact,. She hears the cons and nods for a moment, she knows it's time to go and she's going to get moving with Bulkhead. 
"Time to go, Bulkhead!"
With Vision leading the two seekers off on a merry chase of her throughout the halls, Bulkhead guns his engines.. and accelerates. Slowly. Like.. slow. He's not fast and he's weighed down. One of the seekers realizes that there's a bigger target and opens fire on Bulkhead, several rounds strking the armored hide of the truck as it makes it out the door. "Time to go!" he says as he rumbles out the doors and makes a hard right as he rumbles down the road to try to get away. 
Slow as Bulkhead might be to accelerate, Cascade's voice on the radio means that they are accelerating into a line of defense: as they move out into Iacon's streets, a few friendly faces pop up to return the seeker's shots, forcing the lone Decepticon to fall back. Bulkhead and Cascade are free -- for the moment, but the sound of seeker engine's in the sky mean that they better find cover, and quick. Inside, Vision leads the other seeker through smaller, and smaller, and /smaller/ tunnels, until she's popping back into the vents to wiggle her way to freedom. She'll catch up to them. But in the meantime -- they've got a good haul of loot, and they need to find somewhere to stash it and lie low. Distant sounds of destruction hint at Decepticons taking out their anger on defenseless archives, but with backups safely in place, history has been saved. Some of it, anyway. For a little while.
Category:Autocracy