space girl | bumblebee

xviii.

Leo had talked about the Robo-Warrior as if he was some sort of professional hacker, but also well-versed in any and all information and events relating to Cybertronians, including the language. It was hard to believe any of the information or praise that the boy gave everyone when Bumblebee parked in front of a butcher which was run-down and completely trashed. While the business was still running, Onyxia doubted that it was safe or hygienic.

The humans all got out of Bumblebee and the Autobot's holoform appeared beside Onyxia, looking at her with a smile. She linked her arm with his and listened to Leo as he ordered the group as if he was the leader.

"All right, wait here. I'll give you the go/no go. All right?"

Sam, Mikaela, Bumblebee, and Onyxia all looked at each other, coming to a mutual agreement in which they would not wait. They watched Leo enter the butcher and waited for a minute before they all poured into the building. Onyxia scrunched her face up when she was met with the smell of raw and cured meats.

The man in front of them, wearing a white chef's hat and white kitchen shirt, was Simmons. 

"No," the man spoke, in complete disbelief as he gazed upon the group in front of him.

"You got to be kidding me," Sam groaned. Onyxia gripped Bumblebee's arm tighter in the hopes that it would help calm her fears about what had happened two years ago with Simmons. Her partner looked down at her with softened eyes--his own way of silently reassuring her. While he held great discontent towards Simmons and his actions, it would not do anyone any good if he started a fight with him, whether that be verbally or physically.

"All right, meat store's closed!" Simmons yelled to all his customers. "Everybody out! Out, right now!"

While Simmons ushered all his customers out, Leo looked at Sam with furrowed eyebrows. "Wait a minute, you know this guy?" he asked incredulously.

"We're old friends," Sam replied, which seemed to piss Simmons off.

"Old friends? You're the case that shut down Sector Seven, got the kibosh, disbanded. No more security clearance, no retirement, no nothing. All 'cause of you, your Autobot buddies, and your criminal girlfriend. Look at her now, so mature," he said cynically.

"You got shut down because you were meddling with things you didn't understand, and never will," Onyxia sneered. "Torturing me for centuries and doing so relentlessly with no mercy. It's much deserved, dickhead."

"Moron. Where's the whitefish?!" a middle-aged woman cried from within the cool room. Her words were directed to a young man with incredibly crooked teeth, who was tenderising raw meat without any gloves. Onyxia nearly gagged at the sight.

"Hey! Don't touch me with the pig!" he cried at the man behind him who was carrying a skinned pig.

"Yakov!" Simmons snapped.

"What?"

"You don't get Christmas bonuses standing around. You want those new teeth you saw on SkyMall?"

"It's my dream!"

"Help her out!"

"You live with your mama?" Mikaela remarked cynically.

"No, my mama lives with me. It's a big difference. They got your face all over the news, alien boy," Simmons directed at Sam.

"Yeah, I know," the boy replied, not in the mood to discuss facts.

"And NBE One's still kicking? How did that happen?" Simmons asked rhetorically, quickly interrupting Sam as he went to reply, "Don't answer. I don't know what you're hiding but I don't want anything to do with it. So goodbye, you never saw me. I got bagels to schmear. Vanish." He began to walk away but Onyxia grabbed his arm tightly.

"You owe us," she said simply.

"We need your help," Sam spoke. 

"Really? You need my help?" Simmons sneered.

"I need...Look, I am slowly losing my mind. Okay? I had a little crab-bot, plunged a device deep into the soft tissues of my brain and started projecting little alien symbols like a freaking home movie. And on top of that, I'm a wanted fugitive. So, you think you got it rough?" Sam snapped at him, speaking so frantically that Onyxia could barely follow.

Simmons looked at him with an unwavering gaze, greatly intrigued, "you said it projected images off your brain?"

"Right," Sam confirmed. Simmons looked almost excited when he motioned to the cool room behind him.

"Meat locker, now!" He led them into the cool room and crouched in front of a trapdoor. Leo looked around him with disgust at all the skinned pigs hanging from meat hooks. Onyxia and Bumblebee weaved around the corpses with fingers intertwined, stopping to wait for Simmons to open the meat locker.

"What you're about to see is top secret. Do not tell my mother," Simmons ordered. Onyxia looked at Bumblebee, highly amused. The smile on her face brought one to his own and he nearly chuckled at the fact that she had found Simmons' words so amusing.

"Swine flu, not good," Leo commented as everyone followed Simmons down a ladder into a once spacious room that was now cramped due to the countless stacks of files and papers.

"Now you know," Simmons began, "next time you eat a goat or a pig, there's a story behind it. Sad little story." He reached the bottom of the ladder and began muttering about files. Onyxia and Bumblebee were the last ones to reach the bottom of the ladder and began looking around, curious as to what all the papers were about.

"Okay, cube brain," Simmons spoke, opening a file for Sam that had a photo of a glyph from the language of the Primes printed on one of its pages. "Any of these look like the symbols you saw?"

Sam snatched the papers, "Where'd you get these?"

Simmons climbed up a stack of file cabinets to grab another file at the very top. "Before I got fired, I poached S-7's crown jewel, over 75 years of alien research, which points to one inescapable fact. The transformers, they're been here a long, long time. How do I know?" He tossed a file to Leo, who just barely caught it. "Archeologists found these unexplained markings in ancient ruins all over the world." He climbed back down.

"I was here for 12,000 years, how long are we talking?" Onyxia spoke up.

"Well, young lady, we're talking about you. You write any symbols on ancient ruins?"

"No, I was in hiding here for my entire stay." So, then, she was never alone on Earth like she thought she was. She was surrounded by signs of her race without noticing a single thing. She let out a deep sigh--yet another disappointment she could add to her list.

"China, Egypt, Greece," Simmons said, tossing photos of each location with ancient glyphs inscribed on all sorts of ancient ruins. He played a tape of a group of archeologists in Egypt standing in front of a ruin that had Cybertronian glyphs inscribed on it. "Shot in 1932. These the symbols you've been seeing in your head?" He left the tape running and pointed to all the photos with glyphs. "Same ones over here, right? So, tell me, how did they end up all drawing the same things?" There was a childish wonder in his eyes that Onyxia found amusing. So interested in her culture yet so willing to harm her and others a part of it.

Such a foolish human, she thought.