Transformers Multi-Versal: Pony for your Thoughts

Blocking Galvatron’s laser blasts with a forcefield was easy.

Keeping power to the forcefield that was blocking himself from said insanely powerful blasts? Not so much.

Technosis could feel his shields failing. He desperately tried to redirect as much power as possible to them, but life support and consciousness systems were kind of essential.

His jets roared, suddenly sending his skyward, causing a round of blasts to annihilate the ground he was just standing on. He converted to his alternate mode, a sleek fighter jet. Behind him, he heard the sound of his five opponents transforming and taking chase.

It’s just one of those cycles, he mused. Directing as much power as possible to his thrusters, he slowly accelerated.

But to where? There was nowhere he could go that the Heralds of Unicron wouldn’t find him. He could pick up Legatron and leave this planet, but there was little chance that all five Heralds would follow, leaving the remaining few to do whatever they pleased on this innocent planet.

Reinforcements weren’t an option, either, due to those smeltin’ Cons blocking any signals he might send. Just how they suddenly could accomplish this, Technosis had no idea, but he hoped he’d find out and be able to disable it- fast.

Looking out his rear-view sensors, he saw that Galvatron and Noizemaze held the lead, with Cyclonus and Scourge trailing behind. Due to his rather slow helicopter form, Shiftech was far back in the distance.

Greeaaaat, that only leaves four ultra-powerful opponents that I’ll have to fight to the death, he thought. I can totally handle that.

His commlink beeped.

“Kinda BUSY,” he answered.

“Technosis!” Legatron said, “Where are you?!”

“Oh, about 30 yards from DEATH!” the white jet snapped back.

“Not the time for humor,” Legatron sighed. “Look, I got a plan. Get back to the battleground, STAT!”

“You want me to turn around and go TOWARDS the robots who are trying to kill me?!”

“If it means beating said robots, yes.”

Technosis growled. “If this plan doesn’t work, so help me-”

“If this doesn’t work, it’ll be payback for making me come here in the first place.” The signal went dead.

Technosis cursed under his breath, more violently than usual. He slowed down eeeeeever so slightly, allowing his pursuers to catch up a bit.

When they were close enough, Technosis converted into robot form. Swinging his feet so that his heels faced forward, he gunned his foot-mounted secondary thrusters, propelling him backwards, sailing underneath his pursuers. When he cleared them, he morphed back to vehicle mode and shot off.

Just as he was thinking about how well that had gone, he was hammered by laser fire. But not from the back, oddly enough, he was being shot from the front-

Technosis cursed again as he realized that he’d completely forgotten about Shiftech being so far behind the others. The black and maroon helicopter was visible in the distance.

There was no turning back now. Technosis gunned his thrusters harder than ever before. The ground and trees below his became a vague green and brown blur. The clouds seemed to mesh with the sky, making a swirling blue and white pattern.

Shiftech’s helicopter form grew large at a starling pace, but Technosis continued to bare down on him.

The evil helicopter realized how fast his opponent was going and quickly increased his altitude. Technosis’ jet form raced under him with only inches to spare.

Clear of his enemies, Technosis began to slow. However, as he did so, his thrusters coughed and sputtered, having been overloaded. Tired of swearing, he instead decided to focus on getting to the meeting point.

With a deafening boom his right thruster gave out, sending him spiraling out of control.

Thinking fast, he cut power to his reaming thruster and converted to robot form, where his backpack rockets slowed his out-of-control motions. He barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief before he was shot out of the sky.

In the distance, Shiftech hovered in midair. His arm cannons were still aimed at the spot Technosis was moments before. With a sinister chuckle, he moved in to finish the job.

**********

Technosis laid on the ground, wondering what happened. He attempted to fire up his jetpack, to no avail.

Instead of swearing, he just sighed to himself and mass-shifted back to his small robot form.

Time for plan B, he thought as he started running.

**********

Noizemaze lead the heralds of Unicron back to Shiftech. To their surprise, the helicopter-bot was in robot form, searching for something on the ground.

“Uh, what are you doing?” Noizemaze said as though Shiftech was doing something seemingly idiotic (which he was).

Shiftech grunted. “I shot down white-and-nerdy just now, but it looks like he bolted.”

Scourge knelt close to the ground. “He smacked down here, judging by the robot-sized crater. He then got up, slowly, probably thinking of flying. If he did, though, he would’ve been seen by Shiftech. No visible footprints suggests he didn’t run…” The blue robot thought a moment, “Or he did something else before he ran-” He pointed a sharp, red-tipped finger at a tiny set of footprints, “Like mass-shifting to a smaller size.”

Shiftech looked stunned. “Wow, they weren’t kidding when they said you had amazing tracking skills.”

Galvatron turned to Shiftech. “So what is the next plan of action?”

Shiftech processed. “Aw, smelt the heroes. We have the upper hand. We can beat up punks like them anytime. We don’t get many good chances to go power-object hunting.”

The other heralds nodded in agreement.

“Alright, it’s settled, them,” Shiftech announced. “We’ll split into groups and fan out. Scourge, Cyclonus- you seem to get along well.” The two robots nodded before converting onto their alternate forms and roaring away.

“Noizemaze,” Shiftech continued, “You will accompany Galvatron and-”

“Woahwaohwaoh,” Noizemaze interrupted. “Just WHAT makes you think I’m gonna accompany THAT lunatic?”

Shiftech leaned closer to his comrade. “Because I TOLD you to. I’M in control of this operation, remember? You WILL accompany Galvatron. Got that?”

Noizemaze grumbled before changing into his alternate mode and rocketing away. Galvatron followed suit.

Shiftech sighed to himself. This leadership thing was a lot tougher than he imagined-at least, leading these idiots was.

He growled. Well, then, I’ll just have to be tougher.

*********

Cyclonus and Scourge flew through the clouds, scanners on high alert. If the relics in this universe were as powerful as Shiftech had made them sound, then finding some should be no problem at-

“Got something,” Scourge announced.

“Same here,” Cyclonus said. “Looks like it’s coming from-”

A streak of color shot by, then looped back and circled around them several times.

“Hey, purple-punk, care for a rematch?!” Rainbow Dash shouted to Cyclonus.

Cyclonus was about to decline when he realized something. “Scourge! SHE’S the energy source!”
Rainbow Dash smirked. “Whoops, that’s my cue to GO!” She then shot off in a streak of cyan and rainbow.
“Galvatron will NOT be happy if she gets away!” Scourge said.
At the exact same moment, the two Transformers gunned their thrusters and zoomed off after the rainbow-haired Pegasus.

**********

“You’re being strangely quiet,” Noizemaze said calmly as his alien jet form streaked through the sky.

“Somehow I get the feeling that talking will only make you hate me even more,” Galvatron replied.

“And what makes you think I hate you already?” Noizemaze asked.

Had Galvatron been in robot mode, he would have rolled his eyes. “Oh, PLEASE, it’s obvious.”

“I guess you’re not as stupid as you look,” the orange and black vehicle replied.

“Hate you, too,” Galvatron snapped back.

With that, Galvatron shifted his focus to the planet below him. The grass was a perfect shade of green, occasionally dotted with splotches of colored flowers. Trees grew tall and proud, most of them colored a dark forest green (appropriately enough). Hills rolled gently across the landscape, giving it an interesting texture from an aerial viewpoint.

It was all so serene and well-maintained.

Galvatron hated every bit of it.

“So, we’re just looking around for anything that looks like it has a lot of potential power?” the purple jet asked.

“Well, I’M doing the smart thing and using my scanners to locate power objects,” Noizemaze said with sarcastic compassion, “But if you want to carefully comb every bit of a very large and expansive planet for tiny artifacts, then go right ahead!”

If he were capable of doing so in vehicle mode, Galvatron would’ve rolled his eyes.

It’s gonna be a looooong cycle, both of them thought to themselves.

**********

Shiftech studied the stature carefully, rubbing a finger along his metal chin as he did so. He didn’t understand what was so important about this hunk of chiseled rock. The ponies of this world clearly though it was something of value, seeing how they had locking it up deep in the catacombs under the castle and stationed heavy guards around it- all of which Shiftech had blasted through with ease.

Now he had made it to what they had insisted on guarding so heavily, and he had no idea what he was even looking at. It was a tall, lanky, bipedal figure who looked like little more than a snake with a deer head and limbs.

But it was the head and limbs that were the strange part. One arm seemed to belong to an eagle, and the other to a lion. His legs seemed to have been stolen from other creatures as well- specifically, a dragon and an ox.

And its head- what was up with the head? The entire figure was posed as though it was blocking itself from something, the face displaying a look of fear. Shiftech almost chuckled at the thought of it shielding itself from something very ugly rather than actually dangerous.

Of course, figure out what the heck was up with this sculpture might have been easier had the glyphs on the wall in the small cave not been so foreign. They didn’t even seem to follow a 26-character alphabet that many other languages across the multiverse had. However, the writing at the top of the text read one word, written mostly in letters that looked like another language that Shiftech did know. Eliminating the unrecognizable characters and filling in a blank or two gave him the word “Discord”.

In his head, the robot looked up the definition of the word. It basically meant ‘lack of agreement or harmony.’

“Well, THAT certainly explains a lot!” he said sarcastically to himself. He then turned to the statue and again noticed its random makeup of animal parts. “On second thought, it DOES kind of make sense if one thinks about it…”

His commlink suddenly beeped.

Clicking the receiver on, he stated simply, “Go.”

“Scourge here,” the reply came. “We’re in pursuit of a pony that seems to be emitting a MASSIVE energy reading.”

“On my way,” the black and maroon robot replied while he locked on to his ally’s location.

As he left the cave, he wondered if this “Discord” character was real or not, and if he’d ever get a chance to meet him.

**********

“Is everyone ready?” Legatron asked.

His allies nodded. In addition to Technosis and the six original ponies, Princess Celestia and her sister, Luna had joined them, as well as another pink unicorn-pegasus hybrid named Cadence (who WOULD NOT SHUT UP about getting revenge for hurting Twilight’s brother for some reason).

The green robot glanced at the necklaces that five of the six ponies wore, as well as the big crown thing worn by Twilight Sparkle. ‘The Elements of harmony’, they’d called them. When in the right hands- or hooves, whatever- the seemingly harmless jewelry would supposedly fire a beam of energy that could turn an organic creature into stone- or expel an evil corruption from someone. He’d heard two very different stories about the Elements and wasn’t entirely sure what they did.

But one thing was for sure, and that was the fact that they could be tracked by Cybertronian scanners. Rainbow Dash had proven this to be true when she’d worn her necklace while flying around Scrounge and Cyclonus earlier.

And now six similar energy signals were grouped in one spot. There was no way the Heralds of Unicron could miss THAT.

Then why are they taking so dang long?! Legatron’s expression grew more annoyed by the minute. If he wasn’t on such a serious mission, he’d be tapping his foot while glancing at a nonexistent watch on his wrist every other nanosecond, just like a human.

Finally, five Dark Energon signals appeared on his scanners.

“Alright, here they come!” He announced as his allies took up their positions. The horns of the pegasus-unicorns (there HAD to be a better name for that) began to glow, as did the Elements.

Five flying vehicles came into view over the horizon and simultaneously converted into four-story robots without slowing down. Legatron had to admit the action had a cool effect, and made a mental note to tell his friends about it.

The Heralds hovered above the clearing that contained the ponies and two small robots.

“Oh, dear, it’s a trap!” Noizemaze said with mock fear.

“I dunno,” Shiftech said softly so only the other Heralds could hear. “There’s some massive energy readings coming from those things…”

“Will you relax?” Noizemaze retorted. “They’re just stupid horses!”

Each of the Equestrians tension anger at this. Legatron and Technosis couldn’t help but snicker at the sight of such cute ponies looking so furious.

Technosis then threw a glance back at the ponies, who nodded at him. In response, the white robot nodded to Legatron.

“If you’re so confident, why don’t you let US have the first shot?” Legatron shouted with a mischievous smirk.

Noizemaze laughed, then folded his arms across his chest. “Go ahead, GLITTER me to death.”

“I got a baaaad feeling about this,” Shiftech mumbled.

The pegasus-unicorns’ horn glowed brighter as the Elements of Harmony charged. Bolts of energy shot up from each of the power objects and merged with the power form the winged unicorns. Legatron and Technosis then activated as many long-range weapons as they had on their frames as the magical energy poured into them.

“THIS. IS. AWESOME!!!” Legatron said as his blasters charged with a rainbow-colored hue.

“Ooooh, pretty,” Noizemaze said sarcastically.

“Um, do you even REALIZE how utterly MASSIVE that energy signal just got?” Galvatron question.

Noizemaze’s chuckling was cut short as he activated his energy scanners and realized the intensity of the multicolored magic below him. “Oh slag…”

Down below, Technosis and Legatron carefully aimed their cannons at the massive robot above. They then felt the energy reach its climax, and fired.

A combined rainbow-colored laser blast tore through the sky toward the five metal monsters.

“Told yah so,” Shiftech said just loud enough for Noizemaze to hear as the energy blast came upon them.

**********

“Living machines, huh?” Celestia said. “Amazing.”

Legatron and Technosis simply nodded, both of them still tired from containing so much magic energy earlier.

The two robots were currently speaking to Twilight and the three pegasus-unicorns- which they had learned were called ‘alicorns’- about their robotic species.

“And you can shape-shift without the use of magic?” the purple unicorn asked, eyes wide with curiosity.

Legatron chuckled. She just looked so dang cute with that expression. “Yep! We’re capable of rearranging parts of our bodies to mimic other forms.”

Twilight was about to ask another question when she was cut off by a certain pink party-pony. “Alright, everything’s set up! Let’s get this party started!”

The two robots were about to question how Pinkie had appeared out fo nowhere before remembering that Twilight had told them that they’re better off not asking.

Instead, Legatron rose to his feet before morphing into his pony form.

“Wow,” Twilight said softly after witnessing the change.

‘Leon’ nodded to her as he began trotting to the place of the party. Pinkie apparently threw a city-wide party every week, but she’d dedicated this one to the defeat of ‘those big, meany-pants robots’, as she had put it.

“Hey, wait for me!” Technosis said to his friend’s retreating form.

Leon turned to him and smirked. “Oh, sorry, buddy, but you gotta be a pony to attend the party, or you’ll scare off the locals.”

Technosis’ face fell as the information sunk in. Legatron was entirely right, and Technosis wasn’t capable of changing his alternate form so much without the use of a Reformatting Chamber, unlike his green friend.

With no other choice, Technosis sat on a rock far away enough from the party so that he wouldn’t be seen, but close enough to hear the music. Annoyed, he considered the thought that this was bad karma from making Legatron go on this mission alone.

After awhile he heard foot- erm, hoofsteps. The white robot turned to see the pegasus known as Fluttershy approaching him.

“Um, why aren’t you at the party?” she asked softly. “Th-that is, if you don’t mind me asking…”

“I didn’t modify myself with a pony form, and I still can’t get back to my ship to give myself one,” the robot explained, recalling how the Heralds of Unicron had blocked his communications with his ship. The effect would wear off, but it would take several hours- maybe even days.

Fluttershy walked closer. “Oh, that’s too bad. I’d be at the party, but, I don’t really care for social gatherings too much…”

Technosis couldn’t help but smile at the pony. More than any other one he’d seen, she was so CUTE!

He gently began patting the pegasus’ head as the two continued to chat. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

**********

Epilogue

Nightmare moon sat in her new bipedal robot form on the floor of the ruins of an ancient castle, deep within the dreaded Everfree Forest. She’d witnessed the Heralds of Unicron, including Shiftech, get blasted mercilessly by a group of ponies and small robots.

Now she was left with only herself, with her only way of fully understanding her new mechanical form having been utterly annihilated by the laser blast.

Her attention was drawn from her thoughts back to the real world as she heard footsteps approaching the castle. She stealthily slipped into the shadows and waiting for the newcomer to reveal themselves.

Her jaw dropped as a heavily damaged, but definantly alive Shiftech came to the ruins. She came out fo her hiding spot and went to greet him.

“So, you’re alive, then,” the female robot said as she approached the taller, bulkier robot.

Shiftech nodded. “It takes more than a multi-colored laser to take me down.

Nightmare nodded. “And what of your friends?”

The black and maroon robot’s expression didn’t change. “Unicron is going to have to revive their sorry afts. Not the first time that’s happened, I might add- at least, not for Noizemaze.”

The femme chuckled. “So, what brings you back here?”

“An offer,” Shiftech replied. “It has recently come to my attention that the other Dark Energon Heralds are less than reliable- or at least more so than I originally thought.” He extended a three fingered hand to Nightmare. “I have made the decision to gather new troops and form an inner circle comprised of some of the most sinister being in the multiverse- one of which is you.”

Nightmare Moon considered this. Thanks to this being in front of her, she was now free of her energy-like state she had been trapped in. Now he was offering to free her of her own WORLD- away from the repulsive kindness of the pony civilization, away from Celestia and Luna…

…and away from everyone else who knew of her weaknesses. It would cost her the revenge she sought so dearly… but then again, what if her attempts at revenge failed like her plan to plunge the world into eternal darkness?

She smiled as she shook Shiftech’s hand. “You have a deal.”

The End.