An Exploration Mission (Closed; Att'n Vallermoore)

[Vallermoore]

Loyal Star was very pleased to be picked up and taken out of that enclosure. "I really tried not to shoot your pet bear but it was him or me. I hope he will be alright. If you have other tests I will do my best to pass them for you and show there is a Decepticon soul in my pony body. Me being a pony I can't help unless I pass the test for the Ultimate Upgrade. Perhaps I can help you in some way ? Although you are a truly amazing war robot who can out-Decepticon most Decepticons and I'm a mere unicorn pony at least for now. Or perhaps you want to know how Megatronist I am and what I know of it?"

He was very aware of the metal hand he was riding in-a hand that could at the will of it's owner crunch him into red jam just like he could bring his hoof down hard on a small insect. But the fact that he was still both alive and had not been told he was now a slave, at least for now, meant that he was at least doing something right. As before they went at a speed that was very fast to Loyal Star even though it was just a walk in Decepticon terms. Loyal Star thought to himself Maybe my God is smiling on me and that is why I am still alive, even though I am in this hand. What do I need to do to get Carjack to like me? As things stand, it could go either way, he could either free me or enslave or kill me. The smooth engine noise was comforting, as angry Decepticons had rough engines.Looking up at the eyes they were of average brightness.

[Victorious Decepticons]

"You did good at getting the point across to him without causing too much damage," Carjack responded as he continued to walk. "I knew you'd have to hit him at least a bit. Years ago I tried to scare away squirrels with a pellet gun, and they had no idea what a gun was until I made some kind of contact. Pretty much all wildlife on this planet is like that. They're coded to recognize teeth and growls as threats, not popping sounds and sticks. Aggravatingly, they DO immediately learn that you can't project your force when you're not holding the special stick and will eat your birdseed right in front of you during those times."

After arriving back in the orchard area, Carjack didn't return to the original location. Instead, he walked through the orchard, out the other end, and down a dirt road. After another mile or so, he came to a clearing filled with about 100,000 tulips, which were in full bloom. In the center of this field was a big Decepticon-sized park bench complete with synthetic velvet. Carjack plonked himself down and set the pony down next to him.

The General looked around, and for a split second, a wistful look crossed his face. "Pretty soon I have to report back for duty," he commented. "The Annual Military Raid is coming up." He turned to face the pony. "So, do you think you'll enjoy the big Raid? Descending on some planet that's no challenge at all, extracting about a billion barrels' worth of oil, and then coming back to Cybertron?" It appeared that Carjack would rather be involved in more serious invasions.

"And what kind of help do you think you can offer me?" Now Carjack looked skeptical. In his mind, it was the pony who needed help - and if he got into the Military, Carjack would make it his first order of business to put the new entrant into a special training group to improve his magical stamina.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Coltan

Masher's spies reported that Megatronism was spreading and had gained a solid foothold on Vallermoore. The mob boss cursed aloud and clenched a fist. It was always harder to disabuse someone of religious beliefs than political ones, and when the two types of belief were fused, it was more than twice as hard as tackling either one or the other.

"There ain't any otha option den," he growled to the Lone Scout who had made the report. "We's gonna have ta start up our own state religion wit' ME as da' god, and spread dat all ova dis planet before we's ova-run wit' undaground Megatronist exhaust."

The Lone Scout left, and Masher was soon on his communicator. First, he ordered his Advertising Department to prepare a campaign to convince people of his own godhood. Then, he connected to Replicator's most secret frequency.

[Vallermoore]

"When Decepticon duty calls, it needs to be done. If I do successfully become a Decepticon then one of my first things I need to do, after learning how to fly and blasting at a few targets, is my first conscription stint, and that is fine with me. I might find I enjoy raiding; in some cases, if the targeted planets are well known foes, I know I will.What I really want to do, once my first stint has been served, is be ordinated as a Priest and convert primitive alien races on other planets to Megatronism, and over the centuries,upgrade their societies to the point where the very best of them can successfully immigrate. While they are still too primitive to use oil they can pay it in tribute to their God. That is the way I think I can be of the best use to both my God and the Metal Planet. Of course,when Cybertron needs me to either defend it or take the fight to other worlds, I will be there in the beat of a fuel pump. I have no intention of shirking my duties to the Nation."

His tail waved as he spoke, a common pony trait when a pony was excited or sincere about something. "As for helping you, I could give you an amulet that detects changelings in case an entire Swarm were to someday sneak up on you in disguise as animals or birds and drain you, but you most likely have a detector already in that impressive body of yours."

***********
Vallermoore

From zero believers at first, Megatronism now had a packed temple and a large number of human and pony believers. It helped that with all the known alicorns dead, Ponyism was falling apart as ponies abandoned their faith, and many were attracted to the more powerful God. It also helped that the chosen few could earn the Ultimate Upgrade and perhaps cheat death forever or at least for centuries. Fire Eater was also very good at his job. His sermons were never boring and even for those who would or could never become Decepticons, they were useful. His congregation liked him. Apart from lightly monitoring what was said, the Vallermoorian government left him alone. Partly no one wanted to get blasted, but mostly there was freedom of religion and he was not urging outright crime or the destruction of the Vallermoorian government.

Coltan

Plans were put in motion for a state religion on Coltan, but it could not be done overnight. Masherism needed to say what it wanted from it's believers and what it could offer them. Meanwhile a Coltani who had decided whilst in an android body on Vallermoore to convert to Megatronism decided to tell his friends about it on Coltan. Recently the IOPC had set up it's own version of Domintel and this would be an early test of how good it was. If Megatronism was able to spread on Coltan it would be a disaster for Masher. An example would need to be made of this would be missionary and the spark of trouble stomped out hard.

[Victorious Decepticons]

Carjack paused for a moment. One thing the Decepticon Military had never had was a true chaplain. He realized that could change, at least while this new immigrant was serving.

"Be careful how you go about doing that service," he said, "or else you might get stuck in a boring position like base preacher," he warned, assuming, right or wrong, that nobody would actually want to spend their time in the Military safely standing in front of a giant image of Megatron's face in a magic-looking body instead of going out and blasting things (and dodging SAMs).

"That's a good idea you have about converting primitives. So far, we've gotten one planet completely converted. Long ago, we also planted seeds of belief in ourselves - all of us - as gods on a few others. That was even before Megatronism. Some people were so primitive that ANY Decepticon seemed as though he was a god, so of course, we capitalized on that to the max. There, they think that Megatron is a god of gods, rather than THE god of the realm. Wherever we have that racket running, all Megatron Energon has to do is stop by on the place's yearly High Holy Day to pick up its tribute," Carjack chuckled. "I never would have thought Megatron would REALLY become a god."

"As for upgrading their societies..." Carjack looked slightly apprehensive. "You'd better check with a High Priest or the Divine Leader before you do much in that regard. The Leader is quite protective of our position as the superior people. We don't want to upgrade anyone who isn't a Decepticon too much. I'm sure he'd want them to do noticeably better than they used to in order to cement their loyalty - but not nearly so well as would be required for them to become our competition."

Carjack listened to the offer of an amulet, but immediately confirmed Loyal Star's suspicion that he had that equipment on deck. "It's original Code, believe it or not. Learning magic that way was a lot of hassle and very hard on the wetware, but I know it now and couldn't imagine relying on some amulet - that could be lost, carry magical 'malware,' or recoded by some enemy." It was clear that he thought that amulets and other such items were for amateurs and suckers, though he was polite enough not to just say that.

"Speaking of magic, if you make it through Immigration, I'm going to request that you get assigned to my platoon so I can teach you how to do it properly. You ran out of steam back there after only five minutes. You can do much, much better than that! Oh, and don't worry about losing your magic after you become a Decepticon. You won't. Instead, the RAM and CPU upgrade will make your magic FAR more powerful. The thing is, many people think that magic is an inborn biological trait - a physical trait. But it's not. It's about how your mind-code has formed. Substantial changes to brain structure result only after you start using it, and for those who master it, are no more different than the changes that come from learning anything. Alas, with humans, it's also possible to botch it badly enough to damage the wetware. That problem is probably rare in pony populations since magic is an acknowledged and accepted part of life, so you would have had others to ask for guidance along the way."

"Anyway, since you'll be ported directly, save for major errors, you'll have the same types of power only with what amounts to nuclear-level amounts of mental energy to put behind them. But don't go hog-wild when that happens. If you don't get stamina training, you'll still end up burning out your chips by overdoing it. You'll also need a better cooling system. That spell you were doing back there will eat approximately 1,000,000 CPU cycles every 10 seconds running on a Standard Class 1 Military Chipset, and that generates a hell of a lot of heat." A Class 1 chipset was the variety given to new recruits.

Despite Carjack's chiding for the pony's stamina, it was clear that he was glad to be able to talk to someone who even knew what magic was and was actually able to fire something off that had a real effect. As a human, people often thought magic was either fake or delusional, and on Cybertron, talking about it too much was a good way to become a subject of Paranormal Research - and Paranormal was interested in stealing the scripts he'd spent a lifetime developing through hard work and danger!

"Anyway," Carjack said, "You need to find somewhere to stay for the rest of your Physical Challenge. However, to stay at MY place with my Asset Protection Force as your allies, you have to be able to offer me some sort of large payment. The last guy who came here got a cabin and everything, complete with the APF stopping him from getting stolen, but he paid me a fortune in exchange - and in advance..."

~~~~~~~~~~

Vallermoore

The Vallermoorian government didn't have to fear open revolution, but it found it progressively harder to get new regulations approved at the polls whenever the people had a chance to vote on them. A new political party was also forming: The Megatronist Bloc. Members could be counted on to categorically oppose any new legislation at the polls. They also began to secretly support candidates from both the major party and its opposition, hoping to cause a gridlock situation so that legislation couldn't get passed at the parliamentary level.

Fire Eater was very pleased at the number of converts and even at those who just came to listen. Even if some didn't completely convert, he knew that if they took in at least some of his ideas, the planet would be that much more friendly to the Decepticon Way.

Questions did come to his mind, though - what happened to the souls of the Ponyists now that their gods had all been defeated and deleted? Would their afterlife realms now be barren wastelands? Would the newly dead wait forever for assignment to a new realm? He wished he had asked Loyal Star about that before he left, but alas, now the other pony was lightyears away.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Coltan

It wasn't long before Masher's domestic intelligence agents picked up on the fact that someone was already talking up Megatronism. The agency, which was called the Market Share Protection Force in the manner befitting of a Corporation, didn't waste any time. Unfortunately for the Megatronist, Masher - and by extension, his government - wasn't quite as rigid as Megatron about conducting investigations or making sure every duck was in a row before pulling the trigger on a death warrant.

The head of the MSPF, a glitzy red bot with silver stripes and hands named Trust Builder, listened to the recordings the agents had made and instantly gave the order to raid his house. Inside, the Megatronist was regaling 10 friends with stories of Megatron's greatness. A proper attack would take them all offline before they could transmit Megatron's message any further, and assuming that good jamming was used, they would be dead. Other agents were to go around and nail the spares and saves at the same time.

Meanwhile, the Advertising Department commandeered the airwaves in preparation of showing this assault. They had propaganda at the ready to show what happens to those who follow "strange and foreign gods." Currently, they didn't intend to announce Masher as a god; he had told them to wait until he had some sort of ability to prove that claim.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Replicator's Shop

Replicator's communicator made a noise that sounded exactly like a common speaker glitch. Even the customer currently in the shop thought that it just meant that his communicator was on its way out and needed to be replaced. In reality, of course, Replicator never used a piece of junk communicator. He knew that the noise meant that Masher, specifically, wanted to arrange an extremely secret meeting.

Due to the secrecy level indicated by the code noise, Replicator didn't close up early. He continued to do business all day, selling copies of other people's very expensive modification parts, fake gold, some illegal artificial enchantments, and other things of that nature to whoever had the money. Once closing time finally came, though, he went in the back and flipped a secret switch on one of his spare bodies. If his business took longer than expected, this counterfeit counterfeiter would run his shop until he returned.

Finally, he took off towards a nearby bright star. Of course, he didn't actually land on that! Instead, he landed on a moon of a nearby planet - a moon that was so tiny that when a telescope was pointed its way from Cybertron, the light of its star blotted out its presence. ForIntel did know about the star, and the ploy of using it as cover for where a Decepticon really landed, but it also knew that there were 100 little moons in the area. It sent agents out, but chances were good that Replicator's deal would be dealt - and him already gone - by the time they found which moon he happened to have been on.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Before long, Masher arrived, along with a giant non-sapient cargo ship the size of those used to remove the water from Coltan. Replicator flew out to the vessel and confirmed that it was full of not mere oil, but Standard Energon.

"So you want to be a god." Replicator guessed in one shot.

"Dat's right! Yous a smart bot!" Masher enthused. They returned to the small moon together. Replicator didn't trust Masher not to kidnap him if he fully boarded that ship, while Masher didn't trust Replicator not to try to hijack it if he was allowed to board completely. A deal would have to be made before any handoff, or any situation that could become a handoff, would be allowed.

"I knew you'd be asking for that tech," Replicator said pleasantly. "I've been working on it ever since Megatron blew up that asteroid." He let this sink in. "Unfortunately, I haven't been able to copy that particular move. But I have managed to design something that could replicate that thing he did where he changed the spin of a planet, and I adapted it to make it so that you could stop a planet from spinning, too. Of course, everything on such a planet would fly right off if you stopped it suddenly..."

Could replicate...could stop...if you stopped it...

"What's da catch!" Masher demanded, knowing weasel words when he heard them.

"The catch is that you'll need either the force of 10 nukes or 10,000,000 souls to power it. And if you use the nuke version, the machine will be so big that you'll have to hide it somewhere on Coltan. The only way I could shrink it was to use the soul ver~~"

"Dat's a beta!" Masher said angrily. "I woulda heard aboudit if yous went and did a genocide, and ya'd need ta do a genocide ta get ten million souls! You didn't do anytin' like dat! Dat means dis is all t'eoretical! I can't be usin' sometin' t'eoretical! If Megatron gets winda dis, he might challenge me, and I gotta be able ta be sure I stand some kinda chance - and preferably, enougha one dat he ain't so antsy ta duel in da first place, ya know?!"

"Okay, so you don't want the Planet Stopper. How about a way to break metallic bonding? Basically, you use your mental energy to turn any metal-based opponent into nothing but a cloud of dust."

"Dat ain't impressive enough," Masher poo-poohed. He was actually quite impressed, and worried that Replicator could be running a system like that right now, but he also knew that the master counterfeiter surely had something a million times better and was just trying to get lots of Energon for almost nothing. Like Masher himself, Replicator was an astute businessbot and knew to never reveal his full hand too quickly.

After almost an hour of more dickering, Replicator finally offered something at the level Masher was looking for.

"It's almost certain that the Divine Leader is running some sort of quantum computing system," he said. "That's what it'd take to keep up with and respond to enough events to maintain a claim of divinity...or an illusion of it. It's also what would be needed to figure out how to power, and then control, the levels of magic or magic-like effects we've seen. I don't have a system built as powerful as his, but I do have one that'll basically make you able to handle 1,000 times more events than the typical high-end Decepticon board set."

"Did ya manage ta swipe dat rare mineral I heard dey're mining?" Masher said incredulously. He had tried to sneak some raiders onto that planet to steal some, but had no luck. Its heat had made most of them crash (both in terms of computing and the violently-crashing-to-the-ground kind), and the government's troops took care of the rest.

"Oh, of course not," Replicator said, stifling a chuckle. "I've been in the replication business long enough to know that if the government makes a big intentionally-leaked deal about a 'new, essential' resource or 'hot-hot technology' - that resource or information has nothing to do with anything I'm trying to copy. It's a ruse meant to throw us counterfeiters off. As for what Megatron's system uses, the actual material comes from somewhere else...somewhere far stranger than a mine and almost impossible to get to without the help of those with Paranormal Research's highest clearance levels. But remember: I'm Replicator, not Mr. Authentic. You get a system that's a copy of a system, running on a substance that's a copy of a substance, and that is not the only copy in existence. If you choose to hand over that tanker, that is. If you don't, I'm afraid our conversation has come to an end..."

Hours later, Masher returned to Coltan. No Energon tanker followed.

[Vallermoore]

Coltan

Fast One, a Coltani bot who under King Coal had been in the middle class, was talking to a circle of his friends. Coltani bots made friends with each other more easily then Decepticons and almost as easily as humans did. "Even if you think me saying he is a God is just a lot of used oil filter paper, he truly is an amazing leader with a huge Empire that he adds to almost every year. Nothing like King Crap was, and even better then Masher. And that amazing Metal Planet-I want to see if it is possible to go there and become a proper Decepticon despite being Coded as a Coltani." Sadly for Fast One, not keeping his voice chip turned off about Megatron's greatness would mean he never had a chance to try that. Things had changed since those heady first days of revolution when there was no secret police at all. There was now a Market Share Protection Force that was Masher's Domintel and just as ruthless,and an example was to be made. If Megatronism was not cut off in it's tracks, cultural corrosion would start on Coltan.

The first thing the bots inside knew was when their door was blasted off it's hinges. As the battle started, Fast One asked "Who is this? Are you robbers?"

"We are Masher's Market Share Protection Force! And you are all traitors to which no quarter will be given. Megatronism is banned here."

Two of the bots tried to fly away but were rapidly shot down, the rest did a running fight over three floors and gave as good as they got. When only Fast One remained and he knew he was doomed, he turned on his jammer and killed one of the attacking bots before he was blasted to junk fit only for a furnace. This particular raid, far from being secret, was filmed publicly and shown on Coltani holovision as a warning to any other subversives that stirring up any trouble and certainly trying to preach Megatronism in particular meant death. And it had it's effect. It would be quite a while before the MSPF would be called on again on Coltan.

Fast One found himself in a small metal room with two screens, one of Decepticon Heaven and one of Decepticon Purgatory. He wondered what his fate in the afterlife was to be.

*******
Vallermoore

From nothing at all, a Megatronist Bloc had formed and had between 5% and 10% of the voters, which meant at the elections up to a tenth of the MPs could be Megatronists. Whilst by themselves they were still too politically weak to jam everything up, it was a good start. And by secretly allying with other parties, they were starting to get into a position where everything in parliament could be at least slowed down. Given the right circumstances, their support could grow further. Huge numbers of sapient ponies were interested in what Fire Eater had to say, and many Ponyist temples were deserted and would soon have to close or sell up, with no alms coming in, the alms going to Fire Eater instead. Many humans were also interested. With changelings, it was much less so because most of them remembered the genocide of their race on Equestria and they had their own religion.Their gods and goddesses still lived. Fire Eater was now Vallermoore's most well known religious figure. He wondered how his pony acolyte was doing.

One day an undisguised and brave Changeling decided to ask Fire Eater if the Megatronist view was that Changelings were fit only for being killed, or if they too had any part to play in things.

*****

Decepticon Earth

"If I did become a base chaplain, I would expect to and want to take my place in the front of the battle line to show the other troops that a Priest of Megatron is as warlike and as willing to take a risk of battle injury or even death as they are, should I end up in a battle or military raid. Staying back at the base would hardly make Megatronism look good to the Decepticon Military. I want to do my bit to make the religion popular after all." As he said this his tail was flicking back and forth excitedly. With sapient ponies their tails expressed a lot of their feelings. "Good point about the upgrading. I would ask Fire Eater, my religious teacher about it, and if need be pray for Megatron's guidance. The last thing I want to do is cause later hassle for the Decepticon Military and Empire when trying to help it."

"Are there Changelings on this planet? Us ponies and changelings do not get on that well ever since a Swarm of their soldiers invaded Canterlot more then a century before your invasion. Changelings in out of the way places love cocooning stay ponies and there is no way I want to be ambushed by them. Then I would never become a Decepticon.And I would be happy to serve under you and hone my magic. Do you want me in your...Genocide Battalion? I'm not certain if they would accept an immigrant. As for paying you, I do have an account in Vallermoore with fifteen thousand ChingChings in it, but no vast fortune. Perhaps I can work picking fruit for you or doing some other useful task and pay my rent that way? Even if it is just toiling on a treadmill grinding corn? Or stay for as long as you think fifteen thousand ChingChings are worth and then go and take my chances outside?"

[Victorious Decepticons]

Coltan

Trust Builder - whose name referred to an old term for building monopolies, rather than the feeling - watched proudly as the holovision showed his forces deleting the traitors. He cringed as one got blasted, but overall, his agents had performed very well. The agency would surely be an integral part of Coltan society from now on.

~~~~~~~~~

Soon, Masher arrived back at his mansion. Once inside and in a very secure room, he opened the package he'd gotten from Replicator. He'd taken a quick look at it before he had authorized the transfer of the Energon, but now, he could properly examine it.

The item was much smaller than his current set of boards - about 1/4 of the size. It was held within two rails that were set up to be able to fit in a standard chest board cage. Masher carefully opened its case, and once he did, he was met with the sight of a device that seemed nothing like modern computer components. After examining it and making sure that it wasn't a bomb and did indeed appear to be at least be some sort of computer part, he closed the case and looked back in the bigger shipping box for the manual. Soon, he found the manual-chip; all parts of this nature came with one.

After running his several antivirus programs on it, he went ahead and opened the file on the chip.

Replicator Advanced Counterfeits
Congratulations on your choice of the finest custom counterfeiting services on Cybertron! You are now in possession of the Quantum One Mind and Data Processor and Storage Unit! Installation is simple. The intended location for this model is the space that would normally hold Motion Boards 2,3, and 4. This location protects the Unit from headshots. It also allows the Unit to have the stability and shock absorption offered by the main body.

Switching the mind from a standard boardset to the Unit follows the normal procedure for bodily mind-transfer.

Initial bootup takes approximately 10 seconds as the Unit optimizes the user's file system to work with its configuration. Afterward, the user will find that defragging is no longer needed on roughly a nightly basis. Instead, one defrag every 100 days will be sufficient to maintain perfect functionality. Note that if the user happens to enjoy defragging, it won't hurt to do it more often.

Reboots are almost instant. This speed can make a user feel as if a reboot didn't actually occur, but a temporary log will be created to provide assurance of proper rebooting operations.

This Unit has been coded to operate on the Decepticon OS, but note that there is a new, underlying OS that translates the usual one so that it can work at peak efficiency. It is believed that the Original uses a similar system since the Decepticon OS only works well on normal Decepticon hardware architectures. Note that while this won't be a problem in most circumstances, it can cause major issues with debugging at the lowest level. Debuggers who need to work with issues at this level should contact Replicator for assistance. If the Unit itself needs repair, it should be returned to Replicator, with or without the user still within.

For normal Debugging services, it is best to mind-transfer back to a standard Decepticon boardset both for ease of the work and to avoid the possibility of overly-excited Debuggers breaking their vows of secrecy in their enthusiasm for the new tech.

~~~~~~~

Masher copied the information to his memory, removed the chip, and then blasted the chip into vapor so no one could ever stumble upon it and find out what it was about. Then, he mind-transferred to one of his spares. He would use the spare body to install the new unit into his main one.

Installation was a snap. He simply took all of his old boards out and then put the unit in as specified. It took up three bays, and as Masher installed it, he noticed that it included its own shock absorbers that worked along with the ones the body usually had. "Seems a bit touchy," he thought to himself.

After a pause to gather his natural bravery, he attached the cables from the spare body to his main one and put through the command to mind-transfer back. Immediately, a growl of shock, pain, and outrage filled the room! Masher was in the process of finding out that the "initial bootup" was really a porting process much like the one faced by immigrants to Cybertron! He felt pain, massive confusion, and even psychedelic effects as the most important parts of his Code were switched from the Decepticon OS to Replicator's best guess - calculated by scientific knowledge of how the new hardware worked - at the Megatron Divine OS. At the end, only Masher's learned knowledge remained in Decepticon OS format. His personality, base capabilities like mathematics and cycle timing, and instincts were all ported.

Despite the manual's glossing-over of this part, it was right about one thing: It was all complete in 10 seconds. Immigration's transfer system, on the other hand, took at least 5 hours - excluding setup time. At first, Masher didn't really appreciate this fact. He spent the next several minutes cursing into the air and wishing all sorts of tortures onto Replicator. After this, however, he calmed down and marveled at how quickly the new unit was able to accomplish such a massive task.

Masher got out his communicator, called the Advertising Department, and gave the order to announce his new religion. Like Megatron, he figured that it was best to have his name as part of it. If he called it something else, some clod could come along and claim to better represent the ideal or even call him a false god! Masherism it would be.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Earth

"Changelings? I wish I could say there were none! There were supposed to be NONE!" Carjack said, miffed at the mention of the name. "Unfortunately, that clod...er, um, Overseer...got some of those delivered to his mine. Because of that, there probably ARE none by now. He kills his slaves really quick, zombifies them, and then works the zombies until even they fall apart. That said, occasionally a zombie will trudge on for years before it degrades. So there might be some zombie ones down there in the tunnels."

"Recently, somebody raided that mine and there was a big military exercise to re-secure it. But Overseer would have body-control chipped any Changelings the second he got them, so it's certain that none of them got out. A few humants and ponies did. Some of them may or may not be living somewhere in my territories." He looked over at Loyal Star. "The Decepticon Way only demands that Decepticons be protected from being narked on. But it doesn't say that non-Decepticons have to be narked on if they aren't legitimate threats to the State..." He flashed one eye as an obvious wink. "Let's just say that anyone I would condemn to Mine #1 is a person I'd rather take care of with this." He showed his right blaster. As he did, the sun glinted on the micro-fine etchings of the barrel.

"As for the Genocide Battalion, no, I was actually thinking that you would be part of the Regulars. But if your record shows that you have a history of either genocidality or the traits that normally lead to that or serial killing, that may change. Or if Immigration sees that you'd be a good candidate when they do the code-read. If they do, they'll let you know."

"Now: As for work. You must think your situation is pretty desperate to be willing to do work! You're lucky I used to be a human or else I'd pitch you into Rendering for being too undignified. But I know how hard it can be to keep one of those things running with no form of infrastructure when you're not trained as an outdoorsman."

Carjack thought for a long while. "All of Carjack Ag's grain grinding is done by massive machinery," he said as he considered the options. He thought the idea of using biologically-powered grinding wheels was ridiculous since he had millions of bushels of grains to process. "And I have a whole team of weeders already. I'll tell you what. How would you like to drive a mile-wide combine? I'd have to adapt one to be driveable by you, but it could be done. And as you should be able to guess if you've properly learned about the Decepticon Way, I have a very hard time hiring anyone to do the job and end up having to pay way too much. I also don't trust slaves to handle any equipment that powerful. I like driving the combines, myself, but even with a machine that big I can't get to all of the fields in time."

~~~~~~~~~~~

Vallermoore

Fire Eater was shocked when a Changeling showed up, mainly because the creature looked so strange! He was about to ask if he needed to be rushed to a hospital to have those holes taken care of when the being identified itself as a Changeling and asked if there was any room for them in Megatronism. Quickly, Fire Eater pulled up his file on the species of Vallermoore and looked up a bit of info on this type.

"My file says that you're a bunch of energy raiders that target sapient and semi-sapient beings with your raids," Fire Eater said, "and notes that Changelings were one of the 'major opposition' groups during our war against Equestria. As you have surely heard, we ended up having to call in the Genociders to stop the insurgency. Even so, there is no blanket ban against Changeling membership in the Temple of Megatron, and as long as you are a loyal follower of the Decepticon Way, you can gain all of the benefits offered to anyone of the same level of loyalty. You can also gain the Ultimate Upgrade if you are a proper practitioner of the Way and pass the immigration tests. While you can attempt to immigrate even without a long membership in the Temple, you'll have a far easier time of passing if you join the Temple first because you'll learn the right mindset needed to pass the psych tests."

~~~~~~~~~~~

Decepticon Afterlife Waiting Area

A grey-painted Decepticon spirit formed in front of Fast One, and once Fast One was done jumping back in shock, he began to speak.

"You have done well to declare your loyalty to Megatron even when you had no clear path to citizenship," he said. "However, you got deactivated because you foolishly started telling all and sundry when you should have known that Masher would see that as competition of the highest order. These two things cancel each other out somewhat, and firmly place you in the Neutral Realm."

"That said, the Divine Leader has already told me that if you freely tell us everything you can about current life on Coltan, Masher's intelligence apparatus, any police force still present, and everything else you know about the planet and how it's currently being run, he will make you one of the Neutral Realm's factory supervisors instead of a production unit. Alas, that is all I can give, for only the most exemplary Decepticons may enter the Realm of Endless Energon."

[Vallermoore]

Decepticon Afterlife Waiting Area

Fast One may not have had access to Masher's government secrets, but he could tell the investigators basic but useful information about how things basically worked on Coltan, which was still useful for knowing how things were going. Whilst he had failed through his own stupidity, which was a big minus, he had still been trying to spread Megatronism to a new place, which was a big plus. He would end up as an overseer in the Neutral Realm, neither Heaven or Hell. Sending such a faithful Megatronist to Hell would be perverse. Fast One's friends ended up as part of the Metal Stream.

Earth

Loyal Star was pleased that whatever his fate,it would not be one of hanging in a changeling cocoon as a living meal. He explained about the work thing. "I am at your mercy, if you didn't like me I would be a new blaster notch already. If I didn't offer something for being allowed to stay here, at the least you would put me outside and I have enough food for one month only. As it is public that you were biological once, I thought if you did find me, at least you would know what life in a body of flesh and bone is like."

As things turned out, Loyal Star proved to be a hard worker for Carjack,and he just needed food and somewhere to sleep, which was much cheaper then a Decepticon worker. The day came when an FNG was sent to bring him back to the Metal Planet and he soon found himself once more standing before Gatekeeper, his tail once more flicking with excitement and a little fear as he knew being ported would be painful. However, it would be worth it to serve his God in a proper Decepticon body, in a way that was impossible as a sapient pony. Once he had been ported, had a basic flying and blasting lesson so he could control his new body properly, and served his first stint in the Decepticon Military, he could become a Priest of Megatron and fly to Fire Eater, who would surely be pleased that his acolyte had earned the Ultimate Upgrade and could now spread the faith amongst biologicals and strengthen it. He thought of Fire Eater in the same way that as a Ponyist, he had thought of his Bishop. He then thought that if someday he was to die in some titanic battle defending Cybertron from invasion,the Pony afterlife would not be allowed to take his soul and thrust it into Tartarus where bad pony souls went after death.
*****
Vallermoore

Whilst many Changelings still stayed away, or at least came in disguise,some did come openly. Unlike the old Nazis of Earth before the Decepticons conquered it, the Decepticons did not normally see certain groups as utterly worthless and beyond redemption, fit only for death. Whilst they did genocide sometimes, it was not a major part of their ideology and they didn't pour vast amounts of Energon Cubes into setting up vast death camps for the sheer hell of it like Hitler had done. A Decepticon genocide was generally for those who refused to surrender when it was clear that further resistance was useless, or for those who had endangered the Decepticon race, like that country that offered the misguided Sky Knight a factory to mass produce Autobots.Letting hatred override everything else just created foes with nothing to lose from fighting to the very end.

*****
Coltan

Masher got a nasty shock when he installed what he had brought from Replicator at great expense and it ported him. Whilst at least it was quick, porting hurt a lot. No one liked being ported. All sorts of foul Decepticon curse words followed in a stream of pure profanity. Then Masher started to explore his new Godly capabilities and find out just what they were. For Coltanis to accept him as a God, he would have to prove it or he would be laughed at behind his back or thought of as in urgent need of Debugging.

[Victorious Decepticons]

Earth

Carjack had to make a few beta attempts at remodeling a combine before Loyal Star could effectively drive it, but once that was done, the pony saw the planet from Carjack's point of view for the first time. He towered above endless square miles of corn, and the "corn head" - the part of the machine that cut the cornstalks and drew the cut-off part towards the combine's intake - looked as big as a row of nuclear missiles. The corn itself was greatly enlarged, so this part was simply in the right proportions for the crop. The width of the combine, however, was far beyond simply being proportionately increased. Loyal Star could easily understand how if something got in the way but was closer to the ends of the head, it'd be impossible for the driver to even realize it was there. The only warning wildlife had that it was coming was its noise, which was quite tremendous.

Navigation of the machine was done with GPS. This, surprisingly enough, wasn't hot-hot technology. Earth's farmers had been using it to make perfectly straight rows for years before the Invasion. With the giant combines, however, it was also needed for avoiding desirable trees, buildings, and basically for not turning a mile-wide harvester into a low-grade WMD.

Once the pony had been properly trained, Carjack got to hire one less expensive Decepticon worker. He did, however, immediately correct Loyal Star when he started acting as though he was hard-working. "There ain't any work in driving one of those!" Carjack said with a mixture of laughter at the notion and irritation at meeting yet another biological that thought "working hard" was some kind of good thing. "All it takes is riding around and enjoying the scenery, minus a few checks of the GPS. The combine is the one doing all of the work! If it wasn't that way, I'd have re-engineered the system years ago. Now listen here: Anyone who is growing plants and thinks it's hard work is doing it wrong."

"There are a few kinds of plants that are extra-touchy. Most of those kinds are now referred to as 'found only in the wild,'" He laughed.

~~~~~~~~~

Back at Immigration, Gatekeeper met Loyal Star with a pleasant look, but one that showed a bit of concern. "DomIntel tells us that you plied Carjack with free labor," he said. "We would have preferred to see you use something better than brawn to pull off your survival. Carjack also reported that you seemed to think that working hard was a virtue. He was perhaps concerned that you were actually a DomIntel agent or Megatronist loyalty scout, but the fact is, he explicitly ordered the enslavement of 'those types who think work is some kind of a good thing.' 'If they love work so much, they shall have it!' he said as he told his troops to round up everyone who had not had several periods of unemployment in their lives and throw them into the mines, starting with those who'd been on the same job for 10 years or more."

"At least you've never been a low-level manager," Gatekeeper added. "Or at least, you were smart enough not to say so. Carjack would have never let you out alive if you were one of those..." Gatekeeper was clearly not pleased about Carjack's opinion of that rank, seeing as he fit the definition.

"In any case, since you are asking for entry not just as a potential citizen, but one who wants to be a Priest of Megatron, I believe the final verdict should be up to our Divine Leader. Let us pray for his response..."

When starting his religion, Megatron had been torn as to how to direct his subjects to pray. He could certainly see the massive ego-boost it'd be to have people prostrate themselves to him, Muslim-style, in abject submission. Yet, he couldn't stand people who either had no pride or put on the appearance of having none. Proper Decepticons, he believed, shouldn't be nearly kissing the ground or making it easy for others to come and kick them in the ass! Then he considered the Christian method, which in many sects, included plenty of kneeling. That, too, was an idea that thrilled Megatron's ego, yet also seemed unbecoming of a Decepticon.

Finally, Megatron had directed that Decepticons stand with pride. Pride in what they were, pride in their Nation, and pride in their god! They should also maintain a salute, with the right hand held over the chest while closed in a fist, to show that they honored their god. This, a show of strength and pride, while saluting to show their respect, would be the Megatronist way of praying.

In light of this, Gatekeeper took on a proud but solemn air as he intoned, "Divine Leader Megatron, here Loyal Star stands awaiting your decision on his admission to the Decepticon Empire, and on his admission to the Priesthood of your Temple."

Loyal Star, knowing the approved method, took on the appropriate stance while silently praying to get accepted.

Megatron was never one to use something as subtle as a feeling when he decided to respond to a direct query. Feelings were far too easy to misinterpret, ignore, or outright imagine. Megatron's response, therefore, came in an unmistakable format. The lights in the Immigration Office flashed and went out, and the walls rumbled with a thunder-like effect. Then, a single spotlight came on - right over the Transfer Seat.

"Send him though." Megatron's voice rumbled from the air in the room, and then after a dramatic pause, all of the lights returned to normal.

~~~~~~~~~

Coltan

Once Masher quit cursing and regained his bearings, he decided to test his divine powers. To his shock, he seemed to have NONE! After many tries, he radioed Replicator again, and after the counterfeiter had a chance to get to an area private enough to have a hope of retaining secrecy, he called back.

"What is dis piece 'o junk ya sold me! I can't even blow up a marble wit' dis t'ing!" Masher demanded, and then described a few more things he hadn't been able to do.

"Oh," Replicator said, not too surprised at hearing this, "That system doesn't directly make you magic. It's a processor and data handler unit. What it does, is give you enough mind-power to figure out the secrets you need to know. It also gives you the power needed to use your mind for...extended capabilities. But first you have to figure out how to fire that sort of command. Don't worry. With that kind of CPU power on deck, it shouldn't take you but a few days. If you knew nothing at all of magic, it would be harder. But you've already seen the Enchantment Units in action. Surely you can figure out how to copy that general effect and then power it with your new item there."

Masher wasn't at all happy to hear that! He wanted a turnkey godmodifier, not what amounted to a simple CPU upgrade! However, as he imagined how he'd like to tear Replicator apart at the welds for charging him a huge tanker of Energon for that...his Quantum One Mind and Data Processor and Storage Unit subconsciously went through Masher's files of known data, determined the type of welds Replicator was most likely to be using and what kind of energy could split them, how an Enchantment Unit would respond to such a command, how to use his mind to copy that sort of response, how to transmit the requisite intent and energy level from the Unit all the way to Replicator - and proceeded to ping Masher's conscious mind with the complete answer, along with a visual representation that seemed like a natural part of his imaginative process, all in 1/100th of a second.

"Maybe dis t'ing ain't such crap afta' all..." Masher said with amazement, and turned off his communicator without further comment. Usually, Replicator would have been just slightly worried about the implications of the way Masher had said that, but not this time. Replicator, after all, was already using a better version of the same device - and he had also mastered its operation.

Masher went outside the back of his palace, where he had the range that was typical of the homes of Cybertronian syndicate bots. There, he set up a few panels of scrap metal and welded them together well. Then, he stood back, generated the intent to rip them apart with mind-power, and let the Unit process out what it'd take to accomplish that. In another 1/100th of a second he had his answer, and with the use of what would have been 10,000,000 cycles' worth of power on a standard board set, transmitted the panels to fall apart with the force of his mind. About a second later, the panels fell to the ground with the welds torn asunder.

"Noice!" Masher said with the sort of grin one gets when the happiness of discovery is combined with the realization of the potential for malice. That's when he realized - thanks to the Processor - that the term "Quantum" likely wasn't just a marketing word. Instead, it had to be an important clue as to how not only the Unit, but magic, worked. If he could learn more about this theory and then master it, perhaps he could figure out the key to Megatron's divinity.

As it stood now, as powerful as the Unit was, it could only make Masher appear to be divine. Since Masher had no control over any realms other than his part of the Mundane, nor could he do many of the other more spiritual aspects expected of a divinity, he was actually a false god.

While that irked Masher on the level of the principle of it, he wasn't really too bothered by that fact. He would be able to pull off enough to convince the people of Coltan to worship him instead of Megatron, and that's all that mattered in reality. After all, the only way someone could find out for sure who controlled an afterlife was to die - and once someone was dead, it really didn't make any difference what they found out next!

[Vallermoore]

Immigration Ministry

Loyal Star realized that if Carjack had mistaken him for an undercover Domintel agent, who was quietly checking out his loyalty to Megatron, that had most likely saved him from being either enslaved or promptly stepped on. Although the huge red eyes of Gatekeeper showed some disappointment, it was not enough in itself for Loyal Star to be outright rejected. He had passed the test by a way that was not forbidden, after all. When they prayed to Megatron, Loyal Star had never prayed harder in his life. Despite being a religious pony, he was not generally a god botherer as such, (and with priests of all religions there was often a fine line between being properly religious and over the top) but in this case he really did want this particular prayer to reach Megatron's mind boards. And it was answered, and in dramatic fashion. For a few seconds there was darkness, lit only by the red glow of Gatekeeper's eyes, and then the light above Transfer Seat let up and Megatron's voice was heard as if He was in the room himself. "Send him though." Then everything went back to normal.

Loyal Star gave a whinny of joy but before he hopped into the Transfer Seat, he looked at his tail and flicked it for a few seconds, one last time. As he was strapped down but before he was muzzled he said "Long Live Megatron and everything properly Decepticon" as his last words as a sapient pony. Soon enough the painful part started, and if his mind had been read at that second, most of it would just be saying "Ouch!" which would not be worth much for checking that he was not a spy. However, soon enough they could read it properly as they placed it into mind boards. It did reveal that once he had been a fervent Ponyist, but that his conversion to Megatronism was totally genuine and that before trying to pass the immigration tests, he had both helped the Priest Fire Eater and thoroughly studied Megatronism. And he was certainly neither a spy nor a rebel, that was for certain. As before the invasion of Canterlot he had lived there for a while, he was used to dictatorship. Finally the mind was ported into a set of mind boards with a camera and a microphone attached so he could see in there and speak.

"Wow! The pain has gone and I feel amazing but I don't have a body yet."

*****
Coltan

Once Masher discovered the power he now had, he thought of a major miracle that would both amaze the Coltanis and make them like him even more. His Market Share Protection Force had not had to kill many bots, but more popularity would not hurt at all. If King Coal had been a popular bot, he would not be ingots now after all. He would summon as many Coltanis as possible to one of the seas that still remained on Coltan, and then Masher would evaporate the sea and declare himself a God, and the Coltanis would believe he was one having seen the miracle live with their own eyes. His power over them would be even stronger then it already was. Things were already improving on Coltan although it was not at Cybertronian levels yet, and the Grand Upgrade of every bot had not yet happened although more metal was being brought in. More raids were starting to happen, and they showed enough sense not to raid the Decepticon Empire and certainly not Cybertron like they nearly did once. Whilst more work needed to be done, things had greatly improved since the revolution.

On the appointed day for the miracle, huge crowds of Coltanis turned up to see it, on the land and in the air as well, eager to see Masher preform magic for them.

[Victorious Decepticons]

Immigration Office

Gatekeeper and a Debugger looked at each other with strange expressions.
"Ouch?" The Debugger asked, reading a screen that had a heading labeled real-time thoughts.
"That's a gratingly snooty way of expressing mild pain," Gatekeeper said with a bit of disgust. "Apparently this guy thinks its 'high class' to misuse it by saying it to express agony, instead of the far more legitimate 'AAAHHHH!'"
"But he's actually thinking that, not just saying it to pretend he's special! Maybe he has something wrong with his sensors!"
"You might be right." Gatekeeper responded. "We've gotten a few Brits who were so brainwashed with 'decorum' nonsense that they actually thought 'ouch' when they meant 'OOOWW AUGH AAAAHH,' but this guy's from Vallermoore..."

After making a few more remarks about the "ouch," they switched away from the real-time thoughts screen and over to the one of actual interest. They didn't need to wait for Loyal Star to get his head together to see what they needed to see: The actual data and memories being transferred over. This was the truly important part, not what Loyal Star was consciously thinking about at the time. After all, for much of the process, he wouldn't be thinking anything coherent at all.

Here, they saw his past as a Ponyist and his switch to Megatronism. Everything looked good, though they were worried that he might defect from Megatronism with just as much fervor if the time came when the Decepticons faced an enemy more powerful than themselves. This was always a possibility with those who switched to the Decepticon side only after the robots had proven themselves superior to someone's former group.

Before he was reactivated, the Debugger checked his script for errors, installed a Binary Language Pack, added a copy of the SEDP, and added the manual for the body he would be getting. He also spent a couple of hours writing a customized script that would handle all of the pony's usual motion commands and translate them into ones that would work with the new bipedal design. This work went faster than it did when the first pony came over, but it was still a relatively new task and therefore time-consuming. The hardest part was writing all of the commands for using hands, and disconnecting all of the many programming loops that would ordinarily cause all four limbs to move together when walking.

When Loyal Star was finally activated in his new set of boards, the first thing he experienced was a strange and dizzying sensation mixed with confusion as the system automatically generated his new master file table and then ran its first defrag process. Then, he finally returned to full lucidity only to find that he didn't yet have a body. The fact that he immediately realized that he was body-less instead of being stuck in an immobile one was noted as a good sign.

"We have to ask you a few questions and observe your functionality before we install you into your new body," the Debugger explained. "We like to be sure everything is working right before we give you command of an armed and dangerous war machine. I'm sure you can understand that..."

With that, he ran through a series of basic psychologist-style questions to establish that Loyal Star knew where he was, what had happened, who Gatekeeper was, and some of the events that occurred while he was on Earth. Next, he tested the SEDP installation by asking things that Loyal Star wouldn't be able to answer without accessing the data pack, such as the typical thickness of Cybertron's Planetary Steel.

Finally, after passing all of these checks, Loyal Star was shut down so his boards could be physically installed into a body. When he came online again, he would be seeing the world from the lofty perspective of a true Decepticon.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Megatron Mansion

Leader Megatron's body sat nearly inert, with its engine idling gently, as his mind entered the Neutral Realm. There, he flew to a big, gray edifice - the offices of the managers of this realm. Once inside, he strode through the hallways, his footsteps making slightly echoing clunks as he made his way to the office that held the Admissions Officers. There, he graciously accepted bows of welcome and words of adoration before getting down to business.

"So, what did Fast One report?" He asked.

He was told how Masher had been improving the planet, and that it was much better than before the takeover, but that some of its subjects weren't satisfied with the speed of improvement. Fast One had hoped that he could bring Megatronism, and thereby bring Megatron, to the planet to take it over and speed up the terraforming of Coltan into a true robotic paradise. He had, as Megatron had already known, been found out and blasted in front of cameras. Fast One had also reported on how DomIntel was being referred to as the Asset Protection Force and that the Advertising Division didn't advertise a product, but instead, was the propaganda arm. Finally, he noted that Fast One seemed to be somehow blocked from seeing the mechanized members of the Neutral Realm as a separate - and lower - class.

Megatron wasn't surprised about the names of the government agencies. "Masher's gang has always been referred to as a corporation," he said, "so it stands to reason that he considers 'his' government to be an extension of that. But that part about Fast One being impatient...that's something I can use. Now that the population has seen that improvement is possible, it seems that some think that it can be done even faster and better than it is. I'll be sure to capitalize on that trait. It's a rather human-like trait, too...I wonder what other human-like tendencies they have~?"

"As for this lack of classism...that's quite unnatural. Bring him to me. I suspect that there might be a nefarious reason for that."

Fast One was called off of the factory floor - an order he was happy to obey since he was already bored - and brought before Megatron. He bowed down as far as he could while making exclamations of how honored he was and how great Megatron was. What happened next shocked him - Megatron demanded that he open his panels for a code read, right then and there! Soon, after being reassured that he wasn't suspected of secretly harboring treasonous intentions, he went along with it.

A few minutes later, Fast One was fully aware of the idea of classes and class supremacy once more, and Megatron was informing him of the hack program that had been installed by Masher. "Amazingly, it stayed with you even after death," Megatron said. "But I've cleared it from you now. I'm sure you'll find your existence in this realm much more pleasant now that you can fully appreciate your status as a member of its upper class. As for the others who carry that program...let's just say that we'll soon find out what they think of it after they are made aware of its existence..." Megatron's eyes glowed with sadistic malice as he imagined Masher's palace besieged by rebels.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Coltan

Masher arrived at the large sea, which had already been drawn down quite a bit but was so big that it'd take a few years to fully drain it if he continued to use his usual method. He had realized that truly evaporating it would only turn it into a problem for the entire planet, thanks to the fact that evaporated water forms rain that lands far from its origin point, but he still had a plan to get rid of it. Instead of evaporating it, he would split the water atoms apart into oxygen and hydrogen. Then he would cause winds that would blow other gases into the mix so that neither would be pure enough to remain volatile.

The most tested way of splitting water molecules, he'd found out, was to electrify them. With enough electricity, they'd break apart on their own. Alternatively, the water could be heated to about 2,000C, which would get rid of half of it. He could do that again and again until there was none left. After considering it, he decided that electrolysis would be the best bet. It would also be the showiest way to go about it.

He put forth his will, and soon, recordbreaking storm clouds gathered over the body of water. These clouds didn't drop any rain, but instead, began to blast the sea with tens of thousands of extra-powerful lightning bolts. These pseudo-divine level bolts were far more powerful than the norm, and soon, the water began to dissipate. This, however, wasn't enough to get rid of an entire sea. It did, however, put enough energy into the area for Masher to take over and direct it in the most efficient way for splitting the water. When it finally hit the critical level of energy to pull off a miracle, Masher dispersed the clouds.

The crowd waited in anticipatory silence as Masher raised his arms and hollered out "BEGONE!" In an instant, the water simply disappeared.

Without explaining what he was doing - or that he was doing anything more at all - Masher then sent the invisible oxygen and hydrogen clouds away and brought in other winds to mix with them. As far as the people were concerned, he'd just gotten rid of a body of water the size of the Gulf of Mexico just by blasting it with lightning and then thinking about it. Only the more-educated people would guess that the water was actually split into its component parts - and even then, it was a suitably impressive feat that even engineers wouldn't consider possible for a regular individual to do.

Later, when Masher returned to his palace, Red Diamond would give him a piece of sobering news: The Decepticon Bureau of Propaganda had been making a full-on assault on Coltan's media shielding. Worse yet, it had been attempting to pirate-broadcast the idea that a certain patch had been secretly installed in Coltan's population.

"Oh, really!" Masher said, not bothering to deny it since he knew that Red Diamond had likely already looked at his own code and saw that in there. "If I hadn'ta done that, Coltan'd eitha be in a huge class-based civil war, or we'd still have 90% rustbuckets all ova da place. But da people might not see it right if dat competin' broadcast gets through yet. Put all we got on keeping dat jam up for now, and I'll get the Advertising Division on da job of telling da facts from MY perspective!" He ordered. As soon as he was done talking, he got his communicator out and ordered an emergency, top-secret meeting of his top Advertising professionals.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Military Base, Cybertron

Everyone in the newest batch of soldiers was on edge today. Word had gone out that today, troops would be selected for the Annual Military Raid. Almost everyone hoped that they would be called to be in on it, and the barracks were abuzz with tales of what the winners would do with their loot.

[Vallermoore]

Immigration Office

After being a bit surprised about the "Ouch " real time thoughts, they checked the important thoughts to see if he planned to be a spy, rebel or traitor. It was decided because it was extremely unlikely anything or anyone could be more powerful then the Victorious Decepticons, that it was therefore very unlikely he would defect and so he was allowed in. When his engine was turned on after checking that his mind was intact and sane, he felt an amazing surge of power as his engine turned on and he stretched and looked in a Decepticon sized mirror at his new body. It was in dark blue and grey for now. "This is amazing-truly amazing." Gatekeeper presented him with his token Energon Cube that all new immigrants got so they did not very quickly starve to death.

"You need to go with this bot here and he will show you how to fly without at once crashing into either other bots-who will open fire on you if you get too close, or buildings. Then a short time in a Raid Games Centre and on a firing range and you get to dispose of your old body. in the Military under General Carjack. After that you need to either raid or get Energon in some other way and get at least one spare and find somewhere to live and then as long as you don't commit treason, you can do anything you want. Be careful before you get a spare body, that you don't get into fights with other Decepticons if at all possible. You get three moths before you need to serve in the Military under General Carjack"

Soon enough Loyal Star, who considered his old name Decepticon enough unless told otherwise , did a quick flying lesson and then went to a Raid Games Emporium and temporarily surrendered his blasters. After some paintball battles and a shower, and some time on a firing range against targets, he went to the Main Pit and took his own body from a panel, gently touched it's cutie mark one last time with a finger tip, and then hurled it into the flames, where it quickly burned up. After a small amount of sightseeing and drinking his one free Energon Cube, which tasted like apple juice, he radioed Fire Eater with the good news. "Fire Eater, I made it, I made it! I am a Decepticon now just like you. I will fly over to you ."

He was followed covertly by Forintel, just in case he was planning to defect somehow, but they need not have worried. On the way to Vallermoore he looked for somewhere on the Raid List so he could get himself some much needed Energon.

*****
Coltan

When Masher got rid of the unwanted water, which to Decepticons and Coltanis alike was seen as unwanted toxic waste and a menace, he was cheered a great deal by the gloriously happy bots, many of which started thinking he must be a God to be able to do such a thing. And his grip on Coltan strengthened. As someone who had overthrown the previous ruler, he was aware that in the right, or rather, wrong circumstances, the IOPC's grip could be broken if the Coltanis ever got truly and utterly fed up with him. He was sure he would never let himself grow as lazy and vile as King Coal though, who had just let everything go to rust and misery all over the place. He soon got some unwelcome news from Red Diamond. The media shielding was being battered from Cybertron. In the short term, it was holding, but sooner or later pirate broadcasts would get through with the one thing that might really make Coltanis kick off against Masher and risk their own lives to try to throw him into a foundry pit-the virus he had put into the population. Such a thing would go down like water in a pit of hot steel with most robots, as they would fear he would put in a loyalty or enslaver virus next. Soon the meeting of Masher with his Advertising professionals began.

*****
Military Base, Cybertron

To SolarTempest's great joy, he was picked, and he jumped up and down a few times with the sheer joy of it. Yet another thing in his life had gone right. He wondered what planet would be chosen this time.

[Victorious Decepticons]

Coltan

The meeting with the heads of Advertising was a tense one, but not because of the threat posed by the broadcasts. Instead, the members of the group were quite unsettled and angered by the revelation that Masher had installed an anti-classism program along with their own upgrades! Masher found himself having to talk quickly, and do so not only without Advertising's help, but TO Advertising itself. Even worse, ad professionals and political spinners were naturally great at detecting their own stock in trade, and they called out all of the bull Masher was trying to roll. Finally, he just bluntly said "I didn't wanna spend a buncha time and effort on dis old classism sludge. Broke bots can't buy nuttin'. Dat's not good business for da Corpa'ration! Even worse, dey'd be unsatisfied and keep wantin' ta revolt, but wit' da class warfare goin' on, dey wouldn't eva get any richa. Every time somebody got rich, dey'd declare him an enemy an' raid 'im. Not only dat, but da more sociable types wouldn't really wanna get rich cuz dey'd be scared'a losin' dey're broke-ass friends."

"It woulda' taken years ta train all dat outta da peeps, IF it could EVA be trained outta' dem. More likely, dey'd just pass on dey're defective divisionism ta dey're offspring, and it'd stay dat way foreva'. So's I decided ta fix it quick 'n dirty like."

Many of them could, after a bit more talking - and assurances that no loyalty patch or other such malware had been installed - understand that Masher was just being pragmatic and impatient. Two, however, were not convinced. "There's only one way to know for sure that there's no patch that'd keep us from blasting you," one said angrily. With a swish, he brought up his blasters and fired them both directly at Masher at full power. The other began to move to do the same thing.

Masher's new Quantum system immediately spotted the threat and adjusted his conscious clock speed so that he perceived things in what humans used to call "bullet time." At this processing speed, he was easily able to see the blasts coming and work out the calculation for how to use his near-godly power to stop the attack from connecting. He put a mental shield around the blaster energy and used it to direct that energy into two ball shapes. Then, he reformed the energy balls into long, thin, shell shapes.

By the time the attackers realized that they hadn't connected, it appeared as if two artillery shells made of energy were just hanging in the air. Masher paused long enough for them to fully understand that they had failed, and then turned the shells to face them - one shell for each bot.

"I t'ink yous misplaced some energy," Masher said with a hard edge to his voice. "I have plenty'a my own, t'ough, so take it back." With that, the shells sped back to the attackers, and before the bots could react, the shells powered through their head armor before dispersing into circuit-vaporizingly-powerful blasts of raw power. This power then scorched its way down the bots' main command cables, taking out the motion boards and several servo control circuits in the joints below, before finally dissipating harmlessly into the metal floor. Smoke emanated from the attackers' heads, which had horrified expressions. Later, testing would show that they hadn't had time to mind-transfer since they had been taken by such surprise and the effect was so quick.

"Any otta' suckas wanna die today!?" Masher demanded. Of course, nobody was eager to sign up to be next, but it wasn't just the threat of death that defused their anger. They had seen that, failure or not, the other bots had indeed been able to attempt to deactivate the leader. That meant that there was indeed no forced-loyalty virus - or, at least, none that was active.

~~~~~~~~

After a few moments for the remaining Adbots to collect their thoughts and calm down, and for the dead bodies to be removed by some support staff, the meeting continued.

"Here's da deal," Masher announced. "We gotta come clean about dis programmin'. Othawise, when Megatron decides to cut t'rough da shield himself, he's gonna spill da beans in da most shock-n-outrage way he can. We want da people ta say, 'and dis is why we's doin' so well!' Not 'he did WHAT!?' Ya get me?! Yous need ta get da news out dere in such a way dat da people end up t'inkin'a dis GREAT UPGRADE as just dat! Sos when Megs says it's a bad t'ing, dey t'ink of it like if someone said Energon Supreme was really ocean wata. Yous can do dis, right?"

The Advertising heads nervously agreed, knowing that if they said "no, wrong," it would be their last day in this realm.

~~~~~~~~~~

By that night, specials were being broadcast over Coltan's holovision. They showed an apocalyptic view of what would have happened if severe class stratification was still in place on the planet, with more and more people becoming rusty as order broke down and raids on the rich became rampant. At the end, the programs showed a completely rusted planet with only a few dying bots crawling around.

After several days of programming like this, and saturation advertising for such programming - there ostensibly to promote the shows, but in reality, used as a means of getting these images in front of people who wouldn't watch an entire post-apocalyptic show - the news was dropped. This had been prevented by the inclusion of the Patch to Repair Fractive Classism, which had been bestowed upon the population to undo the years of mentally-corrosive damage that had been forced upon the populace by King Coal!

At first, the reaction to the news was mixed. Many were infuriated that Masher had done that, and for two entire days and nights, the planet was eerily quiet and devoid of activity as people stayed home and went through their mind-programming line-by-line to detect if any other unauthorized coding had been added. It was definitely Masher's good fortune that he had shown restraint and hadn't made any attempts at forcing actual loyalty, hadn't added any actual glitches, and had indeed fixed the glitches he said he would when he set up his Debugging Centers. Even with these benefits, however, it was only by the expert propaganda put out by Masher and his Ad-bots that saved him from being the target of a giant revolt.

He was reminded, however, that no matter how good a sales pitch is, there is no such thing as a 100% conversion ratio when a large amount of people were involved. Soon, he learned what it was like to be walking down the street and have random people try to assassinate him. He always won these sudden battles, but he began to appreciate what Megatron meant when he'd insist that being the leader was not all hot wax and Private Reserve.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cybertron - Bureau of Propaganda

Megatron paced around, fuming, as his Propaganda chiefs told him that they'd been unable to successfully broadcast to Coltan. Even worse, a recent ForIntel report noted that the spy agency had picked up broadcasts FROM Coltan, and that these broadcasts involved Masher admitting to adding the Code of interest. Topping it off, it appeared that Masher's propagandists had successfully averted mass revolt, though the news from various cities on Coltan would occasionally mention a 'glorious victory for our God' that would turn out to be a thwarted assassination attempt.

"A glorious victory for their WHAT!" Megatron shouted with angry outrage.

"Um, that's right, sir. Masher has declared himself a divinity. We were unable to see Coltan's news at the time he did it, but thanks to relentless efforts by the DomIntel Supercomputer, we were able to access their archival reports, and..."

"Did he manage to do anything to back up that ridiculous claim!" Megatron demanded.

"Yes, sir; he was able to make a large sea disappear, sir..."

Megatron stormed out of the Propaganda offices, slamming the door behind him. With his other hand, he already had his communicator out. Almost immediately, he ordered ForIntel to get more details about that claim. Next, he ordered the Bureau of Impossible Physics to figure out just how Masher had been able to get rid of a sea, with a specific eye to determining whether it was by magic, will, or - he hoped - some sort of large-scale parlor trick.

As the Divine Leader got further from the Propaganda building, a determined look crossed his face. He'd just come up with an idea to show Masher who was who and what was what - in a way the mob boss would never forget.

~~~~~~~~~~

Immigration Office

"Welcome to the Decepticons," Gatekeeper announced after Loyal Star passed all of the tests and was activated. He went through all of the standard introductory procedures, and before the new bot left, he warned, "That name of yours is close enough to our conventions to keep it, but you might not want to use it before you're ordained. Nobody likes a holier-than-thou, or loyaler-than-thou, type, and you'll find yourself getting into a lot of fights if you tell all and sundry that you're so loyal that you named yourself after that trait. At worst, people will think you're a wannabe DomIntel agent. So, until you get your Megatronist body, I'd suggest using a more low-key kind of name. Once you've been ordained, of course, a name like Loyal Star will be expected, and almost nobody wants to mess with a Megatronist priest for fear of being declared an enemy of the Faith and the State. Well, not unless you mess with them first, that is. If you do, they'll blast you as good as anyone else."

At the Foundry, he was surprised to be greeted with a rousing round of applause as he chucked his old body into the Pit. All of the workers, as well as those who had come to sell losers and other scrap metal, stopped what they were doing to welcome Loyal Star to his Decepticon life. "That's where biological bodies belong!" One said, giving a thumbs-up. Others made statements along the same lines, while some gave "woo-hoos" and waves. They all knew that this wasn't just the elimination of a random deactivated body, but a start of a new life for the shiny immigrant.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Loyal Star kept Gatekeeper's warning about his name in mind before deciding to travel to Vallermoore. When he was about to take off, however, his calculation showed him that he wouldn't be going all that far on one puny Cube. He'd have to stop somewhere and raid along the way. After procuring a Raid List, he realized that the targets on it were of a wide variety of difficulty levels. The newly-discovered barren worlds had already been hastily updated as being "Claimed by IOPC," "Claimed by ICC," or even "Claimed by 10,000 individuals." That left inhabited planets, some of which were designated jungle and some as desert. Then, there were a few specific multi-planetary empires on the list, obviously enemies of the Decepticon Empire, that had huge premiums listed for loot from them. Alas, as Loyal Star perused the latter ones and noticed how each big empire was followed by the names of approximately 100 or more planets that counted as raiding them, he decided that smaller targets would be good.

After a while, he selected a planet that appeared to have miles and miles of desert hardpan and a few nomads riding camel-like, yet strange, beasts in the background. He wondered about the little notation, "beware the sand worms," but was sure he could score a few Cubes' worth of oil to refine no matter what these things turned out to be. He'd just need a field still...or so he thought.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Military Base

Those who were chosen for the Annual Military Raid were surprised to learn that this year, they wouldn't be hitting just any old rock. Instead, they would be part of an unprecedented exercise. Their target, it turned out, was known only as Oil Planet #947376: Masher.

This sort of designation was in accordance with the government's naming system for worlds with no native life. The system was simple: Resource, type of celestial body, numerical order of its discovery, and who was currently exercising direct control. In short, this was an oil-bearing body, a planet, was discovered fairly recently - and most importantly, was an actively-producing property controlled by Masher.

"We're going to steal this entire planet," the Trainer announced to the group at StellarTempest's base. "And when I say the entire planet, I mean just that. First we take the oil, then we swarm and mine the metal, and then we take the rest for ceramics! The ENTIRE PLANET is going to be physically deconstructed and taken away." He paused as murmurs went through the group. Across Cybertron, similar scenes were playing out at all of the other major bases.

"We will be divided into groups of 10,000 troops each. Each group, and its attached cargo-bots, will be responsible for taking one part. Then, each group will go to an assigned Decepticon Government-controlled planet and drop off the loot for processing."

"The size of the intended loot pile isn't all that's different about this raid. We will almost surely encounter what is known as the Hard-Asset Protection Force of the Metal God Masher. This fancy name is the one used by the joke better referred to as the Coltan Military. We are going there to prove that this little militia is nothing before the might of proper Decepticons. Before you begin the actual raid, you will destroy each and every tin soldier of theirs that comes anywhere near us. We will not be bringing the Genocide Battalion on this raid. General Carjack will be flying, but just with his regular platoon, and we will all be fighting. We will show that these Coltan 'troops' are so far beneath us that we don't need the Genociders to wipe them out!"

"Since the opportunity for good loot will be limited since we're attacking a raw resource planet instead of a properly-civilized one, you'll all be granted 5,000 Cubes of Supreme after the raid ends. Of course, you can also take anything you can fit into your panels or haul by yourselves as well. Except, of course, for the cargo-bots since they'll be hauling the Governmental share. Cargo-bots will get 15,000 Cubes of Supreme for the extra risk they face as well as a reward for not flying away with all of the oil, metal, and sand they'll be filled with!"

[Vallermoore]

Coltan

The heads of Advertising were themselves Coltanis rather then members of the IOPC, for the very good reason that only Coltanis knew every detail of how things worked on Coltan. Normally they were all perfectly loyal to Masher and would not even think of trying to overthrow him; but they were barely holding back their own fury, their eyes a deep sea-green and their engines running roughly. Adding anything secretly to a living bot's code, even with the best of intentions, was seen as intensely suspicious. Masher had some harsh questioning from his own spin-bots.

"Why did you hack us? Is our loyalty not strong enough for you? Even King Crap never did this to every bot on the planet." "Yeah. Is even being practically worshipped not enough to make you feel secure? Do you think the whole of Coltan was just waiting to chuck you in a slag pit?" Masher replied honestly "I didn't wanna spend a buncha time and effort on dis old classism sludge. Broke bots can't buy nuttin'. Dat's not good business for da Corpa'ration! Even worse, dey'd be unsatisfied and keep wantin' ta revolt, but wit' da class warfare goin' on, dey wouldn't eva get any richa. Every time somebody got rich, dey'd declare him an enemy an' raid 'im. Not only dat, but da more sociable types wouldn't really wanna get rich cuz dey'd be scared'a losin' dey're broke-ass friends. It woulda' taken years ta train all dat outta da peeps, IF it could EVA be trained outta' dem. More likely, dey'd just pass on dey're defective divisionism ta dey're offspring, and it'd stay dat way foreva'. So's I decided ta fix it quick 'n dirty like."

Most of the bots there calmed down a bit. Engines ran a bit less roughly and eyes lightened, but things were still tense. A bot asked "What OTHER stuff have you sneaked into our Code? Perhaps you are planning to sell us all into slavery? The number of Energon Cubes you could get for that..."

"Hell No! I want bots who want me as their leader, not captured drones that are no use for anything but basic tasks and have to be told everything you want them to do. Drones are not much good in a battle situation or even in raids. I want to build an empire. If I had enslaved you, wouldn't I have activated that virus already to avoid ending up like King Crap? Check your Code if you think I'm lying."

That calmed things down dramatically for all but two of the bots who were angry enough to settle things by force. "There's only one way to know for sure that there's no patch that'd keep us from blasting you." With Masher's new powers, he was able to slow things down, and turn the bot's blasts back on themselves. That...and the fact that the bots could blast at Masher...settled things. Clearly they had not been enslaved if they could try and kill Masher.

It was decided that rather then wait for the news to be leaked in a planetary revolt causing way, it would be released themselves after some pretty strong ads on the holovision. When the news went out, soon the only bots in the streets of Coltan were IOPC members who were guarding Masher's palace and other key ministries, half expecting a massive revolt like the one that deposed King Coal and now threatened them. If every bot kicked off, the IOPC were grossly outnumbered. Inside their homes and flats and for the rich, their mansions, Coltani bots all over the planet were searching their code line by line for loyalty viruses, enslavement viruses, shutdown viruses and other malware. Once so popular that even if he was to allow the slag-worthy idea of elections he could win without any cheating, now things were far from secure. What prevented a second revolution was that no other stuff had been sneaked into the Coltani Code. A couple of hundred bots did revolt and it was put down with heavy violence by the IOPC. A larger group of just over a thousand left Coltan in disgust to find a new home somewhere. Nearly all the rest accepted it although a few lone bots tried to assassinate Masher and paid with their lives and their Metal for it.

*****
Cybertron/Outer Space

Loyal Star took Gatekeeper's helpful warning to heart and decided that in the unlikely event that he was randomly asked his name, he would just say it was Star. He knew no bot would pry even if they guessed it was not his real name. The first thing he needed to do was get rid of his old body which he took to the Main Pit for a speedy cremation-something normally not done for Earth ponies. He was pleasantly surprised with the reaction he got from the other bots, even the foundrybots, who he thought might be angered by biological trash being slung in their pit. There was clapping and cheering as this was the sign of a new immigrant. "That's where biological bodies belong!" Soon enough he drank his Cube, which his body registered as tasting like apple cider, and set off to Vallermoore hoping to get ordained. One Cube, he was soon aware, was not enough for the trip, so he pulled up the Raid List. Once he saw the entries on the IOPC and ICC, there was no way he wanted to tangle with them. Soon enough he chose a desert planet that seemed easy to raid and headed down to an unclaimed oilfield, feeling a bit overconfident, his Bravery Up set slightly too high for safety.

*****
Oil Planet #947376: Masher.

The old Royal Coltani Army, never that big, had been blasted into scrap when it unwisely sided with King Crap, as the ex-monarch was universally known now on Coltan. And the IOPC had needed to train a new one to replace it. It was brave and loyal and already better then a mere milita-but the garrison on that planet under IOPC Trainers and IOPC officers was massively outnumbered by the Decepticons. To their credit, most stood and fought and even sent some Decepticons back as data packets to the Decepticon Military Save Vault before they were destroyed. Then the entire planet-oil-metal-rock, water, as it had a small sea on it, everything that was not too hot to take-was to be stripped away, and this was a planet that could be seen with telescopic eyes from Coltan. Red Diamond had to tell Masher that an entire planet half the size of Pluto had been taken over by the Decepticon Military and was being utterly looted. "Do we order the population of Coltan to retake it? The vast majority would still fight for you if you ordered them to, and we might well have enough to take that planet right back before they have enough time to take everything of value from it."

[Victorious Decepticons]

Coltan
Main Military Base
Masher sat in a basic seat that was part of a special piece of artillery. This small-bore energy cannon was able to fire, retarget, and fire again over and over at the rate of approximately two blasts per second. Just as importantly, it had tremendous range, and could reach into the nearer areas of outer space.

Currently, he was using the weapon's scope to look at a swarm of Coltanis just outside the atmosphere who were obviously bent on defecting. They flew slowly, indicating that they had filled their panels with what was most likely their tools and other personal effects. Some were pulling small glider-carts behind them. These carts were of varying levels of quality, but all seemed to be of types used for personal rather than business purposes.

"Now yous are gonna pay for your disloyalty to your Nation and your apostasy against your God Masher!" Masher radioed at them just before opening fire. The long-range cannon immediately began its work, and twice per second, it fired a devastatingly accurate blast into space. The defectors began to be broken up into debris, and the group soon broke up in an effort to make it harder to aim. "He's going to kill us! He'll kill us all!" Cries of dismay and fear soon filled the airwaves in the group's area of space.

Masher had destroyed about half of the 1,000 would-be defectors when Red Diamond arrived with the bad news about his resource planet.

"Dammit," Masher said with a growl as he accessed his multithreading capability to pay true attention to both things at once. "No, don't send da population out there. Even if we drive off the first wave, da Decep population is far bigger'n ours and dey're all trained soldiers. Megatron'd just keep sending more until we were overpowered. It's gonna take some real t'inkin' ta beat dat. I'd bet dat's da Military Raid dat's goin' on up dere. Dey always take along a lot of new guys, but da Generals are gonna be dere too. And den Megatron'll show up." As he considered this, he continued to blast the spacefaring traitors to bits with his cannon.

In space, the dwindling number of traitors realized that they'd need to take cover quickly or there'd be none of them left. That's when one saw the action going on far away. "That's the Decepticon Military!" One called over the radio. "Let's ask them for asylum!" They began to speed toward the Decepticon formation while calling out on their radios to announce their peaceful intent.

The Decepticons looked in the direction of the radio calls, and saw a group that was getting utterly annihilated by energy beams coming from Coltan. It didn't take long to see that the group was in legitimate danger, but the Decepticons were too far away to be able to immediately interfere with the attack. Not only that, the Decepticon Military had no policy for protecting the weak. The weak were to be raided and enslaved, not given asylum to spread their corrosion to the great Decepticon Nation!

"Hey," one soldier said over the encrypted Decepticon Military frequency. "Let's grab some of those up and use them as our personal loot!"

After a quick buzz of discussion, about 100 Decepticons decided to use FTL to "jump" over to the Coltani defectors' position, use their energy-blast absorption technology to block the attack from Coltan, and escort the defectors to a "safer location." Their platoon commander, General Skywarp, was fine with the idea once he was told the rest of the plan.

Unfortunately for the Coltanis, they couldn't decipher the encryption and were quite happy when they saw the lights of FTL in the distance and then again right next to their positions. They were even happier when the Decepticons formed themselves into a wall between the Coltanis and Masher's cannon blasts and used their technology to absorb the energy. For now, it seemed, they were saved.

~~~~~~~~~

Masher stopped firing soon after realizing that he was now only feeding power to a bunch of Decepticon Military raiders. He did smile, if only for a brief moment - he knew that the Decepticons would never take refugees under any condition that refugees would want. Those defectors would probably be spending the rest of their pathetic lives as overworked mining equipment. The irony was delicious: In their haste to get away, fueled by their fear of getting hacked, they had flown right into the very people who would actually hack them in very deleterious ways.

After watching that for a moment, he turned his attention to his small resource planet. Even though it was smaller than Pluto, there was no doubt that this rock was indeed a planet. It orbited Coltan's sun just two spots down from Coltan itself and even had its own thin atmosphere. Or, at least, it did. As he watched, he could see the planet's mass being removed with great haste, and soon, there wouldn't be enough left to produce the gravity needed to hold an atmosphere.

Masher's eyes flashed for a moment as he came up with an idea. He concentrated, and over the next several minutes, the tiny planet seemed to become much smaller - but not entirely because of the massive raiding going on. Nearby cargo-bots slowed significantly, as did all of the troops on or close to the planet.

"What in the slag is going on?!" The Decepticons began to say. "Suddenly we're 10 times heavier than before! I think my struts are going to break!"

"Hey! The planet is turning molten on us! That wasn't supposed to happen until we stripped another 1,000 feet of surface off of here!"

As this was going on, Masher's eyes narrowed and grew dark. Up there, in the swarm, was a robot whose paint job he clearly recognized. It was StellarTempest - the bot that his offspring had been calling on the IOPC to deactivate that day at the base! He grabbed the controls of his cannon and began to fire at him to try to wreak vengeance, but unfortunately for Masher, the long-range artillery's cannon couldn't project a blast that far out. Even more unfortunately for Masher, the cannon's range was still long enough to get noticed by the Decepticon Horde even though they were outside of its effective area.

"Kill that thing!" Came the order from General Shockwave, and immediately, a large contingent of Decepticons opened fire at the location Masher's blasts were coming from. Alas, their distance - two planets away - meant that it took several seconds for their blasts to reach Masher's position. By then, Masher had seen that he was about to end up on the short end of the stick and had left the immediate area. The now-unmanned cannon exploded behind him as the blasts made landfall.

Despite these other events, one thing did remain true: Whatever Masher had done to his resource planet had effectively increased its gravity by 10 times, and the same was true of the materials from it that were in the holds of the nearby cargo-bots. In the process, he had also heated the planet to the point that some areas were becoming molten far closer to the surface than they should have been. These things greatly slowed the looting, and for now, it seemed as though it wouldn't be possible to take nearly as much material as originally planned.

That's when Leader Megatron's presence became far more prominent.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Megatron hovered near the planet, but not close enough to have to put much effort into resisting its new gravitational pull. "Masher has condensed the planet's materials," he announced, "and this has resulted in it having more gravity per unit of area than before. The condensation has also heated it, which is why it became more molten. But none of these things are serious problems. Cooling a planet is just a matter of drawing off its heat..."

With that, Megatron and Masher found themselves in a battle of wills. As Megatron siphoned the heat from the planet's core and surrounding area to cool it down, Masher concentrated on adding more - and on causing some of the materials in the lava to crystallize and form a matrix that would remain stable and condensed even if the cooling happened. As long as planet stayed condensed, the gravity would remain high and make it very hard to loot regardless of the core temperature.

Megatron, of course, realized that decreasing the planet's density would be essential to allowing the raiding to progress. He began to put effort onto breaking it up and then spreading it out, and he succeeded at getting a few blobs of lava to shoot away from the main body of the planet's core. Masher, however, was quickly building his crystalline matrix, and every part where he had been successful was now very resistant to this effort. Megatron would likely be able to overpower Masher's efforts with enough concentration, but as long as Masher's technology held up, it would be a hard job.

As this went on, Megatron detected a familiar energy signature. Replicator, he thought to himself. For a moment, a sense of hatred ran through him. He usually didn't outright hate the counterfeiter, but this was an unusual situation. This will be rectified, Megatron vowed to himself.

~~~~~~~~~~

On a Sandy, Apparently Barren World

Loyal Star landed at the location the Raid List said contained an oil field and began to dig. According to the List, it wouldn't even take a real derrick to reach enough oil to make a Cube or two. He looked again at the notation "beware the sand worms" and scoffed. What could a few stupid worms do? As he looked over the area, he saw nothing of note and figured that he didn't even need his Bravery Up running at such a high level. There was nothing here!

He was about to turn the patch down when he felt it. There was a strange, abrasive-yet-slithery sensation at one ankle. For a moment, he wasn't even going to bother looking down, but when he decided to go ahead, he saw a thin, long creature beginning to slither upwards from under the sand. As the description had implied, it itself seemed to be made of sand and the rest of its body blended with the surroundings perfectly. That's when he realized that the ripple that was actually its body stretched for at least 300 feet.

Still under the influence of Bravery Up, Loyal Star chuckled to himself at the idea that these 5-inch-thick things could be considered dangerous. Compared to his Decepticon body, even that anaconda-like thickness was like nothing more than thick thread! He decided to ignore it and went on digging. Soon, he struck the oil the Raid List had promised was there, and went to get out his portable oil-refining still to make Energon out of it.

That's when he realized that the sand worm was now all the way up his torso and had pinned his left arm to his side. His first thought was that a good yank would just rip it apart, so he attempted to forcefully pull his arm up and away from his body. At this point, he knew that he'd been far too cocky. The worm didn't tear or even budge. After a slight pause, it continued twisting its way up further, completely unbothered.

Now, Loyal Star recognized that this thing was going to be dangerous. He began to blast the rest of the worm with his free arm, only to find that the creature's sandy exterior made it as blast-resistant as concrete. Worse yet, it now detected that its prey was dangerous, and began to tighten its coils like a constrictor snake to immobilize and kill him. Loyal Star's legs, both of which were now within those coils, were soon pulled together so he couldn't walk or even kick. Soon, the metal began to bend under the tremendous force the worm's muscles generated. Loyal Star turned his blaster power to the max, hoping to either penetrate the worm's armor or overheat its insides, and fired away in desperation.

[Vallermoore]

In Space

The fleeing Coltanis had earlier been able to enter and leave Coltan with impunity, for raids and that sort of thing, without being fired upon. However, the carts they were towing behind them with all sorts of possessions such as spare bodies and tools inside revealed them as bots who were not going to return-which made them traitors. And Masher was not going to let them get away with that. They got a sudden and very unwelcome message from him over their radios. "Now yous are gonna pay for your disloyalty to your Nation and your apostasy against your God Masher!" This was followed by an immensely powerful barrage of cannon blasts, to which the blasters of the Coltanis were too far away to reply to, and large numbers of them along with any spare bodies that had not been destroyed by the Asset Protection Force were blasted into small pieces. The panicking Coltanis, generally unaware of the terrifying reputation of the Decepticons and their very negative attitude towards most refugees, thought that they could get help, and all but a handful of the survivors fled to them. After all, they too were robot life as well, and surely they would help them at least in the short term?

The Coltanis were escorted to General Skywarp himself. "I'm General Skywarp of the Decepticon Military, and since we saw that you are clearly no friends of Masher, you are friends of ours. But since we are on an active battlefront and there might be spies or even assassins amongst you, we would like you to disarm temporarily until this Military Raid is over. Then we will give you your blasters back and those who want it have a fair chance of citizenship." His eyes glowed with a warm red friendly glow and his engine purred at them. The Coltanis looked at each other, and then one took off his blasters and handed them over. When he was not at once blasted or jumped on, the rest started disarming, and the Decepticons stayed friendly until the last pair of blasters had been handed over. When General Skywarp saw that, his bright eyes darkened dramatically and his engine ran rough like dust had been dumped into it. "Grab them and chip them with slave chips!" Grinning, the Decepticons grabbed the Coltanis and held them firmly, the Coltani engines running with fear.

"Why are you doing this to us? We are Masher's enemies and your friends. We want to help you and if need be fight with you."

General Skywarp threw his head back and laughed. "Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Who do you think we are-sapient ponies?? They are the ones that think friendship is magic. But even if we did consider friendship a virtue, you have two strikes against you. First, you are political refugees and we detest such people. Taking you in would only create trouble and more work for Domestic Intelligence. The only ones happy to see you would be the foundrymen right before you were dropped into their pits. Worse then that, you are traitors and therefore totally and utterly worthless. A traitor to one side will become a traitor again if things go bad. You will spend the rest of your lives toiling away in our mines. Chip them!" Quickly each struggling Coltani was subdued and chipped, and turned into totally obedient slaves. Only their thoughts would be free, at least until they became utterly insane from boredom and lack of Debugging. The platoon would make a nice profit in Energon Cubes out of them and General Skywarp would profit too, as two of them were earmarked as his slaves.

There was one kind of refugee that was welcome in the Decepticon Empire. Those who had committed spectacular crimes and got a lot of money from them, and were fleeing from police, would be looked warmly on and given a chance to try to immigrate and become Decepticons. Even if they failed, they would be allowed to leave through a part of space that was not blockaded by police to take their chances elsewhere. Decepticons sneered at extradition requests and never extradited anyone to face the Law and prison or execution. Alas for them, none of the Coltanis were this type of refugee, and all would soon be starting new lives of slavery.

*****
By heating the planet up and turning it molten, the Decepticon raiders got a nasty shock and a few would need replacement limbs as a result as lava damaged or destroyed them. For biologicals this would be a disaster, but for these Decepticons it was just annoying as they would need a Military mechanic's services. As they were wounded in action on active service in the Decepticon Military, they would not have to pay for new limbs.

When Masher's excellent optics noticed StellarTempest up there, anger filled his mind boards. Sadly for him, the cannon did not have quite enough range, and it was noticed by the Decepticons, whose return blasts busted up the cannon, a cannon brought from Cybertron in happier times. Masher had time to get to a safe distance.

A magical battle then started between Masher pumping in more heat to keep the magma molten and Megatron cooling it down. It would take hours for Megatron to finally win this battle of wills and he sent a message to Domintel about Replicator.

*****
Replicator was busy in his shop when the soldiers came for him. After several arrests by Domestic Intelligence, he knew the drill. He raised his hands and said "I appeal to Megatron" and was allowed to shut the shop and put up a sign "Closed-getting hassled by Domintel again." He let himself be tied up. "We meet again. Maybe this time you won't get away with it," said one of the bots, who had arrested him once before.

*****
On a Sandy, Apparently Barren World

By the time Loyal Star discovered the danger he was in from the sandworms, it was almost too late, and he was held in the coils tightly and being slowly dragged under the sand to what would be his death. For the first time as a Decepticon, he felt a fear-not quite so much of death, as of his likely fate in the Neutral Realm making Decepticon parts for all eternity. By blasting at full power, he broke the worm's hold and was able to use his jets to get out of the sand. With great care he would get a few Cubes of Energon made and then would fly to a rocky cliff where he could bang the dents out of his legs.

Setting Bravery Up to a more sensible setting then 95% was, he drank two Cubes and headed on to Vallermoore. There he realised that his body was too big to fit into the Megatronist Temple, so he radioed Fire Eater. "Fire Eater, it's me, Loyal Star! I made it and am now a Decepticon, but my body is too big to fit into the Temple. Please could you come to me?" Unknown to him, one of the very few remaining escaped Coltanis had seen him and his Decepticon Seals from miles away, and having seen how Decepticons treated Coltanis, he had a deep dislike of them all. Depending on just how angry the Coltani was, Loyal Star might find himself in an unexpected fight for survival.

[Victorious Decepticons]

In Space

The captured Coltanis were made to hover in a location that was safe from blasts from Coltan and the target planet's new gravitational pull. They had found that simply being robot life protected them no more than the shared biological status of a gazelle and a lion would protect the gazelle. There was no way for them to even talk to each other now, and they hovered silently in their own little bubbles of personal fear and sorrow. At least they would live, or so they thought. In reality, this would only be true for most of them...

Meanwhile, the Great Leader and the lesser one engaged in a war of wills and magic. Both got the idea of intercepting the others' energy for his own use, and this slowed progress even more. After a long time, Megatron realized that it was all but impossible that Replicator would have been able to make an exact replication of his own system. That meant that Masher's system almost surely could be overloaded with a sufficient mental blast - and since Masher was actively drawing off the power Megatron was putting out, he'd almost surely not be able to stop that draw in time to prevent the damage.

With that in mind, Megatron exerted nearly his full power with the intention of causing that overload. The energy sped down the invisible "draw line" Masher had going, and since it was of a magical variety, it moved at faster than the speed of light. It was only because Masher's own system was far above standard technology that he even saw it coming. He quickly shut off his draw, but even so, some of the extra energy made it to him and ripped through his system. Masher was wracked with pain as his Quantum Processor did its best to protect itself through semi-automatic scripted responses. It caused the energy to disperse in all directions, and the amount involved vaporized everything within a 100-foot radius. Red Diamond, who had been nearby, didn't even have a chance to mind-transfer as he was reduced to atoms.

Finally, the overload was dissipated. Masher had survived, but now, his Processor was heavily damaged and he was in a state that was similar to extreme drunkenness mixed with even more flagrant errors. He would have to mind-transfer back to a standard system and be debugged before he would even have normal capabilities again.

The Decepticons didn't even have time to cheer when the Law of Unintended Consequences kicked in. Since Masher was no longer transmitting at the planet they had been stuck on, all of the parts that weren't yet permanently condensed by his crystalline matrix suddenly expanded. This caused a massive and lethal impact to the troops that had still been standing on the still-expandable parts of its surface or flying low above it, and gave the Military Raid its first serious unfortunate result in history. Luckily for StellarTempest, he had been flying out of range of the expansion, so for him, this event would just be a war story for him to tell an offspring at some point in the future - that is, if he decided to break the typical Decepticon style of simply never talking about any 'unfortunate' parts of a military activity.

Replicator! Megatron thought again, his eyes completely black with fury.

After the initial negative result of the sudden removal of Masher's interference, Megatron was able to quickly cool the planet and break it up enough to cool its once-molten core. Then, the remaining troops efficiently packed its substance into cargo-bots, who took it to the Decepticons' many offworld processing planets for conversion into useful material. They also made sure to take all of the scraps of any deactivated Decepticons. These would be recycled at the Military's foundries on Cybertron. The actual soldiers would be reinstalled into already-built standard military bodies.

Coltan

Even Leader Megatron would face overthrow attempts if someone saw him staggering about in a glitched, "drunken" stupor, and Masher hadn't had nearly as much time to build loyalty. With Red Diamond currently deactivated, there was no one around to do anything when a Coltani came up and took him by the hand. "I'll get you fixed right up," he said in a reassuring voice as he led Coltan's leader down the street. Masher mumbled something incoherent, and staggered along behind the seemingly-friendly bot.

After about 10 minutes, the pair were in the industrial section of the capital city, and in the distance, smoke could be seen coming from a small stack. The bot continued to lead Masher along, making his way to the smoky location. Other Coltanis, not yet quite so aware of this sort of thing, thought it was strange but didn't realize the true severity of such a situation.

Cybertron
Interplanetary Oil Procurement Corporation Headquarters

It didn't take long for a Cybertronian IOPC spy to report back that Masher was heavily damaged but not offline, and Chemist soon accessed Coltan's media to try to get the story. Before long, he found a channel that was showing Masher and the other bot. The reporter was speculating about the damage Masher had suffered and commenting on how the friendly bot appeared to be taking him to get help. Chemist made a scoffing noise, disgusted at the apparent lack of hardness of the Coltanis, when the camera panned back as the segment ended. That's when he saw the unmistakable sight of a scrubberless foundry stack in the distance - in the exact direction Masher was being led. He immediately knew that at least one Coltani had indeed picked up the Decepticon...or "Masher"...Way, and was in the process of practicing it at this very moment.

Now, Chemist had a quandary of his own. He could very easily keep his trap shut and let what was clearly about to happen go ahead and happen! As the top Underboss of the IOPC, he was the most logical choice to rise to Don status if Masher met his end! Yet, he also knew that what he had seen on the holovision was an unplanned, opportunistic strike. That meant that Masher would have at least one Save Disk still in perfect condition - and because of that, all it'd take for him to return would be one single loyalist who either knew where it was or happened to search in the right place.

After a few moments, the decision was made.

~~~~~~~~~~

Back on Coltan

Blue swirling lights appeared high in the atmosphere as the pair approached the service doors of General Metals, the largest foundry on the continent, and were met by foundrybots who were clearly of mixed emotions. Unlike on Cybertron, where the foundries were used as the tough and seedy arm of Megatron's more-controversial 'weakness cleansing' policies, Coltan's foundries usually only dealt in truly dead metal. The idea of throwing someone in alive, in itself, was something only a few considered and even fewer did...and the thought of throwing the leader himself to his doom - especially after how he had improved their businesses - was unheard of. Yet, here was someone who obviously wanted to do exactly that! Sell the Leader of Coltan as so much scrap!!

The IOPC bots above sped down as fast as they could. Just as Coltan's foundrybots couldn't see doing it and never even thought of it, the IOPC never even considered that anyone would refuse. They raced as fast as possible to save their Don, not only out of loyalty, but because they knew that they were of too low of rank to have anything to gain from Masher's meltdown.

At the foundry, the employees soon formed a blockade in front of their doors. "What the hell do you think you're doing!?" One said with some outrage. "You can't melt down a living person!"

"What the hell are you talking about!" The enterprising would-be leader argued back. "He's clearly weak and a liability to the Nation! According to Masherism, the weak are to serve the strong! It's time for him to serve us by providing his Metal to proper Coltanis, and to serve ME by providing me with 4,000 Cubes for his scrap value! Move out of the way, and accept my delivery!"

The foundrybots looked at each other for just a moment. Masherism did indeed say that. Would it be blasphemy to refuse to obey the directive - or blasphemy to melt down the God of Coltan in strict lawful-evil adherence to that same god's rules?

As this was going on, the IOPC bots landed and began to run towards the foundry. They didn't want to fire from the air for fear of accidentally hitting Masher. Because of this, they were able to overhear what happened next.

To the dismay of the one who had led Masher there, deeply-held old morals die hard, and it wasn't long before he had his answer. They refused to melt someone down alive, and on top of that, they refused to commit what they believed would be deicide. "We're sure Masher will forgive us once he gets his boards on straight. What you're trying to do is reprehensible! How dare you take advantage of his condition?! And after all he has done for Coltan! This foundry itself would be barely operational if it wasn't for Masher's mass-upgrade project! YOU would be nothing but a rusted hunk of garbage that would have been dead and in our pits - I can tell by the way you act that you weren't a rich bot! Now get out of here, before we change our policy on live meltdown and throw YOU in!" The foundrybots moved forward menacingly.

"So you want him dead before you'll melt him down. Then so be it!" The captor said with fury, ignoring their moral condemnations. He turned to blast Masher's head off with both of his weapons, not knowing that the Processor was housed in his chest.

To the captor's dismay, he was blasted from two directions before he could complete the move. To his right, all of the foundrybots opened fire, and from his front (but off to the side), the IOPC contingent opened fire. Within seconds, there was nothing left of him but a few very burnt pieces of scrap.

~~~~~~~~~~

The IOPC bots ran over to Masher and the foundrybots, and quickly formed a protective bodyguard contingent around the stricken leader. Then, they asked the foundrybots why they had refused to take the metal. Didn't they think Masher's Metal was worthy!? They also wondered why they didn't then throw the captor in the pit and fight each other for the dictatorship, but they didn't ask that part for fear of giving the other bots any ideas. The thought that the foundrybots really believed that they shouldn't do that still hadn't sunk in.

After some discussion, they finally realized that the Coltanis at the foundry actually believed that murder was wrong! The concept was entirely new to the IOPCers, and when they let that slip, the Coltanis were shocked. "That...that really IS what Masher meant when he said that we must 'cleanse the Nation of the weak!?'" They said with horror. "Surely not! He put a lot of money and effort into upgrading everyone!"

"Yeah, because if he hadn't, he would have been the Dictator of Nothing," the IOPC bots said. "From what he said, this planet was falling apart. Anyone with sense knows you can't genocide your own planet unless you want to be the ruler of a bunch of rust. But now that everyone's upgraded, he surely wants to cull those stragglers."

"Shuddup," Masher slurred, finally realizing a little bit of what was going on and that his guys were about to talk him into a jam, though he still couldn't really understand the details.

"See?" The Coltanis said, interpreting that as agreement with their position. In reality, Masher could just sense when a deal was about to go bad and wanted that to stop, whatever it was.

The IOPC didn't interpret it that way, but since they still respected Masher's authority, they followed his order and shut up. Soon, they walked away with him and took him back to his palace, which they then searched high and low for a Save Disk so they could restore Masher's missing data. After many hours, they finally found it - in an extremely well-hidden underground moisture-proof lock box that was sealed underneath one of the many planetary panels, in the dirt, outside in the yard. They'd had to dig up the entire yard to get it - there had been absolutely no sign of it from above ground since all of the panels had been recently replaced.

Soon after, they realized that all of the data was in Decepticon OS format - while Masher's running instance not only was NOT, but was encrypted with a far more advanced schema than any that had previously been seen on Cybertron. Even the DomIntel Supercomputer would need 10 years of full power to have a hope of cracking it. Their only hope of a speedy restoration would be to get it cracked by Replicator, who they were sure was responsible for the strange new system Masher had even though Masher had never admitted it to them. This, alas, would prove to be a problem...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Megatron Mansion, Cybertron

Leader Megatron landed with a furious bang and stormed inside, only to find Replicator sitting in one of his chairs looking cocky as ever. The reason for that cockiness was soon apparent, as Replicator reminded him that he'd never declared quantum computing research to be forbidden, and in fact had publicly announced research on it - including announcing the discovery of a certain substance meant to facilitate it!

"The fact that I happened to ignore the idea of using that particular substance is not illegal," Replicator noted, "and there is also no law against thinking that the effects of divinity can be created with science." He paused. "Also, Masher is still officially a citizen of Victorious Decepticons, and therefore is not subject to any technology embargoes. While Domestic Intelligence did inform me that he was able to interfere with this year's big Raid, you did not announce his property as a target beforehand and it was heretofore unprecedented for the Raid to involve a citizen. Therefore, it is only natural that business proceeded as usual, and on top of that, totally non-treasonous. Speaking of that, DomIntel seized my tanker of Energon, and since it was obtained via legitimate business, I would like that back."

Megatron seethed with obvious fury, but from a legal standpoint, Replicator was dead on. He had indeed not declared his system classified, because if he had done so, everyone would know that there was a technology aspect involved and there'd be a million copies instead of just one. Simply having that many betas running around would be bad enough it itself, not to mention that many more people would have gotten close enough to the actual unit to present problems.

On the other hand, he was not about to let that go. Replicator knew that Masher had set himself up as a rival, yet went ahead and did the deal! It might have been legal, but that didn't leave Megatron with no recourse. He immediately ordered Replicator out, but followed along after him. Once they were outside of his posh mansion, Megatron challenged Replicator to a fight as a private citizen - right there on the spot! This time, though he did NOT order a broadcast. He was sure he would win, but he didn't want to give any publicity to the idea of a god-tier quantum computer.

Replicator accepted the challenge. He was not a coward, and just as importantly, he had the only true top-tier replication of Megatron's quantum system and was currently running it!

Megatron soon found out about this fact as he fired his fusion cannon only to have Replicator use his size-and-density changer to shrink down out of the way of the light-speed blast with time to spare. The counterfeiter then returned fire with his copy of a mil-spec, standard-blaster-shaped, mini fusion cannon and melted a few inches of armor off of Megatron's chest. Now, things were serious.

The two were soon locked in tense combat, and both dealt good damage to each other once Megatron compensated for Replicator's new ability to move fast. Megatron's elite guard bots watched closely, riveted to the sight they never thought they'd see - someone who seemed to stand some kind of a chance against their leader. For many moments, the outcome was not cut and dried like usual.

Finally, however, the superiority of Megatron's system became apparent. He used his divine power to slow time around Replicator, and did so with enough power to override Replicator's attempts to speed it up. Then, he activated his jamming and fired one final fusion cannon blast.

Replicator's system was only able to overpower one of these effects. Either he could try to speed time back up and dodge - possibly failing at that - or he could put all he had on overriding the jamming and accept defeat. He had only enough time for a flash of consideration, and in that time, he decided to override the jam. Just as he did so, the blast hit, vaporizing the entire head and chest of his current body.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Over at the Domestic Intelligence office, the agents got the dreaded notice.
Subject cleared - all investigated activities legal.
~Megatron
PS: Subject's running instance deactivated

The agents were angry that Replicator had gotten off, but were happy that he got deactivated anyway. Obviously he'd finally gone too far!

That's when one noted that the notice specified that only the "running instance" was down. This was a clear sign that, though sore and down a body, their foe was almost surely still extant.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The "Open" sign was once again in Replicator's window. Replicator stood, in his shiny new body complete with Quantum Processor, at the counter as usual. He looked rather miffed despite his survival - his huge tanker of Energon had not been returned, and now, he'd have to steal it back from Megatron's vaults - the second-hardest target in the Empire.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Vallermoore

Fire Eater suggested meeting on Vallermoore's nearby moon, and soon, he was on his way as Loyal Star flew there from space. As Loyal Star adjusted his course, he saw another plane in the void and assumed it was a Decepticon. It didn't have Decepticon Seals, but it did have IOPC derricks, and it didn't quite come to mind that this meant that it didn't consider itself part of the Decepticon Nation. Soon enough, he found out - as two blasts shot by him and barely missed his wings. It was obvious that the stranger had meant to hit him.

[Vallermoore]

In Space

A few of the Coltanis would be blown apart when the planet expanded and sent to the Metal Stream, and they were the lucky ones. The remaining Coltanis would be sold as slaves and toil in the mines for centuries, always working except when they were given their Low Standard Energon once a day or occasionally taken in for physical maintenance. Robot slaves were far less common then biological ones and could mine far more ore, so most slave masters had the sense to keep them alive. SolarTempest had managed to blast at least one of their foes to small pieces when they roared into battle, and he could consider this a Military Raid well done and something to boast about to his gang when their first conscription period was over and they could meet. I am a much more successful bot then my Coder. I'm pleased that I didn't have to take my Coder's life as he had the sense to realize when I was fully sapient. Few of the bots who had blasted or indeed killed their Coders took much pleasure in it, instead they saw it as a sad necessity. Even a bot with Empathy Down on maximum did realise that without a Coder, he would not exist. The loot from the planet would be a slap in the face for Coltan and Masher and a big benefit to Cybertron. As the Military headed back, Megatron and the High Generals leading them, other bots got out of the way.

*****
Coltan

Although Masher was popular still with most Coltanis, there were a few who either hated him, hoped to take over from him or both. Seeing Red Diamond was gone and Masher was staggering around and clearly mentally damaged, one Coltani whose Coder had died defending King Coal took his chance. He would lead Masher to a foundry and push him in. He doubted that he could take control of Coltan from the IOPC, but at least he would be able to avenge the death of his Coder. I'll get you fixed right up," he said, and his eyes flashed the clear green of a connive, something which Masher's damaged mind boards were unable to notice. Soon enough he reached his target, without either the IOPC intervening or other Coltanis getting in the way. Revenge was so close! Soon one of the richest, most powerful and most fearsome of all Decepticons would be a pole of ingots. He found his way blocked by the foundrybots.

What the hell do you think you're doing!? You can't melt down a living person!"

"What the hell are you talking about?! He's clearly weak and a liability to the Nation! According to Masherism, the weak are to serve the strong! It's time for him to serve us by providing his Metal to proper Coltanis, and to serve ME by providing me with 4,000 Cubes for his scrap value! Move out of the way, and accept my delivery!"

The bots looked at each other. We're sure Masher will forgive us once he gets his boards on straight. What you're trying to do is reprehensible! How dare you take advantage of his condition?! And after all he has done for Coltan! This foundry itself would be barely operational if it wasn't for Masher's mass-upgrade project! YOU would be nothing but a rusted hunk of garbage that would have been dead and in our pits - I can tell by the way you act that you weren't a rich bot! Now get out of here, before we change our policy on live meltdown and throw YOU in!" A semi circle of angry foundrybots formed up. As Masher's captor tried to blast him, he was hit by both the blasts of the Coltanis from on side and the IOPC on the other side, and just a pair of smoking legs that would soon be foundry food themselves survived the blasting.

At once the IOPC bots surrounded their stricken leader. They were extremely surprised that the foundrybots had not allowed Masher to be thrown into a pit, and still more surprised when they found that these Coltanis considered murder to be wrong. They were used to encountering biologicals who thought that way, normally in battle as they blasted them, but did not expect this from bots that in some ways were very like themselves. When they took Masher to a safe place and located his Save Disc, they found to their horror that he was now running on a different OS that only Replicator would know how to fix. Chemist sent several of the more hardcore Masher IOPC loyalists to find Replicator to get him to fix Masher as quickly as possible and for now, took over on Coltan.

*****
Vallermoore

Loyal Star was shocked to be fired on for no apparent reason by what appeared to be an IOPC bot. He had done and said nothing that might annoy the IOPC or it's leader. However, he was going to deal with this in the Decepticon Way-with as much violence as necessary. In seconds he had turned his pain signals down to 40% and his Bravery Up to 80%, and he and the unknown bot were circling and blasting at each other. He radioed the other bot. "Blast a not yet ordained priest of Megatron for fun, would you? If you have no spares I'll send you to the afterlife for that! The two bots, both inexperienced in combat, gave each other minor wounds and chased each other's tails. It was a close thing, but Loyal Star had a slightly better body, and his lack of a spare and knowledge of his likely fate in the Decepticon afterlife gave him a burning desire to live. As Fire Eater arrived on the scene Loyal Star finally blasted his foe to pieces.

He radioed to Fire Eater "A strange bot attacked me without reason, so I did what a Decepticon should do when attacked." and dipped his nose in a polite bow to Fire Eater when after a short flight he met him on the moon, before transforming.

[Victorious Decepticons]

Outside the Megatron Mansion

Megatron stewed as his mind registered the fact that Replicator was not now waiting in the afterlife for a fast ticket to the Realm of Punishment. That meant that he'd managed to transfer! He almost took off for Replicator's shop, wanting to finish the job, but then decided not to. Replicator, after all, had been instrumental in stealing many types of enemy technology and handing the plans over to the government. Even though it was in exchange for pay, the fact was that Megatron's scientists - who were on the honest side of the spectrum - weren't as good or fast at figuring out how to outright copy the effects of something. They were more into carefully reverse-engineering things and then trying to build something better. Building better was usually a better strategy, but it wasn't a faster one, and speed was essential in wars.

Despite that, Megatron felt good about blasting Replicator into atoms. That guy had been a thorn in his side more and more often, always running around and selling copies of everything that was any good and thereby narrowing the gap between the government and the population and then showing that everything he did was legal! Yet if he just made a decree to ban doing that in its entirety, he'd surely be met with every Sonar and Meltdown making spite-copies and it'd backfire. His quantum "CPUs" worked overtime as he tried to devise a way to just wipe Replicator out without either losing access to the ability to quickly get copies of foreign tech or ending up with 10,000,000 new "replicators" in his place.

As he walked back into his mansion, he got out his communicator and called the Military office. "Start looking for top-notch counterfeiters in the ranks," he ordered. "Test everyone's ability, whether or not they were in the counterfeiting business in daily life." He hoped that they could find one that could match Replicator's skills, but who wouldn't be so problematic. Using the Military for a personnel search made sense because they could test millions of people right away, and disguise that testing as being for typical military purposes. If they found any who were good enough, those people could then be further vetted without actually telling them what Megatron had in mind or giving them any specific ideas. For now, even the Military didn't know what Megatron had in mind, which ensured complete secrecy.

After he disconnected from them, he made another call - this time to Domestic Intelligence and the Military outpost closest to Replicator's storefront. His eyes glowed clearly as he spoke in rapid Binary, both because of something he'd just realized, and because of what he planned to do.

Megatron was glad of one other thing: The Decepticons had, despite the unexpected difficulty, managed to successfully steal a planet. Even though it was a very small one, it was still a planet and it was still physically taken from its original position. This made this year's Annual Military Raid the greatest ever. On top of that, they'd also captured about 450 Coltani slaves. There would have been 500, but 50 had been in the way of the little mishap with the planet's expansion.

After a short rest indoors, and then mind-transferring to a perfectly-intact body, Megatron took off for Earth. The Coltanis would be arriving at the slave market soon, and the Leader had decided that he wanted a living souvenir of Masher's failure.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Replicator's Shop

The IOPC bots marched toward the shop, and people quickly got out of the way of the clearly-dangerous contingent. However, the IOPC group was soon surprised to find a group of 10 other bots who not only didn't move, but came towards them in blockade fashion. Seven of these bots were active-duty soldiers, while 3 of them were marked with the logo of Domestic Intelligence.

"Hold it," one of the DomIntel agents commanded. His insignia marked him as a Chief Investigator. Those were only stationed at the main office, so this was clearly a very important matter.

The IOPC contingent halted, but didn't look intimidated. Instead, by the looks of it to bystanders, it seemed as though a battle could erupt at any moment.

"By the Decree of Leader Megatron, Replicator is hereby forbidden from providing any sort of technical support, hardware or software, for the Device operated by your CEO. We have been commanded to prevent any attempts from obtaining such, and to keep Replicator under constant watch to prevent him from providing any services of this nature."

Immediately, the IOPCers argued back in loud Mafia style, menacingly gesturing with their blasters as they demanded to be let through. Despite this, the DomIntel agent and his military contingent did not budge. Instead, they pointed their own blasters at the IOPC group and told them to either leave now or fight. They also made it clear that if they fought, backup would be called in if needed, and more and more backup would come until the government's victory was inevitable.

Cursing, the IOPC went a few hundred feet away, but then immediately called Chemist for further instruction. The interim Don silently smiled broadly. Such an order would keep Masher offline - possibly for good! - and pave the way for his full ascension. He considered what to say very carefully. He'd need to give an order, but make it one that was unlikely to actually result in Masher's restoration. On the other side of the communicator, his eyes glowed so clearly it was possible to see the individual luminescent traces that generated their light along with the plain copper traces that carried the illumination commands.

"We'll have to wait until we can obtain cooperation," he finally said. "For now, return to the base and go back to business as usual." Obtaining cooperation was code for the practice of bribing the necessary agents - a common IOPC response to governmental reluctance or interference. Since it was such a standard practice, the contingent had no questions or qualms about doing what was ordered. Chemist, however, had no intentions of even approaching any agents who were actually corrupt. He did know which ones they were - as an Underboss, he had been shown Masher's list of the ones currently on the take and those likely to end up working for them later - but he would be using this information in a way Masher never intended. He would use it as a list of who NOT to approach. It was possible that the idea would therefore backfire and they would find someone who wasn't on the list who'd take the bribe, but this was very unlikely.

Done right, Chemist could have the IOPC offer fat bribes to 20,000 agents and never get a single one who was willing to take the money and break the blockade on Replicator. "My time has finally come," Chemist thought silently while leaning back with a smile. "Masher will be a mere staggering mascot until he finally dies, and then I'll truly be in control of the entire operation."

Behind him, Masher wavered on his feet with a dull expression. As was typical of computers of all sorts, keeping a bot running who was in a drastic state of hardware damage was causing more errors to accumulate every moment. Chemist turned around and said some soothing words, but did not shut him down. Hang! he silently willed. If Masher's system hanged, he would be the equivalent of comatose. Of course, since Chemist had no special powers and wasn't running any enchantments, his willed desire caused no effects. He would just have to wait. Without help, and without being shut down, it would just be a matter of time before all of Masher's current data was thoroughly and irreversibly corrupted.

Now, Chemist needed to do just one thing more. He needed to instigate some sort of fight or similar situation, and set it up so Masher's Save Disk was caught in the crossfire. Then, with no way to restore Masher left, it would just be a matter of having him declared unsalvageable by the main Cybertronian Debugging Center and allowing them to euthanize him...

~~~~~~~~~~

Elsewhere on Coltan

Red Diamond's Coder paced around with worry. His offspring usually contacted him every week or two, but there had been nothing in three weeks. He was sure he'd get a call after Masher had been seen on the holovision in a grave state and the news said that Masher'd been damaged at his palace, but the communicator had remained silent. To try to take his mind off of his fears, he put the latest news chip in his port and began to look at the stories.

Before long, instead of being relieved, he found his fears confirmed. The front page said how now, Coltan was being run by some unknown Cybertronian called Chemist and that efforts to restore Masher were ongoing. Along with the story, there was a picture of a large blast area and a small caption that said that repairs on the Masher Palace were underway after an explosive event. It noted that one unidentified bot had been caught in the blast and apparently annihilated, and made mention that the unknown person might not have made it out in time to reach a spare.

The Coder, Diamond Saw, knew immediately that it had to have been Red who was destroyed. Red had always been hanging around Masher as his main adviser - he would have been the only one that close!

With the sort of grimness that could only come to one who didn't know for sure if a restoration from a save was the same person or just a copy, Diamond Saw made his way to Red Diamond's mansion. Red had told him where his Saves were - while it was not unheard of for there to be rivalries between Coders and Offspring on Coltan, it was far rarer than it was on Cybertron. More often, Coltani Lines - while they were typically not nearly as close in maturity as some human ones - did keep their members apprised of key information like where to find a Save or a hidden body, just in case of a disaster. As insurance against the case of either multi-member death or betrayal, they typically told at least one close friend, as well.

Diamond Saw soon arrived at the manor, blasted the lock, and dashed inside. Immediately, he went into the main bedroom and started to feel around above the fancy, exposed rafter beams. Soon, he had what he was looking for: Red Diamond's most recent Save. Fortunately for Red, he hadn't accumulated enough enemies to make it worthwhile to make it nearly as hard to find as a Cybertronian would. Soon, he would be back online - and once he was, and was apprised of all that had happened since the Save was made, he'd know what he'd need to do: Protect Masher from being destroyed.

He would begin by trying to get to Masher's secret cache of Saves and Spares, which he was sure Chemist wouldn't have found yet.

~~~~~~~

A Moon Over Vallermoore

Loyal Star and Fire Eater soon met up, and after Fire Eater heard of the worm, he chided Loyal Star slightly for ignoring the warning on the Raid List. "You're very lucky to have made it off of there alive," he said. "If you had tried to set up a proper derrick, you would have been in a much worse situation. Those things are attracted by vibrations, and the bigger the vibrations, the more - and faster - they come. That's why you didn't see derricks all over the place already. Everyone who tries to run one attracts thousands of those worms, and when they've been incited by the tromping of an entire raid gang and the vibrations of an oil drill, they move fast. The worms come over under the sand, crawl up, and then drag everything under the surface. It's only after they've done this, and crushed everything that moves into scrap, that they realize that Decepticons and oil drills aren't edible. Of course, by then it's too late."

"The worms themselves aren't really made of sand, but their outer coatings are. They incorporate it into their skin, where it serves as a sort of armor. As you found out, this makes it hard to deactivate them or even drive them away. That's why the raiders don't just blast them all when they show up en masse, or more accurately, why it doesn't work when they try. Blasts just don't work fast enough to help against a big group of the things. And yes, as you might have guessed, I've been there. What I thought would be nearly-free oil turned out to cost me 1,100,000 Cubes. A million for my body, and 100,000 for my rig. May our Divine Leader curse the sandworm species!"

When the conversation moved to Loyal Star's successful immigration, the mood lightened. "I'd suggest starting the ordination process when you get your leave right after the 'boot camp' portion of your Military stint ends. You'll still have to complete your full-soldier portion of the stint, but that'll get things started. The first part is simple enough; you'll have to pass a Temple test on Megatronism. It's a bit different than the Immigration test, with far more emphasis on our Divine Leader's personal history and preferences rather than the Decepticon Way as a whole. Once you pass that, you'll do the rest of your stint. Then, once you're out of the Military, your Priestly training will start. One of the most important aspects of that is learning how to properly do public speaking. The Divine Leader has mandated that no boring speakers be allowed to preach at the Temples. You can be an ordained Priest and do other duties, but if you want to be a Temple leader, you absolutely have to know how to keep people's interest. If more than one person goes into unconscious idle on you during your sermons, you risk having your privileges revoked."

"You'll also have the unique privilege of being what you might call an officially-designated god-botherer. You surely noticed that we aren't for big, unified congregational prayers except for the Praise of Megatron that comes at the end of a service. Now, I can tell you one of the secrets to how Megatron knows the congregation's needs anyway. The congregants will naturally start telling you about issues that bother them and those they know, and you'll offer on-the-spot counseling. But after a service, once you're alone, you'll pray with a condensed version of those issues. This gives our god the information he needs, but without all of the filler most people would ordinarily add to prayers."

"Is there anything else you'd like to discuss?"

~~~~~~~~~~~

Earth, Slave Market

The dirty, green-eyed slaves were quickly sold to several wholesalers, and Energon Cubes were distributed to the troops who brought them in. All of the wholesalers were a bit fascinated by these strange bots and were surprised to learn that they were actually aliens! Some of them were happy to get what they saw as exotic stock, while others quickly went to work replacing their eye panels with red ones and repainting them in the manner of Decepticons in order to pass them off as the "tried and true" types they thought their buyers would want.

One Coltani slave, a new-looking one with no damage at all, was ordered to wait off to the side. "You're a lucky one," his temporary owner told the silent machine. "The Divine Leader himself ordered that the best of the stock be saved for him, and that's you." He gave the machine a solid pat on the edge of the wing, and ordered one of his guards to watch him so he couldn't be stolen. The Coltani was unable to move or respond, and could only wait and wonder what would become of him.

[Vallermoore]

Earth, Slave Market

The Coltanis that were being painted over and disguised as Decepticons were particularly angry, but could not even show it because of the virus in their system.

The Coltani who had been picked out for a special fate was a middle class bot who had taken part in the war against King Coal with many of the middle class, only to desert Masher out of annoyance at his upgrades having unwanted stuff put in with them. If he had been a biological, and if his slave chip had let him, he would have been crying at his fate. Slavery was certainly not unknown under King Coal; it was the punishment for many crimes under the old Coltani laws, which were now either repealed or about to be repealed to make Coltan much more like Cybertron. But except for murder or treason, Coltani slavery was normally for a fixed period only. Now he knew he would never be free again, just because he had been stupid enough to obey General Skywarp's
request and peacefully disarm to show his loyalty. He thought that he would rather be a mere human or sapient pony if it meant that he was free. Thoughts of endless mining on a diet of Low Standard Energon rose up in his mind boards.


A Moon Over Vallermoore

Having encountered these horrible sandworms before, and lost a body and derrick to them, Fire Eater was anything but impressed at Loyal Star ignoring the warning and nearly ending up being pulled to his death. For a planet to have a warning about something, meant that there were creatures or planetary conditions on it that could even seriously endanger a Decepticon body. Loyal Star knew Fire Eater was right to chide him as well as being his superior in the Church, so resisted the temptation to argue back, only saying "You are right, the next time I see a planet with a warning marked on it I'll be much more careful." When it came to ordination as a priest, things got much better and warmer between the two.

"I look forward to being trained as a Priest, and I hope I will never let you or our God down. There is one thing I would like to ask for help with, and I understand if you say no. I want you, if you don't mind and you can spare the time, to help with my first Raid and I would happily share the Energon gained from it in return for your help. Once I have a successful raid completed, I can buy a new spare and start establishing myself on Cybertron, but if the first raid goes wrong, I could end up dead and most likely in the Neutral Realm. After my first raid, I'll be a lot more confident and can sort things out myself until my first conscription period starts. It's not fear holding me back, I have Bravery Up to deal with that, and it's certainly not a reluctance to raid, it's that I have no spare or enough Energon to buy one. Which makes it vital that my first raid works. One bot trying to raid by themselves often ends up eating a SAM or otherwise failing."

He hoped Fire Eater, even if he didn't want to directly help, would at least give him some good advice. Fire Eater had liked him when he was a mere pony acolyte after all, so they were on good terms together. It was logic that made him want to get Fire Eater's aid. If his first raid went wrong, at best he would end up having to labour in a factory to gain his Energon. Whilst such a thing was not going to attract negative attention from Domestic Intelligence, it was not really the proper ideal of the Decepticon Way. As an immigrant and a would be Priest of Megatron, Loyal Star wanted to be the sort of citizen that Megatron would want him to be, and for now at least that meant becoming a raider until he joined the Military. At least, that was what Loyal Star personally thought. Many immigrants at least in their first weeks tried to be more Decepticon then the average Decepticon, and this was more so for Loyal Star. At worst at this stage, a failed raid would result in death. Whilst Megatron would surely not plunge him into the torments of Decepticon Hell just because a raid failed, an eternity making parts in the afterlife was not a good fate.

*****
Elsewhere on Coltan

Red Diamond was fortunate to have a relatively recent Save Disc and to be on good terms with his Coder, Diamond Saw. Coltani Lines sometimes had their frictions, but they tended to be more stable then Cybertronian ones for the most part. Diamond Saw fed the Save Disc into one of Red Diamond's spares and soon it came online. Red Diamond gave a deep bow to his Coder, the Coltani equivalent in biological terms of a big hug. Like Decepticons, Coltanis did not hug even when hugging would normally be really called for, and for the same reason; it was far too easy to accidently damage the one being hugged. Once his Coder explained what happened, Red Diamond knew that he wanted Masher back and healed. There were at least three known Masher spares on Coltan. There had been a couple of hundred Masher Spares on Cybertron, but he thought that it was possible that Domestic Intelligence had melted these down, and had found and destroyed all or nearly all of the Save Discs there. As a Coltani bot, Red Diamond could not go there anyway.

One of these locations of these Masher spare bodies was known to Chemist, a second was in Masher's palace, but there was a third hidden in, of all places, the Coltani sewer system, that only Red Diamond knew about. Masher had also trusted Red Diamond with the location of one Save Disc, which Red Diamond soon found and dug up. He tried to install the Save Disc into a Coltani spare at his mansion, but the Coltani OS was different to the Decepticon one and it didn't work. So he and his Coder quietly set off on a quest to get to that hidden body, without telling any other bot about it, just in case Chemist or other IOPC bots did not want Masher coming back online. On Cybertron Domestic Intelligence would already know everything, but the Market Share Protection Force was still finding it's feet as a proper secret police force. Even so, since Red Diamond was not in a disguised body, it did have enough to report a bot that looked like him digging up a Save Disc, although it was not totally sure just who the Save Disc belonged to. If he wanted to restore Masher, Red Diamond was going to have to act quickly.

At the same time, even if he did guess what had happened, Chemist could not just order the whole IOPC to track down and blast Red Diamond, or the truth would get out. He could however go after him with a few trusted IOPC bots who did not like Masher to try and prevent him ever getting to Masher's spare, the one spare on Coltan that he did not know the location of. Most IOPC bots who did not like Masher had joined his offspring's short lived rebellion, and been purged or chased far away, but not three of them.

Replicator's Shop

After some threats and a warning blast or two into the ground, the IOPC backed down from a direct fight with on duty Domestic Intelligence bots, not wanting treason charges to be levelled at them and for as many soldiers of the Decepticon Military to be called on to reduce them to scrap metal. They left it to Chemist to try and get Masher restored, not knowing that he now had other ideas.

*****
An IOPC bot with the Decepticon equivalent of the Mafia capo rank informed Chemist "It seems that Red Diamond has been restored from a Save, and was seen digging up a Save Disc five miles to the north of here. This is great news, our Boss could be online again very soon."

[Victorious Decepticons]

Slave Market
Over the next several hours, buyers came and went from the market. Most couldn't afford the 100,000-Cube "Decepticon" slaves, but some could and happily took one or two for their mines. Others saw the green-eyed Coltanis, with their duller paint and slightly different builds, and inquired about them. Alas, as the more fraud-prone sellers had figured, the buyers weren't very impressed by them. They were of a foreign robotic species, and therefore, automatically inferior. The most a forthright seller was able to get was 50,000 Cubes - still 100 times more than what someone would pay for a human, but only half what the conbots were making. Before long, cans of spray enamel and red eye panels were being brought in.

Once almost all of the robots were repainted, it seemed as though everyone would make good money. Unfortunately, the buyers were beginning to catch on that it was almost impossible for hundreds of Decepticons to have been enslaved at once. Buyers began to question the particulars of the body shape, which couldn't be hidden just by painting it. They also noted differences in the engine noise and the exhaust smell that gave away that the engines of these "Decepticons" were not the usual. Soon, they were demanding that the panels be opened and then rejecting them or paying far less when they were either met with refusals or they saw the plainly non-Decepticon engines and board sets inside.

By the time Leader Megatron arrived, 300 slaves had been sold, mostly at reduced prices. Prices were still dropping as fewer and fewer buyers who could afford robotic slaves of any type remained. Megatron hid a smile, knowing that after a while, the wholesalers would get sick of feeding them and sell them off dirt cheap. He could then buy them back for a song and ship them off to places like Equestria, which were lacking in robotic slaves. Even better, there'd be no political backlash since these were just inferiors anyway.

After chatting with some of the people at the market, Megatron approached the one who had been saved out for him. He was still in his Coltani colors and stood rigidly next to the appointed guard. "This is your new owner," the guard said. "System - transfer of ownership. Recognize as owner: Leader Megatron." The guard pointed at Megatron as he gave the command that would put the Coltani under Megatron's direct control.

"Excellent," Megatron said. "Thanks for watching it." He turned to the Coltani. "Follow me."

The two left the market, and Megatron took off into the air as slowly as he could without stalling. Behind him, the Coltani automatically transformed and took flight. After a long trip, the two arrived at a very nice, but comparatively small, manor in what used to be known as The Badlands of the USA. Most of the terrain was extremely rugged, yet also beautiful. The immediate area around the manor had been flattened out to provide a place for the house as well as a solid landing area. Megatron landed on his feet, and the Coltani transformed in the air and then followed suit.

"I've heard about the use of slaves as personal servants," Megatron said to the still-muted bot. "I'd never trust one on Cybertron, but you'll make a nice addition to my new getaway here." He opened the door and led the slave inside. There, the Coltani saw more poshness than he ever had before. An extremely light gold alloy covered the walls, and the floors were made of tiles crafted from highly-polished granite that had been inlaid with apparently-random thin strips of tough brass. Along the walls, sconces produced light with the effects of large candles with twice the brightness of medieval torches. The "candles" were artificial replicas that actually ran on electricity, but it was impossible to tell this by sight. The rest of the house was similarly appointed, though in the workshop, the flickering torchlight was replaced with the steadiness and brightness of filtered fluorescent light.

"Now. Your first order is to treat me to a nice hot wax job. As you do this, you will tell me about yourself - and what it was like before and after that false god showed up." With that, the Coltani was able to talk, but only about exactly what Megatron wanted to know. In fact, he couldn't NOT talk about it.

~~~~~~~~~
Coltan

Red Diamond didn't realize that Chemist was making a grab for the position of CEO of the IOPC, so his first move was to go over to Masher's palace. However, when he arrived, he spotted Masher through the window - obviously in a very bad state. He instantly realized that Chemist was leaving him running in order to cause more errors - it was well-known that in the case of hardware damage of that magnitude, the afflicted should be shut down. Alas, there wasn't yet anything he could do because there were several Cybertronian IOPC members guarding the area. Red Diamond and his Coder sneaked away before being noticed.

Once they were in a safe location, Red Diamond said that he couldn't activate the Save yet. With Masher still alive, a new copy would have no soul - but not for long. It would soon generate, or perhaps gain, a new and separate one. This would make it so that there were two completely different people, but both would have Masher's memories and consider themselves the real one. Red would just have to wait until Masher either died or ended up in a place where a restoration could be attempted.

"His running instance is on its last cylinders," he noted. "We should find his Spare, and then wait for this new guy to make the announcement. Then when he does, I'll install the Save and give that Chemist guy the surprise of his life!"

Red Diamond actually knew where a Spare was - Masher had told him. Without delay, he headed off to the one place a Cybertronian wouldn't even bother to look for one: the main governmental offices. Such an obvious location was unheard of on Cybertron - and this is exactly why Masher chose it. "I hid it in plain sight!" he had bragged.

When he and his Coder reached the main governmental offices - the ones that handled things like taxation, permitting, and other boring things left over from Coal's reign - it didn't take long to find the Spare. It was standing on a big pedestal right in the middle of the lobby, plated to look like a bronze statue. The two bots sat down on a nearby bench. Red Diamond looked totally at ease, but his Coder was clearly nervous.

"Aren't we going to look for our...lost item?" He asked.
Red Diamond leaned over and whispered, "you are looking at it."
Then, at a normal volume, he said, "That's quite a beautiful statue. He said that Megatron never had any of himself made out of fear they'd be toppled, as if having a statue invited revolution, and that he thought that was crazy. He had this one commissioned right away..."

Outside, the Asset Protection Force noticed that the two were sitting there, but didn't think anything of them discussing the statue.

~~~~~~~~~~
Chemist wasn't bothered when his spies told him that Red Diamond had found a Save. He played along with artificial happiness, but he already knew the truth: Masher was no longer running on the Decepticon OS, so the data would not merge. On top of that, if a reinstall was done, he would simply claim that the restored Masher was a fake. Only the system Masher had bought from Replicator could do the miracles that would "prove" godhood - and with it being damaged beyond redemption, a restored Masher would have no solid evidence of his identity.

~~~~~~~~~~

No news came to Red Diamond that day, so when the building closed, the two bots had to leave. After that, they stayed in the area, but didn't keep sitting in the offices. It would draw suspicion if they did an obvious stakeout of the place.

A few days later, Chemist's dream seemed to come true. Masher finally became totally unresponsive, and after a few more hours, smoke rose from the costly Processing Unit that had managed to run in its heavily damaged state for so long. Chemist wasted no time in declaring himself the Dictator of Coltan and the Boss of the IOPC, and showed Masher's body on the holovision as proof. "His system was too advanced for us to figure out," Chemist announced with great, but totally artificial, sadness. "We were also prevented from getting an expert from Cybertron to help. With no way to fix him, all we could do was watch as things got worse, until...until he stopped functioning at all."

~~~~~~~~~~~
Decepticon Afterlife

Megatron was overjoyed when his system told him that a very specific Decepticon had arrived in the waiting area. Masher! When he used his mind to look in, he got the confirmation. Masher was indeed there, looking absolutely furious and holding his weapons in the ready position. Soon, Megatron arrived in person to gloat.

"So you thought you were a god! Well, if you're so divine, you should have no trouble willing yourself back to life!" Megatron taunted. Alas, Masher couldn't do that - his system had reverted to his old specifications upon death.

"Oh, NOT a god after all!" Megatron went on. "And not only that, you banned my religion. Now you shall pay the price - the price of blasphemy and heresy!"

"Oh come off it," Masher responded. "You know that yous ain't really any better'n me. Yous just got a more expensive rig!"

"You think so?! You will note that you are in an afterlife situation. An afterlife that I control! What technology can give power outside of the realms of the living!?"

"Da original dat Replicata didn't manage ta replicate, dat's what!" Masher said with cocky confidence. Alas, he was wrong. The Original - the system Megatron was running - had also been imbued with magic. Technology alone, no matter how good, would have a very hard time duplicating its full power, if it could do so at all. Megatron wasted no time in saying that more than technology was involved, though he made sure not to even hint at just what the secret ingredient was.

"It give me great pleasure to be able to respond with 'go to hell' and actually make that happen," Megatron said smugly. A portal to the Realm of Punishment immediately opened, and on the other side, Masher could see a land of what appeared to be thousands of scientists, Debuggers, mechanics, and other totally-honest types - a land where no one would go along with his connives, and everyone was too smart to end up on the wrong side of them. There were also no refineries to raid, and finally, a place with a very visible dome that would prevent him from flying into space to raid somewhere else. It was a land that sent horror through him just to look at it.

Megatron pushed him to the portal, and despite the attempts of Masher's ghost to blast Megatron hard enough to free itself, Masher found himself right at the edge of it.

That's when he suddenly disappeared.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Coltan

Chemist's message hadn't even finished being delivered when Red Diamond ran back into the government building from an Energon cafe across the street. He quickly climbed up on the huge pedestal and connected a wire to his portable Save Disk reader. The other end of the wire went to the "wonderfully realistic port" on the side of the statue, and before building security could chase him away, the reinstallation was in progress.

Everyone was shocked when the "statue" they thought was a monument to Masher's ego came to life with a roar - a roar of pain and fury. As the noise, mixed with Masher's distinctive cursing, filled the room for 10 minutes, the random people started to look worried. After that short time, however, the engine smoothed out and the statue began to move with purpose. Masher was back.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Moon Over Vallermoore

"Ah, you want to do a proper raid!" Fire Eater said. "Well, the first thing you need to do is re-read the Raiding and Military Tactics and Strategy part of your SEDP; most of the basics are in there. Immigration would have given you some SAM-dodging practice, too. But to me, the best way to succeed at a raid is to hit some planet with no defense that's anywhere near that." He thought for a while. "I'll tell you what'd be really great; glassing part of that sand worm planet and then just setting up a high-speed derrick and draining it of a few million barrels! The problem is that nukes and derricks cost money."

"So, I'd say that your best bet, unless you want to try to join a raid gang, is to use the CON in you. I'd say it'd be a good idea to use some kind of artificial money to convince some sucker planet to part with 100,000,000 barrels or so. Then call in a cargo-bot to haul it for you in exchange for a cut. Use Mechanic's Transport - they're so honest it's almost heresy! The name is the tipoff. Mechanics are some of the most honest types outside of the government, or at least, the ones who don't end up dismantled are. While I may wonder about their commitment to the Decepticon Way, they won't fly away with your loot unless you try to rip them off. If you do, of course, you'll lose the whole load."

"The only catch with this is that you have to hit some place that hasn't been hit in that way before. If they've been hit before, they'll verify your payment by physical means, and then realize that there's no legitimate way you could have gotten it. On top of that, your target has to have good enough infrastructure for a cargo-bot to land somewhere."

[Vallermoore]

Megatron's Home

Using a Decepticon as a house slave would not have been that wise for Megatron. First, it might be a connive of some kind; from a bot only pretending to be enslaved so he could attack or steal Megatron's stuff when his back was turned, to a genuine slave whose body had been rigged to explode as an assassination plot. Second, should the news get out, it would not exactly help Megatron's public image to treat another Decepticon that way. Megatron was supposed to protect the Decepticon race as a whole, rather then enslave it's members. With a Coltani, there were none of these problems.

"Before the coming of Masher, Coltan was ruled by a monarch, King Coal. Once he was as great as you are; he fought to free our planet from it's human and pony rulers; he conquered a few other planets, he raided and fought and took risks in the first line of battle. As the centuries passed, he did this less and less often until he ceased even leaving his palace, preferring to sit on his throne and gorge on captured biologicals. And our system became enormously class ridden, with a large number of poor, rusty bots, kept in check by his open police force, the Sheriffs and his secret police force, the Secret Sheriffs. King Coal was needlessly cruel to his own people and his support withered away. To the point that when Masher and the IOPC came most bots were heartily sick of the King, me included. We rose up and overthrew the King and his loyalists in a day or two of glorious revolt, and Masher himself killed the King, although his arm was cut by the king's sword and needed replacing.

A lot of stuff changed, not all of it for the better in my view, not that my view matters any more. Bodies were to go to the furnace rather then being stored until needed for parts or, in the case of the highest nobility, buried in tombs. Most laws were either repealed, or were to be repealed once everything was sorted out properly, although the anti-treason laws remained in place. Duelling and vigilantism in general were made legal and welcomed, and raiding of other planets greatly encouraged. So I and thousands of others decided to raid the best target of all, the Metal Planet. Masher didn't like that one little but and quashed that particular raid before it got more then a few feet off the ground.

What turned my great loyalty and admiration of Masher to dislike was that he messed with my upgrades, so I left Coltan in disgust, only to be fired upon. And then captured."

As he spoke he was giving Megatron the hot wax that he wanted.

*****
Coltan

As Masher booted up again, it felt like he was being ported again, hence the torrent of Decepticon swear words coming out of his mouth. Being ported was painful. Once he was fully himself again he realised Red Diamond had brought him back to life, and saved him from the true horrors in the afterlife of what Megatron had planned for him. Such loyalty needed to be rewarded but first he needed to sort out whatever trouble had got him deactivated in the first place. Red Diamond explained what had happened and the two watched a nearby holovision with the news of Masher's *death*. Masher's eyes darkened dramatically as he found out what his trusted Underboss had done.

Many, perhaps most, members of the Company either realized that Chemist had let Masher die on purpose and wanted revenge, or themselves wanted to lead the Company, and one of them blasted Chemist right there in front of the Coltani media crew. Chemist's armour was dented and a little buckled and scorched but it held, and he blasted the bot into little bits of metal, flicking his jammer on and off just quickly enough to kill his challenger. "ANYONE ELSE up for a fight?" he demanded. For now, noone acted, but Chemist's positions were far from secure. At heart, the IOPC was a very large and very impressive raid gang. And when any raid gang lost it's #1 member, there would be disruption as it's members jockeyed for positions of power. With a small gang, that didn't matter, but with a gang as large as the IOPC, a civil war was very likely to break out in it.

At worst, the fratricidal conflict could get so large that the IOPC would implode and digest itself, in a mini version of what would happen to the Decepticon Nation if Megatron was ever overthrown. Masher knew that danger as much as any bot, and knew he would have to act quickly to stop the IOPC falling apart around his ears. He also wanted to tear Chemist apart for his treachery.

*****
Moon Over Vallermoore

"I know now from my SEDP how to forge money perfectly, and I know a planet that could fall for it, but I only have five Energon Cubes in my panels and I'm not sure that's enough to get the needed paper and inks for forging with." Loyal Star knew that if need be, he could surely find a gang that would accept him as a member. His SEDP said what to do to join a gang. He would rather be a con-bot though.

[Victorious Decepticons]

Megatron's Villa, Earth

Megatron listened as he obviously enjoyed the hot wax. He'd always wished he could get services like that, but on Cybertron, it had always been too risky - letting someone get behind him to do his back could, and most likely would, have resulted in that person being too tempted to resist trying to blast him while he wasn't at peak attention.

His engine ran roughly with surprise when the slave told him about King Coal gorging himself on biologicals. "My spies had heard something like that," he commented, "but I thought it was just youthful horror stories they'd been picking up! That's just crazy; he would have had nothing to gain from that. Well, nothing serious, anyway. A Human Food Processing Module only delivers about 3,000 calories per tankful, and that's nothing compared to the actual fueling needs of bodies like ours."

After getting the rest of the original response, Megatron noted the slave's tendency to switch sides whenever there was something he didn't like. "The reason Skywarp captured you all instead of taking you in peacefully is simple," he explained. "Those who turn traitor whenever there's something they don't like are certain to do it again. This is because there is no such thing as a government that is 100% satisfactory. There will always be something you won't like, no matter where you are or who is in charge, and then you'll be off to the next guy. It is this fact that has led to my policy of simply enslaving or even outright killing all treasonous refugees."

"I'm sure you think your reasons for fighting Coal were good, and frankly, he sounds like he was deserving of revolution. And, I don't know if you know this, but I despise hackers, so I'm quite displeased with Masher myself. It was actually because of me that you found out about his little shenanigan. My Bureau of Propaganda had been attempting to spill the beans about it and I was ready to personally use my power to break through the media blackout shield that Masher has set up. He realized this, so he decided to come clean while he could still put his own spin on it."

"But despite these things, I can only assume that you people would have found something about ME that you didn't like, and then you would have been off to who-knows-where along with the secrets of the Decepticon Design Specification and Codebase. And I can't have that. Yet I saw no need to let Masher just turn you all into scrap when you are more valuable as strong miners and oil roughnecks. So, when Skywarp gave the order to capture, I let it stand. That's when I decided that it'd be nice to do one of the things Coal had done, and that's to use one of you as a house servant instead of just another piece of mining equipment. So here you are."

Megatron shifted a bit, allowing access to his arms for waxing.

"Now. You told me about the overall political landscape of Coltan, but not about yourself. Also, what parts of Masher's changes - other than his hidden anti-classism hack - didn't you like? You said you were eager to raid. One thing I have to grudgingly commend that guy on is his intelligence of not letting you raid MY planet. I would have come with the Military and wiped Coltan clean of all robotic life if you'd attempted that. In fact, when we detected you massing up and looking in our direction, I soon had my communicator in my hand ready to give the order."

"As for your views, they are indeed important, though not paramount. It's always a good idea to know how a population is responding to an enemy leader's way of ruling." Megatron smiled, but grimly.

For now, Megatron did not mention that several hours ago, Masher had clearly been killed by someone, only to get yanked back to life by an as-yet-unknown party. His engine ran a bit roughly at his loss of dominion over Masher's soul, but he figured that eventually, the time would come that Masher's luck would run out once more.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Coltan

Chemist didn't have to wait long before his general challenge was accepted, but to his chagrin, the one accepting it wasn't anyone near him. The sky darkened dramatically, and an extremely powerful lightning bolt pounded down directly onto his head. Only Chemist's Cybertronian internal Faraday cage saved his circuits from instant vaporization.

The look on Chemist's face showed that he knew who must have done that, and almost instantly, his fears were confirmed as Masher appeared behind him accompanied by the loud bang of sudden and massive air displacement. "You lousy traitor, did yous t'ink I wasn't smart enough ta have a spare?! And ta t'ink I trusted ya as da Undaboss! Well I'm rectifyin' dat ri~"

As he got to the last part of his sentence, he saw that Chemist was about to take the coward's way out. Chemist's expression and engine noise had changed just a bit as he put through the command to mind-transfer away. Unfortunately for him, Masher hadn't allowed the situation of only having one Quantum Processor remain. Instead, he had used the first Processor's power to immediately reverse-engineer the device and had made a copy - which he had put inside of the Spare he was now using. This allowed him to very easily see what Chemist was trying to do the moment he began the attempt.

Masher waited for the tiniest fraction of a second before taking action. This was enough time for Chemist's system to reach the point of no return on the mind-transfer command. Just as it entered the sequence to actually start the transfer, Masher activated his regular jammer and used his mind-power to make it 10,000 times stronger than usual.

Static filled the holovisions as the live broadcast signal was jammed along with Chemist's transfer. In less than a second, the broadcast signal returned - only now, Chemist's eyes were completely dark. Masher pushed the body over with one angry index finger, and it crashed to the ground, dead. Then, he paused for just a moment, as if concentrating on something. There was no way for the viewers to know what he did that for, but all over Cybertron, Coltan, and even some asteroids, every single Save Disk that Chemist immediately became totally and irreversibly corrupted.

For just a moment, Masher looked extra-disgruntled. He remembered how Megatron had bragged about how he, rather than Masher, still had control of the afterlife. This was bothersome because Masher wanted to torture Chemist in a pit of steel that would boil for a thousand years, but had no way to do so. He pushed the thought from his mind and addressed the cameras.

"'Scuse da disruption 'a da last few days," Masher said. "I had an unfortunate result, as some already know, but it was just a min'a inconvenience. It's a sad fact dat d'ere will always be some idiot who t'inks dat an unfortunate result is a chance ta be da Big Bot. But as yous can see, dat doesn't work out too well fer da idiot. Chemist here was about ta try ta send his mind back ta Cyba'tron like da coward he turned out ta be, but I blocked his signal. So now, he ain't nuttin. An' his body is reject parts. But I ain't gonna have dat body smelted, cuz it belonged ta a garbage traita mind. I'll be sendin' it ta da sun in a drone so it turns inta da nuttin' dat it's worth."

"As fer da rest of yous, just rememba: It takes more den one lousy fluke ta get rid 'a Masha! I wouldn'ta lived DIS long if dat's all it took! So da next time some yokel tries ta say I got permanently deactivated, just blast 'im. Or laugh at 'im. Or betta yet, do both."

Masher walked away cockily and then went into his palace, which was still a bit damaged by the initial explosion. Soon after, Red Diamond and Diamond Saw arrived by air.

Once they arrived, Masher had Red Diamond follow him to the most secure vault room. "You definitely have earned 100 Cubes of Masha's Private Stock," he said as he opened up the 1-foot-thick steel door. Inside, there were Cubes and Cubes of the nearly-clear, brightly glowing fluid that a Cybertronian would instantly recognize as Megatron's Private Reserve. His successful, and ongoing, theft of the most exclusive grade of Energon was one of his pride and joys, but it was one he could never even mention. Most who tried to steal it targeted the Main Foundry, Megatron's vaults, or the Megatron Mansion - and all failed. Those who thought of targeting a pipeline always went for the big main lines that carried Energon to the various distribution points, and while these were fairly insecure in places, they didn't carry the best stuff.

It was Masher himself who realized that Megatron's famous supply of "hot and cold running Energon on tap" had to be coming not from a big pipe, but a small one - one just big enough to carry the amount needed to run it through the taps of the Megatron Mansion. He had traveled through Cybertron's Underworks with a pipe-detecting tool until it finally found it - a pipe about twice the thickness of a human garden hose, running all the way from the Main Foundry to the secured area of the Underworks that was underneath the Government District, hidden within the planetary panels between the first and second underground levels. Then he came back later, again and again, and very quietly installed a tap line about the thickness of a pencil and ran it from the center of the pipe's length down to a supply of empty Cubes hidden inside of a room three levels below. His only regret was that he could never admit he had the real thing, or else he would give his own heist away.

"This is great stuff," Red Diamond enthused as he took a sip.
"T'anks," Masher responded with a grin as he dipped a ladle-full into his own glass, swished it, and drank it in the manner of drinking fine brandy.

~~~~~~~~~

Moon

"Five Cubes of Energon could be enough to buy you more paper and ink than you could ever use, or not enough to buy you a single industrial-sized sheet, depending on which currency you want to counterfeit," Fire Eater said. "Typically, the more advanced the nation, the more advanced its anti-counterfeiting measures and the harder it is to copy it cheaply. However, that's not always the case. Years ago, when Earth was still under its own dominion, one of its biggest countries went through a lot of trouble to make their money hard to copy. However, despite their use of fancy paper for the real thing, the fact is that we could copy it just by using high-grade stationery, a good array of waterproof ink colors, a steady hand - and an old-fashioned washing machine to beat it up enough to hide the real texture of the paper. Then everyone would fall for it unless they specifically checked it for legitimacy, which most wouldn't. Even banks took it without a problem unless we tried to give them a huge amount of it.

"They tried adding a plastic strip to make it harder to do that, but then all we did was get linen paper and turn it back into pulp. Then we'd re-press the pulp into paper after adding our own strips to it, and it was back to business. Or biznez." He gave a look that was almost like what goes with a wink.

"Basically, though, if the country is primitive enough to still rely on paper, you can make millions of its main currency unit for about a Cubelet. The real key is knowing how to do it. To find that out, you need to call the Decepticon Interplanetary Bank and get the specs. Use their encrypted frequency - " He told Loyal Star the frequency and gave him a copy of the key needed to decrypt it - "so your target and any would-be Autobot-thinking sludge types can't find out just what you're up to."

"But an even better way is to go for a nation that uses electronic credits. Then all you need to do is buy the appropriate card from the Decepticon Interplanetary Bank and it'll be basically unlimited - but that costs 100 Cubes of real Energon."

"Either way, you really should get some Energon before you go, or you'll end up drinking it all just to get there and you might not get that far! So, what you need is a way to make money NOW. And the best way to do that in your situation is simple. You just need to install a jet fuel-to-Energon converter inside your body. I've got one at the Temple; I can let you use it for a while. Anyway, once that's in there, you use temporary paint to make yourself look like you're part of the fleet of one of Vallermoore's business jet companies. Then you just land at the big airport and taxi on up to the fueling lane. They'll start filling you up, and your converter will be turning that jet fuel into proper Energon as they do it. They'll start wondering what the heck when you don't end up full in the expected time, but will almost surely think that it's their equipment that's faulty and keep the fuel running until you have all the Energon you can hold. Then you fly away, and they stick the company they think owns you with the bill. After that, the company might prove that it doesn't have a 'demilitarized' fighter jet in its fleet, but by then, you're long gone. Oh, that reminds me: you'll have to carry your blasters in your leg panels if you do that. It's fine because you're doing it to further a connive. Legally fine, that is. If someone comes up and starts blasting you, it most certainly won't be fine."

"Just wait here for a while and I'll get some stuff to set you up if you want to work that connive. It'll take some temporary paint, a jet-fuel-to-Energon converter, and finally, a couple of extra tanks so you can fill up all the way to your weight maximum before you're out of space."

"We can also discuss the specifics of any heist you have in mind if you let me know more about what you're planning," Fire Eater added.

[Vallermoore]

Megatron's Villa, Earth

"Myself? My name is Best One. My Coder was a middle class bureaucrat in the King's civil service and I was Coded a century ago. We were not poor and living next to a river, but we were not greatly rich either. It seemed like I would be doing the same kind of job as my father when the revolution came. I played my own small role in deactivating one of the King's Sheriff's, and I liked nearly all that Masher offered. I had high hopes for being a raider and in fact I went on a couple of successful raids myself, sadly I was then captured and my role is now that of a slave. Apart from the hacking, the one negative thing of living under Masher, for me at least, was that the crime rate rose through the roof and I had to use my blasters several times and even kill another Coltani. Under King Coal, I only once or twice needed to use my blasters in a century, and now I felt in danger of attack constantly by my fellow Coltanis."

Although his body was hacked, his mind-boards were free, and Best One could imagine the squadrons of Decepticon Military blasting every last Coltani bot and IOPC bot for that measure on Coltan, until there were too many bodies for the planet's foundries to cope with. As he spoke his body carried on cleaning and waxing Megatron. This was certainly better then an eternity of mining, the normal fate of Decepticon slaves.

*****
Coltan

"ANYONE ELSE up for a fight?" Chemist asked.

Just after he said that, a lightning bolt pounded into his head. A biological would be rendered to dust on the floor, and most robotic life would be shorted out and killed outright, but the Faraday Cage held out, and he got away with a badly scorched head and a bad headache. With a bang, his eyes dark and his engine revving with rage, Masher appeared. "You lousy traitor, did yous t'ink I wasn't smart enough ta have a spare?! And ta t'ink I trusted ya as da Undaboss! Well I'm rectifyin' dat ri~" Chemist was no coward or badly made bot, but he knew he would be blasted to small pieces of junk if he fought now. So he mind-transferred away, only to be jammed as he did.

He found himself in a small metal room, with a holovision showing the joys of Decepticon Heaven and another holovision showing Decepticon Purgatory on the walls. Somehow, he feared it would be Decepticon Hell he might well end up in as a traitor both to Megatron and to Masher. When a bot of Chemist's rank or above ended up in the Decepticon afterlife, it let Megatron know personally.

*****
"'Scuse da disruption 'a da last few days. "I had an unfortunate result, as some already know, but it was just a min'a inconvenience. It's a sad fact dat d'ere will always be some idiot who t'inks dat an unfortunate result is a chance ta be da Big Bot. But as yous can see, dat doesn't work out too well fer da idiot. Chemist here was about ta try ta send his mind back ta Cyba'tron like da coward he turned out ta be, but I blocked his signal. So now, he ain't nuttin. An' his body is reject parts. But I ain't gonna have dat body smelted, cuz it belonged ta a garbage traita mind. I'll be sendin' it ta da sun in a drone so it turns inta da nuttin' dat it's worth.As fer da rest of yous, just rememba: It takes more den one lousy fluke ta get rid 'a Masha! I wouldn'ta lived DIS long if dat's all it took! So da next time some yokel tries ta say I got permanently deactivated, just blast 'im. Or laugh at 'im. Or betta yet, do both."

With these words, Masher showed he was back, and the IOPC knew it. There would be no fratricide as the capos fought each other to become the ultimate Boss of the IOPC. Stability had returned. Coltanis dragged out the body and within an hour it was in a drone and heading towards Coltan's sun to be burned into nothingness. As a traitor body, it was unworthy of reuse by either Decepticon IOPC members or by Coltanis.

Red Diamond did indeed get a reward-the best tasting Energon ever, and 100 Cubes of it! On both Cybertron and Coltan, very rare was the deed of valour that got this big a reward.

"This is great stuff."

Masher gave a genuine grin back, something quite rare from him. "T'anks."

"If anything happens that you should need to leave Coltan for, you know you have me, a loyal bot to hold the fort until you return, no matter how long it takes." Red Diamond said to Masher.

Red Diamond granted his Coder half of a Cube from his Cubes, as he himself would be dead without his Coder acting to bring him back.

*****
Moon

Loyal Star thanked Fire Eater and since he knew Loyal Star could not fit into the Temple, Fire Eater got him what he needed. When he was painted Loyal Star said "I know a planet with a country largely filled with sapient equines and I can radio them, and trick them into selling me a large amount of oil and then get that turned into Energon Cubes, which should be enough to live on. Then I can once it is no longer needed get that paint off so I can go back to Cybertron and not be blasted because they think I'm a foreigner.

Soon enough he had tricked Vallermoore's main airport into refuelling him. Normally, Decepticons never leant anything at all, but Fire Eater knew this was his acolyte and future fellow Priest and could be trusted. His connive would work as it turned out, and he was able to get the needed Energon to survive for now without having to join a Raid gang. He decided that he would find somewhere to rent and as things turned out, he ended up calling Silver Blaze.

[Victorious Decepticons]

Megatron's Villa

If Decepticons were able to choke, Megatron would have when he heard the name "Best One."
"Well I'm certainly not going to be calling you that!" He quickly said. "There's only one person who's the best one in the Decepticon Empire, and it's ME! I'll have to come up with another name for you."

"And sure enough, there IS something you didn't like that you wouldn't have liked about Cybertron either: The fact that there is no law to hide behind...that there is no refuge for a coward or a weakling. I can tell by how you talk that you would have tried to bring cultural corrosion to the great Decepticon Race and only ended up executed if you had come - or worse, tried to overthrow me. You 'had to' use your blasters, and 'even' kill another Coltani. Not: 'You finally 'got to' use your blasters for their intended purpose, and even 'got to' deactivate some worthless punk and sell his lousy Metal!' Do you see the difference in mindset? What makes it so that you are now a slave, while a Decepticon is in charge of Coltan?"

"Masher likes to think of himself as something other than a Decepticon. But I guarantee you, he is one, right down to the tappets in his engine. The main problem I have with him is that he is ambitious to the point of being a potential enemy. But so far, he has managed to avoid running afoul of most of my official decrees. I could, technically, take over the government of Coltan - planets seized by raid gangs are officially parts of the Empire - but on the other hand, is it not normal for a Decepticon to want one of his own? That said, I was fully prepared to come with the Military and wrench it away from Chemist, who did nothing to win it except the most basic of transparent connives and wouldn't have lasted 10 days as its leader."

"I also have no qualms in reminding Masher who has the real power, and make sure to do so regularly enough that he doesn't forget it. That's why I took that little bauble of his, and did so in a way that let him see the Decepticon Military's massive raiding power and how puny the IOPC's ability really is when directly compared to my forces. He needs to be constantly reminded that he is not a power in comparison to me." By 'little bauble,' Megatron of course referred to the planet his Military had made off with.

The slave, unaware of what had gone on since his capture, said nothing about Chemist's attempted takeover since he didn't know what Megatron was talking about.

"Chemist was Masher's second in command in the Corporation," Megatron noted, sensing the captive's lack of knowledge. "After Masher tried to keep me from swiping that planet, I overloaded him, and Chemist was acting as interim dictator. Or at least he was, until some fool reactivated Masher. Needless to say, it didn't take long for Chemist to get 'fired' - from living. Now Chemist's soul awaits my judgment, but he can stand and wait until you're done with this task."

"The biggest problem Masher has is impatience. He's used to being able to get things changed right away. It's an issue that just comes with the territory of high-powered leadership - most things can be changed just by making a decree. But not everything can be changed that quickly, and that's where the trouble starts. He couldn't adapt fast enough when faced with the task of actually having to convince millions of people to do what he wanted."

"It disappointed me, really. He has a highly skilled Advertising Department, but he didn't give his PR people a chance to do their jobs and cause opinion to truly shift against classism through propaganda. Mistakes like this will be the end of him if he doesn't learn quickly."

As Megatron kept talking, the slave, who had not yet been renamed, finished the wax job and had just been standing and listening. Megatron now ran his hands over his body and gun barrel, enjoying the slickness of the wax.

"Ahhh. This is the first time I've had that done since just after the Cybertronian Revolutionary War," he admitted. "I missed it a lot and enjoyed it thoroughly. You did very well. For now, I must be off. Chemist awaits my judgment. While I'm gone, give the place a good dusting. I'll leave you a Cube of Standard so you don't end up shutting down. Most slave owners give Low Standard, but I prefer not to end up spending 10 hours clearing the gunk out of your engine or having to buy another slave. Oh, and of course, you must remain on the property."

"As for your new name, for now you will answer to Butler, just so I have something more fitting to call you."

With that, Megatron faded out before Butler's eyes, and reappeared in the waiting area of the Decepticon Afterlife Realms.

~~~~~~~~~~

Afterlife Waiting Area

Chemist was surprised to see Megatron appear, but didn't make any moves to attack. As he had waited, he realized that even though he had supported the IOPC, he had never committed treason against the Decepticon Nation or Megatron. Also, Chemist trying to take over the IOPC was simply practicing the Decepticon Way against a private individual, despite his abject failure at his plan. Raid gang underlings who wanted to gain rank without switching gangs typically tried to do so by getting rid of whoever was above them, and Masher was the only one left in the group who was above Chemist.

"I see you had a very unfortunate result," Megatron said. This immediately put Chemist more at ease since Megatron was using the respectful way of referring to his deactivation. "It's a shame you didn't succeed at permanently deactivating Masher."

Before he could talk further, five Decepticon spirits arrived rather suddenly while still in plane mode. The room automatically expanded by several thousand feet as they lost forward momentum, transformed, and landed. Some gray bots appeared through the walls and led them through portals. They would be going to the Neutral Realm; their defeat at the hands of SAM battery operators had been far from glorious, and as Megatron saw it, totally avoidable.

"Anyway," Megatron went on as the room shrank back down to a small area, "Your record is very interesting. According to my Divine Knowledge, you successfully embezzled over 100,000,000 Cubes of Standard from your drug operations over the last 300 years, quietly weakening the Corporation, and spent much of that money at retailers that were at the end of my companies' supply chains - thereby increasing their power as well as my own."

"On the other hand, it was your chemical products that led us to have some friction with Turtleshroom II as well as pretty much any place else that traced their drug infestations to our Nation. But, offsetting that, it was you that developed our Slave Performance Enhancement, and this has directly brought me millions of tons of cheap ore through the years. Not only that, billions of biologicals around the universe are essentially enslaved thanks to your extremely addictive drugs, and almost every bit of their money now comes to the Empire instead of whatever pathetic nations they belong to."

"Now, there's the matter of your performance just before your unfortunate result. Your connive was shamefully transparent; any idiot would have known that you left Masher running so that he would burn out and die. And, of course, you seemed to have forgotten what a Spare was. These things are negatives, but not bad enough to condemn you considering all of the good you've done for me and the Nation."

"Finally, there is the matter of your atheism, which you thought you had kept secret. I believe the fact that we are standing here at the entrance to several possible afterlives will have suitably convinced you to give that up~?" Megatron knew that in this situation, only a defective would remain atheist.

"When everything is put together, I believe that you have been a very good Decepticon - to the point that Masher ended up on the wrong side of the Decepticon Way at your own hand, even if only for a moment - and to be able to give Masher any kind of shaft at all means that you are a truly exemplary practitioner. Since it is Masher, and not the IOPC as a whole, that I am against, your membership in the Corporation will not be held against you - and in fact, your ability to rise to its #2 position is in your favor. However, you have still made some unintelligent moves in your time. I am sending you to the Realm of Pleasure, but because of those few flaws, you shall reside on the second tier of the large mountain from which its Energon-Fall flows rather than right on top."

A Decepticon glowing with white energy then came through a portal in the wall. "This way," he said, gesturing toward Chemist.

~~~~~~~~~

Moon

Fire Eater laughed when Loyal Star thanked him for his generosity as if he'd been given loan from Fire Eater personally. "Oh, no," he corrected. "I'M not the generous one. All of the stuff is being lent through the Temple of Megatron, so there's no risk to me. Of course, that means that if you don't bring it back, you may be cursed by the Divine Leader himself, so be sure to drop it off once you've completed your oil reappropriation!"

Later, on Cybertron

Silver Blaze was always willing to take a call from a potential tenant, at least when said prospect had money ready to spend.

"So, what kind of a budget are you thinking of?" He asked. "Right now I have a few large homes ready, plenty of mid-level ones, and - in a rare instance - one that's extra-affordable. Prices range from just 100 Cubes a month all the way to 5,000. Just let me know where you'd like to start!"

[Vallermoore]

Megatron's Villa

Butler nodded when Megatron pointed out that he would not be a good Cybertronian at all. "You are right, under King Coal there were laws, even if the judicial system was sometimes corrupt. Murderers were melted down or enslaved for life, for example. I certainly would not have lasted long upon Cybertron before either I was blasted, or came to the attention of your secret police and was melted down. I am better off here as your slave. At least I am not mining rock or metal for the rest of my life, and it's unlikely that anyone would blast me." When Megatron went, Butler drank his Cube and then the virus took over and set him to the task of cleaning. His thoughts were free, and he decided that even if he were not in thrall to an enslaver virus he would stay as Megatron's slave. The work was not unpleasant for a robot and there might be times when he got time off to play a video game. At least he was safe here.

Afterlife Waiting Area

As it turned out, far from ending up in Decepticon Hell, Chemist would enjoy a very good life in the Land of Endless Energon, were blast wounds quickly healed and there were all the games and parts one could ever need. His treachery against Masher was just part of the Decepticon Way. If it had been aimed at Megatron, his fate would have been very different indeed.

Red Diamond was lucky that at least for now, Megatron was unaware that he had saved Masher from what would have been a horrible Hell.

Later, on Cybertron

Loyal Star's connive with the help of the Decepticon Bank had been successful, as the sapient ponies through they were talking with one of their own over the radio, one who spoke perfect Equish. He had managed to con no less then 100,000 Cubes of Energon out of them. 5000 had been spent on Vaults to store it, but it was still quite a lot. "I'd like to rent a 2000 Cubes a month house please. In time after my first conscription stint I might be able to afford something better and if so I will let you know. Where would you like to meet me?" He had been sure to give what he borrowed back to the Temple of Megatron. Being cursed would at the very least stop him from becoming an ordained Priest of Megatron, his fuel pump's desire.