Walk on the Ocean

Walk on the Ocean
Ficlet as half of a trade with Lady Omicron



Geology is a funny thing, really. The face of the world can change in only a few thousand years. Give it millions, and you really start to see things shift.

Oceans become valleys, valleys give way to mountains, deserts become beaches and so on.

Silt can do odd things too.

Radiation can be downright fascinating. Its effects on ancient Cybertronian alloys, even moreso…


She walked along the Nevada desert, looking down into the paleontology dig. Looking for dinosaurs, everyone kept saying.

“Nah.” She’d insist. “We’re looking for ocean lifeforms and the fossils they left.”

She would often walk along the desert face, picturing back to the time there was hundreds of feet of water covering this place. It would be so dark, so lonely. There would be no light whatsoever. Cold, terrible dark.

She shivered briefly.

The young human female, who went by the online moniker of ‘Omicron’, squatted at the edge of the dig site. This area wasn’t too far from a nuclear test site. The radiation had gone to completely safe levels in the time since, but ghost stories still circled around the camps. Nobody felt comfortable here for some reason…

Diggers would frequently complain about shared nightmares. Always in each, they were running from a pair of violent, vibrant green eyes in the darkness. They would feel themselves scooped up, dangled over a horrible, alien mouth, then lowered to bone-crunching oblivion, the only sound in their ears would be terrible, cruel laughter.

Others spoke of a great manta ray that became amorphous and turned into a tall man with crimson eyes and razor-sharp wings. He would speak in a bizarre language that didn’t make any sense to her, sounding like multiple electrical impulses mixed with varying vocal tones.

Every time she dreamt of the tall man, she somehow knew he meant to protect her from the green-eyed one.

Every time she dreamt of the green-eyed one, she always awoke shivering, cold and wide-eyed.

A group of native Americans nearby told them that the nuclear spark had awakened the spirits of the ancient gods and warned them against digging.

Naturally, they dug nevertheless.

However, as time passed and the dreams and nightmares became more vivid, more violent, the diggers became gradually spooked away until at last, only she who called herself Omicron remained at the abandoned campsite, her only company being the wind, the two figures in her dreams and the faint background radiation…


“July nineteenth, where was I? Oh yeah, found some new fossils with… well, really odd characteristics. This whole area I found looks like it was hit by something really, REALLY strong, like a meteorite. Which… doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me… The impact I can extrapolate with the deep-earth radar is too small for a meteor to have penetrated hundreds of feet of ocean water. It would have to have a solid mass that would have screwed with the tectonic plates. To be honest, this place looks like it was hit with an explosion of serious power. On another note, the dreams are getting worse. I can make out a figure with the green eyes now… Looks like a cross between the devil and a CuisineArt. The other one is still just a shadow, but I feel much safer. Helps that the bugger’s not trying to eat me too…”

She put down the voice recorder and took a deep breath. She hadn’t heard much from the rest of the world, but she kept hearing things like the United States mobilizing for war, UFOs descending on Los Angeles, terrorist incident in Mission City and radical new military hardware being thrown around. Just what the heck was going on?

She’d find out herself, but that would mean abandoning the site completely. With everyone gone, she had enough supplies to theoretically last her a few months.

Not that she’d stay that long. Her research was nearing completion and the sooner she got away from this eerie place, the better.

Omicron, as she called herself, walked outside her tent and looked around the area. The other tents stood there, non-maintained and vacant, now tatters in the wind. She looked out across the vast, flat land to see the reddish mountains standing further away than they appear.

She went to check on her jeep, which was her only way of getting home. Anything happens to it, anything at all, and she’s stranded here.


She found herself digging again. It was slow going, her being the only person there and it was terribly quiet to boot.

For times she would zone out and just let her hands go on autopilot. This time though, when she snapped out of it, she found herself staring at a shape, most strange. She had excavated a few square yards and found what looked like a… gigantic metal claw…

She knew cetaceans and this looked like the claw of an Alaskan King Crab, except this was MUCH bigger…

She looked closer, seeing a circular pattern on the side of the claw. She took her little shovel and tapped it.

It made a clang. It was definitely metal.

She gasped and crawled out of the digsite as fast as she could and became to hyperventilate… She forced herself to calm down, her heartbeat becoming erratic. “C-Calm down…” She whispered to herself shakily.

Like any good researcher, she took pictures, dusted off the thing and took surface samples and took them back to her tent to study. With shaky hands, she discovered the thing was four million years or so old.

This discovery was incredible. It’s clearly artificial. This indicates one of two things. Either mankind had much more sophistication than previously realized, or…

Her eyes lit up at the thought.

… or it is indisputable evidence of alien life.

She scribbled late into the night until exhaustion set in… She who calls herself Omicron finally settled down and slept like a log, and oddly enough, there were no dreams that night.


Rain. Drip… drip… drip dripdripdripDRIPDRIPDRIPDRIP!

Midnight rain!

She awoke with a start, her eyes wide. “Oh no!” She shouted, grabbing an old tarp with surprisingly swift reflexes. If the big claw was damaged by this rain, her evidence would be destroyed…

She *knew* she should’ve kept Swanson’s radio to keep an ear out for weather reports…

Thankfully still wearing her digging gear and clothes as she rarely took it off these days, she ran to the site with the tarp and a few weights and a flashlight in hand.

She slid into the digsite, expecting the hard ground to meet her feet… instead, wet, deep mud did. She yelped, sinking in to chest-depth. She looked around with her Mag-Lite to see if she could find the claw… instead all she found was churned up and disturbed earth.

‘NO!’ She thought to herself in anguish. Somebody had come here and taken it!

Her eyes widened as she felt a tremor in the earth around her. Another one. Another one. Still sinking in the mud, her lips trembling, she looked up and saw with her own eyes, a pair of vibrant, violent, emerald green eyes staring down at her. She could see red and purple metal glinting from the light of her Mag-lite, little rivers of rain washing off the ancient dirt.

‘Holy mother of God!!!!’ Her mind screamed.

Her heart missed a beat. She couldn’t move, couldn’t twitch, couldn’t breathe.

“Yes… Such a good girl… I must, mmm… thank you for awakening me…” Said a deep and rich voice full of quiet promises of everlasting pain.

She whimpered softly, trembling as her chin squished into the mud as it swallowed her neck, her shoulders already submerged. At the same time, her feet met solid ground under all the muck.

“You’re very afraid, aren’t you? I’ve felt you, you know. You’re the only one who stayed here long enough to learn the truth. Well, I may not be indestructible anymore, but nothing your race can throw can harm me. I’ve felt the presence of the great progenitors here, and if I stay quiet, I can feed in peace.” It said.

It knelt down and extended a hand down into the pit… A finger of metal stroked across her cheek with surprising gentleness.

She trembled, eyes focused on the metallic beast as it proceeded to scoop her out, holding her and a blob of mud in its hand.

Even as it held her, she knew she was doomed if something didn’t happen…

Her mind flashed to the tall one with the sharp wings.

“HELP ME!!!” She screamed.

“Ah, you are losing fear and growing courage. Heh heh heh… cannot have that, can we? With the fear gone, the only thing left to do is eat.” He said, plucking her from the mud in his hand and dangling her over his mouth. “Farewell, dear awakener…” He said softly, lowering her towards the horrible doom that awaited her…

“X!!!” Came a strong, powerful and enraged voice from the pit. Another shape, like a… a giant man with razor sharp wings… flung itself from the mud, rain washing away the muck and running down slick metal surfaces, and crashed into the big red and purple monster.

She couldn’t scream, even as she fell to the ground with a wet THUD!

She looked up to see the blue one with the sharp wings hold up what looked like a large crystal. She didn’t know it, but the two were finishing a battle that had begun four million years ago…

“What do you think you’re doing, old friend? Do you even know what’s happened here?” Asked the red one.

“Yeah. My coms patched into the communications net the humans put up. I know the Autobots and Decepticons have arrived. Doesn’t matter. I’m not letting you hurt her, or anyone else.” Replied the blue one.

“Then why not settle down and die now? I will make it peaceful for you…”

“Your spark… By the pit, it’s no longer invincible!”

For the first time, the red one looked frightened…

“Please… I can change my ways…” Said the red giant, changing his tune in an instant.

“Or… you can DIE!!!” The blue one bellowed, leaping forward and driving the crystal into the chest of the red beast…

She heard a scream of unholy agony that would forever be etched into her mind… Like a thousand souls being released from bondage at once.

Muddy, wet and cold, she looked up at the panting form of her savior.

He looked down at her with those big, comforting, crimson eyes. “You okay?” He asked.

She nodded meekly, her voice not quite working.

“Good… It’s finally over. This waste of space is finally gone for good.” He said, kicking the big robot into the digsite and sitting down.

“I-I’m… well… you c-can call me Omicron.” She said to him as she leaned against his metal form. Somehow, she knew he would never harm her.

He looked at her in mild surprise. “I’m Depth Charge.” He said…

The end.