#pilar esquiel

[witchofthesouls]

Hey, for the other!tfp trio….let's assume that the team remained on really close contact despite the distance after the war (RID 2015 who knows you? Certainly not me). I wanna see a really touching reunion between the bots and their protegees, but here's the twist:

They return to their kids, only to find out that these three are no longer kids, but young adults (maybe late teens for Raf, because our future little Dragon always will be the youngest of the trio) and are no longer humans (cause they have fully embraced their other heritage)

This time-lapse could be explained by either A) the bots spending a bit longer on Cybertron and losing the human sense of time or B) The kids deciding to make a joint trip to elsewhere/the other side after the end of the war, where time doesn't move the same as in the human plane (they went as kids, but elsewhere spit them as grow ups even though this change doesn't make sense to the bots.... because they are seeing things from a human sense of time); now, when exactly these three got lost and then reborn, that's privy to them alone.... I prefer the B) option if you ask me....

Regardless, I think that these three would remain tightly nit, as tight as possible (they could be on the other extreme of the planet or any other plane, and yet they would return to each other...eventually). Cause after all the went through, separation is not an option for them

Reactions and talks/explanations are meant to happen in response to this..... and what roles June, the Esquivels and the Nakadais families had to play in all this

Ohhh, this is interesting. I hinted or understated in some pieces that time can get weird in Elsewhere as a call to the folktales and myths of humans stepping into an otherworldly space to spend a few hours there, and then stepping back to their world to find out decades had passed.

Perhaps it's their heritage, singing in their bone marrow and igniting from the Matrix's influence, June's own presence (haunting and hungry, no matter how muted or how well she hides her own teeth), or a strange combination. Perhaps it's the experiences they shared, forged in fire and blood as Earth's own chaotic nature. But these three are bonded. Intertwined with each other, even across the world.

Distance means both little and much to them now. They ventured onto foreign, alien planets and spaceships, traveled to lands across the world in the blink of an eye, and went on the run from a manhunt.

Miko keeps the Apex Armor and takes it back to Japan. At the right moments and when the urge gets too much to bear, she steps into the sea and goes farther than any of her relatives could go, even the ones that can hold their breath for 20 minutes.

She hasn't been the most filial of daughters, but she is her parent's child. Her sea-blooded mother stole back a human that survived and thrived from Elsewhere and claimed that man as a spouse. Bloodlust and wet works are no distant strangers to her. She's inexperienced but a willing learner. She already cut her teeth on foreign flesh.

Down in the dark depths where there's no difference between going up to the sun and going towards the abyss, but where her steps tread, she meets someone with pearly, iridescent scales across a long, serpentine body and a face so much like her own (and her mother's and her grandfather's and her-) with large, dark eyes with an amber ring.

After meeting the yokai that birthed her lineage centuries ago, Miko finds her way back to the Americas. A blessing and a warning kept in her heart.

(One day, Miko will understand what her sea-blooded mother meant when she told her that her father was a 'good Man.'

Raf's deep fascination (admiration, obsession) with space exploration and technology is taken in stride among the Esquivels. He doesn't raise any suspicion among them because that's how they all are.

He absorbs whatever he can, consuming the hard-earned lessons under Ratchet's care and oft-handed commentary. The Esquivels hunger and Raf is no different as he swallows how Cybertronian theory and application and attempts to further bridge between human and alien equipment.

Raf had found his teeth and his siblings recognized it as their baby brother doesn't disappear on them nor shrink away from their more vicious arguments.

(They are a family whose flesh descended from fire tempered by earth. Raging passion and violent temptations. Wicked protection and immense wrath. Voracious, cruel, and beastly, yet so very kind and vigilant.)

Mama kissed her youngest boy (because Raf will always be her baby boy) on his head and told him to be careful, praying for his safety as he went with Jack.

That protection will save them on a summer trip when Jack retraces his steps to all the places he once called home.

Ever since his mission to Cybertron, Jack dreams of strange, wistful things. An unquenchable thirst, an itch in his bones... he feels bereft for some reason.

He misses Arcee. He misses all of them. But for some reason, Jack

In the summer after graduation, he takes his new-used car and travels across the mainland United States. The windows are down as the radio blares, wind ruffles his hair as Raf laughs and tries to figure out maps since some locations are so off-beat that the GPS can't confirm the coordinates.

Deep in the bones of a decrepit old house he once called a home in his long-distant childhood because June and Jack moved repeatedly, hopping from place to place without rhyme or reason... there are the echoes of a wailing scream buried within it.

A living corpse for a copse of trees that guard the area.

(A mother will tell her son what exactly brews in their powerful blood and what she has done to ensure he grew up safe to make a choice.)

Elsewhere exists in so many ways, shapes, and forms. At one point, the legends and myths had once walked upon Earth and left their marks. Something happened in the unwritten, unspoken past that corralled those legends away.

The trio will venture through the many portals and gateways and have many more adventures as they realize there are far more Cybertronian relics on Earth...

Mermaid queens and Seelie emperors, dignitaries of unearthly shapes painted in enamel and precious jewels, sharp animals with sharper intelligence that speak in prose, the faint imprints in slumbering environments, and empty, the lingering remains of humanity's role among such great and terrible things.

(Humanity was (is) great and terrible themselves.)

(Miko's father is a 'good Man,' and that means something different to such beings.)

"Long ago, Man made peace with Magic." "Long ago, it was decreed that Man would stay."

Time isn't linear in Elsewhere which incorporates so much that a single or several maps would be useless. Time flows in so many directions that it's a constant battle to recognize and travel to and from their own particular section of a river.

Perhaps it's his heritage or a minor blessing from the Matrix, but Jack is more sensitive to flow and can locate the best spots for them to get back to their Earth. To the same week, month, or year they ventured away.

Miko explores her own bloodthirst and prey drive. The singing, thrumming chant in her blood and how the Apex Armor responds to it.

Raf hones his own instinct on his particular guidance to find portals and lucky happenstances. Between him and Jack's instincts for 'shiny' things, little can escape them.

In some worlds, they grow older. Aging and bulking, exploring how to reshape themselves and all sorts of careers. In others, they seem immortal compared to the rapid change around them in a species whose lifespan is a single human year.

"We could be gods here," says a man with a firestorm trapped in his bones and has become a dragon. Not a Dragon because he searches the stars for a mech he once called brother. "Are we not gods already?" The not-man made of shadows and feathers replies. He still dreams of a far-distant metal planet and realizes that it whispered to him back then. "Does it matter," laughs a woman encased in armor that's more like a second skin, tendrils sweeping upon the floor like the gentle motion of a calm tide upon the beach. Pink for her lost girlhood and passion, a warning and a sign from her many great-grandmother. Green as the metal she once called her kin.

When humans are pulled Elsewhere. Three things usually happen: they break there, they struggle or thrive, or they break at home.

"How many times have we done this?" A boy that's not really a boy, who shall become a dragon in so many lifetimes, asks his companions. (Raf keeps his sister's warning close to his heart as she once died in a foreign, strange desert and was resurrected in her own pyre to devour the city that enslaved her and so many countless others. Pilar has become a Dragon and that legacy between mortal and divine shall be her epitaph in a battlefield far sooner than later.)

Ratchet returns. Some things change, while some remain the same.

Jack tastes the grief and repressed anger upon the medic and leaves him be. Raf remembers Ratchet parked in the garbage and keeps the old medic busy between lessons and searches. Miko digs into the festering tangle of emotions, lapping into those wounds as she uses the Apex Armor on the training mats to absorb those fighting skills and grills for information about Cybertron and the rest of Team Prime.

She cares, she really does, but the boys' avoidance of Ratchet's issues won't help anyone, especially if (or when) the medic leaves the planet with no way to contact again.

Ratchet went Elsewhere twice. The first time was a rough pill to swallow as Team Prime never realized its existence. He wondered where the trio had scavenged a considerable amount of Energon crystals and the resources to guard the new base with all the newly acquired. He stiffly apologized to them because he had thrown hurtful words over their travels, calling them "superstitious" and "better than that" and "this is why you never applied yourselves" was the least of the insults. The second time, he realized just how much and fast humans age as he counted each tick on his chronometer as they ventured across new continents and strange seas. Those years and crippling injuries and strange bodies melt away from the trio as they return back to their native Earth and their baseline human form.

June visits them. Ratchet never thought to ask how she found them in Nevada when Agent Fowler would have never told a civilian about them. No one questioned how she managed to bypass all the security with her car.

He tallies all the strange, eerie signs as she leaves hints to solve their challenges, how she seems to appear when food is low and they're too busy to bring anything more substantial than a simple run to the nearest fast food joint or a quick foraging session, how all the security in the world, both Cybertron's and Earth's, cannot track her.

"I am what I need or want to be." The one called June Darby demurely answers.

The only family member of Raf's that Ratchet will officially meet is Pilar whose bones are filled to the brim with rituals, survival tips with monsters, gods, and hostile environments, and formal protocols in so many kingdoms, both dead and alive. She grieves as well. She had given up the Dragon to return home but her memories are bursting full of laughter and people and color when the crumbling ruins the new Team explores are long empty of an extinct people or a fallen kingdom.

"Sometimes I think I carved out parts of my heart and left it there. All I have left are the memories as I'm the only one that remembers the campfire songs and the lessons of all those who helped me."

Ratchet will never meet the Nakadai family face-to-face, but he gets a hint of what they are with all the messages and packages they send their only child. Izumi sends pointers on how to prepare certain sea creatures and how to differentiate the signs of an underwater portal in treacherous waters. Her husband will leave cryptid messages and strange, gold pieces. Sometimes he sends coordinates for Miko to dig up a weapons cache or an informant to cultivate.

Of course, things change when the not-quite-human trio spirit back a Primal Artifact of Quintus Prime...