Petty Dealings by Velvet_Glove
Summary: 2002: Shortly after joining the Autobot cause, Blurr is struggling to find his place in it.
Categories: Generation One Characters: Blurr (G1)
Genre: Drama
Location: Library
Challenges:
Series: None
Chapters: 1 Completed: Yes Word count: 6256 Read: 583 Published: 01/12/09 Updated: 02/12/09

1. Chapter 1 by Velvet_Glove

Chapter 1 by Velvet_Glove

Blurr had used to be somebody. Back in the Ted Quadrant, in Hedon, he had been a celebrity, a household name. As the Master of Ceremonies at a successful club, he was arguably the most popular robot in town. Oh, true, there was the small issue of him being a slave, but it had been a gratifying existence. Then he had given it all up for this.

"Why why why do we have to heave, hoist and haul all these boulders manually?" he demanded, making good speed despite his complaints. A large heap of rocks had been dumped close to the brink of a gully through which ran an old road, now unused, ultimately leading to Autobot City. To the casual eye, it appeared that the sides of the ravine had been reinforced by wooden ramparts to catch landslides. In fact, the ramparts were explosive traps, and Blurr was laboriously filling one with boulders from the pile. "It's not even great security—what sort of idiot is going to be taken in by an old-fashioned booby trap, except for the old fascist who set us to do it and is too much of an idiot to use safety equipment on a security measure!"

Working in tandem to fill the next trap along, his fellow army-recruits, Arcee and Hot Rod, grinned at each other.

"Kup's just teaching us our places, Blurr," Hot Rod replied. "Matrix forbid that we think we joined up to fight!"

"At least it's something we've chosen to do, Blurr," Arcee added, apparently in the belief that that was comforting.

"Oh, well that's funny, and not ha-ha funny, but stupid funny, because I recall signing up to fight the good fight, defend freedom and justice and do something worthwhile with my life that did not involve fetching and carrying!"

This time he got no answer, which did not surprise him. Of the three recruits, Blurr was becoming more obviously the third by the day.

He now realised that his big mistake had been joining the Autobots at the same time that Arcee had rejoined them, after being stranded in the Ted Quadrant for most of her life. It turned out that no other female Autobot was still fighting. Blurr was used to his speed getting him noticed, but it could not compete with Arcee's gender. As soon as she set foot in Autobot City, she became the centre of attention. She returned most flirtations with a bland courtesy that was steadily boring would-be admirers into giving up on her. However, this did nothing to dampen her reception as a long lost survivor of Elita One's band. Nobody seemed to care one way or the other about Blurr's arrival, and he found it harder than he would have thought to shrug that off. Never had he wished so hard for first impressions' novelty to fade.

Then there was Hot Rod: charismatic, energetic and infuriated that he could not beat Blurr in a straight race. Blurr found him an entertaining companion, but he had to own that Hot Rod, too, was more interested in spending time with Arcee—who, maddeningly, had chosen to encourage his advances with coy retorts. Still, appealing to Hot Rod's own frustration with their circumstances sometimes paid off. Hot Rod had been on Earth for about a year prior to their arrival, was well and truly fed up with the life of a recruit, and Arcee was a poor listener where complaints about the system were concerned. However, Hot Rod's complaints differed from Blurr's. His chiefly revolved around their training supervisor, Kup. Kup undeniably ran Hot Rod harder than he did either Arcee or Blurr, with the consequence that Hot Rod always had his attention. He had spent the better part of an hour lecturing Hot Rod on how to aim his gun yesterday, but he had given Blurr no more helpful advice than "Take your time." Blurr didn't like taking his time, particularly when nobody else could be bothered to take time on him.

Oh, his problems were shallow and lugging granite gave him ample time to reflect on that. Nor did he want to stop doing this, the only career he had ever had that could be considered 'worthwhile'. He had come to the conclusion that the Decepticons should be suppressed shortly after two of them had tricked him into slavery, more than a century ago. However, there were no Decepticons present right now, and, small though his sacrifices might be, they still stung.

The conversation had languished again. Hot Rod was trying to catch Arcee's eye as he hefted the biggest rock he could find, and she was resolutely concentrating on rock-placement. Blurr jumped up from his own finished defence and decided he may as well give full swing to his grievances.

"And it's not fair that I do twice the work you two do. We're on the same work detail, but I set one trap alone and single-handed faster than it takes the two of you to set yours, so you do less than a quarter of the work while I do more work than both of you put together, because we've all been put together on this stupid, idiotic, dumb-witted chore!"

"So slow down, Blurr!" Hot Rod suggested, chuckling. He was liberally taking his own advice, making a big show out of dragging the large boulder to the cliff-edge, although Arcee was working diligently enough.

"Slow down, take your time, do it gradually, take it easy, no hurry hurry hurry! That's all I ever hear, but it's no use, no use, no use at all, because I can't slow down unless I just stop!" Blurr liked the fact that his processing speed and powers of acceleration were unique, but that was no reason not to complain about it.

"If you're finished, take a break and wait for us," Arcee spoke up. "We'll be done soon too."

"Wait wait wait, and it's always me who has to—"

Hot Rod cut across his litany. "She's only trying to help, Blurr. Cut her some slack."

"And of course you leap to her defence, lend her a hand and are her knight in shining armour. I'm surprised that I've not been locked out of the barracks yet, that's what I am, surprised, because if you locked me out, you could have some private time to tell her whatever you want to tell her, except, of course, you don't have the courage, so I'm not surprised at all!"

Mortification settled on Hot Rod's features, and he frantically protested this accusation. For her part, Arcee hastily lowered her stone over the edge of the cliff to hide a smile. Blurr was not about to let her off so easily.

"Like you're any better at all, Arcee, by any comparison. Tell me, did you join up because you were trying to complete your failed mission or because you liked Hot Rod's paintwork?"

That jerked her head up, optics flashing. "That's both none of your business and deeply offensive, Blurr!"

Since her arrival on Earth, this was the first time Arcee had betrayed the faintest hint of a temper, so intent had she been on the role of good soldier. Hot Rod actually took a step back in surprise. Blurr, who knew her better, was undaunted. He now had an audience, and he was not going to waste it.

"It's all very well for you, getting the chivalry treatment of 'ladies first', 'here, have my seat', 'pardon my language', 'let me hold the door'. Some of us have to earn our respect with actual work, effort and industry!"

Something snapped in Arcee's face, and she threw a fresh rock down at Blurr's feet. "I am working. It's hardly my fault that I'm the 'Last Female Autobot'!"

"Like there can't be hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of female Autobots elsewhere in the galaxy. Perhaps they need a better reason to sign up to a war than Hot Rod giving them a second look twice!"

"Do you think this is fun for me?"

"It's certainly a lot easier for you!"

"Blurr, lay off her, will you?"

Hot Rod's attempted intercession was rebuffed not by Blurr but by Arcee. "Oh, you lay off it, Hot Rod. He's right about you. If you really want to impress me, how about you do your share of the work instead of letting me do most of it?"

"It's me who—" Blurr started to protest, but the other two were ignoring him again.

"Fine then!" Hot Rod scowled. "Blurr is right. You're given an easy ride by everybody here."

"Maybe it's because I actually do what I'm told to!"

"Two months ago, Kup ripped me apart when I forgot to put the safety on my rifle before starting to disassemble it, and yesterday he basically chucked you under your chin and told you not to do it again!"

Blurr was beginning to think that things had got away from him. So far away, in fact, that he might as well be back in Hedon.

"Yeah, it's a really easy ride when half of my superior officers are flirting with me, and the other half are always looking for an excuse to ask me how well I knew Firestar or Moonracer or—"

"What in the name of Alpha Trion is going on here?" Kup bellowed.

All three recruits spun guiltily around, staring at the recruit-master who was still transforming from the pickup-truck that nobody had heard arrive. None of them had a ready excuse, nor was he going to wait for one.

"Right. Double clean-up duties for a month, and since you can't concentrate when put together, you can all work alone. Blurr, take these fuses to Perceptor. Arcee, you can finish up here. Hot Rod, get to the other bank and start off there."

Blurr clamped his jaws shut, willing himself not to make comment as Kup prodded Hot Rod forwards with a curt "Move it" before offering Arcee a hand with one of the larger rocks.

Only when he was racing away on the path to the Ark did he give the landscape the full benefit of his oratory: "Oh, like scrap they know what problems are any more than he knows what equal treatment is and I know what it's like to have things actually work out for me just for once..."

 

"Because things couldn't possibly go right for old Blurr, nuh-huh no way no how."

It was eleven miles from Autobot City's limits to the Ark, the wrecked spaceship that had acted as Autobot Headquarters for almost two decades. Largely due to the rather meandering roads, Blurr had never got his journey-time lower than two minutes and forty-six seconds. On this occasion, he stopped his chronometer in disgust after five minutes and the thirty-third time he had overshot his turn. Nothing slowed him down more effectively than his own frustration.

It did not help that Perceptor noticed his late arrival. "Your average velocity for the route must have been significantly below your customary standard, Blurr..."

"It's not like I've been ordered to go everywhere at top speed, in fact quite the opposite, I've been ordered to go slower, ease up, take it one step at a time, but of course when I do it, I'm still wrong!" Blurr snapped out.

"My apologies. I had intended to couch my remark as an observation rather than a reprimand."

Perceptor was mild-tempered enough to handle Blurr's impatience—in part because his own deliberate nature inspired impatience in most of his comrades. He showed due appreciation for the fuses that Blurr had brought, and if he did not show as much interest in the other Autobot's state as Blurr would have liked, he at least offered him some energon. Blurr needed a high energy diet in order to keep up with himself.

The other reason Blurr got on better with Perceptor than many other Autobots was that Perceptor was the chief scientist of the army. As such, he had found Blurr's speed far more interesting than Arcee's gender—not that he deduced anything more from Blurr's processor than other scientists had done in the past: he was not a particularly efficient unit and could probably expect a shorter life-span than a normal robot. Blurr had heard this so often that even he had stopped complaining about it. Now that he was a soldier, he was privately convinced that he would be killed before he could wear out.

Perceptor continued, with placid contrition. "As soon as I complete installation of these new fuses, you may convey the superior ones currently fitted to Autobot City. I fear that your wait will be of no small duration."

This was standard procedure on these errands. With Autobot City taking over from the Ark as the main headquarters, the Ark's best materials were being cannibalised for the new settlement. However, it had been decided to keep the Ark on as an alternate emergency base, and as such it needed to remain functional, if limited. The bare rooms could still be used for storage, the defence system was kept operable and the ship's computer, Teletraan One, would stay aboard. Perceptor was overseeing the whole process and was now the last Autobot remaining in residence, so he was obliged to fit all replacement parts alone—barring minimal assistance from Blurr who had as yet only the most basic mechanical skills.

Blurr did not normally appreciate being kept waiting, but he had begun to see these trips as a respite from the otherwise gruelling training routine. Perceptor's boundless tolerance made a welcome change from the more irritable Kup, and if nothing else, Blurr's vocabulary had expanded immensely. Not that he expected Perceptor to do all the talking. The scientist had a gratifying habit of listening seriously to all that was said to him, regardless of interest. Accordingly, by the time he had changed two fuses, Perceptor had heard the entire story of the recruits' argument that morning—some parts in triplicate.

"Blurr, does this situation necessitate some counselling, or has merely verbalising your aggrievement ameliorated your disposition?"

It was entirely possible that Perceptor got on with Blurr due to the latter's ability to analyse the scientist's speech so swiftly. Blurr answered him in an instant: "Well, can you tell me anything useful? Because if you can't tell me anything useful, there's no use telling me anything at all!"

"It is sometimes mollifying to realise that one is not alone in discontent. For example, I myself have been informed that, upon my transferral to Autobot City, I will be allocated quarters with Springer. He would not be my primary selection of cohabitant, but I daresay we shall each make our own concessions to achieve an harmonious arrangement."

Blurr buried his face in his hands, leapt up, paced the length of the room twice and wheeled on Perceptor, highly aggravated. "Yes, yes, yes, you have problems, I have problems, Kup has problems, Optimus Prime has problems, Megatron has problems—I know everybody has problems! What I want to know is how does everybody else's problems solve mine?"

Perceptor kindly waited until his tirade had finished before replying: "I believe the implication is not to find a solution for your complaints but to encourage you to tolerate them."

"In other words, my problems are not worth complaining about. That wasn't useful at all."

"To take a more mathematical approach in solving this psychological conundrum, perhaps you should also calculate the trivial pleasures of your existence. If the resultant equation does not resolve into a positive outcome, it may be that you should reconsider the military lifestyle. I have often wondered whether I am suited to being a soldier, but I do get satisfaction out of my position. The Ark is now entirely self-powered through solar panels, and that is due to my work. Though that may be an insignificant victory in the War, I consider it a personal triumph."

"I was hauling rocks all morning. Where's the job satisfaction in that?"

In his own way, Perceptor was as stubborn as Blurr. "Then you should take a more active approach to your position. Even as a recruit, you are entitled to a specialised weapon, if there is one you would like to request. I shall be happy to accommodate any ideas you may have now or in the future."

"I've spent my life as a courier, race-car and emcee. What do you expect me to know about weapons?" Blurr demanded peevishly, but Perceptor had successfully sidetracked him. Within a few minutes, he was accessing Teletraan One's datafiles on artillery.

 

In the end, it took Perceptor over four hours to re-fit all the fuses, even with (perhaps, because of) Blurr's assistance. By the time Blurr was on his way back to Autobot City, he had calmed down enough to contemplate apologising to Hot Rod and Arcee. In retrospect, he was embarrassed by what he had said—particularly to Arcee, who was probably distressed enough that the Autobot soldiers she had spent her life trying to rejoin were not, after all, paragons of virtue. On the other hand, apologising to them would only encourage them to apologise to each other, and he suspected that might provoke him into another scene.

Absorbed by this moral dilemma he failed to register the sound of strange engines until it was too late.

"You're busted, Autobot!" came a catcall as a white sports car shot onto the road in front of him and braked hard to block his way.

Blurr spun around to avoid collision, only to find a streamlined black car screeching to a halt behind him. Both wore the Decepticon symbol.

"Don't bother coming quietly, it's information Megatron wants," this one leered, transforming even as Blurr did.

"Yeah, we want you to hum like a well-oiled engine—and we'll provide the oil!" smirked his pale companion, also transforming.

The dark one looked past Blurr in confusion. "What's that supposed to mean? I don't get it."

"What's to get? It sounds cool!"

"Runamuck, wit is not about sounding cool!"

"Yes, it is!"

"No, it isn't!"

"You!" Blurr had been uncharacteristically quiet throughout their entire exchange, and now it seemed to take all his effort to get out that one, high-pitched syllable.

His two assailants looked confused, but stood tall.

"Yeah, us! The Battlechargers!" Runabout declared. Runamuck struck a pose.

The floodgates burst. "You! You with your 'Here deliver this to the Ted Quadrant, tee-hee, cash on delivery, ha-ha, directions included, snicker-snicker!' More than a century of slavery, freedom denied and no payday in sight because of you!"

Runamuck stared at him, but Runabout suddenly doubled over in laughter. "Man, oh man... Runamuck, it's that courier who was dumb enough to take that 'package' to the Ted Quadrant! Remember? Right after we were on the lam for gunrunning?"

"No slag! The wheel-less wonder on permanent overdrive? Didn't we get two thousand galactic credits for him?"

"And lost them at the casinos on Monacus, yeah."

"Get ready to lose something more, like maybe a few limbs, some vital connections and—why not?—half of your head!" Blurr swung rapidly between them, casting and recasting his decision over which one to hit first.

A rifle fired, but, fast as he was, it had not been Blurr's.

"Keep very still, Autobot," snickered Runamuck, before throwing an unrepentant grin at his partner. "Sorry. Couldn't resist."

Blurr had frozen the moment he heard the sound of the shot, his mind quick enough to realise that his body was too slow to avoid it. On the painless impact, he had remained frozen in the lightning conclusion that he must be dead if it hadn't hurt, and if he was dead, he didn't know what to do. Then again, if he wasn't dead, something was very wrong. It felt wrong. The fact that Runamuck was addressing him was not reassuring, and Blurr elected to obey his order for the time being.

His chronometer told him that only a second passed between Runamuck speaking and Runabout's chuckled response, yet it seemed like eternity.

"Oh, Autobot, Autobot, Autobot..." He paused, struggling vainly to contain his laughter. At length, he continued anyway, in an erratic mixture of sniggers and speech. "You've been hit by a... friction rifle."

This elicited wild shrieks of mirth from the pair of them. Blurr failed to see the joke.

"If you move... you go boom!" Runamuck explained, gesturing extravagantly to illustrate his point.

"There's a field around you," gasped Runabout. "Increases friction heat—tiniest movement and..."

"Boom!" they chorused.

Although a little hazy on the finer details of what had happened, Blurr grasped the key point: absolute inertia was required.

This was far from an ideal situation.

"The good news is that it only lasts five minutes," Runabout continued, getting over his hysteria now and settling into a malicious smirk. "So all you have to do is keep dead still for five minutes. No problem, right?"

"For him?" sneered Runamuck. "Yeah, no problem—least, not the dead part!"

Five whole minutes of immobility? Blurr checked his chronometer: a good minute had passed since he had been hit, so that left four—they were right; he was doomed. No, he wasn't. He refused to let them be right. There must be a way out of this. Could he call for help? Did using his radio move any interior parts? For that matter, what about thinking? Or panicking? No point risking the radio, as it would take more than four minutes for anybody to reach him. He was going to have to wait it out. Three minutes and fifty seconds left.

"Wait, what do we do if he explodes?" Runamuck suddenly asked. "We're meant to have a prisoner."

"Eh, we'll grab somebody else," Runabout answered, absently firing small bursts from his own rifle into the ground, for the simple amusement of watching the miniature explosions.

It occurred to Blurr that the presence of these two was a gross infringement of Autobot security. There were not supposed to be any Decepticons on Earth; if the Battlechargers had got here, somebody had screwed up. This made it phenomenally unfair that Blurr had to deal with it. He was a recruit for Cybertron's sake! He wasn't supposed to be in this sort of situation without supervision. Furiously, he planned out a complaint to file with Kup. Three minutes left.

Runabout looked up from his explosions with a sudden grin. "How long do you reckon he was stuck on Ted?"

"Man, I bet he was still there when the Combaticons fouled up. I ain't never seen him on Earth before."

"I bet he's working off a rescue debt to the Autobots."

Back in his emcee days, Blurr had been forced to practise ignoring hecklers. He thought hard about that now, although the prospect of throwing himself at them and taking them out in his resultant explosion was looking more and more attractive. Two minutes twenty. That was past the halfway mark, so all he had to do was stay still for as long as he had already done, and then he could tear them apart. But what if they shot him again? They might just carry on hitting him with the friction rifle until he could not take it anymore and had to move to end his misery.

For that matter, how would any of them know when the field had vanished? Was that feeling of hot tension the field or his own panic? If he could not see the field, then neither could they, so they could not know when it had gone either. But if he could feel the field, then he had an advantage. Two minutes fifteen.

"What do you think his face looked like when he realised we had sold him into slavery?"

"Probably something like this."

"Hahaha—no, wait, like this!"

"Or this!"

Perceptor had waffled about small victories and personal triumphs being important to happiness—something like that anyway. Blurr decided that it would be a personal triumph to grind these two into a pulp. He just had to figure out a way to do it that did not make him a target for the friction rifle again. One minute and fifty-five seconds.

"Bet he makes a good soldier, all that practice at being told what to do..."

One minute forty-five.

"... Probably had to ask permission to blow it out his exhaust..."

One minute twenty.

"... we caught him so easily because he's forgotten how to think..."

Less than a minute.

"... can't believe anybody could be such a fragging moron..."

Thirty-five seconds.

"He'd probably win the Autobot award for stupidity. Heh, get it? Because Autobots are dumb anyway, so to be award-winningly dumb, you'd have to be really dumb... get it?"

At about ten seconds to go, Blurr realised that he was starting to feel different, almost... relaxed. He then spent fifteen seconds debating whether this was his imagination, whether he was really relaxing or whether the field was dissipating.

"Heh, yeah... dumb—hey!"

From absolute inertia to full speed in less than a second: Blurr had transformed and shot off towards Autobot City.

Runabout and Runamuck wasted no time in following him, but even so, Blurr had to hold himself back as much as he could to keep them on his tail. Deliberately reducing his speed to less than two hundred miles per hour was torture, but he refused to outrun them... yet. He ran off the road, onto rough terrain, which slowed him further, until he hit the older track that he had been looking for. He idled for five seconds to make sure that they had not lost him, before flying forwards again.

"Come on come on come on, can't you go any faster, Arcadroids would be ashamed, you're pathetic!" he screamed into the wind of his passage. It was unlikely they could hear him, but he felt much better. Small victories.

At this speed, entire minutes passed before he entered the stretch of road which ran through the gully. Blurr choked his throttle, slowing himself to a near standstill, allowing the Battlechargers to catch right up to him. Then away he went, forcing himself to match their snail's pace. On either side of him, the embankments loomed over, illusive protection from the boulders heaped within them. There was no sign of Arcee or Hot Rod now; their task had been completed. Blurr's hopes were resting on himself and a motion sensor whose location he could not remember

Fortunately, he heard the tiny click of the connection being interrupted.

Blurr threw himself forwards, accelerating so quickly that the first noise came from his own sonic boom. The road twisted perilously through the gully, but he dared not slow down. Making turns at breakneck speed, he flipped himself through three hundred and sixty degrees twice, yet momentum carried him on. Above him, the traps were exploding in rapid succession; their loads surging briefly upwards before falling. Blurr needed that moment before gravity claimed them. It would take them seconds to hit the ground; it would take him seconds to exit the ravine.

Running in a more typical gear and speed, Runabout and Runamuck only had time for a dual "Whoa!" before the rocks struck.

Beyond the cliffs, Blurr transformed and promptly fell over. Dizzy from his escape, he surveyed the debris now littering the ravine. He wondered if Kup would make them clear it up and start again, or whether they could just write the road off now. Then he remembered the Battlechargers.

The landslide probably had not killed them, but they would not easily be able to escape the rubble. Just to make sure, Blurr did a victory lap along the cliff-edge, before gliding smugly back to Autobot City.

En route, he encountered Ultra Magnus and Springer, who had set out to discover why Blurr was taking more than ten minutes in his return to the City. Perceptor had been right: Blurr felt immense satisfaction in telling them that he had been set upon by two Decepticons, but not to worry, because they were now immobilised on the gully road two miles away. It might be an idea to send Grapple and Hoist out to help retrieve them.

 

Blurr had missed basking in the admiration of others.

"I can't believe you took down two Decepticons single-handedly. Right outside the city!"

Hot Rod had pounced on Blurr as soon as the latter had left his briefing with Optimus Prime. His fellow-recruit was clearly both jealous and proud of Blurr's feat, and Blurr's ego preened to the attention.

Hot Rod was still raving about it when they entered the room allocated to the three recruits. Arcee was inside, lying on one of the recharge berths and half-heartedly polishing her gun. She glanced up briefly as they entered but kept an awkward silence. Hot Rod made no visible acknowledgment of her, but he sat down on the edge of the berth she was using, nudging her to the back-wall of the compartment. Rather than take offence at the offhandedness of his action, she equally casually rolled onto her side, curling around him slightly as she continued her inefficient polishing.

It was the beginnings of a tacit apology, but for now Hot Rod's focus stayed on Blurr. "I have got to start running errands for Perceptor. Hey, Arcee, did you hear about Blurr?"

"Mm-hm." She stopped polishing and sent Blurr a diffident smile. "You got away OK?"

Blurr accepted her olive branch by keeping most of the self-satisfaction from his grin. "Not a scratch!" Not quite true, but so what?

Hot Rod was no more anxious than Blurr to be left out of a conversation. "So how come you're here, Arcee? Don't tell me you finished cleaning the dome of Blaster's tower already!"

She dropped her gaze uncomfortably. "Blaster told me to take a break. Said that he and his cassettes would finish off," she told them, her voice dismal.

Hot Rod rubbed her shoulder lightly. "Poor Arcee. We're just going to have to get you a Kup of your very own."

She chuckled in spite of herself. "Ooh, just what I've always wanted..."

Blurr had become extraneous again, but for now he welcomed the opportunity to let his thoughts run at their own speed. He relived the thrill of his escape which made him recall what Perceptor said about job satisfaction which led to pondering Perceptor's offer to design a personal weapon for him. After today's encounter, Blurr had some new ideas for that. Next time he ran into the Battlechargers, he wanted to leave them at a standstill. A petty goal perhaps, but it would be a personal triumph nonetheless.


Author's note:

I was supposed to be writing the conclusion to my Transitions series. However, when I came to map out the story, I realised that I needed to cut out Blurr's entire subplot. Immediately, I was consumed with guilt, because Blurr always gets shafted. Besides, I'd set up his Battlechargers encounter in the previous story—reading between the lines of Life of my own Choosing, you can work out that it was Runabout and Runamuck who conned Blurr into becoming a slave in the first place.

So I abandoned the story I was going to write and turned Blurr's cut into a story in its own right. It's by far the shortest of the series, and I think of it as more of an interlude than anything else, but on the other hand, it was a great excuse to follow up on what happened when Arcee and Blurr got to Earth. It also let me do a little scene-setting and exposition in advance of that last fic.

It was actually a lot of fun to write a story that was just Blurr's. He's doomed to be eternal comic relief, but I've always felt that the character had a lot of potential. Petty and needy, but still doing the right thing. His speed proved to be fun to play around with in a text medium—it's not just speech patterns! I'd kind of like to write many more Blurr stories just to practise writing that sort of speed. Of course, I doubt that will happen, as I don't have any more ideas for Blurr, and I do have ideas for other characters that I want to write more.

One of the big problems with Blurr is that he doesn't have a particular canon bond with any one other character. Nobody seems that close to him, although they're familiar enough with him. This made it awkward to choose the supporting cast for the fic—but it directly inspired the third wheel atmosphere. In his first canon appearance, the Movie, Blurr seems to be closer to Hot Rod and Arcee's rank than anything else, which is why I've made them all recruits together here.

Hot Rod's predicament with Kup is direct from the Movie (even if this is three years in advance). Arcee's situation is specific to my own personal universe, since I've gone with the idea that Elita & Co are dead. Obviously, the Paradronians will re-introduce females to the Autobot ranks in 2006, but until then Arcee appears to be unique. It's also notable that everybody seems to like Arcee, with Kup and Ultra Magnus in particular being on the avuncular side. Because it's Blurr's fic, her storyline doesn't really get wrapped up (somebody else can be shafted for a change), although it sets the scene for Springer's apparent mentor role in the Movie.

I decided to use Perceptor largely because he was cut from He Who Dares. Like everybody else, there's no canon evidence for him being particular friends with Blurr, excepting possibly for Five Faces of Darkness part one, where it falls to Perceptor to explain to Blurr why he can't race in the Galactic Olympics. Similarly, there's no canon evidence that Blurr has a knack for understanding Perceptor—there's just no occasion that I can recall when he doesn't. It's Springer who acts as Perceptor-translator in the Movie, hence the throwaway line about them rooming together. He must have had plenty of practice...

Of course, using Perceptor turned out to be a huge mistake. Normally, I love writing conversations and find it all comes very naturally. Doing dialogue between two characters with particular speech patterns? Almost killed me. This story was hung up for days at the beginning of Perceptor's scene, during which time I rewrote the opening scene twice, to change and rechange the geographical location. In the end, it worked out, and once past that hurdle, I zipped through the rest.

I can't remember when I decided that Runabout and Runamuck would be to blame for Blurr's slavery. I believe originally it was going to be Decepticons unknown. Then a few stories into the series, I decided that I should use canon characters as much as possible, and looked about for Decepticons who were free to run around the galaxy at that time. Runabout and Runamuck got the job because I'd already used them in Full Circle. Once I'd identified the culprits, it seemed only fair that I should give Blurr some revenge on them.

So it was all rather serendipitous that Runamuck should have a weapon that requires the victim to keep perfectly still. Better yet, when researching the fic, I discovered that Blurr's own weapon is an electro-laser which renders his victims immobile. How is it that these two characters have not been put together before? In the end, I couldn't figure out a way to use Blurr's weapon, so I left it as the outcome of the event rather than a prop. Still, I kind of like the idea of a battle where the opponents manage to freeze each other and can do nothing but glare daggers for the duration. Another time, perhaps.

Don't ask me what happens to the Battlechargers after the story's end. They obviously have rejoined the Decepticons by Season 3. I did originally have a paragraph saying that it was too risky to keep them prisoner in case they learned of the Moonbases, but several people kindly pointed out to me that letting them go was not plausible either. So I've left their fate unknown (much as I did at the end of Full Circle). In my universe, they're used to being in trouble with the law. Perhaps they are great escape artists by now.

With this out of the way, it's straight on to tackling the series' end!

This story archived at http://www.transformersfanfic.com/viewstory.php?sid=4977