There’s a terrible sound, the kind a venom-spewing monster might make as it rips the plating off a hapless sparkling. Knockdown is operating off instinct now, and despite being underground in the dark, his instincts are saying, “Fly away.” It usually takes Knockdown a good ten minutes of patient work to flip in his hand and coax his thruster “cuffs” out of his wrist. But fear trumps patience; with a whir of his t-cog both thrusters are out and firing thin jets of fire.
It’s for the best that Knock Out has pulled away to make a mad dash for the stairs, because Knockdown has no idea what he’s doing or where to aim his arms. First he instinctively brings both arms in front of his face to shield himself from the Sparkling-Eating Monster—which means his wrist-thrusters are firing upward. Result: one blue Seeker crashing into a sitting position as a chorus of eerie”noot noots” echo from the ceiling. When he tries to push himself to his pedes to run, the thrusters hurtle him forward towards the darkness, somersaulting and scraping him across the floor.
He’s crying now because he doesn’t know how to stop and there’s nooting all around him and he’s going to be eaten and he’s burned his leg.
(The lights don’t come on when he makes a loud sound, but something else happens: everything horrible. Suddenly there’s screaming and the roaring sound of firecrackers, and scuffling feet and something crashing into him that’s hot and yelling. Bumblebee screams and tries to fight the thing off, swinging wildly and calling out for Beachcomber at the top of his shrill little lungs.)
By this time, the newspark’s mad dash for the exit has paid off. He staggers up into the merciful light, falling against the wall, scarcely able to believe he’s still intact. Although he’s shaking and tear-streaked and the pain in his knee actuator is starting to spread, he’s still very much aware that Knockdown and Bee are stuck down there in the darkness and cold.
He knows what he has to do. Knows that there’s only one thing he can do.
When he returns to that hallway with its hellish doorway to the abyss, it will be with Megatron in tow.
“Down there! It’s got them!”
It happened in a very short amount of time, as these things often do. Megatron had been helping a student work out some difficult words on a datapad, and suddenly he had lost sight of three of his students. No sooner than he’d noticed the conspicuous quiet of missing children did he hear muffled shrieking, and the ex-warlord sprang towards the voices, mindful of the tiny bots at his pedes.
The little red seeker- Knockout maybe, he’s too intent on the distressed screams to recall names- nearly crashes into him, leading him to the basement door. Megatron slams on the light to find a little blue seeker spewing flames from his thrusters and crashing into the other missing child, the excitable minibot. All the while the both of them continue to shriek in panic.
The giant mech descends the stairs in a few strides and catches Knockdown in one servo, separating Bumblebee with the other. The jet scalds him, but he’s had much worse. “Alright! It’s alright, calm down- stop, it’s alright. Knockdown, relax, turn off your thrusters, it’s alright!”
Megatron's back up 