Transported. Their whole army, everything they owned that was on Earth, had been transported to an unknown planet. How? Nobody knew, in fact, they didn't even know they'd been transported until recently. It was a rather embarrassing thing, that Megatron decided to blame on Starscream. After all, he was always the easiest to blame on things. He almost always was the source of problems, even when he wasn't.

Their first order of business, after a thorough beating of the [i]unfortunate[/i] Starscream, was to establish where exactly they were. Although the atmosphere of the planet as a whole had remained the same, their location on the planet had changed significantly. The Darkmount Fortress, which had originally been located in the desert in Nevada, was now high up in some sort of mountain range. The temperature was significantly colder, and there was even snow on the ground. A major change from where they once were!

After ordering Soundwave to deploy Laserbeak, they soon discovered they were not alone. In fact, there was several other major groups dotted around their immediate area. This also worked to help them find the layout of the world around them. Using the images returned from the small bird-like Decepticon, they could piece together a partial map of the lands that surrounded the Darkmount fortress. Of course, it wasn't the full global map (they'd need to deploy the Nemesis for that), but it was a start. It was during the scouting that Laserbeak detected an unidentified object in orbit above them.

When Megatron heard of that, he immediately ordered the vehicons out to secure the area around them. The troopers didn't need to work too hard to conquer the cities nearby them, and they had completed their mission in a matter of hours. They hoped that this would help keep the unknown object (which they had deduced was some type of ship) from attacking them, especially if it was Autobot in origin. After all, hostages were the best way to keep an Autobot from attacking oneself.