Not soon after the construction of the radio tower in the forest, the tower goes mysteriously offline. Scythe sends Shadowraith and Skystrike to investigate. They fly to the tower, and notice a group of ugly humanoid creatures are trying to knock it down. They fire a few warning shots, but the creatures, orcs, are stubborn, and try to attack with thrown spears. The Maximals kill several of the orcs and some of their kobold companions with their air strikes, then the remaining creatures run away. The tower is knocked over, however, so Shadowraith radios Scythe and asks him to come down and fix it. Riding Hulk, Scythe heads toward their position while they return to mining energon in the nearby vein.
It takes almost all night for Scythe to repair and reinforce the tower. While he is working, he hears noises behind him…startled, he radios for help. However, all he encounters is a group of excitable kobolds, who are dragging away the ruined orc bodies. Scythe discovers that the creatures are aggressive, but weak, and manages to shoo them just as the flight-enabled Maximals are arriving.
Meanwhile, Rift and Paladyne are approaching Carriton City, the capital of the country across the river from their crashed ship. The soldiers lead them to the castle of the emperor, the king who lords over Carriton and several imperial-owned lands on the southern continent. Paladyne talks of the Maximals' plan to defeat the "dark gods" who have been gaining power throughout the world, telling the king to call them "Predacons" from now on. When the king's mage advisor becomes curious as to how such creatures can be defeated, Rift brags of the race's invincibility. The mage tries a few spells on the pair, first Detecting and then attempting to Dispel the magic that holds them together. Paladyne panics at first, not understanding what such spells might cause. However, the Maximals discover that the mage's spell simply clears the area of local energon for a while, helping them rather than harming them. The mage insists that the emperor not send anyone to attack these Predacons until he can study the Maximals and discover how they can be defeated. The Maximals respond that they can defeat the Predacons on their own, if they had information about where the Predacons are and what they might be doing. The king allows them to look at the Carriton library, where the knowledge of the kingdom's mages is stored.
As the sun rises over the White Star, Trenek, alone on the ship, has an interesting encounter. A wagon of gnomes, very interested in the Maximals' metal contraption, approaches the ship with a catapult. They are frightened off initially by the early warning system, but attempt to load their weapon and aim it at the automatic guns. Trenek climbs out of the ship, arming her machine guns and firing at the more primitive weapon. The rope breaks, sending both the payload and the hapless gnome still loading it careening into the side of the ship. The gnome, injured, hobbles back to his wagon, and Trenek inspects the device he had launched, discovering it to be a device that was intended as an explosive. Luckily, its complexity prevented it from working properly, and the Maximal disarms it. Soon after, the other Maximals return from their long repair trip. Skystrike is the first to encounter the gibbering gnomes (now bandaging their friends' leg). Shadowraith arrives a few moments later, and tries to calm them down while he is barraged with questions about his technology and the Maximals' flying machine. Scythe finally arrives, and has a question-and-answer session with the gnomes. One of the gnomes, looking at the wagon Hulk is pulling, says that he has seen the "blue jewel" ore before, and knows that dwarves sometimes mine it in the mountains to the north. Scythe refuses to allow the gnomes to look at the ship, and certainly won't allow them to "fix" it. However, he asks for a map to the energon mines, and when one of the gnomes complies, he gives him a small piece of unrefined energon. The gnome, naturally, immediately finds the best way to make it combust. Shadowraith and Skystrike have already returned to the ship, and now that the scanning tower is working again, Shadowraith is getting a new signal: one of the Maximals' stasis pods has crashed, in the mountains to the west. Immediately, the flying Maximals rush to investigate, with Shadowraith carrying Trenek along with him.
Back in the city, Paladyne spends an entire night searching for answers in the library. He gets help learning to read, but due to his advanced language processing abilities, catches up quickly. By the next day, he's almost got all the information he needs to seek out the Predacons. Meanwhile, Rift wanders the library, eventually napping in the isles. He seems to have picked up an unwanted sidekick, in the form of an apprentice mage that has never seen a blink dog before and, like many of the humans here do, asks a lot of questions. Skystrike, the fastest of the Maximal flyers, is the first to arrive at the location where the stasis pod fell. Unfortunately, it's already been removed, and rolled away on a wagon. The wagon tracks lead deep into a mountain cave...