Ep 0.5 - The Universal Language (closed)

Steeljaw flicked one audio array and finished carving the glyph for stupidity, linking it with artful curved claw marks to the modifiers of willfull-blindness and life-threatening folly in a way that would read, if one were to translate it to the local organic language, as the equivalent of the human saying too stupid to come in out of the rain. Satisfied, he sat back on his haunches, eyeing the completed line.

He had heard Shadowrunner coming, correlated the sound of her step and the calculated weight and mass of her frame, and ID'ed her before she had come into sight. Of the occupants of the base, she was on his list of "probably wouldn't care", which was good enough for Steeljaw. He hadn't wanted to break in the middle of a line, when he might not remember the particular twist of phrase that he had wanted to use later.

That she had found and apparently read his other bouts of anger management put it in a different light, however, and he cast her an appraising glance. "Number twenty-five, actually, but I'm impressed you found the rest." He gave her a bipedal readable smile, flicking amusement at the fringes of his field - easy to do, now, when the act of scratching out rudimentary (and rude) word art had taken the edge out of the seething foul temper he had built up earlier. "I'm afraid one through sixteen are in the Amazon rainforest - one of them had some limited notoriety with the local populace. Not exactly a publishing offer, but I'll take what I can get."

Steeljaw tipped his head to the side, regarding her. "So... are you an appreciator of the poetic arts, or did you just enjoy watching someone drill Blaster a new exhaust port?"

Steeljaw peered over his own shoulder at his tail. The tip twitched, shivered, the movement extending into a full-length convulsive lash before he tucked it back around his hind paws once more. "Apparently," he replied, tone drier than the desert outside the base walls, "if all of the humans are accounted for on the catwalks, there are some occupants of this base who get a bit... lax in their monitoring of their rear talocrural sensors." He invented sharply, the sound suspiciously like a disdainful sniff. "I suppose, in their defense, I shouldn't have been trying to walk across the floor of the control room. I certainly haven't made that mistake since."

Turning back to the wall in front of him, he eyed it with narrowed optics and then stepped back. Walking across the width of the hall, he transitioned from floor to wall with nothing more than the subdued click of mag clamps and a shortening of his posture as he crouched lower to adhere more of himself to the wall. Secured, he continued up in smaller steps to crouch near Shadowrunner's shoulder. "You can read it if you want," he offered. "I'm not one of those purists who won't let a line be read until they've proofed it a dozen times." He regarded her thoughtfully, sidelong. "I'd be curious to know what you think."

In more ways than one, really, but the stanza, as it stood, could have been directed at either of the armed factions of the war. Which one Steeljaw meant it for in particular was less clear, though the dark colored femme could probably certainly guess. A calculated risk, but he was willing to bet his first assessment of "probably wouldn't care" was correct.

Her first question made Steeljaw go still for a moment inside his own processor; it was, beyond Ratchet's rather gruff professional concern, which Steeljaw appreciated, the first Autobot he could remember directly asking such a thing. There had, near universally, been an attitude that "upright and functioning" meant "better" and as such should be congratulated and then promptly ignored. He could, he suppose, see the point of such an attitude in a group who seemed to all bear varyingly aged weld scars of one sort or another. No point lingering on what was obviously a way of life.

It was... nice, and he pulsed reassurance at her without thinking about it.

Watching her read his latest meditation made him laugh to himself, tail miming silent humor in smooth looping swishes. "It's therapeutic," he told her. "And like most art, not entirely accurate, but sometimes the glyph arrangement is more important than literalness."

Standing fully, balanced against the sideways drag of gravity, he readied and jumped, smoothly, from one side of the corridor to the other, clamping down again next to his verse. "My original host, Uplink, discovered I had a habit of taking my temper out on... well. Just about everything, really, when I was first created. The furniture, the walls, important pieces of equipment, Uplink himself, a particularly slag sucking customer once or twice. We tried a number of mitigating exercises, but coding and composition are the two that stuck." He flicked an ear dismissively. "I don't usually code when angry unless I'm making a particularly violent end level challenge for a game or working on a virus. Poetry is the safer route. The analytical exercise of it is calming; circumvents the emotional routines in favor of working the puzzle."

It was more personal information than he had offered to any of the 'Bots and he found himself a bit startled by it, but her obvious appreciation of his work had hit a chord. Giving himself a shake, Steeljaw turned to look first one way down the corridor, then the other. "Unfortunately, this is probably a bit more obvious than it should be, in more ways than one." He eyed the verse, recorded it for later reworking, and then dropped one shoulder, half rolling across the scratched stanza. Micro-fine polishing scrubbers beneath the myriad plates of his neck licked out, shearing a molecular thin layer from the metal of the wall.

Twisting to bring the other side into play, Steeljaw scrubbed face and throat across the stanza again, then again, alternating sides in long, smooth streaks. When he was finished he sat back up, flaring his neck plates and giving himself a good shake. Metallic dust spat up in a small cloud, leaving nothing but a weirdly shinier patch of wall.

"Polishers," he told Shadow dryly. "For housecleaning." If one counted 'removing tell tale marks and surface contaminants from things you didn't want people to know you had touched' as 'housecleaning', which Uplink had, but it was hardly necessary to tell her all of THAT. "Convenient, sometimes."

"If I had guns I imagine I would be sneaking out to use them on harmless rock formations," Steeljaw admitted. "As to polishing..."

When he dropped his shoulder again it was to roll entirely, paws coming free from the wall as his plates magnetized in their entirety, sticking him securely to the metal. Wriggling, he pressed his back to the wall and scraaaaaped, the sound shrill and oddly soothing at the same time - or at least soothing to Steeljaw, who sighed in relief as the healing itch across his back welds eased some. "You would not believe how difficult it is to get at that exact portion of your own backstruts," he told Shadowrunner. "Ordinarily my linkages do twist that far, but Ratchet was very emphatic that I not do so until it's healed. Itches like the Pit." He wriggled a bit more, leaving an odd snake like mark across the wall as he did so. "I would happily polish half this base if it would make the Pit slagging itch stop."

Surprise made Steeljaw pause, stretched out in a long curve of spine across the wall, paws curled in towards his own abdomen as he squirmed. He cycled his optics at Shadowrunner. Had she just offered...?

One audio finally flicked, and like a surge through his linkages the motion became an all over one, flipping him back over onto his paws. "Not," he told her hastily, "to appear desperate, but if you could, perhaps...?" He let it trail off, but arched up his back obligingly towards her hand, plates twitching in little fits and starts all down his backstrut.

His answer was meant to be verbal - something along the lines of "yes, please, that's perfect" or maybe "sweet Primus YES don't stop" - but what actually came out was a long, low rumble of his power plant as Steeljaw half shuttered his optics. He arched up into the wondrous relief of fingers rubbing into the Pit slagging itch that had been plaguing him in and out of recharge every moment of every planetary rotation.

Dignity. Scrap and rust. Dignity was for mecha not recovering from snapping their spinal linkages and having them be re-smelted and welded back together. Steeljaw clamped himself firmly to the wall and arched his back into Shadowrunner's touch, click rumbling a note of gratitude - and oh, Primus, he could write odes about that, he really could, and he'd never been much of one for joyous verse - as the pleased and relieved rumble of his power plant shook his plates.

"Happy cat is happy," Steeljaw agreed, venting a long cycle of relief. The small plates that made up his armor twitched into alignment, rippling down his back in waves. "That was wonderful. Thank-"

The trouble with relaxing was that up and down were not nearly as arbitrary as Steeljaw preferred to think. He twitched his ears in annoyance as one hind paw slipped, dragged downward before he could muster the focus to stop it. "Curse your sudden and inevitable gravitational betrayal. Long cat is also long." Suiting action to words, he let himself slide - hindquarters first, stretching down the length of the wall until his paws reached the ground, then gingerly walked his frontpaws down until he was standing firmly on the floor. Giving himself another shake, he leaned in to rub the side of his cheek against Shadowrunner's knee. "Thank you."