[ti]Ep 2[/ti]Miscalibration (Closed)

[Deleted]

Set Week 2, Day 5, after Synchronicity II

He was clean and gravity was broken.

Except, no, it wasn't.

Yes, it was.

Something was wrong.

And now...it was fixed again.

Skywarp sat on the edge of his berth and turned off his optics. It made him feel marginally better, like the world wasn't occasionally contracting and expanding and adding extra dimensions in the corner of his optics before collapsing down a few and what the frag was going on. Some sort of space anomaly on the Nemesis? He couldn't be the only one seeing this (of course he was, no one else saw the world the way he did). But surely the ship's sensors would have picked it…?

Maybe it was just him.

Him and the aftereffects of whatever it was that had left him submerged in a lake for two planetary cycles. His memory of what he was doing before that was murky. Skywarp dimly remembered anger, a fury had that swept all reason from his processor, and strange voices in his mind but little more.

All he knew was that the aftermath had been yucky and exhausting. He'd pulled himself out of the lake covered in mud and filth. At the time, the seeker had put down any ill effects that he was feeling to the sheer amount of muck permeating his frame. But now, Skywarp had eventually gotten himself clean and upon returning to his room, he could no longer deny that Something Was Wrong.

His tanks churned unsteadily. Skywarp's energy levels had been low when he'd woken up but he didn't think that had anything to do with...this.

Maybe...maybe…

Maybe...he was miscalibrated.

The thought was a terrifying one. But Skywarp could only recall one other time when physics had made no sense to him. When universal constants distorted themselves and the universe just couldn't work like this, all the numbers were wrong, wrong, wrong.

Skywarp had been new then, pulled freshly from the Allspark, in an experimental frame that theoretically should have worked but hadn't. His processor had been bombarded with so much conflicting information from his warp drive, an overwhelming torrent of raw data about the mathematical equations that defined the universe. Many of the others had been driven mad or died from the shock and it had only been the hard work of the scientists that had made him that had kept Skywarp from going the same way.

But he remember it, that agony. The fear. Being miscalibrated.

Very bad memories.

And now it was happening again and there were no scientists now with their cold tools and painful machines that could hook into Skywarp's systems and decipher what was going on with him. There had been no one with that knowledge in eons. His warp drive had degraded in that time due to the lack of care. Perhaps the lack of maintenance was finally having more effects than a decrease in range? This wasn't quite the same as what Skywarp had experienced before. Having been alive for a fairly long time, Skywarp had a very solid understanding of just what the universe should be doing and this was more...his processor throwing up the wrong number every now and then. The sort of number that suggested the universe should be collapsing in on itself or there was about to be another Big Bang kinda thing and that just wasn't right at all and made no sense since he was not actually experiencing any of that right now. It was a queasy sort of feeling, his processor saying one thing but his optics seeing another.

So something was wrong indeed.

Most likely with him.

He could try seeing a medic or a scientist…? Skywarp grimaced at the idea. It was unlikely that they would be able to do anything. The mecha who made him and knew how he worked were long dead. But there was nothing he was achieving by sitting here except feeling like the universe was about to unravel on him. The question was, who?

Shockwave - ha, that idea was right out. Knockout or Flatline…? Which one was more likely to keep their mouth shut? The shiny mech had more steel in his struts than the spindly one and he was the official medic on board, Knockout was far more likely to log a visit if Skywarp went to him. And hadn't Flatline once offered to make Skywarp something to keep him entertained? The spindly mech was...nicer to him.

That settled it, Skywarp decided. He rose to his full height unsteadily, optics narrowing as the equations went wrong inside his processor again and the room blurred on him. It lasted for a microsecond before returning to normal. The seeker reached out and placed a servo on the wall to support himself while he got his bearings again. Maybe Skywarp should have stayed covered in gunk, at least then the dirt had distracted him enough that he hadn't noticed what was going on.

The seeker pushed off the wall and left his room, heading for Flatline's workshop. He had a mech to track down and find.

[Flatline]

Flatline was... not working for once.

The Medic, or... was his title better described as Science Assistant?... Whatever label people wanted to place on him, it did not matter. The point was that he had been working hard through the previous night, and found himself crashing and burning with about as much grace as an actual vehicular accident. The front room to his lab was clean enough, there was no evidence of anything being out of line, or any projects half abandoned on a counter, but the back room was another story all together.

On contrast to how clean and tidy the front was, the storage area beyond the unlocked door looked like a bomb had exploded. The majority of the room had makeshift racks and shelves positioned up near the walls, the planks of metal supporting a myriad of bins and containers full of filthy parts ripped and torn off of Vehicons in favor of upgrades. Scanners and display huds, spare parts from the Drone he had modified for Skywarp, pared with makeshift scrap and human novelties scrounged up from earth.

There was a car engine from some abandoned vehicle, and there were other technological bits and pieces like wires and fiber optics. Paired with all this was plenty of just raw metal that could be melted down and used for making metal stock. He liked collecting that the most, because if he found a particularly nice piece of metal that he could make good bar stock out of, he could then use it to machine into new parts and pieces without using the finer quality Cybertronian metals that would be overkill for the task. It seemed what was left of the room was then filled with crates and boxes of other scrap yard finds, and a crate of enamel paints he had scrounged up, except for one corner where a smaller berth was pushed up against the wall almost hidden.

Flatline was laying half on the slab of metal, and half off, his upper torso and thus the majority of his weight slung on the surface. His arms were splayed out in front of him, the fingers of his left hand lodged between bed and wall to 'lock' himself from sliding entirely off of the surface. His right primary was holding a dingy rag that he had been using to probably clean up the main room of the lab a bit ago. While most of his mass was on the slab, his slimmer lower half and long spindly legs weren't even close to making it up onto the surface.

One leg was folded up underneath him, the hoof like toes of one ped folded down so some of his weight was resting on the 'knuckle' while the other limb was stretched awkwardly backwards and away, the limb pulled straight from the tendon cable running down its backside. It further added to the visual that he had been attempting to make it to his bed, before just downright crashing into recharge prematurely.

He was dead to the world.

[Deleted]

According to Skywarp's current calculations, the gravity exerted from the Earth upon the Nemesis was so strong, the ship should have been snagged out of the air and plunged to the ground.

Obviously, none of this was happening.

Skywarp scowled.

The numbers reset themselves to their previous values. The big seeker continued on his path and experienced no further disruptions on his trip to Flatline's workshop.

Skywarp let himself in. He cocked an optic ridge at the freakishly clean lab but was too agitated to dwell on it. His gaze quickly swept over the room, searching for the spindly mech with too many limbs. Where was Flatline? Deeper in the lab, perhaps?

The big seeker strode forth into the storage bay, optics roaming the area. Ordinarily, his attention would have been diverted by the mess. But Skywarp was single-minded in his search right now and the distractions were not paid any attention.

There.

It should have been funny, the sight of Flatline passed out like that. But Skywarp hurried forth, ignoring the pose the other mech had fallen into recharge in. He loomed above the spindly mech, then reached down to place one large servo on Flatline's shoulder.

"Hey," Skywarp scowled, giving Flatline a shake. "Wake up."

[Flatline]

During their previous encounter, Flatline had to express that just because his name was what it was, didn't mean it was meant to be taken literally. He was not a poor medic he killed everyone that was placed upon his table, nor did it mean he worked with forensics or dead Cybertronian back on their home planet. He didn’t have some abnormality that meant he didn’t seem to have a spark beat and thus was 'flat lined' nor did he have anything else obvious to pair with the name. This said, despite all of his denials and attempts to brush that connotation aside, he managed to actually have one thing that made sense with his name, and that was what was happening right here in the now.

He was unresponsive, and the shake to his shoulder did nothing to wake him up. But while it did not wake him, it did unhook his claws from the far edge of the berth. This caused a slow scraping sound to play out, as gravity pulled at his body and caused it to start to slide backwards off of the bed. A moment later, and the medic slapped down to the ground roughly upon his back, nearly bending the one outstretched leg backwards at the hip before it popped forward. His back rammed down hard, punctuated by his helm snapping back and smacking against the neck guard that collared up behind his throat. Nothing was broken, but the impact startled him awake.

Hazy processor not even slightly put through the proper boot up process, caused Flatline to spazzum momentarily in startled alarm. His leg that had just popped forward, now crooked up and kicked out frantically once in tandem with one of the harpoons engaging and triggering with an excessively loud bang. The barbed post of metal launched hard with a rattle of chains and a vroom of its velocity, slicing through the air between Skywarps feet to ram into a metal container across the way and then into the wall.

The container was launched from its resting spot, a gore of metal rended through it as it spun on its side for a second only to fall. The contents of brackets and other hinges fell out onto the ground with noisy rainfall of metal, Flatline in response lurching and scrambling. He attempted to sit up but the chain pulled his shoulder back and down.

"Hwu-egh!? What!? Who's dying!?"

[Deleted]

Whatever Skywap had been expecting, Flatline jerking awake and launching a harpoon between his feet had not been it.

The seeker was thrown into a loop and his worries were immediately forgotten as he twisted his head around to watch the trajectory of destruction caused by Flatline's harpoon. Even that weird patch of space that had been hurting his head in the corner of his optics was ignored. "Woah," he said, optics wide.

Who could worry about things like potentially life threatening damage when Flatline was wrecking his lab by accident and things were falling apart?

And best of all was that it wasn't Skywarp who had done this! Well, technically he'd set the events into motion that had caused the destruction but he couldn't have foreseen that this would be result of waking the mech up. Surely no one could blame him for that!

Gingerly, Skywarp stepped clear of the harpoon's chain that lay between his pedes. He made no move to help Flatline out of his predicament, mainly because he wasn't certain where to start and there was every possibility that his unguided help would end up making things worse.

"Hwu-egh!? What!? Who's dying!?"

"Your lab, by the looks of things," the seeker observed.

"And I didn't do it!"

[Flatline]

Flatline was unable to sit upright because of the harpoon chain that was locking him down, which was somewhat ok since he was no longer trying to do so. The barbs on the post kept it securely lodged into the wall with no remorse, and the chain wasn't slack enough to really give him any leeway on the subject. This left him seemingly stuck upon his back, splayed out as if he had died all over again and all that was needed was a chalk line to immortalize the image.

Bleary red optics stared up at the ceiling above, the lenses within dilating and contracting lazily as they tried to tune in to reality and what exactly was going on. He could see the faint light above, and then a blurry figure of something large looming overhead and blotting out a good third of the light. He could recognize the shape of orange optics, but that just made him that much more confused because it wasn't exactly a commonly chosen optic color.

With the makeshift adrenaline surge passing through him, and the mystery figure talking, the medic started to try to put two and two together finally. Even so... it still felt like trying to shove a square post through the triangle hole as he shot blindly in the dark trying to put a face to a voice inside his helm. Eventually, he made a good enough match that should have been instantaneous.

"Oh... it's you..."

Flatline's tone of voice had returned to an almost normal level. It was tired, bleary still, and heavy with the weight of realization and clarity of thought, which... was somewhat standard when he wasn't shrieking his helm off at Roulette. Paired with this commentary on current events, he lifted a hand and splayed it out over his faceplate, smearing down the panels to etch a finger along one of the deep seams that branched away from his optics. When the tip of his claw reached his jaw, he finally opened his eyes again, and he could see properly then.

Skywarp.

Letting out a groaning noise, Flatline flexed his spine while reaching his arm up to twine and twist it around the chain. The links rattled lightly as they wound about his forearm, where he got a good enough grip and tugged lightly to cause the harpoon to slip free with a pop. The weaponry only disengaged so easily, because he had remotely unhooked the barbs on the end, permitting them to lie flat and turn to weapon into a slick post. If he hadn't had the mind to do so, he would have likely just drug himself across the floor at the wall instead. Either way, the now-javelin reeled back at him with clunks of the internal spool turning, trying to get fed back into the turret.

"What do I owe this unexpected and not particularly desired visit... since I was in Recharge"

[Deleted]

Skywarp folded his arms across his chassis and watched Flatline slowly get himself together with bubbling amusement.

It took the spindly mech awhile as he lay on his back and gazed blearily up at the ceiling. Skywarp bore through this with unexpected patience.

He was here to ask for help after all. With something that he'd usually want to keep as far away as possible from someone like Flatline. Except Skywarp knew, knew just how woefully unequipped he was to deal with his own systems (and wow, was he bitter about that? Surely not. Skywarp hated a slim number of things in his life) . The people who made him hade been too. It had taken a lot of trial and error (and the lives of a lot of his frame brothers) before they anything approaching understanding and expertise in how to fix Skywarp . And they were long gone now.

His options, as much as Skywarp disliked it, were slim.

This...was going to be tricky.

"Oh... it's you..."

Skywarp, in his self centered and decidedly deluded manner chose to take it that Flatline was a 100% absolutely delighted to see him. Which was good, because the sentiments didn't go the other way.

"What do I owe this unexpected and not particularly desired visit... since I was in recharge"

He twiddled his thumbs, about to speak when it occurred to him that he had no idea where to start.

Plank's constant isn't 6.626 x 10^-34 anymore. It isn't anything anymore. Why has this happened?

Light stopped behaving as both a particle and a wave just a while back. But it can't just be a particle, light's able to diffract, reflect, interfere with itself…those are wave properties...

The earth's gravitational pull increased. Did the earth increase its mass and density? If so, how did that happen and no one noticed? Or maybe they did but they didn't think it was weird. It’s weird. Planet's shouldn't do that. Well, they shouldn't do that without outside interference.

Since when did the energy of an object get calculated with the speed of light raised to the power of three instead of two…

These thoughts and more swirled around in Skywarp's processor. But what ended coming out of his vocaliser was a pitiful:

"My head feels funny."

[Flatline]

The javelin of metal rattled across the floor at an at ease pace as the mechanism pulled it back and into its socket. He was in no rush, he didn’t have to be to reload and launch the weaponry again, and because of this he only gave the minimal amount of power to the device. After a moment, the harpoon slipped back into its socket with a rattle, only to be accompanied by the sound of a click and pop when it latched in place.

He had hoped Skywarp would concoct a good excuse, and would have something he actually needed. Really, Flatline's sleep delayed mind was providing a dozen and a half examples that he could be facing in the next few seconds. The most likely cause that kept lazily pulling to the forefront of his processor was that the giant brute of a beast had somehow broken something of value, and was spooked that he was going to get in trouble. He probably wanted Flatline to repair it so that others wouldn't be any the wiser!

But this was wrong.

Red optics pinned closed again, wishing and willing this all to be some kind of elaborate hallucination or dream. There was no way that Skywarp barged through his lab and into his room, just to tell him that his head feels funny. Even if this was a legitimate concern, shouldn’t he go to Knock Out? Wasn't the annoying sports car the medic for the ship? Not that Flatline would suggest anyone go to him. He did not like the medic and wanted nothing to do with him. Maybe the same was said for Skywarp? Flatline TECHNICALLY could serve as a medic, and this could pose as an opportunity, but... a helm feeling funny was hardly a glamorous job.

"Wonderful..."

He croaked, before finally opting to sit upright. The tension cables in his back creaked marginally as he did so, his systems warming up to return to a normal state of operations rather than the lower key idle of recharge. He gingerly tucked one of his legs down and beneath him before pushing upright to stand up fully and try to take in his surroundings. For a moment he wobbled, unbalanced, but as his systems booted the gyroscopes in his upper torso initiated and he found his footing once more.

"Do you care to be a bit more descriptive than that? Unless you have a visible bump or scrape I can't work with that much."

A part lie, he could do scans, but he wanted Skywarp to talk and elaborate so he had somewhere to aim with the scans.

[Deleted]

There was a gravitational anomaly in the corner of Skywarp's optics.

The seeker has settled on giving it the stink-eye and so ignored Flatline's oh so delighted, "Wonderful." He watched the bit of physics weirdness for a moment, was dark energy acting up and speeding up the metric expansion of space? Or was it photons gaining energy twice as fast? And why was it happening here in Flatline's lab? Neither should be observable at this scale.

What the every living frag was happening.

"Do you care to be a bit more descriptive than that? Unless you have a visible bump or scrape I can't work with that much."

Skywarp blinked and looked up. It registered, vaguely, that Flatline did not sound pleased. In fact, one could go as far to say that the spindly mech sounded annoyed. At what or why, the seeker had no idea.

He shut one optic and squinted at Flatline as he thought hard. "It's…" Skywarp floundered. "I. Things are weird. Like really weird. You know?"

[Flatline]

Flatline stood beside his berth with upmost annoyance flickering through his field. His eyes were part closed still, and one hand placed down upon the edge of the metal slab to lean his weight against. It was almost like the burden of gravity was just too much for his sluggish frame to process and his arm had to play a role to help his limbs.

"I sadly do not know..."

Pinning his optics closed a moment, Flatline's right primary hand raised up to lightly rub at his eye. It was a slow motion; trying to smudge out whatever may be blurring his vision, before his hand smeared down and part drug his faceplate with it along the way. All this was paired with a groaned grumble, trying to get all his frustrations out before he had to pretend to be professional.

"Does it hurt? Is there pressure? A sharp pain? Balance sensors off? Is your depth perception skewed? Exhaustion? Over alertness?"

Relenting, he began just spewing out symptoms after symptoms, trying to give Skywarp words to latch onto. If he couldn't pull up the descriptive terms on his own, perhaps he could just point out the ones that did catch his eye and relate to what he was experiencing. It was a tactic used with underdeveloped Processors often. They didn't have the same experience and connectors built yet through the speedway of their minds, and offering these bridges was a good way to help facilitate that growth.

"Is it weirdness sensed in your mind? Or your field? Does your body feel off or is it just your head?"

Pushing away finally, Flatline lazily began walking forward so that he could exit the room. He was under the impression that Skywarp would follow, and vacate his personal quarters that the behemoth had NOT been invited into in the first place. Each step was light and calm, soft 'tik's that were only accented by the hum of machinery.

[Deleted]

It was Skywarp's not so humble opinion that Flatline should know. The other mech's job involved a great deal of understanding how mecha worked and what made them tick and what not. Couldn't install or upgrade the weaponry on someone if you didn't, so Flatline had to know these things.

He was about to petulantly raise this point when it occurred to him that the mecha involved in his creation hadn't had much of an idea either. A great deal of haphazard guesswork had been involved. Haphazard guesswork tended to have painful and occasionally deadly side effects.

Fond of the medical and scientific professions, Skywap was not.

He blinked as Flatline began to ask all the questions. Seriously, slow down mech, one thing at a time. Did it hurt? Uhhh, Skywarp contemplated the answer. No, he wasn't in pain. Wait- pressure? Sharp pain - hadn't he already been asked that one…? Balance sensors…

The spindly mech was asking him too many things at once. Skywarp's optics narrowed in annoyance as he tried to keep up.

"Is it weirdness sensed in your mind?

"That one!" Skywarp latched on to it, sounding all too pleased to finally have something pinpointed down. He followed Flatline from the room. "My head feels off."

Never mind he'd already said that things were weird and that his head felt funny. This was a marginal improvement for Flatline in terms of diagnosis.

[Flatline]

Flatline wasn't even half way through what his life expectancy could be for a Cybertronian, and already he felt like he was too old for this slag.

Skywarp wasn't helping in any way whatsoever and wasn't offering really any clues as to what was going wrong. A lot of the joy Flatline had thought at first in being able to undermine Knock Out, was going sideways out the window the longer time droned on. This looked like it was shaping up to be an infuriating experience, in which he was going to want to strangle Skywarp's throttled little head clean off his shoulders. He didn't want to have to try to medicate and treat EVERY known thing in the universe that could be wrong, and he just needed more to work with.

"So it is strictly a mental feeling, and not physical to your body... ok..."

Striding into the room, Flatline palmed his hand against the wall to activate the lighting that had been off a moment prior. The laboratory flooded itself with illumination a moment after, creating cutting dark shadows and accenting the iron cabinetry and setups across the workshop. A few computers were already on and running, calculating and rendering projects that were meant to be addressed in the morning, but otherwise everything had been shut down and stored away.

"You have three options and three options alone Skywarp."

He started, reverting easily to a more aggressive and blunt approach he was accustomed to. Flatline then took a moment to remind himself that this wasn't a typical Cybertronian, and he had to be a bit more tactful about how he worded things unless the brute have a tantrum and destroy something. It is because of this his tone lightened up with his following words, speaking clearly and calmly to smooth over his frustrations.

"Option one: You can be a bit more detailed in what you are experiencing, which would let me know how to treat things."

Flatline started to count off on his fingers as he did so, to accent the different options as clear as day.

"Option two: I have to use a medical port and physically extract information myself since I do not have a medical scanner."

Shifting his weight a bit, he unfolded a final digit.

"And lastly, option three: you go to Knock Out and make him use the scanner on you since he has a monopoly of all those tools hoarded away from me."

The little fragger.

[Deleted]

Skywarp blinked.

He squinted at Flatline. He hadn't heard anything beyond the first option. Be a bit more detailed…?

"Okay," he said slowly and seriously. "Well, you know how dark energy speeds up the expansion of space. Something seriously weird is going over there."

He jabbed a finger towards a corner of Flatline's lab, where a few computers beeped serenely. "Space is getting bigger over there faster than it should be, according to my warp core. Which isn't right, my numbers are wrong and they shouldn't be," Skywarp sounded utterly appalled that his math was failing him.

"My head feels weird, because it doesn't make sense."

[Flatline]

Uhm... what?

This was a good bit of information to work off of, but... it wasn't information he knew exactly what to do about. This was a different brand of science, centralized about something he didn't frankly understand.

Flatline was a manufacturer. He could craft mechanical parts, and assemble them together with upmost care. He had the skills and capability to create full functional Cybertronian frames, frames that could be gifted life if the All-Spark was still around and offering what it could to help. But... he didn't really make MACHINES, and a Space Bridge was a machine he didn't understand beyond its basic purpose and properties.

If you handed him all the parts of a Space Bridge, and told him to put it together pike a puzzle, he could possibly figure it out, but to build it from scratch when he had to program it all and actually machine out all the parts...? No... he had no idea. He didn’t dive into those sciences because there were always others more skilled at it than him. He needed to remain in medicine, and that is where he had stayed and felt most comfortable. Repairs, body parts, organs, he could do...

This was different.

This request was miles above the piddly little drone needed before to entertain Skywarp, this was beyond what he really knew how to do. Skywarp would be better suited going to an engineer than he would a medic, yet this machine was now an organ inside his body, so it also fell into the medic territory as well. All of this confusion and conflict, showed as Flatline's sharp angled brows furrowed and pushed together, his optics widening a bit for the lens ring within to contract in and blankly stare at the larger mech.

"While I don't know anything about your warp core unless you permit me to actually study it, there are still a few things I can do to try to help."

Falling back to a confident tone, he didn't want Skywarp to know he was somewhat out of his element. Really, a hard reset would possibly do wonders if there was just a loophole somewhere in his calculations that needed to be flushed out. If it was just a calculations error? Yeah, sure, Flatline could fix that easy. But if something was actually broken in the way the warp core functioned... he would need to go to Shockwave who'd be the only one with the scientific skills to even tackle this job unless Flatline could get someone to help him that knew how a Space Bridge worked in full detail so they could collaborate.

"Sit down on the table and let me get a few things."

[Deleted]

Skywarp wasn't quite done. He still hadn't told Flatline about watching five dimensions collapse down into one and the black hole that had formed right above the spindly mech's head. Or that light had briefly stopped behaving like a wave just a little while back. Or the changes of gravity that had occurred.

He was still trying to think of ways to articulate how physics was completely and utterly broken, when-

"While I don't know anything about your warp core unless you permit me to actually study it, there are still a few things I can do to try to help."

NO.

The seeker shot Flatline a dirty look. "No sciencing," he reminded the mech sharply. He clenched his fists and shifted with agitation, brimming with the promise of violence lurking round the corner and waiting for the slightest provocation.

Skywarp was nowhere near what passed as a rational mindset for him. Few things could rattle him but a malfunctioning warp core and even just the thought of being studied again? Those were not good things. Those were the farthest things from being good. So far, he'd managed to keep it together because he was aware of how slim his options were.

And also, because it had been hilarious watching Flatline wreck his room like that.

It took effort but he managed to unwind himself enough to follow directions and perch on the edge of Flatline's table. He kept his gaze locked onto Flatline, determined to keep track of the spindly mech's every move and what the mech was fetching.