[ti]Ep 2[/ti]My, what big teeth you have! [Sparkplug]

[Deleted]

Episode 2 | Week 4 | Day 6 | 8:00pm (or thereabouts)

• ...Far be it from me to suggest that your resplendent wisdom is in any way lacking, but I must protest. Perhaps you should take some time to reconsider taking this course of action. If you would just allow me to provide–"

Mal silenced the AI, muting its link. Again.

He initiated a long invent, relaxing ever so slightly as cool air breezed across his over-heating systems. "BAB-715. TMI-992," he said, recovering from his concerned AI's interruption. The two Vehicons didn't twitch from where they stood facing him at attention. "No more arguing. You will be my wingmen. You have no choice." Mal leaned forward, looming over the drones from his perch on a top bunk.

The left mech shifted uncomfortably. "Sir, what you are asking is beyond our..." TMI-992 flinched as his processor misfired and the shared quarters went still while it waited for him to continue. A frozen klick passed before BAB-715 raised a claw hopefully and tried, "pay-grade?"

The red light of Mal's visor glowed malevolently and BAB-715 withered.

"Both of you will accompany and support me until I dismiss you,” Mal ordered. “Your objections are irrelevant.” He didn’t expect either drone to understand a word like ‘irrelevant,’ but neither had he when SAS-213 had used that same line on him and now look. It was coming up in every day conversation.

TMI-992 shifted again but his partner stopped him from speaking by flinging a servo at his faceplate. Accepting their silence as agreement, Mal dropped down from the elevated berth and sauntered out of the room. The two lesser Vehicons plodded after him.

Mike, put me on a route straight to Sparkplug’s workshop, he pinged the AI. A long delay preceded the arrival of a detailed map coupled with written directions, and Mal realized he was under the silent treatment. Thank the All-Spark.

Well, not really. The fragging All-Spark could get fragged.

The bright-faced trio took the scenic route to their destination, detouring to chat with Mal’s friends, avoiding those of his wingmen, and stopping in at the mess hall for a cube. Just one cube. His reluctant underlings could wait to snack on their own time. The meandering and networking would provide him with a solid alibi, because at least a few of the mechs he’d gossiped with or waved to down the hall had glitched chronometers that would place him in proximity during his venture.

By the time they reached the degenerate corridor where the new kid allegedly was housed, Mal felt certain that they had successfully averted any notice. He spared a glance around his shoulder and froze in shock mid-stride, momentum sending him sprawling to the ground with an echoing clatter.

“Imbeciles!” he flailed noisily and struggled to his pedes while simultaneously awarding himself a gold star for word use. “Put your blasters away! This isn’t a combat mission, you fools!”

BAB-715 swiftly transformed the weapon away and rubbed his fender sheepishly, but TMI-992 was a little slower on the uptake. Glancing between Mal and the the triangular energon blaster that presently made up his own arm, the drone stammered, “But...aren’t we supposed to be support?”

Mal silently wept. “Not with guns. Put that away.” Once TMI-992 complied, wisely keeping silent despite his obvious confusion, they walked the last few yards to the door flagged on his map.

He couldn’t help but notice that the door was immaculate. The rest of this area of the ship was run down and frankly disgusting, but the door was glittering like new. Surprised and deviously pleased, Mal hoped it was an indication of similar quality to whatever he found inside the room.

“Don’t say a word unless I tell you to,” he hissed at his back up mechs. Then, arching his forearm to align one of his claws with the control panel, he pinged for entrance.

[Sparkplug]

Sparkplug's workshop project was coming along nicely. Somewhat typically, she had several different bits and pieces underway at the same time. At the end of the room furthest from the door, a heavily armoured weapons testing chamber had been set up, though no markings had been painted within the box yet, and the monitoring equipment was lifelessly silent. Midway down the room, several workbenches were all bolted securely to the wall, their rear portions bearing several different containers with dozens of small, neatly labelled drawers. Opposite them, a large lathe and pillar drill were positioned roughly on marks on the floor, but were yet to be bolted down or connected to the warship's integrated power supply.

At the other end of the chamber, near the door, a large, complex chair made of multiple independently moving parts and servos sat proudly in a clear space, various wires and cables trailing from it to a temporary handheld pad. A narrow track ran along the floor and ceiling from wall to wall, which would guide a folding divider to seal off the very end of the room next to the chair when finished, but was currently just a gleaming channel a metre or so from the end wall. Dark monitors studded the walls like blank optics, and a pile of speakers sat in the corner. The entire place was full of gleaming metal and polished parts, the air rich with the scent of lubricating oil, giving the brightly-lit chamber an air of productive industry.

Sparkplug was on her back on the floor, plugging in a motor connector, when the entrance signal chimed. Her gaze flicked to the monitors flanking the door, but they remained flatly black. "Darn. Guess that's not hooked up properly yet. Wonder who that is?"

Raising her voice, she called out, "Coming!" even though the room was pretty well soundproofed, and paused just long enough to push the connector home before scooting out from beneath the throne-like chair. Maybe it was Starscream, come to check up on her - she'd been working at the chamber for a few planetary cycles. Brushing her hands together to remove any flakes of metal, she stood up and strolled over to the door. A tap of her finger and it slid back smoothly into its socket, letting in the distant grumble of the warship's engine.

A trio of vehicons stood there, their blank silver masks somehow expectant.

The femme was shorter than them by a noticeable margin, her head around chest height to the vehicon standard. The lights within the room were considerably brighter than the dim, gloomy hallway, and they leant highlights to her gleaming white paint. Her mismatched arm, double articulated and an unpainted silver, dangled loosely at her side, down to her calf. Bright green optics in a pale grey faceplate regarded them curiously.

Sparkplug blinked, then relaxed and grinned at the three of them. "Well now, hello! Wasn't expecting visitors. Come on in." Stepping back, she made room for them to enter, strolling over to lean on one of the benches with her right hand. "Been meaning to have a word with some of you. I need to take some measurements of your body plan, make sure it matches up with the schematic data I've pulled. There's a lot we can do with the basic frame!"

Catching herself before she launched into a digression about what exactly she could do with a vehicon frame, she added, "I'm Sparkplug, nice to meet you. So what brings you by?"

[Deleted]

Dagnabit...what am I doing? I mean, frag.

Mal rebooted his visor to make it stop fizzling and spun in a panicked circle, barely keeping his balance. He was in an unknown section of the Nemesis, accompanied by two Vehicons, and was standing in front of a door. A...very nice door?

Processor misfire. A major one. And the Vehicon had a feeling that right now, right here was a really bad time for it.

Mal turned to the pair of drones behind him, recognizing both as lesser Vehicons that he rarely bothered to associate with. He gazed suspiciously at them and they stared back, most likely uncomprehending of what had just occurred. “What is our—“ His query for mission details was interrupted by the hissing of the door and he twisted back to face it.

This was a very bad situation. He had no idea why he was here, or where here was, or who the femme gleaming in the doorway was supposed to be (and it was a little beyond his panicky processing at the moment to think of comms). Nonetheless, Mal took the opportunity to admire her splendidly unique frame, from the shiny white plating to the predominant wheels and a spectacularly gawky looking arm.

Then he was ushered inside.

The femme’s workshop was quite nice at first glance. Though the marks of previous neglect still clung in places, the room was cleaned to a sparkle and meticulously organized, not to mention extraordinarily well lit. Mal didn’t go far from the entrance, opting to stand stiffly just on this side while the two drones attempted to find space behind him without brushing the door.

It didn’t escape the Vehicon that the femme hadn’t stopped talking since she’d answered the door. He had missed some of it, still scrambling mentally to regather the time lost to his lapse, but zeroed back in in time to catch something about measurements and schematics. Something about the casual way she said it gave him pause, but that was brushed away. He pulled his shoulders back and straightened, an outward reflection of his inner self finally settling into some measure of calm.

Not that he had any clue what was going on.

“I am...” Oh slag. Was this official business? Was he supposed to provide his real designation or an alias? Mal wanted to bash his faulty processors against the wall. Instead he glanced at the drone to his left in hopes of some sort of cue, received absolutely nothing, and slumped forward in defeat. He couldn’t actually remember waking up, but he was sure he’d not been planning on a day like this.

“MAL...364,” he continued hesitantly, finally opting to go with a partial alias. He could blame it on a glitch if he’d chosen wrong. “We are here to assist you.” It was vague enough to cover a lot of different possibilities. It was safe. Relatively.

Mal reached back to snag each of the drones with a claw and dragged them forward, a barrier between himself and an abyss of uncertainty. “This is BAB-715 and TMI-992. They are both Vehicon Trooper frame types, but I am sure you will have no difficulty altering them to ‘Basic.’ Not that there is much there to alter, if you catch my drift,” he finished with a staticky laugh. That had been clever. Because they were drones. Slag processors, and all that.

Sharing a joke with the femme designated Sparkplug made Mal feel much more at ease. He moved his tri-taloned servos up to the backs of the drones and nudged them forward until the three Vehicons were lined up the middle of Sparkplug’s workshop.

Like lambs led to the slaughter.

[Sparkplug]

Sparkplug's optic ridges rose a little at the vehicon's hesitation before he spoke his designation. She wasn't totally sure what the root cause was, but some of the vehicons seemed to have more personality than others. For a moment, she thought he was one of the mostly quiet ones, before he disabused her of the notion by adding more details conversationally, and laughing. Bit of an odd laugh - sounded like he didn't have his vocal emitter quite lined up properly - but she wasn't going to trouble him about something minor like that.

"Here to give me a hand, huh? Heck, this place just gets better and better. Well now, Mal, it's nice to meet you, and your colleagues here. TMI and Bab?" She glanced between the two, looking for some sign as to which was which, before shrugging and turning back to her workbench.

"Lemme see here, I've got a tape. Ridiculous that I couldn't find a set of laser calipers, but that's how it goes." Pulling open a drawer, she plucked a roll of white tape from it, marked with neat, precise divisions of distance. "This'll have to do. Alright, let's get a schema for you guys up..." Darting over to the wall, she clicked one of the dull monitors on, and typed fast and one handed, calling up a neat schematic of the vehicon frame from the warship's database. Various breakdowns of frame components scrolled across it, separating into exploded diagrams, then reassembling.

Nodding in satisfaction, she strolled over to stand in front of Mal. "Alright, now. You just stand still right there, and let me double check the schematics." Pinning one end of the tape to his shoulder, she stretched it over his chest, her elongated arm making it easier to reach the far side. Her touch was businesslike and matter of fact, moving the tape this way and that with brisk efficiency as she checked his primary dimensions. Her bright green optics darted to and fro, from the tape to the wall monitor and back again.

"Y'know," she said conversationally, "you should always double check dimensions before you make any alterations to a frame. Sometimes, those schematics, and the manufacturing tolerances? Waaay off. You do not want to find that out half-way through replacing a major subsystem, and suddenly, uh-oh, this component is only ninety five percent of the size it needs to be. Or one hundred and five, which is actually worse. That's a mistake you only make once, right?"

The tape rolled up into her hand with a snap, and she smiled brightly. "Looks like your tolerances are pretty much correct, though! Someone did good work. Or they documented really well after. Either way, that means I can trust the internal dimensions. Oh! Yes, there's something else you can test for me."

Dancing back across the floor, dropping the tape measure into the drawer and flicking it shut without even looking at it, Sparkplug came to rest behind her large, complicated chair. Radiating cheerful enthusiasm, she said brightly, "I want to make sure the adjustable segments conform properly to different body types! I've only tested it on mine so far, and that's no good for presenting the automatics with unfamiliar body plans. Will one of you come and sit down?"

[Deleted]

It was in the moments following his introduction that Mal recalled he had one reliable comrade that might be able to dig him out of this pit. Mike? Mike? You there? he thought furiously, receiving silence. The AI would never leave him to flounder in such a dire situation if he had a choice, which meant Mal’s processor hadn’t quite recovered from the misfire and Mike was incapable of responding.

With that realization, the Vehicon felt even more alone standing between TMI-992 and BAB-715, facing down what, for all he knew, could be a fire-breathing dragon disguised as a bubbly femme.

“Yes, yes, it’s a lovely warship,” he said glumly. “If you really want to talk to them, they go by Timothy and Barnaby. And they aren’t colleagues.” Sparkplug was glancing back and forth between the two drones and Mal tilted his head just slightly. Was there something wrong with the pair of morons? He leaned forward to get a look at the mech on his right but couldn’t see any problem beyond the usual. The other one seemed fine too.

Maybe the femme was just sensing their natural ineptitude. General frame types had some weird intuitions.

Everything Sparkplug said after that went in one audio receiver and out the other. Mal stood dumbly and let her work over his frame with a bendable bar that shrunk and extended to whatever length the mechanic required. Every few seconds he sent a new inquiry to Mike which was never returned.

After a time, Sparkplug’s babbling changed abruptly in tone and Mal tuned in, understanding enough of her chatter to comprehend that whatever the femme had been doing was a success. He nodded knowingly, still more occupied trying to fix his mental problems than participating in reality. That changed when Sparkplug, leaning gleefully and maliciously on a freak chair, asked for a test subject.

Mal visibly flinched, taking a few steps back and clearing his vocalizer. “Yes, uh...” He spun around, looking for one of the drones. His visor lit up and he jumped forward to grab TMI-992 by the forearm and drag him forcefully to the mechanic’s chair. It was no surprise that the poor little fellow fought back—more than a few Vehicons actively avoided frame modification as if it were the plague.

“TM—I mean Timothy volunteers!” Mal assured Sparkplug, shoving his captive into the chair and holding him down as the drone thrashed.

A moment later, a flash of white light arced over Timothy’s upper body accompanied by a loud, horrific crackle and Timothy went limp, limbs dangling over the edge of the chair. Mal froze, leaning over the sprawling Vehicon, and slowly raised his visor to look into the mechanic’s piercing green optics. “Er...I apologize on Timothy’s behalf. He is notoriously unreliable.”

[Sparkplug]

Timothy and Barnaby. Sparkplug shook her helm. The names the vehicons had selected were weird. Still, it was their right to call themselves whatever they felt like, so she committed them to memory, until such time as they came up with something a bit more Cybertronian.

Leaning on the chair, Sparkplug raised an optic ridge when the lead vehicon - Mal - turned to one of the others and seized him by the arm, declaring that 'Timothy' volunteered. At least she knew which vehicon was which now, which she hadn't been able to figure out just by looking at them. Maybe they were a bit more physical than she was used to among themselves.

Then, Mal began to drag Timothy, who for his part began kicking and struggling mutely to escape.

Sparkplug's mouth dropped open, and for a moment she struggled to find her voice, paralysed by total bewilderment at the sight of one vehicon bodily forcing the other to sit down. Jerking back, she was just about to speak when the flare of an electric arc flashed over Timothy, and Mal guiltily jerked backwards from his suddenly prone comrade.

Grabbing her helm with both hands, Sparkplug finally managed, in a high-pitched squeak of disbelief, "What in the ten thousand smelting pits are you doing? I asked one of you to sit down to test the fit, you identikit mass-produced purple lunatic!" Jerking into motion, Sparkplug yanked a drawer open with her long arm and pulled out a bright yellow testing meter, dangling probes on colour-coded leads.

"I don't even have the fragging comms set up here yet! You - Barnaby! The nano-klik I tell you to go, you run down the hall and find a comm panel, right? Medical emergency in chamber 17192-7337. Just hold on while I check how bad he is, don't wanna drag Knock Out down here for no good reason."

Glancing up at the diagram on the wall again, she stamped on a foot switch. The back of the chair swung backwards, the leg and arm rests raising as the entire assembly rose. In seconds, the chair had flattened out into a platform, held at a convenient waist-height. She felt a tiny flicker of satisfaction at that, but didn't have time to focus on it. Tugging the vehicon's prone arm straight, she flicked open a small service panel and slid the probe leads into the standard ports beneath, readouts awakening on the handheld to give her a rough idea of his internal operating status.

Her green optics briefly flicked up to Mal as she worked, then down again, and she added, "As for you, Champion of the All-Time Inappropriate Wrestling Team, you stay right where you are."

[Deleted]

Well, it was true. In Mal’s not inconsiderable experience, working with TMI-992 was asking for humiliating failure. But honestly, did he have to go and glitch now, leaving Mal to take the blame for his personal deficiencies?

Between his own anxiety and the steady stream of panic and horror clogging up his comm, courtesy of BAB-715, Mal turned to jelly. His knees buckled inward and he collapsed onto his aft, throwing up one servo to hook around the edge of the chair and hold him steady. He shut down his optics and cycled air rapidly to cool down overheated systems and try to avoid getting lost in a vortex of terror.

He distantly registered a screeching spew of insults, and felt a brief pang of regret. It was not exactly unheard of for general frame types to be courteous to Vehicons and their like, but rarely did anyone go out of their way to be friendly and welcoming as Sparkplug had been since the moment she’d answered the trio at the door. Now that her kindness had been transformed into disgust, Mal couldn’t help but feel dejected and unworthy, no matter how many times he’d assured himself he was purely self-sufficient.

The femme was still yelling by the time Mal forced himself back into awareness, shoving the haze of emotion away and determining not to make a fool of himself. He tried to turn his servo and press it flat on the chair for leverage, but it refused to budge from where it was resting sideways. With an upward glance, Mal could see that, rather than using the edge of the chair for support, he had wedged his claws within TMI-992’s hip joint.

He squealed in fright and instinctively jerked away. Timothy’s frame was slammed into the side of the chair, the impact loosening the joint and freeing Mal’s talons allowing the Vehicon to scramble for the far side of the room in a frantic crab-walk.

“Oh slag oh slag oh slag,” he whined loudly, relieved to be able to press his back against an empty patch of wall and curl in on himself. He stayed frozen for several minutes until his raging spark settled into an even rhythm and his systems cooled to acceptable levels. Very slowly he stood back up on shaky pedes and forced himself to look back at the collapsed Vehicon.

“Is he...terminated?” he asked quietly. If so, it would probably be best to high tail it out of here and hope the alias he’d given Sparkplug would be enough to maintain anonymity. It would have been more convenient if he’d picked something a little further from his real designation, but ten minutes ago he hadn’t been making decisions based on potential murder.

Meanwhile, Barnaby had calmed down from the initial shock of seeing a friend completely fritz. It was a relief when Sparkplug had given him a command, even to stand by, and he gladly saluted and waited by the door for further instruction.

[Sparkplug]

Sparkplug focused her attention on the monitor, frowning at the read-outs. She wasn't, as she'd be the first to admit, a medic. The tool she was using was also more of a multiple-path circuit analyser than a proper diagnostic instrument for use on fully integrated and sparked up chassis. Nonetheless, the rhythms of the signals were reassuring, and not least because there were signals, and not just a flat note from shut-down machinery.

The dial clicked under her fingers as she turned it to a couple of different settings, studying the resulting graphs. It was only when the prone Timothy jolted, nearly falling off the flat platform the chair had transformed into, that she noticed Mal was now scrabbling about on the floor. She sighed, venting a breath of cooler air over her internal heat sinks, then checked the meter again. Some sort of electrical short had knocked out his processor briefly, but she could see it coming back online, traces slowly picking up into steady activity again.

Okay. No permanent harm done. Probably. Now she had one panicking vehicon to settle down.

"It's alright," she told Mal, addressing her words to Barnaby as well. "You can settle down, now, he's had a nasty electrical short, but he's not dead or anything. Not sure what caused it; maybe he's been ducking out of regular maintenance. No need to call for a medical team, he should reboot in a minute. I'd like him to go and see Knock Out after we're done here, though - I'd appreciate it if you make sure he does. Could be that he's cooked some small component somewhere that'll cause trouble down the road."

Crossing the floor to where Mal was hunched against the wall, she extended her long arm and offered it to give him a hand up. "Look, I get that maybe you guys have a way of roughing each other up, but let's not have any grabbing or shoving in here, okay? If you can't persuade someone to do something without laying hands on them, it doesn't happen." Though, now that she thought about it, these vehicons had been on a ship with Shockwave for a while. If some of the more terrifying rumours about him had any grounding in fact, they might be accustomed to being picked off one by one for experimental work. "That goes for chassis work too, you know," she added, wanting to make the point very clear. "I've got a couple of things I can offer you, while you're here, but you don't step forward and declare, why yes, you'd love such and such a weapons system, then it doesn't happen."

Strolling over to one of the benches, glancing at Timothy's prone chassis as she did so, she opened a squared off storage compartment and began laying components out on the bench. "I've been sticking together a few prototypes for compatibility with the vehicon chassis, over the last couple of days, between bolting the benches together and suchlike. If some of you have a variety in weapons, that'll make you a much bigger threat, harder for the Autobots to brush aside. Take this friendly little toy, f'r example."

She hefted a large, smoothbore weapon with a wide, stubby barrel, and an attached ammunition rack full of fat, snub-nosed shells. "This here's a grenade launcher. Picture the scene," she began, her voice switching up in enthusiasm as she gestured with her free hand. "There's a platoon of vehicons firing at some lousy Autobots that have crept in somewhere they shouldn't. Every mech is firing, laying down a good barrage, but those smug, tin-plated glitches are hiding behind a big rock. No line of sight. So they're safe and cosy in there, until they figure out the right way to deal with you. But then you," she gestured randomly at Barnaby, "step up and phut lob a grenade right over their stupid rock. It clatters to the floor. 'Grenade!' they yell in a panic, some of them jerking out of cover right into the barrage of fire, some standing right there and getting their legs blown off. You win. Now think how good it'd feel to watch them run around in a panic like that. Twenty five shells, short range, easily manufactured for restocking, all the fun in the world. So that's that."

Setting the weapon back on the bench, she scooped up the second of the three tangles of technology. This one had an array of eight barrels, in a rotating mount, with a small plasma-launching blaster assembly squatting at the top, the back of the weapon trailing off in disconnected power lines and targeting data cables. "Now this one, this is a rapid fire gatling. The guns you've got, they fire, what, once a nano-klik? Maybe one and a half? Zap, pause, zap, pause. Your enemy knows exactly your firing rate, so they duck, pause, dodge, pause, and you know what? You don't ever hit them. You'd warp your emitter barrel if you tried to fire faster than that. But this little beauty will fire eight times as fast. Zapzapzapzap. It spits a line of plasma discharges so fast, it's almost a continuous beam. Sweep this across something coming towards you, and you will hit. Now, each discharge is smaller, you're still running it off the same internal energon converter, but if you sweep it across some poor glitch's faceplate, even a small discharge right in the optic will really ruin your day. Let's see them dodge that. Still! If they just flat out run at you, and it's close-combat time, well, you could be the one packing a nasty surprise for that instead."

Laying the multi-barrelled plasma gun back beside the grenade launcher, she picked up the last item. At first, it was hard to pick out exactly what it was, seemingly a short silver cylinder densely encrusted with mechanisms. Sparkplug picked it up and held it in her right hand, while dexterously flicking open a power output socket on her wrist with her other hand and plugging a feed line in. "But this, oh, this one's fun. I'm giving it some power so you can properly appreciate this little beauty, since it's in the stowed configuration. Okay - now try not to jump when I turn this on, alright?"

She paused, then grinned widely, her green eyes bright and cheerful. Any hint of previous displeasure was no longer evident at all, swept away by her sheer enthusiasm for her work that radiated from her, her field filling the chamber wall to wall. "So like I said, an Autobot decides, scrap it, they're just gonna charge you down. They run towards you, boom, boom, boom," she said, mimicking an approaching bot's heavy footsteps. "But you, as they're just about on you, do this." She flicked a switch on the back of the object in her hand.

A huge, reinforced chainsaw blade erupted from the device, easily as long as a vehicon's forearm and comically oversized in her small hands. The chain spun up, producing a snarling growl that shifted in pitch as she waved it back and forth energetically. Raising her voice, she called, "Close-combat range only, but they are not gonna see this coming, and it's enough to give someone a really nasty surprise! No one wants to get in the way of this thing. Good for intimidation, too! It slices, it maims, it doesn't speed straight past your target and hit your friend on the other side of the room."

Shutting down the chainsaw, the long blade collapsed back into stowed position, the room suddenly quiet again. Setting it down on the bench, she grinned cheerily. "So that's what's on the table. Each one replaces your main blaster system - you've only got so much energon and mounting points - but it'll make you that bit more special, if you want to be."