Ep 1.5 - Not Quite Cosmetic Details - Closed

[Deleted]

[[set 6 days after the end of Ep. 1 - open to medbay staff]]

Winging through the medbay door, Ratbat hovered near the ceiling of the waiting area, scoping out the situation. Punctual as always, he was here ahead of his appointment by a small margin. It had taken longer than he'd expected for medbay volume to die down enough for him to find a slot that fit his schedule. That hadn't upset him though, as he'd known Arma's little stunt would slide him down the triage queue.It was all according to plan. His systems needed delicate repair and a tune-up, not an emergency weld, and that meant he had to come when the medics had time for such things.

While he was lucky to have escaped the battle with as little damage as he had, the Prime's strong fingers had pressed into and warped his metal with a mere grab . He'd need the subtle denting straightened out, a cable spliced, a full repaint, and a look at his poorly armored internals, which had been throwing more errors lately. Some of his problems were likely due to age, but they had been adding up.

Perhaps they could even fit him in a little early. He swooped down to check in.

[Deleted]

"--through the axillary line. It's an old battlefield fix. It's not as efficient, but it works just as well so long as the patient isn't going to be seeing combat. Route it back through the pectoral." Knock Out straightened, optics still keenly on his new aide's hands as they went about splicing coolant lines on a spare arm.

The Eradicons had proved themselves useful in the medbay during the latest attack, and Knock Out had decided that, Eradicons or not, he needed more actual trained hands. He'd ordered in those who had performed their rotations through the medbay most competently and was in the process of weeding through them. A few of them--including this one, who when asked for his name had given his batch number as well as "Hector"--seemed to have steady hands, optics for detail, and were able to sufficiently follow orders. Knock Out was cautiously optimistic that handing over some of the routine gruntwork would free him up for more delicate procedures that required his time.

Like his next appointment.

Knock Out left Hector to his work and pinged the medbay computers with his acceptance of his patient as he walked to meet him. "Ratbat. Punctual, as usual, of course. This way, if you will?" Knock Out gestured Ratbat to one of the private rooms, already set up for cassette examination. "I appreciate your patience."

[Deleted]

Ratbat paused in the air to give Knock Out a brief acknowledging nod and sailed past, away from curious optics. The private room was officer scale, which meant he was hopelessly out of scale within it, but he waited above the berth, drifting out of place every so often as his hover drive lost synchronization. The hum it was producing was getting particularly annoying.

"It's of no concern, I'm aware you've been busy," Ratbat said calmly. "How would you like me, here?"

[Deleted]

Knock Out gestured. "Land on the berth, please, and we'll get a scan. I might need you to transform, once I see what there is to see. Other than your hover drive, that is. Primus, that sounds terrible." Knock Out's own scans flicked out, noting the dings and dents as well as the bent plating and general compression damage.

"I hadn't heard that you had been involved in the fighting," Knock Out said as he marked hairline fractures and...yes, yes, those were the indentations of FINGERS. Quite large fingers, too. "You are usually so careful to avoid it."

[Deleted]

Ratbat banked slightly to get a look at the berth with his upward facing optics, then carefully hovered over it. His lower wings locked into his middle ones, his head folded outward and flattened, and then he cut the drive to drop him the few final centimeters. As his belly limpeted to the berth, his full wingspan extended out of subspace slowly.

Normally at this point he'd be perfectly flat with hardly any vertical profile. The warping was thus highly visible, making it pretty clear that someone had grabbed him out of the air. Soundwave had cleaned him up since, but some scratches retained hints of other paint colors, and there were patches of bare metal here and there.

Ratbat's two yellow optics glowed, set side by side on the upper surface of the flattened head. "I assure you it was not intentional," he sent via comm.

[Deleted]

Knock Out watched the medberth's readings as it gave Ratbat's frame a deep structural scan. He had to wonder who it was that grabbed Ratbat, but he knew better than to ask. The paint transfers...hmm....red on his chassis, black embedded in the compression damage around his frame, and blue in some scrapes along his ventral side, with a few traces of yellow.... Oh dear.

Knock Out very...very carefully did not let his mirth show.

"I'm sure it wasn't." Knock Out flipped the results onto the screen so that Ratbat could observe. "I will need to take off some of your outer plating to repair the inner damage to your hydraulics and your hover drive. After that I'd like to do a fully monitored diagnostic cycle, as I don't like the look of a few of those errors. It might be due to the damage, or it might be routine degradation. It's not in any of the usual places that your frame shows wear."

Knock Out looked down at Ratbat and pinged him the estimated timeframe, including the repaint. "To do it all would take longer than your appointment time. Shall I extend it, or would you like to come back later?"

[Deleted]

Ratbat's vocalizer produced a muffled affirmative hum from where it was tucked away. It was, after all, the efficient solution, and he was glad he wasn't having to throw his weight around to get the extended appointment. It was only his due, after all. "Please take as much time as you need. I think the cable splice is probably lowest priority, but I'd prefer to get everything done at once. If you need to work on anything Soundwave's locked down or made modifications to, you can talk to him about that." Working around his carrier's possessive streak was always a challenge.

A delicate pause."I should mention, I can't fly on wing-edge at present, so you may have to flip me."

[Deleted]

Knock Out checked his first, reflexive quip about enjoying helpless patients (honestly, he was spending too much time around Downforce) and merely said, "Of course." He bit down on "Don't worry, I'll be gentle", instead adding, "My apologies for the manhandling, but I will endeavor to make it as quick and painless as possible. I know that you are a busy mech and value efficiency."

It wasn't just flattery (though it was that as well). Ratbat was a stuck bolt, but he was a stuck bolt that Megatron appreciated. Ratbat's bureaucracy was a necessary evil on the Nemesis, and he could wield it like the weapon any Towers mech knew it to be. Knock Out, 70% of whose livelihood and usefulness on the Nemesis required large amounts of specially-refined medical-grade energon and parts, had a vested interest in keeping the picky requisition-master happy.

The medic edited the appointment schedule to extend Ratbat's appointment. It bumped the installation of two Eradicons' new arms until the next day, but they were on light duty anyway. It could wait. Knock Out sent the confirmation to Ratbat. "I don't believe I'll need to alter Soundwave's work. Most of it is straight structural repair."

Knock Out sent Ratbat a prepared code packet for the sensor block. "I do hope that Soundwave is recovering from his injuries. He was in the medbay briefly after the attack, but he ran off before I could finish repairing him. He has not responded to any of my comms suggesting that he make another appointment."

Which was just Soundwave, really. The only times Knock Out had successfully fully repaired Soundwave had been when he'd been so injured that Knock Out could keep him offline for the entire procedure.

[Deleted]

Ratbat vented oddly, almost a huff. "I'm afraid I can't help you there. I do try to keep him fueled, but he's..." there was a pause as he trailed off, wondering if he wanted to follow this mental thread.

He was usually capable of remembering what happened in Soundwave's presence. It was just that the memory tended to spool straight to archive, as did any casual attempt to think about the topic, so it was never in his active recall. That left him less informed about what his carrier was up to than most would think, but usually the archived gaps weren't that much of an issue. Something on a subconscious level was niggling him... he dismissed it.

"I've been looking into locally sourcing some basic parts for the Eradicons to address shortages," he commented instead. "Obviously they wouldn't be as structurally robust as our engineering, but against the heavy weaponry of the local... insurgents... it'd hardly make a difference. Do you have thoughts on the subject?"

[Deleted]

The mental image of Ratbat fluttering after Soundwave with an energon cube in his claws like a carrier nagging a sparkling was...all right, that was hilarious. Not that Knock Out let his amusement show.

Much more interesting was the possibilities of reduced parts shortages. "Outsourcing to the humans? That's something I've never considered. Hmm...." Knock Out thought about the issue seriously as the sensor block slid into place. Gently he positioned Ratbat on the medberth's gel surface and opened up the cassette's chassis. The medic transformed out his smallest set of manipulators (sufficient for plating and most other gross repairs) and his optics whirred as they ratcheted to maximum magnification. One bit of bent plating required "convincing" to retract, then promptly split in half in his servo. Knock Out followed the hairline crack and cut out the rest of the plating just to be sure before turning his attention to the hydraulics.

"I would want to see a sample of what they can do, but there...theoretically...should be no reason that human-made parts could not be used. Obviously nothing that should be made of cybertronium or any alloys that the humans haven't invented yet, but properly-purified steel and other human-made alloys carefully worked might suffice."

Knock Out considered what he would be willing to replace with human-made materials that did not have the strength or longevity or exacting standards of Cybertronian-made materials. "Wire and cable, in particular, would be of great use. Human wiring is nearly Cybertronian-standard quality, and wiring is usually protected enough that the fine defects will not be of great importance. Plating and such, hmmm.... I have doubts about replacing too much of a Cybertronian body with non-standard materials, lest the cybertronium around it wear it down from friction, but I can think of a few parts where that would not occur or not matter. I'm sure for the proper price we can find someone who can follow a pattern and keep to the proper tolerances."

Knock Out finished switching out a few miniature hydraulics cylinders and smiled slightly. "It is one thing I must allow about the humans: they can do some exceptionally fine machining."

[Deleted]

"Microwork is best done on a micro-level" Ratbat supplied smoothly, the minicon line automatic. "Actually, my only worry is Autobot detection and sabotage, but I have a few leads. I wouldn't be setting up a permanent supply line, but they'd never detect a batch here, a batch there. I have a Taiwanese supplier lined up and can provide samples... shortly. Nothing that would provide techological transfer, ugh, perish the thought. But we do need parts, and we seem to have less skilled workers by the cycle."

Between the gel berth and the sensor block he couldn't detect much of what was going on, folded in as he was. He was used to this kind of helplessness, though, and only betrayed unease through the primed tension of his transformation cog.

[Deleted]

"Anything that keeps me from having to tie up the fabricators with cable and wire work is a plus in my file," Knock Out said, quite honestly. Anything that shaved time off of repair work, he was all for. The queue for repairs waiting on parts was getting long, especially for the enlisted and the Eradicons. The current state of affairs on Earth had nothing like the unrelenting pace of some of periods of warfare, but the Nemesis had nothing like a true Cybertronian city's manufacturing capabilities, either, and none of their frames were getting younger. He had dozens of Eradicons-worth of parts in storage, as well as a Seeker or two, but the heavily-modified and ultimately unique frames such as Megatron, Soundwave, Barricade, and--quite honestly--himself and Breakdown inevitably needed his and the fabricators' attention and continually shunted other repairs down the list. Not that Knock Out particularly cared about the enlisteds' grumbling about his wait times, but the recent raid had underlined how one never knew when the war would demand all hands on deck.

Knock Out was no coward, but when he was attempting to solder someone's arm back on, he always appreciated having as many bodies as possible between himself and the actual fight.

The medic finished with the last section of cracked plating and started working straightening out the warped plates with a mixture of heat-softening and old-fashioned leverage.

"Actually, related to the worker issue, I would appreciate your input on an idea of mine. As you know, the medbay is short-staffed. Has been for quite awhile, of course. During the raid, I conscripted several Eradicons to aid in triage and workflow. It was a measure of desperation, I'll admit, but in several cases it worked remarkably well. They can't, of course, be trusted with delicate manipulations, but they could be trusted with many simple tasks. I think that permanently assigning two Eradicons as aides to the medbay would greatly increase the overall efficiency of treatment."

There was no better time to bring up medbay supplies and personnel, Knock Out had learned, than when he had the requestee on a medberth. Especially when that requestee was Ratbat and Knock Out was slinging about the word "efficiency".


<<KO's assuming that he'll only get one, if that, so feel free for Ratbat to play hardball and cut his request. >>