Ep. 1.5 - Internship - Closed

[Deleted]

The medbay was quiet and empty in the early-shift, except for the CMO and the tapping of his claws on the console. Knock Out lounged in the chair in front of the viewscreen, panes of information flicking by one by one. Every now and then he would flick one to the right or left, saving or dismissing it. Finally, three remained. A bit more consideration over a cube of energon, and one was chosen from among those and the other two saved for later retrieval.

Knock Out glared at the combined personnel and medical file in front of him. It described...an anomaly, certainly. A very old Eradicon. So old that his own beginnings were lost to him. So old that his personality had grown...distinctly odd.

And yet. He had survived more years of active duty in the Great War than 99% of his brethren. That said quite a bit about his ability to follow orders and be generally competent.

Knock Out dismissed the cube with a huff. He was going to regret this. He just knew it.

::Eradicon QXW-926, Attrachus, report to medbay.::

[Deleted]

There were very few days where Atracchus felt every one of his four million-odd years sit on his chest like a big, fat trachytic cat. But after a full three cycles of stubborn repair duties, the precious little recharge he felt as though he'd only just slipped into was aborted under priority orders from a ranking officer. Usually they would circumvent any Vehicon who was off-duty, but Knock Out had personally requested his presence in the medbay. After a nanoklik’s worth of systems jumping straight into rebooting protocols, the Vehicon replied with a prompt ::Yes, sir.:: underscored with military glyphs of received-acknowledged, and sent a quick info packet of his current location and estimated time of arrival. The Vehicon rooms were located almost at the opposite end of the ship to the medbay, and Knock Out was infamous for being a stickler for appearance – a late one most certainly would not do.

He was glad, for once, that there was such a large amount of ship between the two locations. It gave time for sluggish strings of coding to be purged from his processor, and so that he could at least ease into standing up straight and fully illuminating his visor. The Atracchus that walked into the medbay was almost completely alert, with only a slight tell-tale sag to the edge of his field. Then again, who on the Nemesis, Vehicon or Decepticon, wasn’t running around ragged in the aftermath of the Autobot invasion?

A precise salute was given, so interwoven into primary coding and mesh memory that Atracchus didn’t consciously register it until he needed to lower his arm. Now that he was here, Atracchus briefly wondered why he had been called. Because of still-booting systems, he was having difficult recalling whether he might be due for maintenance, or whatever other reasons the CMO may have to summon him here.

[Deleted]

Knock Out turned as the Vehicon entered the medbay, his arms crossing and one talon tapping lightly on the opposite gauntlet. Not bad. Snappy response, even offduty and (by the location he'd pinged) likely right out of recharge.

Another tap, and Knock Out broke the silence, saying, "I am contemplating reassigning you to medbay. I say 'contemplating' and not 'have reassigned', because I am giving you a choice. You may stay as you are, or you can be trained as a medical aide to the best of your abilities. I'd never give you life or death assignments, of course, but as you likely remember--" Knock Out's glyphs were wry with temporal markers for the raid "--medbay is no place for the clumsy, the slow, or the dull-witted."

Knock Out advanced, head tilting up slightly to look up at Attrachus. "If you feel that you are any of these or you have any objections to being reassigned, then I highly suggest that you speak up now and save us both the processor ache. I will not tolerate incompetence or half-aftedness in my medbay."

[Deleted]

Atracchus started. He was willing to put it down to the misfiring data loop in his audials he’d had for the last vorn or so, but when the second wash of auditory data seeped into higher processing systems he knew what Knockout had said had nothing to do with defrag lag.

<< Sir? >> he beseeched. His otherwise military-crisp glyphs that were perfectly formed only moments ago were now sloppily coloured with an unguarded surprise…before it clicked, with utter horror, that this was purely indicative of all three evils he’d been warned against only kliks earlier.

The basic was coming thick and fast, almost blurring together in his haste to recover. << No, sir, this is an honour, sir. I have no objections, sir. >>

What was he not objecting to again…? Oh, that’s right. He was going to be a medical aide. He didn’t even know his own opinion on being a medical aide. All that he could see himself doing, from what seemed like a very far way away, was that he was saying yes.

[Deleted]

Knock Out's optics narrowed. That had been a suspiciously slow reply.

"Are you CERTAIN?" His talons tinked delicately in perfect sequence off the opposite gauntlet, his gaze skeptical. "Because I will be HIGHLY displeased--" translation: likely to let you bleed out in the triage line "--if I find that I have wasted my time on you. This is not a mandatory reassignment, and I know that that is a rather NOVEL thing among the Eradicons, but I would prefer that you USE the choice rather than attempt to delude yourself and me that you are--"

Knock Out cut himself off as the medbay lighting flickered, the pitch of the Nemesis' systems altering for a nanoklik before coming back to normal. His optics narrowed again. Frag, what was--

"Engineering to medbay! Three...no, four...frag, maybe five incoming. Plasma burns and some concussive damage. One of the energon relays just blew all over the repair team...."

"Frag," Knock Out muttered. He snapped his fingers at Attrachus, pinging the Eradicon a list of medbay supplies and their locations. "You. Gather these supplies." He squinted at Attrachus skeptically. "Evidently you get a PRACTICAL."

<<Something to liven up the proceedings. Poor Attrachus, KO doesn't care that he's five minutes out of recharge. Welcome to the medbay!

Insert ye olde random medbay emergency. Feel free to make up things for Attrachus to do and to skip forward a bit if you'd like. KO'll set him to doing simple things: triage this, fetch that, hold this, etc.>>

[Deleted]

((Hahaha! Poor Atracchus indeed I've set him up for maximum bossing. We'll see how he manages XD))



It was all Atracchus could do to weather the ire of the CMO. The sheer, well, novelty of the request, as Knock Out himself had put it, had knocked him back too visibly for his reflexive affirmative to be taken seriously, and Atracchus did not rightly blame him for the chewing-out he now received. A medic’s work was the most imperative amongst all the war classes to be executed precisely – the slightest mistake could kill a mech. Processor finally booting up a second time, Atracchus began to seriously weigh up what Knock Out had asked of him –

The lights flickered. The minute, discordant sweep through the ship’s harmonics made then engineer pause. What was that?

Then all hell broke loose. Knock Out barked out his orders to Atracchus and he rushed to obey, grabbing the trolley and gathering all the supplies requested from their various homes as the repair team were brought in. The discordant fritz of their EM fields, expressing different flavours of agony and aching, made Atracchus’ own vents stall for a nanoklik as pain/pain/PAIN washed into his field from five kindred sparks. There were burns, crushed limbs and the emblematic, chilling silence from damaged Vehicons, with the clicking and popping of damaged vocalisers the only audible expression of their screaming fields.

Tobias was shivering, the sensation an icy-cold acidic heat eating away at his helm and optical visor. Falling back into casual med-help protocols from the Autobot invasion, Atracchus fished through the assortment of canisters in front of him with as much haste as he could manage without upending the box, until he found what he was looking for. Snatching it up, he thrust the opened can into a cleaning mesh towel and quickly – but gently – wiped it across his wounds, the buffer neutralising the residual plasma almost instantly.

A soft, squeaking sound came out of the Vehicon’s vocaliser as Atracchus applied his ministrations, the relief that the buffer brought registering as something almost like a new pain to his raw and fritzing sensors. Then a cool wash started to trickle through his feeds, coalescing the sensation from the sharp, pressing agony it was into a dull background ache. When his shudders lessened, Atracchus put a steady hand on his undamaged shoulder and handed him the towel.

<<Keep applying pressure to the burns: two hundred kliks on, two hundred kliks off. If you need me, I’ll be over here.>>

Standing up with the supplies box Atracchus surveyed his injured kin briefly, before a ping from Knock Out directed him over to the CMO’s side.

<<Sir?>>

[Deleted]

Given that this was the third repair-induced set of injuries in the past decacycle--and certainly not the worst--Knock Out was not unduly flustered by the injured Eradicons in his medbay. The only truly worrisome injury was the one where obviously being thrown against the wall had jammed a mess of strut and plating shards dangerously close to the primary energon pump. The result was a mess, but the Eradicon had been lucky and nothing had more than nicked any major lines. Cleaning out the mess, however, was going to be tedious work. Knock Out picked out the trickiest bits himself--eyeing the Eradicon's energon levels to make sure that extraction was not unplugging any holes--and then glanced up at his new aide.

The Eradicon had done tolerably. He had gathered what he'd been told with the minimum of fumbling. He had hesitated oddly when the group had first come in, though whether from nerves or something else, Knock Out hadn't been able to tell. Still, he had snapped out of it enough to apply the appropriate first aid and was now looking for more to do. Well, then. Knock Out was always willing to oblige.

He pinged Attrachus and directed him to the right place by the time-honored medbay tradition of helm-tilting and elbow-pointing. "Have a cleanser wash ready, and watch what I am doing." Knock Out absently pointed out the pump and all the major lines. When he'd cleared enough debris, he directed Attrachus to hold onto the unconscious patient's frame while Knock Out quickly released the broken arm at the shoulder and pulled the broken strut from the nest of crumpled abdominal plating that it had gotten itself wedged in. The strut came free from the crumpled outer plating with a screech of scraping metal. Knock Out set the broken arm with the rest of the debris. He eyed the remaining bits and pieces.

"All right. Cleanser wash throughout here, and here. There's nothing in there you'll hurt with a stream of cleanser, and he's out until I reboot him, so be thorough. Turn him to drain if necessary. And pick out anything that obviously doesn't belong there. If you're not sure, leave it." Knock Out turned to the next berth over, his attention already on assessing the damage to the plasma-drenched Eradicon's plating.


<<Quite a grisly task, as there is basically a hole crunched in the patient's side, but KO's not exactly good about empathy. And if Attrachus can't handle the grisly stuff, KO knows he doesn't want him in there after all. ;P>>

[Deleted]

((He’s part of a Lego mass-forged race with spare parts stored in clearly marked bins out the back. He’s used to the idea of bodily harm ;P))


Atracchus set the cleanser aside on the trolley, bracing the unconscious Vehicon as he was commanded by leaning his weight on top of their shoulders. He could feel the minute unlocking of strut linkages under his palm, before the entire ruined arm was yanked clean from abdominal plating where it had been unnaturally wedged and then from its socket. His visor didn’t even flicker. Atracchus had seen his share of horrific accidents in the mines – spontaneous explosions, pinned limbs, crushed helms, impaled mechs – and had assisted with the aftermath and clean-up on many, many occasions. He couldn’t help but feel grateful that his kin was oblivious to what must have been immense pain lancing through his sensors right now. Not for the first time and most certainly not for the last, Atracchus looked down at a form so factory-exact that it could have been his own disembodied visor and frame, and saw a hand that fate had played that could have so easily been his.

As easily as the thought slid into his mind it had diffused back into the ether on equally worn routes. Atracchus dutifully followed Knock Out’s instructions, thoroughly squirting the cleanser into the gaping holes. Energon, coolant and maintenance oils pooled onto the medberth, along with metallic filings and rock dust that had been made to breech the outside protective plates from the force of the impact. Gently lowering the patient after the first wash had drained away, Atracchus applied cleanser again. After sterilising the forceps and prod in an alcohol solution, he got to work removing the larger fragments that clearly did not belong there.

[Deleted]

Plasma burn taken care of, Knock Out moved on. The next mech he also put into stasis for surgery (always easier when one was going to have to do a full replacement of about half of a torso's worth of wiring), and gave the rest pain blocks while they were being triaged.

When he was certain that no one would drain out if he turned around, Knock Out moved to check on Atracchus' work. Tolerable. Not perfect, of course. He watched the vehicon's servos: quite steady for a frame with no specialization for being so. "No, leave that. It's wedged between a tertiary coolant line and the strut. Let me handle it. Clean out all this."

He used a low-power photon beam to indicate where he meant inside the cavity. "Pull out these large pieces and then wash the powdered slag out of there with more cleanser. Make sure it doesn't run further in, or I'll have you scrubbing it off his heat sinks."


<<Feel free to have them move along here, with Knock Out directing Atracchus to do whatever. I imagine that Atracchus will do a good job, otherwise KO'd run him out of there and give this all up as a bad idea. If there's anything you want to do with the scene, feel free to set it up. >>

[Deleted]

Knock Out’s instruction made Atracchus pause, forceps clenched around the piece that had seemed no more innocuous than the rest to his untrained optics. Hand unclenching around the instrument more slowly than perhaps necessary, he followed the line of light that illuminated the other pieces. He nodded – affirmative-sir – and crouched down lower to better access them. Tools at the ready, he reached inside with steady hands to prise out the closest piece.

::Atracchus…::

Tobias’ signifiers. When the shard was removed and safely on the bench, Atracchus responded. ::Is everything alright?::

::I’m fine…well, no worse than I was before…::

There was a tinkling sound as the second fragment joined the first. ::You are in good hands here, Tobias. Knock Out will not let anything happen to you.::

::I know…::

::Rest, Tobias. You have suffered a great ordeal today.:: He paused communications, reaching in for another piece. When that had cleared the cavity, Atracchus hd the chance to ask his question. ::Are the pain blockers functioning?::

::Yes…yes, they are.::

::That’s good.:: He stopped as he began working again. Once the next piece was removed, he continued. :: Is there anything wrong?::

::It happened…so fast…I…:: A dazed hum crossed the link as hir searched for the words in hir's numbed processor. ::What does…I think…I…I don’t know…::

Atracchus broadcasted a packet of reassuring glyphs, encouraging hir to take hir’s time.

::…What does…fear…feel like?::

One by one the pile of carefully removed pieces grew; a strange energon-splattered dish emerging on the trolley’s platter. Atracchus put his tools down and reached for the bottle of cleanser. ::Fear…can…fear can make your gears feel stiff and unresponsive, despite your best directives.::

They had found it was best to answer these sorts of questions by matching them first to their physical sensations – it was easier for those that had not been so long ago unaware to run sensor-based diagnostics, rather than determine abstract concepts such as emotion straight away. By no means, however, did this make such a deceptively simple query any easier to answer. Though his mind was scrabbling for proper phrasing (Primus, WAS there a hard and fast answer?) his hands never stopped moving. Adjusting the nozzle pressure with Knock Out’s warning in mind, he aimed into the cavity and squeezed. ::Fear can make you feel cold, even though your core temperature readings return as normal.::

Diluted energon, streaked with oil and dust, trickled out of rivulets and pooled on top of the berth. ::When you are afraid, everything can feel dangerous. You feel unsafe, and, depending on how unsafe you feel, it can make you feel very upset.::

Cleanser set aside, he picked up his tools again and entered the breech in the patient’s side. ::Is this like what you felt today, Tobias?::

:: Affirmative. It felt as…though…I were malfunctioning. I thought…::

The comm. went dark for several long moments. It reset with a hard click. ::…I thought that…I would be terminated.::

Silence. Then the comm. came online again. ::But…that is not possible.::

Atracchus vented unsteadily. Too deep, too soon, too complex for him to address as he was now, elbow-deep in a kin’s gore, working to salvage them from such a fate.

Of all the lessons, death was the hardest one to teach, to understand, and; most importantly; to accept. All Vehicon drones were programmed with a rudimentary understanding of death as sparkloss: triggered by complete systems failure or by breaching the spark chamber. Friendly units were vulnerable to death and needed to be protected. Enemy units were also capable of dying, and this was a weakness to be exploited at all costs whenever they were encountered. But as Vehicon drones had no awareness that they contained a spark, they could not comprehend how the same fate could, and did, apply to them. It was as illogical a conclusion as the concept of ‘living’.

Another piece of twisted metal clattered on top of the rest. ::You are safe now.:: he said simply, strongly encoded with safe-secure-home-protected.

::You must be tired. If you want, we can talk some more after you have rested. You may start to feel better by then.::

::That…yes. I would like that…:: Glyphs for illogical-paradox-error underscored Tobias’ wishes.

::Of course,:: said Atracchus. His shoulders drooped a fraction at the thought of the talk that they were going to have, memory files rising unbidden to mind. ::Recharge well, Tobias.::

Tobias’ comm. obediently switched off. Shaking all thoughts for the near-future out of his mind, Atracchus again put down his tools and re-administered the cleanser. Being careful to ensure that all forms of liquid drained out of the patient and not further in, Atracchus lowered hir’s abdomen from where he had elevated it and turned back to the trolley -

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

Startled, Atracchus whirled around, taking stock of the vitals screen where the unholy screeching was emanating. Warning messages were lighting up the display thick and fast, too fast for his optics to track. Atracchus didn’t understand. What had gone wrong?

<<Sir?>> he implored, desperately seeking guidance on this.

[Deleted]

Knock Out's optics narrowed in general annoyance as he pulled back from diagnosing low hydraulic pressure as a leak or a coding problem at the berth's strident beeping. He pulled himself out of the diagnostic, shaking it clear form his HUD as he strode over to the berth.

His first diagnostic action was to kick the medberth. That berth had a short in it that sometimes caused the blasted thing to scream that a patient was hemorrhaging every fluid they contained. Which was not what it was screaming now ("Power fluctuations, spark signal fluctuating."), but Knock Out had learned over the vorn as new equipment had become but a dream, and every berth--even on the Decepticon flagship--had its own quirks and issues, that "kicking it" was a good first triage step.

His second thought as he approached the medberth was that there was no way that the Eradicon's energon levels could have gotten THAT low without being noticed unless KO's choice of aide had been incredibly poor. Which was obviously not true, as the berth was not dripping energon. Dripping solvent and diluted fluids, yes, but not charged energon.

"Out of the way," Knock Out snapped absently, yanking the light down to his level so he could see. The cavity where Atrachus had been poking looked fine enough. Knock Out jacked into the prone Eradicon's systems, flicking his authorization at the firewalls in passing.

A bare klik of information streamed from the Eradicon's machine logs let KO see the problem. Or rather, NOT see the problem. "Frag it," he muttered. "Something's obstructing the lasercore's energon feed. Probably something jammed further in."

Further in where they still couldn't see. Knock Out snatched up the tweezers and, with rough precision, pulled out the large chunks that he'd told Atracchus to leave, then looked again. His view to the relevant feedlines, though, was still obstructed as the hole narrowed. He had a feeling that the spear-tip of the strut had broken off and been left in there when he'd yanked the rest of the limb out of the wound. He cursed again for good measure.

"I need hir opened up," Knock Out said, hands skating to the hidden catches that rounded the edge of every Eradicon's chestplating. "Release the latches on that side. Like this." A burst of informational diagram accompanied the order, catches highlighted. "Then lift the plating up and away. The magnetics will resist, but just pull straight up."

[Deleted]

Atracchus’ visor flickered with surprise at Knock Out’s attentions being directed first to the berth. As an engineer by function the Vehicon was very familiar with the charms of ‘percussive maintenance’, but he hadn’t expected that to be the first…prognosis when a patient’s vital signs were throwing shrill klaxons of distress. Drawing on that assumption, though, medberths were machines just like engine blocks and control panels. Given excessive use and limits on new stock, it was inevitable that any machine would start to develop its own quirks and tricks, and, in that same sense, 'personalities' of their own.

Just like the Vehicons themselves, really.

Making way for Knock Out to examine the prone patient, Atracchus paid close attention to what the CMO was doing over his shoulder. After a medical jack-in there was a rough diagnosis to work from, and Knock Out pulled out the more dangerously wedged pieces with far greater speed and precision than Atracchus had managed to do by far. When he was addressed again Atracchus stepped forward and around to the other side, his HUD overlaying the anatomical diagram on the limp and berthbound figure. Sure enough, those hidden catches were there (he didn’t even know they had them). Unfastening them with a series of clicks, he was a little surprised - but reassured - at the strength of the magnetic force holding the chestplate to the chassis, before he was eventually able to separate the two entirely.

He gently set the chestplate down against the wall behind him before turning back to see the exposed mechanisms and cogs. Even to the untrained eye it was clear that not all systems were meshing well - engine juddering with the strain and cables writhing like snakes from the building internal pressure - but it was still fascinating to see how everything worked beneath the hood.

One visor met two optics, and a quick glyph burst was relayed between them.

Ready-next-sir.

[Deleted]

Knock Out's sharp fingers were already joint-deep in the Eradicon's chest, shunting overstrained tubing and cabling away so that he could see the lasercore, nestled in its own armored framework just below the spark chamber. It was a vital component, not one for casual repairs, as damage to it tended to be rather instantly fatal and anything that took out the lasercore often continued right on through to the spark chamber and ended the discussion right then and there.

As a result, it had a lot of slag in FRONT of it, complicating Knock Out's ability to (yet again) see what the frag he was doing. Including the primary energon feed itself, its tubing now swollen and straining as the Eradicon's systems desperately attempted to deliver the demanded energon without exceeding tolerances.

Knock Out's fingers skated along the feed gently, searching by touch for an obstruction and couldn't immediately find it along the tubing's length. Perhaps it was jammed up against the...?

His fingers encountered something sharp. Small. Definitely jammed against the feed where it met the laser core.

Knock Out pressed the primary feed gently to the side with one hand, and a tangle of wiring somewhat less gently to the side with the other. "Hold these wires out of my way," Knock Out ordered, pressing them flat against the side of the Eradicon's fuel pump by way of demonstration, then letting them go so he could drag the light down even further.


<<Knock Out will probably fuss about a bit, see something that needs both hands to rectify, and then tell Atracchus to hold the energon feed also. CAREFULLY. NOT PUTTING PRESSURE ON IT. (ha, no pressure!) Feel free to do that in your tag, or I can do it in the next one. >>

[Deleted]

((So PUNNY XD I popped it in my tag, thanks Aster Let me know if you want me to edit it any!))


Wires were shoved out of the way with a half-minded but professional care. Given the depth of his probing into the other Vehicon’s chassis, Atracchus supposed Knock Out was directly making his way to the sparkchamber. He was mindful to keep out of the CMO’s way, giving him plenty of elbow room, but curiosity made Atracchus lean over a little further to see what was going on. The scene was frenetic – hydraulics hissing tiny geysers of pressurised air from compromised components, tubes and wires thrashing wildly or lying eerily still, and the odd spray of sparks from cabling twisting shadowed shapes against the darker nooks of his chest cavity. Atracchus was surprised to see that for all of the damage there was so little energon to be seen. He wondered why that was.

Knock Out was giving orders again, and Atracchus held the wiring back against the side of the pump, carefully, just as he was shown. Then, the primary energon feed was conferred to his care, ‘CAREFULLY’ scrubbed had into every glyph as the CMO delved deeper into hir’s chest. Atracchus held it back apprehensively, feeling the energon flicking past his servoes as the seams bulged with pressure.

A jolt went through him as the feed surged against his hand without warning, hard enough to feel the energon bubbling thickly under the surface. He recovered from the shock only just in time to not drop the primary line, bringing his hand out quickly and allowing the feed to coil against the pump before the pressure slackened. Unease rippled through his systems as Atracchus gingerly caught the straightened feed, shifting to hold it steady in its new position while taking great pains to NOT add more pressure of his own.

The Vehicon trusted the CMO completely with his kindred’s care, but he didn’t trust himself in nearly the same regard at all. A small prayer to Primus to not condemn hir’s life from any foolish mistakes, and he adopted a grim watch over the feed’s sinuous movements.

[Deleted]

Knock Out spiraled in his optics to focus on the dark cavern of the Vehicon's chest. He couldn't see as much as he'd like to, but he couldn't afford the time to crack things open further.

Luckily, he knew enough of the frametype's internal topology to investigate by touch and light scan what he couldn't see.

"Fragging hell," Knock Out muttered. He'd been right. There was a sharp chunk of strut that had lodged right at the join of the feed and the laser core. He could see the tip, and the rest was obscured under the curve of the core casing. It didn't feel as if it had pierced the line, thank Primus, just occluded it. Which didn't mean that it couldn't pierce it if he moved it wrong.

He'd made jokes about being able to fix Vehicons with his optics closed. This particular Vehicon was lucky that it was true.

Knock Out felt out the shard of strut, clamped claws delicately on it, and pulled.

His claws slipped off the shard with a scree of metal on metal, and the obstruction didn't move.

"Scraplet-fragging spawn of a...." Knock Out yanked out his hand, grabbed a pair of forceps from where Atracchus had set them down, and dove back in, using them to give him more grip.

Out of the corner of his optic, Knock Out saw the feedline, ready to burst.

He yanked, and the shard came loose.

Knock Out's optics were immediately on the feed line in Atracchus' fingers. Faster than reading the medberth's warnings. The tension in it slacked immediately, and that plus the lack of a burst of energon spraying everywhere was a very good sign.

The medic straightened, holding up the recalcitrant bit of strut for examination before flicking his attention over the medberth readings (laser core power restored, energon pressure evening out).

"Well," Knock Out said, dropping the fragment into a pile with the rest of the debris. "I hope you caught all of that," he said to Attrachus, his glyphs deadly serious for a moment before he huffed and shook his head in amusement. "Go fetch me some EE-35 tubing and an A-6 connector. I want to change out that feedline."


<<Why yes, KO did just actually joke a bit.
The stuff is probably in one of the storage cabinets in the back of medbay. If you'd like, Attrachus can notice his buddy locked up on his way back, or he can notice after KO shows him how to change out a laser core feed? Whichever. >>