Flashback - Take It Easy - Ratchet, Percy,Academy

[perceptor]

"So a med student in the class -- stop me if you've heard this one -- so there's a med student in a physics class. He asked the instructor, 'Why do we have to learn this?' The instructor said, 'To save lives.' The med student asked, 'How does physics save lives?' -- I know," Perceptor interrupted himself to join in laughing with the others, of COURSE physics saved lives, when you used it every day in thousands of individually unnoticed ways, not that the medics ever thought about that even when they had to consult out for engineers, "So the instructor said, 'To keep idiots like you out of medical school.'"

The mecha around him -- mostly physicists, Perceptor noted, not that he knew all of them but he'd seen them in the department -- lost it, and Perceptor cracked a smile himself at the successful joke, one of his favorites at parties like this. The energon was actually decent and a mech could hold a charge on it. The place was even someone's quarters, no occasion except the end of the shift, what felt like half the Science Academy there to relax.

[Deleted]

The laughter made one mech at the edge of the group flick the light of his optics upwards with a huffed ventilation. Physicists. Or engineers, but it was all the same, and Primus, how did they all coexist in the same spatial range with that much ego involved? There was a physics problem none of them had solved yet.

Ratchet downed the last of his drink and reached for another, sending the first sip to chase after the burn of the last, where the lot of them were setting up a pleasant warmth in his tank. Company aside - and he knew better, he really did, but the engineers always threw the best parties with the best amateur distillations to be had - the highgrade was better than average and plentiful, and really, after the decacycle he had had, that was all he asked for.

Well, that and maybe a little less fluffed up walking egos.

He took another drink and raised his voice to cut across whatever the next speaker thought passed for clever wit. "So let me get this clear - physics will save lives by keeping medical tract mecha out of medical school? When the clinics are in their seventh straight vorn of staffing shortages? Would that be a political view or a philosophical one - oh." He drawled the last note loud and clear. "Silly me. Because if I'm IDing your voice print correctly, you would be the one who couldn't keep the difference between the two straight in Scanwave's philosophy class last cycle."

Mecha were already moving, opening up a clear line of sight between himself and the previous speaker and yes, there - Ratchet recognized the red and blue coloring immediately. Ratchet leaned his hip against the edge of the sofa, grin sharp and not at all blurred by the handful of cubes he had already downed.