[ti]Ep 3[/ti]Unstable [Carbine, Patch]
Jun 11, 2021 0:08:47 GMT -5
Post by Carbine on Jun 11, 2021 0:08:47 GMT -5
Carbine watched Patch intently as she moved around to his right side to set up the scanner and connected monitor, his eyes rounded and unblinking.
"-̷cl̶osęr͜ ̀l̢oo̶k a̢t͢ y̶o͠u͠r h͟el͢m͏- ͠z̷̷̨zc̀v̨h̴͝hh̸̨ -get à ͝look͡ at̛ a͝ny p̢r͏e̵v͏io͝us dam̕ag̀e̢- ̡ţ̕h͠zc̸͢hh̶́͢ -̕hòw͏ ̶de͘ȩp̧ th͘i̧n͠gs̵ go͘-"
Stall... Delay... Push it back... He could only do so much from here, unless he were to open-palm shove Patch to the ground and bolt. That would be the ultimate stall! He wouldn't though... he couldn’t... There was the idea of verbally stalling however! Yet how could he do that? If he rambled off on some kind of story it would be painfully apparent what he was doing and Patch would get angrier at him. An angry medic was never a good medic. If he tried to stall by talking 'feelings', that would work and he knew it. Boo hoo, poor Carbine needs some time to settle... but that was so far out of his comfort zone to the point he would rather just jump off the mesa and not even attempt to transform.
It seemed like now was now and there weren't really any other options unless he wanted things to just keep getting worse and worse and worse... until he wouldn't have to worry about it any longer, as he'd be dead. As such, Carbine's forearms lifted a small amount as Patch worked on the monitor, fingers flaring open while he peered down at his palms. He just had to do this once more, then maybe that would be it. Once more. That was the lie he was telling himself. What he needed to internally chant to make it through. After a shaky crackled exhale, he continued up to reach over and grip at the back of his helm firmly.
White fingertips dug down, goring into the juncture between head and neck in an attempt to hook underneath to get a good grip on something. It was difficult, freshly applied silicone from a week prior doing its damndest to keep holding strong. Once he got the faintest of a snag however, it didn't stand much of a chance, and the seal was broken with a hiss of air being sucked into the void behind it. The cracked faceplate wrenched forward sharply once the bond gave way, the yellow of his optics vanishing abruptly.
As the cage of metal and iron glass was pulled completely off, it revealed instantly that it had been a helmet all this time, rather than his head being structured without features from the day he was brought online. A flickered glance at its inside showed smears of red and orange, some kind of crust-caked fluid around the bottom half of the visor that’d slicked its surface. Dark stains smeared up the far side on the gray padding, scrapes and tears joining them. The helmet was moved down, held securely on his lap as if it were a life support, fingertips creaking as he gripped onto it firmly.
Carbine... well. From Patch’s angle, he didn't look odd or anything, nor did anything seem truly amiss.
His upper helm was not elaborate in the slightest. No chevron or crest, no hooking layers of overlapping plating. Rather boring in a way. A black slate that was accented only by white paint that mirrored the helmet counterpart to an extent. It made sense, nothing to snag and catch up underneath the added protective layer. A cheap stock build only differentiated by the white flared jawline the visor mounted down into. Within this frame was a smooth, pale gray faceplate, a darker stripe along its perimeter that lined beneath his cheekbone down to disappear behind the white. It held faint red smears in the edge between face and jaw, but nothing particularly notable.
Carbine's optic was mostly the same as how it looked through the filtered visor. Predominantly yellow, tapering ever so slightly darker in the corners. The only thing that was new was the ability to see the smaller white pupil in the center. Simple, once more rather standard fare and not unique in any way. This gaze was staring straight ahead, a deadened look behind it as the lens plate contracted some to the light. A faint tremble rocked through his frame while he forced his focus to then lock over onto Patch from the furthest reaches of the corner of his vision, his helm not even slightly turning towards her in the process.
With his gaze twisted so far to the edge of his sight, Patch was only a blur at that point, a muddled shape that was barely there. Despite this, he could imagine what expressions she would be making. Confusion... shock that he had a face... Why was he making such a fuss about things? Except the edge of his mouth twisted back, a pained grimace forming which revealed speckles of dark fluid with flakes of rust pooling near the connection points of his teeth. Paired with this movement, a long string of coagulated oil slipped down and off the bottom of his chin from the far side, a gelatinous web that held solid chunks of Primus only knows what that broke the tension to patter down onto his helmet, leaving shorter strings in its wake.
It somehow felt worse than with Bumblebee. With the Scout, it was what it was. Cobbled attempts to work with things they had on hand, a hack and go wild swing at some kind of solution... Getting to that point however was laced in hostilities and anger, threats, and bartering for options. Yet here? Here it was different. Here he was scared. Here he was possibly going to get help. Here, he would be disappointed all over again when it wouldn’t work. Here? he was looking into the eye of a pretend doctor that wasn’t going to just scrape and slap on a band-aid, but who thought she could do something that was more substantial and would actually fix things.
More invasive.
No... with Bumblebee? It was a relief... A weight off his shoulders to have someone else who knew and could help manage things and work with it. With Patch, it was anxiety and stress, and yet things were what they were and he could do nothing to change it now. He could try, he could... but it was too late, and no amount of inner thoughts and wishes could alter this path. Such things made time stretch on for an eternity for him, drawing his own anxiety out to make his world start to collapse inward. Not wanting to see her reaction, not wanting to hear what was coming... in actuality, it was only a couple of seconds from when his helmet was sat down, before he turned his head entirely to look at her straight on.
It instantly became apparent where the issue was.
And why Windshield had traumatized him as much as it had.
Obliterated paneling... Mangled remains...
To say Carbine had a face on his left side would be an absolute lie
The damage, ignoring rust, appeared to be a combo strike of two different assaults. The first seemed to have been made by a blade of some kind, or claws, with three raking gouges that shredded from just between his optics to stretch down to his jaw, tearing his brow in half along the way. The middle of the three was the worst, plunging deep into the framework below only to be filled in and welded shut sloppily in a fumbled attempt to bridge the broad gap, rather than seal it properly with replacement metals. The welds were poor at best, blobby smears with bubbled air pockets done in a rush. The real damage, however, came into play with the savagely cruel blunt force trauma that must have followed. It seemed as if the fissures made by the strike created stress points, where a heavy impact then ripped the upper pallet free as well as other breaks and gaps where the 'skull' was effectively obliterated on one side.
Welded plates were bolted down intermittently, branching and spanning over garish voids to literally hold what was left of the side of his head together. The frontmost piece was affixed through the malleable faceplate that remained on the right, further attaching the top teeth and palette that had been completely snapped down at some point, given the fractures and placement of the fusion points. It was questionable how deep the repaired connection even ran, or if everything was simply superficial and all strain would be put on the external brackets should he try to bite down onto something hard or was ever struck head-on with a punch.
Similar damage was on the lower jaw, though to a lesser extent, the fracture didn't appear to go all the way through at the slash points. Instead, there was a hinge at the back made of dead metal, gray and primitive, with no side-to-side movement possible. Evidently, instead of the arch breaking under the blunt force trauma, the entire joint had snapped backward to absorb the impact, shoving into his throat.
His left optic was spared enough to have been repaired it appeared, protected by the paneling between his optics that deflected the assault from the socket, though there was the equivalent of a burst blood vessel within from strain and stress from the recent incident with Windshield. The bottom half was stained orange, liquid running along a couple of the internal connectors in thin streaks and mottled patches, yet was otherwise functional. Now that it was exposed to the light however, the white pupil was contracting and dilating in lurched twitches in an attempt to focus on Patch, spasming, the right not showing such a response as it had already stabilized to the brightness of the room.
This was just what was on his face however, it didn't include the top of his head where there were more 'repairs' if one could even call them that. His helm casing had been broken in and cracked on the side, more welds jaggedly stretching from the left to right. Covering the point where the damage intersected were two split plates that acted as a processor cover, thick bolts driving into the skull to hold them in place. They were chunky and ragged, simple panels pushed through a press brake to make a 'curve' to work just well enough, the seam sealed shut with something that may have been aged resin.
All the damage on the outermost surface across the entire left side of Carbine's helm looked to have been scraped and rasped recently, sharp silver shining through what seemed to be the results of a scouring pad of some sort that was already starting to turn red once again. Someone had really pressed into trying to shear the top layer of metal off, dark grime left behind in pock holes, seams, and around bolts where rubbing a soft pad was impossible to do any good. A clear sealant was smeared along a couple of spots, a futile effort to plaster and prevent more rust from forming on the surface.
Removing the helmet once more was like ripping off a gnarled scab for a second time in the last couple of weeks, only this time it was paired with the wonderfully fresh damage inflicted in an attempt at self-care. To say it irritated the dead metals and where they were bonded was an understatement, as after these few seconds since taking his helmet off, the grimace peeled back even further. A crackled breath sucked in sharply across the bolts on the inside of his mouth in a gritted strain to hold back a noise of weakness. This sharp intake was quickly followed by a rattled exhale of a sigh that parted his mouth, the exposed jaw on the left a mess of jagged broken edges. The rearmost molar pegs were bashed back, some with fissures, many almost angling towards the throat, the metal around it betraying horrible compression damage from blunt force trauma.
It was a mess.
When Carbine's jaw opened and angled down slightly to breathe out, the new position caused pooled fluids that had collected inside his mouth to drain uncontrollably, given there were no 'lips' on one side to hold it back. A splatter of orange and red with a colored sheen of oil stretching down in more slimy tendrils...
So much of the damage was replaced by dead metals. Things that would not show on a scan, things that were inert like holding a tool in one's hand. The connectors that would have attached to his faceplate that could move to make expressions and register that something was gone were no longer present, the only ones remaining being around the optic that did have some of the original flexible metals, though they were severely discolored. Most of the 'skull' didn't even appear to be stock built any longer, nor even made of materials that would ever fuse and biologically bond over time. A false frame of braces that did what they could with the fatigued and taxed foundation beneath it.
The rust and oils in his vomit... the horrific miasma that was mixed into the vibrant blue Energon he expelled out of stress in front of Patch and Windshield... it wasn't sourced from his tanks at all. No... it was all formed from swallowing runoff and drainage, consuming what pooled to not let it fill the bottom half of his mask or leak out through any gaps the silicone didn't seal shut. The hole within his throat, the adaptation... it was an 'aftermarket' addition, just to further hide what he had become and what had happened to him. Yet, like much of his neck up, it was far from perfect, and when he threw up it had collected in his mouth and mask before he had managed to open the port and force it out, swallowing what he could. He had breathed in fluid during that wonderful experience, throwing a bit of moisture into his system which caused the angry crackle when he heaved harder, the filters slightly plugged.
The moment Carbine really looked at Patch, knowing she was going to react poorly, if not at least make a gasped noise of disgust... he preemptively winced back, teeth gritting as his optics pulled up on the underside, mismatched brows furrowing. He didn't like this part. He never liked this part. The damage was never 'good' to see, not in any way shape or form, and it was expected for most to be appalled... however... that was before the rust had formed. Clean silver, clean welds, clean sealer to protect it... so now it was ten times worse to behold. He came to Earth just fine enough with no real issues other than a weakened skull and some nasty looking bracing... yet, time made things all go to the Pit and back, and he simply couldn't get it under control.
Everything was rotting, corruption quickly overtaking any attempts made to fix it. He, Thundercloud and now even Bumblebee couldn't fend it off, and that was what scared him. He didn't understand why things had gone downhill so fast since arriving on this world, nor how to stop it from getting even worse. Maybe it was the humidity trapped in his helmet, or perhaps it was triggered when he was pushed into the salty ocean months ago... he truly didn't know. Yet all this decay, all this pain where the bolts drove into his skull... it was new, and he stomached it down because that was what you had to do in order to survive...
He just wanted to survive.
"-̷cl̶osęr͜ ̀l̢oo̶k a̢t͢ y̶o͠u͠r h͟el͢m͏- ͠z̷̷̨zc̀v̨h̴͝hh̸̨ -get à ͝look͡ at̛ a͝ny p̢r͏e̵v͏io͝us dam̕ag̀e̢- ̡ţ̕h͠zc̸͢hh̶́͢ -̕hòw͏ ̶de͘ȩp̧ th͘i̧n͠gs̵ go͘-"
Stall... Delay... Push it back... He could only do so much from here, unless he were to open-palm shove Patch to the ground and bolt. That would be the ultimate stall! He wouldn't though... he couldn’t... There was the idea of verbally stalling however! Yet how could he do that? If he rambled off on some kind of story it would be painfully apparent what he was doing and Patch would get angrier at him. An angry medic was never a good medic. If he tried to stall by talking 'feelings', that would work and he knew it. Boo hoo, poor Carbine needs some time to settle... but that was so far out of his comfort zone to the point he would rather just jump off the mesa and not even attempt to transform.
It seemed like now was now and there weren't really any other options unless he wanted things to just keep getting worse and worse and worse... until he wouldn't have to worry about it any longer, as he'd be dead. As such, Carbine's forearms lifted a small amount as Patch worked on the monitor, fingers flaring open while he peered down at his palms. He just had to do this once more, then maybe that would be it. Once more. That was the lie he was telling himself. What he needed to internally chant to make it through. After a shaky crackled exhale, he continued up to reach over and grip at the back of his helm firmly.
White fingertips dug down, goring into the juncture between head and neck in an attempt to hook underneath to get a good grip on something. It was difficult, freshly applied silicone from a week prior doing its damndest to keep holding strong. Once he got the faintest of a snag however, it didn't stand much of a chance, and the seal was broken with a hiss of air being sucked into the void behind it. The cracked faceplate wrenched forward sharply once the bond gave way, the yellow of his optics vanishing abruptly.
As the cage of metal and iron glass was pulled completely off, it revealed instantly that it had been a helmet all this time, rather than his head being structured without features from the day he was brought online. A flickered glance at its inside showed smears of red and orange, some kind of crust-caked fluid around the bottom half of the visor that’d slicked its surface. Dark stains smeared up the far side on the gray padding, scrapes and tears joining them. The helmet was moved down, held securely on his lap as if it were a life support, fingertips creaking as he gripped onto it firmly.
Carbine... well. From Patch’s angle, he didn't look odd or anything, nor did anything seem truly amiss.
His upper helm was not elaborate in the slightest. No chevron or crest, no hooking layers of overlapping plating. Rather boring in a way. A black slate that was accented only by white paint that mirrored the helmet counterpart to an extent. It made sense, nothing to snag and catch up underneath the added protective layer. A cheap stock build only differentiated by the white flared jawline the visor mounted down into. Within this frame was a smooth, pale gray faceplate, a darker stripe along its perimeter that lined beneath his cheekbone down to disappear behind the white. It held faint red smears in the edge between face and jaw, but nothing particularly notable.
Carbine's optic was mostly the same as how it looked through the filtered visor. Predominantly yellow, tapering ever so slightly darker in the corners. The only thing that was new was the ability to see the smaller white pupil in the center. Simple, once more rather standard fare and not unique in any way. This gaze was staring straight ahead, a deadened look behind it as the lens plate contracted some to the light. A faint tremble rocked through his frame while he forced his focus to then lock over onto Patch from the furthest reaches of the corner of his vision, his helm not even slightly turning towards her in the process.
With his gaze twisted so far to the edge of his sight, Patch was only a blur at that point, a muddled shape that was barely there. Despite this, he could imagine what expressions she would be making. Confusion... shock that he had a face... Why was he making such a fuss about things? Except the edge of his mouth twisted back, a pained grimace forming which revealed speckles of dark fluid with flakes of rust pooling near the connection points of his teeth. Paired with this movement, a long string of coagulated oil slipped down and off the bottom of his chin from the far side, a gelatinous web that held solid chunks of Primus only knows what that broke the tension to patter down onto his helmet, leaving shorter strings in its wake.
It somehow felt worse than with Bumblebee. With the Scout, it was what it was. Cobbled attempts to work with things they had on hand, a hack and go wild swing at some kind of solution... Getting to that point however was laced in hostilities and anger, threats, and bartering for options. Yet here? Here it was different. Here he was scared. Here he was possibly going to get help. Here, he would be disappointed all over again when it wouldn’t work. Here? he was looking into the eye of a pretend doctor that wasn’t going to just scrape and slap on a band-aid, but who thought she could do something that was more substantial and would actually fix things.
More invasive.
No... with Bumblebee? It was a relief... A weight off his shoulders to have someone else who knew and could help manage things and work with it. With Patch, it was anxiety and stress, and yet things were what they were and he could do nothing to change it now. He could try, he could... but it was too late, and no amount of inner thoughts and wishes could alter this path. Such things made time stretch on for an eternity for him, drawing his own anxiety out to make his world start to collapse inward. Not wanting to see her reaction, not wanting to hear what was coming... in actuality, it was only a couple of seconds from when his helmet was sat down, before he turned his head entirely to look at her straight on.
It instantly became apparent where the issue was.
And why Windshield had traumatized him as much as it had.
Obliterated paneling... Mangled remains...
To say Carbine had a face on his left side would be an absolute lie
The damage, ignoring rust, appeared to be a combo strike of two different assaults. The first seemed to have been made by a blade of some kind, or claws, with three raking gouges that shredded from just between his optics to stretch down to his jaw, tearing his brow in half along the way. The middle of the three was the worst, plunging deep into the framework below only to be filled in and welded shut sloppily in a fumbled attempt to bridge the broad gap, rather than seal it properly with replacement metals. The welds were poor at best, blobby smears with bubbled air pockets done in a rush. The real damage, however, came into play with the savagely cruel blunt force trauma that must have followed. It seemed as if the fissures made by the strike created stress points, where a heavy impact then ripped the upper pallet free as well as other breaks and gaps where the 'skull' was effectively obliterated on one side.
Welded plates were bolted down intermittently, branching and spanning over garish voids to literally hold what was left of the side of his head together. The frontmost piece was affixed through the malleable faceplate that remained on the right, further attaching the top teeth and palette that had been completely snapped down at some point, given the fractures and placement of the fusion points. It was questionable how deep the repaired connection even ran, or if everything was simply superficial and all strain would be put on the external brackets should he try to bite down onto something hard or was ever struck head-on with a punch.
Similar damage was on the lower jaw, though to a lesser extent, the fracture didn't appear to go all the way through at the slash points. Instead, there was a hinge at the back made of dead metal, gray and primitive, with no side-to-side movement possible. Evidently, instead of the arch breaking under the blunt force trauma, the entire joint had snapped backward to absorb the impact, shoving into his throat.
His left optic was spared enough to have been repaired it appeared, protected by the paneling between his optics that deflected the assault from the socket, though there was the equivalent of a burst blood vessel within from strain and stress from the recent incident with Windshield. The bottom half was stained orange, liquid running along a couple of the internal connectors in thin streaks and mottled patches, yet was otherwise functional. Now that it was exposed to the light however, the white pupil was contracting and dilating in lurched twitches in an attempt to focus on Patch, spasming, the right not showing such a response as it had already stabilized to the brightness of the room.
This was just what was on his face however, it didn't include the top of his head where there were more 'repairs' if one could even call them that. His helm casing had been broken in and cracked on the side, more welds jaggedly stretching from the left to right. Covering the point where the damage intersected were two split plates that acted as a processor cover, thick bolts driving into the skull to hold them in place. They were chunky and ragged, simple panels pushed through a press brake to make a 'curve' to work just well enough, the seam sealed shut with something that may have been aged resin.
All the damage on the outermost surface across the entire left side of Carbine's helm looked to have been scraped and rasped recently, sharp silver shining through what seemed to be the results of a scouring pad of some sort that was already starting to turn red once again. Someone had really pressed into trying to shear the top layer of metal off, dark grime left behind in pock holes, seams, and around bolts where rubbing a soft pad was impossible to do any good. A clear sealant was smeared along a couple of spots, a futile effort to plaster and prevent more rust from forming on the surface.
Removing the helmet once more was like ripping off a gnarled scab for a second time in the last couple of weeks, only this time it was paired with the wonderfully fresh damage inflicted in an attempt at self-care. To say it irritated the dead metals and where they were bonded was an understatement, as after these few seconds since taking his helmet off, the grimace peeled back even further. A crackled breath sucked in sharply across the bolts on the inside of his mouth in a gritted strain to hold back a noise of weakness. This sharp intake was quickly followed by a rattled exhale of a sigh that parted his mouth, the exposed jaw on the left a mess of jagged broken edges. The rearmost molar pegs were bashed back, some with fissures, many almost angling towards the throat, the metal around it betraying horrible compression damage from blunt force trauma.
It was a mess.
When Carbine's jaw opened and angled down slightly to breathe out, the new position caused pooled fluids that had collected inside his mouth to drain uncontrollably, given there were no 'lips' on one side to hold it back. A splatter of orange and red with a colored sheen of oil stretching down in more slimy tendrils...
So much of the damage was replaced by dead metals. Things that would not show on a scan, things that were inert like holding a tool in one's hand. The connectors that would have attached to his faceplate that could move to make expressions and register that something was gone were no longer present, the only ones remaining being around the optic that did have some of the original flexible metals, though they were severely discolored. Most of the 'skull' didn't even appear to be stock built any longer, nor even made of materials that would ever fuse and biologically bond over time. A false frame of braces that did what they could with the fatigued and taxed foundation beneath it.
The rust and oils in his vomit... the horrific miasma that was mixed into the vibrant blue Energon he expelled out of stress in front of Patch and Windshield... it wasn't sourced from his tanks at all. No... it was all formed from swallowing runoff and drainage, consuming what pooled to not let it fill the bottom half of his mask or leak out through any gaps the silicone didn't seal shut. The hole within his throat, the adaptation... it was an 'aftermarket' addition, just to further hide what he had become and what had happened to him. Yet, like much of his neck up, it was far from perfect, and when he threw up it had collected in his mouth and mask before he had managed to open the port and force it out, swallowing what he could. He had breathed in fluid during that wonderful experience, throwing a bit of moisture into his system which caused the angry crackle when he heaved harder, the filters slightly plugged.
The moment Carbine really looked at Patch, knowing she was going to react poorly, if not at least make a gasped noise of disgust... he preemptively winced back, teeth gritting as his optics pulled up on the underside, mismatched brows furrowing. He didn't like this part. He never liked this part. The damage was never 'good' to see, not in any way shape or form, and it was expected for most to be appalled... however... that was before the rust had formed. Clean silver, clean welds, clean sealer to protect it... so now it was ten times worse to behold. He came to Earth just fine enough with no real issues other than a weakened skull and some nasty looking bracing... yet, time made things all go to the Pit and back, and he simply couldn't get it under control.
Everything was rotting, corruption quickly overtaking any attempts made to fix it. He, Thundercloud and now even Bumblebee couldn't fend it off, and that was what scared him. He didn't understand why things had gone downhill so fast since arriving on this world, nor how to stop it from getting even worse. Maybe it was the humidity trapped in his helmet, or perhaps it was triggered when he was pushed into the salty ocean months ago... he truly didn't know. Yet all this decay, all this pain where the bolts drove into his skull... it was new, and he stomached it down because that was what you had to do in order to survive...
He just wanted to survive.