[ti]Ep 3[/ti]Park and Wreck [Cassandra/Avalanche]

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"Yeah, that looks good. Doesn't seem like it's going to mess up my paint; you picked a winner. Had to do this before?" asked the muscled holotar. Behind her, a man in a black convertible slowed to stop and stare, but then sped up when a white truck behind him honked.

"For a living," was the woman's reply. Her tone was clipped but not unkind - her focus was more on fixing the truck's paint job. One side of Avalanche's body was almost halfway done, even if the woman had to go back over a few spots. Her glance fell upon the holotar's efforts, seeing little to help with in Avalanche's wake. This prompted her to move to the right, getting to work on the sloppily-sprayed "DAB".

"What happened to your hand? If I can ask," was Avalanche's next question, and the redhead paused. She looked over at the holotar, and it was obvious she hadn't been expecting the question. Her scarred hand pulled away from where she'd braced it against the truck. The old injury was facing Avalanche, fingers curling in a little.

"An accident," the woman said after a moment. "I was fooling around and wasn't watching where I was going. I was young and stupid, and thought I could do anything. What I tried to do took a great deal more focus than I cared to have." She stuck her hand back in her pocket, wriggling it in until it was snug. This left her with only one to wipe with, the motion stiff and a tad awkward. If this bothered the woman, she didn't seem to show it.

"It looks bad, but it's been a while since it happened. Years."

[Avalanche]

Another honk, another grimace from Avalanche, another little tensing of her brake system. At least the idiots speeding by could see that the vandalism was being removed, and so were less likely to think that she endorsed the trashy scrawls that had turned her perfectly mundane and unremarkable altmode into some kind of exciting attraction that everyone in town had to express their opinion on.

She didn't know what recourse was available to her if she ran across the juvenile artists again, but the big femme definitely had a lot of pent-up displeasure to express.

The question about Cassandra's hand had been intended as a conversational thing, something to keep communication going. Unfortunately, as soon as she asked it, Avalanche knew she'd made a mistake. The way it was hidden, leaving the human awkwardly working one-armed, was more than proof enough of that.

Well, it wasn't the first time Avalanche had known someone that was sensitive about old wounds. Not the first time she'd crashed into a conversational topic that was best left unbroached, either; she could be clumsy at times with people she didn't know.

"I know how that is," Avalanche offered, but said nothing more on the topic. She wanted to remark on how she'd managed to get her frame mangled before through young carelessness and the belief that she was invincible, but that had been a long time and several rebuilds ago. Certainly her avatar was entirely lacking in scars to point to as evidence of her own mistakes. Better not to try to wade into that subject any further.

Climbing up the side of the dump truck's bed, one foot braced against a wheel, Avalanche began scrubbing away the obnoxiously vivid scrawl of a human voiding their body cavities through every available orifice. After a moment's quiet, she grabbed hold of the last conversational straw available to her.

"So you clean up this kind of vandalism regularly? Vehicles, or buildings as well? Is that what your shift later is?"

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"Sometimes buildings, but not often. Vehicles once or twice," the woman said, still wiping. "I housekeep at Jasper Emergency. I change beds, clean up floors, sanitize the bathrooms - the usual. Sometimes a youngster or two decides they want to decorate the walls out back, but not like in Vegas. Everyone knows everyone, eventually, and that's incentive for people to behave right."

By now, the woman - the janitor - had reached the end of the word "FORTNITE". She left the solvent to rest on the other part of the tag, planning to finish cleaning it away after a few minutes. Even with one hand stuck in her pocket, her body adjusted and her movements smoothed out. If she wasn't used to cleaning with one hand before, she wasn't showing it now.

"When I'm not working there, I'm a post-disaster and crime scene cleanup worker. I deal with any crime tape, Luminol stains, and human remains left at a scene when police are finished with it. I also clean up houses after floods and fires, help out with hoarding situations, and tidy up the road after the odd car crash or two. My hours at the hospital were cut a few weeks ago, so I've been doing more of this work lately. It's where most of my experience with removing graffiti comes from."

One side of the truck was almost clean. The janitor circled around to the back bumper to start working on the crude blue "OFFICER SHITTYPANTS" doodle. It too began to smear and drip under the influence of a good bottle of Lift-Off.

"Is work what brought you to Jasper? I haven't seen you around here before, stranger," the woman asked, voice raising a notch over the nearby cars. Her focus was on the vomiting, pants-soiling sketch, the woman leaning back on her heels a little. Her head was in a slight cock to the side to hear Avalanche better.

[Avalanche]

Avalanche scrubbed at the neon mess somewhat absent-mindedly as she listened; she was already splitting her attention between her primary chassis and her holo, and picking out information from the human's words without betraying her lack of context was an additional overhead of a quite different kind.

Okay. The woman cleaned vehicles and buildings, but rarely. She 'housekept' - guarded? - Jasper Emergency. Some kind of local institution that involved responding to emergencies. Something that involved beds, lots of them. That nudged it more towards a medical treatment facility than policing or disaster recovery. She cleaned things. Reference to Vegas - that was the nearest large human city, according to her briefing materials.

The avatar nodded to herself, cleaning cloth pausing as she sorted through her impressions. This woman cleaned and perhaps guarded a medical treatment facility, where deliberate vandalism was rare because of a limited pool of local inhabitants and the inability to escape consequences, unlike Vegas where the population was much larger and more transient. That made sense. She was keeping up.

Oh, and the woman had another job, too. Luminol? That wasn't a word Avalanche knew; something to check later. Broader cleaning, dealing with a wider range of incidents. 'Hospital' confirmed she'd guessed right about a medical facility being involved.

Shaking herself, Avalanche resumed scrubbing, removing the last neon smear across the high side of her truck bed. Jumping down, she circled around to her front bumper and began cleaning the defaced road sign with firm swipes of her cloth.

"Seems like I was lucky to run into you," she remarked, raising her voice a little to be heard over the rumble of road traffic. "I was expecting I'd have to try hosing this off with pressurised water. This is a lot more effective. Can't beat a specialist at their own game."

For a moment, Avalanche considered asking the woman why her hospital hours had been cut. But if that was for poor performance, or unpleasant incidents, or that was just rude to ask humans, she didn't want to step on another conversational landmine. Instead, better to follow the thread laid out for her.

"Yeah, that's right. Some digging, some rock hauling. Haven't been here long. Frankly, I just want to get on with things, keep my head down and not cause any trouble." A certain sour note entered her voice as she finished the sentence, and it wasn't hard to imagine why. "I was driving around earlier, getting a feel for the place. Stopped off to take a break, have a look on foot. You know how that worked out."

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"Mm." The woman raised her hand to begin cleaning at the Bahaman Blue that dominated the back of the truck. "They're probably responsible for some of the other vandalism incidents around here. A few of the local garbage and maintenance trucks have had problems with graffiti. This doesn't look too dissimilar to what they've seen on their trucks. I'll bring it up to the truant officer after we're done here."

Her good arm was starting to get tired, the limb sagging a little and the hand getting stiff. Out came the scarred hand to brace against Avalanche once more. Brow furrowing as she scrubbed at a heavy patch of spray paint, the janitor said, "What kind of rocks do you haul? Quarry debris? Mountain road cleanup, of some kind? The sign on your front reminds me of things I see up in the hills in the parks near here."

She stopped to get another cloth, her current one full of stains and resembling sloppy tie-dye. Walking around to toss it into the bucket (for now), the item left by Avalanche for now, the janitor dried her hands. "You could get work with some of my people, if you're open to the idea," she added. "We're always looking for people to come haul away from the heavier jobs. I could make a few calls, ask about a few places, Ms...?"

She trailed off, waiting for Avalanche to respond.

[Avalanche]

"Like you said, everyone knows everyone. When you don't have a lot of different people around and you don't have a lot of through-movement, if you keep coming across the same kind of damage, it's going to be the same ones doing it. Even if there's more than the four artists from before, deal with them and anyone else with a spraycan will think twice."

The truant officer again. Responsible for policing juveniles specifically? It was weird being around a species with a formative stage that was a significant chunk of their lifespans. Newsparks were - had been - a bit clueless, but they usually caught on to the work fast enough, and they never went through anything resembling the pre-adult phases these humans went through. They changed so much in size, capabilities and mental outlook over a few short orbits around their local star that they were almost a different species. Several different species.

The foam on her bumper hadn't quite penetrated; Avalanche began rubbing harder to compensate, grimly determined to scour every last trace of the brightly coloured contaminants from her frame. Her head lifted a little as the woman asked about the sorts of haulage she did, and she shrugged her shoulders, muscles shifting smoothly.

"All of that. Construction hauling, delivering loads and removing debris. Scooping pulverised bedrock. Did some temporary bridge and road construction not that long ago." On another planet. "Some tunnelling, too. Road clearance. And yeah, quarrying. Had a hand in most things, over the years."

It was a fortunate coincidence the falling rocks sign on her bumper was apparently familiar to the inhabitants of this region; it might make her look a bit more at home here. She hadn't spent time keeping herself disguised from a non-Cybertronian population for a while, but she hadn't forgotten that a few distinguishing marks were, paradoxically, the kind of thing that made it easier to be ignored. Once she was familiar enough to be identified at a glance, she'd disappear all the more easily from notice.

The red-haired human appeared around the side of her altmode, approaching Avalanche's holo form with a paint-smeared cloth in hand. As she began her pitch for work, a thoughtful look touched Avalanche's face. Getting some kind of local work, even on a very short-term basis, could mean that she'd disappear more easily into the local populace. A known quantity. There again, if she had to drive off in the middle of a shift because gigantic alien robots were attacking halfway around the world, that wouldn't be easy to explain.

And then, at the end of the sentence, the human woman ambushed her. After all their conversation, now she asked?

A name, a name, a human name-

Avalanche tried to keep her avatar from registering the flash of mental scrabbling around, trying again to dig up something, anything, from her reading on human society.

She failed.

"Ava?" Avalanche flashed a slightly unconvincing grin. Surname, surname- "Larch. Ava Larch. Ms Larch. Ava is fine. Nice to meet you."

Suppressing the urge to plant both hands over her face and groan into them, Avalanche went on quickly, "What's your name? I've got steady work at the moment, but I'll talk to the boss. Maybe he'll be okay with me taking on some side work."

[Cassandra Cassidy]

The grin and awkward body language didn't go unnoticed. The woman came closer - perhaps a bit too close. She was within whispering distance as soon as Avalanche stopped talking. Turning to lean toward and scrub a curse word sprayed in red, the woman's tone dropped low.

"If you're going to lie about your name," she said, voice soft but not threatening, "you need to do better, 'Ava'. I don't ask questions if that means there's going to be a problem. 'Butch' is what everyone calls me, and that'll work for you, too."

Now Avalanche had a name for her helper: "Butch". Not a typical feminine name on Earth, but would the Cybertronian know that? One couldn't say. Not the janitor, especially, that was still naive to the true nature of the holotar beside her. The cuss came off the truck with little difficulty, and Butch circled around to help with the bumper. She moved away from Avalanche as she did, but was still within a range for quiet conversation to be heard.

"So you did construction and delivery," Butch began. Her tone had risen to normal levels now, again adjusted for traffic and the noises of coming and going. "That's a hard area for women to get into. How'd you do it?" She sounded on the edge of impressed. Complementary, even.

[Avalanche]

Was it possible for a dump truck to wince? It turned out that it was, the dual pistons that lifted her truck bed pulling in a little tighter, and only a herculean effort prevented her entire chassis from settling lower on her wheels.

Okay, she'd totally failed at coming up with a human-plausible name. What exactly was this woman - Butch - thinking about her right then? Military ties, unspecified heavy construction, fake name, being purposefully vague... in Butch's shoes, Ava would be thinking about secretive military work. Or some ambitious criminal enterprise that involved a lot of heavy earth moving equipment for some reason.

Not ideal.

Oh, and apparently it was unusual for human women to be in the construction field. She really wasn't doing a great job of blending in. On the other hand, she hadn't done anything to take her from 'suspicious' to 'suspiciously inhuman' in Butch's eyes, so things should still be salvageable.

Polishing off the bumper, the hologrammatic woman circled around to begin scrubbing the side of her bonnet, only for the silver letters reading 'Avalanche' to stare her in the face. If Butch couldn't connect that to her hastily chosen pseudonym then she, Avalanche, was a scraplet.

Inwardly cursing in terms that only an old soldier could, she invented desperately, trying to stick as close to the truth as possible.

"I wasn't ever expected to be anything else. I had a lot of relatives in construction. No one ever told me that-" women, not femmes, "-women shouldn't drive a truck, or pour concrete, or know how to handle rebar." Of course, dividing jobs by femmes and mechs was a stupid concept. But on the other hand, she knew a lot about being the kind of mecha that certain others, that peers and superiors, didn't like because of who and what she was. A harder note entered her voice. "You can get treated pretty badly when you don't match what people expect of you, but what's the alternative? Go back to your box and prove them right? No. You plough on. You do the job in front of you, and you do it well."

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Butch nodded as the other spoke. Her eyes flicked toward the wheels when Avalanche hissed and winced, but not for long. She joined Avalanche at the bonnet, working on the same section of defaced paint as the holotar was. There was a synchronization starting to happen, Butch matching the robot's pace and movements. She'd let the Cybertronian take the lead, and was following along accordingly.

It was her turn to say, "I know how that feels," when Ava finished. "Maybe not in the same sense, but I've broken expectations. Some of them were good, some of them...." Butch trailed off, and started to frown. Her hand paused, little drops of solvent racing down the bonnet from her cleaning cloth. A small, short sigh escaped her nose.

"Like I said, I know how it feels. I'm glad you were able to break away and do what you love. People are all too quick to put something as complex as a human being in a box, even if were are layers of myriad dreams, wants, and abilities. You have nothing to be ashamed about if you've done honest work - and if there times you haven't, you can move on from them." The last part had a careful tone, edging toward something more uplifting than a hidden jab. Butch's face was neutral again, her eyes on the task at hand, so it might've been hard for Avalanche to tell.

"You'll find good people and pay here if you look, and not just from my boss," she continued. "If you work hard, and are open to taking some of the tougher and more unorthodox jobs that pop up in a small town, we'll notice. I don't know if Chicago was your home or just a stop, but if you've lived in the city, you'll be surprised at how little is out here. We have at least three or four places serving ice cream, but not one place in town - to my knowledge - sells office supplies. The closest is a little mom-and-pop store that has odds and ends for cheap. I think it's one part 99-cent gig, one part thrift shop."

Butch stopped and leaned back, surveying how much of the bonnet remained to fixed up. With the two of them working on the same part of the truck now, Butch figured she could step away from the scrubbing. She circled back around, grabbing the gray bucket before returning to Ava. The janitor said, "The Lift-Off on the other side should be ready to rinse off now. We can't leave this on for too long after the paint's been removed. I have to find a place to get rid of my rags, and then I'll fill the bucket back up with water. There's no public hose available, so I'm afraid we'll have to rinse it by hand. Do you think you can get the other side while I finish up what's been started?"

[Avalanche]

Avalanche's gaze shifted towards Butch as she spoke, listening quietly to her as the avatar sprayed and scrubbed. It sounded as though Butch had been through a lot in her short years. Breaking though barriers placed before her, and at times, falling short of what she wanted for herself.

Something as complex as a human being.

There was a hard reminder that despite their wildly differing lifespans, their technologies, their knowledge of the universe, even their very natures, the native lifeforms were no less complicated than her own people. Their emotions and wounds no less worthy of respect. Here was a woman that bore her scars, and bore them well.

From the moment she'd created her new holoavatar here, it had struck Avalanche how natural it felt to inhabit a human guise. No matter how different their biology, the form was so similar. Perhaps that was what made it so easy to empathise with them.

The careful spaces between Butch's words didn't go unnoticed, either. Avalanche turned, and looked at her directly. Her voice was even, not confrontational, but quietly certain.

"I'll tell you this. I'm no criminal. No thief. I've made mistakes, and I've got regrets. There isn't anyone that doesn't." No Cybertronian, anyway. They'd all had far too long to accumulate those. "But the regrets I've got, I came across while doing my damndest to do the right thing."

She really, really shouldn't be giving more unnecessary hints about her own history. Even so... there was that core of deep-down stubbornness that didn't want this woman to think she was on the run from some kind of shady past.

Too stubborn. That had always been more of a flaw than a strength with her.

Avalanche turned back to the scrubbing. "I wasn't in Chicago for long. Just passed through, picked up a couple of things on the way." An altmode and a police pursuit. "Sure, you grab the water, and I'll take care of the rest of this mess on this side."

She'd almost said my side. The astringent chemical was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable where it had rested longest, and while she was grateful that it had stripped off the mess, the sooner the residue was rinsed off properly, the better.

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"I'll tell you this. I'm no criminal. No thief. I've made mistakes, and I've got regrets. There isn't anyone that doesn't. But the regrets I've got, I came across while doing my damndest to do the right thing."

Butch only smiled. She wasn't going to argue with Avalanche about the statement. Back to cleaning the both of them went, Butch listening away when her turn to speak was done. When Avalanche told her she'd take the other side, Butch moved away from the truck. "I'll be a little bit. The tap doesn't have good flow," she told her, and speed-walked off to go fill the bucket.

As Butch worked the hoseless tap at the auto-parts shop, the laughter of boys rose in the distance. Barely heard over the noise of the cars, they pedaled worn bikes around the side of the parking lot. Once they came to being parallel to the convenience store's sidewalk, they stopped in the dirt on the lot's edge. Dropping their bikes in a cloud of dust, the boys - still laughing, still joking with each other - jaunted forward. They were so absorbed in their conversation they didn't notice the giant truck and its owner. If they had, they might've been wise to go around the other way, or wait for her to leave.

And if Avalanche noticed them, she might find them familiar. A sort of plaid-and-denim, cursing-and-swearing, mouth-from-the-gutter familiar. The name "OFFICER SHITTYPANTS" was a half-drowned out punchline from the small pack's leader, who was black-haired and blue-eyed.

[Avalanche]

Whatever Avalanche had expected to get from declaiming her supposed lack of criminal intent, she didn't get it. Butch just smiled, in a way that neither implied belief nor invited confrontation on the topic, leaving the statement hanging in the air by itself.

The holographic woman grunted, turning back to her work. She nodded as the human walked off with the bucket, concentrating on scrubbing the last colourful streaks of intrusive paint off her chassis.

She shouldn't have said anything.

Lacking the surprisingly sharp-eyed company of Butch that had forced her to mute her chassis language, Avalanche settled a little lower on her axles, a kind of mirror to the irritated slump of her avatar's shoulders. A little more scrubbing, a rinse down with water to get the chemical stripper off her paint, and then back to the garrison to make a report and hopefully never have to think of this frustrating, infuriating incident ever again.

Well. No, she grumpily corrected herself, first she had to drop Butch wherever she needed to go - this hospital, Jasper Emergency, most likely - and make it clear to the human that she owed her a favour. One Avalanche had no idea about how to repay. And if the Prime and his existing advisors thought it best to try to integrate into the local population, she might have to owe Butch two favours once she asked for an introduction to all this work that was apparently floating around.

An unfulfilled obligation was to Avalanche like an itch she couldn't quite scratch. Speaking of which, the paint stripper was beginning to itch a little, too...

If she'd failed to take account of her surroundings before, when exploring with her avatar, she'd been sharply reminded not to be so careless with her altmode. Avalanche's scanners caught sight of the boys before they'd even dismounted their bicycles, her mirrors angling to catch a clear look. The voices were infuriatingly familiar.

Avalanche's avatar paused, mid-sweep of the cleaning cloth. Her muscled shoulders tensed up, teeth gritting as she heard them approach, her cab tilting slightly forward as her suspension stiffened. Had they tracked her down to give her a second going over?

Not going to happen.

She stalked out from behind the bulky shelter of her altmode, cloth in hand, five feet four inches of compact, hard-muscled wrath.

"Hey, you! The artists from before." Now what was it Butch had shouted? Ah, yes. "Fuck off."

[Cassandra Cassidy]

The boys stopped in their tracks. They stared at Avalanche, confused, until they registered who she was all at once. Their eyes popped out of their heads, their expressions gaping or nervous. The head boy went stiff, visibly unsettled, and swallowed hard. He fought against whatever fear he had, throwing a glare at Avalanche.

"You fuck off, lady!" Mark spat. "We're just passing through! What, is it the time of the month for you already?"

"Mark..." one of the brown-haired boys murmured behind him. His eyes flicked back and forth between Avalanche and Mark, body tense as if to run. The other boys glanced at the brunette, but focused their attention back on Avalanche. They made no move to keep walking - the femme's holotar was standing close to the sidewalk. One wrong move, and she could make a grab without much fuss, holding them in place.

But Mark dared to step forward. He shoulder his backpack a little, as it'd begun to slip. He moved away from Avalanche, aiming to go around her and hug the wall of the store as best he could. As he did this, the boys looked even more nervous. Mark managed to make a half-cocky, half-terrified smirk at the angry hardlight projection. It dared Avalanche to do something, an undercurrent of "yeah, you stay the fuck back" going unsaid.

[Avalanche]

They didn't even recognise her - or her altmode! - for a few seconds. Somehow, that pissed Avalanche off even more. Sure, desecrate someone's chassis with spraypaint, then forget it ever happened. They needed a short, swift lesson in consequences, and if they'd been young idiot mecha, she'd have been the one to give it to them.

Still, the flash of 'Oh no' that crossed their faces as recognition clicked home was gratifying.

For the other three, that would have been enough. They didn't want to escalate things in the face of her tangible wrath, and backing off seemed like the course to take. The ringleader, though. He didn't want to back down, and there was the escalation regardless.

She had no idea what the calendar date had to do with anything, but 'fuck off' was a phrase that she was quite clear on at this point. Had there been another cybertronian within sensing range of her field, they'd have been met with a cloud of stormy, vengeful anger that would have invited them to turn right around. As it was, her avatar's expression was doing a sterling job of exuding that same menace.

"I know someone that's looking for you," she said in a lower, harder tone. "Someone that's going to be just delighted to hear where you are. What was it you were calling them? 'Officer Shittypants'? I'll be sure to pass that along, too."

Her glance flicked over to their bicycles, lying on the ground in a tangled heap. "These three look like they want to leave. So sure, you go on and go where you're going by yourself. It'd be a real shame if I accidentally ran over your bicycle and left you stranded here, waiting to be collected."

Avalanche's eyes narrowed, and a cold smile touched the corner of her lips. "It wouldn't even scratch my bumper. So go ahead and make your choice. Punk."

[Cassandra Cassidy]

The other boys backed up, ready to bolt and run. Even the nervy Bradley cowed at her, his expression like that of a four-year old just pushed off a swing-set. Mark, however? Mark wasn't backing down. He sneered at Avalanche, the ugly grin showing teeth held together with wire and rubber bands.

"Then call him up, short-ass," Mark quipped. "Tell him the boys say hi and to catch us if he can. But first, tell me: what's Officer Shittypants's real name, miss?"

The other boys stared like Mark had grown a second hand. Mark's posture straightened, casually leaning to one side. "And really? You're going to threaten us? Do you know what would happen if you tried to run us over? You must be really fucking stupid if you don't know who I am. My Dad's a cop, and he'd put your sorry ass in jail if you even fucking tried to rev your engine at me."

"C'mon, Mark," the other plain brunette whined. "Let's just go already! We'll go somewhere else!" In response, Mark held up a hand.

"So go on, lady. Call him. Or try smashing us under your tires. Make my day, Ms. I'm-A-Bitch-On-Steroids. Make - my - day."

Everyone was gawping at him now. Some people had turned to stop and watch, equal parts bewildered and intrigued by the bit of drama. Bradley put his face in one palm and groaned.