[ti]Ep 3[/ti]Lowering the Bar [Avalanche/Skystone/Cassandra]

[Avalanche]

Episode 3 | Week 3 | Day 7
Location: Omega Garrison, Nevada

The heavy thrum of footsteps echoed down the empty corridors of the lower level, a tall, broad-built figure moving past storeroom after storeroom and giving each the most cursory of glances. There was a touch less decisiveness, less purpose, to that stride than was customarily the case.

Avalanche was, frankly, bored.

She'd always considered boredom an unworthy emotion for a commanding officer to display. There was always something to do, some report to review, requisitions to streamline, internecine squabbles to mediate that had exceeded the capacity of her subordinates to settle. If not that, preparation for the next sortie, reviewing convoy security. Training. There was never enough time and never long enough to recharge properly.

The sudden lack of all that was rather like taking a step and finding a leg missing.

She'd done research on the native culture, she'd written up recommendations for changes to the garrison and manuals for drills, she'd trained hard, caught up on more sleep cycles than she'd ever expected to, and still she found herself at a loose end. With too much time to worry about the mecha she'd left behind under damnable Forgelight's command.

The big femme sighed. Maybe, if she could admit it to herself, it was more loneliness than boredom that she felt. Well. Nothing ever got better all by itself. Notice something wrong, you fixed it. That was how progress was made.

Avalanche came to a stop, then turned on her heel, a new destination in mind. Or, more accurately, someone in mind. Her long strides carried her up the ramp to the main level, and down the corridors to the increasingly overcrowded barrack rooms. Stopping in front of one particular door, the big femme eschewed the door signal to simply rap lightly on the metal with the back of her knuckles.

The door opened. A tall femme stood there, framed by the mass of her white wings, distinctive yellow-green optics flicking up to meet hers. Skystone.

"Hey." Avalanche raised a hand in greeting. She paused briefly, then gave an inward shrug. "Want to come out to Jasper with me?"

[Deleted]

Skystone was sitting in her room.

Just...sitting.

She had blueprints out on her personal desk, her rock collection had been at least three times in the past hour, and still it felt like there was an itch she couldn’t scratch.

She had thought about going out to train, but when she went to go look, the room had been a little crowded, and she’d trained alone since...the last incident where she trained in a group.

It wasn’t ideal of course, didn’t lend much in the way of actual sparring, but she made do. She’d found herself lately holed up in her quarters more and more, almost as if she was convinced that she could control what happened in this room and this room only, and that made it the safest place to be.

Between famine, cave-ins, in-fighting, and a host of other mishaps that had plagued the base since Skystone arrived, she’d found herself becoming more and more concerned with what she could and couldn’t control, and trying to eliminate variables in her life that weren’t hers to control.

Now that she was thinking about it, she’d all but found herself tending towards self isolation.

I probably need to get out. 

She stood there, looking around, then sighed. Getting out almost seemed novel at this point with everything going on around her. And where would she even go? There weren’t many safe places for a Cybertronian to just stroll around and enjoy a drink (there used to be) and even if there were, Skystone knew everyone was insanely busy. She shouldn’t just go out and bother-

Clang clang clang.

Skystone looked towards the door, instantly curious. Who would knock on her door? As soon as she thought that an idea formed in her head of who would, but she went ahead and opened the door just in case…

Right to Avalanche’s face, as expected. Skystone wished her room wasn’t covered in blueprints and that maybe her posture looked a little less exhausted, but she’d been taken by surprise.

Avalanche’s question was even more so.

The words were out of her mouth before she’d even thought about them. “Sure, when?”

What?

Well. Jasper would be better than sitting in her room sulking, at least, she instantly began rationalizing. Accompanying a companion out is also productive.

[Avalanche]

Skystone's immediate response brought a smile to Avalanche's lips, a flash of happiness flickering through her field. She had been fully prepared for the flier to beg off to focus on base maintenance, and if she had, Avalanche would have been quite content to help her with it. But a breath of fresh air was better still.

"Right now," Avalanche replied, raising her optic ridges slightly in a playfully challenging look. "If I can tow you away from all this."

Her gaze flicked past Skystone, taking in the spreading ocean of blueprints that plastered every available surface. It seemed like the other femme was going over and over them in ways that had ceased to be productive some time ago. A slightly more assessing expression touched Avalanche's faceplate for a moment as she took in Skystone's subtly stooped posture, the way her wings sagged a little on their mounts.

It seemed that Skystone might need a break and some time to socialise even more than Avalanche did.

"If we go together to a human bar, there's a better chance we won't be directly approached. Makes it easier to get used to being around the natives," she added. Not that going to the bar together wasn't the point, but it added a jaunty little hat of theoretical responsibility to the endeavour. "Is your holoform prepped for human contact?"

[Deleted]

There was something about the way Avalanche brightened when Skystone agreed that made her feel like she was glowing inside.

Even if she’d wanted to argue just to seem like herself that alone would’ve made her reconsider.

She glanced back momentarily at her mess of a room before trying to straighten up, shaking herself off mentally.

“You can definitely tow me away...I’m not really gettin’ anywhere right now anyways.”

A human bar? Interesting idea. She supposed it would be beneficial to interact more with the locals.

“My holoform is prepped, thankfully. I figured it might come in handy.” Were she ever stranded and needed to communicate with a human, her holoform seeming as lifelike as possible would be key.

She stepped fully out of her room, letting the door shut behind her. “I can park far away enough if we go to the right bar so that I'm not seen...a large plane might draw the wrong type of attention." 


She wasn't sure there'd be any way at all to look past what type of plane she was as well, unfortunately. But she doubted anyone would go looking too deeply if she parked high enough up and away from sight.  

[Avalanche]

This had definitely been the right choice.

Avalanche was aware that, later on, she might have cause to regret that assessment. Getting entangled with other species was always fraught with unforeseen complications, and doing so with an uncontacted species - right outside their hidden base! - made the likelihood of something happening all the greater. Nevertheless, right at this moment, seeing the smile on Skystone's face, she couldn't imagine having second thoughts.

She stepped back as Skystone emerged into the corridor, the door sliding shut behind her. Reaching out, she rested her hand on the other femme's upper arm for a moment, before turning and heading off down the corridor.

"Must be hard to deal with the secrecy, as a flier. I can drive around Jasper all day if I want to." Although that comes with other risks. Damn little punks. "A plane taxing down the street, that's going to cause trouble. Even landing at the airfield would raise questions. Still. If we find a decent place for you to take cover in, I'll drive you down the rest of the way."

Having Skystone's avatar ride along with her... she didn't know quite how she felt about that. She definitely wanted to, it would be good to help out the other femme. Somewhere deep down behind her chestplate, a flicker of shyness stirred for a moment, rather confused by its unfamiliar surroundings.

"Hope you've settled on a proper human name." Avalanche glanced over her shoulder at Skystone as she strolled into the control room, heading for the exterior door controls. Pausing at the panel, she lowered her voice, breaking into a grin. "A human asked me for mine, and I didn't have one made up ready. Know what I said?"

She pulled a mock expression of being caught off guard. "...Ava... Larch?" The big femme shook her helm, rueful humour in her field. "That could have gone better."

Gripping the hatch control, Avalanche tapped a few buttons with her blunt, squared off fingers, then pulled down. Rock and metal rumbled as they began to grind open, a fresher breeze riding a bright shaft of sunlight through the widening gap.

[Cassandra Cassidy]

The Gulch was Western kitsch and '50s-style decor covered in a layer of dust and staffed by no one who cared. Its one redeeming value was that it was the sole dive for miles around. The beer was cheap, but no one remembered drinking it. The cocktails were an overpoured jumble of ingredients, but people liked the spontaneity. It was the place someone went to be anonymous for a bit, get drunk, and then wonder where the hell they'd been the next day.

Cassandra "Butch" Cassidy, that evening, was one of those patrons. The yellow taxi she'd hailed pulled up to the side of the bar, Butch stepping out with few words and a passing of bills. She let out a deep sigh through her nose as the car pulled away. Her good hand's fingers pinched the bridge of her nose, and Butch wondered for a moment if this was a good idea. It'd been years since she'd gone to drink without abandon, and recalled the one time she'd woken up under a dock. Butch could go home, shut the blinds and turn her apartment's lights off instead. It was so much simpler, so much more sensible to try and sleep off everything she'd dealt with.

She then thought of the pale, gap-toothed face staring back at her from a filthy house. The hallucination of a giant talking robot, and a stranger she could swear was her male twin. The police. The questionings. The smell of death even stronger in her nose, even though a touch of it always lingered with her. The stress of foregoing sleep catching up with her, delayed only so long by coffee. Her coworkers fussing over her and asking if Butch needed to sit down, if she was okay, if she wanted to take a few days off....

The physical exhaustion, mental drain, and sheer shock of the day's goings-on hit all at once. Butch felt like slumping and curling up on the ground then and there. Instead, she shook her head and fished around for her wallet with her bad hand. She'd jammed it in her left pocket after leaving the police station, and for once, didn't care how it looked to others. Yanking the wallet out, she flicked through and fumbled for a few more bills. Quick, quiet steps took her through the cliché saloon doors of the place, and to the far end of the bar where few sat.

Just this once, it'll be fine.

[Avalanche]

Sometimes, things didn't work out.

Well, no one needed that lesson repeated, not considering their history. On the very verge of escaping the base together like cadets sneaking awol, Skystone had been called back inside, and was drawn into an inescapable, tar-like mass of paperwork and meetings. Left at a loose end - and admittedly, if quietly, sulking a little to herself at the turn of events - Avalanche had eventually decided to hit the road by herself.

Even if her stated reasons for going had largely been a pretext to spend some time with the other femme, they were still valid ones. It was good practice to spend a little time among the humans, working on not being too obvious, not being too weird. And she had truly, sincerely felt the need to run her drivetrain a bit.

All of which lead her to the Gulch, a dusty, unimportant outcrop of a long ribbon of baking hot blacktop. The heavy dumptruck pulled into a parking slot among a desultory couple of trucks making stopovers, using their trailers to see what shade she could from the hot sun on her metal. The rumble of her engine died away, and within her cab, Avalanche's holoform gazed at the club with an unconvinced look on her face. There really was something about trashy dive bars that managed to transcend culture and species.

The driver's door opened with a clunk. The holo jumped down, her heavy black boots hitting the simmering tarmac with a thump. And then she hesitated, one hand on her own fender. Every contact with the natives was a risk, and boredom just wasn't a good enough reason to ignore that. But, sooner or later, she'd be on a mission and need to pass among the natives without drawing attention for truly serious reasons. Better to practice now, when there were no stakes involved beyond her own presence.

Probably.

She wasn't a mecha to hesitate for long. Shoving her cab door closed, she strode off towards the bar without a backward glance at her main chassis. On the contrary, her main chassis was watching her go; she didn't intend to let herself become oblivious enough to pick up more vandalism while her attention was on the holo. The tatty building loomed before her, and with a shove of her hand, she stepped out of the burning heat and into indifferently air-conditioned gloom.

As far as anyone inside knew, a powerfully muscled young woman pushed her way in through the doors, a woman with straight brown hair, dark eyes and a certain stubborn set to her expression, wearing a black leather jacket over a clinging white shirt and faded jeans. Clunky boots with metal toecaps and a thick belt completed her ensemble.

She hadn't forgotten Butch's implication that she might draw sexualised attention from the natives. A jacket ought to fix that. Probably. Who knew how these creatures thought? And as if summoned by the thought, Avalanche caught sight of a squat, muscular woman shambling towards the bar.

"Hey, Butch!" she called out. Two people together would definitely draw less attention than one alone.

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Butch turned on her heel, blinking. Her good hand hung in the air, having reached out to plant cash on the edge of the bar. Butch squinted through the crowd, picking out a muscle-bound, burly woman between people. Brow furrowing, the cleaner stepped around a tall man in a cowboy hat to get a better look.

"Hey," Butch called back, walking toward the stranger. She couldn't help but look baffled, wondering who on Earth would be at this place at this hour. Her coworkers preferred the bar-and-grill between Jasper and Vegas. Was a cop from earlier out here? Butch hoped that wasn't the case. She'd said her piece, told the authorities everything she could, and just wanted to be left alone.

Her face softened as recognition started kicking in. Butch thought back to a week or two earlier, when she'd been out for a break one day. There'd been a dump truck some of the local kids had tagged...she'd helped the driver clean things off. But the woman hadn't been wearing a jacket at the time - maybe it wasn't her?

Butch stopped in front of the woman. "Sorry, um...I'm not sure if we've met. I think I recognize you from somewhere - Evie...?" Butch trailed off. The gears in her head continued to turn, trying to put a name to the face.

[Avalanche]

The look of incomprehension on Butch's face was as clear as it would have been on an Cybertronian's. Again, the sheer similarity of structure and emotional expression between their wildly disparate peoples struck Avalanche, though admittedly she was more occupied with her own mild surprise at not being recognised.

Of course, she chided herself, it did make sense. Butch was one of an utterly miniscule number of humans she'd ever spoken with, and aside from the vandals - whom she did not remember fondly - the only native on the planet to have touched her armoured hide. The only one to have ridden inside her. Of course the squat woman stood out in her memory. To the human, though, it was merely a day she'd helped out someone passing through, probably buried under other concerns within days.

"We've met," Avalanche confirmed, nodding once. "Ava. You helped me scrub a load of graffiti from-" my armour, she nearly said, and quickly amended it to, "-my truck. We went for a drive. Appreciated the help. You know if Mendez ever caught up with the brats?"

If Butch didn't remember the stumble she'd made over choosing an alias on the fly, so much the better. That had been legitimately embarrassing. Glancing around herself at the bar, trying to interpret the nature of the looks she was attracting, Ava went on, "Was on my way here with a friend, but she got called away. Ended up here by myself. How about you? You brought company?"

Having experienced how jumpy Butch could be, Ava was at least half-suspecting she'd interpret 'are you alone' as some kind of probe prior to a kidnapping or assault. Still, it was better to get the obvious out of the way, and find out if Butch had business of her own that didn't include a casual acquaintance turning up out of the blue.

"I owe you a drink for the help before," she added. Now that she actually had some native currency, unlike her last ill-fated trip. This time she was determined to be better prepared.

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"Ava," Butch repeated. She gave Avalanche a small smile. "I remember now. Yeah, Mendez tracked them down. Turns out they're regular nuisances - I think they'll be in detention after school for a month. I wouldn't worry about them again."

Ava then explained how she ended up in that dump of a bar, asking if Butch came with company. Butch said, "Nah, just by myself. Long day, and I wanted something quick and cheap." Then Ava offered a free drink, and Butch hmphed with a smirk. Some of the tension went out of her body, leaving her in a half-sag.

"You don't know how welcome that sounds right now," she said. "Come on, join me. Maybe if we get drunk enough, we can complain about life together." Not that she intended on talking about anything that happened today, even if she did get drunk. Butch was sure she wouldn't break so much that she'd start talking about illusions and corpses.

Walking over to the bar ahead of Ava, Butch re-found her seat at the far end. She took the penultimate chair, leaving Ava the option of sitting right by the wall or not. There were three empty seats between Butch and the rest of the bar, the nearest patron a burly trucker in plaid. Butch waved over the bartender, who barely looked old enough to be working there. He adjusted his glasses as he came over, and stopped to grab a straw cowboy hat to wear.

"Howdy, partner! What it'll be tonight?" the young man asked. He wore thick-rimmed black glasses, a buckskin vest, a tight white shirt, and some old jeans. Everything but the shirt looked too big on him, and a glance over the bar revealed he wore flip-flops for shoes. Butch tried to not took incredulous at his getup, especially at the plastic gold "SHERIFF" badge on his vest.

[Avalanche]

Avalanche snorted, nodding. A chunk of her attention warily scanning around the main body of her altmode, she replied, "It's never just once. Idiots like that don't start off from nothing. They work up to it, get more and more sure they'll get away with anything, and keep escalating 'til someone stops them hard. Or someone gets hurt."

She'd never had to deal with juvenile humans before, but she'd had to deal with her fair share of idiots who had no idea where the boundaries were before they slammed their faceplate into them, even before the war.

She broke into a smile at Butch's response, tempered by mild concern for the human. Seemed like she'd had a rough day. Though as for any hope that Avalanche would get drunk... well, her holo was fitted with an internal storage volume for solids and liquids, and she had a rudimentary ability to pick up the sensations of different compounds, but mostly it'd be a matter of nodding, bluffing, and eventually discreetly emptying her internal tank somewhere out of sight.

The fact that this last part was roughly analogous to the human situation didn't occur to her at all.

Avalanche followed Butch over to the bar, interested by the fact the other woman hadn't taken the last stool that put her back to the wall. Courtesy? Settling onto the end stool, she rested her elbows on the bar. All she had to do was mimic Butch, and not do anything too weird.

The young human behind the bar, though, was making it hard for her to figure out what 'weird' counted as. Was he some kind of law official? Why was he serving drinks? "Whatever she wants. And one for me, too," Ava said. Thank Solus. Now Butch could name a plausible drink for this situation, and that was another potential minefield negotiated.

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"Whisky sour," Butch piped up. "Two, please, for me. One to start the lady off with." There was almost a sarcastic edge there, a playfulness to calling Ava "the lady" - but not in a mean way. The bartender only stared in response. Butch stared back.

"Uhhh..." went the bartender, ducking to check behind the counter, heading next to a line of bottles at the other end of the bar. He was back in a few moments, frowning. "I don't think we make that here, ma'am...."

"That's fine," Butch said, shrugging. "You've got a cocktail menu?"

"No, just nightly specials. But they're really good!" the man said, smiling. "Did you want to try them instead?"

"Sure," Butch replied, giving a dry smile. "Show me what you have, 'partner'." The man nodded and scurried to the bottles, gathering up ice and ingredients in a noisy jumble of clinks. Butch shook her head.

"I give this place three weeks before it finally bites the dust," she said. "Don't eat any of the food here if they offer it. If he's walking around in flip-flops, the kitchen's probably a wreck."

Somewhere up the bar, a glass broke and was followed by a hurried, "Sorry, sorry, sorry!" Someone from behind a dingy swinging door yelled for tickets, and a fryer hissed and gurgled. The smell of breaded chicken and old oil began to fill the bar like a miasma.

[Avalanche]

Already, Avalanche was floundering with human cultural references she just wasn't equipped to understand. There was something about the way Butch said 'the lady' that hinted at some kind of joke or reference, but as far as Avalanche could see, it was a direct and literal translation of 'femme'. Clearly she was missing something.

Cocktails was a word that her translation system mapped to its Cybertronian equivalent; nightly specials made less sense. Still, it seemed from the way the male human bustled about picking up bottles that he intended to combine them in a cocktail-manner anyway. She blinked again at the suggestion that the bar was doomed to an imminent closure by the man's choice of footwear, still less why that meant she shouldn't eat there.

Trying not to show how immediately and thoroughly she'd found herself adrift, Avalanche clung to the idea that at least she wouldn't have to pretend to eat the human food. Liquids were easier, more familiar. At least she knew what to do with the tinkle of broken glass.

"It'll close sooner than that if he keeps dropping the glasses," she replied conversationally. "Just hope none of it ends up in the drinks."

That got her, oh, two full sentences before she was once again out of things to say that she was at least partly confident would be appropriate for the venue. She needed to get Butch talking, give her more to work with. "Looks like you've had a rough day," she added.

Even if it didn't get much of an answer out of Butch, it was something to move the conversation along, and right then, she'd have taken anything she could get.

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"Looks like you've had a rough day."

A rough day. A rough day, Ava had called it. Butch laughed, the sound breaking out strained and half-stifled. A couple of people looked over from a table with peeling varnish, then went back to their drinks. Butch managed to pull back the volume until it was a giggling fit, the cleaner laughing into her knuckles.

"Sorry...sorry," Butch said. "It's just...I'm fine. The job today sucked. I've got something better lined up tomorrow, and I'm pretty sure it'll be over fast. Tonight, however?"

Her expression held the edge of a mischievous smirk. Despite her exhaustion, there was foxy glint to her eyes.

"Let's see what's so good about these 'nightly specials'. Here's our order now."

The Sherriff returned with a handful of bottles, a shaker, some condiment bottles, and shot glasses. Butch's face was neutral again, watching as he lined up everything he was going to use. Some kind of cheap vodka, some syrups, rum, grenadine, Dry Vermouth, Jack Daniel's, lemon juice.... Wait, cranberry hard soda? Pomegranate beer? Heavy cream? Canned kiwi slices? Melon liqueur?

"This is going to be awesome, believe me," the Sherriff said. He flipped the lid off the canned kiwi slices, the smell of syrup and aged fruit strong. (Butch wondered how long the top had been sitting freely, disconnected from the metal.) He grabbed a few kiwi slices and dropped them in each shot glass, green and yellow near-melting over ice. He took the shaker and popped it open next.

"Two shots of vodka - "

Off he popped the vodka bottle's lid, letting it chug in like water from a bucket. Butch's eyebrows went up - that was not two shots of vodka. That was more than a third of the bottle he was pouring in.

"One shot of the liqueur - "

Another pop, and in went the melon concoction with far more care than the previous ingredient had. Butch's nose twitched.

"Some simple syrup - "

Way too much was squeezed in from the condiment bottle. Either this was going to be sweet enough to give her cavities, or more nauseating with the alcohol's kick.

"Oh, I forgot, the jalapeño - "

The Sherriff looked around for a minute, then spotted two of the small chile peppers on the bar. He reached over and swiped them away from another, similarly-dressed bartender, who let out an indignant, "Hey!" The man ignored her as he crushed the peppers in one fist, Butch leaning back and blinking from the sudden fumes. The Sherriff squeezed as much of the pepper he could into t shaker, then dropped the remnants in.

"And we stir it all up!"

He took a festive-looking curly straw from a small container beside Ava. Jabbing the little implement into the shaker, he stirred the drink with vigor. Butch began coughing into one hand, hiding her lips and nose. The overpowering odor coming from the shaker and crushed peppers was unpleasant. To Butch, it spoke volumes about how done she was with the day that she struggled to keep a straight face.

"And there you ladies have it...the Lush Lagoon!" the Sherriff proclaimed proudly. He poured the opaque, toxic green result with gusto, almost overflowing both glasses. When the shaker clunked back down on the bar, he leaned in with an expectant look. "So?"

Butch looked at the Sherriff, looked back down at her drink, and gave a sideways glance to Ava. The look she gave Ava said it all: You first.

[Avalanche]

Avalanche winced as Butch broke into a peal of definitely teetering-on-hysterical laughter. Whatever the human standards were for 'bad day', Butch had blown past them and then some. Seemed like something best left alone; in other words, a comprehensive failure of a conversation topic.

Damn.

The bartender's return was at least a distraction. Avalanche turned her gaze upon the dubious figure of her 'rescuer', immediately suspicious of the sheer volume of bottles and objects he was carrying. A sideways glance at Butch confirmed that whatever was going on here, it wasn't going to be good for humans.

...it really was amazing the way some chassis language translated to other species. She didn't know human drinks, but the messy, multi-layered way he assembled the drink reminded her of cheap bars, bad energon cocktails, and young idiots that thought they were way more talented than they were, trying to show off behind the bar.

Well. At least she knew how to react to that, and if she was wildly off-base, she'd just have to chalk it up to personal taste. Butch's unspoken signals that she was to go first were at least readable; it was a shame for the human woman that she'd learn precisely nothing from Ava's reaction to the concoction.

Avalanche nodded at the barman, a figure she was coming to distrust had any business being behind the bar, and took a long swig of the liquid. It was odd. Thinner than energon, and caused her rudimentary chemical signals processor to spit out some odd, crude impressions. She paused a moment, judging her timing, then set the glass down on the bar half-full and remarked calmly, "That's truly awful."

Casting about for something to add before she was asked to describe the taste, she went on, "How's the personal life going? Dating anyone?"