[ti]Ep 3[/ti]Freshening Up [Closed]

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Week 4, Day 7

Omega Outpost One, NV

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Her work hours were going to be lessened in the next week because of a scheduling issue - good. Her job with What Stays In Vegas Cleaning was giving her time off after telling them she needed a day or two - also good. That meant, for the next week or so, she'd be able to dedicate herself time to cleaning up Omega Outpost One. Cassandra Cassidy couldn't be happier with contributing to the war effort, and by extension, something her father had fought for as well.

It was all starting with the human part of the base in, the Rec Room area. There was a layer of dust in and around less-used parts of the kitchenette. The fridge was somewhat empty, and the coffee machine had decided to cut out that day. That last problem would be the easiest to fix; Cassandra busied herself with putting a kettle of strong coffee on in case anyone needed it. One, two, three heaping scoops from an available tin were added to a modest amount of water, so as to keep its potency. Once it was put on heat to boil, the woman started searching for some wet wipes to dust down the counters with.

[Avalanche]

Pa-thunk. Pa-thunk. Pa-thunk.

Avalanche’s heavy footsteps reverberated through the concrete beneath her as she stalked the corridors, a frown drawing her brow plates down low over her burning orange optics. She was restless, her quarters are small enough that she barely fit within them when lying down, and the base didn’t hold any mecha she felt inclined to confide in. Not since Skystone had left for Solus knew how long, and Patch was-

Which was one of the major thoughts on her mind to begin with.

The situation was... unfamiliar. Frustrating. She was used to the primary limitations on her ability to act coming from limited supplies, insecure fortifications, the relentless pressure of the enemy. Over her time in command of her battalion, she’d found ways to deal with those pressures, even if they ground her down. But here... the groundbridge was a revolution in tactics she was still wrapping her processor around, allowing for their seemingly (only seemingly, she thought sourly) impregnable fortress, protected by secrecy where raw fortifications would have fallen long ago. Even the supply situation was recovering.

No, the limitations here were far more born of her own side. She had authority – to a degree. But an unspecified one. The command hierarchy was so murky, it didn’t exist. And should she give an order, and one of the many mouthy mecha running around tell her to go cook her aft in a slag furnace, she genuinely had no idea whether she’d even have the ability to punish them, or how far, or in what way. The garrison had the discipline of a rowdy bar, she didn’t have the power to fix it, and it was causing them losses.

Like Patch.

Avalanche rested a clenched fist against the corridor wall, a small betrayal of the deep frustration simmering with her. Frosty would have recognised that gesture; Manifold too. In time, she knew, she’d get used to her new posting and role, and build bonds with the mecha around her. It’s the way it always worked – always had to work, when she was moved around at the whim of Autobot Command. It had been a long time since she’d been through that, but nothing lasted forever.

Her restless prowling had carried her, almost without noticing, into a more central portion of the base, one fit for a human presence as well as the juggernauts of Cybertron. Avalanche’s heavy fuel pump was powerful, but not especially efficient; as she caught sight of the doorway to the rec area, she suddenly became aware of her low fuel state. Better something tended to now, before some unexpected trouble struck; exhaling, she stepped through the doorway, ducking her helm a little.

And there- in the human-biased section of the chamber, a short, rough woman with orange hair. Avalanche tilted her helm, a wry smile quirking her black lips for a moment. Perhaps she did still have some bonds left within the base.

“Hello Butch,” she remarked, her voice deep and resonantly female, recognisable as the same voice as her holo, if dialled up in base and reverb as it thrummed through her bulky frame. She rested one hand on the energon dispenser, her fingers great heavy wedges of metal, grit and rock fragments pounded into the joints from mining efforts both recent and long past. “You’ve had some time to think. Not enough,” she added with a touch of humour, “but some. How are you managing?”

[Cassandra Cassidy]

The heavy footfalls of a Cybertronian were instantly recognizable. Butch looked up from her search, nodding at Commander Avalanche entered the room. "Commander," she said, and ducked down to check under the sink for wet wipes. There was some Windex and Bleach under there, Butch noted, but not what she was looking for.

Standing back up, Butch looked back over to the enormous robot. Craning her neck up, she couldn't help but take in the sight before her. Thick, heavy plates of dark armor hung on what Butch imagined to be great coils and fuel lines under hard skin. Furnace-orange eyes reflected what Butch imagined Avalanche's heart must be like, and by extension, other Cybertronians'. The Commander must've weighed at least a few tons, and that hand resting on some dispenser could crush her like a bug. It was a testament to creation that humans shared the universe with such creatures. It would be a while before Butch stopped being awestruck at the thought.

"I'm doing all right," Butch answered to the Commander's question. "Trying to convince my one boss something terrible didn't happen was a bit of a challenge. Nothing I couldn't handle, in the end. I ended up telling him I was sick and lost my phone, and that I needed some time off so I stopped forgetting everything. My coworkers have tried to convince me for weeks I should use some of my vacation days up, so everything worked out. Combine that with a shift change at the hospital, and I should be coming in frequently the next couple of weeks."

The cleaner moved over to another cupboard. No such luck in finding any wet wipes, again, but at least there was paper towel. Butch pulled out the package in case she needed it. "How are things faring for the Autobots here?" she asked.

[Avalanche]

“Avalanche,” the massive femme replied. “You’re not part of my command structure.” As if one of those really existed here, she groused inwardly. “Or Ava. I don’t mind informality from you.”

Treating the dispenser with a degree of care – no one on base would ever forgive the idiot that broke the thing by accident – she retrieved a moderately sized cube of energon. It wouldn’t fill her fuel tanks, but it would take the edge off, and it never did for a commander to look greedy. Cocking her helm, she listened as Butch described the hassle of dealing with her work superior, crossing the room to settle down on the Cybertronian-sized seat.

For a moment, she considered manifesting her holo, but decided it against it. After all, it wasn’t every day she got to speak to a human face to faceplate, without the buffer of a human disguise.

“We’ve taken some losses lately,” Avalanche replied evenly. “But our supply situation is a lot better than it was when I landed here.” There were quite a lot of words queued up in her vocoder about the current situation, and Butch would be a worthy confidant, someone with experience in the native equivalent of their armies. And yet, discretion won out. It wasn’t her place to badmouth the organisation of the base to anyone, aside from the strange, intimate trust that held between medic and soldier. Even then, perhaps she should have contained her opinions instead of confiding them in Patch.

Switching topic – she knew Butch would notice the purposeful move, and knew she’d understand why – Avalanche went on, “I remember the work I used to do, before the war. Sounds like your foreman, your boss, cares more about your safety than the work he needs getting done. Your co-workers, too. That’s the right way around.”

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"Yeah, well, I think he worries bit too much at times."

The subject change did not escape Butch's notice. Giving up on the search for wipes, she turned to walk back to the human area's table. On top of it sat a weather-beaten duffel bag, stained and dusty from travel and work. Butch unzipped it, peering inside and reaching her bad hand in to grab.

"Don't get me wrong, I appreciate they care. It's just that, sometimes, they don't understand I'm fine, even when it looks like I'm not. I'm used to all sorts of scrapes; it takes a lot to knock me off my feet."

Yanking out her own stash of the sought-after, solution-laden supplies, the redhead walked back to the counter. Popping their lid, she pulled out one and began to swipe it down the worn surface. Gentle steam wafted from the kettle, and the scent of coffee was beginning to fill Butch's workspace. It was a rather cozy feeling to her, reminding her of her own home a little.

"What did you do, before the war?" she asked. "Something with hauling? Factory work, maybe? You mentioned a foreman." Into the sink she dipped her wipe, stopping to scrub at a few water stains sprayed across its side.

[Avalanche]

Avalanche watched Cassandra work, evidently searching for something, before she retrieved a small, pre-wetted cloth and began cleaning the counter. A wry grin tugged at her black lips as she listened, nodding in understanding.

“You do the job that’s in front of you,” she agreed. “Fixing yourself up has to wait for later, sometimes.”

Leaning back on the couch, shifting slightly to make the twin smokestacks up her back more comfortable, Avalanche lifted the cube of energon to her lips and drank. Immediately, she felt a little relief, her internal mechanisms welcoming the extra fuel.

“I was made for construction.” The big femme paused, searching for the right Earth-word, then resumed, “I was a bulldozer back them. Six track units, big articulated digging blade. Pivot about two-fifths of the way down, with rams to angle the front of my chassis. Last form before I came here, I was formatted as a bridge-layer.”

Avalanche’s hot orange optics gazed through the wall, into the reaches of her memory. “Construction mecha like me, we were the lowest caste. I wasn’t an architect either, like some of us were. I can knock together a bunker or basic structure with my bare hands, but you want to get fancy, you need someone higher up to make up a design.

“What doesn’t help much-“ she grimaced, “-is that most of the lower castes backed Megatron, when he started talking about the unfairness of it all, and how we deserved better. One of the most famous units the ‘cons have is made up of construction mecha, and I’ve had that flung in my faceplate pretty much my whole career.”

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Butch listened without pause. The sink continued to be the source of her attention, the cleaner bent over an old stain that refused to come out. Frowning, wondering if she'd need a calcium remover in case of hard water, she stood back up as Ava finished.

"That's rough to hear, ma'am," Butch said. She moved to clean out the sink again, scrubbing at a new spot now. "Was it always that unfair there, with that caste split? Or was that a new development at some point?"

Butch walked over to the wet wipes and grabbed a new one, the moisture gone from her current one. It was replaced with smears of red dust and traces of hard water. Butch speculated that the dirt she was finding everywhere was knocked free by giant footsteps. She made a mental note to dust down everything at least once each time she was in to clean.

"Do you have anything you'd like me to do while you're in here, ma'am?" asked Butch suddenly. It occurred to her that the Commander might want her to look at something that she had missed. Optimus Prime had been thorough in his instructions, but there always could be something someone needed help with.

[Avalanche]

Avalanche vented a low sound, leaning back a little more as she took another gulp from her energon. Her gaze drifted to the side. “It wasn’t always like that. Before I was sparked, there was a time when Cybertron looked outwards. Founding colonies all across the galaxy. Space bridges, linking worlds as casually as you’d walk from one room to another. But it all collapsed inwards, in the end. Energy shortages. Space bridges shutting down, colonies isolating themselves. Infestations. Our world had looked long and deep into the sky, and finally gotten scared. Pulled back.”

She grunted. “All the things that used to come from offworld stopped. Cybertron itself didn’t have the energy reserves it used to. Either everyone took the hit, or those with the most pull were going to shove down every other mecha so they could keep their luxuries. Guess which happened.”

Ma’am, Avalanche noted to herself. There was an irony there. It wasn’t that she was a gigantic alien machine that had put a little more distance between her and Butch, it was her rank.

Couldn’t be helped. They both were what they were.

She nursed her energon cube as she watched Butch work, making it last a little longer, but there was only so much she could do with a standard sized ration block. The human’s actions made sense, to Avalanche at least. She had a set of skills. She wanted to be of help. As things stood, cleaning up the rec room was one of the unglamorous chores of maintaining the outpost, and it needed doing as much as any other of a thousand minor tasks. Avalanche appreciated that.

Still, there were other uses for her hands too. The big femme’s thoughts drifted back to how they’d met, having Butch clean off her armoured hide from the graffiti the wretched immature-stage humans had daubed. Perhaps there was a means here to take a little strain of what passed for the back up to the back up to the medical staff.

Leaning forward a little, Avalanche planted a hand on the ground, palm down. The backs of her fingers and hand were thick with ridged black armour, the hinged joints heavily overbuilt to take the burden of heavy blows. Rocky fragments were embedded in the armour and between small gaps in the joints, dust and grit built up in the oil. A thick band of metal covered the tops of her knuckles, dull silver adorned with conical, blunted spikes.

“I’ve done a lot of rock mining with my hands. Did some more not long ago. If you want to take a try at getting the shards and grit out, that would be useful.”

[Cassandra Cassidy]

The request gave Butch pause. She stood up, hand paused in the middle of work. She looked with uncertainty at the Commander, then at the massive hand lowered to the floor. Butch - though educated in a few basics when it came to car repair - was no robot enthusiast. Nor was she a robot doctor, which is what she would expect Avalanche to go to to ask to get her fingers looked at. There was a real chance her inexperience could break something off, or lodge something into an important joint.

On the other hand, she wasn't sure if this was something some kind of...robot doctor found important enough to fix. The gaps between Avalanche's joints were also large. Too small, maybe, for fingers thicker than Butch's head to try and pull from and poke around in. But Butch's hands - well, her good hand, at least - were small and dexterous, easily able to slip into those gaps to take a look. The uncertainty on Butch's face disappeared, and she nodded.

"Yes ma'am, I can do that," the cleaner answered. She walked over to her duffel bag and grabbed it, swinging it over one shoulder. Long strides carried her over to Avalanche quickly, and she sat down beside the hand. Putting her bag on the floor, the cleaner leaned over and began to examine the joints carefully.

"Is there any part of your hand you'd like me to start with?" Butch asked. "Anything that hurts in particular, or you find hard to move?"

[Avalanche]

The play of emotions across Butch’s face was tangible. Hesitation, uncertainty, acceptance. It was honestly strange how familiar humans were. No having to discern layers of meaning by scents, many of which were too fine-grained for standard olfactory receptors to distinguish. No watching for the precise angles of mandibles and antennae. Admittedly, they were all a bit similar compared to the wild variations of Cybertronian chassis, but the faces...

Perhaps this was why Earth, in the end, was the site of this last stand. A whole world of people that could still be saved, easy to emphasise with, to see as tiny, brief echoes of themselves. She dismissed the thought, not for the first time.

“Nothing specific,” she replied with a shrug of one armoured shoulder, the wheel embedded in the guard turning slightly with the motion. “They get stiff, but I’ve never been one for detail work. Nothing important enough to bother the medics right now.” Whoever that actually was, if anyone. They’d suffered two devastating losses in a row. Maybe they’d get Patch back alive; she hoped with all her Spark they would. But she’d been through too many wars to expect it.

All the same, it felt like some tiny betrayal to ask Butch to clean her hand joints, when Patch had been about to do it before they’d gotten interrupted before.

Her hands were built massive and with a kind of blunt, purposeful simplicity. They were tools, and weapons, in their own right. Thick metal that had taken far too many impacts, yet remained intact, scratched, her coating worn. Dust, grit and rock shards had wedged in among them, slowly being crushed to powder by her movements.

The towering femme vented a sigh. Choosing to turn the conversation, and distract herself from her own thoughts, she remarked, “I arrived on this world by space bridge. Not a Cybertronian one; from a different species. They did a pretty good job. Hit the planet I was after, over a landmass. Trouble was, it opened a hundred meters in the air. I was in vehicle mode, too.”

She gestured with her other hand, a closed fist descending, then unfurling as it approached the ground. “Shifted mid-air. Hit the ground, broke through, made a nice crater into a service tunnel. And that was the middle of Chicago.” A touch of wry chagrin touched her tone, seeking to draw Butch into a less formal dialogue.

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"You...landed in the middle of Chicago. A major city," Butch said. She couldn't help but stare at the Commander. "And you somehow didn't end up on the news at eleven."

The cleaner stood in silence for a moment, as if expecting the punchline to some kind of joke. When that didn't come, she simply said, "You're serious," and shook her head, blinking away the shock from her features. Butch began to go over the massive femme's hand, immediately spotting several shards. They were caught close to the top of Avalanche's knuckles, and had grooves along the sides. That was probably caused by movement grinding them down, making Butch wonder if they sat on other fragments.

"So, what's a space bridge?" Butch asked, reaching into her bag. She put both hands inside to dig around its contents. "Is that like your ground bridge...thing, but in space?"

She pulled out a small, plastic stick with bristles on one end - a toothbrush - and held out the blunt part with her good hand. Next was a small spray bottle of water, placed beside where Butch knelt. Finally came a bottle of a viscous green fluid - dish detergent - which she put down beside the bottle. Leaning forward, she dug the tip of the toothbrush into one joint, gently levering out a larger pebble.

"I should be more surprised you came here because of aliens with one, but...you're proof life exists in the universe. It only makes sense that it comes in different forms. Are humans one of the stranger ones?"

[Avalanche]

Avalanche vented a sigh, nodding. “Not the way I’d have chosen. I switched modes and drove off fairly quickly, but I was the wrong scale for your world. My altmode was made for a species taller than yours. All I could do was break into a construction site and scan the first half-appropriate vehicle, then get out.”

A grin shaped her lips as she watched Butch’s incredulity, and she added, “Your government has practice at hiding signs of us. We try to avoid populated areas where we might be seen, but it’s not always possible.”

She propped her chin on her knuckles as she watched the human work, feeling odd little sensations as chips of rock were levered out of her heavy-duty joints. “Mhm. The ground bridge is a space bridge that doesn’t have the power to transfer as far. Same technology. Just better range. That there’s one here with even a planetary range is a massive achievement; everyone thought they were lost technology. I’m having to redraft the whole book of strategy because of it.”

Keeping her hand carefully still, Avalanche tilted her helm at Cassandra’s question. “What’s strange about you is how not strange you are. Bipeds, similar body plans to the standard root mode, similar faces to ours. The way you signal emotion, though expression and tone. When I set up my holo avatar, the first thing about it was how comfortable it was.”

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"That might be convergent evolution at work," Butch said, carefully digging out another shard of rock. "Similar pressures in an environment inspire nature to create alike adaptations in different species. Birds and bats both fly and have wings, but come from different ancestors; this is because of convergent evolution."

It almost sounded like she was reading out of a textbook. When she wasn't busy tidying up one mess or another, the cleaner indulged in studying nature. Though she often worked or sat in silence, there were times she'd curl up with a documentary from YouTube, or a copy of National Geographic. Earth and her processes fascinated the rough-looking redhead.

"How are you able to project images?" Butch asked, reaching to pull a small fragment from the middle of a finger joint. "Did you use them for navigation or teaching, or something else?" She blew on the joint, then stuck the bristled end in and ground it against something. With a slow drag, she was able to pull out a smaller bit that wedged deeper inward.

[Avalanche]

Avalanche nodded. She was vaguely familiar with the concept of convergent evolution, though it wasn’t something that applied to her own species; the shifting and shuffling of genetics through the frantically short generations simply wasn’t a feature of Cybertronian life.

“We live too long for that,” she replied, her voice thoughtful. “I’ve seen the results of the process on a good number of worlds, though.”

Cocking her helm, curious about what prompted the switch of topic, Avalanche lowered her other hand. A port irised open in the plating on the underside of her wrist, ejecting a meter-long rod of intricate components. It floated above the ground, upright, like an enchanted staff.

“Holoprojectors,” the big femme explained. “Some chassis came with them. Some had them retrofitted. Some are straight Cybertronian tech. Some are alien components, or hybrids. At the core of every holo you see, there’s some kind of machine. It’s linked to my cerebral processor. Can’t get casual with them; if it gets wrecked, the backlash is nasty stuff. Can shock some mecha right into stasis.”

The rod of machinery shimmered, and where it had floated, a short, black-haired woman stood, her tanned body firm with compact muscle. Taking over from her primary chassis, the holo spoke, recognisably the same voice but without the bone-shuddering reverb.

“The main use is for communication and disguise. Some creatures, you can’t talk to them with just sounds. It takes body language, with body parts we don’t have. You have to mimic to communicate. You don’t always want to give away that you’re Cybertronian, either. My kind has a bad reputation. Beside that-“ she shrugged, “-can be useful to see into small spaces where the chassis won’t fit.”

The brushing and cleaning felt a little odd, but it was also a pleasant sensation, feeling the accumulated debris being prised out of her joints to clatter to the floor.

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Butch watched in silence as Avalanche explained. Her eyes were glued to the avatar, and it was clear the human watched with great interest. Her eyebrows went up at the mention of backlash, and she said, "Really? Is it because the projection is solid, and you can feel that, somehow?"

How else to explain how the projection interacted with objects like anyone else would? Butch wasn't about to start questioning what was in front of her. The miraculous tech of other worlds was something to admire, and something to learn from. She wondered what it would be like to project herself elsewhere, to have her consciousness in one place and her body in another.

But that thought could continue later. The cleaner was quickly ridding Avalanche of the most obvious debris. Moving deeper into a couple of Ava's hand's seams, Butch reversed the brush and pried at a pebble. It clinked as it slowly inched its way up, only to jam at the top and above the toothbrush's tip. Frowning, Butch applied a bit more pressure, the brush bending in her grip.

"You have a lot in here," Butch commented. "How long has it been since your hands had any - "

Ping! The pebble broke free, rocketing backwards and into the middle of Butch's forehead. The cleaner blinked, startled, but then put the bristled end deeper into where the stone had stuck. She began digging back and forth.

" - Had any maintenance, ma'am?"