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

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"Sounds like a lot of bureaucratic negotiation to me," Butch said, scoffing lightly. "I can see why they'd have to talk before giving you a second location, though. They'd have to give you some place that couldn't be found easily. Maybe somewhere in the Arctic?"

Like Butch could give ideas on where a bunch of giant robots could hide. The fact the world was oblivious to the Autobots' existence (for the most part) showed how methodical they were in their planning. They blended in with the locals, and didn't draw attention to themselves. The robots-in-disguise shtick that Go-Bots had going on had nothing on what the Autobots probably had in store.

"You can keep it. I don't have anywhere to put it," Butch said, and she flashed a smile at Avalanche then as she got to work on the she-robot's other hand. "You punched the bastard, you deserve it. It's certainly been stuck in your knuckles long enough for you to go, 'Finders, keepers.'"

[Avalanche]

"Finders keepers," Avalanche's holo replied with a nod, stroking the tip of her finger back and forth over the point of the metal shard. No real point wondering whose plating it had once belonged to. She'd fought a lot of 'cons, and there was no telling when it'd got wedged in the joint. The sharpness of it was strange against her holo's finger, the simulated flesh more sensitive to sensation than her own thick hide.

Quiet descended, textured by the sound of Butch's patient scrubbing at her finger joints. Cleaning liquid dripped to the ground as the human worked, stained a redder colour by oxide-rich rock fragments. Not always the most socially adept of creatures, Avalanche's reservoir of casual conversation was running a little thin. She cast about for something else to say.

"...are all humans as resilient as you?" she asked after a moment. "Briefing says your people haven't had public contact with anything outside your local system. Then you get told there's uncounted species out there, and some of them are here. That you've met some of them, and ridden around in them." She gave a brief cough of a laugh, then added, "Wouldn't blame you if you'd taken a week to scream into a pillow or something."

It had to be hard on Butch, a lot harder than the human was letting on. Not just from the shock of it all, but from the realisation that her knowledge was dangerous, to her and everyone near her. Avalanche wouldn't have ever told the human the truth, not unless there was absolutely no other choice. But... given that Butch did know, it was... good to have a friend. Avalanche didn't have many.

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Butch smiled. "I've already taken a week off," she said, "so that's no worry. And I've already had my existential crisis about other sentient beings in the universe. Once my nerves settled, it made quite a lot of sense that something else would develop an advanced level of consciousness."

That hadn't stopped her from crawling on her couch and assuming the fetal position for a few hours while she had a blanket wrapped around her. Only popcorn and the Discovery Channel had kept her sanity afloat while she processed what had happened to her. Then, she'd come to her senses, started looking up everything on alien life she'd ever read out of interest, and forced herself to binge it until something in her brain made sense about it.

Not that she'd ever tell anyone here any of this....

"I think I read somewhere that, in the Milky Way, scientists predict there are at least four other civilizations we haven't made contact with yet," Butch said. "I doubt they'd be as familiar as your people. The convergence of evolving so many similar features despite our wildly different biologies strikes me as odd. More than coincidence, I'd say, but who knows what evolution considers peak form for different environments. Perhaps it was just the best outcome for whatever proto-species your people came from."

She felt like she was rambling a little. Maybe she was - like Avalanche, she didn't always have the longest social fuse. The cleaner scrubbed at Avalanche's joints with a bit more force, attempting to remove a small pebble wedged between two fingers. It dropped out after a few moments of work, and Butch got onto the next finger.

"Learning of other species with our level of intelligence also puts a lot in perspective. You ever hear of the human photo 'The Pale Blue Dot'?"

[Avalanche]

The pebble clinked free, clattering to the floor. Avalanche surreptitiously opened and closed her other hand a few times – or as surreptitiously as a giant robot could do so – feeling the smooth lack of irritation like a physical absence in her plating. It felt good. As much as she'd avoided confronting the fact – despite Frosty's insistence – she'd been letting her chassis get worn down. Never wanted to take medical attention from the others under her, and having the medical staff tend to trivial things like grit in her joints always felt like it'd diminish the respect of those under her. Probably not true, but she'd learned the hard way not to give her enemies within their own armed forces any additional ammunition.

Four other civilisations. She couldn't help but wonder what the humans had done to arrive at that neat little number. Assumptions stacked on assumptions, she supposed, piling up into a tower of dream-logic. But, without any evidence of intelligent life other than their own people, what else could they do?

"Growing up as a species thinking you're all alone; probably does something to the civilisation. But being out there, aware of the threats, the greatness and foulness of other kinds, that probably messes you up too." Avalanche released a low, thoughtful hum, and for a moment she spoke through her chassis and avatar at the same time before she caught herself. "Ever since I arrived-" she paused, then focused on speaking through her avatar, "-it's struck me how easily emotional expression and body language translates between our kinds."

A pale blue dot? It wasn't a term she was familiar with. The native information net was a trap fit to drown an unwary bot in bizarre minutia. She shook her head, her black hair shifting with the motion and a long lock drifting over one eye. "No. What does it mean?"

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"It's the furthest picture of our planet ever taken in space," Butch explained, scrubbing at a particularly dirty patch that, upon further inspection, looked like a tiny spot of rust. She frowned, then continued with, "It was taken by a spacecraft known as the Voyager - I forget if it was its second or first incarnation - and portrays Earth as a pale blue dot. Around this dot is blackness, save for a few streaks of color on camera if you look close enough. Every living human that ever was, at the time it was taken, was on that dot. Every war and conflict, every loss and triumph, every hope and moment of despair, every loss and every victory, every discovery both terrible and beautiful.... All of it, confined to one tiny speck of blue in the universe."

She smiled softly, then went back to scrubbing. "After I went home and was processing all the things that had happened, I looked at that picture for a while. Learning about Cybertron just puts everything else into perspective, including that picture. We are so small, so insignificant in the universe, and there are great and wondrous things out there that are just waiting to be beheld. Now, whether or not humanity does so without being bastards - that is a different story."

More scrubbing followed, then came more examining of the spot of rust. "I think you have some corrosion between the third and fourth fingers, here," Butch pointed out, tapping the spot delicately with a finger. "Did you want me to see if I could get off with a Brillo pad?"

[Avalanche]

A strange thought. How far back in Cybertron's history would you have to go before a single image could encompass the world and all that had ever lived on it? The Thirteen Primes? Certainly, in their reign there'd been space travel... Considering that the humans had no idea there was other intelligent life throughout the galaxy, to them, that image represented all intelligence, all life, in a cold and bleakly hostile, empty universe.

One point of light. The perspective must have been... "Dizzying," she murmured, half to herself. "The solitude. The fragility." It was a revelation that could turn a society in on itself, walling off the universe behind denial and refusing to look up, or else outwards in a desperate search for evidence that they were wrong, that they weren't really alone.

Butch had taken her own revelations in stride, found her own relationship to them. Avalanche couldn't help but admire that.

"You'd have to work hard at being bastards to make an impression. My kind aren't well-loved. Too much collateral damage from our war, over the millennia." Many worlds banned both sides entirely, having learned – correctly – that where one side went, so did the other, and the war with them. She'd had some unpleasant greetings from other races, and even when she had to defend herself, she couldn't really blame them. They had cause. If the humans had been more advanced, they'd have been well within reason to do the same.

The thought of MECH passed uneasily through her processor.

Butch's words drew her from her reverie. "Corrosion?" Her avatar stepped forward, moving beside the human woman and leaning over to take a look at the indicated spot. "Hm. Tarnish. From acid, probably. Punch a tanker-form and you get a big mess. Leave it. Not worth irritating my plating to clean off."

The holo woman stepped back, and moved over to drop into a human-scale chair. "We don't corrode easily. Our bodies resist it. But there was this disease, long time back. Living rust. Spread on contact between infected surfaces. Gets inside you, breaks you down from within. Matter of days, you crumble away. We lost entire colonies. Either voluntarily quarantining, or having their space transports and bridges destroyed from orbit. Once it takes hold, nothing stops it. Even the 'cons haven't tried to weaponise it. Too likely to kill all of us."

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Butch frowned deeply at the story Avalanche told. "Sounds like a terrible end," she said, paused for a moment in her cleaning still. "We have a couple like that too, but luckily, modern medicine takes care of most of the nastier diseases. Still, I can't imagine the scale of what your people went through with that. Entire colonies, you say?"

Back to tidying up Ava's hands the cleaner went. She was careful in cleaning around the spot of rust, picking dirt out of every little nook and cranny otherwise. Now she was down to the fourth and fifth fingers, finding them refreshingly bereft of the grit that was deeper in Ava's other plates. Butch smiled as she began removing the last of the dirt, tongue poking out the side of her mouth a little.

"We humans haven't had much experience with interstellar aircraft," Butch went on. "Only one of ours, one of the Voyager aircraft I mentioned, managed to break through the...I forget what it's called. The heliosphere? The helio-sheath? The area influenced by our sun, whatever it's called. It's now beyond our solar system, and working on some primitive tech compared to now. It's a miracle of science we still receive data from so far out."

Butch wiggled a finger experimentally. There was a slight creak to it, which would probably be fixed with the WD-40 she kept in her bag. "We also only recently had something interstellar pass through our system that was of note. 'Oumuamua, a flattened piece of space rock determined to be from outside our system. It was all over the news for a bit as the first interstellar object to visit us."

[Avalanche]

Avalanche nods slowly. "It is." Obviously, she'd never directly seen a victim in person, but there'd been... footage. Every mecha on Cybertron in those days had seen more than enough; far too much. The measures taken to contain the spread had been unthinkable, and the Council had needed to be certain they understood why.

She exhaled, watching Butch scrub at her last fingers, nodding along to the human's words. The technical terms for the sun's influence were unfamiliar to her; she'd never needed to know much about celestial mechanics, trusting in those mecha more qualified to transport her and her forces from post to post as needed. Still... the humans were reaching out, with the best science they had. It was only going to get better. One way or another...

"Might have been a rock. Might not. Eventually, someone will come. Openly. There's been enough ships to your world that it'll be noticed. Can't hide it forever. You might be living in the last decades before the galaxy comes knocking."

Whereas for her, her youth had been spent watching the galaxy retreating. Far, far out of reach. Avalanche was quiet for a long moment, and when she spoke again, it was the deeper, resonant voice of her main chassis. "...when I was young, very young, I saw a space bridge. Huge. Magnificent. They bound our civilisation together, over many worlds. Cybertron was the jewel at the heart of a web. We call it the golden age, now. Then the Rust came.

"Began with a ship. Then a colony. Then more. The bridges let the infected walk from one world to another. Before long..." she trailed off, shaking her helm. "It was unstoppable. No cure. The only thing slowing it down was how fast it killed. Limited the time a victim could spread it. Orders went out. Every space bridge had to be destroyed. And the knowledge of how to rebuild them, wiped. Couldn't risk mecha trying to escape to Cybertron."

Avalanche vented a low, quiet sound. "That was the end of it. Any ships that approached were destroyed. Bridges destroyed. We stopped looking up at the sky; nothing but death out there, and shame. For the worlds that were dying, and we'd let die. Had no idea if any of the colonies had survived uninfected. I was so damn young."

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Such tragedy. Such lost potential. The gravity and quiet sorrow in Avalanche's words hung heavily in the room, and Butch grew somber as she finished up the last bit of the robot's final finger. The human couldn't begin to imagine the sheer loss, the amount of death on the hands of those who ordered the space bridges closed. And for that knowledge to become forbidden out of necessity, dooming whoever else might be out there to such a terrible fate?

Someone had once said that the needs of the many outweighed the few. But just how few were those lost to Cybertron? How Pyrrhic had been their victory, how great their colonies' sacrifice? She was no authority on this matter, and thus, said nothing. All she could do was clean off the dirt that had accumulated over millennia in the giant robot's fingers.

At last, moving on the final knuckle, Butch's work finished. The fingers on Ava's other hand shone with fresh cleanliness, and the cleaner was quick to dry them off. "Done," she announced with a hint of pride, pulling out her WD-40. She began to take each finger and spray the joints gingerly, carefully working to get as much lubricant in the seams and cracks as possible. The small smile that usually graced her face had widened, and it was obvious Butch was pleased with her work.

"Tell me how it feels?"

[Avalanche]

Avalanche nodded, unsurprised by Butch's silence and accepting it. There was little anyone could say to such a magnitude of loss. It was unsurprising – painfully so, in retrospect – that with the loss of the colonies, their people would turn inwards upon themselves. Less resources. Less freedom. A loss of vision. Loss of hope. It was inevitable that sooner or later, something would snap.

One ship, one mech, reaching out to touch something strange and unfamiliar, and finding a dark, red-brown scrape on their hand... and countless cycles later, the colonies were gone, Cybertron was dead, and their people scattered to the winds, forever at each other's throats. If only someone could have gripped a shoulder, pulled back that hand before it completed that first, fatal movement in an endless domino chain...

Well. What was, was.

She settled down to watch Butch work, grounding herself in the present once more. The scent of the spray lubricant was pungent in the air. "Good job," she replied, giving the human time to step back before she lifted her hand. Flexing her fingers, she opened and closed both fists, then splayed her hands again before testing the movement of her thumbs with their ball sockets. Her hands moved smoothly and without the nagging little jerks of resistance, almost numb in the lack of little painful sensations.

"Good. A lot better," she remarked approvingly. Flashing a grin at Butch, she added, "You'll make a medic yet." She flexed her hands again, this time testing the mechanisms that swung the heavy spiked knuckledusters into place; they moved, but without the slithery smoothness of her finger joints. Setting both hands down, she nodded at the twisting mounting points on each side of her hands. "Lubricate those up, and we're done."

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Butch chuckled. "Maybe not a medic, but perhaps a manicurist, one day," said she. She didn't show it much on her face, but she was overwhelmingly proud of what she had done for Avalanche. The she-robot's joints moved effortlessly, and Butch realized that there had been small, taut micro-motions that had gone unnoticed. A tenseness to the fingers, a delay in response to a twitching thumb - all of that, gone now. She wondered how much use it might be in battle, and then a small voice in her head told her ego to not get involved.

"Yes ma'am," Butch said, and a smile decorated her face as she went to spray Ava's impressive knuckle-dusters. She sprayed the joints each on them, admiring them as she worked. They looked like they could pulverize mountains, the tips scratched and worn from a thousand and one conflicts. These mighty hands told a story, and Butch wondered how much more of it Ava would share. She'd ask for more of it sometime.

"There," she finally said, both hands and now the knuckledusters all lubricated and tidied. "You're done. The prettiest fists in all the universe, good and ready for Decepticon punching." She balled her bad fist as best she could and lightly punched the palm of her good hand. It made a quiet thwack, and the rather reserved woman's face was bright. It felt good to help out the Autobots, however small her contribution.