[ti]Ep 3.5[/ti]How To Buff A Truck For Complete Beginners [ Avalanche ]

[Avalanche]

Avalanche grunted. The moment of transfer from the Hive to Earth? That was fast. Getting to a position where she could use their alien bridge technology, that was something else entirely. Still, she was – pleased, she decided, to hear how Sunstreaker had got off Cybertron. It was cunning and resourceful, making use of a bad situation and running with it. She approved of that.

“Good job,” she replied, her optics closed. “Use the tool you have and make it work. That’s how you survive.”

A good job from her was a ringing endorsement by her standards. Avalanche didn’t waste words on lavish praise. The fact that there was something subtly darker under Sunstreaker’s words when she spoke about the barge... some things were better left alone.

Silence, but for the hum of the buffer. It was good... little creaks came from Avalanche’s joints now and then as she shifted slightly, relaxing against the rack. She was almost slipping into recharge, her central processor spooling down, when Sunstreaker spoke again and drew her back to full awareness.

There was a depth to the gold-plated femme’s words. When no one else had been there, it had been Avalanche that caught her. However much her assignment to Avalanche’s unit might have been rooted in dumping a problem on an unpopular officer, she’d ended up where she needed to be. Avalanche couldn’t help but be warmed by that.

Her furnace-orange optics slid open a little. “You do the best you can for those under you.” That had been the core of the advice Avalanche had given back then, and it was still true now. “If you hadn’t been as broken up as you were, you wouldn’t have been worth saving.”

You're hurting over the loss of your troops. Good. Strange how some words lingered in the recesses of your memory, long, long after they’d been spoken.

Avalanche vented a deep sigh. “I had to leave my unit under Commander Forgelight. Haven’t stopped worrying about them since. But if they do as well as you did, once I didn’t have my optic on you-“ It was a compliment, to be sure. But more than that, it was a confession. Avalanche, in the past, didn’t let those under her know she even processed such mundane things as worries. Frosty and Drillbit, her medic and second, they were the only ones she let the facemask slip a little.

Frosty was with Forgelight. And Drillbit was with the Allspark, now.

Her optics closed again. She focused on the vibrations of the buffer, vibrating through her heavy plating.

[Sunstreaker]

"-you wouldn't have to worry at all."

Were they Avalanche's words or her own that had come out of her mouth? Deep down, Sunny knew she could say that. Hell, she'd always told herself something along similar lines -- about herself, mostly. Yet for all her bluster and boasting, few people had ever reflected it back to her. Nobody like Avalanche ever had, at least. It meant quite a lot to her to hear her say that. Sunny had never considered herself any kind of standard or role model, before.

The buffer sang its song in the meantime, beginning to finish up the mirror shine on the back of Avalanche's torso. She hoped Ava's form remained just as shiny as a truck as it did as a biped. No way she'd be canvassing her a second time today. Even miracle workers needed time to recharge.

Her attention turned back to the conversation, letting her hands work themselves into a decent mindless flow. "But we're not superior and subordinate now, I guess..." They were, they most definitely were, but not nearly to the same degree as they'd been on Cybertron. "You're a hell of an officer Ava, but I also wanna call you my friend." Sunny didn't have many of those, as she'd ruminated about many times before. Most often, her "friends" were just people she could impress. Personal connections that formed organically were an undiscovered science to her, and had been for her entire life.

Did friends ask permission to become friends?

They did now. Sunny was going to be the best at friendship.

"You busy at all later today? Or whenever, really. I've been itchin' to go for a drive that I'll end up documenting as a patrol, later."

[Avalanche]

She always worried about those under her command. That was a habit ground agelessly deep into her very spark. But there was a difference between worrying about those on missions, and those simply out of her reach; she’d let herself sink too deeply into thinking of those under Forgelight’s care when she knew damn well fretting with no information to go on was fruitless. Sunstreaker had lived through the ages and the Fall. So had the rest of her surviving troops. They were hard, and they were stubborn. Some would die. Some wouldn’t. That was war.

Losing Drillbit had hurt her more than she’d truly realised. Lacking her accustomed command duties had left too much time on her hands, left her maudlin. It was time she accepted that, acknowledged it... and let it go.

The buffer moved smoothly over the layered armour plating of her back. Avalanche wasn’t a slob; she washed in the racks whenever she could spare the time, and lately, she more than had the time. Nonetheless, there were plenty of spots that were hard for the big femme to reach, and as the waxed pad whirred, it swept away dust and grit in the crevices of her plating. Little by little, the plates of her body grew clean and shining; deep, lustrous black, creamy off-white and metallic grey-silver. The surface of her finish was marred by uncountable silvery scars that cut through the colour layer, scratched, beaten and battleworn, and it would take proper paint and care to erase those deeper marks. Gravel and small rocks were caught in the deep treads of her multiple tyres. Still, her back looked better than it had for a long time.

Lost in her thoughts, relaxed by the steady massage of the buffer, Avalanche had almost forgotten the conversation she was in. It took her a second to register what Sunstreaker was actually asking, before a rumble of throaty laughter escaped the femme’s massive frame. “Permission granted,” she replied, and in the gruffness of her answer was its own teasing.

“Sure. We can go out for a drive. Which will be a patrol,” she added. No reason they couldn’t combine business with pleasure. “Give the planet a chance to mess up your hard work.”

[Sunstreaker]

A laugh was a laugh, not a minor seismic event. So why did it feel like one to Sunny? Perched beside Avalanche, she felt the armature of her spark chamber vibrate in tune with her client's joyous exaltation. Big femme had a big laugh, which she should have expected. But of course, it was a yes to her request. Her calm, collected exterior belied the potent spark of elation that zipped through her psyche at hearing Ava's enthusiastic response. Then, an honest-to-Primus chuckle sounded from Sunny's core as Ava played into her timeworn role of grizzled commanding officer.

How long had it been since she'd laughed? Eons at least. Nothing to laugh about in war, or in isolation. Prowl could make her laugh, but not in the positive way. No, this was a pure episode of emotional expression. Very rare for the repressed-slash-histrionic perfectionist.

"Of course, of course..." Sunny mumbled along, fully intending to ignore the business component of their eventual outing. Fuck no it wouldn't be a patrol. She'd be patrolling for Ava, and that'd be that.

Nothing ever happened in Jasper anyway.

Her face contorted into a hella scrunch as Ava laid down a very real, tangible possibility. She glanced down to the big femme's now-immaculate coat, the one she'd just spent a metric ton of elbow grease and love on.

"Mhh..." she grumbled. It was her vanity speaking. If Ava were to get all dusty and dirty on the drive, it would naturally fall to Sunny to dive back in and restore her freshness. Not at all a bad thing, Sunny just couldn't stand to bear witness to her great works (buffing) crumbling (Getting 0.001% dirty).

"...fine." She relented, smiling in defeat. Leaning in a few degrees closer to Ava, Sunny gave big blue a quick pat on her side. "So long as you give me the chance to make you all presentable again, now..."

[Avalanche]

It was good to hear Sunny laugh in time with her. It had been a damn long time since she’d heard that, and it had taken a damn long time from their first meeting since she’d heard Sunny laugh back then, either. Guilt was a heavy burden to carry, and the deaths of your comrades – the deaths of those you commanded – was the heaviest.

Perhaps that, way back, had been the foundation of their mutual respect. As different as they were, that bedrock remained.

Of course, Sunny agreed, in her ‘I might agree with the letter of what you said, but damned if I’m sticking to the spirit’ tone of voice. Good enough. If Avalanche was honest with herself - and she always tried to be – she wasn’t that interested in the patrol either. A vent of amusement escaped her as Sunstreaker gloomily contemplated the dust, dirt, rain and sundry other insults about to assail her hard work.

“Deal,” she replied in a low rumble. It was hardly a downside to have Sunny work over her again like this, and she shifted with a low, deep hum of enjoyment as the buffer rubbed over a more sensitive spot on her external plating. Optics closed, she enjoyed the patient movement over her broad back and down her heavy, industrial limbs, waiting for the other femme to signal when it was time to turn over.

“You could ride my bed,” she remarked, her deep voice touched by amusement. Sunstreaker’s chassis could easily fit in the bed of her dumptruck form, whether vehicle mode or root form. “It’d keep the dust off. Though we’d have to cover you with a tarpaulin.” Obviously, that would be anathema to Sunstreaker, who loved to move and show off. If there was a double-entendre in her words, given the Earth ambiguity between truck bed and recharge rack-bed, the big femme hadn’t noticed it.

[Sunstreaker]

Oh.

Avalanche's internal monologue was spot-on. Sunstreaker was indeed the sort of creature who could not avoid a flagrant display of her material composition. To cover herself and hide away was anathema to her very being -- nay, her purpose. It just didn't feel right. But, what did feel right was Ava's rather generous offer. Not only would they have a bit of time all to themselves, but Sunny would be scoring a free ride as well. Both were worth keeping things on the downlow, to her.

She flashed a small, satisfied grin to herself.

There were certainly pros to cutting the buffing right now and skipping to the drive, but when it came to matters of beauty, Sunstreaker was no slacker. Her optics passed in orbit above Avalanche's back-end, not wholly satisfied with her work, but for a combat bot like Ava who rarely ever saw the inside of a salon, it was positively magnificent. "Verrrry nice..." she purred, looking over her kingdom.

"Alright." The golden femme gave the large customer another little pap-pap to her side, pulling her equipment close to her chest. "Roll on over for me, if you will."

She cleared her vocal cache upon realizing that she'd given no direct response to Ava's actual suggestion. Chalk it up to professionalism and not leaving a job half done. "Buuut... going on a ride with you? Sounds premium," she chirped pleasantly. "Be happy to play passenger in the back."

So long as it's you carrying me, she would have remarked, had she not barely succeeded in stopping herself from blurting it out loud.

[Avalanche]

Sometimes, a tactical gamble that had seemed so certain that she hadn't even considered it a gamble turned out not to fall the way she'd anticipated. On even rarer occasions, it worked out better than her original plan, and at such times, the only thing to do was take the win. Sunstreaker, choosing to hide under a tarpaulin? Damn near inconceivable, but here they were all the same.

It would keep excess attention from latching onto them, she supposed. A brilliant gold sports car accompanying a scratched up dump truck was a contrast that invited speculation. The huge femme vented a little sound, a huff of a laugh. She might not have anticipated Sunstreaker actually agreeing – who would? – but it could be nice.

"Better have your holo in my cab," she remarked. "Otherwise all you'll see is the tarp and the inside of my bed." A fake licence had come through from their contacts in the native government, certifying Avalanche's own holo to drive heavy vehicles like herself. Seemed she was stuck with 'Ava Larch' as her native name, now.

The massive femme stretched, planting her hands on the broad rack and slowly easing herself over onto her back. Her twin smokestacks settled into the dips shapes into the rack, and she sighed deeply as she settled comfortably once more. Her segmented, overlapping stomach plates gave the slight impression of abdominal musculature, her Autobot sigil clean and glinting chrome on her chest armour over the four copper lightning bolts that reached out from it. Former unit insignia, now worn by her alone.

Furnace-orange optics regarded Sunstreaker for a moment, a smile on her black lips, then slid closed. "No slacking," she murmured, a note of humour in her deep voice. If there was one thing she could count on, it was for Sunstreaker to do a good job of polishing her up.

[Sunstreaker]

Before she could prime herself for the monumental task of giving Ava's front some flash, the big trucker fired off a curveball.

"A holo?" she repeated quizzically. There was no need to search for meaning behind the word. Sunstreaker had primed a holomatter avatar for herself on day one, as soon as she touched down and spied her first glance at a human. Given her aversion to the walking meat-sacks however, she had found no need or inclination to actually use it. Why go incognito when you could stay away entirely?

Of course, it now seemed her avatar would be used for something slightly different.

She blinked herself out of her thoughts. "Uh, sure." She was uncertain, yet not unmotivated. "Never really used mine before, actually." Sunny found herself comfortable enough to betray that little hint of weakness. Well, not weakness per se. Just... unfamiliarity.

"Just don't laugh, kay?" What was there to laugh about, even? Sunstreaker was a perfect beast who could never fall flat on her face in a holographic body. Never. Never ever.

But then, Sunstreaker found herself subject to an odd feeling -- something both expected and unexpected. She found herself almost intimidated by Avalanche as her front half sprawled out before her on the berth. The larger femme was passive and horizontal. So then, why did the radials of her spark flutter so slightly? The answer was simple, and Sunny knew it without a doubt. It was not fear that flowed through her. It was awe.

Avalanche was a remarkable creature.

She started out low, pivoting herself to angle the buffer against her customer's legs and pedes. There had hardly been a pause between words and work. The awe simply struck in less than a moment's time, yet its potency made it more durable than just a mere feeling.

A brow arched, accompanied by a grin passed over her shoulder. "Slacking?" she echoed. "Last I checked, you had to be getting paid for it to count as slacking." Sunny wasn't even slacking. Ava was a comedic beast too, it seemed. The whirring of the buffer proved her unspoken point.

"Besides, I'm gladly doing this for free..."

[Avalanche]

It was surprising, seeing Sunstreaker flounder over the mention of a holo. Avalanche wasn't a particularly sneaky sort; she'd had to learn patience and cunning, but deep in her spark, her preferred approach was as blunt as a ballistic brick. Her brow plates rose at the half-serious plea not to laugh. What had the femme chosen for her human avatar? As someone who'd picked in a hurry and without much forethought, Avalanche supposed it was unlikely Sunstreaker had done much worse than she herself had.

So naturally, Avalanche rumbled, "No promises." A quirk at the corner of her lips betrayed the humour in her otherwise deadpan response.

She stirred slightly as Sunstreaker set about cleaning the huge, heavily armoured boots that made up the lower halves of her legs, triple tyres buried deeply in their backs. She wouldn't put it past Sunny to use blacking to darken her tyres, but at least that level of detail was probably off the table when they were about to go for a drive anyway. Polish and wax... a little wasted on her given how worn and scratched her paint was, she supposed, but it was still nice.

...very nice, she admitted to herself. A low, spark-deep sigh of relaxation vented from her, and she shifted a little on the rack. It felt good. The buffer, hot and smooth, stroking every crevice of her plating. "Mmmh..." she murmured, without really noticing she'd made the sound.

After a moment, she replied more audibly, "You're thorough when you want to be," agreeing with a tilt of her helm. Her optics still closed, she went on, "Pick a name for your holo before you talk to natives with it. I didn't. Called myself Ava Larch. She didn't believe me, obviously." Avalanche grunted, adding, "Don't let your holo get too far from your vehicle mode, either. Got mine streets away when these juvenile natives started spray-painting me. Had to walk back slowly, so it didn't look suspicious. Made a mess of my hide."

That had been deeply, impossibly annoying. But at least she'd met Butch, and that made up for a lot of things.

[Sunstreaker]

A very loud sound reverberated through Sunstreaker. It was internal, though it had come from outside. The little pleased trill her customer had made, doubtlessly just a small thing to the big femme herself, had blasted through every layer of defense Sunny had erected. In fact, there was nothing she could have done to stop herself from feeling every note of such an inexorable vibration.

It was sweet...

It was addicting.

While her thoughts flatlined from the counter-frequency, her servos remembered the job. The buffer had been steadily climbing up the length of Avalanche's legs now. Ava's lower half was nearly as long as Sunny was tall, which did nothing but remind her of the vertical disparity.

Someone ought to hit the EJECT button, because the egotistical perfectionist was having feelings.

Just as she had taken her out of it, Ava's voice brought Sunny back into the realm of cognition. Sunny's face crinkled into a 'face' as she was bombarded by praise. Objectively, it wasn't a real weapons-grade praise bombardment; it just hit differently when it was this femme in particular. She had to summon a great deal of willpower not to silently reply with a whispered Yeaahhhh...

A name.

What's in a name?

Simple. It was a no brainer for her. She was no turbodork, but she'd at least done some research ahead of time. "Easy. Sunny." It was perfect. Thank the Primes she hadn't been given a name like Razorclank or Firewheels. Or Prowl. "Short for Sundae, if anyone asks..."

She drummed her digits along Ava's waist, tilting her head to the side as she nodded twice. "Yeah, yeah... don't wander too far... I know about that, at least..." Sunny knew the basics, even if she'd never had the need to practice them. Hence why she inserted a no-laugh clause into their deal before.

[Avalanche]

Unaware of the inner devastation her little sigh of enjoyment had wrought, Avalanche shifted slightly, her fiery optics closed as the buffer ran over her. It wasn't as though she was going to go seeking a repair to her colour coating; that was too vain for her. But knowing the care Sunstreaker was putting into polishing her battered hide, it did make the thought cross her mind for a moment.

She vented an amused snort at Sunstreaker's reply. "Keeping it simple. Good." In her own way, she'd done the same, but it was more from hurried lack of inspiration than anything else. Sunstreaker's fingers tapped along Avalanche's overlapping waist plates, a casual touch that would under other circumstances have been unthinkable, but in the context of the buffing massage went unremarked.

She'd enjoyed having Butch drive around with her. Though she wished the human hadn't got caught up in everything, for her own sake. Long history showed that when other species got caught between the grinding gears of the endless civil war, it went badly for them. Still... if Butch had had to get involved either way, at least Avalanche had a friend out of it. A human friend, someone to guide her in the intricacies of the native society.

"Met Butch yet? New human about the base. Red hair." The other distinguishing feature of Butch's hand, Avalanche chose not to mention. "First human I properly talked to. Helped scrub the native scrawls off my hide, before she knew what I was. Been useful." The huge femme chuckled to herself, shaking her helm a little. "She warned me that my holo might be... what was it? Too attractive to the native males, but only when wet. Bewildering."

[Sunstreaker]

The buffer crawled and crawled. If it wanted to, it could have sped up -- done the same job in half the time. Its owner was not that sort of creature. Whether or not perfection was a real, tangible reward or some subjective fantasy clung to as one plunged into the sun, it required patience above all else. Sunstreaker was that patient, diligent beast. Here, at least. Avalanche deserved the very best. Because she was the best.

In silent approach, the Sunstreaker maneuvered the buffer up her client's hips, relieved that she was now roughly half done with her labor.

She spiked a brow as Ava broke the gentle tension in the air.

Sunny shook her head lightly. "Nope. Can't say I have." She hadn't met many humans, if any. This had been by design. Still, perhaps it was a little odd that she'd missed the aforementioned meat-bag. She knew the name, but not much else. Hopefully it would stay that way. It was a personal preference, nothing against 'Butch'.

Humans...

They shed...

Ava's tip of advice perplexed her. The connotations failed to register in her head, like two trains on the same track failing to collide -- no sudden epiphany, no great revelation. The software had to be installed first, for it to register. "What, humans like wet things?" How strange. Perhaps it had something to do with all the oceans. Yes. That was it. It had to be. All that water had 'gotten' to the humans at some point, long long ago in their evolutionary history. Inserted itself into their lives in order to co-exist with them.

Man, this sociology shit was easy.

But, she heeded Big Blue's peculiar warning. Don't get wet, because people will really, really like it -- and that was a bad thing for some reason.

She scoffed. "Masculines are weird, on every planet," Sunny remarked over the tone of the buffer. 'Masculines' was a catch-all for her. Mechs, Males, Men. All planted firmly along the same obnoxious axis. "Sure as hell glad I ain't one anymore."

[Avalanche]

Avalanche shrugged where she lay, an easy movement of her heavy shoulderguards. "Didn't understand it either. Can't get it into my helm; humans being attracted to me. Suppose the holo's convincing enough." She'd never thought of her holographic avatar being too successful, but if she drew attention for mating purposes, she'd be even more at sea than she already was in communicating with the natives.

Getting wet signalled availability. She supposed it might not be a bad thing that it didn't rain often, even though she'd come to like the drum of it on her hide.

Her brow plates shifted upwards a bit at Sunstreaker's last remark, her optics sliding open a little to release a hint of that dull, furnace-orange glow. She was aware that some mecha chose to substantially change their root mode, and the type of transformations they were capable of. Back in the old days, when caste was based heavily on the kind of altmode a mecha was capable of, meddling with such things was severely frowned upon. It was a threat to the power structure, after all. Shifting from mech to femme or the inverse wasn't a threat to the established order in the same way, but it picked up some of the same censure.

In short, Sunstreaker wouldn't have taken the choice lightly. It wasn't something she'd ever mentioned before, and they'd known each other a long time.

"Definitely picked the right side." Avalanche rumbled the words with a touch of humour, choosing to accept the revelation without fanfare. It wasn't as though it changed a Primus-damned thing about the femme she'd known for so long. "Always been a femme's femme myself. Pissed off more than a few mechs, in the old days. Some of them, seeing I'm stronger, wanted to slither into my rack like it'd prove a point. That they'd won somehow. Afts."

The humming buffer ran further up her plating, the vibrations thrumming through her frame. Sunstreaker plainly knew what she was doing with that thing, and she was relaxing in ways she hadn't for a long while. "Ever met Subcommander Rotor? Green, slender. Heliformer. In Commander Torque's brigade. Absolutely hated me. Hated her right back. Everyone knew that." Avalanche vented a little sound of amusement, her black lips quirking into a surprisingly sly grin. "We shared a rack sometimes."

[Sunstreaker]

Sunny was playing it very cool right now. It had not been some accidental slip of her glossa to let such an intimate, personal detail about herself out into the open like that. For if it had been a legitimate accident, she was lying to herself that it was not. It was a moot point however, considering her company. Her change in identity was not a topic of discussion she would share in the barracks, despite the fact that she was doing so in a bunk at the moment. Some people could be weird about it, but Sunny had no doubts about Avalanche.

She had done it fairly early on in life, leaving very few who actually knew her beforehand. It began with little things, like switching her color scheme from deep crimson to shimmering gold, and it had ended when she'd saved up the shanix to go to a reputable doc. Everything after that had simply clicked into place.

Reality flooded back in over the reminiscence, reminding the beautician that she was buffing her customer's hips at the moment. After ensuring they were spotless and enviable, she moved on from hips to abdomen -- the abdomen that looked like it could be used to hammer out swords.

Her thoughts had lasted but a second before Avalanche's comment sent a little bolt of affirmative euphoria sailing through her conscience. She slid her icy blue optics shut and smiled, momentarily. If she had not accompanied it with a physical response, the emotional load might have blown a circuit somewhere.

She actually giggled, attempting to play it off. "Heheheh... you know me. Kinda obvious I'd pick the side that always looks fine as hell." It didn't not make sense, considering everything about her personality. But also, curves were very nice. Her curves were nice, especially those little ones on the lower half of her abdomen. She blinked, optics opening.

Right. Reality.

They were entering the femme-talk phase, one that Sunny was all for. She knew precisely the mentality that Ava was describing. Sunny had historically applied it to her targets, however. Go for the big ones. It will earn you more respect from the friendly big ones. Fighting them, of course. Not the other thing. In Sunny's case, she had been right. Going for the big ones did indeed mean more respect from the friendly big ones. But in Ava's case, going for the big ones usually meant the chilling sting of rejection.

"A femme's femme, huh?" Sunny quietly, amusedly repeated. She hadn't assumed, for that was rude.

She held off on pushing further, at the time. Ava was returning the gesture of trust with one of her own. Two keys, turning two locks at once.

Subcom Rotor. The name had probably passed her index at one point or another, but no face. The grunts never bothered with brass from other units. That was their brass's problem.

But, oh? Gossip? Juicy gossip?

All for that.

Sunny's lips blossomed into a sly smile. A brow ticked up. Into the talking about past lovers stage they went. Hers were not quite so saucy, so scandalous. "You like short, angry femmes now, do you...?" her words trailed. Sunny wasn't completely sure. She had never met Rotor, so she presumed she was short. Most femmes were, in comparison to Avalanche.

[Avalanche]

Avalanche gave a bass chuckle where she lay, the vibration of it thrumming through her chestplate in symphony with the vibrations of the buffer. By Solus's Hammer, it had been a long time since she'd just relaxed and talked like this. The highest ranking officer didn't get to unwind. The lack of command structure other than 'Optimus, who does the telling' was driving her out of her wits, but it did at least open the door for a conversation like this.

She smiled, her optics closing again, recognising the relief in Sunstreaker's heady little giggle. "Suits you. Can't imagine you any other way." She shifted lazily, settling her rear-mounted smokestacks more comfortably into the oval indents in her rack. As Sunny echoed 'a femme's femme', Avalanche replied with lazy amusement, "I've always been on the winning team." It was a new side of her that she was showing, a side more akin to the femme she'd been before the weight of command had piled atop her back.

"All kinds. Every kind of femme's got their charms." Seeing as she'd said that much already, Avalanche figured she might as well be frank about it. Though it was more than that. It was a lonely, hard-pressed femme finding a little solace in friendship, and for once unwilling to put it aside for the sake of command. "She hated me. Wasn't an act. Undercut me every chance she got. I couldn't do much about it; she was under Torque and not part of my command. I hated her too. Stubborn, stuck up, impertinent to me. But the most annoying thing was... she was so damn pretty."

Avalanche smiled, shaking her helm slightly. "Slender. Not as tall as me, but not short. And the most obnoxiously perfect aft. Kept it to myself. Then, in the middle of a fight, we- mrm. Turned out, she was as into me as I was her. And as annoyed by it. It was rough, the racktime. Lots of insults. And it was good. Really, annoyingly good."