[ti]Ep 3[/ti]Chiaroscuro [Open]

[Thundercloud]

Episode 3 | Week 4 | Day 3

Thundercloud had the sort of decision-making skills that made himself and everyone around him wonder how in God's name he wasn't dead twice over by now. This wasn't to say he was ignorant or naive and made thoughtless, careless choices – rather, he was prone to carefully considering all the facts and knowingly chose the wrong decision anyway, even when the cost-benefit analysis did not weigh in his favor. He couldn't explain why he did this, he figured maybe he was just wired wrong and didn't have a properly functioning sense of self-preservation, but there was probably a more complicated answer. He vaguely remembered something about boundary-testing and psychological safety, but not who said it or where he heard it. Maybe he read about it once, or a medic mentioned it during a psych-eval to make sure he was still fit for duty. He didn't know exactly what either term meant, but he had a decent enough idea – enough to know that bending the rules wasn't just something he did because he was a cool rebel without a cause.

Which was lame as hell, but whatever. Everybody had their damage. Thunder's was just easier to pass off as a quirk of personality.

Case in point – if anybody walked in to the rec-room and saw him drawing on the walls, they'd be quicker to assume he was engaging in some casual vandalism before (correctly) deducing that he was stressed as hell and trying to keep busy so he wouldn't get himself into real trouble. The way Thundercloud figured, scratching away at the walls with some homemade charcoal wasn't exactly a constructive use of his free time, but compared to all the other things he did to relieve stress, it was by far the least objectionable. Better to have art on the walls than holes in 'em, even if the art was just some loose gesture sketches of a cityscape he only half-remembered.

Thundercloud took a few steps away from the wall-turned-canvas, hoping some distance might help him find the missing pieces needed to put the whole composition together. His brows were furrowed, his expression pinched as he fought with the disconcerting realization that he didn't know what Praxus's skyline looked like anymore. All the towers seemed to blur together in his mind's eye, melding into some sad approximation of the truth that somehow felt wrong even though he couldn't say how. Maybe he had some buildings switched around, or the heights or the angles were off. Hell, maybe everything was wrong and his brain was just making things up because he had completely forgotten what his home city used to look like.

It was a sobering thought, one which was really screwing up the whole stress relief thing he was trying to accomplish by drawing on the walls in the first place. He was half tempted to mop the whole thing up and start over, try sketching something that wouldn't make him feel all weird about the passage of time and the fallibility of memory, but that would mean admitting defeat and Thundercloud was nothing if not a stubborn son of a glitch.

Instead of trying to fix whatever felt off about the sketch, Thundercloud instead decided to double down on its wrongness by just going off and taking some artistic liberties – ie: drawing a huge Godzilla-looking monster breathing fire on the portion of the city he couldn't get right.

[Jack Darby]

Usually, food at base wasn't an issue for Jack. Ever the responsible one, he brought his own snacks to avoid having wander to the base kitchenette. The way he saw it, it kept him from being underfoot of the 'Bots, and the kitchenette food was more for people like Agent Fowler. Why get in the Autobots' way and take from the people who worked on-site? Jack was fine with snacking on a couple of granola bars and having a late dinner with his mother, even if that dinner was vegan tofu turkey.

Today, however, Jack had forgot to pack himself something. The teenager's brain was instead preoccupied with a large math quiz and an Art History project due on the same day. Both were substantial in the chunk of a grade they represented, and most of Jack's mind was dedicated to passing both. He'd been working on studying as much as he could, ignoring the rumbling of his stomach until his eyes began to strain.

Funny how his stomach was determined to distract him now that his focus was broken. It wouldn't stop rumbling, a reminder that, on top of no snacks, Jack had only had a light lunch. With a sigh, the teen resigned himself to heading for the fridge, keeping close to the sides of the hallways as best he could. When he entered the rec room, he had to take a moment to marvel at how big everything was, compared to the kitchenette in the corner.

That's when he noticed the rather intense-looking jet in the corner, scribbling a Godzilla monster on the wall with something. Charcoal? Jack thought, taking a moment to process just what he was seeing. He...was pretty sure that drawing on walls wasn't allowed at base. And yet here was an Autobot he hadn't met yet, doing just that. The drawings looked pretty good, too, though the Godzilla monster was garishly cartoonish compared to the more realistic-looking buildings. It struck him as a late edition to the work, an afterthought with less detail -

And he was analyzing the drawing. Of an giant alien robot. Vandalizing the rec room. Yeah, he'd been doing his Art History homework for too long. The youth stepped forward, slowly approaching the working jet, cocking his head to look up the spires of spindly-drawn towers.

"Uh...are you allowed to do that?"

[Thundercloud]

When he really stopped to think about it, Thundercloud realized humans were a lot like minibots - though he wasn't sure who most deserved to be offended by the comparison. They were both small and fragile and underfoot all the time, he had to be mindful not to accidentally step on 'em and make 'em past tense, and no matter how much time he spent around them it still spooked the hell out of him when he heard a voice come up from the floor.

He knew it was probably some kind of ingrained startle-response meant to keep mecha from getting smoked by scraplets - you hear something skittering around below your knees, you wake up and pay attention - but that didn't make it any less embarrassing. Thundercloud prided himself on being a stone-cold son of a glitch, and getting startled by little people suddenly existing where he could perceive them was pretty damn weak, far as he was concerned.

Thankfully the rec room was empty except for him (and the tiny interloper) so no one was around to see his wings twitch up in alarm when Jack's question met his ears. He turned fast, careful to keep his boots planted on the ground so he wouldn't risk accidentally catching another manslaughter charge. His optics immediately cut to the floor, knowing it was better to look down than up than up and down when it came to humans and vertically-challenged 'bots. His gaze quickly cut to Jack, though he didn't actually know that was the kid's name. He tried not to spend too much time around the baby humans, on account of them being fragile and impressionable and him barely qualifying to watch Bolo let alone a whole ass sapient alien child.

“...Prob'ly not.” He admitted with a shrug, before turning his attention back to the wall so he could give his bootleg Godzilla a truly excessive amount of teeth.

“Why, you a narc?”

He threw the question over his shoulder, seemingly indifferent to whatever Jack's answer might be, and continued to detail the lizard-monster with a bit of rough shading to give it the illusion of depth.

“Cause I don't fuck with narcs.”

The words sat in the air for less than a second before Thundercloud grimaced, regretting his word choice. Or rather, regretting his choice to use a very particular word.

“-Oh, shit. You already knew that one, right? If you didn't, you didn't hear it from me.”

[Jack Darby]

The first thing that caught Jack off-guard was the speed with which Thundercloud whirled around. He hadn't meant to sneak up on the Autobot, and stuttered out an, "O-oh, sorry," as the mech looked down at him. Jack knew better than to intentionally startle one of the Cybertronians, on account of how easily one wrong move could see him crushed underfoot. He blinked rapidly, then, at the second thing that caught him off-guard: the massive number of scars on the mech, especially the jagged lines that cut across his throat. Jack took a couple of steps back, hands raised in a gesture of peace.

Then there was the teeth. The sharp, feral-looking teeth. Jack had never seen fangs on an Autobot before, and this mech's mouth was full of them. He was beginning to regret approaching Thundercloud as the mech admitted he probably shouldn't be scribbling Godzilla on the walls of the rec room. Then the Autobot asked if Jack was a narc, and Jack stammered, "N-no! Not at all! I, uh...I like your Godzilla there. Very...toothy - "

The tension was suddenly broken by Thundercloud looking apologetic, of all things, and asking if Jack knew the meaning of the word. He did, in fact, and had been called such before (and worse) by Vince and other bullies at school. Such was a fact of life when you tried to be the responsible one, the studious one, the one that didn't go and get drunk and hop trains in the railyard on a weekend. Jack didn't like being called it, but he quietly took pride in the fact that he "had a stick up his ass".

Well, for a teenager, anyway.

"Won't say a word," Jack assured the intimidating figure. "Cross my heart and hope to die." He peered a little closer at the drawing, squinting his eyes at some of the smudged details. It wasn't that bad, and there were parts where the shine and shadow was particularly pronounced. It had depth, it played with the eye a little, and it looked like something from Cybertron.

"Is this back on Cybertron?" he asked. "Did you, uh, have monsters stomping through your cities, too?"

[Thundercloud]

Oooh, kid was quaking in his boots.

Thundercloud fought a smile, tried not to be too much of an asshole about the tiny baby alien being obviously intimidated him for all the obvious reasons, and probably a few he cooked up in his tiny baby head. It wasn't like he enjoyed it or anything, the humans being afraid of him, he just thought it was funny that even aliens took one look at him and decided 'yeah this dude's unhinged.' Granted that wasn't exactly an unfair assessment, but Thunder liked to think he was reasonably unhinged. He didn't just pop off for no reason, didn't hurt people just for kicks – not counting a little ego damage, talking mad shit and roasting folks was fair game, far as he was concerned.

But actually laying hands on somebody? Nah, he wasn't gonna do that just for a laugh. The kid didn't have any way of knowing that, though, and Thundercloud wasn't about to come out and say it because that would make it seem like he cared. Instead of taking the direct route to putting the kid's fears to rest, he was just gonna keep subverting his expectations until eventually he got the memo.

Looking back to his sketch, Thundercloud had to admit that yeah, it was pretty toothy. He didn't really know how many teeth was normal for organic life, so he had decided to err on the side of reckless and just go with however many looked cool. Which, y'know, in the true spirit of excess, was a lot.

He turned his attention to the cityscape next, drawn there by Jack's question. It was supposed to be Cybertron, yeah, or at least one small corner of it, but he didn't want to give the aliens the impression that that was what his world looked like when he knew he had gotten a lot of the details wrong.

“It's tryin' to be.” He answered with a shrug, before looking down at the back of his hand.

He dragged the charcoal stick in his left hand over one of the spikes on the knuckle of his right, using it as a makeshift hobby knife. A few shavings fell to the floor as he sharpened the charcoal stick, which any keen eyed observer would notice was actually a stick – one of the perks of organic worlds was you could just burn things to make drawing tools. It had taken Thundercloud a while to figure it out, turned a lot of different kinds of plants and minerals to ash and unusable slag before he found the winning combination. Granted he probably could've saved himself a lot of time and effort by just doing a little research and looking up how to do what it was he was trying to do, but figuring things out through trial and error had been more fun – an excuse to set things on fire just to see what would happen.

At the mention of monsters stomping through the cities, Thundercloud couldn't help the derisive snort that escaped him.

“Yeah, but they didn't look like this.”

They looked like people - because they were by technical definition, even though Thundercloud would never call them people by any metric that mattered. They were monsters more than they were people, and they outnumbered people five-to-one. The war wasn't really so bad, looking at it like that. Sure, the body count was through the roof and there was hardly a fraction of their original population left, but with a five-to-one ratio of monster-to-person, almost nothing of value was lost. There had hardly been anything of value to lose in the first place.

Looking down at Jack – and wow, humans really just got smaller and smaller the longer you looked at them – Thundercloud felt a strange urge to be, like, vaguely friendly or something. Maybe because humans were small and pathetic what with their fragile bodies and miserably short lifespans, maybe because he was in a generous mood, or maybe just because he didn't have a good excuse to be a dick at the moment. Whatever the reason, Thundercloud found himself shaving off a sliver of his charcoal stick, making a rough estimate of what would be an appropriate size for human hands, and gave it a light underhand toss in Jack's direction.

“Here. Pretend like you're learnin' somethin'.”

He nodded towards the wall, gesturing for Jack to add something of his own to the makeshift canvas.

“Anybody asks, I'm teachin' you art theory or some shit.”

[Jack Darby]

The spiked knuckles were warily eyed as Thunder shaved the edge of his charcoal on them. Jack couldn't help but mentally praise his ingenuity, and to be fair, shaving his charcoal on his spikes like that? That actually was pretty cool. He didn't say anything about it, instead watching Thundercloud with a mix of curiosity and trepidation.

The passing of a piece of charcoal was unexpected, and Jack nearly dropped his new tool as he reached out to catch it. He looked at the tall drawing with a bewildered expression, unsure of what to make of the invitation. He wasn't four - he knew better than to draw on the walls, especially the Base's walls - but he wasn't sure what the mech would do if he refused. "O...kay," was Jack's answer, and he stepped towards the base of the drawn towers.

There was a lot of space for him to draw between the structures. They were almost as tall as - if not tall as - some of the buildings in Jasper. Jack's first instinct was to draw a little motorcycle zooming between the spires, thinking of Arcee. His hand rose, and he lightly began to sketch a rough outline of his guardian. He didn't say anything, but looked over his shoulder more than once, as if expecting Thundercloud to do something or disapprove of his choice.

At least it beat doing art history homework.

[Thundercloud]

As soon as Jack stepped up to the wall, Thundercloud took a step back to give the kid room to work. He knew he was technically contributing to the delinquency of a minor by encouraging him to do something neither of them were really supposed to, but he figured this was pretty tame as far as trouble-making went. If somebody walked in with a stick up their ass and decided to give them hell for it, he'd just remind them that soap and water exist and nothing was being done that couldn't be undone. It wasn't like he was scratching at the walls with a chisel or staining 'em with paint, and it wasn't like he was putting anything obscene in plain view of God and everybody. Aside from the cartoon lizard stomping through downtown Praxus, he couldn't think of anything anyone could possibly take offense to.

So yeah, no, they were probably in the clear.

Relatively sure that nobody was gonna come in and start getting on the kid's case for doing something a giant alien killing machine told him to do, Thundercloud dropped down onto his knee so he could get a better look at what Jack was drawing. He tilted his head, trying to get the shapes to make sense, but it was hard to tell what the kid was going for at first. In Jack's defense, motorcycles were hard as hell to draw. Lots of irregular shapes and way too many parts and details to keep track of just from memory alone. Still, it wasn't half bad – Thundercloud could recognize what it was supposed to be, once the loose gesture lines had some clarifying details added in.

He grinned, picking up on what – or rather who – the bike was probably supposed to be.

“Nice. That your girlfriend?” He asked, just to get a rise out of him.

[Jack Darby]

"Not half-bad" could be debated in Jack's case. The boy wasn't an artist by any stretch of the means. He liked working with his hands, but there was something about capturing shape and form in a sketch that escaped him. He'd become a little bit better by virtue of having to design blueprints for metal shop, but not enough to make the motorcycle look realistic. Like Thundercloud and his spires, Jack decided to give Arcee's sketch a few artistic liberties, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth as he sketched in some definition to her.

Thundercloud's comment completely broke his concentration. "Wait, what?" he squawked, hand jerking to the side and leaving an ugly line that led away from one wheel. "She's not my girlfriend!" Jack gave the jet an indignant look, then moved away from the motorcycle drawing. He thought for a moment, then began to scribble the silhouettes of three human beings. One was whip-thin and lanky, like him; the second was shorter, with two poofs of hair and a similarly-lanky silhouette; and the third was the shortest, with a tuft for a hairdo and a pair of square glasses. They stood in no special pose, merely existing in the cityscape that Thundercloud had created.

Though they weren't the best-looking humans, it was clear Jack was giving them a lot of detail. Off to the side he gave the second one a braid, and filled out shadows below them to give a sense of light. Their blank faces Jack started to give stereotypical smiley faces to, but then smudged away the eyes and mouths with his thumb. It looked too childish compared to Thundercloud's drawing...which could be said was already childish, with Godzilla stomping around.

[Thundercloud]

Somehow, Thundercloud managed not to laugh right in Jack's face – an impressive feat worthy of admiration in his not so humble opinion, because the face the poor kid made was objectively hilarious. All wide eyed and scandalized and mortified, emotionally-honest to a damn fault. Didn't seem like the kid had an ounce of guile in him, didn't know how to keep his cool and save face, couldn't help but let people know when the out of pocket things they said got to him. The sort of person who got targeted by hecklers because they saw him as an easy target, somebody they could get a rise out of without having to worry about push-back.

It was something the kid would have to work on if he didn't wanna get hassled his whole life. The world was full of assholes looking for any excuse to make somebody else's day worse, and until the kid got a thicker skin or a better poker face those bad actors were gonna zero in on him like sharks smelling blood in the water.

Now, this was in no way Thundercloud's responsibility. Wasn't his circus, wasn't his monkey. If people gave Jack a hard time just because it was easy and his reactions were admittedly pretty damn funny, well, tough shit. Wasn't any of Thundercloud's business.

But, y'know. It wouldn't cost him anything to toss the kid a few softballs, see if he couldn't encourage the little dog to bite back when he got barked at.

Plastering on his best 'don't look at me I'm just an incorrigible scamp' smirk , Thundercloud pointed to the figure with the two puff-balls on its head – the one that was presumably Miko, since the other one was clearly Raf. Or a troll doll. Or an ice cream cone with glasses.

“Is that your girlfriend?” He asked, somehow managing to sound even more amused with himself than last time.

[Jack Darby]

Jack sighed an exasperated sigh. "No," he said, beginning to sketch in his best attempts at proper faces on his friends. Curiously, his remained blank. "That's Miko. She's another one of us here on base. You might've seen her around with Bulkhead - he's her protector, like Arcee is mine. Not my girlfriend, either of them." He paused in drawing, smudging one of Miko's eyes away to draw something less lopsided.

"What about you? Do you have a girlfriend?" snarked Jack. He highly doubted it, as he felt like he would've heard about it from Arcee. It felt like relationships would make the dynamics on base even more messy - he said, she said and all that. Arcee would no doubt have something to say about it, though Jack was more likely to confide in her than she in him. She had a lot on her shoulders, and Jack knew it wasn't his place to pry or try to take that weight onto himself.

"Or maybe a boyfriend? I don't judge," Jack added. Satisfied with Miko's eye, he began to sketch a larger figure, one with wings and a bulky figure. Though it was a rough sketch at best, Jack was quick to begin filling in details: large arms, a heavy frame, a large wingspan, a chevron.... It wasn't to scale, but Thundercloud might recognize the picture as looking like himself.

[Thundercloud]

'I don't judge.' The kid said, like that was supposed to mean something, like the context was obvious. To humans maybe it was, but to Thundercloud the sentiment was confusing and out of place, apropos of nothing. He couldn't for the life of him figure out what the hell there was to be judgmental about in the first place, so he wasn't sure what to do with Jack's assurance of his open-mindedness.

“It'd be weird if you did.” He said carefully, not really sure what they were talking about but not wanting to ask any sort of clarifying questions that would belie his ignorance.

Just rolling with things was the best social lubricant he knew of – rather than interrupt the flow of conversation with questions that would make him seem like a dumbass to get answers he really didn't care to have in the first place, he'd just bulldoze right through any bumps in the road and move on to someplace where he had more solid footing. It was a tactic that really shouldn't have worked half as well as it did, but Thunder was damn good at pretending like he knew what was going on when he didn't have even half a clue. People didn't question confidence – if you were self-assured and didn't hesitate, you looked competent. Put together. Unflappable.

Thundercloud, he was the cockiest son of a glitch in any room he swaggered into. Partly by nature, mostly by design.

“But yeah, no. None of the guys around here are really my type.”

The inverse was also likely true, but Thundercloud felt that went without saying. He was a felon made of anger issues and bad habits who came part-and-parcel with Carbine, who was his own special brand of deal-breaker. Between the two of them there were more red flags than a communist parade. Not exactly prime dating material, even when their species' entire population was comprised of deeply flawed, profoundly damaged people savaged by thousands of years of too much killing and not enough living.

As Jack began sketching another figure, Thundercloud leaned in a bit, peering closer at the drawing. He fought against a slow smile when he realized what the kid was doing, recognizing the addition of himself in the picture as a gesture of good will. Like when Bolo dropped random crap at people's feet, trying to make friends.

“Who's this guy?” He asked, a wry smile curving the corner of his mouth as he set up his joke. “He looks like a psycho.”

[Jack Darby]

"Call me surprised," Jack quipped dryly, tempted to add such an expression to the figure that represented him. The Autobots as a whole didn't strike him as the dating type, and it'd be weird if they did. They were so serious and focused on the war all the time, the news someone had a significant other would be.... Well, Jack didn't know what to think of it. He tried for a moment to imagine Arcee in a relationship, and his brain came up with nothing.

Onto coloring in the flier in his portion of the drawing, then. He was beginning to add in some facial features when Thundercloud made the comment that the flier "looked like a psycho". "I wonder why," he quipped again, picking up on the joke this time in Thunder's voice. He emphasized the chevron on the flier's brow to look like eyebrows making a V, and scribbled in an array of sharp teeth for his mouth. The mouth was smiling, making the flier look like a shark that had smelt blood in the water. One could argue that the mech looked as toothy as the Godzilla monster that had been drawn, or close to it.

"I think he looks pretty good," Jack would say as he added a few more defining features. A few lines meant to represent Thunder's bigger scars would cut across the figure next. "What do you think, big guy? Or do you have a name I can call you?"

[Thundercloud]

As the drawing progressed, Thundercloud got a better idea of what the kid thought of him. Everything that got added was something Jack considered a defining feature, or at least a prominent enough feature that it deserved to be added to the sketch. He appreciated the wicked smile and the mouth full of sharp teeth - it made him look like some kind of feral animal, which wasn't too far off the mark. Everyone thought him and Carbine were cut from the same cloth, but truth be told Thundercloud felt like he and Bolo had more in common, personality-wise. They were both loyal to a fault, acted on instinct, got vicious when they were pissed, had a propensity for biting. The list went on, but Thundercloud felt elaborating on their similarities would be offensive to the both of them.

The kid went in on his battle-damage next, scribbling in scratches and dents and old scars. The one across his throat was the worst – the EMT that welded him back together had been more concerned with getting the job done fast than making sure their work was pretty. Still, it didn't look nearly as bad as it could have, all things considered. The seams were ugly, sure, the fusion lines were scorched and the filler-metal bubbled in places where the heat was unevenly applied, but you couldn't tell by looking at him that he had been half-way decapitated.

A small part of him considered the idea of telling the kid the story behind that scar, just to watch him squirm, but in the end Thundercloud decided there were better ways to mess with him. Ways that didn't involve opening up his closet and letting all the skeletons fall out.

“That a jab at me being low-caste?” He asked, knowing damn well that it wasn't, because how the hell was the kid supposed to know that some Cybertronains had serial numbers instead of names.

He kept his expression stern for all of three seconds, trying to feign offense, like he actually believed the kid would ask a question like that with any kind of malice. Then at the end of those three seconds his composure broke and he couldn't help but crack a smile, huff a small laugh.

“Just screwin' with you, kid. Name's Thundercloud. Surprise nobody's warned you 'bout me.”

[Jack Darby]

"What?" Jack squawked at the low-caste comment. He stammered for a moment, then said, "N-no, I mean - what does that even mean?"

He took a couple of steps away from the mech, expecting a verbal jab or something else unpleasant. He had a dour expression, and Jack's mind whirled as he tried to remember Arcee's stories of Cybertron. Oh right, the caste system - how could he forget? Not that it wasn't the entire basis of the Cybertronian civil war, and something each and every Autobot had lived through....

Then Thundercloud laughed, a small smile breaking through his dour expression. Jack's shoulders sagged, and he gave the mech a look that told Thundercloud he wasn't pleased. "I'm guessing they had other things to do," Jack said, and turned back to his drawing of the flier and the human children. Jack canted his head a little, thinking over what had been drawn and what might still be missing.

"Did you have birds on Cybertron?" Jack asked. "Or something like it? We could add birds in-between the towers. Like pigeons. Do you know what a pigeon is?"

A bit of a stupid question, but it kept the conversation going in a less-embarrassing direction. For all Jack knew, too, the flier had never seen city birds up close. Maybe regular wild birds, from flying around, but not something like the fat, fluffy ones that liked to poop on cars.

[Thundercloud]

Yeah, no, Thundercloud's first impression was right on the money. Jack was definitely way too easy to rile – the other kids his age probably zeroed in on that, hassled him just to watch him jump and stutter and trip over himself. That wouldn't be so bad if the kid could give as good as he got, but Thundercloud didn't get the vibe that Jack was the fighting-back type. He seemed way too soft for that, too civil. Even when he finally got the joke and realized Thundercloud was just screwing with him, he just flashed a flat, unamused look and moved the conversation along.
It was a weirdly mature response – Thundercloud had been counting on Jack taking the bait and taking a few shots back at him, but evidently the kid's idea of friendly conversation didn't involve reciprocal ribbing. Ah well. His loss.

As Jack switched tracks and moved the conversation towards the subject of birds, Thundercloud took a moment to debate whether he should feed the kid some wild bullshit about Cybertronian wildlife, just for kicks. The truth would come out as soon as Jack fact-checked with just about any other Cybertronian except for Carbine (because he was a dick) and Bolo (because he couldn't talk, and was also sometimes a dick by proxy), but still. It could be fun, seeing how long he could keep the kid fooled before he realized he was being punked.

...Or he could just match Jack's energy and stop being a dick himself for five goddamn minutes, which, yeah. Okay. It wouldn't kill him to talk to somebody without actively being a nuisance.

“Those are the lil' round ones that eat trash, yeah?” He asked, on the subject of pigeons.

He didn't think the Functionalists would let anybody have a cassette like that, back when they were still in charge of what kind of “animals” were allowed to exist in their society, but it was possible that some rich asshole could flash case and make a case for themselves. Why the hell they'd do that when they could have a Good Boy like Bolo, Thundercloud had no clue, but he wasn't about to pretend to understand how bougie folks's brains worked.