Ep. 1 - Nevada - Sunday Drivers - Closed

[Deleted]

Gently toking his silver tinted pipe and working the coal into a fierce smolder, Gasket vented through both his dentals and back vents but intentionally shunted it away from Maximus himself. It was not polite to blow smoke in the face of someone like that. His former drive had smoked a pipe and the fireman would get worked into a froth if he did; it was a bit of humor and mock tension between them. As Maximus settled himself in for a sit, Gasket waited for a response. He would not have felt bad if the young tank did not want to hear of his former life as not everyone was interested.

It wasn't until Max spoke up that he took a stiffer draw of his anthracite; the smoke leaking from small vent cells across his frame.

"I'd like to hear that. Don't think I've ever had a chance to hear something like this before. I thought I'd seen a lot of the alternate modes this galaxy has to offer, but it seems I was wrong."

"Well I can't... very well argue with that. A galaxy of sentient beings and none have quite the same... setup to their transportation. I..."

Smiling and venting gently, the air filled with the tint of smoke, Gasket realized he'd just about gone off on another tangent. That wouldn't do at all. Slipping his pipe stem from his dentals as it continued to smolder, he allowed his optics to lose focus a moment as he dug up the memory pockets that he sought.

Ancient history... for some.

"You see, Maximus, I am not... unaccustomed to this planet and its peoples. I arrived... just more than seventy local stellar-cycles ago during the last major global conflict between humans. "

Returning the pipe to his dentals he took another toke, drew it in and held it as he continued to line up the memories he was going to speak on.

"When I arrived in system... my matrix was not in the right place. I had grown... sick of the war, depressed by the thought of those I'd killed... suicidal by the loss of beloved Cybertron." His smile faded at the word suicidal but he'd long accepted that such was his thought at the time.

"I was tasked by the former Prime, Zeta, to... hide energon in the galaxy; I'd found Earth and the Sol system by a coincidence. After completing my mission I'd decided to put myself offline as... retribution for crimes committed. It seemed a good idea at the time, I suppose. I deactivated my nexus and essential functions and... flung myself at this blue dot."

Chuckling, his smile had returned quickly if a little more somber.

"That said, I didn't even care enough to do a... life signature scan. That decision... I think, saved my aft from rusting to bits." Biting down on the pipe stem, he reached down and pulled one of his longer tie-rod blades from his leg assembly before laying it across his servos. When he talked this voice was slightly slurred by the clamping of his dentals.

"You saw what I... awoke as. A massive form belching smoke and coal and as black and imposing as... anything you'd have found in Kaon. While I was offline my disguise routines must have run... when I put a hole in the roof of an engine-works in the human city... Philidel. Wait, no...

Placing his blade back into its holder, Gasket removed his pipe from his dentals and tapped his chin. "Philly... means 'brotherly love...' Oh, Philadelphia; that's right. Anyway, I didn't arouse after the... crash but they took my transformed fra"me and sold it like any other engine.

Twisting his leg assemblies he pointed to a few spots of paint in the form of Arabic numerals. "I was sold to a railroad.... under engine number '4505' as a main line freight engine."

Pausing, Gasket had to rearrange his memories again, realizing where he was in his timeline. "When I awoke I was in... the engine form. My stance hadn't changed on the war and... I didn't want to harm anyone else but I can admit one thing; I was frightened." Turning his eyes downward he took another deep vent and looked back up at Maximus, their optics meeting.

"That... fear, that moment of carelessness killed two humans who were inspecting the pipes on my alt form. I was so... ashamed, so scared that I changed back then and there. Due to my... shock I did not try to shift for several solar cycles."

Shaking his helm he didn't say anything more than that about the two men he'd killed. It was still a soft spot for him. "The days and months afterward were spent getting used to this form but not through my own... efforts alone. I had a crew, two humans who... ran me. They operated the jumble of levers and switches, valves and triggers that... comprised the control center for the engine."

Returning his pipe for another small toke, Gasket's eyes were beginning to glow. That was the best time of his operation in recent vorns and he was not shy about letting the joy fill his voice and glyphs.

"Without their help I'd... have been in the same position as you. The humans have done me... something of a service and while its no retribution for killing their people... killing our people, it allowed me a few short solar cycles of reprieve."

" This story... simply ends when they were set to scrap me. I went offline again... and for what I thought was permanent this time. The Prime and crew found me rusting in a boneyard..." Taking a final toke of his pipe he upturned it and knocked out the ash in a puff of dust, smoke, and ash. "Suffice it to say... the air of the humans with learning how to work my own form is incentive enough to want to protect them." Smiling he shrugged and placed both servos on his knee joints.

"And here I sit."

[Deleted]

When Gasket finished, Maximus sat for a moment in silence.

Little emotion had filtered through his expression during the telling, his face a mask. But in the end his iron composure had slipped a crack; he now stared at the ground between his feet with a furrowed brow.

He had sat quietly throughout the long tale, his elbows on his knees and his hands laced together. His red optics had remained fixed upon the old train-bot as he spoke and puffed a gentle cloud of smoke between them. In the shade of the rock face the words had hung in the air, undisturbed by wind or noise from the world outside their small corner of the desert. In general, Maximus was not one for stories - he preferred facts, delivered concisely, reports and statistics, the universe drawn into a neat and orderly list of factual events. A story was as much a social affair as it was a historical reckoning, and Maximus had little love for socialising.

But an opportunity to hear from one of the old labour-class titans from the golden days of Cybertron's history, a mech who had once been so weary of war that he had considered the grimmest means to escape it... that had struck a chord. And so he had listened.

The story that had followed had been like nothing he had ever heard before.

A sense of disquiet flickered through him, mingled with awe. Maximus could honestly not imagine what it had been like to awaken upon a foreign planet clad in the body of a new alternate mode, an alien construct of steel and black smoke. To be sold, put to work on the rails by humans who had treated him with the respect due one of their own powerful machines of labour, who had taught him the complicated workings of his own locomotive mode as the years passed by, only to consign him to scrap at the end of his service. It was a hard thing to wrap his mind around.

Gasket spoke calmly, with stoic reverence towards the long years spent with his human engineers. Maximus shook his head slowly and sat back.

"That is... a remarkable story," he said when he had found his voice again. He leaned back against the rock wall and regarded Gasket soberly. "I've never heard anything like it. I can't think of another mech who can claim they learned how to function in an alternate mode of a foreign nature from its own creators. I don't think I've met one who would have had the patience or respect to try it. Most of us seem to assume we always know best when it comes to our own workings. Myself included."

He fell silent and watched the smoke and ash drift on the breeze. Then he said, "Can I ask you a personal question? You don't have to answer it if you don't want to."