Ep 1.5 - Strange Wildlife (closed)

[Deleted]

((Timeline note: mid to late 1.5?))

It had been a while since Rhinox could return to his garden, and it showed. Patches of sunrays were dying off, outcompeted by more aggressive plants, the bee plants had gone to seed, and an owl couple had made a nest in the rock wall, surrounded by overgrown vines. Ironhide and Cleaver the cacti, of course, were doing just fine. They always did.

Rhinox smiled to himself, content at the sight. His garden was as much experiment as it was relaxation technique, and the new species making their way into his space were as much a part of it as the ones he'd planted here. "Good morning, everyone," he murmured, kneeling gently in the dirt by a small copse of cheerful-looking pink blooms. "Let's start by learning everyone's names." A quick Google search provided the answer he was looking for. "Mimulus, is it? Perfect. Sorry, but I'm going to have to pull a few of you. You're getting too close to the sunrays, and they were here first."

Sun-warmed, chattering, and content, Rhinox got to work.

[Deleted]

<<OOC: Let me know if any of these details need changing, Moogle!>>

On the other side of the brightly coloured flowers, a small cassette sunk back into the foliage.

It had been, she felt, a good bit of detective work in finding this place, and even moreso in seeing the potential in monitoring it. Though all the plants in the lush site were native to the state of Nevada, there was unmistakably a good deal of cultivation taken place. It had caught her optic whilst pouring over satellite data, and she'd taken a few off-cycles over a period of several days to investigate it.

There were no access roads for humans to make an easy approach to the garden in the wild, and she'd made short work of finding Cybertronian tracks. No alt-mode tracks, however, which indicated that the garden wasn't conveniently close to the Autobot base and that a groundbridge was being used to come here.

Certainly not Decepticon. She knew roughly what the majority of the crew got up to in their spare time, and the rest didn't strike her as the gardening type. Too nurturing. Too Autobot.

The cassette had noticed how untidy the garden was looking today, and found some dying plants that would doubtless have been taken care of. It had crossed her processor that the Autobot gardener she'd been staking out might have been killed, but decided to believe that they were just overdue a visit instead.

When the vortex of compressed space finally spiraled open and her mystery mech had appeared, Fairwinds had dampened her field and watched as he greeted the garden and got to work. It was endearing, in a weird sort of way, how he chattered away to the greenery. Hardly Autobot Warrior stuff. Could probably get an Eradicon crew down here to snatch'im, easy.

Fairwinds held off on her comm. line, however, optics narrowing as she soaked in the outermost eddies of the mech's field. Relaxed. Open. A conversationalist. Maybe interrogation isn't the bestest of bets... Hn.

She scuttled around the perimeter to take up a perch behind the stubby cacti, making no effort to hide the sounds of her movement. The mech was a good few strides away, and her thrusters were primed. Fairwinds weaved her helm a little, eyeing the Mimulus.

"Pretty flowers."

[Deleted]

There was a cassette in his chokecherries.

A Decepticon cassette in his chokecherries no less, since the only Autobot or Neutral cassette he knew was Steeljaw, and Steeljaw had had all he ever cared to of the Great Outdoors and thus wouldn't be caught in Rhinox's garden if his life depended on it. Rhinox fell silent, both hands in the dirt as he tended to the flowers, and considered his options.

Rattrap or Airazor, he felt certain, would turn right around and shoot the intruder. It would be the smart thing. But Rattrap and Airazor were equipped with more precise weaponry than his own chainguns, which were not precise in any sense. They would rain destruction down on the cassette, probably severely injuring it or deactivating it outright; they would also shred his poor flowers. That, Rhinox could not stand.

Besides, he had his back to the cassette and everything, and he hadn't been shot at. Not that he was too worried about the prospect, his armor being rated for cannon-type weaponry. A cassette might sting but it wouldn't kill. So he held his peace, and when the cassette (an avian model, he noted) perched well in view and spoke, he answered with equal politeness.

"Yes. Mimulus rubellus, according to Wikipedia - commonly known as the little red-stemmed monkey-flower." He paused. "Don't ask me why."

[Deleted]

So far, so not-shot-at.

Fairwinds cocked her helm in thought, optical crystals swiveling as she focused in on the flowers. She kept several sensor threads on the mech, however, just in case.

"Well. They're sorta cheery smiley flowers, y'know?" she began slowly, feeling that staring on and off at them for the last few days qualified her to give an opinion. "And their stems are twisty and bendy, like a monkey tail. And they grow out in colonies, see? Starting to climb up that rock, there. That's all monkey-like."

The search thread she'd set running chirped an alert, and her crests flared as she straightened up again. "Oh: it's cuz some species have flowers shaped like a monkey's face, and others have painted faces resembling a monkey." One optic narrowed in a squint, the line of her beak taking on a dubious, downward angle. "I don't see it. I think they're broken."

[Deleted]

Rhinox was actually kind of impressed. A Decepticon who bothered to learn what a monkey was, let alone attempt to connect its appearance to that of a variety of flower, was certainly a rare sort of Decepticon. If this was a ploy to get him to let his guard down, it was one targeted to him specifically, and Rhinox couldn't imagine why the Decepticon high command would bother with that level of effort for one little chaingun-wielding engineer.

"Perhaps," he answered, amused, "the human who came up with the name has a far more active imagination than you or I." He gathered up the flowers he'd weeded out and added them to his compost pile - which more resembled a pile of kindling after he'd let it dry out in the desert sun for so long, more fool him.

"So," he ventured as he went back to inspect his bee plants. "May I ask whom I have the pleasure of addressing?" Channeling Optimus Prime a bit, there.

[Deleted]

Oh, how deep, my sweet, shall I sew deceit...

The Decepticon mark was bold and clear on her wing, and he'd not opened a comm. line to inform anyone that his garden had been discovered. A clear willingness to converse, at leas until he worked out her angle, and Fairwinds settled on her undercarriage a little more fully. It would take time to - heh - cultivate any rapport through which information could be gleaned, and some surface honesty was called for.

Give information to get information. Easy.

"'m Windy," she replied, bright and friendly and entirely nonthreatening. The cassette watched him kneel, large hands gentle and knowingly steady as he tended. "Thought the Bot Base might be near your garden. Looks like not." She shrugged her wing mounts, glancing up at the sky.

Fairwinds waffled on in the vague direction of some cumulus clouds hunched low on the horizon. "Never known anyone who liked the earthy bits of Earth. I mean, Earth stuff's cool: fezes, comics, radiators, glitter, limited edition Alf pogs, fairy lights, wooly hats." She flicked her helm to gesture to the array of plantlife, beak snapping. "The indigenous organic stuff like bugs and trees and mud and puddles just gets all up in your plating, though, and if you get a fungus spore up in your vents then you have to have the worst time in the Medbay ever and get scrubbed and lectured and decontaminated and lectured some more."

She trailed off scratching the underside of her beak with one claw. "So yeah. Fungus bad."

[Deleted]

The location of the base. I might have known.

One little chaingun-wielding engineer could certainly reveal the location of the base, if he were to be captured and tortured or hacked. He wasn't worried about capture right at that moment - if a groundbridge from the Decepticon base opened up anywhere nearby, he could have an Autobot bridge opening in answer within a klik - but... he would have to talk to Jazz about this. He would have to face the fact that his garden was compromised. If Jazz thought it was necessary, he would have to abandon it.

Rhinox's fingers slowed in the dirt. For a moment he considered telling Windy that his garden was crawling with fungus, the spores were everywhere, and if she wanted to avoid the lecture of her life she had better leave right now and never return.

"I'm Rhinox," he offered instead. "And your experience with medics sounds remarkably similar to my own."

[Deleted]

"Yeah." Fairwinds sniffed. "They never want you having any fun. Hobbies are a nuisance to medics - says it just gives them more work. The speedsters get done for blowing their cylinders and hydraulics; fliers for birdstrike; the Eradicons for mashing Happy Meal bits into their servo joints when all they want is the toy."

Fairwinds found that she was quite enjoying herself, despite being sat still and keeping her servos and beak to herself. The sun was warm on her plates, the Autobot wasn't trying to crush, shoot or otherwise maim her, and the longer she watched him, the more interested she became in the subject upon which she hoped to build a rapport. When she'd first staked out the garden, she'd found it rather boring. His quiet care and obvious pleasure made it, somehow, more appealing.

"Did you play with Embryophytes before now?" The avian cassette watched Rhinox with the intensity of one whose usually scattered attention was entirely focused. Her helm crests lifted and fell in the breeze. "Are you a botanist? Do you have a greenhouse somewhere? Do you have a wheelbarrow? Do you need a shed if you have a garden? Are you gonna get a horse to make fertilizer, or are you worried it'll eat the monkey plants? I like donkeys more because if you stick their ears up they look like Optimus Prime with the finials and the mopey face and the big optics."

[Deleted]

Rhinox spluttered into his gauntlet at that. Definitely leaving that bit out of the official report. Jazz would never let poor Optimus live it down otherwise.

Comparisons between the Autobot Prime and certain local fauna aside, Rhinox was gratified by the cassette's curiosity. "I dabble in a little bit of everything," he told his visitor as he returned to his work. "Organic biology has been a hobby of mine for a while, but I've only had time to pursue it since I came to Earth, and the planet's biodiversity makes it an ideal location to study. So far I don't have a shed or greenhouse," he gestured to his garden, "or a wheelbarrow. Or any kind of animal to make fertilizer for me. I haven't needed them yet. Perhaps if I get a chance to expand, I'll look into it."

[Deleted]

Quite certain that she had struck upon a highly exploitable vein with suggestions on how Rhinox could improve his garden, Fairwinds plowed on.

"You should get pygmy goats. There's one called Buttermilk on YouTube who has eight million hits. That's a good goat," she affirmed, having concluded that YouTube hits were like Amazon ratings. The cassette flicked through a few more videos at high speed, then huffed with a scowl. "Their fecal residue is proportionally puny, though."

Fairwinds twisted the tips of her claws against the rock as she continued to think on the optimum source of fertilizer for Rhinox's garden. If she could suggest and then procure the right animal, his plants would thrive and he would be happy and in her debt. It was not solely a question of Nitrates and Nitrites, however. The Autobot was more complex than that, doting on his garden above and beyond mere maintenance. Additional elements were no doubt thoughtfully selected, carefully sourced and lovingly introduced. An animal would be no different.

There was a flash across her neural net. Got it.

"Black Rhino!" she announced, springing up with the chirp. "They're endangered and make lots of slag and they've got this massive horn on their face for stabbing and killing things. Totally awesome. You could call it Shaft and train it to defend your garden." Her search threads pinged back just as her gleeful excitement peaked, and the cassette immediately deflated. "Oh. But they don't get many hits on YouTube, though. Not even the little ones."

When Rhinox did nothing but stare silently at her for longer than it took to process, Fairwinds flapped her wings and hopped a few paces closer. She interpreted his tense silence as anxiety at a Decepticon being in his garden, his fears no doubt mounting as he waited for her attack him.

Just outside the top of his shadow, she peered up at the Autobot with big, reassuring optics and a similarly comforting field. "Don't worry. 'm not gonna hurt you."

And because that didn't sound very Decepticon, she quickly added: "I totally could, though. Cassette from the Decepticon flagship an' all. I could wreck your slag. Like... So bad."

[Deleted]

Rhinox managed not to laugh, though it took a valiant effort. She was so cute. "I have no doubt of that, Miss Windy," he answered with utmost respect and an absolutely straight face. "Thank you for sparing me your wrath."

I can hear Rattrap laughing at me right now. .....Shut up, Rattrap.

"I'm afraid a black rhino wouldn't be a very good idea," he added with an apologetic smile. "I'm trying to work with only native species here. Rhinos are better off in their own natural habitat, and this garden's far too small for one to be happy anyway." Not to mention rhinos were endangered. The paperwork involved in importing one was bound to be staggering.

Still, the cassette's eagerness presented him with a rare opportunity. Whether she was only playing along or not, if she was willing to listen he could provide her with quite the education. Biology, ecology, the amazing interconnectedness of life on Earth - it was too much to hope that it would make her rethink her allegiance, symbionts being even less free to desert their signias than even ordinary mecha. But perhaps - just perhaps - it would change her thinking. Just a little.

The fates of entire planets had turned on less.

"If I were to deliberately introduce wildlife to my garden," he began, "I would start with insects. Although very small, they are incredibly important for the life of the plant. Some plants even use insects to reproduce themselves, by tempting them close with a sweet liquid called nectar - it's full of sugars for energy, so it's like energon for the insect. Of course, some insects also eat plants, but they in turn are food for larger creatures. Such as birds." He gestured to Windy's birdlike form. "So equilibrium is maintained, and all the species thrive."

[Deleted]

Fairwinds nodded, absorbing the little lesson as intel' which may prove to useful in the future. Rhinox was pleased to teach her, to engage with her in a positive way as opposed to trying to take her out with what her scans had pointed out were some pretty serious guns.

The little cassette was fairly knowledgeable about the wildlife of the planet, having absorbed a lot of documentaries and children's programs from the human data networks in her off-duty hours. It made movie night more enjoyable to know why they needed a bigger boat, or how frogs falling from the sky was A Big Bad Deal.

She bounced on both pedes in a full spin, landing with her optics back up and facing him. "Okay, so, show me 'round so I know what insects are the absolute bestest. Master told me once that organic life wasn't like energon pick'n'mix and that I couldn't collect different things and mix them all together and expect it not to turn into a disaster." The cassette frowned, distant, and tapped a claw against the ground. "Actually he said I couldn't have anything organic. Or radioactive. Or sticky."

Shaking her helm, Fairwinds scrutinized the monkey flowers again, then the cacti, then the chokecherries she had been hiding in. Giving Rhinox her back with an air of confidence, though her thrusters were primed to blast if he so much as reached for her, the little avian femme waddled towards the brightest of the flowers.

"Bees. Bees interface with the interfacing bits of flowers and then with each other." Her faceplates scrunched up. "Which is... kinda weird, but they're organic so, y'know..." A shrug, and she stretched her neck out to bring her right optic close to a flower, a centimeter shy of touching it. "But they get the nectar and get their fuzzy afts covered in flower dust and spread it about on the other flowers with their afts, then they make their houses of the mush they regurgitate..."

Helm jerking back, Fairwinds hopped 180 degrees to face Rhinox again with a scowl. "You know what? Insects are gross. Why don't you have a rock garden? Rocks are clean and there're different kinds and they'll never wander off and get lost and none of them need other things to rub all over them."

[Deleted]

Rhinox chuckled. Windy's mood certainly could turn on a dime, couldn't it? "Geology isn't my field," he answered, as he checked over his cacti. "Rock certainly has much to teach us, but it isn't alive. Life is messy, Windy, and so are we."

We've got a whole dead planet to prove that.

That was the cynical Rattrap-voice talking again; Rhinox did his best to banish it. His cacti needed... nothing much, really. They were still the same old Ironhide and Cleaver, growing in cheerful defiance of the brutal sun. ...Well. Feeding on the brutal sun, really. Rhinox wasn't very good at metaphor.

[Deleted]

Rhinox's remark gave the cassette pause, and Fairwinds stilled as she turned the statement over in her processor. It was such an innocuous thing to say: that they were messy, a word that, broadly speaking, held two meanings: to in themselves be messy, and to create mess. Cybertronians as compared to organics were very clean and tidy, in her opinion. No excretions of fluid at uncontrolled intervals, no wet and sticky reproductive protocols, and no olfactory-offensive decomposition at the end of their lives.

In terms of creating mess, however, their species rather took the title. They'd had the technology to take their war to other worlds and decimate those after killing their own, to such an extent that the galactic council had barred them from many sectors. At least the infantile species of this planet hadn't been able to frag things up any further than their own atmosphere.

Fairwinds shuffled on her pedes, dismissing the tangent before it could travel any further down the path implying that the squishies were in any way superior to them. Human June Darby had kept her in a box and interrogated her under threat of blowing her helm off for weeks. Humans sucked.

When Rhinox was done examining the spiky plants, Fairwinds skittered beneath the foliage to carefully poke at the base of one of the unusual specimens. "What's up with these? Why're they all prickly and slow-growing and don't have any flowers or anything?"

[Deleted]

Somehow Rhinox didn't think Windy believed him, at least to the extent that he intended. He hid a smile, regardless. It was a terrible idea to introduce them, but if Windy ever met Rattrap, organic life would forevermore seem medbay-sterile in comparison. It was an amusing thought.

"That's because they're cacti. Singular, cactus." Rhinox kept half an optic on that sharp beak. "They evolved to thrive in hot, dry environments where most plants cannot survive. The spines are to protect them from animals that might want to eat them. And they do flower," he added. "It's just not the right season right now. Come back in late spring, you'll see them bloom."

...huh. He'd just invited a Decepticon to come back and visit his garden again. Siege must be spinning in his burial vault. ...Well, it was not certain he'd be coming back to his garden, depending on what Jazz said. Someone ought to get some enjoyment out of it when Ironhide and Cleaver got all dressed up for the spring.