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So, Thrust thinks, this is a farm. Well, it's flat.

It's actually not impossible to keep a low profile if you're a big pink robot motorcycle, it's just tricky. It's particularly difficult when you're working on getting your refuelling station set up semi-permanently (Oliver had helped him move it somewhere out of the way, but Thrust is doing fiddly work, now, that he wouldn't trust to anyone else) and reliably running the way you want it to.

Really, being somewhere out of the way on the Cooper farm (at least Thrust hopes it's still the Cooper farm; he doesn't know where the territory ends) is only a marginal help. He is, after all, seven or eight feet of brightly-colored robot fiddling with a machine made out of part of a light pole with four rather small solar power panels, a pressure cooker, a toaster oven, and many other less recognizable small appliances securely welded to it. Further welded sections of light pole make up a sturdy square base. There are symbols carefully painted onto the pressure cooker-- one is pretty self-explanatory, even without the dialogue, but the other is a little more unusual. (Hey, it's technically a Vehicon refuelling station, even if it's a refuelling station in the same way a vending machine is a restaurant.)

Thrust fiddles with tubing and wiring and connections, now and then tossing a manipulatory-appendage full of organic matter (mostly grass, although with the occasional dirt clod) into the pressure cooker, then peering at the toaster oven before continuing to make adjustments.

He really wants just a vending machine, see, not a still.

The whole thing might look a little bit odd, to a passing human.

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"Gabriel."

He smiles, just a little, eyes locked on the place where Thrust's spark would be visible if he were transparent.

"You're interesting."

This level of interest is considered creepy by most organics, actually.

Good thing his faction sigil is painted right over it, or Thrust might be a little unnerved by that. "Lemme guess. First robot you've met?"

Thrust was, for several local months, basically stalked by someone who intended to either seduce him or turn him inside out because she thought he used to be her old boyfriend. So long as Gabriel doesn't say Remember who you are, Silverbolt! Thrust is going to assume the staring is because there's a big pink robot puttering around with Cybertronian history's least attractive refuelling station.

"Yes, as it happens."

Blink. Blink.

"If you don't mind my asking," thank you Steve for making Gabriel considerably politer about these things, "why do you have so many points of articulation?"

It almost looks as though Thrust's entire body can take itself apart and reform into a different shape.

But that would be ridiculous.

Right?

~~Otherwise, he wouldn't be such a cool action figure!~~

"Aside from stuff like bein' able to balance and move at the same time?" Because being a unicycle in robot mode means you either shift your weight a lot or you fall down a lot, it's a thing. "I'm a Transformer."

Based on past experiences, Thrust is either going to have to explain a lot, be called on to demonstrate, or he's going to get asked if he's an Autobot or a Decepticon.

If only he were a betting mech.

If only he had someone to bet with who wouldn't be directly influencing the outcome of the bet.

"Show me."

...well. Looks like option B, then.

Although most people phrase it as more of a request.

Then again, Gabriel's not exactly most people, is he?

Thought the other one was not most people.

Thrust shrugs-- hey, he was built to follow orders, and talking to Steph and Thomas (okay, mostly Steph) has Thrust in a pretty decent 'indulge the locals mood.

"Thrust: overdrive." Thrust's lower half spins around-- his upper half doesn't, exactly; it's more that it folds into itself, panels in his head twisting and flipping. A tire that was laid flat against his back drops to the ground, while the one he'd been standing on is now at the front of a long set of struts. Arms pretend to be exhaust pipes to either side, and Gabriel can probably tell that there's a third gun hidden against Thrust's underside-- should he come speeding at something reared back on his aft wheel, he could blast it to slag before slamming down on top of it.

Thrust is a motorcycle-- one with only a cursory effort at a seat, unpadded, and completely without any kind of windscreen, but definitely a motorcycle.

"Standard feature," he says, head that should be handlebars swivelling to look at Gabriel. Counterintuitively, perhaps, Thrust's front wheel doesn't turn when his head does. (It can, the mechanism is there. But the mechanism is voluntary.)

...he thinks he understands what the younger him sees in Intuition, now.

"That's incredible," Gabriel says breathlessly. There would be more, but he's having a little difficulty articulating speech right now. Everything works, and perfectly, each piece fitting into its proper place-- the detail, the intricacy, the smooth transitions--

He lacks the vocabulary to explain how amazing this is.

Vehicons. Say what you will about the political situation, the moral situation, their boss-- they are some prettily engineered robots.

"You mind if I stand up? I don't like lookin' up at people while they're talkin'." Well, if they're taller, he doesn't mind so much. Thrust sounds amused-- humans have the best reactions, seriously. "Well, and I need my hands."

"Oh, of course. Go ahead."

HE GETS TO WATCH THIS IN REVERSE TOO? O_O!

Astonishingly, Gabriel manages to mute the glee and staring to something closer to polite, enthusiastic interest than flat-out near-lustful intensity.

"Thanks."

It's not quite the same process in reverse-- the motorcycle hunches in the middle, something disconnecting, then lowers, Thrust's-- what will be Thrust's arms in a moment swinging forward as his weight is shifted fully onto that front tire, planes of his head shifting again, and a final twist around right as his rear tire is pulled flat against what is now his back.

He nods his head and turns to re-attach a cable that he'd disconnected earlier, to shorten it.

Thrust hasn't noticed anything too off in Gabriel's reactions-- everybody stares, so far. Oliver gibbered a bit. Steph applauded.

...:D, goes Gabriel.

And notices the sign just in time to not step forward and help. (The urge to make things work as they should is terribly, terribly strong.) Witness the abortive jerk forward of his left hand, before it drifts back to his side.

Oh, it's working as it should, it's just that there's a range of 'as it should.' Compare it to a cider press, really.

This one was making applejack so strong you could probably call it scumble, if it were actually made from apples. Mostly apples.

Now, it's producing hard cider.

Thrust just wants some damn apple juice.

Every little adjustment brings him closer to it, but he doesn't have the diagnostic equipment to figure out exactly where the problem is-- this isn't like being able to scan a car and understand how a stick shift works, after all. Screw up refining energon and the stuff has a tendency to blow up.

But he does notice Gabriel's hand moving. "Careful." There is a Do Not Touch sign on the thing. "I think I'm a vegetarian, see." He means it as a joke, and the joke is right there in his tone (Thrust doesn't sound much like a robot, really).

Honestly, the whole refuelling station is only dangerous to him if Gabriel were to stick his hand in the conversion tank-- the pressure cooker-- or if an energon cube should crack and explode.

"--oh, of course. No, I'm not going to touch the conversion tank. What are you trying to change, exactly? It seems to be working, but..."

But this part and that one are aligned oddly, as though they're in the process of-- he supposes he should call it an upgrade.

More of a downgrade, technically-- or at least of not refining things quite so far.

"It's workin', it's just not workin' right. My own fault for putting it together in a hurry."

Hey, look at that, fallible robot. Does this humanize him or make him a fragging moron? Apparently, Thrust is trying to find all the little mistakes he made thinking 'this is close enough to spec, let's just keep moving' while his power reserves dipped past uncomfortable levels.

"It's refining energon, it's just... well, basically it's putting out gasoline when I run on diesel. Except that's not how it works, but it's close enough to get the point across."

You know, provided diesel engines got drunk on gasoline before eventually processing it properly as opposed to... just not going.

"Hmmm. Can I--"

Luckily, the parts involved aren't small enough that Gabriel needs his other glasses to see them, at least not at this point. So he peers cautiously at the cables and cannibalized hardware, and points.

"That part there. Is it suppposed to be turned that far?"

Hint: the answer is no.

Thrust looks at the part.

Then he looks at Gabriel.

"Nope.

"You seen one of these before?"

But he does reach around and adjust the part-- doesn't toss in another handful of grass to check the energon coloration, not yet.

"No, never. I... ah, I have a talent for understanding systems."

He still blushes when he says it. It's an honest-to-goodness superpower, after all. At least according to Steve, and Steve knows everything.

"Try moving this--?"

A short gesture in the direction of one of those cables, which appears (to Gabriel at least) to be connected one aperture too far to the right. Not an impairment in the function of the mechanism, exactly, but certainly... off. Describing this is tricky, even inside his own head. A watchmaker's mental map of metaphors contains no marked point for something that's wrong without being broken; timepieces are intensely unforgiving of error.

Thrust actually double-takes. "You know, I feel less stupid for doin' that in the first place than I do for missing it for so long? Frag."

But he fixes it, even if his posture suggests he'd be headdesking if a desk that could stand up to it were immediately handy. "S'a pretty impressive talent," Thrust says, conversationally, as he reattaches things. "I couldn't have built this thing if I weren't pre-programmed with the schematics."

A weapon or a short-range commlink, sure.

"It's--"

(nothing special)

"--terribly useful, I must admit."

Tentative smile.

Truthfully, "I can't imagine what I'd do without it."

"See how it would be," Thrust agrees. Now he does the grass-test, if only to just see, tossing a handful into the pressure cooker and clamping the lid down tight. It's probably not all straightened out quite yet, and it's definitely going to take a minute or two to process anything, but maybe Gabriel would like to see how the thing works, and what exactly it makes.

"That why you wanted to see my transformation sequence?"

Energon is slowly being refined-- and Thrust is curious, really, as to what Gabriel makes of it. It's radioactive, yes, but completely harmless to organics, and it's a potent fuel source. ...And if the conversion tank portion of Thrust's refuelling station is any indication, it can be refined out of almost anything.

"Yes."

The rapt attention that was focused on Thrust not so long ago is suddenly directed at the refuelling station.

He has to show Steve this thing.

"It's--"

All right, the matter-energy conversion is interesting, but it doesn't have the sheer mechanical beauty of Thrust's transformation.

"--magnificent," says Gabriel, flicking his gaze up to Thrust's face for the brief second it takes to smile honest admiration before he looks back to the conversion process.

"And I'm not even one of the pretty builds," Thrust says with a chuckle, then reaches into what was, in a former life, a toaster oven.

With enough raw material, he'd end up with an energon cube the height of the oven; with only a handful of grass, he's got barely an energon chip, just a little glassy (well, it looks glassy, it's filled with liquid, though, held in place by a sort of self-sustaining force field) bit of clear pale lavendar matter, coruscating gently. It's still got the faintest tinge of pink to what should be blue-white... but it's a definite improvement over the stuff Thrust has gotten before. "Not bad."

"Glad I could help."

Not one of the pretty builds? There are Transformers more gorgeous than this? ~~Are any of them male? Are any of them--~~

Gabriel blushes suddenly. Oh. Oh.

...probably shouldn't explain that one to Steve.

"Have you been here long?" he asks, the first thing that comes to mind in a desperate search for a less heated conversational topic.

Gabe would make an excellent Transfan, really.

"Define 'here,'" Thrust says, conversationally, suddenly wondering if he might have figure out what he did wrong. High grade and standard grade are just settings, after all, that any refuelling station should be able to produce-- maybe he just pulled up the wrong settings specs once or twice while he was in a hurry. He considers the same specs now, looking for discrepancies.

It's not quite as fast as Gabriel can do it, and it kind of requires him to move around the station, but maybe he'll find those last few bugs. "Here on this planet, a... couple of weeks." The local units of time are so short. "Here on the farm, since yesterday."

He opens his mouth to make a suggestion and then shuts it again, satisfied, as Thrust turns his attention to the part Gabriel was about to indicate.

No need to offer help that's just going to be redundant.

"I was going for either, actually. I've been at the farm... I don't remember. A few weeks by now, surely. Maybe a month. And in this world only a couple of days longer than that."

Planet. Of course. Alien robot.

Steve is going to totally and completely lose it. In a good way.