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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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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.

"... Hey, maybe you know," Thrust says, head swivelling to look at Gabriel. "The whole 'hey, welcome to a foreign planet, hope you speak the language' thing-- is it just planetary or is it some kind of interdimensional deal, too? The first guy I met is...

"Uh, a little primitive," Thrust concludes. Oliver probably wouldn't like it if he heard it, but what Oliver isn't there to hear isn't any less true. It's not like he means it in a you Og's woman now way, after all.

"Stephen's current theory involves wormholes," he offers. "So yes, interdimensional. --Stephen's my, ah, friend. I met him here."

The slight stutter before friend is a telltale mark of Gabe's nervousness.

"Frag," Thrust declares. That was definitely cussing. "Was getting the idea it worked like that, but I was hopin' if I sent up a distress signal somebody'd pick it up."

He's probably going to try anyway, he's just not going to hurry a whole lot.

"This Stephen of yours a scientist or somethin'?" It's possible that 'of yours' does not, in point of fact, denote anything but the claimed friendship, or that Gabriel knows Stephen and Thrust does not.

"He's a genius," Gabriel says proudly. "He builds things. Invents them."

He had a modified fighter jet named Darth Vader about whom he speaks in disturbingly familiar terms on occasion, but Gabe is wise enough to omit that part. And anyways, Vader languishes back in Steve's home universe.

"I'm sure you'll be seeing him around soon. He'd love the chance to look at something like this."

A nod to the converter. Not that Steve wouldn't also love the chance to look at something like Thrust, but Gabriel is polite enough to omit that, too. Barely.

Thrust's fighter jet was called Jetstorm, but if Thrust speaks about 'Storm in familiar terms, it's sort of because they were best friends. (Jetstorm was the pretty one.)

"Bet he would. Most advanced fuel source I saw on the way out here was petroleum based." One more fiddling, and one more test, though this one involves the 'waste' chip being dropped into the conversion tank instead of just grass.

Well, it'll be faster that way.

"If he does show up, remind him about the 'do not touch' sign early on or he'll be at it with a wrench before you can blink twice."

Pause.

"If you blink."

He looks straight at Gabriel, and his optics wink out, then flicker back on again. "I blink. Don't have to, but I can." It comes out sounding amused.

"That sign's just there because it was shorter than 'Please do not feed your fingers to the Vehicon,'" Thrust goes on. "If he wants the schematics, I can probably do somethin' about that."

Two vending machines is better than one. (Steve's would probably look better.)

"I'm sure he'd appreciate it," Gabe allows.

Understatement. Of. The. Year.

(And, he likes to think, Steve's would probably work better too. But Gabriel is slightly biased on the subject of Stephen Bell and his genius.)

Stephen Bell was not trying to build a complicated matter-to-energy converter while on a road trip with a very nice guy with some very deep-seated prejudices against nonhumans going it will take me that much longer if I also have to rig a car so I can drive it so I can haul the refuelling station around like it was some kind of mantra. But at least Thrust knows exactly what was distracting him that he screwed up?

"Hey, if it keeps him from takin' this one apart, no problem. Starving from power-drain ain't what you'd call a party."

Thrust examines the new-- slightly larger, in fact-- energon chip.

It is very faintly blue. Just as it should be. "Now that's what I'm talkin' about."

"Oh, he'd put it back together afterwards. Immediately."

And if he couldn't manage it he'd make Gabriel help.

"But of course it would be better all round for him to build his own."

"Probably get the settings right the first time, too." And also not get drunk off his aft from the bright glowing pink results of fragging up the works.

Thrust has a heap of weeds, grass and dirt clods which he starts packing into the conversion tank, tightly this time. "... Hey, if you want to show him something to get him thinkin--" Thrust holds out the energon chip. "Otherwise I'll just recycle it into a full cube."

Hey, it's shiny, right?

"Well, if not having one of these means you starve I can imagine you were in something of a rush."

...OOH SHINY.

"Thank you!" He accepts the chip, carefully tucking it into a pocket. "I'm sure he can occupy himself for hours studying this."

~~But first he will be occupied for hours studying other things.~~

"I was startin' to get a little tired of the guy drivin' the van, too. Think I just forgot to check which settings specs I was usin' once or twice because I was in such a fraggin' hurry to get it done." Usually, Thrust knows he's cool. Right now, he knows he was a Tankorr-level moron.

"Oh, hey, bout the chip. Don't let him throw it at anything." It's too small to go boom, but it could probably go snap, anyway.

"I won't."

Not that any such throwing is likely. Then again, you never know.

"Thank you."

"Chip that size wouldn't do much but blow itself out, but still." Thrust wouldn't even feel it, but on a human it might sting like a son of a glitch. Better safe than sorry.

"It's volatile?"

That talent doesn't tell him everything.

"Good to know."

"It's a fuel source," Thrust says, as though that explains everything. Maybe to Thrust it does-- most of the fuels Cybertronians have used with any efficiency have been unstable or volatile, and Thrust understands that humans use gasoline and diesel, neither of which belong around open flame or intense heat sources. "Pretty much harmless unless the casing gets cracked, though. If you threw a cube this size--" he gestures at the toaster oven-- "You'd get a real shallow crater and knock us both on our afts. Blow an energon cube in an energon storage facility, though..."

Thrust has no understanding of setting up dominoes just to watch them fall, or he'd use it as an analogy.

"I'll remember."

Boom.

Smart guy. And hey, his gender is now two for three, which is probably a good thing!

"So how'd you end up meeting your friend?" Thrust asks, in no small part because he's got nothing better to do than sit around and try to keep people from poking his energon.

"The coast of California. We showed up together in the company of a kraken."

He waves a hand to the pond.

"Have you met Spots?"

"... No. Who's Spots and what's a kraken?" Thrust's datatrax basically says 'mythological sea monster; Norse, but occasionally attributed to the Greek' and not much more.

... Okay hey wait a klik. Sea monster and he's waving at the pond and Thrust has a sneaking suspicion they're going to need a bigger pond someday.

"We thought he was a baculite at first. He's-- ah, I probably can't offer a better explanation than a quick visit could give you. We're not sure of much about him other than that he's small, young, cute, and has a lot of tentacles. And eats ham."

Which Gabriel suspects is a substitute for human flesh, but that's not the sort of thing one says in public.

"Huh. You'd think he'd eat fish." So Gabriel's idea of cute involves tentacles. That's different. Although he does do something that secures the door of the toaster oven, and at least looks ready to follow Gabe, if Gabe's heading toward the water. "I don't think animals like me much," Thrust admits. "Or at least thhe horse didn't."

"Spots likes everyone," he admits as he heads pondward. "He's rather indiscriminate with his affections, although I'm not sure how he'll react to machine life."

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