shatterverse | (no subject)

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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."