>>41542357"Teach me?" Jet parroted dumbly, needing a moment for the proper (the
correct) mental connections to pair up before he realized what she meant. "Oh," he half-smiled self-consciously to signal he'd answered his own question. Teach him to
read. I mean, it
sounded like a good idea, at least; he'd sometimes wondered what some of those yellow-and-black chevron-bordered warning said, covered in rust and thoroughly ignored as they were as he and his buddies had trudged past them every day, but wonder had never properly sparked with resolve to create the desire to actually find
out what they said... which was honestly probably for the better, because if
any of the miners could have read those signs they probably would have been put down by riot droids the same day. That life, however, was behind him, and he'd already shown just how more important being able to actually understand what all those tiny squiggles would be for him now that more was expected of him than just being another loyal, disheartened Imperial drone. "I mean, sure," he replied, trying to not be too distracted by the way he was going through the same mental struggle of wondering if she would take his hand or not.
He was too preoccupied with trying to find ways to weasel out of being tutored by her, now that he'd had a few seconds to properly construct a few scenarios in his mind and his mind alone of how utterly humiliating it would be for her to see, really, truly
see just how uneducated he was.
"I just really don't, uh..." He tried starting out, 'try' being the key part of that sentence. "Where do you even start with something like that?"
There. A bullet-proof defense if ever he'd seen one before.
(He hadn't.)
>>41542369"
Gawd!" Sabot guffawed at the sight of what was one of the most ridiculous personal weapons he'd ever seen. He strode over, smoldering eyes affixed to the ludicrous weapons platform as the Mag'har reached up to take one of the twelve barrels between thumb and forefinger, giving it a testing pull to see if the spin-up device would let it swing around at all out of sheer curiosity to see it doing just that. Whether his hands-on-ness would be rewarded or not, however, didn't change how he saw the bore diameter on the other barrel, how you could stick your whole head inside of it with ease, and then did just that with all the foresight you'd expect of someone who had at least a few ignominious deaths on his record. "'Zog-off' is selling it a little short, buddy," he marveled, the first half of the sentence comically echoing from inside the deffgun's barrel before he pulled his mug out to continue admiring the rest of it, giving special care to the golden helmet as he squatted down just enough to be 'eye-level' with it, tilting his head curiously and tapping it to watch it wiggle back and forth a bit.
"Ostentatious little fucker, whoever he was," Sabot muttered to himself; whoever it had belonged to, he already had the feeling the galaxy didn't miss their presence terribly much.
>>41542413One part of Cybertronian culture that a lot of organics had trouble with was the concept of giant metal robots needing psychologists. "Who the hell would make a robot with mental issues?" they asked. "A god whose goals exceeded his means," a few of the more embittered of those robots would probably reply, but once they would expound on their culture a bit, more than a few of those organic beings might have been surprised to learn just how similar Transformer culture was to their own, one of the biggest differences being how cultural shifts were measured in eons and not decades. A lifespan of several million years left plenty of time for quirks to develop in the brain module and even more time for society to recognize the need for some of their own to
address those quirks.
That, however, left nothing to be said for when that society suddenly went down in flames and both sides were literally mass-producing soldiers. Not citizens;
soldiers. Jinx had been one of those soldiers, and thrown from the crucible of war into the belly of a galaxy that, from her perspective, hated and feared her species had only exacerbated whatever particular quirks
her brain module had developed from coming into existence so quickly and so Primus-damned violently.
All of that to say, while Grind might not have had proper training as a psychologist, Jinx was hardly a mystery to him.
Her body language said everything it needed to, even if it would have happened too quickly for anyone not used to 'discarded' MTOs to register. First she was visibly confused at someone she hadn't been with upon landing on the planet giving her orders. Next she
visibly tensed up as those bright violet optics swept Grind's chassis. It might have seemed weird, but there was no telling how many times he had been scanned just like that... aside from it being enough times to almost certainly be spark-crushing and exhausting by now.
It wasn't enough for her paranoid mind that people were hurt and needed help. It wasn't enough for her that he was a Transformer, that he was one of her people after she'd spent years in exile. There was only one question that mattered to her, and it probably broke his spark to see the suspicion on her face when she couldn't immediately answer it by his lack of livery.
Autobot or Decepticon?
Friend or Foe?
That was all that mattered.
That was all that they had made matter to her.Whatever comment about "Who died and made
you Prime," however, would be forgotten almost as soon as the Major made her appearance; when made to choose between taking orders from a Cybertronian and from a jumped-up human officer, the choice suddenly became much easier...
