milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

ironhide,
yuna

(no subject)

It's... possible Yuna overdid it on hot rum toddies last night. Not extravagantly, but enough that she chose to spend the night in Milliways. This morning she had a small headache, but it's passed by now, and she's more-or-less cheerfully marking time by the fire; when she goes home, she'll need to go to sleep, so she needs to wait until she's tired to go back.

In the mean-time, she's leaning back on a couch, working on the Rubix Cube she got in Ray's New York. She's still wearing a simple blue shift, and she's still barefoot. As her hands move quickly over the surface of the cube, twisting and ratcheting, her large amber ring flashes in the firelight.

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The puzzle might get a look at some point, but not just yet. For now, Ironhide's just come in from a round of considering what he knows about the humans, and he's vaguely wondering just how much more he really wants to know. But mostly, he's getting a beer. Specifically, something called Riggwelter (http://www.blacksheepbrewery.com/Beers/BottledBeers/Riggwelter.aspx).

He's not sure how much he likes this one yet, but he's willing to give it a chance.

Yuna has met at least one intelligent machina, but Prime is significantly less menacing than Ironhide; there's a real resemblance between this 'rowboat' and the machina she's been encountering day after day in the Thunder Plains.

His actions--moving to the Bar, ordering a beer--ought to be enough, but she's caught off-guard. She was relaxing, and in the sudden desperate raising of her guard, the fine details slip past.

She's on her feet, the cube bouncing under the couch (with four sides done, alas), and in a graceful motion and a blaze of light, she's summoning Valefor. Without a staff, which she would've told you she couldn't do.

The aeon seems to swoop into the space in the rafters from far away, despite there not being a far to be away in.

The sudden sharp movement in the periphery catches Ironhide's attention; the beer forgotten in his hand, he looks up.

Huh. That's new.

"What're you looking at?" he demands of the aeon. Hey, around here he might get an answer.

The aeon cannot talk; it screams, a hunting bird's shriek. It hovers in the air, wings flapping far too slowly to support it. Yuna can, although her breath is coming fast and rough.

"You can talk," she says tensely. "You--you're like--" It was a while ago, but Yuna remembers people, even when they aren't the kind of people she normally thinks of as people. "--like Optimus? A rowboat?"

She's focusing now on the beer in one metal hand, and starting to feel embarassed.

Ironhide's optic shutters slant and narrow the blue glare of his eyes before he turns and looks at the frightened human- although he's still keeping a good part of his attention on the hovering thing. "Yeah, I am," he says. "Optimus is my people's leader and my supreme commander. Who're you?"

He doesn't tend to give his designation first if he can help it, and anyway, he's still trying to figure out what the deal is with that thing with the wings.

Definitely embarassed now. But also--not as trusting as she was once. And the sensation of summoning Valefor, as always, makes her feel both braver and more desperate than herself; edgy, impulsive and tense as a coiled spring.

"My name is Yuna," she says. "There are a lot of machina in my world that attack humans on sight. I've been fighting a lot of them lately."

Ironhide grunts. "Any of 'em call themselves Decepticons?" he asks.

Because, honestly, that's the first thing he thinks of when he hears about machines that attack humans on sight, or anywhere close to on sight.

"They don't call themselves anything. They don't talk. They just kill." She lets out a long, shuddery breath, and makes an odd hand gesture; a bird flying away.

Valefor claps his wings, and vanishes.

"Huh. Not from my planet, then. We don't use drones in combat."

He remembers the beer, and starts undoing the top of the bottle with one hand.

"My designation's Ironhide. I come from a world where all the life is robotic, like me and Prime. And the first rule we've got on Earth is that we don't hurt humans. Not that I don't get tempted sometimes, but that's right there up front."

He had to deal with Lissar's father last night. Temptation doesn't even begin to cover it.

"That's what he said, too," she says. "I'm sorry I startled."

Ironhide waves a hand vaguely. "I scared the exhaust out of two hundred humans yesterday just by walking into the room. Guess I oughta expect a little of that around here too, from time to time."

"Do you turn into another shape, like Optimus?" she asks, curious.

She wonders what Rikku would make of him.

"Yup," says Ironhide. "All my people do. Except Rad, but he's a special case. Optimus show you his alt mode?"

She nods. "He turned into a machina vehicle, like I had seen on Earth, but smaller. He said the Bar made him smaller, that he would be much bigger in his world."

"Yeah, it's the same for me," says Ironhide. "Different vehicle, but same deal."

He sets the beer down and steps away from the Bar. There's a sound (http://www.box.net/shared/xenlyml62m).

"Like this," says the severely miniaturized Topkick.

"Oh!" She stands by her opinion that miniaturized trucks of all kinds are adorable. She refrains from clapping her hands as a sop to Ironhide's obvious dignity, however.

"Yes, I've seen vehicles like that in New York City."

Yeah. Current icon to the contrary, Ironhide doesn't do adorable.

"You've been to New York?" says the truck. "Never been through there myself. We passed through Fort Dix on the way to and from Qatar, but that's as far north as we got."

"It's the only place on Earth that I've been," she says. "I have a friend who took us there."

The truck grunts, and with the sound of metal on metal and another electronic sound (http://www.box.net/shared/5o84ysut52), shifts back into Ironhide's form. "I'm gonna have to check it out someday," he says. "Sounds like an interesting place."

And probably an easy target if Starscream comes back looking for revenge, since it's a tight cluster of humans in an area the Autobots can't reach quickly.

"It's enormous. And--confusing, for me. Maybe it would be different, if you're used to that kind of place. But so much of it was so different from what I know that it was just, meaningless. Buildings like mountains, and machina like yours moving everywhere, so fast."

"But I had a nice time, with what I did understand."

"I'm still getting used to organic life," Ironhide allows. "Plants. We didn't have plants on Cybertron. Or fish, or half the moving creatures you do."

"That's what Optimus said," she says again. "I have to admit, I don't really understand how a world of machina would work."

Machina are made things. Are they, despite appearances, living things? What happens to them when they die?

It's a question that intrigues both halves of her, Al Bhed and Yevonite, and it also seems incredibly rude.

A human would be sipping his beer right now because he needed the fortification. Ironhide gets no such reaction from alcohol; he's drinking it because he likes the taste, and because he's thinking how to phrase this.

"Before the count of recorded time began," he finally says, "the Cube moved in space. Nobody knows where it came from, or who built it, or how, or why. The ancients said it held the spark of a being called Primus, or the Allspark- the soul from which all souls come, I think you humans'd say. Anyway, recorded time began when the Cube landed on a lifeless ball of rock, and reached out its power to assemble the material of the planet into machines, and then give those machines life. That ball of rock became Cybertron, and the first thirteen machines it brought together were the first generation of my people. All other life on Cybertron, ever, came from the Cube- either it acted on its own, or we used it to bring some new mech to life ourselves."

She nods slowly, absorbing this. "This... spark, was held inside a cube? In an object?"

"For all our history," Ironhide says. "Until the Cube had to be destroyed, to keep it out of evil hands."

He's not gonna think about how that meant cutting off their own future at the knees just now. Thanks to Rad... well, there might, just might, be a chance.

"Destroyed?" she says. "But what happened to the, the Allspark, then? And what will happen to your people?"

"If it really was what the legends say it was," says Ironhide, "then the Allspark still exists, and Primus is out there somewhere, probably looking to take on a new form somewhere in the universe. Out of reach of the mechs who'd turn the old one to making an army of slaves to conquer everything that exists, preferably. As far as our people..." He sighs. "We're working on that. We don't know how to return life to our world just yet, but there's a mech from another universe who's trying. We'll see if he has the kind of success we'd need."

An army of slaves to conquer everything that exists.

Maybe that's what it is, she thinks, trying to fit this into the growing theological tangle in her mind.

"I hope so," she says. "Good luck." She hesitates, and then adds, "My cousin knows something about machina--and I know something about the magic of life-force and spirits, at least as it works in our world."

"We don't have anything like what you humans call magic," Ironhide says. "None of our people do. Life-force is just our part of the Allspark- that's where it comes from, and that's where it returns when we die."

Yuna has to listen carefully to that, because behind the magic of Milliways translation, she's hearing the same words again and again; it's only by paying attention to emphasis and usage that she can follow. "In my world--there's not really any difference, between the life-force, and magic, and... what you call the Allspark. We say the Light."

Ironhide grunts, nodding. "All right," he says. "Guess I can see that. How's it work for your people?"

"Well--the life of all living things flows through the core of our world. It begins there, and when we die our spirits are sent back there to rest, while the life-force returns to the world."

"All the magic we can do involves manipulating that force, to move it or shape it around a spirit or dream or idea."

This gets some consideration. "Yeah, that's not us," he says at last. "We don't manipulate any of that force. Not unless you count using the Cube to incept a spark into a new mech."

That takes a moment of parsing, as well, and then she colors. "We do that, um, without any magic. Or, um, instruments."

"I know," says Ironhide dryly.

He looked over Bumblebee's shoulder once when the smaller mech was pulling in some downloads.

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