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In Enzo's defence, the pink thing at the end of the Bar has been inert lately. He really didn't think it a problem to go to that end for an order of chips.

Oh, how wrong he was.

He realizes his mistake as the music begins and he starts dancing involuntarily.

Thank goodness he hadn't picked up the chips yet.

[Uh-oh, the Karaoke Machine's on! Watch the ~~horror~~fun, or get ensnared yourself!]

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"That's cool." And awful nice of him. The garage sounds a bit better than the driveway, at least. He supposes it must be comfortable if you're a car.

"You're Bumblebee, right?"

The recording Bumblebee plays back is from the start of some concert, recorded live by a local radio station: "The one! The only!", and he bows. (And follows it up with a tv commercial's chirrup of "Accept no substitutions!")

Enzo laughs at this. "Uncle Optimus told me about you. I've got one of your plushies."

"Oh! You would be Enzo Matrix?" Bumblebee says. "I should have guessed, but I didn't scan. It's a pleasure to meet you."

"Uh-huh! Good to meet you, too!"

"How are things going in Mainframe? Isaac is doing well, but I think you knew that already."

He nods - they have indeed been in periodic touch.

"Pretty good, but I'm not in Mainframe, I'm attending the Academy in the Supercomputer."

"The-" Bumblebee shuffles through his files a moment. "Oh. For Guardian training? How far along are you on that?"

"I'm only on my second term. There's ten more."

"Good luck," Bumblebee says sincerely. "The educational period often feels like spending a year with two pints of lubricant in a system that needs three to run, but it's worth it in the end."

An odd simile from Enzo's perspective, but he nods. "I guess I gotta know how to mend stuff before I can do it." (The 'defend' part usually seems a little more straightforward, although there is still much fine-tuning.) "And I'm already getting better at fighting. Did you have to go to school?"

Edited 2008-08-03 05:29 (UTC)

"I had most of my necessary programming on file when I was incepted, and downloaded the rest afterwards," says Bumblebee. "The trick was to live it. That gave the knowledge meaning."

"Yeah, but they won't let me live it yet."

Problem is, sprites live at such a rate that the downloading takes a lot longer to them.

"As I said... two pints in a three pint system. It will pass before you know it. I lived under Sunstreaker and Sideswipe's tutelage for thousands of years. It takes time, sometimes."

O_O

"Thousands of years?"

Enzo is suddenly feeling a lot better about his twelve terms.

Bumblebee dips his head. "I'm forty thousand Earth years old, Enzo. I left Cybertron in search of the Allspark ten thousand years ago."

There's a pause.

"And I'm the youngest Autobot on Earth."

Enzo already knew that Cybertronians live a really long time, but somehow he didn't get that even schooling would take thousands of years.

"And you don't live slower than humans, do you?"

"No," says Bumblebee. "Just longer."

"Man. That's too much school."

"It wasn't exactly school," Bumblebee says, "so much as tutoring. Ironhide had group training more than I did. What I had was more like living with a pair of teachers, and I lived with them until they had taught me enough to live on my own."

"Living with teachers? That's... actually, that sounds like living with Dot." Never mind.

"That's how we did it," says Bumblebee. "New incepts were assigned mentors within a few solar cycles of being brought online, and sent to live with them. They were usually senior members of whatever cohort we were built to work with."

"What's a cohort?"

"A unit of mechs organized around a common purpose and optimized to work together," says Bumblebee. "A little like a military unit as humans know them, and a little like a family. Mine was a cohort of messengers and investigators; I was built as a courier mech, originally."

"Really? I had a delivery service for a while!"