milliways_bar | (no subject)

Current Music: Click the link. You know you want to.

Entry tags:

(no subject)

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!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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!"

"Oh? Was this at the Academy, or did you run it before leaving Mainframe?" Bumblebee asks, interested.

"Before leaving. It was my after-school function, but I'm way too busy at the Academy."

Bumblebee nods. "Were you good at it?"

"Uh-huh!"

He was, actually, but the cocky expression he's wearing might make Bee want to ask someone else's opinion.

Bee would smile at that if his face were built for it. That's almost exactly the same expression he remembers from Sideswipe back home, when asked if he could pull a particular mission off.

How Bumblebee got raised by a pair of rampaging cocksure egotists and came out as a reasonably tolerable mech is a testament to the power of programming.

"Did you turn the business over to someone else when you entered the Academy, or was it simply allowed to expire?"

"Expire. It wasn't a big business, it was just me."

It's like with a lemonade stand. You don't need to hand it over to another kid, they can haul their own card table out to the sidewalk and it's just the same.

"Just wondering," Bumblebee says. "It's always interesting to see how other races develop and handle themselves over time."

"You said you used to be a courier? What about now?"

"The war changed that," says Bumblebee, a little more quietly. "When I saw what was happening I joined Optimus Prime's militia. They asked me to be a scout instead. I've been doing that ever since."