Damsel Update

Feint has gained a bit of courage these days, and Blurr is to blame. A bit of his impulsiveness and blaze` attitude towards danger have rubbed off on her, and it's a good thing; she was so shy should barely stand to be in a crowd of over three people. Now she feels like she might just be able to transform and start /flying/. Imagine that! After being in a hole in the ground for 500,000 years, -actual flight-. It makes the processor hiccup.
Checking out one of the places she remembers Blurr having been to here and there, she comes into Maccadams, moving out of the doorway and just stopping to look up at the stained glass ceiling. It's lovely, and certainly much better than a hundred thousand tons of solid ore.
"Hey! I know you!" This is probably not what Feint is eager to hear. All things considered, it's a warning: run, hide, beware, or she'll be back in captivity and chained to a creepy old lech of a mech faster than you can say buti'mblurr'sconjuxendura.
There's little threat in the face of the mech who addresses her. Hot Rod has an open, friendly expression. He's left his place at the bar to move toward her as she studies the stained glass ceiling. He tips his head back, mirroring her, but she's more interesting than the domed glass. "I think I do, anyway. Uhm, you probably don't remember me, do you?"
"I kind of do," Feint says, as she walks over to Hot Rod. "Blurr remembers you at least, and that's good enough for me." Strange way of putting it.
She decides to have a seat near Hot Rod. BRAVERY INDEED. "I believe... you were there at that... /underground place/," she says trying to do her best wink-wink nudge-nudge dance around the real name of the Institute.
It's not hard to read in Hot Rod's puffed delight the obvious belief that Blurr must've told Feint /all about/ his /buddy/ Hot Rod. "Yeah!" He studies her with obvious fascination. His gaze drops (maybe a bit rudely) to trace the lines that seal her spark chamber from view before lifting. "I'm pretty glad to see you out and about. I was kind of worried. The last time I saw you...." He trails off. Dot dot dot, indeed. "But you're fine! And Blurr's fine?"
"Well, as fine as he can be... there are gaps in his memory," Feint explains to Hot Rod matter-of-factly. "A lot of them in fact, someone's been erasing him a lot, and I intend to find out what's going on."
"And yes, it's a lot better to be in one piece. The last thing I remember seeing before waking up in Translucentia was my own spark being lifted out of my body. I think I screamed a good solid minute when I rebooted."
"That mech was a creep," Hot Rod tells Feint matter-of-factly, much the way he would say 'flames are awesome' or 'i like red'. These are just facts. "You're adjusting to the whole--." He breaks off and gestures at her frame. Upgrade? Downgrade? Sidegrade? "We weren't able to get everyone out of there, but I'm glad we could get you."
He seems less than surprised about Blurr: "I kind of heard about that. I know where that happened -- or where one of the sessions was, anyway," Hot Rod corrects. "One of my friends found him after one."
"Who was that?" Feint asks, curious, ready to become Dectective Sherlock Feint. Certainly someone pulled out of the bowels of Kaon a few months ago is ready to take on THAT job.
"I'm very fortunate to get out. Tarantulas said he was going to make me into his sparkmate, but I had to have a different body for him first. That's almost as bad as Solvent -- Blurr kind of forcibly bought him from me.... Solvent liked to keep me on a chain with an anti-transformation band on me. He was going to disassemble me to find out how my abilities worked."
Hot Rod gets as far as "Ar--" before thinking better of it. He frowns, the thought turned inward. "Maybe I shouldn't say. I guess she's already a target because of it." It's not like he has a long list of friends, that said: all of his caution means very little up against a force with eyes everywhere. "But I can tell her that you want to talk to her," he offers instead. "What is it that you do? There's way too much disassembling and dissection going on down there."
"Well, I see -everything-," Feint honestly answers. "Through the walls, through people's bodies, heat, radiation, communication grids, energon, sparks..." She trails off and then points towards the west. "About five hundred hics from here there's a lone green spark among all the blue ones, for example. You don't see those very often." She sighs. "I'm an outlier and people want them now. Depending on the ability they're even offering altmode exemption." Which is kind of a silly thing to say to someone who might as well be a total stranger, but she hasn't learned much about stranger danger yet.
Since he hasn't either, she's excused. Hot Rod lacks the good excuse of slavery and Instituting for his lack of common sense, but he is clearly -- gradually, slowly -- picking up traces of it here and there. See: not immediately naming Arcee. "Oh. Oh, wow," he says, and his eyes light. "You could find all their secret labs without even needing to go--." He breaks off, fairly tumbling over his own words in the rush of eagerness, and leans forward.
Hot Rod regards her with a focused intensity that's lightened somewhat by his smile. "Want to help shut those guys down?"
"Well, if I do that, I really should learn how to defend myself. I've been in the mines so long I don't even know how to fly. And I have /wings/!" she points out, waggling them slightly as they jut up from her shoulders.
"Also I'd better ask Blurr about that. He might want to help. Or he might forget about everything again, and I'd like to avoid that."
Hot Rod settles back with a thoughtful hum. His feet shift restlessly as he tucks them back beneath his chair. Sitting and thinking is a real challenge for him when he would so clearly rather be moving. "Yeah. You definitely should. We all should, actually. And having Blurr would be a real asset -- like with you. Why don't you ask him, ask him if he wants to help. Right now we're--" And he keeps saying that 'we' without any sense of how many wes there are. "--really just trying to get information." And yes, he sounds disappointed by that. "But it's so we can shut those places /down/. If you guys are in, I'll tell the others."
"Well, I'd certainly like to help, it's a lot more interesting than just sitting around in an apartment with nothing to do but play video games," Feint agrees. She taps her chin. "I don't suppose you know anyone that can teach me how to fight or fly, do you?"
"I'll find someone," Hot Rod recklessly promises. "Well -- to fight, anyway." He pauses, thinks over his words very carefully, and then says the first thing to come to mind anyway: "Fliers are kind of stuck up, really." After a brief pause, he adds, "No offense." So that's all better, right? "I don't know many. But I bet there are some training manuals or something."
"None taken, I'm more of a walker, myself," Feint laughs. "Does that make me less stuck up?"
Hot Rod grins in answer to Feint's laugh. "Sure. Although, really -- if you want to fly, you want to race, you want to walk. I'm good with it. Stuck up is about more than what you are. You think the Senate has categories for it? Like, if your alt-mode doesn't do anything, you get arrested for being smug?"
"I would think they'd -encourage- being smug," Feint jokes. "You must be at least this smug to enter the Senate Pavillions." Giggling a bit, she settles down. "Oh, did you want a drink? Blurr keeps trying to give me all this money and I don't even know what I'd do with it. I just try to find ways to help others with it."
"Well, of course there's a minimum level of smug for the Senate," Hot Rod agrees. "But you still probably better be careful not to smug outside your caste." Although he looks tempted -- free drink! -- he says, "There are probably some better places you could spend that. If you're looking for a good cause, you should take a look at Nyon. Blurr's giving you a bunch of money, huh?" He sounds ... nonjudgmental, but curious. "He sounds serious about taking care of you."
Well, he kind of..." Feint seems a little flustered. "... he asked me to be his conjunx endura."
Hot Rod should've said yes to that drink. That's the kind of thing that should be shared when he's midway through a drink and all set to cross-contaminate his intakes in a splutter. "Oh." He pauses. Then he goes, "Ohhhh," like suddenly everything makes sense, except actually it ends a little puzzled. "Congratulations?"
"Oh thank you. It's a little sudden and everything, I know, but... you'd be surprised how lonely he is. You'd think with all that fanfare and audiences commanding his attention he'd have plenty of friends, but he really doesn't. His managers pretty much keep him locked up when he's not out to perform. I only want to help, so I agreed to it." She sighs and looks down. "Though it's never going to be recognized. I'm a disposable, he's high caste. You can't bond to /property/ you know, so we just eloped." Bad decisions? Check.
Hot Rod smiles again, but it's gentler than his earlier grin. For all that Feint's fluster could make her an easy target for teasing, he holds back. "You know, I might not be that surprised. He was kind of down, thinking you'd left him. Maybe that was just more of them messing with his processor. It's a bunch of scrap, that caste stuff." He doesn't exactly shout that any more than he did his Senate sassing, but neither does he make much effort to keep it all at a whispered tone. "What's really important is that you care about each other, right?" He says this like someone who has learned everything he knows about relationships from vids.
"Agreed, and we do," Feint assures. She hasn't even had the benefit of the vids. "Did you know he's only fifteen revolutions old? He needs someone to look out for him. I know I'm only five hundred thousand but that's much older than fifteen. I've been trying to help him understand what it's like to be a disposable, to work in Blaster City - before it blew up anyways - and that seems to be something that keeps getting erased. It's like someone doesn't want him to understand how the world actually -is-."
This too would be a moment well-timed for a sputter. Instead, Hot Rod stalls, staring at Feint. "Fifteen?" He stops, then says again, "/Fifteen/?" The second time is louder, like it will make more sense that way.
"Yes, fifteen -- don't tell him I told you that, but if he acts like he doesn't understand reality? That'd be why," Feint responds. "He's a new build, IAA's design."
Hot Rod makes a little gesture -- cross his spark -- to signify the secret is safe, but he still looks a little stunned. "So ... when he came out of nowhere and started winning everything, he really came out of nowhere. Wow. Maybe those lessons on fighting should include some lessons on, uh, life."
Feint nods and grimmaces. "Yeaaaah. I'm doing my best, but he's kind of.... Blurr. Thinks he knows everything already. The huge mass of damaged memory files aren't helping him either."
The reminder of the memory damage causes Hot Rod's temper to flash hot in obvious outrage. "I can't believe they'd just do that to him. You know, he might be high caste, but it sounds like he's basically just a toy for them. Whoever it is that's behind those clinics, the IAA, everything: they think everyone is just there for them to play with."
"Yes, and something needs to be done about it," Feint affirms. "I've been bought and sold one too many times for my liking. I'd like to help you rescue people from that awful laboratory -- do you know of anywhere I can find you when I need to?"
"Here." First Hot Rod gives her his contact information, but then he says, "If you can't find me here, you can check in the Hall of Records." Because he /really/ looks like a thoughtful, studious type, right? "I really hope that you and Blurr both decide you can help. You both could bring a lot to the table when it comes to shutting those guys down."
Feint takes the information and files it into her communications chip. "Thank you. I'd like to get Blurr to help, but I need to find a way to keep him from being erased all the time. I don't think his handlers know what we've decided and I'm not sure they're going to be happy about it. On top of that, I need to learn how to control my abilities. I'm doing a good job of it right now, but if I start to panic, well... it makes everyone else hallucenate."
"There's a guy down there who knows like -- everything," Hot Rod says, full of faith in someone he's met only /once/. He clearly has zero problem with snap character judgment calls. See also: the current conversation. No sooner has he said this than there's a beep-beep of his own comm that draws his attention away. He hops to his feet. "Oops. I've -- got to go meet someone. About something." He looks a little shifty, so whatever it is can /only/ be for a good cause, see also: illegal. "Take care of yourself, okay? And Blurr."
Feint nods. Hmm, hall of records huh? It's worth checking out. "Thank you. Be safe!" she says, wishing him well.
Hot Rod flashes her a cocky sort of grin before speeding off: "No way. That sounds boring. I'll just be fast." And then he's gone, fast as he can -- though hardly speedy to someone who is used to Blurr speed. Oh well.