Reunions, Apologies

Cybertron has been increasingly tumultuous, and Nautica's life has been no exception to this. In the wake of the Institute adventure (and then witnessing and interfering with an assassination attempt), Nautica has decided to stick close to the embassy for a while. So it is that she's standing once again in her old workshop, looking over her available tools with a mildly wistful expression. Whatever else you want to say about the Institute -- and oh, is there a lot to say! -- they at least equipped the labs well.
Clanking into the workshop on heavy steps as though she belongs there, Chromia stops past the threshhold and leans back aganst the framing of the door, her arms folding across her chest, her hip canting to scrape its surface as she crosses her feet, half-wheel set against the line of her opposite calf. She waits there for a moment, not because she doesn't have anything to say, but maybe because she's not sure where to start, and watches her friend in this meagre approximation of her natural habitat.
Nautica glances up -- her amica endura may be many things, but quiet is not usually one of them -- and offers a slightly less effusive smile than usual in greeting. "Hey, Chromia. Sorry... I guess I didn't really get around to those self-defense lessons." She sounds as if she's apologizing for more than that, somehow.
"Don't you apologize to me," Chromia says in a sudden rush of heat a little inappropriate to tone and setting. She strides across the distance between them, clank, clank, clank. "You shut that off this instant."
"But I really /am/," Nautica replies to the other Camien, in a surprisingly firm tone. Evidently she's developed a little bit of steel in her spark from her time in that hellhole. "I got in over my head, without backup, and ended up in a situation where I couldn't go /get/ backup, not easily."
"You shouldn't have done it. You should have listened to me. You should have protected yourself. But you shouldn't apologize to me," Chromia insists with all the fire of that long burning frustration, of all those hours, days, she spent scrabbling at imaginary walls, trying to find a way to get in at Nautica where she could not. Having closed the physical gap between them, she stops before Nautica and lifts her hands to grip her by either arm, her glow-bright gaze intense in the frame of her winged, helmed features. "What you should do is make sure it damned well /never/ happens again."
"I promise I won't ever be unprepared like that again," Nautica assures Chromia, which is probably not at all what Chromia intended to extract in the way of promises.
Chromia gives her a look that does, indeed, bespeak a certain level of dissatisfaction with this. For all that physical demonstrativeness that does not involve violence is hardly her strong suit, she grips her hard and stands there for a moment looking fierce, and then pulls her the rest of the way into an embrace that does not /actually/ scrape anything, but seems strong enough to do so. "I kept thinking I was going to find you and beat the scrap out of you for doing it to me," she says. You know. Like a loving friend.
Something in Nautica seems to give way, and she leans into the embrace. "I would've been happy for it," she admits. "Because at least that way I would've seen you. /Primus/, I missed you all, but I was afraid to go near you with that thing in my head. It would've drawn his attention to you, and I couldn't let that happen."
"Let me tell you I'll give him /my/ attention," Chromia says with a deepset glower as she straightens away again. She frowns at Nautica. "Right through his head with my axe."
Nautica shakes her head. "No! You can't, Chromia," she replies fiercely. "He's too respected; most people think he's this genius, brilliant doctor. Going after him will just make everyone think you're crazy. You'd be seen as a dissident. And besides, he has too many resources to draw on. Just... wait, for now. Sooner or later, there'll be an opportunity." Which is perhaps an unusually vengeful statement to come from the engineer.
"I don't /care/," Chromia starts to say, but she closes her mouth again over the fume. Her mouth firms and her jaw sets, her head tilting in a slow nod. "Fine," she backs down a little. "Fine. I'll wait. But if he happens to run into me in a dark alley somewhere away from his resources, he's going to be sorry about it."
"If he does that, I'll /help/," Nautica replies darkly, one hand straying to the wrench at her side almost unconsciously. She sinks back to half-sit against her workbench, watching the other femme for a moment. Finally, she says, "I still want to learn to fight. If you're still willing to teach me."
Chromia starts to answer, and then she laughs. After a beat's pause, she laughs again. "There will be ample opportunity," she says, not without rue. She then explains: "I told that ... hyperactive mech with the aggressive paint that I would help train him and his little friends if he could get you out."
"What, Hot Rod?" Nautica seems about to say more, but then pauses as if thinking better of it. Instead, she settles on, "He has a posse now?"
"I suppose." Chromia looks and sounds dubious. "I suppose we'll see if he remembers to collect," she says, with a faint edge of dry humor amidst these words. People generally remember to collect favors they are owed, don't you find. "Either way, I'll make sure we have time to train."
Nautica turns now, looking away from Chromia as she examines all the things arrayed on her workbench. "I think... he might not be wrong. There's so much wrong on this planet. And it all comes from one place, and I don't know how to /fix/ it." Because, being a mechanic, she feels the need to fix things /somehow/.
"You -- /we/ -- don't have the leverage." Chromia takes a half-step back, bracing her hands against a surface behind her, one knee bent and gaze narrowing a little with the sardonic hook of her mouth. "If this planet really /is/ going to be /our/ problem, we're going to need a bigger wrench."
"I don't know if there's a wrench big enough. The thing is... the thing that really /kills/ me inside..." Nautica trails off, and then admits with a sort of quiet frustration, "He's /right/. I mean, I can't condone how he did it, but... that monster at the Institute is /right/ about some of it."
"So?" Chromia widens her eyes at Nautica, and then narrows her gaze again as she leans back, her mouth thinning a little with internal pressure. "So what? Nobody ever got to be evil by setting out to be, Nautica."
"No, I meant..." Nautica makes a noise of frustration as she tries to express herself and can't find the words. After a moment, she turns around from the workbench once again, regarding her friend thoughtfully. "Chromia, do you know what the state of the energon supplies on this planet is?"
Chromia thinks about it, her head tilting slightly to one side as she goes over the data that she has seen, the rumors that she has heard, and the general /aura/ of the place since her arrival. As pop culture ignorant as she is, and as removed from certain avenues of life, her answer when she speaks it still comes out to be the reasonable hypothesis of, "Fragged?"
"That's... more or less accurate," Nautica says finally, with a sort of wry edge to the words. "There's shortages. Not everyone's caught on yet, but there are, and they're getting worse. That's what so much of what's broken stems from. Stratify society into castes and you can justify giving people less. Keep everything locked down, and you can prevent panic. But..." She hesitates.
"Beats mass slaughter for population control." Chromia is sure quick to recognize where worst case scenrios are being spun to, isn't she?
"The insecticons can eat raw matter -- rubble, debris, /other bots/ -- and convert it to energy," Nautica says finally. "That's why Pharma had a bunch of them prisoner. He kept taking them apart to figure out how that worked. He wanted to replicate the system, solve the energon shortages that way. He didn't care what it did to /them/, even though they're sentient. Even though one of them could be easily as smart as Pharma himself if given the chance... maybe even on my level, I don't know." Clearly, she rates her intellect above the crazy medic's.
"It's a load of junk," Chromia comes out with after a pause for thought. She gives her highest intellect friend a mulish look, scowl written into her brow, as she says: "What this whole planet full of idiots has is this oppressive system based on controlling the need for energy by controlling the people, but the way to ensure function in times of scarcity is to build consensus, not ... stricture. You can't find solutions to problems just by crushing everything in your tyrant fist. If the Insecticons can help, you should find out what they want and find out a way to get them to want to help." After a beat, Chromia adds with complacent certainty: "Windblade could probably do it."
"I know! Pharma called me short-sighted. But I tried to think 'what would Windblade' do, and tried to build a friendship -- an alliance -- with the insecticons. I rebuilt them to be stronger, faster..." Wait, what? Nautica, that's maybe a bad idea. "...so they could help in the escape. But they've all been so abused for so long by the other Cybertronians, I don't know that most would /want/ to help. I think they'd be happy to see the planet burn and try to run it better themselves."
Considering for a moment, Chromia snorts. "I /sympathize/," she says with a dour shade of humor. She does not seem to disapprove of Nautica's helpful upgrdes to the Insecticons. Maybe it doesn't immediately occur to her that it's a little above and beyond what would Windblade do. "Stupid scrap heap of a planet anyway. Except for the part where we're stuck on it."
"Maybe I'm not cut out for this whole 'Autobot' thing," Nautica admits, as little sadly. "I don't know that I trust the Senate enough anymore to really work with them. I'm pretty sure they knew exactly what was happening at the Institute... but I can't /tell/ anyone that, or they'll think I'm paranoid. Or one of those Decepticon dissidents. And I have some other things to puzzle through..."
"Well, at least you've still got us," Chromia says with staunch firmness, straightening away from her lean. "I'm not going to stop doing my job -- I mean, Orion Pax and the Autobots were part of getting you out of there, even if they were part of getting you stuck in there in the first place. But that doesn't mean that I like the /Senate/ here, because ... well, I trust your logic."
"I just wish there was a way I could /do/ something," Nautica admits, clearly frustrated by her inability to. She's not a fighter, and sometimes it seems like science can't solve everything. "Maybe I should go with you to talk to Hot Rod's group, see if there's anything I can do to repay him for helping get me out."
"I'm sure he'd be delighted. Careful, though." Chromia makes a very expressive face. "He trusts pretty easy for a revolutionary, maybe."
"There are worse things than trusting easily," Nautica replies, perhaps just a /smidge/ defensively.
The glance that Chromia gives Nautica now speaks volumes. She says only, "Perhaps," though, before a slight shake of her head. "He certainly worked very hard, and cared very hard, to get you out. I don't have any complaints, really. Just a caution."
"Hrm." Nautica nods once, apparently taking this under advisement. After a moment, she decides to change the topic. "So, I met a giant genius spider who helped me with the escape a little. I'm also pretty sure he's the one who woke up the insecticons and taught them to speak our language instead of theirs, and I kind of think he may be older than most living Cybertronians."
Chromia starts to answer, and then stops. She shifts her weight, leaning her brace more on one hip than the other, and blinks in a flicker of glow-bright eyes. "That sounds /bizarre/," is what she eventully comes out with.
"Well, he kind of offered to help me with my fluency in wavespeech -- that's the language insecticons speak, the one we can't normally hear -- and I hacked into his brain module while he did." That was an awfully matter-of-fact admission, Nautica.
"That's--" Chromia starts to speak, and then stops again to take stock. It's almost funny watching her do this. The 'that doesn't sound very safe' is kind of secondary to the fact that Nautica is at this moment not in harm's way. She shifts her weight again, folding her arms over her chassis with a faint narrowing of her gaze. "And hacking his brain turned out to be a good idea?"
"Uhm." Nautica pauses. "Well. He /was/ a high ranking researcher at the Institute. So I wasn't sure if I could completely trust him. And I just got more than I expected; I got a bunch of things in Old Cybertronian, which I need to learn now. And some images of insecticons, and a couple other things." That's not really an answer, and the engineer seems to realize this after a moment. "And I'm pretty sure he figured out what I had done. But he wasn't angry. Actually, he..." She trails off.
"So, /completely/ ancient," Chromia says, in a voice that reflects some lingering baffle. She tips her head. "He what?"
"I think he kind of found it... attractive," Nautica admits, a little sheepishly.
"Eugh," Chromia says, a little predictably. "Ancient spider mech who's into getting hacked by submarines? That might even be creepier than getting chased all over Iacon by a horny mechanical shark." Okay, that part of the conversation probably wasn't predictable.
"Mechanical..." Nautica trails off, blinking once. "Oh, Primus. Does he /cry/ a lot?"
"Yes," Chromia says with an attitude so grim it verges on grisly. "He does."
"Oh, Chromia, I am /so/ sorry," Nautica replies, shaking her head. "He's..." But words fail her. She's got a genius IQ, a polymath brain that works in an unusual enough manner to qualify as an outlier ability, and speaks multiple languages -- one of which most Cybertronians can't even hear, much less speak -- and yet she cannot figure out an appropriate way to describe Sky-Byte.
"Well," Chromia says, looking on the bright side of things as she looks sidelong at Nautica on the verge of a laugh, "at least I don't have to try to explain."
"No. You don't," Nautica assures Chromia with a laugh. "Which is good, because he /really/ defies explanation."
Chromia exhales. It is a soft noise, all breath and no voice, and with it, she exhales some lingering tautness in the breadth of her shoulders, and the long set of her frame. The comparative looseness of her stance is a subtle thing, not /ease/ exactly, but rather, the absence of its lack. Of all the things that are wrong in the world, there is one that has been set to rights, and not an unimportant one. "So," she says, "do you need anything in here? I've got to head back over to the training facility for a few hours," which I am calling hours damn it, "but when the recruits are through maybe we can meet up. I think Windblade is at the hall of records..."
"I'd like that," Nautica replies, with a smile. "I've got a few things to work on here -- I want to finish transcribing the Old Cybertronian text -- but I'll meet you both there when you're done at the facility."
Chromia touches lightly to Nautica's shoulder and then turns to go on clanky steps, saying, "I'll look forward to it."
Category:NC Institute