babyboombox (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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robothell2015-04-14 05:19 pm
babyboombox) wrote in robothell2015-04-14 05:19 pm
Entry tags:
whoops heres another one [open]
Who: soundwave but a baby this time. also u
Where: in the city, anywhere that looks like it could have been a seedy back alley
When: nnnnow?
What: tiny soundwave is not equipped to deal with this
Warnings: none so far
(please use they/them pronouns for this soundwave, ty!)
[ Waking up in an unfamiliar city without any warning would be bad enough for this baby, but Soundwave can tell basically immediately that Ravage, Laserbeak, and Buzzsaw are nowhere to be found, and this tips their anxiety levels right over the Initiate Shutdown threshold. It also temporarily destroys all the self-control re: their brain powers that they've been learning, and while this city is relatively underpopulated, the way that everyone's stuck here means that there are enough minds around to overwhelm them if it keeps up.
They'll be wandering around the city center, calling for Ravage & the birds and getting increasingly anxious about it. This progresses fairly quickly into sensory shutdown, at which point Soundwave will curl up against a wall and not move until it passes.
You can come in before or after this happens :) ]
Where: in the city, anywhere that looks like it could have been a seedy back alley
When: nnnnow?
What: tiny soundwave is not equipped to deal with this
Warnings: none so far
(please use they/them pronouns for this soundwave, ty!)
[ Waking up in an unfamiliar city without any warning would be bad enough for this baby, but Soundwave can tell basically immediately that Ravage, Laserbeak, and Buzzsaw are nowhere to be found, and this tips their anxiety levels right over the Initiate Shutdown threshold. It also temporarily destroys all the self-control re: their brain powers that they've been learning, and while this city is relatively underpopulated, the way that everyone's stuck here means that there are enough minds around to overwhelm them if it keeps up.
They'll be wandering around the city center, calling for Ravage & the birds and getting increasingly anxious about it. This progresses fairly quickly into sensory shutdown, at which point Soundwave will curl up against a wall and not move until it passes.
You can come in before or after this happens :) ]
no subject
She's still learning Cybertronian psyches, but this isn't delicate probing for long-suppressed memories or astral combat against another master telepath--the poor thing is almost catatonic. Emma reaches out with her own much greater control and throws her psychic shields around Soundwave's mind, shutting off the telepathic racket they haven't learned to block out on their own yet.]
There, now. I've got it.
[Her mental voice is much softer than just about anyone else on the planet would get from her. Soundwave might be older than human civilization, but they still feel like a lost teenager to Emma.]
no subject
marvel telepathy is ridiculously op whee
I'm Emma Frost. I'm a telepath, too. I'm shielding your mind.
[It's not a Cybertronian name, but friendly psychic aliens are really the least of Soundwave's problems right now.
Emma's mental shielding feels like diamond, a smooth, hard expanse of crystal, flashing with cold rainbow fire inside its facets.]
good thing soundwave's too baby to tell
... Thank you.
[Something like embarrassment colors their thoughts. Ravage had taught them better than this.
Of course, Ravage not being here is half the reason it happened in the first place, and Soundwave tries (badly) to stop the rising tide of sorrow in their spark at that thought.]
no subject
[Reminding herself that this is a giant space robot who might well be a war criminal--the species seems to have a lot of those--Emma manages not to append "sweetie" to that, but it's a near thing.]
There's nothing to be embarrassed about, darling. [That endearment is just a verbal tic. She calls everyone that sooner or later.] No one gets good at filtering without practice.
[As she speaks with Soundwave, Emma is making her way to where they're sitting, following the mental link as easily as if were a physical map. It'll take her a while; Cybertron is not scaled for humans.]
no subject
Yeah. [In the presence of someone who's clearly mastered their abilities, Soundwave's embarrassment rounds off into a dull grumbling frustration. She's right, of course, but, still. They'd spent a good million years or so mentally floundering before any help arrived, and it's all too easy to slip back into that mindset.
Soundwave relaxes a little, but they're still mostly curled up against the wall and aren't moving anytime soon.]
no subject
Emma doesn't think Soundwave's in any condition to be left to their own devices yet, so she continues the conversation with the pleasant but firm tone of someone who's already decided how things are going to be. She's very good at that one.]
I'm on my way over, so we'll be able to meet in person soon enough. [She almost says "in the flesh," but, well.] I'm an alien, incidentally.
[There's a ripple of amusement accompanying the declaration, since as far as she's concerned, they're the alien...but it's their planet.
Sort of. All this multiverse nonsense. She doesn't approve.]
no subject
I... yes. You feel different.
[Her mind, they mean. There's something about the shape or feel of it that Soundwave's never seen in another Cybertronian - which isn't surprising, of course, but they marvel a little at it anyway. And Soundwave would never admit it, but she's not wrong about them being alone; they don't object.]
no subject
Organic. I gather you don't get a lot of our kind in your neighborhood.
[She shares a mental picture of herself, a statuesque blond woman in a white, skintight superhero costume with a billowing cape. There's no sense of scale accompanying it, which isn't entirely intentional on Emma's part, but they don't have a common reference she can compare herself to.]
no subject
No. How did you get here?
no subject
Excellent question. If you find an answer to it, do let me know.
[Emma doesn't bother to hide that she would rather not be here, but none of her annoyance is directed at Soundwave.]
no subject
I don't... What?
no subject
[You'd think Emma might frightened, or at least confused, but no. She's just irritated. There is not a single salon on this worthless planet.]
no subject
[Soundwave's got no real way to respond to that. But they do start unpacking the data they got from their surroundings before descending into telepath hell, and comparing it to the city they'd been in right before that. They'd always hung around the ratty edges, but even there the buildings were, well... intact and lived in. This is different.]
no subject
[Emma follows along with Soundwave's mental inventory, then shares the image of where she'd been right before finding herself here, a conference room that wouldn't be out of place on a populated Cybertron, but filled with other organics who look extremely homogeneous by Cybertronian standards--one of them has a visor, though! (Red optics, apparently.) The room's panoramic window shows a broad sweep of ocean with a primitive-seeming suspension bridge in the distance, silhouetted against a blue sky with white clouds.
Her feelings don't mark it as home, exactly, but it has an aura of safety about it, of a redoubt against some sort of external threat.]
Rather a large change for me.
[Not that she minds filling Soundwave in, but she's mostly killing time until she can get there physically. To do what, she's not exactly sure. Give them a hug? They seem like they could use it.
It's certainly not that she's getting lonely without her teammates around. Nothing like that.]
no subject
There's so much water. [Soundwave had heard of cities on Cybertron whose generators were cooled by artificial lakes, but they'd never seen any, and certainly hadn't imagined it could look like this.]
no subject
[The scene switches, and while the bridge is still visible in the same place, now they're standing on an expanse of tarmac, unprotected, as a squall sweeps across the bay, the sky a steely gray and waves crashing against the rocky shore of the island.
Since Soundwave's so interested, Emma lets them share her full memory of those few seconds after the team had left the Blackbird but before she'd switched to diamond form against the elements--the cold impact of wind-driven raindrops on her skin and the salt tang of the sea air...and an annoyed but still friendly voice and mental presence behind her as the gale tears her cape from her grip and blows it up to smack Hank McCoy in the face. Sorry, Henry.]
no subject
It's nice.
[So nice, in fact, that they write it to their personal memory banks. It may only be a proxy memory, but it's already more engaging than anything Soundwave's experienced on Cybertron thus far.]
no subject
I have a friend who'd be pleased you think so. He's quite fond of the ocean as well.
[Yes, Emma, Namor is your "friend" who's "fond of" the ocean. That's it exactly and not massively understating the matter on all counts.]
no subject
[It's more like a desert, or a sea in the lunar sense, than anything else. Soundwave's never been, and they don't want to. An Earth sea, though? Absolutely.]
no subject
The salt water might not be good for your... [what do Cybertronians even have] ...mechanisms, darling.
[She'd totally take them anyway, though.]
Hmm.
[Emma has many memories of the ocean, not all of them pleasant or even neutral, but she reaches back to the more distant past, those childhood summers on the French Riviera, the warm turquoise Mediterranean so different from the stormy Pacific.
Emma is swimming upwards, towards the light that pierces the water in hazy beams and reflects from the barrier between sea and sky in brilliant flashes like diamonds scattered across the waves. It's not silent down there, but the noises are muffled and strange, carried differently by the water than the air. Her eyes sting a little from the salt and her lungs are starting to burn with the need to breathe, not enough to panic her, just to make breaking through to the welcoming air into a sharper pleasure than the mere enjoyment of being cradled in the warm water. A spray of droplets and a gasp announce her return to the breathing world, waves slapping against the hull of the yacht and gulls crying as they wheel overhead through a cloudless sky.
She's not sure why she's sharing so much, except that Soundwave seems to need it, and she has it to give. Her own life might have been a better one if someone had taken a moment to be kind to the frightened girl who couldn't shut the voices out of her mind.]
no subject
Maybe.
[Soundwave watches the memories with no small amount of awe. Cybertronians aren't exactly designed for movement through water - save for those few with aquatic altmodes - and they're becoming increasingly convinced that humans are amphibious to some degree.
The mental sharing is certainly helping Soundwave become more familiar with this ground, as it were. It had taken Soundwave a while to believe Ravage's claims that their telepathy could be useful rather than a constant hindrance; this is firsthand experience.]
no subject
[Without trying to explain oxygen metabolism, Emma conveys the awareness that this "breathing" thing is in fact vital to human existence. She can imagine a circumstance where Soundwave tries to release an injured human back into their "natural habitat" and someone drowns, because that is exactly the sort of ridiculous thing that happens in her life.]
Ah, here we are.
[Emma at last rounds the corner into Soundwave's alley, looking exactly like her mental picture of herself. Except tiny. Smaller-than-minibot tiny. She's tall for a human, especially a woman, but when height differences in your species are measured in inches, that doesn't mean much by Cybertronian standards.
All of which Soundwave might or might not notice depending whether they've got their optics switched on.]
no subject
Soundwave brings their legs down and leans forward to get a better look.]
Hello.
no subject
Hello.
[Emma smiles in reply, comfortable under the scrutiny. Not that she minds being looked at for more maculate reasons--femme fatale is her chosen persona, after all--but Soundwave's curiosity has a childlike innocence to it. Besides, she's staring, too.
It's not just a size difference between them. Everything about Emma except her mental presence screams upper class, from her poise to the dramatic, spotless white of her X-Men uniform. Soundwave, though...even a human whose Cybertronian acquaintances can be counted on one hand can tell they're badly in need of a good body shop and detailing job. Or whatever it is the species does to take care of themselves.]
How are you feeling?
[She can tell, of course. She can't avoid telling, connected telepathically as they are. But asking is polite.]
no subject
[Soundwave's a little awed by her presence, but it's not so much her appearance as it is all that mental power in such a small frame. As far as Soundwave knows, they're the only Cybertronian with these capabilities; meeting an alien who can do all of that and more is... a little overwhelming.]
How... How did you learn all of this?
no subject
[Mentioning her own past as a not-friendly telepath? NOPE. Besides, even at her absolute supervillain worst, she's always been reasonably benign to people she thinks of as her students. Soundwave has nothing to worry about.]