[open] Brainstorm has competition

[smarterthandad]

Who: Valeria and visitors
Where: Her under-construction lab
When: Anytime from about a week after arrival on
What: Tiny supergenius for hire and/or underhanded plotting
Warnings: Val's Prowl-level ethics, idk

Based on what she acknowledged was her incomplete understanding of the Cybertronians' factions and the balance of power as it stood after their war, Val had decided that Optimus Prime asking for her scientific expertise counted as carte blanche to do what she wanted--not that she wouldn't have anyway, but the imprimatur of authority never hurt--which had at first mostly involved browbeating Drift into helping her scout locations, and then move heavy objects even an adult human wouldn't have been able to budge. Now, though, things were finally coming together to the point where she could get some useful work done.

She was rapidly filling up the floor space with remote-controlled equipment to let her manipulate enormous Cybertronian technology without needing to call for help every time, but much of it was still half-built. The spacious catwalk around the edge of the room at convenient Transformer eye height was quite finished, however. Val was used to having to look up at people, but 20 feet or more was a bit much, thanks. She should probably add some antigrav scooters when she got a chance; a room large enough to host even Optimus or Megatron comfortably made for a lot of walking when you were three feet tall. As with so many other things on her to-do list, that would have to wait until more pressing concerns were out of the way.

Like the fact that it didn't seem as though their war was quite as over as they said it was, so in true Cybertronian fashion, she'd focused on weapons. Her own Earth had something to say on that front, and after throwing together a few basic EMP grenades and an x-ray laser (you know, just in case) Val had switched to more interesting designs. Duplicating Iron Man's repulsors with Cybertronian tech had been a snap, though an adequate portable power source was taking time. Obviously it should run on energon, but she didn't fully understand that delightful concoction yet, and for the moment, her new toys were hooked up to a smallish fusion reactor that hummed in the corner behind a symbolic barricade of hazard tape.

The sharp zap of a repulsor blast and the metallic clatter of the makeshift target Val was practicing on were audible from the street, though hearing her giggling about the minor havoc she was causing would require being inside the lab. Not much of a feat--the door was unlocked and she had rigged an enormous "come in, we're open" sign of the sort that hung in the windows of stores on Earth. She found it funny, even if no one else was going to get the joke.

Comments

[smarterthandad]

She looked over her shoulder as Megatron entered, waving with the hand that didn't have a repulsor strapped to it.

"You know, just the usual. Manhandling technology scaled for someone a minimum of five times my size, bootstrapping a fusion reactor to generate some useful amounts of power because the city grid is a disaster, building a bunch of weapons because some of the people five times my size aren't very friendly. That sort of thing." Val loved nothing so much as building machines, save possibly scheming, and there was plenty of that afoot, so she rattled off the whole litany with good cheer.

[towardspeace]

"Indeed they are not," says Megatron, without much humour – although he still seems curious, perhaps even impressed. He crouches down, taking some care not to step on any of her stuff. "I've found myself similarly ill-equipped to deal with them, actually – I was wondering if you might be able to render some assistance." He'd normally be rather more irritated about being reduced to asking a human for help, but really, he doesn't have much to lose any more – and besides, he likes this one.

[smarterthandad]

There were much deeper depths of ignominy than getting help from Val, even taking into account the whole 'human infant' thing.

"Hmm." She disconnected the repulsor from the power cord, winding the cable up for storage as she ran through the possibilities for a few busy seconds of rapid thought, then looked up at him, studying his face for the minutest reaction. "Why aren't you going to Ratchet or one of the other medics?"

She'd already noticed that his movements were fewer and more deliberate than Optimus', the only other Cybertronian she'd met who was Megatron's size, but that could have been a matter of personality. Now, in the artificial light of the lab, it was much more obvious that his...whatever the glow that shone through his armor was called was dimmer than on the others of his species. Granted, he might just be seguing into asking for a weapon more powerful than that pistol he carried, but, well, Val trusted her observations, and even if he changed the subject, that too was a data point.

[towardspeace]

He should have expected that question, he thinks.

"Ratchet doesn't much like me," he says with a wry smile. "With good reason – but I don't think he'd be very inclined to help me, and even if he did I can't imagine he'd be happy about doing it. And besides... I'm curious about what you can do."

[smarterthandad]

Valeria half-smiled as her conversational bet paid off and Megatron didn't show any surprised reaction to it. Nice to be dealing with someone who had a decent amount of skill at the game. "I can do just about anything. The question is time."

And, under these circumstances, payment. While she did enjoy helping for its own sake, and she did like Megatron, she hadn't yet established a secure enough position to be doing things solely from the goodness of her tiny heart. Still, quid pro quo counted as payment, and having favors in the bank to draw against never hurt.

Val set the repulsor down on a lab bench and began the trek to where she'd left her datapad, up a ladder on the catwalk. She really needed to bump an augmented reality visual overlay up her priority list so that this would stop happening. Oh well, being on the catwalk would put her much closer to Megatron's eye level, at least. "Anyway. Ratchet's big on medical ethics. What kind of history do you have that he'd withhold treatment?"

She had her suspicions, but people got more offended over flawed character judgments than they did other things, so better to let him tell what he wanted and fill in the blanks herself with a few strategic questions to Optimus or Drift.

[towardspeace]

"Before I defected to the Autobots I was the leader of the opposing faction in the war," he says, without much hesitation. "And after I defected, one of the conditions of my, ah, freedom, such as it is, is that I have been dosed with a form of energon that drains my strength, to ensure I do not pose a threat in the event my change of spark proves... temporary."

He sounds kind of amused, if wryly so.

"Which was all well and good until we ended up here, and suddenly I actually need to be able to defend myself and my comrades. In theory the effects should wear off in time as long as I'm no longer consuming the poison, but... it would be a slow and unpredictable process."

[smarterthandad]

"Heh," she chuckled from about five feet up the ladder, attention more on not falling than on the particulars of Megatron's story. The fact that he'd been the Decepticon leader was more than she'd hypothesized--but not what she found funny. "They should have gone with a cortex bomb. Drugging you just impedes your usefulness without creating any kind of behavioral check."

Yes, Val, that was what was wrong with the situation.

"So you want me to flush your systems." Plans for how to do it were forming before she even reached the top of the ladder, but as with any worthwhile problem, there were complications. "I've done similar things before, but the machines in question weren't alive--not to mention Prime hitting the roof if he finds out."

That last wasn't a problem for her. She was just saying.

[towardspeace]

Megatron laughs. "I should be able to convince Optimus it's for the best."

[smarterthandad]

"By asking forgiveness rather than permission?" Val's expertise on that tactic would have been hard to overstate.

"I have technical questions, of course," she said, hauling herself onto the catwalk with only minor breathlessness. "I assume I shouldn't just pump the stuff straight out of the ground and into your internals." She jerked a thumb at several cylindrical tanks of unrefined energon she hadn't gotten around to thoroughly analyzing yet. It was more energon than was strictly necessary for the initial round of tests she had planned, but Val liked the pink glow.

[towardspeace]

"No, you're right; it needs to be refined before it's fit for consumption." His optics linger on the softly glowing tanks for a moment before he looks back at Val, his expression serious.

"I can answer any questions you might have – but you should be aware that this is a favour that could put you at odds with a number of the Autobots here. You would, of course, have whatever assistance but I can't imagine this would go down well with many of my supposed allies. I wouldn't blame you if you declined."

Megatron isn't traditionally an honesty-is-the-best-policy kind of bot, but hey, he's supposed to be one of the good guys now – and Valeria, tiny organic or not, seems like the kind of person it would probably be best not to mislead.

[smarterthandad]

"Yeah, I kinda figured that from the fact they poisoned you in the first place." While Valeria, tiny pragmatist that she was, didn't object to that sort of thing, it was at odds with the claims Optimus had made about what the Autobots stood for, reinforcing her skepticism about the entire mechanical lot of them. Nobody who fought wars came out looking good, but people sure did lie to themselves about it a lot. At least Uncle Doom--and Namor, as little as she liked that clothing-averse aquatic Casanova--didn't shy from the opprobrium. Megatron seemed cut from similar cloth. Or cast from similar metal, to use a more appropriate metaphor.

"Since we're having an honesty-among-thieves sort of a conversation..." Val paused and pressed her lips as she considered how to play this. Straighter than usual, she decided. In a game of iterated prisoner's dilemma, initiating betrayal was not a viable strategy. "My mother and I would be dead if she hadn't taken a chance on a guy with a track record like yours." She shrugged. "The only way to find out for sure if someone's trustworthy is to trust them."

With a tap at her tablet, she turned on a Cybertronian-scale screen so Megatron could follow along without having to squint at human technology. "Don't get me wrong--if you try to weasel out of the favor you're going to owe me on this, I will sell you out so fast you'll think I built a time machine--but I'm not going to assume a priori that it's your plan."

Responding to betrayal with reprisal, however, was a winning strategy. She could prove it with math.

[towardspeace]

Megatron nods, an approving and faintly amused smile crossing his face. "Good," he says. "And I'll assume, in turn, that you don't plan on taking the opportunity to sabotage my systems. You have more to gain, after all, from making me an ally."

[smarterthandad]

"You made that assumption before you even set foot in here," Val replied with a faintly amused smile of her own.

"Now," she said, all business, "tell me about energon. Much as I like the thrill of independent discovery, we're presumably looking at limited time here before someone causes an incident."

If you only knew, Val.

A cursor blinked on the screen as she waited, stylus in one little hand, looking expectantly up at Megatron.

[towardspeace]

He laughs humourlessly. "It may already be too late for that – but you're right, I'd like to get this straightened out before anything worse happens."

I don't know what I look like to you but it sure as hell isn't someone who's good at bullshitting science, so I am just going to handwave him setting out to tell her as much about energon as he can – he's not an expert, but he knows enough, and Val is presumably smart enough to ask the right questions when something she needs to know isn't something that would have occurred to him. He explains the fool's energon in a little more detail, too, although he hasn't been given the precise ins and outs of that one – "Wouldn't want me figuring out a way around it, after all."

[smarterthandad]

Val was in her element, asking incisive questions and scribbling notes and equations in her childish handwriting that the datapad converted to much more legible text as she went.

"Yes, well, you had the good sense to come to me," she told him with only the usual baseline supergenius level of smugness--which was actually pretty cute on her. Being adorable substantially increased the number of shenanigans she could get away with. "Can I get a bloo--uh, energon sample? I can do a seamless patch job if you're worried Ratchet might notice whatever your equivalent of a needle stick is."

[towardspeace]

Megatron has little grasp of the concept of 'cute', but Val comes close here, honestly.

"Hm," he says, a little impressed. She really does think of everything. "That could be helpful, yes. Do you have the means to extract the sample yourself?"

[smarterthandad]

The smile she flashed him response was a little disturbing. From the table next to her on the catwalk, Val picked up something human-scale and thus hard for him to make out. She flicked a switch with her thumb, and a narrow purple flame, its core almost too bright to look at, jumped out of the device.

"Plasma torch." Point made, she turned it back off. "Given the size difference, I'll only need what feels like a few drops to you. I probably couldn't even pick up one of your medical vials." Speaking of which, that came out a little absently as Val looked around her work space for an adequate container for her giant robot medical samples, preferably one that didn't involve climbing back down the ladder.

"Could you grab that crate next to the energon tanks, please?" She bellied up to the railing to point at a box bigger than she was, holding what by Megatron's standards were thimble-sized clear cylinders, obviously modeled on the standard energon tanks they were next to, and scaled down to be usable by a human even smaller than usual for the species.

Making him do it didn't involve any ladders. She'd even said 'please.'

[towardspeace]

He retrieves it without complaint, setting it down on the catwalk next to her. He doesn't seem particularly concerned about the plasma torch.

"It's probably easiest for you to take it from here," he says, indicating a spot on his lower arm – it's probably not the best place overall, but it'll certainly be the easiest for her to reach.

[smarterthandad]

Val would be perfectly willing to clamber all over Megatron if necessary, but he was the one getting the unlicensed medical procedure, so she'd play it his way.

She popped the top of one of the small energon canisters, which even empty was still unwieldy for her despite its much smaller size, and pulled on a welder's gloves and mask to protect herself from the torch...or from poisoned energon spatter.

"Are there any sanitary precautions I should be taking, either for my safety or yours?"

[towardspeace]

He eyes the gloves and mask thoughtfully. "That ought to be enough," he says. "Energon isn't very good for humans, but as long as you don't ingest it you should be alright."

Despite his previous assertions, he is a little wary, and he doesn't fully trust her. But it doesn't show.

[smarterthandad]

Val was trustworthy, in a sense--she always did what she said she would. The problem (for others) lay in whatever else she was doing that she'd conveniently failed to mention. Here in this new universe, she hadn't yet had time to get as many irons in the fire as was her wont, so for the moment, Megatron was only being conspired with, not against.

Besides, she liked him. That almost invariably meant any future conspiring against would be benevolently intended...or at least not actively malicious. Generally speaking, Val only sent friends to their deaths when she was certain they would cheat the aforementioned.

See, nothing to worry about.

"Okay, let me line this up." Val nudged the tiny vial-slash-5-gallon bucket into place with her foot, then sparked up the torch again. "I'm not quite sure how your pain perceptions work, but I doubt this will hurt much."

She touched the flame to his arm, vaporizing a hole big enough for her to get a finger or two in--assuming she wanted to sustain serious burns, that is. It amounted to a pinprick on him.

"Oh, wow, that even looks wrong," she said when the energon started to well up from the hole, either a tiny speck or a entire Red Cross donation per droplet, depending how you looked at it.

[towardspeace]

He barely feels it – or if he does, he certainly doesn't react.

"It doesn't taste good, either," he replies drily, watching the tainted fluid drip into Val's tiny vial with faint curiosity. "Are you sure that will be enough?"

[smarterthandad]

"It'll be fine," Val assured him. "Dirty little secret of the medical profession--they only take as much as they do because smaller amounts are too difficult to work with." She made grabby motions with her free hand to emphasize how small she was relative to the volume of energon she'd collected. "Not a problem for me."

She tweaked a setting on the torch and flame color changed to a cooler-burning yellow-orange so she could weld the hole closed. "Let me know if I need to do a better patch. I can whip up something to match your finish color if you hang around for a bit."

[towardspeace]

"Hm," he says, considering, lifting up his arm to take a look. "No, I think that will do. I don't expect anyone will notice something so small."

[smarterthandad]

"'Kay." Val turned her attention to the minimal cleanup necessary, sealing the lid of the tank and checking for any stray splatters to clean up.

"If we had any established medium of exchange, I'd put money on the mechanism being a catalyst that accelerates fuel breakdown. Not only would it limit the power available to your systems, it'd tend to deposit on any available electrodes. The latter would be more of a long-term problem, though, so if you're not experiencing any--you know, I'm not sure how you'd perceive it." She stopped her science stream of consciousness as the problem of qualia arose, her reflexive hand-to-chin gesture interrupted by the fact there was a welding mask in the way. Flipping it up, she revealed an expression of distant concentration, blue eyes unfocused and staring through Megatron as she visualized his inner workings.

"Probably a paradoxical combination of numbness and radiating pain in the extremities as your central nervous system tries to compensate for reduced signal strength...but that's totally a guess." Satisfied with her hypothesis, Val stripped off her protective gear, leaving only control suit with its visibly glowing green circuit traces.