[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]

"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.

[towardspeace]

His brow furrows slightly, or at least the arrangement of the plating of his forehead kind of gives that impression – not so much because he's confused by what she's saying, because he isn't particularly, but because there's something curious about this brilliant little creature with no knowledge of the inner workings of Cybertronian life trying to puzzle it out like this.

"Hm," he says, one hand at his chin. "How much of a long term problem are you hypothesising?"

[smarterthandad]

Val loved every second of it. Even if she'd been able to go to Ratchet, she might not have availed herself of the opportunity, because figuring it out on her own was too much fun. It would hardly have been the kindest choice for her giant patient, but even though her intentions were good, her ethics were demonstrably lacking--and since he was obviously an A-list supervillain, newly-discovered respect for life notwithstanding, she was quite sure he could take it.

"Depends how long you've had the stuff in your system." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate the poisoned energon in its little tank. "If you're not showing any symptoms, your self-repair is probably keeping up, and should fully clean out any impurities once they're not being continually reintroduced."

[towardspeace]

And as far as Megatron's concerned, that risk is clearly a reasonable price to pay for not having to go through any of the Autobots to get this dealt with.

"Six months," he says, eyeing the tiny tank of fool's energon. "Give or take." He folds his arms. "Is there anything else you need?"

[smarterthandad]

"Then nothing to worry about, I'd say." Satisfied it wasn't something she'd have to deal with, Val put that concern out of her mind and retrieved her datapad.

"I don't need anything, but do you want me to juice up that pistol of yours?" If his Autobot 'allies' didn't trust him with his own body, they sure weren't going to trust him with a gun that was good for anything. "I can do that kind of engineering in my sleep."

[towardspeace]

He produces the pistol in question, looking at it, and then her, contemplatively.

"Oh? I can't say I'm surprised. The size wouldn't be an issue?"

[smarterthandad]

"Most of this equipment is to allow me to work on things scaled for your species," Val said, gesturing around the room. "But if you wanted to pop the housing on it and set it down on that workbench for me," she pointed down to the floor, at a workspace near his ankle, "I wouldn't stop you."

[towardspeace]

"And I certainly wouldn't say no to an upgrade," says Megatron, with a slight, cordial smile. He obliges. It is kind of unintentionally comical watching him stoop down that far.

[smarterthandad]

Fortunately for Megatron's dignity, as soon as he acquiesced, Val made for the ladder. While he crouched to deposit his gun as requested, she was sliding down with her feet braced along the outer rails in a display of physical prowess quite unsuited to her age and guaranteed to stop the hearts of any hypothetical adult humans watching.

She trotted over to the workbench, clambering up on the stool beside it, and then onto the table itself so she could look at the inner workings of the weapon. A handgun for Megatron was still bigger than she was. "Okay. Power source, regulator, beam collimator, emitter. Solid state load cell for trigger activation...hmm. Not how I'd have done it."

Val picked up some sort of meter from a shelf next to the table, and leaned over the gun, touching the leads to various points of its circuitry and checking the readings. "Good news and bad news. Bad news, I've made guns my size more powerful than this. Good news, that means I can fix this one."

[towardspeace]

"Excellent," says Megatron, crouching to watch her work. Small hands, he thinks. She can probably get a lot more done in a smaller space that way. "How powerful do you anticipate being able to make it?"

[smarterthandad]

Toddler that she was, her hands were little even by human standards, though children her age were generally still working on not drawing people as potatoes with legs rather than on applied plasma physics. Valeria's fingers moved like an adult's, her grip on her tools both certain and precise, and she'd already begun her task when she answered.

"Without it slagging itself after a single use?" The question was rhetorical, and she continued without waiting for a reply. "I can get it to hit like a rifle of similar design, but the trade-off is fewer shots, and you'll burn out the components faster, because this thing is not built to be effective. There's only so much I can do without replacing the internals completely. They really don't trust you, huh?"