[open] There's serious metal fatigue in all the load-bearing members...

[quantumechanic]

Who: Nautica, various TFP Decepticons, anyone else
Where: Around the city
When: Anytime after people are more or less settled
What: The planet's only appropriately-scaled engineer fixes things, makes friends with Decepticons
Warnings: My tendency to technobabble but probably no blood nvm megatron threw her into a wall

Nautica was keeping busy. Cybertronians were tough species, sure, but even they needed to power up sometimes--oftentimes, in the case of certain mechs who couldn't seem to stop punching each other--and that energon from the crater, while blessedly plentiful, wasn't going to refine itself. The process was a little outside her area of expertise, but the theory was straightforward, and her phenomenal breadth of reading and memory (with the occasional call to Brainstorm or Shockwave to double check the finer points) were up to the challenge.

Between that and the various side trips to assist the less technically adept (or the more technically adept, in the case of Brainstorm's communications network project) she didn't have a lot of downtime--and Nautica was fine with that. She preferred not to think too much about the extremely depressing larger picture. Optimus and Megatron would want answers soon enough, but she didn't have any to give them, so she threw herself into doing what she could. She was easy to run into around the city, working on getting a small energon refining facility up and running, repairing vital infrastructure, or just making less vital infrastructure more livable. And certainly not worrying about never seeing her friends again.

Comments

[starscheme]

"Don't be ridiculous I don't have friends," Starscream growls icily. If she meant allies that would... well, it'd still be pretty damn hard to accomplish, but certainly more feasible than the other thing.

Maybe it's sincere, maybe it's just that he's desperate and is falling back on his old habits of manipulation without even realizing it, but his wings and eyebrows both droop, expression softening into the most pathetic sad puppy face he can muster. "I don't exactly have the freedom to run around and play meet and greet. There are individuals on the loose who are literally actively seeking to kill me!"

[quantumechanic]

Everyone had friends, Starscream, come on. She wrote that off as exaggeration, since he seemed prone to it.

Likewise, even Nautica didn't entirely buy his poor-little-me act, but she made a better audience for it than most, and she nodded in sympathy. "Yeah, I've noticed that people here are really confrontational. We're all understandably jumpy, but everyone I've talked to has been fine once they calmed down."

Her altmode was not, in fact, a Care Bear, but possibly only because Hasbro doesn't have that license.

[starscheme]

"Well that's all well and good for most bots I'm sure, but I hardly believe jumpiness is what is causing Dreadwing to behave in such a violent manner. " he says rather waspishly, then pauses before whimpering pathetically, giving Nautica the woobie eyes: "He's sworn a solemn oath to tear out my spark with his bare hands if he ever gets the chance! For no good reason either, if you ask me! Megatron has long since forgiven me, I don't understand why he can't just bury the hatchet too!"

A brief tirade too late, he suddenly picks up on something that she said just before. "Wait! Wait…" Starscream levels a finger at her, waggling it a bit while he tries to articulate his latest idea. "You… The way you spoke before. It sounded as if you are with a group…?"

Okay she didn't really but he's just full of wishful thinking right now.

[quantumechanic]

Resurrecting his brother as a zombie was kinda personal, Starscream.

"Uh." Starscream's abrupt shift from monologuing about his miserable existence to an actual relevant question caught her by surprise and it took her a moment to catch up to the topic change as she reviewed whether she'd said anything that implied she was with a group.

Nope.

"I didn't say anything like that, but some of my crewmates are here, and the Autobots as a whole could count as a group, I guess." She tapped the Autobrand at the base of her throat. "Are you looking to defect?"

It seemed to be the done thing for Decepticon High Command lately.

[starscheme]

Look okay maybe it was but it wasn't personal towards Dreadwing it was personal towards Skyquake and his stupid insubordinate corpse.

He seems to puff up with offense at her query, lip curling with mild disgust. "Defect? Primus no. I was assuming that given the dire circumstances in which we have all found ourselves, factions would be something of a non-issue."

Not that he's much for rubbing shoulders with Autobots, or particularly hopeful for the chance to make nice. He's just willing to do whatever it takes to save his own chassis.