[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

[aminerproblem]

First Aid wouldn't be the first one to make that mistake. At this point, there's no point in correcting it, really. As long as Nautica made it back to the medibay on time, he could be mistaken for his older self as many times as needed.

"I was on my way there."

The engine beneath them growls as Megatron accelerates again, treads crushing debris and smoothing out the bumps on the old road ahead of them. A few paces down, he broaches the question:

"How is she?"

Whatever manual readings he made would never be as accurate as a specialized scanner, so he was anxious to know.

[quantumechanic]

Nautica was not doing well. She'd hit her head hard enough to black out and cause a concussion, and the force of impact with the wall had driven her impellers and their housings through her back and into her chest cavity, fortunately missing the spark chamber but unfortunately wreaking havoc around it.

"Think I hit my head," she told First Aid, already having forgotten that Megatron had just said the same thing. Her fingers, smeared pink with her own energon, curled weakly around First Aid's, but she made no other motions, not even to track the movement of the scanner with her optics.

[lifepersists]

Oh. This was terrible. First Aid doesn't say anything for a moment, just putting away the scanner so he can hold Nautica's hand tighter, giving it a good squeeze.

"She hit her head," he repeats, but his tone says that it's way worse than he's actually saying. Better not freak out Nautica. His voice had that underlying note of hurry.

He braces a hand over her to try and keep her a bit more still. Riding on the back of a tank wasn't exactly the smoothest of emergency recuse travels. He has to let go of her hand after a moment, fingers folding into various, tiny tools.

"I'm going to try and close some of the leaks. I may need to give you active energon if you keep up this loss rate."

[aminerproblem]

Megatron hears the implication in First Aid's voice loud and clear. The engine beneath them roars as he picks up the pace, doing his best to avoid large bumps and ditches in the road now that they were accelerating.

It was impossible to avoid every obstacle, many a roadside piece of debris ended up crushed with a loud wrenching of metal, but it was as steady as he could make it.

"I don't have any extra canisters on me," he warns,"but I do have a tap for energon transfer if you need it."

[quantumechanic]

"Sorry..." Nautica didn't know what she was apologizing for, but something in the way First Aid had phrased it made her feel like she should. It made sense to her, anyway.

No stoic, she held as still as possible while he worked, but couldn't keep from shying away with a hiss or a whimper when the cure occasionally proved worse than the disease and First Aid's ministrations or Megatron's driving sent a new jolt of pain shooting through her already agonized systems.