Nanowrimo 2019 - Exceprt

[fascinationex]

My nanowrimo is just a bunch of losers stumbling around in the wilderness and trying to cook energon out of really dangerous rocks before they all starve to death.

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“Thundercracker,” he said, when he saw him approach – empty handed, so probably just coming to check on Starscream, like he was an errant sparkling instead of an injured but totally functional mech. Of course.

“Starscream,” said Thundercracker. “You’re feeling better.” By this Starscream assumed he meant ‘you’re awake’, but it was true that he was also feeling a little better – his automatic repair at seventy per cent still meant that there were millions of tiny nanites doing something to repair him.

“Yes,” he said, dismissively, and didn’t bother to ask Thundercracker how he was doing. He could see how Thundercracker was doing: the injury inflicted by the insecticon swarm on their first night was nothing more than a subtly raised bump and an unsightly unpolished spot. He was fine. “I need a ferrowolf. Ideally a large one.”

“A… ferrowolf,” Thundercracker repeated slowly.

“Yes.”

“We're thinking of the same thing, right? This big, full of teeth and... teeth?" He waved his hand expressively.

And now he was just belabouring the obvious. Starscream would have rolled his optics, had they not been mostly broken. "Yes," he said, with mounting impatience.

"...Alright, why?”

Starscream made an annoyed noise, but he supposed it was a reasonable question. “Come here,” he waved imperiously. “See this?”

“Uhh...” Thundercracker very evidently did not see, and Starscream’s lopsided half-blind scribbling in the dirt didn’t enlighten him. “You might have to explain a little.”

Starscream scoffed. Nevertheless, he jabbed his finger expressively at the scribble in the dirt anyway. “I thought about using a basin we could dig out, but given the possibility of it all exploding, something sturdier is necessary.”

“Exploding would be bad,” Thundercracker said, in a tone more thoughtful than alarmed, then added, querying: “Sturdier?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

He zoomed his optics in on the dirt scribbles. “And a mechanimal is, uh, it's – sturdier?”

“Its spark chamber is." Starscream had not tested this exact set of variables, but -- "It must be.”

Thundercracker nodded. “It does take a lot of work to breach a spark chamber on a mech,” he conceded after a moment’s thought -- and entirely validating Starscream's theory, an accident that he would probably have been quite chagrined by had he known it.

Still, he hesitated to agree to carry out Starscream’s order, which, given his actual capacity to enforce it, was rather more like a request. “Our onboard weaponry uses a lot of energon,” he cautioned.

Starscream’s onboard weaponry, as comparatively light as it was, used what now seemed like an enormous quantity of energon just to fire a single shot, so he was certain that the heavier systems with which Thundercracker and Skywarp were equipped would be a drain.

“I didn’t say you had to shoot the blighted thing. In fact,” he said, reasonably, “it may be better if you don’t. It would be better to get the spark chamber as intact as possible…”

Thundercracker stared at him for several looong, judgemental moments, clearly envisioning himself wrestling in the dirt with a ferrowolf. (And, no doubt, all its many attendant teeth.)

“Just go get one,” Starscream told him, fed up. He swiped one hand through the scribble in the dirt, erasing it. “And give me that cutter.”

Thundercracker’s vents made a rattling noise when he cycled the air through them, but in the end he disappeared from the cave shortly after. Starscream just went ahead and assumed that he had gone to make himself useful. Instead of worrying abut that, he occupied himself with the equations he needed to determine the exact shapes and angles necessary to make the local quartz crystals – not the singing ones – into lenses that would concentrate the ambient light enough for a beam to reach a temperature sufficient for his purposes.

With a little luck, he’d be able to just boil tetradendihex out of the faintly yellowish mineral rocks in the area. It was extremely common in Cybertron’s crust, and it didn’t have to be pure…

His equations were rough, because he remembered only the general principles involved, and neither physics, nor its practical cousin, mechanics, were his area of expertise. But after several, feverish hours of work, he had what were – probably – the right measurements, and there was still enough light, so he went ahead and cut the lenses.

When Skywarp returned to their cave, it was to the sight of Starscream just outside, not sixty metres from its opening, surrounded by decimated quartz outcroppings and bits of crunchy silicate underfoot. He looked really half wild, with his cracked optics and unsteady gait, heaving a fresh-cut hemispherical lens up to balance over another, more gently curved one. Each round of material was as large in diameter as his own wingspan, and each was suspended, resting upon semi-stable structures of piled up rocks, and when the light of the local star hit them just right in the brightest part of the daylight…

Well. For now, mostly, it merely melted what it came in contact with. Which was just as well, because it needed to be exceptionally hot. Starscream was pleased that he could already smell the heady, acrid reek of the tetradendihex coming out in the gasses, because if his chemoreceptors could catch the particles and identify them it meant that they were likely well-concentrated in the composition of the melted rocks.

“Hey, Starscream,” said Skywarp.

He glanced at Skywarp and then looked back at his lens. “It’s fine,” he assured him, although Skywarp had absolutely not asked. “When we use the ferrowolf, it won’t smoke so much.”

The smoke, he allowed, might be a little alarming – it was chartreuse, and thick, and drifted in heavy, sticky clouds. He’d put it downwind of the cave, though, so Skywarp oughtn’t complain.

“When you… use the ferrowolf. Sure. Uh-huh,” he said, which didn’t sound like a complaint, exactly, but wasn’t as enthusiastic as Starscream might have liked. “That’s cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool. That’s… uh, real cool. Anyway, there’s native copper out here, so that’s cool. I mean, also cool. Additionally...”

“Cool,” Starscream finished drily, without looking at him. “Yes. I gathered. If you’re going to boost your comm signal anyway, you might ask your friend, what’s-his-gears, how we get oil from the ground.” It would be a lot more productive than trading for energon, because Starscream was thoroughly convinced that they’d start producing their own by midday tomorrow. Oil was another matter entirely, because all Starscream knew on the topic was 'drill down, perhaps', and his joints were already grinding subtly if he moved wrong.

“Scrapper? You mean Scrapper?” Skywarp said, squinting at the structure. “Sure. I’ll ask if I can raise him. Is that going to fall over?”

“Absolutely not.”

Aaaand it turned out that assurances from someone who looked like he’d flown face-first into a wall at mach three didn’t fill Skywarp with confidence.