Surfing with the Alien 1b
It's not something you'd know without crawling down there and looking, but there's actually a pretty good sized space inside the body of my truck form, around my so-handsome head. I'd never changed the camera settings after transforming back to vehicle mode that afternoon, so when I next became conscious that space was what the eye cameras were showing (upside down, but that at least was as it should be) - except it wasn't as empty as normal. A shivering silver bundle topped in brown was in there, precariously balanced on the "frame member" that becomes my upper arm in robot mode. There were a number of things really strange about how I felt, but the outside temperature sensor reported it as being Damn Cold while the cabin sensor was at Come On In The Water's Fine, and having realised I was looking at the girl I'd rescued wrapped in my first aid kit's emergency mylar blanket-thing I thought it might be a good idea to share that second report.
Getting her away from bits that would squish her if I accidentally hit the transformation button also seemed like... the transformation button, yes... button, button, where's the button... where's the finger, the arm, the body... The head-bone's connected to the, neck-bone...
Oh dear.
I believe I shall hold very, very still, while activating the head sound system and face synch. Will that actually work without a pilot's face in front of the camera to run it? Oh. Oh, yes, well, let's just shut that camera off for a few minutes, shall we? I don't need to think about skin covered in circuit patterns and cables that burst out of my skull for a little while.
It seemed the mimic software I'd kludged together was no longer needed, since I could feel the metalized rubber I'd used to make Wave Convoy's face moving as I softly called out, "Miss?" She jumped, and slipped off the ledge, landing out of my line of sight below, making me wince sympathetically. "Sorry, Miss? Are you all right?"
She sat back up into view, and I noticed the fur and cat ears for the first time. There were cute little mini-fang incisors too, as she yawned and blinked at the robot head mounted upside down in front of her. "Hai..." she said at length, and while I didn't know if it was a greeting or fan-japanese for yes, I assume the latter because she followed it with a greeting. "Um... Hello, there. I kind of got locked out of the truck, somehow, but I don't really know where we are and well... yeah," she trailed off, running a hand along one ear dejectedly.
It flicked away from her finger and I realised they were more than just a costume... I still needed to get her out of the crush-zone though. "Is there a name I can call you? It's kind of wierd just saying 'Miss' - but it would be a really good idea to get out from under the truck, I'm getting twitchy trying to stay still." Oddly enough, it was true. I had the strongest urge to stretch out and stand up, and a pretty good idea what doing so would mean at the moment.
A sob caught in the girl's throat, but she forced it down and replied, "C-call me Shuko, I guess... since he said their daughter Marci was dead, and no demon was going to profane her name..." By the state of her puffy, red eyes and tear-tracked cheek fur, I figured she'd done a lot of crying over that in however long I was out (04:34:17.882, a corner of my mind noted helpfully, another that bioneural functions had been migrated to cerebro-circuits 01:38:44.207 after losing consciousness) and understandably so if I was interpreting correctly. Pulling herself together with a visible effort of will, she clambered out through the side trim plate I opened and asked, "What's your name?"
"I'm, ah, having a bit of an identity crisis right now myself, actually. Um, you're not a demon are you? Becasue I'm pretty sure I'm definitely dead."
I'd switched to the grille camera, so I could see her fragile expression. "N-no... I don't think so..." Her voice becme very small, and she swallowed before whispering, "...maybe?"
Putting as much descisiveness as I could into my projected voice, I stated, "Sounds like a 'no' in that case, since you're much more likely to be an angel from what I can see." Trite? I suppose. Sappy? No question. On the other hand, it brought a tiny smile to her lips if only for an instant, before puzzlement knitted her brow.
"What do you mean, dead? No one's found us yet, and you sound a lot better than just after we arrived. There was a lot of blood, but it stopped so I got out to pee, and then the door wouldn't open again." She adjusted the shiny plastic sheet in a way that suggested she was doing it to remind me she was cold, rather than for the adjustment's sake.
"That's tied to the identity crisis. You see, the blood stopped because I ran out. The thing is, it seems I won't be needing it any more anyway... I suppose you could say I am Wave Convoy now instead of driving Wave Convoy." I was no where near as sure of myself then as I sound in my memory, but audio files don't lie, as long as you use a lossless compression format anyway. "You're welcome to come in - I'll open the hatch - but my body, I mean, the hardware I had for the last couple decades, is in there kind of... dead. And I'm in here, for approximate values of 'in' and 'here.'"
Suprisingly, then, Shuko laughed. "You sound like a CS major," she said. "Always talking about hardware and software abstraction and this value or that value."
"Makes sense," I noted. "I am a CS major. You're in college, then?" She looked about that age, but the fur could have been throwing me off.
"Yeah, double engineering major, ME/EE. The workload is totally insane, but I'm almost done... except now I've missed months of classes thanks to this. She tugged on the same ear spitefully, and winced when the nerves reported that ear-tugging was a Hurty Thing. The little moment of good mood she'd found popped like a soap bubble on the floor. Then she shivered violently and clutched the emergency blanket tighter like she meant it. "It's... really cold. Share-a-room-with-a-body-to-get-away-from type cold. Will you, -- oh, thanks."
I'd popped the passenger side gullwing's latch and started opening it right away, and she was up the ladder and leaning in in a twinkling. I switched cameras again, to one of the inside ones that looked that way, and saw her nose wrinkle. If she'd gotten more than just the looks from whatever gave her fur and things - I noticed a tail the same brown as her hair poking out now that she'd wadded up the blanket to use the ladder. I could see why she'd grabbed it, all she had on otherwise was a shortie tee, loose shorts, and some lowtop sneakers, I guessed because heavier clothes rubbed her fur the wrong way. The cream and brown pattern of it gave her a somewhat Siamese look, as if she was wearing clipped-finger gloves and dark socks. Where was I? Oh, Shuko looked like the smell was giving her second thoughts about corpse vs. cold, and having decided that I didn't have any real options in terms of a return to carbon-based living, I told her, "I'll let you decide which is worse, but go ahead and dump my old body if you want to. You should probably strap in either way, though, I seriously need to stretch and am certain that means transforming."
She shuddered once, put her hands together as if to pray, then looked at the speaker I'd routed my voice to and shook her head. Steeling herself, the petite catgirl climbed in through the hatch and levered my ... old-me's... whatever - legs to be in reach of the driver's side hatch, now gliding up on its hydraulics. Hadn't that just been a gas cylinder before? Well, it was fully powered now, along with the latches and locks. Then she went back out the passenger side and hopped up on the roof of the cab to cross over, get her feet set on the ladder rungs, and start to haul the bloody corpse out. Cetain important muscles had relaxed in death and I got a report of a .05% increase in power consumption and a hot feeling to go with the embarrassment, but she didn't mention it and neither did I. Some things were going to take more getting used to than others I thought, trying to distract myself.
After a considerable amount of effort, a quick stop to vomit, and a few whispered not-a-cuss-words (which told me I'd better watch my tounge around her, most likely) she managed to get my meat body to the point where it tipped out and fell to the ground with a crunch, the head and one arm ending up at angles that would have been bad if Elvis hadn't already left the building, so to speak. Hah hah, I kill me.
I shook off the looming depression in the face of Shuko's tearful if incoherent apologies, and went for warm and reassuring this time when I comforted, "Hey, it's okay. Don't worry about it - I'm not using that any more, you know? It's not like you hurt me, or did it on purpose." For some reason that only seemed to make it worse, and she hurled herself across the cockpit to the (mostly clean) passenger side to get some really good crying in where she didn't have to think about her balance. I closed the gullwings and tried to figure out what on earth the problem was - she was still babbling but between the wails and hiccups it was a real job to figure it out.
Fortunately I did have some physical means of comfort at my disposal - doing up the safety belts had turned out to be a major pain the ass, also the back and shoulders, so there was a pair of small arms mounted in the cieling console that had been intended to get code written so they could help do up the belt under computer control, since running them manually had ended up being even harder. (And why couldn't I have thought of them just a bit sooner, and helped the poor kid out? Was I that out of it?) Since I now was the computer I activated them and ran the lightest touches I could manage along her shoulders, giving her comforting words at low volume from the closest speaker.
Eventualy I pieced it together, she seemed to think I'd been shot by her father when I rescued her, and then she'd gone and broken my body when she'd always been taught that the state of the body was mirrored in the soul... something along those lines, anyway. Apparently her family were very spiritual, very devout (but more importantly, very small-minded) Baptists, cosplay and fantasy gaming being her bit of rebellion and ways to blow off stress from school. Then something happened at a con (I didn't think it was THAT con, though the timing was suspicious - it would have been a long way for her to go to get to New Hampshire without being caught and quarantined looking like she did, though) and her costume was part of her and that was somehow her fault too, because of something she'd done while making it(?) and, well, her life just kind of fell apart.
Later discussions filled in a bit more of the details - it in fact HAD been the guacamole dip, but she'd left early to go to a different hotel outside of town where the rooms were cheaper, and didn't get caught in the first sweep. The rest of the time between then and now had been taken traveling by hook and by crook, and a couple of times by using her new claws on someone who thought a little kitty needed a warm bed more than a ride, but at the time all I knew was what I could piece together. She never has explained just ow she got inside my truck form - I've asked a coupkle of times and all she does is give me a Look and say, "Duh, I'm a cat. Getting interesting places I'm not supposed to be is natural." The best I can figure is that she somehow squeezed in through the gap over my forearms, where the drive nacelles fold up in robot mode, but that would have been really tight even for her.
Looks like the Boskos in the other shuttle have written us off - they're out of my detection range, at least. I still haven't had any more playmates, though vibrations through the deck show at least one person moving now and then. Eh, whatever, I can deal with that as it comes. For the moment, I extend the human-size manipulators from my first and second fingers, setting up a course for the shuttle that will take it back out to the rally point. I'll have to be nice and quick on the IFF when we get there if I don't want my own side to blow us out of space, but radio silence is the way to go for now.
I was getting better with the sucky waldos in the cockpit, and tried a few basic back- and shoulder-rub motions, which at least seemed to help her hiccups. Finally she looked up from where she'd pillowed her head in her arms and asked, "Why are you being so nice? It's like you aren't even bothered by everything that happened to you, and... and I'm just here making it worse."
That one was a toughie, and I said as much, continuing, "I am bothered - so far beyond freaked out it's not funny - but I don't, well, as far as the body goes I feel very different, of course, but in terms of being me, I don't feel any different at all. Whatever made me, me, seems to have just... slid over. And, well, you're a handy distraction. I never met someone in a running gun fight before today."
The mood wasn't right to laugh, but at least she seemed to have calmed some. "Seriously, though," I continued, "it looks like we'd both be best off heading for space. You'd be stuck in quarantine, and I doubt I'd even get recognised as a person, let alone the same person, able to claim my bank accounts and things. Just figuring out how this affects life insurance would be a doozy. The problem is, for all the nifty stuff I built into this rig, one thing I don't have is a flight system.
"I fiddled with one for a little while, but all I could get was short bursts, enough to jump and transform, so I figured I'd leave it until after the road test. Then things went insane and people thought I was some kind of terrorist or something, and here we are. The only up side I see is that with your major you'll probably understand the stuff I got on this "speed drive" thing a lot better than I did, I just tried to follow the pictures because most of it was way over my head, and function seemed to follow form for most of the rest of the things I tried."
"The engineering helps less than you'd think," Shuko replied with a self-depreciating grimace. "I like 'unobtanium' better for the name, but I messed around with the suff too - treating certain parts of the costume with it and using it in the glue to stick them on let me wiggle the tail and ears by tensing other muscles, and that's probably why I got stuck like this, instead of some other way. I'll give it a shot, though."
"Please, no shots for a while, okay?" I pleaded. "Even as an expression... I don't want to think about that right now." I used the cockpit waldoes as they were intended, picking up the ends of the seatbelt and clipping them into place. "But for now, if you'll just hold on tight, I have never needed to stretch like I do right now in my life."
It was true, too. That first warm-up after the first transformation from inside - that was like nothing I can even explain, except to say that it's how a butterfly must feel when it climbs out of a pupa and unfurls its wings. Somehow merging with Wave Convoy had made a number of improvements here and there, most relatively small ones, but enough to notice performance increases even without looking at the hard data. Alas, my sorry attempts at a flight capable engine were not among them, and boosted jumps (or jumps without need of a ramp, in vehicle mode) were all I was going to get until Shuko worked something out. Transforming again, she read the drive data and reports I'd collected and we talked it over while I drove, heading north again with the intention of losing ourselves in the Maine woods and maybe making a border crossing in the middle of nowhere - Canada being slightly less uptight about handwavium than the USA at that point, Shuko should at least have been able to get supplies and materials without too much trouble as long as she didn't linger.
Any tentative plans to head for Canada were scrapped when the hunt for Shuko and I switched into high gear. It seems Daddy Dearest had been too busy being a reactionary asshole to hear about me, but the officers who questioned him after he called in a bio-mod sighting certainly did. The four and a half hours lost standing still turned out to have been a blessing in disguise since they meant that the media had caught up with what was going on and we heard about the cordon going up all along the border from New York to the coast rather than running into it.
Out of ideas, we ended up gravjumping the gate and ripping the shipping bay padlock off of an abandoned paper mill somewhere near the Maine border at about three o'clock on a Saturday morning, on the outskirts of a little town that had undoubtedly originally been settled to support it, but had become nothing more than a place to commute from. Shuko raided a Salavation Army donation bin outside the general store as we passed for a knit tuke, long coat, and gloves, so she'd at least be able to stay warm and have some chance of passing on the street if no one looked too closely at her face, but both of us were fending off despair with little more than hope at that point.
That hope rested entirely on the fact that I'd picked up an unencrypted WiFi access point as we passed the town's little public library, and the friend who'd driven her the last leg of her trip "home" actually lived only fifty or so miles away, having dropped her off at the driveway as he passed through, leaving because she'd thought her parents wouldn't throw her out if there wasn't transportation waiting. Bastards. As far as I was concerned, she was well rid of them, though of course I didn't tell her that.
More importantly, her freind - Marcel LeChevallier is his name, but he prefers Michael - had mentioned having acquired some handwavium to play around with, but never getting much in the way of results before it was banned and he hid it away in the basement. Since my handwavium, which we started calling Seibertron-type, didn't seem to want to make full-flight capable engines, she hoped he'd give his batch to us since he HAD gotten as far as a radio-controlled flyer built into a three foot long GI Joe aircraft carrier.
I didn't dare park within range of the un-'waved wifi , but fortunately Shuko had a wifi equipped PDA. After sleeping a few hours she bundled up and walked to the library, perching on a bench outside with a nice view of the river, and hit the network to send him an email asking for help. She also searched around for any more information on space-travel mods while waiting for a reply. I had her send a quick message to my family through an anonymiser to say that I wasn't really dead, nor had I gone on a terrorist rampage like the government and media seemed to think - I knew my mum especially must have been completely freaking out by then, and only hoped it would make things better instead of worse.
Fortunately, Michael was still willing to help, at least once she assured him that no, she hadn't killed the guy who'd been found a couple towns away (namely, me) and the "Battlemech Terrorist" she'd hooked up with (me again... though how anyone could take a Transformer for one of those lumbering clunkers is beyond me) hadn't either, and was in fact just a guy who wanted to show off his cool toy and unintentionally started a panic. He had a condition, though: We had to take him with us when we went. It seemed he'd felt the siren call of the stars as well, but kept chickening out before actually building the (technically illegal) speedrive he'd collected parts for or putting the 'wave to his car. He drove up that afternoon with all the parts he'd accumulated crammed into the back of his station wagon, plus a sheet of plexiglass from Home Depot and some (very welcome) heating-optional TV dinners for Shuko.
This time, 'waving the plexi was the very first thing we did, after cutting it to shape at least. It gave the stuff a cool, golden semi-mirrored effect, like the F-117 cockpit glass.
He gave his notice at work that Monday, while Shuko and I spent the week hacking together a pair of the units Michael had dubbed 'Wave Motion Engines (due to his choice of testbeds) that would fit into the rather limited spaces I had left unfilled in the Wave Convoy frame, on either side of the truck cab behind the trim stripe in the blocks that fold down/foreward to be the sides of my abdomen in robot mode. We also used some of the new stuff (or rather, she did while I stayed well away to keep from contaminating the batch) to make an electrical generator to run my energon cube condenser, since by the end of the week I'd be running uncomfortably low.
Eventually, Friday rolled around and Michael came back, wagon loaded with his geekstuff and household supplies, arriving once again in the dead of night. Since we'd be leaving soon anyway, I ripped the lock off the factory gate so he could drive in. We painted his Subaru Outback top and bottom with handwavium and gave the dual speedrives a single (thank the Matrix, successful) test shot for about ten seconds, because according to the info it took at least fifteen to get a solid read on gravity detectors. Then we sat around with two-liters of Dew and an Energon cube bullshitting and saying goodbye to Earth while we waited for it to set.
The plan had been to use the electromagnets in my fifth wheel to lock the Subaru in place on my truck form, but there was a small problem with that - we had no ramp, no crane, and if I was in truck form I couldn't pick the car up and set it in place myself. I could do that now, but I hadn't figured out as many Stupid Robot Tricks at that point - opening a side hatch for Shuko was actually the first time I'd manually controlled a transformation joint instead of using a prgrammed sequence ever, even when I was building it.
This was how we came to make the exit that's since become a staple of practically every documentary on fenspace and the so-called Great Exodus from Earth - after driving the Outback back out back (snicker) to the factory parking lot, I transformed, picked it up, and took off for the stars, Superman style.
We were detected pretty much instantly, of course, and due to the still-ongoing media circus (which would probably have died down, if not for the President and various politicos taking advantage of the opportunity to wave the flag and justify more "emergency legislation" by playing up the supposed terror threat) Air Force jets and CNN helicopters were immediately dispatched to intercept, unlike the majority of fen takeoffs where officialdom considered it a self-correcting problem.
I was just barely able to hold the Outback in one arm instead of two, and juggle my tractor beam gun off the rack on the bottom of the cab/backpack to knock away oncoming missiles, but didn't want to turn it on the jets themselves - I may have become ashamed to call myself an American in recent years, but that didn't mean I'd lost respect for the guys who went out to get shot at protecting the rest of us. Fortunately they ran out of missiles before I ran out of missile-shooting luck, their mounted guns didn't do much more than scratch the paint, and going straight up I was beyond their service cieling before any more could arrive.
The newsies got some good footage of that from below, but it's the one gun camera clip that gets the most airtime, where the pilot was following his last pair of missiles in and strafing, me knocking them down with bursts of glowing blue rings that made the missiles think they'd hit something, looming large with machine gun bullets ricocheting in bright showers of sparks before he pulled away from a collision course. Michael was pissed about that aspect of the adventure - the bullets may have bounced off me, but they turned the windows of his Subaru into sugar and spiderwebs and they burst instead of holding atmosphere. He had three cases of soda in there that popped the plastic bottles and froze all over his stuff - apparently we should have given the 'wave a couple of days to really work on it before taking off.
Finally! The shuttle had started behaving erratically not too long after I set course for the rally point, then the drive cut out - my guess is that the surviving Boskone had set about doing whatever they could to make my life difficult. It didn't matter by that point, though, momentum would carry us from there and there would be plenty of small craft with the supply train for the makeshift assualt fleet to retreive us. Now that we were well away from the battle, I dialed up the Gnarlycurl to call in.
Shuko was visibly relieved to see me, the image relayed from a little pop-up camera on my good arm while I percieved hers directly as a video stream. "Good to know you're okay, Green Machine," she greeted. "We heard you radio for assistance after getting split up, nya, then Maike getting shot down, and nothing."
"I had some enthusiastic playmates," I explain, "and we ended up breaking our toys. I'm going to need someone with a working drive to corral this shuttle, and deal with the raiders that are still on board - I suspect they've forted up in the engine room. Personally, I'm still ground-mobile but my drive is out and I'll be needing a new left arm."
Putting on an over exaggerated look of irritation she complained, "Hssst, always making more work, aren't you?" Her face softened again, and just from the tone of my best friend's voice I knew something was up as she repeated, "I'm really glad you're all right, Wave Convoy. Michael... A raid broke into this area while he was making a run for more medical supplies, since we've been doing hospital ship duty, and ... they got him. One of the rammers flew right through the Magic Bus, didn't even give him a chance."
Damn. Michael was kind of annoying sometimes, but he was a good freind to both of us. He'd always come through in a pinch, and it's not like the Gnarlycurl wasn't big enough to have our own private spaces.
---=- + -=---
I don't technically need to sleep these days, physically speaking - with adequate energon supplies my robotic body doesn't get tired per se. The cerebro-circuits that took over housing my personality, that had once just been a brain-shaped sculpture with whatever electronic parts I had handy here and there put in the head for versimilitude, still mostly mimics the functions of a human brain however and needs periodic rest cycles to organise things. Even then I can pull off the trick dolphins have where only half their brain sleeps at once as long as I don't mind looking like I have the processing power of a TRS-80 until all of me wakes up.
Wounded dignity is hardly the only reason I avoid that in favor of plugging in for daily recharge cycles as much as I can, though - part of it is simple efficiency, since my energon level regenerates a bit with far less power cost than making cubes and consuming them normally, part of it is to maintain some loose connection with humanity, and part of it is because I don't get the really interesting, semi-coherent dreams unless I do. Of course, the flip side of that is that I don't get the really nasty, horrific or depressing nightmares either... which was the real reason it was close to a month after that battle before I bit the bullet and settled into the recharge couch.
Sure, I'd told myself it was because there was just so much to do - I'd sortied again after getting repaired, and then there was retrieving the dead and wounded, and getting those craft that could be fixed back into service, and those that couldn't stripped and the wrecks out of the way, and captives to deal with and funerals to attend and a million other things... but I knew the truth, and by the end I had a constant, low level dissapproving buzz from the Matrix for my cowardice. Eventually I stopped making excuses and got down to it, the perception of my quarters fading and being replaced - suprise, suprise - by an Autobot briefing room.
The big screen was replaying the end of the battle as if from a camera following me and for just an instant I thought the form silhouetted against it was Victory Saber, which would have finally answered whether these dreams were really directly from the Matrix or not, since Victory Saber hadn't ever carried it, co-existing with Rodimus Prime in the Headmasters/Masterforce/Victory time frame. Then the screen changed back to the default Autobot logo and the lights came up, and I realised it was just Ultra Magnus. So much for proof.
Looking around the room, I saw that Rodimus was here too, as well as... "SCOURGE!? What the slag is a Decepticon doing here?"
The sinister Sweep leader scoffed from where he leaned against one wall, exasperated. "Weak-minded Autobot fool. Do you forget that I carried your precious Matrix briefly as well?" He sneered and crossed his arms, while Rodimus winced and looked away.
I had forgotten that episode, or was it a two-parter? Scourge had been pretty messed up by the Matrix energy, but he did get the standard leader-grade power boost despite that, where Galvatron and even Magnus hadn't been able to use it at all. If he'd gotten it while he was still Thundercracker, before getting rebuilt by Unicron made him less compatible, it might have been game over. "That still doesn't explain why you're here," I insisted. "It's not like a Decepticon - espescially you, the S&D squad leader - would have a problem with bloody battle, or any moral credibility to reprimand me."
Rodimus answered that one, saying, "We're not here to reprimand you - you already know how you should try to handle things next time. Magnus and I are here because we didn't feel worthy of the role any more than you do, while Scourge is the example of what someone truly unsuitable to hold the Matrix is like."
The scowling, dark blue Sweep scoffed again, then pushed off from the wall to take his seat at the conference table. "Perhaps, but before you soft-hearted fools make me glitch with your pep talks, let's get down to business. Whether I care about how they offended you or not, hunting down the rest of these 'Boskone' of yours calls for MY area of expertise." Narrowed red eyes glowed cruelly for a moment, in memory of chases past.
=====================================================
The title "Surfing with the Alien" is the name of a Joe Satriani piece I particularly like, and seemed apt for dealing with overtech that gets shortened to "wave." Likewise, the ship we end up with will be called Gnarlycurl, and its favorite music (Not mine, Michael's, or Shuko's, the ship's) is surf rock.
The chapter title comes from one of the animal poems of Flanders and Swann, one that was not expanded into a full song. It is as follows:
The Platypus
We call him "duck-billed platypus"
and mock him for his name
yet he does not seem to mind it
he doesn't feel any shame
for he does not know himself by such a title
He's a "Golden, Shining Love-Bird"
in duck-billed platypese
I'd originally said "Relevance? Hmph. Topicality? Hah! A Jedi seeks not these things!" but after further consideration, it does actually apply - The majority population would call him a nut from the beginning, possibly an undead digital demon later, the govermernt called him a terrorist, the media thought he was a battlemech of all things... but he does not know himself by such a title. He's a hard-luck, dreaming Transfan, in T.F. fandomese.
May the sauce be with you. (And the rest of the pizza too!)
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
It's not something you'd know without crawling down there and looking, but there's actually a pretty good sized space inside the body of my truck form, around my so-handsome head. I'd never changed the camera settings after transforming back to vehicle mode that afternoon, so when I next became conscious that space was what the eye cameras were showing (upside down, but that at least was as it should be) - except it wasn't as empty as normal. A shivering silver bundle topped in brown was in there, precariously balanced on the "frame member" that becomes my upper arm in robot mode. There were a number of things really strange about how I felt, but the outside temperature sensor reported it as being Damn Cold while the cabin sensor was at Come On In The Water's Fine, and having realised I was looking at the girl I'd rescued wrapped in my first aid kit's emergency mylar blanket-thing I thought it might be a good idea to share that second report.
Getting her away from bits that would squish her if I accidentally hit the transformation button also seemed like... the transformation button, yes... button, button, where's the button... where's the finger, the arm, the body... The head-bone's connected to the, neck-bone...
Oh dear.
I believe I shall hold very, very still, while activating the head sound system and face synch. Will that actually work without a pilot's face in front of the camera to run it? Oh. Oh, yes, well, let's just shut that camera off for a few minutes, shall we? I don't need to think about skin covered in circuit patterns and cables that burst out of my skull for a little while.
It seemed the mimic software I'd kludged together was no longer needed, since I could feel the metalized rubber I'd used to make Wave Convoy's face moving as I softly called out, "Miss?" She jumped, and slipped off the ledge, landing out of my line of sight below, making me wince sympathetically. "Sorry, Miss? Are you all right?"
She sat back up into view, and I noticed the fur and cat ears for the first time. There were cute little mini-fang incisors too, as she yawned and blinked at the robot head mounted upside down in front of her. "Hai..." she said at length, and while I didn't know if it was a greeting or fan-japanese for yes, I assume the latter because she followed it with a greeting. "Um... Hello, there. I kind of got locked out of the truck, somehow, but I don't really know where we are and well... yeah," she trailed off, running a hand along one ear dejectedly.
It flicked away from her finger and I realised they were more than just a costume... I still needed to get her out of the crush-zone though. "Is there a name I can call you? It's kind of wierd just saying 'Miss' - but it would be a really good idea to get out from under the truck, I'm getting twitchy trying to stay still." Oddly enough, it was true. I had the strongest urge to stretch out and stand up, and a pretty good idea what doing so would mean at the moment.
A sob caught in the girl's throat, but she forced it down and replied, "C-call me Shuko, I guess... since he said their daughter Marci was dead, and no demon was going to profane her name..." By the state of her puffy, red eyes and tear-tracked cheek fur, I figured she'd done a lot of crying over that in however long I was out (04:34:17.882, a corner of my mind noted helpfully, another that bioneural functions had been migrated to cerebro-circuits 01:38:44.207 after losing consciousness) and understandably so if I was interpreting correctly. Pulling herself together with a visible effort of will, she clambered out through the side trim plate I opened and asked, "What's your name?"
"I'm, ah, having a bit of an identity crisis right now myself, actually. Um, you're not a demon are you? Becasue I'm pretty sure I'm definitely dead."
I'd switched to the grille camera, so I could see her fragile expression. "N-no... I don't think so..." Her voice becme very small, and she swallowed before whispering, "...maybe?"
Putting as much descisiveness as I could into my projected voice, I stated, "Sounds like a 'no' in that case, since you're much more likely to be an angel from what I can see." Trite? I suppose. Sappy? No question. On the other hand, it brought a tiny smile to her lips if only for an instant, before puzzlement knitted her brow.
"What do you mean, dead? No one's found us yet, and you sound a lot better than just after we arrived. There was a lot of blood, but it stopped so I got out to pee, and then the door wouldn't open again." She adjusted the shiny plastic sheet in a way that suggested she was doing it to remind me she was cold, rather than for the adjustment's sake.
"That's tied to the identity crisis. You see, the blood stopped because I ran out. The thing is, it seems I won't be needing it any more anyway... I suppose you could say I am Wave Convoy now instead of driving Wave Convoy." I was no where near as sure of myself then as I sound in my memory, but audio files don't lie, as long as you use a lossless compression format anyway. "You're welcome to come in - I'll open the hatch - but my body, I mean, the hardware I had for the last couple decades, is in there kind of... dead. And I'm in here, for approximate values of 'in' and 'here.'"
Suprisingly, then, Shuko laughed. "You sound like a CS major," she said. "Always talking about hardware and software abstraction and this value or that value."
"Makes sense," I noted. "I am a CS major. You're in college, then?" She looked about that age, but the fur could have been throwing me off.
"Yeah, double engineering major, ME/EE. The workload is totally insane, but I'm almost done... except now I've missed months of classes thanks to this. She tugged on the same ear spitefully, and winced when the nerves reported that ear-tugging was a Hurty Thing. The little moment of good mood she'd found popped like a soap bubble on the floor. Then she shivered violently and clutched the emergency blanket tighter like she meant it. "It's... really cold. Share-a-room-with-a-body-to-get-away-from type cold. Will you, -- oh, thanks."
I'd popped the passenger side gullwing's latch and started opening it right away, and she was up the ladder and leaning in in a twinkling. I switched cameras again, to one of the inside ones that looked that way, and saw her nose wrinkle. If she'd gotten more than just the looks from whatever gave her fur and things - I noticed a tail the same brown as her hair poking out now that she'd wadded up the blanket to use the ladder. I could see why she'd grabbed it, all she had on otherwise was a shortie tee, loose shorts, and some lowtop sneakers, I guessed because heavier clothes rubbed her fur the wrong way. The cream and brown pattern of it gave her a somewhat Siamese look, as if she was wearing clipped-finger gloves and dark socks. Where was I? Oh, Shuko looked like the smell was giving her second thoughts about corpse vs. cold, and having decided that I didn't have any real options in terms of a return to carbon-based living, I told her, "I'll let you decide which is worse, but go ahead and dump my old body if you want to. You should probably strap in either way, though, I seriously need to stretch and am certain that means transforming."
She shuddered once, put her hands together as if to pray, then looked at the speaker I'd routed my voice to and shook her head. Steeling herself, the petite catgirl climbed in through the hatch and levered my ... old-me's... whatever - legs to be in reach of the driver's side hatch, now gliding up on its hydraulics. Hadn't that just been a gas cylinder before? Well, it was fully powered now, along with the latches and locks. Then she went back out the passenger side and hopped up on the roof of the cab to cross over, get her feet set on the ladder rungs, and start to haul the bloody corpse out. Cetain important muscles had relaxed in death and I got a report of a .05% increase in power consumption and a hot feeling to go with the embarrassment, but she didn't mention it and neither did I. Some things were going to take more getting used to than others I thought, trying to distract myself.
After a considerable amount of effort, a quick stop to vomit, and a few whispered not-a-cuss-words (which told me I'd better watch my tounge around her, most likely) she managed to get my meat body to the point where it tipped out and fell to the ground with a crunch, the head and one arm ending up at angles that would have been bad if Elvis hadn't already left the building, so to speak. Hah hah, I kill me.
I shook off the looming depression in the face of Shuko's tearful if incoherent apologies, and went for warm and reassuring this time when I comforted, "Hey, it's okay. Don't worry about it - I'm not using that any more, you know? It's not like you hurt me, or did it on purpose." For some reason that only seemed to make it worse, and she hurled herself across the cockpit to the (mostly clean) passenger side to get some really good crying in where she didn't have to think about her balance. I closed the gullwings and tried to figure out what on earth the problem was - she was still babbling but between the wails and hiccups it was a real job to figure it out.
Fortunately I did have some physical means of comfort at my disposal - doing up the safety belts had turned out to be a major pain the ass, also the back and shoulders, so there was a pair of small arms mounted in the cieling console that had been intended to get code written so they could help do up the belt under computer control, since running them manually had ended up being even harder. (And why couldn't I have thought of them just a bit sooner, and helped the poor kid out? Was I that out of it?) Since I now was the computer I activated them and ran the lightest touches I could manage along her shoulders, giving her comforting words at low volume from the closest speaker.
Eventualy I pieced it together, she seemed to think I'd been shot by her father when I rescued her, and then she'd gone and broken my body when she'd always been taught that the state of the body was mirrored in the soul... something along those lines, anyway. Apparently her family were very spiritual, very devout (but more importantly, very small-minded) Baptists, cosplay and fantasy gaming being her bit of rebellion and ways to blow off stress from school. Then something happened at a con (I didn't think it was THAT con, though the timing was suspicious - it would have been a long way for her to go to get to New Hampshire without being caught and quarantined looking like she did, though) and her costume was part of her and that was somehow her fault too, because of something she'd done while making it(?) and, well, her life just kind of fell apart.
Later discussions filled in a bit more of the details - it in fact HAD been the guacamole dip, but she'd left early to go to a different hotel outside of town where the rooms were cheaper, and didn't get caught in the first sweep. The rest of the time between then and now had been taken traveling by hook and by crook, and a couple of times by using her new claws on someone who thought a little kitty needed a warm bed more than a ride, but at the time all I knew was what I could piece together. She never has explained just ow she got inside my truck form - I've asked a coupkle of times and all she does is give me a Look and say, "Duh, I'm a cat. Getting interesting places I'm not supposed to be is natural." The best I can figure is that she somehow squeezed in through the gap over my forearms, where the drive nacelles fold up in robot mode, but that would have been really tight even for her.
Looks like the Boskos in the other shuttle have written us off - they're out of my detection range, at least. I still haven't had any more playmates, though vibrations through the deck show at least one person moving now and then. Eh, whatever, I can deal with that as it comes. For the moment, I extend the human-size manipulators from my first and second fingers, setting up a course for the shuttle that will take it back out to the rally point. I'll have to be nice and quick on the IFF when we get there if I don't want my own side to blow us out of space, but radio silence is the way to go for now.
I was getting better with the sucky waldos in the cockpit, and tried a few basic back- and shoulder-rub motions, which at least seemed to help her hiccups. Finally she looked up from where she'd pillowed her head in her arms and asked, "Why are you being so nice? It's like you aren't even bothered by everything that happened to you, and... and I'm just here making it worse."
That one was a toughie, and I said as much, continuing, "I am bothered - so far beyond freaked out it's not funny - but I don't, well, as far as the body goes I feel very different, of course, but in terms of being me, I don't feel any different at all. Whatever made me, me, seems to have just... slid over. And, well, you're a handy distraction. I never met someone in a running gun fight before today."
The mood wasn't right to laugh, but at least she seemed to have calmed some. "Seriously, though," I continued, "it looks like we'd both be best off heading for space. You'd be stuck in quarantine, and I doubt I'd even get recognised as a person, let alone the same person, able to claim my bank accounts and things. Just figuring out how this affects life insurance would be a doozy. The problem is, for all the nifty stuff I built into this rig, one thing I don't have is a flight system.
"I fiddled with one for a little while, but all I could get was short bursts, enough to jump and transform, so I figured I'd leave it until after the road test. Then things went insane and people thought I was some kind of terrorist or something, and here we are. The only up side I see is that with your major you'll probably understand the stuff I got on this "speed drive" thing a lot better than I did, I just tried to follow the pictures because most of it was way over my head, and function seemed to follow form for most of the rest of the things I tried."
"The engineering helps less than you'd think," Shuko replied with a self-depreciating grimace. "I like 'unobtanium' better for the name, but I messed around with the suff too - treating certain parts of the costume with it and using it in the glue to stick them on let me wiggle the tail and ears by tensing other muscles, and that's probably why I got stuck like this, instead of some other way. I'll give it a shot, though."
"Please, no shots for a while, okay?" I pleaded. "Even as an expression... I don't want to think about that right now." I used the cockpit waldoes as they were intended, picking up the ends of the seatbelt and clipping them into place. "But for now, if you'll just hold on tight, I have never needed to stretch like I do right now in my life."
It was true, too. That first warm-up after the first transformation from inside - that was like nothing I can even explain, except to say that it's how a butterfly must feel when it climbs out of a pupa and unfurls its wings. Somehow merging with Wave Convoy had made a number of improvements here and there, most relatively small ones, but enough to notice performance increases even without looking at the hard data. Alas, my sorry attempts at a flight capable engine were not among them, and boosted jumps (or jumps without need of a ramp, in vehicle mode) were all I was going to get until Shuko worked something out. Transforming again, she read the drive data and reports I'd collected and we talked it over while I drove, heading north again with the intention of losing ourselves in the Maine woods and maybe making a border crossing in the middle of nowhere - Canada being slightly less uptight about handwavium than the USA at that point, Shuko should at least have been able to get supplies and materials without too much trouble as long as she didn't linger.
Any tentative plans to head for Canada were scrapped when the hunt for Shuko and I switched into high gear. It seems Daddy Dearest had been too busy being a reactionary asshole to hear about me, but the officers who questioned him after he called in a bio-mod sighting certainly did. The four and a half hours lost standing still turned out to have been a blessing in disguise since they meant that the media had caught up with what was going on and we heard about the cordon going up all along the border from New York to the coast rather than running into it.
Out of ideas, we ended up gravjumping the gate and ripping the shipping bay padlock off of an abandoned paper mill somewhere near the Maine border at about three o'clock on a Saturday morning, on the outskirts of a little town that had undoubtedly originally been settled to support it, but had become nothing more than a place to commute from. Shuko raided a Salavation Army donation bin outside the general store as we passed for a knit tuke, long coat, and gloves, so she'd at least be able to stay warm and have some chance of passing on the street if no one looked too closely at her face, but both of us were fending off despair with little more than hope at that point.
That hope rested entirely on the fact that I'd picked up an unencrypted WiFi access point as we passed the town's little public library, and the friend who'd driven her the last leg of her trip "home" actually lived only fifty or so miles away, having dropped her off at the driveway as he passed through, leaving because she'd thought her parents wouldn't throw her out if there wasn't transportation waiting. Bastards. As far as I was concerned, she was well rid of them, though of course I didn't tell her that.
More importantly, her freind - Marcel LeChevallier is his name, but he prefers Michael - had mentioned having acquired some handwavium to play around with, but never getting much in the way of results before it was banned and he hid it away in the basement. Since my handwavium, which we started calling Seibertron-type, didn't seem to want to make full-flight capable engines, she hoped he'd give his batch to us since he HAD gotten as far as a radio-controlled flyer built into a three foot long GI Joe aircraft carrier.
I didn't dare park within range of the un-'waved wifi , but fortunately Shuko had a wifi equipped PDA. After sleeping a few hours she bundled up and walked to the library, perching on a bench outside with a nice view of the river, and hit the network to send him an email asking for help. She also searched around for any more information on space-travel mods while waiting for a reply. I had her send a quick message to my family through an anonymiser to say that I wasn't really dead, nor had I gone on a terrorist rampage like the government and media seemed to think - I knew my mum especially must have been completely freaking out by then, and only hoped it would make things better instead of worse.
Fortunately, Michael was still willing to help, at least once she assured him that no, she hadn't killed the guy who'd been found a couple towns away (namely, me) and the "Battlemech Terrorist" she'd hooked up with (me again... though how anyone could take a Transformer for one of those lumbering clunkers is beyond me) hadn't either, and was in fact just a guy who wanted to show off his cool toy and unintentionally started a panic. He had a condition, though: We had to take him with us when we went. It seemed he'd felt the siren call of the stars as well, but kept chickening out before actually building the (technically illegal) speedrive he'd collected parts for or putting the 'wave to his car. He drove up that afternoon with all the parts he'd accumulated crammed into the back of his station wagon, plus a sheet of plexiglass from Home Depot and some (very welcome) heating-optional TV dinners for Shuko.
This time, 'waving the plexi was the very first thing we did, after cutting it to shape at least. It gave the stuff a cool, golden semi-mirrored effect, like the F-117 cockpit glass.
He gave his notice at work that Monday, while Shuko and I spent the week hacking together a pair of the units Michael had dubbed 'Wave Motion Engines (due to his choice of testbeds) that would fit into the rather limited spaces I had left unfilled in the Wave Convoy frame, on either side of the truck cab behind the trim stripe in the blocks that fold down/foreward to be the sides of my abdomen in robot mode. We also used some of the new stuff (or rather, she did while I stayed well away to keep from contaminating the batch) to make an electrical generator to run my energon cube condenser, since by the end of the week I'd be running uncomfortably low.
Eventually, Friday rolled around and Michael came back, wagon loaded with his geekstuff and household supplies, arriving once again in the dead of night. Since we'd be leaving soon anyway, I ripped the lock off the factory gate so he could drive in. We painted his Subaru Outback top and bottom with handwavium and gave the dual speedrives a single (thank the Matrix, successful) test shot for about ten seconds, because according to the info it took at least fifteen to get a solid read on gravity detectors. Then we sat around with two-liters of Dew and an Energon cube bullshitting and saying goodbye to Earth while we waited for it to set.
The plan had been to use the electromagnets in my fifth wheel to lock the Subaru in place on my truck form, but there was a small problem with that - we had no ramp, no crane, and if I was in truck form I couldn't pick the car up and set it in place myself. I could do that now, but I hadn't figured out as many Stupid Robot Tricks at that point - opening a side hatch for Shuko was actually the first time I'd manually controlled a transformation joint instead of using a prgrammed sequence ever, even when I was building it.
This was how we came to make the exit that's since become a staple of practically every documentary on fenspace and the so-called Great Exodus from Earth - after driving the Outback back out back (snicker) to the factory parking lot, I transformed, picked it up, and took off for the stars, Superman style.
We were detected pretty much instantly, of course, and due to the still-ongoing media circus (which would probably have died down, if not for the President and various politicos taking advantage of the opportunity to wave the flag and justify more "emergency legislation" by playing up the supposed terror threat) Air Force jets and CNN helicopters were immediately dispatched to intercept, unlike the majority of fen takeoffs where officialdom considered it a self-correcting problem.
I was just barely able to hold the Outback in one arm instead of two, and juggle my tractor beam gun off the rack on the bottom of the cab/backpack to knock away oncoming missiles, but didn't want to turn it on the jets themselves - I may have become ashamed to call myself an American in recent years, but that didn't mean I'd lost respect for the guys who went out to get shot at protecting the rest of us. Fortunately they ran out of missiles before I ran out of missile-shooting luck, their mounted guns didn't do much more than scratch the paint, and going straight up I was beyond their service cieling before any more could arrive.
The newsies got some good footage of that from below, but it's the one gun camera clip that gets the most airtime, where the pilot was following his last pair of missiles in and strafing, me knocking them down with bursts of glowing blue rings that made the missiles think they'd hit something, looming large with machine gun bullets ricocheting in bright showers of sparks before he pulled away from a collision course. Michael was pissed about that aspect of the adventure - the bullets may have bounced off me, but they turned the windows of his Subaru into sugar and spiderwebs and they burst instead of holding atmosphere. He had three cases of soda in there that popped the plastic bottles and froze all over his stuff - apparently we should have given the 'wave a couple of days to really work on it before taking off.
Finally! The shuttle had started behaving erratically not too long after I set course for the rally point, then the drive cut out - my guess is that the surviving Boskone had set about doing whatever they could to make my life difficult. It didn't matter by that point, though, momentum would carry us from there and there would be plenty of small craft with the supply train for the makeshift assualt fleet to retreive us. Now that we were well away from the battle, I dialed up the Gnarlycurl to call in.
Shuko was visibly relieved to see me, the image relayed from a little pop-up camera on my good arm while I percieved hers directly as a video stream. "Good to know you're okay, Green Machine," she greeted. "We heard you radio for assistance after getting split up, nya, then Maike getting shot down, and nothing."
"I had some enthusiastic playmates," I explain, "and we ended up breaking our toys. I'm going to need someone with a working drive to corral this shuttle, and deal with the raiders that are still on board - I suspect they've forted up in the engine room. Personally, I'm still ground-mobile but my drive is out and I'll be needing a new left arm."
Putting on an over exaggerated look of irritation she complained, "Hssst, always making more work, aren't you?" Her face softened again, and just from the tone of my best friend's voice I knew something was up as she repeated, "I'm really glad you're all right, Wave Convoy. Michael... A raid broke into this area while he was making a run for more medical supplies, since we've been doing hospital ship duty, and ... they got him. One of the rammers flew right through the Magic Bus, didn't even give him a chance."
Damn. Michael was kind of annoying sometimes, but he was a good freind to both of us. He'd always come through in a pinch, and it's not like the Gnarlycurl wasn't big enough to have our own private spaces.
---=- + -=---
I don't technically need to sleep these days, physically speaking - with adequate energon supplies my robotic body doesn't get tired per se. The cerebro-circuits that took over housing my personality, that had once just been a brain-shaped sculpture with whatever electronic parts I had handy here and there put in the head for versimilitude, still mostly mimics the functions of a human brain however and needs periodic rest cycles to organise things. Even then I can pull off the trick dolphins have where only half their brain sleeps at once as long as I don't mind looking like I have the processing power of a TRS-80 until all of me wakes up.
Wounded dignity is hardly the only reason I avoid that in favor of plugging in for daily recharge cycles as much as I can, though - part of it is simple efficiency, since my energon level regenerates a bit with far less power cost than making cubes and consuming them normally, part of it is to maintain some loose connection with humanity, and part of it is because I don't get the really interesting, semi-coherent dreams unless I do. Of course, the flip side of that is that I don't get the really nasty, horrific or depressing nightmares either... which was the real reason it was close to a month after that battle before I bit the bullet and settled into the recharge couch.
Sure, I'd told myself it was because there was just so much to do - I'd sortied again after getting repaired, and then there was retrieving the dead and wounded, and getting those craft that could be fixed back into service, and those that couldn't stripped and the wrecks out of the way, and captives to deal with and funerals to attend and a million other things... but I knew the truth, and by the end I had a constant, low level dissapproving buzz from the Matrix for my cowardice. Eventually I stopped making excuses and got down to it, the perception of my quarters fading and being replaced - suprise, suprise - by an Autobot briefing room.
The big screen was replaying the end of the battle as if from a camera following me and for just an instant I thought the form silhouetted against it was Victory Saber, which would have finally answered whether these dreams were really directly from the Matrix or not, since Victory Saber hadn't ever carried it, co-existing with Rodimus Prime in the Headmasters/Masterforce/Victory time frame. Then the screen changed back to the default Autobot logo and the lights came up, and I realised it was just Ultra Magnus. So much for proof.
Looking around the room, I saw that Rodimus was here too, as well as... "SCOURGE!? What the slag is a Decepticon doing here?"
The sinister Sweep leader scoffed from where he leaned against one wall, exasperated. "Weak-minded Autobot fool. Do you forget that I carried your precious Matrix briefly as well?" He sneered and crossed his arms, while Rodimus winced and looked away.
I had forgotten that episode, or was it a two-parter? Scourge had been pretty messed up by the Matrix energy, but he did get the standard leader-grade power boost despite that, where Galvatron and even Magnus hadn't been able to use it at all. If he'd gotten it while he was still Thundercracker, before getting rebuilt by Unicron made him less compatible, it might have been game over. "That still doesn't explain why you're here," I insisted. "It's not like a Decepticon - espescially you, the S&D squad leader - would have a problem with bloody battle, or any moral credibility to reprimand me."
Rodimus answered that one, saying, "We're not here to reprimand you - you already know how you should try to handle things next time. Magnus and I are here because we didn't feel worthy of the role any more than you do, while Scourge is the example of what someone truly unsuitable to hold the Matrix is like."
The scowling, dark blue Sweep scoffed again, then pushed off from the wall to take his seat at the conference table. "Perhaps, but before you soft-hearted fools make me glitch with your pep talks, let's get down to business. Whether I care about how they offended you or not, hunting down the rest of these 'Boskone' of yours calls for MY area of expertise." Narrowed red eyes glowed cruelly for a moment, in memory of chases past.
=====================================================
The title "Surfing with the Alien" is the name of a Joe Satriani piece I particularly like, and seemed apt for dealing with overtech that gets shortened to "wave." Likewise, the ship we end up with will be called Gnarlycurl, and its favorite music (Not mine, Michael's, or Shuko's, the ship's) is surf rock.
The chapter title comes from one of the animal poems of Flanders and Swann, one that was not expanded into a full song. It is as follows:
The Platypus
We call him "duck-billed platypus"
and mock him for his name
yet he does not seem to mind it
he doesn't feel any shame
for he does not know himself by such a title
He's a "Golden, Shining Love-Bird"
in duck-billed platypese
I'd originally said "Relevance? Hmph. Topicality? Hah! A Jedi seeks not these things!" but after further consideration, it does actually apply - The majority population would call him a nut from the beginning, possibly an undead digital demon later, the govermernt called him a terrorist, the media thought he was a battlemech of all things... but he does not know himself by such a title. He's a hard-luck, dreaming Transfan, in T.F. fandomese.
May the sauce be with you. (And the rest of the pizza too!)
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows