−αΣn=1NDi[n][Σj∈C[i]Fji[n − 1] +Fexti[[n−1]]

“I don’t get excited about being a table,” Sword says, and he… actually, he looks kind of offended. “It was an unintentional rewrite on my part– not even one I was aware of until just now. Do you really think I planned on being your furniture? I’m a swordsman. …Was a swordsman.” The fire bot stands up, using his height to his advantage in an attempt to look a little more intimidating.

The jazzercise tank top doesn’t really do him any favors, but, whatever.

For the moment, anyway. Astro was about to counter Sword's snippy behavior by pointing out he'd probably fall flat on the ground 5 seconds after being unplugged, before Sword offered to help. Again. His face instantly scrunched up in confusion. Again. This was all strange and unfamiliar, challenging his previous assumption that Sword had all the emotional capability of an Automatic Teller Machine.

“…You may have,” he starts, pausing. “…Inadvertently given me an alternative purpose, using me as a table. When you returned my legs to me and I synced up…” the bot shrugs. Is he embarrassed? After his one emotional slip-up, he looks more guarded than ever, so it’s hard to tell. “…Being useful to you drove me to seek you out.”

There’s a beat of silence.

Face seemingly melting as his fingers pulled at his synthetic skin, Astro weighed upon this seriously weird confession. “What.” Propping his forehead in his hand, he redirected his glare at the floating ball, bemusedly poking at its polished surface.

“No. Nuh uh no what no uh no no no no NOPE no stop slow down, Brienne.” This was sad. This was so sad it would've been worth recording to laugh at for years to come – if only he weren't so offended that he was partly to blame. “Dammit, I'm not a fan of your relentless moping so your finding purpose is great! I guess. But my table??? That's what you get excited about in the day. To hold my china.”

Ugh. UghhHHHHHHHHHHH. “Now I have to be responsible and keep you from being a moron like those... those 3rd Gen chumps,” he muttered under his breath, punctuating his frustration with quiet “bleghs.” 

“…I came to you so you could recharge me,” Sword repeats, strangely, realization dawning on him. His face contorts into something like shock for a moment, eyes wide; the reaction too fast for him to suppress it properly.

"...I came to you so you could recharge me,"

Uhhh what? Annoyed, he turned to look at the other. "What are you blubbering abou--?"

What the hell was that. Sword's face wasn't like that .052 seconds ago. Something happened to Sword's face. What that was, Astro had no idea, but he had no intent of letting a weirdy thing like that slip through his feckkin useless sausage fingers again goddammit.

Sword’s eyes remain closed, but his brows furrow, cogs whirring within as the anti-grav system starts back up. The cold reboot leaves his body scrambling to re-patch and update– a clear sign of the fire bot’s neglect in charging himself regularly. Not that that’s anything new, but…

The fact that Sword had gone looking for help? That he’d actually gone out of his way to try and prevent his battery from dying?

That was a marvel in itself.

He finally starts moving, his head sluggishly rocking to one side and then the other, as if shaking himself awake. His legs, lying dead to the side of his upper body, roll into a sitting position just below his torso. The lids of his eyes flutter open and shut, his optic receivers slowly regaining light as his sensors begin to activate.

Odds and ends arced through the air and landed in a shoddy cardboard box, uninterrupted by the vocal intrusion, as Astro prepared for his next migration. “You know what, I did.” Whatever strangeness tainted Sword’s tone was lost on the preoccupied robot. If there was any significance behind recharging his brother, it didn’t really occur to him -- Sword’s the same, sad lump powered or not, Astro thought to himself as he began stuffing his rear sphere apparatus with the rest of the pointless junk that wouldn’t fit in the box.

I TRIED TO WARN HIM, MAN, I REALLY DID

TOLD HIM “HEY BRO, MAYBE SNEAKING INTO ASTRO’S ROOM AND DRAWING DICKS ON EVERYTHING ISN’T SUCH A GREAT IDEA”, BUT DID HE LISTEN TO ME?? PFFFFF, LIKE HELL HE DID

If Astro thought it would be fun to watch then how could he NOT try to make it happen for him? Slowly, the proverbial gears in his head began to turn, and right away the circusbot went to looking around the party for any potential victims. He didn’t think that he’d ever heard Astro say that /anything/ would be ‘fun’, and especially not anything that he’d ever suggested. “Well, maybe it’ll happen tonight! It’s still pretty early, I mean.” He said, gesturing toward the sun that was now just barely peeking out from behind the horizon.

But after a while, it dawned on him what he just uttered: sounds like fun. Because it did! But only because the nature of his field of study gave him something of an eschatology fixation.  An asteroid, nova, or maybe a gamma ray burst would've been vastly preferable to a fleet of alien warships, but he wasn't going to nitpick. "Maybe. What's a prom without a world-shattering disaster?" A Clown-induced altercation resulting in absolute destruction at someone else's expense? Hell yeah he wanted to see that shit. He'd even add some tasteful dubstep to the video and make it his screen saver.

"I hear what you’re saying, but see, to me, whatever ideas Grenade’s got rattling around in that empty head of his aren’t really going to be all that entertaining because he’s gonna LIKE whatever the consequences are!" The sky was blue, the grass was green, and Grenade blew himself up on a daily basis; it was just sort of the way the world worked. "Now, a group of smug robots that think they’re better than everyone else getting blown to smithereens by angry aliens? Now that’s comedy.” Clown continued, following the other over to where the drinks were, clandestinely wiping the smooshed and mangled twinkie off of his hand onto a passing robot.

"I guess that’s true…" Clown agreed with a shrug. It was true that the party was just about everything that Clown wasn’t, but he still liked attending them. He liked to dress up, and besides that, it was the only day in the entire year where he could just be nice to his dumb linemates without anyone getting any weird sappy ideas about it.

"Those insular servile babies? Please." He moved over to the beverages and poured himself something without really looking at what it was. Mm, tangy. "They might have their heads jammed up their rears, but they know better now. But judging from recent events..."

Scanning the grounds for other robots, he caught sight of a train with an oversized bib, a couple of the aliens themselves, but no Napalm man? Huh. Either down and out or late. "I'd have to say that the one to watch is gonna be our very own Grenade. If he shows up." It took a perfect storm of dim wit, loudness and staggering ignorance to incite what amounted to a massacre. Ol' Gren would probably love every second of it.

"AggwwhhhwhWAAEGEH GEH GEH GEH GEH HEY. HEY. NO. UH UH." He hissed. Touching! No no no no, that would not do. As soon as Astro registered the contact, he flailed his own noodly arms around to shoo those freakishly hefty metal boas away from him. For touching, this was definitely a no-fly zone, it didn't matter who -- was that paint on his arms?