#highdrive

“This place is perfect!” Bumblebee exclaimed the moment they entered the warehouse that Sari had suggested.

The little girl stood with her hands on her hips and a proud grin on her lips, obviously proud of herself. Tyla had to hand it to her, she certainly had the perfect place in mind like she had claimed an hour ago.

“Told you. It’s an old warehouse that even my dad doesn’t know about and he owns the place. I figured since it wasn’t being used, that you might get some use out of it. After all, you need a base and it’s a pretty cosy place to hang out at too.”

“Must be nice being rich. I couldn’t even afford a cube of this place considering my rent already,” Tyla said, making her way up to a catwalk situated on what she assumed was originally meant to be a second floor or third floor. Yeah, not even if she had two jobs would she even be able to afford one room.

“And you’re sure we can use this place?” Optimus asked, looking to Sari with an even bigger eye at her in what she assumed was their version of a raised brow.

“One hundred percent big guy,” Sari smiled, giving him a thumb’s up. The action seemed to confuse Optimus for a short while as he looked to Tyla for some sort of explanation. She only smiled as well as she gave him the same gesture. He copied it with an awkwardly raised blue thumb.

“Hm, I guess I can move some of my equipment over… it’ll take a while to get everything off the ship though,” Ratchet said, a scowl on his face as he wandered off through one of the archways, possibly to look at the rest of the building. Highdrive seemed like he wanted to ask about the place a bit more before Ratchet’s voice boomed back into the room, calling him over to help check things out.

“It’s so big out here,” Bulkhead breathed, nearly spinning around from excitement. Compared to the ship, or what she had seen of it so far, the warehouse was certainly far bigger, perhaps even big enough to hold their ship if it could transform into a giant robot like the others.

“You say that like you’ve never been in a big room before,” Tyla said from where she leaned against the railings, her arms folded on them as she balanced herself on the heels of her feet on the walk.

Bulkhead only smiled, his three-fingered hand rubbing against the back of his head like a child that had been caught doing something silly.

“Small minds are often easily amused,” Prowl hummed from where he looked around the base. Bulkhead kept his smile for a short while longer until the realisation of what Prowl truly meant kicked in, causing him to lower his arm back to his side. Tyla frowned to the motorcycle bot, tempted to remind him that it was because of the small mind that he was still functional. She hadn’t seen a lot of the fight, but she was pretty sure that if Bulkhead hadn’t been involved, then things could have ended a lot worse than they did.

Optimus stopped her before she could, walking up to the larger bot and putting a hand on his arm with a soft, trying smile. “I know this isn’t exactly ideal, but it’s something. We might as well try to get used to it, don’t you think?”

Those words seemed to be just what Bulkhead needed, and they seemed to be effective enough to cause Prowl to look away and rethink what he said. What Sari suggested next, got Bulkhead even more excited.

“Hey, how about we go pick out a room for you? I know just the one,” Sari offered, hopping onto Bulkhead’s extended hand like she was taking a ride at a fair as the two of them bundled off together with Sari guiding him through each room.

Perhaps getting acquainted with giant robots wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but Sari took to it so naturally that it was almost as if she was one of them. Unable to contain her own excitement, Tyla rushed down the stairs, waving to them.

“Hey, wait for me!”

Warning: mention of self-harm

Screech! Screech! Screech!

Every morning it was the same routine. Wake up after five in the morning to a screaming alarm clock and dragging herself out of bed. Pushing herself up from her bed, Tyla groaned as she looked to her reflection in the oval-shaped mirror hanging above her old country-styled bed.

The picture of a messy, blonde, boy-cut hairstyle teenage girl stared straight back at her with a pair of yellow eyes. Eyes that had earned her mockery ever since she was born. When her parents first saw her eyes, they’d gone to a specialist and asked to know what was wrong with her. Wrong. Not if she had an illness or if it was some genetic disease. They had wanted to know what was wrong. To say that her parents couldn’t wait to get rid of her was an understatement. Their original plan had been to just dump her somewhere in the streets until a social worker convinced them to give her up for adoption instead.

She had never been adopted, but in a way she supposed that she owed a lot to that social worker. If it hadn’t been for them, who knows how long she would have been out in that cold autumn wind waiting for an end with no possible chance of surviving on her own.

For years she had been bullied by the kids at the orphanage because of her eyes. At one point it had gotten so bad that she’d almost attempted to cut them out beneath the old wooden staircase in the far corner of the building. A small crowd of children had gathered, urging her on. Before she had stabbed the point of the scissors into her waiting eyes, another girl had stopped her. She couldn’t remember anything about that girl, only that she had leukaemia and died the year after. Tyla had never asked the orphanage director for her name. Sometimes she thought that she had simply imagined the other girl as a way of coping with everything. No one had ever bothered to confirm or deny her thoughts.

Whilst she was growing up, Tyla had often found herself sitting in that same corner that she had almost blinded herself in, just staring at the wall before her, desperately trying to recall the girl’s face. The week after she turned sixteen, she had made a run for it, escaping from the orphanage, and finding a part-time job as a deep frier operator at a Burger Bot in Detroit, the most advanced city in America, or at least that’s what the billboard had said. The job had originally relied on robots but the owner had eventually given in after what she could only assume was pity. Ever since that day, she had worked the frier from Mondays to Thursdays and the odd Saturday or two.

Her original plan had been to buy a pair of contact lenses after getting her first pay check, but the rent for the small room, water bill and food costs had eaten through the money so fast that she’d resorted to buying her furniture from third-hand shops whenever she could afford it. The smudgy mirror she had picked up from the dump. Apparently someone had messed what seemed like some kind of oil on it and had deemed it too much effort to clean. It wasn’t the prettiest thing in her room, but it was useful, and that was all she needed it to be.

Two moods today

I'm Vincent. I'm an adult, that's the most you'll get about my age.

I am working on a project with my friends, things have gone fucky so now I have tumblr to watch over that. I don't know if I'll post, maybe when I get high.

“Tyla! Hey! Earth to Tyla!”

Nearly jumping out of her seat, Tyla looked over towards the red headed girl that was nearly on top of her, her lips pressed together in a frown.

“Are you okay? You’ve been zoned out the whole morning.”

Blinking, Tyla watched the younger girl return to her seat before she attempted her best reassuring smile. There was no way she could tell the other girl that she had spent a good chunk of the night talking to a giant robot head that was meant to be a secret from.

How she hadn’t discovered it yet was something Tyla was still trying to process, along with the whole conversation about how the head belonged to an Autobot that didn’t want his fellow bots to know about his current condition.

Something felt off about it but considering that Sari’s dad was helping to restore the head to its original form, she supposed that she couldn’t blame Megatron for wanting to keep his secret. Even though he was a giant robot, being reduced to nothing but a head had to be embarrassing.

Not that she would know. If a human lost their heads it was basically game over. No redo. Not yet anyway. A shudder went through her at the thought of humans living as robots one day.

She loved spending time with the bots, in fact she considered them her closest friends, but to live like one of them… she wouldn’t wish that on any being. Granted, being robots were all the Autobots knew, but if being one of them meant staying alive as only one part of something physical, she didn’t want it. Wham, ban, no thank you ma’am.

“Yeah. Just… had trouble sleeping,” Tyla said, not missing the questioning gaze in the other girl’s red eyes. To others they would have been an unsettling colour but considering that her own weren’t exactly a natural hue, she never judged Sari about hers. And considering that Sari never said anything about Tyla’s probably meant that she felt the same way about it.

“Was the wattage too low?” Highdrive asked out of nowhere, reminding her that he was the one driving them back to the warehouse where the two girls planned on spending the rest of their day.

“Wattage?” Sari asked with an even more concerned look on her face as she looked at Highdrive’s dashboard.

“You know, for your recharge cycle.”

Even though it was basically the same principle, Tyla couldn’t help but smile at the cute interpretation Highdrive had of a human’s sleep schedule. It was still a little weird comparing the two sometimes though. Not knowing how to explain what she had been up to most of the night without divulging a secret that she had been sworn to keep, Tyla nodded, keeping her smile. “Yeah. The wattage was too low, Highdrive.”