Chapter Text
"Why isn't anybody doing anything about this?"
Scrapper refocused his optics through the holographic schematics he was working on. Gremlin was on the other side of the display, holding up a datapad. On its screen was a site from the humans' internet, the header reading in clunky English glyphs The Sun Will Eventually Engulf The Earth.
"Oh for..." Scrapper stopped short, and took a moment to subspace his stylus and turn off the holotable. Looked like this scraplet of his was, as Swindle put it, 'going all Nellie Bly' again.
Whatever that meant.
Gremlin, at the age of four Earth years, had blown the lid off the conspiracy that sometimes the big bots would turn into vehicles. And then he'd uncovered an insidious plot to standardize 'naptime' and deprive him and his fellow mechlets of valuable cartoon and/or Lego time. Once the mechlets began school, Gremlin had been the first to figure out that the big bots had never done any of this before— this being mechlets, the very concept of elementary education, the whole shebang.
And after that first (real) revelation, Gremlin had decided he wasn't going to let anything go unquestioned. Scrapper approved, of course— the universe could fragging well stand to have a few more sparks asking why when told to jump. Gremlin's problem, however, was the kid had no damn sense of scale.
"The squishies have about a billion years to get their dross together," Scrapper told him patiently. "I'm sure they'll have figured something out by then."
"But—" Gremlin pointed to some chart comparing star sizes with planetary orbits. "The humans aren't doing enough space stuff, can't we help 'em?"
Scrapper fired off another short message to Perceptor suggesting that maybe a bit more emphasis on Cybertron Is Better in the curricula might not be a bad idea. Earth was... okay, certainly safer for the mechlets than Cybertron right now. But if the scraplets grew too fond of the muddy blue planet they might never be rid of it.
"Gremlin, look—" Scrapper began. "Organics like the humans change really quickly. Maybe in just a million of their years they'll rejuvenate Sol, or move the planet or something. See, if their scientists already know this much—" he poked Gremlin's pad, right on an animated graphic of an expanding red giant— "then that's half the job done, right? They know what's coming."
Gremlin studied the screen, still unsure. "I guess..."
"If it'll make you feel better, why don't you go see if one of their science-types will tell you what the humans are planning to do," Scrapper suggested. "I hear they worship someone known as Science Guy. Or there's that one Skyfire goes on about... Kneel the Grass Typhoon, or something like that."
Scrapper couldn't believe he was seriously sending his mechlet off to get scientific data from humans, but there it was. Astrophysics was a bit beyond his ken, and the only Cybertronian experts on the subject were having a little trouble unraveling such a dense subject into simplified principles for the mechlets' education. It really wouldn't matter how primitive or incorrect whatever the humans told Gremlin was if it gave the mechlet something to focus on.
Gremlin perked up, red optics brightening. "Does Stephen Hawking have a Twitter?"
Primus below. "No Twitter. That place is a rust pit. Email only, y'got me?"
"Email only!" Gremlin grinned like a turbofox after glitchmice, already on Google.
"And write me a report on what the humans tell you, too." A little extra work never hurt anyone, and he wanted to be sure these squishy scientists, not a few of whom were quite chummy with the Autobots, after all, wouldn't editorialize on the subject of Decepticons.
"I'm gonna find out everything," Gremlin promised, sitting down next to Scrapper and furiously tapping away at his datapad.
Scrapper couldn't stop a smile from crawling across his faceplates. "Pace yourself, kid; it's a science lesson, not an exposé on political corruption."
Gremlin's head snapped back up. "What political corruption?"
Scrapper buried his face in his hands and groaned. Perhaps he should look up this Nellie Bly.