damned_institute | Day 40: Lunch

*hobble wobble*

"Damn that SCOURGE!" Starscream cried out, the slowly-filling cafeteria producing a jarring echo of his raspy voice. His limping, already bad enough from not knowing how to properly use his crutches, was now exacerbated from the injuries he'd received the shift prior. Despite the gauges in his non-casted leg so lovingly provided by the aforementioned 'patient', Starscream could still put some weight on it, but not so much that he could really stop and rest; relieving the soreness under his arms was out of the question. The nurse that walked behind him with his tray, already upset at having to deal with yet another troublesome inmate, was growing rather impatient as his charge slowly made his way down the food line.

"Just...give me a standard serving of the aquatic creature's flesh, some of those fried potato slices, two bananas, and three bottles of juice," Starscream sighed, his anger from just a moment ago assuaged by the physical exertion needed to move the way he did. "I'm going to sit down here...bring it to me when you're done."

He was hardly surprised to find that one of the bananas was completely bruised along its inner curve, or that the handful of 'chips' on his plate were all on the small side. Tired and frustrated as he was, however, he could barely muster a 'damned flesh-creature' before moving his fingers to the plate, picking one of the longer 'chips' and shoving it into his mouth listlessly.

There was an unusually high concentration of sodium chloride crystals on it. Of COURSE.

[For Tony Stark]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"It may interest you to know," Starscream smirked, "that we actually achieved mass conversion in a much LARGER scale. One of my warriors can change from a robot my size - approximately twenty or so of your 'feet' tall - to a human audio media device...oh, what is it called...a 'cassette player', I think." Such mass changes were mundane for Transformers, of course, but it was technology far superior to anything the flesh-creatures of his world could achieve, and so in his processor was something about which bragging came easily.

"As for the location of my true form...sadly, I do not know." His beaming disposition was at once eliminated, replaced immediately with a dour countenance. "My limited exploration of this facility has yielded little in terms of either physical or anecdotal evidence, but they MUST be somewhere on the premises...perhaps underground, for the rooms seems too small to house myself and my fellow Transformers either in our robot or alternate forms."

Had he believed the tale, Tony would have been both duly impressed and more than a little curious. Mass conversion on that scale should have been impossible, though 'impossible' had seemed like more of a guideline than a solid rule the past few days. As it was, he eyed Starscream contemplatively, eating a few more bites of his meal before asking, "Why would a twenty foot tall robot want to transform itself into obsolete media technology? It wouldn't even make a good disguise past the early 1990s."

His expression turned wry, and he looked over the crowded cafeteria to give himself somewhere else to focus for a few seconds. "You think they have a large-scale robotics bay hidden in the basement?" he asked. Little as he believed the story of giant shape-changing robots, the prospect intrigued him. It intrigued him even more that it lined up with his own thoughts on where the technology used to bring them all to the Institute had to be hidden; having it off-site and transporting so many people in with such frequency would have been far too inefficient and open to discovery.

"We awoke on Earth...approximately twenty of your solar cycles ago," he returned, assuming that the person across the table was, in fact, a human, and that he was taken from roughly the same time as Starscream was. "The course of our war with our enemies, however, saw us leave the planet to return to our own world. There was little need for Soundwave to update his form, therefore, if disguise on Earth was no longer a concern."

Starscream shrugged at the next question, taking another bite of the fish (and wincing at its constant...slipperiness) as he pondered the various possibilities for where, indeed, his chassis could be located. "It seems most logical, does it not? Storing such things off-site would be quite the security risk for these people; thus, it stands to reason that something as important as the true bodies of some of the...'patients' here would be stored where they could be readily accessed by Landel and other people of power here." As he took a swig of his juice, he noticed a momentarily intrigued look flash over his companion's face. Starscream smirked and leaned in a bit.

"Even if you do not believe my story, the prospect is tantalizing, no?"

"Assuming they had a use for that sort of thing, or wanted to reverse-engineer them, storing on site would make sense. But if they didn't..." Tony shrugged as he trailed off. Privately, he was sure the Head Doctor would keep the true bodies of his non-human patients on hand, if he really had them in the first place. The entire situation smacked of overconfidence, and discarding such trophies would be the next best thing to admitting the possibility of patient escape.

"The prospect of a fully-operational robotics bay? You have no idea. Now, the prospect of having to bypass the security system anyone sane would rig for something like that, with the sort of tools we have available here?" Tony's expression drew into an aggravated grimace. Breaching the security within the more public areas of Landel's Institute had proved difficult enough, though he had to admit the monsters skewed those results. "If there is one, getting in might be a bigger obstacle than finding it."

There was a visible pause in Starscream's thought processes and smug attitude, his hand hovering mid-lift as it clutched his juice glass. The thought of disposing of his and the other Cybertronians' bodies never crossed his mind until this point, but the very concept made him stop in fear. No...surely they could not...my spark would be extinguished if my chassis was destroyed...wouldn't it? He soon became cognizant of his delay, however, and quickly drank his juice, the action helping to set off a few more neurons firing in his 'synthoid' body. "I cannot imagine it would be easy to do anything ELSE with them, especially given their relatively primitive technology. Disposal, especially, should be difficult; how to explain the destruction of two, perhaps three jets, and that's only of the other Transformers I have confirmed being here!" Suddenly, a scoff; his hesitation and worry was for nothing.

"You have a point," he then muttered, realizing that, given his experiences just the night before in acquiring something as simple as potassium nitrate, the kind of security in place for guarding something as precious as his magnificent form would be formidable indeed. "Nevertheless...if there IS something down there, and it IS related to my body, I cannot sit back and bemoan any potential security threats. Assessing such obstacles would at the very least prove incredibly informative, and would give me - er, anyone interested, a starting point."

Day 40: Lunch

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