Day 48: Cafeteria (Breakfast)

[should_be_dead]

Luckily for Mele, the night had ended before Tenzen had changed his mind and deemed Mele appropriate for target practice. Even if the situation of who was mocking who had seemed to change into the Iga ninja's favor. Despite her behavior, perhaps the insolent woman could serve some sort of use nonetheless. He had been trapped in this place for a

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[arc_wrench]

If HK was ever prone to do anything undignified, he might have been skipping down the halls with glee. He was a Decepticon now! He'd managed to hide the inked mark on his arm from the nurses, so it was still there, carrying with it a sense of pride and mostly-ignored traitorousness to the Sith cause. But the Decepticons were like giant droid Sith anyway, so how could this be wrong?

His nurse looked exceedingly confused but hopeful when he didn't make a fuss over the food, but oh, HK was in too good a mood this morning to let something like that slide. No, it was his droidly duty to pester the life out of every meatbag within range! Unless they were interesting and sensible enough to place the same value on viciously murdering others as he did. Those meatbags were fine.

And so the nurse had a vacation of approximately thirty-six seconds before HK began complaining loudly over the disgusting fleshiness of the pancakes: "Description: It's like a Tach was run over by an industrial press and then stretched out under a hot lamp for a few minutes to 'cook!'", the former meatbag status of the sausages "Suspicion: And it's just a tube of meat. I refuse to eat anything that looks like that. ...Well, meatbag, because it looks like a part of anatomy that shall not be mentioned. Cooked. And then placed on the tray to mock me."

Even the fruit did not escape his ranting. "Exclamation: Plant embryos! Why do meatbags eat the developing forms of other organic life? Do you eat baby meatbags as well? ...Don't run off when I'm talking at you, meatbag!"

HK was left alone as usual, poking suspiciously at his food as he always did, but happy. He looked at the symbol on the inside of his forearm again, just managing to hold back some sort of happy, excited squeak. He was a Decepticon now!

[Free!]

[bullygeneraleva]

This? Was crap. She was finally back in good shape after that embarrassing mess with Junpei and the biting, ready to get out there and... destroy something or impress someone, whatever felt good, and what had she managed?

Nothing. It was like the early days back at Mahora, when she'd seriously thought Nagi would come back if she played his little game. Sure, she hadn't exactly played well, but she'd played, and all she'd gotten for it was that he'd died. And she'd had to invent a different game, one that took a lot longer to play and had tons of long boring stretches where all she got to do was play board games with the headmaster, replay Dragon Warrior, and try to make annoying little girls cry. And watch the Chao show; that at least had been genuinely entertaining.

And of course when the whole thing had finally started to unfold properly her good buddy Martin Landel had decided she ought to be playing in his little fake hell instead. There was a pattern there.

In the midst of this meandering and typically misanthropic morning review Evangeline unconsciously drifted to an area free of the annoying chattering of the nurses, and found herself staring at HK. He looked vaguely excited, which around here scanned as 'unhinged.'

She sat across from him anyway. Might as well find out why.

"I hate to break it to you," she said in a voice that suggested she actually enjoyed crushing people's dreams quite well, "But I don't think your friend is actually a tattoo artist back home."

[arc_wrench]

"Greeting: Good morning, meatbag who is failing to antagonize me!" HK's head snapped up to look at the meatbag, eyes sparkling with manic, likely insane happiness. "Statement: No, he is not. He is a giant droid capable of incredible feats of destruction, and he has just inducted me as one of his faction, hence the mark." Yes, he probably could have drawn it better but it was official this way! Well, sort of. The words of the oath had obviously been changed and the chassis was likely supposed to be permanently marked with the symbol, not in pen, but still!

[bullygeneraleva]

Evangeline was opening her mouth to fire back a retort when her expression collapsed into exasperated disgust, like she'd just stepped in something unpleasant in her very cutest shoes.

"Oh. It's... you," she said. Among her diverse hobbies Evangeline was a minor robotics aficionado and had followed the conversations of the various synthetic 'intelligences' of the Institute with little interest but considerable amusement... but they were, she'd decided, entirely too stupid to be tolerable in person and were best followed from a distance.

Lucky her, she'd found one anyway.

Well, there was really only one possible response: keep being an ass. "I'll bet he tells all the other 'bots that. Is that what your little club does? Sit around exaggerating how big the guns on your old bodies were to each other?"

[arc_wrench]

"Query: You recognize me? If I have met you before, meatbag, I have completely forgotten." He was a good droid and cleaned out extraneous memory files when things started to get cluttered, and meatbags were of course the first things to go. "Statement: I have seen one of them in his original body. Easily over five meters tall, although I was focusing on not being squashed or shot, not taking precise measurements." Having to think about Lockdown was... well. Not the most cheerful subject at the moment. Especially when we was now forced to share his cell again with a meatbag.

But he refused to be made unhappy by such things! "Statement: You're just jealous that you aren't really an inorganic. And we don't. I was frankly tiny in comparison to them, being only human-sized, but I still have a kill count of over 500 distinct assassination targets within the three years I have been functioning." He still was irritated that Starscream had disappeared before he could convince any of the Decepticons to hire him to assassinate him. If he could have done that, he might have been inducted even sooner!

[bullygeneraleva]

"I recognize the way you talk. And write. Stupid messages arguing with stupid children." Or had that just been his new buddies? Who cared, if he was this eager to be counted among their less-than-august ranks, guilt by association was definitely fine.

"I'm undead," she corrected, sounding annoyed. Her body was still organic, sure, and she was thankful for it, but she had few of the weaknesses the slur implied. "Look, I'm sure it's great polishing each other's chrome or whatever, but frankly your new friends are all idiots. Maybe they could afford to be when they were all big war machines who just had to find the next target to step on, but right now they can't be anything but a liability. You're hitching your wagon to the wrong team."

[arc_wrench]

"Query: How else am I supposed to keep myself entertained in a place where I can't get away with killing someone during the day?" It made perfect sense to him. If you couldn't kill anything, annoyance was the next best thing.

"Statement: You're still a meatbag, so I don't care." Yes, he was extremely mature. And three years old, so possibly it was justified. "Do you think they fought humans? Really?" Although it would be exceedingly fun to do so in that sort of way. Not very stealthy, but fun. "From what I can determine, they fought other, less reasonable droids of equivalent size." 'Less reasonable' in HK's mind meaning 'not sharing the opinion that one should be able to kill whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted.'

[bullygeneraleva]

"Then their 'other droids' were just as stupid." Or they were materially inferior or in a disadvantageous strategic position, but Evangeline felt like focusing on the stupidity angle. "Every time one of them writes something on the bulletin it makes me wonder how they even remember to breathe. They're a race of ancient robots but they've got the emotional nuance and subtlety of a thirteen-year-old girl and it informs everything they think. And they say everything they think, too. No control at all."

Evangeline didn't particularly care that HK had actually met them while she had based her opinion off of a few half-remembered scraps of paper. Admitting that wouldn't have left her with a whole lot to say.

[arc_wrench]

"...Conjecture: You've never actually met any of them, have you?" Yes, Lugnut could be a little... well. Dim. But he was very, very good as either acting as a distraction or clobbering someone really, really hard over the head. Also, he seemed as determined as a droid should be to see a target completely destroyed and splattered over the walls. "And what does character really have to do with killing things, anyway? As long as you are willing to do so, everything else does not matter."

Also, though he had not gotten the chance to meet Megatron, the Decepticon leader had almost... well. Reminded him of Revan. His maker. Nothing could be wrong about that!

[bullygeneraleva]

"See, that's the sort of thing they wouldn't even think about," Evangeline said, launching another attack even as she admitted her basis for doing so was less than substantial.

"Are they good at killing things as humans?" She asked. If they were, that was something in their favor, but she could easily see them being terrible at that, too. Even if they were in full control of their new bodies, she didn't see what use a professed assassin could have for such a noisy bunch.

About their leader, though, she would have agreed. He alone had not struck her as a fool. At the very least she could easily see why he'd been the one in charge...

[arc_wrench]

"Statement: Or maybe they are effective enough in combat that it doesn't matter," HK shot back. "I've been stuck with more petulant groups of meatbags, but even they still managed to kill everything within sight." Well, the Jedi and the whiny pilot only killed 'bad people' and the Mandalorian didn't kill other mercenaries and hunters who were 'honorable' or something and the Wookiee wouldn't kill other Wookiees and T3 was just a useless little jerk, but HK certainly killed everything in sight!

"Answer: They are better." A response made mostly by supposition about the Decepticons, but Lockdown had certainly been impressive during their rampage through the meatbag town. He wanted that to happen again. Possibly with Lockdown again, somehow, regardless of how unpopular he was with Lugnut and Scourge.

[bullygeneraleva]

"I wish every assassin that came after me thought like that," Evangeline said dismissively. "'Just throw a few dumb brutes at them and it ought to work out.'"

She said it only to goad him, offend whatever murderous sense of professional pride had him boasting about his precious kill count; she in fact preferred the benefit to her image that high-quality enemies afforded her. Killing stupid children who didn't know what they were in for was something she was glad to have put behind her.