Prompt 6 Response
Title: Neon Rain
Rating: G
Continuity: IDW
Character: Jetfire
Warnings: science geeking
At times like this, Jetfire felt guilty, though he knew it defied logic. He had every reason to be here, and, to be honest, here wasn’t exactly an enviable place, to some. The gas giant’s furious winds were screeching against him, buffeting his armor, howling like the planet itself had gone mad and was raking long agonized fingers over its face.
Heat pressed against him, and Jetfire could feel his armor creak under it, glad of his molyalloy coating that siphoned the worst of it. No, it was not a place most Cybertronians could survive, much less enjoy.
But he could, and he did, even as he did his work.
There were ways to synthesize liquid metal hydrogen, yes, but they were expensive, and large and fragile, three things that a race in the middle of a war had to think thrice about. And the effort and energy to make some, when it was here, in a gaseous planet, just roiling under the ferocious helium storms above, waiting to be collected?
Brainstorm needed a superconductor. And here it was, a vast dark lake of it, lashed under a storm of gases that would sting at Jetfire’s optics if he removed his helmet. And here was Jetfire, who had sighed at the summons-Brainstorm did not request or ask, ever-and shelved his own research, donning his helmet.
And once here, he was secretly grateful for the break, grateful for the chance to step away from yet another weapon of death, to look up from a tiny isolated laboratory and see science, as it was, all around him.
The storm was powerful, but it brought Jetfire a strange kind of peace: this was nature at its wildest: chemistry at its most rapacious as molecules snatched at electrons, colliding into each other. It was violent and brutal, but it had, to the trained optic, a sort of beautiful order, a sense and reason to it. War was chaos, and this, for all its lashing winds and colliding molecules, was order.
The hydrogen was running up the tilted side of his flask, parts of it superfluid, defying gravity and wind. He watched a thin film of it coat his thumb, feeling the pressure and sting of it, but more than that, the marvel of it all. He stoppered the flask, stowing it in a pressure and heat sealed storage compartment, before tilting his head up, wasting, perhaps, one last look through the helium sky, streaked with brilliant falling blue from the neon rain. Even that was science: helium bonding to neon, too heavy to stay aloft, getting excited from the fall through air to shine.
He didn’t believe in Primus, or any of those gods. He believed in science, and science brought him miracles enough.
Rating: G
Continuity: IDW
Character: Jetfire
Warnings: science geeking
At times like this, Jetfire felt guilty, though he knew it defied logic. He had every reason to be here, and, to be honest, here wasn’t exactly an enviable place, to some. The gas giant’s furious winds were screeching against him, buffeting his armor, howling like the planet itself had gone mad and was raking long agonized fingers over its face.
Heat pressed against him, and Jetfire could feel his armor creak under it, glad of his molyalloy coating that siphoned the worst of it. No, it was not a place most Cybertronians could survive, much less enjoy.
But he could, and he did, even as he did his work.
There were ways to synthesize liquid metal hydrogen, yes, but they were expensive, and large and fragile, three things that a race in the middle of a war had to think thrice about. And the effort and energy to make some, when it was here, in a gaseous planet, just roiling under the ferocious helium storms above, waiting to be collected?
Brainstorm needed a superconductor. And here it was, a vast dark lake of it, lashed under a storm of gases that would sting at Jetfire’s optics if he removed his helmet. And here was Jetfire, who had sighed at the summons-Brainstorm did not request or ask, ever-and shelved his own research, donning his helmet.
And once here, he was secretly grateful for the break, grateful for the chance to step away from yet another weapon of death, to look up from a tiny isolated laboratory and see science, as it was, all around him.
The storm was powerful, but it brought Jetfire a strange kind of peace: this was nature at its wildest: chemistry at its most rapacious as molecules snatched at electrons, colliding into each other. It was violent and brutal, but it had, to the trained optic, a sort of beautiful order, a sense and reason to it. War was chaos, and this, for all its lashing winds and colliding molecules, was order.
The hydrogen was running up the tilted side of his flask, parts of it superfluid, defying gravity and wind. He watched a thin film of it coat his thumb, feeling the pressure and sting of it, but more than that, the marvel of it all. He stoppered the flask, stowing it in a pressure and heat sealed storage compartment, before tilting his head up, wasting, perhaps, one last look through the helium sky, streaked with brilliant falling blue from the neon rain. Even that was science: helium bonding to neon, too heavy to stay aloft, getting excited from the fall through air to shine.
He didn’t believe in Primus, or any of those gods. He believed in science, and science brought him miracles enough.