Keep On Dancing

A/N: Oikodomopolis first shows up in "Asking for Directions", aka Exploring Breakdown of my Twenty-Eight Breakdowns.


Oikodomopolis left the dancehall after the fifth jetdance song. She hated jetdances. All silvery and light, like flying, every single one of them. A groundpounder like her couldn't dance to that kind of music. At least jetdances didn't remind her of air-strikes, so she had it better than some mechs she'd worked with. Jetdances just bored her silly.

It was such a pain to find a dancehall that played good groundpounder music. Most of the Decepticon non-jets didn't much like dancing at all, because the only kind they were familiar with was designed to be done by a flier and just looked silly if it was a tank doing it. Didn't really help that the most common type of artistic dancing was aerial dance.

So running a dancehall for groundpounders wasn't exactly easy or good for making money. The Smith knew, most dancehalls at least tried to play a few groundpounder pieces a night, but when Oikodomopolis wanted to dance, she didn't want to have to wait half the night before they played something she could dance to.

She was making herself angry just thinking about it. Smelt it! She wanted to dance so bad that not even picking out a truck'former to flirt with would make it go away. Looked like she'd have to make her own music.

She had the equipment in her quarters and the space to dance if she kept her 'floor' pretty small. It wasn't like she kept a lot in her quarters anyway; just the console and a set of concert-quality speakers. Expensive, but well worth the litres traded.

She wanted some new music, though. She had copies of all the really good dance music already, and she'd danced to it a thousand times before. Nothing new on the music'net, though, she found when she did a quick check. Looked like she'd have to remix something.

Oikodomopolis brought Unison's "Captive" up on her mixer program; the Autobot POW's pieces always had a haunting quality that made her circuits crawl. "Captive" was pretty slow, though, so she pulled up a battle march she particularly liked (recorded on Constructicon trumpets, at that) and changed "Captive" to fit its tempo. She quickly spun in the drums from a Forgefire hymn and adjusted the bassline's beat to an uncommon groundpounder dancebeat.

She played the result and made a face. Too many snares in the drumline for the base music. Scratch everything but the bass, then pull in some other deep-sounding percussion from her library.

She mulled over her choices, then selected a sound sample she'd gotten from Euphony: a Gigatron terraforming project in the middle of hitting their commissioned planet with asteroids that would add various features to the landscape. Who didn't want to use an entire planet as a percussion instrument?

Tweaking the music only took a few more hours, then she kicked clear a large square of flooring and put the music on her good speakers.

Then she began to dance, and the floor shook.

End