"What's going on in... hey! Get out of my stuff!"

Mirage and Trailbreaker jumped up from the sudden interruption by the Jeep, resulting in sheets of paper -somewhat small by the standards of Transformers- scattering about the floor. Hound, slightly irritable after returning from patrol in the pouring rain, was not pleased to find the two bots poking through his personal possessions. And upon seeing said papers littering the ground, he immediately got down on hands and knees to hastily pick them up. "Geez! Ask before you start going through my personal stuff, will ya?"

"Hey, what's with the paper?" Mirage asked, holding up the rest of them, bound in a pad.

"Give me that!" Hound snatched it from him and carefully slid the sheaf of paper behind the card stock cover to protect it. Much to his dismay, he felt heat rise up in his faceplate. Fortunately for him though, embarrassment in a Cybertronian wasn't so easily detectable as a blush on a human.

"No need to get so defensive," Trailbreaker said, holding up his hands in defeat.

Mirage stepped toward his green friend, putting an arm around his shoulder. "Prime asked that we move out to make room for those two new guys, Trasks and Blaster, so we're bunking with Trailbreaker here for a while. We thought it would be a friendly gesture to help you move out, but I accidentally dropped this thing-" he gestured here to the pad. "-and paper went everywhere. That's all."

Hound sighed.

"What's so important about them anyway?"

He looked up at Trailbreaker, then back to the bound sheaf in his hands. "They're... they're drawings."

"Oh... that's what we thought."

"Who made 'em?"

"...well, I did."

The black Autobot grinned. "YOU did?"

"Yeah, I did," Hound snapped, getting defensive again. "So what?"

"Nothing, nothing! We were just curious. After all, you never seemed like an artistic kind of 'bot. Where'd you get the idea to start drawing anyhow?"

Hound stared at his feet, though there was no turning back now. They'd discovered the secret he'd been hiding for more than a year, and now he had to confess where he'd gotten such a crazy idea.

"Well... it was when Spike took me to the Natural History museum before we built the Dinobots..."

Hound felt more than silly walking around the place. Here he was, 14 feet tall and millions of years old, getting a crash course on Earth's biological and geological history while carefully studying every exhibit on display in the human-sized building. They'd gotten an extremely long lecture from security at the entrance, and so coming within close physical proximity to anything made the Autobot beyond nervous.

"Look, I have to use the bathroom, so stay here and I'll be right back. Okay?"

Hound twisted up his face. "Well... all right. But hurry. I don't want to get in trouble for anything..."

Spike laughed. "I'll be RIGHT back."

Being alone made him feel even more ridiculous than before. He was stuck where he was for the moment, very aware of all the people gawking at him and quite unable to occupy himself with anything he hadn't committed to memory yet. He looked around, trying to avoid optic contact with any of the touring humans, when he spotted a single figure sitting on the floor in front of a model velociraptor.

The young man was wearing a shirt that seemed to be advertising a 'Duran Duran', whatever that was. Upon his head was a gigantic pair of cans, as Jazz called them, plugged into a small cassette deck set on the floor beside him. Hound watched with curiosity as the boy's forearm swept across a wide, flat, white thing in his lap, drawing marks across it. He inched closer to peer over his shoulder, and saw what looked to be a well-executed reproduction of the dinosaur in front of him. After a moment or two of staring, however, the boy happened to discover he was being watched. It was quite entertaining, really, to see him catch sight of the crouching Autobot out of the corner of his eye, think nothing of it for a nanosecond, and jerk all the way around, eyes wide as Cybertron's moons as he looked up at his audience. His gaze passed over the benignly smiling 'bot before the human fumbled with a shaking hand to stop the music he was listening to.

He swallowed. "C-... I... uh... I... I'm allowed to draw here, right? Because if it's any problem at all I'm more than happy to get right up and leave, just give me a few seconds here and I'll be out of your hair--" The young human male stumbled over his words like Rumble running for his life.

"Hey no, I was just watching... if you don't mind?"

The boy looked up at Hound for a few more seconds before relaxing by the slightest bit, attempting to turn back to his sketch.

"Mind if I ask something?" The inquiry made the boy jump a bit.

"Yeah... er, no... no, what?"

Hound pointed at his drawing pad. "Why are you going through all that trouble when you can just take a picture of it?"

The human thought about it, and in doing so, seemed to relax even more as he was lost in trying to find an answer. "It, uhm... it helps me see better." The Autobot cocked his head to the side in mild confusion, so he continued. "Uh... observational drawing skills. Getting good at that helps you see things... how they really are and not how you think they are. And also, it's much harder to take a photo and make it yours, so to speak. You follow me?"

Try as he might, it didn't make any sense to him. "No, not at all really."

"All right." The young man set down his drawing pad and turned around to face Hound. It appeared as though most of his initial anxiety was gone, thank Primus. "Anyone can draw a dinosaur like that." He pointed to the reconstructed velociraptor behind him. "Each person has a vision of what they believe a dinosaur to look like, and it usually looks nothing like an actual dinosaur. There's so much detail, so many little things that make a dinosaur a dinosaur, you have to learn how to see all of it, otherwise you're just drawing from your imagination."

Hound pondered this bit of information from the human stranger, and oddly enough, it began to make sense to him. It had always been his function to observe, to see, to record visual information... and never in his eons of living had he thought to draw anything, really, as a means of recording.

"You're a robot, aren't you?"

He was shaken out from the musings deep within his CPU by the young man's question. "Both of our species have a lot more in common than anyone might give us credit for," Hound replied.

"Sorry, there was a line." The mech turned his head to see Spike walk up beside him. "Hey, I see you made a friend already."

"Oh!" the young man, visibly older than the Whitwicky boy, exclaimed. "I'm Cam by the way." He held out his hand, which Spike shook, and Hound did too in turn.

"This is Hound you've been talking to," the boy introduced. "An Autobot. I'm Spike."

"Nice to meet you. Hey look.. I gotta get going though. Meeting friends for lunch."

"Sure thing," the Autobot said, standing up once again.

With that, Cam packed up what little supplies he had and walked off in the direction they had come, glancing over his shoulder but once. Hound was silent for a moment before turning to Spike.

"Hey... would you mind running an errand for me after we get back to the Ark?"

"And you've been out drawing on almost every patrol since then?" Mirage asked.

Hound sheepishly shrugged, conjuring images of the landscapes and wildlife he'd done in thick, soft graphite. He was proud of them, and over the past year had come to love learning about Earth by recreating what he saw on paper. "Well, yeah. Please don't tell anyone, guys. They'd never let me hear the end of it."

The two mechs looked at each other an laughed lightheartedly. "No problem, buddy," Trailbreaker said. "You may be crazy, but you're still our friend. How about we pretend this never even happened?"

"Well hold on there a second," Mirage broke in. "Before we go on erasing our memory banks of Hound's little guilty pleasure here, I might want to ask him for a commission." He smiled broadly at the Jeep.

Hound narrowed his eyes at the blueblood as Trailbreaker began to roar with laughter.

"You may be my best friend, Mirage, but don't push your luck or else I might just go in and erase your memory banks myself," he said, grinning. A threat like that from Hound didn't have the same affect as it would had it come from someone like Sunstreaker. He was just too nice more often than not. But this time, he decided to amend that statement with something that he would actually do. "On second thought," he said slyly. "I think I'll just immortalize your aft instead."

Note: That last bit there was in reference to the quote: "Never piss off an artist or we'll immortalize your ass."