Shrift and Reticle
You guys, Beri got me into the More Than Meets The Eye arc in the comics. I was only able to find issues 19, 20, and 21, but she's been filling me in on everything as it happens. Except for these. This, we didn't see coming. The writing in those three comic books made me feel like I was watching a movie or an episode of Firefly. I actually almost cried at one point!
Anyway, all that to say, originally I wasn't going to post anything today. But I've been playing "Transformers: Legends", which is apparently tied to the Dark Cybertron comic arc. The characters you are about to meet were inspired by what tends to happen to me when I play. And just between you and me, one of the two may or may not be me. Because its my birthday and I feel like being silly.
Once upon a time, there was a rather unfortunate Autobot. She was not strong, or fast, or sleek, or stealthy. She wasn't much of a fighter and she was frightened of enclosed spaces. In fact, it used to be that the only things that stood out about Shrift were her mild eccentricity, (somewhat more pronounced of late) and the fact that every time she went on a team mission, she was shot at. If a crash came from the back of the procession, Mirage didn't even have to look anymore. "Medic, back row, red and gray," he'd say. Most days, no one even remembered Shrift's name. She didn't mind. Mostly.
Shrift's job was to scan for life forms whenever they made camp or went on raids. Somehow this always turned into Shrift finding a Decepticon and being shot. In fact, if there was one thing Shrift was really good at, it was finding booby traps. Quite honestly, she should have been sent back to the Autobot Capitol in disgrace after only a meta-cycle, but they were so short-handed that they couldn't afford to lose anyone. At least, that's what Mirage said. Tracks said it was because Shrift was handy cannon-fodder. Shrift usually pretended not to hear that, but that blasted Striper made it hard to ignore. Nomech was quite sure how, but the scanner-femme continuously found the same Decepticon.
Shrift would go out scouting in the field and hear a rustle. The next thing anyone knew, she was in two or three pieces, shouting, "Not fair, Striper! Pick on somebody else!" He never did. Any other Autobot would've shot him out of the sky in an instant, so the scraggly Decepticon only ever targeted the one he knew he could hit. It wasn't clear if he was following her around or if she was just terribly unlucky, but Shrift was becoming an expert at being shot. Striper even fired rockets at her on her spark-day! Hoist found her steaming mad, sitting in a crater surrounded by shrapnel and confetti. As that was the day their new medic had arrived, Shrift marked that particular spark-day as the day she met her best friend.
They say that first impressions can sometimes determine a relationship. If that were so, Shrift would never have made friends with Reticle. She'd been ushered into the ramshackle lab to find the lanky scientist in the middle of a strange experiment involving lamps and a disembodied helm. "That is a mech's helm." she'd gulped. Reticle had glanced up through bifocal optical enhancers. "Eh, what? Oh. Yes." Mirage muttered something under his breath and deposited Shrift onto the examination table, dropping her leg next to her. "Nononono," Shrift grabbed at the captain's servos and pointed. "That is a Mech's helm!"
"Yes, Drift-" "Shrift." "-Shrift. Now let him fix your leg and get back to work." She pointed a shaking servo and her voice rose to a shriek. "That Is a Mech's Helm!" Reticle blinked and wiped goopy servos on his chassis. He pointedly looked at Shrift's severed limb. "And That is a femme's leg. What of it?" He stooped to pick up a scalpel that had very obviously not been cleaned. Shrift looked at the scalpel, looked at the medic, and took a deep breath. "AIIEEEEEEEEE!" Reticle waited until her voicebox started getting staticy. "Have you quite finished?" he asked. "Yeah, I'm good." And nothing more was said on the matter, especially since Reticle forgot why he had the disembodied helm.
The rest of Team Aoine quickly realized that, as useful as it was to have a Red Shirt along, it was not very conducive to a stealth mission when every few minutes Shrift was shrieking and getting blasted. After a particularly disastrous encounter with Lazerbeak, Mirage dragged the femme into the shoddy med bay and pushed her towards a rather discombobulated Reticle. "Here! Shrift is your new assistant. Keep her off the field, or so help me Primus, I'll let Striper scatter her across the Hydrax Plateau!" He turned and marched out. "Er...hullo," Reticle said. "Hi," said Shrift. After a few breems of awkward silence, Reticle dashed cleaning fluid over his four narrow optics. "Want to help me dissect a Driller optic?"
Trying to be useful, she foolishly agreed. A decacycle later she was heaving energon out her intakes in the corner. "Sorry about that, Shot. I didn't expect the liquification!" the gangly mech called sympathetically. "My name is Shrift, not-bleuarrgh!" Shrift bent over again, holding her tank. Reticle was not a very personable mech by most standards. Gray-green, paranoid and more than a little eccentric, the multi-limbed Cybertronian would have been just as happy exploring the far reaches of space, away from others of his species. He wasn't sure what to do with a femme purging energon all over his laboratory. "Do you need a container or something?" He edged past the violent pink stain with all the grace of a drunken Sharkticon. "You...you're going to strain something. I put the optic away, you don't have to look at it anymore," he muttered.
At the words "optic" and "look", Shrift looked positively wretched. "Oh no! Oh please don't purge again!" Reticle wrung his servos miserably. "You'll be absolutely no use as a lab assistant if you exhaust all your energon reserves!" Shrift wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and squinted at Reticle. "I'm no use anyway! Or didn't you know? I'm cannon-fodder." Four pale optics shuttered and opened again, all at slightly varying times. "Well that's not a very good life goal." He patted Shrift's helm awkwardly. "I'm sure we'll think of a better one for you eventually." The short femme straightened and groaned. "I have life goals!" she protested as Reticle moved back to his table. She watched him rapidly break down a subsonic repeater into useless pieces and winced as he attempted to shove them into what almost looked like a flux capacitor. "Um...what are you doing?" she asked gingerly. "Science!" he answered brightly, "Well, sort of. I'm experimenting."
Smoke poured from the mangled device, quickly suppressed as Reticle's third hand dropped a canvas over it. "I'm trying to make the components for a molecular implant to track and neutralize guilt-based insanity by lodging in the part of the processor that deals with emotions." Shrift tilted her helm to the side incredulously. "You learn stuff like that in the science academies?" Reticle nodded absently before seeming to hear what she'd said. "What? Er, no. No, they threw me out of the academy for that kind of thing." A fourth arm reached behind him and pulled a pair of delicate pliers from a crowded toolbox resting precariously on a hastily-erected shelf. "So..." he glanced down at the femme as she tapped her servos together. "If I'm your lab assistant, what do I do? And don't say dissect things, because I will purge again." The declaration was part apology and part blunt statement of fact. Reticle shrugged and glanced at his tools.
When Hoist stepped in about a centicycle later, the slapshod med bay was filled with smoke of a blueish hue. "What the- again?!" He cleared his vents several times and waved the smoke away. "Where are the liquid mesh patches?" The medic and the red shirt slowly raised their helms from their impromptu bomb shelter and stared blankly at the Autobot. "Energon and Nightmare Fuel don't mix." Reticle whispered, optics wide." "Ever." And that was the beginning of the end of Reticle and Shrift's careers as Autobots.
