Disclaimer: If I owned these lot, I'd be too busy glomping them to write this ficlet, and since the ficlet is here to be read, this must mean that I don't own them. Good for them.
Someday I'll think of a better title. Since the Minicons are conspiring to drive me insane (more) when it comes to WIPs, will post this silly little thing in an effort to share the madness. Of course, it's not compulsory to read…
A Matter of Taste
"Sand!"
"Snow!"
"Sand!"
After a week of tedious inactivity, the Adventure Team had decided that they were due an outing. There was, after all, only so much confinement a trio of explorers could take. Even ones as patient as Minicons.
"Snow!"
The trouble, as Ransack well knew, was settling on a destination.
Dune Runner glowered at his opponent. "I don't see," he said indignantly, "why the rest of us should suffer just because you're a wet lump who overheats in a sunny spell."
The two rivals had long since abandoned their seats and moved to the empty space between the table and the door, across which field of battle they were now facing each other. Despite his reckless reputation and risk-taking nature, this was not an arena into which Ransack was inclined to venture.
"You're the only one who has a problem," replied Iceberg coolly. "Ransack doesn't mind."
Together, they turned to look at their leader, sitting behind the opposite end of the table. Ransack's head shot downwards, behind the oversized map he was holding. It wasn't, after all, as if there were any real anger in the debate. No, decided Ransack, they were having too much fun; he wouldn't interrupt them.
Behind the safety of the paper sheet, he heard as they gave up on getting any help from him and returned their attention to each other.
"Anyway, you're just scared you'll get ice on your seats."
"Yeah, yeah. You're still worried you'll get stuck in quicksand again."
Judging it safe to emerge again, Ransack laid the map on the table and brooded. It was inevitable, one team-mate loving the desert and the other having a passion for ice and snow-covered landscapes, that they should have to come out of their preferred environments to join forces.
"Right. Quicksand. Sanders, d'y'know something? You're a yellow bootleg and you don't know a vista when you see it!"
This time, they were going to have to meet halfway.
"Vista? Miles of freezing blankness? You know, Iceberg, I used to put your paintjob down to colour-blindness."
"Yeah?"
To compromise, in fact.
"Now I know it's just lack of taste."
"Look who's talking, Mr. Blue-and-orange-dune-buggy."
Ransack grinned to himself, faceplate notwithstanding.
"That was only for one day, and it was ages ago! Besides," said Dune Runner, his tone softening a bit, "we're team-mates; always have been, always will be. Beginning to end."
Iceberg was unimpressed. "So?"
"So if I'm a bootleg, then you are, too!"
"Uh… you were adopted. Hey, at least I'm not yellow!"
Ransack picked up a pencil, or perhaps it was a pen: he'd have to ask the difference at some point. Heedless of and unheeded by his argumentative partners, yellow visor alight with mischief, the green Minicon carefully circled a rather nice-looking national park; it didn't have sand (though it did have mountains) and there wasn't any snow (but there were lots of trees). And it was bound to have plenty of mud.
Let the others squabble. They'd find out where they were going when they got there. In the meantime, Ransack…
Well, sometimes he was enormously glad that his taste, for one, was literally common as dirt.