T ransformers Animated: Morning After By Fang Wolfsbane
"Tyla, table five has been waiting for half an hour already!"
Lie.
"Be right there! Just take care of my table for me!"
Lie.
"Hey, you, you got my order wrong."
Lie.
"I'm sorry, but we're going to have to give you a pay cut."
Lie.
"Hey Tyla, snap out of it."
Tyla blinked, her attention snapping to the thumb and index finger that appeared out of nowhere, clicking against each other repeatedly. They belonged to one of her co-workers, one whose name she couldn't bring herself to remember. They remembered hers, so she supposed that she should at least return the courtesy, but their name plate was missing and she didn't feel like raking her brain until their name popped back into her head.
"Huh? What is it?" Tyla asked, looking to the figure beside her, watching their long fingers popping open the top of a cigarette carton and pulling out one of the small white sticks residing inside of it. Personally, she never understood the reasoning behind smoking, but she didn't care to find out either. She took a broad step to the side, wanting to limit the disgusting smoke smell sticking to her clothes and invading her lungs without her consent.
She could have stood somewhere else, but she had been standing there first, plus the smoker's area was inside the building, not outside. Her co-worker must have thought that no one would mind the air being poisoned. She minded though she kept her mouth shut about it. The last thing she needed was to start something and end up getting another pay cut simply because her co-worker was too inconsiderate to take her health into consideration whilst throwing their own away.
"Oh nothing. You just seemed like you were off somewhere better than this," they smirked, putting the cancer stick to their lips, lighting it up a second later, the smoke curling its corruption against the air, off to poison something in its path. "We can't have that now, can we?"
Tyla forced herself to smile at the depressive comment, albeit a weak one. If only they were right on their assumption. A daydream would have been nice, if only providing a temporary escape from her workplace. She tilted her head back against the wall of the local Burger Bot, blonde hair sweeping in front of her eyes. She didn't feel up to moving them out of her eyes, so she let them stay there, blinding her for a couple of seconds of pure sight deprivation.
She wanted to reply with a cocky 'if only', but instead she shrugged her shoulders, a meagre gesture, but one her co-worker understood well enough to concentrate on what they were busy with instead. She had taken her fifteen minute lunch break in the hopes of spending some time alone with her thoughts, but that hadn't gone as planned.
She could have chosen to hide behind the dumpster, but the smell would have chased her away faster than her co-worker's. Although she had thought of spending the time alone, she supposed that it wasn't really all that bad if she tolerated the other's presence for the remainder of her break. Even if the two of them didn't talk, she found some form of comfort in knowing that someone at least wanted to be within her company. They could have easily avoided her without a care, yet they had chosen to stand beside her instead. Maybe they needed the interaction just as much as she did.
Tyla glanced over towards them, breathing out through her nose to try and keep the smoke's smell from drifting up through her nostrils. Her own hands were resting in the pockets on her jeans, the only place she could think of to put them instead of having them hanging at her sides with nothing to do.
Her lips parted, then closed. She didn't know what to say, much less what to do, so she looked ahead of herself once more, brushing the stray strands of hair out of her eyes this time.
"Hey, Tyla?"
Well, it seemed that she wasn't the only one that had been thinking of striking up a conversation for the sake of drowning out the silence. She looked to her co-worker once more. "Yeah?"
"Do you think we finally did it?" they asked, their blue eyes looking down to the gravel pavement pushed against the side of the building. Tyla's gaze followed theirs, watching a tiny ant skittering off on its own with a bread crumb someone dropped when they were eating one of the burgers on their way out. She almost smiled at how happy the ant seemed to have found something for its colony. A true provider with nothing more than a simple wish to make those it lived with happy. It was cute, if not a little sad.
"Did what?"
"Reached the pique of humanity?"
Ah, that question. The question everyone living in Detroit seemed to have on their minds at one point or another. The most advanced city in the world, what with its robotic helpers taking over all the roles humans no longer wished to participate in. Window washers, refuge cleaners, even dogwalkers were replaced by those 'automated helpers' that the world-renowned Isaac Sumdac earned his fortune from. How he had originally come up with his idea for his robotics company, she didn't know. She only knew his name because of the TV in the corner of the fast food restaurant she was leaning against like some kind of loiterer.
When she first moved to the city, she'd had to jump out of the way to avoid quite a few of those automated helpers. When it came to applying for the job she had right now, she had been worried about being turned down for not having some kind of robotic part inside her body.
What amused her was the fact that there were still a few humans that worked inside the building, doing the cooking and grilling, and even taking the orders of the customers all too happy to complain when their order took too long despite being prepared beforehand for their waiting convenience to be cut in half. If they had to make it themselves, they would have taken twice as long. She didn't work behind the griller, but she noticed how stressed the cooks became when the table waiters and waitresses put pressure on them to hurry up before a customer decided they wasted their time simply waiting to be served, have their meal brought to them simply because they had the status and money to afford eating out once in a while.
She wanted to shrug again, not really knowing what her own personal thoughts were on the topic but found herself answering instead. "Probably not. All things considered, humanity could be doing worse."
"Worse than we already are?" they asked, tilting their head as the ash at the end of their cigarette dribbled to the ground, leaving it for a refuge bot to clean up at a later point. Tyla felt her stomach churn at the sight but tried to ignore it. All things considered, she was surprised that she herself hadn't turned to smoking as a way to cope with all the thoughts running rampant in her mind at times. That was their usual excuse, wasn't it? That smoking helped them breathe. She would have laughed at the irony, considering that they wanted to 'breathe', yet were more than willing to ignore the obvious fact that they were busy poisoning themselves and those within their current vicinity. Still, she kept her mouth shut about it. If they wanted to rot their lungs, then so be it. Everyone had their coping mechanisms, some were simply more destructive than others.
"We're humans, aren't we? There's always more ways we can screw up," Tyla said, the unease in her chest lightening some. When was the last time that she had been so honest with her own opinions? She didn't know, but she was glad to voice that at least.
Her co-worker nodded, seemingly agreeing with her, or at least pretending to. A short while later they dropped the end of their cigarette to the ground and stomped it out, stretching their arms high above their head, the soft snap of bones releasing tension from their shoulders.
"Well, guess it's time to head back in and earn that money. Gotta make a living somehow right?"
With that, they turned and headed back inside, leaving the smoked butt on the ground to become someone else's problem later down the road. Tyla found herself frowning, looking to the dumpster barely a few feet away, not to mention the ashtrays that were inside the restaurant for those who found it too inconvenient to dispose of the remains properly.
Tyla sighed, swooped down to pick up what remained of the burnt out stick and tossed it into the nearest ashtray when she walked past the smoker's area. Luckily, she had gotten the choice of whether she wanted to work within that area or not. Her lungs thanked her for taking the choice to avoid it.
L ooking out to the gathered crowd of waiting customers, Tyla took a breath, steadied herself and went back to work. That much needed money wasn't going to go earning itself, not with her luck.
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