By Fang Wolfsbane

"Just what the slag are you doing?"

Highdrive nearly yelped out of his seat when Ratchet's growling voice snapped behind him. He was only too relieved that he hadn't sprung a leak from the fright alone.

Setting his equipment down, for safety reasons, Highdrive turned to face his mentor. "Practicing."

The old bot arched his optic ridge as he made his way over to Highdrive's side to get a better look at the programming chips Highdrive had chosen to occupy himself with. One would think being on a brand new, practically undiscovered, planet would leave plenty for a bot to do, but that wasn't necessarily the case. At least not from his point of view.

He had already gone on plenty of drives with Sari, Tyla, Bulkhead and Bumblebee. There wasn't any street left in Detroit that he didn't know more or less by spark by now.

Ratchet hummed to himself as he slipped on a medical monocle, pressing the side to let the zoom function take its course to scan over the chip's more finer details. "What's the idea with it?"

For a moment Highdrive stayed quiet as what the older medic bot asked sunk in. For once he wasn't being lectured by the older bot about what he was doing wrong. He almost asked Ratchet if he was sure he hadn't maybe hit his helm against something without being aware of it.

"Just a basic router. I thought that if I could get the computer's systems to work faster, then maybe we'd be able to respond to emergencies as soon as they're called in."

As Autobots, the group had taken to assisting human emergency service workers whenever the opportunity presented itself, depending on whether their equipment picked up on the transmission in time. Most crime and incidents tended to happen whenever one of them were in town.

"Then you're going to have to make a couple of adjustments," Ratchet said as he reached out towards a nearby tool, took it and started welding a couple of connectors to the chip as he showed Highdrive what to do. Granted the whole idea behind it had been for Highdrive to learn on his own, but then again, what better advice was there than from a teacher?

S itting back, Highdrive watched Ratchet's movements closely, committing nearly every movement and action to his memory banks. Who knew when they might come in handy.

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