Rumble and Frenzy sat at desks in the very back of the one-room schoolhouse. They’d gotten there extra-early specifically to get them. Megatron had given the order, and so they were there, but they didn’t have to enjoy it. The less they had to participate, the better.
“But we’re millions of slaggin’ years old!” Frenzy said as softly as his screechy voice allowed. “We got computers for brains! We forgot more stuff than any of these ponies are ever gonna know!”
“Yeah, I know,” Rumble hissed back. “And Megatron told us to shut our vocabulators about all that, remember? We’re supposed to be ponies. Just little ponies. Littler than most.”
Frenzy slumped on his desk. “I’m sick of bein’ littler than most,” he said. “I been littler than most since I first came on-line. Why can’t my spark get transplanted inta a titan or somethin’?”
“Will you shut your trap about that?” Rumble hissed a little louder. “Yeah, bein’ little sucks, but-“
“Oh hey! ‘Scuse me, but that’s my desk!”
Rumble and Frenzy looked at the newcomer. In terms of overall mass, the other foal came out about the same as either Rumble or Frenzy, but he didn’t even come up to either of their shoulders in height. Where the two Decepticons-turned-earth-ponies went up, this pale blue newcomer went out, to the point that he bordered on the spherical.
“It was your desk, shrimp,” Frenzy hissed. “Go get another, there’s plenty.”
The short, fat unicorn shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “See, this one’s mine, and your friend is in Snails’s space. Pina Colada sits over there,” he added, gesturing to the currently-empty desk beyond. “In the row ahead you get Diamond Tiara, Applebloom, and Silver Spoon. And up in the front row you got Tornado Bolt, Liza Doolots and Twist. And that’s all the desks there are!”
“Well, somebody’s gonna have to get another desk!” Frenzy said. “And it ain’t gonn-mmmph!”
Rumble held a forehoof over his brother’s mouth. “Sorry about that,” he told the unicorn foal, “but he’s got a point. We was told we were gonna be in this Cheerilee’s class startin’ today, two days a week. So we gotta sit someplace.”
“Wow! You’re new students!” The chubby pony grinned, showing off a significant overbite with a huge gap in the middle. “I’m Snips! Nice to meet ya!”
Frenzy shook off his brother’s muffling hoof, then looked down at Snips, utterly ignoring the unicorn’s outstretched foreleg. “I’m Frenzy,” he muttered. A slow grin crept onto his face as he added, “And my brother here is Other Rumble.”
“What? HEY!!” Rumble took a swipe at Frenzy, who ducked out of the way, giggling wickedly. “I TOLD you I don’t wanna BE Other Rumble!”
“Wait, YOU’RE Other Rumble?” Snips’s grin widened. “Yeah, Rumble told us all about you! He said you two were real funny ponies!” His grin slipped a little as he added in a confused tone, “Folks say Snails and I are funny too, but I don’t really get what they mean. It’s not like they laugh when we tell jokes…”
Rumble groaned and slammed his head into his desktop.
“Uhh, you might not wanna do that.” The voice that said that advertised to the world that whatever was happening in the mouth, absolutely nothing was happening in the head above it. “When I do it it hurts.”
“That’s kinda the point,” Rumble mumbled. He looked up to see a pony as tall and skinny as Snips wasn’t. His body was as orange as Snips’ mane, but the mane, far from blue, was the ugliest green Rumble could remember having seen. And while Snips had a bit of an overbite, this unicorn had dentition that belonged on a beaver, or possibly a crowbar. “Lemme guess,” Rumble added, taking a quick glance at that butt-picture ponies set so much stock by, “you’re Snails, right?”
“That’s me!” Snails said proudly.
“You gonna ask for your desk back?”
“Why?” Snails asked. “I figure if they don’t have enough desks for us, they’ll send me home.”
Rumble and Frenzy looked at each other. “Why didn’t we think of that?” Frenzy asked.
“Look what we’d have to go home to,” Rumble replied. “You wanna explain to Megatron? ‘Cause I don’t.”
“Hey, it’s the new ponies!”
One by one more and more pony kids walked into the schoolhouse, and all of them stopped to stare at the two Deceptiponies. A blur of introductions went round, and for a moment neither Rumble or Frenzy could make sense of it all.
Then one asked, “Hey! You both have your cutie marks!”
Frenzy and Rumble looked at each other again. “Um, yeah,” Rumble said quickly. “’Course we do. Who doesn’t?”
“Yeah,” Frenzy said. “Who doesn’t?”
One of them- the one wearing a little wire crown that matched her cutie mark- gave a smirk that would have fit perfectly on Starscream’s face and said, “Nobody. That’s who! At least nobody worth talking to!”
A yellow filly with bright red hair and a pink hair bow walked away, her ears slumped low on her head, and took up the middle desk in the little classroom.
“What does yours stand for?” a gray foal with wings asked. “Mine’s a tornado, ‘cause I’m gonna be a stormbreaker when I grow up! I busted my first dust-devil over the summer!”
Almost simultaneously Rumble and Frenzy stretched their heads around to look at their rumps. They’d given their own cutie marks not a single thought in the time they’d been in this world. The only emblems they’d ever cared about were Decepticon and Autobot logos, and that was only for the sake of telling friend from foe.
“Um, yeah, mine are… rocks,” Rumble said quickly. “Fracturing rocks. ‘Cause I can make the earth shake with my hooves.” He sighed and added, “But I can’t show you that ‘cause Megatron will be on me like rust on a… um… I mean he’ll be really mad if I do it.”
“Megatron? You mean the guard pony?” That came from the filly with the crown. “What does he have to do with you?”
“Um…” Rumble began sweating- a sensation he’d been happy to go millions of years having never felt, and which hadn’t become any less creepy since he became a pony. “I… er…” He couldn’t mention Decepticons, or the war, or that Megatron was their supreme commander. All of that was top-secret stuff, the same kind of stuff he’d been on Frenzy about blurting-
“We’re junior cadets,” Frenzy said quickly. “We’re both gonna be guards when we grow up.”
Rumble swallowed his surprise at Frenzy thinking up a clever lie like that so quickly. “Yeah!” he added. “To punish and en… ah, to protect and to serve, isn’t that right?”
“What about you, Threnzy?” asked a filly with incredibly vivid red hair and a mouth full of braces. She squinted through her glasses at the spiky, irregular linked circles on his rump.
“Um… has to do with high-frequency sound,” Frenzy said. “I like gettin’ on people’s nerves, and my voice really puts people on edge.”
“We’ve noticed,” the crowned filly put in.
“Yeah, and that’s why I try to do all the talking,” Rumble said quickly. “Except when we want a fight, in which case the more jangled the other guy is, the better.”
“You fight a lot?” Snips asked.
“Well, we’ve done our share,” Rumble said, and Frenzy nodded agreement. “But Megatron says we gotta behave, and nobody can beat Megatron.”
“Except those sneaky tricky cheatin’ Au-“ Frenzy’s mumble ended in a shriek as Rumble hurriedly kicked his leg. “What the slag was THAT for??”
“That sounded like bad language to me.”
A grown-up pony- body somewhere between maroon and lavender, with hair just the pink side of white and three sunflowers for a cutie mark- walked into the classroom. “And bad language,” she continued, “is not permitted in my classroom. Unless you’d like me to have a conference with Mr. Soundwave or Captain Megatron on your first day?”
“No,” Frenzy groaned.
“Good.” The grown-up pony walked up to the front of the classroom. “I see you’ve already met the rest of my class. I’m Miss Cheerilee, by the way, and I’m your teacher. We’ll be getting two more students next week, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to bunch up. Frenzy, Drumble, could you help-”
Frenzy couldn’t help snickering. “Drumble?”
“Aw, man!” Rumble moaned. “That’s worse than being called Other Rumble!”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Cheerilee said. “That’s what it said on the paperwork…” She pulled a couple of papers out of the big teacher’s desk at the front of the room. “Oh, I see. It was an initial. D. Rumble and D. Frenzy.” She looked a little more closely at them. “Are you two related?”
“Brothers,” Rumble said, trying to ignore Frenzy’s ongoing snickering, which had infected half of the other foals and fillies.
“I see,” Cheerilee said. “Well, it’s a good thing Thunderlane’s little brother is a year down and in a different class. I can’t imagine all the confusion!”
“Tell me about it.”
“But anyway, if you and your brother could help me pull some extra desks out of storage,” Cheerilee said. “With so many new ponies moving to Ponyville lately, it’s going to be crowded unless they finally raise the money for a new school.”
“Sure, we’ll be glad to help!” Frenzy said. “Come along… Drumble.”
Rumble ground his teeth. “When we get back home,” he murmured.
“Take it up with Soundwave, bro,” Frenzy said, still grinning.
“Well?” Megatron said, passing the two ex-cassettes on the street after Cheerilee’s class let out. “Did you learn anything important?”
“Yeah,” Frenzy said. “We got invited to this big party for Diamond Tiara on the weekend. She’s the daughter of the town big shot, the guy who owns that big store.”
“The teacher spent most of the day talking about these icons on our butts,” Rumble continued. “Says they represent what makes a pony ‘special’. And the more unique that symbol is, the more ‘special’ they are.”
“We’ve already been told this,” Megatron grumbled. “Did you find out anything else?”
“Well, maybe,” Rumble said. “The teacher moaned a lot about the school not having any money and gettin’ overcrowded. But I don’t think anybody else was complainin’ about only havin’ to go two or three days a week.”
“Aside from that it was basic stuff,” Frenzy said. “Had some math- didn’t even have to think about that. There was a globe, so I guess this world is round, maybe? Not much else.”
“I see,” Megatron said. “Well, keep listening for anything useful. Pay attention. And don’t cause trouble.” Megatron leaned his head down to look directly into Frenzy’s eyes as he said those last three words.
“No problem, Megatron,” Frenzy said. “We’ll be good little fleshlings. Isn’t that right… Drumble?”
Rumble’s forehooves stomped involuntarily. “Request permission to make my little brother more littler,” he growled.
“Denied,” Megatron said without a moment of hesitation. “Now get out of… wait.” He looked at the two of them one more time. “Are you certain you didn’t observe anything we could use to get off this world?”
“Well,” Rumble said, thinking of all the fillies with purple or violet in their fur or mane. “Th’ young ponies got good taste in color?”
Frenzy, for his part, thought about the red-haired fillies who’d sat in front of him. “Yeah, I guess that’s true,” he nodded.
Megatron shook his head. “Dismissed,” he growled, returning to his patrol.