Roadside Assistance

by BlueBastard

Chapter 3: "Culture Shock"

Roadside Assistance Chapter 3; “Culture Shock”

I don’t know how Applejack was going to pull it off. Sure, she’d directed me to someplace far in the back on the farm’s land, some kind of private grove type place with a lake, but it was still in plain view of the residential structure she and the rest of her family lived in. The family that, to my knowledge, somehow didn’t know about the blue mechanical thing who had been put in some old barn. But, she’d said I could walk around in my regular form so I could stretch and stuff, and I really needed to, so there I was.

Of course, having actual peace and quiet was out of the question, because Twilight simply needed to interrogate me about everything I knew that she didn’t.

“So, what is this ‘Nemesis’ that you keep referring to?” she asked, her horn’s…’magic’…illuminating both her forehead’s glowstick and a feather which was leaving marks on some kind of thin, sheet-like material that I could only assume was for recording information. Highly inefficient compared to visual recording and data logging, but considering how primitive this pony race seemed to be overall, it was to be expected.

“The Nemesis is the flagship of the Decepticon Space Navy, serving as Megatron’s personal vessel towards the end of the Great Exodus to chase after Optimus Prime and his contingent in their Ark. That was millions of years ago, though, and while the Nemesis is still one of the finest warships ever built, she’s more of a mobile base for Decepticon operations on Earth these days.”

“So…it’s like your home, since the war you keep talking about destroyed your home planet? Cybertronia, was it?”

“Cybertron. No ‘-ia’ at the end. But…” I stopped massaging my shoulder rotator joint as I thought about my answer. “…yeah, in a way, I guess you could say the Nemesis is a home of sorts, although I’m not a fan of the purple mood lighting Megatron insists be all over the ship.”

“I see…” said Twilight, the glowing piece of bird carcass rubbing the non-plumed end on the sheet, periodically moving over to a small container full of black stuff (remote spectral analysis indicated it wasn’t oil, but instead some kind of solvent composition of water, dissolved charcoal, some kind of naturally sticky residue such as beeswax, and a touch of turpentine), which seemed to be what was being applied to the sheet as residual markings. “And who, exactly, is this ‘Megatron’ character?’

I had to chuckle at what I was perceiving to be her probable reaction to what I was going to say. “Megatron, well…he’s basically my boss, although he prefers grand titles like “Supreme Emperor of Destruction” and “Lord of the Decepticons” and such.”

“Okay, um…is he a good boss?”

“Come again?” I had to raise an eyebrow in confusion, how in the world could she think-oh, right, she only knows the name.

“Is he a nice guy to work for?”

She jumped when I burst out laughing. “Megatron? A nice guy to work for?! AHAHAHAHAHA!” It took a few minutes for me to recollect myself before I could talk to the startled pony, “Sorry, but ‘Megatron’ and ‘nice’ are two things that are polar opposites.”

“So…you don’t like him?”

“Not really. I mean, in terms of capability he’s a decent leader, I guess, even if some of his more grandiose plans usually go south. Personality wise he’s actually pretty demanding, since he doesn’t tolerate failure very well and he’s got quite a temper. But, at the very least, he’s sometimes quite witty and can be entertaining to watch, unlike that absolute bore Optimus Prime and his equally boring Autobots.”

“Those are the guys you’ve been fighting for millions of years, right?”

“Yeah. Megatron formed the Decepticons initially as a political party of the common Cybertronian to combat the rampant class inequality status quo which the Autobots enforced. If the rumors were true, Optimus used to be some datahead who basically did nothing but sort files in the data archives –“

“The where?” asked Twilight.

“Data Archives, it was a place where all kinds of information was stored for reference by anybody, really.”
“You’re saying that ‘Optimus’ guy was essentially a librarian, like me?”

“Uh…sure, let’s go with that.” I had no idea what a ‘librarian’ was, but if there was any kind of similarity I was willing to roll with it. “Anyway, he’d been known as ‘Orion Pax’ back then, and through countless cycles or ‘months’ in your own time measurement units he came to the conclusion that class inequality was bad.”

Twilight frowned. “But you said that the class inequality could be found all over the place, didn’t you?”
I nodded. “Yep. It took him months to realize the same thing he would have known in an instant had he just gone outside and visited anything not directly supported by the Autobot Senate. Still, after figuring out the obvious, he somehow became good buddies with Megatron, at least up until the day Megatron proposed his vision of a better future for Cybertronian society.”

“What happened?”

“I actually don’t know the specifics, only that the Senate rejected Megatron’s ideals, yet when Orion supported Megatron by simply regurgitating Megatron’s supporting points, the Senate decided to give the plucky archivist the honor of being the first ‘Prime’ since the Golden Age ended, even though at the time it literally was nothing but an empty title they used to buy off Orion and bury Megatron’s opposition to their corruption.”

“Is that the commonly known story, or what Megatron says the story was?

“Megatron actually didn’t like talking about it, and what I’ve told you is the general summary of what I’ve heard from both Autobots and Decepticons alike. I doubt anybody alive other than Megatron and his former ally Orion – who later took the name ‘Optimus Prime’, the pompous piece of slag – even remembers that’s where the war began.”

“The war that destroyed your home planet?”

“Yeah, it’s a funny story about that, actually. You see-“ Whatever I was going to say, I immediately forgot as my full attention went to the rather sizable boulder suddenly impacting my head. The actual, physical damage was minimal, a super small dent at worst, but the inertia caused me to shift off my center of gravity, and one bad step to the side on the edge of the pond quickly led into me falling into the pool face first.

“You’re going to pay what you did to mom, you freak!” came a voice I did not recognize, further distorted by my hearing sensors being submerged in water. Quickly rectifying this by pushing myself back upright and rotating 180 degrees on my waist transformation joint, I immediately saw my assailant.

She was a unicorn, not quite as big as what Twilight’s height measured out to be (assuming she was a full grown unicorn), her fur some color between purple and pink and her mane made up of two darker shades of violet. I couldn’t tell her cutie mark due to the angle, but I could tell she was pissed off at me for something that I also didn’t remember doing. I also noticed there was a smaller pony, similar to the three from earlier, this one also a unicorn but colored a light purple-gray and was blonde. Any further observations was interrupted by a giant rock bathed in some kind of transparent mulberry trying to merge with my head. That quickly ended when I easily snatched the boulder from the air with a quick movement of my wrist, whatever force controlling it now trying to remove it from my grip in vain.

“Sparkler, Dinky, what are you two doing here?” inquired Twilight, concern on her face.

“That thing hurt mom!” exclaimed the smaller of the two angry unicorns, “he’s gonna pay!”

I sighed. Normally, I would have loved to have taken the challenge and beaten the snot out of anybody who had a problem with me, but simply using my hammer to reduce my new enemies into a red, sticky paste of organic guts wouldn’t win me any points with the ponies as a whole. Plus, it wouldn’t have been worth the effort as there was nothing they could do to me that I couldn’t shrug off anyway.

“Look, I know this sounds crazy, but…” I began, crushing the boulder into tiny bits of gravel with a single squeeze in my hand, “…can’t we just talk this over?”

---

Back on the Nemesis, I’d heard stories of how individual Cybertronians, regardless of alignment or any physical attributes, could experience ‘overclocking’ if they consumed too much Energon, the primary form of sustenance Cybertronians lived on, at once. Their behavior protocols would become severely weakened to the point where behavior turned unpredictable and random, such as when Knock Out knocked back one too many and decided he needed to remodel himself to look like some kind of scaled lizard with large jaws. Subsequently, they would over-exert their systems and go into a short term stasis, having a massive headache and no memory of what happened during their overclocking (Knock Out was horrified when he saw what he’d done to himself and spent a long cycle locked in his lab restoring himself while forever swearing vengeance on Earth crocodiles, whatever those were).

At this point, it felt like I was going through that post-overclocking period myself, only differences being that I clearly remembered going offline and that the headache was coming after I’d woken up. It was a good hour after my little Q&A with Twilight had been interrupted by the ponies “Sparkler” and “Dinky”, whose reasoning for having thrown a giant boulder at my head was so complicated that I needed to hear their backstory even though I really couldn’t have cared less.

According to Twilight, Dinky and Sparkler were the adoptive daughters of some other pony named “Derpy Hooves” or something of a similar, inane-sounding nature. Their birth parents had been unicorns who had specialized in non-weaponized pyrotechnics called ‘fireworks’, allegedly some kind of entertainment used for large celebrations or public displays. However, due to constant drinking and they generally just being total jerks to everybody else, their children had suffered abuse and neglect for several years until Derpy had taken action and had the pony legal system transfer the rights of parentage to her.

In all reality, most of it flew past me as I didn’t really see the significance outside of explaining why their mother wasn’t their natural mother. All the wordiness was excessive in that all I needed to hear was basically “their birth parents were not fit to raise them so they were dumped onto some other pony by that pony’s own volition”. The part that didn’t fly past me, however, was when one of the unicorns (I wasn’t paying enough attention to discern the speaker) mentioned Dinky was not expected to grow bigger. The exact cause made no sense to me, it involved the chemicals found in alcohol that ponies drunk for some weird reason reacting to the developing pre-baby phase pony in the mother, but the idea it stunted her growth had a small impact on my initial impressions. I didn’t voice it, but I actually could empathize with Dinky in being perpetually smaller, for I had been in that position millions of years ago, before the war.

“Breakdown, are you paying attention?”

“Wha-I, uh, yeah! Totally paying attention!” I lied.

“Ugh. You should have let me keep beating him with the rock, Twilight,” complained Sparkler. Dinky hadn’t said a word to me since Twilight convinced them both to not try to kill me, she just glared angrily at me. “Besides, if you’re on first-name basis with him now, I would have figured you would have let him know how much he’s screwed the town over by taking out Ponyville’s mail carrier.”

“Whoa, did you just say ‘mail carrier’? Like, comparable to a courier or such?”

Sparkler raised an eyebrow at that. “Um, yeah? Mom’s basically a one-mare mail service for the town, which you’ve literally crippled thanks to your little assault on the town.”

Damnit, now I had a vested interest. At the same time, perhaps a way to improve my standing in the eyes of these ponies, too.

“Tell me, Sparkler, is your mother the only one who got hurt during my little ‘incident’?” I asked.

“What’s with the sudden interest, red-face?” she snapped back

“I am curious, myself,” said Twilight, “although thankfully, Derpy was the only casualty in your onslaught.”

“Well, that’s a relief, then.” I said, “Would it be possible to go apologize to her, then?”

“Why?” shouted Dinky in response, “What makes you want to apologize to her now, after all this time?”

“It’s…for reasons of personal integrity.” They’d learn my reasoning soon enough.

Sparkler and Dinky were unmoved, but I thought I caught a slight smile on Twilight’s muzzle. Possibly she thought that I was better than her impressions suggested, but of course those had been under less than preferable conditions.
“I’m sure she’d appreciate that, Breakdown,” she replied as she got up onto her four hooves.

“You’re not serious, Twilight!” said a shocked Sparkler, “You can’t even take this guy through town, it’s going to be just like before all over again!”

“Not if I teleport us all. Derpy is back home, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, she is, but you’ve never teleported anything like him before, have you?”

“Nope!” she replied a little too cheerily for my own comfort, “But I think I’m strong enough for such a task.”

“Uh, maybe I should mention that I’m-“ I started, but Twilight’s horn flashed and suddenly I felt myself being ripped apart at the molecular level only to be reassembled…right in the middle of town with my mouth finishing my sentence; “-heavier than I look?”

“Yeah, that probably would have been better to have known beforehand.” Said Twilight, who seemed tired. Evidently her magic hadn’t been strong enough to take us all the way to Derpy’s house. It had been enough to land our group of three unicorns of various sizes and a large Cybertronian like me right in the middle of Ponyville. And every single pony else within sight had frozen with their eyes locked onto me.

At least until they all simultaneously freaked out and made themselves scarce.

---

Twilight stayed behind to comfort the town, evidently she’d had to do this multiple times over the years. However, that left two antagonistic unicorns to accompany me as direction givers.

“Wheeeeee!” said Dinky, riding on my left shoulder as I made a brisk walking pace. Evidently, being angry at the alien who injured your mother could, in her mind, take a backseat to that same alien giving free rides.

“Take a left turn here.” The same could not be said of Sparkler, atop my right shoulder, even though she’d moved from being angry to just being sullen. “The post office will be the building with the sign shaped like a letter hanging on the front.”

The building was easy to find with the sign, although I had to wonder why the post office was situated so far from the town as I knelled down to the ground to let off the ponies.

“Wait here,” curtly stated Sparkler, who went into the building along with Dinky, leaving me alone outside and giving me a chance to evaluate the structure. At first glance, it looked too big to be a residence, but then I remembered it was the post office as well as the residence for a single mother and her two adopted kids.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” I was startled, not having expected to hear Twilight’s voice again so soon.

“So, is the town back in order or something? You did that really, really quickly.”

“Yeah, as bad as your incident was, the town has suffered worse.”

I stared down at the pony, slackjawed. “Considering how often you ponies keep bringing up how ‘horrible’ it was when I apparently just went around destroying everything in sight, the only thing that could possibly be worse is something that actually did level the entire town!”

“Well, that is what happened with the parasprites, truth be told…” she sheepishly replied. I had to wonder if her sudden change in demeanor implied she’d had a hand, er, rather a ‘hoof’ in the matter. I had no idea what ‘parasprites’ were, though, and she picked up on my cluelessness. “Parasprites are little round bug like creatures who are like black holes for food and can instantly reproduce by vomiting. At least until the one time I tried to make them eat less, only for them to suddenly start eating everything that wasn’t organic like clothes and buildings.”

“Ah! So they’re like organic scrapulets?” Now the positions were switched, with her giving me a funny look due to not knowing what scrapulets were. “They’re kind of the same thing as your parasprites, at least the use of ‘little’ and ‘round’ to describe them. Stick a swarm of scrapulets into a sealed room with anything made of metal, that object’s lifespan will be reduced to miliseconds. Why, this one time, back in the cybertronian city of Kaon, some of my then-teammates and I-“ I barely caught myself in the nick of time, “Um, actually, I’d rather not go into detail about that story, it wouldn’t make any sense to somebody who wasn’t there.” To the contrary, I fully expected Twilight to know what the term ‘torture’ meant, since I had almost described a method used to ‘interrogate’ Autobot prisoners by suspending them above a pit full of those little scrapulet bastards. Regardless of whether or not the prisoner talked or not (the success rate was about fifty-fifty either way), the unlucky Autobot was always dropped into the pit. My old teammate Wildrider had described it as ‘Quentession Justice’, although to this day I never figured out what a ‘Quentession’ actually was outside of something with a rather perverse sense of actual justice. But Twilight didn’t need to know any of that, at least not if I didn’t want to meet my end a second time through being subjected to those parasprite things she talked about.

“I think you already did, since I can’t exactly imagine anything good coming out of something that apparently could eat somepony like you within a minute.”

Slag, she was sharp. I needed to make a save and fast. “Okay, fine, if you must know, we had a pit of the things located at all the bases, with large magnets to keep them at the bottom for safety. We used them to dispose of dead Autobots who offlined while in captivity while waiting to be interrogated.”

She was, as expected, rather horrified. “You just threw the bodies away like that?!”

I rolled my optics. “Like I said, you wouldn’t understand, namely because you’re looking at this from the viewpoint of a biological race, whereas my race is non-organic. It’s not like the Autobots didn’t do the same things we did (although probably without the torture-interrogation) during the war, or even before the Decepticons came to be. It was standard practice for offlined Cybertronians whose bodies were in such poor condition that salvage was impossible. Otherwise, most cadavers were taken to the smelting pools where they were stripped of all functioning parts for later re-use on newly assembled cybertronians, then their hollow remains dumped in the smelters to become raw material to form body frames for new Cybertronians. Unless you were one of those pompous Autobot Senate members, then when you died your body wasn’t going to be mixed in to become part of a lower class worker. Noooo, you got to have your body preserved so the lesser classes could stare at your greatness for all of eternity, then-“

“AHEM” Sparkler cleared her throat, having returned to the outside world, “While I find that discussion interesting, which by that I mean I couldn’t care less, that’s not the reason you’re here, remember?” As if on cue, Dinky pushed out the pony I presumed was their mother; Derpy. She was bound to a chair on wheels, with about half of her body bruised pretty badly, wrappings covering one of her wings and a cast on her right leg…er, hindleg, her right foreleg looked to be in good enough of a state.

“Miss Derpy Hooves, I presume?” If I was the one responsible for her condition (in which case she must have been really durable for her size as there was no other way to explain how she could have suffered non-lethal injuries from one of my strength), then I was already trying to make up ground in leaving a good impression. Granted, I usually didn’t give a damn about leaving good impressions, but this was a unique circumstance.

“Yes, that’s me.” She replied. Her voice was slightly shaky, most likely due to my presence and/or her injuries, but she seemed to show no outward reaction of fear to me. Twilight, Sparkler, and Dinky also seemed to notice the wounded pegasus being rather nonchalant towards me.

“I, uh, have been told that I was the one who injured you such that-“

“You don’t remember?” she interrupted. Any lingering doubts about her being scared in my presence immediately disappeared as she looked up at me with a raised eyebrow. It was then I finally noticed her eyes weren’t in line with each other, as she did too with her unusually quick ability to read what I was thinking despite my face not sharing any possible similarities to that of these ponies. “Don’t worry about my eyes, I’ve had strabismus since birth, so it’s not from your doing.”

Did I just hear that right? A cross-eyed pony who was born with a crippling eye defect was in charge of delivering the mail for the entire town?“Wait a sec…you’re the town’s designated mail carrier…but you can’t see straight? How does-“

“Royal Crown Decree on the Subject of Handicapped Workers. I can’t do any kind of mail delivery across long distances between towns, but I can handle the mail in Ponyville just fine.”

“Or she used to, no thanks to a certain somepony,” nickered Sparkler, clearly not willing to budge from her dislike of me.

“Sparkler!” chided Derpy, turning to look at her older daughter, “if this…individual, is willing to come and apologize for what he did, you should have the courtesy to be just as polite towards him.”

“But apologies won’t make up for the fact you aren’t in any condition to work, Mom!” the unicorn argued back.

“Actually, that’s something else I need to talk about.” I said, kneeling down on one knee, “I know it’s going to sound weird, but out of professional courtesy and respect, I’ll take on your courier job until you fully recover.”

“Wait, what?” piped up Twilight, “How in Equestria are you going to do that? From what you’ve said, you’re no mailpony!”

I smirked, “You got the part where I’m not a pony right, but you forget…” I quickly assumed vehicle form, stunning Derpy and her daughters although the pegasus seemed intrigued by my ability, moreso when I quickly resumed my bipedal form. “There’s also the fact that, before Cybertron was ripped apart by the Great War, I was an information courtier myself. So, in respect to both my old job and to another employed in the same role who I have prevented from doing her job, I will shoulder the burden in her place.”

Twilight was moved, or at least I think she was. I wasn’t that good at reading subtle expressions from these ponies. “Wow, that’s…that’s really nice of you, Mr. Breakdown.”

“However, I must ask that I get something in return.” I continued, “while I am not organic like you ponies, I do require a form of sustenance to continue living. As it stands, I highly doubt this planet has any Energon reserves, but luckily I have been outfitted in ways that allow me to use alternative fuel sources. Fortunately, the fact there is technology on the level of steam engine transport implies an abundance of oil, which is a suitable fuel source for me.”

“So, you’re saying that in return for doing Derpy’s mail job, you want to be paid in oil?”

“If you wish for me to continue functioning long enough to meet your leaders, then yes.”

“I’d say do it, Twilight.” Said Derpy, all of a sudden, “He’s clearly a good guy at heart, even in light of what he did before, and there’s probably more alternatives he can have other than oil for sustenance if it’s just energy he needs.” She then turned to me, “As for you, um, ‘Breakdown’ right? I do greatly appreciate what you’re doing, not many ponies understand how important the mail service is and just take it for granted.”

“Believe me, I know exactly what you’re talking about,” I answered. To be truthful, I probably knew more about it than she did, but it wasn’t important to mention that.

“But you probably don’t know the town at all, which can be difficult as most of the homes do tend to look the same.”

“Just give me a map, I’ll be fine.”

“I can do better than that, Mr. Breakdown.” She smiled with a gleam in her eye. I frowned, as every single time any individual who did that in similar contexts usually implied not so good things in my future. “Why don’t you take my daughters along on the runs? I’m sure you won’t hurt them and they know the town inside and out. Plus, their presence should help ease the town into accepting you going around in my place for the forseeable future.”

“Yay!” chirped Dinky, bouncing up and down, “Rides rides rides rides!”

“I’m sure we can make it work, can’t we…Mr. Breakdown?” said Sparkler, clearly intending to exploit our new partnership in every way that would make me uncomfortable.

Twilight, unsurprisingly, was totally oblivious to all of it. “Well, I guess it’s a workable arrangement, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “It’s fine with me.” In reality it was anything but fine. Sure, I had further secured my continued existence with a job I was originally built for, but having to cart around a hyperactive child and her sister who clearly still had it out for me, through a town that still feared me that probably would be full of out-of-towners wanting to see the big blue monster delivering the mail…somehow I’d managed to turn my situation into being an attention-grabbing spectacle. I could only hope that this arrangement was well over by the time somebody from Cybertron came to rescue me…if anybody ever came to rescue me at all from this technicolor hellhole.

Comments

[Zeynelse]

I'm not going to read this right now, since it is on hiatus. But I have it in my reading list and if you start updating again I would love to give it a try! :pinkie happy: Update soon.... Please?

[BlueBastard]

4744212
While this story is on the backburner in light of my current other projects, I do intend to continue it at some point, so don't worry

[kristonalprime23]

Breakdown is on his own he got him self captured by the ponies it is his fault.
Starscream: master? Lord megatron your not suggesting that we just leave breakdown to the hands of the ponies?
Megatron:(growls loudly)
Starscream: uh understood master.