not_so_smooth | (no subject)

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If wasn’t exactly glad he was on the island, he couldn’t deny that he wasn’t enjoying it. That made him feel a bit guilty though, that he was relaxing and enjoying himself when his family was an entire reality away. There was no helping it, he knew that, if he could go home he would. Part of him felt like he shouldn’t be enjoying himself this much without Mikaela, and as much as he missed her and there was a real, genuine ache at the absence of her presence, he couldn’t get past the fact that he was in what amounted to a tropical paradise.

Sure, there were dinosaurs on part of the island, some people were fictional characters, he slept in a sort of common room, and sometimes the island turned into candy, but overall it wasn’t that bad. There was even free food in the kitchen, which is where Sam found himself now, having a slightly late breakfast.

Next to his plate piled high with fruit and other assorted breakfast items, Sam had set a list. The list was of things that he should or needed to do here. He could just go through the rest of his time on the island doing nothing but hanging out. Room and board were free, clothes could be found in the clothes box (even if not reliably), and there really was no external need to do anything than just exist. Which was fine, for a bit. Sam definitely needed some decompression time. After everything back home with the Autobots and then finding himself here, doing and worrying about nothing for a while was healthy. But it wasn’t a routine that Sam wanted to keep forever. He had realized lately he wanted to do something with his life, he wanted it to mean something. Sam wasn’t sure just what he wanted it to mean, but he know he didn’t want it to mean nothing at all.

“Alright,” he mumbled to himself as he bit into an apple. “There’s school. Definitely doing school. Should I get a job? Do they have jobs? Maybe Zell could teach me to fight? Because that is seriously on a list of skills it would have been nice to have back home. Not that I could kung fu a Decepticon. Maybe I should add ‘learn to use a rocket launcher’ to my list. Is that even a possibility here? Do they even have guns on the island?”

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"I don't know if they'd be as depowered as some people," Sam said. He hadn't seen anything remotely like the Decepticons here, but he didn't want to just assume none of them would show up. He didn't have the faith yet that some people did that the island wouldn't allow things like that to happen.

"They don't have powers, really. They're more... giant, sentient, alien robots. And I don't think they have powers, they're just robots, but robots that are really strong and as big as a house.

It sounded a bit weird, to be frank. Faye had never been a stranger to science fiction or all that it entailed, having watched a great deal of such shows when she was young, before the accident. But for all that people speculated that space travel and further work with artificial intelligence would result in the overtaking of the human race, it hadn't proven to be the case. The worst of it that Faye could remember was a lonely satellite intent on drawing pictures into the surface of the Earth.

Still, there was no harm at taking the boy at his word, or at the very least humoring him.

"There was a space station a while back with a security system that people said was practically sentient. Pretty sure it was still programming, though, in the end. Self-learning programs," Faye shrugged. "Other than that, haven't met any androids on the island that sound even remotely like what you're describing."

"Trust me, you would know a Decepticon or an Autobot if you saw one," Sam said. "Uh, unless they were in vehicle mode. Then they'd just look like a car or jet or something like that. Which, would probably be about as out of place here as a giant robot."

That was some comfort, at least they wouldn't be as incognito as they were back home. It would be nice to have someone like Bumblebee here, and Bee would love this place. The Camaro was a big kid at heart, or Spark as it were, and would love the beach and the sun. For a moment, he felt a pang of homesickness.

"What's your world like? You know, assuming it's not some sort of horrible distopian society that you'd rather not recall. If it is, you can just tell me how you're supposed to fire a gun to properly save your life. Actually, if you could eventually get to that anyways it would probably be helpful."

"Going over my head, kid," Faye said first in response to his rather rambling explanation (or lack thereof) of the Decepticons and Autobots, her mind vaguely able to put together the image of robots turning into cars, but not really seeing what the point was. More mobility for the former? Opposable thumbs? With a sniff, she shrugged; either way, anything animated either turned human upon making it to the island, or just lost its magic altogether. Robots would either remain programmable objects, or they'd fall over, broken, unable to work.

But she couldn't blame this kid for being careful, either.

After a long draw of juice, Faye pursed her lips, wondering how much she wanted to bother explaining. "My world's a bit further ahead in time than most people here, I guess. Venus, Earth, Mars. People on all three, now. Long arm of the law has trouble extending quite that long."

"So it's like the wild west out there?" Sam asked. Space cowboys, that was pretty awesome. Hot female space cowboys were even more awesome. Not that he couldn't tell this woman would chew him up and spit him out without batting an eye, Sam knew she would, but that didn't make her less awesome. Well, maybe only a bit.

"Except, you know, probably not as dusty."

"Not as dusty? Kid, you send an asteroid belt slamming down on Earth, that leaves more dust than you're probably used to breathing in a year," Faye tilted her head, speaking matter-of-factly. People didn't stay on Earth anymore if they could help it. The rich ones moved away, moved to different parts of Mars or Venus, each being preferred for its own reasons. Mars was always a little colder, a little more refined, more fabric to cover skin. But Venus had its appeal too, romantic and full of fervor. Earth, though.

Earth was a little broken.

She shook her head, lips curved in wry amusement. "But what is it with you boys and your obsessions with the wild west, mm? They've still got that whole Western theme going for us hunters, even all these decades later."

"Hey, in my defense I didn't know I sent an asteroid slamming down on Earth."

That sounded bad. How they couldn't foresee something like that and stop it baffled Sam. He wasn't an Astronomer yet, but he had studied enough to know they keep pretty close tabs on things like that. He figured 'hey, how did your world screw that up?' was not a great question to ask.

"Because there's not a lot of other stages in history where there's that sort of thing going on."

In spite of herself, Faye softened just a touch. Because she could very readily recall those few days after she'd woken up, disoriented, her memory nothing more than one big, sweeping blur. She hadn't anticipated asteroids slamming down on Earth either, and had taken quite some time to believe it after she was first told, needing to see the craters, footage, photographs that she could hold in her own hands. As thinking about her past often did, Faye grew just a tad quieter, more solemn. Teased a bit less.

"No one expects asteroids to come raining down on Earth," she conceded, before her nose wrinkled and she tilted her head to point out. "Then again, to send a bunch of lazy bums off the planet, where they'll have to completely rebuild? You can imagine that it takes quite a bit hit to get that level of change going."

Sam noticed the change in attitude almost immediately, mostly because she had been so caustic before that the softening was markedly noticeable. He couldn't imagine living through something like that. Even just the destruction of Mission City was horrific, he couldn't imagine an entire planet visited by that destruction.

"So how far along is society on those other planets?" Sam asked. He wondered if they were barely surviving, or if they had all the comforts that they had been used to back home. If it wasn't so horrific, it would be interesting to see a city that was built new, without having to accommodate previous infrastructure but had all the advantages of modern technology and planning.

The question made her blink just a bit. Strange, if only because she'd never even thought about how difficult the transition to living on other planets might have been. She skipped all of that. Was asleep as towns were built, networks drawn, simply woke up to towns and cities with technology that surpassed any that had been on Earth. Maybe she could have asked Spike, how that period of transition had been. He would have known more than she did.

But she didn't exactly want to speak to him, not if it could be avoided in any way.

"Society's the same as it ever was. Huge disparity between the rich and poor, only now we have three planets to sprawl over instead of one," she shrugged, resting her chin on her hand.

"That sucks, you'd hope with a chance to start over on a new planet they'd be able to fix some problems," he said, taking a bite of his breakfast. Come to think of it though, even as old as the Cybertonians were, they carried their same problems, their same war, over onto a new world.

"Although, I guess the problem isn't Earth so much as it's that people suck."

There was a hint of idealism in the boy's words, and Faye was never quite sure how to address something like that. On a practical level, sometimes idealists were best stamped down and fast, before their hopes carried them higher, higher, and higher still, making the eventual tumble almost impossible to deal with. On the other hand, hand was sometimes the strongest motivator of them all, and the whole point of wars were that they could be fought without involving everyone else in the process. She settled for the truth, this time.

"Pretty sure people will always have the same sorts of problems, no matter where they go. It's selfish, but it's also self-preservation."

"Same sort of interpersonal problems, yeah," Sam said with a nod. As much as he'd like to have hope that people would get better, they didn't seem to really make a whole lot of progress in being more decent as a collective group of people. Optimus said humanity was a young race, but Sam wondered just how old a race they had to be before people stopped being dicks to each other.

"I mean, we can keep drinks cold now without sticking them in the snow, right?"

She snorted a little laugh at that. His sense of humor was an obvious sort, but Faye could appreciate that, the direct nature of his. Even if it did make him seem a little more stunted, less subtle, fewer layers than most of the guys she knew. Then again, layered guys were overrated, weren't they? Her thumb ran over her jawline, thinking briefly of Whitney, and all of the technologies that he'd introduced her to after she woke up from her sleep. Things changed. People didn't.

"Yeah, I didn't mean it that literally," she nodded just a touch. "If anything, progress in technology sometimes takes people back, doesn't it?"

"Seriously, have you seen the kind of comments are on YouTube? It's like someone monkey house somewhere got a hold of the internet and a program that translates flinging poop into video comments," Sam said. Anonymity seemed to give people free license to be as stupid and ignorant as they wanted.

"And none of that makes sense if you don't have YouTube in your world. Or the internet. Or monkeys, I guess."

Faye scratched idly at her cheek, peering at Sam with more than a hint of confusion. While she'd been able to follow his lines of logic fairly well up until then, YouTube had her blinking. Didn't sound like anything she'd known, either in present day, or in that lifetime decades ago. Something about videos, though. Videos that people could comment on.

She could imagine the inane remarks that would come with that.

"No YouTube, yes internet, yes monkeys," she rattled off with a shrug. "I'm guessing by the name that YouTube was meant to be some kind of personalized television on the net."

"Yeah, people can put up video clips of things and you can comment on them," Sam said.

At least other worlds had the internet, and he was pretty sure people would be just as stupid online in other worlds as they were in his. He wondered if anyone was from a future that didn't have that level of stupidity expressed. Maybe hundreds of years in the future, people wouldn't be so stupid.

"And the comments are the dumbest things you will ever read. Ever. It's almost scary, what people will say when they're mostly anonymous. It's like they're secretly ignorant and are just looking for a place to express that ignorance."

Faye was longing for a smoke. Enough that she teased at her hair, picking herself up from her seat and leaning more fully against the counter, her arms folding together. That people could be complete idiots was not something that came as a surprise to her. Talking about it was something that she didn't care for right then, either. Normally, she would have enjoyed making fun— she'd started, with Sam himself. But sometimes she just felt like nothing on the island really stuck with her.

Like it was all a bit futile, knowing that it wouldn't last.

"People are idiots. Men are babies. Everyone's lazy when they can afford to be," she sighed, stretching. "Getting to hide just makes it a million times worse. Because then you're no longer accountable."

"Aaaaaand that sounds like a wrap," Sam said.

He hoped that he never got that bitter about people. Or about anything, really. Of course, having Earth nearly destroy would probably color anyone's outlook on life so he couldn't really blame her. There wasn't much more they could talk about on the subject though unless he wanted to hear her rehash how people suck, which he was pretty sure she would get bored of doing.

"So are you liking the island?"

Maybe other people would have found it charming. Maybe, on some level deep down, Faye did as well. But at the end of the day, she didn't want to be questioned about her own experience on the island, didn't care to go over the wide ranges of emotions she'd had being there. She gave Sam a look, trying to decide if he was just that type of person, questioning every person he came across, trying to be nice.

She needed to let him know that she didn't need that.

"It's an island," she replied at last. "Whether or not I like it, I'm stuck here anyway for the foreseeable future. Like an extended vacation."

Sam got the message loud and clear. He wondered if she had used up all her polite conversation moment or something, suddenly she didn't strike him as the type to be really sociable. Or it could have just been him that she was put off by. Maybe he had suddenly gotten all weird on the island but didn't notice because everyone else was weird.

"Well, it was nice meeting you, but you'd probably like to actually finish your meal in peace," Sam said, standing up from the table. "Thanks for the chat though."

Sam gave her a smile and a small wave before heading off to put his tray back.

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