Playing Catch-Up

[Rodimus Prime]

Day 10. Pz-Zazz. Semi-private; ask before joining. Blurr's presence included with player permission.

Rodimus slips between the vehicles on the Pz-Zazzian road - truth be told, he rather enjoys the scale here. It's nice to be a 'small car' once more! Once he gets to his destination he pulls to the side of the road and transforms, meaning he'll be making this house call naked. As he turns to wait for his companion, he double checks the address from memory, looking over their destination.

"This should be the place," he observes as Blurr pulls up behind him.

[Blurr]

Blurr would enjoy the darting between other vehicles more if he could, well, dart properly. It's far less fun when he has to keep correcting for reflexes that simply aren't there and he comes close more than once to clipping other vehicles as he passes when he moves more slowly than he thinks he should.

"Finally!" he grumbles, all but leaking his exasperation in every direction. "This has been the longest drive of my life and I've taken plenty of drives, none of which were this long, so that's saying something. But we're here? That's good – no, that's great." He wastes no time following Rodimus's example and transforming – and at least he's recovered enough equilibrium that he only stumbles a little stepping onto the sidewalk. He shoots Rodimus a look that says don't worry, I'm fine and straightens himself out as if nothing at all untoward just happened.

[SceneMod]

The building the Prime and Blurr have stopped at is a charming little town home, complete with ivy growing up up the front wall and along the wrought iron railing. Three steps lead to the heavy wood door. The building is obviously old. The brick is crumbling. However, the care that has been taken with this home- especially compared to the other homes around it- is exceptional.

There's a balcony off the second story, and on that balcony swiftly paces a brightly-colored avian lady. Without the bulk containment suit, it is much more obvious that she is small, fragile- and quite lovely for a bird lady. When she spies the Autobots, she chirrups, then zips downstairs to open the door.

"Blurr! You're here and you're okay, or at least you seem mostly okay, but come in, both of you and oh!"

"I was so worried!"

---

OOC: For reference, Patterwing's coloration is similar to this: wildbirdsupplies.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/hummingbird.jpg

[Rodimus Prime]

Rodimus smiles fondly as Blurr rambles - it's interesting how force of habit keeps the repetitiveness, even now when Blurr no longer needs to do that in order to be understood. And then Patterwing darts down and... really does speak the way Blurr normally does, doesn't she?

Despite the presence of speedsters, this will be a long visit, won't it?

When invited in, Rodimus enters the house, smiling warmly in greeting. "Thank you, ah, Patterwing, isn't it? I'm Rodimus Prime, a friend of Blurr's," he reaches his hand forward to shake it.

[Blurr]

A lifetime of speech habit is hard to break! Blurr smiles at Patterwing to mask his dismay. Is he that obvious?

…Well, yes, he is. There's a cane tucked away on standby in case he needs it, though he rather hopes he doesn't, but it's plain to see by the way he moves – and in ways and details beyond his speed or lack thereof – that he still isn't right. Nevertheless, he keeps up the cheery air as he follows Rodimus indoors. Not that being out of the public eye is any less embarrassing.

"I'm fine," he says, "really I am. See?" And he gestures with his arms out to either side, demonstrating that he is, indeed, in one piece and fine form.

[SceneMod]

Patterwing shakes Rodimus's hand. The motion probably reminds Rodimus of shaking Blurr's hand, though it's a bit obvious that Patterwing is trying to slow herself down to something closer to "normal" speed in both motion and speech.

"Nice to meet you really it is, and thank you so much for coming by and bring Blurr because I really really was worried and I wanted to see him myself and- oh!"

She looks terribly embarrassed for a moment, then steps shyly over to Blurr. Patterwing reaches up and tries to place one hand on Blurr's shoulder.

"I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I really, really didn't."

The fact that she's more obviously slowing her speech now probably doesn't make Blurr feel better.

"The sitting room is off to the left. We can sit down in there."

[Rodimus Prime]

Rodimus nods and moves towards the sitting room, as indicated, checking to make sure there's something in there that looks like it can support him - even on a world where most of the inhabitants are Transformer scaled, Rodimus is still a pretty large robot.

"Well, why don't we start with what you do know?" he asks, turning back to glance at Blurr. He's probably checking to make sure the slowed speedster is still doing all right, although he's at least attempting not to be too blatant about it.

[Blurr]

That Patterwing is accommodating him both heartens and depresses Blurr. Nevertheless, he smiles and makes his way into the sitting room, taking it as a personal mission to avoid leaning on any furniture or bracing himself unless he's really that close to passing out. And he feels fine other than a niggling little worry that he might never be back to normal.

Ah, but he can keep that to himself. He's being enough of a burden as it is, and since he turns to look at Patterwing when Rodimus asks her a question, he fails his spot check on catching Rodimus checking on him.

"And what… what happened?" he adds. How did just toting those things do this to him?

[SceneMod]

Oddly enough all the furniture looks like it could support the two robots. Patterwing sees them both seated, then continues to flit around the room at high speed, finally settling down a lovely cast iron tea set, complete with cups, warmer, two complementary- though not matching- pots, all on a lovely tray of warm red wood.

She pours the cups. In them is a warmed version of... something that looks a lot like energon, actually. She pours herself a cup from another pot, and this looks much more like normal tea.

"Well... what it is was... those containers, they had to be charged up in order Doc's experiment to work, and the only way to charge them without them going boom was through contact with something or someone running at near FTL speeds. And I knew that part, but I couldn't tell you that because that skews the data and the reactions and tends to make people not perform at optimum capacity, but I didn't know it would make them slow! He didn't tell me that! He didn't!"

She grips her teacup entirely too tightly, "I really didn't! It worked, it worked just like Doc's research said it would, but it shouldn't have hurt you. It didn't hurt anyone else!"

"I... I was let go from that position for asking questions, but I have friends in other places and so I got another job pretty quick. They've actually been trying to help me figure out what happened."

[Rodimus Prime]

Rodimus frowns thoughtfully as he peers down at the drink, wondering just how she managed to get so close to energon. As used as he is to talking to Blurr, he knows better than to focus on trying to understand every word - instead, he just listens until he has the gist.

"So they were charged, and Blurr was drained," he scowls into his drink. "And you didn't know, but you've been trying..." he looks up. "Have you figured anything out?"

[Blurr]

Blurr rests a hand near his cup but makes no move to lift it or drink what's offered; he's staring at Patterwing instead. She knew. She knew what would happen and said nothing. Because knowing would have made him run slower? No, that's ridiculous. He frowns and looks down at his cup, fiddling with the delicate little handle between thumb and fingertip.

"It didn't hurt any of the others," he says quietly, remembering the fellow he'd met on his way into meet with Noah, "because they were blown up. The packages blew up on them."

[SceneMod]

Patterwing didn't know that the containers would steal Blurr's speed! Just that they needed to be moved that fast to charge them!

"Yeah, they did. Blow up that is," she says. Patterwing looks sad, but not nearly so upset over that fact as some people might. She's lived on Pz-Zazz her whole life; death by explosion is not the worse way to die.

"As for what I found out- well. Doc's experiments were about time manipulation. Those of us that move so fast, we don't always just seem to be moving slightly out of phase with normal people, under right conditions, time can speed up or slow down for us, depending."

Patterwing is trying very hard to speak at a more normally-paced level. It makes her voice sound stilted, off key. A bit of her normal pitch and speed creeps back in as she turns to look at Blurr.

"You know what I mean right? How the world seems to move at slow motion because you're moving so fast. 'Gone before you know it, there before you blink, like you literally race into the future and leave everyone behind?"

"Everyone caught in the energy release was moved forward a half hour in time though it isn't quite as simple as that."

[Rodimus Prime]

"Time travel," Rodimus groans, bringing his right hand up to his forehead. "Great. I hate time travel!"

Being a veteran at it doesn't mean he has to like it!

Then he lowers his hand and shakes his head before glancing at Blurr and muttering to the speedster, "Should have brought Perceptor along." Then he looks back at Patterwing. "All right, I'm already guessing that the technical details are a bit beyond me, so I'm just going to cut to the chase. Do you know how to fix it? If not, do you know who we should talk to to try to fix it? If not, can we have the data you do have so we can get it to our own scientists?"

Rodimus may be no speedster, but that doesn't always stop him from rushing headlong into things.

[Blurr]

It isn't how they died that bothers Blurr; it's that they died just trying to complete a job. A job that didn't involve fighting a war. It can't be changed, of course, but it still rankles. It's wrong.

But what bothers Blurr the most, for he's never felt this so acutely as he does now, is that he can't keep up with the conversation. He hears what Patterwing says and he hears what Rodimus says, but he can't follow either of them. His brain module aches with the effort and he still feels like he's thinking in slow motion. He looks from Rodimus to Patterwing and then lifts his cup to take a sip before his hands start shaking too badly.

"Probably should have," he agrees quietly, masking a wince behind his cup. Perceptor joining the conversation would just make this worse.

[SceneMod]

Blurr will find he feels better- and perhaps can follow the conversation a smidgen better- after he takes that sip.

"Not time travel. Not exactly. I said time manipulation. Essentially, those people- myself and Blurr included- were moved forward in time at an extremely accelerated rate. To an observer outside the field, we would have seemed like a shadow seen out of the corner of the eye, an image that slips out of focus and never seems really there- at least until the appropriate point was reached."

"We were moved forward, but we never moved. We lost a half hour of our lives, super-aged by that time in the space of seconds." She gazes down into her teacup. "Hastening the natural process of entropy."

After a few minutes she continues, "Preliminary indications are that Blurr's speed should return on its own, once his body has the time to reset to default and/or catch up with the amount of time stolen from him. We don't know exactly how many people were affected so we don't know how much time he lost, or how many seconds that equates too for him."

She reaches over and taps the teapot containing the energon-like substance. "Where I work now, one of the doctors is treating some guy like you all for addiction. She shared some of the appropriate fuel blend with me and I talked with one of the chemists and he cross-blended it with additives which should help Blurr's system by causing a slow but natural increase in his reflexes and thought processes thereby stimulating the appropriate parts that control his super speed and fostering healing. I thinned it out, but I have the pure mix if you want it?"

Basically? It's the equivalent of a coffee with quad espresso shots- times thirty.

Patterwing reaches over to try and place a hand on Blurr's arm. "You're going to be okay, you really will." She's speaking very, very slowly. "It isn't permanent."