TK-D-3 had waited for this moment for centuries. No more humiliations for Maximal interests!
It wasn’t fair. Everything bad had always happened to TK-D-3. He came from a lucky batch, created in peacetime to deal with the fallout after the Nightbird War. Old technology, designed anew, used in their creation. Organic forms. In the shape of things humans know on Earth. With no real task when online’d, just the directive to live and love well.
Damn that TK-K-9, for getting all the luck. Form matches his personality, faceplate stuck in everyone’s exhaust. Not D-3’s fault his ID doesn’t make a pun. Not every can be puppy. Or wolf. Penguin. Monkey. Giraffe. Stinkbug.
No. D-3 made Fluffy. Stupid animal. Animal want love, get hurt instead every time! Not even real animal, just animal hybrid like Junkion.
D-3 knows why D-3 was made Fluffy. D-3 is special, best of batch. So durable, body made of interlaced nanites which could readjust density and rebuild same with less if damaged. Could eat metal like Insecticon, break down to regain density. But with immortal Spark needed to survive. D-3 was greatest anomaly ever!
But that was most useful in war. D-3 was not made for war. D-3 was made to appeal to humans. So D-3 was assigned a stupid hodgepodge unnatural animal, pike a genetic Junkion. His beautiful golden paint disappeared into the dark brown and black striped fluff, two useless wings spamming his mind with error signals when he tried to use them, and a built-in gun that became his lower abdomen meaning he couldn’t deploy it in his alt mode without turning around and firing blindly.
So maybe D-3 was talkative. Interrupted a lot. Got bored and went to do things when others talked. Liked touching others and being touched. Enjoyed organizing things into neat stacks by color.
Not D-3’s fault Protoform Manager had short temper and a new paintjob that wasn’t made to survive a grabby 7 foot talk newborn bot. It wasn’t worth the punishment of being Fluffy at any rate. D-3 didn’t even leave embassy before human shoved him off the balcony where the new generation was being presented for the human news programs! The humans crowd on the ground below laughed at D-3 when he splashed facefirst into a two inch deep puddle and struggled to get back up on the slippery pavement.
D-3 ran, and hid in alley to figure out why nobody had helped him. D-3 was made to be a friend! Then little Fluffies came to D-3, sniffed D-3. Demanded food! D-3 tried to explain that D-3 didn’t need food but Fluffies put muddy soft hooves on D-3’s sparkly gold-colored leg! They were trying to hurt D-3! But they were dumb, because D-3 was made of metal. It still made him sad. He pulled his legs close to his chest and told them he was just made, and was supposed to give love. They didn’t care. They laughed, muddied all of D-3’s pretty sparkly paint. He wanted to fight back but didn’t know how, he wasn’t made to fight, so he thrust a hand out at them to make them go away. They stopped, so he looked up and saw his pretty shiny grey hand covered in red, sticking out the back of a gurgling Fluffy around his wrist. The rest screamed. Some hit him more. They turned around and fired their hidden weapons at him, but it had no effect. D-3 had a gun stored in the same place, but realized that for some reason it had no ammunition; he was worse than a real Fluffy with their useless organic liquid weaponry.
He couldn’t hear the things they were screaming over the speaker-crackling discordant harmonizations of their shrill warcries but D-3 was dimly aware he was screaming at them, crying, begging the Fluffy corpse bracelet to stop being hurt. It must have been a Spy-class Fluffy because it was full of smaller Fluffies, one still stuck to D-3’s dangling sharp index finger and connected by a wire to its commander. Its blue eyes were open in shock, red hydraulic fluid staining its pretty green. D-3 never forgot that look. Never forgot how badly the Fluffies wanted to hurt him for the Offline’d Fluffy honor. How they had no power to.
D-3 was laughed at when he returned to the embassy. Humans recorded him, one threw a Fluffy at him and suggested he mate with it. “Only a day old and the little cog went native!”
“Well one thing is sure, they won’t see us as a threat after this.”
“WHY WHEELJACK MAKE SNARL WITH NOSE?!”
D-3 tried to run to the dirt wash, but was grabbed by the claw arm of the security systems and forced into the high pressure heat/acid wash instead. The rest of his wonderful paint came off, exposing the dull bronze-like alloy beneath. He tried to transform and save the last of his paint, having never actually been a Fluffy before. While no real Fluffy’s screams could reach the levels needed to break glass, real Fluffies don’t have amplifiers that can make clear speech across a battlefield.
It was decided that D-3 would work as a janitor for a century and a half. No trial, just being informed via intercom while he was still hugging his knees to his chin on the floor of the wash chamber. There was no need for it, the cleaning drones did better than he ever could, but every Cybertronian who still had a vehicle mode felt like some kind of justice was deserved for the time and resources spent replacing their windshields in the medical wing.
So D-3 washed every surface inside the embassy, every day, without stopping. Bots who had a bad day would leave messes or order him to do it in his alt mode. In either mode he was kicked frequently by larger bots, eaten several times, and roundly mocked. D-3 didn’t try to touch anyone anymore, though he could never quite stop himself from talking. Since nobody listened he talked to himself, narrated what he was doing and discussed his plans and desires. The rest avoided him even more, which was fine by D-3. Nobody liked him, and he was fine lying to himself that he didn’t like them either. If he said it to himself he could then agree, which surely made it true.
As time went on D-3 started dropping grammar. His alt mode’s speech patterns bled in a bit, and there wasn’t coherency needed when he understood himself quite fine.
Once something nice happened. It was Christmas, and he was forced to restock the human refreshment area napkin containers in Fluffy form by an inebriated TK-C-34. C-34 was always bullying him because he was jealous, they were both made of the same flawed batch of liquid metal. C-34 was born already dying, he’d never live to see the age of nine thousand, and on top of that his assigned form was a pig which always made him aggressive to those he saw as an even lower animal and simpering towards the ones he saw as his betters. D-3’s nanite biology had made it unlikely anything would kill him without a crack team of scientists or a Planetformer on the job, and the thought that the Fluffy was the immortal one made D-3 live in his RAM rent-free.
D-3 hated C-34 for being naturally gold, the same color as D-3’s lost paint. His lost innocence. But C-34’s twin G-17 made him go away, told D-3 to go have fun. When D-3 bitterly reminded him he still had over a century left of nonstop labor C-34 picked him up and asked if he was at least having a nice Chosen One Day. When D-3 told him he didn’t know what that was he clarified it as Christmas. He still didn’t know what that meant. G-17 gave him a data disc, then asked what D-3 wanted more than anything. He said he wanted his pretty paint back.
D-3 never got to watch the disc, since he was never supposed to stop working. But he did find a pretty box in his supply cupboard. Inside was a sample pack of paint. There wasn’t enough gold to cover himself, bit it seemed poignant that the green was the same shade as the dead Fluffy who had been loved so much by its comrades.
When the humans told the Cybertronians to leave Earth nobody told D-3. The embassy transformed, assuming its humanoid form and walking to the designated launch site. The other Cybertronians were asleep in their Protoform pods while D-3 was battered to shrapnel by pumping pistons he had been polishing in the armory that was currently an ankle. He shook loose and had repaired enough of his body to crawl away. His screams were ignored, and while the 80 foot tall Cybertronian Titan stopped with his leg in midair to wait for a real Fluffy to finish crossing the walkway poor D-3 was torn apart again by the sudden engagement of the equilibrium plasma chamber keeping the giant’s balance.
Feeling weak, since the formerly 300 pound bot had shed 128 pounds in repairs, D-3 unthinkingly began eating a guardrail. The security systems triggered, and D-3 was again rendered into broken fragments of a broken bot. He was only reassembled enough to feel pain as the Titan reached the takeoff platform, transformed, and blasted off into space.
Months of excruciating pain from the high-Energon discharge of the Titan’s respiratory system later, the Titan landed on Cybertron. Because D-3 was not in his pod he was marked as having gone AWOL, and contact was made with the humans to try and conduct a search for him on Earth which lead to accusations of spying. The political incident had reached a fever pitch when D-3 was found lodged in the Titan’s right primary abdominal Energon exhaust vent, pleading for someone to Offline him.
D-3 was punished for potentially killing the Titan and his entire generation as well as for the various relics aboard, for humiliating the Cybertronians, and for the cost of the guardrail. The only thing that made D-3 feel better was knowing C-34 would be long Offline when his sentence of polishing grates in the sewers of Iacon was over.
When the terrorists approached D-3 offering him to join them his only request was to be re-generation-ed to actually be gold and green instead of merely painted. The rest were offered cities to rule, but D-3 only wanted to be loved, and the first step was obviously to look worthy of love. A small price to pay for access to the sewers of the Maximal capital city.
When the extremist calling himself Megatron after the infamous historical warlord, himself named after the god Prime of war and martyrs, approached D-3 with an offer as a crewmember on his ship there was no hesitation. He finally had comrades!
While they went back in time to change the past and rule the future D-3 was barely paying attention. He just wanted a mission, to be useful. To defend his leader and fellows. For them to fight for him.
Most of his generation had taken vehicle forms after leaving Earth, or copied an alt mode based on other alien lifeforms. He never let on that he was still a Fluffy. But when the Energon radiation of the place their ship had crashed turned out to be lethal to his comrades they copied animals in the environment around them as their new organic alt modes to protect their robotic parts. D-3 submitted to the reconfiguration, and like that he was no longer a Fluffy.
It had apparently recognized he had a small original form, and had assigned him as a human-sized insect. His abdominal gun remained, but felt that it contained energy bolts instead of an empty liquid tank. He still had wings, but now they worked and he had a counter-gravitational field allowing him to fly even as a biped!
Now he would have respect! He would be valued! Loved! No more cleaning, no more mud, no more Fluffy humiliation!
He was so happy! D-3 was finally dead!
“LONG LIVE WAZZPINATO-“
A metal fist from D-3’s red comrade into his cheek knocked off his mandible, shutting him up. Still an improvement though.
