Fender Bender Troubles

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Characters: mikaelabanes, @jazz
Location: Jasper Autoshop and Repair
Content Warnings: N/A
Plot Summary: Jazz gets a fender bender and goes for help from Mikaela. She's smarter than she lets on and knows something is fishy about this.

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It was about noon when Mikaela finally got a break. The amount of people coming in was slowing down and she knew there was going to be a bit of a lull for a little while.

The girl sipped at her water, leaning back against a chair watching the area when suddenly someone pulled up that she had never seen before.

Instantly, she was curious. In a little town like Jasper, you knew almost everyone. And with a job like Mikaela's, even if you didn't know them by their face, you knew them by what car they drive.

Mikaela stood up, curious about the newcomer.

"Hey!" she called out, her voice friendly.

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In retrospect, this entire thing was his own fault, and he knew it.

Jazz ought to have known better than to get distracted by his own music while off road on patrol, for it was a rookie mistake to allow one’s focus to slide off of the task at hand, but in his defense, the music he’d been listening to had been rad as all hell. The end result of his indiscretion had been a particularly abrupt encounter with a large boulder that had been enough to give him a pair of busted headlights, a severely damaged bumper, a dented front end, and something rattling under the hood of his alt-mode -- likely something small and insignificant had broken off somewhere and now was loose in his chassis.

Ugh. Well, he couldn’t go back to the base, because running into a pit-damned rock was a slagging embarrassing reason to have to ask Ratchet to fix him up for, and because Prowl would never let him hear the end of it for driving while distracted again. The only solution he could see to his little problem was to go find a human mechanic that could fix him up without looking too closely at his parts.

Well, Jazz’d been itching for an excuse to trot out his holoform and practice with it a bit. Might as well.

A short while later, a very fancy and very souped up white, red, and blue sports car pulled up to the first autoshop it could find in Jasper. “Hey!” Jazz greeted back as he rolled forward -- or, rather, his holoform greeted from behind his own steering wheel. “Y’think y’can help me out? Kinda got into a fight with a rock and busted myself up." 

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A smile threatened to pull at Mikaela's lips and she tried hard to suppress it. The amount of times she had seen that happen...

"Sure thing," Mikaela said, leaning down a bit to the window. "If you wanna hop out, I'll take a look at your car and see what I can do to fix it up."

Already, Mikaela saw that it was mainly superficial damage. Take out the dents, redo the paint. The one thing Mikaela was worried about was anything on the inside under the hood getting damaged in the crash.

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Hop out? It took Jazz an embarrassingly long moment (by his standards, mind, because by human standards it was but a brief pause) to connect the words to their intended meaning. ‘Yikes, I’m gettin’ rusty at this.’ The human mechanic wanted his holoform to get out of the car. He had a brief spurt of panic then, for though he’d been practicing with his projection skills lately to see what tricks he could do, he’d never done anything so complicated as coordinating his door opening with his holoform holding the handle, stepping out, standing, and shutting the door behind it.

The alarm passed. This was no big deal at all, and he’d been in worse situations before -- and besides, he was a master at improvising. “Yeah, sure, no problem!” He waited until the human was focused upon his bent-up front-end to simply project his holoform outside the chassis of his car form. Whether or not the mechanic noticed that the car door had not opened or closed and that her customer had apparently just teleported himself outside his car was another matter.

“What’s the diagnoses? Am I gonna be able t’play the piano after this?” His holoform -- a dark-skinned man in his mid-thirties wearing what Jazz hoped was a sufficiently cool enough outfit -- leaned up against his own door. “And d’you take credit here?” Jazz hoped so, ‘cause all he had in terms of human currency was the US-government issued credit card number Agent Fowler had given out.

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Mikaela missed Jazz's holoform fizzling out and then back outside of the car. She would have been extremely confused and alarmed as to why that would happen. Mikaela ran a hand through her dark hair, checking out the front of the car. Pretty car, shame it was all dented up.

"Yes, we take credit," Mikaela said absently. It seemed to be all superficial damage. Bumps, dents, easy stuff.

What Mikaela was worried about was the engine getting damaged in the crash. Engines were delicate things, and difficult to fix due to all of the components.

"I wanna look under the hood to make sure there's no damage there," she stated.

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So preoccupied with examining the cosmetic damage on his front end, the human mechanic missed the flicker of his holoform moving from one point to another. Jazz was relieved, ‘cause he couldn’t imagine anyone being pleased with him if he blew the whole ‘robots in disguise’ cover. Good to know that he wasn’t as rusty as he thought he was with going undercover and blending in, but he certainly could use a bit more practice after being out of the field for such a long time.

“Go ahead,” He’d expected the mechanic would want to take a look under his hood, even hoped for it, because that loose part had to be fished out sooner or later, and small hands were better for that sort of thing than large. The locks for his hood audibly clicked open, and it helpfully popped open. It didn’t occur to Jazz that most humans popped their car hoods from inside the car, and that he should’ve reached in to find that particular button. “Just a heads up, though, I got a custom engine in there, so things might look a little different t’you.”

Jazz -- rather, the holoform Jazz -- crossed its (his?) arms and leaned against his own door as he watched. “Apart from th’ front end bein’ all busted up, I think there’s somethin’ broken in there. I heard it rattlin’ round’ when I drove here. Don’t think it’s catastrophic, though, otherwise somethin’ would’ve gone wrong.” He wasn’t too worried about it, of course, for it was indeed true that if it were vitally important, he’d still be out in the desert, maybe waiting for Ratchet to come through to see what trouble he’d gotten into.

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"Custom engine, huh?" That was exciting. Mikaela only saw generics. But she was pretty accustomed to most engines, so she didn't think it would be a big issue to fix it up.

"No problem, man." Apparently this was a custom car too. Popping the hood open from wherever. If only she could have a car like this...

Opening up the hood, Mikaela stopped short. This was like no engine she'd ever seen before. But she kept a poker face on while she glanced at it. There was a strange noise coming from inside that did not sound like a noise a car should make. And was that...?

"... Why is your gas tank in your hood?"

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It made Jazz want to preen a little in knowing that the human mechanic seemed to be excited and impressed at the prospect of looking at a custom engine -- though ‘custom’ was a bit of an understatement when one was actually a giant alien transforming robot. The holoform stayed leaning up against the door of his chassis, content to watch as the human mechanic wandered around to the front and took a look.

His spark did skip a beat at her words. Of course, humans were clever, and it would make sense that this one would notice something out of the ordinary considering fixing cars was her profession. The the strange, quiet whirring noise that Mikaela heard increased in speed for a few seconds before slowing once more, a reflection of his momentary nervousness. “-It’s a secondary tank, ‘cause I do a lotta endurance stuff. All of it’s a custom build, actually,” He said smoothly after only a moment’s delay (during which Jazz quickly tried to figure out if humans even put gas tanks under the hood and if this would be a viable excuse), the holoform giving a bit of a shrug.

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@jazz

"A..." Mikaela trailed off, looking at the man in bewilderment. "You know that if your gas tank is in your hood, there's a lot more likelihood of it getting pierced by accident and causing a leak that will catch your car on fire."

This man seemed pretty nonchalant about it, though...

"What's that noise that keeps coming from your hood? That doesn't sound like an engine noise."

Mikaela wondered how long it had been since this man had took his car in for a tune up. Or if he had ever.

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There was a very long, pregnant pause as Jazz comprehended her words (the rather frozen, awkward look on his holoform’s face certainly revealed the feelings of his ‘inner persona’) before his processor rebooted and he was left scrambling to come up with a plausible reason a human might have put a tank full of flammable fuel in the hood of a car. “It’s, uh, custom?” was the best he could come up with, which was horribly embarrassing. His sudden inability to improvise was concerning -- he was rustier than he’d thought.

He got even more nervous when the mechanic made reference to what could only be the whirring hum of his spark. His spark casing wasn’t exactly something he liked medics to go near much less humans, and the sound wasn’t exactly something he could turn off. THe holoform fidgetted crossing and uncrossing its arms. “It’s nothin’, don’t worry ‘bout it,” he said quickly, before trying to divert the subject. “‘Sides, I’m pretty sure there’s somethin’ else loose in there. Heard it rattlin’ an’ stuff.”