Bee in the City

[Sari Sumdac]

Characters: Sari Sumdac, @bumblebee
Location: Crown City
Content Warnings: N/A
Plot Summary: Sensing that Bumblebee could use a break from his team, Sari offers to take him on a grandiose tour of Crown City. Will Bee enjoy his trip to the city that he secretly protects, or will the duo find themselves in nothing but a heap of trouble?

[Sari Sumdac]

If there was anything to be deemed weird about the situation Sari found herself in, it was the fact that she could call the vehicle she was currently sitting in a living, sentient being.

She'd become friends with the Autobots at that old junkyard after that fateful day she met young Russell Clay, and she finally had people she could hang out with.. even if most of them were roughly three stories tall. It didn't matter to her, however. In fact, she found the Autobots super cool! They were so huge, and they could turn into vehicles and even dinosaurs from what she had seen from the ones she had met.

When the teenager saw that the yellow Autobot seemed a bit overstressed, that's when she'd offered him an outlet. Maybe getting him to drive around would do some good, and she could show him around Crown City all at the same time. All she had to do was sit in his passenger seat and pretend to be the driver. It wouldn't be terribly difficult, unless Bee made one wrong move and sent the police chasing after them. Sari couldn't even drive! Imagine all the stress it'd put on her father. The man already had white streaks in his hair as it was, as well as darkened eyes from his many sleepless nights. If something like that happened, he'd likely never let her leave Sumdac Systems again for a long time.

And in the driver's seat the young Sumdac sat, hands on Bumblebee's wheel, but with a grip so loose that the Autobot was in full control of where he drove. It was merely an act, just so other humans in the vicinity didn't grow suspicious. She smiled to herself, looking on ahead as they neared the bridge to Crown City.

"We're going to have so much fun, Bumblebee~. I'll show you all the cool places around town, even if we can't visit them all with the whole 'robots in disguise' thing. Not only can you learn about where I live, but you can get to see how all the humans are too! I wish I could introduce you to my dad. I know he'd get a kick out of seeing you, but I know that I can't. Maybe one day though?" Sari hummed to herself quietly, thinking about all the fun things they were about to embark upon. There was just one thing missing..

"Hey, Bumblebee? Do you have any good music we could listen to? Pretty pleeeeeeease~?" Not exactly sure where to look so that he could see her (how did that even work with these guys anyway), she gave her best pleading look toward the steering wheel. You could trust a face like this, couldn't you, Bumblebee?

[Deleted]

Bumblebee liked humans. Well, maybe that was a bit too broad. Some humans were certainly unlikeable, but Bumblebee liked his humans, those he considered friends. The list wasn’t very long: the Omega Outpost’s children and the Clays, a few others here and there, and now Sari Sumdac.

After meeting each other, they had become friends pretty fast. Bumblebee had been puzzled by her strange energy readings at first, and still was, but he had decided that was a mystery that would eventually solve itself.

Besides, despite her odd signature, there was no reason to suspect Sari. The redhead was a sweet kid with a lot of zeal. She was also hiding a knack for mischief a parsec wide, but Bumblebee knew her to be Good all the way down to her struts. After all, the moment she had noticed his twitchiness, she had proposed a relaxing day out.

They drove into Crown City and started meandering through the city’s streets. He half-listened to his friend’s excited babbling and gave a soft rueful chuckle. He would like to meet Sari’s father as well, but he shouldn’t even have met her. Dragging her dad into it too was out of the question.

“Maybe one day, yeah.”

Bumblebee took a turn, driving down a narrow but clean street. Sari’s hands were light on his steering wheel as it spun on its axis, and he was grateful for the gentle grip: she didn’t seem to want to control him, and he appreciated that.

Especially since she wasn’t even of legal age to be driving. What a mess they’d be in if the human authorities pulled them over! Could the humans around them tell she wasn’t old enough to be behind the steering wheel? Supposing they got caught, what was the punishment for that? Could Sari end up in prison?

Bumblebee couldn’t let that happen. He slowed down, not to a turtle crawl but enough to have the drivers behind him slowly but surely grow exasperated by his pace. The further they were from the speed limit, the better, right? He had never been this nervous when Rafael Esquivel had made himself at home in his driver’s seat, but Jasper had been a little town; Crystal City was a metropolis, and it showed.

And this was supposed to be a relaxing day out?

“What? Oh, yes, sure,” he stammered, not realising he hadn’t even turned on the radio. He tuned into one with popular music playing. Sari looked like the sort of person who liked the mainstream just fine. “There we go. And, uh, speaking of going—where did you say you wanted to go?”

[Sari Sumdac]

To be fair, Sari didn't even notice that Bumblebee wasn't paying too much attention to her speaking at first. She just kept talking about how she wished that her dad could meet the Autobots and become friends with them and the Clay's, but that would remain a dream of hers for the time being.

It was only when the Autobot began stammering that she raised an eyebrow. Not even just that, but she began to realize that he had decelerated quite a bit.. so much so that there were now cars flying around them and even a few honking or yelling.

"Uh.. Bumblebee? Are you alright? You shouldn't be going this slow. The speed limit is 50, after all. We'll get in trouble if the police see us." Lord help them all if the one cop that did spot them happened to be Fanzone. He'd have a fit, and that's not considering what his reaction would be if he found out that the car she was in was actually an alien from another planet!

The poor man already hated machines enough as it was.

Giving a random driver a nervous grin, she turned her attention back to the radio as Bee finally got the music going. This was her jam! Her grin switched from nervous to one fueled by excitement, bobbing her head along to the beat, only to stop when questioned by the Autobot.

"Well, I dunno~! I was thinking maybe we could drive around for a bit, stop at the Burger Bot, and whatever else we think of along the way. We don't have to have a full plan to have fun, right?"