Author's Note: Back after one year! . I started college and never really thought of carrying on, due to the workload and stress-load. Then I came up with this. Hope it fits.

These characters don't belong to me AT ALL! Thanks Hasbro and Takara!

The Other Observer

Mirage found himself unusually alert when he returned from a lonely drive. There was something different about the Ark, as he stepped into the corridors.

There was a strange smell around here. This smell was foreign, and he couldn't calculate what he was sensing.

But he knew one thing – it smelt of earthly origin. Much of the senses he accumulated of earth were… earthly. There was little else to say about them.

Not that he was concerned.

As he headed towards the energon dispenser, the smell grew more intense than it was at the doorstep. As they got stronger, he found something even more… interesting about the scent.

There were… many scents. Many individual scents in one. He couldn't quite place what they were, but that, he discovered. It smelled pretty offensive to him too, but that only stirred his interest of what could be so repulsive.

He drew closer to the room, and now there was sound – a sizzling sound.

Then there was talk – human voices.

"Pass me the sugar."

"Sugar?"

"Yeah, sugar."

"But sugar in pasta sauce?"

Mirage peeked into the pantry, and found the source of the smell and sounds.

Carly and Spike were by the 'humans' area, huddled over what were, according to humans' terms, a pot and a stove. Carly held a wooden object and kept glancing into the pot, while Spike seemed to be the audience of whatever Carly was doing. Beside Spike was a square table and a separate flat surface on top of it. It had the remains of some different-colored items broken apart, a few empty cans and a small knife.

But, no, Mirage knew what they were doing. The humans were cooking – at least Carly seemed to be preparing food to make it more palatable to the humans. When he first learned of this term, he found this activity… queer. Energon was always instantly consumed by themselves, and the only kind of preparation that would happen would be refining it into different grades of quality.

Humans heat their food up in containers of metal put over a source of strong heat – pots and pans, if he wasn't wrong. Maybe he was. They would prepare the raw foods in different ways, then combine all of them together in specific steps, with specific measurements and priorities. If anything went wrong, the humans' senses – visual, olfactory, and taste – would immediately realize this and reject it. It has become a passion for some humans to pursue perfection in this field, preparing the foods and methods of adding heat to make something more than palatable.

All this, he knew from Perceptor. The scientist interviewed Chip Chase about it when the human brought something called 'lasagna' to the lab and got Perceptor's olfactory senses working a storm with the new scent. Perceptor did not know how to perceive this at the least, and Chip remarked to Mirage himself how funny the whole situation was, Perceptor panicking over lasagna.

And here was his own, being worked up by a foreign scent.

"I'm sure there's no sugar in pasta sauce!"

"Only a little bit, Spike. See? It's there in the recipe!"

Carly flung the book out at Spike, her finger jabbed at a certain part of the text.

"OK, fine! Just a pinch, right?"

Mirage, ever the quiet-stepping spy, sneaked in and stood by the energon dispenser, just watching. The dispenser would make a sound while filling the ration cup, so it'd have to wait for a while.

This was really interesting.