Title: Domestic Electronics, Pt. 30

Warnings: This barely resembles Transformers at all. You're better off not reading.

Show Rating: G

Continuity: IDW/More Than Meets The Eye AU

Characters: Decepticon Justice Division, Pharma, Scavengers

Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

Motivation (Prompt): There was a translation error, and then Shibara drew a picture based on that error, and then I had to give it a story. It all went downhill from there.

Part 30: A voter from Illinois asked for "Tarn, Domestic Electronics."

[* * * * *]

"What is a 'Warworld' and how did I win one?"

Thus spoke I on the last day of my normal life.

"You won something? Great. Tell me it's edible." Bob peered into today's Tupperware of Mystery with much suspicion and little hope. Krok had been attempting to put him on a diet. Krok had been trying a lot of things, lately. The Fortress Maximus demo model Bob had taken home for behavioral program modification had stirred things up in his apartment, and now Krok had set out on some personal mission to rehabilitate every single D-line model on the Cybertron registry. And he'd put Bob on a diet, like some kind of horrible cherry on top of the self-improvement movement.

I scrolled through the email on my phone, trying to figure it out. It had to be an advertisement. I couldn't have actually won something from the Transformer brand. "I dunno, man. Do you know anything about a Deathsaurus model?" What a weird photo. Turning my phone, I leaned to one side, then the other. All four optics seemed to follow me. Creepy.

"Uhhhh, D-line. He was a babysitter model before the brand figured out people really are stupid enough to think a knee-high robot can be left alone to care for infants. Repurposed a couple time for special releases, so it's probably another re-release." Bob poked a plastic fork into what was, theoretically, his lunch. From the smell of it, it'd probably be a candidate for the trash can. "Does he have a package bio?"

"Yeah, lemme click the link." I casually curled an arm around my own lunch, protecting it from poaching. Nickel was a tiny tyrant of my health, but she regularly fought taste versus health battles with Tesarus and Helex, my input unnecessary and unwelcome. I was fine with that. The kitchen electrodomestics had a vested interest in keeping me coming back to their domain to use them, so they stood up for my tastebuds. "Here, got it. Oooo, dang. Daaaaaaang, Bob, I think this guy's the new D-line flagship model."

"What?"

Shoveling a spoonful of pudding down the hatch, I hurriedly read through the domestic electronic's stats. "Designated lead unit for the Warworld - seriously, what the heck is a Warworld - he's 'an ideal central unit to caretake D-line appliances linked to the brand new hub, designed by the Transformer brand for longer charge, better performance, and more secure information.'" That made no sense to me. I looked at my translator of domestic electronic package language.

Bob was gagging over the sink, having already dumped the rest of his rejected lunch into the trash where it clearly belonged. "Urrgh. Alright. What?" He held out his hand for my phone. I handed him a paper towel first, and he grimaced as he wiped his mouth. "This is exactly why self-improvement people need to keep it to the 'self' part."

"What was it?"

"Might've been tofu. Or overcooked noodles. Couldn't tell past the texture."

I wordlessly handed over half my sandwich. I'd mooched enough of his coffee creamer stash from the breakroom fridge to owe him at least that much.

"Oh my God, food. Bless you," Bob said fervently. "I'm buying canned soup on my way home, and Krok can spend the night in the damn Tupperware if he says one thing about it." He waved the plastic container like a threat while shoving the sandwich into his food hole. "Mnewr whzzis?"

This time I handed him the phone. "I said I think Deathsaurus is the new Megatron. Check out his loyalty stats." No, I'm not a Domestic Electronics aisle employee, but I knew how to read the packages.

Line flagship models like Optimus Prime and Megatron had what the tabletop gamer in me still called Charisma Points. Rodimus had a high rating for it, too. It was part price, part programming, and part of the flagship model recognition inbuilt into their respective lines. Deathsaurus had a rating at least as high as Rodimus. Since Rodimus had pretty much ruled the DE aisle on his own until the A-line Megatron demo unit came along, I could just imagine what the D-line models would be like around Deathsaurus.

Bob swallowed, barely remembering to chew in his excitement. "Heck yeah! This is the new hub controller! He was in the catalogue, but - "

"What hub?"

"Security thing." He waved a hand at me, still absorbed in reading off my phone. "Y'know. Like your guys use the outlet for power but sync up with your laptop. Businesses giving their employees a personal electronic are okay with that, but the business itself wants something more secure for the business itself. The appliances all power up and sync up through a central hub for the business - or house, a lotta rich people like keeping one for all their electronics - and it's got its own network secure from outside access. The Transformers brand wants people to exclusively use their stuff, so, yeah, they're coming out with their own hub instead of just having a flagship model like Megatron to do the line control thing." Because we'd seen how well that worked once the brand mucked around with their Megatron models. Anarchy in the D-line.

"Sooooo…is this guy a leader for the A-line, too?" I leaned back in my chair as I finished off my pudding cup.

"Pfft, no, they've invested way too much into the Prime units to throw away that cash cow. They'll probably just upgrade the Matrix for the A-line. Maybe take the Prime off the market and reintroduce him for the millionth time in a row, or really amp up promoting Bumblebee again." Bob's eyes suddenly popped large. "Wait. Wait. Joe?"

"Mm?"

"You said you won a Warworld."

"Yeah. What is it?"

He stared at me. "Dude, I think you just won a new hub."

"What? What the Sonny and Cher am I gonna do with a hub?" It took a moment to digest, and then I was even more confused. "Naw, I couldn't've. I didn't enter a contest or anything. Was there a contest? There had to have been a contest."

"Must've been." Bob was tapping around on my phone, which I would have objected to except for the fact that he'd caught on faster than me.

I got up and looked over his shoulder, already feeling that tightness in my chest. "Don't tell me."

Bob had run a quick search in my folders. "I'm not gonna tell you," he said as he showed me the results in my Deleted Messages folder. "And that's just for the last week."

Depending on how long the contest had gone, the daily acknowledgement of my email being entered into the Win Big! contest likely stretched back every single day. "Those little fuckers." Time to change all my passwords. Again. Not that it'd stop the D.J.D. from doing what they did best, which was get on my nerves.

And apparently be lucky on my behalf. I didn't feel lucky. Y'know, when other people won stuff they actually felt lucky instead of a sinking sense of doom.

It turned into the prickly sense of burgeoning panic when I got a call from the Transformers PR person. I could barely get a word in edgewise as she went through a spiel about the Warworld's many, many, many, manymanymany features. Did I mention the features? I kid you not, she went through a list. I lost count at around 100 or so, because no joke, that was too many to say out loud. As a sales person, let me tell you, at some point you just pointed to the box and smiled.

500+ features later, she finally took a breath. "How big is this thing?" I blurted into the teeny-tiny opening. "I don't know if I even have room for this. I mean, I live in an apartment."

"Oh, that won't be a problem! Deathsaurus is fully equipped to adapt! He can learn to function in an isolated environment. While ideally that would be a larger office building, a small business set-up will profit wonderfully from our new hub's organizational functions!" I tried desperately to interrupt, but no, she was off and talking again about the individual pieces of the hub. This thing was starting to sound like 500 separate domestic electronics squished into a ball, not a single piece of equipment. I had the crazy mental image of the Warworld cruising around raiding appliance stores like the Death Star in miniature. I honestly couldn't picture this thing in my apartment.

Plus, I wasn't a business owner. This lady would not, no matter how I tried to tell her, get it through her head that I didn't own a business, a house, or some kind of nonprofit group. To be fair to her, what she had on her end were my entries in the Cybertron registry. There weren't many people who weren't filthy stinking rich with a small horde of electrodomestics registered under their name. Unless they were a complete techhead, I supposed, although usually the guys that made it to the Trouble Troop level of I.T. support knew better than to take their work home with them. Suckers like me were the ones stuck with reject electronics.

"Look," I interrupted at the top of my lungs to break through the chatter, "I don't know how my group will take a brand new electronic! I've only had one new one, and they get upset every time I try to introduce another one."

Surprisingly, the cheerful exposition about how great Transformer products were stopped. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped out of Sales Mode into something approaching human. I should know; I spoke the same way depending on if I talked to a customer or coworker. "It's technically against the rules to tell you this, but..."

That's never a good thing to hear from a big corporation's PR person. "Uh."

"This drawing wasn't as random as most of our customers likely thought. If they'd read the fine print - did you read the fine print?"

"Oh yeah, sure. Always." I hadn't even known my pack of evil glitches had been entering me in it. "Why, don't other people?"

She seemed to relax. "No, it's actually a problem we have in every drawing or give-away. People don't read the rules. I thought you might have, considering how many of the Justice Division you have. Did you know only ten people in your city have the whole set?"

Lucky me. "They are a unique bunch." There. That was tactful.

"Well, fortunately customers didn't have to have them all in order to enter, but the requirement was two or more. You, of course, were more than qualified. The point of this drawing wasn't just to promote the Warworld and its features. Our brand is moving focus in the workplace, branching off the more companionable of the D-line into a separate market and centering our sales on business electronics. Deathsaurus is aimed at small business owners in particular, with minimal to no coordination with the companion electronics. The Warworld actually can't sync up with any of the A-line, including the Megatron units. Are you familiar with the recent line changeover for that unit?"

I clearly remembered Tarn's reaction, yes. "You could say that."

She kept talking, but it all turned into a jargon-laced sales pitch of products I had no interest in. Bob would pester me for details later, and it did kind of seem important to his aisle organizational chart. If what this lady was telling me was right, the A-line vs. D-line sales strategy for the Transformers brand had just rolled out their new assault wave on the market.

With Deathsaurus and the Warworld at the head of the D-line. "So they're testing how much authority he has by sending him out to people with the Justice Division," I told Bob, rubbing my temples as I spoke.

"Make sense, I guess?" He munched pretzels thoughtfully. Krok obviously had no influence on today's lunch. "They're like the police of the D-line. If they accept him as the new flagship model out in the real world, the rest of the line'll go along with it."

I sighed. "But...c'mon, I don't want a Warworld. She kept saying this thing's the size of a desktop computer like that's no problem. That's an enormous problem." Maybe I was exaggerating a tad, but my apartment was cluttered enough. Where the heck was I going to put an electrodomestic and his...docking...hub...thing? I had no idea what I'd do with it.

"You could bring it to work."

"You just want him for a free demo model."

Bob looked wistful. "You have no idea what kind of sales I could pull in if we carried the high-end stuff."

I snorted. "What, do you need to fund your secret alter-ego superhero lifestyle?"

"I'll have you know that the Batcave doesn't pay for itself."

I conceded the point. The rent was probably skyhigh. "Yeah, okay, but she already said he won't get along with the A-line. Like, at all. Putting him with the Megatron and that Rodimus," we both rolled our eyes, "is just asking for a fight to the death."

"True. Pretzel?"

"Thanks."

We munched salty carbs for a while. Bob seemed lost in thought, which rarely ended well for anyone. I just sucked down coffee in a futile attempt to fuel my brain for advanced problem solving.

"Can I have him?" Bob asked at last.

I pictured Deathsaurus, the Warworld, and the Bob-mob in one room. "I dunno, man. I feel like your guys would absorb into the Borg Collective if they get near a hub."

"Oo, good point. Plus there's Grimlock."

"Oh, shit, that wouldn't be pretty." Grimlock had nearly torn Fortress Maximus a new one, and they were theoretically on the same side. Grimlock versus Deathsaurus would be even worse.

Then I pictured Deathsaurus versus Tarn and grimaced. "I feel like a deadbeat two-timer keeping a girl on the side, but bringing the Warworld home doesn't seem like a good idea. Keeping him at work will probably be smarter."

"Except for my aisle."

"Stop bringing logic into this."

"Sorry."

"She could have been wrong," Bob said. He crumpled up the pretzel bag as he stood, and I gave him a wary look. He sounded too happy for my peace of mind. "She might have underestimated the size of this thing."

Suddenly I was picturing something the size of a washing machine being delivered to my apartment. "Gorammit."

[* * * * *]

"How the Hell am I going to get that thing home," I said flatly. My backpack looked sadly inadequate.

Tim wandered over from Housewares with Whirl pinned to his shirt front like some sort of bizarre prom corsage. Pincers waved at me as the little glitch zuff-huff-huff ed merrily at the unwieldy box sitting in my area. "You're doomed," Tim told me. "DoooOOOOOoooomed." Dramatic intonation complete, he went back the way he came.

I glared after him. "Yes, thank you harbinger of chaos, panic, and disorder. I needed that."

"My work here is done!"

Whirl added a final zuff-huff as insult on top of injury. Man, some people have no sympathy for people whining about free prizes.

And I could see Tim's point. I was whining. How often does a box this size get delivered for free? Full of free expensive electronics? That I didn't really want, but I hadn't outright refused the give-away because, what, did I look nuts? Even if I ended up hating Deathsaurus and his Warwold hub thingie, I could probably sell him to the store after a couple months. Worst came to worst, I could shut them off and put them back in their boxes.

For now, I'd told Tarn I who and what I was bringing home this week, so I at least had to introduce my new domestic electronics to the gang. Who knew? Maybe they'd get along. Deathsaurus was supposed to be Megatron's successor, after all.

The good news was that the Warworld actually fit in the extra-large bags we carried up at the cash register. It was going to be a pain in the ass carrying on the bus, but it was do-able. A lot of the weight seemed to be Deathsaurus himself, and I was taking him out of the box. Too bad I wanted to save all the Styrofoam packing cut-outs, or I probably could have fit the Warworld into my backpack by itself.

"Huh." Deathsaurus was kind of…cute. I hadn't been expecting cute. "You looked bigger in the pictures." Compared to the huge Megatron unit, Deathsaurus looked only a bit bigger than my set of anklebiters. Tarn had more tread-bulk going on, but Deathsaurus hadn't been given the utilitarian vehicle mode Tarn had. Deathsaurus had more of an animal theme. He wasn't in his altmode, but the beak and wings were actually sort of adorable now that the eyes weren't following me from the pictures. Stiff, offline, he looked like every other electrodomestic awaiting activation.

Yeah, I was going to activate him. Which would make the commute home interesting, but I was such a sucker for these guys. "Dammit."

Tim and Whirl laughed at me from Housewares.

[* * * * *]