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The agitation rolled in heatwaves off Red Alert’s thoughts; the high-paced, twisted tangle of frustration and anxiety like flames from a raging fuel fire.
Briefly, Inferno played with the idea of hosing those flames down literally. Maybe not a bad idea — idly switching on his heat sensors showed quite the glaring hot-spot around Red’s vents. Who knew how the mech managed with his processor running at a hundred percent practically all the time. His coolant systems sure didn’t like it much.
He bumped his friend’s shoulder with an elbow. “I can smell your processor cookin’ from here, Red, and scrapped if I’m too shabat to try an’ edge into that mess.”
Red Alert seemed to abruptly log back in to the real world, plates shifting to re-calibrate their positions, optics resetting, and he turned to face Inferno. “Hm? Oh, I’m sorry, Inferno.” His fans cycled in a blasting sigh that sent hot air everywhere. “I got lost in there.”
“Good thing I didn’t try to butt in,” Inferno replied cheerfully.
The other forced a smile, though the blaze of his thoughts did still slightly. “Like a wild fuel fire, is it?”
“Ten thousand degrees and countin’.” Inferno leaned back with a much more genuine and easy smile of his own, panning his optics out to the panorama of twinkling lights spread out before them, his hefty peds dangling out over the drop. “I think I can take a guess, though. That test blowin’ your circuits out of whack?”
The sigh, this time, was much more forceful, with a lick of exasperation that Inferno could clearly feel through their bond — along with a deeply-buried uncertainty. “I feel as if I haven’t prepared enough. As if all my study will be for nothing. Everything I’ve put into this, and one little twist—” He demonstrated with a flick of his hand “—one singular twist that I haven’t adequately committed to processor — will send it all tumbling like so many energon sticks.
“I’ve been attempting to review, but with no idea what they could be throwing at me, it’s a hopeless case.” With a quiet, frustrated grumble of systems and a rasp of metal-on-metal, he planted his face in his hands, rubbing up to the sensory knobs on his helm.
Leaning his elbow on Red’s shoulder, Inferno sent as much wordless encouragement as he could manage, gesturing with his hand. “Red, if anybody knows all this stuff, it’s you. You’ve trained your whole life for this — way more’n I ever did with the whole fire thing — and you know it top to bottom. So what if it’s a closed exam? You don’t need no fancy memory drives.” He gave his own helm a ringing tap. “You’ve got it all up here, right in the CPU.”
A groan, muffled deep in his systems and far clearer in Inferno’s head, came from his friend. “I appreciate the sentiment, Inferno, but you don’t understand — and I can’t expect you to understand — precisely why it isn’t that simple. I can’t afford to be blase.”
“Alright then.” Inferno spread his arm wide, dramatically. “Lay it on me. Throw me the whole damned thing and let’s understand how it’s eatin’ you.”
He got a brief glare in return. “Security issues, Inferno. You know I can’t do that.”
He shrugged. “It’s not like I’d understand the fancy codes and terms, anyway. No problem, there. Here, how about a compromise — you send all that pent-up effort and frustration and everythin’ without all the codes and the procedure whatsits and I betcha I’ll understand just fine.”
Red still hesitated, and Inferno didn’t pressure him, keeping his side of the bond open as he let the high-strung security-bot-in-training mull it over. Or, well, more like analyse all the angles of it and what could go wrong and how it could compromise the entire Primal establishment and senate, or even get him kicked out of the academy. That’s just Red; always overdoin’ it.
“Well... if you’ll promise not to share anything that could potentially be compromising to the security establishment....”
“Red, how long’ve you known me?” Inferno said easily, rolling a look at him and getting a sidelong glance in return. “I’ll keep it till the orn my spark extinguishes and cycle not a harmonizing tone in the Afterspark, on my honour, T-cog, processor, and spark. If you don’t want to vent all that hot air, fine with me, but it’s drivin’ you crazy and it’s drivin’ me crazy, and if I can put some retardant on it I’ll be happy to.”
In answer he received a flood of data.
Hoo-wee I shoulda known.
Shading his optics with a hand, he squinted at the grooves in his fingers and the distant lights reflecting off their surfaces, processor practically battered with the cyclical storm of Red’s unique mental processes. Unique as in overbearing and over-detailed in every sense of everything.
“Lil’ bit a’ warnin’ would’ve binn nice,” He grumbled.
Red Alert might have given some kind of apology; he did get a brief sense of it flashed behind everything else. He didn’t quite catch it audibly, though.
His friend’s frustration and fears were quite clear — the high attention-rate he had to employ, the stress, the copious notes taken in orderly, excruciating detail, the exercises, the tests — sweet dreamin’ Primus the tests — all the spark and energon he’d put into it.... And the fear that it could all dissipate in this last, final exam. Especially with the abrupt declaration: no aides, all external systems locked down... no excuses for gaps in knowledge or experience.
The rates of success/failure stuck out prominently, too; some part of him twitched in surprise at the amount of students who actually got accepted. One in ten, he’d heard, and that didn’t sound so bad, but all the different statistics showing it pointed to a conclusion that he found alarmingly low.
Still, as he ran through all of that something consistent popped out. Despite all his worries and stress, Red did know his stuff. It showed in every procedure-quiz, every exercise — a confidence Inferno knew from his own work. You could only do that kind of stuff when you knew what you were doing. An inexperienced firefighter didn’t know the flames like a seasoned responder; didn’t know their tempestuous unpredictability, each current of swirling superheated air and pocket of cool calm; didn’t know how far you could push it, or when you had to back away.
But in all the (rather quickly brushed over) adventures in creating security protocols, designing guard patterns and all that technical stuff his processor struggled to get around, Red had it. He knew it, and it wasn’t from some external memory note-taker. Sure, those things were useful for references, but useless for actual emergencies. He should know.
He chuckled — a bass rumble in his engine — as he rubbed his forehead. “Red, you really don’t know how good you are, do you?”
He caught a flash of confusion. Maybe a tinge of concern that the data-burst had fried his circuits.
Heh, I’m used to it by now. Don’t worry about that, pal.
A smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, Inferno rubbed at his opaque shutters, shaking his head slowly. “You remember when I was trainin’ for all this emergency responder stuff? You told me to take notes, notes, and more notes. I swear my externals were littered with the things; everywhere I looked, little flash notes; every time we talked, snap tests. You were real annoyin’, as I recall.
“But when it came down to the real thing, to the real test, you know what? I threw ‘em out. I found out I knew the stuff so well, I didn’t need those things, because I knew it.” He glanced up, throwing a wry half-smile at Red. “Sure, I’ll admit, without all that I might not’ve, but I reached a point I just didn’t need ‘em anymore. And you, sure as a punctured tank’s gonna leak, don’t need ‘em, Red. Just like I told you from the start.”
Red sat silently for a moment. “And if I don’t know an obscure point well enough...?”
Inferno shrugged. “Can’t speak for that. But even security makes mistakes — you just gotta know how to deal with that after you’ve done it. I’d say that shows better’n a whole perfect score that you’re the right mech for the job.”
Slowly at first, almost reluctantly, some of the stress and uncertainty eased, and for the first time since he’d seen him that orn — scrud, probably the whole chord — Red Alert gave a genuine smile, his helm rising to look out over the city. “Your faith in me is appreciated,” He said softly. “I only hope you’re right.”
About fragging time. Inferno smiled broadly and slapped him between the pauldrons. “Right? When have I ever been wrong? C’mon, let’s grab some engex; relax down at the Crooked Aileron while the night’s still new, huh?”
Red grimaced. “I’d rather not end up overcharged the orn before my final exam.”
Inferno grinned and pinched his fingers. “Then it’ll be a weak energon spritzer and a pile of the cheap house goodies.”
This time, he did give some not-so-subtle mental bond nudging as Red deliberated, and the bot finally gave in, lifting his optics to the Unmaker with a token cycle of vents. “Alright. But only if that spritzer changes to genuine, Iaconian Dawn Highgrade.”
“Good choice,” Inferno approved, servos stressed from a day of hard work creaking slightly as he stood and held out his hand. “Tell you what, I’ll shout you that and the in-house special. Deal?”
Red took it with a smile. “Absolutely.”