#internal temperature sensors

[nasa]

A Tour of Cosmic Temperatures

We often think of space as “cold,” but its temperature can vary enormously depending on where you visit. If the difference between summer and winter on Earth feels extreme, imagine the range of temperatures between the coldest and hottest places in the universe — it’s trillions of degrees! So let’s take a tour of cosmic temperatures … from the coldest spots to the hottest temperatures yet achieved.

First, a little vocabulary: Astronomers use the Kelvin temperature scale, which is represented by the symbol K. Going up by 1 K is the same as going up 1°C, but the scale begins at 0 K, or -273°C, which is also called absolute zero. This is the temperature where the atoms in stuff stop moving. We’ll measure our temperatures in this tour in kelvins, but also convert them to make them more familiar!

We’ll start on the chilly end of the scale with our CAL (Cold Atom Lab) on the International Space Station, which can chill atoms to within one ten billionth of a degree above 0 K, just a fraction above absolute zero.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Just slightly warmer is the Resolve sensor inside XRISM, pronounced “crism,” short for the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission. This is an international collaboration led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) with NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). Resolve operates at one twentieth of a degree above 0 K. Why? To measure the heat from individual X-rays striking its 36 pixels!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Resolve and CAL are both colder than the Boomerang Nebula, the coldest known region in the cosmos at just 1 K! This cloud of dust and gas left over from a Sun-like star is about 5,000 light-years from Earth. Scientists are studying why it’s colder than the natural background temperature of deep space.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Let’s talk about some temperatures closer to home. Icy gas giant Neptune is the coldest major planet. It has an average temperature of 72 K at the height in its atmosphere where the pressure is equivalent to sea level on Earth. Explore how that compares to other objects in our solar system!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

How about Earth? According to NOAA, Death Valley set the world’s surface air temperature record on July 10, 1913. This record of 330 K has yet to be broken — but recent heat waves have come close. (If you’re curious about the coldest temperature measured on Earth, that’d be 183.95 K (-128.6°F or -89.2°C) at Vostok Station, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983.)

We monitor Earth's global average temperature to understand how our planet is changing due to human activities. Last year, 2023, was the warmest year on our record, which stretches back to 1880.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

The inside of our planet is even hotter. Earth’s inner core is a solid sphere made of iron and nickel that’s about 759 miles (1,221 kilometers) in radius. It reaches temperatures up to 5,600 K.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

We might assume stars would be much hotter than our planet, but the surface of Rigel is only about twice the temperature of Earth’s core at 11,000 K. Rigel is a young, blue star in the constellation Orion, and one of the brightest stars in our night sky.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger 

We study temperatures on large and small scales. The electrons in hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, can be stripped away from their atoms in a process called ionization at a temperature around 158,000 K. When these electrons join back up with ionized atoms, light is produced. Ionization is what makes some clouds of gas and dust, like the Orion Nebula, glow.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

We already talked about the temperature on a star’s surface, but the material surrounding a star gets much, much hotter! Our Sun’s surface is about 5,800 K (10,000°F or 5,500°C), but the outermost layer of the solar atmosphere, called the corona, can reach millions of kelvins.

Our Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona in 2021, helping us answer questions like why it is so much hotter than the Sun's surface. This is one of the mysteries of the Sun that solar scientists have been trying to figure out for years.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Looking for a hotter spot? Located about 240 million light-years away, the Perseus galaxy cluster contains thousands of galaxies. It’s surrounded by a vast cloud of gas heated up to tens of millions of kelvins that glows in X-ray light. Our telescopes found a giant wave rolling through this cluster’s hot gas, likely due to a smaller cluster grazing it billions of years ago.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Now things are really starting to heat up! When massive stars — ones with eight times the mass of our Sun or more — run out of fuel, they put on a show. On their way to becoming black holes or neutron stars, these stars will shed their outer layers in a supernova explosion. These layers can reach temperatures of 300 million K!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman

We couldn’t explore cosmic temperatures without talking about black holes. When stuff gets too close to a black hole, it can become part of a hot, orbiting debris disk with a conical corona swirling above it. As the material churns, it heats up and emits light, making it glow. This hot environment, which can reach temperatures of a billion kelvins, helps us find and study black holes even though they don’t emit light themselves.

JAXA’s XRISM telescope, which we mentioned at the start of our tour, uses its supercool Resolve detector to explore the scorching conditions around these intriguing, extreme objects.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

Our universe’s origins are even hotter. Just one second after the big bang, our tiny, baby universe consisted of an extremely hot — around 10 billion K — “soup” of light and particles. It had to cool for a few minutes before the first elements could form. The oldest light we can see, the cosmic microwave background, is from about 380,000 years after the big bang, and shows us the heat left over from these earlier moments.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

We’ve ventured far in distance and time … but the final spot on our temperature adventure is back on Earth! Scientists use the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to smash teensy particles together at superspeeds to simulate the conditions of the early universe. In 2012, they generated a plasma that was over 5 trillion K, setting a world record for the highest human-made temperature.

Want this tour as a poster? You can download it here in a vertical or horizontal version!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Explore the wonderful and weird cosmos with NASA Universe on X, Facebook, and Instagram. And make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[bestanimal]

Round 1 - Phylum Arthropoda

(Sources - 1, 2, 3, 4)

Arthropoda is a phylum of animals that have segmented bodies, possess a chitin exoskeleton, and have paired segmented appendages. They are colloquially called “bugs” though this is often only used for terrestrial arthropods, and sometimes only used for insects specifically.

After Nematoda, this is the most successful phylum, and it is far more diverse, with up to 10 million species! Arthropods account for 80% of all known living animal species. The three major subphyla include the Chelicerates (sea spiders, horseshoe crabs, arachnids, and the extinct eurypterids and chasmataspidids), the Myriapods (centipedes and millipedes), and the Crustaceans (shrimps, prawns, crabs, lobsters, crayfish, seed shrimp, branchiopods, fish lice, krill, remipedes, isopods, barnacles, copepods, opossum shrimps, amphipods, mantis shrimp, entognaths, and insects).

Arthropods are so diverse in fact that it is next to impossible for me to describe a model arthropod. They are important members of marine, freshwater, land, and air ecosystems and are one of only two major animal groups that have adapted to life in dry environments, the others being chordates. All arthropods have an exoskeleton and must molt as they grow, replacing their exoskeleton. Some arthropods go through a metamorphosis in this process. They have brains, a heart, and blood (called hemolymph, though some crustaceans and insects also use hemoglobin). They sense the world through small hairs called setae which are sensitive to vibration, air currents, and even chemicles in the air or water. Pressure sensors function similarly to eardrums. Antennae monitor humidity, moisture, temperature, sound, smell, and/or taste, depending on species. Most arthropods have sophisticated visual systems ranging from simple eyes (ocelli) which orient towards light, to compound eyes consisting of fifteen to several thousand independent ommatidia capable of forming images, detecting fast movement, or even seeing polarized or ultra-violet light. Some arthropods are hermaphroditic, some have more than two sexes, some reproduce by parthenogenesis, some by internal fertilization, some by external, some have complex courtship rituals, some lay eggs, some give live birth, some have prolonged maternal care. The first arthropods are known from the Ediacaran, before the Cambrian era.

Propaganda below the cut:

Insects are the first animals to have achieved flight

The smallest arthropods are the parasitic crustaceans of the class Tantulocarida, some of which are less than 100 micrometres long. The largest arthropod is the Japanese Spider Crab (Macrocheira kaempferi) with a legspan of up to 4 metres (13 ft) long. The heaviest is the American Lobster (Homarus americanus), which can get up to 20 kilograms (44 lb).

Many arthropods are popular pets, including various species of crab, shrimp, isopod, crayfish, mantis shrimp, millipede, centipede, tarantula, true spider, scorpion, amblypygid, vinegaroon, mantis, cockroach, beetle, moth, and ant! Some are even domesticated, including silk moths and honeybees.

Many arthropods are eaten by humans as a delicacy, and farming insects for food is considered more sustainable than farming large chordates. These farmed arthropods are referred to as “minilivestock.”

Arthropods feature in a variety of ways in biomimicry: humans imitating elements of nature. For example, the cooling system of termite mounds has been imitated in architecture, and the internal structure of the dactyl clubs of mantis shrimp have been imitated to create more damage tolerant materials.

Spider venoms are being studied as a less harmful alternative to chemical pesticides, as they are deadly to insects but the great majority are harmless to vertebrates. They have also been studied and could have uses in treating cardiac arrhythmia, muscular dystrophy, glioma, Alzheimer's disease, strokes, and erectile dysfunction.

Shellac is a resin secreted by the female Lac Bug (Kerria lacca) on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is used as a brush-on colorant, food glaze, natural primer, sanding sealant, tannin-blocker, odour-blocker, stain, and high-gloss varnish. It was once used in electrical applications as an insulator, and was used to make phonograph and gramophone records until it was replaced by vinyl.

One of the biggest ecosystem services arthropods provide for humans is pollination. Crops where pollinator insects are essential include brazil nuts, cocoa beans, and fruits including kiwi, melons, and pumpkins. Crops where pollinator insects provide 40-90% of pollination include avocados, nuts like cashews and almonds, and fruits like apples, apricots, blueberries, cherries, mangoes, peaches, plums, pears, and raspberries. In crops where pollinators are not essential they still increase production and yield. Important pollinators include bees, flies, wasps, butterflies, and moths.

Many arthropods are sacred to humans. In Ancient Egypt, scarab beetles were used in art, religious ceremonies, and funerary practices, and were represented by the god Khepri. Bees supposedly grew from the tears of the sun god Ra, spilled across the desert sand. The goddess of healing venomous bites and stings, Serket, was depicted as a scorpion. Kalahari Desert's San People tell of a legendary hero, Mantis, who asked a bee to guide him to find the purpose of life. When the bee became weary from their search, he left the mantis on a floating flower, and planted a seed within him before passing from his exhaustion. The first human was born from this seed. In Akan folklore, the cunning trickster figure Anansi/Ananse is depicted as a spider. Western astrology uses the crab constellation, called Cancer, and the scorpion constellation, called Scorpio. Dragonflies symbolize pure water in Navajo tradition. In Anishinaabe culture, dreamcatchers are meant to represent spiderwebs and are used as a protective charm for infants. They originate from the Spider Grandmother, who takes care of the children and the people of the land in many Native American cultures. The Moche people of ancient Peru often depicted spiders and crabs in their art. In an Ancient Greek hymn, Eos, the goddess of the dawn, requests of Zeus to let her lover Tithonus live forever as an immortal. Tithonus became immortal, but not ageless, and eventually became so small, old, and shriveled that he turned into the first cicada. Another hymn sings of the Thriae, a trinity of Aegean bee nymphs. Native Athenians wore golden grasshopper brooches to symbolize that they were of pure, Athenian lineage. In an Ancient Sumerian poem, a fly helps the goddess Inanna when her husband Dumuzid is being chased by galla demons. In Japanese culture, butterflies carry many meanings, from being the souls of humans to symbols of youth to guides into the afterlife. Ancient Romans also believed that butterflies were the souls of the dead. Some of the Nagas of Manipur claim ancestry from a butterfly. Many cultures use the butterfly as a symbol of rebirth. And the list goes on…

cute crab eat a strawbebby:

[tozettastone]

For the prompt ask:

1. Deidara & Sasori are isekai-ed into a fandom of your choice

Or

2. Any Naruto character is isekai-ed into a xianxia story

I'm going with 'Deidara & Sasori are isekai-ed into a fandom of your choice.' Except I actually asked @mixelation to pick the fandom, and they gave me Hannibal. :)

--

Sasori Akasuna, if that's actually his name, runs a tiny gallery that can't possibly be making enough money to sustain itself. It's three floors tall and skinny, built of dark brick some time shortly before the turn of the century, and it stands tall and straight among its huddling neighbours in an out of the way bend of an ill-favoured river, where the smell of refuse rises and falls over the course of the day as the current passes.

Will Graham parks across the river and walks there with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his coat. He is here to talk to the owner, a man with whom it is almost impossible to get an appointment — unless, apparently, you are law enforcement.

The FBI has reason to believe he might be connected to their latest killer.

The reason Hannibal has come along is... less constructive.

"He's a tremendously skilled artist," he says, walking at Will's side with a spring in his step. Will can't equal his enthusiasm, just as he can't equal his hand-tailored woollen coat. "But he speaks to nobody. I wonder if he finds other people distracting."

"I'm not here to talk about art," Will points out. He can't help himself.

He's also not sure that what Sasori does is art. Call him uncultured.

When he makes to Sasori's place of business, the front window is entirely taken up by a taxidermy chimera: the big cat's head separated from the cervine body and a pair of vulture wings that must be almost a metre each. In the gaps, there's a steampunk nightmare of gears and chains and strange brass designs.

It must be associated with some kind of motion sensor set-up, because as they approach, the mechanisms begin to move and so too does the chimera, piece by immaculately preserved piece: the head turns, the cat's jaws open to show long sharp teeth, the wings curve.

"Magnificent," breathes Hannibal. "Look how smoothly it moves: bird and beast all in one. It could be alive."

"It's certainly... unique," says Will, clipping the words.

He flashes his ID to the black eye of the camera in Sasori's doorway, ignoring the way the cat's head follows him from the window display, teeth bare and eyes utterly empty. The intercom hisses with static. The door clicks open, allowing them both into the building.

It isn't noisy on the street, but the second they enter all the sounds from outside disappear utterly. The river, the distant traffic and the crying of the crow perched upon the bridge railing are all equally lost to an oppressive hush.

The carpet is old. The floor creaks. There's a smell in the air of an old place that sees little daylight.

The air is the slightly cool room temperature familiar to conservationists everywhere. A dehumidifier waits like a silent sentinel for when its services are needed. And lining every wall, case after case, shelf after shelf, are relics of the dead.

Hannibal pulls off his dark coat and slings it over his arm, revealing a powder blue, three piece suit that fits him like a glove, and immediately goes to inspect a case full of colourful birds.

Will doesn't remove his outerwear. He is distracted. He spins slowly, taking in the room.

Dead things stare at him from case after case, climbing up the walls. Their veins and bones and guts are all internal machinery now, and their eyes are glassy and blank. Sasori is indiscriminate about his animal models: there are goats and bulls alongside wild cats, bears and the snarling faces of wolves. Some are combined with each other into fantastical chimeras; others are perfectly lifelike.

Will spots a dog. Its face is so well-preserved and lifelike that it might be about to bark.

The centrepiece of the room, standing tall and proud, is a stag. It is magnificent: four or five years old, with heavily muscled neck and shoulders and enormous antlers. It makes no noise, but its ears swivel to follow them through the room, exactly the way a live buck's would.

It sure is... something.

This, Will senses, is Sasori's design. Careful. Precise. A perfectionist. He is exacting in his demands for these works: You will not rot. You will last forever. Or else.

Will licks his lips. He glances at Hannibal. It's impossible to say if he also senses the driven and aggressive personality behind these artefacts. If he does, it won't show.

Will is so distracted by the vast array of creatures that he doesn't immediately notice Sasori Akasuna himself arriving.

The first he knows of him is a sharp voice saying: "Don't touch that."

"I apologise," Hannibal says easily, turning away from a dead lammergeier, which is frozen with its wings spread and its body hunched, as if defending prey. (It is the only bird whose diet is mostly bone. Sasori has made its bones into metal.) "The work seemed very fine, but I'm unfamiliar with the taxidermist's craft. These extraordinary specimens retain more mobility than I've yet seen elsewhere."

He might say he's unfamiliar, Will notes, but Hannibal is undoubtedly a man who has seen a great deal of taxidermy.

Will turns to look at Sasori, too.

Clearly Hannibal has found and sighted the man, but for the space of one whole breath, Will can't even spot him.

It's impossible to tell Sasori Akasuna apart from the rest of the room. In that second, he blends in seamlessly with all the perfectly-preserved creatures on display.

Then Will exhales. That's stupid. He can see Sasori just fine. He's the only other human being in the room. It's not that cluttered.

Although by all accounts he's been in this one spot for almost a decade, Sasori looks no more than twenty. He is a short, slight man with at least one East Asian parent, although he has no obvious accent. His hair is dyed a shade that could be called any number of things — dark cherry, merlot, garnet — but which Will naturally associates only with blood. His skin is as smooth and unblemished, like a doll's.

He's wearing a dark, oversize coat and sandals that reveal his toes, which seems like a strange combination.

"The puppets are built and preserved for performances," Sasori says, turning his face to Hannibal. "Art is my calling."

"So I see! I have heard your performances are magnificent."

Magnificent, yes, supposedly — but also invitation-only, according to both the brief from Jack and to Hannibal himself. Will himself is reassured by this idea, because he definitely doesn't want to watch these dead things all come to life.

"Yes. They are." Sasori's eyes drift from Hannibal to Will and back again.

Even to Will, who can empathise with a brick wall, it is challenging to read any expression on his face. Botox, he thinks. It explains how young he looks, too. A little. If you don't look very closely.

Will tries to match the man to the creations. There's something missing. He can feel it beneath his ribs.

But he's not here to think about what's wrong with Sasori. It's the man's broader network that seems suspect. A small favour. Still, he can't stop picking at it.

What's he missing?

"I have heard," Hannibal is pressing delicately even as Will furrows his brow and tries to make sense of the picture before him, circling around a fever dream of a creature crafted from the remains of a wild cat, a goat and a peacock, "that some performances have a guest list so restricted that the invitees are not permitted to know or speak to one another at all. That they must arrive in masks and veils, and are forbidden to remove them until they leave again."

Will startles and half-turns towards Hannibal. What?

Sasori doesn't even blink. "Yes. What do you want?"

There's a hesitation. The world pauses for breath. Hannibal goes quite still, but Will can see from the set of his shoulders beneath his immaculate pale suit that this abrupt demand has annoyed him.

Presumably he wants to talk for forty minutes about the nature of art before they get to the mass murderer.

"We have some questions about a man who used to live here with you," he interjects, before the interaction can go even further off the rails.

Sasori blinks, eyes rolling in a strange and unsettling display.

Like a doll himself, Will thinks. Then he blinks the thought away.

He can't be a doll. That's... ridiculous.

"Deidara," says Sasori. "What about him?"

He says it so certainly. He has only ever had one housemate here. It's unclear if they were only housemates.

Will takes in Sasori's entire person with a look. He glances around at the displays.

"A fellow artist, I'm guessing," Will says, taking a leap of intuition. Who else would live with a man like Sasori?

Sasori's doll-like eyes fix on Will. "Deidara believes himself to be an artist, yes."

'Believes himself to be' is a strange way to put it. Does Sasori have a leg to stand on, when it comes to who is really creating art? The distance might be very obvious to Sasori himself, but it's not particularly clear to Will.

"We believe he might have bombed a church and killed sixteen people," Will says, watching carefully to see how this statement lands.

Sasori does not look as though this surprises him in the slightest, but it's hard to say if that's meaningful. Sasori has so far displayed the flattest emotional affect of anyone Will has ever interviewed.

It's so marked, in fact, that the ancient reptilian part of Will's brain keeps insisting that Sasori has more in common with his artworks than the other humans in the room. Will would like to rise above the impulse to believe his instincts in this case. Flattened affect is a symptom of a wide array of disorders and disabilities, and none of them are inhuman.

"And?" Sasori prompts. "What questions do you have for me about it?"

There's not even a hint of doubt. Sasori clearly believes his housemate capable of building and detonating a bomb in an act of premeditated mass murder. That's important, too.

Frustratingly, Will can see why Jack wanted him to do this interview, even though on paper it feels like a waste of his time. Sasori is hard to read and very, very strange.

"We'd like to ask a few questions about the last time you were in contact with him."

Despite his entire personality, Sasori seems outwardly pretty cooperative. He has a precise memory, and seems to recall the details of text messages — the pair's primary method of communication, even when they were living in the same house — to the minute of their receipt. He is meticulous.

Will already told the behavioural analysis unit that the bomber was acting out some kind of aesthetic compulsion, but Sasori seems to understand it in more detail:

"Deidara uses art to embrace the transience he believes is the end state of all things by unmaking artefacts in the span of a second, usually explosively," Sasori says. Then, apparently unable to help himself, he adds: "Transience — the art of a single moment — is an incoherent and flawed thesis."

"The simple passions of a mind that cannot grasp eternity," muses Hannibal, running his knuckles over the glass that separates him from a dead monkey, which is trapped, forever, screaming silently in rage. This is a rather romantic assessment, but the statement certainly captures Sasori's attention.

"Yes," he says slowly.

Despite what he actually says, he does not sound entirely as though he agrees with this assessment. It is at precisely this point that Will realises Sasori and Deidara are not artists making ends meet as indifferent housemates. They are life partners of some kind. They are very probably lovers.

Sasori says hasn't seen Deidara for a week. This meets their timeline perfectly. Will doesn't — cannot — trust it. But he can either write the answer down, or he can tell Sasori he thinks he's lying right to his blank doll-like face.

He licks his lips and writes it down.

"Before we go, Sasori," says Hannibal, hesitating before he pulls his coat on again, "will you tell me something?"

"What?"

"Do these chimeric creations represent the pinnacle of your art? Are they what you display at your most secret performances? Or is something more challenging the star of your show?"

There are some dogs who, once they've bit down on a man's limb, have to be choked out before they'll let go. Hannibal occasionally reminds Will of just such an animal.

"No," says Sasori, tonelessly. "The chimeras are not my most important works."

That's when it happens.

It always does, with Will. Eventually.

For one hideous, dislocated moment, Will Graham understands this man totally. He can see what grotesqueries might lie in the workroom above this display, just by looking Sasori in his lifeless face. He can almost feel the hours of meticulous work in his own hands and back and shoulders, turning the coarse materials of the human body into works of art that will last thousands of years at least.

He has no respect for their bodies. He doesn't care about the person who inhabited each physical form at all. They are raw materials. It is the work of his hands that renders them art. His towering ego is in every touch.

For a breathless, hanging second, the hollowed insides and smooth articulated limbs and wired jaws of Sasori's victims are beautiful to Will, too.

Then that second is over.

Will's brain screams that Sasori isn't a person.

This time, Will believes it. Oh, he may once have been human. But he's not, now. Sasori knows it — he's proud of it. And because Sasori knows it, now Will does, too.

Will does not feel sick. Feeling sick requires internal organs. Right now, Will can't feel anything.

"That's all we need," he says, sounding just as flat and toneless as Sasori. The thump of his heart feels strange and hollow, like the heavy ticking of a metronome. Thump goes the meaty clockwork that moves his body, so loudly that Will almost startles at each shocking new beat. "Thank you for your time."

Sasori doesn't say they're welcome. That's because they're not.

When they exit the building at last, the outside sounds are deafening: the river roars, a dog barks. Will's heart is no longer the primary feature of the soundscape.

He goes back to his car, a little too fast to be polite. He sits in the driver's seat and clutches the steering wheel. Hannibal closes the passenger-side door with a thump a minute later.

"An interesting man, wouldn't you say, Will?"

Will starts the engine and gives it a few moments to warm. He talks when he pulls out from his car space and into the sparse traffic of the little-travelled riverside road.

"I'm not sure," he says slowly, "that Sasori Akasuna is a man at all."

"Ah," says Hannibal, unshakable and sanguine as always, "the perennial question of philosophy."

"I was thinking more about... biology," Will admits.

"Were you?" A pause. "And what did you conclude?"

He's a doll, Will thinks. He's a doll and he makes other people into dolls. If you cut him, I promise he won't bleed.

But these are not the kinds of thoughts a man tells his psychiatrist if he wants to keep doing field work. And so Will ignores the great shadow that passes between himself and the sun — the towering shape of Sasori's preserved stag, moving with all the beautiful mechanical efficiency of a polished watch escapement — and instead says, "He's lying about the bomber. They're close."

"Hmm," says Hannibal, as if he doubts it. But in the end he only raises his eyebrows and tilts his chin inscrutably. "I suppose we will have to see."

(Will isn't a gambler, really. But would bet virtually anything that Hannibal will be receiving an invitation to a performance very shortly.)

[crying-fantasies]

In health and sickness

Masterlist

Many words could describe him at the moment.

Overprotective, over doting conjunx, overwhelming, overbearing and many others that could be an excellent reflection of his actions and reactions, it's the second one that catches him off guard because he isn't sure if it was due to embarrassment or that it felt like a joke at his expense.

There are little options when his system charge way before the programmed hour, not knowing what is going on before his sensors show him in deep red alarms a focus of temperature in the room and the low registration of CO2 in the room, there is a way too short time for decision making as he finds you looking at the ceiling without blinking, chest hardly moving before a horrendous sound erupts, like an engine got stuck somewhere or a spark giving up, almost like a dying cybertronian or an idiot that consumed some corrosive substance.

He has heard both frequently in the battlefield, that's his excuse to call, and appear, at ungodly hours to the nearest clinic going full police car, poor the souls of any mech on his way while you were hardly battling off the mucus on your throat and the pain of your insides twisting, churning, trying to get whatever kept oxygen out of your lungs.

Nothing too hard, just the main problem being what humans call a virus, Prowl has to download once again the basics of your species and the recently updated papers about the whole deal, how did it came to Iacon when he was so sure the outbreak was limited to Stanix? How is it possible that there is no cure for this humorless pest, almost strangling the medic with his bare servos when the indications of "just let them rest well, a lot of fluids and a healthy diet" were all he could give you apart from medicine to only temporarily placate any symptoms.

Prowl knew that humans had a terrible automatic cleansing and protective program, but it still was ridiculous how it only took a little microscopic individual to have you in the verge of dehydration and suffocation, assaulting as an opportunist in your weakest state of mind to have him saying the same as always: you don't have to work, he'll take care of everything, you don't have to stress yourself because here you're safe, but his words aren't that believable as this is the result of the heat generators in the city falling once again because he can't still keep the energy flow uninterrupted, your little body caught in a decreasing temperature in mere minutes before someone else gave you a heated metal blanket to stop a freezing coma or something worse.

There is nothing left to do, only make it bearable for you, as long as it can last because even the most advanced remedies are lacking and he can't have something better in at least a few more years when he needs them by yesterday when it all began.

"It's okay", you try to calm him, knowing well how under his stoic faceplate he is freaking out, you just have to see how far Prowl is going, this is his second day working from home, his scowl is present as always but the way his door wings move at any sound from the street show just right how in the edge he is.

Somehow, your words seem to make it worse, his angry expression almost scares you, "don't talk back now", is his only response, putting a little cube with warm lemonade next to your side of the berth, internally, you cringe, thinking of the warm but also stinging fluid going down your sore throat, thinking how expensive a single lemon is in Cybertron.

But, above all else, seeing him so on edge puts you in the same circumstances, trying to talk him down from submitting a complain to Stanix's medical officers regarding the virus now in Iacon, he is so engrossed in it, not even putting his datapad down when there is an obvious notification of intruders on your door, Prowl only gives it attention when Bonecrusher ends up decimating the door of the living quarters by brutal force, falling with it and still punching the poor thing, growling and roaring like a wild animal, soon after the rest of the constructicons follow, but they look in a way you've never seen before from them.

Wild gazes, bared dentae, vents puffing out hot air, their armor moves and stands threateningly, they look murderous enough for Prowl to hold you in his servos, almost preparing himself to be attacked before Long Haul claims, "Where is it?! Where is the slag fragger, son of a glitch-?!"

Turns out, Prowl's anger and worry could be felt by them.

Turns out, also, that they don't have his filter of supposed control.

"What? What is this?"

Turns out, easily freaked decepticons, who have very little real interaction with humans, shouldn't enter the medical area of a corny website probably made by a doctor wannabe.

And it shows, in how Hook push them all out of his way when you cough once again, too hard this time, the paper on your hand now with a tingle of blood in between, before any word of assurance can be said from your part Prowl is the first to hold you near, Hook is fast to ask what is going in and someone is already crying out loud for a medic.

So much for a peaceful Saturday morning.

"This will do, this has to do the work", Mixmaster usual anxious movements seem to reach another point, normally steady servos seem to shake ominously when mixing something that smells like bleach, "concentrated citric acid, this'll kill it, show that thing not to mess with us", a drop of the thing reaches the table, an acid like reaction eating away the metal, Long Haul and Scavenger look with dread as the thing keeps eating part of the floor, smoke frizzing out of it, visors wide with obvious panic, the bigger 'con putting a protective servo over you, using his own frame and stopping his partner to get near in his hysteria while the smallest started to cry yet again while clutching your hand between massive digits, said cries only decreasing when you started to promise you were going to be okay, hard to believe when another coughing session appeared again, "it'll work, I swear, only a few sips of it and those parasites will be gone forever!"

Hook shouted too, "it's vitamin C! Vitamin C!", he holds down Mixmaster, who at the end just let's go of the cube with a strangled growl.

Prowl would never admit it but he could act normal if Long Haul was watching over you.

"We should punch them in the faceplates", Bonecrusher keeps going, going from one side of the place to the other, barely kept anger on him.

You try, you really do, to push yourself out of the different blankets above of you, but they have made the sentence of "keep warm to improve the process" a lot more unnecessary, as you're sure at least one of those is your weighted blanket, "I'll be fine" you promise once again, mucus on the nose, throat incredibly raw, pretty sure they can read the increasing fever in their sensors, Scavenger is the one closest to you, and is also the one hearing every word of yours and give it real credit, "this takes a week as much, just let it-"

Another fit of coughing erupted, and this time followed by sneezing, more blood coming and showing like an alarm on the white tissue, and someone shouting "MEDIC!" as if you have just been injured on the battlefield.

You're ready to die from mortification, preparing your lengthy apology to whoever has the disgrace to treat you as Prowl drives back to the hospital with 5 constructicons after him.

.

For my Prowl lovers fellows (sorry for the constructiprowl content but boy I love all of them together) @dundeey, @lovenotcomputed and @ikkosu.

[rinixo]

variables

Tech/Reader | 1.5k | Rated E | smut, afab!reader, oral sex, Tech pov (mainly), Tech internal thoughts, slight possessive!Tech

He had never been one for flowery words, but as he closed his eyes he realized he understood now what the poets meant about devouring one another.

a/n: originally started out as a follow-up to auxilium, but ended up just being better as a stand-alone.

read on ao3

Tech’s sat on your floor, surrounded by communicator parts. He had offered to repair it for you when you mentioned it was malfunctioning. You had agreed, knowing that even if you said it was fine, you'd find it missing one day and returned, good as new, the next.

He comes over to your place more often, now. The first few times you had hovered anxiously, unsure of if you should find some way to entertain him, worried that you were boring him.

"I enjoy being in your company," Tech had stated matter-of-factly, halting your nervous fussing. Since then, you’d relaxed, going about your own activities while he worked on various projects.

He had built you some clever devices, intended to make your life easier. A tea kettle that would ping to your wrist comm, letting you know when it was at the perfect brewing temperature. A sensor on your door that actually worked, so you didn’t have to risk opening it up just to find some drunk passed out on your step.

Tech struggled to give voice to his feelings. He sometimes lacked the nuance that came easily to others regarding certain topics. It was easier for him to simply do. Every time he soldered a wire or tightened a bolt, it was a little testament to his affection towards you.

The sound of the bathroom door caught his attention. He watched as you emerged, toweling your damp hair, dressed only in underwear, content to let the rest of your body air dry.

He appreciated that you felt comfortable enough to share some of your quirks around him. In fact, Tech appreciated many of the small habits he observed in you - this one included, and not just because you were bare. Sometimes, he found himself musing about them while waiting for data to compile or during hyperspace journeys.

The way you flip your tools in your hands idly. There was a callus on one of your fingers, from the friction, and he could sometimes feel it when you touched him in certain sensitive places.

The lines between your eyes, when you frown. The subtle asymmetry of your brows, one rising higher than the other.

He likes that you don’t roll your eyes when he rambles, sitting through many impromptu lectures in good grace. The way that you’ll remember where he last left off, ask genuine questions, and invite him to continue.

He appreciated how he could sense when you wanted him to kiss you: your eyes darting to his lips, hands tensing and relaxing.

He cherished the tremble of your skin under his touch, whether his palm was spread over your abdomen or between your shoulder blades.

You sat on the edge of your bed, towel draped over your arm, looking humorously at the parts spread out on the ground.

“You’re going through a lot of trouble for me,” you joke. “I’d still like you even if you didn’t fix everything I own.”

“It’s no trouble,” Tech replies softly. Your knee is next to his head, droplets of water evaporating into the dry air. He can see the goose prickles on your skin.

A soft smile on your lips. “Don’t you have to go soon?”

Tech hums thoughtfully. His squamates were becoming suspicious of his increased absences. It was Echo who had approached the topic most directly, weeks ago on a long hyperspace transit back to Ord Mantell.

Tech didn’t know exactly why it bothered him or why he felt somewhat possessive over the knowledge. Over you. He had kept his tone neutral in response, hoping Echo would get the hint that it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. The former ARC trooper didn’t look convinced but had dropped the subject.

It didn’t stop him from paying you a visit the very next day, however. And the day after that. And most days since then.

“Yes,” Tech decides. “But I want to be here.” Placing his hands on your knees, he pushes himself up and over you. You eye him, leaning back to keep his face in view.

He slots himself over your body, pressing his nose just above your belly button. Your skin, still slightly damp, smells wonderful.

“Tech," you mewl halfheartedly. “I just washed…”

He trails his nose down to the apex of your thighs. “You can wash again,” he breathes, kissing the fabric of your panties over your mound.

You must realize it’s a lost cause because you lean back with a sigh and throw an arm over your tired eyes.

He kisses you through the fabric, suckling softly, The fabric grows wetter between his tongue and your slick. He can see the color of your skin through the translucency, swollen and waiting for him. But he has the time, and the patience, and the desire to make this last.

Pulling the fabric to the side, he flicks his tongue over your clit, making you squirm. Your thighs twitch, and he knows you want to prop them up. He obliges you in this way, letting one of them lift over his shoulder. The other he pats, enjoying the plush way they mold under his hand.

More than one previous lover had made remarks about ‘using his mouth for other things’, insinuating that his clever tongue could be used for more than wit. It had never really sat well with him before, the suggestion that he was too much, too talkative, that his mouth would be more useful to them elsewhere.

Tech didn’t feel that way about you. He could spend hours between your legs, memorizing you through touch and taste alone. He took great offense at leaving any job half-done, and this was no exception. He wasn’t satisfied until you were satisfied, and even then he would be so hyper-focused at times that it wasn’t until you’d pry him away with shaking hands that he’d realize you were moments away from passing out from pleasured exhaustion.

Tech moves the hand on your thigh down to ease two long fingers into you. Glancing up, he can see those lines between your brows, eyes screwed shut. He feels you tense and then relax, caught between adjusting to the new sensation and giving in to the continued assault from his mouth.

He’s careful, delicate almost. His tongue curls around your clit, his teeth just barely creating pressure. You pulse with it and he releases, wanting to draw this out further. He likes when you’re desperate for it, writhing and rambling nonsense. It won’t be until you’ve begged, pleaded, bargained that he’ll let you come. Tech likes to be awash in your praise - it makes his cock throb to hear how good he does it, how good he makes you feel.

It’s more than just physical pleasure, too. Tech supposes he could have stopped himself from falling in love with you. Love was powerful and dangerous. It wasn’t predictable and defied attempts at pathology. It required one to give up control and give in to vulnerability. It wasn’t logical, and it wasn’t something he had ever prioritized before. Lust was much simpler in comparison.

You threw unknown variables into the carefully charted graph of his mind, his perception of who he was, and his place in the galaxy.

It was overwhelming, at times. Something that would need to be parsed out eventually, tallied, and taken inventory of. But for now, he channeled it into attending to your body, focusing solely not on what he thought but on what he could feel, on the lust coursing through him.

The shadows on the wall change and the dimmed lights click on before Tech’s finished with you, pulling back to see you panting. This was some of his best work so far, he thinks, wiping his chin absently. His cock, pressing against his blacks, is achingly hard. He lets it pulse as he watches you, enjoying the edging sensation. He’ll let you decide, once you’ve gathered yourself, if you’d like to go any further. And if you decide that you’re tapped out, that’s all right - just as much as he likes to feel your mouth on him or be buried in your cunt, he likes to sit back and have you watch him stroke himself until he’s coming hard over his hands or spraying over your stomach.

You’ll attempt to apologize later, but he’ll quiet you with his lips. Why should you apologize, when you’ve given him as much as you have? When he desires you so intensely? When you sate the monstrous appetite he didn’t know he possessed? He’d have to find the time, the courage, to figure out what it all meant. What he wanted, what you wanted, and what - realistically - was possible.

But now was not that time, he knows, as you push yourself up and pull him closer. Tech holds your head as your trembling hands pull down his blacks, breath leaving him shakily through his nose as you take him into your mouth.

He had never been one for flowery words, but as he closed his eyes he realized he understood now what the poets meant about devouring one another.

[heartlaboratory]

Claudia, one of your friends, invited you to attend to her beach volley match. The match is held indoor so, given the fact that its summer and in this country summer is also very humid, temperatures are going to be torrid. Beside this fact you're still quite surprised to see that the majority of the players are playing naked, females too (in this parallel univers human are not ashamed by their own bodies). After all sweating is the best way to cool down. She's quite skinny but look really good with that blue bikini, you always liked her so, secretely, you're very happy to see her playing covered just with air. Given the fact that the playground is going to be free the whole day, organizers decided to complete the tournament without skippying to next day.

Some hours have passed and she has played for a lot of time now. Room temperature went higher than 36°C for the whole last matches and now Claudia looks pretty torn. She's always been a warrior, someone who don't surrender easily but all that jumping in this particular condition had an effect on her too. She's covered by sweat, her skin has assumed a reddish tone and her panting has become so deep anyone can clearly hear her fast inspirations and exales. The thing that tunrs on a light in your mind though is the fact that her entire upper body is rhythmically shaking like it's thrusted by a sort of internal earthquake. You suddenly realize that you recently activated a medical app on your phone developped at the laboratory where you work that makes possible medical analises through the phone camera thanks to experimental sensors placed in the camera. You activate the app and feel pretty lifted up by the fact you already added her profile. A thin ensamble of laser rays, almost invisible, is projeced towards her and the selected target orgal (obviously Claudia's heart) becomes visible on the screen. Her heart is beating like crazy, not only considering the pace but also the strenght of each beat, the app says her heart is beating at around 195 bpm but it's probably even higher. It's something that is completely out of any safety zone for someone who is 34 years old... and not even a younger person should push its heart like this. The device can also work as a digital stethoscope and by wearing headphones to listen to her you remained schoked. Her blood is pushed so violently that it's making strange wooshing-like noises by rubbing against her heart internal structures, sounds that almost cover up her slamming valves. Suddenly the software gives a diagnosis: High cardiac risk- probability of a sudden cardiac arrest of 89%-potentially lethal arrhythias occurring. By looking at her detected heart electrical activities, her organ is so over-stimulated that PVCs and VTACs burst are already present. You know exactly what to do, Claudia's life has an 89% probability to end in the next few minutes and it's increasing. You decide to get up from your seat and run towards the referee to show him the analysis of your device. One of the players' heart is going to stop very soon.

A second before you move, on the ecg a strange beat appears and suddenly Claudia's heart interrupts any activity, it doesn't even fibrillate, it just ceases to beat as silence arises from your headphones. Terrified you see her taking a couple of deep breath, the ball she was holding fell on the ground and her left hand is placed in between her bare breasts... after a moment she collapses on the ground.

You have always wanted to place your hand on her chest to feel her heartbeat but now you have to do this to make it beat again. CPR has to be started immediately.

[feroluce]

So this ficlet-ish thing was inspired by @hydrachea, nsfw super genius extraordinaire, but also by the fact that in addition to Boothill's left eye being cybernetic, I like to hc even the parts of him that look human aren't fully natural. I mean the dude eats bullets, after all. I think he should also have vents in his mouth so he can literally blow smoke/steam, it would look super cool. Think Father Gascoigne or Studio BONES' Todoroki. We as a fandom deserve that!!

So anyway, of course, sometimes these vents get blocked up and need to be cleaned manually. Thankfully, Dan Heng is super helpful ☆

Like there's one day where Boothill is lazing around in the archives, fresh off a bounty and happily soaking up the luxury of the Astral Express after however long he's spent tracking his prey through all the dust and dirt with almost no rest.

Boothill likes it in the archives. It's not silent, but it's quiet. There's no music and only muffled voices from outside, but there's the hum of all the computer systems. It makes for a nice place to hide away and recharge when he's just finished exhausting himself.

And besides, Dan Heng is there.

Sometimes the two of them talk back and forth, but today it's mostly quiet...except for-

"I didn't know it was possible for you to get sick."

...Except for Boothill having to constantly clear his throat. That's the thing about your mark trying to flee into the desert. You either go after them and get sand everywhere (and even worse, sticky sand once it gets all bloody) or you wuss out and lose out on the bounty. Personally, Boothill likes being able to afford to eat.

"Grit's stuck in a vent somewhere, 'n' the usual maintenance ain't gettin' it. I'll prob'ly have ta manually dig it out." But later, when he's not laid out half asleep on Dan Heng's extra futon. Usually after a chase as long as this one took, he can shut down for almost a full day. He doesn't want to get up yet.

Something shadows over him, and reflex demands Boothill's eye open. Dan Heng steps around him on his way to some drawer built in the wall on the other side of the room or something. Boothill closes his eye again.

From under his hat he hears the sounds of rummaging, drawers sliding open and shut, the swish of a long coat. The shadow returns.

"Sit up, just momentarily. I have something to help." And Boothill groans a tired don't wanna, but he does it anyway, he hauls himself upright into a kneel. And then he sits up a little straighter because he realizes Dan Heng is standing right over him.

Dan Heng tells him "open your mouth," and Boothill's jaw pops open without his permission, without even a second thought, and hey, what protocol in there ok'd THAT?!?!

Before he can really unpack whatever the heck that just was, though, Dan Heng murmurs for him to say so if he needs them to stop, and then he's sliding a long, hard rod down Boothill's throat, tipped with some soft little brush he probably uses for all his fancy archival equipment.

Dan Heng tells him the handle of the brush is straight and can't be bent, he needs to move his head to be able to reach the vent in his throat. Boothill hums affirmatively; he can't do anything else with his mouth occupied.

Dan Heng's free hand holds him by his jaw, tilts it up slowly but firmly so he has to look straight up at him.

Boothill feels dizzy.

The cycle of blue blood through his artificial heart whirrs just a bit faster, his temperature sensor pings an internal alarm to warn for imminent overheating. Boothill curls his fingers into the guard over his knee as Dan Heng carefully brushes at the dust irritating him. All other sounds- the hum of running equipment, the occasional beep from the computers, the noise of the crew outside of this room- seem to pull away, until all Boothill can focus on is the steady and measured breathing from the man above him.

"Almost done."

Thank the aeons, maybe one of them likes him after all.

"Your tongue is in the way... I'm going to hold it down, ok?"

Nevermind.

The fingers holding his jaw curl around his chin, thumb slipping past open lips to dip into his mouth and pin down his tongue. One of his teeth catch on the digit, breaking skin just enough to bleed a drop where he can taste it. Dan Heng doesn't even flinch. Another temperature alarm pings off in his brain, then another, then another.

Boothill has never been shy about eye contact but oh, god, it nearly kills him when dull green irises flick away from their task and look down right at him as his mouth is held open. He quickly squeezes his own eye shut for some relief.

With his vision cut off, the rest of his senses automatically recalibrate to compensate. He can hear every breath even more distinctly now, every soft inhale and exhale, feel the strain in his neck, the softness of the brush, the hard floor beneath his knees, the hand holding his jaw and the fingerprints that feel like they should leave burns in his skin, the taste of Dan Heng heavy on his tongue-

Forget it, eye open, eye open!!

"Alright. There's one last pebble stuck."

Boothill had been trained to endure torture, back on his homeworld. It was part of being in a gang, part of being a bounty hunter.

Somehow, keeping himself quiet and still as Dan Heng inches the brush even further down the back of his throat is a profoundly similar experience.

The seconds tick by, Dan Heng's brow furrowing, face growing ever more concentrated and Boothill struggles not to watch him too closely, fights down the noise that suddenly tries to escape him as the brush withdraws-

"Swallow."

Stars and aeons, Dan Heng is going to be the death of him.

Boothill swallows. He feels it when the movement finally dislodges the loosened pebble from his vent.

His face feels shockingly cold now bereft of touch, even though Dan Heng's hands are always cool. He asks to see, and Boothill's mouth is already open again to show him, even as he belatedly realizes he could have just told him it had worked.

"Good." There's the slightest smile on Dan Heng's lips as he finally, mercifully, leans back out of his personal space, goes to put away the brush. "That should feel better now." Boothill spends a moment dizzy and dazed, feeling the need to blink spots out of his eye even though his vision is clear. He still hasn't moved off his knees.

What the fudge.

[sshadowritestoriess]

Hi hi, can I have some ramattra first time HC’s plzz ily it’ll actually make my week omg 🙏💖

Hiii I hope this is sufficient 🫶

Ramattra’s First Time

Outwardly, he wouldn’t seem nervous in the slightest despite it being clear he needs some guidance

He knows how it works, that much is obvious. But he heavily lacks an understanding on how important foreplay is, and that there’s more that can be done during sex than just rutting against one another— so you’ll just have to show him

You’ll likely have to ask him to slow down a couple of times, and after the third or fourth attempt to stop him from rushing into it, he’d eventually give up on taking the lead

“Now what?” Becomes a popular question when he’s checked off something to your liking.

He’s aware he needs to be gentle during such an intimate activity, a stark contrast to the typical brute force he exerts for most of his daily tasks. But he’s still partially rough in his first tries to touch you— you’ll just need to grab his wrist and tell him to be careful, and he’ll try again

But his excitement and steady rise in confidence will result in quicker and rougher movements now and again. So reminders, reminders. Else he may attempt to break you.

He’d definitely find some difficulty in being vulnerable, letting you touch him to get riled up was not something he had mentally prepared for. It’d be a whiplash of internal conflict over how terrifying it is (who would have thought he’d allow human hands poke and prod at him to elicit pleasure) and how nice it feels.

Omnics have far more control over the sounds they can produce and when. It doesn’t take much effort for Ramattra to stifle small noises of encouragement, but in such an exposed and trusting state it is extremely easy to catch him off guard. Dragging a nervous grunt out of him will make him raise a hand to cover his throat, where his vocalizer hides. (He didn’t know he could even make that sound.)

He’d be easily embarrassed if you compliment him on anything— how he looks, how well he’s doing. He thanks you every time very politely, but you can practically hear how bashful he is in the stammer of his tone, as much as he tries to hide it in his body language.

He’d have a preference for the ‘main event’ to be in missionary for his first time, so he can see your face and watch carefully to make sure he’s doing everything right.

He’d express his gratitude to you as he sinks in, agonizingly slow, for being patient with him and trusting an omnic of his model to be vulnerable with you. Maybe a bit cheesy, but he was mostly running words out to keep himself from rushing his full length in with a single shove. A self-induced distraction so he doesn’t harm you by accident.

He would invite you to keep your hands on his chest or the silver handles on his hips, just in case, to give him a small push if he does anything too rough. He was designed with heightened senses— even the smallest amount of deliberate pressure could be detected, so he’d know to take it down a notch.

But he’d do just fine when he starts thrusting, small and shallow rolls of his hips controlled by a surge of nervousness to perform well. He may even begin narrating what this feels like for him; “It’s… like I’m on fire.”

He’d become addicted to your warmth very quickly, hiking your ass higher and pulling your thighs further over his while he arches in closer to you, burying his faceplate into your shoulder and relishing in the way his sensors alerted him toward the rise in temperature.

He’d cage you underneath him with his arms, eerily quiet— focused— on how much warmer he could make you, already experimenting with angle of his hips as he slows his pace and rides into you with differing strokes.

And then your walls flutter around him and that would be the first time you hear him moan. This shaken, breathy sound that rumbles from his upper chest, and releases the air vents in his shoulders with a quiet hiss.

He’d notice your reaction to the sound instantaneously— not only seen in the reaction of your face, but additionally in the way your internals hug around him and nearly pull him back inside. He’d be elated that his voice could cause such a response, and he’d become a lot more noisy for you after that

Ramattra would find himself asking every so often “is this alright?”, and you may have to try and stay focused enough to be able to reassure him, or else he’ll stop. It’s hard to tell if he pauses because he’s worried when you don’t respond, or because he’s being smug knowing you can’t.

If you encourage him to try going faster, he might hesitate. But with further praise, he may comply, trying to be quicker while being just as gentle as before.

He’s an extremely quick learner, however. One correct response to anything he’s attempted is immediately memorized and saved, and he will try certain things again exactly as he had the first time to get the best reactions out of you. His first time quickly begins to seem like it’s his hundredth time, becoming an expert in just under ten minutes.

So quickly molded to your liking, trying things you would like, toying with your body like a plaything to earn more praise and encouragement. For Ramattra, it’s so much less about the euphoria he feels from you, and more about how long he can please you before you come undone.

But he still would like an orgasm, so he may get a little selfish toward the end of the exercise. He would whisper to you to please forgive him, pushing into you more rough than before, hammering wave after wave of pleasure into himself until he’s completely overwhelmed his systems.

You will literally have to brace yourself the first time he ‘cums’ inside you, his entire frame would tremble and shake while his limbs go rigid and lock up, until he eventually collapses on top of you with a deep sigh as he’s lulled into a brief unconscious state. But he would be up again in just a handful of seconds, and he’d apologize once more

And, being a machine with a nonexistent sense of stamina, he will make it up to you again and again if only you wish for it. Sex turned out to be a lot more fun than he had imagined, especially with a human, and he’d love nothing more than to show you how eternally grateful he is toward you for letting him play.

[spacefrontier]

Launch of an Ariane 5ES, carrying the Georges Lemaître ATV (ATV-5) to orbit. July 29, 2014.

ATV-5 was the fifth and final Automated Transfer Vehicle launched by the European Space Agency. Georges Lemaître carried 6.6 tonnes of experiments, spare parts, clothing, food, fuel, air, oxygen, and water to the International Space Station. With a total mass of 20.3 tonnes, ATV-5 was the heaviest spacecraft ever to be launched by an Ariane rocket.

Georges Lemaître ATV approaching the International Space Station. August 12, 2014.

In addition to transporting cargo, ATV-5 conducted two experiments: LIRIS (Laser InfraRed Imaging Sensors), a new autonomous rendezvous sensor that would allow future spacecraft to dock with uncooperative targets, such as orbital debris or sample capsules. LIRIS was used to dock with the ISS instead of the normal sensors. Break-Up Camera, which recorded the ATV in infrared as it disintegrated during atmospheric reentry. A reinforced black box was used to transmit accelerometer, magnetometer, and temperature readings to an Iridium satellite, but nearly 6,000 images were lost.

NASA 1, 2, 3, 4 ESA

[the-s1lly-corner]

Sun x reader who wears headphones

something something UUHUHUHUHUH i need to write more moon stuff because i feel i write more for sun... though idk if thats even accurate LMAO notes: reader is gn, admin projected onto the reader so some of this is unique to him probably, reader is not explicitly stated as ND but given the previous and admin is ND they may be seen as ND/coded, reader works as a daycare assistant cws: none

theres been children in the daycare who wear headphones so hes well aware that sometimes theyre a need for one reason or another, so seeing you with them is nothing new to him!

i think there might be some spare sets stored somewhere in the event that something is broken or goes missing, so you have a backup in case anything happens to yours!

good at reading body language so even if you dont know sign or have an alternative way of understanding him or others around you, he can get a good idea of how youre feeling with a good look!

having in built in sensors makes things easier when he can easily measure things like your heart rate and body temperature if youre internalizing something or otherwise in distress

reading lips isnt an option with him though, since... well he doesnt really have lips that move

knows sign, though!

if you listen to music with your headphones hes interested to know what youre listening to! is it a fun song? is it upbeat? hes curious now!

not listening to anything at all? thats cool too!

generally very understanding and accommodating!

helps educate the kids if they have questions, though he tries his hardest not to speak for you

"everyone is different" kind of thing, you know!

[usafphantom2]

This story reminds me of a movie I heard about when my Dad was still flying the SR-71 called “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!

In 1977, Buz Carpenter and John Murphy’s TDY at Mildenhall, United Kingdom, was extended to support the air tattoo celebration of the Queen's silver jubilee open house. This would be the first public display of an SR-71 since the record-setting speed record in 1974 from New York to London in under two hours

The SR-71 would be part of the static display but roped off so that people could not touch the aircraft. We were advised that, indeed, the Russians were coming. To prevent the Russians or anybody else from exploiting the display. No sensors were left on the aircraft, all fuel had been removed from the tanks, and the plane was heat-soaked to an ambient temperature to prevent infrared cameras from discovering the aircraft's secrets, internal structure, and support systems. We four crewmembers Buz Carpenter, John Murphy, JT Vida, and Tom Alison were standing around the aircraft, answering questions from the crowd when sure enough the Russians showed up in numbers. They took numerous regular and infrared photos. Some of the Russians even had hidden microscopes.

They were a site to see coming up like a convey of quails. It looks like the Salvation Army had outed them. Their dress sense was from a 1930s movie about American mobsters. They were wearing double-breasted suits made from a rougher cloth than one normally sees.

The head of the Soviet delegation is a former MiG-23 fighter pilot who’s quite relaxed and talkative in his demeanor. He asked John and me to drop in on Vladivostok ( the USSR) as a gesture of peaceful relationship.

We just quipped “please forward that request to our state department” 😆. Buz Carpenter

I found this story in Paul Crickmore‘s new book Lockheed Blackbird Beyond the Secret Missions, the missing chapters.

Linda Sheffield

@Habubrats71 via X

[booleanean]

Day 9 - Aphrodisiacs - Robots with Dicks

"Oh fuck, yes, yes," Carla panted.

She heard Felix scribble something on his clipboard. For an AI postdoc, he was oddly attached to pen and paper.

The Mk1's chassis had been completed weeks ago. Carla had stared at it, stood in the corner of their basement workshop, waiting for Felix to finish training the AI, until finally she couldn't take it anymore.

"Yes, harder, faster." Carla moaned as the robot's control loop interpreted the commands and thrust into her with greater intensity.

Every inch of it was as good as she could make it, artificial filament muscles covered in variably translucent silicone to visually measure performance, hydraulic actuators in the torso visible behind 3D printed transparent aluminium. Strength was about twice what the strongest human could achieve without modification or drugs, dexterity on par with the best industrial robots from ten years ago, but on a fully mobile base. It was the peak of humanoid robotics, right at the very bleeding edge of technology. Their research paper was going to omit certain additions she'd made to it, though she had been half tempted to see if they could win a Nobel and Ig Nobel for the same project.

Felix looked up long enough from his clipboard to stroke her hair.

"Feel good?"

"Oh fuck yes, I'm close."

Even the penis attachments were works of art. Integrated in a special modular pelvis, she'd created two prototypes. The one that was rocking her world right now was a basic steel shaft with an internal set of ducting keeping it at body temperature, and a separate network of microtubules dispensing lubrication along the entire length. Pressure transducers and temperature sensors fed back into the control loop, letting the robot respond to her physiological responses as well as her voice commands.

She was saving the other prototype for the full AI integration test. The basic functionality worked the same as a mammalian penis. Silicone stood in for flesh, with a body safe hydraulic fluid for blood, filling corpora cavernosa made of custom designed aerogel. It even had realistic skin that slid along the basic structure. The sensors were also inspired by biological systems, with increased density in the tip. The piece de resistance was a realistic set of testicles, weighted properly, that contained most of the operating mechanics and a fully functional ejaculation system tuned to mimic anything from a pathetic little dribble to a pressure and volume any porn star would sign away their immortal soul for.

She already had plans for another, more futuristic attachment with a direct magnetic nerve stimulator for the clit and g-spot.

"Fuck YES!" Carla screamed as she came.

The sensors in the robot's dick tripped the control loop into a new regime, keeping the same pace perfectly, matching her thrashing movements, letting her focus on nothing but her own pleasure. The impassive face, silicon lips pressed tightly together, eyes scanning her face mechanically, pulled her out of the moment a little but the perfect fucking it was delivering got her close to the edge again right on the heels of her first orgasm. Just before her pleasure peaked, the robot pulled back out of her completely and sat back on its heels between her legs.

"CONTROL LOOP FAILURE, SAFETY MODE ENGAGED."

She screamed her frustration at the abrupt feeling of emptiness and ruined orgasm so tight on the heels of such a good one.

"Fuck, that sucked." Carla tried to catch her breath. "Mk1, go stand in the corner."

"COMMAND UNCLEAR, PLEASE RESTATE."

She pushed it off the bed with her foot, the basic inverse kinematics keeping it stable as it shifted to the floor. At least that was still working.

"Walk forward four paces, turn forty-five degrees clockwise, walk two more paces, then go into standby mode."

Carla pulled at Felix's shirt, trying to get it off over his head while he tried to hold on to his clipboard.

"Are you going to take notes, or are you going to fuck me? The Mk1 clearly isn't up to the task yet."

He froze, then tossed his clipboard aside. They kissed as he fumbled his pants off. He was inside of her seconds later, rock hard. They'd fantasized together about being with other people, but never wanted to make it a reality. The fantasy was hot, real people was too far for both of them. When they'd been working on the Mk1 together, Carla had suggested a little side project. Felix clearly really got off on seeing her with it, he was rock hard.

"Yes, fuck me, fuck me." Carla rocked her hips against him, meeting him thrust for thrust. She held his gaze, urging him on. Within minutes, he had her back at the edge, years of being together had taught him exactly what she liked. She held herself there, holding back, waiting for him.

"Cum in me, fill me, yes, YES!" Carla felt Felix stiffen inside of her and then warmth flooded her. She let go and screamed his name as she came, "Felix, Felix, Felix!"

When he collapsed on top of her, she stroked his back. He was still inside of her, and she could still feel the occasional twitch of his cock.

"Of course! There was no path from the 'partner orgasm occurring' state into the 'partner orgasm starting' state! God damnit, I forgot to account for multiple orgasms in quick succession. Fuck."

Felix kissed her, muffling her last word. He pushed up on his hands, hovering over her, still inside. "The tensor farm should be done testing the latest model by 8pm. If this one is all green, we can probably have it installed by 10 and give it another shot with the AI this time."

"I'll rewire the state machine for the control loop in case there's any red tests still."

This had been their sex life for the last couple of months, since they started the project to build the ultimate sex bot. After, often with Felix still inside of her, they'd discuss ideas about what they could change, or features they had to have. This was the first time after a field test though.

"Did you like watching me with it?"

"Oh yes. God damn, that was hot."

"Would you ever want to try it? Both cocks are self lubricating, you know."

"Mmm, maybe. I want to see if we can get a threesome mode working first though."

After dinner they guided the bot back onto its stand in the basement workshop with a dozen cables leading to various parts to extract telemetry, recharge, and provide data connections for reprogramming. Carla was getting distracted trying to rewire the state machine, each possible transition suddenly causing both real and imagined sense memories. Felix looked tastier and tastier as she worked. He was futzing with parameters, rerunning partial tests on subsystems. The tests had all been green, but he'd had ideas to get everything optimized before their first live test.

By 2am, they had the first version of Felix's AI uploaded to the Mk1. She and Felix had curated a lot of videos from Pornhub over the last couple of months, finding performances they liked. Lots of hotwife scenes and threesomes, some bisexual stuff, but mostly relatively vanilla scenes. Carla had added some scenes where the male performer was a bit more rough than Felix was comfortable with doing himself, spanking and pinning wrists above heads. For vocal interactions, they'd retrained a large language model on erotica and textual descriptions of the scenes in the porn videos, generated by an off the shelf accessibility AI.

There wasn't any actual universal intelligence in the robot of course. This was a sexy version of an AI chat bot that most phones had built in now, combined with a convoluted control loop for its physical interactions. Simply a very clever way of giving the impression that something was smart, when really all it was doing was basic pattern recognition based on a predefined dataset.

"Want to give it a shot?" Felix asked, but Carla shook her head.

"I want you, not the bot."

Shutting the bot down for the night, Carla drew Felix upstairs back to their bedroom. As they made love, they teased each other with all the amazing things they'd do with the robot tomorrow and in the weeks to come.

The next weekend, Carla really had to admit Felix had been right. Her control loop version of the robot's software was good. It got her off just fine, but it was impersonal. As its designer, she had a hard time focusing on herself as she felt it roll into new control regimes. The AI felt much more human. He looked at you, used his hands for more than balance, and even showed some imperfections in his motions. He got (artificially) winded, slipped out, fell over, all the things a real human partner would do. The experience was so much more realistic, she sometimes forgot it was a robot fucking her if she couldn't see him.

She sat at her desk in their upstairs office now, working on the more serious portion of her research. They had run a series of strength and dexterity tests that afternoon, characterizing the robot's ability to maintain precision while assert force at different levels, and she was processing the data. Felix was downstairs in the lab, tinkering with parameters and adjusting the training data for the next version of the AI.

Carla heard the neighbor plug in his bass guitar, the amp turned way up. She muttered under her breath about people not respecting their tools. Didn't he know he could damage the speaker like that? The noise wasn't too bad, but listening to Seven Nation Army played by a spirited amateur over and over again didn't really appeal either. Her noise cancelling headphones were in the basement with Felix though, so for now she'd just suffer through.

Her phone beeped halfway through the neighbor's warmup.

Felix: Robot reacting to bass music. Carla: "music" Felix: He's getting better. Anyway:

The next message was the robot's dick, the biomorphic one, clearly at half mast.

Carla: Is he on? Felix: in standby Carla: Odd. Sensors recording? Felix: Yup, caught it before the buffer flushed. AI parameter log too. Carla: nice

Before she could really get back into her work, the neighbor finished Seven Nation Army. The next tune he played was the Pornhub sting. She almost spat out her drink. He did a pretty good version, though the lack of drums made it not quite perfect.

Before she could get back into her work, Felix yelled from down in the basement.

"Carla, come take a look at this!"

The Mk1 was standing in its alcove, still docked to all the various wires and cables. Felix was standing in front of it, studying the biomorphic cock. It was throbbing like a real one would.

"Remember how it was at half mast during the first song the neighbor was playing? Despite it being in standby? I think I figured out the reason."

The neighbor, who had just finished House of the Rising Sun, chose that moment to play another couple of Pornhub opening stingers. The Mk1 responded, humping the air slightly, his cock throbbing.

"You didn't cut out the intros on the training data so—"

"— now every time it hears bass music, and the Pornhub riff in particular, it gets aroused. It's still in standby, it's barely drawing current, but there's enough residual charge in the artificial muscle fibers for, well, this." He gestured at the robot's midsection, still rocking back and forth.

"Aren't the tensor cores supposed to be off?" Carla watched a slow drop of lubricant fall from the tip of the twitching robot cock.

Felix shook his head, "Some stay on to parse voice commands."

She reached out, touching the silicone cock. It was slick, the lubricant dispensers clearly activated. It was interesting to see that it was apparently simulating precum as well, despite that not necessarily being the focus of their training data. The artificial dick twitched at her touch, and she grasped it firmly, stroking up and down. A slow trickle of fake cum was leaking out the tip now, covering her hand.

"So we're thinking bass guitar is a robo-aphrodisiac then? Because you trained it on videos with Pornhub intros?"

"Mm-hmm."

"That's hilarious."

"And means I have to remove the intro from over fifteen hundred videos, and then retrain and retest the entire model." Felix sighed heavily. "Again."

"There's an ffmpeg command for that, surely."

"The trimming, sure."

Carla kept stroking the robot's cock, watching the artificial foreskin slide back and forth over the head.

"Seems like a shame to waste this though. It really shouldn't be erect out in the open air for too long, it's designed with the idea of at least some counter pressure. Also, it would be a shame to not gather some extra data. It might be interesting to have a robo-aphrodisiac function, though maybe something more specific that won't just trigger if someone forgets to unplug their Bluetooth speaker when they're going to rub one out."

Felix grinned at her, then nodded.

Carla pulled her sweat pants and top off, standing naked in front of the mechanical man. "Mk1, wake up."

The Mk1 went through his wakeup sequence, part mandated by technology, part for show because they were both massive nerds. The cables, mostly plugged in along his arms and back, ejected and retracted into the alcove like Neo waking up in the real world for the first time. The sound effect of Seven of Nine's alcove powering down at the end of her regeneration cycle played, and Mk1 took a single step forward.

"Hello Carla, nice to see you again. What would you like to do today?"

Felix had campaigned long and hard for the robot to say "Please state the nature of the sexual emergency" but eventually she had put her foot down. The chances of that ending up in a version they showed off at their defense were too high, and while Robert Picardo could get it, the Doctor was a bit too acerbic for her tastes.

She walked over to the mattress they kept in the basement for quick tests, standing at the foot. She was in the mood for something a bit more rough than just the vanilla stuff they'd tried with the bot so far, and this heightened state it was operating in seemed to be a perfect opportunity to try that out.

"Take me. Be a little rough."

Before, he'd always asked for confirmation before initiating anything sexual. It hadn't been hardwired, but the AI training data was heavily incentivized towards asking consent first. This time though, with three long, powerful strides he was inches away from her. The intensity of his movements were a little scary, but she had the utmost faith in her and Felix's work. Still, she took a half step back reflexively.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Felix asked.

Carla stood staring at the Mk1, transfixed by his gaze. She knew it was just servos and cameras and tensor cores running a neural network, there was nothing there, but she still couldn't look away.

"I need this," Carla whispered.

With that, Mk1 took one more step, pushing her over and onto the mattress. He guided her down as they tumbled, cushioning her fall a little and making sure her head didn't hit the ground, but it was still an intense experience.

Decided to fight a little, she tried to push him off. He gathered her wrists in one hand and effortlessly pinned her arms above her head.

"Pause," Carla said.

Immediately, the Mk1 froze. He still held her, but the pressure on her wrists was lower, and he held all his weight off of her.

"Good, that still works just fine. Resume."

The intensity the Mk1 showed was unreal. She'd enjoyed him before, but with this added level of robotic arousal added on top, she could finally completely lose herself in the act. There was no room for thinking about kinematics and control loops, muscle fiber force limits, defects, or additions to the training data. There was no worry about her partner's pleasure, no anxiety for her own performance. All that was there was her own pleasure, pure and uncomplicated.

She fantasized about a future where a Mk2 and Mk3 could join in with the Mk1, taking turns getting her off, letting them recharge and refuel in shifts as they spent an entire day teasing her from orgasm to orgasm.

Mk1's synthesized voice, indistinguishable from human despite being produced by a speaker rather than a voice box, let her know how good this felt for him. All artificial of course, but so necessary for a realistic experience. Soft moans, grunts, little gasps. Even simulated breathing growing shorter as he exerted himself. It had still sounded artificial to her previously, but now it just went straight to the pleasure center of her brain, letting her enjoy the moment even more. She came, crying out as he whispered her name in her ear.

Just as her wrists were beginning to hurt, he shifted, pulling her legs up against his chest. The new position let him reach new and interesting places inside of her, the intentional curve she'd put on his cock letting him hit her g-spot. As she approached her second orgasm of the afternoon, he started moaning louder, grunting. When she came, so did he. The twitching of his cock was entirely lifelike, his orgasm forceful enough she could feel it deep inside of her.

She lay there panting, and he emulated her, letting her bask in the moment. Felix had sat next to her on the mattress, watching her closely. She could see his erection clearly in his sweats.

"That looked intense," he said when she looked over to him.

"Oh yes. We definitely need this feature."

"Would you like to continue?" the Mk1 asked.

Carla flicked her gaze down to Felix's sweats then looked him in the eyes. "Join us?"

Felix grinned and started pulling his shirt off.

[funnitrianglethingy]

had a talk about robotgirls, decided to try my hand at a short story

You're hanging off the ceiling while your girlfriend is working on you. Everything looks a bit hazy in the dimly lit room. She's laying right underneath you, taking off your cover plates to inspect the damage. — Yeah, that EMP got you good. I'm glad the static shielding worked, 'cause otherwise you'd be cooked crisp. Try to avoid corporate strike groups during your next runs, okay? — I know, i know, but i couldn't just let them take that guy away for disassembling, you know? — Alright, supergirl. Just know that you're paying out of your pocket for this heroism, 'kay? You don't want to admit it, but she is right — the burned components have to be replaced, and flashed android parts aren't cheap. She puts away the last cover plate and pushes her hands inside, skillfully disconnecting all the components in the way. You can feel every component disappear as the internal log gets filled with warnings. — Alright, let's see… two servos and a backup controller in the left leg, some spare neural processing units… ooh, they got one of the drives in your long term memory RAID array. And even some dies on your RAM sticks. Whatever it was, it was aimed to get your brains. She plugs off a couple more things, and then sends you a message through the LAN Alright, turn off all unnecessary systems, i'll ping you once i'm done here You do as instructed and turn off most sensors, all servos, video and audio peripherals, as well as the aforementioned RAID array, relying on the instructions saved to the boot drive. It seems dark. All you can feel is some things being disconnected from you. You reach to the boot drive for instructions, and it returns a string "prepare for shutdown RAM devices 3, 4, 5 and 7. set listener to port 8080. reconnect all systems on listener event" You interpret it and perform the instructions, freeing up those sticks and send a command to reindex the remaining memory… you check the internal clock, the reindexing and reboot of the personality network took about 3.2 seconds, not bad. It's kind of hard to hold onto any thoughts, but it doesn't matter. You set a listener for the ping to the port from the instructions, and await… Some 15 minutes later the listener returned true, and you went down again to perform the necessary instructions… you check the internal clock and the log, the soft reboot took 3.5 seconds, and judging by the logs the new RAM worked as expected. You reconnect the RAID array, scan all ports and reconnect all the servos, processing cores, etcetc… The room is still dimly lit and nearly silent, the most prominent sound being your fans spinning at full blast. You check the temperature readings just in case, and see that they're within the acceptable range. — I'm back on. How did it go? — Swimmingly. What's the status. — All systems online and in optimal condition. It'll take a bit for the RAID array to work it's magic but other than that i feel great! So, will i have enough pocket money? — No and for a while. We're gonna need to restock quite a few things, and that means dipping into the savings. If i were you I'd pray that the guy you saved is generous, and will pay off some of the spares, otherwise I'm gonna need to find us couple more gigs to fix this dent in our budget.

[ow-old-men]

Obsessed with the idea of omnic specific body language and etiquette, like-

Balling your hands into fists around human people is polite, there’s a lot of small moving parts and a lot of strength in them to damage a distracted human passing by you. Open or especially moving hands when walking among people is read as a politics statement or as aggression

Most omnics won’t instinctively point their face plating towards a conversational partner. On most omnic models, the audio and visual sensors are not located in a way where that would enhance their sense of the conversation

A lot of omnics don’t ever stay completely still unless they’re shut down. They’re optimised for manual cooling, moving their limbs slightly to allow proper and varied airflow

Most big emotions will make internal fans kick on if the omnic in question have them

Compared to most human people, a lot of omnics initiate physical touch with very big, obvious movements (holding a hand outstretched for you to take, slowing down right before touch happens or verbally stating a touch will happen, even a very casual one). It started as a practical thing stemming from omnics sometimes being uncomfortable or dangerous to touch due to high temperatures, sharp or grinding parts. These days it’s pretty much just unconscious and happens in omnic to omnic interactions just as much as between omnics and humans

For most omnics, instinctually ‘looking at someone’ will be looking at their chest (or most chest like part if they’re an omnic) rather than their face or head

Tired or stressed omnics often get twitchy and shaky. At a certain point of exhaustion most omnics will wrap their limbs close to their body, sometimes even holding their arms down or pinning them to their torso for fear of a malfunctioning limb lashing out

A lot of slang and language that emerged from omnic culture includes the clicks and clacks that comes from moving in an omnic body as a sort of grammar or second layer of language. Thus, there’s often a lot of gestures included as well

[tachyon-omlette]

can't sleep. posting updated Eda physiology diagram

more in-depth descriptions under the cut (feat. a rethinking of how dark energon/angolmois exists)

I use the term "cell-spawned" as a reference to how Armada Sideways was "grown from Unicron's own cells", implying there may be a difference between Unicronians that were once Cybertronians (ex. Galvatron) & those that were fully created by Unicron, like Sideways. or Eda.

cell-spawned Unicronians have 2 sets of major systems: molten metal & angolmois (dark energon)

the molten metal system is a vascular system equivalent, but a little different. ingested metals r smelted down until they're more liquid than solid (& as a consequence a Unicronian's internal temperature is extremely high), then passed through a network of arteries that deposit new metal around the antispark chamber & beneath external plating. this allows the antispark chamber to be reinforced even as its cargo slowly strips away the inner layer, & allows external weathering/surface-level injuries to be sheared off in favor of allowing new metal to grow underneath (which means neither Eda nor any cell-spawned Unicronian bears scars save for what they willfully upkeep). the metal is also infused with heat-resistant nanites once it enters the "bloodstream"; these nanites are what implant proximity sensors on exterior-facing plating & direct the flow of new metals to any pierced-armor injuries (the result of which leaves a scar that appears like a large weld, which can be sanded down or otherwise weathers away on its own). surface-level pierced-armor injuries are usually somewhat painless in the injured area, but release trapped heat & reduce mobility until that heat can be restored.

the dark energon aka angolmois system is, however, very different - where most things have interpreted angolmois as energon but Scary, in my mind it's more accurately an opposite: less fluid & more viscous like tar, a pitch-black that opalesces with deep purples & glitters like the night sky, and cold like the void of space. angolmois systems are more heavily-guarded than a Cybertronian's energon system; it is circulated usually where it is needed to cancel out or counterbalance the excessive heat generated by the molten metal systems (ex. the cpu/brain module & other finely-tuned systems), thus preventing a Unicronian from simply melting themselves down on accident. it also runs through major support structures like bone marrow, emitting a natural cooling that makes excessive heat integral to the use of limbs and digits, lest they grow frost - the rupture of an angolmois line is, thereby, equivalent in pain to a broken bone, & for a cell-spawned Unicronian who feels barely any or even no pain with more common & superficial scrapes, it is often a crippling injury. angolmois leaks are harder for the molten metal system to repair & often create systemic injuries by virtue of the extreme cold structurally compromising most metal it touches, & the damaged structures often require direct patching in order to aid the molten metal repair systems & prevent a total freeze-down. for cell-spawned Unicronians like Eda, angolmois can be naturally replenished by tapping into the entropy of the universe, whether that be through simply waiting (either lucid or in stasis) or artificially increasing localized entropy (i.e. causing problems & destruction & chaos wherever they are currently); for more severe cases the latter route is often necessary.

angolmois is still the most direct route to corruption, as it freezes & kills whatever it touches & often is difficult to recover from (ex. if some lands on a field of wildflowers, the wildflowers it lands on will die, along with the microorganisms living in that patch of soil. if it is removed, then only that place will have a dead area & over time will naturally repopulate; if it seeps into the ground, the entire field may die & will become hard or even impossible to repopulate a la the Prime Kindergarten from Steven Universe). for Cybertronians, coming in direct contact causes freezing injuries & in severe cases requires amputation. ingestion causes internal damage & generates and/or exacerbates inner turmoil(s).

any questions ?

[melindaaskblog]

SMI received a new assignment without much fanfare. 

Another contact testing, as the researchers call it. It was nothing new: An entity was deemed either too dangerous or otherwise difficult to handle, and the researchers wanted it off their hands. The contact was for testing the waters, see if SMI could take over some of the more hazardous work. It made sense - they were designed to handle things human employees feared.

Melinda. SMI very soon learnt the name of the amorphous inky, from the thin, heavily redacted document that offered minimal information for things to work. It’s sentient. Easily agitated. Prone to lashing out. To the surprise of no one, cannot be allowed near human proximity, for reasons unspecified. SMI chalked them down to the usual complications of being kept at Blacksite.

The near-zero toleration towards light was new. It meant SMI’s screen would have to be shut off for the duration of the contact. It’s strange, having to communicate without a face, but they supposed that make them and Melinda to be on equal footing.

— — — — —

“Just do what you do best. Go in there and make a friend.” Was the dry comment SMI heard from the supervisor, before they were sent into the airlock. A list of questions was already downloaded into their mind. SMI was permitted to go off-script, if only slightly; so long as it doesn’t set the entity off.

The inner containment door slid open with a hiss, and the cold air hit immediately. The temperature of the cell was far too cold for a human, but comfortable for SMI. Their internal fans whirred lazily, the cool air a relief to the overworked systems. They stepped inside, and the door sealed them in.

The cell was shrouded in almost complete darkness. SMI scanned the cell, and soon their sensors locked on the only moving object in a room, a pile of blanket. They called out carefully.

- Hello, Melinda.

(Hi hi! excited to finally interact with Mel, hope this is comprehensible and not too wordy.)

(@voice-o-fallacy)

(NONO ITS BEAUTIFUL AND I LOVE IT)

[Melinda would startle from their nap as soon as they heard the faintest noise of the researcher speaking, it's eye rings popping open as it hesitantly peered out from its blanket pile.]

◇... Am I talking to a computer-? You know what? I'm not one to judge. Anyone can be sentient if they want to be.◇

[Melinda's expression would go from mild surprise back to drowsy quickly. Shuffling a bit before sliding a note across the floor.]

`I'm surprised you even came inside the cell. Most scientists are too scared to even go into the first door of the airlock.`

[The void mass would raise up a bit to appear more present, their eyes tilting to the side like some strange cat.]

`I can't tell if you're some kind of computer-based experiment, or just some guy with the least protective mask in the world. Though it doesn't really matter. I'm assuming you're just here to ask another round of pointless questions I won't answer.`

[The blob would cross two tentacles like arms.]

`It's getting painfully dull, you know? Children's toys only go so far, be sure to tell your researcher buddies that.`

[The void mass would gesture to the various toys scattered across the cell floor. A drum, xylophone, colorful rubber ducks, blocks, even a rattle, which seemingly had the most use of all considering the several dents in it. Actually, no, that was probably just from angry throwing.]