#sometimes the monsters stick around and continue to be a problem! sometimes theres long term consequences!

[thenamesblurrito]

finished this and then forgot to post it whoops!

so everybody knows scraplets are harmless little omnivorous pests, hungry buggers but only likely to chew on you if they're absolutely starving. comparable to rats, they're adaptable, decently intelligent, and even friendly if you're careful. Whirl hides steel woolies under his bunk to feed a growing scraplet colony he affectionately refers to as his children. but, much like everything else in SNAP, all it takes is a little supernatural interference to turn docility into danger...

in s1e10- An All-Consuming Hunger! An Upgrade to Friendship, something new stalks the streets: mecannibals. bigger, hungrier, and meaner than regular scraplets, they don't seem interested in eating trash so much as eating living metal. skittering hordes of them swarm Iacon, treating people like prey, and worst of all they seem to be able to socialize with other scraplets and infect them with their hunger, spreading the mecannibal menace. the heroes drive them off by the end of the episode, but that isn't the last we see of them

by s1e13- All My Friends Are Food! An Upgrade to Cannibals, the undercity of Iacon feels... wrong. junkers have been going missing, more than usual, and even Enforcers are noticing shapes skittering in the shadows. an uptick of missing persons cases reaches its crescendo with the reveal of Stinger, a sapient, self-contained swarm of mecannibals, a rat king ready to build an underground empire of gnawed struts and spilt energon. Stinger's organized army is much harder for the heroes to combat this time. a lot of ordinary folk are forced to fight back themselves, or flee for their lives like bitty Bumblebee. even when they do succeed, mecannibal bites leave lifelong scars. it takes desperate coordination and teamwork to bring Stinger down and end the reign of hunger, but hunting down every last feral mecannibal is the work of months

the stragglers keep popping up every so often. they make nice snacks for Gatoraider, and prove to be yet another threat for junkers just trying to survive. it's not until s2e08- See Things My Way! An Upgrade to Triptych that the last of them are finally flushed out of hiding in one final swarm, pouring into the halls of the JAAT itself