#there was another sensor going bad that messed with the idling. so it acting real weird and sucking down gas at a record speed

[traitormithos]

My car was finally on the roadway to death and so I had to get a new one (a new used one, we don't buy new cars here, it's unnecessary)

Well, anyway I didn't cry about spending more than I wanted (for a. dependable car and b. dream car), but I have cried 4 times so far over trading in my almost broken equinox

[butterflyinthewell]

Headcanon stuff

I kinda sorta have my own headcanon for how Optimus’ intakes work. He’s got vents under his helm on the back of his head that suck air in. Vents on his nose (like nostrils) and in his mouth are exit only vents. The mouth vent is mostly for clearing debris by coughing just like humans. 

He’s got intake vents and exit vents in a few places on his body to help keep his internals cool if they get too warm. Of course this means they seal off if he gets submerged in liquid.

Optimus doesn’t ‘breathe’ in and out rhythmically like humans do. He might cycle air three or four times an hour. Sometimes he’ll cycle on purpose and move his shoulders a little to simulate a sigh in ways humans can understand.

He vents a LOT of steam if he’s overheating. That rarely happens (not even sex can mess him up that much! :P), but there is one way to cause it. 

Figuring this out is the result of being creative about taking a human’s PTSD symptoms and coming up with explanations for how and why Optimus manifests them as stasis trauma.

Optimus’ CPU (brain) is a quantum computer. He’s capable of thinking and reacting to situations way faster than humans can. This does generate some heat, but probably not as much as a desktop PC that’s idling.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/quantum-computer1.htm

So what can make Optimus’ processor go so haywire he’s literally blowing out steam?

Answer: A panic attack 

We humans hyperventilate during panic attacks because our shallow, fast breathing releases too much carbon dioxide. Most mammal bodies need a certain level of carbon dioxide to “use” oxygen. That feeling of “oh my God, I can’t breathe!” is from too little carbon dioxide, so the instinct is to breathe even more and...well...it’s what makes you feel like you can’t breathe and why a swift deep breath with very slow, long exhales usually helps.

Optimus hypoventilates because his internal temperature sensors glitch out on him. His body thinks its temperature is fine, but his CPU says “no, I’m way too hot up here” and it’s a war of reflexes that gets more intense as his panic level rises. That’s why his ex-vents get shorter and shorter. His fuel pump speeds up to its maximum speed, and in a quiet room you’ll be able to hear it whir-clunking away. He gets tunnel vision (well, his is more pixelation and loss of visual resolution), a bad case of the shakes and tingling all over with the addition of a screaming awful headache.

Tremors are the most physically debilitating part of his panic attacks. They disrupt his fine motor skills, causing him to drop things, knock stuff over or even lose his balance. They happen because his fight-or-flight programming keeps switching on. Useful in battle when he doesn’t have to think about arming his weapons because they arm themselves and are ready if he needs to shoot, but that’s not something he wants to happen during a panic attack. Like, if he left that program on in a panic state, he could shoot anything that moves. 

He has to do something like a desktop computer's control-alt-delete function to reboot that part of his CPU. Motor function disturbances are the side effect of him literally turning a chunk of his brain off and on again.

Humans with PTSD experience a similar phenomenon, though not quite for the same reason. Psychologists call it psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, or PNES. Sometimes they look like epilepsy seizures and sometimes they look completely different.

Btw, Optimus won’t overheat to death. If he’s left to panic alone for several hours, he’ll pass out into stasis lock if his CPU gets too dangerously hot to sustain life and he stays passed out until his systems cool. Unfortunately, he’s going to wake up feeling what he felt when he went down, so he could go into another panic attack. It’s a vicious cycle. Also, you can smell how hot his processor is getting because of all the electricity-- his ‘breath’ smells like ozone. (Ozone smells kinda like burning metal and chlorine in a pool to me...)

Getting him out of a panic attack requires making him think of something pleasant or calming to make his CPU cycle out of the high energy state. The distraction helps him let go of that “danger, danger” feeling, which stops the fight between his CPU and his body and he’ll start ventilating properly again. Heat feeds the panic attack, so cooling it eventually shuts that reaction off.

Mikaela usually gets him to put his head down on a table and rubs his back if he’s using his bot holo or sits on his shoulder if he’s full size. She asks him to talk about a happy memory, which forces him to focus on something other than “omg I’m about to die”. It works every time. <3

...and yes, I have proof that Optimus emits steam from his nose. He steams twice in AOE. First time is when he’s pissed off in KSI headquarters, the second is when he’s taming Grimlock. Those instances are voluntary, he’s doing it for effect to say ‘yeah, I’m really fraggin’ pissed off at you douchenozzles’ and it’s a small bit of steam. He makes that happen by condensing air as it passes through his intakes.

Both gifs found on Google.

With panic attacks, there’s a lot at first and it becomes short bursts, but it’s still very dense and obvious. Think of steam locomotives and that’s about the right density and amount for a panic attack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipsc9SoL79U

In concept, it seems like it’d be funny, but it’s actually not because he’s in a lot of physical pain when he’s panic-steaming.

Mikaela knows he’s calming down when the short steam bursts become long ones and then the steam thins out until it eventually stops.

Stasis trauma is literal robot PTSD. It only happens if a bot experiences something traumatic as they’re going into emergency stasis. 

Emergency stasis is like forcibly going to sleep. Injury, illness and resisting recharge(sleep) can do it. It’s different from stasis lock, which is more akin to going under anesthesia for surgery-- there is zero awareness.

Bots in emergency stasis will still ‘dream’ (data tracks of lived experiences) and retain some environmental awareness, but they can’t act until whatever put them into emergency stasis is resolved. Like Optimus in AOE, it happened because Cade removed the missile blocking his systems from connecting.

Sometimes a bot’s CPU gets stuck replaying the moments before stasis in a loop instead of “proper” dreaming. Cybertronian dreams are old data tracks, they don’t dream of random things like flying toasters the way humans do. Well, they can if they see a gif of one, but it won’t get dreamed about unless they experienced it first. :P 

Now imagine reliving a horrific moment over and over and over and over, nonstop, for several years. Imagine reliving a moment that’s scary, but it becomes traumatic because you’re stuck living in that moment for 10,000 years or some enormous timespan.

Stasis trauma causes a lot of data corruption by connecting the trauma to various reflexes and emotions. Imagine your desktop computer with all the shortcuts getting scrambled and clicking some of them takes you to a website with videos of really gross or scary things.

That’s how flashbacks work in stasis trauma-- any stimuli that is a trigger opens the looped data track. The bot literally goes back to that moment, but they can still hear the ‘real’ world and breaking out of the flashback is doing something unrelated to the flashback situation. In Optimus’ case, he was injured and couldn’t move, so he freezes and thinks he can’t move. Encouraging him to move, even to twitch a finger, will break his flashback and close the data track. You can tell he’s having a flashback because his optics will flicker and he’ll yell at you to “stay back!” while it’s happening.

Flashbacks are just a tiny part of stasis trauma. Like I said, it’s the robot equivalent to PTSD.