Give Those Fine Chaps a Hand

Janitorial Way

These series of tunnels give back access to many of the storm rooms and were probably used to perform janitorial duties in a discreet fashion. Right now, the tunnels look like they could use a janitor! Cleaning tools are strewn about, mops tilting at crazy angles. Grease is streaked on the floor, walls, and even ceiling, and a thin coating of dust covers everything, even the grease.

Rodimus Prime has a crutch.

Seriously. The leader of the Autobots is still weak enough to be forced to rely on a crutch just to stand up straight. But that doesn't stop him from trying to explore Crystal City's underground. Mostly because he's /bored/ with hanging out in Debris engaging in wheel chair races with Wheelie.

He looks around at the assorted exists, then hmmms. "Only one left at this point, right?"

"That'd be correct Prime, then we can be done with this wild chase Omega has got us on." Impactor grumbles, grumpy as usual. Not for any particular reason mind you, just because acting tough and emotionally think is this Wrecker's style. And why mess with something that ain't broke? "So, which way is it?"

Jetfire was just glad to see Rodimus finding something constructive to do -other- than trying to get into fights he shouldn't be getting into yet. Though he was along just as much to keep an optic on the Prime as he was curious to the investigating. It was quite possible they could find some old forgotten technology or something else useful down here. "Not that it would hurt to check previous passages with different people in case something else was missed, but it would be most effective to make sure all the passages have been explored at least once first."

Rodimus Prime nods towards the.... broom closet. "That one. That's the only way we haven't gone yet." He limps towards it and smiles. "I would give it a try myself, first, /but/ I'm not sure Jetfire would approve of me going into broom closets with a crutch."

Grapple has been trying very, very hard not to stare at the crutch. Instead, he focused on the tunnels themselves, trying to find any little nook or cranny they may have missed along the way. He does stare at the broom closet, however. "..A.. Closet?"

"Whoever built these passages originally seem to have had a knack for trick exits," Jetfire explains to Grapple. Although this is the first trip he's gone on himself, he's read the reports on the others.

Grapple boggles at that. "..Trick exits?" Well, he has heard of stranger things. Still.. "That sounds somewhat counterproductive."

Impactor boldly strides up, giving Jetfire a slight nod and approaches their 'fearless' leader. "Prime, come on now ... just cause Docbot cleared ya fer an off campus pass doesn't mean yer headin' inta tha fray first." he gruffs, giving Rodimus a small pat on the shoulder and warm smile.

"Sides, that's why ya brought ah Wrecker. We're expendable!" he chuckles, giving the door knob a slight turn. "Persistant little bugger idn't it?" he plays it off, sending his shoulder into the frame this time.

Impactor bounces off the door frame and lands on his aft.

Grapple tries to fight the smirk off and fails as Impactor bounces off the door. "A locked closet door. Suppose there's a key or something similar around here..?"

Jetfire takes a step up as Impactor rebounds off the door, partially to catch the Wrecker before he falls over completely and possible hurt himself farther. "It doesn't look like it's rusted shut. Prehaps you caught it at a bad angle?"

Broom Closet

This broom closet more resembles a torture chamber than a proper broom closet. It might just be that it isn't really a broom closet at all and instead contains high tech alien space robot cleaning equipment, which looks very futuristic, with all sorts of fiddly bits. Or maybe, just maybe, it might be that someone has strung up a scythe-like axe to the ceiling, and it looks ready to fall at any moment. That might be it. Across the room and under the axe, there are some collapsed shelves, laden with paint cans. Get the shelves back up, and there might be a doorway behind them.

"Sassafrassin' rustin' blasted door. It's obvious, they left a piece out!" Impactor exclaims, pointing to the door handle as they step through.

Rodimus Prime limps through after Grapple, leaning heavily on his crutch and ducking around cleaning supplies. He looks around, frowning as he does, and shakes his head. "/This/ is /broom closet/?"

Rodimus Prime takes a moment to glare at Impactor.

It seems that there WAS, in fact, a key to the door. A cursory glance around the door happened to reveal it. Lo' and behold, the door is now open! ..Although now Grapple is wishing they hadn't opened it at all. He stares at all the very pointy things all around and.. "..Is that a -scythe- on the ceiling?"

Jetfire ducks in after the others. And under the scythe. "Yes.. yes it is..." Broom closet his shiny aft. He picks up a rather viscious looking knife off a shelf and looks at it for a moment. "... Though these tools look even older than the door and actually rusted. This room -may- of been used for something else and then repurposed later in the city's history." "I /hope/ so," Rodimus answers warily, looking around the room. He shakes his head. "So is there a way /out/ of here?"

Giving the hanging scythe an unfavorable look, Impactor ducks down and squat-walks along with the rest. "Broom closet my rear shifter!" he laughs.

Grapple boggles, slightly disturbed, by all the very pointy things. "..Perhaps it was repurposed for storage.." Instead of whatever else a room full of knives would be used for. He ducks down to dodge the various blades and looks around. Perhaps a door or a hatch or.. A cat flap, for all he knows..

Rodimus Prime leans against one of the shelves. It breaks, and he stumbles backwards.

Jetfire erks at the shelves falling down, followed by a clang and a growl as he bumps his head on something overhead and ducks down again. Sometimes being so tall almost makes him miss being tiny. Almost. But as he squats back down he notices something and tries to pick up one of fallen shelves with his hand to see behind it. ".. It looks like these were erected in front of another doorway."

Grapple looks up a the clatter of breaking shelves. "What.. Is everyone all right?" And then he hears Jetfire's proclamation. "..A door -behind- the shelf?"

"Some sorta secret passage?" Impactor asks, taking a closer look at the shelving.

Rodimus Prime recovers his balance and leans heavily on the crutch, peering over at the area indicated. "A door? Really?" He looks around at the others and shrugs. "We'd better check it out, then."

Lost and Found

This room clearly was once a lost and found where the janitors put unclaimed objects. Then it got lost, itself, until some intrepid explorer found it again. The objects here are mostly junk: spare tires, hubcaps, severed hands, tourist guides, and so on. There might be something interesting in one of the bins, but there's a lot of rubbish to go through first.

"Prehaps." Jetfire gives a nod to the architect. "Help me move this stuff out of the way Grapple. With-out- knocking more of it down." Let the two techs do their thing so the others can get to the actual doorway.

Grapple nods to Jetfire and helps move a few boxes out of the way; enough space, he hopes, for crutch-bound Rodimus to move on through without problem. At the sight of what was in one of the bins has him stumbling a moment and nearly dropping it all. "..Why in the world is there a box of -hands- here?"

Rodimus Prime manages to follow, although he does stumble over one of the boxes in the process. However, he manages to avoid falling. He offers the others a weak smile, then blinks at Grapple. "A box of hands?" He pauses. "Well, the original Crystal City /was/ built by Scrapper."

Jetfire makes a bit of a face at Grapple's discovery. "It's best to just not think about and move on," he rumbles. Once the broken shelves are out of the way, he's able to find an actual handle to the door behind it, and with a little work, push it open for the others. "Yep, there -is- a door back here."

Grapple shakes his head a little as he carefully sets the box aside. He really, really does not want to have to clean up severed hands. "These tunnels are bizarre."

"Indeed." Rodimus looks around and shakes his head. "And... junk, and more junk. Omega Supreme appears to be a pack rat."

Impactor just follows along for now, bringing up the rear and making sure Rodi-Crutch is alright. The Wrecker leader wasn't too enthused to allow him to come on the mission in the first place, with the unknown labrynths below this complex. But you try telling a Prime no. "Stop bein' so squemish, it's just ah box o' spare parts."

Jetfire chuckles a little to Rodimus. ".. This appears to be some sort of storage room. For -what- considering the previous room, I don't really want to consider, but... hmmm." He rubs his chin and nudges a random container with his foot. "There may be somethng in one of these bins."

Grapple shakes his head again. "Ah, but a box of spare parts that we have no idea of the origin. And considering the room we just came from.. Well.." He rather not continue that train of thought, now that he was on it. He does nod to Jetfire, however. "..Good idea." Then, he starts to look in boxes. He stops only a moment to give a pile of tourist guides a confused look.

"You know," Rodimus says absently, casually leaning against his crutch, "I was forced to rely on a spare Hoist hand for about a week or so awhile back. So it's not like spare hands /aren't/ useful." He pauses.

"Handy, even," he adds.

Grapple stops to stare at Rodimus. He gives the Prime a 'did you really just say that' look.

Rodimus Prime BEAMS at Grapple.

Grapple rubs his face with a hand. Then, he decides to go back to looking through boxes.

"Some Transformers -do- have hands that just on a control rod that plugs into their wrist socket," Jetfire muses idly. "And then some of them started replacing one hand with a weapon instead. That's how the whole 'gun-hand' style got started, isn't it? ... just make sure you don't have the spring-loaded forearms, or might unhand yourself."

Rodimus Prime shrugs and looks over at Jetfire. "Don't know, I'm not that old." He pauses. "Hoist said his could be, erm, ejected, but I never got around to using it in battle. The annoying part was it couldn't retract, though." He holds up his hand, still leaning on the crutch with his other arm. His hand retracts, and is replaced with his usual buzzsaw before he puts things back to normal.

Remaining silent, Impactor casually glances around the room and inspects a couple of crates/bins. "Yeah yeah, less idle chatter about hands and ah little more searchin' ah?" he gruffs, then realizes that Rodimus is in the room. Shrugging the insult aside, the Wrecker continues to comb the room.

Jetfire grunts a bit. "It'll take forever to look through -all- of these bins." Considers for a few minutes as he picks one up and shakes it lightly. "Look for containers that appear to be more current or more recently disturbed, if someone put something down here to hide it before closing up, it's likely newer than the other bits of junk around here."

Impactor comes across a bin that's exactly as Jetfire described! Imagine that. Peering into it, the Wrecker finds a red metal cylinder. Grabbing the bin up in his hands, he dutifully marches it across the room towards Rodimus. "Hey bossmech, whachya make of this?" he asks, pushing the bin out in front of him for all to see.

Grapple looks up at Impactors' call. He stares at the metal cylinder and makes his way closer. "It certainly appears to be more modern than anything else in this room.."

Jetfire pulls another bin out of a shelf to look behind it, see if anything was stuffed in the back, then puts it back into place. Turns his head as Impactor apparently took his advice, and steps over to look over the other's shoulders. Not hard to do with his height, even to the taller Autobots present. "Looks like some sort of containment cylinder with a hermatic sealing cap. Whatever -is- in it is likely still in exceptional shape; that sort of seal would keep out anything short of the Scraplets."

Rodimus Prime's optics flicker and he reaches for the cylinder with the hand not holding a crutch. He lifts it up, then tosses it towards Grapple. "Grapple, think fast!" he says, then grins.

Grapple sputters! "Gah!" After a short near-fumble, he holds the cylinder. He holds it out at arms length for a moment -- as if he expects it to explode -- and gives Rodimus an incredulous look in the process. "Prime, that was not the least bit funny!"

Jetfire has to stifle a small snicker. "Good catch... though that looks to be the only thing that's not just 'spare parts' down here... I still don't want to think about where some of these components came from..." Then turns to look to Rodimus, "But it's still a potential source of materials, which we desperately could use. Prehaps something can be worked out with Omega Surpreme in exchange for our assistance in these explorations?"

"Indeed, we're burning through more resources than we're gettin' ... I'd like ta think these little adventures weren't a waste of our time." Impactor waxes for a moment. In truth, he was against helping Omega Supreme search these ruins. Not because he didn't believe that the big mech wouldn't deliver on his promise, not that at all. But that Omega Supreme has abandoned the fight, and to him ... to this Wrecker, that's a fate worse than defection.

Rodimus Prime beams as Jetfire starts to snicker. "/I/ think it was hilarious, Grapple," he answers happily. Then he nods at Jetfire. "Omega Supreme actually already told us we could keep anything he didn't need to run the city, so I'm sure we could, Jetfire."

Grapple grumbles under his breath as he holds the container. It seems he didn't see the humor in what Rodimus did, but doesn't truly voice his annoyance, either. "So, what should I do with this?"

"Figure out a way to open it," Rodimus answers. He leans against the nearest wall. "Maps of Cybertron, even outdated ones, have the potential to be very useful to us. We could get lucky and they could be of the underground, which would be even better."

Jetfire nods in agreement. "Best to return to the Pax or such before endevouring to do so, though, were the laboratory and proper equipment can be imployed in doing so, and the contents are not damaged."

Grapple nods to Jetfire and Rodimus, calming down from the annoying-and-still-didn't-think-it-was-funny throwing incident. "You would think whoever created this would have made it easy to open.." He turns the container over in his hands. "..Yet, this does look like it may need some actual force.."

"Easy to open would of likely not preserved the contents this long," Jetfire points out.

Rodimus Prime straightens. "Well, guys, I think I'll try to make my way back by now. Let me know when you get that open, Grapple."

Grapple is still staring at the container. "Of course, Prime. You'll be the first to know as soon as it's open."

Jetfire turns back towards the others. "Other than a general collecting and cataloging of materials, I think that looks to be the only 'important' item in this room. I'll get someone to take care of that and make arrangements with moving out the stock Omega allows us to take so our supply records can be updated accordingly."

Rodimus Prime limps back to the surface with his crutch. :(

Impactor follows behind their leader, acting as cartaker for now.

Rodimus Prime has a baby sitter.

Jetfire puts an arm around Grapple's shoulders to nudge the architect as they head out. "Let's go see if we can get that baby open, shall we?"

Grapple absently follows Jetfire, still inspecting the little container.