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Nickel stared.
Tarn stared back.
Nickel gesticulated in wordless frustration, shaking her hands at Tarn's torso.
Tarn looked down at his opened plating and back up, and nodded. "I'm glad we can agree this is unusual."
" Unusual? " Nickel couldn't help but yell, "How do you lose a transformation cog? Did you knock it out of it's mount?"
With a carefully measured absence of defensive body language Tarn replied, "I didn't lose it. I just felt a tingle and then I couldn't transform. When I checked, it was gone."
Nickel ground the heels of her palms into her eyes before she pushed aside the bracket that would normally hold Tarn's T-cog in place, checked the mount for a somehow unnoticed cog, then leaned into the maintenance hatch and swung a penlight around to look for any sign of an escaped component. No sign of an errant organ, same as the last four times.
Tarn rolled his eyes and said, "There's a proverb, you know. 'The definition of insanity-"
Nickel cut over him as she turned away, "Is saying that an internal component walked away of its own accord?"
"It's gone and there's no way it could have just rolled away, Nickel. Did you check the last batch for abnormalities?" Tarn eyed the cog storage against the wall, sense of visceral incorrectness battling the common sense that this needed explaining before he could trust the current stock. He sighed, "Unusual subspace routing on the donor's part, perhaps?"
Nickel shook her head and glared at the datapad of transformation cog sources and information, figuring it was a less confrontational target. She said, "Not likely. Autobot, standard class land vehicle, no communicable diseases or physical abnormalities. Every single cog you harvested on that ship checked out. I can look over another from what’s left of that group, though..." She cocked her head in thought, "You said their C.M.O. was on board? Maybe they were experimenting in some form of failsafe."
Tarn nodded, "Please do, I would rather know what's happening before the next one takes out more than just itself."
Nickel rolled her eyes and keyed in the access code to open the cooler.
Tarn clicked his plating back into place and leaned over inquisitively as the hum of the open cold storage unit droned on past a couple seconds.
Nickel stared into the fridge.
Tarn stared into the fridge.
Tarn asked, "Oh dear, how do you lose twelve transformation cogs?"