Little Gladiator

Chapter 4: Introductions

Note: I STILL DON'T OWN ANYTHING!

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Newspark in pet carrier and pet carrier in servo, Megatron ignored the stares he got from his peers as he made his way to the rec room. Like the medbay, the rec room wasn't much. It was the second largest area, besides the arena, so it could fit all the mechs and femmes that came for their rations; filled with rickety chairs and wobbly tables; and had one holoscreen on a rusting wall, it's edges beginning to chip away.

The gray gladiator set the crate down on an empty table. He looked around for the low grade Pitbull had talked about and spotted it across the room. He grabbed a bottle of the stuff and a cube of his mid grade and sat back down at his table to find his closest peers there too.

"So, Megs," Scythe said, "What's inside Mystery Box #1?" Scythe was a sky blue femme with sandy tan accents along her sides. She had many tantalizing curves that would make most mech's lubricate at the sight of her, but she was not available. She wielded her twin scythes with deadly skill and could behead you in less than a nanoklik.

"It's not a box, it's a pet-"

"But it feels like a sparkling," said Soundwave. He was a lanky, purple and black mech with a visor instead of a face. Although he looked very fragile, his frame was actually very sturdy. What he lacked in physical strength he more than made up for with his telepathic abilities, speed, tentacles, and cassettes: Ravage, a cat, and Laserbeak, a bird.

"Well, it is-"

"Woah! You got sparked?!" Dagger exclaimed. "Wait, I thought your reproductive protocols were offline?" Dagger was a black mech with silver accents on the edges of each plate of armor. He had a serpentine alt mode and used it to crush his opponents in his embrace, though he was no sneaky snake. While in root form, his jagged knives only missed his enemies if he wanted them to.

"Shut up and let me talk!" Megatron yelled. The rec room went quiet until they realized the fierce gladiator wasn't talking to them.

"We're all audials, Megsy," Scythe said with a wink.

"Don't call me that. Last orn, the pit master gave me a newspark to train until his first match. He's in the crate now."

"A real sparkling?!" Scythe nearly squealed. "Can I feed him?"

Megatron raised an optic ridge but handed the bottle to her and said, "Be my guest."

"Aw! He's so adorable! What's his name?" the blue femme asked as she cradled Bumblebee like he was made of glass and raised the bottle at the perfect angle for him to drink. Bumblebee's optics lidded lazily as he suckled the low grade. The others looked at her like she had gone mad.

"Um? Who are you and what did you do with Scythe?" Dagger asked.

"Come on, Dags. It's not every orn you see a sparkling, especially a newspark, especially here! In the pits!"

"Well, your femme programming is going to have to shut off. I'm not allowed to coddle him," Megatron informed her as he reached for the bitlet.

She smacked his servo away. "I'm the one who's coddling him."

"Well..." Megatron trailed off as an idea popped into his processor. "If you want to take care of him so much, you can change his waste tanks. Primus knows I don't want to."

"And I know you don't know how," she retorted. "Seriously, what did you name him?"

"Bumblebee."

"Like the cyberbees in the Crystal Gardens?" Soundwave asked.

"Those things? They're so cute and killable!" Dagger laughed.

Megatron leveled him with a flat stare that had him ducking his helm. "A single sting could hurt at best and kill at worst. Even the most seasoned mech will run from a swarm of them."

"Hm. Don't you have a cyberbee allergy, Dagger?" Soundwave casually jested.

"Oh yes." Megatron rolled with the joke. "What else would explain the sight of you screaming like a aristocratic femme cycle." The black and silver mech spluttered and hissed in embarrassment, eliciting a roar of laughter from the surrounding Cybertronians.

That moment splintered off into another when a loud slurp signaled that Bumblebee was done with his low grade, followed by a tiny burp.

Megatron quickly snatched the bitlet away from Scythe before she could protest and placed him in the pet carrier. "Okay, scraplet. You've had your fun. Time for training."

Suddenly, his peers looked concerned. "Training?" Scythe asked. "Surely the pit master doesn't want you to train a newspark!"

"Then you don't know what he wants," Megatron said. "It's not like I'm going to shove a blade into his servo and say 'destroy the training drones'. He can watch first while I try to get him to stand up."

"That's reasonable for a 1-vorn-old," Soundwave admitted.

"I suppose that's why I'm doing this. Come, on. I think our usual spots are still empty." Megatron got up to head to the training room with Bumblebee while the others followed him.

"And if not," Dagger said, "We can just scare the dumb newbies who thought they could train there!"