Work Text:
Cliffjumper groaned as the elevator started its descent to sublevel 50. The bumpy start nearly caused the sack of tools to slip off his shoulder. He didn't want to imagine what caused lucky smelter number two to clog up. The other three had gotten so bad that they needed someone to go down and get them working again every few shifts. But smelter two had been working perfectly for… quite a long time. Maybe the equipment had been replaced more recently?
It really didn’t matter. Soon it’d be breaking down as often as the rest of them, and Redshift would keep sending him down because she couldn’t take a fragging joke. Seriously, it was like ages ago!
Cliffjumper was about to start planning his revolution to return to the repair rotation when the elevator lurched to a stop, and the door to smelter two hissed open.
Primus, it was hot. The heat always caught him off guard, no matter how many times he came down to this sublevel.
The next thing he noticed was the towering pile of trash spilling over the sides of the conveyor belt and completely clogging the chute. No wonder the smelter was tagged as faulty. He sighed and dropped the tool bag by the door as he walked inside. The conveyor belt wasn’t moving. It had either stopped under the weight or had been the cause of this whole mess. He’d bet it was the latter.
He walked closer to the smelter and started chucking some of the nearby pieces of litter into the fire. If he took too long, the trash could clog the chute and make a bigger mess, so the quicker he was, the better. After throwing in a few handfuls of debris, he was about to get the shovel from the pack when his fingers snagged on something big and heavy.
Maybe this caused the problem. He worked on trying to clear it out. It was unusual for something this size to have made it this far. Normally, sub-level 42 broke down bigger pieces to be more manageable for the furnace. So how did- His mind short-circuited. Was that a shoulder?!
He frantically cleared off the junk, uncaring of whether the trash landed in the furnace or not. As soon as he had moved enough, he hooked his hands under the mech’s plating and dragged them out of the garbage and into the far corner of the room. He propped them up as best he could before taking a moment to recover from the heat and exertion. What’s someone doing down here? How did they-? There’s not even energon? Are they even…?
He slowly turned to get a good look at the mech. They had dull yellowish-gold armour tarnished with soot and heat. When he checked, their eyes had a faint blue glow. Oh, thank Primus, they’re alive. Their spark was lit, but dim. Depending on how long they’d been down here, they shut down from the heat or lack of energon, probably a combination of both.
“Okay, this is fine.” He could do his best to fix that. Energon first. Cliff rummaged through the tool bag for the spare cube, packed away in case fixing the furnaces took too long. When he found it, he put it in the mech’s mouth and held their jaw shut until it had dissolved.
That was one problem fixed. But staying powered wouldn’t do anything if their circuits fried from the heat. There wasn’t any coolant in his bag, but maybe they kept an emergency supply near the furnaces. He pulled back the accordion door to the supply nook. If there was coolant, it would be- It was just full of trash; three vaguely bot-shaped constructs and a string of lights. He double-checked, but there was nothing he could use.
Cliffjumper scowled and slammed the door shut. Fine. No coolant. He could feel his frustration at the situation rise. He needed a clear head for this, so he decided to work it off. He grabbed the shovel from the bag and set to work throwing the trash into the furnace. It was annoying when more junk tumbled out of the chute to dirty the space he just cleared, more so when the occasional piece hit him in the head, but the exertion did its job, and he felt better.
He put down the shovel and thought through his options. Give yourself a moment. Take inventory. The supply closet had nothing but junk, but maybe there was something in his bag he could use. He grabbed the bag and riffled through its contents: a deep-level comm, an extendable rod for knocking stuck garbage out of the shoot, brushes to remove soot and debris, electrical tape for wires, and a couple packs of moldable oxypolymeric. There was the shovel with a collapsible handle he left on the far wall, but that was no help at all.
Cliff frowned. He had been hoping for a bag of detergent, the same heavy-duty stuff they use to clean out the ducts when they’re too clogged with soot. But now that he thought about it, there wasn’t any water down here to make a solution, and it might have been too strong for a mech’s vent system anyway. That sucked. He couldn’t get them coolant, he couldn’t clean their ve… His focus snapped back to the bag as he hunted for the thinnest wire brush cleaner he had.
Victorious, he held it out to the flickering red light of the furnace. Perfect. He practically threw the bag aside as he scrambled to the mech in the other corner. After a couple of tries, he managed to awkwardly hold them so he could reach the vents behind their helm, and by the primes, they were filthy. They were choked with so much soot he couldn’t feel an air flow, even in this heat. As he scrubbed at the sticky mess, he tried to get everything he dislodged to fall to the floor, but even though some fell inside, he told himself it was better to be fast than perfect. He kept cleaning until his arms ached and he could feel a breeze.
He gently eased them to the floor and stepped back. That’s really all he could do for them right now. He returned to chucking trash in the flames. Hopefully, he wasn’t down here for a suspicious amount of time. Being demoted would suck. He kept peeking at the mech while he worked. They had started silently mumbling a while back, but didn’t look anywhere close to consciousness. Eventually, he had finished clearing the conveyor belt. Now he just had to clean the trash off the floor.
He was in the middle of scooping stuff into the smelter when he saw something noticeably shinier glinting in the garbage. It was a gear. No, a pile of gears. They were all different sizes and colors, all cannibalized from different machines, but one looked familiar. He held it up to the side of the conveyor belt. Perfect match. While holding it up, he noticed two things: one, the conveyor belt needed this gear to work, and two, he couldn’t just put it back in because the gear was stripped. Unfortunate, but manageable. He grabbed a pack of moldable oxypolymeric from his bag and tore it open. He did his best to shape the putty into the shape of the missing teeth. He unhooked the gear it was meant to connect to and ran it over the spot a few times. It wasn’t long before the polymer reacted to the oxygen and fully hardened.
He carefully put both gears back and positioned himself by the power switch. He flipped the switch, and the belt groaned back to life. He sighed in relief. The oxypolimeric was always finicky with him. But this time it was going well.
He gathered the last few armfuls of trash as slowly as he dared, but he was still done quickly. He collapsed the shovel handle, put away the wire brush, and tossed the empty oxypolymeric packaging into the fire. He hesitated at the entrance to the lift. The mech was still slumped in the corner to his right. If he listened closely, he could hear their fans whirring. They were definitely doing better now than when he first came in, but he didn’t want to leave them yet. He couldn’t stay for long if he didn’t want to get stuck with the bad jobs, though.
Cliff thought for a moment before taking the extendable rod out of his bag and hiding it away in a corner. He could say he left it behind by accident. Redshift would be upset, but he could come back down with more energon and coolant. It would have to be after the Iacon 500, so maybe the mech would be awake by then, and they could figure out a plan. With that thought, he rode the elevator back up to waste processing.
When he returned, the smelter room was empty.