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"Fight me! You slaggin' fraggin' scrappin'... brag. Yeah! You're a brag! Now fight me!"
Whirl being drunk was not an uncommon circumstance. He liked drinking, and Swerve was usually happy to fill him up with all sorts of fun new concoctions that were majorly flammable and had a kick like... like. Something kicky. He knew that he tended to lose a bit of his self-control (not that he needed any; he rarely did anything he didn't mean to do) when drunk, but, in his defence, Fortress Maximus' helmet had looked at him really annoyingly.
And much to his greater annoyance, Fortress Maximus (Fartress Fartimus. Man, Whirl had to remember that one for later) kept refusing. Giant mech with guns in his legs, and he just kept insisting on sitting with those tiny fluffy helpless things he'd found instead. Waste of good guns, in Whirl's honest and entirely correct opinion. So, he was trying to get Fortress Maximus to use those guns for something, even if that was on him. And also to get revenge against his helmet. Which, frankly, was frankly a stupid frankly hat.
Whirl waved his claws at the two Fortress Maximuses spinning in front of him, and managed to dodge the nearby wall's surprise attack. "What, you scared? 'Fraid you're gonna get your aft kicked by an ex-Wrecker? Come at me!"
He had managed to get one claw around one of the Maximas' dumb head-antenna when he was suddenly picked up by a large hand around his neck.
"Whoo, fight!" Whirl whooped, and did a valiant attempt at punching the arm that held him. It was about as effective as trying to punch something... something big and hard that wasn't usually punchy, but he was willing to give it a try regardless. He was the best at punching.
About then he realised that he was moving through the air. But not thrown, because he still had the hand around his neck, and also a Fortress Maximus was taking up most of his view. Had someone set off an explosion without him? Rude. He needed to go yell at Brainstorm to make him a bigger gun so he could shoot whoever was blowing up stuff without him.
And then there was suddenly a lot of bright light, and he had to squint his optic to avoid being blinded. There was wind, and something plantish, and, ah. The Maximus Fort had taken him outside. Right. They had landed on a planet that had a lot of energon-equivalent rich soil, and that was why Whirl had been drinking. To celebrate their discovery. (A new universe had a lot of planets no one had discovered yet, so they had a lot of celebrations. Whirl loved this universe.)
That was about when the sky appeared under his feet for a brief moment before everything went dark and his head started hurting a lot.
"Slaggin' fragger," Whirl said, mostly to say something, and tried to punch the darkness, only to find his arms almost immobilised. "Fraggin' slagger," he added, for emphasis, and kicked his legs, finding them unrestrained.
It took him a bit to make sense of his internal readings, because the dumb things kept being all wobbly and wavery and having way too many numbers and letters on them, but eventually he managed to intelligently deduce that he had been stuck upside-down in a hole in the ground. Like some kind of... of thing that went into the ground. Some Earth thing. Sounded like hippopotamus, but less hip. Or was it more hip?
Whirl kicked his legs some more.
... He really should have finished his drink before trying to fight the Fortress Maximusses. Fortresses Maximus? He had to ask Minimus what the correct plural form was so he could make sure to keep using the wrong one. At least there was something oddly comfortable about being in the ground. Like a hug, but without the whole having-arms-around-you thing.
"Whirl?" said Tailgate's voice from somewhere in the vicinity of his kneecaps, which was where it usually was, but not when Whirl was the wrong side up. "... Why are you in the ground?"
"Legs! Shhhh-sh-shshhsh-shhhhsh," Whirl replied, spitting oral lubricant all over his hole.
"?" asked Tailgate.
Whirl lowered his voice conspiratorially, and, realising Tailgate could not hear him, raised it again. "It's all part of my master plan. Everything's going according to keikaku."
"??" said Tailgate, and Whirl snickered to himself at the utterly untypesettable noise of a confused mechanoid broadcasting said confusion almost entirely through their personal electro-magnetic field.
"Scrap," Whirl agreed, and kicked his legs again. He could just about wiggle his arms by now. Soon, he'd be free, and then he'd go shake dirt all over the hallways. Watching the drones try to hoover up dirt while he used them as target practise was always worth a laugh.
That was, until he realised that Tailgate had gone silent, but not gone gone. He paused his kicking and listened, confused at the soft scratching he heard. Like some kind of... scratchy thing.
"Whatcha doin', Legs?" he asked.
"Helping with your master plan!" Tailgate replied in an excited whisper.
Whirl had to pause and mentally rewind the conversation several dozen steps to figure out what Tailgate was on about, and by the time he had managed, the scratching had stopped, and instead there was a very metal-on-dirt sound like the noises Whirl made when he kicked his legs. He kicked said legs to check, and, yep, the sound was similar.
Curiosity getting the better of him, he rotated his knees the way that most of the bots onboard hated when he did, planted both feet on the ground, and pulled hard. He would definitely need to pester someone to give him a backrub later, judging by the resulting ache in his spine and neck, but he managed to pull himself out of the ground with what was sadly nowhere near a 'pop', and promptly fell backwards onto his aft when his internal gyroscope decided to give up on figuring out which way gravity went.
There was a nice, Whirl-sized hole straight into the ground, and, next to it, Tailgate's legs sticking up out of a different hole. Whirl thought about pinching them, until he realised Tailgate's legs were all floppy-relaxed.
"Legs?!" he asked nervously, forcefully snapping on his FIM chip and wincing when the nice buzzy feeling in his processor disappeared and let him know that, in fact, his head hurt a lot more than it ought to. Stupid Fortresi Maximi planting him in the ground like that.
Tailgate's hole made a weird, warbling noise. It sounded similar to that one time he, Cyclonus, and Whirl had gotten into the high-grade in their hab suite, and Cyclonus had decided to demonstrate something on Tailgate that had probably been illegal for eight billion years for being way too sexy. Which at least meant that Tailgate was not in any imminent danger, so Whirl nipped at his feet until he got a response.
"This is so nice!" Tailgate groaned in bliss, not even seeming to care that Whirl was wiggling one of his pedes.
Whirl wiggled it some more. "What, being buried like a potato?"
"Mhm. What's a pot of eight o's?"
"Nevermind that," Whirl said, and sent out a personal comm. He needed more sensible backup. "Yo, Cyclonus, you gotta come pick up Tailgate. He's being weird about dirt."
In hindsight, he could probably have phrased it better. But at least it meant that it barely took any time at all before Cyclonus skitted to stop beside him, feet leaving long gouges in the ground from his rapid deacceleration. Whirl almost felt like applauding Cyclonus for somehow managing to not go tumbling aft over helm in the process, but settled for waving Tailgate's foot at him instead.
"What happened?" Cyclonus asked after a brief moment of taking in the scene. Which, for Cyclonus, was pretty much the same as having to scrape his jaw off the floor.
"Cy! You've gotta try this!" Tailgate squealed from the ground. "It feels so good to be a pot of eight o's!"
Whirl shrugged when he got a red-eyed stare that he only knew was puzzled thanks to long-term experience picking apart the minutiae of Cyclonus' expressions. "It does, actually," he said.
"Hm."
Cyclonus gave the ground a very thoughtful glare and then, to Whirl's surprise, squatted down and started widening the hole Whirl had been in. Very systematically, very mechanically, and very efficiently for someone whose alt-mode was a jet, and whose primary mode got incredibly cross when someone got dirt in his seams. And then, to make matters worse, Cyclonus stuffed himself head-first into said hole.
"You're both weird. I'm gonna go bother First Aid," Whirl said, gave both sets of legs a pinch to show he never the less cared for the dirt-loving weirdos, and headed to the medibay.
There was no First Aid to bother, but Velocity was nice enough to set Whirl up with a couple of painkiller apps and a new gyroscope to replace his broken one. This one had numbers that glowed in the dark.
So chuffed that he did not even bother shooting at the drones trying to clean up after his trek in, he headed back outside to show off his new addition, only to having to pause and stare. Then reset his optic, rub at it for good measure, and stare some more as he tried to make sense of the insanity he was witnessing.
"... Whut?" he eventually settled for, once he had done a thorough search of every swear word he knew and found that they all came up short at the sight of dozens of legs sticking out of the ground.
Brainstorm was waving around some kind of scientific doohickey around two sets of legs that belonged to Perceptor and Nautica, if Whirl was to judge from the colours, and also utterly ignoring Whirl's attempt at getting his attention. Not wanting to bother The Creator Of Really Fun Guns too much, 'lest Whirl lost his status as Preferred Tester, Whirl wandered over to where Needles had pulled himself out of the ground and was now staring at the hole—probably still containing the other half of the lovebirds—with the same confusion as Whirl felt.
It took about an hour before the smart brains onboard came up with an answer—and after Whirl had, purely out of scientific curiosity, stuck himself into a hole again and concluded that it did feel just as nice as before. Even better when he found out that he could burrow a bit sideways with his claws and hold Tailgate and Cyclonus' hands without having to go above ground again.
For some reason, any bot that had come from a hotspot on Cybertron found it comfortable to be buried underground in metal-rich soil. The medics had theories about sparks containing some memories of emerging, the scientists had theories about it being related to the specific types of metal, and all the cold constructed onboard were left utterly befuddled about the whole situation.
And if Whirl happened to smuggle a few crates of the dirt onboard, and also got a tub big enough for three mechs to lie down in, and also happened to sometimes engage in pot-of-eight-o's time with Tailgate and Cyclonus? Well, that was his business and his business alone.