Dreams and Swords

Can't manage NaNoing tonight, so I'm dorking around with my Days of Future Past DZ AU. Angstpocalypse!

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Needlenose eyed the circuit laid out in front of him critically. The pattern of its teal leads against the pink semiconductor irritated him. It was ugly, jarring and tangled, almost impossible to set up for a fabber to produce. He couldn't achieve the visual effect he wanted without sacrificing its functionality, and he couldn't make it mass-producible without sacrificing both functionality and aesthetics.

Sure, he could make up for the loss of efficiency by splitting everything across five or six circuits. But they still wouldn't be mass-producible, and they definitely wouldn't be chic.

Besides, Perceptor made fun of him for how many of his Spinister-chips he already had installed.

If he stopped insisting on the colors, he could rearrange the leads to achieve functionality and mass-producibility.

"I like the colors," Needlenose muttered, antennae flicking back.

Putting so many of Spinister's sensor-baffles in one circuit was difficult enough without frivolous patterns and colors.

"If I wanted something completely utilitarian," he snapped, "I'd go to Shockwave."

In another room, he heard and felt Hairsplitter sigh and Sunbeam say, "Dude, you're arguing with Spinister again."

So he was. For years after Spinister's death, he hadn't understood why he couldn't get over the helicopter. He'd had thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lovers throughout his life. Some of them he'd even cared for as much as he had Spinister, and they'd faded from importance inside a year. But Spinister stayed in his head.

Or, rather, Spinister stayed in Singe and Hairsplitter's heads.