"Yes?" Knock Out agrees quizzically, not understanding the source of her confusion. "I told you that the day we met. It's not the same as—"
He stops, mentally replaying his last remark back to himself, and then ex-vents a loud, exasperated huff. "Primus save me from languages without modifiers. English really does just tack any random suffix onto a word and call it a day, doesn't it? Where is that phone we bought? I have an idea."
While she retrieves the cell, Knock Out offers a heavily condensed explanation. "Velocitron was one of Cybertron's colony worlds. A cyberformed planet, given its own Well of Sparks, pioneered by the Titan-class mech called Navitas."
When she returns with the phone, he takes it and connects it to a cable that snakes out from beneath his plating — the same one that he uses to charge the device while he was in vehicle mode. Whatever he does isn't visible, but when he hands it back to Rogue, there is a new program on the screen.
"All right, let's try this. My species is Cybertronian," he begins, and an alien glyph immediately pops up on the phone's screen. Underneath it offers an English set of translations: species/order[taxonomy]/identification[personal/collective].
"My 'nationality', if you will, is Velocitronian," he continues, and the phone displays a new glyph along with subspecies/genus[taxonomy]/identification[personal/collective]. "Though Velocitronians are physically distinct from homeworld Cybertronians—" The glyphs change again to accommodate. Every time he uses the words in a different context, the glyphs update accordingly, even though in English, it's the same spoken term.
"However I immigrated to Cybertron, so my residency status is legally Cybertronian... you see where we start running into a problem in English?" he deadpans.
no subject
He stops, mentally replaying his last remark back to himself, and then ex-vents a loud, exasperated huff. "Primus save me from languages without modifiers. English really does just tack any random suffix onto a word and call it a day, doesn't it? Where is that phone we bought? I have an idea."
While she retrieves the cell, Knock Out offers a heavily condensed explanation. "Velocitron was one of Cybertron's colony worlds. A cyberformed planet, given its own Well of Sparks, pioneered by the Titan-class mech called Navitas."
When she returns with the phone, he takes it and connects it to a cable that snakes out from beneath his plating — the same one that he uses to charge the device while he was in vehicle mode. Whatever he does isn't visible, but when he hands it back to Rogue, there is a new program on the screen.
"All right, let's try this. My species is Cybertronian," he begins, and an alien glyph immediately pops up on the phone's screen. Underneath it offers an English set of translations: species/order[taxonomy]/identification[personal/collective].
"My 'nationality', if you will, is Velocitronian," he continues, and the phone displays a new glyph along with subspecies/genus[taxonomy]/identification[personal/collective]. "Though Velocitronians are physically distinct from homeworld Cybertronians—" The glyphs change again to accommodate. Every time he uses the words in a different context, the glyphs update accordingly, even though in English, it's the same spoken term.
"However I immigrated to Cybertron, so my residency status is legally Cybertronian... you see where we start running into a problem in English?" he deadpans.