He'd always been fascinated by mechanics, always wondered what made them tick. Between taking apart and putting back together the wind-up clockwork toys he had when he was little, to examining- and sometimes even fixing- old, broken tech when he was a teen, he had always held that love, that fascination, that obsession with mechanics.

His first job was an internship at a small robotics lab near where he lived. Every day he'd go, and, as he worked, he'd often find himself looking at whatever was being designed, and trying to think of small ways to make it bette, just as a thought experiment. Maybe connecting those two spots would be more efficient, or maybe moving that thing to the other side would aid in the robot's balance.

As he did these little thought experiments, he slowly built up a stronger and stronger idea of what the 'perfect' robot would be. He imagined what, in his mind, was the most efficient, most graceful, smartest being that could be created with modern technology. Hell, it was probably the best being that could exist.

Page after page of his sketchbook was filled up with drawings of systems and mechanics and clockwork and blueprints, the products of a mind flooded with an idea. The perfect being, superhuman even. Above anything any human could hope to achieve.

Of course, that meant it couldn't be him. He was only human. He was imperfect.

The first time that thought crossed his mind, he brushed it off, and went back to the blueprint he was designing for a more efficient pump system to move coolant around the robot just a smidgen quicker. The idea lingered, but he ignored it for the most part, and went back to his theoretical designs.

The second time the thought crossed his mind, he had been flipping through one of his old schoolbooks, from biology class, smiling at the cheeky little doodles in the margins and the scrawls of the code that he and an old friend had made up. He had come upon a diagram of an eye, and scrawled next to it, in his handwriting, was 'my camera could do better lol'. Still, he ignored the feeling of imperfection. Yes, he was human, yes, he was flawed, but that wasn't a bad thing. Probably.

The thought didn't cross his mind for a while, after that. He made a bunch of close friends, started a world, Moonlight, with them, and everything was looking up. It could have been said that he led the perfect life, except for the part where he knew he didn't, where he knew that there was imperfection.

But still, in the end, the thought did end up crossing his mind yet a third time. It was when he was running some silly little race with the others. He was in the lead, until he tripped over his own feet. As he roughly pushed himself up, he realised how imperfect, how inefficient his movements were. Distracted as he was, he lost the race.

When Impulse punched him lightly on the arm to tease him about losing, he barely registered it, the figurative cogs of his mind working on a way to become more literal. When Graph and Sarc laughed about how the race had essentially flipped, he didn't hear over the whirring of his thoughts. When Zed accepted the reward for winning (a block of pink wool), Tango's mind was elsewhere entirely.

He had to become mechanical.

He had to become perfect.

Somehow.

Just a short little Robot!Tango idea. I think I might continue it tomorrow (or even later today) because brainrot.

As for why there were no uploads last week, well. We've begun working on something. More specifically, the return. Hype!

I've been Entropy, peace out from the present!