After a couple hours of looking, I found a clearing in the middle of a forest, a ways up a dirt road that didn’t look like it saw much use. This looked like just the place to try to work out how to change.

When my Grandpa was a kid, there were these automech toys—Reformers, or Transfusers, or something. Grandpa had a big collection, and when I was a kid I used to go over to his place and play with them. I liked to try to figure out how they changed without reading the instructions. The real old toys were easy—they were just bricks with arms and legs you pulled out. But the newer ones, after toy designers started using CAD to engineer them, got harder and harder. More and more complicated, with lots of moving parts.

I’d kind of hoped my experience at puzzling them out would help in my current predicament. But working out how to turn a toy car into a robot sure is a lot harder when you’re that toy car. On the bright side, at least I wasn’t made of cheap plastic that would break when I got it wrong.