As the foreman of the oil pumping station walked by, Phillip J. Fry tried desperately to look busy. He grabbed a large wheel in front of him and began to turn.

Leela spotted him and grabbed his arm, hissing for him to stop. “Fry!” she said, her voice somewhere between a whine and a whisper. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I was trying to look busy while the boss passed. Geeze, Leela, I’m really going to have to give you a few lessons in proper slacking!”

“But if you turn that now you’ll get oil all over the place! Weren’t you paying attention when they explained how these things work?”

Fry rolled his eyes and made a wooshing sound between his teeth. “Of course not, Leela! Hello! Professional slacker here!”

“I don’t even understand why we’re here,” Amy Wong said as she approached the other two.

“As I’ve already explained two dozen times,” Leela answered in her most condescending tone, “we’re stuck here in the past until we can find Nibbler again to provide fuel for both the time machine and our space-ship, and as long as we’re stuck here, we all had to get jobs and try to blend in!”

Amy Wong’s face scrunched up in confusion. “Actually, I already knew that. It’s as if I were suddenly compelled to claim I didn’t, so that you could provide some sort of exposition or something.”

“Wait a minute, guys! You’re forgetting about Bender! We need to find him, too!” Fry pointed out.

“I suppose,” Leela sighed, covering her face and most of her single, large eye with her hand. “After all, who knows how badly he’ll screw up the future if we leave him here.” The cyclops then lowered her hand and sighed. “I just hope poor Nibbler wasn’t captured by those horrible, fuel stealing, alien robot invaders Earth has during this time!”

“What are you talking about?” Fry asked, baffled. “Earth doesn’t have any alien robots yet! I know! This is my home!”

“Of course they do!” Amy Wong argued. “Everyone knows that! There are all sorts of surviving news footage of the invaders, the Decepticons, and the heroic alien Autobots who stopped them!”

Fry stared blankly at Amy for several long moments, his jaw slack and his mouth hanging open. Then, finally, he burst out laughing so hard he was forced to lean against the control wheel for support. This caused the wheel to leak a small amount of oil onto the grass, which later caused a horrible fire that would burn for the next decade, but that’s not really important.

Finally, Fry stopped laughing. “Those weren’t real, Amy! That was a TV series based off a toy line! It was great, you had Optimus Prime, and the Autobots, and Megatron, and they’d always fight, and then the Autobots would win and Megatron would shout-“

“Decepticons! Retreat!” came a grating, metallic voice from far enough in the distance that even giant robots involved in an cosmic clash would look like randomly scrawled dots in a coloring book.

“Right!” Fry cried, jubilantly. Leela, who had wandered a bit away from the others during the conversation, was already turning around, as were the rest of the workers. They craned to see what was going on, but they didn’t have to strain for long, for the whole of the Decepticon army was running right at them!

“Wow! Those are some toys!” Amy exclaimed, impressed, before Leela grabbed both her and Fry and shoved them behind cover. The three crouched together as a horde of terrified Decepticons stampeded past. Then, just when they thought it was over, a stampede of horrified Autobots horded past! Finally, when all the giant robot stampeding and hording was done with, the three dared to look out from their cover.

“Nibbler!” Leela cried out in joy as her strange, alien, fuel-pooping pet ambled up, a few flecks of metal around his mouth indicating that he had not gone hungry since his arrival in the past. As soon as Nibbler spotted Leela, he scampered up to her and leapt into her arms, where-upon she commenced cuddling and fussing over him. “There you are, my little schnoockums! There’s my boy! There’s my sweet little dear!”

Just then, Bender came running up. His arms were stretched out towards the departing Transformers. “Wait! Wait for me!” he cried out mournfully. When it became apparent that they would do no such thing, his arms dropped to his sides and his head drooped. He stood there and made a sobbing noise, a broken robot. “Ooooo! It was always my dream to join the Decepticons and help conquer the universe!”

“I thought your dream was to become a robo-pimp on Monacus, surrounded by sexy, moneymaking robo-whores?” Fry asked.

“Hey, that’s right!” Bender answered, instantly cheered.

“Too bad you’re never going to accomplish that, either,” Amy Wong observed.

Bender’s arms dropped to his sides and his head drooped. He stood there and made a sobbing noise, a broken robot. “Ooooo!”

“Come on back to the spaceship, Bender,” Fry said as he put his arm around his mechanical friend’s shoulders. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

“Free beer? All right!” Bender answered, instantly cheered.

The group of them headed back to their carefully hidden (read: sitting in the middle of a few shrubs) space craft. As they left, they passed by the foreman, who watched them go. As soon as the group was off camera, the foreman turned to the nearest yellow-hatted worker and asked, “Who the hell were those four-fingered freaks?”