Credit to @keferon for creating the tf mecha AU!
The door behind the tactician hissed shut, isolating him from the outside world.
Prowl had a short walk, 11.2 clicks, to the communications terminal. He took exactly as long as was necessary. Not a click sooner.
Injury warning messages were manually silenced. He’d neglected his own self repair for lower priority tasks before. This was no different.
Shutting Tacnet off from working on the Jazz Mystery was a greater struggle. It’d been so long since Prowl had gotten to work through a puzzle like this, it had him booting up long dormant scripts he hadn’t used since working as a detective. The mental stretching warmed him up. It felt good. But it wasn’t what was currently required of him. He shut off that branch of his processor too.
Like packing up his room, Prowl “got into uniform”.
Optic hue shifted to within the parameters of the socially accepted spectrum.
Doorwings lifted high and almost pressed together, neither spread out in intimidation nor lowered in submission.
Helm tiled forward 24 degrees to cast the maximum level of shadow over his features while not obscuring vision.
Prowl reached the terminal like a silent storm.
He nodded the minimum angle required to be interpreted as bowing for the manifestation of War resolving on the screen.
He glared from beneath his chevron, pricks of light in a darkened room.
The course of action Megatron required tactical support for was frankly amateur. The solution incredibly simple.
Sentinel Prime had once more prodded the leader of the revolution into a vengeful fury, so now Megatron wanted to, of course, retaliate violently.
The correct course of action was to not engage.
It was clearly a trap designed to whittle away their limited resources, which would have been idiotic even if the Quintessons were not a factor in the equation. Since they were however, it lowered Prowls opinion of both leaders even further that they’d even considered reigniting the civil war at a time like this.
No, what truly challenged Prowls strategic prowess wasn’t the request itself, but how to tell Megatron “That is an idiotic idea and how dare you expect me to entertain it.”
The trick, after much trial and error, was to not tell him at all.
“There are 24 optimal targets for a retaliatory attack Lord Megatron. 8 of which would yield material gain if taken and 3 of which would yield additional territory.”
All three of the territorial land grabs overlapped with the material gains category. However, when phrased correctly, it both implied even more options for Megatron to pick through and forced him to choose from plans Prowl had decided in advance.
Megatron gave the illusion of consideration.
He selected the land grab options, for the obvious purpose of irking the standing Prime. It took one to know one and megalomaniacs despised having their property made smaller. Stolen goods were numbers on a page. A map was a picture of what was lost.
“Very well. For the most expedient retaliatory strike, the mining depot on ES 9-B33 will be ideal for your conquering.”
Prowl had the mining depot mission lined up for close to a vorn. It was on the edge of Cybertronian territory, minimally guarded and would provide the Decepticons with a cache of ever needed raw materials. And while it was a great boon for their small faction, to the sprawling colonial power of Cybertron, it was hardly worth notice.
Which meant Sentinel and the Functionalist government shouldn’t waste resources on restarting the Civil war (66%).
Megatron, satisfied in his ignorance, ordered Prowl to draw up the assault plans immediately.
Prowl was sorely tempted to tell the deception to “do it himself” and not just to get him out of the picture for a time.
It was a very rare thing for Tacnet to come up with 100% certainty. However, Prowl could say, with terrible absolute certainty, that nothing short of a true Prime, or maybe an exploding star, could take Megatron in a fight.
The mech had forced Prowl to reset his parameters of what a cybertronian could physically survive no less than 13 times. At least 5 of those being assassination attempts from Starscream, whose preferred method of execution was “beyond all reasonable restraint.”
Until further notice, Megatron was an immovable piece of the board that required skillful circumvention.
“The plan will be drafted in 4 breems Lord Megatron.” Prowl dipped his helm and did not break eye contact until the screen went dark.
Prowl connected to the communications system, pinging Soundwave for the most recent updates on ES 9-B33, layering the new information over his original outline.
Once received, it required only a fractional amount of processing power to run through which decepticons were available for action, filter out those not suited for the job and sort the minutiae of coordinating supply ships to reroute to arrive at the depot as the assault team would be wrapping up.
Will softened by boredom, temptation won out and Prowl turned the bulk his processing power to Jazz.
Details laid out plainly, it painted a concerning picture.
Jazz was a highly skilled combatant, he solely exists to kill Quintessons by his own admission.
Jazz speaks a language neither Prowl nor Bluestreak have ever encountered, Jazz himself having never interacted with Common, let alone standard Cybertronian.
Jazz was exceptionally sociable, even going as far as to try and play card games with hostile organics. Yet even pressed chassis to chassis, not once did Prowl detect an EM field.
And he’s a shameless flirt.
Jazz had many unusual physical attributes, such as abnormal ranges of motion, multi jointed legs, and in spite of all his injuries, Prowl hadn’t seen so much as a drop of energon.
Jazz possessed a disturbingly high pain tolerance, and was at best accustomed to substandard medical treatment, if not outright abuse.
And he’s never felt a kind touch before.
When Bluestreak had asked about him, Prowl had told his brother that Jazz was an alien mechanical lifeform and to not harass him unnecessarily. Between his physical bizarreness and lack of common knowledge among cybertronians, it was a natural conclusion.
But something hadn’t been quite right ever since Prowl had rescued the mech. There was this nagging inconsistency with Jazz’s behavior.
He was very curious about Prowl, yet seemed far more in awe of the other alien life forms and ships they’d been traveling with. There was also the immediate (and somewhat overwhelming) familiarity with which Jazz conducted himself around Prowl.
Jazz doesn’t consider Prowl to be alien (88%).
If he thinks Prowl is the same species as him, then would that mean Jazz doesn’t realize he’s the alien?
An alternate, unpleasant theory began to weave.
Unless Jazz isn’t an alien at all.
Prowl finished the assault plan and sent it with a harsh hand. Re-opening his comms to the backlog of messages from Bluestreak, he scrolled back to something his brother had said when he’d been repairing Jazz’s visor.
BLUESTREAK: [WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF.]
PROWL: [Please do not comment aloud.]
BLUESTREAK: [Is he really fully in recharge? Just like that?]
PROWL: [No. Jazz is still conscious. He’s not completely limp either just… very sedated.]
BLUESTREAK: [Just from holding his face? C’mon Prowl, that’s weird. This is weird. You found a weird, weird mech who definitely has a thing for you.]
PROWL: [He does not have a “thing” for me.]
BLUESTREAK: [Oh yeah? What are you getting from his EM field then?]
PROWL: [Nothing. He doesn’t have an EM field Bluestreak. Jazz is an alien and likely doesn’t have all the same traits as a cybertronian.]
BLUESTREAK: [Are you sure? I mean, the anesthetic worked fine. And he looks pretty cybertronian to me.]
BLUESTREAK: [Maybe he has field atrophy? You had that once. I couldn’t feel you even if I was touching you.]
That was when Prowl had been apart of the decepticon High Command. He’d spent multiple Vorn isolating himself, doing nothing but churning through battle plans and inventory logs and reconnaissance reports with little rest. Then there was the first time he crashed.
A minor setback at first. Almost immediately Prowl went back to work. Over and over again, he’d bypass previous limitations of the decepticon military. With each success, the bar was placed a little higher, with is successive crash, the recovery took a little longer.
There were always improvements to be made. He’d long moved on from the most needed structural changes to continuously finer tuned modifications to how the entire faction operated. He sharpened Megatrons rebellion scrap into keen edged blades.
Prowl did anything for the edge.
Even down to the smallest percent.
Even down to the smallest decimal point of a percent.
At Prowls worse, when he had just started to tip over to spending the majority (51%) of his waking time in recovery from continuous Crashes, he had come up with a strategy that would give the decepticons a 0.04% advantage in the long run against the Quintessons.
Repairing critically damaged ships was not cost effective. If a ship’s structural integrity fell beneath 14%, Prowl had instituted a script to cause the ship to self destruct. Therefore causing maximum damage to surrounding attackers in a final blow.
Prowl stared at his reflection in the black glass.
You couldn’t see the break in his nose anymore, Smokescreen had punched him in the medbay so it was fixed fairly quickly.
Bluestreak was stuck in the medbay for a quarter of a Vorn.
Prowl straightened, optics returning to his default blue. The injury warning messages eeked back into his processor, causing his doorwings to shake briefly before Prowl allowed them to drop.
If the Functionalists had someone like him in their employ, then Jazz may not be an alien at all.
To all the folks who picked up on the clues, good job! There’s no Optimus and there’s no Autobots. Yet.
There’s more to how Prowl got into his current situation later and I’m sure Jazz will be “totally cool” with Prowls past life choices. And current life choices. And general sense of ethics.
Bluestreak knows Prowl’s responsible for blowing him up and uses it to blackmail him constantly once their relationship got better again.
(Cybertronian timescales are weird, but a Vorn is basically a “year” for them, and fifty years for a human. A breem is pretty consistently 8 minutes.)
pixelskylines
izzy806
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
vaporwave
areudirty
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind