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If Jazz was good at anything, it was compartmentalization.
Despite that, his systems were running several alert levels higher than baseline, rushing power to movement and sensory systems, gearing up for a fight that hadn’t come. Ruthlessly, he smothered it down, repeatedly dismissing alerts and executing manual overrides to try and wrangle things back under control. Though a combination of his silent-running mods, long practice with EM field manipulation, and the fact that he was in alt mode meant that his agitation was likely impossible to perceive from the outside, the fact that it was there in the first place was extremely fragging annoying.
His structure was wildly different in alt compared to root mode, and his sensory systems obviously changed to match. But he could feel the hint of tackiness on the end of digits he didn’t currently have, and the impossible scent of internal energon floated through his olfactory system, though the speed of his driving would whip any scent away before he could possibly perceive it.
In the privacy of the open road, sensors picking up nothing but open landscape around him, Jazz indulged in a frustrated growl of his engine.
It just didn’t make any fragging sense.
Jazz had been dealing with summoners for a long time. His frametype, mods, and skill set leant themselves to most things sneaky or dubious, and that had guaranteed he never went too long without a contract. And time after time, for megavorn, certain patterns had become apparent in the behavior of summoners.
Sometimes they were cowardly, shocked at their own daring for having summoned a demon at at all. As soon as Jazz completed these kinds of contracts, they immediately cut all contact, evidently trying to put the whole thing behind them as quickly as possible. Occasionally, contracts cut out much before that point, and Jazz didn’t even have to finish a job before he was turned loose, free to do whatever he wanted for as long as he could last without fresh sacrifice to increase his timer. He always found these kinds of summoners equally amusing and pathetic, unable to commit to their own courses of action and acting as if turning a blind optic to what they had already done would erase it.
Other times, summonings were meticulously transactional. He was paid proportionally to whatever task he was ordered to complete, measured by metrics unique to each new mech. Sometimes these summoners would offer additional jobs after the completion of the first, and each side of the contract knew exactly what they were getting into every step of the way. Jazz had had a few repeat customers, as it were - politicians who wanted rivals or dirty secrets assassinated, collectors who wanted artifacts and valuables beyond their reach, people like that - who recruited him as someone for the job that was near-impossible to trace. These summoners were pretty boring, honestly, as Jazz was fully aware he was just a means to an end, able to be swapped out for any other demon that could get things done. But sometimes the jobs themselves were an entertaining enough way to pass the time, and he often had freedom at the end of a job to get up to a little mayhem to boost his mood.
Then there were the greedy ones; the ones who got a taste of power from issuing a command and watching as it was completed to their specifications. These were the ones most likely to go for layers of rules and bindings, attempting to lock down a demon into complete control that was impossible to escape from. Jazz didn’t often refuse a contract, as very few things put him truly at risk, and he had little moral objection to a murder or a theft or whatever, when he was barely ever physical long enough to witness the repercussions of his actions in the metal. But if a contractor tried to remove his ability to refuse through poorly understood Primal Vernacular and imprecise Neo Cybex commands, Jazz immediately shut that frelling down. A contract was always some degree of give and take, and the moment a summoner tried to leverage more control than Jazz was willing to permit, that summoner forfeited their right to remain functioning. The appeal of a physical frame was nowhere near enough to give up what little independence the nature of his existence allowed for, and he was not the kind to give second chances to those who wronged him.
But then there was Prowl. And Prowl made no Pit-damned sense.
He obviously wasn’t a coward. Jazz hadn’t worked under one contractor for this amount of consecutive time… ever, probably. The Praxian always had another job for him, or, more often, several to choose from. And they weren’t frivolous little nothing jobs, either, letting Jazz stretch his skills in a way that threatened to be fun. And not once had Prowl flinched from offering sacrifice, consigning many mechs to death, and to never reach the coveted “oneness of the afterspark”, too, if you believed the more religious of their species. Jazz had never had so many sparks so readily available whenever he wanted, as the practical difficulties of procuring a live mech for a demon to tear open often made summoners reluctant to put themselves that much closer to discovery.
But Prowl had undone even that, handing over a bit of tech that had to be cutting edge - or else the landscape of conflict would have changed entirely - like it wasn’t anything at all. Jazz had eaten more sparks in the past vorn than in nearly the entirety of his life. The potency of the energy sustaining his frame was intense and lingering, and he had only ghosted once since that first meeting in Staniz. And even then, Prowl had correctly interpreted his instinctual emergency message as he was discorporating and almost immediately brought him right back.
Jazz felt a pang of unease at how his executive suite had immediately taken the route of calling a mech that he had known for an incredibly short length of time - and a summoner at that, with all the baggage that entailed - and sending a cry for help of all things. Prowl hadn’t even addressed the message at all, though Jazz’s processor was still spinning from the foolish show of sentimentality. Weaknesses like that were swiftly and viciously taken advantage of in Jazz’s experience; Pit, he had done it himself. But Prowl had just… teased. And Jazz couldn’t even challenge the mech to demand what he was thinking because Jazz had been overwhelmed with the rewritten invocation because-
Because what was the angle?
Prowl had thus far given over control of the influx of sacrifice, and never once had tried to limit the flow at all. He hadn’t even insisted Jazz run job after job tirelessly in exchange, and had in fact gone out of his way to offer downtime that Jazz didn’t really even need. He was suspiciously accommodating, seeming to give more and more away without asking for reciprocal exchange. But who did that? Who put all of this effort into a stranger, from a species known for their violence and trickery, not only giving them payment for their work but also fragging- everything else? Jazz had a whole useless hab suite, and an established identity among normal mechs, and so much unsupervised, unrestricted time that he didn’t know what to do with himself. Jazz practically came to Prowl with a warning label built in; his summoning blueprint advertised that he would lie and cheat and manipulate, and yet Prowl seemed to accept anything that Jazz told him. Jazz wasn’t dense enough to think that Prowl genuinely believed everything Jazz said, but every action the Praxian had made seemed to be as if he did accept the lies that Jazz told, that Prowl knew he was telling. It was frelling ridiculous. It was a stupid farcical dance of “I know you know I know” and Jazz was left just anticipating the inevitable fallout when Prowl stopped the charade.
And on top of that, Prowl hadn’t even given any kind of order to prevent Jazz from betraying him in any way. Forget just the standard threat of physical harm; Jazz could enumerate exactly what Prowl was doing to the whole of Autobot High Command: the unauthorized assassinations, the collection and refinement of controlled substances, the creation and usage of technology that could be described as ethically dubious at best, and that was without even getting into the whole employs-spawn-of-Unicron thing. Jazz could ruin Prowl, and it wouldn’t even be hard.
And Prowl just kept making that even easier with every move. Jazz had been claws deep in his fragging chassis and Prowl hadn’t even ordered him to stop. He had struggled and glared, but they both knew there wasn’t a chance he could get out of the demon’s grip on strength alone if Jazz didn’t let him. And then Prowl had said those fragging Pit-damned words, saying that Jazz didn’t want to kill him, and in that moment Jazz had realized it was true.
This was the worst frelling part of the whole slagheap. Something had worked its way into Jazz’s systems like a line of bad code, sending cascades of errors that made him behave entirely against his instincts and his understanding of the world. If a demon didn’t keep a summoner in check, the summoner could bind them into such a trap that would make existence torturous. Frame death wouldn’t even be a way out, as, if a summoner had enough identifying glyphs and necessary resources, a summoner could keep calling a demon back over and over into the physical world until there was no chance at any kind of existence without obedience. Incorporeal demon networks spread the news every time it became known that one of their kind had fallen into this kind of trap, and normally it wasn’t long before some other embodied demon just-so-happened to eliminate the rogue summoner to prevent them from making any further contracts. No one wanted to risk that they’d be next in the blueprint with that kind of person in control.
Jazz had never gotten cornered like that. Before this, he believed he that he never possibly could. But if his processor was ignoring all the very pertinent information from his logical center and pushing him into reckless, out-of-character actions, then maybe he wasn’t as above it as he thought.
There just had to be a trick, or a manipulation, or a trap of some kind. Maybe Prowl wanted to make Jazz believe that he wouldn’t take advantage, and then when his guard was down Prowl would find a way to ensnare him completely. Processor like Prowl’s, he might even be actually able to make a contract Jazz would struggle to loophole his way out of, and that was no minor thing.
There had to be a catch. Just because Jazz couldn’t immediately see it, didn’t mean it wasn’t there. The alternative was just too impossible to comprehend.
The road rushed by beneath his repulsors, eating away at the distance between him and his target. The blank emptiness gave him nothing to do but dwell, and he was far from untangling the mess in his processor. Once, a mech came into his extremely sensitive audial range, and within a few moments he had rippled his paint into dull browns and stretched the edges of his plating into different shapes. The chances that one mech driving in the opposite direction would have any impact on his mission was negligible at best, but there was no point being careless.
When the mech passed, he relaxed the shapeshifting, and fell back into the monotony of a long drive with nothing to distract him from his unsettled thoughts.
—
Jazz was a little ways past Uraya when he felt the signal, a little pulsing flare of demonic presence at the edge of his senses.
He couldn’t restrain himself from a small frustrated noise at Mirage’s absolutely fragging terrible timing.
Immediately, he doubled down on smoothing out his emotional subsystem, knowing that EM field control alone wouldn’t be enough to hide his disquiet from any of his team, and certainly not one as perceptive as Mirage. As soon as he was confident nothing would come across as abnormal, he flared his presence in the other-sense in the established pattern, letting it be known that he had noticed the signal and was free to respond.
He felt the flicker of acknowledgement, and then felt the distance between then begin to close. Slag. Of course one of his team would show up at the moment he least wanted someone else around. That was just his luck.
It wasn’t far to Polyhex and therefore his target, but at the speed the other demon was approaching, he would have no excuse to avoid responding if - and likely, when - Mirage noticed his current state of agitation. Sometimes he questioned if it was really worth it, foregoing privacy to hang around busybodies like his team all the time. But even as he thought it, he had to admit to himself that they had had his back in situations where he’d have a rough time making it out on his own, and that that was worth nosy fraggers shoving their way into his business from time to time.
Even though he hated it right about now.
As he had predicted, Mirage caught up with him when he was still a ways outside of Polyhexian city limits. He slowed to a stop, shifting back to root form and leaning against a cliff of raw metal, letting his attention slide a bit out of sync with the physical world and onto his incorporeal teammate.
Since he had no physical form, Mirage was limited in what ways he could communicate. Emotional projection similar to EM field sensing carried the most message content, but without a frame, intentional manipulation of what particular emotion was projected was almost impossible. For that reason, Jazz knew the suspicion/scrutiny he felt coming from the other demon was entirely genuine, and that he had already managed to fail to keep his problems to himself without even speaking a single glyph. Mirage immediately suppressed and extended his presence in the pattern that meant a request for a status update and Jazz groaned showily, letting the back of his helm thunk into the cliff wall. “Don’t start, Raj,” he warned. “’M fine.”
The doubt he got in response was unnecessarily pointed, in his opinion. He retaliated with admonishment/reproach and shoved Mirage’s presence a little further away, taking advantage in the difference in strength between a freshly summoned demon and one that had been incorporeal for a while.
Mirage flowed easily with the surge, already crowding back close before it had completely faded. Jazz knew that any further attempt at deflection would only make Mirage more insistent, and knew equally well that he himself was not gonna budge on refusal to explain. So instead, he said, “I’m on a contract. Assassination. Wanna play backup?”
The motionless projection of unimpressed/unconvinced made it clear exactly what Mirage thought of that subject change, but eventually he flickered an acknowledgement, repeating the status update request and settling into the determination/focus of a demon on an impending job.
Jazz suppressed the urge to exvent heavily as he began to enumerate the details. Maybe some good old fashioned violence would get his processor off of the unfathomably confusing nature of his latest summoner.
He could feel Mirage’s attention trained squarely on him as he transformed and continued toward the city.
—
Over the past several quartexes, Polyhex had changed radically under Decepticon control. When Jazz had last been here, the neutrals had outnumbered the ‘Cons maybe three to one. Now, though, there were so few mechs around, the streets were almost empty, and every single one wore purple Decepticon badges prominently displayed. The feeling of the city contrasted with last time, too, from not all that different from pre-war mundanity into something far more hostile and threatening. Even the lighting had changed, many buildings gone dark as if abandoned, and the streetlights were dimmed to near low-light levels. With only the distant stars in the sky, the entire city was enveloped in shadow in a way that felt still and lifeless like a mech in emergency stasis.
Maybe that comparison was accurate on multiple levels.
Jazz, having shapeshifted into the appearance of the thickest armor he could manage and with non-functional bits of kibble to mimic integrated weapons he did not have, considered his options. The buildings here were mostly intact and a few storeys tall, and some part of him wanted to scuttle up with his magnets and get a view on things from above. But the higher proportion of flightframes among the Decepticons compared to the broader population rendered that immediately unworkable, as they’d be more likely to catch sight of something above the direction of a grounder’s usual visual feed.
Instead, he subtly darkened his colors further to take advantage of the shadows, lingering close to the edges of buildings as he passed and ducking into alleys and gaps when he could.
Mirage, ghosted and therefore imperceptible to normal mechs, was scouting ahead. Though Jazz could feel the signatures of multiple other demons in range, a snooping incorporeal demon wouldn’t draw much attention as long as he didn’t do anything aggressive or foolish. Jazz had a general direction to pursue, but the databurst Prowl had sent lacked much detail. He had to find out the state of things for himself.
He pushed away thoughts that tried to drag him back into analyzing every interaction he had ever had with his latest summoner. Later. He had a job to do.
As Jazz moved deeper into the City, he began to hear the sounds of many people clustered together, talking and laughing and jeering. There was a quick burst of weapon fire and the heavy impacts as they landed, and a roar went up, savage cheering at the destruction.
The source of the noise became readily apparent when he rounded a corner. Though there had obviously once been several buildings nearby, most had been haphazardly torn down, opening up a wide area with little to obstruct line of sight. The free space was now almost entirely occupied by one large, circular structure, much shorter than even the squat industrial complexes that remained around it. Decepticons were flowing toward and away from the structure easily, lingering in small groups with EM fields restless and excited.
Jazz joined them, shapeshifted purple badges on either shoulder pauldron, and went to see what the commotion was about. The structure was one massive wide-open arena, surrounded on all sides by walls several mechanometers high, the spectators’ stands crowded with Decepticons. The arena itself was sunken into the surface of the planet a bit, with only one entrance down on ground level, blocked by a heavy spiked door. On the arena floor were several scattered dead and dying mechs, sparking visibly from damaged or missing components, with energon splashed liberally everywhere. Two remained standing, clearly worse for wear, pointing weapons at one another as they circled, looking for an opening. Jazz spotted red Autobrands on both of the surviving mechs, and not a single Decepticon brand on any of the frames he could see in the arena, functioning or not.
Signatures of several other demons pulsed slowly in the crowd, and Jazz idly wondered if they thought the bloodsport was as much of a waste as he did. If the ‘Cons were going to kill the mechs anyway, why not put their spark energy to use rather than letting it dissipate into the atmosphere? Prowl would never be so wasteful-
He cut that processing thread as soon as he registered it.
In the distance, he felt Mirage begin to draw closer, evidently done with his scouting and on his way back. The problem with the code Jazz and his team used to communicate between physical and non-physical states was that it would be obvious to any demon nearby. They might not know what was being communicated, but a message being sent at all might be cause for investigation by the more paranoid. Mirage knew better than to risk it at this distance.
One of the final mechs in the arena feinted abruptly, slashing harshly with an integrated saw of some kind. As the other dodged, the first followed up with a rapid spatter of blaster fire, mostly missing, but a few, crucial shots landing debilitating blows. The mech spasmed in pain, actuators misfiring, biolights pulsing terror, and the saw-wielder took advantage of the distraction and ripped their blade right through throat cabling, severing everything in one wild stroke. Helm and frame impacted the ground moments apart, paint already beginning to lose saturation and shine.
The watching Decepticons cheered, a few exchanging shanix and other goods they had obviously bet on the outcome of the match. However, rather than relax, the final survivor froze in place, frame shaking with high alert and pain.
“Decepticons!” Came a loud, booming shout. The cheers died down slightly, as a tall black and red mech strode up to the arena wall. His armor was both thick and clearly modified for threat display, extraneous spines that served little functional purpose decorating plating around joints. He raised his arms high, calling, “We have a winner! Shall we give our champion their reward?”
Jazz zoomed in with his visor, immediately identifying the speaker against his databanks. He had found his target: Straxus, ruler of Polyhex.
The crowded Decepticons screamed with even more fervor, the mingled noise of many systems powering on all at once rising in an electric whine.
Straxus gestured extravagantly with one black servo, and declared, “Show this Autobot how things are done in Polyhex!”
As if it was a signal, dozens of weapons fired down at the final fighter in the arena all at once, peppering them from helm to pedes in blaster fire and projectile wounds. They were dead before they even hit the ground.
Over renewed roaring, Straxus called “Bring this trash to the smelters! At least there it might have some use!” With that, he turned and swept away, the crowd parting for his passage and closing around him after.
Mirage, who had crept back to Jazz’s side during the spectacle, pulsed subtly in the patterns for “useful” and “follow,” and immediately drifted down to hover over the gore-streaked arena floor.
So Mirage had found something interesting at the smelters. Jazz was content to follow his lead for now, and so joined the ‘Cons jumping down to collect the corpses. Remains were casually hefted over shoulders, limbs occasionally ripped harshly away and handed off to others to lower the weight of the dead of larger size classes. Jazz was careful not to carry anything more than a normal mech of his size would have been capable of; he was lucky that none of the demons in the crowd had joined the cleanup crew, and so he might keep his species under wraps.
He followed the group through the spiked door, passing several empty and energon-stained cells. Clearly the Decepticons had no more prisoners here, as they had all been in the free-for-all deathmatch.
The smelters were not far from the arena; they must get a lot of traffic between them. Smell was the first indicator, the scent of molten metal and smoke coiling through the air in a heavy haze. Not long after that, they came into view, crouched in the remains of a mostly demolished building with jagged struts stabbing up toward the sky. It had clearly once been a ship-building facility like the one Jazz had sabotaged for his very first mission, and the scaffolding above the white-hot metal was mostly intact, though visibly damaged.
Jazz wondered at Decepticon priorities, that they had disabled a facility to make warships to turn it into corpse disposal instead. Seemed to him that a ship would have infinitely more value. Maybe he’d mention it to Prowler, see what he thought about it.
Jazz caught the tail end of that, realized what he had done again, and scowled to himself. His own damned processor was getting away from him. He needed to figure this slag out sooner rather than later.
As the corpses began to be dumped into the smelters a few at a time, Mirage drifted up and away, not limited by gravity or any obstacle in his path. Jazz tracked his progress, glad for the visor that made it difficult to determine the direction of his attention, and immediately saw what Mirage wanted him to find. On a second level of elevated walkway, near a wall with a door leading to what had once been another part of the ship-building complex, was a crudely assembled throne. It had obviously been built for aesthetics over purpose, with elaborate and unnecessary spikes of darkly painted metal sticking out in odd angles that would probably limit how comfortable it was to sit in. As all Autobot knowledge suggested that Straxus was the sole commander of Polyhex and was assuming a quite dictatorial role, and the fact that the throne was assembled in a matching pattern as Straxus’s armor, valuing form over function, meant that this throne could only be for him.
The beginnings of a possible plan began to come together. Jazz suppressed a grin.
One of the corpses dropped into the molten metal with a bit more force than the others, sending a small wave of splatter into the air, and the ‘Cons nearest flinched back. “Watch it, idiot,” one snapped. “You melt my plating, and I’ll rip yours right off!”
“You’re all talk,” another jeered. “You’re nowhere near that good in a fight. Everyone knows you got demoted last quartex.”
The first Decepticon screeched in outrage, and as a group they descended into squabbling, tossing insults and shoving at one another’s shoulders with just enough force to overbalance. Jazz immediately clocked that no real damage was done despite the loudness of the argument, and not so much as a claw was unsheathed, let alone a more powerful bit of weaponry. EM fields were subtle, but showed amusement/camaraderie rather than any anger.
He couldn’t help the little curl of wistful nostalgia that floated through his emotional subsystem. Seems that even after all this time, Polyhexian culture remained much the same as he remembered it, no matter the hostile takeover.
Taking advantage of the noise and distraction, Jazz slipped away from the group as they began to filter out of the smelter room, stepping into the shadows beneath a half-destroyed wall plate. Mirage immediately drifted to his side, his presence focused/attentive and clearly waiting for Jazz to speak.
“Saw what you meant,” he murmured, volume of his vocalizer low enough to be lost to the ambient noise of an outdoors location for any mech that wasn’t specifically listening for it. “Just gotta figure out when that throne’s occupied next.”
Mirage flickered an affirmative, subtle enough to likely go unnoticed by any other demon this far away, and then pulsed in the pattern for “reconnaissance” and the extended flare that made it a question.
“Oh, for sure, mech,” Jazz responded. He paused, and a wide fanged grin split his faceplate. “… What are the chances Straxus puts “gloating over the melted corpses of his enemies” onto his schedule?”
The particular variant of exasperation/disapproval he got in response was one he was very familiar with, and had long translated into Mirage calling him an idiot despite his inability to speak in glyphs.
As the noise of the arguing Decepticons faded with distance, Jazz ducked away, heading immediately toward where the control room was likely to be for a facility such as this. Though he had absolutely been joking about the specifics, there was still a possibility that scheduling for the commanders of Polyhex was kept somewhere accessible over the local intranet. If they had any sense at all, it'd be encrypted, but, with a little cycling test of a few mods, Jazz was confident he'd find a way into something interesting.
There was only one mech in the control room, leaning on one elbow near the main console with discontent frame language and sullenness flashing through his EM. He was a scrawny little thing compared to the average 'Con Jazz had seen thus far, and carried himself in the kind of way that Jazz immediately clocked as someone easy to push around. Considering how packed the arena had been and the general excitement, it was likely this mech had been bullied into this post to let someone else go watch the show.
Jazz weighed his options for a klick. He was certain he could take this mech out with minimal difficulty, and it was only whether or not it was worth to risk the detection of a corpse that stayed his servo. He did have access to a convenient smelting pit not too far away, but, scrawny or not, this mech was still visibly much more Decepticon than Autobot, and depigmentation would do little to hide that. It was a question on if it was better to certainly reveal his presence to lie his way into the control room, or only potentially do so, but with much greater fallout.
Making a decision, Jazz stepped into the room with enough noise to announce his presence. The 'Con looked up, posture going defensive almost at once. Definitely someone used to mockery or worse.
“I've been assigned here too,” Jazz said, pitching his voice and projecting his EM to indicate disappointment and bad temper. Making a gamble, he continued, “He's such a hardaft,” hoping for commiseration.
But the skinny Decepticon just squinted at him. “Too?” he questioned. “Isn't the point the isolation?”
Frag. That’s what he gets for making a snap decision. Keeping his frame language dejected rather than showing any of his alarm, he tried, “Guess they figured I didn’t count.”
Suspicion bloomed readily through the Decepticon’s EM field, and he rose to stand, one servo twitching toward his subspace. “Straxus alone is in charge of assignment. Who’s ‘they?’”
Oh it was definitely time for the backup plan. Jazz threw a knife almost before the other mech finished speaking, the blade landing squarely in the center of the primary neural cable leading from processor to the rest of the frame. By necessity, this also severed a major energon line, and glowing pink splashed across the floor and one of the security consoles as the ‘Con abruptly tilted over and slammed to the floor in a sprawling pile of limbs, unable to send any signal to his frame even as he bled out.
Jazz crossed the room, retrieved his knife, and shoved it decisively into an exposed optic, hastening processor death and making the Decepticon’s corpse immediately begin to gray. He withdrew the blade, examining it briefly. It was absolutely coated in energon, the importance of the components in a helm requiring among the highest amounts of fuel in any frame, and he didn’t want to subspace it so soaked. Absently, he slid his glossa along the blade to clean it, appreciating the taste of the energon even if it would do nothing for him in terms of timer.
A short distance away, Mirage pulsed disgust/disdain/disappointment at him. Jazz grinned in his general direction, deliberately exaggerating the gesture for the other side of the blade just to feel the EM deepen in intensity. ‘Raj was always so focused on “civilized” behavior even after all this time, as if he wouldn’t jump on the chance to eat a spark right out of a mech’s chassis. Hypocritcal slagger. Prowl hadn’t even twitched when Jazz ate a spark right in front of him, much more honest about his standards and without all the showy posturing.
Jazz paused for a nanoklick as he dismissed the processing thread again, keeping his frustration at his inability to go one frelling joor without thinking of the Praxian carefully contained.
Evidently it wasn’t well enough, because he felt Mirage’s attention shift just slightly, and Jazz spoke aloud to change the subject before the other demon could bring it up. “On a time limit now. Gonna get to work.”
He unspooled a data cable from the back of his neck, allowing his most strongly partitioned and isolated systems to be the ones to connect to the Decepticon network. It took a few more nanoklicks to process the data than if he was accessing it directly, but there was no point in being stupid. Though Jazz had not met Soundwave in the metal (yet? Who knows what turns the war would bring.), he knew the Communications Officer’s touch in a few nasty traps that his sanitization processes took longer than usual to work through.
Eventually, though, he made his way into the network, already sending out programs to search for specific keywords in any of the files, data structure, tags, or users. By necessity and basic common sense, most if not all of the systems in any of the cities on Cybertron - Autobot, Decepticon, and neutral alike - were kept isolated from one another. The holonet was technically still functional, allowing anyone with a sufficient connection to access any server still connected, but accessing them since the inception of the war was opening yourself up to viruses at the very least. Instead, each city tended to have a smaller intranet if there was any broader network at all, if each console was not isolated entirely from connectiong to any other.
Polyhex under Decepticon rule seemed to go for citywide intranet, which was certainly useful for Jazz’s purposes. His keyword searches were turning up results, though most were false positives. Specific phrases did net him some schedules to examine, but they were either out of date or else for low ranking grunts and didn’t have any value to him. He also found a few communiques announcing citywide events, most often the deathmatches in the arena he had already witnessed. Jazz was mildly impressed at how often they were organized; there surely weren’t that many prisoners left among the Decepticon faction if they were going through them this fast.
Finally, he found a grouping of files that seemed to be reports on the officers in Polyhex. Straxus was unambiguously the ruling mech of the city, but he had a few subordinates of higher rank than the general rabble. More often than not, these officers seemed to dole out punishments exclusively, rather than provide any other useful leadership, keeping the underlings in order through threats and fear. Jazz even found a reference to what must be the punitive assignment to this security room specifically, listing a servoful of various ‘Cons, with one particular designation more often than most. He spared a glance down at the gray frame on the floor. Scramble seemed to indeed have been the kind of mech to get pushed around a lot, considering just how often he ended up on this job. Rotten luck, that.
He was following a promising chain of messages between officers that was steadily climbing the ranks the further back he went, when Mirage suddenly and sharply flashed warning, sending Jazz’s systems into immediate alert. He began the process of disconnecting from the console at speed, clearing any lingering data from his partitioned systems in case of any malevolent code he hadn’t noticed, though it’d have a hard time affecting him because of said partitioning anyway.
He’d gotten maybe halfway through it when the door to the security room slid open, a deep voice already saying, “I’ve decided you get another chance, Scramble-”
Jazz looked up as Straxus himself stood in the doorframe, an obvious datacable still connecting him to the console, and an energon-splattered corpse out in the open across the floor.
Flashing a wry grin, Jazz said, “I know this looks bad-”
Straxus didn’t give him time to finish, already unsubspacing a weapon somewhere between a battle axe and a miner’s pick that was almost as long as Jazz was tall. Jazz yanked the datacable free before the disconnection processes could finish, immediately granting him a processor ache even as the cable slid back into its place on the back of his neck. He shunted the errors away from his HUD, ducking low under a swing of that giant axe and darting past out the door. The cramped quarters of the security room and the hallway both were less than ideal for any kind of conflict, and Jazz rushed toward the smelters, knowing the scaffolding there would at least provide several potential angles of attack.
Straxus chased after him, roaring “Intruder!” at his vocalizer’s loudest setting, the sound of his pedesteps thunderous and shaking the building entirely.
Jazz spun in place upon reaching the catwalks, blaster in one servo and energo-dagger in the other. Straxus didn’t hesitate for a moment, immediately storming forward to swing savagely. Despite the brutality of his swings, he was well-controlled, not once hitting the railings or overcommiting to a strike and overbalancing himself. Jazz let himself grimace for a klick, firing a spray of blasterfire at any visible transformation seam or gap in armor, searching for weak spots. There was very, very little to work with, the Decepticon covered in thick layers of plating, sacrificing flexibility for defense. Jazz managed a few shots into joints that prompted the briefest flinches, following up with slashes of the dagger at any place that seemed vulnerable. Here, Straxus’s showy threatening armor actively hindered him, the superfluous spikes allowing Jazz to direct the dagger into joint gaps more easily as the blade slid along the metal. He scored a good hit on one of the ‘Con’s hip joints, feeling at least one tensor cable sever entirely under the stab.
Straxus bellowed in pain and rage, stumbling just slightly as he compensated for the lowered mobility in that leg. Silhouetted against the light of the smelting pools, he looked more the picture of a demon than Jazz himself ever did, red biolights flashing fury and axe held at the ready.
Jazz flicked through that thought again, and immediately leapt into a plan. With careful dodges and feints, though he had to take a few strikes from the axe to earn them, Jazz herded Straxus toward one of the more damaged bits of the scaffolding. Though he was freely bleeding dark energon from several crumpled and sliced wounds, Jazz transformed out his sonic weapons, lowered his audial sensors as much as he dared, and blasted Straxus with the hardest wave as he could muster. Under the assault, Straxus stumbled on his bad leg, and Jazz leapt bodily onto him, sending them both careening off the side and down toward the smelting pool.
The demon twisted out of the way midair as best he could, prepared for the fall in a way Straxus was not, but even then he could not evade the molten metal entirely. The servo with the blaster and the adjoining forearm all were briefly doused in molten metal, and he at once let go of the blaster and recoiled, baring fanged dentae in a pained hiss. The damage wasn’t pretty, surface plating warped and gone in places, and delicate circuitry and sensors damaged to the point of screaming errors that multiplied in number even as he set a process to automatically dismiss them.
Movement out of the corner of his visual field had him lunging to one side, as Straxus climbed back out of the smelter, his armor visibly glowing hot and dripping molten metal to the floor in sizzling drops. He snarled an ugly burst of static, vocalizer damaged by the heat past the ability to function.
Jazz couldn’t help the “Come the frag on!” that escaped him as he retightened his good servo on the energo-dagger.
Straxus had lost his axe into the molten metal, but he was big enough, strong enough, and furious enough to make him plenty dangerous. He lashed out in huge hammer blows of his fists, any claw mods he might have had melted away. Burning orange splatter followed his movements as his own armor dripped off of him, but he didn’t seem to care, too intent on destroying Jazz. Though he had more and thicker armor than Jazz, he had spent more time in the smelting pool, and his plating was similarly warped or missing in huge swathes across his frame, every bit of him still glowing with heat.
Jazz found that his energo-dagger could slice through the heat-softened metal in a way he couldn’t before, but each strike sent up more splatters of liquid cybertronium that seemed to be damaging Jazz faster than he was killing Straxus. All the while, the Decepticon was alternately throwing brutal punches and attempting to catch Jazz in a grapple, which would inevitably result in Jazz’s death the moment he couldn’t maintain his mobility.
Acting almost on instinct, already knowing the plan would have consequences, Jazz ducked around another grab and jumped onto Straxus’s back, clinging tight with his legs and bad arm even as the heat began to burn him just from the contact. Straxus twisted and thrashed, trying to throw him, but limited in flexibility in the way Jazz had recognized through the nature of his frameplan.
On a particularly harsh jerk, Jazz had to grab at the shoulder beneath him with his bad hand to steady himself, leaving it in range of Straxus’s grasp. At once the demon knew he was in for a world of hurt.
Huge hands, still dripping molten metal, grabbed at Jazz’s bad forearm, searing the metal and crumpling it beneath his massive strength. Jazz let out a scream of pain as his vision and processing were flooded with alerts and errors, but took advantage of the Decepticon’s diverted focus. With as much strength as he could muster, relying on visual memory though his visor was currently blocked, he drove the dagger into Straxus’s narrow optic. Helped along by the heat-softening of Straxus’s faceplate, the blade slid home, piercing the processor at once.
Straxus managed one last burst of wrathful static, and then tumbled to the floor in a tremendous crash, sending up splashes of molten metal on contact.
Jazz got the frag off of the corpse and backed the frag away, running a quick diagnostic of his damages. The plating all along his hood, bumper, and legs from mid-thigh to his pedes was burning with pain and heat alike. The twisting of the metal as it attempted to liquify was bad, but his forearm was by far the worst. It had been actually submerged for a moment rather than the rest of his burns, which had only been from surface contact, and the limb was completely beyond use. The pain signals and error messages were intense and relentless, and Jazz made another decision that was gonna be painful.
Activating a mod that would cut the energon supply at his shoulder joint, he dampened whatever pain sensors he could not turn off, and cut through his arm at the elbow with several strikes as rapidly and harshly as he could, baring his fangs at the pain and letting loose a scream. Once the forearm was severed, though, the barrage of error and pain messages decreased to several rather than multitudinous. A missing limb was rather simpler than damage to every system. Couldn’t send pain signals if it wasn’t attached, after all.
Jazz lurched for stability. All at once, Mirage was pressing forward, alert/concern thick in his EM field, flashing in the pattern for request for status report. He had kept silent and unobtrusive during the fight, as anything that drew away Jazz’s attention could have terrible consequences, though things had turned out pretty frelling terribly anyway.
“I’ll live,” Jazz gasped. “Think the ‘Cons took apart the civvie shuttle bay?”
Correctly interpreting that, Mirage sped in that direction, leaving Jazz to stumble out of the back exit of the smelting pits, knowing he had to get the Pit away, as the fight with Straxus had been anything but subtle. Already, he could hear approaching voices, calling out, “What happened?” from distressingly close.
Jazz headed toward the civilan shuttle bay before Mirage could even report on its status, since it was toward the edge of the city anyway. Much of his plating was still glowing hot, and made him extremely aware that he was extremely visible to light and heat sensors. He decided for speed over stealth, and went as fast as he could manage, knowing he was leaving a trail of hot pedesteps to follow if not drips of his own cybertronium.
When Mirage darted back toward him, pulsing “good to go” when he got in range, Jazz almost let out a hysterical laugh, the relief that overtook him was so strong. If there was a functional shuttle there, he could leave this fragging city and this fragged-up mission behind. The high castes that travelled between cities favored speedy, quiet vehicles, visually flashy but not too loud that the passengers could not verbally posture with one another. Even a seeker would have a hard time keeping up with one with Jazz at the controls.
At the turn just before the shuttle bay, he saw a passing ‘Con perform an almost comical double take, but Jazz was already rushing past, long practice with stealing these particular shuttles coming back to him from deep storage and getting him inside and in the air in less than a breem. The shuttle’s sensors reported that there were immediate pursuits from flightframes, but as Jazz had predicted, pushing the acceleration as hard as he could meant that they were left in the exhaust until they faded out of sight.
Jazz set the shuttle on autopilot toward the acid wastes outside Iacon, flexing his one remaining servo and grimacing as the pain signals seemed to redouble, now that his combat systems were cycling down. He hadn’t been this badly hurt without discorporating in a long time. Despite knowing better, he checked his subspace, searching for something to increase his timer so he could burn a little on healing the worst of the damage. He had nothing, as he well knew; he had just discorporated from the dweller after a mission that had been tough anyway, and right after his resummon he had jumped straight into another fight. Not even Prowl had been efficient enough to procure anything for him other than the dark energon for his latest blueprint.
For a brief, conflicted klick, Jazz considered shoving those thoughts away as he had been doing through the whole mission, before deciding that his stupid emotions could go frag themselves until he was less likely to ghost from the damage two times in as many orn.
Mirage had followed him onto the shuttle, and was pulsing request for status update again, now that they were not in immediate crisis. Rather than answer his teammate, Jazz pulled up Prowl’s comm frequency, connecting before he could second guess himself.
::Job’s done,:: he sent first. ::But it wasn’t clean. In a civ shuttle toward the acid wastes, and I’m pretty sure I managed to ditch the pursuit.::
::Acknowledged,:: Prowl replied. ::What is your status?::
Jazz felt a pang from his emotional subsystem that he had neither the energy nor the interest in unraveling. ::Bad,:: he admitted. ::One forearm gone and melted plating all down my front.::
::Are you at risk of discorporation?:: Prowl sent at once.
After another glance at his diagnostic results, Jazz replied, ::No, but only barely.::
::Understood,:: Prowl sent. ::I will meet you in the wastes.::
Shifting his focus back outward and away from the comm, Jazz registered Mirage nudging him with attention and intent in the other-sense. “Sorry ‘Raj,” he muttered. “Was reporting in.”
At that answer, Mirage seemed to coalesce into determination/expectation, and Jazz realized he had something else to dread. It was the habit of his team to keep an eye on one another when they were summoned for any length of time. Since Jazz had been physical for almost a vorn now, he was well overdue for a visit from a ghosted demon, come to get the measure of his latest contract and his latest summoner.
That was going to be a slagfest, he just knew it.
—
At shuttle speeds, it took less than a joor to reach the acid wastes, and Jazz took over from the autopilot to settle into landing on a plain just out of sight of Iacon. He transmitted his location data to Prowl, and got an affirmative ping in response.
With a heaving exvent, Jazz settled into one of the passenger seats, cradled by soft high caste mesh and cushioning. Immediately, his dorsal vents were stifled, and he rolled his optics at the thought of politicians and aristocrats deciding they apparently didn’t need to even vent like lesser mechs. He leaned forward to clear the blockage, running another diagnostic now that he wasn’t actively melting anymore. It wasn’t quite as bad as he had first thought, only a few layers of components deeper than the surface plating significantly damaged. That was disregarding the arm, of course, but that went without saying. He’d still need one Pit of a repair to get back to baseline.
His proximity sensors caught an approaching vehicle in the distance, and he immediately matched it to his identification of Prowl. As the Praxian approached, Jazz pinged the shuttle door to slide it open, allowing the pursuit vehicle to unfold into a scowling black and white mech.
Prowl visibly looked him up and down, analyzing the damage for himself. “There are three options,” he started, skipping any veneer of small talk. “Ratchet and First Aid are aware of your species, and are willing to provide repair. Alternately, I can provide enough sacrifice for your self-repair to eliminate the damage, though I am unsure what quantities that would require.”
Here he paused, and, knowing the reason why, Jazz pressed, “And the third?”
Prowl did not break optic contact, but his doorwings shifted in subtle discomfort, and he said, “Or I could resummon you into a fresh frame.” After another pause, he added, “I would appreciate input on the invocation to avoid giving any… offense.”
Invisible and imperceptible to Prowl, Mirage shifted focus intently, and flashed “elaborate” and “later” in a way that felt decidedly threatening to Jazz. The Polyhexian ignored him as best he could, keeping his visor trained on his summoner.
Jazz remained silent for several long klicks, partially to see what Prowl would do. Other than that small flutter of his doorwings, he remained firmly in place, standing upright and meeting Jazz’s gaze unflinchingly. He really wasn’t going to get back at Jazz at all when Jazz had speared him through to the spark. Instead he was turning over even more control, in a move that was so stupidly trusting and almost naive that it made Jazz’s fangs itch. This fragging mech. Nothing made any damned sense, and the lack of understanding put Jazz firmly on edge.
In another decision that might end up getting him in more trouble, Jazz though ‘Frag it,’ and said, “Resummon’s probably the easiest. Depends on how much dark energon you have.”
“I’m sure it will be sufficient,” Prowl replied. Neutrally, he asked, “And the invocation?”
Jazz leaned back in his seat to project ease that he absolutely did not feel, though it immediately suffocated his vents again. “The last one’s fine, Prowler,” he said.
He felt Mirage spasm at the casualness of the address, and silently despaired that there was so much that Mirage was going to demand explanation for. He was going to be relentless.
Prowl studied him for a long moment, optical lenses spinning and cycling, and then he nodded. “Is here in the wastes acceptable, or need we find another location?”
“Here’s fine,” Jazz answered.
“Then I will carve the blueprint.” An odd expression crossed his faceplate, and in a slightly strangled voice he added, “I will, ah, allow you to handle the necessary discorporation.”
Right. Prowl thought that damage was the only way to ghost a demon. He probably assumed Jazz was going to have to stab himself or something. Let him keep thinking that; the fewer demon secrets that Prowl knew, the better.
Jazz flashed an easy and false grin, gesturing with his only servo toward the door of the shuttle. “Go on, boss-mech. I got it.”
Prowl nearly fled through the doorway, leaving Jazz and Mirage alone once more. To avoid the mess, Jazz began laying out his subspace contents on an adjacent seat, rather than everything toppling to the floor and risking damage. When he couldn’t put it off any longer, he looked up in Mirage’s direction, asking, “You mind?”
Mirage knew what he meant, of course. All the members of their team had done this for each other several times over the megavorn. Before he began, though, Mirage went focused/determined again and repeated “elaborate” and “later” very pointedly.
“Later,” Jazz replied. He knew there was no getting out of it, but it was a problem for the future. He had enough to deal with in the present without also worrying about things he couldn’t change.
At unspoken agreement, Mirage swarmed around Jazz in the other-sense, as demons would to fight. Jazz put up no struggle, even as he felt his timer begin to drain as Mirage siphoned the energy away. It wouldn’t do anything for Mirage like allow him to generate a physical frame- that still required a summoner and blueprint. But the energy would be of more use within his grasp rather than dissipating into the atmosphere.
Jazz closed his optics behind his visor, and felt himself scatter into nothingness.