by K.A. Rose

Transformers and all related characters and concepts © and ^TM Hasbro and Takara, 1984-2007. Used without permission for non-profit fan appreciation.

Whatever I'm doing with this, it's not worse than Kiss Players, okay?
 

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Lower Praxus, Cybertron, Human Year 2206

They'd moved on her birthday.

It was useless telling her mom this, because people like her mom had no idea what a birthday was. In all 74 megacycles of Mouse's existence, she'd never gotten a card, a present, or a pat on the head from her mom for her birthday. And when her dad stopped sending letters, she resigned herself to no-one caring ever again.

Mouse hated moving. She hadn't liked Earth much but she liked Cybertron even less: it was busy and crowded and everyone was a complete snob. The apartment they moved into wasn't half the size of their place in Autobot City, which hadn't been that spacious to start with. Their neighbours next door were a pair of Decepticons, one a disabled vet who swore loudly every time he saw the insignia on Mom's chestplate. Her dad would have said that for some people the war just wasn't over; her mom just laid in her recharger bed and drank.

They moved because they couldn't afford to stay on Earth. Mom had lost her job as an archivist and Aunt Arcee was tired of supporting them. So Mouse's mother Spindizzy had the bright idea to go leech off other people that she knew, and get back on her feet in the city of her youth, forgetting that it had disintegrated into urban wasteland since she saw it last. She kept saying that home was home.

Mouse stayed out of the apartment as much as she could, but there was nowhere to go. Lower Praxus was a dirty, rusting ghetto where everyone looked like you wouldn't want to meet them after the dark, and it was always dark here. There was no-one her own stage. No-one even spoke English here. Ultimately what she ended up doing most was going to the parks, sitting down on the rail of a low bridge over the crysallis lakes and doing her best to ignore the entire planet. But even that got old pretty quick.

"You should be proud," her mother said stubbornly, slurring half-drunkenly over their kitchen worktable. "You're surrounded by teracycles of robot history. Show some respect."

Sure, their history. Her mom's history. What did Mouse care if Praxus proper had been the site of such and such battle in some stupid long-dead war? They had a parliament now, and prime ministers, and tax collectors and buses. Even Mouse's Decepticon neighbours never did anything but call her mom an access hub, which she was anyway.

Mouse thought angrily, sometimes, that the older Transformers were just making it all up. She'd never seen fighting in all her uptime, save what humans always did, and that was as boring to watch as ants scurrying around a kicked-apart anthill anyway. People talked about the Great War and the Battlestars like it was the be-all end-all of their existence, but it was history. It was statistics and dry old stories in tired databanks and all the little factoids about Fire Convoy or whatever didn't make Praxus anything less of a pit. And her teevee couldn't pick up any of her favourite shows anymore.

"Be grateful," Spindizzy ordered her, endless circuit that she was. "You owe everything to 'bots like us. We made the nice comfy world you live in."

YOU didn't, Mouse thought, but said nothing.

Two decacycles after their move, her mother dragged her down to Level Sigma to get her chassis upgraded, and made no secret of how much she loathed this little obligation. They stood in line for decicycles at the mouth of the nurseries, before the huge gurgling red tanks and the Paradron nurses who danced up and down the queue with forms and questions, and no-one would translate anything for her. Mouse had never spoken Cybertronix at home except to the old geezers on the base and half of everything the medics said went right past her.

She knew one of the things that they asked. After all, these were upgrade clinics just for derivatives like her, and the one thing the nurses really had to know before the technicians would touch a gasket is who the parents were.

The tall, dusty nurse inscribed Spindizzy's registration onto one line of the parentage datacard and then asked for the secondary contributing manufacturer, which was as close as Cybertronix got to a term for father, it seemed.

"Bumblebee."

In front and behind them in the queue, several heads turned.

"Oh my," the nurse tittered. "Oh my."

Mouse had gone into the technicians lab with a few choice data panels picked out on what she wanted for an altmode. The lead technician took one look at the schematics and laughed.

"You'll be all kibble, darling! You won't be able to move."

"But why can't you just make the whole frame bigger?" Mouse asked in strained Cybertronix.

"Well, that's something you'd have to talk over with your warranty-issuers, kid," the technician said, still amused. "Once you start talking frame extension, that's a deep-hardware surgery, and you'd need your originator to set up a diagnostic with your consulting mechanic and..."

And then Mouse lost track of it. Her audio receptors fizzled. How did people use this backwards language?

A centicycle later, Mouse stumbled out of the lab aching and her new treds numb and springy. The adrenal pump had dulled most of the pain, but there was still a vague hurt through her chassis.

They'd let her keep her old colour, but everything else felt completely foreign. Even the additional RAM wasn't enough to really stretch out in. It was like someone had loosened the pressure valve on a suction suit, but only for a moment, before anything new actually happened. She kicked at the floor plating and tried to work the gumminess out of her altmode while her mother bitterly paid the bill.

People in line were still looking at her. The news had started moving around, she guessed. Who cared. Finally some respect for her dad, but it wasn't like he was here anyway.

"Mouse, enough!" her mom shouted. Mouse stopped quickchanging and glowered at the floor.

On their way out the door to the powerlifts, they passed a Decepticon and Autobot couple with their set of demented twins, a pair of boys drooling coolant out of the corners of their mouths as they ran about the place.

"You, girl," the Autobot father said nastily to Mouse, as she brushed his elbow. "No organics in you, by any chance?"

His wife cackled viciously, and then some of the others joined in. Spindizzy jerked her daughter along by the wrist with redoubled speed.

Mouse learned soon enough. Her dad had fought in the Great War, but he was no hero. The old mechs on Earth, at least, had been polite in how they'd danced around the rumours. Not so here.

At the bridge in the park, Mouse pounded her thumbs on her little handheld game and tried very hard not to let it get to her, which of course meant it got to her even worse. Her dad, the terran-lover. Left his kind for a small blonde with a pick-up truck. Fought their wars on their stars, and didn't once look back. Only merged with that access hub of a racing car out of some drunken mistake. Maybe she wore a skirt to catch him.

Idiots. Idiots! she yelled in her head, or else muttered under the rush of the stream below the bridge.

So much for the city of history. So much for the culture of millennia. The people here knew what they cared about.

Her dad had run off with a human. Her dad had left her for a human. It wasn't that she didn't know this, but how dare they remind her.

"Ugh, not another one," said a voice behind her on the bridge.

"Seriously. They show up like vermin these days," said another.

"Someone should write to the Primes. Honestly. People've got no shame. What poor drones made you?" the first voice asked, nudging Mouse's back kibble with a foot. She started and stood up, balling her fists. "Ooh, feisty!" he laughed. He was tall and yellow.

His red companion was no better. "Better not, sister!" he teased. "Unless you wanna get put down!"

He said the last part in English, as though trying to get a rise out of her. Her curved audio receptors flattened on her head but she kept her lips pressed.

"Phew, what a face!" the yellow one cackled. "You the loving union of a panel truck and a lawnmower?"

The gears clenched in Mouse's jaw. More Earth words. She didn't even have a terran altmode anymore-- they just thought they were being clever. Of course, derivatives came from Earth. Of course, only an Earth-borne robot would be that stupid.

"I don't like yours either," she told the yellow pretty-bot in flawless, acid Cybertronix.

The brothers howled even harder at that one. "Mine still ain't the one that's gonna get messed up, if you don't watch your piecemeal little mouth," the yellow one threatened, beaming horribly, mere centimetres from Mouse's nose. "How 'bout you clear outta here before someone terminates your warranty?"

Though her adrenal compressors pounded in her circuitry, Mouse didn't feel scared. It was a strange sensation, but she couldn't think of anything but how she'd like to see that pretty face of his all over the bridge.

She did what her dad had done, what had pulled him through a thousand ancient battles. She barrelled straight into them and headbutt the first metal thing she came across.

"...Thirty thousand in credits, don't know how the warranty company is going to pay for it, do you have any idea what you've gone and done--"

She just went on like this. Mouse stared at the far wall. She'd stopped tuning in a good centicycle ago, playing absently with the dead wires jutting out of her wrist.

"--and have you thought at all what it would mean for us, what it would do to us if the Lambor Twins pressed charges--!"

Her mom wasn't going to listen to whatever she had to say in her own defence. She was definitely not going to hear another round of Mouse saying she wanted to go home, that she hated it here, and here hated her.

She had nothing to do. She had nowhere to go. Everywhere public was full of slagbuckets like those guys in the park, there were no terran shops, there were no terran cartoons, no arcades, no-one to play with. Even the other derivatives that she saw here and there were sickly, antisocial things that would sooner dribble down their chestplate than talk to her, and it wasn't like they'd have anything useful to say if they did.

The library, her mom would say, or the mall. There were plenty of places for Mouse to go blend in and be normal. But the mall was full of things just itching to step on her and the library was full of her dad. Her dad, one of Prime's favourites. Her dad, a traitor to his circuitry. Not even the straight accounts of the Great War could pass up a jab. Breaking up a human marriage by interfacing with Consul Witwicky's wife. Twenty years of Earth trade embargoes, and all someone could think to write in the margins was "but where would he plug it in?" No, no libraries for her.

She hung out in the apartment hallways, folded against the thirteenth step of a stairwell. She made a point not to look up no matter who walked by, and pressed the buttons harder if anyone tried to talk to her.

It was a quiet enough building during the A shift at the factories, and there was only one mech from the B shift that was sure walk by at the same time each evening, on his way to the lift. An older Autobot, black and white: he walked like a spring that had gotten tired of life, and he carried his energon resupply in a tin human-style lunch pail. He didn't say anything, but he pat her head as he passed. She tried to duck after the first few times, but after the twentieth or so she just accepted this strange end-cycle ritual.

The hand felt sad.

She needed to go in three more times for follow-up repairs, and before she knew it a half-megacycle had gone by and it was back for tune-ups. Spindizzy shrieked constantly about the upkeep. She still hadn't gotten a job and her old dock friends had stopped extending their support. The bills got steeper. Mouse went home less and less.

In a way it made her feel closer to her dad. The home was a nest, a pit, something to escape. She thought maybe he'd made the right choice in leaving. Maybe not so much with the leaving her behind.

In end-cycles she laid awake in her recharger bay and wondered if he still functioned out there somewhere. She was on his file, so if he showed up dead they had to tell her, didn't they? But if he'd run off somewhere far, where word might not come back quickly enough, if at all... And who was taking care of him out there, what fleshling girl? Did he like her more than his daughter? Was that the only reason he stopped writing?

Mouse decided that she hated him. And having arrived at that conclusion, she now had a full set.

She didn't mean to start stealing. It just happened. Another fight with her mom and she knew there was no chance getting back into the apartment for a few cycles, and her power cells were dwindling. There weren't so many options.

The markets all had cameras and security bots so she stole from her neighbours instead. After spending so many decacycles sitting on the stairs watching people go out for work and come back, she had an intimate idea of who was gone from their compartments when, and not everyone locked their doors.

The lonely Decepticon triple-changer on the eighth floor went out at half past the twelfth centicycle, almost always at a gallop because he was ten milicycles late. The inside of his apartment was stale and overcrowded and a lot like her own, to the extent that she didn't enjoy visiting it, and grabbed what energon tabs she could find in the drawer and quickly split.

The old neutral lady on the third floor was taken away by Paradrons every fourth cycle for maintenance, and she left behind in her unlocked apartment a room full of squashy old furniture with dusty sheeting over everything, to keep her many cassette cats from rusting the metal. The cassettes yowled up at Mouse as she picked her way across the floor plating but made no other objection, too stupid or too apathetic to stop her. She found the lady's accessory box and modeled casemods in the mirror, funky old jewelry whose flash batteries were all but dead, LED piping that shone feebly as she looped it around her neck. Nothing that would even fetch much of a price. She stuck to stealing food again.

After decacycles of this, visiting an apartment once every few cycles, it was the exploration that became more of a thrill than the theft. Every room was another world that no-one had seen fit to show her. Some were nests of an idyllic, wealthy past that had suffered war and famine with grace, only to buckle finally under the force of the new bureaucracy. Some homes were the property of lonely, foreign wretches even less acclimated than she was, desperately trying to graft their home planet's trappings to the walls, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes in a comically literal way.

The apartments belonging to former Decepticons were most interesting of all, where a furtive warmth and vulnerability emerged between the seams. Holograms of their old regiments projected in the corners. Videocards of lost loves, whose factions and tribes and species mattered little if anything. Even weird orga-made souvenirs that had snuck sideways into their effects, such as the weird oversized human-knitted tea cozie that one tenant kept as a hat.

She could feel herself developing a strange affinity for these people, and yet she knew all of them wouldn't even suffer the sight of her if she tried to speak to them. So she stuck to stealing their food, and snatched a few centicycles of sleep in their lonely recharger beds when she knew they were away at work, and then hung out in the halls playing her games as they passed, and sneered, and went right along.

The older Autobot was an exception. She couldn't find out where he lived and wasn't so sure she was okay with robbing it if she did. One morning as he was heading down the stairs to the lift, same as ever, he patted her head just as usual and then paused on her step, giving her a closer study.

"What's your name?"

Mouse jumped but tried to hide it. She hunched further down into her game.

"Nunnayurbusiness," she muttered. And then she lifted her head, suddenly realising he had spoken to her in English. But he was already down to the next landing, chuckling to himself.

After a while she was able to go back to her own place, but her mom was the same way that she'd left her, drunk and miserable, staring blankly at the teevee and practically collecting a layer of dust where she lay. The mail databank in the entryway computer was full to bursting with bills, but when Mouse mentioned it, Spindizzy yelled her head off. Mouse hid in her room until her mother fell asleep.

"Stupid leech," she heard her mother slur, from the other room. "I was such a pretty thing... The boys all loved me, till I got stuck with you."

With stolen pocket cred, Mouse used the pay-transmitter on the corner to call her aunt.

"Listen, I'm sorry, but I can't get involved any more," Arcee told her. "Your mom has to sort herself out. I can't fix everything for her."

What about me? What did I ever do? The thoughts pounded in Mouse's throat tract. What had made her not worth fixing?

"But I could go live with you," Mouse said desperately. "In Iacon. Please, Arcee."

"No, listen, Iacon isn't the place for derivatives. I wouldn't be able to make things any better for you. You'd hate it here."

I can't possibly hate it any worse than here!

"But I want to," Mouse whispered.

If Arcee took her in... If Arcee introduced her as her daughter, everything would be fine. Spindizzy was a nobody, she'd never fought in the wars. Bumblebee was a hero but he'd gone and disgraced himself. But Arcee... everyone loved Arcee...

"I'm sorry, sweetie. You're just going to have to work it out."

Mouse was mad. She didn't know why. Arcee hadn't said anything cruel-- in fact she was the kindest voice Mouse had heard in nearly a megacycle. But still it stung, horribly.

She slammed the receiver down furiously and left the booth.

She was supposed to get two more upgrades that winter. She didn't get them. Spindizzy had grown sick of funnelling money into her useless daughter and said as much to her. The bill collectors were coming more and more. Some vanished into the depths of Spindizzy's compartment and came out a centicycle later, harried and unspeaking; others yelled at the suggestion and slammed the front door so hard it shook the hall.

Mouse retreated to the rooftop and stayed there until her circuits nearly froze. The batteries on her palmplayer had long gone dead, and she had trouble snitching the money to feed herself, much less to power up a toy.

On the twelfth floor stairwell she encountered the black-and-white mech again, who noticed how weak she was getting, and how despondently she slumped against the rails, too bored and listless to even move.

"How's your mama?" he tried one evening.

Mouse scoffed and didn't answer.

The old mech frowned, but didn't ask anything more. He knelt down on the step next to her and opened his resupply pail. He held an energon tab out to her.

Mouse eyed it intensely. She knew she was better to this, she knew she couldn't give in to this guy, but she hadn't refueled in almost three cycles. Before she even knew that she'd moved she snatched the tab from between his figures and inhaled it, gobbling it down in one huge swallow. She almost choked, but the warmth that spread through her frame immediately reassured her. The underused adrenal cables in her face surged through their disintegrating sheathing and little bits of liquid welled in the corners of her optics.

He pet her head again, but stronger, comforting. The cables broke completely and before she knew it she was crying against his knee.

"Aw, shug," the old mech said gently, stroking her back. "Don't do that; you'll use it all up again..."

He spoke to her in English, using phrases that were old, even for her. He told her to simmer down and buck up. He said if she ever needed a pal, to ring him up, thirteenth floor, second from the waste chute.

"Any time, doll, you dig?"

She nodded rapidly, rubbing at her optics.

"Atta girl," the old Autobot said, and said his name was Jazz. And then he went to work.

Not four milicycles after he left her there, Mouse was already hating herself. She'd acted out of weakness and now he was treating her like a stray, she knew it: a scruffy little cassette cat like the lady downstairs collected. She knew she couldn't be in this hallway when he came back in the start-cycle. Or any other time after that.

The embarrassment burned her from her insides out. She resented him for making her look so pathetic, for extending help like that-- what did he take her for? If only she had some way of erasing that horrible moment from his memory. She'd never be able to look him in the optic in her life...

She couldn't stay on this step a refresh longer. She stood, and began racing up the steps to the 13th landing.

Jazz's door wasn't unlocked, but it gave with a little effort. She would go in now while he was at work and take what he wouldn't give to her-- that would serve him right for treating her like she was pathetic. She'd show him. She took care of herself.

The inside of the apartment was cluttered but not dirty, and full of things she didn't quite expect. There was a massive poster on the wall showcasing some human post-rock band, and paper lanterns dangled from the ceilings. A multi-coloured wood-panelled human juke box stood underappreciated in a crowded corner-- it barely came up to Mouse's waist and she doubted she could even press its buttons without smashing the entire keypad. There were figures and trinkets everywhere, some broken but still positioned with care on every available surface. There were a great many graphical displays and a few holograms, but she wasn't interested in looking at them.

He had a large picture window facing the interface hotel across the street, with the opacity screens on thick enough that only the thin strings of neon cut through into the room. The little balcony wasn't enough to even walk along, and even so was packed with extra junk: an oversized bicycle, houseplants, spare tires. There was a shy door that led back into what looked to be a recharge compartment, but it was the kitchen that interested her.

Given the readiness with which he'd fed her earlier, she thought his energon tank would be chock full, but the metre on its front panel warned it was near empty. She kept hunting, for goodie packets or tab stacks, and found a few chunks here and there and swallowed them thoughtlessly, but larger scraps eluded her. She was just about to give it up as a bad job to go look to see if there was something to steal next to his recharger bay, when something caught her eye.

One of those regiment pictures. They were a cred a dozen in vets' homes in this building, but this was different somehow. It was clearly taken off a celluloid negative, and printed on fairly ancient paper. And from the angle of view, it was obvious a human had taken it.

He had served on Earth, then? Or with the EDC, same diff. But he wasn't alone in the picture either. She tugged it out from under the magnet that stuck it to the foodbox and held it close to her nose.

The red one was Soundwave, or Blaster, or whatever his name was, the music player one. He had served two different Primes before dying in some duel with that Decepticon what's-his-name, Mouse remembered that much from skimming the library's records. He and Jazz were doing something with their hands, with the middle two fingers tucked in and the thumb, index and little finger jutting out like horns, and they seemed to get a huge kick out of it.

Between them, smaller and stockier, was a goldish-yellow 'bot with a fat faceplate. He looked familiar, but Mouse couldn't place him. Given her general distaste of history records, it wasn't likely she'd seen him in a file somewhere...

Before she could devote another moment's thought to it, her audio receptors picked up the distinct sound of the apartment door opening. Panic flooded her starved circuits: B shift shouldn't be out for half a cycle, there was no way for Jazz to be home so early, unless he'd forgotten something? Mouse dropped the photograph straight to the floor and darted for the entrance into the living room, diving behind a set of shelves just as the figure at the door shuffled through the foyer.

Mouse was barely at rest when she knew this was a stupid place to be. The entering 'bot walked within view of her a refresh after, a satchel slung over his shoulder.

It wasn't Jazz. It was a smaller mech, about Mouse's own height, mostly white and blue, and he had young, exhausted optics. Mouse hadn't even time to crouch and start crawling toward to the recharge compartment before the boy swung his gaze to her corner, and immediately let out a shout.

Flight instinct took over. Mouse leapt over the low furniture and barrelled past the young 'bot. He caught her by her back plating but she tore out of his grasp, wincing as the hood kibble cracked but not daring to pause. She raced out into the hallway and was at the stairwell taking the steps three at a time before she heard him behind her. His voice was high when he shouted, but she was in no state to pay attention to what he was yelling.

Mouse ran until she hit street level and kept running after that. She ran three blocks into the dimly-lit evening avenue until she staggered, sure that she had lost him by now, and also sure that he'd be waiting for her if she tried to go back anytime soon.

The run had depleted her heat reserves. Her chassis shivered in the night air. Not that Cybertronian atmosphere looked any different in daytime, but it was a lot colder.

She found a bus station and sank down on a bench, hugging her arms. Her adrenal compressors were still pounding in her chest.

He was a kid. He was a kid like her, a derivative. What was one of those doing in Jazz's apartment?

And that photograph, that short mech, the gold armour and a lightness to his optical visor, as though under that faceplate he was wearing a wide, honest grin... but how did she know that...

Her energy cells rapidly depleting, Mouse didn't have room to think about it further. She nestled further down into the bus bench and fell into standby.

The street patrol picked her up a centicycle before the A shift would be waking up. It was nothing to do with being a child and a delinquent --Cybertron had no such policies; they still barely knew what children were-- and everything to do with her cluttering up a public space. They charged her power cells enough to get her back home and shipped her off back up the street with curt prod in the back. She stumbled, haggard, through the cold, up to her apartment block, and up the lift to her floor in a complete daze.

Her mother was asleep when she entered, the teevee still blaring in the dark and rank room. Mouse switched it off. Her mother shifted on their dirty unfurnished floor but didn't wake.

Her own recharger bay wasn't working. The utility guy had come talking about the taps and her mother had bargained him down to keeping one bed working and ten milicycles of senselessness for his trouble. Of course, it was Spindizzy's bed that worked. She was the one who hardly left it.

Well, it was free now, and Mouse needed rest so badly even her mother's recharger bay looked inviting. She flopped down into it and nestled her back into the worn groove until the sockets caught and she was wired in, and she fell asleep half on her side, smelling her mom, who smelled like drink.

Mouse woke far too soon, in pain. Her mother was hitting her, slapping her hard with the flat of her hand. Shrieking about the little monster in her bed.

Mouse raced out of the apartment in a hurry, without checking the time. It was the evening, and she collided with someone's leg the instant she emerged in the hallway.

"Whoa, now! Hey, sport."

'Sport'. That was her dad's name for her. It wasn't her dad saying it, though.

She flattened against the wall opposite Jazz, terrified to look away from him but desperate to spy an escape route as well. He seemed bigger than yesterday.

"Heard you met my boy yesterday," Jazz said. It was hard to guess where his tone was exactly. "Shocked the hell outta him, though he won't admit it. 'Spose I shoulda said drop by when we was in. Your mama's got a lot ta answer for if she's teachin' you bad manners like that."

She shouldn't have answered but the words took it out of her. "She don't have anything to do with me," she said hastily.

Jazz stood baffled. Then he laughed. "Well, if that ain't the most I heard outta you yet."

He wasn't carrying his lunch pail. B shift must have already begun by how, but he didn't seem in any hurry. It might have been his day off.

"We got a bit a' time before my Prowlie's outta his class," Jazz continued conversationally. "Your mama in?"

"No," Mouse said instinctually.

"That right? So you were shoutin' at yourself in there?"

Mouse tensed, seeing no escape. Noticing her anxiety, Jazz waved her down. "We're cool, chica, we're cool. I wanted to have a good talkin'-to with your originator about letting her kid out and about with no energon. That ain't Arcee's style, leastwise any Arcee I useta know."

If someone nudged her then, she would have fallen right over. Her mom looked a great deal like her twin sister, that was for sure, but how could Jazz have picked that up if she never stepped out of the flat? And how could he be so personal when he spoke about her aunt? They couldn't have served together, could they..?

More than anything, though, was the agony of the moment. Mouse remembered the phone call to Arcee in Iacon, how she'd wanted so badly for Arcee to have been her mother instead. But that could never come at the expense of Arcee's reputation, no matter whom to.

"Arcee's not my mother," Mouse said, though it pained her to do it. "My mom's her sister, Spindizzy."

"Spindizzy..." Jazz ran the name through his voicebox a few times, heavy in thought. "The space geisha?"

"Huh?"

"Never mind. So your old lady, think she'd be hot to trot for a chat for a mo'?"

Mouse cringed. She flashed on the last male to vanish into the depths of Spindizzy's compartments, and the guilty, drained look on his face when he exited. She'd sooner rip her own innards out than invite Jazz to that party.

"My mom doesn't talk to people," she muttered to the floor.

"To you neither, I expect."

She shook her head.  "...Just yells."  The cracks to her casing where her mother's hand had landed stung bitterly.

Jazz said no more about it. Whatever he wanted to ask Spindizzy, it wasn't so important in the end.

He extended a hand out to her, bending close so she could reach it.

"Well, now that's outta the way, how 'bout we go and talk ourselves?"

She took his hand hesitantly. It was strong and hot, like it had felt when he patted her head.

"And after all that dirty laundry, don't you think I've got a right to learn your name?" Jazz said kindly.

"...Oh," she said, and told him.

Jazz's son was named Prowl 2, and he was lean and bookish, a lot different from his father. He took classes over at the university in Upper Praxus most of the cycle and came home after Jazz had gone to work, and was off to school again almost as soon as Jazz got back in the mornings. Once a decacycle they had a bit of time off together, and this cycle was one such.

He regarded Mouse irritably at first but suffered her like a little sibling by the end of dinner. His father had excused Mouse's burglary as "just foolin'" and Prowl 2 did not apparently argue with his father.

They had a lot of respect for each other. Though he wasn't much beyond Mouse in stage, Jazz spoke to him like an adult, and Prowl answered in kind. The only thing that marked him at all, size aside, was the way he called Jazz "Dad".

Dad. She hadn't heard that word aloud in so long.

"Prowlie's namesake served with me in the Great War," Jazz explained casually, filling Mouse's plate again. Despite knowing full well the limited contents of their kitchen, Mouse had been so low on energy and without a real meal in so long, she couldn't control herself. Jazz didn't seem to mind, though once in a while Prowl 2 snobbishly stole one of her energon tabs away with his iron chopsticks. "A Decepticon brother by the name a' Scavenger took him down during the Siege of oh-five. Rest his spark. But so long as I've got my boy, it's like he ain't really gone."

"Dad," Prowl 2 quavered, embarrassed.

"We always meant to stay on Earth," Jazz continued, deferring slightly to his son's protest. "But Prowlie'd had a near miss as a sparkling and he was never so fit, and at the time, maybe fifty years ago, they had a girl workin' the nurseries here who could fix anything she laid her hands on. She did Prowl up so good you'd think she'd drawn the schematics herself."

Mouse listened enviously to this. The technicians who worked on her had always been distracted and fumbling old mechs, cursing at low volume like she'd made her internals confusing on purpose, and leaving her chassis worse than it had been before. She wished she'd been seen by this miracle doctor. But the way Jazz spoke, it seemed she wasn't around anymore.

"After we got here, well, there was no money to get back, so I got a job to put Prowl through policing school and keep his upgrades going, and here we are today. Imagine my surprise when I heard that little palmplayer of yours warblin' in Japanese," he said to Mouse, looking up from shoveling energon croutons into her mouth.

"Palindromeda Eighteen," she said knowledgably, still compacting. She wiped the corner of her mouth. "You play as Star Sabre. I ran out of batteries before the final battle with Overlord, though."

Jazz laughed. Prowl 2 snorted through his olfactory sensors.

They listened to music while watching teevee. Mostly they just flipped channels, enjoying the glow of the raster lights more than the substance of the thing. Mouse couldn't remember the last time she'd sat down and watched teevee. None of her programmes showed here. But Jazz and Prowl 2 had the human channels.

It seemed as though gazing into some magic portal, catching snippets of life in some other universe. Smiling, happy-faced humans, pink and brown flesh dancing and contorting as they smiled and moved and spoke in languages Mouse had all but forgotten. Back in Autobot City there were humans everywhere-- there were more humans than Autobots, even, and they had been dirty and annoying and as bad as anyone else. But humans on television were enchanting and beautiful and everything she regretted leaving behind.

A flouncy blonde came onscreen and Mouse thought morosely of her father. For him, the magic of the teevee had turned into the real thing. It had led him off into the wilderness, leaving her a big bottle of shame and jeers about her "organic" side.

Jazz had not asked about the other half of her parentage. Nor had Prowl 2. Jazz spoke instead of the war and Prowl talked about military history. He was training to be a policeman, like his late father, whom he had never really known while alive, but whom he respected greatly, thanks to Jazz and the history books he'd studied. In stark contrast to Mouse's father, Prowl 1 was universally a hero. Hearing about him, though, Mouse privately thought he sounded a bit stodgy.

Prowl 2 was not. Once he'd relaxed there was a calm warmth to him, and he kept up with his father's frenetic rambling on the finer points of neo-opera, and knew most of the groups that Mouse liked. The young fembot's power centres swelled fiery-hot to meet someone --a derivative her own stage, even!-- who actually got Lawny Zippo, and The Busted Shins, and hyper-post-rock philharmonic.

In the space of a decicycle since she'd walked in the door, Mouse had a new best friend. It was easily said, since she hadn't had many friends to speak of up to that point.

"Can I come with you when you go to school tomorrow?" Mouse asked eagerly, since she'd never been to one.

"I don't know if they'd approve," Prowl 2 said apologetically. "They're very strict about derivatives uptown. They only tolerate me because Dad knew one or two of the professors from back when."

"They like you cuz you whipped everyone else at the entrance exams," Jazz corrected from over by the jukebox.

"I wasn't that good," the boy insisted to her. "I don't have half the memory cache the others do. I just got lucky on some of the questions..."

"Where he gets this modesty, I got no idea," Jazz said, still adamant. He sat down between the children to enjoy the operatic rap he'd just put on. "I always 'spected his dad was cheatin' on me with Ultra Magnus."

In Mouse's databanks, Ultra Magnus was an untouchable pillar of military legend that had not so much lived as existed in timelessness as One Of Those Names Everyone Knows. Hearing Jazz suggest something so lightly almost caused Mouse to faint.

She wondered if her dad ever talked like this. He had never really gone into his war service with her. Would he even have known Jazz? Would Jazz have liked him? If they'd both lived on Earth for so long...

The song changed.

Mouse's audio receptors tilted on her head. It was a very different piece, a style a lot older than she was used to hearing. It was a lone human voice and a guitar, and some violin and piano that snuck in carefully. A high tempo, but the words were ironic and sad.

'...Steve McQueen
jumped the first one clean.
But the great escape
He tried to make
Was not to be.
Maybe next time, Steve...'

"What is this?" Mouse asked, momentarily caught up. She couldn't understand the references so much but the voice carried weight.

"Irish song, oh-four, easy listen'," Jazz said, sounding distant. "My buddy Blaster played it after the Siege came, the one that took most of us away."

'Absent friends
Here's to them.
And happy days, we thought that they
Would never end...'

Beside her, Prowl 2 was silent. She understood. That was the day his other father had died. This song might have been one of the earliest memories he had.

Jazz still spoke, but his voice had affected a reflective tone. "I lost most of the men I'd grown up with, that day. Folks I'd spent millions of years arm and arm with. Fine, fine people."

Mouse stared at her knees and said nothing.

'Absent friends
Here's to them.
And happy days, we thought that they
Would never end.
But they always end.
Raise your glasses, then
To absent friends.'

The song ended in a rush of cheerful violin, incongruous to the timbre of the human's voice. It crashed into silence, just the whir of the jukebox as it selected the next song. No-one said anything.

Then, Prowl 2 stood up.

"The trams should have cleared by now," he told his father.

"Right!" said Jazz, standing as well. He helped little Mouse to her feet. The mood had completely cleared. "We'll take the lanterns. It's her first time an' all."

"We're going somewhere?" Mouse asked. "In the middle of the night?"

"Why else recharge so much at dinner?" the boy said airily. "This is all the time we'll have in a decacycle. Who'd want to spend it asleep?"

"But you just said the trams've stopped."

Prowl grinned. "What, you've never gone skateboarding before?"

"No, no, no, no--"

"You'll love it! Here we go!"

"No, no, no--!"

Mouse's scream echoed the entire length of the tunnel.

Yes, she'd told Prowl, of course she'd gone skateboarding before. She was raised on Earth, after all, what did they take her for? But the terran version of the sport did not involve a vertical drop into pitch darkness, bent forward to meet the wind as it rushed across their faces, while all the world tore away.

Mouse dug her fingers into Jazz's arms so tight she might have cracked his forearm. She was frozen stiff, terrified beyond measure, her processors spinning completely out of control as Jazz's board hopped and weaved along the polished metal walls it hugged. He spun them into a 360 and Mouse's compressors turned upside-down. They hit wall again and found purchase again along the grooves between the riveting, wheels touching down with a hard crack just as they hit a bend in the pipe.

Prowl was behind and ahead of them seemingly at once, whooping and laughing as he boarded circles around them. Jazz forgot his cargo and counterweaved to join the dance, and Mouse was too frightened to even yell her head off any more.

When they reached a plateau, one of the tram stations it seemed, the father and son dismounted their boards and Prowl 2 presented his to Mouse, dizzy with adrenaline.

"Go on! You try."

"No, no, I--"

But the two of them urged her onto the board anyway, repositioning her feet into the braces.

"It's just like driving," Prowl 2 panted, correcting her posture, rolling her to the edge of the pipe. "Just hug the inner side on turns. It's all in the hips."

"No, wait--"

He pushed until the front wheels teetered in the air, and then the whole front of Mouse's board lurched forward. It hit the bend of the halfpipe hard and momentum carried the rest. Mouse only had room to shout once.

Everything started to blur together. Before she knew it, plating after plating was rushing past; her entire frame felt light, as though numb, and even the rush of air seemed to be gone. She was only aware of movement, of the fluid exhilaration of the turn, the blinding speed as the tunnel once more turned vertical before her, as Jazz and Prowl 2's voices echoed up from behind and then surpassed her, and she realised belatedly she was laughing right along with them.

At the base of a steep up-slope Prowl 2 and Mouse got on foot and climbed onto Jazz's shoulders with the boards tucked under their arms. Jazz transformed beneath them, into the old Earth altmode he'd refused to change. The exhaust and burnt rubber filled the tram tunnel with a thick haze as he peeled out, charging up the curve of the tunnel at blistering speeds.

The lights of downtown spread into view as Jazz hit the lip of the tunnel and let it go. For a moment, an eternal moment, there was pure weightlessness. As fluidly as human muscle, Jazz transformed again in mid air, and Mouse and Prowl 2 hugged to his back panelling and watched the city lights as a stream of raster noise. Mouse had never seen anything like it in her life.

Without really thinking about what she was doing, adrenal cabling still pumping overtime in her chest, Mouse clung tighter to Jazz, and to Prowl 2 as well.

Jazz spun and landed on the treds of his feet, perched on the rooftop adjacent to the tunnel they'd just shot out of. They were on the edge of the tallest skyscraper in Lower Praxus, overlooking the whole of downtown. He guided Mouse down to her feet gently, when she discovered she couldn't quite stand yet.

"What a sight, huh?" Jazz said to her, woozy, coming off of a bad overclock as well. Prowl 2 landed beside them, stretching the linkages in his legs. "What a sight."

Like a magnet, she attached herself to him again, hugging his knee as tightly as he had held her by the waist. They weren't moving anymore, but she still worried about letting go.

They stayed out until nearly the end of B shift, when the trams were warming up for morning service. Mouse was dragging her feet as they neared the apartment, more a mental exhaustion than a physical one. She didn't know quite how she came to walk hand in hand with the father and son pair, but she did, and they lugged her up to their 13th floor flat as cheerfully as they carried their boards.

They didn't stay in the crowded apartment living room long. Jazz had eaten less than the children the night before because he was intent on recharging properly before his shift that evening, and Prowl had to grab his satchel with his school things.

"Your professors won't mind if I'm with you, right?" Mouse worried.

"You could always go home instead," Prowl 2 suggested, but didn't get too far with that idea. Mouse dug her heels into the floor plating at the very notion. "In that case, just stay quiet. I'm sure it'll be all right."

He didn't seem too convinced, though.

Jazz hugged his son tight before they departed and gave Mouse a good squeeze as well. He'd packed the leftovers from the night's dinner in Prowl 2's lunch pail, which looked just like his own except it bore a chipped and worn painting of Star Prime on its side, and gave this to Mouse to carry as he waved the two children out the door. Always a little sad to look at, right then Jazz seemed almost miserable to see his child off, so much so that Mouse felt a small tug in her power supply to run back to him.

The university lay in the northwest of Upper Praxus, near the Helix Gardens. They took the trams to the edge of uptown and switched over to the metro bullet train for the rest of the journey. Prowl 2 had a student pass, but Mouse had to scrape into her pitiful savings to pay her fare. There were no seats for them, so they stood in a corner and hugged the glass and tried not to get stepped on.

Almost everyone who did happen to notice them gave them a dirty look. Prowl appeared accustomed to this reaction; Mouse, not half so immune, cringed behind him and kept her optics to the floor. She barely noticed the polished city flashing by around them, until they reached the university station and Prowl 2 was tugging her arm.

The University of Praxus were among the old buildings of Cybertron, the ones that exhibited the physical effects of the Golden Ages. Within the sphere of its territory the sky above them lit up as a vivid spark blue, like Earth summertime. Its buildings shone from within as a golden glow; wild helix crystals that had spread by the wind from the nearby gardens crept up and down the sides of the law and civilities buildings like violet ivy and networked across the walkways.

There were plenty of students around, who looked the way Prowl 2 might if blown up to regular model size. They were mostly slight, thin-cased 'bots with ramrod straight backs and little or no expression. They mostly manouevered in small groups, speaking the way a mechanic would airdust a motherboard, with precision and lightness and an utterly surgical professionalism. No-one greeted Prowl as he and Mouse passed them by, and in fact the two went completely unacknowledged until they arrived at the doors of the Culture and History lecture hall.

"Hey! Quarkface!"

The speaker was a snobbish, swaggering yellow and blue thing, who padded right in front of the doorway as Prowl 2 and Mouse made to pass. If he were a human, the word 'jock' might have been appropriate. He might have been a racer in his spare time.

"What's wrong, your contributors haven't shut down your production line yet?" the jock said, leering.

"I don't know what you mean, Reg," Prowl 2 replied stiffly. He didn't attempt to get past him, clearly having been through this morning ritual before.

"I mean that dust mote shadowing you," Reg sniffed, gesturing so vaguely and uncaringly in Mouse's general direction he more specifically identified the wall behind her. "Should we be sending an official down to your house to neutralise your mother's serial jack?"

"This is my friend," Prowl 2 answered, touching Mouse's arm firmly. "She's sitting in on the lecture today, that's all."

"Oh yeah? Funnily enough, I remember there being some sort of qualification before I could attend classes here. I think it was an entrance exam? Although I suppose some of us are such beautiful and unique crystallised water particles we can just sidestep all those neat little rules, isn't that right?"

"I'm here by my own merit," Prowl said, unwavering. "If you doubt that, ask Professor Skydive, who proctored my exam-- and yours, although I don't suppose that was too pleasant an experience for the poor mech."

Mouse wasn't entirely able to suppress the giggle. Reg glared like he expected the look alone to smite her.

"Mouse is my guest today," Prowl 2 continued. "She's derived from a line of famous sharpshooters, something you would know if you paid the least bit attention in Fourth Age History. If you have a problem with her occupying one of the seats left vacant by your many drop-out friends, take it up with the professor."

Reg didn't answer. He spat a wad of oil on the steps and made a low derisive noise, and seemed to lose interest in them. He left the doorway.

Prowl 2 muttered an Earth curse under his breath as the jock went. Mouse was momentarily shocked, but then her overwhelming awe took over.

"You're amazing!" she cried.

"He's the easy one," Prowl 2 said tiredly. "Silver sparkplug type. It's a good thing we didn't get hassled by Deep Blue-- he's sharp and he hates derivatives. You'd think one leaked in his iron supplements each morning or something. Come on," he added. "We need to actually get you cleared with the professor before the class starts."

"What was that about me being descended from famous people?" Mouse said hastily, as he dragged her through the classroom doors.

"Sorry. I didn't want to lie, but you are, I mean, sort of. Arcee's battle accuracy ratings are legendary, and you did say she was your aunt..."

"Yeah, but..."

"Professor!"

Professor Skydive was inscribing notes with a laser pen on the enormous blackscreen at the head of the lecture hall. He was surprisingly young-looking for such a high-ranked academic, Mouse thought, but then, age was a relative thing in "proper" Transformers.

Skydive received Prowl 2 with a weary sort of warmth. Between his demeanour and some of his grammar, Mouse discovered he must have served quite a lot of time on Earth, and maybe that was why he continued to have some affection for his small student, even though the faint discomfort on his face never exactly went away. Especially when he noticed Mouse shrinking at the corner of his desk.

"Oh, no, Prowl, honestly, I don't wish to be seen as making all these exceptions..."

"Plenty of students have brought guests in the past! Wide Berth brought that reporter from the Times, and Lockjaw brought his companion twice..."

"Yes, but, ah, it's just I don't want to exude the image that we're... well, endorsing certain practises and... well..." Skydive shrunk beneath his pupil's intense gaze. "I take it she'll be quiet?" he said desperately.

"You won't hear a beep outta me," Mouse volunteered, before realising that may have been the wrong course of action. Skydive hurriedly went back to avoiding her gaze and writing lecture notes on the screen. She promptly shut up.

Prowl 2 led Mouse up the steps to his row as the clocks tolled the decicycle, signalling the start of class. Most of the students were already in their seats, and the few that remained outside began filtering in at a comfortable pace. The last was barely sitting down when Skydive began to speak.

"Good morning, gentlebots, and welcome back to our History of Military Strategy unit. We continue today with our discussion of the tactics employed by Autobot and Decepticon strategists in the Second Age. Please open your copies of Annals of Warfare and take a moment to download the sixth chapter before we proceed."

As he spoke this instruction, a sound of rummaging filled the hall as students pulled out their databooks. Prowl 2 hefted his own copy out of his satchel and hastily keyed it open to the sixth chapter. He wired himself in at once and began downloading at an unheardof speed. A great look of concentration that approached pain spread on his face.

Mouse cringed on his behalf. She couldn't even imagine decrypting data at the rate he was going, and yet it was clear he was struggling a great deal more than the other students around him. He'd barely passed 78% by the time Skydive announced they were now moving ahead with the discussion.

"As we can infer from this chapter," Skydive said, returning to his board, "the Second Age strategists ultimately reached a stalemate when the Decepticons' development of the phylanx formation was counteracted with the Autobots' staged cavalry deployment, leading to identical rates of exhaustion on both sides and neither advancing nor retarding the front line..."

Prowl was enscribing notes furiously onto his external drive. Mouse stared in astonishment, wondering why his pen didn't shatter in his grip. The full-frame students merely sat and listened, calmly writing the lecture into their onboard databanks.

The longer the lecture went on, the closer Prowl 2 looked to frantic. Yet he kept his mouth pressed into a hard, flat line and soldiered on, keeping pace as closely as he could. It was valiant but pitiable. She could hardly watch him after a while.

"Now," the professor finished: "who can tell me what can logically be deduced as the flaw in the Autobots' offensive strategy as we arrive in the second half of the Mitiral Dynasty?"

Half a dozen hands were lazily held up. Prowl 2 stopped writing something mid-sentence to shoot his own up.

"Ah, yes, Reg," Skydive said distractedly.

Reg was reclining easily in his seat, at the other end of the hall from Prowl and Mouse. "Simple, Professor: it was an offensive strategy, and Beta was a strategist of the defensive school."

"A bit of an inconsiderate summation, but not incorrect," Skydive told him. He addressed the class at large. "Would anyone care to elaborate on Reg's postulation?"

Prowl 2's arm strained in the air. He seemed to be burning with a desire to outdo the guy at the moment.

"Oh. Ah. Prowl."

"Sir." Prowl stood up in front of his desk, the better to be heard. "Beta was a standard-issue civilian model of the B17 line, as such, much of her battle logistics bore out of self-defence protocol. Even though the Autobots had switched to the offensive by the Battle of Oversight, her principal strategem was still the preservation of life, weakening the effectiveness of the First Division's assault."

"An acceptable reading of the material, Prowl. Yes, as we can see by this map in our reader, the First Division--"

A new voice rose up. It was the stiff-upper-lipped nextgen Prowl 2 had pointed out to Mouse before class, the mech called Deep Blue.

"Professor, I must contend there is a critical flaw in the boy's assessment," he said calmly, not a raised voice, but ceded to by Skydive all the same.

"Ah. Do go on?"

"The Battle of Oversight was not by any stretch of imagination a definitive example of the limitations of staged cavalry deployment," said Deep Blue. "In fact, it was a clear victory for the Decepticons, owing to the terrain."

Prowl 2's jaw clenched. It seemed to Mouse that the guy was only bringing this up to needle him.

"Yes, that's true," Skydive confirmed, awkward, like he didn't appreciate having his lecture derailed. "However, I believe we can all agree that the net effect by that point had--"

"The Skirmish of Brandier is more astutely designated the turn of the Mitiral Era confrontations into standstill," Deep Blue continued, undeterred. "Although I suppose that's simply too obscure a historical footnote for some to bother with."

Prowl 2's fingers clenched the edge of his desk.

"Not at all, Deep Blue, not at all," Skydive reassured him hastily. "It's important information for any student of military history to be aware of."

"So glad you agree, sir. It begs the question, then, professor, why this child in our midst didn't see fit to acknowledge it."

"I... I forgot," Prowl croaked.

"He forgot," Deep Blue announced, amused. Some light chuckling filtered up from the rest of the class.

"That's quite enough," Skydive said sternly, raising his voice above the murmured laughter. "It has no impact on our lecture for the day. Now will you all please open your readers to pagefile sixty-eight-B--"

Prowl 2's fist connected hard with the wall plating. He cursed.

Mouse stood awkwardly at the edge of the alley between the Science and Development buildings, leaning against one wall and staring into space.

The lecture had continued miserably from that point, with Prowl falling further and further behind in the discussion. Every time he spoke, and even sometimes when he didn't, Deep Blue had spoken up to do some needling in his direction. He'd even taken a jab or two at Mouse, who hadn't said a word the entire class.

"Asshole," Prowl hissed, using words only Jazz could have possibly taught him. "If I had just had more RAM, I could have remembered that! He always does that, catching me up on some stupid technicality! It's not my fault my processing power is half of what his is!"

Mouse lowered her gaze from the opposite wall to her feet. "Forget that guy," she muttered. "He's just a big box of trivia. Who gives a slag about him?"

"I don't!" Prowl 2 shouted, and then punched the wall again. A weblike crack appeared in the metal. "It's always 'boy' this and 'kid' that! He'd never have the guts to go around calling a micromaster or whatever that, you can bet your skidplate! It's just derivatives like us!"

"But we are weak," Mouse said sadly. "We're always going to be inferior. We're never gonna be better than they are."

"I don't believe it!" he yelled defiantly. "I'll never believe that! If I had the credits, I could go down to the nursery and buy a new body today and be everything he is, or even better! It's all down to money!"

Mouse winced. She knew it was true, what he was saying. But megacycles of dirty looks told her it couldn't possibly end there. No-one could possibly be so cruel to cheat an entire breed out of proper development just because someone had started a rumour that they were weak and unreliable and dumb and small and pointless. It had to be because they really were.

She'd accepted that. She'd decided her only way to make it through life was just not to care.

She gave Prowl a light nudge with her fist. It bumped his cheek plate a little harder than she intended. He scowled at her.

"Come on," she told him, unbothered. "Let's blow this joint."

"I have two more classes today," Prowl 2 said stubbornly, suddenly aware of his satchel again. "And I need to study in the library before the next one. I didn't finish all of the computations for homework--"

"So?"

"So-- I--"

Mouse didn't exactly know what was compelling her to be spontaneous, but her desire to get Prowl 2 as far away from himself as possible for a while was overriding her timidness. She transformed into her altmode and rolled her front fender against Prowl's shin.

"Come on! Race you to the skyport!"

"...Frag it," Prowl 2 muttered, stowing his satchel away in his back pod. He forced a small smirk, but then after few moments it wasn't so forced. "You're on."

They started out for the skyport but in the end they just drove, and kept driving until the edge of evening came. They wheeled to a halt on a naked ridge above the western expansion and unfolded into their robot modes, staggering and panting, dangerously close to overheating.

Prowl 2 braced himself on his knees. "Geez, you're fast," he gasped.

"It's... haa... the one thing I've got to my... credit," Mouse heaved, flopping down onto her back. "That and my stupid... hard head."

"You really are related to Arcee." Prowl 2 sat down in stages, taking it a little at a time. "Has she ever seen you go?"

"I haven't seen her in megacycles."

"My dad, my other dad, he was one of the fastest things on the road. He had to be, to be a good cop," said Prowl 2, closing his optics to enjoy the mellow wind coming over the hills. Their cases were practically steaming. "It was how he met Dad. He caught him speeding. Back before the Great War."

"Only good my racing's done is keeping me from getting caught."

"Yeah," Prowl 2 smirked at her. "I saw that."

She stuck her tongue out at him. "Lock your doors better."

The boymech laid down on the slope of the hill next to her, head cradled in his hands. This far from the old buildings of the city, the full detail of space opened up in the sky above them, uninhibited by the azure atmosphere.

"What about your dad?" he asked Mouse. "Or your other mom or whatever."

Mouse froze on the answer. She bit her lip.

If anyone would know Bumblebee's place in military history, Prowl would. She couldn't bear him looking at her with the same derision as all those people at the clinic. It would ruin everything between them.

"I dunno," she lied, looking away. "My mom doesn't gotta clue."

She expected him to drop it, but he seemed to take it as a challenge.

"Really? You're sure you don't know?"

"Positive. Seriously."

"Huh," he rolled onto one shoulder, musing. "With your chassis design, the other contributor was probably a minibot... You're really energy-efficient, too: you said you went whole cycles before depleting your power cells, that's pretty rare out of derivatives... And there were only a few who served in the Great War who had a battle protocol like yours."

Mouse snorted. "I don't have a battle protocol."

"I didn't say it was a very good one, but it's pretty distinctive... Heh!" He barked a laugh into the cooling air. "Maybe you're Bumblebee's kid! That would be pretty awesome."

Mouse whipped her head around at him before she could control herself.

"But I guess not pretty likely," Prowl 2 continued slowly, still lost in thought.

"...Would it really be awesome?" she asked softly.

Prowl 2 glanced up at her before she had a chance to compose her expression.

Jazz hugged her so tightly she thought she thought her rivets would pop.

"Bumblebee's sparkling! Primus be praised!" He was very nearly crying, by the sound of things. "Bless your little frame, child! To think ol' Bumbles' own was just two floors down from us this whole time!"

Prowl 2's father had been slightly disconcerted to hear he had skipped class the day before, but all that vanished at breakfast the moment Prowl had told him about Mouse's parentage.

"I was the first he told after it happened," Jazz went on. "Prowlie an' me were livin' in Sydney at the time or we mighta been your neighbours! Shit! To think! They'da named me godparent if'n your mama hadn't been disgusted at the idea. Old-fashioned semaphore."

Mouse tapped his shoulder urgently. To her great relief, he finally loosened his hug and set her back down on the floor.

"How is ol' BB?" Jazz asked her, dabbing at an errant bead of coolant that had accumulated in the corner of an optic. "He writes ya, of course?"

Her compressors sank. "No," she said. "Not in megacycles."

"What?" the old Autobot cried. "That ain't the 'bee's style at all! He loved ya to bits! Said you were the best thing that ever happened to 'im!"

Mouse looked at the floor. She didn't bring up what people said at the nursery, and wrote in the history books. How her dad had gone and turned into a fleshie-lover, how he'd abandoned his own kind and his kid for a blonde with a red pick-up truck. She didn't see how Jazz couldn't know about all that, but if he didn't --or he did and he was in denial-- she didn't want to get him started about it. He was the first person who'd spoken favourably about her father since she'd moved here.

"Well, whatever's goin' on, if it weren't official before it is now," Jazz declared, "honey, you're welcome here whenever and however, as long as you function."

Suddenly, Mouse felt next to weightless. "If Dad made you my godfather," she said anxiously, "does that mean you can take custody of me?"

"No, no. I'm afraid not, shug," Jazz told her sadly. "Your mama's got rights over you until you've got your equivalency or she's declared unfit by the state."

Mouse shrank down again. For one brief moment there, her spark had fluttered like a drive LED with that faint little bit of hope. So much for that now. The Welfare Commission had investigated Spindizzy twice and decided that so long as she wasn't dismantling her daughter for spare parts, she didn't count as an unfit caretaker.

But she'd had half the upgrades that Prowl had and her mom was probably not going to take her back to the nurseries again for a long time, maybe forever. And if she didn't get upgraded, she'd never pass her equivalency test. She couldn't stand the thought of being stuck with her horrible mother for all eternity, not when Jazz was so close and so obviously gave a damn, and Prowl 2 was quickly becoming her first real friend.

Prowl 2 finished his breakfast and collected his school things. Mouse dashed back to the table and swallowed down her portion, to chase after him as he began out the door.

"You really can't come with me," Prowl told her, embarrassed. "I mean, yesterday was fine but now I'm really behind, and I need to make everything up..."

"But your dad's going to sleep," she protested. "I don't wanna just hang around in your house all day."

"I'm sorry." He looked really agonised about it. "Maybe in another few cycles, okay?"

With Prowl gone and Jazz recharging, Mouse had nowhere to go but home, and home was the one place above all others she didn't want to be. She hung out in the corridors instead and stared at the wall, replaying yesterday's adventure in her head until she wore herself out thinking about it. She kept hoping vaguely that the boy would reappear, having changed his mind, or Jazz would show up and take her somewhere interesting, but she knew they wouldn't. They both had lives to get on with.

Her mom hardly kept track of the cycles anymore so she reacted to Mouse the same as she did any other day: screaming until she lost interest or started complaining of a headache. There were more bill notices in their inbox and more bottles littering the floor. Mouse hid out in her room until the air got too stuffy to sit in and went right back outside.

She spent days like this, and after a while that brief cycle of happiness seemed like some sort of dream, or a story she'd just read in a book. She didn't feel confident enough to visit them at breakfast and when she saw them in the stairwell or by the elevator they were always too rushed to talk. They were harried as they went out and exhausted when they came in, and every cycle was exactly the same.

Again feeling confined to the pitifully small apartment block, Mouse wandered the hallways and descended briefly into her old tresspassing stint, visiting the unlocked flats in odd hours when the tedium grew too much and just trudging through the halls for the rest. No-one spoke to her still. She still had no friends except those two, and they weren't around.

"Miss! You, miss!"

It was the old senile fembot. Mouse didn't even remember when she had wandered down to the third floor, but somehow she had gotten there. The old lady was carrying a basket in one frail hand. The basket was mewling.

"Come here, my little nextgen, let me have a look at you," she babbled. "You live in this building, do you? I have a favour to ask. You see, I keep a few cassette cats here in my little place..."

"I know," Mouse said without thinking.

"You do? Strange, my dear, I don't believe you've been to my door before..."

"Er." Mouse thought quickly. "I... sorta... smelled it. Going past. Uh."

Thinking wasn't Mouse's strong suit. The woman squinted at her dubiously.

"Which I do quickly," Mouse continued desperately. "Always in a hurry. Errands."

"Yes, well," the old neutral said, clearly still wary of her. "I have a bit of a problem, you see. The foolish things have gone and had another litter and I simply can't have another dozen of these running around; I'm on a fixed income, you know." Mouse nodded fervently. "So I was wondering if you would like a pet, my dear."

Mouse froze. "Pet?" she squawked.

"They're very low-maintenance," said the elderly fembot. "They'll hibernate whenever they're the least bit bored, and they hook right up to your chest when they need to recharge. Feeding is optional. And these are second-gen derivatives so they're quite small!"

Impossibly tiny was a better word for them. The small sandy-coloured one the woman deposited into Mouse's hands was barely bigger than her palm. It chirped affectionately at her.

She named it Kibble.

The reason escaped her at the time, but she soon was able to rationalise it. It was small and useless, like its owner, but it just wouldn't go away.

It transformed into a music player, its little whiplike tail turning into an adapter to hook up to an altmode music deck, if only Mouse had one. It was fairly pointless because the kitten didn't come with any songs anyway, although it made plenty of random noises of its own design. It scuttled across the floor plating on thin stick-like legs and buried itself beneath Mouse's chest plate to sleep, which it did so most of any given cycle.

Three cycles after Kibble came into her possession, in the afternoon, Mouse sat cross-legged on the twelfth floor landing teaching it to transform on command, when Prowl 2 showed back up, sporting a cracked optic and a nasty split in his cheek plating.

"Primus!" she cried, covering her mouth.

Prowl turned his head to try to hide the damage. Or maybe he just didn't want to look her in the eye.

"I should've known better," he said bitterly. "I did. I did know better. He just got me so riled..."

"Reg?"

He nodded.

"Oh, Prowl..."

She hugged him, but he winced and she stopped. His face wasn't the only place he'd been damaged.

"We need to get you looked at right now," she said urgently. "We'll wake your dad up, he can take you down to the clinic--"

"I've got auto-healing nanites," he told her quickly. "They're standard. It's slow, but it'll repair after a while. I just don't want Dad to see me like this. I think..." He clutched his busted satchel, falling apart at its seams. "I don't know if I'm going to class any more."

"Don't say that!" Mouse exclaimed. "You're so smart!"

"I'm not. I can't keep up," Prowl 2 said miserably. "And no-one wants me there anyway."

She gripped him bracingly by the shoulders, where he didn't seem to be hurt. "Don't be like that," she begged. "Please don't be like that."

"I'm sorry. I know what I said before, but... It's true, you know? We are just weak."

Mouse couldn't even stand to hear the words out of him. "You just need a break, that's all! C'mon, let's go around downtown for a while."

"But..."

"We'll only stay out till your dad goes to work. Just so he doesn't go in worrying," she assured him. She stooped to pick Kibble up and tucked the kitten into her chest compartment.

"Okay," Prowl 2 said hesitantly.

She was sure the fresh atmosphere would help Prowl clear his head a little, but it had less of an effect than she could have hoped. They tried going over to the platewalk and browsing the shops, but neither of them had much spare money to speak of and Mouse couldn't steal with Prowl watching her.

She showed him Kibble, and had the cat transform for him. It sat on Prowl 2's knee and made a sound like a tape rewinding.

"You can have one too: she had a bunch," Mouse went on. "But I think she'll tear their heads off if she can't get owners for them soon."

"That's illegal," Prowl 2 said distantly, letting Kibble chew on his finger.

"What can you do," Mouse muttered into her chestplate. "The dead weight always goes first."

"I thought you dragged us here to cheer me up," Prowl 2 jibed.

"You should be cheered up," she retorted, folding her arms. "You've got an awesome dad and you're so smart and you act like a full-frame." The kitten lept from Prowl's lap to its owner's, tiny feet tik-tikking on Mouse's thigh plating. She scratched it behind an audio receptor. "I don't got anything I can offer anyone. That's probably why my dad left."

"Bumblebee wasn't like that."

"Are you his kid?" she challenged, annoyed at his contradiction. How could he ever know?

"No," Prowl 2 said, a little taken aback. "You're right."

He fell silent.

This was stupid. Mouse kicked at the dust streaked around their bench. They'd come out here to clear Prowl's mood but all it'd done was spread his angst further. He still talked about dropping out of school. Mouse still thought about how she wasn't useful to anyone. She thought about all the stealing she'd done and all that sullenly hanging out in the stairwells while other people went on having lives and her mother drank and moaned about what a burden Mouse was. Jazz said that her father had thought of her as the greatest gift of his life, but she must not have made good on that, or he would have stayed.

75 megacycles old and she'd never helped anyone, had she?

She counted the loose cred in her side compartment. Petting Kibble down its spine, she urged the kitten back into its altmode and stored it away again.

"You know, you're wound awful tight for Jazz's kid," she told Prowl 2, standing up.

"He says that too," Prowl said, looking up her and smiling weakly.

"But you're no stiff," Mouse declared. "An' I know a lot of stiffs. Your class was full of 'em. I doubt any of them even know what Lawny Zippo is."

"Sure, but..."

"You know videogames, right?"

"What?" Prowl 2's optics were wide in momentary bafflement. "Of course, but what's that matter..?"

Mouse pointed down the street. Prowl followed the finger to the arcade at the edge of the pier.

"Oh no," he said quickly. "No, no. I don't have any money to spend on something like that..."

"It's my treat! Come on; just one game, it'll give you a total defrag." She grabbed him by the wrist and tugged his arm insistently. "I won't mind if you suck!"

"--But--"

"Come onnnn!"

"All right, all right! You'll tear my arm off!"

In Jazz's private compartments, there is a small glass case with a deactivated chrome-finished pellet gun, long obsolete but too battered to be called an antique. It had belonged to Jazz's departed mate, salvaged from the hijacked shuttle which he had been piloting to Earth at the onset of the siege of 2005. It was one of the larger pieces they'd collected in the aftermath.

Before, Jazz had always gone to see Prowl Senior's grave beside his comrades at the Mausoleum, but that had since been lost, and now this was all that was left. It wasn't the best momento. There were a lot of ways Jazz would like to remember Prowl besides when he had a gun in his hand, but it was something, anyway.

Jazz set his activation alarm a centicycle early for that evening, and work up stiffly, aches in his aging joints and the compartment air just as stale as it always was. He missed forests. He missed oceans. He missed stinking terran city gloom full of burnt sausage stalls and petroleum exhaust. At least it had been something.

He stretched his shoulders and went to make a call.

Jazz had never told little Prowlie the full details of his conception. It wasn't out of modesty: he'd made sure to tell his son early on where 'bots like him came from, the less for him to ask later. But the night itself had been a strange one, and a memory he was sure would only start to fade long after the rest of him had rusted away.

It had come at the worst possible time. They'd suffered heavy damages at the base where they had been stationed and their forces weren't in any condition to take on additional burdens right then. But stress had taken Prowl outside of himself and he'd needed to feel something electrical, and he'd responded differently to the contact than he had in the past. It was suddenly more visceral to him.

Prowlie's father had hung onto him and they'd kissed like a pair of desperate teenaged humans, and that seemed so weird in retrospect, but Prowl had learnt to equate most anything irrational with humans and with Jazz, and Jazz was the one who made him irrational.

They'd wired up their usual way, farther down than you were supposed to, and they hadn't planned at all to do what they did, but every component in the body was connected to every other component. And Prowl had whispered urgently not to stop.

They'd just meant to feel around, to see what it was like, if it was such a different thing going past the tier-one firewalls. It was. And the ensuing incoherence had been too much for them to get themselves to stop.

He had nearly died that night, their son. It was a damn fool of a thing for them to have done and the spark should have expired in their hands, but Prowl 2 was a blessed, blessed little child, and he had forces larger than themselves watching out for him. And then Prowlie had gone and grown up so strong, so much like his namesake, that it was all right that all Jazz had left of his old comrade was his battered, broken gun.

The telecomm was an old Junkion manufacture, a bit ad hoc, and Jazz spent a good few milicycles fiddling with the knobs until he hit a clean frequency. He punched in an old memorised serial and waited to see what he got.

Bumblebee answered at length, his projection a little fuzzy and the line full of interference. He was coming from a longer way off than Jazz would have expected.

"Jazz!" Bumblebee shouted. "It's been forever and a day, buddy! What the hell do I owe this pleasure to?"

He spoke in English like his daughter, though it had surely been a long time since he'd touched down on Earth.

"'Sup, 'bee," Jazz radioed back calmly, settling forward in his chair. It was like sinking into a favourite old shell. "How's it hangin', dawg?"

"Low and left, brother, low and left. You on Cybertron, then?"

He was back in his Goldbug form. He went back and forth on that every half a gigacycle or so, Jazz noticed. Maybe he was on a long haul mission with the EDC again.

"Shucks, brah, jus' grinding the wheel, you know how it is," Jazz said. "You'll never believed who I gone went an' run into the other day."

He didn't trail it off, but left the statement as a pointed punctuation. Goldbug shifted uneasily, the question already poised behind his faceplate.

"That's right," Jazz told him. "And wouldn't you know, she's swell as her pops was. She an' Prowlie get on like a house on fire."

"Really." Goldbug's voice was quiet. "That's good to hear."

"Spindizzy's doing her wrong, Bumbles, from the sound of it. Your kid wants her dad. You at liberty t'say jus' why that ain't happenin'?"

"Look." The voice was even smaller now. "You wouldn't understand."

"I don't need to," Jazz said, leaning back with his arms folded over his chestplate. "But you gotta be sure she does."

Mouse let out a cry of anguish.

"Why're you so good at that?" she demanded, throwing down her controller gun. She was all out of extra lives, and had just run out of tokens. "That's not fair!"

Prowl 2 held his gun up at shoulder level and grinned sheepishly. "You were probably just going easy on me..."

"I was not! You've had lessons, haven't you?!" she accused, stabbing a finger at him.

"A few, yeah," he admitted, laughing.

He sunk the controller down into its wire holster and cashed out his remaining lives as tokens, giving them a few extra. He tossed them in his hand, smiling to himself.

Mouse beamed at him. She didn't dare mention it, but she could tell he was feeling a little better, and because of that, she felt better too.

The arcade had a subsurface layer that connected with the under-city, and many of the machines wired into the world network. If not for the fact they were here before A shift ended the entire place would probably have been packed with people. As it was, it was pretty crowded, and Prowl 2 and Mouse had had to settle for some of the obscurer machines if they'd wanted any chance of playing that cycle.

But as they walked past the central hub on their way to the racing games, the image on the main monitors caught Mouse's attention. She halted in her tracks and spun on a heel, craning her head to see the action. Prowl 2 followed suit.

It was the display feed from the battlesim that took up a large part of the central floor space. There were two combatants: a micromaster and a young full-frame flight-type, the latter a Decepticon mould if not a Decepticon herself. She seemed to have a clear upper hand, with the micromaster reduced to quickchanging and weaving to avoid her rifle fire, but the more the derivatives watched, the more it was apparent the micromaster was wearing the larger Transformer down, striking in controlled bursts when her defences were lowered.

"What is this?" Mouse said, voice small and raptuous.

"Hm? Oh. It's the sim arena," Prowl 2 explained. "It's a big thing; there are professional leagues. The results of amateur bouts like this are recorded in the global databanks. A lot of top players get discovered that way."

"It's sorta... realistic, isn't it?"

"Gladiatorial combat has a long history on Cybertron. But the Primes banned a physical arena because in the past it had been a way for revolutionaries to network and start banding together. But it was too much of a cultural artifact for them to get rid of it completely--"

"AH!"

Mouse pointed excitedly at the screen. The Decepticon lady had just toppled over and the micromaster stood over her chassis, heaving, lugging a weapon three times his size. An announcer declared the victor of the match.

"That's so awesome!" she cried, bouncing slightly on her feet. "Prowl! We need to try this!"

"Not a chance," he said seriously. "Look at this crowd. We'll be here for eons. It's expensive for just one game, too--"

"But it looks so cool!"

A full-frame, gruff-looking Autobot stuck his head out of the crowd.

"You two," he snarled. "You wanna play?"

"Yes!" Mouse shrieked, before Prowl 2 could stop her.

"I was next, but I ain't playin' 'gainst no minibot. You squirts are more'n welcome to 'im. I'll sell you my place in exchange fer your tokens."

Prowl 2 looked down awkwardly at the chips in his hand. "Um. I don't know if this is enough..."

"You got somethin' else fer me?"

The children exchanged a desperate glance and began to sift around their various storage compartments. Prowl rummaged through his satchel.

Mouse held out the cassette cat. Kibble transformed in her hands and greeted the Autobot with a shrill "Merl!"

"What the slag is that thing?" the Autobot demanded. It was barely an insect in relation to his size.

Mouse awkwardly withdrew Kibble. Though, part of her was relieved that the 'bot had rejected it.

Prowl pulled his external drive out of his satchel.

"Prowl, no!" Mouse exclaimed.

"If we beat the champion, we win back our entrance fee, right?" Prowl asked the taller mech, who nodded. "Consider this collateral. If we win, we'll trade you the credits for it. Otherwise, it's yours. It's not much but you can format it and pawn it for a little bit of cash."

"Derivatives," the Autobot spat, but grudgingly accepted the drive.

Prowl 2 waved down Mouse's wailings as they stepped away from the 'bot, the line ticket beween them. "I'm not going back, so what use is it to me anyway?" he said.

"I don't care what you're thinking," Mouse said defiantly. "We have to win now!"

"We'll give it our best. I've got a few ideas-- would you listen to them?"

Mouse leaned close, staring with such intensity that Prowl 2 shifted uncomfortably on his feet.

"Well-- look," he said awkwardly. "He's our size but his tech specs will be better everywhere, you can pretty much bet on that. So we've gotta be very careful with how we approach. He focuses on speed, but so do you, right? So what I want you to do is..."

The arcade regulars had never seen anything like it before. Prowl 2 and Mouse certainly couldn't have predicted it.

The battlesim developed a digital projection of its players based off their diagnostics information, yielding a simulated creature with optimal system stats, an ideal version of the players' skill sets. Interfaced with the arena's visual display, sensory systems were voluntarily highjacked and fed sim data very close to realistic sensate conditions. It was real battle without the real fall-out.

The micromaster didn't hesitate once the battle began, but he had acted true to Prowl's predictions. The derivatives quickchanged and sped off in opposite directions, leaving him with two targets to pursue. He targetted Prowl 2, as the slower of the children, and once he closed in, Prowl 2 braked and set off his flare panels, an inherited trait from his surviving father. The light was so intense it momentarily burst the micromaster's raster feed, and in the moment that he hesitated, Mouse changed course and sped up on him from behind.

It wasn't nearly enough to keep him down, but that was all right. By the time he regained visual, the boymech had vanished, and Mouse was screeching into a fast retreat. The micromaster swore and spun around violently, sighting her with his rifle within moments-- but didn't expect Prowl 2 and an acid pellet gun to catch him up.

Prowl 2 had never owned such a weapon, but he'd had a hunch this sim would meet you halfway if you asked nicely.

Mouse carried Prowl's external drive for him on their way back to the tram station.

"That was sorta boring," she complained. "I didn't get to shoot."

"We played to our strengths," her friend told her unwaveringly. "You go faster and my aim's better. It worked perfectly."

"It was pretty quick thinking on your part," Mouse muttered. "I didn't totally buy it before I saw us doing it..."

No-one had wanted to play them after their victory. The kids knew better than to think it was because they were intimidated: no-one had thought it worth their ticket to play a pair of derivatives. One of the floor managers had stepped in and told them in no uncertain terms to take their credits and leave.

Kibble mewled on Mouse's shoulder. The commotion had woken it up a good bit.

"We coulda kept going," Mouse argued to the evening air. "We'd've beaten 'em all if we'd had the chance!"

"There's no way we could have beaten someone bigger than that guy," said Prowl sensibly. "Even then, we were lucky we had a chance to see what his style was like. It won't be so easy in the future."

"You cheated the game into giving you that gun, though!"

"That's different. Weapon serials are bonded by spark signature, and my signature is close enough to my other dad's that it still counts me as its user."

Mouse pouted. "How come I didn't get anything, then?"

"Don't look at me." Prowl 2 shrugged. "It's down to your genetics, and it's not like anyone knows much about that. I only figured this out because Dad used to take me down for target practise in Underside, and they run off the same proprietary software there."

"That's pretty lucky," she said moodily.

"C'mon, don't be that way," Prowl 2 said, faltering in his pace. "I'd've told you one way or another. And we won-- that was what you were so worried about, right?"

"If we'd done a few more rounds we coulda gotten enough cred to buy you a better drive. If we got good, you could earn enough to expand your RAM and keep up and those stupid classmates of yours wouldn't have anything left to talk about."

"Oh, they would."

"So why don't we? I was faster than that guy in there, and he outraced that bigger lady. And you're so smart you could figure it all out on the go, I know you could..."

"I've fallen so far behind in my classes already. I can't drop the ball any farther..."

At those words, Mouse's disposition did a complete 180. She darted in front of him and spun on her heel, walking backwards as she faced him, the drive hugged tightly in her arms.

"So you're staying in school, right?" she asked excitedly. "You're not letting those exhaust ports win?"

"I dunno why it means so much to you," Prowl 2 said, ducking his head. He seemed shy all of a sudden.

Prowl 2 hit the books the moment they reached home. Mouse was so pleased she didn't even think to distract him. She put on the music he said he liked to study to and went to fix something vaguely resembling dinner in the kitchen, sneaking crumbs for herself and Kibble to keep the two of them sated. As the centicycles passed, Mouse was recruited to quiz him with the flashcards he'd prepared, but it was soon discovered Mouse couldn't even read enough to do it justice. He quickly reassigned her to defragging his external drive.

Mouse slept on Prowl 2's floor that night. They had to pull two plates off the surface of Prowl's recharger bay to get one of the cables to reach down to her. They'd briefly considered simply sharing the bed and their cheek plates had burned at the thought.

Her battery cells were better than his so she was already awake when he woke up, scratching his still-healing optic and squinting at the breakfast of B-grade energon set out at his place at the table. She set out a cup of lead sulfide shavings for him as well.

"Don't look at me like that," she said, seeing his expression, as she was pressure-cleaning her hands in the sink. "I've always made my own meals at home. It's not gonna kill ya."

Prowl 2 seemed poised to point out that he had lived on Earth a while too and knew a stereotype when he saw it, but Mouse's expectant face was too much to bear and he took up his chopsticks instead.

His father was late. Prowl 2 started to worry, but kept on his morning ritual. Jazz didn't show up until a few milicycles before the children left for the station, and he came in running, his processors overclocking. He looped his son into a tight hug.

"I got put on the A shift," he told Prowl 2, who leapt up with a shriek. "They had some folks transferring and needed a couple people to replace 'em, an' I had seniority, an'-- This is great, Prowlie! We'll have every evenin' together!"

He swung his child up into his arms and kissed his cheek. Prowl squeezed his arms around his father's neck. The boy stumbled in slight confusion when Jazz almost immediately set him down again and ran back toward the door.

"Wait-- Where're you going?"

"They only had one condition for me, and that was that I hadta start immediately," Jazz explained. "Don't worry. I'll be back by th' time you get offa class. We'll charge up an' hit the town together, the two of us-- the three of us," he amended, noticing Mouse at the entrance to the kitchen. "Mouse, you hang by later too. I got somethin' to tell you-- 'bout your dad--"

"My dad?" she repeated, optics wide. "You talked to him? Did you see him? Is he here?"

"No time; I'll tell ya later!" And then he was gone.

Prowl 2 worried all the way to the tram station. "He didn't even stop to refuel any," he fretted. "I hope he gets something on the way..."

Mouse was having difficulty paying attention. She stroked Kibble with a finger as it laid curled in the bend of her arm. Her dad. Jazz had talked to her dad. What could he have said? It had never occurred to her that he could have been within reach of her all this time.

It was agreed even before they got to the campus that Mouse couldn't go in with him. He had a different class today, farther up the hill, and she followed him up as far as the courtyard when the bells started to toll and then saw him off. She watched patiently as he entered the lecture hall a great deal behind the other students, and when the steps were clear, she started looking for a back way.

This was a bit of a smaller lecture hall than Prowl's other class, and it was taught by a little dark red Decepticon, who wrote notes on his datascreen with such distaste that it seemed he might throw his inscriber pen into a corner at any moment.

He spoke snobbishly, and amended everything he said with something derisive, arguing against what he thought to be an utterly useless set of lecture notes that he certainly wasn't taking responsibility for any time soon.

Hiding in a dark corner behind a support beam, Mouse spotted Prowl 2 toward the front of the class, fervently taking notes as usual. He only paused in his encoding when the professor went off on another one of his mean-spirited tirades.

"So as you go forth with your laughably misguided career paths, keep in mind that a timocracy is one of the most inherently unstable forms of government, dependent totally upon the caprice of the state..."

"Excuse me, Professor Dead End," said the high-voiced fembot freighter Wide Berth, raising her massive hand. "Does this mean that duocracies such as the Alliance are doomed to fail?"

"Excellent, Bertha. Yes, they are."

And then he went back to writing.

There was a discontented murmur among the students. Prowl 2 tapped his pen on his desk, and then Mouse saw him raise his hand.

"Professor," he said, not waiting to be called on. Dead End had his back to him anyway. "Doesn't the fact that the Alliance has lasted over one-point-five gigacycles give testament to duocracy's strength as a form of government?"

Dead End looked over his shoulder at the derivative. "Huh! Only you would think one and a half gigacycles is a worthy length of time, boy."

The other students, including Wide Berth, chuckled. Mouse cringed, but Prowl 2 seemed unaffected, as though Dead End's tone didn't contain any real malice.

"It's true that experience is a large determinant in personal perspective," Prowl 2 returned easily. Mouse saw him put down his pen and sit back in his chair. "But as a professor of galactic history, even you must acknowledge that we see these patterns repeatedly. The Spartan culture on ancient Earth--"

"Any discussion of Earth and its culture may be dismissed out of hand. A blight upon Cybertronian sociopolitical thought if ever there was one. You yourself are proof of that."

This time Prowl did look slightly wounded. He fell silent, and Dead End continued his so-called lecture.

"He talks big, but everyone knows he's soft as a fleshie, deep down in his spark," Prowl 2 said to Mouse, after the class had ended. Mouse sat through her friend's telling of the events patiently, not betraying that she had seen the goings-on. "Rumour around the campus is that he and one of the other professors here have had an Understanding for around two gigacycles."

"'An Understanding'?"

"It's like a marriage, I guess, but a lot different. It, uh..." He sought for the words. Mouse had never really seen him inarticulate like this. "All I really know is that my dads had one, toward the end," he said lamely, after several false starts.

"Do you always get one, when you cross-manufacture?" Mouse thought of most of the Earth family units she knew.

"Oh, no, they're very rare," Prowl 2 said severely, as though he was discussing some sort of collectible. "But if Dead End has one, then he has no right to go on about 'humanness'. He was built on Earth, you know. During the Great War."

"Him? But doesn't that-- He's not much older than you, then!"

"Yeah, but he's got a proper spark," Prowl 2 said, rolling his optic sensors. "It just makes me feel a little better to know that he was brought online that way, instead of something making him like that. They also say he's got a kid."

"No!"

"Yup."

"A real--?"

"A derivative, yeah. I mean, it's just a rumour and a sorta nasty one at that, but a lot of sparkbonds end up having them, so if that part's true..."

"Then that's totally messed up! He shouldn't shred you out like that in the middle of class."

"He wouldn't be the first hypocrite we'd know."

Prowl stood up, dusting his skidplate. Mouse stood up as well, a little unwillingly.

"I should go study," he told his friend. "I have Criminal Law in the lattercycle, and the instructor's got an even bigger chip on his shoulder than that guy."

"But that's not for decicycles. Why don't we hop on the red line and do a quick game down at the arcade?" Mouse suggested. "We've got some cred left over from yesterday."

"I dunno," Prowl 2 said slowly, but that was always what he said and it hadn't stopped Mouse yet.

As she expected, a few turns in the battlesim were just what the mechanic ordered. They got back on the tram and were able to get back to the university in time for Prowl 2's afternoon class, and he entered relaxed and prepared to focus. She couldn't imagine he'd have been in better shape if he had stayed and studied.

The wins had done something to sharpen Prowl's logic processors, redistributing CPU power down narrower and more precise channels. He still toiled like a scrapyard drone to keep pace with the lecture but it didn't induce a thinly-veiled panic as it had before. Even watching from a crack in the corner, Mouse thought he was a changed 'bot.

At first they had only been able to convince other small-frames to play them, but after a string of wins a young femjet had volunteered to face them, and as humans would say, it had only snowballed from there. Mouse was right to guess that Prowl 2 thought best on his feet.

"In this instance the subject was caught flying below eighty-thousand kilometres in excess of the sound barrier," Professor Streetwise sighed, reading off his notes. He was sitting, legs crossed on his desk. "Who can tell me the proper directive precinct air patrol would have employed upon detainment?"

Prowl 2 finished writing and raised his hand. Streetwise kept looking around.

"Anyone?"

Prowl 2 raised his hand a little farther. No-one else in the room was budging.

Rather than admitting some sort of defeat, Streetwise kept right on with his notes. "The squad chief executed Directive 17-B-quibble-6, on account of the exhaust levels emitted by the subject's engines. A three-point tac team was set up at equidistant co-ordinates and a jamming frequency was emitted from either flank point. Whatever. There's a picture in your book. Who can tell me why a nonlethal subdual method was employed over overt tactical strategy?"

Once again, Prowl's hand was the only one that went up. And once again, Streetwise's gaze swept right past it.

"Don't everyone shoot off at once," the professor grumped, returning to his lecture notes. Prowl moodily dropped his hand and went back to writing. "If you open your readers to... I dunno, somewhere in the middle, and you see this chart on combustive jet engines and their comparative engagement protocols, you'll see that an offensive strike would have been, well, a dumbslag thing to do. Of course, in our case file, the subject had another ace up his wrist, which..."

Mouse dug her fingers into the back of the chair she was hiding behind. How juvenile of that guy! What was he playing at?

"...Finally, ten kliks from the drop zone, the perimetre was closed in and..."

A loud noise suddenly rose up above Streetwise's voice. It was a high ringing sound. The students stirred lethargically in their seats and Mouse saw Prowl dig frantically through his patched-together satchel.

"You might remember," Streetwise shouted above the ringing and the students' chuckling, "what my policy is involving alarm clocks and other stupid slag you see fit to drag into my classroom--"

"It's not my fault, professor, it's my dad's emergency line!"

"Oh, your dad," Streetwise repeated sarcastically. "Well, it's a good thing you said. I'll keep that in mind when the board and I proctor your exam at the end of this megacycle."

The beeping ceased as Prowl 2 finally located the device and was able to key off the alarm. He read the text display.

Prowl 2 stood up and began throwing his books and drive back into his satchel.

"Now what's got your suspension in a bunch?" his professor asked him dryly, but Prowl didn't answer. He was in a fast walk all the way to the stairs and by the time he reached those he was into a run.

Mouse caught up with him outside in the courtyard.

"What's wrong?" she shouted as they ran.

"It's Dad!" Prowl 2 cried. "Something happened at work!"

"What?!"

"I don't know! I don't know-- oh Primus this is all my fault--!"

The mechanics explained it at the hospital. Prowl's father had collapsed at the factory, falling off a stairwell onto an assembler belt, which did a number on his left side. The machine was fine, but Jazz wasn't.

The repairs were possible and necessary but expensive. The company wasn't claiming any liability and Jazz's warranty coverage wasn't ideal. The receptionist told them 40,000 for the rewiring and grafts, and that was the least they could do, if they wanted Jazz to have the use of his arm again.

Mouse sat out in the hallway with Kibble and Prowl 2's school satchel. She couldn't hear what they said inside the recovery bay, but the air shook with what she was sure was being exchanged.

Prowl stepped out quietly, sliding the bay door shut behind him. He sat beside Mouse on the bench and opened his bookbag. Working silently, he started to arrange his textbooks in a stack and his pens and tools in another, and put his drive in a pile by itself.

"We could get five hundred for this," he muttered, palming the drive. "Two hundred for the textbooks, another fifty for these..."

"But you need those," Mouse said softly, holding Kibble to her chest.

"Let's not kid ourselves," Prowl 2 said, staring at his knees. "There are more important things than me getting to go to school."

"Jazz would want you to get your equivalency," his friend protested.

"That's what he said too, but it doesn't matter now. Six-fifty," he said, patting the piles. "Then we had another six thousand and seven hundred saved for my next upgrade, so that's seven thousand three hundred fifty..." His optics shut off so he could concentrate on a diagnostic. "I could sell one of my toxin filters and two of the triple-redundancy servos..."

"You can't sell your parts!"

"Why not?" Prowl shot back, standing up. He started to pace the floor. "He did this for me. He wouldn't need to overexert himself if he didn't have me around."

Mouse stood up as well, leaving Kibble on her seat. It curled up in a warm spot and transformed back into its music player mode. "That's not how he sees it at all!" Mouse objected. She grabbed Prowl 2's shoulder to stop him in his tracks. "You can't just sell parts of your body off to pay his bills--!"

"He'd do the same thing for me in a refresh! I need to be some sort of use to him, I need to help! Every centimetre of my wiring is the way it is because he sacrificed: how come I can't sacrifice it all for him?"

Mouse socked him. It wasn't the playful tap of times past and it was stronger than she intended. Prowl stumbled and lost his balance, falling in a heap on the floor.

"Listen to you!" she shrieked. "Your dad did all of that because he loves you! You want to take all of that and throw it away for him, when it won't even matter?! You're so stupid, Prowl!" Her voice started to break. She couldn't help it. "You have no idea what it's like-- You've lived so long with someone that cares about you, you take it for granted that--!"

She flopped down on the floor, hunched forward. She stared hard into her lap and tried to keep her coolant pressure under control.

The nurses and orderlies were staring at them. Prowl 2 touched his cheek plating gingerly. She probably hadn't done that cracked optic of his any good.

Kibble had woken up again. It stood up on its pointy little legs and jumped off the bench, landing at Mouse's feet. It climbed up into her lap and whipped its white wormy tail around and made that tape recorder noise again. Mouse collected it up in her arms and hugged it like a security tarp.

The silence was only broken by a harried junior mechanic, who came over to their spot on the floor and told them that they were a disturbance and they'd have to take it outside.

The children wordlessly got to their feet and packed up their things. They didn't even trade a glance.

Outside on the steps, Prowl 2 said quietly, "What'll we do, then? We need to raise it somehow..."

"We can pay it in bits, can't we?" said Mouse, remembering her mother screaming about payment plans.

"They need at least a quarter of it up-front. But they'd want the rest within a kilocycle and Dad doesn't make a whole lot, plus he'll be out recovering for at least four cycles..."

"We'll worry about that next. Right now, we just gotta put together ten thousand, right? We could go to his old friends--"

"Most of his friends are dead."

"Then we'll go to Optimus Prime!" Mouse shouted, but the ridiculousness of the idea got even to her. She sank down on the bottom step of the staircase.

Prowl 2 joined her, hands between his knees. His school satchel hung limply off a shoulder.

"Seven thousand, three fifty," he said, with an air of finality. "So if we got two thousand, six hundred and fifty..."

"...We made a hundred at the arena today," Mouse pointed out.

They exchanged a look.

"No," Prowl said, holding up his hands. "No, no, no, no, no--"

"But you strategise great!"

"Well, and no, I don't! We've lucked out so far because only the weak ones want to play us, but those are too few and far between. We'd need to enter into a tournament and play our way up if we wanted to earn the credits in time, but we're really unfit for that level of combat! We'd need to upgrade one of us just to stand a chance."

"...How much is your next upgrade?"

"Seven thousand and two hundred-- Hey." Prowl 2 caught up with her line of thought. "You're missing the point--"

"And how much would we get if we won the tournament?"

"...Twelve thousand, maybe. It'd have to at least be ten to one against."

"Can you picture anyone betting on us?"

"...No."

Mouse grinned at her friend. It was a wide and toothy smile.

They were the long shots from hell. They both knew that. They'd had a long time to get used to that.

But right now a long shot seemed just what they needed.

It cost more to have Mouse's undercarriage overhauled so they upgraded Prowl 2's logic centres instead, and they used the left-over credits to buy Mouse a faceplate, the better to run headfirst into things with. They left the clinic straight for the tram station. Prowl kept feeling along the seam of his helmet plating.

"If I had had this before I might have gotten through my classes okay," he said ruefully. They'd already pawned his books and drive.

"Y'feel any luckier now?" Mouse asked, tapping her faceplate on and off.

"No, I think we're so doomed it's funny, but we should at least try. Whatever you do, just--"

"Follow everything you say. I know, I know. Y'know, that 'doom' stuff? You sound like your teacher."

"Which one, the one that thinks I should crawl into a corner and rust or the one that awaits the destruction of all robot kind?" Prowl 2 muttered darkly.

"The funny little emo-con with that bottle of grade-A in the bottom drawer of his desk."

"You're still gonna have to narrow it down a bit more."

Amateur battlesim tournaments were nothing special. They happened daily, with the winners of each set going on to compete in the televised bouts, the winners of which often received contracts to compete in the professional circuit.

Many of the paid professionals were veterans from the wars who had not adapted well to civilian life. There were a lot of living legends to be found in those circles, chiefly Grimlock, who had been the reigning champion for almost half a gigacycle now. (There had been repeated talk of simply disqualifying him from future competition, but no-one wanted to be one to tell him.) A pair of derivatives couldn't hope to even get close to that level of glory, but the cash prizes for the amateur arena was just as tantalising, if you were looking up from the bottom, as most were.

The drone at the counter who took Mouse and Prowl 2's registration looked over the top of his console at them with the weightiest expression of disbelief they had ever seen. Prowl 2, though, armed with a new resolve along with his expanded computations panel, just kept holding the datacard out to him until the drone was forced to accept it.

Mouse shut Kibble down into hibernation mode to prevent signal interference and then she and Prowl went to their stations. The preliminaries had not even begun for that cycle, and their first opponents were a pair of mini-cons even smaller than they were, but not by much. Their chassis were significantly better articulated and betrayed the presence of substantial concealed artillery.

Prowl 2 called up his acid pellet gun. Mouse had previously tried without success to find a weapon serial that would match either her mother or father's record, and had resigned herself to being Prowl's blunt tool for the length of these matches. Her first task once digitised was to pull on her faceplate and lower her tire suspension. The sim had no rules about self-modding within the confines of her technical specs, after all.

"The blue one has a spear," Prowl 2 told her over their shared battle comm. "The red one goes faster and has twin blasters along the rear flanks, but they won't be able to shoot directly in front of him. That's your target."

"I wish we'd upgraded my rear detection systems instead," Mouse said grimly.

"It's not pleasant, but I'll keep an optic on you. What you really want is to dare him into playing chicken with you." He knew the term would work between the two of them.

"But--!"

"It's gonna hurt like hell, yes, but trust me."

The referee's voice came sharply over the terrain audio channel, announcing the start of the match. Unlike normal battles, tournaments announced the participants' names before the bout. The crowd was silent until Prowl 2's designation was called. Suddenly, there was an animated murmuring.

Mouse glanced around, even though she couldn't see anything except the arena field. Prowl seemed unaffected.

The siren rang for the start of battle.

"Go, Mouse! Go!"

Triggered, Mouse quickchanged and sped off to the left, but it was the blue mini-con that started to follow her. Prowl transformed hurriedly and sped off to intercept, but the red one caught him up from behind and within moments, his carefully-laid plan had been reversed. As the blue one sped away after Mouse and Prowl found himself trapped by two lines of gattling fire, he saw one option, and braked.

The collision took out most of his rear fender and most of the red mini-con's everything. The damage sensors shouted hot, blossoming pain throughout Prowl's body. He tensed against it. It only solidified his resolve.

This damage only existed here, in the simulation: it would reset and reset indefinitely, as many times as they played. If they had any hope of winning, they'd have to embrace that pain.

"Mouse!" he shouted over the comm line, struggling to wheel away from the wreckage. If he could get enough distance, he could transform and try to leg the rest of it. "Battle protocol seven!"

"But you said she has a--"

"Do it!"

Mouse's tires screamed on the simulated rock and she quickchanged back to her robot mode, in time to catch the blue mini-con's spear right across her chest. The blade lanced a wide cut clear across her plating, and she went down, spewing sparks.

But she wasn't out. She shouted in pain, on her back on the simulated floor, but she hadn't been knocked out. Prowl transformed back into his robot mode and brought out his acid pellet gun.

"Hey! Ugly!" he yelled, and deliberately misfired past the blue 'bot's shoulder. The mini-con whirled, and in that moment Prowl 2 shouted "NOW, MOUSE!"

Before the mini-con could react, Mouse was up on her feet and charging. And whatever else could be said about Mouse, she had a thick head.

Maybe not thick enough. They heard the crack as the mini-con's rear shell snapped and Prowl saw their opponent begin to fall. He locked gazes with her, seeing the smirking intelligence in her optics the moment before her shoulder compartments split open and twin missles spit out with Prowl 2 dead in their sights.

"PROWL!"

The collision happened in the space of a refresh.

The pain was overwhelming. Even with his upgrades his entire main board was locking up, his command line threatening to freeze. He couldn't see anything for the internal fires raging through the shattered remains of his body.

There was another clunk and a distinct crunching sound as Mouse toppled the blue mini-con the rest of the way to the floor and stepped on her head, and then Prowl 2 heard her feet as she raced over to him.

His topical sensors only barely registered her hands on him.

"Prowl! Prowlie!"

The K.O. sign flashed over his raster imager, and then things blacked out.

Mouse knelt over him, trembling as he went limp and then vanished.

"No," she cried. "Not so soon! How am I..?"

Through every comm channel, the sirens blared, and the referee declared Team Prowl the winner.

"What..?" Mouse had time to ask, before the elastic cord of her awareness cortex snapped back and normal vision resumed, finding herself seated in front of the interface console with a hibernating cassette cat lounging in her lap.

"As long as one team member survives, we win the bout," Prowl 2 said next to her, amazingly fresh-faced, completely unmarked. It was like seeing a ghost.

Mouse hastily reminded herself what the word simulation meant and then felt silly. But Prowl seemed to think she'd been worried about their chances in the tournament and she decided to just let him keep believing that.

A screen appeared on the console showing their earnings. Both derivatives were surprised at the total.

"I guess we get more points if the odds diminish," Prowl 2 marvelled. "I'm sure toward the end there it looked like we didn't have a chance and people put in last-minute bets..."

"I don't wanna risk something like that twice!" Mouse wailed.

"We won't, we won't," her friend assured her, extricating himself from the console. Two or three of the wires were so hot they scorched his fingers as he disengaged them. "Ow! But remember, it's only gonna get harder from here. We're gonna have to be prepared to take some damage in order to win in the end."

Mouse nodded reluctantly. She could still feel how the edge of that spear had cut through her like a laser. She wasn't interested in subjecting herself to something like that willingly... but she'd placed her trust in Prowl 2, and if they didn't do all they could to help his dad, they'd be worse than useless.

The opposing team met them on the floor after they exited the booth. The blue mini-con was a little less fearsome in person, and she spoke in an accent that might have placed her as a northerner.

"You fight admirably," she told them. "The cameras make us look like a bunch of glitch mice fighting over some shrapnel. It's all down to angles in the end. But you fought well. You could teach the border guard a thing or two. I say this because you look the sort that haven't gotten much encouragement in your lives."

She had her spear with her, and she slung it over her shoulder as she went on: "In the border provinces of Iacon is a minibot town, Crystal City. We have our own minor league there, strictly for small frames. If you're ever in the area, you might like to look into it."

"We aren't really playing for sport," Prowl 2 said apologetically. "But thank you."

"Consider it anyway," the red one insisted. "Your talents are wasted in these mixed trials, where everyone and the kitchen decontaminator is against you. I give you another two rounds before someone up in the referee booth puts you up against a freighter-class to see you squashed."

"That's just how the game gets played in these parts, unfortunately," the blue one said sadly. "But we all fight valiantly to the last anyway."

"It's worth it just to wipe one smug look off some bulk's face," her companion grinned.

The derivatives had to admit, the thought enticed them too.

Greater Praxus Spaceport

"I could do without these dirty looks," Kathren Faireborn announced, stepping down the Eclaire's disembarkment ramp, which was only a little oversized for the average terran. "Do we have a treaty here or don't we?"

"So did the Yanks and the Ruskies," Goldbug observed, keying through their clearances at the foot of the dock. There were more of them than he remembered. The glowing Cybertronian welcome hadn't changed, though.

"Yuri needs your help shifting cargo before we head in," Kathren told him, looping an arm around the crook of his elbow. She had to stand on the balls of her feet to do it, but it was worth it to drape her hair along his arm. "Do you recommend exosuits or are we fine as we are?"

"You'll be fine or the Primes will be answering to the full force of the EDC," Goldbug said stubbornly. "Worse than that, they'll be answering to me."

"You don't strike fear into the hearts of many, 'bug, but thanks. It's the thought that counts," his companion laughed.

It was a laugh to melt circuitry and he had a sudden urge to take her back into a ship and into their quarters for a while, but business was business. And he'd be damned if he accepted a cold shoulder from his own native people.

"We're processed," Goldbug said finally, as the console spat out six datacard badges. He passed five to Kathren. "Hand those out to the rest. I'll get this one to Yuri. What's he saying he needs moved?"

"Oh, the fission tanks. We found a buyer. Funny thing, though, considering you'd made plans before we hit a sale. What's got your wires sparking?"

"Just old friends," Goldbug answered distantly, reflecting that it wasn't entirely untrue.

Downtown

The mini-cons had spoken true about the obstacles ahead. Their second round against a pair of young aerial-types had been rigorous, in every possible sense of understatement; the third tier fight was against a veritable warship.

"This is not gonna work."

"It has to work."

"It's not working!"

"You promised you'd follow my orders!"

"BUT YOU'RE HEAVY!"

The massive 'bot's fist began to swing down and Mouse veered sharply to the right, tilting onto two wheels for a moment as Prowl 2 flailed on her back and tried to shoot. The ground rocked and Mouse almost crashed, swerving wildly.

"Lower suspension and hug the corners!" Prowl shouted at her. She hurriedly complied, racing for the outer edge of the arena field.

"LEFT! LEFT!"

Mouse banked just in time to avoid the shelling. The rocket grenades took out huge blackened hunks of the terrain, polygonal shrapnel flying in every direction.

"Now to the right!"

"You better think of a new strategy soon!" Mouse warned thickly, darting to her right and zigzagging to escape the burning fallout raining down around them. "We're not wearing that thing down in a hurry!"

"We don't need to," Prowl 2 told her, hooking an arm through the open panel where Mouse's windshield used to be. "Get your undercarriage down as low to the ground as you can and shoot for maximum RPM. You need to get behind him."

"If he so much as spits in our path we're gonna go flying," Mouse cried.

"Just trust me!"

Mouse hunkered down so close to the floor that her tires nearly scraped the rims and then she broke for maximum acceleration. Prowl 2 dug his fingers into her frame to hold on.

Every time the behemoth took a step the ground thundered beneath them and Mouse's underside scraped the floor plating, but she held course. The big mutha was turning but she could turn faster, even with the boymech on her back.

"Okay, now head toward him!"

"You're nuts!"

"Nuts and bolts and copper wiring," Prowl 2 agreed, climbing into a kneeling position on her hood. "Now get ready to transform."

He jumped in front of her feet-first and caught her fender by the crook of his elbows and heaved. He hit the deck hard, almost torn in two, but Mouse went flying.

"Now! Transform now!"

Mouse spun and quickchanged in midair, cartwheeling forward until she slammed face-first into the crook of the giant's knee.

"Now what?!" she shrieked, grappling onto a bit of plating for dear life.

"Tear that panel off!"

She gaped at the thing. There was barely enough purchase to hold onto, much less pry it free. She climbed down closer to the bend of the knee and pulled back a fist.

The giant 'bot roared with pain, but not half so much as he would in a matter of moments. Prowl 2, though barely functioning, still had use enough of his gun arm enough to point and fire into the exposed knot of leg hydraulics.

There was a cliche to be employed here, about the size of creatures and the relative velocity and ground-shattering power at which they fell.

It was the biggest upset in the amateur ranks' history.

When the pixel dust settled, the battered Team Prowl stood among the wreckage and the entire arcade was suddenly hyper-aware of two derivatives' names.

"Un-slagging-believable," the red mini-con remarked to his companion, from the energon bar.

"You study history at all, Onz?" said the blue fembot.

"Not if I can help it, Techs, you know that."

"I think I remember where I've seen that name before," Techs observed. "If I'm right, I shouldn't have encouraged him."

"Huh. Why's that?" asked Sym Onz.

"He'd never need any."

"Look it all this!" Mouse squealed over their earnings total, after leaving the arena following their battle with the warship. "At this rate we won't even need to fight to the final match! A couple more and we'll have all the cred we need!"

To say that the odds had been against them in the last fight would have made the concept obscenely meaningless. A lot of people on the gambling network were probably furious right now.

Which worried Prowl 2. "Maybe we should retire today, and just come back and make the rest tomorrow."

"They can't take anything away even if we lose. We might as well go the whole nine while we can. I'll bet anything will be easier than that sucker," Mouse declared, still battle-woozy.

True, that monster of a Transformer had probably been a chief contender for the upper brackets. The screams of rage they heard coming from his console as they left more or less corroborated that theory.

What was really strange about that was the way the floor managers had quickly escorted the big guy outside, where it had historically seemed likely they'd just let him have at. Actually, on the whole, no-one was going near Mouse, and especially not near Prowl 2. The drone that served them their energon at the arcade cafe gave them their cubes almost as soon as they'd ordered them and hadn't been seen since.

"Nothing's going to be a breeze, you can bet on that," Prowl 2 said warily. "But we don't have much to lose, so we might as well. A few more battles flying under the radar could be just what we need."

One of the Seekers they'd faced off in the second bracket came up to them near the end of their lunch. He was a fresh-faced boy, who might be called tweedy if he were human. Killer right hook, though. At the moment, however, he appeared worried.

"You guys gearing up for the semi-finals yet?" he asked cautiously. His name was Kite.

"We'd be getting ahead of ourselves, wouldn't we?"

Kite's wet-looking blue-green optics wobbled. "No-one's told you?"

They listened as he explained. Word was spreading like circuit fire that a pair of derivatives were overtaking the lower brackets, and competitors were dropping out of the running like insecticons. Most seemed to feel it the peak of dishonour to even face such a couple of opponents.

"The waste chutes," Kite remarked bitterly. "They're saying it'd be humiliating to lose and disgraceful to win. Some of them are even complaining to the referees about disqualifying you, but none of 'em are budging, thank Primus. The bookies are making so much bank on you guys."

There was just a hint of hero-worship in his tone. He was more than three times their height and the way he crouched in deference to them threw both of the children off-balance.

"Anyway, what it means is they don't have enough competitors left to fill the brackets so they're going straight to the semi-finals. Have you seen the postings yet?"

They hadn't. Prowl logged on to the intranet from their table's datascreen to check the match-ups.

"...Oh no," said Mouse, feeling like her power core had just sunk right to her feet. "No, no, no."

"Gosh," said Kite, oblivious. Mouse resisted the urge to punch him, since she'd done enough of that earlier.

"'Team Lambor'... Not the Lambor twins?" Prowl 2 marvelled. "But they were signed last spring, weren't they?"

"Doesn't keep anyone from competing in the amateur circuit," Kite informed him. "It might get 'em fired, but if the Helix Sentinels drop them someone else'll just pick 'em up. They're too good. But that shouldn't worry you two." He grinned at them.

"Prowl," Mouse said desperately. "Let's forfeit and go home for the cycle."

"WHAT?!" both boys shrieked.

She jumped and started trying to hide under the table. Prowl 2 climbed across the table surface and pulled her out by her back panelling.

"What's gotten into you?" he demanded. "You were the one who's prodded me into everything up to this point! You don't know the meaning of biting off more than you can absorb!"

"Yeah, but," she wailed.

"These guys are famous vets; I know everything about their fighting styles. I'll get us through this one no prob!"

"But."

"Like you said, we've got nothing to lose!"

"...but..."

In her chestplate compartment, Kibble had woken up a