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 and was kneading her base frame with its pointy forelegs, purring. It had misread the excess heat output as a happy thing. Mouse jolted it back to sleep hastily.

There was no way she could explain to Prowl 2 how those twins had humiliated her in the park, especially not with that hanger-on Kite hovering over them. She remembered how they'd torn her apart as easily as shredding blades of helix grass with their fingers, how the technicians had tsked over the damage like she'd deliberately gone and gotten hit by a bus. She remembered how those two had laughed as the yellow one threw her by the arm into the crysallis lake, teasing her to take her technorganic hide and go home. Any derivative to them was already half human.

"Excuse us," she heard Prowl 2 say to Kite, his hand still bracing her shoulder. Kite babbled something awkward and let them be.

"We've got a few milicycles before the fourth brackets start," Prowl 2 said near one of her audio receptors. "Let's get some starlight, okay?"

Lower Praxus

Goldbug craned his head up at the dilapidated apartment tower.

He had come here alone. Much as he'd've appreciated Kathren's support it would've been rude to involve her in this.

He wanted nothing to do with Spindizzy any more. She was a frivolous person, an energy leech, and intentionally unskilled at everything except her primary wartime function, which, really, wasn't that functional to start with.

But drunken accident or not, he was tier-one with her, and tier-one permissions could not be rolled back. They would never have an Understanding, but they would always have this connection, till the day one of them died.

As though removing a hat, Goldbug slid his visor and faceplate back and stepped into the building.

Downtown

Prowl 2 and Mouse sat on the rail of the pier. Mouse swung her heels, staring at her knees.

"Is that how it is," Prowl 2 murmured.

She didn't know what she expected him to say. Something indignant, maybe. She was sure he thought she'd acted stupidly-- she sure knew that.

"Please, Prowlie," she said in a weak voice. "Let's just cash in and start again tomorrow."

The five-milicycle notice for the next bout appeared over the local channel. Prowl 2 stood up.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of," he told her. "It was two against one and you had no idea what you were doing. Besides, you were low on fuel."

"Yeah, but--"

"Those two are nasty. They're a pair of brats that think a war record is a free licence to slum around like a couple of thugs. They haven't had a real battle to fight in almost two gigacycles-- they don't even know what actual battling is any more, if they ever did." He scuffed the pavement with a foot. "And if I was either of my dads, I'd put them in their place."

The coolant cables closest to Mouse's eyes sweated with a flush of heat, and beads of moisture appeared in the corner of her optics.

"Prowl..."

"Remember what that mini-con said? Let's wipe their smug looks off their faces. You can't get much smugger than those two."

"But how?" Mouse demanded, leaping off the railing back onto the sidewalk. "They're a thousand times better than either of us."

"I've got something," said Prowl. "And they're gonna hate it."

Sunstreaker was all teeth when the derivatives arrived at the arena terminal. His twin Sideswipe was already wiring in.

"Well, look what the cassette dragged in!" he shouted across the console. "I thought we told you not to show your half-orga face 'round here any more."

Mouse backed up until she was hiding behind Prowl. Prowl urged her forward.

"Let's have a civil match," he told the Lambor twins, keeping hold of his cringing partner by the arm. "We're all here because we've proven our strength. Let's honour each other as equals."

The brothers laughed. Prowl 2 smiled and didn't budge: he seemed to have expected this.

"And you're even worse!" howled Sunstreaker, to the boy. "What're you, the cross between a dust-sucker and a propaganda drone?"

Prowl's smile remained fixed. "I'm the better man. What about you?"

Sunstreaker started. Prowl 2 quickly ducked into his chair. Mouse rapidly followed suit. They could hear both the brothers snarling, although Sideswipe's words seemed mostly devoted to calming his twin down and hauling him into his seat.

"He'll go after me now," Prowl 2 said quietly to Mouse, as they wired in. "That leaves Boy Red to you. He's a harder hitter but not nearly as vicious... as you know."

Mouse nodded once.

"Remember what I said. Stick to your gears and see the plan through. Unless it totally breaks down, just believe it's working."

She gave no acknowledgement, her gaze still on their opponents at the other end of the terminal. She shut her optics down as she patched through the raster feed.

The terrain visualisation appeared before them. This one had platforms and slopes carved through it, like the park near Mouse's apartment. Most of their arena layouts had been on flat ground: Prowl 2 hastily reassessed their navigational protocol and quietly conveyed the details to Mouse, who worried her lip and then wordlessly slid her faceplate into place.

The Lambor twins stood on a ridge about 50 metres away. They had full weaponry equipped, as much as the system would allow. This would mitigate their speed a little, but not enough to be any big relief.

"Team Lambor versus Team Prowl," announced the referee over the all-frequency. "Semi-final match. Fight!"

At the opposing ridge, the twins momentarily hesitated.

"'Prowl'?" Sideswipe exclaimed.

"Heh. Presumptuous punks," Sunstreaker shouted to them. "We'll teach you to respect your elders."

Rather than retort, Prowl 2 seized their hesitation to fire his acid pellet gun at their eyes. The brothers yelped and dove in opposite directions, and hitting the lower ledge, transformed and sped toward them. Mouse and Prowl 2 transformed hurriedly and raced off in opposite directions.

True to expectations, Sunstreaker maintained course to engage Prowl 2. Unfortunately, that's what his brother did too.

Prowl let out an involuntary yelp as Sideswipe's side artillery lanced the ground to his right and skid into a hard left turn, but Sunstreaker was on top of him in an instant. Prowl narrowly avoided getting crushed under one of his wheels, but swerved too hard, and dropped into a roll down a sharp hill.

"PROWL!"

Mouse reversed course in his direction, in time to see him barrelling sideways down the steep cliff. She saw his glass panes shattering and a thick crag puncture a wall of panelling down his left side.

She heard the twins laughing, and fainter still heard Prowl warning her not to come nearer, but she ignored it. Narrowly ducking blaster fire from both siblings, she weaved across the lower terrain until she came upon her partner, transforming without pausing to break and tumbling to a halt beside him. She grabbed his dented hood and urged him to transform.

"Get to cover," Prowl 2 said thickly. "That outcrop. To your left."

"Right."

She pulled her faceplate back and hauled his dead weight into her arms, wobbling uncertainly and then speeding off so quickly she left scuff marks on the ground, as the twins' laser rifles caught up with her again. She hit the deck below the outcrop with Prowl 2 in tow, banging chest and elbows hard on the simulated floor plating.

Prowl 2 transformed, with effort. One of his wing panels caught and prevented him from shifting his left arm into position. He hissed in pain.

"Tear it off," he pleaded to Mouse.

Mouse shrunk back.

"Do it. Please."

She grimaced. She had him lie down on his chest and planted a foot into the small of his back, took hold of the ruined wing plating and pulled.

Prowl 2 howled, unregulated coolant gushing openly from his mouth and optics. The last wire tendon snapped clear of the linkage and Mouse stumbled back, the plate in her hands. Her audio receptors picked up noise above her and she just managed to swing the plate up to shield her head in time to deflect the first barrage of fire.

Sunstreaker's taunts carried down from above. Mouse dug in closer against the outcrop for protection. Prowl 2 was climbing to his feet, left arm functional once again.

"I guess I went too far with that one," he muttered, wiping his face.

"You're so stupid," Mouse stuttered, the pockmarked wing plating still shaking in her grasp. She dropped it abruptly, as though it had turned red-hot beneath her fingers. "If they'd both gone after me, you coulda shot 'em from behind..."

"I wasn't banking on this terrain. It slows us up. On a flat plane we could have outpaced them." He winced a little, errant wires still sparking in the seam of his shoulder. "But there's no saying it won't work now they've got us both together again. What I want you to do is-- You remember yesterday, that snubfighter we fought--"

He trailed off abruptly, looking up.

"What about--" Mouse began, but was cut off when Prowl 2 grabbed her by the wrist and raced out from under cover of the outcrop, just moments before it shattered and collapsed where they had just been standing.

"Play your hide-and-seek somewhere else, trikes!" Sunstreaker sang. "This is a big mechs' game!"

"We should forfeit!" Mouse wailed as they ran, still dragged by the wrist as the children raced toward a steep dried-out ravine, laser fire hot on their tails.

"No!" Prowl 2 snapped back. "Not till they appreciate who they're dealing with!"

"Prowl--!"

"I am my fathers' son!" he shouted, facing dead ahead, his hand tight around hers. "And so are you, damn it!"

A strange sensation washed over Mouse. She closed her mouth and flipped the faceplate back into position.

They could hear the twins whining from the ridge of the ravine.

"Ref! You watching this?" Sideswipe demanded. "We didn't sign on for a game of tag!"

"Team Prowl is ordered to face their opponents," the referee commanded over the all-channel.

"At the next fork we'll stage a reverse-Magnus," Prowl muttered, but Mouse tugged her hand from his grasp and turned on her heel.

"Hey whatsyourface! Ugly! Sunspot!" she shouted up at the distant combatants. "Why waste the firepower? Come down and squish us! Or are you too fancy to get a little grease on your heel?"

"Exactly what kind of teevee shows did you used to watch?" Prowl 2 groaned, but was ignored. The air filled with a high roar, as Sideswipe engaged his jet pack and hooked his arms around his twin's shoulders and lifted them both off the ground.

They landed four metres or so away, and Sunstreaker wiped the coolant oozing from a gash in his cheek, showing it to the derivatives.

"Very cute," he told Prowl 2. "If you pulled that slag on the outside I'd make you wish you were never spat out of your originator's exhaust port, or wherever it is you vermin come from."

"Your face looked real pretty when I cracked it in half, too," Mouse said conversationally, over Prowl's start of a retort. "Poor guy! Do all you lastgens suffer from Gold Silicone Syndrome?"

"You--!" Sunstreaker began, but Sideswipe got to her first. In the space of a refresh he was standing over her, swinging a balled fist down on her head.

She went skidding, loose things rattling in her head. Her heard Prowl 2 shout, losing his composure as he charged, but the twins just knocked him back. By the time Mouse was able to drag herself to her knees, Sideswipe was hovering over her again, pressing the barrel of his rifle to the sparking wound in her helmet plating.

"No-one talks like that to my brother," he said calmly.

"MOUSE!" Prowl 2 shrieked, sounding a long way off.

Sideswipe didn't shoot her. He reversed his hold on the gun, gripping it by the barrel and bringing the butt of it down hard against her head. There was no real pain, just a crunching sensation. Her limb suspensions went lax. One of her optics blew and the other flickered with static, colours streaming together as the raster levels lost focus. She could dimly feel coolant and adrenal lubricant leaking freely from the gaping holes in her head plating. She landed in an oily puddle when Sideswipe allowed her head to fall back to the ground.

Her topical sensors obliterated, she could only detect he placed his heel on her head by the shadow. And then there was a horrible pressure.

Prowl 2 watched in horror as Sideswipe pressed his foot down, coolant and hot white sparks spraying his leg.

Sideswipe's expression only betrayed the slightest grimace. Sunstreaker's face didn't change at all. Until they turned and noticed him, crouching near a wall with his arm half off. The twins raised the guns in unison.

Prowl 2 broke into a running leap and transformed, the air whipping through his chassis from the hole in his plating as he sped down the narrow ravine. Blaster fire lancing so close to either flank that his casing singed.

Someone's rocket took out the pass up ahead and Prowl 2 screeched to a dead halt, swerving so that as he reached full stop he could see the twins closing in.

Prowl thought of Mouse and the way her body looked when that glorified Spychanger crushed her underfoot.

Brakes still on, Prowl 2 revved until his rear axle threatened to melt clear off his undercarriage and charged.

Ahead of him, the twins transformed and Sunstreaker put down a hand, catching Prowl by the hood and digging his palm into the metal. He got his fingers under Prowl 2's fender and toyed with him like that, half his wheels off the ground and the other two shrieking and burning gashes into the floor plating, and then Sunstreaker neatly tipped him on his back and kicked him like a sports ball.

All along his chassis, things shattered. As he went spinning Prowl 2 struggled to revert form, parts catching and snapping and all kinds of fluids and loose bits scattering across the terrain. He finally rolled to a halt, banging against a large boulder, which was jutting out of the ground like a spear point. He climbed to his feet with half his parts stuck together.

"Thanks for wasting our time," Sunstreaker sneered, hauling Prowl 2 up by his remaining wing plate, to a strangled yelp. "It's a good thing we're such nice guys, or we'd have you pay us for our trouble."

He frowned suddenly, squinting closer at Prowl 2's face, drawn up in pain.

"Well hey," he said lightly, prodding the boy's chestplate with his sidearm. "You sorta do look like him."

That said, Sunstreaker pressed the lip of the gun flush with the derivative's chestplating and pulled the trigger.

The KO was not immediate. Prowl 2 was aware of falling to the floor, and seeing the twins standing over him. Their smug looks hadn't gone anywhere. He hadn't done anything to them.

There was a long, mid-range wail across all the comm frequencies. But it was not the end-bout signal. A voice came over the referee line, though it wasn't the referee who spoke.

"FOUL! This match is invalid! Team Lambor, you are guilty of illegal excessive brutality and command line sabotage!"

The brothers looked up at the blank sky.

"--What--?" Sideswipe exclaimed.

"This bout will end at once! No winner will be declared!"

It was Kite. That little toady. Prowl 2 could hear the official announcer's voice in the background, yelling. There were the sounds of scuffling.

"The match has ended!" Kite shouted. "Illegal brutality and CLI sabotage! You dirty waste pipes! You're lower than predacons!"

The scuffling consumed the other sounds, and Kite's voice didn't return. The official referee came on moments later, and said essentially the same thing, more harried and less virulent.

Prowl 2's awareness cortex snapped back to his real body. The mind-nulling pain vanished in an instant, and then as his vision returned he noticed a crowd surrounding Mouse's terminal.

She was awake, but disoriented, twitching and convulsing at odd intervals. Her vision was unfocused. She stared at nothing, holding her head. When she hiccuped, sparks flew out of her mouth.

Prowl 2's adrenal cables went ice-cold. He tore the interface wiring from his body and climbed over the railing and other bodies to reach her, shouting her name. Kibble mewled unheeded at her shoulder, tugging futily at an audio receptor.

He was no doctor but it was plain to see something was very, very wrong. He shouted desperately at the crowd around them.

"What's going on?" he demanded. "What's happening to her?!"

"I'm ok-aAy," Mouse struggled out, coughing and hiccuping, dizzy even though she was still sitting down. "R-EeaALll-lLYy-- I jJuUs-tT--"

On the other side of the terminal, Prowl 2 could make out the Lambor twins, standing and watching, oddly frozen in space. Sideswipe was shaking his head in denial, swearing things Prowl 2 couldn't make out or cared to. He looked scared. He looked sick.

"YOU DID THIS!" Prowl 2 shouted at the brothers, standing up on the top of Mouse's console. "You did this to her! You--!"

He was blitzing toward them before he could think. It was the same intensity that had taken him over at the university, when Reg had said exactly the wrong thing and all of his reserve, all of his composure had just gone out the window. A dozen sets of hands netted around him and jerked him back. A floor manager was urging the Lambor twins into a quiet retreat.

The referee was coming down from the monitoring station, looking distressed and belligerent. He addressed both teams at once.

"This match has been declared invalid," he said. "On account of third-party interference. A rematch will be held at fourth-decicycle tomorrow morning, and the tournament will conclude subsequently at that time."

"WHAT?!" the twins and Prowl 2 roared.

"But they damaged her!" Prowl 2 cried. "Look at her! That's not supposed to happen! They hurt her!"

"The Battling Commission will not be held responsible for defects in users' programming," the referee said sternly. "Despite what unauthorised comments have been made, it is the official position of the Referee Office that the command line damage is accidental. This match has been invalidated due to outside interference and will reconvene at fourth-decicycle tomorrow, or both parties will forfeit their earnings and place in the tournament."

"NO!"

"The Commission's decisions are final," the referee told him, and his optics were the cold of deep space. "I would advise that neither team remain on the premises."

Mouse was feeling a little better by the time they reached open air, but she was still glitching. She clung to Prowl's arm as he guided her out of the arcade.

Kite was outside waiting for them. He was still shaking with fury. Mouse was vaguely glad at least one of them had the energy to be angry.

"That should have kicked them out of the whole minor league!" he declared, carrying her in his arms to the station. Normally she'd never have suffered such indignity, but he wasn't giving her or Prowl much choice. "That's completely out-of-bounds play! Those two're monsters!"

"No; war heroes, remember?" Prowl 2 remarked dryly, trotting to keep pace beside him.

"Sparkless slagheaps," Kite swore viciously. "I'd sure teach them some respect, if I could!"

"We-E coOu-lLld-nN't," Mouse coughed.

"Don't talk," Prowl 2 urged her.

"I'm fi-IN-e," she objected, still holding her head. Things were spinning, and Kite carrying her wasn't helping.

"The bearings on those two," the young Seeker huffed. "No sportsmanship. No dignity at all. They oughta be drawn and quartered!"

Prowl 2 peered curiously at him. "Just what Decepticon nursery birthed you, anyway?"

They reached home by evening. The old neutral was outside her door, vacuuming for dust motes as they passed.

"Oh, my dear. How is the little one I gave you?"

"I-it's-Ss g-O-od," Mouse managed, clinging to Prowl 2 once more for balance.

They asked if she still had other kittens. It was out of polite interest more than anything. The last thing Prowl wanted on his mind right now was taking care of a pet.

"Oh, no, no, dears, they're all gone," the old lady said. "They're not so useful, you know."

Yeah, Mouse thought. She knew how that felt.

They listened to the jukebox at Prowl 2's place, but Mouse's audio receptors phased in and out and everything was disorienting to listen to, so they shut it off.

It was hard to stay there, knowing Jazz would not be home at any point. It was too late to go visit him at the repair centre and it felt awkward even going near his compartment, or looking at his chair at the table. He was one of few lastgens Mouse knew who liked to sit at tables when he ate.

If she was feeling lonely without him, Prowl 2 was even worse off. He went into the kitchen to prepare some sort of dinner but came back after several milicycles empty-handed, joining Mouse instead at the couch and sitting with his hands between his knees, like he had on the steps at the hospital.

"How are you feeling?"

"Be-EtteR-r," Mouse said, to little comfort. In truth it was a lot worse than even what she let on, but she didn't want Prowl 2 to worry any more than he already was. Her head felt like it was floating in electron gravy, everything twitching and sliding in and out of control. It would be worse if she walked.

She had no idea how it had happened. She had never died in a battlesim match before --even Prowl had only ever been KO'd-- but she was sure that no damage from the simulation was supposed to be real. Well, it had felt real enough...

"It must've been __________ ____ faked out _____ system," she heard Prowl 2 mumble at length. Some of the sounds faded in and out of coherence, but she guessed what he meant. "It was too ____. Your OS is glitching because something's corrupted in the datatrax. Maybe a ________ between your logic centres and learning matrices."

"YoU know-W a lotT," Mouse told him suspiciously.

Prowl appeared slightly embarrassed. "Not really," he said. "When I was younger I had a lot of problems with my command line. Dad ____ ___ about that technician who fixed me, _______? She talked to me the whole time she was operating on me, explaining what she was doing-- you know what it's like, no-one ever talks to us like we're people. She talked to me like we were family. If she were still on Cybertron, she'd be able to fix you, without a doubt."

She discovered that the closer she paid attention to Prowl 2, the less her audio receptors phased. She watched him with her hands braced on her knees, as he continued: "She knew everything. It was like she'd designed me. She made me better than I'd ever been in my whole uptime: I could speak, I could walk, I could even transform. But it was hard work. A complete overhaul. I remember..." He swallowed, as though oil was getting stuck in his receptacle tract. "...When the machines were re-lacing my nervous network, she held my hand and talked me through the pain. I remember every word she said. She told me that derivatives have the same potential as any other 'bot-- unlimited potential. That someday everyone would believe in us."

They sat in silence for a while. It wasn't an awkward silence. Mouse stared at her hands as a curious warmth spread through her cabling. It was so nice to hear Prowl speak so optimistically, even if it was a load of garbage, like her...

"I'm sorry," she said, her voice emitter suddenly clearing. "I've caused so much trouble."

"No; I'm the one who wanted to keep playing," Prowl 2 insisted.

"But I was the one that made it personal. If it weren't foOr mE-e yOo-Uu woO-ouLld-D--" She clamped her mouth shut, as her concentration began to fray again.

"If we don't win tomorrow we'll be back where we started," Prowl conceded softly. "But don't worry. I'll figure something out. I'll ____ up all night if I have to. __ ____ as we keep working together, there has to be..." He trailed off.

He knew. They both knew. With her like this, they didn't have a chance. They had already been completely outmatched today, and with Mouse a bunch of dead weight, they might as well just sleep in.

He gripped her shoulder and gave her a light shake. She'd barely realised she'd sunk forward and was covering her face in her hands, until he jolted her out of it.

"It'll be okay," he said firmly. "We'll work it out."

Mouse burst into a dry sob.

"But he's your dad! I waAs the one who had this stupid idea aboO-uUt the tournament! We've wa-AasteEd all this ti-I-Mme and we're gonna lose everything! We should've sold my parts instead!"

"No," Prowl told her severely. "Dad would never stand for that. He'd sooner stay broken. We both would."

She could have hit him, if she had any strength left at all. "WhYy not?!" she demanded, balling her fists so tightly they shook. "Why ca-nN't Ii be usefulL to someone?! At least if I wAs-S parts, soM-meoOn-ne couLld-- soOmeoN-nE cOu-UllDd--!"

A loud and furious knock at the front door interrupted her. Both children snapped their heads up. Though her audio receptors were still bugging, the sound of her mother's voice jolted Mouse in her seat.

"MOUSE! Mouse, if you're in there, get your skidplate out here right now!" Spindizzy bellowed. "MOUSE!"

The shakes, that Mouse had done so well at keeping subdued, started again in earnest.

"No," she whispered, optics wide. "No, no. Go-O awaAy..."

This was not happening. This was a nightmare, a hallucination, a fault of the glitch. But still the voice kept carrying.

"Mouse, Mouse, baby, listen to me," her mom whined, affecting that saccharine tone, that half-coo she used whenever she was drunk and wanted her daughter to bring her a new bottle. "Mouse, sweetie, I've gone straight this time. I have. I'm going to make it good. I called all my friends in Tarn; I have a job there, we can leave as soon as we want. We can leave in the morning. Mouse, honey, you need to come pack. MOUSE! Mouse, you dumb bitch, open the door for your mother!"

Mouse had been out of her seat by the second word, looking for a place to hide. When her mother started yelling again, she ducked involuntarily, hitting the deck with a squeak and a clatter.

Prowl 2 ran for the door, to lock it, but Spindizzy slid it open before he could reach it. She stood there, haggard, clearly sobered by force instead of time, as though something dark were haunting her.

"What the slag are you?" she blustered at the boymech, stepping into the apartment. "Vectossigma, it's a whole colony of vermin, isn't it. Move! Where is she? HONEY!"

"Ma'am, you're mistaken," Prowl 2 said urgently, trying to bar her way, but he was forced to scurry out of range again to avoid being crushed. "Your daughter isn't here. You have the wrong pla--"

"Mouse! Oh, my baby!" Mouse had not been able to scrawl under the table fast enough. Her mother gathered her up in her arms, in what she probably thought was gentleness. Spindizzy held her awkwardly, cramming her body together in odd and painful ways. "It's all right now! Mommy's made good. I'm gonna clean up and we'll be a real family again. You'll get a complete overhaul and be big like Mommy, won't that be nice?"

"Mo-OMm," Mouse cried, desperately trying to claw free of her grip. "No, nO, pLeEa-SEe..!"

Prowl 2 had caught up and had started pulling futilly on Spindizzy's leg. "Please let her go! Don't take her!"

Spindizzy shook her leg like she was trying to dislodge a wet leaf. Prowl hit the floor, and Mouse shrieked. Still blissfully unaware of both of them, Spindizzy started back toward the door.

"I'm going to be a good mother," Spindizzy murmured to herself, if anyone at all. "I'm going to be a good mother..."

Kibble, who had been sleeping on the arm of the sofa, had woken up and was trailing after, uttering high-pitched mews of confusion. Her friend raced after them as well, optics wide, disoriented and mortified like he had been at the arena.

"PROWL!" Mouse sobbed, reaching out as far as she could to her friend, suddenly seeming a million klicks away. Spindizzy slapped her hands down.

"____ brat! ______ ___ _ ___ ______!" The audio phasing was coming on worse, and the video distortion was returning as well, visuals flickering and bleeding into one another, dissolving completely to static. She could see Prowl 2 running after her, in flickers, falling farther and farther behind--!

"_____ going to be a real fam___," her mother was saying, insisting, like saying it would make it so. "____ do __ _____ this time. QUIT YOUR WHINING!" She smacked the crown of her daughter's head, and Mouse's already distorted vision suddenly saw violet flashes and little else. "You leech, you _________! You ruined my life! But I'll make it better-- I'll make it better for both of us-- We'll be a nice little family--!"

"No! No-O no NnO nO--" She was crying so hard the hiccups resumed, hot white sparks vomiting out of her mouth. Things in her head started to lock up and freeze.

Prowl! she called out desperately in her mind, the last word she was able to process.

Mouse lay on her recharger bed in the dark of her room. There was a pale glow coming from the old city reaching through her window, but no other light. The lamps had been packed.

Spindizzy had put her to work the moment they'd reached the apartment. Mouse couldn't remember there even being that much to pack, but her mother had accrued so much junk during her stay here. Even if it was all her mother's things, Mouse cried silently at the thought of leaving this apartment, leaving this building, leaving Prowl and Kibble, never being allowed to see Jazz again...

She had tried and failed to explain about Jazz and the medical bills. The glitching was bad now, seizing her entire frame at moments. Her mom thought she was acting out to be funny and shouted at her to be quiet. She resented being interrupted while she rambled about their loving future together.

So now Mouse sat in her barren room that she had never gotten around to moving into in the first place, and she rested on her hands and coughed sparks, that glowed briefly around her before fading, dimly warm, on her chin. She was done crying. Her sensors wailed that any more coolant overflows and her entire system would overheat, and even if it was just a misreading, it was a stupid thing to test.

She curled into a ball on the recharger bay and tried to sleep, even though it was impossible.

Her mother was asleep in the living room, having fallen unconscious watching her teevee --the last thing she'd left unpacked, swearing she would do it first thing in the morning, when they left-- and if Mouse tried to leave out of the apartment way she would be sure to catch her. It was like she was possessed now, like something had entered into her logic circuits and stirred awake all those strange notions of motherhood she'd gleaned from the human soaps she loved to watch.

Why're they called soaps anyway? Mouse wondered dimly. Nothing ever even happens in a washroom...

She realised belatedly that a sound was filtering through her audio receptors at odd intervals. Something was tapping on the glass of her window. She sat up rapidly.

There was a familiar silhouette at the window. She'd recognise those wing panels anywhere. Mouse hurriedly but cautiously eased onto her feet and padded silently to the window to let Prowl 2 in.

"What aAre you doin-Gg here?" she whispered at him, amazed.

He squeezed in through the gap she provided and sat down at the base of the wall. She knelt down beside him.

"Your mom's crazy," he hissed. "But I'm glad you haven't left yet."

"We'Re going in the morn-Iing," she explained.

"Over my deactivated chassis," he said valiantly.

She beamed at him. She gave him a strong hug, or at least, the strongest that she could manage.

He returned it readily. "I got something for you," he said, and brought out what looked like a current alternator. He explained that it was a CLI panacea, custom, designed for RCs and minibots, like her mother and father. He had just come back from the grey market with it.

"But we dOn'tT have anYy..."

"I sold dad's jukebox," Prowl said awkwardly. She started to shout, but he pressed a hand over her mouth. "It was the only thing that would go for any money. It's okay. He'll understand."

"But all that music..!"

He grinned, to her surprise, and snapped open his chestplate to explain himself. he pulled Kibble out, who transformed in the palm of his hand. Mouse clutched the kitten to her chest excitedly.

"She downloaded every last track we had stored on there," he said eagerly. "I can't imagine what her total storage capacity is. We had over a quadrillion songs on that thing."

Mewling softly, Kibble transformed back into music player form, its connector cable waggling eagerly. Mouse seized the connector jack and hooked it up to an audio receptor.

"To absent friends, here's to them," came the human's voice, crystal clear over her internal sound processors, the first perfect noise she'd heard since that lattercycle. "And happy days, we thought that they would never end..."

"You gave her the wrong name after all," Prowl 2 laughed. "She's very useful."

Mouse found herself smiling down at the little kitten. "What makes you think iIt's a girl?" she asked her friend.

"Hm? I dunno. She's like a mini version of you."

He eased the music player away from Mouse and encouraged her to open her chestplate for him. She did so, shyly, not really sure why it was so awkward.

Prowl 2 leaned very close to her as he jacked the panacea box into the serial port connected to her mainline. She felt the jolt as he turned the current up, and held onto his arm. They remained like that, as though frozen: she stared at nothing and scented the oil off his casing, a strange blend between Jazz's smell and something else that seemed familiar... Being held like this...

She flashed, suddenly, on a memory. An old burst of pain from cycles and cycles ago, when she had fallen on concrete instead of metal, and the air had smelled of grass and fossil fuel exhaust. She'd clasped her hands around her busted knee joint and howled until the birds stopped chirping.

And then she'd heard his footsteps, his trundling gait as he raced up to her, and knelt beside her.

"What's up, sport? You hurt yourself?" her dad had asked, and his face had been easy and kind, as he laid her out and started putting her leg back together.

"You needed to know a little bit of everything, when I was your age," he'd said to her, as she gazed in wonder. Such fast and delicate fingers, finding everything its place, a small solderer in one hand. "There. That's right as rain, isn't it?"

He'd always used human phrases around her. He always spoke human to her. He seemed proud to have a daughter to speak to in English, someone who knew about Earth but not a thing about Cybertron. Who got caught wearing skirts, who pasted human boys' faces on her walls as readily as those of Hot Rod and Sonic Bomber, because she just didn't know any better.

Her dad embraced everything, and he loved her, because she was the first blank datapad he'd ever known.

The memory of being carried in her father's arms blended naturally to that scene in the hallway, however long ago it was now, when Jazz had let her cry against his knee unhindered. Jazz, who wasn't the least bit bothered by any of that humanness she couldn't get rid of, and who taught his son how to swear in English.

"Prowlie," she said against her friend's shoulder, hugging him closer. "I'm really glad I met you and your dad."

"Me too," he said. His voice came through perfectly. She didn't know if the static had cleared or he was just leaning really close to her audio receptor. "You know, you're the first real friend I've ever had."

"Same here. I had some human friends, but, you know."

"I know."

"I'm over 70 megacycles old. Most of the humans I used to know are dead. A lot of 'em were grown up and gone before I'd figured out my feet."

"I'm over 200," Prowl 2 confided. She could feel his cheek shift, as he smiled against her jaw. "All my classmates are 4 megacycles or younger... We don't really fit anywhere."

"We will," Mouse said firmly. "Someday."

He lifted away from her. He tugged lightly on the cable fixed to her mainline. "Feeling better?"

She broke into a wide smile, realising with relief that she felt completely normal again, if tired. She was about to answer him when she heard a sound, or rather a cessation of sound, from the main room. The teevee had been shut off, meaning that Spindizzy was awake.

Gesturing for silence, Mouse disengaged the panacea mod from her mainline and closed up her chestplate, sticking the folded Kibble in a slim pocket near her power supply. The two children rose and started to climb out the window, as Spindizzy's bleary shuffling continued out in the hall.

Mouse closed the window silently from the fire escape, and followed Prowl 2 up to the roof.

"When I was out researching your condition, I took a look at the War History section at the library," Prowl 2 explained, in the cold midnight air. The neon signs still hummed and the smoke stacks still churned as usual, but the wind bit at the children's topical sensors a little. They sat down on a ledge looking toward the old part of Praxus, where the golden buildings and azure atmosphere still glowed. "I dunno why it didn't occur to me before. This expanded logic board's not worth anything if it's referring to the same old databanks."

"We can't just think our way out of everything," Mouse said, as kindly as she could. "Everything they've got is better'n ours, including their logic circuits."

"Sure, but they aren't using them. All they did was chase us and smoke us out-- cheap stuff. They're stupid tacticians. You ever heard of 'jet judo'?"

She hadn't. He explained. She laughed.

"See?" he said. "It doesn't matter. I was going about it all wrong, thinking about their fighting styles. How they fight is probably the least important part of anything."

Mouse frowned. She wasn't sure she understood, but she'd trusted him so far. And anyway, it was his dad that they did this for, and his pride on the line as much as hers, now. When he spoke, it was with a new sort of passion in his voice, and when he checked his internal clock and rose, she could hardly believe so much time had passed, just listening to him speak there on the rooftop.

"Will you be okay? You haven't recharged at all," she said, as they climbed back down the fire escape. They bypassed her floor, heading straight down for the street.

"We'll catch something on the way. It's fine. I've got enough to last us through the match, and I don't care what happens after. I'll work that out then."

His brazenness gave her confidence. She remembered the time when she used to be so improvisational, just taking things as they came, not worrying about what came across her path. It was a good feeling.

Downtown

The B shift was just getting off of work when Prowl 2 and Mouse reached the arcade, and the familiar regulars were already gathering. It seemed to the derivatives that there were even more people here than usual: word had caught on about the controversy yestercycle, and even those who didn't care for the amateur bouts had stopped by, looking forward to a rare match.

Kite was waiting for them, and he wasn't alone. The mini-cons they had faced in their first match were there as well, as well as a handful of the combatants they had battled in the individual trials. For a few, it seemed clear this was a form of schadenfreude, just waiting around to see the 'bots who had bested them get crushed again, but most, like Kite and the mini-cons, volunteered themselves readily as believers. Even the micromaster whom the kids had fought in their very first match was present.

"You guys," Prowl 2 said gratefully to them, even the ones that glared with their arms folded over their chestplates, "thanks. This means a lot to us."

"Just answer us one thing," said the blue mini-con, Techs.

"What is it?"

"Are you really the son of the Autobot strategist, Prowl?"

Mouse saw Prowl 2's cheek plates flush a dull pink as they heated suddenly.

"Yes," he stammered, taken aback. Mouse wondered vaguely how someone could not know, given the name, but they seemed to attach a lot more significance to it than she did.

Techs nodded, staring all the more intensely now. "And who else?" she asked.

"Jazz."

There were some murmurs and exchanged glances at that. Kite's optics were practically sparkling. Mouse saw Prowl 2's cheeks get even hotter.

"It's... It's in the public record," he said awkwardly.

"Prowl, not everyone makes the library their second home," Mouse reminded.

"Jazz and Prowl," the micromaster was musing, stroking his cheek thoughtfully. "With contributors like that, it would hardly matter at all, if one were a derivative."

"That's not how it works at all," Prowl 2 said desperately. "Look," he addressed the group. "I'm not here to make a name for myself. My surviving father, Jazz-- he's in the hospital. We're only here for him."

"Wasting your time and his, aren't you?" jeered another mini-con, one of the bitter ones. "Hate to break it to you, but no matter how you do in there, it's you two getting scrapped."

There was no murmur of agreement, but a few foot shufflings. Even some of their supporters looked away, awkward.

"We don't know that yet," Mouse said stubbornly, sticking her hands on her hips. "You of all people should think before counting us out, wouldn't you say?"

"Well said!" Kite cried, throwing a fist into the air. He was about the only one who was so enthusiastic, although Prowl 2 gave her a light pat on the shoulder.

"We need to go take care of our registration," Prowl 2 told the group. "No matter what your thoughts on us are, we'd appreciate it if you stuck around to watch us in the match."

"Of course!" Kite barked, balled fists close to his face.

"He's based on Skywarp's schematics," Prowl explained to the others, before they could wonder.

On the second floor of the arcade, the gambling deck, another individual had been able to witness the proceedings. Goldbug watched until the group began to disperse and the children made their way to the registration counter to back away from the observation rail.

Kathren had called him about an hour ago, saying they really should be getting the hell out of Dodge soon. He had asked her and the crew to wait. He hadn't set foot on his home world in more than a century, after all, and there was a lot of housecleaning to do.

Yesterday hadn't quite gone as expected. He hadn't heard about Jazz's hospitalisation, and Spindizzy, well, she was hardly the fembot he remembered. His daughter hadn't even been at home. It had taken a lot of asking around to find out where she had gone, and the circumstances that had sent her there.

Fortunately, though Bumblebee was a laughing stock, Goldbug was an obscurer cool cat, the esoteric sort. Only the people he'd like to see would know him, and the ones he wanted to see, those that were still alive, were all friends.

He knew Smokescreen's basic line of work these days and it hadn't taken much to track him down over the network and ask him out to a drink. It wasn't Smokescreen's usual arena but he knew he did the pro circuits, and the only difference between a pro and an amateur was how many rules got broken. And if you had to see anyone about crooking the wheel, Smokescreen was your 'bot for it.

Goldbug joined him over at their table, in view of the battlesim displays that dominated much of the upper floor.

"Thanks for seeing me, pal," he said to him.

"Any time, old friend. It's good to see you." They were old lines, but the metre of tradition didn't mean anything less than warmth among old comrades. Of all breeds of veteran, none were as closely-soldered than those that had served in the Great War. Smokescreen smirked. "But I'm not your usual stock of company, am I?"

"My kind's in short supply. You haven't heard from Hound lately?" said Goldbug.

"Nada. But it's better than another suicide," said Smokescreen, sipping his cadmium cooler. "They're racking up these days."

"I heard you had a kid."

"Yeah! She's a bright one. I'd show you a picture but it's all outdated now. Dev' hasn't sent word in a while."

There were people in this big, wide universe who would pay good money to get hold of the information Smokescreen had just laid out on the table, but Smokescreen knew he could take Goldbug into his confidence. Any Transformer could. Goldbug was hardly Cybertronian any more: his life did not intersect with the affairs of his native species all that often.

"But what can I do for you, Bumbles?" asked Smokescreen, laying his hands flat on the table. "You're calling in a favour?"

"How do you feel about losing ten thousand cred?" Goldbug said calmly. He hadn't yet touched his drink, or, indeed, pulled the faceplate back.

Smokescreen shrugged easily, spreading his hands. "A little queasy, but I'm sure it'll pass. A bad lunch, in other words. Should I know what it's in the name of?"

"Old friends," Goldbug answered.

"As always, eh?" He toasted to that.

Down on the game floor, Sideswipe craned to see over the many and varied heads of the crowd.

"I wish they weren't so small," he remarked to his twin, who harrumphed.

Sideswipe's anxiety had only grown worse since yesterday. The floor managers had ordered both teams out of the arcade in quick succession before he could get a good look at the girlbot. He'd wanted to know what had happened to her.

Sunstreaker had ordered him repeatedly to cut it out. When one brother was antsy, the other got antsy, and no-one got more agitated over things than Sunstreaker, who was simply one of those animals that had no right way you could pet him. Sideswipe had spent the whole of his uptime around him and still came away with a bitten hand most times.

But Sideswipe still, above anyone else, could read his brother, and anyway, had been there for most of the things that had been written into him. So he hadn't said a word about this continued animosity with the girlbot, because he understood it. Shared it, a little. But not that much.

His optics finally found her, in a corner next to her companion, having some sort of solemn breakfast. He sagged noticeably, sighing with relief.

"Good. She looks fine," he said, gratified.

"So?" Sunstreaker snorted.

Sideswipe winced. "She could have pressed charges, you know, even if the management denied that something happened," he reminded.

"And she'd'a lost. What's the point of this conversation, again?"

Hardly a conversation, Sideswipe thought, but dutifully closed his mouth.

Twins such as them were cut from the same cloth, as organics might say. The state had refused their filing for an Understanding based on a mixture of transplanted human morality and sciencebot theoretical paranoia. No-one knew what a cross-manufacture from a split spark would look like, and so it was illegal to try.

But that was oil under the bridge for them. No, really it was. It didn't matter, because they hated derivatives. They were weak and frail and they died so easily. It was like living with humans underfoot, and they'd had enough of humans. Who would want one of those, in all soundness of mind? Something that died, before it had hardly lived. Something that faded while still held in your hands, its heat easing away as its light extinguished, and no-one around who'd agree to help.

Sunstreaker had been holding the thing when it died. He hadn't said a word. And he'd only broken down maybe twice since that cycle, both times fitful and violent and resulting in him in a crumpled heap on the floor. It was something he would never really come to terms with. And his brother couldn't make him. Come to it, Sideswipe couldn't really handle thinking about it either.

So they hadn't handled it. They had just switched it off. It was easy to blame the design of the things, after all: the structural flaws, the inherent weaknesses, the defects. It was a derivative's own fault that it was so pathetic, they agreed. It was the derivative's own fault if it died.

This worked very well for Sunstreaker, until he was falling apart and not himself. It was a less efficient theory for Sideswipe, who hadn't batted an optic over what he may have done in a sim, but seeing that little girl in pain --that much pain, when she so wasn't asking for it-- had been something else altogether...

"They're starting," Sunstreaker observed, stretching a shoulder. "Finally."

"Bro," Sideswipe said, not really knowing what compelled him: "Let's call it off."

"Say what?" his twin demanded severely.

"Let's just let 'em have it. We don't need the money. It's not gonna be fun. It's just a waste of our time."

"Get real! If I don't tear something apart this morning, the whole cycle's gonna feel off."

Civilian life had been hard on vets like them.

The terrain was random again. More of the scalloped hills and odd cliffs like before, but none of yesterday's patterns. It was back to taking things as they came, but Mouse felt strangely unbothered. She was thinking about the match differently, because Prowl 2 was thinking about it differently, to the extent that even the appearance of their opponents suddenly presented a different challenge than before.

When the referee called the start of the match, the team names had barely left his voice box before the twins transformed and started racing toward them across the low hillocks, leaping off the ground entirely like dolphins bounding through the surf. Mouse and Prowl both knew dolphins, anyway.

"Mouse," Prowl 2 said.

"Right."

Prowl 2 stood stock still. Beside him, his partner quickchanged and drove to the left to engage one of the twins --whichever one didn't matter, so long as she snagged one's attention-- and it was Sideswipe she managed to draw off. Prowl 2 didn't budge or draw his weapon, until Sunstreaker was all but barrelling down on top of him, and then dove sharply to the side.

Sunstreaker braked and spun around ferociously. "I'm not here to mess around, kid!" he snarled.

"That's a bit dull," replied Prowl 2. "It is a game, after all."

The growl that Sunstreaker let out was more akin to a lion than anything robotic. He charged again.

Prowl didn't run. He got into a crouch, and when Sunstreaker was near enough, he jumped.

Sports cars didn't have a lot of purchase on their roofs, but Prowl grappled until he hooked something that took him. Beneath his weight, Sunstreaker yelled and swerved wildly, but Prowl 2 dug in harder, and grinned.

"This seeming a little familiar to you?" he shouted, unanswered, enjoying the wind in his face for the moment.

Mouse could tell that Sideswipe was going easy on her. Even at her fastest he could easily overtake her, and with the terrain the way it was it wouldn't take long at all for him to outrun her, but he kept pace and didn't fire. Her warning systems detected a cliff up ahead and she braked, turning, and Sideswipe braked about twenty paces away from her.

They transformed in succession and eyed each other awkwardly. Mouse noticed she was a little too close to being cornered against the cliff, so she sidled until she had more leg room. Sideswipe mirrored her.

He looked thoroughly miserable, she realised, but couldn't think of how to bring it to his attention. She was glad of her faceplate and how it hid her own expression.

"Well?" she demanded.

He fired at her half-heartedly. She sprung out of the way.

She felt strangely aggravated. She almost wished he showed the same brutality he had yesterday, but not enough to insult his brother again.

The sounds of things crashing on the other side of a hill drew both their gazes. Catching herself, Mouse transformed in frustration and hurtled herself into Sideswipe's shin. He jerked his leg back with a shout and squeezed the trigger on his rifle, rapid-fire bursts lancing the ground and sending up pixel-sized shrapnel. Mouse weaved around behind him before it reached her and zipped to a cool distance, but he was into it now, and sighted her, firing in short volleys and nearly striking more than once. He wasn't coming at her with everything he had, still, but whatever funk he'd gotten into had been cured.

Sideswipe transformed and sped after her, this time in earnest. Mouse reached a plateau and slunk in low on the suspension and laid on the speed, daring him to match her on flat ground. She knew he'd catch up to her. It was all a matter of whether he'd be a sport about anything in-between.

The missles fired suggested otherwise. The second one glanced off her left side and sent her swerving for a moment, but she recovered. She could kill for a little rear weaponry on this altmode, but she sufficed for doing a complex weave and veering off to the left, cutting speed as she did so and watching the red sports car go sailing past confused and shrieking.

A few more of those and he'd be really slagged off, she was sure. So she tried it.

Prowl 2 felt the panels shifting under him and braced for it. Sunstreaker braked as he transformed, but Prowl hugged to his back and set his balance off, sending him rolling. The derivative hurtled himself off Sunstreaker's back the instant he hit the floor, and was on his chest with a gun sticking in the vet's face a scant moment later.

Sunstreaker breathed heavily, glaring at the offensive gun barrel. But he didn't move.

"I'd've liked us to be friends," Prowl 2 said coolly.

"Yeah?" Sunstreaker gasped, still eyeing the weapon. If he moved an arm, the kid would be sure to feel it. "I don't have friends."

"That much is obvious. My dad always said you were strong coffee."

The human phrase finally compelled Sunstreaker to lift his gaze to Prowl's face. It was still unsettlingly familiar, quite apart from the resonate silhouette.

"Prowl'd never say that," he gruffed.

"No, but Jazz does."

He was knocked speechless for a moment.

It was a weird thing that Sunstreaker experienced then, a sudden flush of emotions he wasn't used to feeling. Confusion, surprise, incredulity. Guilt.

Guilt.

Guilt for the comrades he had lost and, Primus, there had been a lot of those. Guilt for Jazz, for the inexplicable way that it had escaped him that Jazz still lived, how it had never even occurred to him or Sideswipe that he was in this city, that they could have seen him at any time. Guilt for the disrespect he had dealt him, one of few who had given an easy shrug and a free pass to any and everything he and his brother did, and laughed, and embraced their youthfulness, calling it the vitality of life that was in short supply those days.

Damn. He'd had a kid.

The other side of Sunstreaker, the proper side, the one to show in public, reasserted itself. So what? it demanded.

"So what?" he barked at the boy. "A pair of contributors like that, you'd never have any problems in life. You can't even begin to imagine how things used to be."

Prowl 2's stare was intense as his namesake's. "'How it used to be'? Let me tell you. I was in a tank when my dad died. A nurse salvaged my spark and kept me safe on Earth until they reopened Autobot City, but I'd deteriorated in the mean time. I couldn't speak for the first 80 megacycles of my life. It took another 70 before I could walk. My other dad and I have scraped and fought for everything we have, to make me what I am. That's the life of a derivative. You have no concept of that kind of hardship."

He said all this on the main frequency, meaning that Sideswipe and Mouse picked it up, at a stand-still on a ridge a quarter of a klick away. Sideswipe listened in silence, hands slackening their grip on his rifle.

Sideswipe knew, without a doubt, that there was only one creature Sunstreaker was thinking of right then. It was one they'd never had a name for.

He felt the rifle almost slide from his fingers, and he knew he couldn't do this any more. If hurting the girl hadn't been bad enough, confronting his brother with his demons was intolerable. "Ref," he said on the all-frequency. "Team Lambor requests a withdra--"

Sunstreaker's yell cut off the voice. He swung an arm to swat Prowl 2 off his chest and the boymech somersaulted back, landing in a crouch on the ground. Sunstreaker clamoured to his feet, but not fast enough: Prowl 2 aimed and took out Sunstreaker's left leg at the knee, and glanced the right one. Sinking to the floor as he howled in pain, Sunstreaker grappled for his rifle and shot only air, as the derivative quickchanged and darted away in maddening speed.

Prowl 2 reached a high and narrow peak and ascended it. It was only when he reached the top that he transformed, and stood and surveyed the landscape, locating where Mouse was ducking Sideswipe's blaster fire.

They'd agreed on this next part on the way over. Mouse had called it crazy, and not at all like what his namesake would do. But he was sure Jazz would approve.

"Mouse!" he shouted on the team frequency.

"Ready!"

He opened up the sim command module and coded in the data transfer command. The acid pellet gun vanished from his hand, and a moment later, reappeared in hers.

Prowl 2 was amazed he hadn't thought of it earlier. They might not have known Bumblebee or Spindizzy's weapon idents, but Spindizzy's spark was genetically identical to Arcee's, and there was an old joke at the university that there wasn't a gun used in the Great War that Arcee hadn't fired.

And, hey, Mouse had always complained about wanting to shoot things.

"To your right," Prowl 2 ordered over their team channel. From his vantage point, he saw Mouse turn and target Sunstreaker as he approached. She missed twice but took out a headlight on the third go: that would slow him down for a moment or two. In the mean time... "Head for the hill behind and to your left. Okay, now dive right! Don't climb up, keep rolling, now turn and get him at a joint, the knee! Go for the knee!"

The rush was incredible. Why didn't they resort to this before? This was where he belonged, as someone else's eyes. The role of the tactician.

The twins' fighting styles were almost moot. What mattered was how he could expect Mouse to move in relation to them, and what he could bank on her being able to do. It wasn't about their defeat; it was about her safety. The rest was incidental.

"Mouse!"

Far below, Mouse wheeled and caught Sunstreaker square in the chest with her borrowed gun. Prowl 2 was too far away to see her expression, but he could bet she was grinning.

It didn't take long at all for Smokescreen to express his confusion.

"Whoever taught you math might want to reinstall the proprietary software," he told Goldbug. "Why on Cybertron did you have me go and do that?"

"Do what?" Goldbug looked away distractedly from the battle monitors. The cameras were focusing a lot on Mouse, as she quickly turned into the centre of the whirlwind.

"Bet two thousand for and eight thousand against. Unless human gambling's changed since I've been around, I don't think that's the way to profit."

"It's not our profit," Goldbug corrected, gaze drawn back to the monitors. "Hey, how many rounds did Prowl's guns used to hold?"

"Why?"

Even as they watched, the small girlbot began to shake frantically at her suddenly unresponsive gun. Seeing her opponents advance, she quickchanged and sped a retreat. The gun clattered noiselessly on the ground and vanished.

Around them on the gambling deck, there was a heightened murmur, and substantially more shuffling of feet in the direction of the bookie.

"Oh ho," Smokescreen said, grinning as he caught on. "Ho, ho. Should I go up my bet?"

"Don't, or you'll tip them off," Goldbug advised. "Or put in a separate one. But that ten thou is a tribute."

"It's sure not making me so ill, any more."

"Even I wouldn't count my robo-chickens before they hatched," said his old friend, watching intently, as the camera angles changed again.

"Take a right," Prowl 2 ordered. "Sideswipe's taken too much damage and he's not going to be able to match your turn."

Mouse did as told, and sure enough, she lost him easily, leaving her just with Sunstreaker on her tail.

"You know what's ahead."

"Gotcha."

She lowered her suspension as far as it would go and creased open her arm panellings just slightly, feeling the wind whip through the cracks in her casing but not enough to cut speed. She had to time this just right.

Sunstreaker was yelling something to her, but she could hardly hear it now. She danced back and forth along her trajectory, shaking her rear fender at him to taunt him, and darted dead ahead.

The yellow mech snarled and hurtled after her, gaining in half-metres like he was hitching forward to gain on her. She shook at him again, now close enough that she could get a dozen heat readings off his hood. If his grill had teeth, it would be snapping at her bumper. Her coolant cables began to sweat. If this kept up much longer--

"NOW!" Prowl shouted over their comm link.

She unfolded her arms and slammed them into the ground. The tug was enough to almost tear them from her shoulder sockets. She transformed rapidly, as her body fishtailed and flung through space, hanging over nothing, just empty air, the chasm of the sheer cliff beneath her.

Sunstreaker's response time was not so fortunate. She felt the air above her move and a massive shadow overtake her, just for a moment, before it was gone, leaving her dangling from the edge of the cliff.

"Slag," she heard the prettybot say, just before a horrible series of noises.

She didn't dare look down to see what had landed.

Sideswipe transformed back into robot form and winced. The damage to his legs stung worse with time. He half-limped towards the cliff, catching sight of Mouse, but no sign of his brother. The acrid scent his olfactory sensors picked up suggested Sunstreaker wouldn't be coming back in a while.

She had her back to him at the moment, hunched and panting, clearly overheating. Their little bodies weren't meant for this much exertion, and she was nearing her limit. Her arms were looking a little lax, like she had torn some of the cabling, or just about had.

He had a clear shot. He should take it. Gigacycles of war --more importantly, surviving war-- had taught him not to wait, but the conflicting thoughts refused to settle. What would happen if she fell? What would it do to her? He couldn't live with the thought of doing her lasting damage-- this was a game-- she was just a kid--

Mouse turned to look at him. She made no move at first, simply watched and waited.

Did she hate him? The horror of that notion hadn't reached Sideswipe before. He'd always so carelessly followed along after Sunstreaker, and she'd been asking for it in the park, and asking for it when she insulted his brother, even if Sideswipe hadn't intended real consequences... But that was the whole point, wasn't it? It didn't matter, his intentions. What mattered was that he'd hurt her --they'd both hurt her-- and she'd already had a scrappy enough life...

If the thing had lived, that little spark, would they have been able to do much better for it? Even Jazz, who must love his kid with everything he had, because he was Jazz, had come up against so many problems...

Slag. It was no miracle, him and Sunstreaker surviving the wars. The way people treated derivatives, it was a miracle any of them lasted a decacycle.

Sideswipe's dilemma of whether to shoot the girl was quickly answered for him, however, as a lone streak of laser fire lanced up from the base of the canyon, and pierced Mouse straight through the chest.

Her mouth opened as she fell, but no noise came out. She vanished over the side.

Sunstreaker. He wasn't K.O.'d. And whatever anxieties were boiling up inside him, he was intent on keeping a lid on them.

His brother always did have a way of making his sentimentality seem stupid. What was he doing? He had a game to finish.

Prowl 2 let out a string of curses. From her radio contact he knew that Mouse had survived the fall, but barely. Anyway, with her out of sight, his vantage point did little good. He sought around for where the other brother had gone.

Unfortunately, the brother had found him. He dove in time to avoid a direct hit but the blaster fire managed to strike a wing as he fell, and he tumbled a good ten metres before getting purchase on the side of the peak. He palmed instinctively for his sidearm but remembered belatedly the trade-off, and the fact that it was out of ammunition anyway.

He thought quickly, scooting down to the next ledge. He decided that as before, honesty was the best policy.

"I'm unarmed," he shouted to Sideswipe, who was quickly ascending the side of his little mountain. "Let's face each other as equals."

Sideswipe hesitated in his climb.

"Now what would your contributors do?" he pondered aloud to the child. "Pull a feint? Prowl might. But you'd never know what Jazz was gonna do..."

"I don't have any feints to pull," Prowl 2 answered frankly. He slid down further to the wider part of the ledge, where there was space for the two of them to stand. He spread his arms for Sideswipe's benefit. He also stood back as Sideswipe reached him, glancing over at the drop that awaited them if they happened to lose their footing here. Or if one of them was flicked off with the barest amount of effort, as Sideswipe could very easily make happen for Prowl.

But there was also the fact that the ledge was far more generous for him than it was for his opponent. In the beat of a refresh, he darted forward, intent to shock as much to hurl himself onto Sideswipe's body. He didn't manage the former, but succeeded in latching onto Sideswipe's injured leg above the knee, affording a slight reactionary stumble, but a little windmilling kept the taller mech balanced. He slammed the nearest hand on the mountain wall and with the other snagged Prowl, before the childbot could scramble up his back.

"That," Sideswipe all but shouted, dangling Prowl 2 in front of him, "was the sort of stunt your Mouse friend would pull." He sounded disappointed.

"Have to correct you there," Prowl said, while he finished thinking. "It's the sorta thing Bumblebee would pull."

In the moment it took for Sideswipe to process this and for his jaw to drop, Prowl activated the flare panels on his chestplate. This close to Sideswipe's optics, the light was enough to blind him for a good milicycle, meaning by the time he regained sight, most of what he was looking at was the ground rushing up to meet him.

Unfortunately, that was what Prowl 2 saw as well.

He apologised to Mouse in advance. In his last transmission across their battle comm, he reflected that, well, it was a pretty good feint.

Mouse struggled onto her knees. It took a great deal of effort.

The shot through her chest had missed her power components, but had totally punctured a series of motor servos and laid waste to the nervous cortex for the right side of her body. Her left optic was shattered. One of her arms was off. Her feet threatened to be right behind.

Sunstreaker didn't have much more to say for himself. His armour was in the worst state she'd ever seen it, battered and dinged and singed from where casefires had broken out, before his coolant systems had kicked in to take care of it. A lot of his kibble was completely in shreds. Adrenal fluid streamed down from the gashes along his face and exposed arms.

He tossed the gun aside as he stood up. It may have been in deference to her or just his own weakness that he waited until she was on her feet to attack, and she only barely dodged the blow.

The panic that had taken a long time coming was creeping up. She avoided the next two swipes but found herself flat against the cliff wall when he came in for the third. She moved to the side but he bracketed her with a leg.

"This's getting pretty boring," he said raggedly. His voice box had been scratched up with the fall. "I'm ending this now."

Mouse twitched, about to make another run for it between his legs, but the slightest movement and his foot moved, pinning her at the base of the wall. Pain exploded through her lower half; she yelped.

She clawed at his shin plating, to no avail. There was no purchase. The more she struggled, the harder she pressed. The sensors in everything below her chestplate were wailing and quickly going dead.

This was it, then. Without Prowl's help, she was sunk.

At the end of it all, she was no use to anyone.

Goldbug looked away from the screens.

It was too hard to watch, for way too many reasons. These simulations always did unsettle him. Who missed war enough to want to reenact death with such loving detail, time and time again?

"I guess that's it for the surprises this morning," Smokescreen remarked idly. If he were human, he'd be lighting a cigarette right then. "Sorry, pal. The odds the way they are, we're not gonna see a cred outta this gamble."

"Not for us," Goldbug mumbled again, staring at nothing. "A tribute."

Kathren was calling again. Maybe he should just go. Maybe he'd misplaced his faith after all. Mouse may have been his daughter, but even he knew that she was the long shot from hell...

Around him, the general murmur rose to a surprised shout. He snapped his head up, and looked in wonder at the splash of colour and movement exploding across the battle monitors.

"Atta girl," he said quietly, so only he could hear. His mouth split into a wide grin beneath his faceplate. "Atta girl."

Mouse held the sparking, severed diode aloft in her hand, before tossing it aside.

An incredibly minor component. She hadn't cared what she grabbed hold of once she'd punched a hole through his shin-- just found something and pulled. Well, it would hurt any 'bot to get one of these ripped out of his leg linkage.

"You bitch!"

"Uh-huh."

"You heap of slag!"

"Yup."

On his skidplate clutching at his leg. Sparks were shooting out of the wound even with his fingers clamped over it. He looked ridiculous-- a big baby.

She couldn't criticise. She was barely walking herself. She probably looked some zombot, limping the brief but impossible, eternal distance between the cliff wall and Sunstreaker. Only one arm left, and it wasn't doing too well after getting that much current through it.

Mouse reached his good leg and leaned against it, heaving. He kicked her off. She landed in the dust a good five metres off. Things rattled but nothing broke.

She climbed up again. Sunstreaker was trying to stand, but he'd sustained a lot of damage, especially to his legs, and standing just wasn't in the programme for him now.

"Shoot me," she invited. "You've got other weapons."

He started to pull out his other rifle, teeth bared. She watched him dimly with her remaining optic.

"Of course, that's not all that sporting, is it," she said dully.

"Shut up!" he snapped, taking aim with a shaking hand.

"I don't wanna fight you," Mouse told him blandly, resting her back against the cliff wall. She thought it was funny that it was true. To think that this used to captivate her, first in anger, then in fear-- now she was just sick of it. "It's not worth it. We're both pathetic. Look at us."

"Shut up!"

"If you lose, it'll be a black mark on your record forever," she said, just making conversation. "If you win, you can go back to the Helix Sentinels and tell 'em why a pair of glitch mice had you leaking in your gearbox..."

He fired a shot. She flinched, but only barely. The aim was so bad the blast didn't even mark the wall anywhere near her.

"You should forfeit," she went on. "That way, it'll look like none of this ever happened."

"Or I could kill you," Sunstreaker growled.

Mouse shrugged. It was a curious gesture, one-armed. "Nothing's stopping you."

"Right," he gruffed, squinting through the dark fluids that were obscuring his vision. He steadied his gun barrel on her this time. "Right."

If someone had asked Mouse right then what she was planning to do, she wouldn't have an answer. She was never very good at foreseeing how things would work. Nothing made sense until it was in motion.

Sunstreaker fired, and she moved. And it wasn't her strength any more, and it certainly wasn't her feet she was running on, not her arm that swung her up onto his knee before he even had the time to register the pressure. All she felt were rubber treads and the hot, pumping hydraulics of her minibot frame; the swinging black and yellow frame that was not her own; a speed she had never experienced and a sense of fatal determination that had existed since long before she'd been born.

A memory. Not hers, and yet the very essence of herself. Something vital and raw.

She reached his chest and stopped, eye to eye with him. The beat hung in space, like an intake of air into the vents, and then the arm that was not her arm moved. It plunged forward into solid plating and grabbed and tore at the first thing it clutched, but the things here were far more precious than some linkage in a leg.

It just felt like a natural thing to do.

And then everything blacked out.

From somewhere in the black, she heard a voice echoing. It came closer and closer, until she could recognise the voice. Prowl's. And the word he was shouting was her name.

Mouse's optics flickered on.

There were eyes looking at her. There were a lot of eyes.

"Uh," she said.

Seeing her stir, some lost interest and vanished, but then still others crowded up. Intrigued, expectant faces. She made out the big goober Kite right away. Prowl was closest to her, kneeling next to her body, looking like he was unsure whether to be relieved yet.

No-one said anything to her, and that was fine, because she had a terrible headache. The floor manager glanced away and muttered nastily about needing the consoles cleared, so Prowl 2 placed a careful hand on her shoulder and she fumbled with the cables to disengage herself.

As she was walking away with Prowl, she heard Kite's voice, in a bit of a fog, asking the floor manager something. "What about the final match?"

"There is no final match," the floor manager sniffed. "The other semifinalist dropped out four milicycles ago, once he saw this thing."

He went on and on like that, talking about needing to clear the floor, how the tournament for the day was getting a late start, how Kite and his type could very well clear off for a while. It all streamed together after a few moments.

"We won?" Mouse said dazedly, as Prowl 2 led her away across the arcade floor.

Prowl 2 laughed, like it was the funniest joke she'd ever told.

There were still a lot of people around them, Mouse noticed. She wondered what it might take to get rid of them. She was sick of standing in people's shadows right then.

A drone came up to them near the energon cafe, carrying a debit disk on a tray.

"For you, sir and miss," it said dutifully, holding the tray up for them.

"Er," said Prowl 2, baffled. "We were already credited our earnings..."

"How much?" Mouse asked him, so eager that her audio receptors tilted straight up, like her kitten's might.

"Twenty-eight thousand," he told her quietly, grinning.

She squeaked and threw her arms around him. He nearly lost balance, but she couldn't stop herself. There were a few awed murmurs behind them, from their group of hangers-on.

"These are separate, sir and miss," the drone continued. The tray didn't budge. "Courtesy of an individual on the second floor."

"Who?" Prowl 2 asked, as Mouse accepted the debit disk and switched on its display to check its balance.

"A gentlebot who wishes to remain anonymous, sir and miss. He said to tell you that you 'might consider this a tribute, in the name of old and absent friends'."

Mouse read the total off the disk and promptly dropped it. The drone deftly caught it with its tray and extended it out to her again, but she couldn't take it, like it had suddenly grown radioactive. She directed Prowl to it instead.

Prowl may have fainted, if he weren't so full of composure.

"Odds like that..." he said weakly. "I guess we really didn't have more than the dimmest of hopes, in most people's eyes..."

"You can buy your textbooks back now," Mouse remarked slyly.

"I can buy the library." He looked dizzy, as though about to fall over. He grappled at the card, taking out his personal debit stick and hastily transmitting over a portion of it, to augment their tournament earnings. She noticed that he added some extra. "Transmit this to the Eighth District Repair Centre," he told the drone, handing him the smaller stick, and told him Jazz's ident.

"Of course, sir. Also, sir and miss have a telephone call waiting for them in the exchange lobby."

Mouse and Prowl 2 traded glances. "A call?" Prowl repeated.

"From Iacon, sir. They wish to speak to you specifically."

Prowl 2 was puzzled beyond belief, but on top of everything else this morning, and his general fatigue clouding his appreciation of things, he just nodded Mouse and passed her the debit disk. "I'll catch up with you later," he told her. "Get yourself something to eat. You look like a ghost."

"Of whom?" said the mini-con Techs quietly, who was among the individuals still shadowing them. Prowl 2 left without answering her.

Mouse looked back at the peering eyes. There was, somehow, even more of an entourage than before. People that she didn't know, who had just watched the match and decided to stick around and hover. They tried to talk about the fight but it disintegrated into babble and she couldn't stay focused on it. She waved them off and excused herself to the Little Bot's Room.

She didn't actually have any business in the sanitation centre but it felt good to have the quiet. Her head was still hurting, and no-one was telling her anything useful. Not that she exactly wanted to hear details about the match, at this point. It was one big streak of nasty.

It descended on her slowly, shut up in a cleansing cell, that she had done it, somehow-- she had won. They'd earned the money to pay off Jazz's medical bills in full, even to do the cosmetic repairs the nurses had stripped off to trim expenses for them, and there was enough left on this debit disk to sear the optics just looking at it. It was more money than she'd seen in her life.

They were the million-to-one chance. Worse than that. And they'd won.

She grinned, the toothy grin she'd shown Prowl on the hospital steps, but her head still ached too much to maintain it.

Outside the cleansing cell, in the general sanitation area, she ran into Sideswipe. She glanced around desperately for some easy way to not end up speaking to him but they were the only two in the washroom, and she'd look weird exiting without blast-sanitising her hands.

She did her best not to make eye contact, which was easy enough given their differences in height, but still he spoke to her, in an awkward sort of voice.

"You should have told us you were Bumblebee's," he said. "We'd never've hassled you if we'd known that."

Now she had to look up at him, to see whether he was for real. What kind of a suggestion was that?

"You mean," she said slowly, and she felt at ease talking to him like this, since she was too tired to feel scared, "that if I'd told you I was the kid of a fleshie-loving circuit-traitor minibot, you wouldn't have called me half-human?"

He had the dignity to look stunned.

"Don't listen to those exhaust ports," he told her. "They don't know what they're talking about."

She smirked humourlessly at the washport. She was getting tired of the hypocrites in this place.

"Maybe," she said, wiping the dampness off her hands on her skidplate. "He still never writes."

Sideswipe continued to looked awkward around her, to the point of illness. The expression persisted until they were back outside in the arcade, and Sunstreaker was there waiting for his brother. He saw Mouse and about half a refresh later there was an argument. An argument about her, even, as though she weren't standing right there.

Sideswipe stood his ground and Sunstreaker ultimately turned away in a huff and stormed off. The very instant he was out of sight, Sideswipe sagged miserably, and glanced back at Mouse to beg his leave.

Well, she was in a giving mood. "Don't worry," she reassured him. "I've got scrappy relatives too."

That look of queasiness finally vanished from his face, replaced briefly by an awkward pink tinge to his cheekplates. She'd probably gone too far on that one.

That was the extent of their goodbyes. He left her where she stood, disappearing, flustered, into the crowd. At roughly the same moment, Prowl 2 appeared at her shoulder, looking like he'd just run a hundred laps around the building.

"It's incredible," he told her, near gasping. "You won't believe this. They want to see us in Iacon-- both of us!"

"Why?" Mouse asked, baffled.

"We've been summoned for an audience with the Primes."

"What?"

True to his style, he was lost in his planning now. "We'll have to take the blue line and do a transfer to the province line at Crystal City. A couple of cycle passes... Should we pack a lunch? They serve things on the train--"

"Go back to the part where the Primes want to see us," Mouse said, feeling faint.

"We won't know what it's about till we get there. But it's unbelievable, isn't it?" He grinned. "I wish I could go tell Dad, but they want us to come right away."

"What, now?!"

"Yeah!"

A kind of paralysis took over her. The very idea of going to Iacon alone with Prowl to see the rulers of their entire planet was enough to lock up her systems, but to have no time at all to prepare..!

As always, Prowl 2 was there to steady her as she started to tip. "Easy, easy! Maybe we should get something before we go to the station. Why haven't you eaten yet? You haven't had a proper recharge in cycles, and that special attack there at the end totally wiped you out..."

"What special attack," Mouse mumbled at the floor.

Prowl 2 sounded amused again.

Iacon

Mouse's aunt Arcee was there to meet them when they stepped off at Grand Station. She was warmer than she had been on the phone, and not quite as tall as Mouse remembered. But then, Mouse guessed she'd upgraded since she'd seen her last.

Arcee was happy to guide them to the High Council Pavillions, since it was where she worked. The Pavillions were not the tallest landmarks in the city but among the most densely packed, offering little chance for sightseeing as they traversed the streets toward the Court of Prime. All of the buildings here were of the old design and glowed like the walls at Praxus University had, generating a bright blue atmosphere over the entire city. The air was thicker, and together with the exhaust and moisture from the traffic it felt almost like being back in Autobot City on Earth again. Mouse knew now just why that was.

"We can go sightseeing after you meet with the Primes," Arcee told them. She held Mouse's hand as they walked through the corridors. She had always had a special fondness for children, even if she felt she had to distance herself from the affairs of her twin sister. "They've finished reconstruction on the Forum of Enlightenment. And I think you'd both enjoy the Stellar Galleries..."

Mouse held tightly onto her aunt's hand and thought back to how she had wished she could have been Arcee's daughter instead. She wanted it more than ever now, but even if Arcee did say yes, it would mean living here, away from Prowl. But once that thought occurred to her, Mouse remembered that her mother Spindizzy was moving them away anyway-- had wanted to move that morning, before Mouse had run off. No matter what she did, this would probably be her and Prowl's last outing together. Money wasn't enough to solve her problems.

Arcee led them as far as the antechamber, where an AI projection took their names and bid the two derivatives to sit and wait. Arcee pet her niece's head and kissed her little cheek, telling them what floor she would be on when they were done for the cycle, and added that they shouldn't worry. The Primes were just people, like anyone else.

"Your aunt's not anything like your mom," Prowl 2 remarked in awe, after Arcee left back down the corridor.

"Sideswipe's not much like his brother, either," Mouse said, watching the hall long after her aunt had disappeared around a corner.

They sat in awkward silence, as the nervousness gradually upgraded to quiet terror. They were all alone in the antechamber, even the AI shutting off as it detected it wasn't currently needed. Unable to take this stillness, Prowl 2 got up and paced the floor.

The room, oval-shaped, held three doors in addition to the entryway they had come from: the main doors leading to the audience hall, where the Primes took official visitors, and two side doors connecting to their respective private offices. The efficiency of a duocracy would be completely mitigated if the two Primes always worked together, after all.

Prowl 2 noticed during his third pass that the leftmost door was ajar by several centimetres. Even then it might have escaped him, had there not been voices filtering through from the other side.

"Uncle, thank you for taking the time to speak with me."

"Of course, child."

The first voice was feminine, and familiar in a way Prowl couldn't quite place. The second voice there was no mistaking: it was Megatron Prime.

He crossed quickly to the wall and peered through the open doorway. From her seat, Mouse hissed for him to stop, but he ignored her.

Megatron Prime was there, standing maybe halfway down the long and dim corridor, his red cape of office reaching all the way to the floor behind him. He had his back to the antechambre door. The fembot he spoke to was almost equal to him in height, pure white and streamlined, with the red medic sigil emblazened across her shoulder.

He knew her at once. She had changed since she'd operated on him 50 megacycles ago, but she still resembled her old self distinctly enough that there was no mistaking her.

"Uncle, your son's condition grows worse," she was telling the Prime. "He sends for you. Please go to him."

Megatron sounded irritated at the suggestion. "You have made this request before and still my answer remains the same. I'm far too busy to be troubled by you over such trifles." He began to turn, but his niece stopped him, touching his arm.

"Havoc is about to undergo a very dangerous surgery," she said firmly. "If it is successful, the worst may be over, but there is a great risk."

"I have faith in your team's abilities," Megatron Prime said dismissively, casting her off. He didn't get four paces before the medic stopped him again. Although nearly his height, she was a great deal slighter than he was, so it was a wonder what it was that made him stop at her urging.

"Uncle," she entreated, more desperation in her voice now. "He's scared. For the love of Primus, go to your son. Ease his mind."

"If he cannot recover from his own inadequacies, he is no son of mine," the Prime retorted.

The medic regarded him icily. "Then you have no confidence in his abilities, or mine," she said decidedly.

He did not answer.

She looked down at her own chestplate. "I left my assignment in Praxus to become your son's private nurse at your request, out of love for my cousin. But even I must consider my integrity." She looked up at him again. She seemed disgusted with her own words. "I will complete your son's surgery, and then I will take my leave. There are other worlds where derivatives are not looked upon as the scourge of society, and I have the sense my services will be better employed there." The voice broke, injured and tearful, at the last sentence.

Megatron pressed a broad hand to her slim cheek. "Theta."

She stepped back, bowing hurriedly, and then straightening. "That hasn't been my name for a long time, Uncle," she said, and turned to leave.

Megatron Prime allowed her to go. He glanced back at her retreating figure only once, then strode for the door.

Prowl 2 remembered his position almost too late, and scrambled away from the doorway only moments before the Prime pushed the door open, sweeping into the antechamber with his cape flowing behind him. He stopped and looked down at the derivatives, flattened against the wall and peering up at him, terrified.

Megatron Prime harrumphed and gestured toward the centre door. "Well?"

The audience hall was a great deal larger than the antechamber and their voices echoed sufficiently more. On other occasions, significantly-sized meetings of significantly-sized people would fill this room, but now it was just the four of them: Mouse, Prowl 2, and the Primes, Megatron and Optimus.

Mouse was no great student of history but even she knew the history to living legends like the Primes. They had been ancient enemies, battling against each other for entire teracycles, until the War of the Battlestars had finally exhausted their hatred. In all Cybertronian history, no two figures were held in such high esteem. And they did, indeed, have great esteem for each other.

It was clearly not frictionless, their working relationship, but it wasn't an issue so much because Prowl 2 and Mouse were the ones doing most of the talking. Rather, it was Prowl who talked, explaining his background, his student record, and in particular confirming his parentage.

Optimus Prime watched him intently, hardly speaking, while Megatron asked most of the questions. He sat in his throne with hands laced together, Mouse thought there was a faint sadness in his optics.

The interrogation came around to the derivatives' performance in the tournament, which Mouse discovered must be the real reason for their summons. The Primes seemed to indicate that someone had tipped them off to an unusual performance taking place in the amateur circuit, and the feeds had been sent to them. They said that a rumour had taken over the Underground, that the strategist Prowl had been reborn. And that, they said, was what they were trying to determine.

Prowl 2's entire base frame was tinging pink, bowled over by the suggestion. Still, he spoke calmly, because words were one thing that he scarcely lost control of. "With respect, my lords, I disagree. I'm a far cry from my parents-- especially the original Prowl. I could never hope to pass for him. He was a great mech."

"Indeed, he was a credit to the Autobot war effort," Megatron said, looking sidelong at his silent co-ruler. "Don't mistake us, child, we don't particularly believe that you are the reincarnation of your contributor. What we were concerned with, chiefly, is ascertaining what you actually are, but clearly, the answer is simple. You admit it yourself: a cross-manufacture, nothing more. One of particularly interesting make, granted, but that is all."

Prowl 2 bowed nervously. "We apologise for having troubled you, my lords."

"Something still intrigues me." It was Optimus Prime, speaking up for the first time in quite a while. Mouse straightened awkwardly as his gaze passed over her. "The science of merged-spark manufacture is as yet in its founding stages. We do not yet know the full scope of a derivative's powers afforded by his parents. It might yet come to light that a cross-manufacture can exhibit more traits of a particular contributor than we've realised, perhaps what the research commission has deemed 'channelling'."

"A shadow of a theory at best," Megatron Prime responded dismissively. "We waste our time belabouring the point in front of these two."

"Megatron."

Optimus Prime's co-ruler scowled and fell silent, as Optimus began to speak at length. No-one had it in them to interrupt the former Autobot commander when he launched himself into a speech.

"You lost many men in the Great War," said Optimus; "as did I. These teracycles of battle have extinguished countless lives that may otherwise have been allowed to flourish-- many of my closest friends, and many of yours. My brother, my dearest and oldest friend, Dion, whom you know more formally as Ultra Magnus, is also among the dead. When the Quintessons destroyed the Autobot Mausoleum, we lost even the remnants of the fallen, leaving us only with our fading memories. With the emptying of the Matrix and the past destruction of our libraries, the bulk of our race's history, our lineage, and the records of the countless number that have sacrificed their lives are now forgotten to us. We have lost mentors, teachers, friends, lovers and even children. And it is left to us --you and I, Megatron, who have been far more fortunate than most of our brethren-- to reflect upon the ultimate futility of their deaths."

He unlaced his hands and sat back in his throne, and Mouse shrank under his gaze again.

"It may yet be revealed to us the purpose of the derivative, his true role among us. As the literal fragments of their parents, they are living reminders of what we have lost. We might regard them as the truest form of immortality, and perhaps also evolution. Perhaps if we as a society were not so quick to dismiss them but instead fostered their healthy development, we would see great things come of them."

"A wirebare theory, as I've said," Megatron Prime said, once it was clear his companion had spoken his peace. "And nothing that might substantiate it at the present time."

"Perhaps. I have seen a number of things today that remind me quite distinctly of older times, but as you know, at our ages everything seems to remind us of something else," Optimus remarked with a hint of wry humour. "I will agree it's no foundation for policy."

"I appreciate your prudence," Megatron told him, faintly exasperated. He swept his gaze over the two derivatives, who were still standing frozen on the lower speaking platform. "If my companion has no further questions--"

"Just one, Megatron, if you'll permit me."

Megatron Prime deferred to him silently, settling back into his seat. Optimus Prime was back to studying Prowl 2 over laced hands.

"Your strategy that you employed in the final match was of interest to me," he told the boy. "It was a departure from your earlier style. Would you care to comment on it?"

Prowl 2 ducked his head, back to blushing again. "Sir. The night before the match, I went to the Praxus Central Library and read a number of tactical manuals from the War History section. One of them was a journal, written by an Autobot soldier during the Great War. He had a passage in there that struck me very profoundly: 'A strategist's utmost concern is not the destruction of his enemies but the safety of his own men.'"

"Interesting," said Optimus. "Do you happen to know the author of this journal?"

Prowl 2 bowed even further. "No, sir. It was anonymous. The journal was recovered from terran orbital debris during the tenure of Rodimus Prime-- no author was ever associated with it."

"That is true, or at least, it was, until just recently. Researchers at our university here have been able to positively identify the writer. Might you hazard a guess who it was?" he invited.

Mouse watched Prowl 2's optics widen, locking gaze with the Prime for the first time.

"I couldn't, sir," he said in a small voice, that it was a wonder that the Primes heard him.

Optimus obliged him. "The journal belonged to your late father. He had it with him on the cycle that he died."

Megatron stared intensely at his fellow Prime. Prowl 2 was back to making eye contact with the floor plating again.

"I must disagree, my lord," said the boy. "All records stress that my father hated making speeches."

"He hated giving them," Optimus Prime corrected. "But your father was always an eloquent writer, even if he kept most of his writing to himself. I'm quite certain he would be proud to learn that his words have finally found a voice."

Mouse glanced quickly at Prowl 2. He was looking up at the Prime with an expression he had never worn around her before.

"Thank you, my lord," he said quietly.

Optimus Prime's smile came across very clearly despite the faceplate. His optics gazed down at the children warmly.

"It's nothing to substantiate our little theory," he remarked to Megatron Prime, who scowled again. "But it satisfies me for the cycle."

"If that's all and well, then," Megatron sniffed. "Let's send them on their way."

"Ah; one more question, if you don't mind."

Megatron clearly did, but he said nothing. Optimus directed his gaze back over to Mouse. She jumped, but tried to conceal it.

"In all our talk we have unfortunately neglected our other guest. We thought to honour your efforts today as well, but we have no real questions for you. I am curious, though: what is your parentage?"

Mouse's power core felt suddenly cold, with only the sleeping Kibble's heat radiating uncomfortably beneath her chestplate. She shrank under the Primes' intense stare.

"Spi-- Spindizzy," she squeaked, and rattled off her mother's ident.

"You are niece to Arcee, then?" Megatron asked, scrutinising her.

"Y-yessir."

"I daresay you exhibit more of her traits than that of your contributor," Optimus told her kindly, and she felt a small feathering of warmth inside. "And the other?"

She looked between them desperately.

What would they say? Optimus Prime sounded like he didn't mind derivatives, even if Megatron Prime clearly hated them. Optimus had fought alongside her father on Earth, had at one time considered him a great asset to the war effort. But that had been before the Witwicky scandal. And no-one in government liked Earth. They didn't use a whit of human in their speech, even for words where the English or Japanese would have been a lot simpler and even normal terran-haters would have opted for the foreign word.

What good would Optimus Prime possibly have to say about Bumblebee? He was no war hero like Prowl. He hadn't gone down in legend as anything but a laughing stock. Even if people like Jazz and Sideswipe held out some affection for his memory, how could even the Primes respect him?

"Unknown, sir," she said, looking at the floor.

Optimus Prime expressed his incredulity, leading Megatron Prime to bark at her to tell the truth. She wanted to crawl into a hole and rust.

"M-my mother was a recreation service model, my lords," she squeaked, not looking at anyone, least of all Prowl 2. "I... I wouldn't ever be able to find out who it might've been."

She knew Optimus knew better. She'd read it off him when he'd looked at her earlier in the conversation. But she couldn't bear being honest with them-- she couldn't bear being laughed at, not by them...

"Very well," Optimus Prime said at length. "If nothing else, your aunt must be pleased to have such a capable young 'bot for a niece. Please give her our regards."

"Thankyoumylords," she said rapidly, bowing deeply. She didn't meet anyone's gaze, let alone Prowl's.

After that it was all formalities.

Lower Praxus

Prowl 2 didn't ask her why she had lied. She was more grateful for that than anything else he had ever done for her.

They spent a good deal of the latter cycle being shown around Iacon by Arcee, but then evening had come and Prowl insisted they really did need to get back. The first thing they did when they were back in Praxus was to go and buy back the things that Prowl had pawned, and then they went to buy groceries. Mouse vaguely hoped all their purchases would be enough to make the debit disk burn a little less in her side compartment, but they hardly even dented it. Ultimately she felt compelled to pass the disk back to her friend.

"You keep my share," she told him, outside his apartment. "I don't need it for anything."

"Everyone needs money in this place," Prowl said, frowning at her.

"I'm gonna get my own job soon. If my mom's right and she got a job in Tarn, she's gonna lose it within a kilocycle, and I'll be stuck without you or your dad so I might as well make my own living. I'll find something."

"I wish you could stay here," Prowl 2 said mournfully.

"So do I," she said, sagging, even after she'd ordered herself not to feel sad.

They hugged again before she went. Prowl mentioned that his dad was coming back from the hospital in a matter of decicycles and she had to come by for dinner before she left, whatever she did. She agreed that she would. Anyway, they needed to get the jukebox songs copied back from Kibble before she left.

She forewent the elevator and walked the few flights down to her own apartment, passing the spot on the stairwell where Jazz had met her and let her cry against his knee, where she had spent the better part of a megacycle playing her stupid handheld game and hating everything around her. Now she just wished it could stay.

Mouse reached her apartment door and stood outside it, hand hovering over the access pad. If she went in now, she had a hunch that would be it: Spindizzy would sweep her up and drag her along kicking and screaming forever, far away from anything she could ever like, from anything that could ever make her happy.

I won't cry again, she swore to herself. I'm sick of crying.

"Hey there, sport."

Something surged through her electrical cabling. It wasn't Jazz's voice.

She glanced over her shoulder, and froze.

It was the mech from the photograph, the one pinned to the energon tank in Jazz's kitchen. The short and stocky gold one, with the visor over his optics and the faceplate over his easy, warm smile.

"Kept meaning to run into ya," he was saying. "Y'know, you're a hard girl to track down."

She'd know that voice if every byte of her datatrax were erased. And suddenly the curious familiarity to the 'bot's expression became crystal clear to her.

Mouse's shriek bounced off the hallway walls. She ran and went into a running leap, and Goldbug caught her as she crashed against him, holding her aloft and swinging her around.

"Look at you!" he laughed. "Hah! You're heavy!"

They took a walk through the park. She walked with her hand in his, his fist that was so much bigger and stronger than Arcee's, though he wasn't nearly as tall. And like Arcee, he was shorter than Mouse remembered.

There were a lot of hard questions that needed to be asked but she couldn't bring herself to say any of them. She told him about the tournament, and the anonymous benefactor. She told him about her trip to Iacon to see the Primes, although she left out the part about not knowing who he was.

He didn't say much about what he had been doing, just that he was freelancing now. She knew it wasn't with other 'bots. He mentioned some of the planets and orbital colonies he had been to and Mouse couldn't help but be amazed.

But pretty soon they were out of things to talk about, or at least, things they wanted to talk about. An uncomfortable silence plugged up the space between them. They stopped on a hilltop, overlooking the Helix Gardens.

Her resentment returned. Did he really think this was all he had to do to be a good father? She'd seen the constant affection Jazz and Prowl 2 had for each other-- she knew what parental love was supposed to look like. Even if he had Jazz and Sideswipe's respect, that didn't mean he had hers.

"Is she pretty?" she asked bitterly, not meeting his gaze.

"What?" Goldbug asked, surprised.

"The human girl. The yellow-haired human you left me and Mom for."

Goldbug was silent for a long time.

"Mouse," he said gently. "I didn't leave your Mom. We were never together. We agreed we'd both raise you, but I was working with the EDC then and they needed me stationed on Titan. That's that moon, you know, around--"

"I know where it is," she said crossly, leaning on the rail and glaring at the luminscent gardens.

"...I didn't wanna leave you," Goldbug told her, his voice soft, as though wounded. "But I couldn't take you with me. I always thought I could come back, but then..."

There was another stinging silence. Her hatred for him boiled viciously. She should say something to relieve the tension, but damned if she was going to do that for him. Let him suffer. She sure had.

"The... The woman, the girl you're thinking of? It was probably Andrea Faireborn. She's Kathren's grandmother-- Kathren Faireborn, she's my shipmate on the Eclaire. You saw Andrea the day she came by our place to serve me my orders, didn't you?"

That was it. A blonde in a red pick-up. A little flaxen rodent invading their apartment in Autobot City, tossing her hair around and acting like Mouse wasn't even there.

"I did love her," Goldbug admitted.

Mouse clenched her teeth, digging her fingers into her forearm. It was disgusting, but she felt too sick to yell.

"I didn't realise how much until we were on Titan together. We served in a lot of battles together; we grew very close. When they reassigned her, I followed. Even after they forced her into retirement, I couldn't bear to leave her. She had a husband and kids and even grandkids, but she was too precious to me to forget, and she loved me back more than she should. When she died about thirty years ago..."

Mouse did the math in her head. "That was when you stopped writing," she said, looking over at him.

His expression, without the face plate to hide him, was pained and miserable. "I fell into depression. Hard. Harder than I should have, but I couldn't help it. No-one can help these things, Mouse. My heart broke."

No Transformer talked about having a heart. It was comical. It was stupid. But there was so much pain on her father's face that all Mouse's laser core could do was tremble, aching for him.

"The EDC discharged me, but I couldn't go back to Cybertron, and I couldn't go back to you and your mom either-- I knew you had to hate me by then. So I just... wandered. And then the Eclaire picked me up. I dunno if it's fate or just Primus mocking me that it was Andrea's own granddaughter on the ship. She knew who I was --I'd played with her when she was a baby, drove her all around Titan-- and she knew what I'd been to her grandma, but she fell in love with me anyway. And I love her too."

Mouse stared at her hands. "But she'll just die."

"Everyone dies, kiddo," said her dad. "Some of us sooner rather than later. It's not that humans live better than anyone else because of it. You can't help how your spark feels."

"But you wanna be with her more'n me."

"No," Goldbug said quickly. "No, that's not it at all! When Jazz called me saying he'd run into you, I turned our ship your way in a second! Listen, I can't make it better," he told her despairingly: "but I want you to know I never once forgot about you. You're the greatest piece of me, sport. You always will be."

He tugged at her shoulder to urge her around, and pulled her into a strong hug against her will.

She wanted to pull away. She wanted anything to not fall into this, to keep hating him, to keep rejecting him. He'd left her and his excuses weren't good enough. He'd be gone again and nothing would be any better.

But she didn't pull away from him. She hung onto him, and cried, and cried.

"I'm sorry, sport."

"Shut up," she ordered, muffled against his chest. "Just stay for dinner, okay?"

He couldn't. He had to go, and he wasn't used to Cybertronian food any more. And he had no idea what to say to Jazz and especially not to Prowl 2, except maybe 'thanks'.

She sat on the steps in the stairwell until Prowl came home with his dad, helping him up the stairs in stages. The first thing Jazz did when he saw Mouse was to scoop her up and kiss her cheek, rather more aggressively than her aunt had done.

"You kids," he said to her and his son. "You got more heart than all this planet put together."

She wanted to object to the word again, but she couldn't find it in her.

If her dad had a heart, maybe she did too. He'd gone half-human. He was something neither robot or terran now. And she was part of him-- the best part, he said. And the parts he liked best about himself were the human ones.

Maybe there was something just defaultly human about being a derivative. You had to be stupid to really think it got its start when the Great War had arrived on Earth, but that's what everyone said. It was one of those 'human things' that the whole of Cybertron just couldn't shake.

Maybe it wasn't so had. Humans had invented teevee, after all, and Lawny Zippo. And as long as she and Prowl had a telephone and Lawny Zippo to talk about, they wouldn't really be apart.

"I'll visit," she promised the father and son, after dinner was over and Kibble had copied the songs back onto the jukebox.

"Visit us in Iacon," Prowl 2 told her. "Dad got a call at the hospital. They're still interested in me for something."

"I wouldn't take to it so much, but I've been thinkin' the factory ain't so much jivin' with my lifestyle lately," Jazz said, grinning. "And it is a sorta all-expenses-paid interest they're harbourin'."

"So you can have this," Prowl said, handing her the debit disk. "It's way more than we're going to need. And no-one'll hire you in Tarn unless you upgrade a little. And you can get a regular train pass to come visit us whenever you like."

"Our door's always open to ya." Jazz smiled. "Even when we lock it."

She went to the corner store to buy batteries for her handheld game, and a carton of energon goodies to keep Kibble fed.

When she couldn't keep it off any longer, she went back to her mother's apartment. She stuck Kibble in her altmode and put it and the debit disk in the bottom of the most inaccessible compartment on her chassis and carefully opened the front door.

Somehow, the neat boxes she had toiled all last night to pack were open, their contents spilled across their wreckage of a living room floor. That was where she found her mother, too, dead drunk and staring absently at the numbing glow of the teevee.

"...Mom?" Mouse tried, after standing awkwardly in the doorway for several milicycles.

"Nn. What, honey?" Spindizzy burbled thickly.

"Are we not moving to Tarn?"

"Smelt Tarn," her mother rambled. "It's too cold." And then she promptly passed out.

A wide grin spread across Mouse's face.

She left her mother's apartment, barely remembering to close the door. She bounded up the stairwell until she reached Jazz and Prowl's floor, bursting into their living room. They looked up from their Scrabble game.

"That was fast," Prowl 2 said mildly.

"I've got time," she panted, still grinning wildly.

"How much?" he asked.

"Dunno. I'm just gonna take it as it comes."

"Well, siddown, then," Jazz said, patting the back of the empty chair between them at their table.

The heat within her chestplate swelled so much that it woke Kibble up. The kitten mewled in her chest.

It was good to be home.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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