This is just a one or two-shot, an experiment in a writing style I've never used before.
Let's hope it's not a disaster, eh?
The voice and characterization of the speaker was based on the way he talked in the book "Transformers: Retribution".
Personal Files: Message 42.3
To make everything worse, it was raining.
That's a rotten way to start a story, I know, but I've never been much of an orator—never you mind what they all say about me up north.
I made my way downtown to where the call was coming in from, taking the speedways to avoid the traffic. It's not for the faint of spark: nobody's tended to the upkeep of that stretch of death since the Quintesson days. Nobody cared about it during the Golden Age, and it was just another battleground during the War. There are holes in the road big enough to drop a Predacon through, not to mention the damaged supports, the leaking cleaner fluid rusting the girders, and—oh yes, let's not forget my favorite—the discarded missile shells every few yards. Most of them are deactivated.
Most of them.
It's funny, in a way, seeing all the old familiar places like this. I used to be a go-between for the Elite Guard and the town militias in the good old days. Well, "good" is a little bit of a stretch where Sentinel Zeta is concerned. Guy had a helm like a rock and a spark like a bonfire, 'til you brought up the lower castes and the crime rate in the outer city-states. Then that bonfire turned into ice, pure and simple, and the 'bot got mean.
Of course, I can get pretty mean too. I hear they're still using my designation as some nebulous, undefined punishment in the Law Enforcement Academy up north. The more things change, right?
After the War, once Cybertron woke up and started living again, I sort of thought maybe the peace was going to last awhile. Like maybe the race as a whole would think, "Gee, haven't we nearly driven ourselves to extinction already? Let's leave off with the fighting and the killing for a mega-cycle or two!" Shows how much I know, right? Maybe that's what happens when you're stuck in space, wandering around with a perpetual optimist for decades. You go soft, naïve, thinking the best of every mech you meet until he tries to kill you.
They're like that up in Iacon, especially now that they've got a youngling running the show. Oh, don't get me wrong now, he's a good soldier, a good friend. But he's no Prime. In some ways, he's the best thing that's ever happened to this broken-down world: a kid who's just about as far from the upper castes' idea of a leader as you could imagine, picking up the pieces where Optimus Prime left off just because nobody else could.
Then again, that's a pretty sad statement on our political and legal system post-war: we had to have a scout-graduate running the planet because we couldn't get our act together.
But that's neither here nor there. See? I told you I was bad at telling stories.
I was on that decrepit speedway headed for a section of town we just called "The Pens". Once upon a time, that was where they kept the gladiators they used to throw into the rings here: dirty, narrow habitation units just big enough to hold a mech on his way to a messy execution. Now they're slums.
This is Slaughter City, where the bad die young and the good die younger.
The War hasn't done it any favors.
Slaughter City is a festering wound, a stain on the wall that Iacon hangs a painting over and pretends doesn't exist. With the militia spread as thin as it is, there are mechs and femmes who are literally getting away with murder around here. That's why I was headed for "The Pens".
You didn't think we got the name by accident, did you?
Ambulon, the local medic, and one of my rookies were already there when I arrived. The rookie wasn't a bad officer; he had an optic for the little details most Cybertronians overlook, and it was easier to get a bone away from a Sharkticon than it was to distract him once he went to work on a case. He had a processor like a laser beam: completely focused. That's what I needed in a place like The Pens: focus.
"What's the 10-45, Nightbeat?" I asked, transforming.
Even the atmosphere felt corrupting. The feel of the place dripped down the walls like the slime leaking out of the vents at old Ventox's place again. Which reminds me: I need to write him up for health code violation again.
"It's a 187, Prowl," he said. His Kalis accent used to grate on the audials. I'm used to it now.
"Homicide, huh?" I asked, stepping over the laser lines, "Who's our victim?"
Whoever the unlucky mech was, he had the familiar purple and silver badge of a Decepticon, possibly a Seeker Elite, with scarring to match. He didn't have the frame of one of the anonymous drones, which meant he must've taken a name for himself at some point. It would've been easier to identify him if his head had still been attached. I crouched and ran a few scans over him. It wasn't a pretty sight.
Every servo on his hands was crushed, like somebody'd been standing on them. There were lacerations on his forearms and most of his armor: this guy had put up a fight. Made me wonder why no one had called in an assault before the mech got killed. Like I said before, his head was completely gone, and his wings...well, let's just say that even if he'd survived, he probably wouldn't have been flying anytime soon. Which meant that whoever had done this was either really big, or proportionately strong.
"Database doesn't have any records on him, surprise surprise," Nightbeat hadn't been down in Slaughter City more than a few Earth-months, and he was already picking up the natural cynicism this town bleeds.
"Alright, call him in as a John Doe."
"A what now?"
"Earth term for an unidentified corpse. Add it to the memory banks, will you? Human words are in vogue right now, in case you hadn't noticed."
Personally, I blamed Bumblebee and the Wreckers for it. There was even talk up at the north pole of adding a biosphere of some kind so their human friends could visit. All things considered, it could be good for the economy, but I didn't like it. Humans are just too small to keep track of. Suppose you're out on a case and one gets underfoot. Squish. Light's out, show's over. Humans make me nervous, same as sparklings. They're too fragile.
Nightbeat took scans of the body and the scene of the crime, and asked me whether he ought to prepare a statement. I almost told him not to bother. Nobody cares in Slaughter City. Nobody but us.
There were probably one hundred and one reasons somebody could've had to kill an ex-Decepticon. Personal history, mugging gone wrong, general prejudice, mistaken identity, or just plain old-fashioned revenge. The damage to the body was a little too extensive for me to lean towards robbery or mistaken identity: this had been personal.
"Alright Nightbeat, get this poor spark out of the alley before he starts to rust. I'll have the mechs at the lab analyze him to see if the perpetrator left any imprints on the nanites in the wounds, and you go make a report to the Commissioner." I slipped a cy-gar out of my subspace and waved it vaguely at our "friend".
"Here's to you, buddy," I said, "At least we'll remember you." I lit the cy-gar and dropped it where his helm would've been. I don't smoke: never did. I just carry them around out of habit.
"Yeah, I don't know if that'll do any good."
When I asked the rookie what he meant, he just shrugged, but I knew that look. Nightbeat had found something, a clue of some kind, and it was making him nervous. Now, sometimes Nightbeat gets nervous because he's just a kid when it comes down to it. One of the first sparks out of the well after Optimus brought the Allspark back—Primus rest his giant, loving, idiotic spark—and kicked out of the academy early. We were shorthanded on law enforcement. I guess Magnus thought he could handle it...or he thought I could handle it. Still, I know that not a lot rattles Nightbeat, so when he gets nervous, that's a good enough reason to start reaching for a gun.
"Alright," I said, "What is it?"
Nightbeat dragged two servos through the slime on the walls of the hab suites around us. That's one thing I can appreciate about the rookie: he's not afraid to get his hands dirty. I mean that literally, y'know, not figuratively. We're trying to uphold justice here, not subvert it. What do you take me for, a sentinel guard?
"Look at this." He holds the servos up in my face. "You got your run-of-the-mill grime, your garden variety heating-coil discharge, and energon."
"So?" I didn't think much of it at first. That made up most of the sludge lining the walls and the streets of Slaughter City these days, even after the rejuvenation of Cybertron.
"So this isn't the victim's blood!"
Well that got my attention. "Okay, Nightbeat. I'll bite."
I could tell even before he opened his mouth that I wasn't going to like what I was about to hear. It's like an extra sense I've got. My doorwings twitch when bad news is coming. They darn near used to flap during the War.
"This is high-grade, Prowl. The expensive stuff."
Oh scrap. I knew where he was going with this.
"So?" I pretended I didn't know what he was about to say as I helped load the dead 'Con's body into Ambulon. Poor mech had been waiting for Nightbeat and I to finish up for a while now, so I figured I ought to at least give him a hand.
"So who in this city can actually afford high-grade?"
The fact that my rookie had come to the same conclusion as I had didn't unnerve me. I don't get "unnerved". If anything, it served to focus my attention on the fact that my case had just gotten a lot harder.
"Ease up there, hotshot," I warned him, "I know what you're thinking. You'd better have proof before you start hunting." I have to play the uptight one sometimes, especially in a town where nobody cares. I knew that Nightbeat was probably correct in his suspicions, but if we wanted to turn Slaughter City around, we had to hold ourselves to a higher standard than anyone else when it came to obeying the law. As an Autobot of my rank, I had no business encouraging behavior that was going to stray into vigilante territory.
All the same, this had Chromatron's stink all over it.
He started out a protest artist during the reign of Sentinel. If I'm honest with myself, there's a part of my processor—set aside for the emotions and the prejudices I can't show the rest of the world—that wonders if the two were connected in any way. It's probably because I just don't like the smarmy sculptor. For a while, it seemed like he had died in the first Decepticon bombings, but Chromatron excels at making backup plans. I don't know where he hid for most of the War, but once the call went out declaring that it was all over, he came waltzing back to Cybertron with a fortune he'd amassed Primus knows how and set up shop in Slaughter City.
He's never made any secret of his hatred for anyone even slightly affiliated with the Decepticons. I wouldn't put it past him to gun down a Forged on the street in cold energon. In fact, I know that he has at least twice, but he's got enough influence in this rotted sinkhole of a town that the militia can't touch him. Still, the savagery of this particular attack made me think that somebody else was involved. Chromatron would never risk incriminating himself by tearing a mech apart like this: he would've known that the nanites in the energon stream would retain an impression of the electromagnetic field of the killer. He wouldn't dirty his hands like that on an ex-Con, not unless he had a really good reason.
That's why I was so adamant that Nightbeat find proof before going after Chromatron.
Alright, that's only half the reason.
Chromatron is a lot more dangerous than he looks, and the entire police force knows it. He could walk into the town hall, shoot the mayor, and walk out again and we wouldn't be able to do anything. That's how much pull he has in Slaughter City right now. I knew Nightbeat would be tempted to chase him down, try to intimidate him into giving something away, but without proof or even solid suspicion, it could get dangerous quickly. I don't want to lose another partner, especially not a junior partner.
"We're not going to jump to any conclusions, Nightbeat. Go back to HQ and file that report with the Commissioner," I repeated, "Once we ID our mech, we can start figuring out why someone would want to kill him." It was odd, knowing that I was going to be hunting down a Decepticon-killer who might have been an Autobot. In just a few years, I'd gone from shooting down Decepticons just to survive to trying to secure justice for them.
I think that's why the humans depict Justice as a figure wearing a blindfold. It is impartial.
That's when it started raining, which is where we started.
"Prowl, you know nobody else in Slaughter City can afford high-grade!" Nightbeat protested, "Who else could it be?"
"You're still a rookie, so I'm going to let that incredible lapse in logic slide this time," I was feeling generous, despite being in a rotten mood. "There are procedures to follow in a case, and we're going to follow them. The last thing we need is for an ex-Con or a NAIL lodging a complaint against one of us. Understand?"
His reply was sullen. "Understood, sir." He looked like someone had just told him he'd contracted Cosmic Rust. I knew how he felt. When you're young, you feel like you can change the universe single-handedly. Politics, corruption, injustice, all the things we were supposed to have left behind after the War, Nightbeat doesn't understand them. His generation never knew the caste system, the lack of justice that most of us grew up with. It rankles him more than it does me.
Me? I'm used to it by now. I was here when the Quintessons were ruling, remember? Doesn't mean I never do anything about it though.
I knew I was going to regret what I was about to do, but I would've regretted not doing anything just as much.
As we transformed and rolled back towards the "better" part of town, I said to the rookie, "Look. You didn't hear this from me, or anyone else, but in the ruins of the old temple on the edge of the badlands, there's a beacon. Shine it towards Kaon once, then the city twice, and someone will come."
"Who?" He sounded suspicious, and rightly so. Attracting undue attention is generally a bad idea in Slaughter City.
"Someone who will help you. I'm not allowed to tell you any more than that," I said sharply. Even in vehicle mode, I could tell that Nightbeat wasn't sure whether or not to believe me. But I've never steered him wrong, and he knew it. He would go to the old temple as soon as he was off the clock.
We parted ways: he went to report to Commissioner Wheelarch and I went with Ambulon to examine our dead Decepticon and see if we could retrieve any physical evidence.
I knew I couldn't stay in the labs long, especially with Nightbeat headed for the temple that night.
I looked out the window as the autopsy began that evening, and saw the familiar beam in the shape of the wolf's head, crimson against the smog of the city.
It was time.
I would have to become him again.