Administration

Continuity: G1 Season 3

Rating: G

Warnings: Hot Rod

Characters: Rodimus Prime, various OC Paradronians, Kup, ensemble

Notes: Many thanks to Spacehussy for beta and support! I'm awesome because I write stories about giant space robot bureaucracy.

Rodimus's return to Cybertron with the thousands of refugee Paradronians ended much like all his trips seem to end recently; in meetings. He had to debrief the meches who'd been left behind, meet with his command staff to figure out the order of operations for the next several orn, and meet with the spokespersons of the Paradronians to try and figure out what to do with them.

"You don't know anything about fighting or warfare?"

Sandstorm, who had been appointed as Official Paradron Liaison somewhere mid-return-trip, said "No, but we're willing to learn."

"Some of us are willing to learn," said some mech called Lightrunner, the other Official Paradon Liaison, "The rest of us want to settle into our new home and begin rebuilding our lives."

That figured.

"In that case, tell anyone who wants to learn fighting to report to Kup and Silverbolt. For everyone else -" Rodimus gestured to the jagged horizon beyond his window. "We've got a lot of empty buildings and plenty of salvage for whatever you might need. If no one else has claimed it, it's yours."

Lightrunner and Sandstorm shared a look Rodimus couldn't interpret.

"It is... not ideal. But I have begun to understand more about what you've faced in this war of yours since coming here," Lightrunner said hesitantly. "The people of Paradron will do our best."

It wasn't like anyone had a choice, Rodimus thought. "Just let me know if you need any help."

Several orn later, Rodimus came out of recharge to the usual processor ache of thousands of backlogged messages uploading into his personal comms from the main server. There were voice recordings, video recordings, text logs, data files, reports, forwards, copies of conversations he had zero interest in, copies of conversations he had no idea why he was being included on, schedule alerts, schedule changes, requests, demands, and status updates. Ultra Magnus had helped him work out an organization system to make slogging through them easier, but it was still a pain in the diodes every time.

"You know, lad, a Prime should have somebody to filter his mail for him," Kup had said when Rodimus complained about the process.

"You volunteering?" Rodimus shot back.

Actually, Kup had volunteered at that point, because that's the sort of thing Kup did, and he was horrific at it. He meant well, but his processor just wasn't programed for that sort of activity. Rodimus put up with it for three orn before quietly changing his passcode access to the server. Kup didn't ask for the new codes and Rodimus didn't offer them. Neither mentioned the arrangement again.

During this particular orn, one message stood out from the rest by the simple virtue of being from someone Rodimus didn't immediately recognize. He had it open before it clicked in his processor that is was from one of the Paradronian refugees.

- Greetings Rodimus Prime,

I am Flashtrack, formerly the Secretary of the Department of Habitation and Sanitation on Paradron. Since our arrival on Cybertron, a group of volunteers and I have been hard at work collecting data and devising plans for the most efficient way to provide safe, healthy homes and access to waste disposal and fuel for all of our displaced population.

In order to continue this process, I would like to coordinate with the department and/or mech responsible for sanitation planning and management among the current Cybertron government and/or administration thereof. However, in my attempts to do so I have discovered only that your logistics officer is dead and the three separate mechs who took his place appear to have difficulty with communication.

I apologize for bothering you in this matter, but any assistance you could provide in directing me to the individuals I need to contact would be greatly appreciated and vital to the well being of my people.

May your fluid lines run clear,

Flashtrack -

...who the slag had an entire department devoted to where people recharged and emptied their waste tanks?

Rodimus started to compose a message to Ultra Magnus to ask him to take care of this nonsense, but hesitated. The phrase 'logistics officer' niggled at him and he realized that while he sort of knew what it meant - the mech in charge of the acquisition, storage, and allocation of supplies - and knew that the deceased Prowl had been Optimus's logistics officer, Rodimus himself had no idea who was his, let alone why he apparently had three of them. Not that being clueless about who went where and did what in this army that had been dumped on his lap was anything new. Frankly, he'd prefer to never learn, but the longer the Matrix stubbornly insisted that yes really, he was a Prime, the more he realized he had to figure this slag out just to stay sane.

He deleted the message he was working on and set his search algorithms combing through his memory core and onboard data storage for anything related to logistics and the mechs responsible for it.

Then he did his maintenance routine while checking the rest of his messages, approving and denying requests, and planning out, yep, more meetings. He went on to attend two of said meetings, review data of recent Decepticon movements with Ultra Magnus, do some security drills with Arcee, Springer, and their crews, and have a quick visit with Kup, Daniel, and Spike before he had a moment to examine the results of the search.

Well, that was interesting.

Apparently Jazz was his Earth based logistics officer, while Groove and Grapple handled the Cybertronian side of things (there'd been two entire meetings on the subject that never made it further than his rarely accessed memory archives). Jazz worked alongside Prowl in the past when the army had grown too large for just him to handle, Grapple sort of had experience having once been a construction coordinator and manager, and Groove had been picked simply because there wasn't anything else he was doing. All three had agreed on the grounds that the arrangement be temporary. The position of logistics officer also covered more ground than he'd original recalled; in addition to supplies, it included the habitation, maintenance, hospitalization, and transportation of personnel, both at home and in the field.

So maybe the Paradronians with their whats-it department weren't all that weird.

Equipped with this knowledge, Rodimus set up a fourway message thread with Jazz, Groove, and Grapple to figure out what was going on and how soon he could stop having to deal with it.

"(Dude, all I can handle is inventory,)" Groove wrote, "(Get me the stuff, and I'll store it, log it, and keep track of who gets what. But scrap me, Prime, that Paradon mech was trying to give me supply lists and I'm not in charge of what Jazz and Grapple do or don't send me.)"

Jazz responded to this with, "(Hey, when it comes to Cybertron, my job is making sure that what's supposed to get there, gets there, and that's it. I'm down with helping supply those new mechs what they need from Earth, but I can't go fulfilling special orders that don't come through the right channels.)"

"(Those channels would be through me, Rodimus,)" Grapple wrote, "(And Ultra Magnus, for that matter, as I have him vet any changes to the usual order. Frankly, I don't understand the problem in regard to supplies. I've encouraged them to sort through my inventory before I began the unfortunately time consuming process of requisitioning supplies from Earth. It's going to be a terrible burden on both sides.)"

The message continued on from there, but Rodimus stopped reading and addressed what immediately caught his attention. "(I thought Groove was in charge of inventory, why do you have one too?)"

He went back to finishing up Grapple's message (and doing some quick re-scheduling to avoid Ultra Magnus scolding him for double booking his activity agenda again) which rambled on about how he was already in communication with two of Flashtrack's mechs to begin establishing medical bays and residences for the refugees and there was really no reason for him to be getting Rodimus involved and blah blah blah.

"(Grapple's talking about that salvage slag pile he and his crew got set up,)" Groove replied to Rodimus's comment.

"(It's very casual and practical, really,)" Grapple wrote, "(Jazz had suggested we send everything we recover through Groove in order to keep a log of it, but I say it's a waste of time and mech power. Most of us use whatever we salvage right away and we know to check the stock pile before making official requests from the storehouse.)"

A private message from Jazz arrived right around the same time. "(Roddi my friend, you know I'm the last mech to be pushing for more paperwork, but those two yahoos are running their operations like rusted scrap. I keep finding out that some super important supply stock I had to do the whole song and dance routine to get to the humans to trade to us has been sitting in Groove's warehouse for megacycles 'cause someone got their wires crossed.

Don't get me wrong, I ain't blaming them for not knowing what they're doing. But I got mechs pulling triple shifts just to keep up with our trade debt and some volunteering for more 'cause they got it in their processors we're helping to rebuild the home world. It can't go on.)"

Like one of those magic shows Daniel was always making him watch where the magician pretended to pull coins out of some kid's ear, a private message from Groove and then Grapple arrived the astrosecond he finished processing Jazz's. He barely resisted the urge to delete them unread. Not only would it not make the problem go away, several mechs were on to his deleting habits and requested read confirmations on their messages.

Groove's message echoed Jazz's disapproval of how Grapple ran things, with an extra helping of annoyance at Jazz for "crawling up his exhaust port" about making sure supplies got to their intended requesters. "(I'm just a receiver Prime, not a shipper. I don't even get told who orders what. Everyone should just chill.)"

Grapple's message insisted that yes, there had been those initial few mix-ups where he'd ordered something that someone was later able to salvage and no one told Jazz, but he'd apologized and Jazz really needed to let it go, and it wouldn't have been a problem in the first place if Groove had alerted him right away when the order was received, and really, Prime, his schedule was a little full here seeing as how he wasn't just handling supplies, he also had to figure out where everyone went and how they got there and if Jazz could just be a little less passive-aggressive in his replies, it would be greatly appreciated, goodness me.

Rodimus had to re-read the thread a couple times and put together a flow chart to figure out what the slag was going on. While he was doing that, he received several private messages from Ultra Magnus about, how convenient, the Paradronians and how they really did need to have another meeting to discuss the matter.

"Isn't the chain of command supposed to be simple and sense-making?" he called Kup to ask.

"It was in my day," Kup said, "Not counting that one unit I served with back on Anadalox-6. Did I ever tell you about that mission? The commander was this rust-chewing old 'bot-"

Rodimus blocked Kup's communications and found somewhere dark and quiet to hide for the next joor.

When Rodimus was up to dealing with the rest of the world again, he sent Flashtrack, the former Paradron Secretary of Whatever, a single, one line message.

-You want a job?-

Galvatron staged an attack on one of their outposts shortly after. It made him feel much better.

END.