Title: Backstage: Sound Crew
Warnings: Silliness, and sensuality. A fetish, and reaction to it. Foul language.
Rating: PG-13
Continuity: G1
Characters: Soundwave, Ratbat, Frenzy, Thundercracker, Skywarp
Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.
Motivation (Prompt): Bewilderment
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It started so stupidly, too.
Starscream died. Wasn't that a laugh? But the Autobots were idiots enough to believe it, and Megatron grabbed that and ran with it.
Someone had bribed Soundwave to mess with the recorded 'Demise of Air Commander Starscream' file Shockwave sent from Cybertron; after some tinkering to reduce the background explosions, he'd played it back at three times the normal speed while Swindle passed out Buzzword Bingo cards to anyone who could stand upright long enough to play. The Decepticon Elite on Earth collapsed against walls and grabbed whoever was nearest, begging them for a punch to the face to sober up before the Stunticons started wondering why everyone was giggling over Megatron's newest anti-Prime ploy. It took even more effort to cover how they collectively broke up laughing over the hiss-spit power-play fight brewing between Shockwave and newly-promoted Air Commander Thrust. It was a laugh riot.
Starscream probably laughed hardest of all, red optics flinty with satisfaction as he gave orders to Thrust from worlds away. The air ranks had learned that lesson well, it seemed. Thrust had his own ideas, but none of the Coneheads were dumb enough to cross the true Decepticon Air Commander again. Thrust requested orders for everything and used his own initiative sparingly at best. He had a better chance of surviving Starscream's inevitable return that way.
On Soundwave's suggestion, Thrust had relocated to a heavily-fortified outpost on Cybertron. Officially, he cited a need to test the Decepticon wings for new additions to the Elite ranks. However, to all appearances the new Air Commander was establishing a power base and vying for control of entire sectors with Shockwave. Every few hours he called up Shockwave's Tower to have a screaming fight over mundane things with the one-opticked loyalist. The infighting was a hugely distracting move that had the Earth-bound Autobots' unwavering attention.
Frenzy had witnessed one such distraction - um, 'fight.' Thrust had borrowed one of Soundwave's audio props from Earth - something called a 'megaphone' - and sat at the comm. console yelling at Shockwave through it. The acoustic warping had been amazingly horrible to hear, distorting even a normal discussion two officers into what sounded like a froth-at-the-mouth argument. It had even taken Frenzy - who was standing right there watching, for Primus' sake! - a good long while to figure out that Shockwave and Thrust were talking about patrol schedules. It guaranteed that whatever garbled form of the transmissions the Autobots managed to intercept would establish Thrust as an absolute, irrational, mech-gone-mad-with-power maniac.
The Decepticon soldiers at Thrust's 'base' outpost were helping that impression along with gleeful ingenuity. Frenzy hadn't been there long enough to actually see them in action, but they'd evacuated the base twice to run laps around the outpost. They spent their free time staring at specific points on the walls in the common rooms and had taken to doing elaborate aerial maneuvers in the deepest underground storage bays. Even to those who knew what was going on, they seemed insane.
Frenzy had been sent to that outpost to advise the local experts on new traps for catching infiltrators. By the time they'd finished testing the upgraded outpost defenses, he'd been convinced the Decepticons there were the craziest bunch of lunatics he'd ever worked with. Crazy like turbo-foxes. He passed on a recommendation to Shockwave for secondary rank promotion for one particular lunatic who took a true artist's care in planning the Autobot traps. That was the kind of attention to detail Shockwave could use around his Tower. Protecting the spacebridge and the invasion plans from discovery was a major priority.
But it'd all been funny. So stupid it was funny, really, which most of the plans that involved Earth seemed to be.
Then Soundwave had sent his Cassetticons to Pentayear to organize the annexation of the planet into the Decepticon Empire, and things stopped being so funny. A civilian conquest had been kind of awesome. Even if civilians themselves seemed wimpy to Frenzy, he had to admire a conquest done with an overall gain in profit and resources. The world market was peaceful, thriving, and wide open to outside trade. The planet was proof positive to all the universe that Decepticon rule would improve overall standards of living. Megatron was in the midst of conquering the universe - and improving it. Peace through tyranny.
Autobot propaganda couldn't stand up in the face of meticulous records kept by the historians, archivists, engineers, and scientists. They'd detailed every step of the way as they brought the planet's primitive civilization up to the rather impressive level it was at now. Sure, the natives lived in slavery, but the vast difference between treatment of a resisting population and cooperative one had even Thundercracker, notoriously reluctant to cooperate with Megatron's policies, nodding in agreement.
Final opinion from the ranks seemed to be that civilians needed to be included on all the invasion missions from now on. Brigade commanders had been sending in requests for 'civilian backup' ever since Starscream's first report was broadcast. Something about the situation fired up the Decepticons as a whole; it'd renewed faith in Megatron's rule and restored vigor to warriors who had been merely standing guard on Cybertron for 4 million years. The eager faces uplifted to Starscream's presence as he'd led troops into the city in parade formation had surpassed satisfaction and lit inspiration. It reignited a fever pitch of belief in all Decepticons. The natives weren't Cybertronians, but Decepticon servants cheering on their personal warrior heroes were worth acquiring and protecting. Frag, it was practically a dream come true.
The Autobots thought the Decepticons to be murderers and thieves, delighting in slaughter and destruction. That was true to a point. But even though Frenzy wouldn't hesitate to kill one of the little technorganic natives on Pentayear, they'd never give him a reason to. In return, it never entered his mind to mindlessly massacre part of the Decepticon Empire's support structure.
Those native were slaves, but that made them structure. Any grunt knew the importance of structure. It was important as energon supplies and the repair bay to soldiers who relied on that faceless, necessary support behind their ranks to keep them supplied, comfortable, and in fighting shape. Besides, they were something to conquer for. Only drones fought on orders. Decepticons, real Cybertronians all, needed something to believe in. Personal enjoyment of battle wore thin quickly, but Megatron had started a war because they followed him. To have a whole world as proof positive that his words rang true, a realized vision painted in a vivid, conquered reality…
The Insecticons had shut the Combaticons in a room with all the footage and records sent back by Starscream. Onslaught had come out of that room looking like someone had sliced his thoughts open at the source. Kickback had stood outside the room waiting, the very image of a Decepticon probationary office grinding the edge razor-keen on a very valid point: This is what you rebelled against. He'd cocked his head up at the Combaticon leader, making no mention of rehabilitation or reprogramming or any of the threats looming over the combiner team because the facts alone were scrambling Onslaught's mind enough.
Onslaught had stared back, speechless in the face of overwhelming proof of a system that worked. Megatron's system. And, because of his own actions, Onslaught's place in this successful Empire was that of a prisoner out on probation. That kind of humiliation burned lessons in better than any lecture or beating.
The other Combaticons had come out of that room subdued as well, point made, but Swindle had been bended knee joints away from begging to be included on the annexation mission. The pure light of greed shone in his optics like a believer facing his god. That had been hilarious. Frenzy had happily set terms and conditions and requirements until he'd wound Swindle up into a twitching, squirming trader kept from a wide-open, brand spanking new market with not a single military acquisition officer in place. Then Soundwave had revealed some new information that just happened to show some teasers of what kind of technology shiploads of Cybertronian civilians could invent while stranded off-planet for 4 million years. Squirming had degenerated into pathetic little whimpers when Swindle saw that.
Between comm. officer and Cassetticon, they'd toyed with the Combaticon until he broke into gibbering promises of whatever they wanted, just please please pleeeeeeease get me in contact with whoever gets put in charge of acquisitions pretty pretty please with credits on top?
Stupidly funny, that. Frenzy had left Earth content, assured that he'd have anything he wanted handed to him by an ecstatic Swindle when he returned with that contact information.
Then came the first glimpse of Pentayear, and Frenzy had snapped into a much more serious frame of mind.
Yeah, he'd joked and strained not to show it, but, oh, he'd been shivering under the cover of mocking Ratbat. The atmosphere on Pentayear required air filter modifications on the teams sent through the spacebridge from Cybertron, but the civilians had come up with a solution to that long ago. It was part of the advanced tech Soundwave had taunted Swindle with. The civvies had modified their alternate modes until external filter systems dealt the heavy metals. The filters were so efficient, in fact, that their bodies actually absorbed and used the excess elements.
Starscream had quickly adopted that solution, mandating new alternate modes for his air ranks. Frenzy had seen the specs for those alternate modes already, but what he hadn't seen was what the flyers looked like in their root modes now. The wings looked fairly similar as before, and on the outside, the air intakes on the flyers' torsos and shoulders appeared mostly the same. All that new tech and those new alt-modifications slotted ever-so-sleekly into place, and Frenzy hadn't been prepared. For all that they looked the same, they were different.
The difference slicked down their legs. It lined their thighs and tucking neatly into knee joints, then flaring bell-shaped and heavy under their knees. Their thrusters were wrapped in layers of complicated mechanisms that clicked open and shut depending on atmosphere composition, creating a solid shell of armor that constricted and expanded. It was constantly-moving but never vulnerable. Even when the flyers stood still, their feet writhed with flashes of moving gears and panels. It was an intricate system that would never survive combat, making it unique to this world alone.
It was fragging gorgeous.
Frenzy dragged his jaw off the ground with difficulty. He didn't understand the new design, could only speculate on what the glimpses of spiraling thrusters and hidden gauges could do, and his bewilderment totally floored him. He'd never been so turned on in his life, and he did not. Know. Why.
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