I'm not reposting all the warnings. If you didn't read them in Pt. 1, then on your head be it.

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Pt. 22

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The room wasn't silent.

On the other side of the table, Ratchet had half a dozen leads hooked into Prowl as the tactician studied an open document window on the table's inset console. The document was blank, and every few seconds, Prowl's hand twitched toward the screen as if he wanted to start taking notes on the information uploading slowly into his cortex but didn't know precisely what to write yet. Other than that slight gesture of indecision, the Autobot Second-in-Command's poker face revealed nothing but a neutral frown to the world at large. Or to briefing room, as it were. Ratchet had his optics on a datapad of his own, but there was a flicker of blue whenever his patient's hand moved.

Jazz had deliberately thrown as many related details into Prowl's briefing packet as he could in order to delay quick absorption. He'd wanted Ratchet to have time to monitor the situation. That, and Prowl worked best when his tactical computer had everything available at its disposal. The tapping of Prowl's index finger lingering in indecision was erratic but a good sign. It meant he was seeing the connections without being floored by what was connecting. The mech didn't know how the facts linked together yet, but at least nothing had knocked him for a loop yet.

The datapad Ratchet kept his optics on had a single cable leading across the table into Red Alert's wrist input. The Security Director had his elbows on the table and his helm in his hands as a continuous unintelligible mutter flowed from him. His optics had clouded over the moment Jazz's download went into the briefing slot, gaze turning inward to process the data with an optic for security. Prowl did situational awareness; Red Alert did security. Right now, they were both falling off a cliff of prior erroneous assumptions about their specialties that had run the course of the entire war.

Talk about rattling their cages. Jazz had been - was still - shaken, himself. Everything thing they'd thought they knew had gotten them through a war, but now they were finding out they'd been skating thin ice all along. Fear lurked under Jazz's brash determination, tonight. There were so many missteps they could have made and could make yet. Ratchet's monitor was there to make sure the recalculations and new knowledge didn't cause permanent damage.

Prowl would wait to start making new connections. Red Alert had started working things into his previous threads of threat assessment as soon as the data started uploading. They had the luxury of some time. Because of that precious commodity, duty priorities had kicked in. They weren't running simultaneous data analysis processor threads. Instead, threat assessment and information assessment subprocessors had organized according to their function. Red Alert would process the download and secure the immediate situation before the consequences caught up to him. Prowl, given that safety, would internalize the download fully and bear the consequences as they happened in order to ultimately pull through and craft a plan afterward.

It made Prowl look unaffected right until he crashed, and then unaffected afterward. It made Red Alert twitch the whole rusted time.

The joke on the Ark had been that Red Alert was a paranoid spaz. He'd responded by yelling back, "Who told you that?!" and getting out the flyswatter. The humans hadn't gotten the joke, but then, the humans hadn't been fighting for millions of years. The fact that Red Alert's sensitivity over his behavioral ticks had transmuted into a running joke he participated in baffled the Autobots who hadn't gone to Earth.

The fact that anyone still had a sense of humor about high-priority duty function handicaps this late in a civil war was the Ark crew's petty victory. They'd returned to Cybertron determined to hang on to that sideways, human-influenced humor.

It'd been an excellent curveball to pitch at the Decepticons of Cybertron, right up until the Elite had responded in kind. Turned out that Earth and its quirks had gotten to them, too.

Well, at least now they all had something in common.

On Ratchet's side of the table, Wheeljack had begun stacking datapads, datasticks, and a few things he'd pulled out from under his hood on top of each other. The inventor never went anywhere without a few tools stashed about himself. He seemed to be intent on balancing them together in an intricate structure not unlike a house of cards. His vocal indicators stayed dull as he concentrated. The idle work of his hands merely indicated that his mind was working. Wheeljack's processors had completely different priorities. Who knew how his mind sorted the downloaded information? Security and tactics weren't his thing.

The orn somebody figured out what his 'thing' really was, they'd have to blow up something to celebrate. The inventor's processors were uniquely chaotic. They were capable of connecting completely unrelated concepts in ways most mechs couldn't and wise mechs wouldn't. It made him a stellar inventor. It made him impossible to predict, sometimes. Jazz very badly wanted to know what he was thinking right now.

Music, of course, was Blaster's preferred working atmosphere. The other officers had adjusted enough to his eccentricities that they'd only had to hush him twice, now. At the moment, Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' kept the Autobot cadre company at low volume, and Blaster had his head tipped back to stare at the ceiling. His mouth pulled into a strange, thoughtful pout as he listened and rearranged the inside of his head. His fingers drummed in time on the table.

Normally, Ironhide would have frowned at him for what he strongly believed to be lousy taste in music. Not that it was anything to start a war over, but the two officers had begun bickering on Earth about the local music and hadn't stopped arguing since. Their disagreement fell somewhere between good-natured pastime and hidden passion. The arguments were silly, but snarking at each other usually served to keep everyone else amused.

The conflict hadn't stopped with the return to Cybertron. The humans and their infectious culture Cybertron were being absorbed quicker than the new diurnal aspects of language were integrating into daily life. The two-way argument, which the Ark Autobots had anticipated as creating hilarity, had unexpectedly turned into a multi-legged continuing discussion wandering off in every direction. Everyone had an opinion on new music, and the stuff from Earth was decidedly different than anything from Cybertron's Golden Age or music produced during the war. Opinions were varied and always a good topic when other small talk ran dry.

Walking into a room full of Autobots and Decepticons eying each other warily inspired old tensions. Casually making a comment on music and having the whole room turn into a passionate argument along sides that weren't clearly drawn? That never got old.

Ultra Magnus had taken a firm stance liking Asian classical music. Elita One, apparently infected by a spirit of devilry, had sent in Moonbase Two's vote for anything by Elvis Presley, and smelt the rest. Blaster had been forced to explain to the Decepticons of Darkmount that Beethoven had only been alive to compose less than a vorn, so no, there was seriously no more music by him. Optimus Prime had been caught playing K-Pop while driving in his altmode. Soundwave seemed to be some sort of Cybertronian purist. He kept wiping the Earth music out of the shared HeadQuarters' databanks and replacing it with meticulously labeled and sorted music from individual city-states from back before the war.

That had resulted in a passionate but mostly one-sided debate about how music was classified, a conversation carried almost entirely by Bluestreak on the orn Soundwave - apparently by mistake, but that mistake seemed to be unforgiveable - mislabeled a Praxian pop song as a historical ballad. Bluestreak had stormed out of the main room at the end of that shift still ranting at a thousand words per klik about the ignorance of some mechs calling themselves specialists.

Soundwave had watched him go with a look Blaster had only been able to describe as dumbfounded. A 'What…the frag…just happened here?' look. Soundwave had worked in information collection with a communication specialization since long before the war started. That didn't make him a music guru. Getting the smackdown over correct information by Bluetreak, of all mechs, had probably rubbed that fact in quite well.

It'd taken Blaster an hour to stop laughing.

The offending label, it should be noted, had been amended. And not to say that the Decepticon Third meekly bent before the tirade of an Autobot sniper, but close observers might notice that no new Praxian music replaced the Earth stuff unless it had three genre source citations and a short summary of the musicians' careers attached. Soundwave apparently didn't enjoy having his ignorance announced stridently throughout Vos.

Meanwhile, the Ironhide and Blaster had stuck to their guns. The Weapons Specialist was a cowboy hat and a guitar away from attending the Grand Ol' Opry. Blaster stubbornly insisted that 80's hair bands would make a comeback. Jazz thought they both needed to lighten up, and, in the case of Blaster, graduate from the 1980s at some point. More importantly, they needed to catch on to the fact that human DJs were importing and remixing Cybertronian music. That slag was hot. Some guy in Latin America was performing wizardry with the old theme songs of vidshows, maracas, and a bass woofer. Those remixes would have gotten a mech arrested in Iacon for how hips shook to the beat.

That was a strange thought to have, after all this time. The Autobots had been discomfited by Earth's various prejudices - bias because of skin color still unnerved them - but the puritanical limits set on things like dancing had been laughable. Sort of. If a mech didn't think too closely about how familiar the preaching against 'sinful behavior' seemed. Because, yes, disapproval still got heaped on an Autobot who acted too…freely.

Not in the sense of churches or Primus. The lines of thought and causation weren't that straight, when Jazz tried to untangle them. The familiarity lay in the spots nobody ever connected, because human similarities hadn't allowed for contrast. Where they had, the alien nature of their flesh-and-blood allies made it somehow easier to overlook.

It'd taken Mirage half the war to stop being horrified when Beachcomber taught tensile cable stretching techniques in public. Beachcomber had taken the noblemech's averted optics and acid commentary in stride, gliding around every critique with practiced ease. That bore a second look, thinking back on it, as did the Autobots' reaction to the odd bits of human practices they could participate in. Jazz had signed all of SpecOps up for partnered yoga classes back on Earth, recognizing them as a version of an exercise half of them already knew. Since attendance got his mechs out and about in unusual locations in Portland, it'd been more for security than education or teamwork. He'd still had to persuade Trailbreaker and Mirage that they weren't actually committing public indecency by working together.

Factually, the Autobots knew SpecOps was doing yoga poses together under the shield of diplomacy and teambuilding. Even so, the jokes from the other Autobots had been relentless. They'd put their hands all over each other in the middle of a battlefield, but Primus help the two Autobots caught in a compromising position off it. Which was something Jazz needed to dig out of his thoughts and analyze right now, because he had the feeling the shame would be used against the Autobots if they couldn't nail down the source.

He was starting to really dislike finding out how he'd hadn't questioned this kind of contradiction before.

Iacon had always been somewhat prudish. Jazz had vaguely known that, because it had stifled him when he'd moved there for Enforcer training. He hadn't fit in the whole time he'd been in training. The Senate had been strictly conscious of the 'tone' of the city-state, policing the citizenry in a way that'd made him uncomfortable. The rulebook had been thrown at him when he'd entered the city boundaries, and there had been no room for movement inside it. He'd just never made the connection between the behavioral constraints put on the city and his own distaste for them. Or how they'd infiltrated his own social protocols.

Sure, his home city had been much more relaxed, but every city was more relaxed compared to Iacon. Yet every city-state bordering Iacon attempted to imitate it wholesale, displacing the current social standards. He'd done it himself, returning from Iacon with an intense feeling of relief for leaving the oppressive standards but inwardly comparing everything in his home city to them. He hadn't thought about how weird it was that the Senate had based the Enforcer Codes off of Iaconian policies without input from the other city-states' laws.

The Enforcer Code had been the standard every citizen in the Cybertron Unification Alliance. That's just how it'd been.

Nobody thought it was odd, back then. There had been grumbles and complaints and talk that went nowhere about reform movements that never started, and everyone went right on feeling like they should conform. It'd been easier than trying to protest.

Looking back at it, Jazz had the inkling that he understood why the Vosian Emirate would have taken the floor in the Senate to tear a strip off the outsiders trampling on the rights of an entire polity. The point of a Senate instead of a single mech holding power was to ensure equal representation, right? Where was that equal consideration when the Iaconian laws were meant to govern the whole of Cybertron?

No wonder Starscream had been shot. The Senators hadn't liked upstarts who rocked the boat.

No wonder Starscream had given his speech. Jazz couldn't imagine someone like Starscream accepting anyone else's control when he took a position of power. The Senate's standards must have grated something fierce against his pride. Multiply that pride by the independence of an entire city-state used to standing on its own, and no doubt Starscream's own position had been cemented when he took a stand and got shot for daring to do so. The amount of calculated risk behind defying the Senate must have paid off.

See Starscream. See Starscream be a righteous patriot for his city-state on the Senate floor.

Don't see Starscream manipulating his way into a secure powerbase by exploiting very real issues.

At least until it's too late to stop him from being a hero in the optics of his constitutes. Surviving an assassination attempt must have handed him Vos on a silver platter. Their leader had nearly become a martyr while standing up for their rights as Cybertronian citizens. They must have loved him.

Vos stood by its Emirate still, and Jazz was beginning to see why. Call him a cynic, but he rather suspected that Starscream didn't hold the city-state in the forefront of his thoughts at all times. He wondered how that factored into how the Vosians saw their Emirate now. Was it stubbornness or faith that kept an entire city-state loyal to the Air Commander? Jazz couldn't think of a single other city-state that'd stayed that cohesive during the course of the war.

It made sense, as Starscream had explained it. There hadn't been that many cohesive city governments to begin with.

The lines between Autobot and Decepticon couldn't be drawn simply using geography, but there was no denying that the northern hemisphere had gone mostly to the Autobots. That had been heavily influenced by the mass migration of the Enforcers' loyalty from the Senate to the Prime himself. The Tri-Peninsular Torus States had thrown in with the Prime well before the Iaconian nobles had, influenced more by organization and law than the continuation of old power, and the Enforcers had come mostly from those city-states. They'd gone with their city-states' votes instead of the Senate's furious condemnations.

The Planetary Guard's dispersal wasn't so easy to track, nor were the Neutral States', but the industrial city-states of the southern hemisphere could be said to have, roughly speaking, gone Decepticon. As Starscream had pointed out, however, most of the industrial city-states hadn't been populated by stable populations. There had been very few city-wide, unified agreements. The decisions had been done at street level, amidst the mob, because the city governments didn't represent the mechs inside them. They were there to keep the working class in line and productive.

The riots when the Senate began automating the mining operations had preceded huge population shifts as mechs moved on searching for the next job. It'd been on an unprecedented scale - all 32 of the C and D Mining Outposts around Kaon had emptied out into ghost towns within five orns - but such resettlements happened. Mechs went where the work was. That was how it'd always been. It was only when the next job wasn't available that real trouble had started. Without jobs, mechs left the outpost towns and collected in the main cities to take piddling temporary work to scrape by. There wasn't anywhere else they could have gone.

It'd been Jazz's job, at one point, to turn away mechs looking to enter Protihex. Without proof of a job in hand, the border process had become pitiless. Exceptions to the rules had been few and far between. Mech had to have a letter of recommendation from a past employer or an educational degree from an accredited university, most of which were in the city-states these mechs had been trying to enter. Without those, they'd been turned away. Jazz and his buddies had found jobs for anyone they could, but that assistance didn't last long.

After a short while, there had been laws passed to prevent a deluge of cheap labor from driving wages down. The migration standards had become stricter. Fewer mechs needing work to survive had been able to get in. The ones already inside became more desperate to do whatever it took to not have to leave.

Those who'd lost their jobs to people willing to work for less had been forced to leave the cities. Those who'd had work grasped it hard, afraid to change anything for fear that they'd be the next to lose. Unease over going against the unwritten conformity became outright fear.

Those that'd pushed for change were ostracized and hated for pointing out what everyone knew but were terrified of acknowledging. Those who'd had power and used it to direct a gradual growth of justice within the Senate's rotted structure were cheered on secretly yet avoided because everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the hammer dropped. Optimus Prime's refusal to comply with the Senators had won him a stalemate in the Senate, but few friends outside it. However avidly Cybertron had watched his speeches on the floor, the discussion of his proposed changes had been done in hushed voices and under a cloak of fear of what the Senate would do.

The new Prime had sought compromise and persuasion, and he'd won very little ground in the Senate as a result. Popular support, yes, but timid, frightened support at best. Everyone had known he wouldn't win. Nobody had known where the glum knowledge of failure came from, but they'd all agreed on it.

And from the fear to act had risen Megatron. Someone with no power but what he tore from the Senate, a miner with nothing left to lose but his life, and absolutely no patience for the slow reforms that were coaxing support from the public. He hadn't the patience or trust for promises of eventual change. He hadn't cared about the hatred heaped on him by the scared masses. Gladiators were already ostracized.

Like gladiators, the social justice warriors the Decepticons first touted themselves as had been the reviled heroes for the working class of Cybertron. They'd even been that for some of the more radical of the upper class. Megatron had been the scandalous darling doing what everyone had assured themselves was too risky for regular mechs to do. He'd been crazy to go about it as he had, and everyone had told each other he'd get slapped down soon enough.

At the same time, they'd admired his boldness. They'd listened and scoffed at him, but wondered. He'd said out loud the things that made the comfortable public shift and mutter uneasily at the truths. Fiery as Megatron had been, he'd raised legitimate issues. Optimus Prime's work in the Senate had been the more rational approach on the same subjects.

Jazz himself had recoiled from Megatron's blunt, offensive speeches, but he'd stepped back and thought about it. He'd decided that having a raging mech yelling angrily probably served to rip open an awareness of the issues. It hadn't necessarily been a good way, as it'd given the reform movement a bad name as the timid public equated even the moderates with Megatron's extremists. The Prime's tactful route had been lumped under the gladiator's extremism.

Jazz had given the problems raised a lot of thought independent of Megatron's ranting, however. Instead of backpedaling and lashing out against the entire reform movement, he'd applied for a transfer to Iacon to work his way toward supporting the Prime's changes.

Not everyone had thought about their reactions that much. There had been a massive backlash against change for a while. Cybertron in general had been upset by this gladiatorial upstart accusing them that their Senate-approved, comfortable lives were perpetuating an oppressive society. Enraged, a lot of mechs had made the jump to assuming that meant they were being accused of being bad people. Quite frankly, Jazz hadn't been happy about that one himself. For as diplomatic as the new Prime had been, exposing the general populace's ignorance had shoved a load of unpleasant facts in people's faces. People tended to get emotional and defensive when that happened. Nobody wanted to find out they'd been thinking about everything wrong.

Jazz sure had been abashed when the Prime chided the Senate for ignoring the plight of the unemployed, under-employed, and unfairly employed. It wasn't that the Prime had been calling him a bad person, but being called out on his underlying prejudice and blindness had sure felt like it.

So, yeah, Optimus Prime had made a lot of enemies. Megatron had made even more, because he had started making those accusations. If a mech hadn't joined Megatron's movement, then that mech was the enemy. There were no explanations, there were no excuses, there was no alternative action or moderation or allowance for differing circumstances. In the Decepticons, even before the group had been the Decepticons, there had been only one re-imagination of the world. It was still Megatron's way or get out of his way, but back before the first violence of the war, he'd only harangued the rest of the world for not agreeing.

Later, the threats had started.

It'd become clear that Megatron intended on demolishing the whole Senate structure. All of it: the Senate, the provincial Councils, the Enforcer Code that had been law for ages in the northern hemisphere. The stability that ruled everyday life for many of the city-states, and the organizational systems that they'd been told and they'd told themselves was just how it was. It all had to go, in the optics of the angry mob led by the gladiator.

Oh, it made a kind of sense when looked at from the right perspective. It had to. Everyone was righteous in their own optics. Normal citizens didn't come out of recharge as ruthless evil villains suddenly thinking that torture, violence, and destruction of fellow Cybertronians in an eons-long civil war sounded like a fun time. Megatron had wanted to burn the world down and start over; Optimus Prime had wanted to carefully restructure what was already established; the Senate had wanted everything to remain exactly the same. They're all believed they were doing the right thing. Didn't the humans say something about a road to Hell and good intentions? Everyone who'd taken up arms had believed that he was doing it for the right reason, even if just for survival.

Cybertron hadn't abandoned its colonies and murdered its population down to the brink of extinction merely because of differing opinions on what music was best, after all.

That's not to say that Cybertronians wouldn't shoot those who didn't share their personal preferences. At this point, personal opinions were driving the war forward almost as much as the overarching Causes for either faction. To be fair, it wasn't just the Decepticons holding grudges. Both factions took things personally now, fighting for what had been done to them instead of ideals.

Still, it was the Causes that were the 'official' reason for the war. Jazz had a rough idea of what the Decepticon Cause had started out as - or rather, he'd thought he did right up until he started getting the ignorance smacked out of him by current events.

He'd always thought the Decepticons were fanatics and naturally violent. Starscream was a backstabbing power-hungry creep that could represent far too much of the faction either for his intrinsic canny nature or tendency to shoot whatever got in his way, even though he seemed predisposed to scheme around obstacles more than the average Decepticon. The Autobots usually typecast the average Decepticon as a stupid grunt for the most part, with the rare dangerous smart one in the mix.

Which was a horribly ignorant stereotype to have after all this time. It was…sort of wince-worthy, the more Jazz dug into it. Warbuilds hadn't been welcomed into the Enforcers because everyone knew they were more prone to violence. When the majority of warbuilds ended up in the Decepticons, that idea had reinforced into fact. Not a terribly factual fact, as it'd turned out. The Decepticons were as Cybertronian as the Autobots. If they were capable of love - and yes, they were. No matter the Senate's early blitz of media defaming the mechs flocking to Megatron's banner, Jazz should have never allowed that thought a foothold - then grouping them into any kind of hive-mind stereotype of lesser-than-Autobot thought was just fragging wrong. Wrong.

True, Jazz was awkwardly aware that he'd had shared the common beliefs. That one about how it seemed most of the educated mechs had become Autobots while the uneducated mechs got tricked into Megatron's fold? That was a particularly nasty one. It insinuated a variety of things that weren't true but sure sounded like it on the surface. Education and intelligence didn't work like that in reality. He knew that statistic had come about because the upper class had supported the Senate for the most part, making the richer mechs less likely to join the faction swearing to tear them down. It was also because the upper class had had the time, money, and access to education, while the lower classes had been scraping from job to job just to survive.

Education was no measure of intelligence. Also, as Starscream's educational background seemed to indicate, the educational institutes of the Neutral territories and entire southern hemisphere had been looked down upon in contempt by Iacon and her allies. Jazz had to wonder how many Decepticons were as educated as the Autobots, but were regarded - and perhaps even considered themselves - as lesser because of where that education had been done.

Those were part of the list of wrongs Optimus Prime had chastised the Senate and the public over, once upon a time. They were all things Megatron had taken advantage of to build a powerbase. The Senate had appealed to Cybertron's fear of insecurity. Optimus had appealed to its morality. Megatron had appealed to its suppressed fury. Everyone was righteous in their own optics, but the Decepticons had gone beyond righteousness into a belief of superiority and a manifest destiny about how conquering anyone who stood in the way of a new Decepticon society was inevitable. They'd been power-blind and power-hungry, angry at the unfairness of the world, convinced that might made right, and that Megatron could right the world.

Well, hopefully the ceasefire would stifle that belief. Because the Senate was long gone, and the Decepticons were free to make their own society now. The Decepticons held the southern hemisphere; the Autobots, the north. There were cautious negotiations to make the separation permanent and establish actual boundaries. Giving up the idea of unification had hurt the Prime's hope and Megatron's pride in equal measure, but they were both trying to end the cycle of war.

Jazz put his elbows on the briefing room table and cycled a long, tired sigh. There were no educational institutes left. There was no more Enforcer Code or individual city-state laws. There was no more upper, middle, or working class. They were all equally war-educated soldiers following the military law of their respective factions. Only rank separated soldiers. Even the functionalist stigma that'd once prevented the miners of Kaon from seeking work outside of manual labor had dissolved. The war had broken previous widely-touted theories on single-function frametypes. The war itself could stand as proof that Cybertronian adaptation could be tweaked to include functions that didn't seem natural.

Slag 'natural.' If anyone from the Functionalist Party remained unconvinced, Autobots and Decepticons alike would raise sixty degrees of the Pit refusing that mech entrance into a position of power. Jazz would be right there yelling, too. Nobody was ever again going to set up a box of limitations around him based on his current frametype specs.

It should have been easy to reconcile their differences, if that'd been all they'd been fighting over. Economics, functionalism, classism, and every spin-off of those issues were complicated, sure, but they were armies now. Pure civilians were kind of nonexistent. Even the Neutrals went armed. Comparing regulations and coming to a compromise based off of military law should have been easy.

Except that the social structure the Senate had attempted to standardize had been implied between the lines of the actual written Code, and the Autobots still followed those unwritten rules. They still held those insidious, poisonous beliefs about lower classes, education, and inherent violence, like the Decepticons were closer to drones than actual Cybertronians. It didn't matter that nobody outright said it; the belief still influenced how they thought. Meaning that the Decepticons probably had similar bias toward the Autobots. Meaning that if they didn't root these things out of their heads, there was going to be some ugly clashes.

All that, and here they were blindly groping after peace. It was a miracle nobody gotten so fed up the shooting started up again. The Autobots and Decepticons had truly separated during the course of the war. The gap was huge.

They really needed to start bridging it. Like now, before somebody fell in.

…right. Okay. The Decepticons had obviously decided to give it a try. The problem was that there hadn't been a single rule about courting written down in any Decepticon file Jazz had ever decrypted, leaving the Autobots scrambling for how to meet the 'Cons halfway on this one.

"You really want to 'face me?" Ironhide asked suddenly, interrupting the saboteur's worried thoughts.

He turned his head without raising it in order to look at the older Autobot through his fingers. "Right now might not be the best time, but yeah. Yeah, that'd be nice. You down for another round later? I could do with some sparring beforehand. A warm-up, if y'know what I mean." Nudge nudge, wink wink.

The red mech stared at him. His expression fell completely neutral as Jazz's hopeful tone caused the other Autobots to shift. The rest of the officer cadre looked uncomfortable at the blunt offer, but more uncomfortable by being made uncomfortable. Frag, but that was a familiar look. It was a look that said, 'I don't know why I want to avoid this topic.'

Ironhide dimmed his optics, brow ridges furrowing, and he folded his arm with a grunt. "Still getting' angry. This ain't right."

"Yes," Optimus Prime said distantly from up the table. "It does make sense of a number of incidents, however. Megatron has been surprisingly…" His head cocked to one side in a slow movement that probably mirrored the way preconceived notions were being tipped on their sides in his mind. "Hesitant, I suppose, although I hesitate to apply the word to him. I've had the feeling that he's not certain how to interpret some of my reactions to his - ah."

Still processing important data or not, the whole table had abruptly fastened attentive optics on him. Reactions to what, hmm? Do tell, Optimus. Just what had Megatron been up to in those private sessions?

The calm baritone fell to flustered mumble. "To ongoing negotiations."

Jazz grinned, and the Prime studiously didn't look at him. That choice of words didn't stop the black-and-white spy's randy subprocessor from throwing out an assortment of lurid speculations. Negotiations were a hands-on deal in Decepticon contracts.

"This is making sense of a lot of incidents," Red Alert muttered commentary cleared up enough to add, but the Security Director promptly went back to words too low to hear.

Another restless shifting moved chairs and changed positions around the table before the cadre settled down again. Jazz looked back down and wished his thoughts didn't lead to scary places.

How long would an entire city-state tolerate cultural suppression? How many restraints on personal freedom could a society take before it lashed out? Vos had been only one city-state, and one of the strongest in the Neutral territories. Multiply that by every city-state cohesive enough to have a unified culture, and every mech of the migratory working class who'd chafed under the Senate's monoculture. How many of these unrecognized cultural differences were being suppressed by the disapproval of the lingering Senate standards? It wasn't that the Autobots were intolerant, but there were definitely certain things that were unofficially enforced as proper Autobot behavior. Anything related to sex was simply slapped under a big, unspoken blanket order of silence.

What else wasn't being talked about? That was a scary thought. Ohhh, was that a scary thought. Jazz had thought he'd known what the Decepticons were fighting for, but it seemed that he'd never seen the full picture. The glimpse he'd gotten tonight was blowing his mind and rattling every officer at the table with him right now. The wider connotations would have to be dissected, likely in intense meetings among the Autobots and then openly at the peace talks with as many Decepticons as Jazz could drag in to be involved. He was not letting misunderstandings and unspoken assumptions derail the treaty!

For now, Jazz's night in Tarn was on the table. The unfounded rape bias held against the Decepticons had to be uprooted, and the maybe aspect had to be introduced to the other Autobots' data assessment processors. A legitimate protest couldn't be raised against applying what he'd discovered. His concern was that first instinct of a closed mind: anger. He feared the backlash from fear of loss. A loss of stability, a loss of power or control, a loss of something intangible that disappeared when pinned down to examine.

There were going to be a lot of Autobots in the ranks soon who were going to get angry. He could already hear the protests. Their mindsets were right, surely! The idea that they'd been fundamentally wrong about the Decepticons on this level was going to create a defensive backlash of, 'But - !'

But everyone knew, but everyone thought, but everyone had heard, but there was that one time - !

But they were wrong.

Prowl's fingers tapped, then did it again more purposefully. Ratchet watched the tapping warily, part of his attention on his HUD readings from the tactician.

"You alright over there?" Jazz asked.

"I'll survive," the Autobot Second said dryly as he began taking notes. "Although if anyone caught the number on the tank that just ran me over, I would appreciate the opportunity to ticket him."

Half the table relaxed slightly. Humor meant that Prowl could think past the error messages. Humor was a good sign.

"I think that'd be me," Jazz volunteered, pretending to cower back in his chair. "Driving the Knowledge Panzer."

Wheeljack snickered softly and put in, "That explains the Treadmarks of Information left on my CPU."

The corner of Prowl's mouth ticked up just barely, and his fingers started to fly as he input -

"Whoa, hey!" Jazz and Optimus lurched forward in the same second as Prowl's optics flickered dark and he slumped forward.

Ratchet was already there, however, easing the unconscious cop car down to rest on the table. "Easy, folks. Medical override reboot, not a crash. His tactical mainframe is having fits about what the download's doing to cross-referencing and threat assessment, so I'm taking the cautionary route." His hands moved over the downed Autobot, and his voice stayed calm and professional. It brought the roused combat protocols around the table back under control even as he checked the readouts. "Probably looking at about six reboot cycles total."

In other words, settle in for the wait.

Red Alert twitched and muttered something to Optimus. Wheeljack had found a wrench somewhere and was trying to balance it on the top of his little building. Ratchet monitored Prowl and kept an optic on Red Alert. Jazz thought about how to introduce the Autobot Cause to the Decepticons, because neither side of the war apparently knew what precisely they'd been fighting over.

"Primus, will ya at least play something good?" Ironhide snapped at Blaster.

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End Pt. 22

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