Teakup's report was incomplete.
As the mech Left-In-Charge, by Starscream, Seaspray was eager to ensure everything at base ran smoothly. Starscream had been hardly out of the hanger-doors before there had been a situation.
Sometimes Seaspray regretted stationing himself on Earth. He missed Vox and all of its modern amenities - most of the fanbase of his radio-show he'd cultivated over centuries was beginning to wither away due to his absence; and already he was aware of other competitors taking his place on New Vos - those who didn't want to get their news from a sparkeater child and they'd said as much. He was suppose to come back from Earth with things to talk about, but with each passing cycle, he felt the stories he'd been collecting on the alien planet would become too censored to be much of anything worth listening to.
And there was another matter...
He used to have a co-show runner in his brother Airwave ...but of course, the mech was dead, and so it was all but guaranteed Seaspray wouldn't return to radio if he survived his tenure on Earth.
It just wouldn't be the same show without Airwave.
All that left Seaspray to do in life, was to impress Starscream with his work - he'd make the grouchy mech proud.
Somehow.
Starscream was notoriously hard to please; and while Seaspray was considered one of the more "favored sparklings ," it didn't make the idea of failure any less terrifying.
The base of operations had been placed into his servos.
He couldn't scuff things up.
Or he'd never live it down.
Fortunately, he was pulled from his barrage of thoughts and worries, by an angry sparkling barking at his heels.
Teakup was being particularly loud at the moment.
Seaspray didn't have time to think of impressing Starscream, fixing his radio show, or about his dead brother Airwave - not with an angry Teakup lingering by his talons with a dead Hazardous Materials Officer.
Icescream looked like literal slag.
'Damn, I actually liked this one.' He thought, as he settled foot-talons across Icescream's dislocated helm. The sparkling's processor was intact enough to be added to Seaspray's collection later; though he'd offer it to Teakup first - Icescream had been more of a brother to Teakup than to him.
Seaspray considered the body beneath his foot. Dead sparkeaters didn't resemble the typical grey-husk of a dead cybertronian - instead Icescream had crumpled inwards like tissue paper - his black-hole spark had collapsed against itself. For lack of a better word, Icescream's protoform had become crispy from Tox-En chewing the meat apart, reducing soft flesh and wire into a suspicious, crumbly black-stain.
The only thing left worth collecting, besides Icescream's processor, were the colorful bits of blue and green from his metal carapace, scattered in all directions like eggshells. A sparkeater never lost its colors upon death - the nano-repair system responsible for maintaining color nanites was trapped in a hellish limbo between time and space - just like the living creature itself had been.
Teakup and Seaspray carefully collected every scale of Icescream's colors, picking out the shards like gemstones amongst the rubble. It was a team-effort, as neither trusted the cleaning drones to properly clear away the evidence of a sparkeater's remains.
It was standard procedure to collect every scale of a sparkeater - such a dangerous resource couldn't fall into the wrong hands - one who wasn't a sparkeater , and one who could use the space-time deifying properties of the scales for something foolish...dangerous...
That's what Shockwave had told them all over and over for millennia - it had become a truth so glaringly obvious to every sparkeater alive that the sparklings now did it automatically, whenever one of them dropped dead - they didn't hesitating to pluck away the pile of freshly dead, scalding hot scales.
Still at times, it was an impossible process.
"Hey Teakup, when you get the chance, try collecting every scrap of color when in an active warzone, with explosions tossing and turning in every direction like ocean currents." Seaspray recalled, his tone playful. But Teakup was in no joking-mood, her faceplates had pinched dangerously together with a sour look. Unlike many of her brothers, Teakup's military experience was limited - having a skill-set more suited for a civilian existence. Back on Vox she ran an energon cafe and with every passing cycle, she missed the little peaceful refueling shack more and more.
Why had she been dumb enough to leave in the first place?
It was a question she constantly asked herself.
"Shut up, Seaspray. Don't talk to me like we actually know each other."
Seaspray flinched, his metal and legs stiffened.
'Alright, that comment stung, but fair enough. I'll cut her some slack...' Seaspray thought, looking over Teakup curiously. 'Perhaps...Teakup has a point - maybe I should get to know the smaller ones better.'
After all, Teakup couldn't be a harder sister to know in comparison to Quasar's threatening outbursts.'
"Sorry, you're right. We don't actually know each other."
Teakup glared at him as if he'd grown a second head.
"Still, if I can say something about Icescream - I didn't know him, but his jokes were always funny when I did see him." Seaspray continued, looking down at Teakup for any signs of hostility. "Hey I'm trying to be earnest here."
She was still glaring, but it grew less so as the seconds ticked by - her posture slouched as she looked down at the ground.
She was trying not to cry.
After living a lifetime after lifetime within active warzones, Seaspray knew when a mech was just on the cusp of breaking.
And Teakup was about to experience one of those moments.
Instinctively, he tried to step away and give Teakup some privacy to grieve - but he couldn't leave her alone just yet. There was still work to be done concerning the crime scene - like plopping Icecream's sorry carcass into a furnace.
So he tried a little harder to show he cared.
"Here, take this - you obviously need it. I'm sorry, it's not...sparkling sized." Seaspray held out a cy-gar, taken from his sub-space, one fat and rich with relaxant-chemicals - the soft metal-shell an appealing chocolate bronze.
If a cy-gar could calm down a screeching Starscream when plans went awry, a cy-gar could calm down anybot.
"Did you get this from Kup? Asked Teakup. She grasped it with both servos, peering down its length, as if the cy-gar was an impressive piece of engineering. "You know...I don't typically like these - nurturing a chemical-dependency seems silly."
Seaspray snorted, as if offended, but he smiled plainly in good humor. "Says the bot who owns an energon cafe. If you didn't get everybot on Vox hooked on high-grade, you'd be out of luck."
Teakup rolled her optics. "That's different. Cy-gars get smoke into my gears, and the smell lingers in my ventilation system."
"Hrmm, I'll take that as my invitation to get started then." He cheekily said.
Seaspray took another cy-gar from his sub-space; he had plenty to spare. Smoking was one of his few joys in life - it was even better than high-grade, in his opinion.
It was just a shame Kup was the only mech alive still bothering to manufacture them.
"Here, let me light it." Seaspray bent down, and realized he should stay more eye-level with Teakup in the future - her optics held a brighter glow when he was up close. With some hesitation, Teakup allowed Seaspray to light the cy-gar up with one of his lighter-fingertips, a modification directly copied off an original finger loaned from Kup's very own servo, once-upon-a-time.
Teakup sat down cross-legged, taking a drag from the cy-gar, holding it like an obscenely large tobacco pipe as she did so.
"Thanks." She said, snappishly.
They both sat in silence, smoking their cy-gars. Their optics trailed over the now glaringly empty room, looking for any shards of Icescream's colors that they might've missed.
Neither were eager to pick their shovels from a corner and to begin to scrape the mess from the floor.
Seaspray could hardly consider himself a leader - the true mech Left-In-Charge, if he didn't know all his subordinates around the base on a personal level.
Technically, he already did - he had a mental-list of every sparkeater alive, regardless if they were stationed on Earth or not.
But he could start better...with Teakup.
"Alright, I'll warn you again, this won't be pleasant." Seaspray had settled himself down into his personal office chair, with servos clasped together in his best professional mech with serious business pose. "You really want to see the camera footage?"
"Yes! For the last time, yes!" Teakup blurted out, her servos grabbed at the air impatiently. "Just get it over with and show me! I have a funeral to plan, you know."
"Right, fine. Be that way." Seaspray muttered. He pushed a button alongside his desk and the room was plunged into darkness. A large screen illuminated besides them, the view taking up the entire room.
The incident hadn't even happened a cycle ago.
It barely took more than a moment to locate the correct footage.
But they quickly got distracted by the older footage, as the rewind feed sped past the incident.
The security-feed of Shockwave's personal office started off unassuming and quiet for the majority of the cycle's recordings. Only Shockwave and Starscream had official clearance to come and go into the laboratory as they pleased, so most recordings showed the boring activities of those two mechs, or none at all.
Blurr's gestation chamber had been a recent addition - Blurr's living-cube and spark had only shipped over a handful of cycles ago, along with Deadend's latest shipment.
They watched the old footage, taken on Deadend's shipment day, as it consisted of Shockwave barging into the room with cubed-Blurr in hand. It was strange to see Shockwave move so quickly outside of an active warzone...or outside the need to strangulate some unfortunate prey-victim...
"Wow, it actually looks like Shockwave gives a slag about something." Said Teakup.
"I know right? He looks like a kid on Christmas day getting the present he'd always wanted." Seaspray typed a few notes into the datapad atop his desk. Teakup looked at him strangely, as if she couldn't believe he would entertain such foreign alien-thoughts. "You really do love those human sitcoms don't you? Teakup allowed herself a pensive laugh, dreading to look at the correct footage she'd originally came for. "I had to look up the word Christmas and of course, it's another human celebration!" Teakup looked besides herself.
"Well, why don't cybertronians have any special celebrations?" he sassed back, and continued typing away into his datapad. Teakup wanted to wrestle the pad from his servos, but she didn't want to get some sort of reprimand either. While Seaspray was known for being a kind and forgiving brother, the expectations and powers that came with being the "Mech-In-Charge," had infected his frame, making him more snappish and unreasonable - just like Starscream. Only when there was a cy-gar pinched between Seaspray's fingers could one be confident he'd stay calm and humorous.
"Okay, I sent the message - Quasar is in charge now."
"What?!" Teakup was too tired for whatever nonsense Seaspray was conjuring. He was looking at her with an unreasonably guilty expression. "What's going on? I just wanted to watch the footage, and to leave, mind you."
Seaspray bit his glossa, mulling something over. "Before I came to the clean-up site earlier to speak with you, I already watched the footage of the explosion."
"What! So? Just show me already."
"Fine, but it's not pretty."
The footage, taken earlier that cycle, consisted of Snapshot taking an uncharacteristic walk throughout the tunnels, his small beaver-peds leaving behind splotches of mud with every step. A few breems passed before a cleaning drone began to scrub the path clean, and the scene would've come off as comedic, if the upcoming visuals weren't so bitter.
Teakup welcomed Snapshot into their breakroom, along with a guest the cameras hadn't recorded.
"What idiot just carries Tox-En on his person? You know we have transportation carts for this kind of stuff." He said, pointing down at Teakup, from a datapad. Her tiny servos were also clasped around a smaller datapad, about the size of a human-phone. "Some Hazardous Materials Officer, he was." Seaspray exaggerated his mocking tone and he watched in satisfaction as Teakup's servos imperceptibly curled harshly around her datapad - enough to crack the sides.
Seaspray could use that.
He needed to take advantage of her anger to get any answers.
He wasn't exactly popular among the other sparklings.
He had always been their "Big Brother" watching over them, their unelected leader who looked after them.
Sometimes he knew too much - heard too much.
Of course they never thanked Seaspray for his leadership - not once. He was seen as "Starscream 2.0" but without any of the perks - they didn't trust him to have their best interests at spark - unlike their dear Ma-ker Starscream.
"Your earlier report was incomplete - you failed to mention Snapshot's involvement - why was he in the tunnels? Who was he talking to?" asked Seaspray, his servos clasped together impishly, as he fixed Teakup with a glare.
'Well, two can play at this game.' She thought, crossing her arms with a particularly sour expression.
"What? Can't Snapshot return home every once in a while, without it being suspicious?"
Seaspray's glare tightened.
"Fine! It was Blurr! You know, the dead-cube-guy. The cameras can't exactly record ghosts you know - they barely record us sparkeaters!"
Seaspray itched his helm in confusion. "Well yah, of course I know it was Blurr, the guy isn't exactly quiet when he walks around, but why was he hanging out with you guys? I thought you all hated him."
"We do! I mean, of course we do! It's just, he's a ghost. We couldn't exactly say no to his presence. What would you expect us to do, tell the fraggin' ghost to screw off?"
"You could've made a banishing circle." Seaspray said simply.
"What the frag is that..." Teakup trailed off as she checked her inner lexicon. "Oh, of course, some more human hullshit. "
Seapray shook his head. "Is it hullshit if it works though?"
"You think throwing "salt," AKA sodium chloride at Blurr, would've caused him pain and to run away!?"
Seaspray sniggered. Suddenly, all Teakup could do was to lay down pathetically against Seaspray's desk, exhausted.
"Just show me the footage you bolthead, so I can leave."
"Right, I will." Seaspray paused. "But only if you agree to help me in the investigation."
"Investigation? Why? Was Icescream murdered or something? It was clearly a freak Tox-En accident."
"Well, we need to arrest Snapshot for one."
"What?!"
"Microwave started up the investigation himself, personally - he's the one to talk to if you want the details of the case. I'm just here to play the 'bad-cop, good-cop,' and to arrest dear ol' Snapshot."
Teakup stayed quiet, staring at her servos. She didn't believe Snapshot deserved to be arrested...questioned maybe - it was all just a terrible accident...
"Fine. If only to make sure you guys treat Snapshot fairly."
Teakup would play police-officer, but only because someone who cared had to.