Ep. 0.5 - To The Beat - Closed

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<<This happens just a few hours after Gone Visiting.>>

Haven was never going to be as secure as Jazz would have liked. Partly it was the layout, partly it was the sheer organicness of the place, and partly it was Cleaver's wishes that the Neutral base NOT be a military installation. So, Jazz was working within his orders. By the time he was done, there would be nowhere on the entire base that an intruder could hide that Cleaver wouldn't know about it, nowhere they could run without running into a (non-lethal) countermeasure, eventually. It was overkill, but eh, this was how Jazz dealt with security jobs that directly impacted the health and well-being of 1.5-soon-to-be-2 members of his cohort.

It was a huge job, of course, way more than could be dealt with in one day. So he did what he could, set the new programs to integrate into the mainframe, and while that was going, he wandered. Partly to check out some of the hardware that had been installed and partly just to wander. Sides had given him a lot to think about.

And then he heard music.

The beat was familiar, teasing at Jazz's memory. Not human, but Cybertronian. Something like Starfall and Light...or was it Gravity's Well? Damn, that brought back memories....

Jazz's feet carried him toward the sound, through the tunnels to a sidetunnel that was now ringing with what was DEFINITELY Sonicstorm's Bad Rendition. He stuck his head around the corner, grinning.

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There was, Moonshot had long ago something decided, something faintly insulting about empty walls. The blank, open stretches of empty red stone interspersed throughout Haven tugged on his spark in ways equally maddening and inspiring, all but demanding that someone- anyone!- fill them. The type of fill itself didn't matter- and after a few weeks wandering those plain red halls he'd accept some half-clocked glitchwit's scrawling as 'fill'- but that fact seem to have merrily whistled over the heads of... pretty much everyone else on-base. Even Cat, more willing to go along with his harebrained schemes than Cleaver ever had been, had given him that Look that said everything without saying a word and shrugged him off.

Glitchers, the lot of 'em.

Fine. Let them think he'd finally lost what few marbles he'd started with. Once he'd finished the rave cave they'd see the light. The thing was his own personal project, after all; he had complete, final control over every last brushstroke and handplaced LED. He had Plans for those walls, the little white mech did, and those Plans didn't involve contamination by the creative energy of others.

They did, however, involve a great deal of loud music, some of which he hadn't had cause to unarchive since his creators had handed it down, and like slag he was going to stand still when there was a beat throbbing through his struts and in his spark. Maybe said loud music- and the shameless bobbing-to-the-beat that went with it- explained why he didn't catch wind of Jazz's approach until the master sneak was standing on his proverbial doorstep as bold as you please.

"If you mess my paint up I swear to Primus you'll be my next canvas," The skinny bot called, carefully correcting a particularly egregious error. Only when his half-finished block-out properly resembled the skyscraper it would someday become did he turn to properly address the intruder in his domain his guest.

All of a nanoklik later he fumbled his paintbrush and, clutching his face hard nearly hard enough to leave dents, squeaked, "-oh frag me. I, uh- I didn't really mean that? Sir?"

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For a second, Jazz thought he'd taken a wrong turn and ended up in medbay, being greeted by a newly-awakened Sunstreaker. The mech had always been particular about his artistry, and trusted as Jazz might have been, Sunstreaker didn't like anyone getting near unfinished paintings. Or finished ones. Or even ones he was thinking of painting. Sunny was like that.

Moonshot was definitely not Sunstreaker. Poor mech even had paint on his face now from the facepalming. Jazz laughed, sending along glyphs that made it clear he was laughing with the bot and not at him as he raised his hands. "Hey, I'm just the guest who wandered into your space, mech. No 'sir's needed. Was just here workin' on Cleaver's security layout and heard...."

He tilted his helm as the song changed. "Is that Razorwire? Oh, mech, I love Razorwire's stuff." His pede tapped to the beat as his optics scanned over the place. The open space was pretty open, light on furniture, but the walls were the real decoration. Or would be. When they stopped being collections of bare wires and half-finished shapes. Jazz could almost see where this was going, paint and LEDs slowly coalescing into something like a horizon below a star-spangled sky.

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'Just the guest', his skinny white aft. If this wasn't The Jazzmeister, fancy-schmancy sneakbot and Autobot extraordinaire, Blue's fragging HERO, Moonshot would eat his favorite gun crystal-cut refractor scope and all. Not many bots on either side of the faction divide could throw longwave at that frequency, and fewer still could make it feel genuine. Jazz somehow managed to do both. Factor in well-chosen glyphs and a beat so easy and natural it seemed like a second sparkpulse and the saboteur got slotted into Moonshot's mental 'safe' category right alongside Bluestreak.

...the fact that he seemed to appreciate Shot's taste in music might've helped too, but that was neither here nor there.

"Yeah, it is," Shot admitted, field caught somewhere between slack-jawed awe, horrified terror and budding enthusiasm, "I, uh- cohort knew Razorwire back in the day, thought his stuff was too good to go under when things started looking bleak. Got all of his early stuff too, but it doesn't play too well on this setup, not enough- look, how the frag do you even know about this? Nobot knows music anymore," And frag if his tone of utter woeful disgust didn't make his opinion of that crystal-clear. "Especially not the good stuff!"

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Jazz grinned. "Oh, mech, music's in my spark. Listened to everything I could get my hands on, back on Cybertron. Well, everything worth listening to, that is." Music, Jazz had quickly learned, was the closest to free entertainment as one could get in Kaon. He was sure that someone was being paid somewhere further up the pipeline, but by the time it trickled down to Kaon, it'd been distributed so many times that it was passed from fan to fan as easy as a "hey, how ya doin'?" and just as cheap.

"And wait wait, your cohort knew Razorwire? And saved his stuff?" Jazz's visor brightened. A music-lover! With music to (hopefully!) share! "Wait wait, do you have...frag, gimme a klik...." Jazz dug into his archives, rifling back through files old as Cybertron. "Earliest thing I've got is Cycle Zero, and I think I'm missing...wasn't there something between Craterstorm and Hyperic Opera?" He looked at Moonshot hopefully. "You need anything? I've got...frag, I've got a lot of random crap, but I've got a lot of his later stuff, and I've got most of his proteges, too. Wait, here, lemme...get you a file list...."

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This was the start of something beautiful.

...or of a raging processor-ache for Cleaver. Then again, the two weren't entirely mutually exclusive.

"'Knew' is one way to describe it, I guess?" Shot tilted his head, vague memories of shouting matches and musical oneupsmanship contests flitting through his processor. The Council might've thought their shenanigans ruled the day, but they had nothing on the drama artisans at war could stir up. "I think Metronome was trying to outdo him, actually, but there's really no comparison. Different styles taken different directions, totally different key preferences and orchestration- I mean, Met was a classical musician. Razorwire was an inventor who happened to use instruments as tools. Totally different things."

Cat had often joked about babies and candy, and how easily swayed the latter made the former. Moonshot hadn't considered himself a 'baby' since before Cat's race had figured out how to bang two rocks together, but even he couldn't deny music was a pretty slagging good bribe.

That Jazz, Mech Of Ultimate Awesome, was the one gleefully discussing his favorite topic just sweetened the deal. (And made him squee internally like the child he sometimes was.)

"Starfall was his first release, then... the one with the really long name. Intersections of Truth and Reality, I think it was. You've got everything else 'tiiiilll... Yeah, Hope On Fire between the other two. Where the Pit'd you get all these, anyway? Razorwire was always fussy about distribution."

...at least partially because the long-ago musician hadn't wanted nutters like Moonshot tearing his work apart, but that was entirely beside the point.

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"Heh," Jazz said, "why, I paid fair and square for 'em. Same as most Kaon-bots. Might not've paid MUCH for 'em, and I sincerely doubt that any of that money got back to Razorwire himself, but I paid for 'em! Most of 'em, at least...."

Jazz pinged visibly at the list that Moonshot shared with him. Oooh, so many things that he didn't have! His biggest fellow music freak had gotten snagged by the Enforcers about the same time Jazz had gotten hip-deep in working for the Decepticons. His music collection had lots of holes from around that period.

He quickly compiled a list that he pinged back to Moonshot with a "these, please?" marker and pulled out Bluestreak's best turbopuppy eyes look. It didn't work so well with his visor, but he could try. "I could trade ya? Maybe some of Chronotype's stuff? You ever hear him? He was like...oh, if Razorwire and Tripnote had a sparkling that ODed on Fireracer's early shatterbeat stuff."