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Despite popular belief, Cliffjumper could, in-fact, slow down for an hour without causing any large scale explosions. After all, spending any amount of time suffering the combined forces of both Ratchet and Wheeljack required both heroic and infinite patience (though he couldn’t tell his buddies that). And while Senator Optimus liked his crazy warriors alright (and so did he!), he also liked to keep some trustworthy, capable bots who wouldn’t go flying off the handle for the important stuff. War had been brewing, and— not to sound like he was up his own tailpipe— every shot, every punch thrown, and every bitter word Cliffjumper muttered had fueled it. All that seemed to be left in their way were some unlucky bots who had to be made examples of before everyone knew who was boss.
Spotlight: Cliffjumper. Optimus (great mech, big dreams, awful sense of interior design) appointed him as his very own crackshot sniper. It was an honor for a mini-car like himself, so easily ignored back home. Not even Blurr had such a privilege. He always wanted to stay and gloat to the bot he was trying to kill. Then again, the smarmy smooth-talker was Velocitronian, so maybe he couldn’t be blamed for his base programming.
Cliffjumper could wait— and he so he did, still and watchful, in the dim, dark space between the the forth and fifth depository floor, for a full 57 minutes. From a distance, the only difference between him and the deeply shadowed metal confines were his narrowed optics. Good. No one should be anywhere closer than “a distance” away from him right now. He’d spent so long looking for the perfect vantage point!
His target, a scientist with awful posture who’d flown in from the middle-of-nowhere, was on his 45th minute of wowing the crowd with his ideas about how Cybertron keeping itself away from the squishies and the freeloading colonies would destroy the planet or something. He recognized some bots in the crowd from his last few speeches, but most looked like they were from all over this side of Cybertron and were rapt with attention. Were they all glitching or just stupid? Couldn’t they learn a thing or two about self sufficiency?
Optimus was always going on about how Cybertron needed to put itself first. As long as Cliffjumper stayed in his senator’s good graces, that sounded pretty cozy to him.
His crosshair trailed his mark. He’d show them real change in a second.
The shot was silent, just one in the chest (quite impressive for a rifle was as long as he was tall, he was told, and Hypertension hadn’t failed him yet). The mech crumpled without fanfare. Cliffjumper wanted to jump down multiple stories, let out a battle cry, and unveil a giant cannon whose recoil would leave his struts sore for length of the drive away. He settled for smirking at getting such a clean ember-shot through all that brightly painted kibble. While the onlookers were swelling in shock, he was already dissembling his rifle and dropping the components into his subspace pockets. As they closed, the shock erupted into a stampede. Cliffjumper’s smirk grew. Prowl would’ve been able to deduce the direction the bullet came from in half that time— not for the greater good of the people, but just to be seen as clever, glowing with the thrill of a good mystery. Luckily, Prowl had his head screwed on straight and was on their side, so only chaos reigned below him.
An hour had passed, and with it, Cliffjumper’s patience. He gave it fifteen minutes before the news spread. He’d be gone in five.