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The observation deck was buzzing as the Seekers made battle plans. Projected onto the wall, the countdown was almost finished, and Rodimus grinned as he saw the last couple of names on the list turn green, marking the other side's preparations finishing up.
"Gentlebots!" he called, gaining the attention of the thirty-odd bots on the deck as he clambered onto Roller's shoulders for an elevated position. "Our time is at hand! Soon—very soon—that timer will reach zero, and it will be up to us to locate the Hiders before Swerve's opens! You all know what is at stake!"
"Free drinks!" the crowd hollered as one.
"Exactly! It is a game of winner-takes-all! All Hiders must be found, or else we, the Seekers, have to pay their tab for the night! And I have every intention of drinking every last drop of engex Swerve can dish up once we win! We will bleed him and the Hiders dry!" Rodimus struck a pose as the crowd howled with laughter and agreement. "Remember, the neutral members of the crew can choose to aid either one Seeker or one Hider! Do not trust anyone you see with the purple Hider sticker, and do trust anyone with a red Seeker sticker!!"
A hand went up in the crowd. "Aren't those just low-res Decepticon and Autobot insignias?"
"Red versus purple!" Rodimus shouted, ignoring the question. "And we all know red is the best! So get ready! Leave no container untouched! No door unopened! We will find them all, and we will win!"
"SEEK-ERS! SEEK-ERS! SEEK-ERS!" the crowd bellowed, feet stomping in a thunderous roar, the stickers' meaning momentarily forgotten.
Above them, the counter reached zero, and the doors opened.
Rodimus's grin darkened with the thrill of imminent chase. "Let's go hunt us some bots."
⁂
There were a handful of bots that were not part of the game. A few had opted out entirely, preferring to stay in Swerve's and get a head start on the decorating and engex pours. Then, there was the crew currently keeping the ship running, who, of course, were exempt from participating—the Lost Light could technically do just fine with just a single person in the navigation chair, but they usually kept a rotation of five to six bots on various posts just to be safe— and thus Megatron, Frevor, Clicker, Blaster, Streetwise, and Waverider were left as neutrals as well.
So, Rodimus should really not have been surprised that some of those neutral bots had already picked a side to help, but he still could not stop himself from pointing and gasping dramatically at the purple stickers on the chassises of two of the three occupants of the bridge.
"I know the winning side when I see it," Clicker said, defiantly raising his head and staring Rodimus down with a glare that had faced off against the Functionists' armies.
Blaster just shrugged apologetically and turned his attention back to the navicon.
Rodimus turned his biggest, wettest, most pathetic-looking eyes to his co-captain. "Megs, help me out! The Autobo—I mean, Seekers need you!"
Megatron, seated in the Captain's chair, did not even lift his eyes from the datapad. "Your rules only say that I may choose to help one side or the other. I'm still considering if the future damage to the crew's trust would be worth joining your little game."
"Traitors! All of you!" Rodimus hissed, and turned on his heel to stomp out of the bridge.
Then returned a few seconds later, checked under all the consoles, and stomped out out again.
⁂
Some bots were easier to find than others. Spinister had been found standing in Ultra Magnus' office, holding a lamp in front of his face. Whirl had immediately hopped out of a vent that no one had expected him to fit inside of when a Seeker shouted that a fight was starting. Anode was promised free reign for her next prank on Swerve if she showed herself. Three red bots had climbed on top of the Rodpod, trying to avoid notice with their natural colouration—one of the rules had been that no size modifiers or colour change was allowed—and Rodimus had to admit that he was somewhat impressed with how Perceptor had tried to use his grey areas to blend in with the Rodpod's. Even if their little stunt had caused his baby to end up with several new scratches.
"Don't worry, sweetie. I'll buff those out later," Rodimus whispered to the pod, patting its side before he went off to hunt down more hiding bots.
⁂
However, as Swerve's opening hours approached and the game entered its final hour, stress began to mount among the Seekers. Twenty-eight of the thirty-three hiding bots had been found so far; dragged from closets, habsuites, and airlocks. But that still left five unaccounted for; five names projected in glaring green on the wall, among a sea of red: Riptide, Nickel, Lug, Rewind, and...
"How has Thunderclash not been found yet?!" Rodimus wailed, shaking Hound back and forth by the shoulders. "He's huge! He's technicolour! I get the minibots, but how in the name of Primus' holy ball bearings have we not found Thunderclash yet!?"
"He's just that good?" Hound offered.
Rodimus' optics narrowed.
"We need to step it up," he said to the gathered Seekers comparing notes on where they had already looked. "Check under every desk, open every canister, light up every hole on this ship. "If it is big enough to hold a bot, check it. If it's not, check it anyway. I am not going to lose this game." His teeth gritted with enough force that the pistons audibly strained. "... Especially not to Thunderclash."
⁂
Had the stakes been less severe, Rodimus might have been proud of the sheer efficiency his crew displayed. While the bots normally stuck to relatively few areas of the ship, and the game had been limited to those same areas, the Seekers combed through the ship with an intensity that rivalled even the most tense moments of the War. Bots crawled on the floor, tapping and listening for hollows. Walls were dismantled and examined. Unused habsuites were overturned. Areas of the ship that had not seen a living soul since its construction were scrutinised.
As the clock entered the final fifteen minutes, the Seekers got more and more desperate; even impossible spots like wastebins were searched, and several of the previous Hiders were bribed into turning to the other side. Lug was dug up from where she had buried herself in Drift's crystal garden; the only sign of her intrusion being that one of the crystals had been misplaced by 8.3 millimetres and Drift only noticed because it very subtly changed the garden's aura. Nickel was found clinging stubbornly to the inside of the garbage incinerator's smoke outlet, and entirely too smug about how she had watched no less than twelve separate Seekers search through the incinerator without noticing her hanging above their heads. Only discovered after what was technically an accident between four panicking Seekers, Riptide was pulled from the bottom of the oil reservoir where he had—somehow—convinced the scraplets to disguise his presence.
"I think I want to try that new cocktail Swerve made last week. What was it he called it? The Schadenfreude?" Clicker mused while Rodimus pulled the top off the largest console and searched through the cables inside, hoping to spot either or both of the two remaining Hiders crammed into some tiny corner.
"I'm just gonna go straight for the Golden Energon once the Hiders win," Blaster replied, turning in his chair so Rodimus could get to the navicon's innards. "Seventy shanix per pint. Don't care if it's good; just needs to be expensive."
Having concluded that the navigation console held no hidden bots, Rodimus angrily shoved the monitor at Blaster and stalked over to check behind the star chart screen. "You could at least give me a hint, Megs! You haven't picked a side yet!"
"Perhaps I'll remain unaligned. I might not get free drinks, but I also don't have to pay for any," Megatron replied, having given up on his pretence of reading his datapad in favour of watching half a dozen bots systematically tear the bridge apart looking for the last two Hiders.
Rodimus paced over the floor, watching the timer entering the final minute before Swerve's opening, and jumped nearly two feet straight up when his comm suddenly pinged. "Please tell me you have good news!"
The radio crackled. "We found Thunderclash, co-cap't! You know that weirdly tall maintenance drone storage closet? He'd crammed himself into the ceiling!"
There was a loud cheer from the Seekers clustered on the bridge, echoed from the others scattered all over the ship.
Rodimus nodded with a smirk. He wouldn't be losing to Thunderclash. "One Hider to go! We don't got long!" he barked at the radio, turned, and paced in the other direction, mind working overtime as he listened to his team dismantle the ship. He had gone through every console, every vent, every chair. Every location, any cavity, all objects big enough to hold a minibot on the entire ship had been thoroughly checked. Unless the one remaining Hider had somehow managed to pull a Minimus and somehow crawled up the aft of another bot...
He stopped dead in his pacing, the timer on the wall down to the last few seconds now. His optics went from Megatron's bemusement, across Clicker's smug face, to Blaster, still attempting to put the monitor back in place.
And then down, to the compartment on Blaster's chest. The compartment that could hold any number of cassettes—or, perhaps, one dataslug whose unmodified alt mode just so happened to be cassette-shaped...
"No..."
Two seconds.
"No!"
One second.
"NOOO!!"
Rodimus threw himself forward, hand outstretched towards the eject button sitting on Blaster's chest. Towards the one thing that stood between his savings and unlimited drinks.
And then a foot hooked around his, and, fingers mere inches from his target, Rodimus went down hard. Over the ship's speakers, he heard the dreadful chime that signalled Swerve's opening hours—and with it, the Seekers' loss. Stunned and confused, he looked up, only to find Megatron looming above him, one steel-grey foot still against Rodimus' ankle.
With the smirk of a victorious warlord, Megatron opened his hand, and revealed the purple Hider sticker newly stuck to his palm. "You lose, Rodimus."
⁂
The bar was loud and cramped with most of the ship's crew having packed inside its walls. The Hiders were loud in celebrating their victory and their hero of the day, who was absolutely plastered as he stumbled around on and off the tables, showing clips of the Seekers completely ignoring his—in hindsight—obvious hiding spot.
Rodimus seethed in his private corner. Someone had stuck a party hat on his head at some point at what had once been a jaunty angle, and he had left it to remind him of his own humiliation. His meagre savings had already been wiped out, having had to pay for the first round of drinks for everyone—and then Megatron had toasted him! Made a little speech about how the crew had displayed teamwork and team spirit, and how Rodimus' idea of a game of hide-and-seek had been a triumph! Rodimus had had to grin and wave and pretend he did not take the loss personal!
"Still sulking about Rewind not actually hiding inside Blaster's chest compartment?" Drift asked, sliding onto the opposite seat.
"No," Rodimus replied, sulkingly.
"If it makes you feel better, not even Red Alert'd noticed he'd switched out the projector with himself," Drift said. "That's why Ultra Magnus was wearing the purple sticker—he'd hidden the actual projector inside his armour."
Rodimus suspected that his party hat had started to smoke, judging by how Swerve was cautiously edging closer with a fire extinguisher.