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“You kids know I was alive for that, right?” Jazz resisted the urge to laugh as two of his students argued over what had started the Great War.
His students turned to look at him slowly, like he’d said something that shocked them. Then one of them, a cute little bit who reminded him of Bumblebee back in the day and called themselves Spotlight, said, “You can’t be that old, Professor Jazz!”
“Who says?” He let himself laugh, this time. It was flattering, both to his vanity and First Aid’s skills, that they didn’t think he was as old as he was. “Cause I may not make you call me ‘commander’ like my partner does, but I was definitely in the Autobot army during the war. And I can tell you, right now, that the war started because Zeta Prime didn’t want to increase fuel allotments to the cities on a scale that matched population growth. No one knew we were running out back then, and Zeta would have died before admitting it.”
“I told you!” The second student, a flier called Dart, crowed.
“But what about the implementation of the caste system?” Spotlight asked. “And the transformation restrictions? And the labor camps at the mines?”
“They all led to the unrest, for sure. I was sabotaging mining equipment to get mechs a few hours rest before I was old enough to enlist, in fact.” Jazz smiled at the memory, both of the first time he’d blown up a drill and of the dock worker he’d befriended doing it. “A lotta things were going really wrong, a lotta people were dying for no reason, and a lotta really wealthy mechs at the top wanted us to keep doing that instead of making them acknowledge our presence. But it was the fuel that set the blaze. There weren't any Autobots or Decepticons yet, though. We were all just rebels. The factions came later.”
“Because Optimus and Megatron broke up, right?” Spotlight asked. Dart groaned.
That made him laugh again. “No, kiddo. They broke up because they were already disagreeing about how to set up functional government and what tactics we should have been using to take down the old government.”
“They really were a couple?” Dart asked, incredulous.
“They really were,” Jazz agreed.
“You owe me five credits,” Spotlight said smugly.