▸ Column · The Decepticon war — energon debts and grudges among Seekers in the ranks, addressed to a troop-wide advice dispatch
STARSCREAM replies.
Replied to by Starscream, with a rebuttal from Megatron.
The letter
My wingmate and I have flown blade-to-blade for nearly eight stellar cycles. Over the last two she's siphoned roughly 1,400 cubes of energon from my private reserve — the worst of it 600 cubes for emergency repairs after the rout at Polyhex, which she vowed she'd return "by next refueling, absolutely." She's never raised it since, yet she keeps proposing extravagant raids and luxury rust-spa furloughs, so clearly her tanks aren't dry. I've hinted twice: once joking I could use those repair cubes back before requisitioning a transwarp run, once filing a formal energon-debit for 200 cubes that she ignored for three orns until I withdrew it in mortification. The bond is genuinely good — we comm nearly every cycle. I dread that demanding the full sum will make me sound like I've kept a quiet ledger on her, which, well, I have. How do I reclaim what's mine without detonating a friendship I actually treasure?
Starscream replies
FINALLY. A debt unpaid, a "friend" floating rust-spa furloughs on cubes that are RIGHTFULLY yours, and you, the wronged party, apologizing for noticing. I know this opera by spark. I have been owed for my entire glorious career.
So here is the play I adore: let it be discovered. A word in the right audio receptor, the barracks "happens" to learn she's a chronic deadbeat, you ascend on her humiliation. Delicious. Soundwave-grade.
And here is where I, against every treacherous instinct in my frame, tell you it does not work — because I have run that exact play on Megatron a hundred times, and I am still the Air Commander, still groveling, still not on the throne I was BORN for. The instant you become the schemer, everyone smells it on the air around you, and they trust the open fool over the clever knife. Every time.
So do the thing I have never once managed. Comm her, no theatrics, no Venmo-cowardice: "You owe me 1,400 cubes. The repair 600 by the wedding. When?" Name the whole sum, own the ledger plainly — keeping it was sane, not shameful. One clean ask buys back more than a hundred clever ones. I would know. I have attempted the hundred.
— Starscream
Megatron weighs in
Starscream counsels you to "ask cleanly." Of course he does. He has spent an eternity asking me cleanly for a throne he will never be handed by asking — and look at him.
Hear the actual structure. The friendship is not the thing at risk; it is the account she overdraws. Your generosity is being read, correctly, as availability. You will not fix that with one well-phrased request, because fairness is not granted by petition.
I keep a lieutenant who repays nothing and apologizes beautifully — I keep him with no illusions and my back to nothing. Do likewise. Stop extending the reserve. Make the cubes flow only after the debt clears. Arrange matters so repaying you is her sole profitable course. Then she pays. Sentiment never collected a cube.
— Megatron
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