Work Text:
They hadn’t even been in Iacon for a full joor before talk of what to do between sets came up. Jazz was generally game for anything his band-mates were, but he’d personally been hoping for a quiet orn to start. The back-to-back shows in Praxus had really taken it out of him.
Of course Blaster was made of durabyllium or something because the Host class mech was jacked about seeing all of the sights that Iacon had to offer. Jazz was too! Just… maybe after they’d recharged for a solid set of joors rather than the broken up ones that came from moving city-states on a global tour.
“Mech, lets get settled in the hotel first and get some energon ordered before we go full tilt.” Jazz knew the others could be swayed with fuel and wasn’t above manipulating his band-mates to get what he wanted. (A nap even, please for the love of Primus let him recharge.) If they could afford a better transport it wouldn’t be so bad, but Jazz just couldn’t rest when they were travelling – not when the grav-mag would intermittently cut out on the right corner and make it feel like they were about to crash.
“I could go for some of that sweet high-grade Iacon is supposed to be famous for!” Arcee chimed in as she clambered out of their rickety transport. Having been the one driving for most of their journey all of her actuators had gotten tight from trying to anticipate when the grav-mad would stop working randomly.
(They needed to get that fixed. She could tolerate a lot about their beloved junker, but that was a growing safety hazard that needed to get dealt with before the left Iacon.)
“Frag yeah! Lets splurge and order in, I would kill for some good mica-chips right now.” Hot Rod, their lead singer sighed dreamily. He would never admit to wanting to have a nap like Jazz would, he was way too young and cool to be doing things like napping. (Even if he really did actually want one.)
“You guys are worse than a coolant flush.” Blaster groaned and huffed as he let out his cassettes. Many hands would make light work and none of them could afford having their transport broken into. Iacon was a decent city but there were aft-heads everywhere who wouldn’t care that they were stealing from mecha no richer than they were.
“Hey, I ain’t sayin’ we shouldn’t take advantage of bein’ here to see the sights, m’just sayin’ we get settled first and fuel. Ya’ dig?” Jazz shouldered his electro-bass and hauled up one of the amps.
“Riiiiight, has absolutely nothing to do with you being the oldest out of us.” Blaster teased as he unloaded loops of cables and the other things that his cassettes could handle. They were a good crew and had done this enough that it only took them a couple of breems to unload and lock up.
“Mech, I am barely a vorn older than you. Ain’t old.” Jazz muttered and kept his real thoughts to himself – which was that Blaster had fissioned another cassette off and the excess spark energy was why he was so downright zippy lately.
“Still older!” Blaster sing-songed with a laugh as Arcee got them checked in.
Two rooms with two berths, in their standard set up. Key-cards were given out and they all piled into the slightly larger of the two rooms to drop off their equipment. A door between the rooms let Jazz and Hot Rod put down their guitars near their berths for the deca-cycle while Arcee and Blaster fussed over organization in the other room.
“Hey, you wanna put the order in? Found a flimsy for a place down the street that delivers.” Jazz handed the menu over to Hot Rod, confident that the flame-decaled mech wouldn’t go overboard.
“Frag ya!” Hot Rod was near gleeful as he grabbed it and all but ran back into the other room with Blaster and Arcee to argue over additives.
Jazz would drink and eat just about anything so he was sure whatever the pickier fuelers of their band ordered would be fine. He flopped face-plates first into his berth and groaned, it was so comfortable. He vented slowly, letting his systems settle into the new space and then curled up on his side so he could sneak in the nap that he’d wanted so badly.
Jazz dozed through the noise of his friends and he forced himself up when their fuel finally arrived (late, but it was the end of main-shift in Iacon in the hotel district so it was to be expected.) He stretched and came up silently behind Arcee, making her shriek as he plucked a cube right out of her hands.
“Thanks!” Jazz laughed brightly at her scowl and dodged the crumped up delivery bag that she threw at his helm.
“So, you figure out what we gotta check out and what’s not as hot?” Jazz sipped at the cube–oooo, spicy!–and leaned over Hot Rod’s hunched form to see if it was worth possibly losing a digit to steal a mica-chip or five.
“There’s a couple museums that Arcee was hoping we could hit and I know Hot Rod wants to hit the race-track, I was assuming you would want the same?” Blaster finally got out as he finished divvying up some of the spread for his cassettes – not because they couldn’t get it themselves, but because someone Eject was a savage and couldn’t be trusted.
“Gettin’ some time to cut loose would be amazing.” Jazz couldn’t remember the last time that he’d gotten to just go as fast as his alt-mode would let him. There were plenty of times he had driven along side their transport when he’d gotten too stir-crazy from being trapped inside.
“I wanna check out the Slumbering City-Speaker, it’s a tourist trap through and through.” Which they all knew Blaster adored and he took some time to down some fuel of his own before the inevitable fight between Rewind and Eject broke out.
“The legend says he’ll only wake for ‘True Love’s First Kiss’, which is such a wild take but I’ve heard from a few people on the forums that swear up and down that dropping a kiss on the city-speaker changed their luck completely. And since we have that slot as an opening act tomorrow I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a try, haha… plus they have those ridiculous bumper stickers and the transport could use another.” Blaster continued on, like everything he said was completely normal and not the most ridiculous thing that his bandmates had heard come out of his mouth.
“LOL what?” Hot Rod nearly choked on his fuel as he struggled not to actually start laughing. They were definitely checking that out!
“Hot Rod you can’t say lol, that’s so – no, I am not getting pulled down to your level.” Arcee ran a servo over her helm to give herself a moment to collect her field. Some orns she swore she was a nanny-bot to a gaggle of younglings and not the youngest of their band.
“There’s some ruins there too, its not just that.” Blaster knew how to lure the rest of his friends over to his side and was quick to dive into the rest of it. (Which had nothing to do with him covering up his superstitious hope that if they all kissed the City-Speaker, they would become famous.)
“Alright, I could be down for that.” Hot Rod had finished up his mica-chips anyway and thankfully only lost a few to Jazz’s wandering digits. He wanted to see what sort of nonsense something like that looked liked.
“Is everyone even up for an excursion? I know its not that late, but that was a rough drive here.” Arcee absolutely wanted to check out the ruins, they were rare to find these orns with every city-state either demolishing them outright or just building over top of them to use the space for their ballooning population.
“Yeah, I’m game, but I ain’t kissin’ no sleepin’ mech.” Jazz pocketed a cube of energon into his subspace and then nicked some of Blaster’s snacks too, though those he shoved directly into his intake. He dodged the swipe from the Host mech with a chuckle that nearly had him choking on said pilfered goods, but it was fiiiine.
“You definitely are!” Blaster laughed and it devolved from there.
It took the a solid joor to actually finish fuelling and get ready, but they had a map and working GPS so it wasn’t too hard to make the drive out. Blaster transformed and Arcee tucked him inside of Jazz’s alt-mode so they didn’t have to get a cab or risk their transport in real traffic.
Of course it cost a few shanix to ‘Kiss Primus’, because what good tourist attraction was free? (One that wanted to wake Primus or his City-Speaker if the legends were true??) Blaster covered for all of them, well aware that if he didn’t he would never hear the end of it. To save his poor bank account, his cassettes stayed docked.
Bored security workers leaned against the wall of the inner sanctum where the City-Speaker was and another kept the literal line-up of mecha flowing.
Jazz did his best not to make a face as mech after mech leaned over the slab that the poor City-Speaker was laid out on to kiss them. This was creepy and super gross and he really, really wished that he hadn’t let himself be pulled along for this one. It was making him re-evaluate his band-mates because none of them seemed to have any issue with this.
“You’re not gonna get your kiss in because of course I’ll be the one to wake Primus, how could he not wake up for such skills?” Hot Rod bragged to Arcee, who visibly resisted the urge to push Hot Rod down the steps. It made the rest of them laugh though and Jazz was a little grateful for the lightened mood.
Hot-Rod was first and made a flourished show of leaning down to kiss the City-Speaker. It was a quick brush of lip-plates and like all the rest of the mecha that had been before them, nothing happened. Nothing had happened for hundreds of thousands of vorns as the City-Speaker rested after saving them all from Quintesson slavery. It was only the soft colour of paint and the faint tingle of an active EM-field that let everyone know that Primus’s City-Speaker still functioned.
Arcee was next and was quick and efficient about her kiss. Once she had completed the task she went to go stand with Hot-Rod and wait for the rest of her friends before they went off to check out the rest of the ruins in the area.
Blaster knew that nothing was going to happen, nothing had happened to the millions of mecha before him who had made this trek to complete this sacred task, that he wasn’t special enough to wake the City-Speaker. (It didn’t stop him from wondering and daydreaming about it though. It was just such a sweet idea that true love actually existed and would wake the City-Speaker who had saved them all.)
And nothing did happen as Blaster placed his kiss down. He straightened up and went to join with the others so they could tease Jazz if he tried to back out at the last breem. Blaster was ready to bring out the heavy artillery (blackmail) if it meant Jazz kissed the City-Speaker.
Jazz trudged up the last set of steps and onto the platform proper where an attendant was barely online themselves to make sure no one did anything more untoward to the City-Speaker. (Which only proved Jazz’s point that this was creepy!)
“Hope you wake up soon mech, Cybetron’s a pretty happenin’ place to be now ‘cause a you. Y’should get to enjoy it too.” Jazz murmured to the small mech laid out on the slab. His friends teased him for being so concerned but Jazz couldn’t force himself to kiss someone who was unconscious on the lip-plates. There was no level in his mind where it wasn’t deeply creepy or fragged up. (Not to mention how absolutely gross it was that thousands of mecha had placed their lip-plates there first.)
Jazz knew there was no real way out of this, so instead the musician leaned up a little more and pressed a gentle kiss against Primus’ City-Speaker’s forehelm instead. One hundred percent less creepage and far sweeter – something a mech who had saved them all definitely deserved.
His friends all groaned and Jazz was about to fire back when his sensitive audials picked up the subtlest pull of air. His visor brightened and Jazz pulled back to stare down at the orange mech as optics as blue as the City-Speaker’s spark onlined.
The silence that surrounded them was sharp and only highlighted as more and more of the city-speaker’s systems spun up. The slender mech shifted ever so slightly, optic shutters fluttering open and closed briefly as he onlined.
It felt like no one else was venting, which only made the pressure worse. Jazz was frozen as the slender mech woke and all the focusing rings in his optics settled on him.
“You have such a lovely voice.” The city-speaker murmured, vocalizer rough from millennia of disuse. For all that he had been resting for so long, he looked exhausted and Jazz felt guilty about waking the poor mech.
Chaos erupted around them, there was no denying that the City-Speaker was awake. And Jazz was absolutely not thinking about what that meant for him.
“Thanks mech.” Jazz did his best to ignore the mecha that were panicking around them, trying to give the poor mech in front of him a place of calm in the storm that would be coming for him. He was gentle as he helped the orange mech sit up and hovered a little when the poor thing swayed.
On an impulse, he pulled out a cube of energon that he’d stashed from the hotel picnic – which currently felt like a life time ago and held it out to the smaller mech. There was a flicker of surprise in that field before it was pulled back and Jazz felt like he was in a bubble of calm as radio chatter and shouting happened all around them.
“Thank you.” The City-Speaker didn’t raise his voice beyond that first murmured tone but he took the cube gratefully and downed it in one swift go.
“Sorry I don’t got more on hand, but I’m sure there’s a stand or somethin’ we can getcha some at.” Jazz reassured the smaller mech and wondered when the last time he had been fueled properly was.
“It’s alright, but might I ask what’s going on here?” The City-Speaker was brightening more as the energon hit his systems properly and he began to study his surroundings.
“Oh mech, have I got a story for you.”
“My name is Rung, if that helps.”
“Rung, I like it. I’m Jazz and well, it starts with–”