Jazz couldn't remember a time when he didn't hear the screaming. It was the first sound he remembered, and it echoed through the orphanage as he grew up even though no one else seemed to hear it. There was a loud, piercing cry coming from any room with an adult berth while he was trying to recharge. It didn't matter if the room was above, below or beside his own. The other was a deeper, feebler cry that echoed down hallways towards him. He thought he recognized the voices but didn't know their designations. No one else seemed to be able to hear the cries, and Jazz learned not to mention them since he kept getting called a liar by adults and other sparklings. Even after he stopped mentioning them he was still teased by some of the older sparklings.

The first time the screams stopped changed the direction of Jazz's life. Topper had pushed Jazz down three times, and Jazz, fed up with the bullying, managed to trip her. Unfortunately for Topper they were too close to an open window, and the sparkling fell out and down two stories to the patio below. The actually audible scream as she fell startled Jazz so much that he almost didn't realize that the other screaming stopped as Topper hit the ground and lay still like a broken doll.

Jazz wasn't blamed for the accident; no one even thought to ask him about it. No one wanted to traumatize the poor orphaned sparkling even more. Everyone assumed that Topper had just tripped over her own pedes since her recent upgrade was known to make sparklings a bit clumsy for a little while.

Three orn after the silence started the screaming began again disrupting Jazz's recharge. It took almost half an orn for Jazz to realize that there were now three voices in his audials. The new one was a piercing cry that penetrated his audials from outside any nearby window. That voice he knew. It was Topper. Being as annoying in death as she was in life.

After Jazz got his mechling upgrades he smothered one of the orphanage sparkling as an experiment. He was a feeble sparkling that probably wouldn't make it to adulthood anyway. The screams stopped for four orns, and Jazz finally got to listen to the street musicians in peace. At least now he knew what he needed to do to temporarily silence the screams.

Sentinel Prime was frustrated by the developing uprising and had stated that he wanted it to go away. Including anyone who supported it. Jazz couldn't get close to Megatron thanks to the telepath that he kept by his side. Instead an open Decepticon sympathizer in Gygax's merchant guild was his assignment.

It wasn't hard to slip into his house even as the multitude of screams made it trickier for Jazz to tell if he was being quiet. Still he managed to slip into the office avoiding detection as he struck. Stepping around the desk Jazz watched the light flicker out of the mech's optics as the energon flowed out of his lines from the. Flicking on the music he could finally enjoy Jazz headed back to his favorite bar by the palace grounds. 341 blissful orns before he'd hear the screaming start again.