Author's note: DarthIshtar, queen of the exquisitely-timed one shots here. (You know, I turn up on April Fool's Day to write a vignette and such things.) So, it is/was our walking wikipedia RK_Striker_JK_5's birthday when I wrote this. I asked Eowyn77 to give me a plot bunny for something Botosphere. She came up with the basis for this. Wisdom-in-Triplicate is what my Dad does.

Will had seen it all before. There were certain prereqs for any functioning unit and they applied to all sorts. Some guys wouldn't believe it, but you could use the same rules to play nice with a special ops team like NEST that you did with your wife and daughter.

Or, in another case, you could theoretically take all your human experience and bond with alien cars. Grandpa Lennox had always been a fan of what Will thought of as Wisdom-in-Triplicate, meaning that all rules came in sets of three and this was no exception.

Rule number one was that food had to factor in somehow. Ratchet could explain it with lectures on dietetics and adaptive biology, but no one let him get on that subject unless they had done something to deserve that kind of punishment. But military units had been called companies for ages and the word immediately told anyone who cared that a military unit had to be made up of the people you were willing to break bread with.

Rule number two was that you respected your elders and your young uns. Not in the Asian revering the ancestors way, though it never hurt to remember everyone who'd gone before you, but both ends of the spectrum had something to offer. The brass might screw up once in awhile, but they'd been screwing up a hell of a lot longer than you had and lived to tell the tale. And the rookies were valuable, if for no other reason than they might come up with something that no one else could think of.

The third was the ace in the hole, the little bit of chaos that no one could do without. This third rule went by a number of different wordings, but it mostly said to "go with the flow."

These were rules that Will Lennox had stood behind for as long as he could remember and they sprouted from one of the less profane lectures he'd gotten from one of the first people he'd had to call "SIRYESSIR!"

The prereqs could be applied to any unit and today, they applied to something that was a little more chaotic than usual: Annabelle's birthday party.

That meant that there ABSOLUTELY had to be food involved - the less organic the better - and you had to go with the flow more often than usual. Oh, and the rule about elders and young un's got a little complicated. Everyone deferred to the Prime, but when even the Prime deferred to a girl in a ruffly yellow dress, you had to bow to his wisdom.

Ironhide was being a better sport than usual, since Annabelle had enlisted him early on to be her "REALLY special HELPER" with the decorations. He grumbled a few things about fusion cannons and helium, but let Annabelle turn the living room into a monsterpiece that resembled Will's back yard after his first girlfriend and her slumber partiers had taken about a hundred bucks worth of TP to it.

Skids and Mudflap were on guard duty, making sure that no one but NO ONE got too near the good stuff. Annabelle hadn't exactly assigned them to sentinel duty, but they couldn't be stopped once they saw one of Annabelle's friends inspecting her largest present too closely. Epps had had to have a word with Mudflap about growling at 4-year-olds when the kid ran off in tears, but Ratchet had unexpectedly intervened and shown a hint of a bedside manner in getting the kid to stop bawling. There had been a lot of rational talking-it-over attempted, but eventually, Ratchet had spotted a toy slinky from the party favors and had finally gotten the kid a fixation.

Prime, Arcee and two of the other base kids were playing their fourth round of Candyland when Will sensed trouble in the air. Try as he had to keep things running smoothly, it had been too long since the pizza (and carrot sticks by the missus' mandate) and even the slinky kid was looking restless.

Instead of fielding a few impatient questions and the inevitable outright whining, Will ducked into the kitchen to check on the cake.

"Almost done," Sarah promised cheerfully. "I'm just finishing the icing."

"Can't you take a few shortcuts?" he suggested, correcting her penmanship with a swipe of his fingertip. "B-day instead of birthday and skip the roses?"

"No."

"But she can't read yet," he protested. "You could write 'Soylent Green is People, down with Nickelback' on there and she'd think it said 'Happy birthday, Annabelle.'"

She grinned at the loop of the second L in their daughters' name. "It's the principle of the thing. You get the decorations."

He'd had to plan months in advance to get the right plastic toppers for the white-with-raspberry-filling cake. Plan months in advance and hope to God the kid didn't drop her obsession with Dora the Explorer. Luckily, the obsession seemed immortal and they'd gotten the stuff in the mail courtesy of Sarah's cousins in California last week.

He obediently handed the toppers over and Sarah immediately started arranging them artistically around the carefully-piped buttercream roses. The bright colors upstaged the girly stuff that she'd spent two hours rehearsing so she wouldn't choke when the time came, but it looked pretty nice.

Right on time, a tiny non-Annabelle voice piped up, "I'm hungry!"

Will smirked in his wife's direction and headed out to the living room. It was the slinky kid's older brother who had been invited just because it was a small base and cruel to deny any kid a good party when they were stuck on an island in the Indian Ocean.

"Don't look now," Will said conspiratorially to Ironhide and Annabelle, "but I think we're almost ready for the..."

"CAKE!" Annabelle squealed as Sarah backed through the door.

The four violently-pink candles were lit and someone hit the lights as a cue. The 'Bots sang along with the rest, having long ago Googled the music and lyrics to everything they would be expected to sing at human functions. Annabelle bounced so vigorously that she practically bounced into the cake, but got very serious when it was time to blow out the candles. The kid did it in one breath and everyone clapped enthusiastically at her lung capacity.

"All right," Sarah said over the excited chatter of ten military brats. "Annabelle gets first pick."

She immediately pointed out the corner that had a monstrous pink rose AND a Diego figure and Sarah obediently set it aside. Annabelle was content to let the rest of the cake be divied up before attacking her own piece, but once the kids had their slices and Epps claimed the only one that didn't have something pink on it, she grabbed a completely different plate.

"Annabelle, your piece is right..."

Before Sarah could finish, Annabelle shoved the plate into Ironhide's hands. Well, not Ironhide's. Aaron Hyde's holographic hands which he kept insisting were pathetic substitutes for cannons. He looked almost human with how puzzled he was and if he'd had more practice with the holoform, he would have probably blinked.

"You're supposed to eat it," Will hinted.

"We have no need to metabolize this," Ratchet objected. He had been the second victim and was holding a particularly thick-frosted piece. "We refueled in the recent past."

'Geez,' Will thought, 'even robots pulled the "I ate a big lunch" line?'

"And one for you," Annabelle said proudly to Optimus Prime who was looking slightly amused by the bafflement of his counterparts. "It's my favorite."

"Den ya shoulda kept it fo yasef," Mudflap muttered. "What is this s..."

"There's cake for everyone," Sarah said calmly. "And it's her favorite."

Ratchet inspected the filling skeptically. "It seems to be a semi-gelatinous compound derivative of rubus idaeous," he announced. "There is nutritious content in this dessert."

"Yes," Arcee snickered. "It comes with raspberry filling. Don't look so shocked."

"As for metabolizing it," Will added, "it won't kill you."

"No," Ironhide admitted, "there do not seem to be lethal substances included in the recipe."

"You know what, I..."

Will sighed and looked to Sarah for backup. She gave him the patient "you handle the technical stuff" look that meant she was enjoying this too much to interfere.

"Are you really going to turn down a child's birthday cake?" Sarah asked after a few moments of silence. "That's not polite."

"Don't mean nothing," Skids asserted. "Our man Epps gawna eat it and we just tell her how funky it was."

Epps probably wouldn't object to a half-dozen slices of cake, but Sarah had mentioned something about principle in the kitchen and Will decided to stand on it. "You're going to have to try eating someday," he announced. "Might as well be now."

Ratchet turned to him for an inevitable lecture on the purpose of such an activity, but before he could, Optimus Prime picked up his piece and did the sage thing to do. He studied it from every angle, including the bottom. He stared at it for a few moments in case it showed signs of independent movement. Every pair of eyes, human and optic, in their corner was on the leader of the Autobots. And then Optimus Prime - defeater of Megatron, hero of Cybertron, role model to many - nodded respectfully at his piece of cake and nibbled it.

Will wasn't exactly sure what he expected - maybe that it would drop through the hologram and leave a mess on the armchair - but nothing like that happened. Prime contemplated the moment briefly before smiling.

"The experience was a pleasant one," he announced. "I think this is my favorite, too."

"You could taste it?" Will asked.

"I could detect a pleasing aroma and the sensation of its decomposition tingled," he explained.

Decomposition...

"You zapped it and it smelled nice?" Will translated.

"Yes," Optimus said. "I think I shall try it again."

Ironhide, not to be upstaged by anyone, even a Prime, tried it as well a few seconds later. Skids and Mudflap shoved it in all at once, but Arcee showed actual table manners in finishing her piece. Ratchet was the last to yield, still looking bothered by the ritual.

"We still have no need to metabolize this," he protested before manfully snarfing compressed sugar.

"Good going, "Will said like they'd just tried their first brussel sprouts with only minimum complaint. "You should try steak next time."

"Insufficiently cooked slab of ungulate?" Ironhide asked. "No thank you."

Sarah smirked at her husband as she headed back to the rest of the party, ready to make sure everyone was set for lemonade. "If they can't have energon, let them eat cake," she pronounced sagely.