A/N Thank you all my reviewers, especially to Black Arein and Leo Oneal. Sorry guys that I haven't replied back to most of your reviews. More so that this it took so long to put up a piece of crap incomplete chapter. Honestly guys, I don't have too good of an excuse (even though some people would use moving from upstate NY to NV as one. Not that I'D use that fact… :P)

I've got more to add on to this chapter, but it'll take time to put the jumbled of notebook pages together and typed into a semi-decent document. And I'm guessing you really want to have one sentence for hope of this continuing.

… please to kill me.

Oh, I'm also going to rewrite the first few chapters. They've been making me twitch.

Optimus slouched over his desk, allowing his face to sink into the palm of his hand. Interrogating his own bots, with there were over forty, was hardly an easy task, for simple reasons. And for these, he was mentally and physically exhausted. If Primus willed it, and Optimus prayed He did, this predicament would be over swiftly. Just learning that one of his Autobots could do such a thing had drained him of much, including hope. If someone could torture a sparkling like Bumblebee, no matter the method, to the point at he was at now, it could not be considered Cybertronian. Not in the inside, not in the spark. And if someone became such a… thing… on the side of good…

The Prime mentally shook himself, clearing such thoughts from his mind. No use thinking of such things right now, the Ark… Bumblebee needed him to be out of despair. Even if Bumblebee was frightened of him now, he still needed his protection. Prime would not let this bastard hurt another one of his young again. He sat back upright, reaching for his data pad again.

He had processed each individual's story, recording them and noted vital points down. And they all fitted together like puzzle pieces, pointing to no one in particular. Ratchet, Wheeljack, and Preceptor had separately estimated the time when Bumblebee was most likely attacked and then left for dead, and it came out to be a two hour timeslot in which it most likely took place. And according to that, there were weaker stories. Thirty-one percent of the bots were on patrol all over the country during this. One or two were out of the country, even. Though half of them had locations and/or partners as alibis, more were on a solo mission, with only the occasional human as them. And when they entered or exited the base, the sensor strips and spare cameras and perhaps their friends, and a good handful of them had so during the two hours.

All in all, fifteen Autobots had no solid proof of their stories, while five of his soldiers where undoubtedly accounted for.

Chief Tactical Officer Prowl was one of the latter. He, for example, went the past sixteen days without recharge, and when his body began to wear down, he was forced into recharge last night in an extremely deep state, one that most Cybertronians only took once a stellar cycle. It was like being frozen to the core, and to be woken up it was like being melted with a relative sized match. There was no way he could have gotten up in the middle of such a slumber without a four hour "warm up" that the end of it really provides. He would not be able to function. Plenty of mechs confirmed this when they went in and out of the room, as did the video feeds and recharge records.

Not that video was solid proof for anyone's case; Wheeljack, who built and programmed the sensor strip program that now lined the corridors, found that it was tampered with, and rather artfully, too. Ironically, Wheeljack, Red Alert and Grapple where discussing a flaw in coding within the system with Prime during the designated time block and spanning out erstwhile and subsequent.

And the final two were Ratchet and Hound, who were both confirmed to be in sickbay by various soldiers during that period. Four days ago or so, Hound was out on a solitary patrol, and was cornered by the Stunticons, and they beat him until the scout could not stand. Ironically, the Motormaster's and his crew's brutality was what saved Hound. Like many Decepticons, they'd rather prolong an Autobot's pain than kill them on sight. More fun for them that way. So ever since, the mild tempered bot was in the medical bay, with Ratchet hovering over him and, at Hound's and Wheeljack's request, studying the damage to find ways to resist the force fields the Stunticons had around their car form.

A soft chime at the door drew Prime out of his thoughts, and he immediately covered himself in the cool, collected expression of his leader form. "Come in."

Prowl stepped up to his desk, followed by Ratchet, Red Alert and Hound, and Prime wasted not a nano-klick. "Prowl, before the war, you were once a crime scene analyst, am I correct?"

"Yes, sir. Supervisor of my shift, to be precise." Beside him, Ratchet actually rose a optic ridge at that.