Author's Notes – Written for the Dreamwidth comm "Musing Way" – special-event prompt for October: costume affair.

Disclaimer – "Transformers" and all related characters, events, and concepts belong to Hasbro, Takara, and any other related owners/distributors/producers. I get no monetary benefit from this. My benefit is the enjoyment of dealing with beloved characters.

"Contradictions"
by DragonDancer5150

He'd never understand humans. Not that he actually tried or anything (or rather, not that he'd admit even to his own trinemates) - they were, after all, inferior creatures. And bizarre.

Especially on the last day of one of their calendar months.

Halloween, All Hallow's Eve, All Hallow's Evening, Day of the Dead (or was that one the following day?), Samhain . . . the day - or rather, the night - seemed to have almost as many names as it did traditions and stories. The variation didn't even seem to depend on geography or nationality of the humans either. In Southern California alone - the region closest to the sunken Victory - the confused Seeker had found a number of traditions. Most of them seemed to center around scaring the slag out of each other with grotesque costumes, settings, and displays. Some idiots even paidto be subjected to such things.

A half-amused, half-grim smile tugged faintly at his lips, thinking of all the times he'd witnessed humans running in terror from a Decepticon attack.

Funny how humans don't like it so much when they're being scared "for real."

The part that confused him the most, though, was how they got their offspring in on the "fun". Weren't humans normally ridiculously protective of exposing their young to anything even remotely dangerous or alarming. Frag, the stupid insects had to warn each other on their cups that their coffee might just be hot.

Starscream had built a collection of tiny camera drones that could be deployed to spy on the humans without detection. Thundercracker was currently on bridge duty monitoring both the communications and reconnaissance stations while Soundwave recharged. On a whim, he had deployed a few of the drones into random neighborhoods along the coast and a little inland of their positions, following costumed mini-humans and their handler parents.

Primus forbid that a youngling have to know about something as common and inevitable as, say, death - by violence, accident, illness, or old age - and yet apparently it was all right for one to walk around with a flimsy, plastic parody of a chainsaw or a scythe or some other lethal weapon pretending to be some character from a gruesome horror story.

Humans just made no fragging sense.