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"...So, basically," Drag Strip said with the projected confidence of a mech who loved to lie but wasn't very good at it, "if you take into account the angle of the floor, the tilt of the table—"
"What tilt?" Breakdown muttered.
"—and the height of the game board, it's pretty obvious that I would have gotten a two on the die instead of three. So, we should totally be thinking about that, and that's not even getting into the wind speed!"
"We're in an underwater base," Dead End pointed out.
"Yeah, but the vents—" Motormaster slammed his fist onto the table, jostling the game pieces.
"Drag Strip, you landed on Tennessee Avenue. Pay Wildrider his fucking rent." Drag Strip scowled and went to hand his giddy teammate a fifty and a twenty. Motormaster snatched it out of his grasp and waved it around in the air. "All of it. He's got two houses, you idiot."
"I'll take what he's giving me," said Wildrider. Drag Strip grinned.
"Yeah, Motormaster, haven't you ever heard of the friends and family discount?" His smile turned poisonous, visor glinting nastily in the low light of the Victory's rec room. "Maybe no one likes you enough to give you freebies. You ever think of that?" Wildrider looked between the two of them with a frown.
"Actually, you said you'd give me some of your ration tomorrow if I—" Motormaster grabbed a fistful of Drag Strip's neat little pile of monopoly money and thrust it into Wildrider's face.
"Take your slagging payment!"
"Hey!" Drag Strip screeched. Wildrider took the money and gleefully shoved it under his aft before it could be snatched away by any thieving racecars. Motormaster folded his arms and looked down his nose at his errant subordinate.
"The point of this exercise is learning how to manage with limited resources at your disposal!" That was, at least, the way it had been described to him when he bought it. Whoever created the game had done a pretty bad job if that was what they were aiming for, though.
"And here I thought we were educating ourselves on the evils of private land ownership," Dead End interjected flatly. "How silly of me." Motormaster pretended not to hear him.
"Next time you refuse to pay up, I'm taking all of it." Drag Strip sneered and started shoveling the colorful pieces of paper into his subspace. Motormaster quirked an eyebrow. "That's not gonna stop me, and you know it." Breakdown raised his hand.
"Um, I think it's my turn now?" Motormaster nodded at him.
"Go."
Breakdown scooped up the dice and tossed them back onto the game board. Seven. He looked at the board, then back to the dice, and then to Dead End, who sat across the table with steepled fingers.
"...I think I just lost the game," he said. Dead End tsked, folding his hands under his chin.
"Come on, Breakdown, don't tell me you're going to just give up."
"I think he should," grumbled Drag Strip. Wildrider brightened.
"Can we swap pieces when you die, Breakdown?" He asked. "I hate being the shoe, but I want to know what it tastes like, so if you give me your thimble, I can just eat it." Motormaster slammed his fist onto the table again.
"I did not pay for this training exercise so that you could turn it into a snack bar!" He glared at Drag Strip, who froze like a deer in the headlights. "Put that back. Your piece was on Tennessee Avenue, we literally just talked about it."
"You jostled the pieces," Drag Strip sulked, dropping his silver car back onto its proper square, "I was just trying to remember where it landed."
"Speaking of ill-fated attempts to delay the inevitable," said Dead End, primly straightening a sizable stack of bills, "I believe that Breakdown and I can come to an agreement that does not result in his immediate forfeiture."
"You put a hotel on Boardwalk, I think I'm just dead," Breakdown replied flatly. "I have, like, five hundred dollars." Dead End's visor gleamed.
"If you sell me Pennsylvania and North Carolina at half price, I won't charge you rent this round." Breakdown grimaced.
"And give you a monopoly on the most expensive side of the board? You couldn't be more transportal."
"It's transparent," Dead End corrected, "and there's no sense in being disengenuous. If you wash out this round, I'll get to them eventually. The only difference between then and now is that you'll be out of the game."
"You're lying," Breakdown replied evenly. "You might just roll terribly and miss those squares for the rest of the game." Dead End tilted his head.
"You'd still be out. I'm making a very generous offer, here, Breakdown. You should take this opportunity while you have it."
"This is basically cheating," Drag Strip piped up, arms crossed. "I think they should both be disqualified."
"Shut up, Drags, I'm ponding."
"Pondering—"
"That's what I said." Breakdown scratched his chin, tilted his head, and sighed. "Fine. I'll give you a cheap monopoly in exchange for not paying rent."
Wildrider cheered. Drag Strip seethed. Dead End handed off the money with a delicate flourish.
"Pleasure doing business with you," he purred, radiating self-satisfaction. A deep frown carved its way into Breakdown's face.
"You're being weird," he said. Drag Strip punched him in the shoulder.
"Good going, Break-dick, you just handed him the win on a silver platter. I hope you're the first to go."
Motormaster once again slammed his fist into what was rapidly becoming a crater in the table.
"Drag Strip, shut up. Breakdown, meet your end with some dignity. Dead End..." He nodded and tried very hard not to come off as awkward as he felt paying a compliment. "Good job demoralizing the enemy."
Dead End hummed and began to meticulously re-arrange the layout of his property cards. There was an odd tension about him that could almost be likened to excitement.
"It wasn't me, it was this game. Skill plays no part in determining who wins or loses. It's brilliant: you stumble into your wealth by pure happenstance, and then you use it to destroy the lives of everyone else around you by charging them for the right to exist in the space you've arbitrarily decided belongs to you. Then, you're rewarded for it with even more money, which enables you to do further damage to your society by repeating the process elsewhere. It's an endless cycle of theft and misery that makes you question why anyone bothers to maintain the farce." He breathed a wistful sigh, visor dimming. "This game is almost cathartic, in a sad sort of way. I think we should all do this again next week—" Motormaster aimed a kick at him under the table.
"Stop pontificating," he snarled, "we'll be here the rest of our off-shift! Who's going next?"
"I think you're up, boss," Drag Strip said. Motormaster counted the turns in his head and raised his eyebrows.
"Huh. You're not lying, for once." He picked up the dice and tossed them onto the table, ignoring Drag Strip's squawk of affront. Then, he grabbed his top hat, counted the squares, and paused. His tanks filled with dread.
Drag Strip grinned like a shark scenting blood.
"What's wrong, sir?" He taunted, too many pointy little teeth on display for Motormaster's liking. "Do you not like what you rolled? Did you land somewhere you can't afford?" His demeanor bothered Motormaster in a way he couldn't quite put a finger on, aside from the obvious insubordination that he'd gradually lost the will to keep punishing after four slagging hours of gameplay.
"Stop projecting your insecurities onto me, Drag Strip," Motormaster replied. "At least I don't turn into an amateur physicist every time I have to make a roll."
"Is that because you're bad at math, or because they don't make lab coats in your size?" Asked Wildrider, who was busy peeling purple paint off the edge of the table.
"It's because I'm not a sore slagging loser!" Motormaster snapped. His hand remained poised in the air. Dead End's three shiny little plastic houses mocked him from their comfortable spot on Illinois Avenue.
...How would losing to his subordinates reflect on Motormaster's leadership skills? They were practically playing a game of chance, sure, but he was still supposed to be the most capable of the Stunticons. How could he be trusted to give commands, speak for them at meetings, or even carry them around in his trailer safely if he couldn't beat them at a simple game like Monopoly? What if Dead End started getting ideas?
Motormaster shuddered to imagine him giving Megatron a battle report during a command meeting. He'd say something like: Well, we failed to secure the energon, but I suppose that was inevitable. I don't know why you put your faith in us. You should probably just stick us all in a car crusher and be done with it. And then Megatron would oblige, and that would be the end of the Stunticons.
...When he thought about it like that, it seemed almost irresponsible not to try and nip that scenario in the bud.
"We're done playing," Motormaster announced. "This game is terrible. You're all free to go back to driving in circles, or whatever it is you do when I'm busy with real work."
None of the other Stunticons budged.
"...I mean," mumbled Breakdown, gaze fixed on the table, "you can leave? But I think the rest of us want to keep playing, if that's alright."
"I'm not leaving this fucking table until I've crushed everyone else into the dirt," Drag Strip announced. Dead End scoffed.
"If that's the case, then I hope you're comfortable, because you're utterly destitute." Wildrider raised a hand.
"I'm also down to keep playing, but only if I get to put some of the pieces in the microwave when we're done."
"You have a microwave?" Breakdown asked.
"Yeah," said Wildrider. "You don't?"
"Everyone shut up!" Motormaster stood and loomed over the table, fists clenched at his sides. The other Stunticons flinched. "I'm putting this away." He started grabbing things and tossing them into the box with a little more force than strictly necessary.
"So much for not being a sore slagging loser," Drag Strip groused, wearing that bitter, mutinous scowl he always adopted when he was thinking up another detailed murder fantasy to write in that secret datapad he thought none of them knew about.
"I can take a loss, you idiot," Motormaster replied, sounding so certain to his own audial receptors that he almost believed himself. "This is just a waste of time. We should be doing tactical simulations instead." Then, he folded the board the wrong way on accident and cracked it in half. He found himself under the scrutiny of four carefully blank faces. "...Also, we're never playing this game again."
The rest of the Stunticons watched in miserable silence as he crumpled up the box and shoved it down the waste disposal chute. It was quickly followed by the board, most of the cards, and as much fake money as Motormaster was willing to pry out of Drag Strip's stubborn death grip.
"There," he said, folding his arms. "Also, I'm stripping the wires out of the next one of you to say the word 'Monopoly.' Have I made myself clear?" His subordinates looked at him like he was crazy.
"Uh... Sure," said Wildrider. The others nodded hesitantly, exchanging glances he couldn't decipher. "Won't happen again, boss."
"I'm going to do paperwork," Motormaster lied. "You're all dismissed for now."
They were gone in an instant, scurrying off in four different directions. Motormaster heaved a sigh and stalked off to get a refund from Swindle.