WHAT YEAR IS IT!?!?

[starscheme]

 Who: Starscream, The Decepticons, Sollux, and potentially, YOU
Where: Variable, the Decepticon Base and the Mojave/California wilderness generally.
When: March 18th and beyond.
What: Starscream wakes up from his visit to Scary Jail and has a lot of personal bullshit on top of probably a pretty angry boss to deal with. Then he goes energon scouting. Reluctantly.
Warnings: Some medical talk in the setup, discussion of SCARY JAIL TORTURE, probably some gay. Okay definitely some gay. 

[Options 1 and 2, CLOSED TO THOSE WHO COULD FEASIBLY BE AT THE 'CON BASE]

It's  a few days before he regains proper consciousness.

Starscream’s last encounter with the AI and put him completely down for the count. He failed to escape, of course. It hadn’t been for a lack of trying, in fact he had come painfully close on his last try, but then he got caught and at that point he just didn’t have the energy left in him to put up enough of a fight. He’d gotten another good zap and then his internals went into automatic shutdown, an involuntary emergency defense mechanism designed to divert all of his remaining energon to prolonging the life of his spark for as long as possible. 

Help did finally come, as he had predicted before passing out from Energon depletion, but he certainly wasn’t awake to witness it. Fortunately it came from (relatively) friendly forces and not humans as he had feared and Orion Pax had suggested. So he’d been carted back to the Decepticon base, completely dead to the world. 

When it came down to it, his symptoms were fairly straight forward. Energon starvation was easy enough to fix; a few transfusions and he would be back up to acceptable levels, though their limited resources meant that he was only just hovering above what was strictly necessary. Starscream has a vague recollection of hazily waking up a few times, confused and enraged and swatting weakly with his one good arm, desperate to get his claws on what he assumed to be the antagonizing AI, but those moments were few and far between and he can’t even remember what put him back out again. The real problem was the implant; it hadn’t taken long to locate and remove, of course, but the procedure had required him to preferably be unconscious, so perhaps it was a blessing he was in such a bad way.

Once the offending piece had been removed though and he was no longer starving to death, it is only another 12 hours or so before he opens his optics for what feels like the first time in ages. It’s slow coming at first, and then the situation hits him with a sudden, startling clarity. 

He bolts upright, snarling and digging his talons into the berth he is laid out on, optics wide with panic. 

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[HERE'S OPTION 2]

It doesn’t take Starscream long to get up and moving around after that. What’s notable is the manner in which he seems to be skulking around the ship. It’s not in his usual, scheming, swaggering kind of skulking. He seems almost dejected, likely troubled by the thorough ass kicking and pathetic state in which he was retrieved in. Of course he’s not going to admit any of this out loud, because he’s an emotionally constipated piece of shit, but it’s easy enough to infer. Beyond that he just seems to be in a particularly foul mood, and oddly unwilling to go back outside the relative safety of the ship unless directly ordered to do so. 

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[OPTION 3: OPEN TO  ALL]

Sometimes he has to go outside though; without a complete formula there’s still naturally occurring energon that needs to be gathered and recon to be done. Those who know what they’re looking for might spot a fighter jet zipping around where it doesn’t belong. He’s carefully cloaked from showing up as an obvious threat on scanners, but those with the know-how can easily tell that he is at least Cybertronian, and can therefore potentially engage him. Those without the know-how might be lucky enough to catch him in robot mode, digging around in the wilderness (desert, forest, whatever floats your boat) for supplies to bring back to the Decepticon base.