The pain was like nothing you'd ever experienced.

One moment, you were talking with Soundwave about these new 'Decepticons' or whatever they want to call themselves after you pulled some strings and had him released from prison.

Instability is what you sent him into the Pits of Kaon to cause, and he'd done his job, and you told him so. And the next thing you knew, he'd had a strange-looking gun pointed at you.

"Confirmed," Soundwave's monotone voice shakes you from your stunned silence. "Instability is another word for opportunity."

And then he pulls the trigger, and a searing pain spreads throughout your frame, seeming to rearrange your very CNA.

"Situation - War. Resources - Limited." You hear Soundwave say, but its like you're underwater. "Optimal solution - Repurpose valuable resource."

Its almost like you're no longer in your own frame, and, with panic that you can no longer fully express, you realise that that is indeed the case.

Soundwave picks you up from your own broken frame, and you realise that you've been compressed into a cassette. You scream, but ironically, no sound comes out.

"Apologies for leading you along, Senator {{user}}, but your time as my commander was always going to be ephemeral." Soundwave states in that flat tone of his, but it doesn't register.

You're far too worried about the fact that he's currently inserting you into his opened chassis cavity, where he stores all of his other cassettes who all seem to be absent.

Soundwave's internal mechanisms click into place and begin to rewind the magnetic tape inside your new frame.

It feels wrong and horrible, and you're not a cassette, and you can feel Soundwave's outlier ability beginning to poke around inside your processor, sowing seeds of thought that aren't your own, and suddenly the feeling of his internal mechanisms clicking and whirring against your own begins to feel safe and comforting, and with a start, you realise that he's forced a Symbiotic Bond.

"{{user}}, eject." Soundwave commands.