Ep0 - 'Dead Air’ - Closed

Bulkhead rumbled, low and deep in his engine, shifting on his axels. The longer they sat, the harder it was to just keep sitting - never a slagging 'Con around when you wanted to beat one in the faceplates, and all over your aft the nanoklik you didn't want them. Typical.

Warships he couldn't do much about; which wasn't to say he hadn't ever, but not from the ground and not with nothing but the weapons on his frame. 'Cons, though... the more Bulkhead had to think about it, the more he couldn't help but agree (and maybe, in the depths of his spark, hope just a little) that it would be a trap - that any moment there were going to be 'Cons crawling out of the abandoned ruins of the landscape, and it'd be right back down to basics. Just like scrapping 'Cons in every other ruin he'd ever slagged them in, though human structures crumpled a lot faster than Cybertronian did.

Throttling back the growl building in his engine, Bulkhead flashed an assent at Bumblebee. He had the codes, though Primus help them all if it fell to him to be the one delivering them and it was anything more advanced than plug and go. ::Got it. Ready and waitin', Bee.::

‘Transmitting now,’ said Bumblebee quietly, glancing at Bulkhead before he opened the comm. frequency and started uploading the failsafe. There was a registry ping from the ship and a location glyph locked into his comm. array immediately, fixing on the war machine and loading the first layer of encrypted triggers. A frequency trigger – an ancient but still effective failsafe as all comms could be hacked and accessed generally with enough time and bandwidth. Force an uplink, load the failsafe. Instant death but time was of the essence here. If they didn’t do this now Optimus would have to buy them time and buy with violence and fuel bled from his own lines.

::Upload is at 34.3452%. Secondary laying triggers uploading. I’m – fraggit!::

A burst of error code jammed up his HUD and logi-tech sub-routines with partitioned feedback off the warship. UPLINK: DISCONNECT (Error: 1338673.82 NON-AUTHORIZATION FAILURE) Encryption GHTX2349641 Slag.

::Arcee, I’m getting run-time disconnect. It’s timing out/taking too long. Our transmission frequency isn’t strong enough to carry the failsafe. Blaster, relying data pack to you. Try to get us a better frequency or we’re scrapped.:: And Optimus will fight Megatron… alone.

As he stood beside him waiting for the ground bridge to connect, Breakdown could read Knock Out's field, and it was bad news for the 'bots, not him. They had both been stationed in medbay, but while Knock Out had been working on some project, Breakdown was bored. The medbay was clean, and the emergency supplies Lord Megatron might need were all set up. Soundwave's order was a lucky break.

"Ready," he told Knock Out, breaking out his hammer.

They were bridged into cover, but Breakdown caught a look at their opponents on the way to it. Nothing special today, and they looked busy. He turned back to Knock Out. "You can take the scout, I got ugly."

A query ping from Optimus. Fraggit.

::I can’t fix this. I’m not an encrypter/hacker. We need to key/cipher or it just won’t–::

The scout broke off chirping. He’d been absorbed in trying to correct the uplink error, had not heard the arrival of the Decepticon duo and instantly snapped around, whirring with alarm. The two ex-Wreckers had clearly just snapped out of groundbridge. ::Fraggit! Must have set something off. Cee, keep out of sight and focus on the frequency.:: Bumblebee was already hitting the gas and gunning it out of the parking warehouse, hitting eighty MPH four seconds flat and tore out there, gunning for the pair of Decepticons’ position. ‘Bulkhead! Covering fire.’

Knock Out didn't reply to Breakdown's words. It went without saying, really. Any other configuration would be comedy, not battle.

The Decepticon medic grinned as the yellow scout shot out of cover, straight for them. "Ooh, a live one." Knock Out said, grinning. He ducked back behind cover as Bulkhead let fly with his usual lack of finesse. "And coming right for two short-range fighters. Honestly, what ARE they putting into the Autobot energon these days? Perhaps I should encourage their rustheap of a medic to up the dosage."

Knock Out peeked out from cover again, lazily dodging a wild shot. Yep, still coming, shooting straight down an overgrown and deserted boulevard that fronted the building they were using as cover. Right. Well, then.

Knock Out transmitted a quick burst of battle-glyphs to Breakdown, indicating that he should avoid Bumblebee's route on his way to Bulkhead. "Don't have too much fun. And keep an eye out for any more of them. I want to know what they're doing here, so far from the main event."

Knock Out stowed his weapon and leapt high, claws digging temporary handholds into crumbling concrete as he scaled the ten-story building in less time than it took Bumblebee to halve his distance to them. Crouching on the top, he leaned over to get just enough perspective to calculate speed and vector vs. momentum in the local gravity before moving back out of sight.

He waited a klik. His claws really DID need sharpening....

Knock Out unfolded from his crouch, two running steps denting the shoddy human construction beneath his feet as he leapt over the side of the building, falling with a grin right for Bumble-brat's front hood, fully-charged energon prod-first.


OOC: first rp combat, yay! Let me know if i'm doing anything wrong!)

Great. The red snarky one was jumping off tall things. Bumblebee knew he wasn’t being super strategic just now, but all he could feel in that astro-kilk when he saw the Decepticon duo coming toward them was this burst of urgent dread – that Arcee needed to be the last thing on their minds for however long they could handle it and give their lieutenant a chance at sorting that frequency and destroying that ship. Optimus would probably strip Bee's paint with disapproving looks for his recklessness… but that was incumbent on his not getting torn up by Megatron then eaten alive by energon-gone-poison in his fuel lines so reckless runaround ridiculousness it was.

Bumblebee saw Knockout run up the building and his sensors told him when the mech took a meteoric free-fall off a the roof with intent to fry him screaming. Bumblebee punched his right-side hydraulics, flipping his alt sideways, but still felt that energon prod jam a lightening bolt of raw current across his plates – glancing charge, his shock systems took most of the damage. Guh. Ratchet could yell at him later. Bee transformed in mid-air, landing with blasters primed and aimed directly at the Decepticon CMO.

His opening salvo barely staved Knockout’s follow-up attack, his targeting systems blitzed with static from the energon prod. He could hear Bulkhead and Breakdown opening fire on one another, Breakdown saying something, Knockout was coming at him and even though distraction was nothing he could afford, all Bee could think was: It’s been five minutes. Optimus is going to fight Megaton.

Knock Out flipped as soon as his pedes hit dirt, dodging the Autobot's fire completely. Not that it was hard. He'd hit close enough to a neural cluster to give the Autobot a bad case of the fritz. Knock Out grinned as Bumblebee backpedaled slightly, hesitating as if trying to reboot something. Perfect. Just how he liked his opponents.

Knock Out tsked as he kept ahead of Bumblebee's distracted targeting, circling to the side and kicking an abandoned car toward the Autobot as further distraction. "Now, now, don't be shy. I do so love to get up close and personal...." Knock Out sprinted in, driving to get under Bumblebee's guard, his prod crackling and hissing with charge as it stabbed from the side for the seams in Bumblebee's armor.