We are a literate, intermediate to advanced AU Transformers RPG Based off of the first season of TFP with dashes of other incarnations sprinkled here or there. Characters from any continuity are welcome however must be restyled to match the TFPrime universe.
Active, with ongoing plotlines, we are always willing to integrate new characters into storylines once incorporated into the setting.
“You know,” he said, quietly, murmuring into her left audio sometimes and then, other times, in her right. “You know that I’m right,” he said. And then he would say nothing for a while until she focused on the quiet and the absolute stillness and it was only there in the razor edge between pure quiet and absolute non-motion that she could hear him. That was when he spoke to her again and always with a smile in this words and a hum of familiarity in the tonal glyphs of his voice which she must have memorized by now… which must have burned into her processor like a laser etch on armor plating. He was a tattoo in her head, written (he was certain) on the fractal shell of her spark gone cold.
“You know that he betrayed you. Labyrinth. He sold you out. He made you his and he sold you out.” Barricade was leaning against the far wall, watching her, arms folded, shadows inhabiting the dark paint of his armor, the deep red glow of optics pulsing in the dark. A chuckle, low and alto. “Argue with me, Shadow. Or aren’t I right?”
"He didn't." Her voice shook; where Barricade was all smug conviction - in his stance, in his voice, in the EMF ghosting against hers - her denials trembled and shivered with doubt. She finally remembered all the pieces of her own personal puzzle, but they still didn't come together to make a whole picture.
At least, not one that fit with what she'd always believed.
She didn't move, merely aimed a sulfurous glare at him. "Labyrinth screwed up. That's all. He screwed up, and you got to him like you got to all of us." Her optics brightened a little with hatred. "You're good at making bots screw up, Barricade, and it's going to stop."
“‘It’s going to stop’?” he repeated, tilting his head fractionally. He did not move from where he stood across from her. The long stretch of her shadow was laid out from her pedes to his, throwing Barricade up like her own silohette against the wall. He flickered like a bad television signal as he shifted, flickered when he blinked and the fractional moment where the fired red glass glow of his optics vanished so did he. His EM field was a miasmic seethe, coiling around her and settling into her plates. “Femme, I was designed to kill your kind. My function for the past several millennia has been, specifically, the killing of little intell bots like you… but in the case of the Lucky Thirteen I hardly had to lift a finger to slaughter you all.”
He shrugged, blinked out, was there again but sitting against the wall, casual as he’d been in the brig. He mimicked her hostile stance, sitting back to the wall, legs apart, arms draped over her knees but where she was tense he was slack. Where she was wound tight, he was lazy. Smiling where she scowled.
“He let me kill you all… He let me. You were his team of toy soldiers and he spent your lives like cheap credits for his own benefit.” He smiled. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
"Our lives were his to spend." But he hadn't spent them, not really; he'd wasted them, thrown them away for...that piece of the puzzle was still missing, had never been hers to recover.
She shuttered her optics briefly, could still feel Barricade there like a sickness on the far side of the room.
"Lab didn't kill us, though. You did." She looked at him again, the unsteady outline of him, as demonic as when he'd been bearing down on her in Lab's ship. Energon slicked his claws, splattered bright across his armor, pooled the floor beneath him, and was gone with her next ex-vent.
"I'm the only one left." Pain lanced through her, crimson bright through the numbness. "I have nothing left to lose, Barricade. Nothing to worry about but killing you. Because you slaughtered everyone who might have given me a reason to stop."
“And after that?” asked Barricade, his face obliterating in static then flickering back again to wholeness. His dark red optics didn’t waver from her, staring with unblinking fixation now on the Impala bot. He didn’t move unless she did now, cycled his vents in sync with hers as he addressed the more pressing question that was, to him, the core of Shadowrunner’s problems. His smile was lopsided, his tone that of someone asking an obvious question.
“Say you do it. Say you catch me, split me open, and I beg you to kill me before the end and then you make me regret every eon I’ve lived and you get your revenge in the name of the Bot that sold out the lives of everything you ever fragging loved…”
He sat there, staring at her, smiling a little. “What do you do after that?”
"There is no 'after.'" And eerie calmness masquerading as peace settled over her. "You murdered the Lucky Thirteen, Barricade. Congratulations. Job well done." A smile twisted its way across her facial plates. "Your only problem is that I can't let us go out with a stain like you on our record. I have to keep moving until this is finished."
“’No after.’” He murmured this against her right audio, crouched now directly next to her, one arm braced against the wall directly over her head. He leaned against the cool solidarity of the concrete at her back, EMF curled into hers, finding and syncing easily with the ragged jag and flux of her field. He was near enough the heat off his frame could be felt, the soft click and hum of his engines clear as the words he dropped against the side of her helm.
"Okay. Then do it.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice as he closed proximity, until he was whispering. “Kill me and then you can stop, Shadow. Clear both our records.” He placed a claw at his own belly, dragged it from dark abdominal plates to his throat. “Split me open.” He laughed. “Then make it thirteen for thirteen.”
Shadow relaxed back against the wall, the cold of it burning into her plating as intensely as the heat of Barricade's frame. Everything was sharp, clear, simple.
Easy. As easy as killing Barricade, as easy as making him pay in energon and mesh and pain for everything he had done to her unit. As easy as extinguishing a spark that she doubted he even possessed.
She turned her head enough to meet red optics that weren't there. "Once you're dead, Barricade. Thirteen for thirteen."
Barricade’s smile was a shadow on his mouth as he leaned her helm against hers, hand sliding down the wall until his arm and his EMF was around her. “Good girl,” he murmured.
He didn’t go on though, because having imparted that Barricade was gone. Then there was nothing left in the Impala’s personal quarters but the heat off her own frame and the fading impression of and alien EMF that could have just as easily been hers all along.