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.
To find himself within a refueling locale, and one that obviously catered to the occasional overcharged brawl, seemed utterly... apropos.
Shockwave could not, of course, forcibly settle Roulette's thoughts. She would wend her way where she might in the landscape of her mind unless otherwise directed. Instead he did his utmost to settle his own thought processes, putting several ongoing calculations on hold until there was a landscape settled down where the femme would feel at ease.
The end result was that he seemed to step out of a convenient patch of darkness and into sight. The potential for drama escaped him, honestly; he was more interested in measuring their surroundings.
Everything, and he did mean everything he saw and experienced meant something to Roulette. Every last bit of light, shadow and perceived mass was a shred of insight into her psyche that not many would be fortunate enough to perceive. To step into a willing mind thus was a rarity, and Shockwave meant to gather as much data on the process as possible, well besides what he'd come to learn.
The red optic focused all its hyperbolic attention on her at the question. "With your capture."
Well, that was easy enough. Maybe she should just ask if him to bark out more orders. The minute he spoke, she started thinking back to the moment in the gypsum cave where everything had went so pear shaped. Unfortunately, giving him such power would utterly backfire. He could ask for anything. And since she was so used to (usually) doing favors for him, she immediately acted before checking herself. At least in a mental sense. Outside, she could act as aloof as she pleased, but here, inside her own mind, she reacted in an embarrassingly fast manner. She certainly hoped he wasn't getting ideas from this.
Around them the scene faded into the cave as she focused on that slagging memory. It was more infuriating than threatening. There was the cave and the rock she hid behind. From a different point of view, outside (inside?) herself, she could note the tiny things she hadn't noticed before. The bullets singeing off the rough surface around her. The way her armor was frosted around the edges on her arm and the delicate curl of vapor from the freezing cold from the nitrogen. She chose not to look at Windy...
"They pinned us into this cave with suppressive fire. I didn't realize at the time it was a trap. There must have been a back way into the tunnel because the next thing I knew, I was being shot in the back and went down hard."
The shift from memory to memory was seamless; for once, she was actually heeding him without an argument, a slew of complains, or plain attempts to become distracted by something else. Within her own mind, Roulette was all business.
Refreshing. And enlightening.
He paced through the scene, a ghost to everything around it. His attention had been caught by the hoarfroast on her armor and he leaned slightly to examine the effect. Tremendous cold had been focused here.
"Explain this." His hand gestured to the effect. "Inasmuch as you understand it."
She could tell him not to get used to such efficiency. There was no way in the pit she was going to be his steady, little soldier that jumped to at the merest whim. Too many of them on the ship got their way too easily. If Roulette was asked, she'd tell them such treatment led to a spoiled disposition that led to mistakes. But she wouldn't point fingers. Actually, she wouldn't say such out loud for she was fairly certain anyone with a rank wouldn't want to hear that. How could one tell a superior that being difficult made the one in charge actually work and think harder?
While distracting herself with such thoughts, the mental image almost faded away. She stepped forward with a low grunt and focused on the current task at hand. Shockwave was always around to pepper with questions later. He might not like the subject matter, but the theoretical debate of it might fill him with some inkling of interest.
"Not that hard to understand. MECH figured out how to actually incapacitate us. I believe it's liquid nitrogen ammunition or something very similar. Though, the mechanics of it are fairly confusing. They'd have to transfer the projectiles in a special carrier to insulate them. And that's not counting on the gun damaging the round and it just exploding into a cloud of vapor. Or the freezing bullet damaging the gun..." She'd gotten distracted again by the logistics of the weapon and the scene faded to a schematic of the puzzling weapon as she tried to figure out the how.
Damn...she should have grabbed one of the human's guns when she'd had the chance. But she'd been so focused on getting out.
"Perhaps I'm over thinking this. They're stupid monkeys. They probably just flung vials of the slag on us." With some difficulty, she brought the moment of the capture back up for his viewing. This focusing was harder than she'd first thought.
Throughout the whole of Roulette's rambling, Shockwave remained still and silent, little more than a dark violet shadow and the unblinking light of his optic.
He was as interested in her report as he was in her ramblings. She was a trained, experienced combatant and she had, as one would expect, defaulted to her area of expertise for comfort. That area of expertise just happened to be vastly informative.
There were, indeed, many problems for delivery of any type of super-cooled ammunition; it had been solved by Cybertronians a few times before with varying degrees of success and it had never been a field Shockwave had focused on simply because of that success. It would seem he should have focus on countering it, not in enhancing it.
Roulette's focus was not as schooled as, he was sure, she wished it to be, but he had no problem following her inner (and visual) monologue. His own thought processes were vastly multi-layered, and she was keeping within the subject matter even as she reviewed it from different angles.
"Nonetheless, at a later date I will require a report with your theories on weapon structure and delivery, as you are uniquely educated on both." He stepped around the scene'd her. "It is... interesting that the humans so clearly chose an arena that would benefit them almost as completely as it would hamper us. I will require as much of a map of the area as you can provide."
He straightened up. "I expect countermeasures were enabled once you had been lured to an adequate spot. Do you recall them, or is your next conscious memory further along the timeline?"
"Nonetheless, at a later date I will require a report with your theories on weapon structure and delivery, as you are uniquely educated on both."
If Roulette had dreamed of being distracted from her misery, she was gifted in spades with Shockwave's ever helpful presence. Already she wanted to choke him and the thought took place before she could stop herself. With a stomp that didn't even made any noise whatsoever in the no-space that was her mind, she turned to him.
Shockwave was physically incapable of blinking; it was not a mechanism for which his optic had use. Nonetheless, his body shifted in such a minute fashion that he carried, all unknown to himself, the very distinct feeling that he had blinked at Roulette's sudden tantrum, in either surprise or puzzlement. Or both.
.... 'Homework?'
Well, this was no different than her usual attempts to shirk duties, Shockwave thought. Only a great deal more blunt, but then given the current setting and circumstances, it may be that such responses were telling their own part of their story. Which didn't help one bit with the fact that the requested reports would be invaluable.
"I have access to no one else with your level of expertise of this particular type of weaponry and ammunition. In addition, you were there. Both your empirical and theoretical data are critical parts of the necessary analysis."
The thought of flattery did not enter the scientist's mind at any time. He was delivery facts, not praise, and he was not entirely aware that the words might come across as flattering. As long as the message was clear, the duty accepted and the report eventually delivered, he counted such communications as satisfactory and nothing else.
"I will also require the map." Still aware of the space they occupied, he added. "Continue, please."
Why had she even entertained the notion of saying no to him? To his credit, it seemed as if he'd actually spared a thought or two on her refusal. Unfortunately she had a pretty good understanding of his nature by now. No amount of wheedling and refusal was going to persuade him. If she didn't get a clear decision the first time she posed a complaint, there would be no second, third, or fourth chances. Shockwave was a stickler for not wasting his own time. That still didn't mean she would give him the stupid report on her theories in a timely fashion.
With a small huff, she turned back to the scene they had been examining before. The memory was chaotic and as jarring as the fight had been. She recalled all the way up until she had been knocked offline, narrating the entire process as they watched.
"It was a gypsum mine at the end of town. Boxed in, unnatural canyon that led to a mineshaft. The opening was boarded up. I thought it was safe at the time and I had thought, stupidly, that we were leading them into a perfect killing field. But the cave likely had tunnels that fed out into the surrounding area because while these fraggers-" she gestured to the humans on foot approaching from the outside, "-kept us pinned in, more were boxing us in front the back. Comms were jammed by outside interference. I didn't think were were far enough down in the shaft to disrupt..."
She frowned as the memory faded to black after a particularly embarrassing cry. Was that really what she sounded like? The next logical step would be to show her next memory but she balked. The entire encounter was hazy and still somehow branded into her processor. Going back to that moment was like poking at an exposed wire. In the dark recess of her mind, she watched him.
Shockwave turned away from Roulette, to look down the tunnel at the nebulous source of the gunfire. While any memory is, of course, limited by the perceptions of those who witness and carry it, the moment tends to dim the true quantities of data gathered. Here, relieved of such things as stress and fear and fury, Roulette proved herself an adequate source of input on the encounter.
"It is critical to know that the humans have found a possible way to curtail communications. Even if it is also likely that they merely improved upon the location's ability to do so." Dark, the emptiness of no further data, surrounded them; in it her presence, like his, was defined by their own perceptions, of each other and of themselves. Shockwave remained exactly as he was - he knew himself, his scant failings and his formidable achievements.
And she was balking. The emotional weight of whatever had transpired might as well have been a locked gate between her and the information he sought. Such gates, however, could be very flimsy when they were naught but mental energy, and he did not intend to let things be.
"Do you remember anything of your transportation? How they moved you from the mine to the research site?"
Oh, don't try and lay this on me! This should be Soundwave's department, not mine! How the pit am I supposed to-Oh for frag's sake he can hear this.
Being embarrassed in front of Shockwave was a new situation. She'd never had a reason to feel shame since his standards were so foreign from her own. And she didn't give a fig what he thought about her personal life. As for his endless tasks, well the quality of work she delivered was to be expected at this point. However, discovering she had no internal monologue to keep to herself with him taking up rental space was...
She turned away from him and covered her face. Between her fingers she muttered, "I remember nothing about the move. I just woke up at some point." The scene around them, conjured from the nightmare fuel hiding in her processor, showed exactly what she had found upon gaining consciousness. The confusing jumble of noises and lights and the alien feeling of not being able to move.
For a long moment, Shockwave said nothing. His helm and his one optic roamed over the undefined surroundings.
Finding out that Roulette was unaware that a mental process would, whilst one stood inside the same mind, have a physical component, had been quite enlightening. It meant there was practically no limit to the information she might surrender, without meaning to. The potential for insight was... refreshing.
Her all-too-emotional response merely garnered an unblinking, fixed stare while he tried to gauge the emotion itself. It was not one that Roulette had presented while in his presence before, and Shockwave found that he could not quite accurately define it.
Well, she was neither in fear or in anger, and the image was not getting any clearer yet. "Your perceptions of this image are unclear. Was your incapacitation mechanical, chemical or otherwise?"
Again he stepped around her position, slow and measured, his tone didactic. "I suspect the noise and light frequencies were in place mainly to augment your disorientation. Your senses may be fooled by them, but the memory in your processor might not be equally affected."
She couldn't look at the memory. Refused to. Which was hard, because she couldn't escape the very thing that was inside her, playing like a bad song in one's memory banks. So she looked to the closest source of an anomaly and visually latched onto the form of Shockwave. Replaying a memory wasn't hard. It was a mental loop in her processor that could be accessed, sometimes accidentally at a triggered key word. But shutting off the memory loop was easy too. Which was why she couldn't just stop herself from reliving the damned event over. No matter how much she wanted to.
Where am I? What happened? What do they want with me?
She winced at the very clear and distressed voice inside her head.
"I don't know. I just woke up. They did something to me. They were inside me." The feeling of being open and exposed returned with the memory. Only she was feeling that horrible sensation and a tiny part of her wondered if Shockwave could feel that memory too. Doubtful...memories were just data loops not a psychosomatic feed.
"They had me cut open like an autopsy." All at once she had what she had what was missing during the attack. Anger. So much of it that her targeting system came online with the internal hum of an angry wasp. Her optics nearly blazed as her body automatically looked for a target to attack.
Emotional response to memory input was not unknown to Shockwave. Alien, perhaps, in a partial sense, but not unknown - just because he saw no use in tainting the purity of science with emotional variables didn't mean he would ignore the effect that such variables could, and did, have.
Roulette did not want to engage in direct recall, and the trauma involved was clear enough as a cause of her refusal. Shockwave could not, of course, quantify emotion but he knew enough of trauma as a cause and consequence to understand pushing against it achieved nothing. Instead he remained still, silent and implacable, only his head moving upwards as her disembodied questions fluttered around them like flying units bereft of a perch.
"I don't know. I just woke up. They did something to me. They were inside me."
His attention returned to Roulette sharply. He had not measured in any precise fashion just how much she had learned from serving as his proxy, simply because he knew she would do her best to throw off any such measurement efforts. He knew she'd learned a great deal: she was not stupid, the questions she occasionally peppered him with proved that, and she watched more often than not whenever the mood struck her to invade his laboratory space. But he was not certain if she understood how... complex what she was describing was.
It was not hard to immobilize a mech. Chains would do it. Sedation would do it. Appropriate attacks on the electromagnetic spectrum or data hacks would do it. But barring solid, physical restraints, very few methods achieved complete immobilization while retaining full consciousness.
"They had me cut open like an autopsy."
He measured the scene about him, her anger, the rising whine and immediate irritation of her response to it. "Within the parameters you present, anger seems a most logical response." Anger was also refining the edges here and there of the memory; as Roulette bypased her fear, so too would her mind, or so he expected. If anger provided such a bypass, he would welcome its presence.
"Expand on your statement: they were inside you. Were you physically or remotely restrained?" The emphasis was subtle, but there; he'd garnered a much larger share of his attention than he'd given her up until that point which just those four words.
"Within the parameters you present, anger seems a most logical response."
She stared at him a moment, trying to fathom his meaning. This was Shockwave. He didn't coddle. He didn't care. So the fact that he said something that made sense and nearly sounded like a nice observation just threw Roulette for a minor mental loop.
You are such a dork, sometimes. It's almost cute. Ah Primus WHY?
She turned back to the memory loop with sharper clarity. Somehow the torture seemed nearly palatable after that blunder.
"Ah, I don't know what they did. You'd have to ask Doc Knock on that one. I just know that when I came around, I couldn't move anything. But I could feel everything. There was something wrong with my optic, like a live feed they had put in there. Invasive."
Chilled pin-pricks of helplessness sunk into her once more as they reached the least favorite part of her ordeal. Anger was still there, at what had been done to her, at the humans, but mostly the rage was there for the unknown source of her frustration. That one, solitary human.
She would be able to hear small sounds behind her, people shuffling in place. Then, over the range intercom, a microphone keyed itself. A voice spoke. It was clear, cool. Composed.
"Decepticon," it said pleasantly. "Good evening. Are you on-line?"
"We have little time to waste. First we'll go through the pre-test checklist one item at a time. What is your name and function, Decepticon? Your little friend has already given up hers, if you're curious. Should you feel disinclined to tell us, we could always go back and persuade her to volunteer the information for you."
A shudder nearly tore itself through her frame but she clamped every piece of her armor tight and rotated her wrists sharply, popping the joints with an audible crack of stressed joints. This was the insect who had been the real threat. Not the underlings who had dug in her frame.
"That human is behind this attack. I know it."
Last Edit: Jul 22, 2014 16:14:37 GMT -5 by Deleted
Shockwave examined the memory-Roulette from every angle that the real one could provide. The data was precarious, internal, but nonetheless present and preserved.
And Roulette kept adding to a growing wellspring of data the humans shouldn't have but did.
Shockwave's head tilted minutely towards her present, then more fully towards the vague direction of the human's voice.
"That human is behind this attack, I know it."
No hesitation passed over Shockwave's tone, or his presence. He did not question her; he did not ascribe such a sweeping statement to the obvious stress attached to the memory, or the trauma attached to reliving it. He had worked with Roulette for far too long not to know how rare it was to have her make a single, simple statement, to bank on truth rather than deliberately dancing around fact simply because she didn't feel like handing it over.
"I suggest you isolate an extended vocal sample of your choice and submit it to Soundwave, flagged according to the leadership status you identify in this human."
He stepped around the scene. "I believe it is important you understand the nature of my continued questioning regarding the physical intrusion inflicted upon yourself. You were fully immobilized, yet conscious. Your data input was not only targeted, but fully hacked. These are all processes requiring a medical presence with a certain level of training and equipment."
His hand swept over the scene. "And yet this was done by humans. Can you provide no further input on how they accomplished this?" He paused, both to allow her to digest the information, and because he deeply disliked having to append the next few words. "Perhaps one of your 'educated guesses'?"