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.
Barricade simply lay there, claws on his abdomen, and contemplated the ceiling for a moment. He felt infinitely better now, getting some notion of context always a pleasurable hum in the neural net… and leaving Shot in a quivering pile of plating and EM waves had been satisfactory as well. Cade was still amnesiac, core-locked, and his plates looked slagged to the Pit, but making some bright plate smart-aleck blow a gasket and fall dithering had improved his disposition greatly.
“So the Decepticons, as per their name, are the ‘bad guys’.” Barricade’s blue optics flicked to Moonshot, looking him up and down. He hadn’t missed the edge in his EMF at the Cons, that suggestion of hate mixed with the fear that came with deference... but his opinion on the Autobots was harder to analyze. “And the Autobots are too good to survive.” He laid his head back, eyes to the ceiling again. “So I gather the war was a class war. Low against the high, the whole structure coming down?”
Barricade hummed slightly. “Are the Autobots the working class?” he demanded, deciding that pretending he wasn’t completely amnesiac would be too hard a sell to bother with. “The Decepticons – what’s left of the Council’s military?” They certainly lied enough to earn the name. “Autonomy was the name of the game in the revolutionary circles I remember. So who was who at the start?” Maybe I can figure who I joined…
"You'd be better off asking Cleaver about all of this," Moonshot admitted, equal parts sheepish and unamused. "I've... never belonged to a side, for reasons that should now be fairly obvious. The other members of my cohort were neutralists as well. Everything I've learned of the 'bots and 'cons I've learned from avoiding them or... well, failing to avoid them. I'll give it a shot, though."
Lanky though he might have been, Moonshot did a spectacular job of folding into a compact little ball when the mood so struck him. Knees pressed to his chest, arms draped loosely around his shins, the white mech resembled nothing more than a particularly angular heap of spare parts left in the wake of some juggernaut's rampage. Even whilst sitting perfectly still he managed to look untidy.
"It *was* class warfare, at least to start with. Most of the 'cons were... the phrase my creators used was 'drop-caste glitch-fraggers', the absolute lowest of the low. They didn't have a slagging thing to lose by inciting rebellion, and a whole Pit of a lot to gain. The 'bots- or the mech who'd become 'bots eventually- were the exact opposite story. Half of them were Towerlings, and even those who weren't had credits to burn. I don't think any of them really wanted war, least of all on the terms the rebels were offering, but by the time they figured out what was happening they didn't exactly have a choice in the matter. Military wound up on both sides, more 'con than 'bot. I guess it fit more." He paused for a moment, appreciating the irony of his race's history anew. "Somewhere along the line the freedom fighters and the Pit-spawn got their wires crossed and swapped roles. Offhand I don't know where or how. Always figured it was safer to not. Ignorance is bliss and all that."
Barricade begged to fragging differ. ‘Not knowing’ was the crux of his every anxiety right now and the lynchpin in the structure of his collapsing identity because there were literally eons, hundreds of thousands of years worth of knowledge and history and personal choice, locked in his head where he could not get at it and put the mech he was in context. He was several millennia regressed to some pre-war, pre-revolutionary, pre-holocaust, new-spark so oblivious that even some bright-plate, Neautralist glitch-wit had more experience than him.
He glanced at Moonshot derisively, the pale armored mech curled into a fragile ball, the bend in his body showing gaps and seams in the too-thin build of his frame. Not build to fight. Built to die then he thought coldly before looking at the ceiling again. Either Moonshot was being super tactful because he didn’t want Cade to rip his pretty face off, or thought the infiltrator was being obtuse – he hadn’t questioned why Barricade wanted to know what were now basic historical facts.
“So the revolutionary faction is now the militant oppressor,” said Barricade. No doubt, this was the bare bones of the conflict. “And the old tyrant guard is the struggling against them. That’s a lot of gray area.” Easy for an infiltrator to melt into either side… and my law cohort would have been on of the first to join the Autobot army in function class refit. So was I enlisted? In cover? Spy or double agent but for whom? And… “You say the Autobots are ‘good’,” said Cade. “Too good to torture a POW, would you say?”
Last Edit: Feb 18, 2012 16:00:33 GMT -5 by Deleted
Now that was something he'd never stopped to consider. The Decepticons might make life unpleasant for every mech unfortunate enough to cross their path, allegiances be scrapped, but would the Autobots be willing to sink to that same level of depravity? Perhaps a better question wasn't if they would, but what it would take to make them. Offhand nothing presented itself; Moonshot couldn't quite decide whether that particular finding reassured him or not.
"I wouldn't put it past them," He muttered, apparently addressing his own pedes. "Can't say from personal experience. If anything would make them break their code of honor, though, that'd be it. If they were desperate enough for information..." That particular train of thought led to conclusions he wasn't quite ready to examine and so was hastily terminated. Silence fell for a nanoklik before a mad desire to keep talking- and thus of (however nominal) value to the Pit-spawn across the hall- made him plunge onward.
"...Look. I'm glad to fill in the blanks where I can, but there's... a lot of them. Why?"
“Over seventy percent of my memory core is locked,” said Barricade with zero preamble, tapping the tips of his claws against the flat of his abdominal plating. There would be no keeping that secret with Cleaver and Reflector on the ship and even if he could keep it to himself, there was little point expending the energy. The infiltrator turned his head aside to look at the sniper, smiling in a way that was perfectly, pleasantly, lethal. “So that means the details of the Autobot-Decepticon war are escaping me just a touch so I’m trying to figure out who, among each of the factions, is more likely to split a mech up the middle and try to rip their spark out at the support linkage before hacking them into a core-lock.”
He shrugged. “Then again, if I’ve gotten through this war with even a fraction of my sparkling personality intact, I can drive the most pious Primus-loving fragger straight to murder so however nasty a Con might be, I bet I can make a Bot break all their honorable oaths with five minutes and half a chink in the armor.” He smirked darkly. “Cleaver says they tore my insignia – if I had one – out of my mesh so I’m Neutral by necessity, not choice right now. So... what do you think, Shot? I strike you as a Con or a Bot?"
Genocide was something you could hold at an arm's length if you really had to. Moonshot considered himself an expert on doing just that- or he did, anyway, right up until Barricade brought the brutal reality of the world they'd come to inhabit crashing down around his audios. Just because he'd escaped persecution- a state of affairs that had far more to do with luck than with his supposed skill- didn't mean the rest of the universe had. He'd seen evidence of that before, of course- the great swathes of destruction cut through space were hard to miss- but never before had it struck so painfully close to home. The war threatening to destroy his race wasn't some vague theory he could shrug off. It was real, it was ugly, and it hurt.
He was only dimly aware of the fact that his hands were shaking, pale plates clicking together in stacatto not-rhythm despite his best efforts to still them. Clenching his fists just transmitted tremors up his arms, making the abused plates around his shoulders cry out in protest. Anger, fear, a childish sense of betrayed trust- it all blended and commingled and doubled back onto itself in the feedback loop from hell.
"That isn't right. Even if you were a 'Con before, that isn't right."
“Can I remind you,” he said, his tone perfectly and eloquently disbelieving, “that I threatened to rip your throat tubing out and jam it down your intake less than two kilks ago?” A sneer because horror, not pity, had been the goal of his last remark – raw brutality to shock the coward. Hadn’t expected the self-serving little slag-head to grow struts and a spark all of a sudden. “So while your moral outrage on my behalf is touching … it’s somewhat glitched in context, mech.”
He sat up facing Moonshot. “I’ve never been to war and I know it’s face in microcosm at least – law bots always know. I don’t believe you’re so naïve. War isn’t ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ it’s necessity and it is ugly, little mech.” One clawed hand traced the run of raw silver from Cade’s collar plate to his belly – the obscene split in his center seam. Cade’s smile was unbalanced, something manic in the buzz of his engines. “War," he said, watching Moonshot shrink away from him, "war looks like this.”
It didn't surprise Barricade that the other mech left pretty quickly following that, leaving the infiltrator to himself. Barricade tipped his head against the wall and ex-vented gently, his hand in a fist over his spark.