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.
She wasn't sure whether or not her heart was racing, whether or not her body had simply gotten used to the fired up nervous system or whether she had actually become as settled as she felt. But that hand shifting in front of her path set her heart to pounding. At least her limbs had enough control to keep herself from stumbling back. With no other choice, she backed away from the hand and back under those eerily pale optics, craning her neck to peer up at him.
Curious. She knew what that felt like all too well, and above all else what it meant. Now she was under the spotlight, literally, until he either became bored or found out whatever he wanted to know. 'So much for trying to stay out of his way. With luck -- none of which she had -- he might become bored with her after this meeting. At the moment, she found it too soon to tell whether or not making an impression on this mech's memory would be better or worse for her future birthdays.
"I'm not really… an expert on vehicle models, but… yeah, I'll give it a shot." She shrugged. It seemed a strange request, suspicious at best, but far be it from her to try and rationalize the thought process of a… amnesia. Cleaver had said he had something like amnesia. 'Does he really not remember what he transforms into?' Stepping back, she gave her hand a casual wave to the new space. "Go for it."
Barricade’s transformation was rough at the very best, none of that aesthetic flash and shift, plates and protoskeletal exhibition or complexity; the massive black and white machine simply burst into a thousands whirling parts with a sound like a junk-heap falling down as the extraneous section of his body shifted into subspace and stopped, finally, as a battered looking automobile rocking back on its wheels. Barricade himself didn’t have the bandwidth to spare looking for Google match on his alt and he could feel his transformation cogs grinding through every step of the shift. He felt comfortable in this form, however, so it was a good fit and he liked the aggression in the design.
“Well, fleshling?” The car’s headlight flashed at her, the lightbar on the roof whirring briefly alight before shutting off. “What manner of vehicle am I?”
Last Edit: Feb 18, 2012 20:44:34 GMT -5 by Deleted
Reflector of course knew what Barricade was in his alt mode, but it never really came up wen they had their little chats. But thankfully the topic had moved from 'smash human' to something a tad more harmless. However Reflector was interested to see how the human would react, as a person with her reputation was no doubt weary of the local law enforcement.
Though she had seen the transformation before, and from a larger female… femme?… with a larger alt mode, she still found herself adjusting her steps backwards until Barricade settled on his four wheels. Perhaps some of it was due to the threat that she was now holding a conversation with, but most of it from the sheer amount of awe. Ahe found her mind stilling with a quiet fascination, a deep interest, at the entire process.
She let herself step a little closer, shifting to the side to observe the painting. "You're a car. The actual model looks like a Mustang, but it looks like the one you picked up…er… scanned, I guess, was a police car." She sighed absently, looking over the quote painted along the rear paneling. True, she was never much for law or law enforcement, but despite her own trouble-making she had no issue with some of the officers themselves. …Some of them she knew by name in her younger days. The whole thought of the mech she just met in the form of something like a police car left her with a deadpan. 'A homicidal police man… a sociopathic police car… That one sounds like it fits.' "You're just a bucket of fun on wheels, aren't you?"
"Does--" She caught herself. 'Does it hurt?' she was about to ask… but thought better of it. She shouldn't be encouraging conversation, and part of her, the part that shut her mouth, half expected to be swatted into a wall for asking a question at all. So she swallowed it, leaning her back against the wall to cross her arms over her chest. "…Anything else?"
“A law enforcement build?” I must have been feeling nostalgic… or ironic, perhaps. “A sensible choice,” continued Barricade, his voice coming from a region somewhere beneath the hood, humming in the windshield. His engine purred and rumbled in an amicable away as he shifted into gear and rolled forward, idly driving around in front of the human at a mere walking pace and circling, a low, long-wave note of bored intrigue in his EMF. “If your law enforcement is anything like our own, natives do not often question the actions of its enforcers and…protectors.”
From the way he said the word, it was a joke. “But no… nothing else pressing in mind, human, I was curious.” He stopped rolling then. “And I suppose there is no time like the present to fit for an integrated alt. Reflector. Get out here.” Little mech hadn’t yet learned to close off his end of the carrier link. There was a smirk in his tone. “The human should meet the full crew.”
Last Edit: Feb 19, 2012 23:18:59 GMT -5 by Deleted
Reflector jumped at the sound of his name, which wasn't much of a smart move considering he was hanging on to the side of a wall. Thankfully he remembered his wings, buzzing them quickly to take off into the air. The winged camera looking thing then flew over to land before the human, more or less standing between her and Barricade who seemed content to just send a wave of smugness through their off connection. The minicon then rotated himself around on the tiny insect legs to pan his massive optic up at the human femme.
"Um...hello Miss Catherine." He greeted in a rather formal manner which betrayed just how nervous the little bot was. Of course the rest Reflector was busy navigating the ship to join with his head, shouldn't take but a moment but it still left him feeling even more timid then he normally was.
'Wait, they're together…?!' The way her head tilted and brows knitted in an incredulous expression, she may as well have said it out loud. Such a small… and dare she say 'cute' looking mechanism coexisting with her first impression of Barricade was difficult to believe. Then again, Reflector had the advantage of not being made of bone and muscle tissue.
Though apprehensive of the car in front of her, she pushed off of the wall… slowly, of course. She felt as though a sudden movement might startle it. 'A good spark.' She recalled Cleaver saying. This was a pleasant change from near-death. "Hi…. hey, Reflector." A smile eased its way onto her face, this one… granted it didn't try to eat her face… she could come to like. "Nice to finally meet you." She shifted her eyes to Barricade's form, looking hopefully to start a relaxed conversation. If she was going to be doing something she wasn't supposed to, she was going to enjoy it. "So you're still looking for an alt mode, I take it? See anything that calls your name?"
Barricade idled there lazily, watching the human’s body langage cautiously shift from defensive to more relaxed at the mere presence of the little mini-con. He was, meanwhile, checking the kibble in his alt and IDing their functionality and necessity looking for something that he could let the mini-con take over. His radio, a camera, the lightbar, sections of seating, could do a refit for some of his exterior body work, but he didn’t want to lose any of the lines or armor if the cassette was gone or make the cassette an exterior section that could be damaged in combat.
He forwarded his specs to the cassette. “There are a few options for compatibility. Your function type and mass would make a linked alt plausible. Or utilize holo-projection software and front a false occupant. Just don’t inconvenience me, Reflector.” He snarled that last part, but the sub-sonics in his voice were more amicable… and nothing the human’s hearing could pick up.
Last Edit: Feb 19, 2012 22:52:54 GMT -5 by Deleted
Reflector glanced back and forth between the two, not really all that sure what they were getting at. And then he transformed, retracting his legs and wings to become a normal looking hand-held video camera. "I'm sorry to disappointing you, but I have chosen my alt modes a while back." Only a few seconds later what looked like a boxy tank and a mini-helicopter moved in beside the camera, coming from down the hallways, opposite sides at that. Once they set down they transformed, the mini-tank becoming a wireless adapter and the copter a satellite dish. Then the three clicked open as what looked like hundreds of cables slithered out of the machines, quickly wrapping and connecting to each other until a form could be seen, growing to human like proportions, though a little smaller then Catherine. When finished Reflector blinked his massive optic at the human and once more began to shift, his wires and cables wrapping around each other until his main mass began to shrink in size. When his body was done changing he looked like a large tri-pod camera, the sort bird watchers might use.
"I also have an integrated transformation for when I link up for Barricade, managed to scan it into my systems early this morning...though it's untested." As he spoke Reflector split apart into the cables again, forming his robot mode once more. When he did he raised a hand up and opened the cabled wrapped fingers towards the woman "Um...may I shake your hand? My research tells me this is how friendly humans are greeted..."
Last Edit: Feb 19, 2012 23:12:19 GMT -5 by reflector
She hid a wince. Reflector might have been able to pick up on the subtle undertones of Cade's speech, but of course, she couldn't. However he might have sounded to a Cybertronian, to her it simply sounded vicious. The little minion, however, didn't seem to be bothered by it in the least.
'A linked alt…' She mused, watching with a deep interest at the transformations of.. three? different parts that all seemed to combine into Reflector. A transformation that seemed to be just as intricate, if not more so, than Cade and Cleaver. 'So they're partners of sorts.'
"Looks good." She said, grinning when Reflector held out a hand. Hesitantly at first, she extended her hand, but seemed to relax when she clasped the cabled fingers. Even giggled. "You may, and you'd be right. In most parts of the world, anyway." She'd give a slight shake. "Nice to meet you, again." Before she could stop herself, she slipped her eyes towards Barricade, adding with an almost tired sigh, "Don't get any ideas for 'hand shake'." ' 'cranky' serrated fingers and polite cable hand-shake. They're like polar opposites.' "So you… link, to Barricade?"
::My systems are up to standard to test the linked-transformation, if you’re up for it.:: Barricade commed silently this time to Reflector along their link. ::Basic. I’m not in the mood to try anything more complicated than a base-line reformatting. I still have the old transformation sequences for my old partner, Frenzy, in place. There should be no problem adapting a secondary sequence for you. You’re both of similar design.::
Though Frenzy had at least been a second-gen carrier switch, not a new-spark. His system records had Frenzy flagged as having belonged to another mechanism prior to partnering with him. No ID tag that he recognized so that database of his memory core was still locked, but most of his carrier-cassette systems were otherwise untouched… they just were not back-dooring through the firewalls to any more data. The infiltrator’s body remembered how to carry a cassette and his neural net seemed geared for it, but his personal memory held very little but the barest of sense memory of Frenzy, conversations or transformations they’d had, nothing specific. He’d trusted the mechanism though… that in and of itself said several massive things about what kind of mechanism war had made Barricade.
“We are partners,” Barricade said simply, leaving any other level of detail to Reflector. The nature of their accidental link up he would not volunteer if Reflector did not.
Last Edit: Feb 19, 2012 23:53:30 GMT -5 by Deleted
"I wouldn't say that..." Reflector added as he winced, hearing Barricade once more confirm that they were chained together. "It was not supposed to happen...I never meant it to happen, but it happened." He sounded more then a little frightened as he walked over to the police car and then placed his hand on the hood, taking in a quick vent of air, the sound coming from inside the minicon's chest instead of his head. "Now or never..." Then he began to split apart into those cables, moving like a some sort of robotic octopus the little mech managed to slide under the hood, his cables linking up to a hundred different parts of Barricade to lend the smaller bot's impressive processing power to his 'partner'.
When all his parts stopped moving Reflector had fused himself to what was the external camera on many police machines. He then had to concentrate to broadcast his voice a bit so that Catherine could hear "Um...my final alt, a car-bound police recorder." he announced,. Reflector was frightened, scared out of his little mind. The closest thing he had ever done to another bot was hack them, being more or less a living cog in a larger machine was very intimidating to the little bot and he wanted to regain his separate self as soon as possible.
She opened her mouth to speak, her muscles tensed as if to move foreword.. but she found herself frozen. Silent. 'Sometimes those are the things we need to happen to us the most…' She wanted to say it, she had believed it herself, but the words sank like stones in her heart, pinning the rest of her where she stood. How could she say that? To a being she barely knew, of a race she knew nothing about, on a topic she had absolutely no experience in-- say all of that right in front of the mech he was now 'bonded' to?
Her shoulders slumped as Reflector merged with Barricade, the process lost to an ache she couldn't help but feel for the minicon. She wasn't sure how much of it she might have been misreading, how much of it she might be superimposing, but she'd be damned if she didn't want to give him a shoulder. Taking in a deep breath, the brief stunned look on her face vanished in an instant, replaced with an easy-going grin and a hands-in-the-pockets posture in an attempt to move to a lighter.. or at least different.. subject. "Nice… had a few run-ins with those back in younger days. …police cars included. So how long have you guys known Cleaver and home-sweet-home, here?" She gestured to the ship around them before taking her spot to lean back against the wall.
Barricade too, grimaced internally at the hardware and software merge, that feeling of alien systems syncing into his own an unfamiliar mental shift. Physically, the uplink into his transformation and carrier ports was easy (mass-memory and ready subroutines kicked in and networked the cassette instantly and smoothly) but psychologically, it was... uncomfortable.
The infiltrator felt his neutral net bandwidth massively expand with the addition of another finely tuned, high-powered (and un-blocked) processor. Remotely, Barricade was impressed. Reflector’s creator had not skimped on the mini-con’s software even remotely. Barricade, who had never been built for the cyber-complexities of hacking, would be challenged now to find a mech with bearings to take on the mental security afforded by the min-con.
Of course, the flip-side of that was the mini-con now inhabited sections of his mind. Auxiliary ones, they did not share thoughts, but still... It make Barricade very aware of the young cassette’s discomfort (like a high-frequency buzz in his brain) and he was no doubt picking up Barricade’s mental recoil. For the mini-con’s sake (and the sake of his own calm) Barricade altered his EMF to a more steady, unflinching calm – the composure of a mech used to dealing with a lot of slag.
:: Accidental or not.:: said Cade privately, flatly. ::Co-survival is partnership, though in circumstance only, if you wish.:: And linked at they were, there was no room for lying. Barricade rumbled a bit. ::We can separate now. I have the sequence programmed in.::
“About two of your months,” said Barricade to the human.
Reflector did not like this at all, the human's question gave him just what he needed to ooze out of Barricade and reform his robot mode, though he was a lot more twitchy afterwards. The little mech then wandered over to Catherine his optic's shutters closing a little as he zoomed in on her, studying her to get the sensation of being inside Barricade out of his mind.
"I found Cleaver on our home world. Cybertron. I was a Decepticon, I was built one. One day a mech conspired against me, claimed I was a traitor and tried to kill me, I ran and found myself a stowaway on Cleaver's ship. She found me and took me in. We then crashed on this planet some years ago..." It wasn't a happy tale, but Reflector was growing more attached to the human and Barricade knew much of this already.