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.
Rhinox's engine spluttered in a snicker as he reviewed the pinged files. "No video games? You poor, deprived spark. How did you ever survive."
Sarcasm? Him? Naaaah. Rattrap is the sarcastic one, not Rhinox.
"The kids - the human kids, I mean - have been introducing me to television as well," he continued, slowing to take a curve in the road at precisely the recommended speed as helpfully informed by a bright orange sign. "Nothing from that long ago, though. I imagine you know more about the recent evolution of the media than they do. ....As well as the evolution of video games," he added with warm amusement.
"It. Was. Tragic," Shadow proclaimed, playing it up for Rhinox's benefit. "You'd be amazed how addictive Pong," she sent him a copy of the game, "can be when there are no other alternatives."
Lies and damn lies - she had never been that desperate for entertainment - but as long as they kept Rhinox entertained and focused on things which were not her, she was happy to spin them.
"Now, television hasn't really changed that much. The special effects are better, and the technology is fancier, but it's amazing - or depressing, depending on your point of view - how little the core values reflected in human entertainment have changed over the decades. Particularly recently, there's been an upsurge in remaking shows from a generation ago, which is either due to a woeful lack of imagination or a desire to turn back what little social progress they've made, depending on which articles you read on the internet." She huffed a little laugh. "Or simply a sign that humans are humans and tastes don't change all that much in a couple of generations."
Rhinox took a moment to play Pong in a subset of his processor. It - didn't take long.
"Hmm, maybe I haven't missed much then," he mused. "Or maybe I should do a side-by-side comparison of one of those remakes with their originals, just to see - hang on."
He rolled - carefully - to a stop, giving plenty of time to let Shadow stop too without any unfortunate bumper incidents. His headlights brightened, spilling light over the curve ahead and a low, muddy rise beyond, buttressed by simple wood braces. Rhinox transformed, frowning in concentration, and approached the cliff.
Shadow rolled to a stop behind Rhinox, but didn't immediately transform, instead straining her sensors to detect his reason for stopping. There...didn't appear to be one, and she wondered if he was getting false readings from the storm. He hadn't been on Earth long, after all, and the interference from the native weather patterns could be deceiving.
"Something wrong?" she asked finally, rolling after him. The simple wooden supports he was approaching wouldn't hold back a real mudslide if one got going, and she didn't think adding the vibrations of a second set of pedes would help. "You might want to watch your step; I don't think there's enough plant life growing there to hold the soil in place much longer."
"That's the problem," Rhinox answered distractedly, examining the situation carefully from all angles. "I was up here the other day - there's sunrays up there. Endangered species of flower. And that buttress looks about two clicks from giving way. If it mudslides..."
He shifted to one side, scanning the buttress with (limited) vision and sensor-scans both. Have to repair it without making it look repaired. I didn't exactly bring carpentry tools with me. Maybe if I...?
Belatedly, he remembered there was someone else with him, and technically they were on patrol. He turned and offered Shadow an apologetic smile. "This is kind of a personal project," he explained. "If you want, you can scout ahead and I'll catch up in a few minutes."
It was the sort of offer she should have taken and run with; her recent wipe-out aside, she could very easily make sure Rhinox wouldn't catch up to her if he let her have a lead. Frag, he probably wouldn't even notice if she stayed or went, he was so focused on the puzzle in front of him. She could just...go, no repercussions, finish her patrol, head back to base, and spend some time soaking the mud out of her joints.
Or she could stay, possibly set herself up for a lecture on Doing Stupid Slag While On Patrol, definitely grind more mud under her plates, and give Rhinox a reason to say nice things about her to Jazz.
"What do you think you can do?" she asked, taking a better sensor scan of the flimsy wooden structure as she transformed. It didn't look promising. "Unless you have a retaining wall hidden in your subspace?"
Brownie points. She was totally only staying for the brownie points.
Last Edit: Mar 12, 2012 23:02:40 GMT -5 by Deleted
Rhinox sighed, a bit theatrically, but a flicker of pleasure and gratitude made it to his field. "Sadly, no. We'll have to make do with what we have."
He knelt by the worst strut, almost rotted through in places. The mud squelched around his leg and up into his knee, cool and wet and gritty; he'd have to hose it out later. "This one is ready to give out. The rest, I think, will hold with a little reinforcement. If you'll keep the retaining wall that's there steady, we can spread out the remaining struts and that should be enough to keep the structure from collapsing." He nodded. "No problem."
((OOC: Not sure whether this should succeed, or suffer Catastrophic Failure and send them both home covered in mud and with flowerpots full of endangered flowers in their backseats. Thots?))
"If you're sure," Shadow said dubiously. Holding the wall steady shouldn't be a problem, but it wasn't like any of the wooden struts appeared to be in good condition. Still, Rhinox was the engineer.
Gingerly, pedes sinking deep into the ever-worsening mud, she moved into the position Rhinox indicated with an absent wave of his hand, bracing the retaining wall. "Okay, I've got it." Even if 'it' felt flimsy and insubstantial. "Go ahead and do whatever you need to do."
((OOC: I have to vote for Catastrophic Failure and mud and plants in their back seats. Possibly with bonus hosing each other off in the wash racks and swearing Never To Speak Of This Again.))
Rhinox nodded to her firmly - they had a good plan. Now it was time to implement it.
Beside Shadowrunner, the bad strut was held on by two bolts, all but rusted shut. Rhinox had to break them loose, and spin them free with his hexwrench not without the loud whine of metal and groan of wood. As it came free, Rhinox braced the bulwark with one hand and pinged Shadow with a look out, here it comes glyph. He pulled it free and tossed it away, slapping his free hand on the wall as weight of mud strained against the bulwark. Some of it slipped free, leaving the rise lopsided; but Rhinox felt the pressure ease under his hands, and when he cautiously lifted his hands away the rest of the mud stayed where it was.
Rhinox grinned in victory. "Now for the hard part," he said, half to himself, and gestured Shadow to stand and brace where the bad strut had been. "We'll move the one on the other end here, and spread out the others," he explained, walking cautiously around his partner to the last strut. "Here goes nothing," he said, and started to work.
((OOC: I don't think that has ever been debated.))
Overall, Shadow had the easier job: stand still and impersonate a post. Easy didn't mean pleasant, however. Her pedes kept steadily sinking into the mud, the rain was coming down in such wind lashed torrents that she might as well have shuttered her optics for all the good they were doing her, and the bulwark was feeling flimsier by the klik, as rain soaked the old wood and increased the weight of the mud it was holding back.
Rhinox was working as quickly as he dared, but none of the struts were in particularly good shape, dried and cracked from sun and wind and heat, and he was having to carefully work them loose to keep them from splitting completely. His field had taken on the tightly focused but content resonance of someone completely absorbed in his work (it reminded her, a little, of Ironhide when you put a weapon in front of him), and the few comments he made tended to be directed at himself rather than at her.
He was nearly finished when she heard a faint creak-crack from the wood as something shifted, sending a watery river of mud around her legs, then she could feel the groaning vibration from the wood she was bracing.
Rhinox had just enough time to glance up distractedly and say, "What-" before all hell broke loose.
'All hell,' in this case, being several tons of mud freed suddenly from a flimsy wooden barrier, with enough force to its fall to send two not-insubstantial mechanical sentients aft over teakettle. Rhinox's only thought was the flowers! as he fell, flailed through the slick mud, and finally managed to sit semi-upright, covered in mud.
At least the heavy rain would help to wash some of it off. Rhinox gave Shadow a sheepish look. "Sorry."
Well, no one could accuse her of not trying to get along. They could accuse her of not thinking, but they absolutely could not accuse her of not trying.
Shadow struggled into a sitting position, regarded the mud pooled around them and the devastated incline, and gave Rhinox a sardonic look. "So," she said, arching an optic ridge, "what's plan B?"
Rhinox gazed sadly at the ruin of mud that had once been the habitat for a rare and beautiful species of flower. No way would they survive now, with their ground dissolving underneath them.
His EMF strengthened with resolve. Not while I can do something about it!
He stood, careful not to crush a single leaf, and brushed mud out of the more vulnerable joinings. "Plan B," he answered determinedly, "is to move the flowers." He unsubspaced his tool box and emptied it out quickly, stowing his tools back in subspace in a hopeless jumble that he knew he'd regret later. "We'll fit as many as we can in here, and I'll look after them until I can transplant them somewhere with a better foundation." He started scooping up mud and plants, tucking the flowers in upright with infinite care.
For a fraction of a nano-klik, Shadow was convinced Rhinox was completely glitched.
Then she had to admit that this wasn't any more glitched than trying to save an injured cheetah she knew slag-all about (probably less glitched than sneaking back across continents daily to feed it; substantially less glitched than worrying that she didn't know what had happened to it once it could walk again). At least Rhinox had some clue what to do about his flowers.
She scanned the plants already in his tool box, then turned her scanners on the mud around them. There were... a lot of these plants, more than Rhinox could hope to rescue, even when she discounted the ones which had been crushed and torn apart by the mudslide.
"My alt mode," she said as she carefully handed Rhinox a plant, the fierce determination of his field washing across her like sunlight, "has a lot of cargo space. Not as much as your alt, obviously, but they'd be protected from this storm, and," she vented hard, a fine mist of mud and steam forced out of her system, "it's not like it's possible for me to get any muddier." Glyphs for humor/joking, and a tangle that roughly translated as OMG worst plan EVAR, "You already owe me so big for this, what's another bad idea or two, right?"
Rhinox bestowed on her a grateful, relieved smile, apology and thanks chasing through the resolve in his field, along with recognition and commisseration with the amusement/worstplanEVAR glyphs in hers. In retrospect, not his brightest idea.
"Right," he confirmed, taking the flower from her and packing it away gently. ".....And I really hope we don't run into any 'Cons," he observed wryly, bending to get another plant. "Juggling guns and flowerpots could get awkward."
He worked quickly, getting in as many of the sunrays as he could - along with a few other plants, because why not - and filled the spaces with mud to keep things stable. "Okay," he sighed, with a regretful look at the ruin of plants left behind. "I think that's the best we can do. Let's get you back to the road before you transform - I'd hate to have to roll through this stuff." Shadow had been through enough because of him - no need to get her stuck in the mud too.