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.
“I’ll take whatever you got on you right now. After that I better get back t’medical. Prime give me a quick rewire an’ a patch for my arm, but Cleaver’s gonna wanna get a shot at me after Sunstreaker’s… stable.”
Sideswipe didn’t say anything else for a moment, just staring down at his arm in a kind of distracted silence. He didn’t get to his feet, watching the solvent rinse away the grit from the still crushed armor of his right knee. Prime had done a quick bypass on that too, saying exactly nothing to him because – at the time – Sideswipe had been mostly unconscious. Cleaver would be looking for him with the intent of doing a proper job. Then and only then would she let him see Sunstreaker. Same as any other time they were both slagged. He didn’t like it, but sparksplits had high probability for vicarious death so until they were both stable, neither was safe.
He looked at Jazz. “The Prime… yo’ve actually worked with him for a while. Think he’s gonna throw the book and us for ignoring the call?”
Jazz nearly laughed, but caught it at the last klik. It would have come out too bitter, he knew.
You'd have to get in line behind me, racked up for taking the more-than-distant chance that Megatron might have come barreling through that bridge and right into the middle of Control.
Jazz wasn't sure which he was dreading more: that Optimus would take him to task for that...or that he wouldn't. Sometimes Optimus could be too...forgiving. Too willing to overlook...
Jazz moved around to Sideswipe's front and took the brush gently to anything that hadn't gotten properly cleaned. Including, VERY gently, to the crushed knee. The plates there were too warped to allow a proper cleaning, but he got the worst of it, then swept his brush downward, then upward. It was soothing, in a way. It was something he could DO.
"No, mech. I don't think he'll be mad at all. He'll...I think he'll understand. Why you didn't come, I mean. No way he'll blame you for going Neutral after that slag. He's not a hard-aft, really. He's...his spark doesn't spin that way."
Sideswipe looked up from the wreckage of his knee, optics fixing steady on Jazz at he spoke for the Prime, a frequency in his voice that even the long time wise-guy, hard-case, and gladiatorial commando recognized as sincere on a mech who had a hundred faces. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just narrowed his optics, the nuclear glow of his eyes refocusing on his friend’s face, trying to gauge the depth of that reverence and whether it ran – like Sideswipe suspected – to the saboteur’s elusive core. Sideswipe was a fighter but in that he chose to fight for his own reasons and the dark motives for his violence were his own and Sunstreaker’s – the necessity of their existence, sparked ugly, and unruly – so this was a part of Jazz that Sideswipe wasn’t sure he’d ever get.
That impulse to remake himself in the image of whatever someone needed to be, his willingness to do so. Even with him and his brother, Sideswipe knew somewhere in the back of his mind that some aspect of the Jazz he knew was a fabrication – not maliciously so, but part of the mech’s nature. That said, the way Jazz said that last sentence… Sideswipe suspected he may had run farther afield from his nature than ever before for this mechanoid, in the name of him. Sideswipe tilted his head slightly.
“And how," said Sideswipe, "does his spark spin exactly? What makes him worth followin' 'sides the whole 'Not Being Megatron' then? Don't get me wrong, that's points in my book - like oodles, actually - but it ain't special. He's just the other guy on a two-sided fight.” His tone invited correction.
Jazz huffed an amused vent, sending the solvent to spatter the wall. "Ask me a hard question, why don't ya?"
When Sideswipe was as clean as he was going to get, Jazz let his hands drop, optics still on them as he thought.
What makes him worth followin'?
A thousand answers came to mind. A thousand scenes recalled from archives so old they had rust on them. A thousand conversations echoed in his audials.
I have seen you choose to be a monster. And I have seen you choose to be the mech that I’ve grown to trust with my life and lives of those that follow me.
Because he makes me want to be a better mecha. Where Megatron made me want to be a WORSE one--just to be able to function day to day, just to convince myself that what we were doing was RIGHT--Optimus makes me want to be BETTER. He WANTS me to be better.
This is me, under the masks. You sure this is what you want? Yes. I am sure.
Because everyone changes me. Everyone leaves a little piece of themselves behind in the form of what they needed, what I was for them. All those masks never really go away, just get tucked down inside somewhere. Some of them I'm better for having. Some of them I'm not. Prime, though...the things he needs, the things I become for him...fit. They're things I want to be. Things I wish I could be. Things I probably will never BE...but which I want to TRY to be.
It is what we choose to be, now and going forward, that matters.
And I like that feeling. Of having something to strive for. Of having someone who wants me to change not for them, but for ME.
Whatever face you choose, Jazz, at the core of it you are a mech I trust to protect and care for your team.
Because he believes in me. And that makes ME believe in me.
That was the personal answer. The too-personal answer, probably. Definitely not the best answer for Sideswipe. Luckily, it wasn't the only answer.
Jazz pushed himself back to sit against the wall. "When I switched I thought you were right. Decepticons, Autobots, it was all kilIing, so what did it matter, right? I just wanted...just wanted the war to be over. Didn't like where the 'Cons were driving, so figured I'd better work for the other side."
Jazz flicked his claws out, gesturing a shrug. "Now.... To be honest, it's not about ideology anymore. It's about family. My family's here, and I will defend them to my last drop of energon. Prime, well.... I like him, I'll admit. He's a good mech. Fair and smart and sometimes too kind for his own good. Practices what he preaches and is harder on himself than he is on anyone else. I believe in him, Sides. I believe in what he wants to build. But when it comes down to it, I don't fight for HIM. I don't fight for the Autobot Cause. I fight for my cohort, my friends, and for myself. Because I want an end to this war that doesn't give us yet another authority that'll go around slagging those who don't agree with him. Prime and the Autobots are my way there. "
Jazz dug into his subspace, pulling out one, two, three cubes of high grade. One of them was old. His last of Crystal City's Rhodium Best. He held them all three out to Sideswipe.
Sideswipe took the cubes, subspacing two and cracking open the Rhodium’s. Of that, he drank half and handed the remaining highgrade to Jazz because, honestly, they were about to drink what was literally the last of its kind in the universal and that experience, bitter as it was, was better off shared. He didn’t know what to make of the sincerity in Jazz’s field, the fact that the silver-tongued, fast talker was tripping over himself finding words to spin – meaning he wasn’t spinning them, because as a professional fast-talker, Sideswipe knew a story came easily to them but the truth was stumbling block. Jazz seemed to really buy into this guy, into the Prime himself, no philosophy or Autobot rallying cry, he seemed to set his hopes on this Prime and pinned them there. Something Sideswipe couldn’t comprehend.
“It’s all killing, Jazz,” said Sideswipe, a very old sentiment of his. His and Sunstreakers. “Yur just killin’for family now, same as I’ve been doin’ from day one. It's a good reason, one of the best, keeps ya goin' when ya should be dead a ditch. But my family is in pieces in th’ other room. So I don’t rightly know who I should be killin’ for right now. Bad place to be.” Sideswipe stood up, looked down at his friend, wondered all the things that had changed and the things that really hadn’t. “I’m gonna go sit with Sunny now. You’ll know where to find me.”
"I know," Jazz said, looking up at Sides with a smile as he downed the last of the Rhodium. It was good, sparkling across his intake with a subtlety that he'd not tasted in eons. As far from catch-as-you-can harsh-refined rations as slag ore from a tempered Cybertronium blade. He let the cube disperse in his hand, and it was gone. "Do what you need to do, Sides. And you know where to find ME, if you need anything."
Sideswipe nodded. He was certain there was more too say – because there was always more to say when it came to Jazz and the strange orbitals he took around the Twins – but the commando didn’t have the social dexterity just then to navigate that mine field. Without asking, he reached down and took the empty Rhodium’s cube from Jazz’s fingertips, the last run of solvent dripping from the corners, running between his fingers as he did. He met Jazz’s familiar grin with a steady stare, not having a smile fake or otherwise left to his name. Sunny tended to take him for everything. Always had.
“I’ll see you,” Sideswipe said, the statement so open-ended as to have meant anything at all. Then he turned, ducked out of the wash racks and headed back toward medical to wait on the world turning, slow cycles, until things made sense again. Or as much sense as it ever made.
Jazz watched Sideswipe go, then leaned his helm back against the wall. He watched the solvent droplets fall for a long few kliks before reaching a hand up to slap the controls and turn it off. The sudden absence of liquid pattering onto concrete made the room very quiet.
Jazz offlined his optics and released the processor holds that had kicked into gear five kliks after he'd answered Sides' comm. They weren't anything particularly special, just spec ops variations of the standard aggrotec buffers, tweaked to allow fast decision-making without interference from emotive center overflows. Nothing too special. Certainly nothing like those he had devised for being on either end of an interrogation.
Still, taking them offline after a crisis was never fun.
Jazz vented as his short-term memory connections started sparking full responses again. He looked down to see what the chittering sound on the ground was and was not entirely surprised that it was his own fingers, shaking against the wet concrete. He pulled them up, wrapping them around one knee.
Just killin' for family.
The audio echo ricocheted against short-term memory, careering off higher thought processors and wading through morality programming.
He'd known before, in an intellectual way, that he'd made a bad call. Now, though...now he felt bad about it, possibilities flashing through his mind's eye. Chaos and death and destruction and Autobot defeat written in energon-soaked glyphs. All of it his fault.
It was useless to dwell on it, as it HADN'T happened, but it was like nearly catching a shot from that notorious fusion cannon: it still made you shake with near-miss danger, still made your processor chew on the scenario, trying to write overrides that would keep you from making the same mistake again.
Jazz rested his helm on his knee and thought, shakily, "You are one Pitspawned LUCKY fragger, Jazz."
<<Tag to any filthy cats that might need washing! >>
The end of Steeljaw's duty shift had come and gone sometime after they had moved the proceedings to medbay proper. He hadn't noticed and hadn't had time to care, too busy holding together spliced lines wherever the medics had pointed, or fetching supplies and tools when they had been barked for. The worst of the mess dripping from his faceplates had been solved simply by throwing himself helm-first into a bit of clean toweling and scrubbing his face back and forth.
It was enough to keep him from splattering more mess but by the time the crisis was mostly averted, the yellow mech stabilized, the red one patched, medbay sorted back to something resembling organized and cleaned, Steeljaw could feel the microplates of his face congealing into a rictus of gummy, drying fluids. His optics were frozen at his midrange focus, the shutters and focusing calipers too sticky from drying energon and lubricant to shift smoothly and the jerkiness of the grating motion was more disturbing than just leaving it be. He had shut his facial vents, but not before the cloying scent of internal fluids had gotten up into them, and he hadn't dared open them since, doing his best to keep his mouth closed for fear of what was smeared across it. Every manipulator tendril was hanging free, some of them still slowly dripping fluid, though he tried to keep those angled towards his own back so that he didn't leave a trail of droplets.
It was, Steeljaw realized in the quiet - rather like a stunned bomb blast aftermath - of the medbay, coming well up on the next morning after his evening monitor shift, and he was tired enough to ache in his linkages, running low on fuel, and it was quite possible he had never been so filthy.
Well. First thing first, and the first thing was the washracks. He wasn't about to let himself fall into recharge in the state he was in, and he didn't dare so much as open his mouth, let alone try to drink anything with any hope that it wouldn't be contaminated with another mech's fluids. Huffing - it came out of all but his rearmost vents in a wet bubbling sort of sound - Steeljaw padded off to the racks. He could at least soak a good portion of it off, and maybe find someone to help him with a proper scrub later.
A potential answer to that idea was already in the washracks, except that Jazz didn't look up to scrubbing much. The saboteur was curled on the wet floor and Steeljaw pulled up short in the doorway, hesitating. The two who had come in so disastrously had been, he had gathered, friends of Jazz's. They were both still functioning, but it had been touch and go and there wasn't much to be said beyond that they were functioning. It was strange, in the aftermath, to see the 4IC almost vulnerable, and Steeljaw waffled between the desperate need to wash and the desire to leave the other mech to his privacy.
Washing and the grating, cloying, sick smell of spilled energon and burnt ozone that was following him about like his own personal miasma finally overruled the niceties of politeness. ::Jazz? Do you mind sharing?::
Jazz looked up. It wasn't surprise, precisely. He'd known someone was there. It was just that his analysis protocols were so low-priority right then that he'd not really recognized anything but a familiar, not-cohort presence.
It took a klik longer for him to process Steeljaw's words, then to puzzle out what was meant. "Huh? I...oh, slag, Jaws, you..." Look like slag, he thought but didn't say. And Jaws DID. Steeljaw looked like the aft-end of a battle. Which was appropriate, really, given how much the quadruped had--
Jazz clamped down on that, hard, firewalling the slick and burbling sight/feel/scent of Sunstreaker as they fought to keep him online. Not now.... Not now. Focus. Not now.
It was obvious what Steeljaw was here for. The muck was caked on him, worked into mechanisms in a gummy coat.
Jazz reached up, turning on the solvent flow again, looking around for the brush. "Frag, mech, c'mere. Lemme help."
Several kliks were lost in the sheer delight of hot solvent flowing over and through his plating. Steeljaw tilted his head up into it, blowing solvent and dissolving slag out of his vents with every few intakes. Jazz, brush in hand, was attacking the larger plates, scrubbing filth out of his seams, and Steeljaw leaned into the touch with pleasure. Pinging the other mech to step back, he flared his plates out loose and shook, hard, from helm to tail tip, in a spattering spray of solvent and filth.
Settling back down, plates loose to drain solvent through, Steeljaw sighed. "That," he declared, when he was reasonably sure he could speak and only taste solvent instead of worse, "was quite enough excitement for one day."
"You'n me both, mech," Jazz said, holding the brush up to the solvent spray to wash it clean. There was more to do, mostly around Steeljaw's face, and his sensor fronds could use individual attention, too. Jazz's focus was shifting down, pinpointing like a laser sight like it had...before. He knew that was a not-so-great sign. Evidently Sideswipe had drained the last of the cope out of him.
But he could do this. Clean up the mech that'd helped him save his friend. Cleaning was easy.
Jazz reached for one of the smaller brushes, gesturing Steeljaw closer again so he could start in on the finer seams. "Hey. Thanks. I mean...I know I didn't give you much choice, but...thanks. A lot. I owe you one."
Steeljaw flicked an audio at the scrape of the brush, obligingly tilting his head so that Jazz could get at the seam that ran down into his throat. Snorting softly, the sound accompanied by another spray of vented solvent, he tapped one of his pedes against the saboteur's. "Despite not being an Autobot, I'm not the sort of mecha to sit and watch someone drain out in front of me. It's messy, yes, and I can't say I particularly enjoy shoving my face in someone's inner systems, but scrubbing makes up for it."
Jazz's field felt flat, somewhere between fatigued and something Steeljaw would have called disturbing, or perhaps disturbed. Leaning in, he nudged the other mech gently with his head. "I'm glad your friends pulled through."
"Yeah, me, too. Thanks." Jazz could feel he was slightly off, his response, his tone not quite up to spec. But it was like running on an empty tank, knowing what your servos SHOULD be doing but not quite...able to get there.
He invented, exvented, trying to steady his systems. He should probably not try to do this now. Obviously he wasn't at his social best, but...they had the privacy, and it was simple. He could get the words out. "N' that...wasn't quite what I meant, y'know. Didn't run that bridge order past anyone, just...made the call, having you bridge them here. Was a selfish call. Risky. Stupid. MEGATRON had slagged them, was chasing them. Frag, I coulda...if he'd been any closer, any faster, or you been any slower...."
Frag, he was picking more up off Prime than he'd thought. He'd never felt this slag-all weight of failed responsibility before. And for all that Jazz had always been vaguely worried about his morals not being up to Autobot shine, he wasn't sure that this was worth it.
Jazz tilted his head back. He was so tired. And he had duty in two hours. Wonderful.
He let his hands slide off Steeljaw's shoulders and back. "I'm just sorry I put you in danger like that. I mean...Megatron coming thundering through before you could close the gate wasn't sure to happen, but it...it was a risk, and I put you in the middle of it. M'sorry." He paused a nanoklik, then offered in a quieter voice, "I'll understand if you're mad."
Steeljaw vented another misting spray of solvent and water, shaking his head to clear liquid from his audials, then turned to thump the flat of his helm against the center of the saboteur's chestplate. "Stop that," he instructed firmly. Another shove, enough to rock the other mech slightly. "You're the fourth in command, aren't you? Do Autobots make a habit of running everything across the entire chain of command in an emergency situation? Seems horribly inefficient. You saved their lives, I'd say that was the right call."
Pulling back enough to look up, Steeljaw focused on the dimmed blue of Jazz's visor. The other mech was running on empty by the look of it, field far too heavy. Huffing, Steeljaw nudged sharply at Jazz. "Also, I am perfectly capable of deactivating a bridge in mid-stream. Yes, even if someone were in transit, and yes, I know exactly what that does. Also," he added, trying to inject a note of humor, "one of us here is not wearing the insignia of Megatron's sworn enemy, and... oh, yes, that's right, that would be ME. Believe me, if a Decepticon Warlord breaks down the door, I'm disavowing anything to do with all of you."