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.
What this was, exactly, wasn't clear, but Cleaver felt it crawling sick and cold across her plates like the fields of dead and dying that the War had created across Cybertron. It felt like being at Simanzi again, fluid and viscera literally pooling about her pedes from an exploded Combiner as she performed slippery triage on anything still alive. Splicing and welding with the utmost skill and diligence until they slipped into the Well, the effort and time spent pointless as someone else she might have reached died kliks later. Another statistic in the war.
This felt like that. Terrible, and outside the sphere of her understanding.
Barricade was a twisted, cruel and sadistic glitch with or without core-lock. Barricade had almost been tortured to death. Barricade had been sparkraped. Barricade had placed Ironhide as the perpetrator.
Ironhide hadn't denied it.
"You cabling up with that one? The spark-breecher?”
Cleaver watched Ironhide through Optimus's back, blades lax at her sides.
Am I?
She didn't know what to say, how to act, thus she remained still and silent. Let the Autobots and Decepticons play it out.
It came out strident and harsh, crackling in tangled glyph harmonics of disbelief and rage, Ironhide's field flaring in supernova pulses that snapped incendiary flash flares across the the hard, flat edge of Optimus' own as the Guardian surged into his space. It forced Ironhide to tip his head back to meet the Prime's gaze, but in no way reduced the growl shuddering through his entire mass or the barely leashed violence spinning through the weapon systems that laced his entire frame.
It had been vorn, hundreds of them, since he had taken that tone to a commanding officer. More, well before then, when he had last unleashed his temper on the mech he would swear spark and loyalty to, when 'Prime' had been a designated title handed down by an ineffectual Council and nothing more. Right that moment, burning with the need to remove a palpable threat, Ironhide couldn't bring himself to care.
"Ah'll tell yeh what Ah understand," he snarled up into those impassive faceplates. "Ah understand yer lettin' him walk. AGAIN. He kills us for sport an' yer talkin' t' meh about vendettas? That Pit fragger would've seen every last spark on this planet - yers, mine, th' Neutrals, everyone - snuffed out in an instant an' he was laughin'. This ain't personal, this is DEFENSE. This is takin' out a threat an' doin' mah JOB."
More - acidic, vitriol - backed up with throttling intensity through his vocalizer, seething in a roiling mass that wanted to break free. MINE, it pulsed in him, burning through frame and field, my cohort, my younglings, killer, murderer, torturer, you ask me how far don't make me answer that you don't want to know and in the depths of his archived files, under the crisp sound of blaster fire and weapon discharge and the sizzle of melted armor there was the sound of screaming that had nothing to do with a clean kill and everything to do with a rage that wanted that sound more than he had ever wanted anything in memory.
“Your job?” repeated Optimus, his tone taking on an edge molecularly fine. His optics brightened slightly, the lenses of his eyes spinning and refocusing on the mechanoid across from him. “Your job entails going against my command? Even when it is abundantly clear that Barricade is playing you for a fool? Lying to me? You job is to break Autobot protocol, poorly, sanction the infraction for two subordinates, and when you are caught… invoke the names of those you protect as rationale?”
“And that, my brother, is why they deserved to die!”
“Everything in his name then, Megatronus.”
"I do not intend to prove Barricade or Cleaver right today in their assumptions of our faction and the limits of our code. We will not be the ones to break truce at Barricade's behest on the impulse of your anger." The Prime's voice dropped a single, reverberating pitch. “So stand down.”
Last Edit: Nov 11, 2012 22:04:57 GMT -5 by Deleted
"Yes, mah job," Ironhide roared back, voice cracking in blistering tones. "He's a threat an' mah job is t' KEEP YEH ALIVE!"
The anger was a riptide, a gravitational well he had already broken the event horizon of, impossible to escape. It held him up even as things splintered and broke beneath the weight of that flat, barked order, crushed and ripped and reformed as quickly as he could shove them into place and cement them with the bitter burn of fury. It sunk his voice low when he reigned it back, glyphs razor sharp and brittle. "Frag yer code an yer glitch rusted protocols! Ah don't give one broken circuit in a smelter pit so long as yeh an' ours are alive at th' end of it all."
A bark of a laugh, bitter and ragged. "'War crimes'. That one's one t' talk, with all th' energon on his hands." Another half step forward until their plates were all but touching, his voice for the Prime's audials alone. "Yeh trust him t' keep a truce? Let him sweep in here, do as he pleases, an yeh want meh t' stand down?"
Optimus looked at Ironhide for a long moment, standing so near he could catch the incremental shifts and flickers in the bright diaphragms of the Guardian’s stare, the sum and total of Ironhide’s field caught up aggressively in his. He and Hide had never come to actual blows before; in the blur of four-million years of war the specifics of every disagreement, insubordination, and yelling match escaped him but that he knew.
“That was an order, Ironhide…”
“Everyone getting along then?” The sound of the boom of something heavy being dropped immediately put all the Autobots on the defensive but just as fast as the spun up weapons. Barricade, flanked immediately by Megatron, had just dropped the warlord’s detached weapon mods, his ion cannon included on the floor at his feet. A small arsenal that, at this point, was historical with lives taken. “Cleaver,” he said, smiling. “Got into med bay. Let myself in. No worries about the lock, I’ve got a mini-con who’s good with that kind of thing. Get this fixed won’t you?”
Optimus physically imposed himself between Ironhide and Barricade this time, catching Hide by the shoulder, a contact flare of warning in the touch. Barricade, ignoring them, left Megatron waiting with his weaponry – clearly and openly expecting the Neutral doctor to do her good work. Barricade, for his part, crossed the atrium, passing Cleaver and grinning at her before taking up a position with his back toward the main passage out, looking at the gathered Autobots.
“By the way,” said Barricade boredly, looking at Hide, “if it’s your job to protect him, then maybe stop letting your pet doctor repair mechs with designs on gutting your Prime." He looked at Shadow. "Hey, Shadow, you like this Prime better Labyrinth? He doesn't seem... frakking sick enough for your taste in officers."
Last Edit: Nov 15, 2012 21:22:12 GMT -5 by Deleted
Cleaver had spent many hours imagining every nightmarish scenario that Megatron's presence in the DMZ could bring about. Overall it fell into two general categories: the Decepticons invading with deadly force to take back their leader once his location was discovered; and the Autobots maneuvering to assassinate him and bringing the warlord's enraged loyalists to the caverns.
Big reactions. Sweeping and broad.
This... personalised fallout was like nothing she had tormented herself speculating upon. Barricade's return, Ironhide's transgressions, Shadowrunner's connection to the black and white Decepticon...
Who'd been alone in the Medbay with Sunstreaker.
Cleaver's spark lurched, and though a instantaneous report back from the berth's monitoring systems showed that the unconscious mech was alive, she was still moving to bolt for the Medbay.
"If you've done anything-"
"Dont worry, your patient's doing good, doc."
The growl was cut off by Barricade's remark and the synchronised touch of pressure against her rotorary mount that stopped her dead. Megatron's hand and choking field, light and quick, but as sudden and arresting as if he'd struck her.
"Now, Cleaver."
The medic turned slowly, optics dazed and plates tight against a frame-wide tremble, finally dragging her gaze up Megatron's powerful frame. His posture was assured and strong. Undoubtedly the temporally-displaced gladiator was gone.
It was easier to focus on the pile of parts and the connections on the floor. Not the Autobots so tense with hatred and anxious upheaval, nor the barrel of the ion cannon so fittingly pointing towards them. Cleaver had thought, had hoped that things would have been easier once Megatron was gone. That things could go back to something like normality.
Now, it seemed certain that things were going to get worse.
He's fine. You didn't just kill him. Everyone's alive. Oh Primus...
"Kneel down." Cleaver's voice was small. She pulled her rotors tight to her dorsal plates when Megatron's optics narrowed, forcing more volume out of her vocaliser. Though not much.
The medic nodded to his bare arm. "Can't reach properly like this."
Megatron smiled like oil spreading through water, and he held the arm across his chassis as if to bow before sinking gracefully down to one knee. His optics flicked to Optimus when she moved back and scooped up the cannon, the weapon almost the size of her entire chassis.
When Cleaver laid the mountings against his forearm, he uttered loud enough for the Autobots to hear: "You're too kind."
With helm bowed and gaze downwards on the welding points of the monstrous weapon, Cleaver shut her optics.
Last Edit: Nov 14, 2012 17:46:09 GMT -5 by Deleted
Shadow's entire function had been one spent learning obedience, lessons in self-control scored deep into her plates and her internals and her spark. Those lessons held - through Barricade's initial entrance, through the flashfire urge to lash out at Barricade and Cleaver both, through Prime and Ironhide snarling at each other and neither one of them right - held her still, held her silent, held her weapons on standby even when the Decepticons returned.
Some distant part of her, a part not wrapped in the deep-space cold of greyed out frames, thought she should feel pity for the way Cleaver meekly obeyed Megatron's commands. Instead, Shadow turned away in contempt at the sight, Cleaver's fear far too little to appease her anger, Cleaver's realization of just what she had offered shelter to coming far, far too late.
What she had offered shelter to twice, and Megatron was the lesser of those evils.
The greater evil stood, smirking and damnably whole, by the corridor to outside, observing the proceedings with the air of someone who had every right to be there. The fact that he did have that right - that Cleaver and Prime had given him that right - ate at her like acid in her lines, physical pain that Barricade's spark could still spin after he had snuffed every spark that mattered to her.
She was in a DMZ...but this DMZ was a fool's game, sanctioned by mecha who were the cowards and hypocrites Barricade had named them, and the one mech who had ever truly held her loyalty, who had beaten and twisted and forged this hard-held control into her, had died by Barricade's claws, spark torn out and guttering in ozone-thick air.
"He's not strong enough," she spat, molten gold optics meeting ice blue as her focus narrowed to the infiltrator. "If he were, you'd have been turned back into smelter scrap as soon as you showed your face. My hands would be in your internals, and you would be screaming out the rest of your miserable existence while I finished taking payment for thirteen lives out of your frame. I'll grant you he's weak, Barricade, because you should be wishing you were dead all over again, and instead, we're wasting time in this farce of a DMZ, trying to appease a Con sympathizer while we debate whether turning you into slag is the right thing to do."
Shadow advanced on him, slowly, weapons humming on the edge of cycling up. Again, she was at a range where she could have a sure kill; the simulation ran effortlessly in the back of her processor, Barricade falling to her guns, Megatron ripping her apart, Ironhide moving to her defense, each of them falling like dominoes, until it came down to Prime and Megatron...and she had no doubt the Prime was too soft to win that fight.
"We both know it's not a question of fragging ethics, don't we?" She stopped just outside of reach of his claws, solid state weaponry transforming out and locking into place. Barricade's smirk didn't falter, his optics didn't flicker from her own; he knew as well as she did that she was dead the nano-klik she opened fire.
She wondered if he thought she still cared.
"This is my right," she snarled, target lock in place. "You gave it to me a dozen times over."
Flaming smelter slag in the Pit, that was what it was. Ironhide's systems were overclocked into the red, sensors straining to watch too many directions at once, too many targets, too many objectives, too many potential ways it could all go to the Pit in an instant and not nearly enough ways he could do slag all about it.
The Prime's hand on his shoulder was nearly too much and for one crystal clear instant he wanted nothing but to knock that hand away, along with the arm and frame attached to it. It had been nearly three and a half million years since he had last felt that, the ernest wish to do harm to the one absolute he couldn't, and the sick feel of it sank into his lines like plasma fire. Wrong, wrong, all wrong, and there was nothing he could do but chase after each impending explosion, knowing it was wrong and helpless to stop it.
It sat like organic base acids in his tank to have to do it, but the worst disaster waiting to happen wasn't the leader of the Decepticons in close proximity to Cleaver by far. Worse, by multiple factors, was Shadow within arm's reach of Barricade - Megatron, or at least the warlord Ironhide had known of in the past, had a certain sense of fair play that did not usually extend to slaughtering those who had willingly helped him. Barricade, on the other hand... the infiltrator would incite death and disaster and chaos with his last spark cycle, just to watch the fires burn.
Optimus was solidly between Ironhide and the Decepticon. Ironhide shook the larger mech away with a short, sharp snap of his plates, drawing in ventilations around the sick wrongness of it all through his systems, and pushed his vocalizer into its deepest register, the one that carried the furthest on a chorus blend of discordant growls. "Shadow!"
He didn't have the right to stop her, not really, and he knew it, even if the Prime was too glitch ridden blind to see it.. But he hoped, the frission of it flaring desperately through his spark, that he could at least drown out whatever lying filth was pouring out with the infiltrator's every poisonous vent cycle.
Last Edit: Nov 17, 2012 18:51:18 GMT -5 by Deleted
"No." Shadow didn't look away from Barricade, didn't cycle away her weapons, didn't lose one iota of the raw hatred flaring though her systems. "No. Don't you fragging dare try to stop me!"
If his tone had been an order rather than a call for attention - if he had spoken to her as commander rather than cohort - Shadow could have ignored him. It struck a deeper chord, though, a response born among a tangle of hurt, frightened sparklings with only each other to rely on.
Don't break. We need you, stay with us. If you break, we all break; don't break.
Nothing changed, but she was thinking now, her attention pulled away from the desperate need to finish things between herself and Barricade. The simulation looped again, and froze. Her own death was a price she would willingly, gladly, pay to end this...but not Ironhide, Jazz, Bluestreak, Bumblebee. Not Steeljaw or the humans, non-combatants but still in the line of fire. Not her friends, not her cohort, even if that cohort was suspect in the wake of Cleaver's actions.
Don't break.
::He's mine, Hide.:: The tightbeam comm was raw and dark with pain. ::He owes me this. Just let me finish it.::
::Ah know.:: Ironhide's answer was thick with understanding, glyphs laced in tangled knots of sincerity and support and a spark deep acknowledgment. ::He's yours, Shadow, an' Ah'll shove it through anyone's helm what says he ain't.::
Truth, ringing loud and clear between them. The absolute truth of cohort, of his willingness to support her claim. ::But not HERE. Not NOW.:: It hurt to say it, hurt worse to know it was right, no matter how much he wanted to rip the infiltrator to shreds himself. He was cycling short ventilations, frame vibrating with suppressed weapon system charge, but he held himself firm and tried, by comm alone, to draw Shadowrunner back with him. ::We can't afford it. Not here, not now. Save it for a better shot. Please.::
::I don't care what we can afford. I won't get a better shot.::
She hadn't shot yet, though, and while she could - wanted to - Shadow knew she wouldn't. Weapons unwavering, she took a step back from Barricade, then another, hydraulics whining protest as she forced herself to back away.
Briefly, her optics flicked to Ironhide, visual confirmation of the promises flowing across the comm between them, and she cycled her guns away with a snarl.
"Frag you." She was looking at Barricade again, but her words could have been meant for any of them, or all of them.
“Oh c’mon Shadow.” Barricade unfolded his arms, stepping forward, optics flashing, EMF a high-watt electrical buzz in the air. “I was dead – you got me, ripped me apart, hid it from your commander, and saved the day.” He pointed at Cleaver. “And she ruined it because she’s a factionless do-gooder meddling in others’ lives. She took that from you and now you’re the same, same femme two-hundred years later: a whole cohort of corpses behind you, running scared –”
Optimus was suddenly between Barricade and Shadow, the physical and impossibly hot electromagnetic mass of him prompting Cade to step back. The infiltrator, for his part, just rolled his eyes.
“You should have shot me,” he reminded the Prime, “when I was your prisoner.”
“Few mechs die on their own terms,” said Optimus. “You, Barricade, of all Primus’ sparked, will not die on yours.”
Maybe he would have gone on, but the boom of Cybertronian turbines deafened the audials and the drag of a Cybertronian Jet going Mach 1 immediately threw them off balance. The burn of contrail and a blur of motion was all that any of them caught of Megatron making his exit via his alt mode, the silver-metal streak of him hooking up the exit tunnel and out. Barricade, taking this as cue, saluted the Prime and the rest of the still very armed Autobots and flipped back into his police cruiser alt, reversing at speed the direction his commander had gone.
Shadow stepped back, from the Prime, from the force of Megatron's exit, from all of them, in a ragged stagger. Barricade's alive, beat through her with every step; Barricade's alive, Barricade's gone, for nothing, all of it, for nothing.
She didn't have to search for the memories Jazz had dug out of her processor. She was always aware of the location of the archived file, just like she knew what it contained, couldn't forget even if she wasn't actively reliving it...and now she flung that file at everyone within range, context for the accusations tearing their way free of her, even if they chose not to accept and view it.
"That's what Barricade is, what he enjoys," she snarled at Cleaver, pinning the femme with a look of raw hate. "That's what's on your servos the next time he spills a drop of energon. Or human blood." Her own memories, this time: Ray Clancy, falling, screaming, vanishing in a spray of bloody vapor while Bluestreak's screams rose to an agonized pitch. Shadow vented hard and cut the memory, forcing words through a vocalizer that wanted to lock into an agonized keen. "Better pray that Megatron was impressed enough by your services to keep Barricade on a short leash."
Movement, at the edge of her sensors. Prime, Ironhide, she didn't care. She couldn't stay, couldn't stand being in this place, couldn't stand the touch of all the wrong fields against hers. Shadow dodged blind, moving for the exit the Decepticons had used just kliks before, fully aware that they could still be out there, could be waiting, not caring so long as she could take Barricade with her.
The mine opened out onto heat and emptiness, Earth's golden sunlight spilling over nothing more than torn-up ground that Shadow hit hard on four wheels. Drive. It pulsed through her spark, shuddered through her frame. Drive, move. Until she stopped thinking; until it stopped hurting.
The roar tore out of Ironhide's vocalizer faster than he could push his frame into motion. The soudshape of Shadowrunner's name chased after the femme's steps and bounced ragged from the walls, distorted glyph echoes of plea and order all at once.
Not fast enough. He wasn't fast enough, couldn't hope to match her on wheels, transformation too slow, mass too heavy. She would leave him in her dust but his tank was bigger and could take him further if he didn't try to catch her in a blind, futile push for speed he couldn't match. Ironhide was already furiously calculating how fast, how far, performance ratings for optimal distance above all else as he started after her - one step, another, plates already shifting, transformation cog engaged, diving after the trail Shadow left behind her...
...only to come up short, stopped by a dragging weight across one shoulder, and he had pulled the linkages taut and straining before he even realized it was a physical obstruction, something caught on his plate, someone holding him back. Incandescent fury flared lightning hot through his lines - who DARED let go, LET GO, she's getting AWAY!
Mass memory, as old as his frame, endlessly ingrained, took over. Spun him, fist up, caught shoulder coming back, going with the tug of that grasp instead of against it-
The Prime.
Ironhide pulled the punch at the last moment, jerking it back with a grinding shriek of his own actuators, systems choking for one nanoklik as he set himself against gravity and momentum to halt the movement in mid-swing. The clench of his hand fell before it ever touched the Prime's plating and Ironhide cycled the wash of shrieking alarm through his systems back into a hot vent of static laden fury. "Let go! Frag yeh, Ah've gotta go after her!"
For that split-second where Ironhide’s fist hung level with his left optic – having stopped just short of, likely, shattering the bio-glass in its orbit – Optimus did not flinch. If he had more time to consider that moment he might have registered that it was the first time – in millions of years in fact – that he’d seen that. Ironhide hadn’t run up against that sub-directive in eons, not since long before he’d taken the Matrix… and the Prime didn’t have time to think about what, if anything, that meant.
“Return to base.” The command glyph was coded and cold with rank structure. It was the same command tone it had taken him nearly a century into the opening salvos of the War to get comfortable using. It was a tone he hadn’t needed with Ironhide since the day Orion Pax tried to take Megatron down one-on-one in the streets of a south prefecture city and proved he was exactly that kind of idiot ridiculously in charge. A Prime directive going down. “You can’t catch her.”
Point of fact, he couldn’t either. Neither of them could. And in that fractured moment in the wake of Megatron and Barricade – Optimus was not certain what would be worse for Shadowrunner: Their catching her… or letting her go. But there was no telling if Megatron and Barricade had fled the scene (though it was likely, given Megatron’s condition and how tenuously the cease-fire had been upheld) so Optimus was running after her before he’d fully decided on it.
“Now, Ironhide.”
The transformation sequence came easy, quickly, the de-segmentation and reconstitution of his body-shell in less than a second and the wheels of his Peterbilt alt hit the ground at 60mph. He was up through the central tunnel through which Shadowrunner had gone, engines thunderous in the corridor and as he gunned after her, downshifting, energon burning through him he half-consciously recognize that he was not certain if he was running after Shadow or simply away from Ironhide. So he focused on Shadowrunner.
//Shadowrunner! Shadow!// She cut the comms.
The African sun was only just rising along the horizon, stretching the shade of trees. Shadowrunner had hit 200mph, the spark of sun catching gold off her chrome. She was already half a mile ahead, disappearing into the horizon. No Decepticons. They’d ground bridged out. Optimus raced after her. He chased her for a very long time, the friction of the dirt beneath him, the body-jarring urgency of his propulsion – the world narrowed to that until Shadow was disappearing into horizon far beyond the reach of his scanners and only once she was completely gone did he stop driving.