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.
Cleaver hesitated before she approached, anxiety-bordering-on-fear coupled with the need to check on Sunstreaker warring against the need to apologise, explain and do something about this disaster. It was only her and Ironhide left in the ringing silence, and she moved towards him slowly.
She knew where blame lay.
"I'm so sorry, love," she began, vocaliser streaked through with static. "I had no idea. There was... He was a wreck when I found him, and then the core lock..."
The file that had been hurled like a grenade seethed in her processor.
The punch of the Prime’s glyphs - order, imperative, implacable and inarguable - hit Ironhide like a force impact to unprotected endomass and circuits, rocking him physically back a step in unthinking response. It was only a moment but long enough for the Prime to break away and by the time Ironhide started after him the larger, heavier roar of the Peterbilt’s engine was already echoing from outside, the higher growl of Shadowrunner’s engine only a faint lingering reverb.
Gone, and he couldn’t follow, couldn’t catch either of them and knew it even as he hated it with every strut and plate of his frame and spin of his spark. Couldn’t follow, couldn’t go after, the Prime’s last order reverberating through code and circuit in a crawling vibration that left him little other choice but to obey.
Slag and rust.
Nothing left but empty space and a maelstrom of panic and anger boiling through his lines, nothing to be done with either... or the twitching feeling of something not unlike shame. He could feel Cleaver’s optics on him, imagined he could feel the static sensation of her judgement against his plates, an exterior echo of the crawling wrong through his struts and lines. Necessary. Everything they had done had been necessary, there had been reason and logical threat assessment above and beyond the purely emotional subroutines, and the reminder of the infiltrator’s mocking laugh made Ironhide set his back struts firm. It was done, and he would do it again if he had to (with pleasure a tiny portion of his processor whispered, payback and then some for the pain his younglings had suffered), and slag if he would feel guilt for DOING HIS JOB.
It took Cleaver’s words a long moment to parse through the jumble of his processor, and when it did her response was so very not what he expected that it took him another klik besides to try to respond, his vocalizer choking through the words. “No. It ain’t… yeh didn’t know. Didn’t even know us then. Yeh did… what yeh do.” Neutral, his glyphs underscored. Medic, healer.
Ironhide shuttered his optics and for the second time in weeks something closer and nearer to his original function coding spun up out of his spark, archived for countless vorn but the only answer he had, formed in archaic glyphs that thrummed once, faltering, through his field where they had once beat constant. Protect-defend-by any means-Guardian.
It wasn’t sustainable any more, dissolving into static and the crawling, demanding itch of the Prime’s order. Ironhide twitched, reflexively, plates shifting uneasily, and found he couldn’t force himself to turn his head and meet Cleaver’s gaze no matter how much he should. “Ah… Ah have t’ get back t’ base. Orders.” His hands clenched, servos creaking from tension. “He ain’t gonna catch her.”
It was a statement, the words cracking brokenly, his comms pinging endlessly at a signal that wasn’t answering. ::Shadow! SHADOW!:: Nothing came back.
What would you do? It had been a rhetorical question but the one thing he couldn’t do was defy his oathsworn Prime and the sick reality of it in his tanks fed into anger that nearly made him shake. He couldn’t look at Cleaver, didn’t dare touch her, knew the black miasma of his field was probably more than enough. She didn’t deserve it, for all that the anger wanted to snap and bite at everything within range - she hadn’t know, had been only another Neutral, no side or stake in any of it at the time.
It helped to keep the anger at bay but didn’t do a damned thing for the sick feeling. Ironhide drew in a ragged ventilation, opening a different comm line. ::Base. Need a bridge.::
Taking Ironhide's field as warning , so dark and crackling it felt like an electrical barrier in itself, Cleaver didn't move any closer. It almost helped that Ironhide wasn't looking at her, as alongside the file Shadowrunner had sent, the visual catalogue of Barricade's injuries when she'd found him had come blistering to the forefront of her processor.
Both optics crushed inwards through blunt force; collar plates buckled and torn outwards; weapons mounts in both arms pulled out at the neural root...
She'd only parsed over Shadowrunner's file - more than enough. Her cohort had died screaming, but not from cowardice.
...chassis armour destroyed and secondary layers split apart; dabilitating stab wound through the upper region; barely fumes left in his lines; processor dark and on the verge of electrical decay...
Barricade had shoved this horror into Shadowrunner's faceplates, processor and spark. It wasn't any wonder that when the opportunity was there, Ironhide and his bitlet alone with the laughing and proud cause of all that pain and suffering...
...major articulation joints in the arms and legs dislocated and crushed; and spark casing...
The overlapping and interlocking plates of the femme's arm blades twitched apart, fracturing outwards in a spasm like hands twitching, and she stared with hard ventilations at the ground. War. Soldiers became inured to a degree of violence. Transgressed limits when fueled with vengence and fury sparked from love.
...spark casing forced with 100% entry; surrounding neuralcircuits heavily damaged and missing...
Cleaver looked over Ironhide's servos. The history of violence chipped and scratched and scored into every angle and plane of them. Who had done what, a treacherous part of her mind wondered.
...signs of external contamination inside the casing suggestive of erotic contact...
The ugliest wounds she'd ever seen on a mech surviving them, ones that had twisted her internals in shock and then hardened her resolve to heal.
"This sort of treatment smells of hate to me," Reflector had said. "And a bot this hated has to have some freakish foes..."
"Whatever he might have done to provoke this, he's suffered plenty for it," she'd replied, hard and short and all but threatening the tiny mech to defy her on that. "Provoked, not deserved. No one deserves to have their spark violated, torn up like this."
The groundbridge spiralled open, its fluid modulations of light and colour beautiful against the roughly hewn walls of the Atrium. Neither of them were looking at each other.
A quiet utterance, loaded with glyph indicators for 'waiting/delay/patience/talk/not yet'. "I'll be here."
The diffractional particles of the groundbridge pinged against Ironhide's sensors, everywhere he did not want to be but had to. Against his other side he could feel the faint echo of Cleaver's field, shifting and uneasy, and he didn't want to look at it closely, to see if there was rejection or worse, fear, in it.
Rock and a hard place, the humans called it, born of a species wide fragility that saw danger in chunks of silicate that his own species never would. He could appreciate the sentiment, though - the smelter fire and the Pit, the humming ozone energy blast or the whine of the whirring blade - both where equally unpleasant, and if stuck between the two the only choice was which, if either, was even less pleasant.
To walk away from where he needed with every molecule in his frame to be? To not go tearing after Shadow, come Pit or smelter, and to the forge fires with anything that said otherwise? Or stay where he shouldn't? Both options tore at him, burning sour through his lines. Ironhide drew an intake, flushing it slow through his systems.
Need. Need and anger, in equal measure, and no ready answer to either.
He forced himself into motion, joints stiff from tension and dragging at each command. One step, another, the radiance of the groundbridge bright against his plating. At the event horizon he paused for one more system cycle, half turning his head, enough to catch the glimpse of orange plating from the corner of his optic. "...Sorry."
It was thick and stuck in his vocalizer, but it was the only thing he could offer. Regret, not for things done, but for failing... what? A cohortmate's expectations? He would have added more - sorry and maybe it was the only way or there were more reasons, or anything that could make her understand, but only the first word made it past his vocalizer, glyphs choked into silence.
Pushing himself back into motion, Ironhide turned to the groundbridge and threw himself onto his wheels, all the twisted anger pouring into his drivetrain as he roared away from the DMZ.