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.
Optimus looked up, expression briefly startled before smoothing back to neutrality. His EM field remained, however, vaguely fritzed by the question. He was not certain why he had not expected it, Fortress Maximus knew him well enough to both read into what he was saying and, furthermore, put the question to him without much regard for propriety. Not giving a damn you were talking to a Prime was the first step in being friends with one – a stage that Max had long since gotten past in their time serving together. He reflexively opened his mouth to say “No, of course not,” but never quite got to saying it.
He thought back to the Neutral base.
“No, I do not think what happened at the Neutral Base was a failure of my beliefs,” said Optimus, his tone now somewhat too even, modulated to cool flat. “Megatron was unarmed in the DMZ and we did not break the ceasefire. Even when Barricade arrived, we did not break the ceasefire, despite everything the two of them have done and how many truces they have broken, despite the possibility of putting it to an end…” He sat there quietly. “We held to the Autobot Code. But long has the Code, its most basic strictures of conduct, become too… encumbering, it seems. Even when we can afford the most simple mercy part of me says we should not show it because Megatron would not.”
"I remember," said Maximus, in a heavy voice, "back when I was first assigned to Garrus 9. I was introduced to the Rig and the technicians walked me through a demonstration of how the spark-extraction process worked. I had been briefed about it, uploaded the technical data on the whole thing. It - and they - explained in great length how the process was intended to ensure maximum control over the most dangerous prisoners, that in some way it could be considered a mercy to them by removing their consciousness from the flow of time. But I still remember just what I thought when I first saw a mech's spark reduced to a light in a whiteout vacuum. It was not relief."
He stopped examining his empty cube and looked squarely at Optimus. "Then I sat in my office a while and familiarized myself with the inmates and realised just who we were incarcerating there. Murderers, executioners, torturers, of soldiers and civilians, spark violators, morphcore harvesters... the list went on. And those were the Autobot prisoners. I don't remember exactly when spark-extraction became less of a horror and more a form of justice, but it did. Green-lighting certain inmates for the process became easier after that. Then it became routine."
This was classified information, and if it were anyone else Maximus would have kept it sealed behind the same wall of silence that not even Overlord had breached. But this was Optimus, and he knew most of it already. Maximus stared into space, his red optics narrowed in thought. After a pause he continued, in a harder voice.
"Remember Impactor? That miserable Squadron X business. I spoke with him briefly before he was taken to his cell. He never did get rigged. No one was going to give that bastard any mercy, if you consider spark removal an act of mercy. I still sat back for a while afterwards and thought about it. And yeah, Springer was right. Squadron X deserved to die, but that didn't give Impactor the right to kill them. But you know what- Impactor was right about something too. Those mechs he executed would have gone free if he hadn't stepped forward and killed them, because of diplomatic reasons rooted in part within the Autobot Code."
Maximus frowned and glanced back at the cube in his hand. It was quite possibly the most talking the taciturn warden had done in several hundred years. "I don't know what I'm trying to say here. The Code is like a line in the dirt. Sometimes you hate being on one side of it, especially when you got a long look at what's on the other side. Yeah. I don't know what I'm getting at here. I can't offer much consolation. Just that... I know what you're saying. That part you're talking about. I wouldn't have understood it once. I do now."
Optimus didn’t say anything while Maximus spoke, while he laid out his own history of the war, Garrus 9, the Wreckers, the necessary darkness they were each and every one of them swallowing in larger and larger doses to survive the fallout of their ill-fated revolution. He didn’t talk about Simanzi. That lay between them without speaking of it – the sulphuric smoke and the repeater shots of a single-slug short rage pistol going off over and over. Like a bio-pulse in the post-shelling silence. That was there, in the atomic wavelengths they were not putting off, that shared moment in time, one of a hundred thousand in a four million year old conflict. Optimus listened to Fort Max pick out one of these terrible things and hold it up because, despite the myriad of atrocity, he still needed to hear someone hold up one terrible thing and look at it.
Even now…
“Thank you, Maximus.” Optimus said it before he knew precisely what he was thanking his friend for. After a moment’s consideration he added, “For saying that. A loud. It reminds me I am not the only one still thinking these things. I know I am not, but… we do not speak of it and long enough in the quiet there is the room for doubt… and it has been strange, this life on Earth.” He folded his arms on the table top, leaning his weight on them a little. “I fear for our survival, but more than that, I fear losing who we are. Fear that who we are will become a luxury we cannot afford in the face of survival… and then, perhaps, if that becomes so, we have not truly survived.”
"It's a pretty valid fear, I think," said Maximus frankly. "I had a number of staff request transfers out of Garrus because the strain of what was happening there got to them over time. They never said anything out loud, but you could tell they were thinking it too. And we were way out on Elba, pretty isolated from the war itself. It got to you, all right. It changes you. You see mechs who started out as welders, accountants- artists. And now they're soldiers - in thought and in action. All that fighting over Functionism and the caste system, and now we're all stuck doing the same thing anyway. What a miserable joke."
An architect. He had been an architect once. Barely remembered those days. And Optimus himself - a librarian. Now he had a Matrix-shaped hole in his chest and the weight of the war on his shoulders. Maximus shook his head.
He studied his friend for a moment, took in his attitude of reflection. The seat creaked as Maximus stood up from it, his empty cube in hand. He waggled it lightly with an inquisitive look at Optimus, silently asking if he wanted another drink as well.
"Here's one for you," he said. "If you could - if it were somehow possible - would you go back to the person you were before the war? I don't mean going back in time to the days before it - I mean just you. Becoming that person again. Would you do it?"
Last Edit: Mar 24, 2013 14:58:38 GMT -5 by Deleted
The complete lack of hesitation in the answer was surprising even to Optimus, who had not quite meant to reply so quickly. He thumbed the edge of his glass again before pushing the empty cube away and looking across the room, like there was someone over there he was talking to instead of Fort Max seated directly across from him.
This question – he had answered it in his head so many times already. If he could undo what was in his mind, unmake the hard-line synaptic network of his mem-net and let eradicate all of what he had become since the start of the war – start again – would he do it? Regain Orion Pax? The person he had been, should have remained, had the war not caught him up and made a symbol out of him so powerful it subsumed all of what had been… in more ways than one.
If he could get that back…
And he saw Megatronus’ eyes in the mine-shaft, looking out at him from Megatron’s war-scarred face.
“No,” he said again, more quietly this time. “I would not. I have seen that happen, seen a mechanoid given that gift and all he did was race back to the same place that he was four million years later. Who we are now… is necessary, is what we have fought for even if it is not what we wanted or envisioned, this is what we have gained. To undo it now is to dishonor the dead and the long war we have survived up until now. And... setting all that aside... Orion Pax did not understand the world as it is. I would not go back now.”
He looked at Fort Max. “Would you?”
Last Edit: Mar 24, 2013 13:12:41 GMT -5 by Deleted
Maximus picked up the empty glass and took it with his own to the dispenser. The act of filling both cubes gave him the opportunity to stall, to dwell upon his answer.
Would he?
How poorly he remembered his past self. Everything before the time he became an Autobot was vague, indistinct. He wasn't warborn, but it had been damn close. That slim window before he had joined the fighting had looked upon a time of unsettled peace, of elegant glass and steel constructs and contentment. But it had been a naive contentment.
"I don't know," Maximus finally admitted. He turned from the dispenser and stepped back to the table, pausing only to set Optimus' glass in front of him. He sank back into his seat and frowned into his own drink. "Not a very satisfactory answer, I know. I don't think I'd go back to the mech I was before the war. I barely remember him. It's like a whole other life. I guess the short answer is 'no'. Long answer..."
He trailed off. The long answer meant acknowledging that wide gulf of history between then and now. So many points to go back to. Joining the Autobots. Being made an officer. Meeting Optimus for the first time. Simanzi. The prison.
Yes!
"Also no," he said. He nodded to Optimus. "You're right, you know. About all this being necessary. And about dishonouring the dead. It wouldn't be right - resurrecting a past self while the dead remained dead. It- no. It wouldn't be right."
He could have said something commanderly, about why they were fighting and why it was right. He could have. He did all the time. He could have said something about the fall of Iacon, about freedom, about justice, about the basic dignity of every sentient being - he could have said something like that but he didn’t.
Here was the part he was not saying to Fort Max: That you could know why you were going to war, you could be certain your cause was just, even if your knowledge was imperfect but nothing would make it ‘right’. The dead were dead and war… war was evil. Optimus could rally whole cities to fight for him, could weaponize words like Megatron had weaponized them – make people into soldiers, give them a cause, a goal, a beautifully spun story about why they were fighting and he could believe it. He did believe it. That much was true – they needed to fight back. But all the cause in the universe did not bring back the dead, did not salvage their world, would not repair the damage they carried.
He didn’t have commanderly words for Fortress Maximus. Not now. So…
“To those who aren’t here anymore,” said Optimus quietly. He tipped the cube toward Fortress Maximus. “Those we’ve lost… and the mechanoids we no longer are.”
Last Edit: Mar 24, 2013 22:20:49 GMT -5 by Deleted
On Cybertron, you read of the deaths mostly through reports from the field. Lists of names. He tried to remember those he had personally seen lost to the war. It was a sea of faces, dimmed by time. One day even those memories would fade.
He thought of his staff, still sharp and clear, long done to death in a prison turned abattoir, tortured for sport or as punishment for his silence. A miserable end in agony, without cause or purpose. Wasted. No one would ever know why.
And here he sat, returned from that brink only for the skill of the Delphi medics. Maximus flattened his mouth. No. It wasn't right.
He tilted his cube at Optimus.
"Thank you," he said simply, to complete the toast. I'm sorry.
It wasn’t much of a smile, point of fact, it was barely there at all – a shadow passing across his mouth and nothing of happiness in the gesture. It was the kind of smile left over when you’d very nearly spent all the real ones you had left and were holding onto the last of them like such things were finite. That said… he felt better having spoken with Fort Max. Nothing was fixed. Nothing was better or resolved. Shadow was still gone, the scar of speaking with Megatronus’ ghost still burned as phosphorous through the core of his spark, and he could not take back what he’d said to Ironhide… or at the least, he did not know how to.
Fortress Maximus was still carrying Garrus 9 in the joints of his endo-skeleton. Cybertron was still dark. Megatron was regrouping on his warship and yet he felt he could get up and walk again. Whether it was the high-grade or the company, he could not specifically say, but the Prime finished the last of his drink and shrugged. Not a very Primely gesture, but there was no one around to impress with the usual ensemble of control. He felt some of the dark around his spark buckle and give and, for now, was enough.