1.5 - Scars - Open

[Deleted]

(OOC: Continued from New Faces. Shift/Ratchet, tentatively open for Crossfire to come in a little later, closed if not necessary.)

Shiftlock struggled to get up off the floor, holding onto the wall to keep her balance. "Sure thing, but I'm gonna be moving a little slow. Not sure how much energon I lost but my vision's gettin' fuzzy. I hope the medbay isn't too far. Otherwise you're gonna have to drag me."

She took a single, shakey step. "Promise I'll be out of your way soon as I stop leakin'." Glyphs of apologetic-hurried followed by a split-astrosecond of warm-familiarity-affection.

Her expression suddenly snarled into a grimmace and a intense wave of grief punctuated her next step. The old medic had a familiar manner about him that reminded her of her squad mate. As the necessary frenzy of battle bled away from her in this quiet, safer place, the full weight of her loss pressed itself mercilessly onto her current processes. Using the walls for support the whole way, dripping energon, her field was snarled and pitted with a potent mixture of physical and psychological agony.

More steps, and the field became cold-dread-paranoia. "... Listen, for your own safety--" she coughed again, hacking up more blue-bright fluid, "--strap me down with the heaviest restraints you can find. I can't guarantee that once you start workin' on me, I won't try to tear your head off."

[Deleted]

Ratchet's brow ridges climbed up past the edge of his helm at the femme's words and the choppy wave of her field. Stepping forward, he caught her beneath the elbow, steadying her steps with a firm grip, further scans flashing over her. "You'll be 'out of my way' when I say so," he huffed, glyphs sharp with medical rank and command, "and until then you will sit your aft down and let me do my job."

He steered her into the medbay, already running quick calculations of what she needed replaced in both fluids and parts, and how much plating he was going to have to remove to get at what needed welding. "As to my safety - hmph! It's a fine thing when a patient tells a doctor what to do. You're hardly the heaviest build I've had in here, or the most dangerous. I'm perfectly capable of welding your aft to the berth if I have to."

[Deleted]

"Look," Shiftlock interjected, glyphs snarling with warning, pleading and her own command rank as she glared Ratchet in the optics, "The Veloci-Cons installed a t-cog inhibitor on me. Every step I take outside of vehicle mode is like walking on molten plasma, getting worse as I go and I am almost to the limit of what I can endure!" Her waves were getting more erratic as she struggled to control herself. "So cut us both a break and drop the senior-dealing-with-recruits fragscrap attitude you use to keep everyone around here comfortably heeled and let me help you!"

Shiftlock shoved Ratchet away from her and staggered to an empty spot in the bay before giving up to a comparatively slow and noisy transformation, damaged plates grinding loudly against one another, throwing out sparks and exacerbating injuries. The cybertronian speeder seemed to shudder.

"I don' know you any farther than I k'n throw you," the femme groaned wearily, glyphing sincere apologies, "and I don' wanna lose control o' myself, red-out overclock an' come back online with your parts scatt'red all o'er th' room. I had t' warn ya. Y'know what I am, what I do. Maybe you can weld me t'th berth, but I wasn' sure... and didn' wanna risk... yer life." Her speech was slurred as she took ragged breaths in exhaustion.

Shiftlock's scans indicated a long period without good care or maintenance, compounded by repeated injuries, illegal and painful body modifications, excessive wear, low energon levels, and internal corrosion. Everything added up to extended torture and unrepaired combat damage compounded by the crash.

She seemed to give up, glyphing submission and repeated apologies. "I don' mean t' make your job harder," she gasped, relieved of some of her pain. "Jus' tryin' t' think of yer good."

[Deleted]

Had she really… Had the demented, processor damaged, glitched out femme really just TRANSFORMED in his slagging medbay?

Yes, yes she had. There was an orange and black Cybertronian racer sitting in his medbay and Primus bless, no medical tribunal left in the entire universe would convict him because he was going to take her apart piece by slagging piece and reformat her into a GARBAGE DISPOSAL.

Ratchet's optics narrowed, the line of his mouth tight and hard. The hand that slammed down on Shiftlock's hood was lighter than it could have been, by far, leaving no dent, but the clang of the impact rang off the walls and the medical grade magclamps in his palm reached clear through her exterior plating to the struts and endomass beneath. Yanking, he hauled her front end up off of the floor with the full weight of a medic's reinforced frame behind it, before releasing the clamp to drop her back onto her tires wheels with a hard bounce. "On your FEET, soldier," he snarled. "Or so help me, I'll be dismantling you because I can't slagging GET to where you're draining out to put a weld patch on in that form!"

Blaster had pinged him the femme's record on request and honestly, Primus, he should have known. Frontliners were a glitching pain in the aft all on their own, but the Wreckers took it to a whole new level and slag it to the Pit, that was just precisely what they needed on base, wasn't it? Another Wrecker. Lovely.

"I don't care one piece of scrap what unit you're with or what rank you hold," he told her sharply. His scans were coming back in a mess of errors - someone had made scrap of her internals, alright. Empathy, however, rarely went far with Wreckers, and Ratchet was well beyond the point of wasting the effort on glitched, processor throttled lost causes in the first place. "Inside this medbay I am the highest authority, bar none, and that includes the Prime. The very best thing you can do for either of us is to shut up, do what I tell you to, and STOP trying to tell me how to do my job unless you really do want to be restrained and taken apart piece by piece, which I assure you I don't have even the slightest qualm about doing. Are we understanding one another?"

He gave her a hard shove, clearing enough space to get around her to his supplies. "You want it to stop hurting? Get back on your slagging feet and ON the fragging medberth. I'm a MEDIC, not a Pit slagging organic auto mechanic."

[Deleted]

Almost ready to pass out, the sudden slam to her hood startled her back awake.

"Sorry!" Shiftlock coughed. "Look, I couldn' help it! Takes all my cons'ntration t' stay in robot mode!" she slurred as she bounced off the floor. "Primus y'r wors'n th' Cons! Y' always s'cruel t' bots on th' edge o'th' well...?" Her voice was getting weaker, her field flattening out and losing intensity to match.

Most of Rachet's angry diatribe was lost to Shiftlock as she struggled to keep from falling completely into stasis lock in vehicle mode. The lights in the bay were getting dimmer and she was losing more and more vision from the corner of her optics. Another shove and more shouting as her head started to swim. Was that gunfire? Was Iacon being overrun again? Her team... she had to find her team...

'On your slagging feet' made it through her dimming sensors. "... clutch kick... s'at you?... okay, okay... on my feet..." Slowly, still grinding damaged parts against each other, she forced herself to transform, falling halfway onto the berth, legs giving out from under her, holding onto the other side of the berth with a death grip.

Red-hot searing pain soared through all her circuits and slammed out into her field, lighting it up like a Christmas tree.

She screamed.

[Deleted]

Ratchet caught her as her legs buckled - two quick steps and a grab, his arm wrapped around her middle as he held her up. His free hand slammed the code shunt into a thoracic medical port while the first scream was still bouncing off the walls, legs braced to take her weight when the stasis code and neural blanket kicked in all at once, leaving her so much deadweight limp mass in his grasp.

"Class three non-critical medic alert my aft," he growled as he heaved the femme up onto the medberth. Oh, to be sure, it wasn't a class one - he knew what a mech sounded like on their way to the well and the femme, for all she probably felt like she was one step from it, was not going down that route if Ratchet had anything to say about it. Which, with her mercifully quiet and in a form where he could get to the injured areas, he certainly did.

A comm slap full of sharp edged glyphs went out to Steeljaw, however, who really should have erred on the side of some amount of urgency rather than second guessing the femme's condition. She was draining, from multiple wounds both internal and external, and Ratchet's hands were already moving over her plating with steady haste, unlocking what could be unlocked and prying up what couldn't. A long legged stretch nabbed his nearest work tray to roll it closer, energon stained plating piled onto it, and he turned away only long enough to grab another tray of clamps and a container of cleanser.

The stasis code was meant for temporary emergencies only and was already counting down, the echoing timer blinking in the upper corner of Ratchet's HUD. He fed another shunt attached to an energon feed into her other side, then plugged into the first, mouth drawing into a thin grimace at the scrolling mess of errors that rolled out from it. "Primus..." He'd seen worse in his time on the front lines, but small wonder the femme thought she must be dying with the scrambled mess someone had made of her neural net. She's mentioned a T-cog inhibitor - filthy things - and Primus knew what else was lurking in her systems. Ratchet growled low to himself and uploaded the strongest of his neural blocks, cutting off all feeling in her frame, and let the stasis countdown continue to zero as he set to work quickly clamping and sealing the shredded fluid lines that were still dripping lubricant and energon across the berth. Awake and not screaming, she could give him a better idea of any other nasty surprises were laying in wait beyond the obvious damage.


<< ooc - Shift can wake up but she's going to be numb from the chin down, with Ratchet working on patch welding everything. >>

[Deleted]

The lack of sensation was merciful, though she still involuntarily twitched for a few moments after the pain blocks were in place. Her venting was ragged and she looked as if she'd been through the pit and then circled around for a second trip to catch everything she missed the first time. Most of the damage was not so much from immediate battle trauma, through it was there, but from an extended period of running on persistent low-level injuries and stress-damage with no little to no maintenance. Some parts were worse off than others; humans would refer to the phenomenon as 'driving it until the wheels fall off'.

The stasis counter clicked down to zero and Shiftlock began to wake. The lack of pain was certainly reassuring and did not incur the Pavlovian reaction to being on a berth that she feared might happen - not that, in her present state, she could have done anything if she had panicked. Drowsy and still dizzy, she was nonetheless lucid and immediately apologized. "Sorry fer bein' such a glitch... s'hard to stay focused an' pleasant in all that pain."

She could tell herself the nightmare was over, now. She kept telling herself in that head, that finally, the seemingly endless rounds of torture were all behind her, that she could relax, that all was well. Part of her still didn't believe it. She tried to reason that paranoid part of herself into silence.

"... You're gonna find a real mess in there. I just got here from a Decepticon concentration camp," Shiftlock began to explain. "I dunno how long I was there, maybe joors, maybe orns, they broke my chronometer soon as I got in. Velocitron's gone to slag. Place's like the endless retaliation now, only it's two wheeler 'Cons versus four wheeler 'Bots. My crew an' I crash-landed followin' the Ark, got shot down... "

"Got sold in an auction to the 'Con's head medic. He's the one that did all this t' me. He put in the inhibitor, hacked my body to make me fit for their slaggin' pit derbies. Got real charged up over torturin' me."

Shiftlock's voice got quieter. "... They told me my crew was alive, and that if I just cooperated they'd keep 'em alive. I let 'em... let 'em do whatever they wanted to me... My crew... my cohorts... last I saw them they were just... parts, hanging on hooks in a market..."

[Deleted]

"That," Ratchet managed through gritted dente - the dente in question currently being used as a third point clamp on an extruded fluid line that both hands were busy working around to stem a steady leak - "is actually more information than I need."

Clamp, seal, weld; his hands flipped lightning fast through transformations, left feeding in new parts from the tray set nearby, right pulling out, installing, flecks of lubricant and energon spattering across berth and floor. A twist and pinch and he pulled the entire fluid line free, spitting it out and tossing it aside, mouth pressed thin in concentration. "You're not going to die," he informed the femme bluntly, "but you are a mess. Next time, tell me that before you stand up - I could have shut your sensors down then. Better yet, tell the mech on duty before he puts in the call to me instead of trying to be fragging stoic." The medic spat the last word like a curse, grabbing up another handful of clamps. "Wreckers, never have enough sense to fragging yell when you're draining out..."

There was a pause, the medic's hands busy at work wrist deep in the femme's chassis, brow plates drawn down in concentration. "I'm sorry for your loss," he said at last, the words tight, field medical precision flat. "But I'm a medic, not a counselor, and right now I'm more concerned with patching your insides. I'm going to keep you locked down until I'm done - you don't want to be feeling this."

[Deleted]

"So I'm s'posed't jus' announce t'the 'Cons I'm at th' edge o'th' Well when Idunnow 'f there's any 'Bots left alive on this rock? S'tactically stupid," Shiftlock slurred out of weakness and under anesthetic. "I hadda 'Con welcome party lined up f'r me soonas I landed. 'M lucky Max showed uppin' he did." She briefly glyphed mirth and snapped herself out of grief forcibly. She'd deal with it later. She always put it off until later. "If I still had sum engex I'd thank'm proper."

"S'nice t'know I ain't gunna die now," she added, "but s'stand'rd proceed'r t'report last combat status't th'medic t'inform command 'fore ya go offline. Jus' had t'make sure Prime knows how bad things'r goin' on Velosstron." Shiftlock sounded like she hadn't recharged or defragged in joor. She had apparently been living in a state of overdrive for who knows how long, and her systems had paid for it.

Dizzy amusement swirled through her processes at Ratchet's grumpy distaste for Wrecker behavior. "Don' worry 'bout me feelin' anythin', y'jus' do whatcha gotta do. I've gotta lotta 'sperience'n handlin' pain."

[Deleted]

"I didn't say anything about the 'Cons," Ratchet retorted. Another length of perforated cabling and several stripped parts went clattering over the side of the berth, replacements fed rapidly in. "I said report your status to the mech on duty in the control room of the base you presumably walked into knowing it was Autobot." He narrowed an optic at the reports streaming across his HUD, vented a sour note at her still dropping energon levels - Primus, whichever 'Con had met her on the way in had done a good number on her, but claw marks didn't narrow down the likely suspect list much - and flicked one hand clean enough to hook an auxiliary feed line from under his own bumper, running it into a shunt on her medial intake. It slowed the drain, another readout kicking up to monitor his own tank level.

Her neural blocks were holding, packet pings coming back empty from her frame sensors. The medic clamped off another leak, pressed a patch weld into place, and pried back another plate... and yes, there was the inhibitor, ugly thing that it was, wrapped up and fed into her t-cog systems. Ratchet glared at it, but the more important concern was stabilizing her interior systems. "You can give me your report," he told her. It would help her to focus if she kept talking. "I'll forward it to Prime."

[Deleted]

"Sorry, I's too slagged up t' think of it," Shiftlock apologized. Ratchet was right on that respect, and normally she'd have let someone know what kind of shape she was in, but at that time all her processes were muddled; injury, exhaustion, overdrive and trauma had done a number on her ability to think or act rationally. She tried to concentrate but the room was still spinning. Furrowing her brows together she stared up at a spot on the wall and kept that in focus. That's what Clutch Kick would always have her do --

-- Oh wait, he's dead. Another pang of guilt and grief stabbed at her consciousness. She swallowed it down and continued focusing on the wall. That was all that mattered at the moment: The report and the wall.

"Auxill'ry Wrecker squadron leader Shiftlock reportin' on behalf of squad. Heavy weap'n specialist Dirt Drop: offline. Medic'n'long range s'port specialiss Clutch Kick: offline. Dem'lishun 'n scout Feint: offline. Fight'r craft A-21 Spitfire damaged by Decept'con fire post exodus ord'rs. Crash land'd'n Acropol's Speedway'n Velocitron. Squadr'n tak'n captive by new Decepticon faction 'n Velocitron. V-Con commander's Ransack, form'r co-rul'r o' Velosstron."

"Velosstron population'n dire straights. Colony attack'd by ousside forces, sparkin' civil war. Pop'lation divid'd between two wheelr's pledged't Megatron, an' four wheel'rs followin' Autobot cause. 'Bot command'r's named Overdrive."

"Squad was not able t' make full contact w'Autobot resistance. Squadr'n detain'd 'n und'rground conc'ntration camp f'r V-Con prison'rs. Squad detain'd 'n separate locashuns. Internal chronom'trs damag'd on entry. Unknown time spent'n camp."

"Squad Lead'r reportin' violation 'f all war sancshuns'n camp. Autobots'n'Neutrals tortur'd 'n force'd t' fight f'r sport. Prison'rs bein' dissassembl'd f'r parts'n'energon. Mechannibal'sm widespred due t'loss of planetary resources."

"Autobot forces on V-Tron requestin' assistance, situation unsustain'ble."

"Squad Lead'r mang'd escape only aft'r confirm'n squad memb'rs offline. End 'o report."

[Deleted]

Ratchet's mouth pressed thinner and harder, the set of his faceplates a hard rictus as he recorded the report, opening internal comms to forward the list of the dead to both Blaster's records and Optimus. Tactical intel went to Optimus, coupled with a preliminary medical report on the femme herself, his glyphs short and to the point , couched in alert warnings for effective triage protocols.

"Report received," he told her. "Prime will want to speak to you when you're out of surgery." Patch, weld, seal, clamp - the leak was getting slower, her systems starting to level off. She wasn't going to be any sort of pretty for awhile, but the rends and dents in her plating were the least of his concerns. Ratchet scanned the femme again, field flat as he cataloged older damage beneath the newest repairs and tagged it all to her medical file. He made himself notes to speak to Ultra Magnus and Steeljaw about proper procedure for bringing in a patient, and another note to forward the pertinent parts of Shiftlock's file to Smokescreen, who would be vastly better equipped to deal with lingering processor-core fallout from the femme's experiences than Ratchet was.

He did, however, need to keep her processor online and at least partially coherent. "I'm going to assume you'd like me to take that Pit slagging inhibitor out?"

[Deleted]

"Yeah, thadda be great," Shiftlock replied with a tired chuckle. "Might be nice't be able't walk wi'out it feelin' like'm steppin' on plasma knives, an' not haffta fight t'keep outta vee'ckle mode." She laughed again and slipped into her preferred mental defense against the suffering that had piled up through her life: an easy, laid-back charisma punctuated with humor. She operated on the principle of "fake it until you make it". That was in essence the summary of her life - strength, skill, courage, happiness - all fake - at least at first. Survival and quick thinking had eventually turned her bluffs into reality, reinforcing for her the correctness of that cliched principle. As Ratchet worked on repairing her battered carcass, Shiftlock was busy patching leaks and broken defenses in her mind.

"Y'do good work, sir," she murmured, continuing to focus on the spot on the wall. "S-sorry fer bein' a glitchwit. You c'n weld my aft t'my helm, seems t'be its regyool'r configgerashun."

[Deleted]

"Aft to helm welding is reserved for glitchwits who try to get up before I tell them they can," Ratchet shot back, a muted note of amusement in his field. "Apology accepted, and I'll be tearing strips out of the ones were were on duty and who should have told me your condition first."

A few more minutes of welding did away with the lingering drain and Ratchet narrowed his optics and slowly withdrew the drip, keeping a close eye on the femme's fuel tank. "Alright," he said at last. "You're good, but I need you to stay there and keep still - those welds need to harden."

He moved around the berth to her far side, tapping her thoracic plate hard enough for the vibration to transfer even with her sensors dulled. "Which means you can't sit up, so I'm going to intubate your primary fuel line and run a drip in, get you back up to acceptable fuel levels." He suited action to words, hands quick and firm. Finished, he moved back to her other side where her plates were still more off than on, the whole berth streaked in lubricant and fresh energon.

Scowling, Ratchet grabbed up a handful of toweling to start mopping with, wishing - not for the first or last time - for a proper medbay, with suction and drainage and clamps and a million other medical niceties that didn't come with cobbled together berths in an outpost on the edge of nowhere. "Alright, let's take a look at that inhibitor," he told Shiftlock when he was finished. "Do you want to be awake or out for this? It's not going to be pleasant, even with the neural blocks."

[Deleted]

Shiftlock continued to bear through the discomfort of the repair. It was acceptable, that strange feeling of internal movement without the sensation of pain that usually accompanied it. She'd been repaired countless times in the past - sometimes in a proper medical facility, but usually right in the middle of the battlefield with laser fire streaking past and explosions shaking everything around her.

Being on a makeshift berth in an offworld hovel like this was far better in comparison, she decided.

Ratchet said she couldn't sit up. That was fine with her, she didn't want to. She wanted to crawl into a bottle of nightmare fuel and not come back out for a few vorn. That would have to wait for a while though, there probably weren't any engex stills on this rock - much less illegal ones pumping out that stuff. What she wouldn't have given to be back on Kimia, listening to Swerve's bartending gossip...

Another question detonated against the daydream settling in around the edges of her perception, startling her back to the present. The t-cog inhibitor. She frowned.

"I wus awake 'n unblock'd when they puttit in," the femme slurred in response, slowly starting to regain proper diction. "I wanna see it come out. 'N while yer innair, c'n y'check m'spark frame? ... S'been carved on."