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.
There wasn't anything wrong with it. In fact it did really fit the red lamborghini, just as well as the other one, if he were to be imagined human at all. She supposed it was all in the eyes. The way that ball cap cast a shadow over those striking too blue eyes, and the way they kind of shimmered when it was coupled with that exact grin-- the devilish one, like he was having the most fun ever and everyone else was too stupid to see what's so funny. That was all Sideswipe.
So she pursed her lips, tilting her head to the side as if this were some topic of super great importance, and studied his new avatar. "Nah; fits fine actually, looks good. Guess I just got so used to looking at you as that guy." She blinked; she'd always thought of him as 'male', something that her brain just did and filed him under, just like Cleaver was this grandmother figure. Even though she knew it didn't work the same way. She said as much, casual conversation. "I didn't really even think about it; just kind of automatically pinned you as this guy, know what I mean? I forgot that isn't really like.. a thing with you guys."
Sideswipe straightened up slightly, glancing back toward Cat, one browplate visibly arched. His avatar, meanwhile, mimicked the gesture, head tilting, the Cybertronian blue of her optics casting a blue halo against the underside of her cap-brim. She pursed her lips a moment, bringing the palm of her hand up under her chin and propping her elbow against the bare brown of her knee, looking vaguely contemplative. Across the cave, Sideswipe himself was no longer looking their direction, but instead reaching down to knock on Stormbreaker’s helm, as though he suspected hollow contents, chirp-buzzing at them in a way that, even to a human ear, sounded pretty much like “Nyah, nyah.”
“Nah, fam. S’a thing, just not th' same thing,” said the holo-matter avatar, looking up at Cat with a vaguely amused expression. “Ya tie form an' function ta things. We do that too, but we not like you. Mechanical species, Kit-Cat – we can change out our chassis if we gotta or we wanna an’ how I function’s got nothin’ ta do with the Spark spinnin’ in my chest.” She tapped her thumb against the skin below her collar bone, smirked, pointed at Cat. “Polarity ain’t function. Glitchfrakkers can be shapist, classist, function excepts an’ still knows dat. Aint nothing ‘bout the charge of a Spark tied to design. Vector Sigma don’t work on a binary, as they say.”
The holoform looked pleased with herself. Clearly, he was waiting for Cat to ask for some clarification on this robot alien bullshit.
Clearly, he was waiting for her to ask him to spill whatever information he was itching to spew from that head of his. Which was fine, really, because she always loved (was always itching to know) what he had to say.
So she sat up and got herself all comfortable in her little pool of paint, leaning back on her palms as she tilted her head to the other side this time. "Okay, so, explain an' let's see if I can keep up. Different shapes, classes, functions and polarities. How's that all mix together?"
Behind her, she heard a clash of metal on metal and felt the resultant thud quaking through the ground. …Paid it no mind, because it was perfectly normal, and she didn't need to look and see to know that Shearwind had just attempted a paint-covered tackle. There was a slightly more delicate sound that followed, probably Stormbreaker's pounce, following Shearwind's downright tackle.
Sideswipe, two jet-morphs now attached to his arms and legs, thrashed about in a decidedly un-coordinated manner before putting Shearwind in a headlock, laughing in a maniacal fashion that was part human laughter, part engine back-firing. Paint continued to get everywhere, the screams of jet-formers over the sounds of metal titans roughhousing… somehow Sideswipe’s holomatter avatar continued to look undisturbed. The holo-girl grinned and took a seat in the paint across from cat, disturbing the rainbow liquid swirls slightly as the hardlight pressed it aside beneath the false weight.
“Function is function. Shape is shape. Don’t matter what polarity you are. Spark polarity aint tied to size-class, function-class, or build – Vector Sigma don’t work like dat, sparking don’t work like dat, don't asign function based on charge. Polarity’s also a scale, aint fixed. Done a million studies lookin’ for a correlation and it don’t exist. High to mid polarity, one way or th’ other, don’t matter, it's random across th’ board.” She did jazz hands. “Science!” Dropped jazz hands. Across the cave, Sideswipe ignored Stormbreaker hanging off his neck and shoulders while giving Shear what looked like a the most gleeful noogie ever giving in all of human and Cybertronian history. “Dat answer yur question, cuz? Or what question you tryin' ta parse? We got a binary, but it aint like yur binary. Ya get me?"
Her expression didn't change much. In fact, she hardly blinked, save for when paint would now and again dribble down the side of her face. But mostly, she stared. Stared with wrinkles all over her forehead until he finished, and only then did she slowly blink, expression switching to a single raised brow.
Tapped her fingers on her lips thoughtfully. She probably should have left it at SCIENCE!, but… they were already here and comfy in the paint, right? She was never very good at leaving things alone, anyway.
"Mmmm-n…-maybe. Two questions." She paused, reconsidered. "Three questions. 'Kay so, polarity. It's like a fingerprint? Unique to the individual?" She was writing this in the paint as she went; question one was on the board between them. "Second: Ve--" She paused, patiently waiting for what sounded like a series of body tackles to die down. "Vector Sigma. …What?" She asked bluntly. Felt like that pretty well suited that topic. She moved her finger over for the third question, ending the neat little list. "Thiiird, what d'you mean about your binary versus ours? …Aside from the obvious."
“Vector Sigma,” repeated Sideswipe, holo waving a pedantic finger. “S’this legendary super-computer or somethin’ that supposedly controls who gets sparked as what and hold th’ whole memory of Cybertron an’ the verse before there was a verse. Mythical bullshit, but Vector Sigma’s real enough, or somethin’ th’ Primacy startin’ callin’ Vector Sigma, who th’ fuck knows. Point is our homeworld built its own populace. You lot had primordial ooze, we got self-replicating cyber-nucleotides.” The holo avatar stuck her tongue out, as though the technobabble had a nasty taste. “If you wanna get sciencey ‘bout it ‘stead a religious, anyway, but don’ ask me t’splain it more’n dat. Ask a tech-head. Vector Sigma, bottomline, is what builds and sparks new Cybertronians. Does other shit, but that’s the thing that most think of when ya bring it up. And like I said: Vector Sigma don’t build based on a binary.”
Sideswipe did not feel like explaining, just yet, the politics of sparking. The Primacies tried and failed attempts at total population control, cold-constructs, the illegal sparking crèches, the one-offs, and the forged sparked out of the control of the government, the apartheids and spark-origin segregation, functionalism. How he and Sunstreaker didn’t have names, why they didn’t, what it meant to rent a body-shell, the relinquishment clinics. Just focus on her questions: What was Vector Sigma? What binary.
“And when I said ‘binary’,” said Sideswipe’s holo. “I mean a binary identification system. You got male female, we got… uh, positive and negative maybe?” The holo girl frowned. “Nah, dat’s not right. Pos and neg’s a medical term, and you can be any polarity and have a positive or negative charge, s’not the same. Uh…” She made a face. “Look, you aint got a word for our binary system, cuz. The closest I can think is it’s a bit like yur gender – it’s a binary not necessarily based on function-typ. An’ spark polarity’s more like a binary spectrum, like a wave length. You got one end of the spectrum an’ th’ other an’ everyone’s all over that spectrum. Dis makin’ any sense?”
From just behind him, Catherine caught glimpses of the three robotic figures wrestling in the paint, all of them now covered good and well in multiple colors. She watched them move while Sideswipe attempted to explain an obviously very complex topic through language and other spacey wacey barriers; studied them. They weren't short, but they were skinny, thin things. They appeared light, where Sideswipe was thick, maybe not heavy set like Ironhide, but he had a definite weight to him. She tried to imagine how that all made sense together; if the two jets had other bodies before this one; what actually defined a 'femme' if not roughly 'female' as humans thought of it; or if it even mattered.
"Mmmm-Sure, I guess, why not?" She said with a shrug. Which either meant… 'yes' or 'no' or 'kind of but she wasn't sure yet'; whatever that meant. Chin rested in her hands, she studied the holo-avatar in front again, lips pursed. "…So where are you on that spectrum? Compared to say," She looked over Sideswipe's human shoulder again, nodded to the winged pair attempting to double team him, "…them?"
Sideswipe's holo-avatar seemed to ponder this a moment, her face scrunching up in what might have been a looking of consideration or just her trying to decide whether she had the vocabulary to make this distinction clear. Behind her, Sidewipe himself was in the middle of fighting with the jet-twins, one of which he had handily tucked up under his arm, the other he was shaking upside down by the ankle like shanix were going to fall out of hir sub-space. Shearwind didn’t seem pleased.
“I’m closer ta Shearwind on th’ spectrum right now,” said his holo-avatar finally. “Stormbreaker’s a bit farther down da opposite end. Shear’s in tha middle, an’ I aint quite in th’ middle. Storm’s just on th’ other side’a th’ fence far as I can tell. Dunno, she’s… a bit odd. Both of ‘em could slide either way really. I think I’m pretty set at this point.” The holoform shrugged. “Spark polarity’s a bit wishy-washy for some bots.”
The holo-girl peered at Cat, eyes still glowing softly, holo-particles glowing lazily in the irises. Cat seemed thoughtful, but didn’t rejoin immediately so she followed up: “Any of that make sense?”
Cat thought about that good and hard, head canted to one side and resting on her paint saturated shoulder. Did it make sense? Well, yes. Sure it did, it wasn't that difficult to understand the words coming out of Side's mouth. …And no, because it was an alien culture millions and millions of years old and what she thought something meant in just English was probably so over-simplified she wondered if it came anywhere close to the real truth of it. But sure. They did whatever the hell they wanted it seemed like, when it came right down to it. (Which could have been both right and wrong).
She thought about saying as much, and then wondered whether or not that'd start a whole different tree of conversations with the same end. But then… eh, it's not like they'd be leaving this atrium any time soon. …For however long it took to clean all this up.
"Yeah." She looked over her shoulder back at the trio, listening to the little clicks and whirrs that followed their actions. And even if she was thinking herself in circles, she didn't seem disturbed or frustrated by it. "Are you brought online leaning one way or the other… or is that something that's kind of learned over time?" By that time, there was a loud thud that shook the ground, kind of mixed with the odd sound of 'splat' that came from the paint puddles. When she looked… it just looked like a giant tangle of limbs and wings to her. "…How do you even multi-task like that? That's ridiculous."