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.
Cade jerked his face away from Shadow’s fingers, a bloom of heat and pressure unfolding through his head and paralyzing him briefly with anticipatory agony, waiting for her to jam her thumb into the ruined socket of his head and ignore the dying nerves there … when she didn’t it was a relief so thick it could feel it wrecking his resolve. Fraggit. You know what she’s doing. You know so turn this one her. You can’t tell them codes, even if you wanted to. There’s no risk, word vomit, make them mad. Barricade could feel himself shaking uncontrollably, jerking with the bare pulse and surge of his spark in the open cavity of his chest and unbearably aware of damage to his erotic and intellectual core. He couldn’t stand thinking of it so he kept talking.
“Nothing,” lied Barricade. “I was angry with Viper… for blowing my cover.” (For killing Dataspike.) “And he was one of easiest to talk into breaking. Heh. He started crying and begging for his brother.” Cade’s single optic flickered, static banding his vision as he looked up into the purposeless abyss of Shadowrunner’s face and smirked because he could see Ray wasn’t the only thing he’d killed today. “I took him to pieces. In every way. And by the end he thanked me to die and you know it’s true.” Barricade shuddered, vocalizer glitching and catching. “He held me while I put the blade through his fragging spark.”
"You're lying," Shadow said, maintaining her illusion of calm by the thinnest margin. Don't focus on what he did; focus on why. "Viper already tripped you up. You couldn't know Labyrinth hadn't alerted the rest of us. You aren't stupid; you wouldn't risk going after Relay for nothing."
Her hand dropped, hovered above his exposed spark until she saw the dread, the horrific anticipation of what she was about to do cross his features. Slowly, deliberately, she reached into his shattered chassis and drove her fingers into a nerve cluster instead, forcing them deeper with every writhing scream, until his vents were stuttering in broken cycles and his vocalizer was spilling out static.
"Don't lie to me." Her voice had gone cold, but when she rested her fluid-slicked hand against his plating the touch was gentle, careful of his damage. Easy or hard, Barricade; which do you want? How far are you going to make me take this? "What was Relay carrying? Which one of us had the failsafe?"
Barricade blacked out… or he would have if the extreme error code and indirect assault on his spark orbitals hadn’t forced him brutally online. He came online thrashing, howling, non-verbal sub-sonics for desperation, torment, pleading, hatred –all degrading into Basic chirp-whirr shrieks. Now that he was becoming accustomed to mind-blowing agony, the infiltrator found -- for exactly an eighth of a klik -- it felt excruciatingly good. And then it was just excruciating and he was screaming and regretting not giving up everything like he’d never regretted a thing in his life. He felt hydraulic lines snap, fuel lines rupture and burst liquid heat, hemorrhaging fluid into his systems and the worst part was he was telling the truth.
Then she stopped and Barricade collapsed into a freezing cold numb and silence, the universe drained of color in the wake of that. He jerked, twitching uncontrollably now when she touched him, servo tracing the contents of his own fuel lines across the plates of his face. He choked, gears locking, fine motor and major sub-processors blown. His optic flickered and glitched frantically.
“Flight… systems,” he said. Despair coiled through every frequency off his ruined body. “Labyrinth had… failsafe.” She’s not going to stop. She’s not. She’s just starting. No, no, no. Think. Think you way out of this. C’mon. “Wanna know how Labrinth was… driving you all… insane, Shadowrunner? Because its pretty… fraggin’ sick.”
Ironhide didn't - quite - throttle back the deep, warning growl of his engine. If there was so much as a micron of truth in the way Barricade twisted words, it was rapidly giving him a sinking feeling about Shadowrunner's former unit and their fate. He didn't trust the Decepticon not to be twisting all of it through the Pit and back, but lies worked best that had some base of truth to them.
There wasn't much he could do except let his field brush against Shadow's as he leant forward slightly, EMF pulsing in the quick sketch of glyphs of caution and warning, distrust of an enemy and wordless support and respect for Shadow herself, the last underscored with real truth - watching her now, the coolly profession facade (and it was a facade, he could tell that much, but if anything it made him respect her more) and knowing just enough to be able to tell that she did, indeed, know what she was doing.
The motion he passed off by slipping a basic med kit from subspace. At the flicker of Shadow's question he shrugged. "Can't keep him talking if he drains dry," he grumbled. Shifting, he pinned Barricade more firmly, taking clamps and tape from the kit. He wasn't a medic by any stretch of the imagination but he could patch a ruptured line with as much messy efficiency as any other frontliner who had patched themselves on a battlefield. Grabbing for the worst of the splits in the wreckage of Barricade's chest, he started clamping them down.
For a horrible, processor-freezing fraction of a klik, Shadow's training fled and all she wanted was to rise to Barricade's bait, to scream furious denials, to unleash every bit of her doubt and pain and loss on him before ripping out his spark and finishing this. It passed before she could even begin to act on it, and she didn't think she'd faltered...but she still felt a quick tracery of dread when Ironhide shifted position, her EMF reflexively pulling tighter to her frame.
The touch of his field was nothing like the sting of his dismissive reprimand, though, just a brief, steadying reminder of what she already knew, shot through with a level of genuine respect that surprised her more than the med kit he produced.
She took advantage of the distraction Ironhide was providing, rising to move a few steps away from Barricade's pinned form. It's a diversion, she reminded herself. Barricade knows this game; he's vomiting up more of the same slag he tried back on base because it worked then. All he has to do is make me clumsy, or distract me long enough for him to offline from the damage, and he wins. Of course he's going to use Lab against me.
Critically, she observed the shuddering wreck of the Decepticon infiltrator. Even with Ironhide's rough repairs, he wasn't going to last much longer; the ground around him was soaked with energon and hydraulic fluid, joint lubricant and coolant. That he was still conscious was a minor miracle.
She'd led Barricade as close to the information as she was going to be able to; the time had come to push him the rest of the way.
Shadow returned to her position at Barricade's side, sending a quick burst of gratitude to Ironhide before smoothing her field back to blank neutrality. "Labyrinth had the failsafe," she said in the same conversational tone as before, drawing Barricade's attention back to her. "And because of that, you tore him open and left him to die slowly." Her voice hardened, optics never leaving his face as her hand moved once again into his chassis. "We can make sure you die just as slowly."
She explored the repairs with a delicate touch that still sent spasms of pain through him. "Or..." Her voice gentled again, her hand withdrew. "You give me the failsafe code now, and I put a nice, clean shot through your spark. At this range, you won't have time to feel anything. No more pain. This can all be over, just as soon as we have that code."
“Get…” Barricade panted, half-growling, half choking, plates ratting as his stabilizers failed across-the-board. “Get smelted… Autobot. Do what you want. I don’t know the code, fools! I only carry them just like your oblivious Thirteen and I will die with them and there is no time even for Blaster to crack a posthumous hard lock. You break your… protocols and… forsake your Prime’s… ethics for nothing!”
He jerked, hard, a machine whine originating loudly form some grinding internal system collapsing in on itself. Core damage exceeds maximum emergency thresholds. Stasis lock imminent. Damn Ironhide and his hideous patch work, digging in his chest, clamping bleeders like a field medic while Barricade’s spark scarred the airwaves around them with agony, universal torment pulsing through the language of electromagnetic sense. Barricade would be safely comatose if only he’d just kept out of it. Primus scragging dammit all. The Saleen wheezed and whirred brokenly, glaring up at his tormentors and hating them psychotically, intimately, not because they were spark-breaching, taboo-breakers but because they would go against their leader’s directive so grievously and for so little. He would give them nothing but the satisfaction of torturing him.
“Even my… even… Megatron would disdain of your… ugh…” The world spun out, a gyroscopic whirligig as his sensor array crashed hard and left the infiltrator blind and senseless before force reboot put him back on the ground again. He laughed, transfluid filling his intake, running from his mouth and down the cabling of his throat. The energon from his wrecked eye darkened the white banding of his face, deadening nerves sparking blue in his head. He looked at Ironhide, because he’d already done Shadow all the damage he was capable of, and gritted, “May your Prime damn you for my sake.”
Ironhide grunted, low and deep, the sound chuffed through his vents. Things were rupturing and leaking just as fast as he could patch, but he kept at it with a grim intensity made all the more gruesome by the truth - if he had come upon a mech, 'Bot or 'Con, left on the field in the shape Barricade was in, he would have already put a mercy shot through the unfortunate's spark. Instead, he was drawing it out, one clamp and wrap at a time, because for every klik they gained there was another chance to pry what the infiltrator knew out of him.
He met the ruin of Barricade's gaze steadily, unflinching. "Oh, he's got more'n this if he wants t' damn meh," he assured the 'Con. "Yer just another drop in th' tank. Won't be first or last time he's better off not knowin'." Truth and lies, mixed in a spin, and Barricade wasn't the only one who could do it, but like slag would Ironhide let the wreck know that this day would be weighing on him in time to come.
Entirely possible that it wouldn't, after all. Not if things went right.
Something sparked inside the Saleen's ruined chassis. Ironhide tamped it down, wrapped it, letting his thumb slide against the still charged remnant of a sensor cluster - gentle as a pat on a sparkling's helm, or an intimate touch ghosted across interior protoform - before he went on to the next patch job, quick and neat and nothing of the roar that he let loose over the Autobot channels making it to his face. ::Base, Ah need an ETA on backup - where th' frag is Blaster? Barricade's got th' slaggin' failsafe codes y'all need, but we ain't gettin' it outta him unless somebody cracks th' fraggin' rock he's callin' a processor! Get meh a hacker out here, stat!::
"But you aren't like us, Barricade," Shadow said, leaning close, refusing to let him distract himself by focusing on Ironhide...or worse, goad Ironhide into killing him. "You don't answer to anyone, and you don't have a master with the key to those codes like we did. You can unlock them any time. All you're doing is prolonging your own suffering."
She hesitated, one hand hovering above his spark, unsure if Ironhide's repairs would hold through another assault. "You can't tell me it's worth it. You give us the failsafe, and the worst that happens is that the war keeps going. You keep refusing..." Her hand dropped lower, until she could feel the first hints of spark energy licking across her mesh. "Ratchet's on the way. You aren't going offline any time soon.
"Is the failsafe worth this?" she asked, and lowered her hand.
“Your Prime won’t allow it. You cannot all be complicit or are the Autobots so false they just –” A jam in his intake jarred him, killed his words on his glossa and an electrical snap of blue crossed the dark at the back of his throat. He coughed, a machine whine caught in his vocalizer. “Primus.”
He glared up at them, his spark pulsing with dread as he tried to drag himself back from the alloy of her palm, the hum of Autobot EMF encroaching on the ache of his spark in its chamber. His damaged systems thrumming wildly, gears and hydraulics grinding and straining as the Saleen tried to pull himself back by his pinned forearms. The sick horror and that razor edge of insanity made it hard to think. They lie. They won’t! No, no no! It’s a trick. Just hang on the damage will kill you. Give nothing away. Don’t think about it. Just –!
“Worth it,” Barricade hissed, biting back a scream as spark energy flared through his damaged chest. “Worth it, because I know what I’m dying for! You’re going to die because you’re broken and Labyrinth broke you!” Primus this hurts so fragging much. “You hear me!? He broke you You’re not an Autobot! You’re a corpse! DON’T TOUCH ME YOU –!” But he didn’t get much past that.
Ironhide counted off three nano-kliks before he tapped Shadow's wrist. "Need him alive," he rumbled quietly, and then counted off another half a klik to be sure the infiltrator was still with them.
"Was a time," he said, when he was fairly certain the 'Con could hear him, "when none of us were Autobots. More t' livin' then just that. And you are a slaggin' stupid fragger. Ah told ya we weren't bluffin'. Maybe now yeh'll pay attention." He gripped the Saleen's jaw, tipping the mech's head back until the other had no choice but to meet his optics. "Newsflash for yeh - Autobots? Are just mechs. An' a lot of us are what yer 'Cons have made of us. Thinkin' yer safe because we wear this-" he tapped against his own shoulder with his free hand, smearing energon and fluids over the insignia branded there, "-well. Y'all think yer th' baddest things around. Dumb an' slaggin' arrogant, an' look where it gotcha."
Sitting back, he flicked fluid off his hands and dove them back into Barricade's chassis, continuing the rhythm of clamp and seal. "Keep 'im hot," he told Shadow. "Second round's on th' way."
"Here's the thing you should have remembered," Shadow said, picking up easily where Ironhide had left off. "Things change when a mech has nothing left to lose. You said it yourself, I'm a corpse; we're all corpses if Megatron uses the weapon you brought him. Do you really think we have time to care what Prime might think about this?
"You claim this is worth it, but is it really? Is all your suffering worth it, just to make the Decepticon victory a little faster?" She leaned closer, her EMF running hot against his, voice dropping low. "Because you're right, you know. I'm broken; we're all broken. We're broken and we're losing and Megatron doesn't need this weapon to finish us. You're dying for nothing, Barricade. We're going to rip you apart and patch you up and keep you screaming until you die along with us, and it will all have been for nothing."
Barricade said nothing. He just narrowed his single optic, glaring at Ironhide, unable to move for the grip on his jaw keeping him there and holding his stare. “I have a notion of loyalty,” he snarled, directing his words to Shadowrunner.“Nothing that you'd understand, crazy Autobot scrap. Your spark is for the smelting pit and your cause was lost from its inception. You never knew a cause, though, only Labyrinth using you like shareware. So good, admit defeat and rip me apart. It will make you feel better.”
Barricade was hyperventilating, his over heated systems whirring, cycling frantically. He was slick with energon, his single optic paled with overclocking, his engines humming impossibly resilient despite the damage. The damage was nothing. There was a renewed heat in his spark, a psychotic stubbornness verging on homicidal. Megatron. Someone’s torqued you off. He focused on that, though the Bots would try to violate even that – they could not reach his partner through him, in any capacity.
“We’ve won. If we kill you all today, then we’ve won and if your Prime goes dark, goes cold then we’ve won. If he tortures me, allows you to be Decepticons, then we’ve won. I’m a solider. I'll die ugly. It’s what I’m meant to do.” Cade held onto the link, focused on that, on him. Not for nothing. He smirked. “It’s worth it.”
Ironhide hooked his fingers wide across the shattered rim of Barricade's broken chassis, leaning down until the edges crumpled, until the palm of his hand tingled with the incipient spark energy and Barricade's vents were breaking in mid cycle with panic, the infiltrator's entire frame trying to bow away from him with nowhere to go.
"Ya listen t' meh," he told the other mech, voice low and shot through with the growl of his engine, EM twisted into glyphs of enjoyment and skirling pleasure that he didn't even try to hide as the Decepticon flinched. "Ya wanna talk loyalty? Then process this - mah loyalty is t' Prahm, and Prahm only. Slag th' Autobot 'cause'. Prahm goes cold? Yer right, you'll've won. But if anythin' ah can do keeps him functionin', then that's mah fraggin' cause. Right there."
He eased back, taking the weight and the press of his hand from the infiltrator's chassis. "An' right now, yer stubborn aft is smack inbetween meh an' what's gonna keep mah Prahm online. Death's too slaggin' easy f'r yah. Yeh think about that an' then ask yerself what Ah'm willin' t' do - Ah'll give yah a hint. It ain't offlinin' yer sorry aft."
A hard press, both thumbs dragged around the edges of the Saleen's spark to map neural clusters and sensor nodes, pulled something like a scream from Barricade's vocalizer. Ironhide grit his dental plates and leaned up, catching the infiltrator's jaw again. "Were up t' meh," he ground out, "yer spark'd be decoratin' a shelf in Ratch's medbay already an' yeh'd be so slaggin' starved for sound or touch or sight-" he brought his other hand up, pressing the pad of his thumb lightly against the surface of the intact optic, "-yeh'd be tellin' us everythin' and then some."
He circled his thumb slowly, tracing the edges of the Decepticon's optic. "Yeh ever seen th' poor glitches they take outta that? Locked up in their own fraggin' minds, stewin' in their own slag, nothin' but spark echoes o' the last thing they remember, over an' over again." A firmer press, the surface of the optic giving just slightly, brittle and slick with energon beneath his thumb. "Yeh give us th' codes, yeh can die. Yeh don't... and Ah'll make sure yeh never fraggin' do."
Cade groaned, fighting the spark-deep instinct to scream out of sheer manic despair. He hurt so fragging much, his spark flaring tank-churning, nerve-stripping agony with every passing nano-klik, his logi-tech fraying with panic as he tried to hold tight to his calm or any sane thought that wasn’t tell them everything. No. He’s lying. He’s lying. He’s really not. The Saleen shuddered, dorsal column arching back, trying to turn his face away when Ironhide pressed his thumb into the fine glass and polymer orb of his left optic and pressed, pain jagging through his head and he heard himself retch, choking, plates shaking.
“You don’t… you can’t. You’re lying. This isn’t Cybertron you don’t have… the resources.” Please, please, gods, let that be true. They didn’t crash and keep a functional spark holding chamber. He jerked, cried out, an animal noise spike with a sound that could have been sob. “You’re fragging liars and cowards and desperate! You can’t win if you don’t – AH!” Another arc off his spark, confused lightening blue energy transfer, current off his fragging soul not meant for anyone and – Primus-skragging frag it hurt so much! He black out, came reeling, dizzy back to consciousness, felt fingers set around this spark casing and threw his head back, choking on a howl. “STOP! YOU PIECE OF SMELT-SWILLING BOT REFUSE! STOP IT!”
He couldn’t take it. How it felt. There was something digging though his soul, a stranger's EMF eating into him, spiking through him, driving him insane. Then he was writhing, his remaining optic cracking. Primus! Megatron where are you?
"You know how to stop us," Shadow said, her voice going to sweet persuasion in contrast to Ironhide's pitiless tones. "You give us the codes. It stops. That's all you have to do, Barricade. Just give us the failsafe codes. It's not a betrayal if it doesn't hurt the Decepticon cause. And it won't. You know that. The Autobots are losing. We've already lost. And as soon as you give us those codes, the pain stops."