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.
"An' until then," Ironhide concluded, each word underscored in knife edged glyphs - fierce-loyalty/anger/pleasure/pain-lust/any-means/any-excuse - that sliced into the Saleen underneath him, "it don't stop. Yeh don't have the right t' cry mercy until yeh give us those codes."
One hard press and twist and the optic crystal shattered, Ironhide's thumb driving knuckle deep into circuits and shards and hemorrhaging fluids. He palmed the Saleen's cheek almost tenderly, pushing the ruined head to the side as Barricade screamed and retched, convulsing.
"That's sight," he said softly, dragging his thumb from the wrecked cavity, smearing fluids across faceplates. Leaning down further, he pressed his lip plates to the Decepticon's audial array, his voice dropping to a low, nearly subsonic whisper. "Want to do sound next?"
It had taken Blaster longer than expected to get back to base and through the next groundbridge. He came out running. The scene he saw before him - Barricade in a total mess with Shadow and Ironhide standing over him - would have normally shocked Blaster. However, he was hardly shocked by anything. If anything, he was ready to deal with the mech who had made Blue cry.
"Oi! Hide! Shadow! Heard you needed my expertise on something!" Blaster called out as he walked over to the scene, "Lemme guess, it's got to do with the motherfragger over there, right?"
If it had to do with Barricade in any way, he was certainly angry enough to do it.
The ground bridge was quite possibly the sweetest sound Ironhide had heard in the last vorn, followed closely by Blaster's voice. Finally. At-fragging-LAST.
One quick shove, palm underneath the Saleen's chin, snapped Barricade's mouth shut so hard that something crunched, metallic sound of plates warping under force. Hooking his fingers into the bridge of the Decepticon's mask, Ironhide held him there, palm covering the entirety of the infiltrator's face beneath the empty, destroyed optics.
There was no hiding the shattered chassis, fluid leaking optic sockets, or energon splashed all over the dirt and the both of them as well, so Ironhide didn't bother to try. Just turned his best grin up at Blaster, gesturing to the body pinned under his knee. "Yah guess right. Slagger's got codes for Buckethead's new weapon 'o doom. Don't seem 't wanna talk, either. Think ya can nudge his memory?" He let his field flick out, prodding lightly at the space where Shadow had gone still. "Tell 'im what ya found, Shadow."
"His security is locked down tight; too tight for me to hack through." Shadow shifted position, turning toward Blaster, expression impassive. "It was set up by an expert; he sure as slag isn't good enough to have done it himself."
She hesitated slightly, then added, "He says the information we want is hard locked; encrypt and lock any information too sensitive for active memory is standard recon protocol, so I doubt he's lying. He claims not to have the encryption key, but that...knowing how Barricade works, I suspect he is lying about that. He's not the type to carry anything he can't get at."
Not like us, she thought, bitterly. If she had known what she was carrying, if she had had a clue before every encrypted file Labyrinth had dumped into her memory had gotten scrambled by her crash on Earth, then dealing with Barricade might not have been necessary at all.
"The problem is going to be overriding his security protocols while you break through his firewalls. I...didn't even get far enough to get a decent look at them, but again: it's standard to carry a viral bomb that will destroy the entire memory core and neural net, and I don't care how good you are, you trigger that and we lose everything he's carrying. You have to download the entire encrypted file without triggering anything and pick it apart after you have it."
And that won't be easy, she added silently, She knew Blaster was the best they had - and from everything she'd heard, he was the best, period - but that didn't make her feel better about having to rely on him. The mech was too smugly self-assured for her peace of mind. These systems were designed to be easy to frag up with a clumsy hack; keeping the data out of enemy hands was the whole point, after all. A good hacker, even the best hacker, with the wrong type of experience would still not be good enough.
Blaster closed the gap between Shadow, Ironhide, and Barricade. Although, he had wished he hadn't. The destruction upon Barricade's body was beyond horrific. Certainly, he himself was rather angry at the infiltrator. Afterall, the bastard had made Blue cry. But this was beyond what he would have wished upon this mech.
"WHAT. THE. FRAGGING. SLAG. DID. YOU. DO?!" shouted Blaster, " You both did THIS?! Primus. You! Both of you! We're supposed to be frelling better than this!"
Ironhide bared his dental plates and growled, the bass vibration rumbling up through his struts to burst, deep and angry, through every plate. "Better?" he snapped. "Better'n what? Better'n th' 'Cons settin' up to wipe every single one of us out? Better'n this piece o' slag who'd send every one of us t' our deaths an' laugh about it? Or kill th' human Blue was friends with, right in front of hir, just t' distract us? Th' kinda slag sucking Pit scrap that would brutalize a youngling just f'r laughs, or go on about how he tortured yer friends t' death just for the thrill 'o twisting the blade in yer spark? THAT kind of better?"
He drew in a ragged ventilation but made no effort at all to rein in the searing flare of his field, only barely stopping himself from reaching up to bodily drag the other mech down and instead turning the aborted gesture into a sharp, commanding indication of the infiltrator pinned underneath him. "Don't yeh fraggin' lecture meh about 'better'," he snarled. "An' unless yer aimin' t' have all of us be cold an' dead an' it be a moot point, get yer aft down here an' DO YER SLAGGIN' JOB!"
"I'll DO my job but Primus-dammnit! What makes you ANY better than Barricade right now? From what I can see, there isn't much separating you two from him! This is EXACTLY why we have so damn many rules! It's so we DON'T turn out like them!" Blaster snarled.
He crouched down beside Barricade.
"And don't you EVER call me out for this kind of job again. I'm only doing this so we actually have SOMETHING to save us from Megatron's special toy. If it weren't for that, I'd leave you two on your own!" growled Blaster.
He gently slipped his fingers behind Barricade's helm hunting for that one plate that hid the port he was looking for. As usual, it didn't take him long to slide the plate back and jack in.
Fragging arrogant scraplet, and that was the type of idealistic arrogant nonsense that got mechs killed - and usually not the ones spouting it. No, that was the type that collected collateral damage along the way and left the originator untouched in the eye of the storm until they rebooted and found out just what that idealism cost.
Blaster, Ironhide reminded himself, was younger than he was, or at least wore the passing vorns less heavily, and hadn't been on the front lines for the entire slagging war. Ironhide had spouted the same slag when he was younger and the war was newer, or close enough. He'd grown out of it. Let the war drag on for another couple hundred vorn, Blaster might grow out of it too.
If they all lived that long. IF. And the 'if' hung mostly on Blaster's skill, which was the only reason Ironhide throttled back his growl and held his peace, waiting to find out if the hacker was as good as his reputation.
Two things kept Shadow from telling the arrogant little glitch to just leave them and they would finish this themselves. The first was that, despite the shock of Blaster's words, the keen sense of betrayal quickly turning to anger, she knew they needed him; Barricade's firewalls and security subroutines were so far beyond the field-level programs she had the expertise to deal with that the idea of going up against them would have been laughable even if she hadn't had pain and error codes and feedback haze constantly pulling at her processor, demanding attention she didn't have to spare.
The second was that Ironhide was just as fragged off as she was, his EMF sizzling hot where it brushed against hers, a physical vibration transmitting itself through Barricade's broken frame. And unlike her, Ironhide had both the authority and the raw power to back his orders up.
She ceded her position at Barricade's side willingly so Blaster could reach the infiltrator's helm, moving out of range of his field with a disgust she hadn't felt even for Barricade. His reaction was incomprehensible; this was data they needed if they were to have any chance against Megatron's new weapon, and Barricade...
Barricade deserved everything we did to him, and more, she thought furiously; the infiltrator was as far from an innocent victim as it was possible to get.
Now that her concentration was broken, her vision blurred and clouded with error messages and feedback-induced junk code, pain pulsing through her with every beat of her spark. She offlined her optics, trying to push everything back down until later...and her memory flooded again with the images Barricade had dumped into her, everyone she had loved - everyone she had ever really known as more than a contact to be used or an objective to be achieved - dying with her hands in their sparks and slick with their energon.
Sickened, she forced her optics back online and stumbled a little farther away, arms wrapped around herself, the shredded metal of her chassis scraping and catching against the claw marks Barricade had left in her plating. They only had one chance at this; she could not risk being a distraction right now.
Barricade couldn’t move anymore. His neural-circuitry was utterly shot, his hydraulic systems dropping offline one by one as stasis-lock flashed his logi-tech and jammed his each and every attempt to move. He could hear Blaster (that stupid loudmouth Primus sucking glitch) yelling at his teammates in righteous Autobot horror. Thank Primus for ethical idiots and Primus, gods it really hurt. Every hostile ripple of electromagnetic energy felt like a swarm of claws dragging down his nerve-raw chassis and he was hyper aware of Shadowrunner’s nuclear EMF withdrawing, replaced instead with the controlled burn and – damn him – concern of Blaster. Fingers on the back of his neck, thumb against the interface panel at the back of his helm. No. Not after all this! No!
Blaster entered his head, stepping into the digital plane of his head as a ripple of calm and the first thing he did was hack Cade’s pain receptors and deactivate them. Arrogant little fragger, didn’t think it mattered whether Cade was distracted by the agony or not and – Primus fragging dammit it all – he was right. Barricade locked down his defenses, shoving his panic away and focusing, writing code and reinforcing his mental firewalls with heavier repeating encrpytions, hurling up a barricade of digital snow – viral code crawling his mind with enough defensive lines to make any Bot flinch. Blaster though – he scanned his work, dropped a viral patch and shredded it instantly.
So, Barricade said, bitterness in every glyph, I guess you *are* here to hack me this time.
Blaster breeched his third tier defenses. He did it slowly. He took his time, bypassed the more brutal options because he could afford to take time with the infiltrator. Barricade would have hated him less if he’d just ripped through but Blaster seemed to sense that Barricade wanted him to rush this… and worse the fragger was trying not to hurt him. Barricade hated him so intensely he couldn’t articulate it. Barricade activated his emergency defenses and Soundwave’s firewalls flared to life, corralling Barricade’s memory core and the hardlocked data pack. Cade felt the viral bomb go active – a trigger on a hair-line. If Blaster tripped ANY of Soundwave’s hideously complex defensive nodes, it would wipe the data… and Barricade’s higher functions, knocking him offline forever.
Of course… if Blaster was good enough, he could trip the trigger, then counter-code the viral-software, and fight to protect the data (and by extension) Barricade’s sanity. Barricade prayed for obliteration.
Last Edit: Jan 10, 2012 13:37:55 GMT -5 by Deleted
But Blaster wasn't a killer. If anything, he preferred to keep his targets alive. But Soundwave's code was a thing of sheer brilliance. A certain destructive beauty. If Blaster had tripped the trap, what was to stop it from coming after him? The best idea he had was to take it slow and with great amounts of care.
The feedback he was getting from Barricade was that of sheer hate.
"As if I haven't heard that a million times. How *original.* What no one realizes is that I'm always the third option," said Blaster.
The trap needed to be deactivated. He wasn't going to take a chance with that. It would have been easy to come up with a counter virus in a hurry. But even that had risks and one of those risks was losing the fail safe code.
"It would be easy to kill you right now. But for what you did today... for making Blue cry, I don't think killing you would be a punishment. So I will let you keep your wicked life in this twisted deformed body of your's. As you and I both are aware, it's hard to get replacement parts on this planet. So.... that will be your punishment," said Blaster.
"And back on base you kept whining how it *wasn’t* you who hacked Cons in the field." Disgusting, two-faced, fuck. "And I’m glad you’re happy with your comrades, Blaster. If Autobots make spark-breech and mutilation a regular part of their POW protocol then you lot just might win this war."
Cade backed deeper into his mind, willing Soundwave’s virus lobomotize him now, obliterate him and take a chunk of Blaster with it.
Twenty kilks later, Blaster broke another security code, releasing virals into Barricade’s multi-function sub-routines, slowing him down. The world went sluggish. He couldn’t feel it when Blaster ripped through his next firewall. No. This hack was taking eons. He could feel himself slipping. Another code broken. This one backfired, a trap code that stopped Blaster dead to fight it off. Then two more blew up in his face. Barricade, given a moment to think, smiled: Thanks, Sounders. Then the Mustang looked up and found Blaster’s coding eating at the other side of his final firewalls, clustering. Scrap. He thought of home.
And then Blaster fucked up.
Barricade’s thoughts shredded, a billion digital hooks of Soundwave’s Primus-blessed suicide-code hitting his memory core and ripping his processor apart. For some reason that felt incredible. Soundwave’s kill-switch hit him like an overload. It occurred to him as the sensation spiked into obscene pleasure, Soundwave must have coded this euphoria in to stop him panicking as the virus eradicated his mind. That was completely sick. And then Barricade was beyond caring.
The last thing he felt before stasis-lock took him was a sudden, insanity-inducing jag of pain. His skull split with red hot sutures like something was digging into his cranial case and clawing something out of him. He felt something tear out. He couldn’t remember why that was bad. Who -? What was –? Where –?
There was one thing Blaster was able to do before everything came crashing down around him. It was just one sneaky little trick, really. He knew that there was a chance that this would have gone horribly wrong. Which meant switching off to his plan B - The Indiana Switch. Or at least that was what he called it. Essentially, he had swapped the fail safe codes with junk code. But this rush didn't allow him to be as delicate as he would have liked.
Either way, Blaster jacked out of the system and opened his eyes.
"Bastard. That bastard coward," Blaster growled.
And that was what irritated him most about this. Barricade had taken the easy way out. He didn't face it like a mech. He faced it like a coward. Almost as if to punctuate Blaster's emotions, he retracted his wrist cable with a loud snap and stood up without a word. He didn't dare look at Shadow nor did he look at his long time friend, Ironhide. Instead he picked a point off in to space and looked towards that as he took a few steps forward putting both metaphorical and physical space between himself and the situation. After a few moments, he spoke up.
"I've got your bloody fail safe codes. But don't you EVER bring me in to this kind of situation again!" said Blaster finally.
Ironhide cycled a deep ventilation. The frame underneath him had gone limp and quiet; he let go gingerly, his own systems tight from the sustained pressure he had been applying. The hot burn of his own injuries came back as he sat back on his pedes, new alerts popping up now that he wasn't ignoring them to inform him of a host of scrap that was going to keep him off his wheels for awhile.
He needed, he thought dimly, a wash, a cube of high grade, and a solar rotation or three of recharge, preferably before he had to go limping anywhere near Ratchet's medbay.
"Good," was all he said aloud, and then, because Blaster was all but vibrating temper and it was warranted, even if it did stick in his vocalizer like a glitch, "...thank yeh. Knew if anyone could, it'd be yeh."
Shadow's relief at hearing Blaster had gotten the codes was underscored by an odd sense of disappointment, of anticlimax. They had the codes, and Barricade was dead, or as good as...but the ache to have him suffer for what he'd done was as strong as ever.
She pushed that aside, watching the others through narrowed optics. They both looked like they thought they were finished here, and maybe to their minds they were. You didn't hide the evidence of a battle, after all, and if Blaster had any experience with this sort of work he wasn't showing it.
With a little flicker of disgust, she slipped into the state databases and sifted until she found an abandoned mine, near enough to be accessible, deep enough to block casual sensor scans, and with a fatality on record which ensured it would have been sealed off to the best of the humans' ability.
"We still need to deal with that," she pointed out. She straightened, EMF flatlining, body language and tone taking on a level of authority that probably skirted another smackdown from Ironhide. "We can't leave him here in the open. There's a mine shaft not even a mile away," she sent them both the coordinates, "over a hundred feet deep, sealed, and unlikely to be disturbed. We can dispose of him there."