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.
Ironhide shot a disgruntled look at Barricade's frame. What that meant, translated from femme-speak, was "hey you, get on it"; Chromia had had the same tone. Grunting, he pushed himself upright, growling as his full weight came down on his pedes. Primus, that parting shot from that winged glitch was going to sting for awhile.
"Alright," he rumbled. "Blaster, yeh'll be wantin' to get back to base - those codes take priorty. Shadow an' Ah can clean up our own mess." He underscored it with as close to an apology as he could manage - not for Barricade, per se, but for the necessity of dragging Blaster into it. He hesitated barely half a nanoklik, weighing the necessity, but the sharp set of the other mech's frame wasn't assurance enough.
"Think it goes without sayin' this didn't happen." He kept his optics steady on the other, even though Blaster was avoiding his gaze. "Won't be the first, Primus willin' it might be th' last, but there's a fraggin' war going on."
"Yeah. Believe me.... I'm well aware of the war," said Blaster.
He contacted the base for a groundbridge. Not long after he had done so, a rippling green portal opened up ahead of him. As he walked through, he was in quiet reflection. It was an unusual state for him as noise and sound helped him think. He knew what war had actually looked like and it was his own personal choice to avoid looking directly at it. Being a hacker, it allowed him to be away from front lines. It made things easier for him.
But what he had just witnessed wasn't an act of war. It was an act of homicide. And he was just dragged in to it.
(OOC: And that's Blaster gone. Feel free to do whatever.)
Shadow watched Blaster vanish through the ground bridge, not particularly reassured by his final comment. As far as she was concerned, knowing there was a war going on and knowing what that meant were two different things.
She shot a quick glance at Ironhide, but he was back to glaring down at Barricade's body as if he expected it to conveniently vanish. She shook her head and set about jerking the plasma blades out of the former infiltrator's ruined arms, tossing them across the body. She worked around the area, retrieving anything large enough to be easily identified; information was power, doubly so when you were dealing with a situation which had officially never happened.
With an odd pang, she recovered her blade from where it was half buried in dirt. This, she definitely couldn't risk being found; too many questions would be raised if it was recognized. She turned it over in her hands once more, then subspaced it and jogged back to Ironhide.
"We'll have to come back here and cover up all the spilled fluids," she said, gesturing to the energon-slicked ground, "but I've finished cleaning up the major components. We can remove the body any time."
"Yeah, Ah heard yeh," Ironhide rumbled. Venting, he pushed himself heavily upright, testing rerouted systems in his injured leg before stooping to hook his fingers into the least damaged portions of Barricade's chassis, heaving.
It was an awkward heft, made more so by loose, ripped, and barely hanging bits, and the slick fluids made his grip tenuous. Growling to himself, Ironhide wrestled the dead weight metal into a balance across one shoulder, threading his fingers through a half exposed strut to keep it there. What little of him that wasn't already covered in energon and dirt would be now, he thought, and Shadow was just as bad. If the universe had any kindess left, Ratchet would not be waiting on the other side of the ground bridge. Which nearly guaranteed that the medic would be, but a mech could hope.
"Alright," he sighed. "Tell meh where t' dump 'im an' let's get this mess cleaned up."
The entrance of the mine wasn't far by any standard, but Shadow wasn't looking forward to the trip when neither she nor Ironhide were in any condition to go to their alts, and with Barricade looking on the verge of falling apart in Ironhide's grip. At least they were far enough out from the nearest town that they were unlikely to have to avoid any humans, not that she was taking any chances, pushing her sensors as far as she could under the circumstances.
Nothing she could sense, just a renewed ache in her processor. She exvented hard and set off across the sand, trying to ignore the grumbling behind her.
Their goal was utterly nondescript, quite literally a boarded up hole in the ground with bright red warning signs set up around it. Shadow caught one of the heavy posts serving as a frame for the cover and pulled, sheering free the bolts driven into the rock beneath. As the state records had indicated, the shaft was deep and almost vertical. Not a perfect way to dispose of Barricade, but they didn't have the time or resources to be picky. And it wasn't like anyone was going to be looking for him.
"This'll do," she said, dumping the detritus she'd been carrying into the shaft first and listening to make sure it didn't catch on anything before it hit bottom. She stepped back so Ironhide could drop Barricade's body after the rest of it.
She was fitting to cover to the shaft back into place before she finally worked up the nerve to say what she needed to say. "I'm sorry we had to bring Blaster into this." She looked up, forcing herself to meet Ironhide's optics. "That shouldn't have been necessary."
Ironhide vented quietly. He kept his hands at his side but let his field unfurl towards her, rough warmth without being condescending, no hint of rank, just one soldier to another. "Things always went t' plan, we wouldn't be here and this war wouldn't be happenin'," he said. "Slagger had himself trapped, right? Not yer fault."
He shrugged, a rolling motion of his shoulders that slid into a plate shuddering shake as he flicked dirt and grime from them. "Ah should'a listened t' ya," he admitted. "Yer specialty, not mine, an' y' know what works and yer own limits." He spread his hands, field flickering faint apology underlined with pragmatic reality. "Most times Ah hear somebody say they don't 'feel like it', it's 'cus they're slackin' slaggers that can't be fraggin' bothered t' do their jobs. Snapped at yeh outta habit. Too many vorn riding grunt bumpers, but yeh ain't an' Ah should of remembered it."
He stepped back, eyeing the restored shaft cover with a considering look, then grinned. Bringing up one arm, he let the smaller of his cannons spin up. "Think anybody'd notice if an old mine shaft collapsed in?" He stamped his foot against the ground. "Organic world. Tectonic plate shifts. It happens."
For a long moment, Shadow just continued to stare at Ironhide, uncertain how to deal with what he'd just said. Labyrinth didn't allow for failure and certainly didn't apologize for anything; she'd been braced for...
Shaking off her shock, she rose and stepped away from the opening of the shaft. "My fault for expecting you to know where I was going. It worked out in the end...even if I would have liked the chance to tear a few more pieces off him before we finished."
Ironhide's cannon cycled up, and she smirked a little at his suggestion. "I think that's an excellent idea. These things are a menace. Just remember, there's a human town about eight miles that way." The smirk turned to a quick grin. "Try not to make enough noise to bring the neighbors."
Last Edit: Jan 15, 2012 20:22:52 GMT -5 by Deleted
"Ah think Ah can manage that," Ironhide said, with the first real bit of humor he'd had all Pit slagging day. He gestured Shadow back, took a good look at the mine shaft with sensors and optics both, then retreated himself. Three precise shots, one right after the other, plowed into earth and the shaft itself. The rumble beneath their pedes was little more than a shiver, rock collapsing into itself with an anti-climatic puff of dirt almost sullenly into the air.
Satisfied, Ironhide cycled his weapon down. The humans had equipment sensitive enough to register the incident - if they were looking. Even if they were, it wasn't anything to get anyone's attention over; just a rock slide in an abandoned mine shaft, nothing more. It would, though, be enough to keep over-inquisitive human younglings or Primus knew what else out of the thing.
Venting, he shook his systems out once more. "Hope yeh rot in th' Pits," he muttered to whatever remnant of Barricade might be listening. "Yeh deserve it."
Turning away, he glared back the way they had come. "Alright. Cleanup, then back t' base," he grumbled. "Screamer owes me for a fraggin' new set of tires."
The walk back was, for Shadow, less tense than the walk to the mine had been. "I'm out of my area of expertise now," she admitted, glancing up at Ironhide. "Normally, I'd report everything to my lieutenant, and let him decide how to spin things. So, since you know this group better than I do, how much of this do we tell Prime, and how much is he better off not knowing? And," she hesitated, fighting the urge to skirt the issue. "How sure are you Blaster will keep quiet about this?"
Ironhide vented, not breaking stride. "Lots of things Prahm don't need t' worry himself about," he replied. The picking through of the day's events, what did or didn't need to go in an official report, had been looping through his processor. It wasn't guilt - it certainly wasn't regret - but Ironhide had been with Prime since close to the start and there were things that the Prime needed to know and things that only made the mech's job harder. Ironhide's task, right behind keeping the Prime's aft intact, was to not make the job any harder than it needed to be and he'd been shaking lose the best way to go about that as they walked.
"We went after Barricade on orders. Starscream shows up, complicates matters, then takes off like th' cowards he is. Everybody takes damage, but in th' end we've got the glitch." Shadow was watching him as he talked and Ironhide ran a quick tally over her frame, totally up injuries. "Seems t' me," he added, the words drawled, "th' slagger tried escapin' more 'n once while we were trying t' get those codes from him. Took a good few shots outta yeh in the process, probably 'cus he knew yeh could catch him easier than Ah could. An' Ah don't hold with 'Cons rippin' chunks outta you, or Blue, or killin' humans, or any of th' other slag he was doin' today." He waved a hand. "Heat of it all, mah aim was off. Hit too close t' his spark, no time t' get him back to Ratch'. Still needed the intel, so we called Blaster."
It wasn't - entirely - lies. Just a small revision of the order of events, and the omission of the worst of the things Prime didn't need weighing on him. In the end, the job was done, and that was the only thing that mattered.
Ironhide fixed his gaze on the horizon, rolling into each step a little more gingerly than he had before. "Blaster... can be a fritzing glitch spawn sometimes, but intel an' the keeping' of it's his energon an' oil, and he's seen worse. He's steady enough, once he gets over gripin'."
Shadow nodded as Ironhide spoke. Carefully edited truth was the best kind of lie in a situation like this, where there was no time to get creative with the physical evidence, and Ironhide's story covered most of their bases. She was even willing to accept his reassurances about Blaster; just because the mech hadn't impressed her as having the tank to deal with this kind of work, didn't mean he was going to break now that the dirty, difficult part was over.
"How do we explain the missing body?" It was the only weak point she could see, and it had bothered her since the moment she had realized there was no way they could allow the others to see what had been done to Barricade. They couldn't safely assume that Prime wouldn't want the body, whether from some sentimental desire to dispose of it properly, or to return it to the Decepticons for disposal. "We can't just claim that Starscream came back and retrieved it; that would raise too many questions if one of the 'Cons actually wants to know where Barricade is."
She hummed thoughtfully. "There are humans outside of the government who know about us," she said after a moment of reviewing the records of the Autobots' few run ins with MECH. "They've gone after live Cybertronians at least twice; it's not inconceivable they'd go after a body. We might get some flak for just leaving Cade out here, but like you said...heat of the moment, both of us damaged, who's thinking that clearly. Right?"
It was the one part of the makeshift equation that didn't set right in his processor and Ironhide rumbled a deep, disgruntled sound. "Not good enough," he admitted. Shadow made an aborted sound, which Ironhide waved off. "Ah'd tear strips off anybody who came back with that excuse unless they came back half drained out an' straight t' medbay. We're walkin', so it ain't good enough."
He paused, optics narrowing as his steps faltered and stopped. "We're walkin'," he repeated with emphasis. "Neither of us have wheels left. Can't transform. Can't disguise." Something almost like a grin stretched his scarred facial plates. "Well now. Yeh did say not t' make so much noise we bring in th' neighbors." He jerked his chin towards their destination, where the torn up ground glimmered in otherworldly fluids. "All that fightin', must've gotten somebody's attention. Blaster goes back, we stay to clean up, but th' neighbors came lookin' and we don't really blend in any more."
Ironhide spun slowly on his good leg, eyeing the landscape, and finally settled on a nearby rock outcropping. "Rushed," he concluded grimmly. "Incoming natives, yeh'r too slagged t' carry scrap, site's too big t' clean up in time an' get ourselves out... cover up is th' next best thing, an' all the humans get 't see is a little tremor and a big rock slide." He spun up his cannon again, taking a few steps back and to the side as he carefully measured ballistics. "Sounds about right, yeah?"
"Sounds right to me," Shadow agreed. Not that her agreement was really necessary, except as confirmation that she'd back his story; she'd already admitted that this was the sort of thing Labyrinth had handled, not her.
Silently, she watched the outcropping collapse down across their battlefield, and tried very hard not to think about what it meant that Labyrinth was gone.