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.
The sound Bee was making was kind of indecently excited. He was, literally, vibrating with joy which was probably not the Autobot response he should have been having to blatantly breaking the rules, but then again it was so very, very rare that the little muscle car was allowed to cut loose like a real Cybertronian. The issue was simply that the technology that Bee was sparked with didn’t exist on the world and to do what he was capable of the roads of Earth was exactly what got him on sci-fi alien watch websites and in serious trouble with Optimus and Agent Fowler’s department.
But out here… ‘And we can go as fast as we want right and it won’t look weird/suspicious/bad or whatever?!’ Primus why hadn’t he thought of the Bonneville Salt Flats before? No police, no traffic cameras, cops, or anything to get between him and going really, really, super fast. Bee chirruped joyfully, happiness radiating powerfully from the happy yellow muscle car that was, currently, doing doughnuts around the parked black Impala, Shadowrunner. ‘Right? Right?’
Last Edit: Feb 12, 2012 21:30:42 GMT -5 by bumblebee
"As fast as we want," Shadow confirmed, EMF rippling with amusement at Bumblebee's antics. She extended her sensors, confirming once again what visual observation of acres and acres of flat, white expanse had already told them: there was no one on the salt today.
She rocked a little on her tires, feeling the slightly soft, gripping surface beneath her. She hadn't been here in years; hadn't been here while fully repaired ever. Including, she thought ruefully, today. Though most of the damage Barricade had clawed into her plating and mesh had healed, there were still deeper aches that lingered. Some of them were even physical.
'Are you ready?' she chirped, dropping into Basic and backing away from Bee's excited spins until she had clear space in front of her. Her engine revved in anticipation. 'Because I am.'
With no more warning than that, she dropped into gear and tore away from the yellow scout in a spray of salt.
The scream of rubber against the grain of the salt flats and the alien roar of a Cybertronian engine was all the reply Shadowrunner got and Bumblebee had laid open his converter and dumped a rush of energon into his transmission. He dropped into gear, tearing up the flats after Shadowrunner and ripping up beside her, chirping and whirring happily, impudently at the Bot racing next to him. The feel of hitting 200 plus was like waking up, systems singing fast and high into overdrive as your whole chassis and every neural line buzzed with the electric livewire hum that so many could get addicted to.
Bumblebee liked the clean burn of high speed, laughed through comm and basic over the two-bot rev and howl of two muscle-car alts ripping up the turf. ::C’mon, Shadow! Let’s see if Ratchet’s welds are gonna hold or should I slow down for ya?:: He gunned it again, pulling ahead and laughing loud through the harmonic rush of speed and glee.
::Don't need you to slow down as long as I've still got an engine!:: Shadow shot back. Salt was already caking her undercarriage and streaking her sides white on black, and there was nothing but more flat white emptiness in front of them. She pushed up beside Bee, knowing they were already shattering every speed record ever set here and they both still had more in them, systems just getting warmed up after too long confined.
Vibrations born of raw speed ran through her frame, caught in recently healed welds in a way she knew she was going to feel later, but for now it felt good, one more aspect of the near-hypnotic thrill of moving, the thing that had kept her sane during too many vorn alone. She micro-shifted mass until she was perfectly balanced for the terrain under them, picked up speed enough to edge ahead of Bumblebee, and already her sensors were telling her that the endless stretch of salt was proving finite to their speed.
Shadow pushed harder, energon flooding her system in a heady rush, slammed her brakes, and skidded in a perfect 180 to race back the way they had come. ::Speed's no good if you can't maneuver, Bee,:: she pinged back to him, laughing. ::Better try to keep up.::
Chirp-whirring with delight and outrage in equal gleeful measure and braked hard, spinning a tight, on-a-dime turn and rocketing back the way he came, running fast after Shadowrunner’s sudden switch up. The howl of the engines ate up the silence for a full mile around as the pair of cars shot in streaks of black and yellow across the salt flats. A rush of pure joy shot though the scout’s systems, hardwired into his neural net and making his head hum with the sensation of hitting that overdrives state without beig in danger or forcing his safety locks.
The hiss of the ground spraying up against his undercarriage, the pressure of the wind resistance against the lines of his alt, his sensor panels conducting the feel of racing straight into his sensor grid and it felt good like nothing else did, explained the physiological want for speed and that hardwired need to move and to move fast. Bumblebee chased Shadowrunner happily across the flats, the curve of the earth thrown up against his field of vision like the horizon to race for. He lost track of time, catching up, his EMF thrown wide against Shadowrunner’s as he matched her pace, chirping happily.
They were coming up fast on their starting point, engines opened up, matching each other speed for speed. Bee's EMF chimed against her own, longwave frequencies tangled in pleased excitement as they vied for the lead in a competition so evenly matched that their differences had more to do with the vagaries of salt and wind than the alien cars themselves.
Her systems were showing the first signs of heating up, vents half clogged with the pervasive fine spray of salt hissing up from her tires. It would have made perfect sense for them to return to their starting point and stop, or at least slow to something other than their all-out breakneck pace. But stopping was the last thing Shadow wanted, and judging from Bee's field, he wasn't interested in sense either. She exvented hard in an effort to clear away the rime, then clamped her vents shut as they crossed the point they'd bridged into.
No sharply efficient spin this time. Shadow cranked her wheels into a wide, skidding loop, digging furrows inches deep into the salt's thick crust and sending up a gritty white cloud that coated them both. She threw her vents back open and cut across Bee's backtrail, EMF flicking out in the Cybertronian version of "tag" before she shot away again, her comm filled with laughter.
Bee flash-whirred at her, a series of clicking glyphs and harmonics that boiled down to “Oh it’s on now”. The muscle car accelerated, the world blurring as he fishtailed hard, sending up a spray of salt and dust and shooting off in a bee-line after the Impala shooting up on her right, spiking his turbines and streaking past her he spun and impossible 180 so he was driving backwards in front of her at speeds topping several hundred MPH. He chirped and hummed, laughing as he briefly mirrored and matched the other car’s swerving back and forth before tagging her EMF, cutting to the right and racing past her left headlight in the opposite direction.
Shadow spun and shot after Bee, sliding so close against his right side that she could feel the vibration of his frame across the narrow gap of air between them. Then she surged forward, cutting across his path in a maneuver that invited a collision, tagging his field as she narrowly skimmed past him.
They tagged back and forth until there was no spot on either alt which was the owner's original color, and they were both starting to slow in spite of themselves, accidentally clipping one another as their maneuvers became less precise. Shadow spun out from one such impact, tires screaming as she fought her way back into a turn and aimed straight for Bumblebee's side. He veered with a chirp of laughter, and Shadow poured every last ounce of speed into chasing him down, transforming at the last second so that she hit him in root mode, catching him and dragging him into a tumbling roll that ended with them both transformed and laughing in the middle of the torn up salt.
The heady rush of racing ebbed a little, enough so that she was feeling the ache of it in every recent weld and the slip-give of exhaustion in her hydraulics. She dismissed a handful of error messages about overheated systems and blocked vents and low fuel, and leaned over to shove Bee's shoulder, the heat coming off him radiating up into her mesh.
'So,' she chirped at him with a grin. 'Good idea, or best idea?'
‘Bestidea! Best idea ever of all time!’ Bumble whirred excitedly, the grammatical signifiers in this words breaking down in the scout’s eagerness at expressing how very awesomely, wonderfully, brilliant he felt right now. Bumblebee was sparked during the war, into a cohort of military buildbots so ‘play-time’ was something he had he work to make time for; the glee of Shadowrunner just opening the ground-bridge and taking him out racing had activated a joyous sparkling-level of happy in his brain that he hadn’t had time to satisfy in a long time. Getting to do so now left him humming with content and the restless instinct to pile the other muscle-car.
He rolled over and bumped his helm happily against the other Bot’s shoulder, EMF syncing up easily to hers, a fission of contact energy passing companionable between their plates, charging alloy with a contagious jolt of joy. ‘Thanks/so much fun/happy/really happy/can we go again sometime?’ He was blurting and he knew it, but with Shadow he didn’t really think it mattered. Basic came easy to her. The Camaro flung an arm around the other mechanism, whirring, doorwings quirking up at a gleeful kind of angle. ‘You’re awesome.’
Bee kept pressing in, crowding close, an overly-familiar jostling of frame and field that reminded Shadow sharply of home and family. She shuttered her optics, half expecting the bump and shove of other frames piling around them.
They were alone, of course, and Shadow realized with surprise that she couldn't remember a time outside of her earliest training when they'd simply been happy. There had always been something, an underlying sense of despair, an acute awareness of the discordant field of at least one of their number. She vented hard, trying to remember a time when they hadn't been huddled together under the certainty that they only had one another until their weakest link was spark-whole enough to function again.
Even that desperate touch and cling and need she would have given anything for, if it would have erased the ghosts of their deaths from her memory.
Shadow forced the glass-sharp jags of pain out of her field before they could dampen Bee's happiness, tried to pull herself back to the here and now, holding on to the excited tumble of Basic spilling from the yellow scout's vocalizer. 'Of course we'll come back.' She trilled amusement she didn't really feel, pulling him close and drinking in the raw joy spilling off him, letting his excitement reignite the thrill of the day and push the older memories away until she could laugh and mean it. 'At least, so long as we don't get caught tracking salt through the base.''
Bee let loose a hiss of static that was the Cybertronian version of ‘pssssssh’ and chittered laughter at the other muscle car. ‘No gonna happen. I’m the best/awesomest scout there is remember? You scrub the logs and I will show you Jasper’s greatest/most wonderful invention: automated carwashes.’
Even with his battle mask semi-fused, you could feel the smile rolling off the little Bot in EMF, bright warm long-waves that looped and looped around and hugged you they were so cheerful and open. The ex-build-bot settled down next to the spy-bot, setting his helm against the side of her chest armor, the hum whirr of her internal systems murmuring into his audio, each sound a physical reassurance of life.
He remembered it used to be he could hear that sound all the time in head he – the collective hum of his whole cohort synced at all times to one another. The sound of his own fuel pump, gears, and pistons in time with his brothers and sisters, his creators, and mass-donors… he tightened his grip on Shadow for a minute, for a foolish astro-klik letting himself imagine that the sound was in his head, not his audios, and he was back with them again. And it was in that moment when he recognized the suppressed wavelength of sadness in the otherwise happy, excited, over-drive rush noise of Shadow’s systems. He looked up at her, door wings flicking up.
‘Shadow? Are you alright/okay?’
Last Edit: Feb 15, 2012 12:32:35 GMT -5 by bumblebee
Shadow tried not to acknowledge that she liked it here more than she should, ignoring the traitorous voice in the back of her processor which asked if she would have gone home even if she could, that reminded her this wasn't her place. She focused on Bumblebee, basking in the heady longwave frequencies of his EMF, the heat of his frame against hers.
She didn't want to answer his question, didn't want to risk thinking right then. 'I'm okay. Just...'
Memories. Reminders. Things she didn't have the first clue how to process, much less deal with. Things that seemed stupid, selfish, to mention; she wasn't the first or only bot to have lost everything, and she was so much luckier than many.
She exvented quietly and curled against him. 'I'm okay.'
His tone suggested he was investigating the harmonic signifiers in that word. He sat there looking down at her, the sun on his plates warm and liquid yellow against his paint, color nanites soaking solar energy, as he clicked and hummed quietly. He liked this. He liked here. He liked Earth, and Shadow, and Raf, and Team Prime and he liked feeling like an autonomous mechanism… actual and whole.
He also knew there was some integral pieces missing and they were not ever coming back and that was that. He also knew it was maddening and it ate and ate and ate at you… and that kind of mad had a frequency and Bee knew it intimately. He caught it off Shadow, here and there and now.
‘Well then, if you are ‘okay’ in the same way that I am okay/slagged/wrecked then I guess we are both ‘okay’.’
'What choice/other option do we have?' she countered. There was no heat behind her words, just tired, a kind of tired that had nothing to do with the day they'd spent racing. She shuttered her optics, wishing her other sensors were as easy to ignore. 'This isn't something that can be changed/fixed/repaired. It isn't...'
She broke off, unable to voice what was really spinning through her processor. It doesn't matter, because the people who knew us, the ones who cared, are the ones who are dead; I don't know how to live without them; I don't understand how I can betray them by wanting friends/family/happiness/life.
'It isn't something I want to talk about/share,' she finally manged, looking up at him again. 'I don't want to deal with bots thinking they understand when they don't. I don't want them making assumptions/judgements about how I should be feeling/thinking/reacting.' A hint of pleading bled into both voice and field. 'You can understand that, can't you?'
‘Yes,’ said Bumblebee, his Basic coloring empty, ‘I can,’
And for a while at least, he left it at that. The war had gone on for so long at this point that loss seemed endemic and inevitable and so many of them were so inured to loss and agony that recovery from it… many no longer sought recovery, only the ability to carry their wounds. Their culture was based on networking, on interaction and function, all Cybertronians part of a greater whole that this… fracturing was in itself a loss so deep there wasn’t a way to address it or fix it… only the option to evolve past co-dependence.
For Bumblebee, that had been a literal and not a social evolution. He’d never been designed to be autonomous, though he’d fought with the Autobots for the right to freedom, for the sake of keeping his cohort safe. Now, he had more autonomy than he’d ever wanted and he didn’t think anyone had the right to tell him how to feel about it… or the right to pity him. He looked at Shadow.
‘You choose how to grieve/operate/feel, Shadow. No one else will know until you want them to. But... I/we/they will always be here for you, if you need it.
Last Edit: Feb 18, 2012 19:06:33 GMT -5 by bumblebee