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.
Steeljaw exvented sharply. "You're fine," he assured her. To prove it, he bumped the flat of his head against her shin. "'Grabby' is touching without warning. Or stepping on. Or, Primus forbid, picking up, and if you've ever seen a human youngling pick up a feline that ought to give you some appreciation - some mecha have NO concept of how to support a frame with multiple linkages."
Stepping back onto the wall, he walked up it to crouch once more at her eye level. "You have a very soothing touch," he told her. "The medical function should be mourning the loss."
Shadow was unable to formulate an immediate reply; "soothing" was definitely not a word she had ever associated with herself. Not before Earth, not since meeting the Autobots, and certainly not since dealing with Barricade. Most days, she felt more like something brittle, ready to explode into sharp-edged shards at the slightest impact.
"Thank you," she said finally; given permission, she reached up to run her servo down his back again. Then, only half joking, "You may be the only person on this base I like right now."
Steeljaw caught himself in a soft, trilled purr again, back arching into Shadowrunner's touch. It was embarrassing, but... he didn't think she would be the sort to blackmail him with it later. And it'd been so long since he had someone simply to talk to. The easing of the itch in his back was just sweet oil on the rust stick.
He hadn't expected to be so easily comfortable with any of the Autobots. He thought it might have to do with Shadowrunner's classification as special operations - she probably spent time with both factions, which ultimately made her 'feel' like neither to him, and the lack of oppressive Faction was a soothing thing when he was having to watch himself so carefully so as not to misspeak around the 'Bots.
Almost... a friend. And it had been a longer time since he had had one of those.
On impulse Steeljaw leaned out from the wall, bumping her gently beneath the chin with the flat of his head. "I'm flattered," he told her, sitting back once more. "And the feeling is mutual."
Shadowrunner chuckled with surprise at the gesture, stroking gently against the overlapping plates of his "mane" before returning her attention to the welds. There were, she noticed, distinct variations in his finish, which made sense when she gave it a nano-klik's though; of course he couldn't do maintenance anywhere not easily accessible. And the others likely hadn't noticed - she certainly hadn't - and hadn't thought about it, since normally a symbiont would have a host to take care of such mundane tasks.
She regarded him thoughtfully, wondering if she should bring the subject up, or if it would just fall into the category of rude assumptions autonomous mechanisms made about symbionts.
"So," she said, putting off the decision for the moment, "you have a temper and you use poetry as anger management. Can I ask what inspired that?" She tipped her head towards the newly polished section of wall. "Or was it just a response to Autobots being Autobots?"
It was easy to dim his optics and lean into her touch again, that blissful easing of itch that seemed to go right down to his struts and endo-circuits. If Ratchet had been any less scrupulous and thorough the symbiont would have wondered if there were still crawling organics left underneath his plates, but the healing welds were almost as bad.
He cocked his head at Shadowrunner, trying to recall the exact fit of temper that had driven him to composition that afternoon. "Autobots being Autobots," he decided at last. "I just... do NOT understand them. At all." He flicked his tail irritably. "Oh yes, the war - the WAR, and don't, please, even get me started on THAT. Even beyond that load of Pit slag, though, they don't make SENSE. If Neutrals ran the way this base did there wouldn't BE any Neutrals left, and THIS is supposed to be our last great hope for a unified Cybertron?" He dug his claws into the surface of the wall, tiny metallic pops as metal pierced metal. "Really?"
And that would be the temper, Shadow thought wryly, as Steeljaw went from purring and arching against her servo to a tense crouch, tail-lashing and claws out.
He also seemed to have forgotten he was talking to an Autobot in the middle of an Autobot base, which was more problematic. Not that she minded what he was saying - she wasn't going to pretend she understood the others, or claim that her ties to the faction extended past the fact that Labyrinth had been an Autobot and she frankly didn't know what else to do with herself - it was simply the location that worried her.
She rapped her knuckles lightly against his shoulder. "I think this is a conversation we should have somewhere else. This may be a nice quiet corner of the base, but it's still a nice quiet public corner of the base." Steeljaw's tail stilled, and she added, "My quarters aren't far, and no one's going to interrupt us if I don't want them to."
A pause, and then the sound of claws not so carefully being removed from the metal of the wall. Shadow took a few steps down the corridor, not certain he was going to follow, but after a klik he was beside her, slinking along the wall at shoulder height, his frame all but vibrating when she reached out to touch him.
Steeljaw paced along the bare walls of her quarters while Shadow triple secured the door, and she let him settle where he was comfortable. The room itself was one step away from unoccupied; she had left everything she valued behind on Labyrinth's ship, and had no incentive to acquire anything beyond necessities since arriving on Earth.
Speaking of necessities...
Shadow retrieved a container of buffing compound and some polishing cloths, settling on the edge of her berth and applying herself to removing a long scrape on the outside of one leg (acquired during the bout of reckless driving which had preceeded her decision to just shoot things instead). "The war," she prompted. "Aside from it being a war, what inspired you to start carving on the walls?"
It was beyond embarrassing, bordering on mortifying and downright glitchwitted dumb, to be schooled by an Autobot - however lax she might be in her toeing of the faction paragraph and line - about speaking his own opinions too loudly in an Autobot controlled base. Steeljaw clamped his jaw shut, cut the first impulse to bolt for the air ducts and preferably stay there until hauled out, and reluctantly followed Shadow back to her quarters. She was right, he'd been utterly forgetting of the first rule of self-preservative caution, but she also showed no sign of throwing him to any officer's mercy and, in fact, seemed more than a bit amused.
She spoke to and treated him like just another mech, and if she was willing to forgive a bit of indiscretion then he was hardly going to let a douse of embarrassment chase him off from a potential friend.
When she sat down he gingerly took a place on the far end of her berth - high enough to converse properly without needing to be perpendicular to gravity to do so. The smell of polish made him itch again; it had been entirely too long since he had managed a proper polish, hampered by the welds on his back, and he was starting to think he could feel the duller, scuffed portions of his neck and spine.
[Bet if you're really nice she'd give you a hand with that,] Uplink suggested slyly. Steeljaw shot a glyph tangle that was rude in every dialect of common use Cybertronian code back at his processor shadow and ignored it.
It was her question that brought him up short, audios pricked up in a strained sort of amazement, optics cycling wide. "You..." he started, but that wasn't right and he cut himself off. "Did you..." He cut himself off again, finally shaking his head sharply. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but..." he hesitated, trying to project the harmless half of the gobstruck feeling her question had evoked. "...you're very young, aren't you? No offense!" he added quickly. "Doesn't matter if you are. I just haven't heard that sort of sentiment except from those sparked during or after the war started."
Shadow didn't pause in what she was doing, and didn't let herself look at Steeljaw. She wasn't insulted the way he seemed to expect - though she didn't think being sparked after the war started was worthy of quite that level of vocalizer-rebooting shock - but this line of questioning could easily go in the direction of things she had no answer for. Why did you join the Autobots? being very near the top of the list.
"I was sparked not long after the start of the war. Before anyone realized it wasn't going to end." She shot him a sidelong glance, forestalling another question with, "So please, feel free to enlighten my woeful ignorance."
Last Edit: Mar 12, 2012 12:51:09 GMT -5 by Deleted
Steeljaw wrapped his tail tighter around his paws and twisted his head, swiping a polishing glossa across the part of his shoulder he could reach. There was a custom mixture of chemical secretion points in his mouth that really did work as a good base polish, with the advantage of tasting a little sweet, and combined with the very fine grade of abrasive surfaces on the sides of his glossa it served him well enough as a built-in polishing kit that didn't require hands. It did require being able to twist himself into some rather improbable configurations, in which he was currently limited.
There was, however, a spot on his shoulder that could use burnishing, and it gave him something to do while trying to compose a reply that was neither insulting or over the top.
Licking the spot a few more times for good measure, Steeljaw vented softly. "It's not ignorance," he said at last. "Call it, instead, 'lack of experience'. You don't have anything to compare it to, so to you it's just a war, or only the war because it's ours."
His paws were forever scuffed from walking and jumping. Turning one forepaw pad up, he spread his digits as far as he could and began licking polish inbetween them, pausing to talk between scuffs. "The humans have wars. In fact, at any given point in time, there are dozens of them going on all over the planet. Those wars, while devastating to those caught in them, can generally be referred to as 'a war', one among many." He crooked two claws to make air quotes. "As in 'there's a war going on over in the Middle East', or 'there's a civil war in Somalia', and so on."
"This," he waved his freshly polished paw in a general circle of the room, taking in the base, Shadowrunner, himself, and by extension all of them, "is not 'a' war. It is The War," his EM, when he said it, underscored and emphasized the words in the Cybertronian equivalent of all caps denoting distinct, singular, and important, "and it has come to define every one of us, our entire race, whether we take part in it or not."
His back plates rippled slightly and he glared down at his claws before going back to trying to clean them properly. "Do you know," he said, almost conversationally, "that there are entire rather large sections of this galaxy where a Cybertronian ship - or any ship carrying an admitted Cybertronian - can be denied docking, commerce, aid, or even contact simply on the basis of being Cybertronian? Not because the locals of that area are at war with us, or in conflict with us. They simply don't want The Cybertronian War anywhere near them and all of us, regardless of faction or lack thereof, are implicated in it. We are the plague carriers of the galaxy, and our plague is our Primus fragging war. We're treated like... like..." He flicked his audios irritably. "The humans have an excellent term. 'Lepers'. We're treated like rust carrying lepers, from the heaviest frontliners to sparklings that have never held a weapon, all on account of THE WAR."
Venting, Steeljaw shut his mouth. It was the most, outside of poetical verse, that he had ever said to an actual faction member on the topic. "It didn't used to be like that," he said quietly. "And as someone who watched it happen, who has watched us devolve into this, who doesn't WANT to be involved in it and keeps being forced to participate or be blamed for it anyways, I am, perhaps, a little bit tetchy about it."
Shadow buffed out the scrape primarily by feel and long ingrained habit, her optics on Steeljaw as he spoke. She hadn't known...or rather, she had known of the areas he was telling her about, but she had known them only as inconveniences, high risk regions to be avoided if at all possible, and because they were so closed off to Cybertronians, they had seldom been relevant to her. Like the war itself, they had been - as Steeljaw correctly pointed out - all she had ever known; a fact of life, not something she would have considered defining of anyone, much less their race as a whole.
Now, she sat quietly, listening to Steeljaw's words, the flickers of irritation in his movements, the far more subdued shifts in his EMF, and turned it all over in her processor, trying to see it from the symbiont's point of view.
The truth was, she was an Autobot because that was the insignia Labyrinth had given her; she had never been given a choice in the matter, and as a result had never given her lack of reasons much thought, her faction as much a fact of life as the war. She stayed with the Autobots now, at least in part, because it was all she had ever known, and even if it wasn't always comfortable or pleasant, nothing had yet given her reason to want to sever that tie. She couldn't imagine what she would do on her own, without her faction to define her (however imperfectly), any more than she could really imagine what she would do if the war ended.
But if she had chosen - deliberately, consciously chosen - a path, only to find that path littered to the point of being blocked by all of the things she wanted to get away from...Shadow vented quietly. Yes, she could understand Steeljaw's anger over the war, and its direct and indirect consequences.
She could also see dozens of different ways for Autobots being Autobots to scrape that anger raw.
Shadow emitted a thoughtful hum, her optics dropping to her leg, buying her time to consider her next words, to decide if she wanted to risk saying anything. The finish wasn't perfect, but it was close enough that nobody was likely to notice the mark, which meant no questions about what she'd been doing to get it. Which meant no further excuses to distract herself.
Steeljaw had trusted her enough to speak to her honestly, in spite of her faction. If he could do that, she imagined she could also trust him not to hold her lack of experience against her.
"Is it..." She paused, feeling her way around half formed questions, not entirely certain what she was trying to ask. "I understand you being angry," she tried again. "Or at least, I can think of a lot of reasons I'd be angry, if I was in your position. I can think of a lot of reasons I wouldn't want to be here." Shadow offered him a weak half smile. "Of course, I can come up with plenty of those on my own, so I'm not sure that says anything about how much I understand about your reasons."
She vented quietly, optics dropping to study the subtle shift and flex of the single forepaw supporting him while he worked to polish the other. "It's not just the war, though. When I asked, you said it was Autobots being Autobots, but now I'm...pretty sure you and I mean different things when we say that. Is it just..." She was fidgeting, twisting one of the cloths between her fingers in a nervous tell that would have earned her damaged joints if Labyrinth had caught her at it, and she made herself set the cloth down, smoothing it on the berth between them. "We...the Autobots...we're half the problem, just by being one side of the war. That much, I can see. Most of us believe we have good reasons to fight, even if we don't like the fighting itself, and I can see how that would be...irritating, if you don't agree with what we're fighting for."
Or that we're fighting for anything at all, rather than opposing the Decepticons because that's why we exist, she added silently.
Shadow spread her hand on top of the cloth, not quite in entreaty. "Beyond that, I'm not sure what I understand," she said quietly. "I can make guesses, but you're right: this is the only thing I know. And I don't think that's enough to tell if my guesses are even close to correct."
Steeljaw examined his own paws, spreading digits and claws to look them over for wear, his tail tip twitching slowly in shivery ripples. "You can't help what you've never had the chance to experience," he said slowly. "Quite honestly, I don't know if words can suffice to convey it. What I knew... doesn't exist any more. What I mean when I say 'Autobot' is probably utterly different than what you mean, and neither of us can see what the other experiences." He slowly rotated the audio closest to her, optics dimmed in thought.
It wasn't, strictly speaking, any of his business. It was, in fact, something that could probably get him in trouble, if not outright shot as a hostile subversive influence. The Autobots raised their own as they saw fit, indoctrinated in their own beliefs, beneath the banner of the Prime. The fact that they failed to pass anything to their younglings beyond combat protocols, weapons, and battle tactics was... none of his business. It shouldn't mean anything to him at all, and it was in his best interest to lock seal his vocalizer and remember that.
He scraped one claw back to sharpness against his teeth, worrying at the inevitable buildup of shavings at the base of the transformation seam. "No one sees what someone else does," he concluded quietly, "unless they share it." The seams of his throat plates closest to her slid back, letting him extend a singular standard data line like an offering.
"Full memory files tend to choke over wireless," he explained shortly, eyeing her sidelong. He was, he found, subtly coiled, hydraulics primed for flight. "My security is up to date, I'm clean, and I don't make a habit of running anything viral. I'm also fairly certain you could out-clock me if you tried to - most mecha of your specs can."
Shadowrunner gave Steeljaw a long look, one that she wished could be considered measuring but which was, she was fairly certain, completely blank. This was no casual thing he had offered, no simple exchange of video and audio files, and she wasn't sure how she felt about the offer, much less how she ought to react.
Steeljaw was leaning ever so slightly away from her, in spite of the slender cable still between them, and though it didn't show in his EMF she suspected he was not entirely convinced this was a good idea. Which made two of them, but also made her more curious, both about what he wanted to show her, and why he'd made the offer.
Labyrinth would have told her that curiosity was a slag-sucking stupid reason to let an outsider hardline into her systems, but Labyrinth wouldn't have been having a conversation with a (no faction and no host) symbiont in the first place. And the risk was minimal. Acceptable. Steeljaw had been with them for weeks without incident (so long as you discounted poetry carved interesting places), there was no way in the Pit she counted as a priority target, and even if he turned out to be a virus-riddled hack, her defenses were up to date and he was right in that she could almost certainly out-clock him.
(Possibly, just possibly, a part of her wanted him to try something, to prove that what had happened with Barricade was a fluke rather than a lack on her part, but that part was tiny and mostly buried under the fact she trusted Steeljaw as much as she trusted anyone.)
Shadow resisted the impulse to move closer, pushing down the sudden desire for the comfort of physical contact, and slowly turned over the hand still braced between them on the berth. The data port on the inside of her wrist slid open, an unspoken acceptance and indication of trust.
"I appreciate this." She vented quietly, optics meeting his. "I still can't promise I'll understand, but I appreciate you trying to let me see why you feel the way you do."
Appreciate. No, Steeljaw didn't for one moment think that Shadowrunner 'appreciated' it - not for what it was, or for why he was doing it, but she might think that she did and it was a polite nicety to say so, and at least there was that. He nodded to her, because he could no more articulate why he was doing it than she could clarify why she was accepting, and there was no polite nothing that he could think of to cover the reverse. Lowering himself to his abdomen, he rested his chin on his forepaws beside her outstretched hand and, cycling a deep ventilation, slid cable to port with a muted click.
Hardlining was never, could never, be what it once had been. Uplink wasn't waiting on the other side of the data stream, spark and systems synched in a thrumming pulse that completed Steeljaw in ways that he was never even aware were missing until they were filled, woven together into something greater than the singular. Complementary and matching, and there was some part of him, a part he couldn't exorcise, that blindly expected that every time he plugged in, symbiont code pinging for host echoes that never came back.
Uplink's echo, in the back of his processor, was very, very quiet, with an empty silence that Steeljaw could feel in his spark.
He cycled another ventilation and made himself stop, shoved it all aside, and pinged Shadow with a purely professional query which was passed through with due process, firewalls hedging each of them in securely except for that one singular flow of data.
It had been vorn since Steeljaw had touched his oldest archived files, many vorn, more than he wanted to count. His own archiving file tree was archaic to him, replaced later by a more streamlined system that kept necessary files closer to easy retrieval. Unpacking it, he dipped in almost at random, filtering, sifting, and pulled random chunks of timestamp to feed into the data stream, passing not just video and audio but neural perception, emotion, FEEL to Shadowrunner in short clips of old memories that he had kept in pristine deeply compressed bundles.
--a busy thoroughfare in Iacon, the streetfront and skies overhead crammed with the bright flickers of newscasts and advertisements, the street itself bustling with mechanisms of all sorts, the upper levels humming with the darting path of flyers. Clean and brilliant and ever changing. Walking the street level, secure, safe, excited, credits to spare in their account and the elemental scent of sweet energon only overshadowed by the flashing motion of an advertisement "Uplink, Uplink, LOOK..."--
--the lights of Crystal City from their apartment, perched on the back of the seating unit and watching the twinkling lights of the primary city hub loops, arching through the darkened sky like frozen ribbons. Listening to Uplink answer the comm, the warm shift of field at the voice of a friend "No, I don't have any plans... We'd love to..."--
--the quiet halls of an archive branch, ident logged, authorization given, and the heady feeling of sitting down with all of the Great Archives at his data beck and call, only a search string away--
--the deafening, strut vibrating roar of a music concert, overcharged on sheer enthusiasm, every stop and system thrown open to take it all in, bowled over by the shared field of joy and the resonation of the harmonics, strut melting and perfect, echoing back in waves from performers to crowd and back again, thousands strong--
--the laughter of younglings playing on the paths of a crystal garden--
--swearing, laughing, multi-networked games with mechs he knew and mechs he didn't, everyone piled onto server hubs that groaned under the strain as a new update hit the data nets, scrambling to be in the first wave--
--rooms, an apartment, belongings, his own and Uplink's, a space that was theirs alone, home--
--stumbling home drunk from a holiday festival, laughing, laughing, four legs even more confusing than two until he'd demanded a ride, perched precariously and hilariously atop Uplink's shoulders and laughing so hard he could barely cling to--
--fuel taken with friends. meeting new faces, clients, sometimes to become friends. being one among hundreds, thousands, never a thought of safety, of violence, of the coming dark--
Steeljaw had been a data handler his entire function, in one fashion or another, and it was automatic to throttle the feed, cutting it off, when it threatened to slip out of his grasp. He could only blame a lamentable lack of practice in recent vorn for the overspill, things unpacking faster than he could accurately sort them, and he felt the the error as the feed didn't quite cut off fast enough.
--Crystal City as he had last seen it, black, darkened, lit only by the fires still burning, the hub loops raising broken, jagged fingers to the skies. Muted sounds of distant explosions, elemental scent of ash and acrid death on the air and if he looked he could see their district, the gutted remnants of their apartment, the entirety of their lives ripped apart, theirs and everyone's, everyone who was still functioning--
The horror echoed starkly across the link even after he had cut it off, long distant memory of something that time had only partially numbed. He had seen worse in the vorn inbetween, but Crystal City had been first.
And in the archives just past that point, barely a blip in time of his functioning, was a heat sucking hole that he didn't dare open. Steeljaw grit his dente, tasting raw shaved metal, and packed it all back away, archiving, compressing, until it ceased to hover at the edges of his processor like a heat sink, drawing at him.
Primus, he was so cold.
It took him another few full ventilation cycles before he remembered to unseal the cable, reeling it back beneath his own plates. Curling into himself didn't help, even though automatic protocols pulled his pedes underneath him, clamping his plates down, trying to conserve heat within a closed system. His voice, when he managed to find it, was streaked in static, rough and hissed. "We had a culture. We had a society. We had lives, and YES some mecha - a lot of mecha - needed better ones, but how is ruining everything justifiable?"
He dropped his face to the berth padding, pressing the flat of his helm against it and vented into his own collar faring, voice muffled. "Even if this war stops, if everyone just stopped, right now, laid down arms by the will of Primus, where would we even start to rebuild?"
Vorn before, Shadowrunner had walked into the one place she considered safe and found her entire universe ripped to pieces in a pool of still-hot energon. For a single nano-klik, before there could be pain or anger or loss or confusion, there had been shocked numbness, a sense that she ought to be doing something, feeling something, and an utter processor-locked inability to know what that something was.
Something very similar held her silent in the wake of Steeljaw's memories.
She truly hadn't had any idea, he'd been right about that, the entirety of Cybertronian culture before the war rendered flat and static by history. Cybertron had already begun its crumble to ruin when she was a sparkling; without the associated emotions, the sounds and images of her own people would have been alien and meaningless. With them, she could feel an echo of what had been destroyed, a phantom ache in her spark even before that final horrific image of loss slipped between them and was abruptly cut off.
It's war, she had said; easy, dismissive acceptance, without any realization that war was every loss she had experienced, redoubled and played out on a macro scale. And Steeljaw had ripped all of that open because she was young and didn't know what she was asking of him.
Primus.
"Steeljaw," she said, and stopped, because I'm sorry and thank you were so inadequate as to be insulting, and I understand would be a lie...except, perhaps, in the sense that she now had a clue how much she truly didn't understand. Instead, she slipped closer, pressing one hand - slowly, not sure he would allow the contact - against the plating of his shoulder, and hoped he would understand at least some of what she couldn't find words for.
He wanted to flinch from her touch but she was warm and instead Steeljaw found himself twisting, face and helm shoved into Shadowrunner's side the way he had been burrowed into the berth pad. It took everything he had not to just crawl into her lap for the sake of that warmth, a distant pale shadow but REAL, tangible, in ways that memory echoes weren't no matter how he clung to Uplink's voice.
"Sorry," he managed, the word muffled against her plates. A ventilation cycled raggedly, too many things choked up in his intakes. "...sorry." He clamped down his field as best he could but knew it was still leaking from audial to tail tip, ragged spikes and cold, aching hurts. "...'m fine."
Which was a stupid thing to say, really, when he had his face mashed into her side, but with any luck it came out so mangled she wouldn't have heard it anyways. Shivering, he curled against her hip and waited for the ache to subside. It would. It always did. It was only a matter of time.