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.
Anytime, Jazz pulsed back. The wash of anger through Sides' field was plain as day this close, flavored with bitterness and pain. Jazz recognized the tenor of it, from when it'd been flying over his head on the control room floor, but he shunted that processing thread aside. Later. Interpersonal issues later. Stabilizing his idiot kinda-cohort was most important now.
"Wouldn't be the first time you threw up on me," Jazz noted, pushing wry amusement into his glyphs as he stood, letting Sideswipe get to his feet. He led the way into the washracks proper, starting the solvent flow so it could think about getting warm before Sideswipe got there. "Remember Shooter's? And those fizzy energon drinks you liked...slag, what were they called?"
“Triple A exgen shots,” said Sideswipe, pressing a palm into the wall below the solvent shower-head, that first rinse of chemical hitting his plates and polarizing the color nanites across his frame, bringing them alive and sending a molecular vibration across his body. The gluey energon, hydraulic and transfluid coming loose from his finish and running off in a sluice of blue and red, the solvent rinsing through plating gaps and crackling clean beneath his armor. He lifted a hand, palm up, the light off his optics reflected in the wet gleam of the sleaning solution on the black alloy of his fingers, watched the blue runoff from his palm rinse clear. “One shot, the distillation process they used to refine it, the total used to make one shot could have fueled a miner for seven weeks.”
Sideswipe let the solution slide between his fingers and pressed his other hand to the wall, turned his head down the solvent hit the back of his neck, running down the cabling there, dripping and running into the cuts and grooves and dents still hammered across his frame.
“Sunny and I liked to steal that slag from the Iacon loading docks. Knew bot out of the Iacon Aerial Academy, back before it was high military, always got me dock clearance.” A smile, the light of his optics dimming. “Four million years ago I was doing that. Now, you can’t even make that stuff. Illegal to waste energon like that. Illegal.” He laughed. “And once you were a Decepticon… now you got Prime’s back. Weird what time does…”
Last Edit: Apr 20, 2012 17:51:22 GMT -5 by Deleted
Jazz stood under one of the other shower heads, letting the solvent get the worst of the muck off. He let himself fall into the sensation, his processor filled with the ping of droplets on plating. He onlined his optics again when Sideswipe started talking, chuckling when he was through. "Yeah. Tell me about it."
Jazz shook himself, plating flaring to allow the solvent into all the crevices. "S'funny, though. Don't feel like I've changed much. Well, 'cept for cohort. But other than that...still the same mech I always was. Just playing 'What Would Optimus Prime Do?' more often, instead of actually knowing what the frag I'm doin'. You know, Prime made me an officer? Me! Laugh of the decavorn...."
Jazz turned, optics sliding over Sideswipe's back, where rock and dirt and some kind of organic sap was ground in in a way that the solvent fall wouldn't be able to touch. He nabbed a detailing brush. "Gonna get your back. Don't kill me."
Sides made a non-committal noise of assent, moving to take a seat below the muted patter of solution from overhead. His armor configuration shifted slightly, gaps over wiring and mesh widening, shifting out of his default arrangement and baring hydraulic lines and cabling to the run of solvent. Sitting forward, arm braced against one knee, his right arm came apart from the elbow down. A slow transformation sequence, a seam along from his wrist to his elbow splitting, combat scythe flipping lazily forward and tucked against his outer arm. Energon and dirt gumming up the neural mounts, but the blade itself was clean save for the black smear of charred coolant, electricity having burnt it ashy against the metal. It rinsed off slowly.
He ignored the feeling of Jazz at his back, familiar enough with the mech he didn’t bring on every instinctive snarl of aggro-tec in Sideswipe’s battle-wired brain. Getting an actual cleaning was hard in military barracks when you couldn’t kill your nerves long enough to unlock your armor seams from battle-defensive tension. Sunstreaker never had a problem… mostly because everyone was scared of him and damned if he wasn’t getting bits of Decepticon out of his gears. Being familiar with Jazz didn’t stop the plating along Sideswipe’s back and flanks from sliding tight again the moment the other bot’s EM field crossed into his, the flicker of Jazz’s hand like a candle flame over the faint seams at his upperback. His jet mod seams were forever getting grit in them during a fight.
“Sunny always has to get the slag out of my back plates anyway,” he muttered, pretending he was absorbed in weapon maintenance and not acutely irritatingly high-strung aware of the other Bot. Pretending he didn’t have his weapon out just to make himself feel better. He willed himself to sit still. “Can’t reach,” Sides added unhelpfully.
Last Edit: Apr 23, 2012 23:40:42 GMT -5 by Deleted
Just me, Jazz pulsed easily, all but pressing the glyphs into Sideswipe's plates as he touched shoulder first, lightly, as a reference point, then got busy with the brush. The jet mod just gave Sideswipe more bits to get things stuck in, and this wasn't the first time Jazz had done this. There'd been times when Sunny hadn't been around or....
Ok, THAT brought a small but genuine smile to his face. "You remember that time in Sector 5, running from the 'forcers, and we jumped into the garbage pit by the quarry to get away?" Mud. Everywhere. Jazz could still feel it crawling through his internals like some kind of sentient monster if he tried.
Jazz kept his field smooth and steady-calm as he poked at a bit of sharp metal, determined that it was not Sides', and yanked it free from a seam. Just me.
Sideswipe twitched slightly at the tug of shrapnel from his back, but the ripple of a smile in other mech’s field – currently close to the curve of his spinal strut – seemed to confuse the pain across his dermalsensors. Mute it. Sideswipe shifted his shoulders a little, activating a partial transformation of his flight mod. The red plates of his upper back split open, veins of space opening all across that gap between what would have been his shoulder blades until the segmented sections hung strangely open under the misting of cleaning solution, the chemicals dripping from the edges of arched plates opened over the bright metal gleam of the turbine still recessed into his back. Grit slid from the edges of the flared metal sections, debris caught still in the gaps.
“I remember that.” Blue optics roved the walls like he could find something there, his sensors mapping in high definition every poke and swipe of Jazz’s hands at his back. “I also remember Sunny locking me out of the apartment until I hosed off at a public decontamination outlet. Good times. ’
Jazz smiled to himself at the helpful transformation. As much as Sideswipe's field jumped and jittered still with battle programming, it warmed Jazz's spark that Sides would deliberately make himself vulnerable like that around him.
Of course, it was also a blatant demand to get the broken debris out of uncomfortable places. Jazz stepped closer, their fields fully overlapping as he got in close enough to see. He popped a portable light out of his subspace and magclipped it to his plating so he could see a bit better. "Yeah, I could hear the yelling halfway back to my place. Primus, that was that dump on 39-7. With Crackshot. Good times." That got sarcasm markers. Crackshot had sold him out to a disgruntled former employer. It hadn't ended well.
He diverted a stream of solvent to clean off a bit of wedged-in slag to get a better look at where it sat. "Uh, lock down. This is sitting next to a sensor node. Gonna be kinda unpleasant no matter how I pull." Deep enough, too, that a hard enough flinch on Sideswipe's part could crunch his fingers between flared plates.
Just me.
Last Edit: Apr 25, 2012 15:46:17 GMT -5 by Deleted
Sideswipe didn’t say anything while Jazz dug around in his back, carefully not thinking about the feeling of someone’s fingers sliding into gaps between recessed hardware plates and into the neural mounts rooted deep into protoform. He carefully locked the hydraulics in his upper back, a sound like a whirr and a click rising from the interior of his framework as he did. Not a moment too soon either; a vicious jolt of pain data spiked up from his back, tearing up his dorsal strut and throbbing across his back plates. The pain was fleeting though and since he wasn’t trying to hold his own abdominal plates open while Sunny dug around in his guts for a hemorrhaging fuel line… he’d call it a win.
Another prodding touch, fingers shifting the stuck shrapnel with exploratory gentleness but sending a bolt of bite a bullet pain up from his spine. Great. Megajerk must have managed that during their mid-air grapple. He’ managed a lot actually. Sideswipe examined his still damaged arm with interest while pretending that what Jazz was doing didn’t hurt like a motherfucker. All damage related to that jet mod tended to be painful to the excess – aggravating already aggravated neural feeds and sensor grids – software he wasn’t spark with nesting irritably in his hardware. Sides broke his reluctantly.
Jazz could feel that he was hurting Sides no matter how gentle he was, so once he had the vector down and could get a good grip, he just got on with it. One good pull and the debris slid free with a gritty scrape, a trickle of energon flowing from where it'd been lodged. Jazz let the solvent wash over it, opticked it again, then nodded, satisfied that Sides' repair was taking care of it now that the offending bit of slag was gone. He went after everything else with the detailing brush. Grass, pebbles, and bits of wood fell to the floor in clumps, and when the mechanisms were clear and clean, he moved on to the other side. Nothing lodged there, thankfully, just muck to be coaxed out.
Jazz's audials perked at Velocity's name. Sides must be calming down, if he was ready to talk about her and not just snarl. "Only a bit longer than me, I think. Less than a planetary cycle, at least." He debated for a klik, then figured that hey, Sides had brought her up.... "Don't know her real well, though she reports to me...kinda. I know there's some slag between you two." He sent a pulse of support. "Wanna tell me what's going on? I don't wanna step in anything."
'Least not something I don't mean to, he thought.
<<Obviously, at this point Jazz is in a position to at least be information broker about Velocity's side of the story. Not sure if you want him to get into that or not? Just let me know what Nym/you want Jazz to communicate or not, and I'll work it in or work around it. >>
Last Edit: Apr 26, 2012 10:04:56 GMT -5 by Deleted
If Sunstreaker was conscious, Sideswipe likely wouldn’t have brought the subject up. As per usual, they would have turned this inside out, taking Velocity, what happened on Outpost Phi-42, the POS, and everything and pulled it into the binary-star system of their hate. Said nothing and fed of each other’s resentment and taken violent, (un)necessary action. Sunstreaker could hold a grudge for eons. Three local decades was nothing and considering what they been through, three deca-cycles was nowhere near enough cool-down time for either commando. He let his thoughts arrange and rearrange themselves a couple dozen times, letting the pain data drain from his sensor grid – replaced by the careful brush and smoothing of detail work. He shifted his plates a little before answering.
“If Sunstreaker were awake… he would have taken her head off.” There was no trace of sarcasm or hyperbole present in the subvocals or glyph parabolas of his words. Kaon had a serious lexicon for violence, all its many shades of it and as he said it there was no mistaking a deep, hugly personal well of vengeance… not necessarily Sideswipe’s but Sunstreaker’s. The roadster cycled his vent, optics irising dark and shutting tight. “We were in the same unit out of Phi-42.She was… our gunny, I guess, back then. Velocity watched our backs while we did our thing.” Sideswipe’s mouth pulled to the left slightly. “Phi-42…that rock was a lost cause. It’s always a lost cause wherever Sunny and I get assigned but this time we…”
Sides didn’t say anything a moment. “She ever say what happened to her old unit, outta curiosity? You doin’ a compare’n contrast right now, Jazz?”
The last bit of mud gone from the delicate mechanisms, Jazz pulled his hands out of Sideswipe's jet mod. After Sides transformed it back in, Jazz took the detailing brush to the rest of the frontliner's back in long, easy strokes. "Yeah, she told me the story. I know it went bearings up. Know she left you to go get reinforcements and didn't come back."
He kept his glyphs and voice neutral, indicating an exchange of information, no more. "I'm not comparing anything. Just want to know what happened. For your sake and hers. You know me: nosy nannybot, having to stick his servo in everything."
He weighed his glyphs carefully as he reached up to scrub tree sap out of a scrape. "It's no secret I'm keeping. I can tell you what she said, if you want to know. I want to, actually. Because for what it's worth, unless she's lying, I don't think either of you have the whole story."
“She left us,” said Sideswipe flatly. There was virtually no inflection in the way he said that – flat, factual, cold. “Maybe she didn’t want to, or it was really damn hard, or maybe it was orders because – boo-hoo – we got left for dead. Like that ain’t ever happened to every throw away frontliner batch sparked to die fast. Whatever. That ain’t my issue.” He looked over his shoulder, tones flat, expression colder than battle field cold because Sideswipe smiled when he fought. Fighting was easy, made sense. What he felt when he turned around and found Velocity waiting to grab hold of him… that had not made any sense to him whatsoever.
“She left us and she don't get a pass. S’not a question’a fair or deserves or details. I don't want to hear it because when she talks I just hear the static on the end of a dead radio. You know, that click click sound of a comm line that’s been cut from the other end? That.”
Last Edit: Apr 26, 2012 23:46:04 GMT -5 by Deleted
Jazz didn't flinch, just pressed a hand to Sideswipe's backplates in acceptance. "I get it. I do."
And he did. Memories could do that: link to a mecha until you couldn't see one without seeing the other. It was hard to break that bond. Hard to let go of that kind of anger. Harder still when you shared a spark with Sunstreaker, who could hold a grudge until every one of his namesakes burned out.
Sometimes things happened that you couldn't forgive. Couldn't forget. Might not be fair, or right. It just WAS. It was sad to see, since there had obviously been feeling there and from what Jazz could tell it hadn't been Velocity's fault at all, but there wasn't anything Jazz could do about it but provide fact. And fact sometimes just couldn't trump emotion.
He went back to scrubbing at plates that didn't need much more scrubbing. "Just remember it's here. If you want it."
He left "it" vague, his glyphs sliding from "information" to "possibility" to "hope", then let it go. "Don't suppose you could conveniently not mention that I ran into you before coming here? I haven't told anyone." His modifiers added "of course" to that statement. "And Velocity'll slag me if she finds out that I knew you were alive and didn't tell her."
Sides glanced over his shoulder again, catching Jazz’s gaze and holding it for a kilk, a dry half-smile pulling at the metal of his mouth. “Thanks for keepin’ your word on that, Jazz. I won’t rat ya out.”
And just like that the subject was dropped. If there was anything Sideswipe liked about Jazz it was his ability to take a hint. Granted, it might have been an ability afforded him by a couple eons of getting punched in the mouth for not taking a hint, or just being on Sunny’s last nerve, or because the twins had decided that Jazz was due for a punch because they were bored with a conversation. But the point was, that Jazz had developed a damn good sense for the strange barometric pressure changes that were Sideswipe and Sunstreaker’s moods. The nuances of their weird logic came naturally and for that Sideswipe was grateful.
“Tell me," he said, grimacing at the other mech, "that you guys have high grade.”
Jazz smiled back. "You kidding? This base has had Ironhide on it for more than a rotation. Of COURSE we've got high grade."
He finished up with the brush and stepped back a bit to use it on his own hands. Carefully not thinking too closely about it.
"I've got a cube or two in my 'space right now. Or we can take a trip to the still. It's a bit of a walk down to the sub-basements. Wouldn't want the higher-ups to find out about it, of course."
Last Edit: Apr 28, 2012 18:19:21 GMT -5 by Deleted