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.
Jazz was already smiling, already readying a reassurance that slag, no, any idiot who gave blanket reassurances was a glitch and yeah, don't worry, he'd had a bit of that agoraphobia thing, too, when he'd hit Earth, but it'd gotten better for him and he was sure it'd get better for Steeljaw, too--when his processing thread was interrupted by--
"Wait WHAT? Several orn? STASIS LOCK?" Jazz reared back far enough to look down at Steeljaw, his arms tightening in instinctive protective reaction. It was, he was fairly sure, a leftover instinct from Blue. "What...why are you going to drop into stasis lock? What's wrong with you?"
He curled around Steeljaw, holding giving away to out and out HUGGING, as if he could keep whatever was wrong away by sheer proximity. He was fairly sure THAT was a leftover from the sparkling days, too. "You should have SAID something!"
Steeljaw lifted his helm back up, optics focusing muzzily, puzzlement flicking his audials back. "Said? But it's...." What? Self evident, maybe, or common knowledge except for the part where it apparently wasn't. Huffing a vent, he put his helm back down before his optics skewed off focus again.
"It's not wrong, exactly," he clarified. "It's just... part of being an unbonded symbiont." He dug a rear claw lightly into the edge of one of Jazz's plates, just enough to sting slightly. "That's in my records. I'm fairly certain you've read those." He managed a partial shrug but didn't try to break the other mech's hold. "I'm stronger than most but I'm still not made to be a stand alone system like full mecha are. I can go quite awhile on my own, but it's been a long time and in another orn or so I'll start feeling it."
Jazz was comfortable, despite the awkward fit, and Steeljaw fit his helm beneath the other mech's chin, shuttering his optics contentedly. "It's nothing dramatic," he assured the saboteur. "My spark just cycles down. It makes me cold - which makes me irritable - and if I let it go too long then yes, it would eventually drop me into stasis lock, the kind you don't come out of. It's a very peaceful way to go, excepting the miserably cold part."
Jazz listened with every evidence of interest and confusion, the specter of "cycling down" making him let go enough that he could continue with the petting even as he eased back to lie flat again. "Well yeah, I read your records, and I knew you were unbonded, but I didn't know that was BAD. Only symbiont/carrier cohort I've known's been Soundwave and his brood, and Ravage could prowl off for vorns on his own without a care, it seemed like. I thought that was just the way it worked."
Evidently not. Slow spark death.... Primus....
Jazz hoped that the contentment in Steeljaw's field meant that there was something that could be done about the situation. "So...what've we got to do? To make this...better? Fixed? You said something about Cleaver and Ratchet? Do you...need a carrier or something, or...oh frag, please tell me that this doesn't involve you and Blaster. The base isn't hardened enough to deal with you two forced into close proximity...."
The claw, that time, was inserted underneath a plate seam with enough force to make the other mech flinch. "Reformat your vocalizer," Steeljaw snapped, tail tip beating an agitated rhythm. "Blaster has made his stance on the matter perfectly clear and even if he hadn't I have NO intention of taking another host." He huffed, exventing sharply. "And certainly not HIM, though I'll be obliged if you don't repeat that. We've sorted out a working relationship that I'd rather not sabotage."
Settling back down, Steeljaw pillowed his chin on the center of Jazz's chest. "I won't take another permanent host," he said quietly, old glyphs of cohort-creator and loyalty ghosting about the words. "But a temporary arrangement, just enough for a spark infusion - a jump start, if you will - works fine." He shrugged again, arching his back up into the other mech's petting hands. "I'll have to decide on who, and make some sort of arrangement in the next orn or so." He squirmed slightly, finding a better position. "It's... awkward."
"Ow, ow, hey, just askin'!" Jazz rubbed the abused seam before stroking the linkages at the back of Steeljaw's neck to appease his feline overlord.
"Yyyeah, I can see how that might be awkward. Especially if a spark infusion is anything like...what...it sounds like? Sounds--" don't say kinky, Jazz, don't say kinky "--kinda personal."
Jazz looked up at the ceiling thoughtfully, unarchiving old, old observation files, picking out everything he'd ever figured out or heard about Soundwave and his menagerie. "So your spark doesn't spin right without access to the carrier's...or someone else's...spark? I thought it was more exclusive than that for some reason...like a sparkbond. That can't be right, though, or a symbiont'd have more problems than just spinning down if they lost their carrier.... Or is it just different for you guys?"
He tipped his head up to look Steeljaw in the optic. "I know I'm asking really personal medical questions here, feel free to tell me to shut up. I'm just curious."
Don't make the cat joke, Jazz, don't make the cat joke...
Steeljaw twisted his head to mash his face back into Jazz's chestplates. It wasn't embarrassment - at least, not on his own part. Not when it was a simple system function. It was, however, eternally tiresome dealing with bipedal frame types and their assumptions and their embarrassment, and the awkward was, he had found over the vorns, entirely situated on their side of the equation.
Steeljaw, personally, preferred to recharge through the proceedings. There was nothing quite as satisfying or system refreshing as recharge while linked to a carrier's systems.
Huffing, he lightly thumped his head against the other mech's chest a few more times for good measure, then vented and resumed his previous position. "I was going to tell you all of this anyways," he said. "As my employer, for the time being, you'll need to know.
"I don't know how it works with ALL symbionts. There's different types, just as there's different frame types, or different ways of making a new spark. Personally, Uplink was my creator. I was split directly off of his spark - his alone, no other code or spark involved." A thought made Steeljaw's audials twitch in surprise. "I suppose... if you look at it that way... it makes us something like spark split twins, with my own share being the weaker half by a good sized factor." He shook his head, venting irritably. "It's not an exact analogy, but it's close. I'm not a copy or a clone or a drone. Uplink split off portions of his own spark to make me, and after the split we were a symbiotic system. I'm not meant to be a stand alone unit. My spark is as stable as pre-war med-tech can make it, but it's not meant to maintain by itself and given time - a few vorn - I spin down."
<<ooc - tweaked slightly>>
Last Edit: Apr 30, 2012 12:45:45 GMT -5 by Deleted
Jazz patted the head that kept thumping against his chest in a minor fit of...helpless "oh god my life", as far as Jazz could tell. He tried to take in what Steeljaw had just said and had to admit that he probably couldn't understand it. The mechanics of sparks were certainly beyond him, but he could pick out the important things: Steeljaw wasn't just a small, four-footed mecha. He needed Other Things, and that was fine. Everyone needed Other Things. Medical things, psychological things, physical things. Jazz's cohort was built around mecha who needed Other Things, though Ironhide without something to guard wouldn't make his spark spin down, just drive him (and everyone around him) nuts.
"I know a pair of spark-splits," Jazz said. "I can't...yikes, Jaws, I can't imagine what would happen if they lost one of them. I'm sorry, mech. I know it doesn't make any difference now and probably doesn't help, but that's a whole lot of hurt you've gone through, and I'm always sorry my friends have to go through slag like that." He leaned up to bump helm touch to Steeljaw, venting slowly.
"And...you'll be ok? Just need someone to do this thing with? S'not anything you need a certain frametype or rare mineral or the right cycle of the universe and an alignment of the stars to do or something?"
"Just a warm frame and spinning spark," Steeljaw confirmed. "Sometimes it works for longer, sometimes less, but I'm no scientist or medic to be able to tell you why."
The press of Jazz's helm against his own was a reassuring warmth. Steeljaw nudged back gently, systems spinning down into a steady pulse after the riotous high and low ricochet of the last few breem. Jazz was steady, had been so in all of his dealings with Steeljaw, and that transparency of motive was a deeply reassuring thing.
It was also something that he, Steeljaw, could not be cited as reciprocating. Steeljaw vented softly. [It's okay,] Uplink soothed. [Got a good feeling about this one, 'Jaws.]
Which only meant that his secondary backup processor had run the statistics and come up with a favorable weighted outcome. Huffing, Steeljaw partially sat up, bringing one fore pede to bear on Jazz's forehelm as he pushed the saboteur back. "Alright," he said aloud. "Full disclosure. I honestly don't know how I differ from other symbionts - I know there's different types but we didn't associate with a wide range. I do know that the medics gave me less than a 15% chance of survival after Uplink deactivated, either from spontaneous spark loss or because, like split twins, they assumed I was going to glitch myself straight into the Pit without him."
He smiled, deliberately, drop jawed with sharpened dente showing. "We proved them all wrong. I won't say it wasn't a near thing - if we hadn't taken the precautions we had, I think I probably would have just laid down and willed myself into deactivation. Starved my systems into shutdown and counted it a blessing, if I didn't actively shred my own lines to make it go faster. You're right - it was a Pit load of slag, and nothing I ever want to go through again. But at that time we had one last code kernel to unpack, and it saved my aft."
Squirming, Steeljaw wriggled until Jazz's petting hand was resting on his backstruts, just behind the rotor assemblies of his forelimb joints. "There. Feel that?" It wasn't, he knew, much to feel - nothing but the faint vibration of a specialized fan set clustered to vent heat from the systems that were housed in the barrel of Steeljaw's chassis, beneath and slightly behind his spark. "Backup memory banks," he explained to Jazz. "We both had them, or rather, we had each others - Uplink carried mine, I carry his. That way, if anything happened to either of us short of full spark loss, we could restore each other to the last backup."
Cycling a deep invent, he met Jazz's gaze solidly. "The memory bank is filtered through a tertiary fourth tier processor that feeds directly into my own. It's not," he added, "a large or complex enough processor to develop an AI - it just does very quick search queries." That was the theory, at least, and Steeljaw would stick to it, though he was also fairly certain none of Cybertron's engineers or scientists had ever experimented with hooking a fourth tier processor up to a full memory bank with read/write capabilities and then running it continuously for as many vorn as the war had dragged on for.
"It gives me Uplink's voice," Steeljaw explained quietly. "And the first thing that voice told me, when all I wanted to do was lay down and deactivate myself, was to get back on my pedes and not let the slaggers win. I'd never not done what he told me to, so I did. There's been plenty of times, then and since, when it's been what's kept me sane, and sometimes when it's kept me alive."
Huffing, the sound not quite a laugh, he leaned forward to tap his helm against Jazz's again. "The important thing - the part you need to know - is that it means I have a backup copy and complete access to all of Uplink's skills and code. I could," he added, dryly amused, "let you 'talk' to him, in a manner of speaking, but it gives me one Pit of a processor ache afterwards."
Jazz stroked a wondering hand over the indicated stretch of Steeljaw's dorsal plates. He could feel it now, pressing in, letting vibration translate through his frame into sound, amplifying what he might have noticed earlier, had he known what to listen for. By the time Steeljaw was done, Jazz's hands had flattened, spidering over Steeljaw's back like he was trying to protect something. All right, maybe he'd turned his petting into more of a hug, too. Maybe.
Jazz was as little a programmer as he was a spark technician, so he could only hazard a guess at what Steeljaw's revelation actually MEANT on more than the most basic level. On that basic level, it meant that Steeljaw was alive, which was indisputably a good thing. Also on that level, it meant that he had a backup of his carrier floating around his memory banks. Jazz (not being a programmer!) could only speculate about what that was like, though he had to say that no mere memory bank backup he'd ever seen or made could have skills or the ability to "talk" in any sense of the glyph. Still...whatever got Steeljaw through the cycle.
He chuckled. "I bet. It's ok. I'm not sure what Ratchet would say about the state of your processor, but hey, if it gets you through--and it sounds like it has--then more power to you."
Jazz rocked a little on back and forth, smiling, taking Steeljaw with him. As tragic as it was, the quadruped's story made him feel like he finally had all of the pieces. And the picture they made was definitely workable. Live, functioning Steeljaw with a processor full of useful skills was a good thing.
A Steeljaw that was STAYING was even better. Jazz's grin got bigger.
"All his skills and code, huh? Sounds like you've been sellin' yourself short, then, in your negotiations." Jazz's glyphs took on a half-teasing lilt. "Anything we should toss in to sweeten the pot? Still privileges? Personal polishing sessions? Plusher quarters?"
Jazz thought about that for a klik then looked up at Steeljaw, perplexed. "Wait. Do you even HAVE quarters? Have you been sleeping in the vents all this time?"
Steeljaw blinked at Jazz, deliberately shuttering and unshuttering his optics as though the cycle through his focus range might make the rest of the situation make any more sense. For as transparent as Jazz could be, and the mech was refreshingly straightforward and businesslike most of the time, there remained some sort of fundamental disconnect when they talked, and more often then not it seemed to result in Steeljaw having to reboot optics and audials and try to figure out what he had said or done that had not been clear to the Autobot the first time. "...yessss?" he hazarded. "Well, not in the vents, precisely - there's a very comfortable place next to the central heating unit. Nicely warm. Inaccessible, unless you're me. A bit noisy when the environmental controls kick on, but it's a white noise, easy to filter out. I usually recharge there."
Truthfully, no one had ever thought to ask him if he had quarters, or to inquire where he went when off-duty. Steeljaw preferred the anonymity, coming and going as he pleased, and it was far from the first time he had staked out a semi-private place to recharge near the engines of a ship or, in this case, the environmental controls of a base. He liked the heat put out by the larger mechanics and cramped spaces plus noise made it unlikely that anyone else would want the same spot.
[...Jaws...] Uplink groaned, which meant he was missing something, but honestly, he couldn't recall the last time he had had actual assigned quarters. It was wasteful to give a mech sized space to someone who was significantly smaller.
More importantly, however, was the remark preceding the question about quarters, and Steeljaw fixed Jazz with a firm glare. "Also - regarding Ratchet - I would appreciate it if the entirety of my situation did not get back to him. On a 'need to know' basis, if you please." His glyphs, underscoring the words, were sharp edged and foreboding. "Ratchet is a splendid medic, but medics as a whole seem to take it as a personal affront and a challenge to their profession when you've done anything to your own processor, and this is NOT something to be FIXED."
Jazz's hands smoothed down the flared plates along Steeljaw's back, his field pulsing understanding-commiseration-support. "M'not gonna rat you out, Steeljaw, I promise. Believe me, I understand about medics rooting around in your processor. Don't really like it myself." The conventional medics traditionally hated doing processor work on spec ops mechs for all the tweaks and firewalls and traps they were likely to find there. It was mutual, especially for the deep cover agents. What the medics called 'irreparable partitioning and thread fracturing' was what spec ops called 'infiltrators'.
"Everyone's got their own ways of dealing," Jazz said, thinking of a certain pair of sparksplit glitches he knew. "Whatever works. If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
The petting just kind of...didn't stop. Funny, that. Jazz had to admit that lying there with a quadruped-shaped chest warmer was kinda nice.
Speaking of lying around.... "I'm sure we can find someplace nicer'n curling up with the central heating unit, if you want. I mean, if you're good with it the way it is, that's fine, by all means continue. But I feel kinda bad that I never noticed you didn't have some assigned space of your own. Figured that you'd just grabbed a room like all the other newcomers."
Jazz's fingers dragged up Steeljaw's back thoughtfully, his thoughts casting back to the complaints earlier about things being too big, too open. "This place IS made for human-sized things. I'm sure we could find you a small room. Turn up the heat. Get you lotsa squishy pillows. The humans' foam technologies are pretty good, actually."
Human sized. Steeljaw cycled his optics. He hadn't thought... well, no, he really hadn't thought. But he did, technically, stand more or less eye to eye with Jack Darby when he stood up. He could, assuredly, stretch quite a bit longer than the human male when stretched out, but technically speaking, in certain positions and through certain spans of measurement, they were close to the same size.
A human berth - maybe one of those rather extravagantly large ones, king sized - would afford him a softer surface than he could remember in ages, and enough room to stretch or curl up within reason. A human room would not be quite so secure as his place by the heating units, but a human sized door would keep out nearly all of the base denizens excepting the humans and Rattrap, and for them there could be traps and alarms.
A human sized room would be small. It would be very nearly Steeljaw sized, and that was a novelty that simply... didn't exist. Ever. His apartment with Uplink had been, naturally, sized to Uplink, albeit with shelving and steps built in that made Steeljaw's navigation through the space nearly effortless. Short of wedging himself into crawl spaces on ships, there was no such thing, in his experience, as "Steeljaw sized". To be a symbiont was to be a small frame in a much larger world.
He thought about it, turning the idea over in his processor, and then bumped the flat of his head against Jazz's chest again. "A small room... might be nice. With pillows. Yes."
"We can do that." Jazz smiled, letting the happiness of being able to HELP percolate through his field to ping against Steeljaw's.
"You pick one out," he said, claws stroking over the symbiont's neck as he sat, slowly, up, until Steeljaw was in his lap, curled around by a happy Jazz. "I'll take care of the pillows. Maybe a space heater? Yeah, space heater sounds nice. The concrete here sucks the heat right out. S'too bad you can't go outside. You'd like the sun on this planet."
He cocked his helm, thinking. "What about if you were in someone's alt? Would that work?"
The mix of surprise and... well, not guilt, per se, but somewhat sheepishness huffed out of his vents before he could stop it. Steeljaw ducked his head slightly, and it was abruptly silly and ridiculous all at once, and Shadowrunner had said that Jazz would appreciate it. Assuming he didn't already know and was just teasing Steeljaw, which the symbiont certainly didn't rule out. "Ah... yes. Well. Inside another alt is fine. Doesn't make me glitch the way open space and dirt does."
He cocked his head, eyeing Jazz sidelong with a grin. "We might have done some experimenting," he admitted with a pulse of amusement. "Shadowrunner's hood is the perfect size for basking on, and if I disable my optics then there's nothing but Cybertronian metal under me and a wonderful amount of radiant heat. We discovered that when she smuggled me off base."
The well of sheepish amusement didn't slide under Jazz's notice. Cross-reference that with a certain amount of base gossip that had been mentioned in his presence and well....
Jazz grinned. "I see. This wouldn't have happened to coincide with the practical joke that I didn't hear about someone maybe playing on Blaster? Perhaps? Not that I've heard about that...."
He tapped petting fingers against Steeljaw's side. "Because of course if I'd heard about that I'm sure I'd have to do something unfortunate and officerly about it, but since I HAVEN'T, well...."
His grin grew. "I can say that if, theoretically, something LIKE a prank of such proportions had been performed, I likely would have to give said practical joker kudos for sheer artistry. I would have to say, 'sir, I salute you and also hope that you never have to rely on Blaster for backup'."
Jazz perked, "But! That all not needing said, I WILL say that I'm glad you have a way to get out, my mech. Agoraphobia aside, don't want you goin' base crazy from lack of new scenery." Eventually. Because hey, Steeljaw was STAYING.
Jazz's smile was internal, soft, and mostly to himself as he watched his servos tracing down Steeljaw's neck for no reason other than Steeljaw hadn't told him to stop. "I'm glad you decided to stay, Steeljaw. Really. For reals."