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.
In the microseconds it took him to reach his rival, it became apparent to Soundwave that his counterpart was going to hold his ground. Normally, after a period of adroit bobbing and weaving and generally leading one another on a merry chase through the data hallways of whatever system happened to be their battle field, their battles would quickly degrade into flurry of vicious cybernated attacks. A deadly hate filled dance that was all tooth and claw and muscle. This time though, Blaster dug in the moment Soundwave locked in on him.
Protecting something, Soundwave realized as he slamed into Blaster's hastily erected defenses.The Autobot was good though and his defenses covered several sectors on the Nemesis Grid--Soundwave couldn't quite pinpoint what information was being targeted or from what point. However Blaster couldn't quite hide the sheer amount of strain on the grids bandwidth. There had to be something, or someone, behind the shield with him. The mech was good but there was no way the Bot could divide his processing power to download at the rate data was being streamed from the grid and simultaneously duke it out with Soundwave. Even Soundwave, though he was loath to admit it, would have had trouble with a task of such a magnatude. Furious, and a touch uneasy, he continued to tear away at his enemy's defenses, determined to shred whatever he found behind it to pieces.
“Urgh! Okay,” gritted Blaster as the full hideously complex brunt of Soundwave’s anti-hacking defenses hit him hard. The infiltrator programs shredded the outer layer of ice he’d erected and immediately went to work tearing them apart. It wasn’t pain exactly that went through Blaster’s head as the firewalls were ripped apart, but he was aware of it happening in detail so complete it made his head spin. “He’s got his energy back, boss-mech. He’s back-fraggin-dooring my anti-virals! He’s gonna get through.”
Optimus didn’t look away from his own screen, completely still, fixed on the datastream he currently had downloading. “How long?”
“You got a kilk, maybe two, then he’s gonna bust through and shred ya, Optimus. Jack out.”
“Negative. Hold him, Blaster.”
Fraggit. “Urgh, yes sir.”
Optimus was mid-way through this data stream and if Blaster could keep Soundwave away from him for just another minute he could finish this and they’d have half of the Iacon database. Literally half of the incredibly vital data that the Deceptcion had sacked from the Hall of Records his home in so much as he’d ever had a home and it wasn’t quite persanal… but Optimus wasn’t going to let Megatron have a single giga-byte of data more than he absolutely needed to let go. The Prime didn’t stop his download, but he did release a pre-prepared encryption virus that hungrily began to spread through the remaining data. He could not destroy or delete it. The protections in place were too complex, but he could… mess with it.
“Optimus…” Blaster again. He was literally shaking where he stood, optics burning white, hardlined into half a dozen interface jacks, EM field ragged with focus. Soundwave was really going to town and these were his systems. There were things going off in his head that he didn’t even quite grasp. “Optimus… seriously…”
Ratbat had been in his office near the main groundbridge when the attack began. It was an excessively tall room, like many in the Nemesis, and so Ratbat had efficiently stacked it - consoles for Vehicons to work on below, his own consoles set above them to be visible from his upside-down perch on the ceiling. He could of course also monitor the Vehicon consoles, though the reverse was not true.
Fortunately, his hold was solid enough that the explosion did not drop him onto his subordinates. But it was a near thing.
Soundwave had tried to contact him, before the explosion - cut off suddenly, ominously. Ratbat began checking in with the subset of... oh that had exploded. Fantastic, he thought coldly. He released his workers to aid in ship defense and sealed off the office, trying to restore contact with his master. Eventually he got a ping for information, and slid his own perceptions into the streams of data Soundwave was collecting.
Like Laserbeak, Ratbat could be Soundwave's eyes and ears if Soundwave wished - unlike Laserbeak, he had no weapons to enforce his master's will. He sensed his master was communing with Ravage, and began sealing off unoccupied rooms to protect them from damage from the roving Autobots as he waited for orders. And if he was steadily working away from the parts of the ship with confirmed Autobot intruders, well, that was merely sensible...
Soundwave strained against his rival, ripping though code just as fast as Blaster strung up replacement lines. The other mech was flagging though. Being forced to hold his ground had made the Autobot unable to dance quite as wildly or dodge quit as deeply and the effort of fighting so fearce in such close quarters was obviously taking its toll. Again and again, Soundwave smashed against the defenses holding him at bay, determined to overcome his rival with sheer force if it came to it. A hard push and he felt the mech buckle. Another hard push and---
Surprise and alarm. His cassette. Ratbat. Soundwave saw his enemies. Blaster and...the Prime himself!
--and he broke though Blaster's defenses and struck forward, slamming into firewalls of the Autobot leader he knew would be there, savagely mauling the mech's defenses even as the Prime's presence suddenly bliped and disappeared off the grid. All in an microklick.
The Decepticon Specialist coiled back on himself a moment before tearing his braid, dropping from the system with a slight flash of vertigo even as he pinged the battlenet with the confirmation of their attackers. He'd barely confirmed the kill order before his attention shifted fully to the symbiot still in the room with their enemies, releasing Laserbeak from his chest as he did so.
Ratbat's plan had been to seal this entire section of ship off to block the assault and preserve infrastructure. With himself inside it, preferably. The chaos in the ship's systems prevented him from doing that remotely, so he hit the access to the nearest data hub with the intent of getting a hardline into somewhere that would let him do that. He was following the fight distantly, Soundwave's distraction and the shipboard chaos keeping him from more total awareness. Where was Megatron? Wasn't this what he was for, really?
He swooped into the room, mind at the other end of the ship. He'd almost reached the point of backwinging to a console when the two tightly disguised signals in the room suddenly snapped onto his threat radar and he realized he was bare meters from landing on the Autobot Prime.
He went perfectly still, frozen in the air. Both Prime and Blaster (his chances were diminishing by the moment) seemed intent on a conflict only they could sense. Hardlined in, perhaps to the point where they hadn't even heard the door.
There was the shift in his head that meant he had Soundwave's primary attention. That soothed his spiking panic, in the slightly artificial way Soundwave's presence always did. But if Soundwave was with him...
They were disconnecting. He had maybe a couple of nano-kliks.
And then he was told to stall them.
He obeyed, of course, flaring his wings to full display and dropping to between them and the door. He'd... think of something. Necessarily.
Last Edit: Jul 23, 2012 17:40:02 GMT -5 by Deleted
The neural-spike hit Optimus’ firewalls and shredded them so fast it was astonishing. Optimus coded immediately, reflexive Cybertornian defenses thrown up against the firestorm of code that came crashing through his head so hard, so fast, the overwhelming rush of it felt like the needle point of some steel syringe shove through his temple with extraordinary force. He instantly went blind, deaf, and for a sickly horrific reel his external sensors were knocked offline and the world as he knew it around him ceased to exist. The universe in electromagnetics blinked out, gone and he didn’t even feel it when his back hit the wall.
He didn’t move. Frozen, for a single exquisite moment in an astro-kilk limbo of soundless dark waiting… and then his sensory grid came back online and Blaster’s voice hit his audios like a mountain of scrap metal falling down. “HOLY CRAP I THINK YOU –!” Static. Silence. “Something on your head!” Another skip in his audio reception. “I THINK YOU SQUISHED HIM – OH WAIT NO HE’S STILL MOVING! I’LL GET HIM!”
Optimus, because Soundwave had all but nuked his sensor grid, hadn’t the slightest idea what Blaster was shouting about or why, exactly, the shorter mech then preceded to hop up and down, taking furious swipes at his head. It was only then that his proximity and dermal pressure sensors came back on line and his HUD cleared and he realized something was flapping and flailing furiously at the back of his head. Caught somehow between his back the wall and with his motor-functions shot he was having trouble moving his arms to actually rid himself of the flappy thing.
“He’s stuck on your smoke-stack things!” shouted Blasted, again, half-deafening the Prime.
He'd thought Prime was going to fall forward at first, right at the console. Then the massive mech had staggered back, sparking, and slammed into him with more than enough force to crush him against the back wall.
Fortunately for Ratbat, the Prime's now deadweight body hadn't quite hit the wall full-on, only the doorframe. His wings could twist and fold down to remarkable compactness, and he could subspace a lot of mass, but survival had meant jamming himself into the contours of Prime's neck and back so intricately that he wasn't actually able to extract himself at present.
It took more than a little flailing to discover that, no, he couldn't move. His half-transformed appendage/wings were jammed in a position he didn't have the articulation to get them out from. His hoverdrive was nonoperational, since his mass and Prime's together were well outside its specs.
He heard the rumble of Prime's voice, powerful enough to shake his frame, too distorted by that for him to understand what was being said. Another ineffectual wing-kick, and then one of Prime's previously-frozen shoulders was moving and his head began shaking violently to dislodge his accidental assailant.
An enormous hand blindly reached up and Ratbat shrieked piercingly. The noise seemed to disorient the Prime a bit more... he staggered off the wall and half-fell onto his companion.
He wasn't going to be able to ride this out. If Prime tried to peel him off, he'd lose at least one wing and some energon lines he couldn't spare. Prime's strength could break him without even trying. In desperation he sent out his small data cables, reaching for the neck medical port he was practically sprawled over. While he certainly was no hacker, right now he didn't think those systems were in any condition to resist him.
He got the port open, which was a good sign that the enemy commander was not with it enough to fight on the code level. After one last flail to keep one of his trailing wings out of Blaster's reach, he plugged in, trying to trigger a systems restart. If he could get Prime to lock up in this position on top of Blaster for even a quarter-klik, he probably could extract himself. He just desperately needed that quarter-klik.
After all, if he was still stuck to Prime when Megatron got here it wasn't the other side he'd have to worry about...
“Optimus! Sodding bloody fragging serious right now?!”
Blaster was, perhaps, not helping much shouting and swearing, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. It was just that Optimus was very big and Blaster was kind of short and when mechs with semi-trucks for alt modes went down, they went down pretty hard. This one just happened to make his bid with gravity right on fragging top of him. Blaster hit the ground hard on one knee, catching Optimus around the middle, and grabbing his arm as he staggered hard into the comm specialist. This close he could hear the distressed rev and grind of internal hydraulics locking and shorting.
“Can’t… move…” Optimus was gasping.
“Gah! Stop talking! More walking!”
“Can’t,” repeated Optimus and did he sound a bit annoyed with him?
“Optimus!” Bloody Pit, that sounded bad. Blaster’s anti-viral should have taken-care of the motor-functions! What the hell was going… He craned his neck a bit and spotted the quivering ball of squeaky mini-con latched to Op’s back. “RATBAT! You glitch-fragger! Let go of him or I’m putting a plasma slug through your tiny brain pan!” Obviously this was mostly bluster because he was fully engaged in trying to keep Op from toppling over on fragging top of him and in no position whatsoever to reach a malicious cassette perched atop Mount Tallimus Prime. “ KNOCK IT OFF OR I’LL DROP HIM ON TOP OF YOU! YOU WILL REGRET ALL OF YOUR CHOICES!”
If Optimus had a problem with being dropped on Ratbat he was too busy trying to stop his internals from locking up to protest. A process that Blaster knew from experience was singularly excruciating.
Last Edit: Jul 24, 2012 16:29:23 GMT -5 by Deleted
It was vanishingly rare that Ratbat ever lost his composure, but this was one of those times. A shrieked series of glyphs blanketed the room, condemning the pair of them as thieves and raiders and tangentially touching on their idiocy, clumsiness, and dubious caste status. Some of his rant spilled over to Decepticon command channels, where he snarled at the unspecified incompetence that had left him as the ship's last line of defense against Prime and Blaster and demanded immediate reinforcements now that he had them temporarily subdued.
Or, if not subdued, at least tangled up in each other. Now that Prime had toppled the other way, the smokestacks weren't being crushed into the rest of him and there was finally enough room for Ratbat to pull his twisted wings out. They left a massive paint transfer behind, joining other purple streaks all over the back of Prime's helm.
"Silence!" he screeched as Blaster's ranting continued, hooking a wing/appendage around an audial and pulling himself painfully up to the top of Optimus's head to stare down at the semi-pinned bot. He finally got the lower wings under him, turning the head into a perch as unblemished wing panels slid out of subspace. "You dare threaten me?" He wasn't unhooking from Prime until he was sure he could fly, but the massive bot was slowly winning control back. This standoff couldn't last forever.
His orders to obstruct and stall them were still in effect. He literally had no choice but to keep them here, no matter how precarious his position. A ping to Soundwave requested updated orders with more than an undercurrent of desperation.
It was possible that Ratbat was going to keep talking, but he was rather effectively kept from going on when Optimus – clearly less than thrilled about his new mini-con headpiece – reached up and grabbed Ratbat. The mini-con’s body in his fist was heavier than one might have suspected based on the once-Councilor’s size, the edge of his wings buffeting briefly against his palm when the cassette realized what Optimus was doing. Too late. The Prime pulled Ratbot off his helm, snarled at the bursting feed-back snap of yanking jacks from the cervical port at the back of his neck. Agony. Static. And for a pain-fevered split second Optimus almost closed his fist and crushed the exo-skeletal structure of the body in his hand, driving metal and proto-mass into the fuel tank and spark chamber, popping the casing like a fruit in the hot centre of Ratbat and snuffing him there and then…
But he didn’t. A sick lurch of revulsion swept through Optimus from his spark out and he immediately tossed the cassette away from him, another surge of nausea and sensory errors bursting molten through his head and sweeping down and through his body in a white-hot bolt. Blaster immediately caught the taller mech around the middle again, clumsily bracing him upright until he caught his balance. The Prime’s engine noise and electromagnetics were wildly off kilter.
“Get out,” Optimus managed, though if he was talking to Ratbat or just stating a plan of action, Blaster couldn’t tell. Soundwave had clawed viral gashes deep through Optimus’ defenses and Ratbat hadn’t helped by jacking into that raw mess and scrambling things. Blaster was dreading that he’d somehow screwed up and let Soundwave truly and royally hurt Optimus fragging Prime. Somewhat disjointedly Optimus added, “I have it. We’re done.”
“Your priorities hurt me sometimes, Prime.”
“Ratbat?”
“Alive. If that’s your question. Again. Priorities, Primus dammit all.”
Ratbat had snapped a cable. A minor injury, compared to what a mech of Optimus's size could do to him with even an accidental application of strength, but enough to kick his self-preservation protocols into overdrive. He managed to get flight control before he bounced off one of the displays, and clawed at it to gain purchase to hang off the top.
Meeting Blaster's glance back with an icy glare, he pinged Soundwave again, and then Laserbeak. Receiving no answer from the first, he stared at the mechs stumbling out the door, optics dimming in thought. He was in a calmer mood now, his uncharacteristic burst of outrage successfully interrupted.
Yet he was still required to stop them. Ratbat spread his wings, approaching to just out of grab range as the pair reached the hall. He introduced a pulsing quaver into his EM to play up his internal struggle with the orders, just a hint of unnatural compulsion, enough to frame himself as his master's victim in all this. He imagined that would play well with the Autobots.
"I'm afraid I cannot permit you to leave." His voice was calm, steady, and deadly serious. as if he had a half dozen of the Nemesis's most skilled warriors at his back.
That got their attention. He'd timed it very carefully. They both were staring at him when Laserbeak cornered to begin a strafing run down the hall.
Soundwave didn't respond to the ping from his cassette, though he knew exactly the flightframe's plight. Unfortunately, the specialist found himself a little busy dealing with a situation of his own. Something inside the slag smear of his temporary fix had knocked loose and grated, and now energon was again leaking from the wound in a small dribbles down his thigh. It wasn't the leak that drew Soundwave's notice, however, but the steady line of tingling numbness that was slowly creeping up his left leg.
The mech ran a quick diagnostic on both the internal and external components of the limb and received a small but growing list of totally or partially unresponsive systems. He was slowly losing power to his leg, a signal that there was defiantly more damage done to his frame than he originally thought, though structural or code, he didn't know. With a final command to his cassettes, the willowy mech limped off to find a more appropriate location to attend to his wounds, preferably, his quarters.
~~
More or less at that moment Laserbeak rounded the corner of the open monitor room and open fired on the Autobots he already knew were there, prompting a hail storm of chaos to erupt within the room.
The little drone didn't have much in the way of sentience, more a cyber-animal than a mecha, but his programming was advanced enough to signal to the Vehicons who crossed his path as he'd made his way to the intruders. The cassette's light trilling call coupled with Soundwave's previous announcement as to the location of the on board Autobots was enough to command attention and soon a fairly large company of mecha jogged along behind him. Laserbeak's programming was not enough to facilitate much in the way of planning however and with Soundwave otherwise occupied, the little monitor room fairly erupted in blaster fire the moment he and the Vehicons stumbled upon its threshold.
“Well, fuckity-fuck,” said Blaster, earning him a bit of a side-eye from Optimus, but if the Prime had some commentary on Blaster appropriation of human swear-words he shelved it for a time when less minicons were trying to shoot his faceplate off. Optimus dove one way, Blaster dove the others and put their backs against the wall on either side of the open door while Laserbeak’s hail of fire destroyed the console they’d been standing at. Blaster glared across the gap at the Prime. “You know,” he shouted over the blasts and explosions. “I’m going to take this time to say I told you so!”
“Noted,” said Optimus, his right arm reformatting into an energon cannon.
“Getting a comm from Bluestreak. Kid’s running amok on the lower levels. Some big bad on his aft.”
“Tell hir we’re enroute. On my mark.”
Blaster’s arm likewise flipped into weapon-mode. “There’re half a dozen Eradicons out there now.”
“Again. Noted. You take Laserbeak, I’ll deal with the Eradicons. Mark!”
“Fraggit.”
Both Autobots swung out from behind cover and opened fire into the crowd of Eradicons. Two fell, the others scattered in an attempt to find cover. Optimus, who was still seeing double for the most part, could not even track the movements of Laserbeak, leaving that task to Blaster before – having caused sufficient chaos – the two Autobot bolted from the monitor room, hit the ground in the alts and tore down the Nemesis hallways in a very decisive retreat. Blaster fire scorched the floors around, them, ripping past the comm specialists’ quarter panel, several glancing off Optimus’ cab.
“Blustreak?”
“Hang a left. There’s something big and angry after him apparently.”
Ratbat had hoped to push the inevitable firefight into the hall, but was forced to dive to the deck, mass-shift as small as possible, and then limpet himself to the wall to avoid the chaos which burst into the area he was in. Power arced as the console was slagged, near him, and he mentally calculated the damages, seething very quietly.
They'd said they'd achieved what they came for. Ratbat reviewed his memories of what the display had shown when he'd inadvertently come in, and hissed. The Iacon database. That could be trouble indeed.
Soundwave had released him. He was not bound to chase them. Instead he waited, perfectly still and quiet, until all reports said the Autobots had left.