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.
Ironhide rumbled softly, a low thrum of pleased satisfaction. He had taken out a data pad as she worked, skimming it one handed, and if he had never taught while the student sat on his lap, leaned up warm against his chassis, then it was just the difference between instructing strangers or instructing cohort and he found he rather preferred the latter. Pulling her back against him, he subspaced the pad and took the ball back. His own scans unfurled across his HUD automatically and he regarded them thoughtfully for a long moment.
"Think yeh'll find," he said at last, "that we're both wrong, an' the micro fissure at its furthest stretch - an' Ah'm countin' where it's only a few molecules deep - is 2.794 millimeters." He solemnly reached into his subspace, retrieving the undamaged half of the rust stick and presenting it to her. "Good work, an' always double check meh. Ah ain't fraggin' with yeh, but Ah ain't infallible either an' it was late last night when Ah finished puttin' that together."
Handing her the rust stick, he tilted his head at it. "So, tell meh what that's made of before yeh inhale it."
Last Edit: May 30, 2012 16:14:33 GMT -5 by Deleted
Shadow took the rust stick obediently enough, but that didn’t stop her from reaching for the ball with her free hand and retrieving it for another look, scanners immediately focusing on the item in question. She could see how she’d made her mistake, the portion of the fissure she’d already measured marked in blue on her HUD, the remainder located and outlined in red with depth notations along the length. The micro fissure’s depth decreased sharply before it truly ended, and even knowing that seemingly negligible amounts mattered, she hadn’t internalized that knowledge enough to follow the fissure to its true endpoint.
“I see. I’m still thinking about this wrong.” Sloppy, a part of her processor which sounded suspiciously like Labyrinth spat at her, stupid, waste of time and effort. Another part countered with learning curve, and that part was bolstered as much by the steady satisfaction in Ironhide’s field as by his admission that even he made mistakes. She gave him what she hoped was a wry grin. “Nothing’s inconsequential.”
Still, when she turned her attention to the rust stick, wondering why Ironhide would ask her about something so simple, it was with a faint ache of failure. “The outer shell is three layers of metallic antimony, each 3.5 millimeters thick and coated in a blend of ferrihydrite crystals and powdered corundum mixed at a 97 to 3 ratio. And the core is,” she faltered, “...almost pure vanadium? That can’t be right, it’s not dense en...” She broke off, adjusting her scans to exclude chemical composition and density and focus solely on structure, refining until she could detect the delicate latticework which made up the solid-to-the-optic center of the rust stick. “Oh.” She was ridiculously delighted by the discovery, the secret of what had once been an utterly mundane item unfurling across her HUD. “The core is mostly air. That’s why they break so easily.”
Ironhide pulsed pride at her, grinning. "An' crunch nice. 'Course, th' real question is how th' frag yeh spin vanadium out like that, what th' right forging temperature an' how fast yeh cool it." He cocked his head slightly. "Mah guess would be liquid cooling, t' get it to keep that shape, but ain't nobody makin' 'em any more t' ask."
Shaking his head, he huffed a vent. "Seems a shame we're gonna have a bitlet wanderin' around base later on an' nobody's doin' nothin' except refining standard ration grade, or high grade that'll clean yer tanks out. Yeh'd think somebody would know how t' make sweets. Have t' see what th' engineers know."
Hooking his chin against her helm, he let her feel his pride and satisfaction. "That was good work, femme. Yer right - nothin's inconsequential. That's somethin' that comes with practice, though, checkin' everything an' then checkin' it twice, an' even then yeh forget sometimes. That fissure - Ah overestimated, yeh underestimated. Either way, if we welded on what our first guess was, wouldn't be entirely right. Imagine it's on someone's weapon mount. It's not wrong - it'd work, an' sometimes that's all yeh got time for - but it wouldn't be th' best we could do. Yer guess would leave a tiny fraction of a fissure that could spread again if it was whacked right, bit of a weak spot. Mine would've heated up an' weakend a bit that didn't need it, an worst case it might distort that spot which'd feel like a patch of itch caught up under yer plates."
He bumped his helm against hers, rumbling reassurance. "But in a pinch? That'd've worked just fine. We ain't medics an' lots of time we don't have th' space t' try for perfection. Ah like t' try for it anyways, point of professional pride, but if there's no time then workin' is more'n good enough."
Shadow relaxed in Ironhide's hold, letting his pride and reassurance pulse through her, settling the lingering sense of failure and quelling the need to apologize. She could see his point, hard as far older lessons made it to accept. "It would work, and it would probably be good enough, but I still wouldn't want to see that repair come back through. Not because I fragged something up." She nudged him lightly. "And neither would you."
Still, his point stood: neither of them might want the error, but it was minor, and certainly wouldn't be the end of the world. Good enough, better by far than repairs going unmade due to lack of time or supplies for perfection...but logic didn't make the lack of a hard dividing line between success and failure any easier. Not after an entire function of striving for absolutes that were set and defined for her.
She let silence settle between them, regarding the rust stick as if visual inspection would tell her something her scanners hadn't. "Air injection?" she offered, taking a bite from the broken end. It did, indeed, crunch nice, shell and core shattering easily between her denta with a flavor both richer and sweeter than she remembered, and she offlined her optics and spent a few nano-kliks simply savoring the taste. "No, it's too fine-grained and complex for air injection. Almost crystalline." She 'walked' the delicate cylinder between her fingers, optics fixed on it while she flipped it end over end. "Would flash cooling make it form up like that, if it was hot enough to start with? Or would it just make it crack?"
It was an idle thought, thrown out while she worked herself up to what she really wanted to ask. Another trip across the span of her hand, and the rust stick stilled, then snapped in half between two fingers. Shadow handed one piece back to Ironhide, her expression a little lost. "How do you tell the difference between accepting your own fallibility, and just making excuses for sloppy work?"
Ironhide nudged the rust stick back to her with a pulse of affirmation that it was for her, well earned, and reached into his subspace to draw out another small shard of rust stick for himself. The act of chewing it and rolling it around his mouth, trying to analyze texture while savoring the sweet burst of it, gave him a moment to think before trying to answer her.
"Yeh think yer likely t' be lazy enough t' make excuses for sloppy work? 'Cus yeh don't strike meh as lazy."
"I don't know," she said honestly. "It's never been up to me. Labyrinth told us what to do and we did it. We...found ways, if we had to."
Shadow scanned the pieces of rust stick again, tracing the minute fractures spidering out from the break, distracting herself from the actual words coming from her vocalizer. "Lab expected us to beat the odds, no matter what. He expected us to be perfect, better than perfect." And I am so very far from perfect, she added silently. "That's what I know. I can be perfect, or I can fail, and I don't know how to judge anything in between."
Humming a low note, Ironhide nudged his helm lightly against hers. "Ain't none of us failures," he told her, "or we wouldn't still be here. War don't forgive failure much. An' ain't none of us perfect, up to an' includin' Prahm, though-" he grinned against her helm, field warm and amused, "-Ah probably ain't at liberty t' back that one up by citin' incidents. Yeh'll just have t' take mah word for it."
He wrapped an arm around her waist, squeezing gently. "All any of us do is best we can. 'Best' ain't 'perfect', but that's alright. Perfect makes more problems then it solves, sometimes. Everythin' was perfect, wouldn't none of us be here scrabblin' around doin' this slag. So 'best' is just fine. What yer best is... if it ain't life an' death, then 'best' is whatever leaves yeh with enough t' tackle whatever comes after what yer workin' on right now."
Ironhide’s words didn’t really answer her question, but Shadow was getting used to that...was starting to realize that what she asked and what the others heard weren’t the same thing. Almost like speaking another language, except in her case, the words were the same, it was just the thought processes behind them that were vastly different. Venting a quiet, only slightly frustrated sigh, she leaned into Ironhide’s embrace and took the reassurance as it was intended, not giving voice to the But how do I know? that was still circling around in her processor.
She missed her cohort with sudden, sharp intensity. She missed familiar voices and familiar fields and missed, desperately, having mecha who understood her. Not necessarily with her right now - this wasn’t the first time she’d gone decades separated from the others, performing her way through the day to day - but that had always been with the knowledge that she could, ultimately, go home.
She was the last, and if she wasn’t precisely alone, she was also never again going to be speaking the same language as those around her.
Grimly, Shadow firewalled the thought away as something she couldn’t afford with an audience present, even if that audience was Ironhide. This wasn't anything new, after all, it was just something she had thought could be fixed by cohort...even if that cohort wasn't hers.
Well, as they kept trying to tell her, everyone made mistakes.
“Good enough is still a pretty new concept.” She changed the subject with a grin, and popped one of the fragments of rust stick in her mouth; the other she slipped into her subspace. “I’ll figure it out. It would just be nice to have parameters.” She pushed the grin into her field. “At least length and density measurements are a little more concrete.”
Ironhide held her, his field open and welcoming, pulses of warmth and approval underscoring it. Shadowrunner... 'waffled', for lack of a better word, sometimes. Tiny things, fluctuations that he didn't generally have the acuity to notice, but that he could feel flickering through her where she was pressed to his plates.
Poor bitlet. They'd pressed her at every turn, scooper her up faster than she could acclimate to, and it showed in the little things where she didn't seem to know how to relax with them. The knowledge that she wouldn't appreciate the sympathy kept it well below any verbalization queue, but he tucked her a little closer, engine rumbling a steady presence. "'s why we start with th' quantifiable things. Yeh can't jump in 'an start making calls yer not sure about, on theories yeh ain't solid on yet. So we start with th' basics, work up from there. Make th' concrete calls first. Learnin' t' tell what's 'good enough' comes later."
He pressed his helm to hers, pushing a gentle wave of assurance at her. "Trust meh, we'll get yeh there. Won't be overnight, though."
Shadow bumped her helm lightly back against Ironhide's, but it felt...wrong; the rumble and vibration of his engine and the touch of his field - meant, she knew, to be soothing - refused to settle into her systems, instead making the cold, empty place where her cohort had always been impossible to ignore. Not mine, she thought, the admission sending a wave of something not quite guilt and not quite grief through her. No matter what he said or what she wanted, Ironhide was not cohort, and no amount of good intentions on his part could change that fact.
Her own field cringed away from the foreign pulse of his, and she pulled out of his light embrace. "Nothing's ever overnight, that'd be too easy," she said, hoping she sounded more wry than bitter as she moved over to the other chair and stood behind it as if it were a shield. "Are we done for today? I can take the chairs back to the rec room before Jazz finds out you stole them."
He let her go, didn't raise hand or voice to stop her, or let any flicker in his field transmit his own dismay. Skittish. She was skittish, something switching almost abruptly from relaxed to a need to put distance between them and Ironhide wasn't sure why but he knew better than to press.
"Yeah," he said aloud, sitting back. He indicated the empty chair that they hadn't used, managing a smile. "Go ahead an' take that one back, if yeh would. Think Ah'm gonna borrow this one a bit more, try t' get some reports done while nobody's lookin' for meh. End of th' week, same time? Do some more work with yer scanners, learn some basic systems."
"I'll be here," Shadow promised, though at the moment this was the very last place she wanted to be. What she wanted was...to run, as far from the base as possible, the alien roads under her wheels and the alien world around her doing nothing to stir up old memories.
What she did was simply to pick up the chair and cast a final glance at Ironhide. His slightly distracted expression told her that his attention had already shifted from her to whatever reports he needed to work on, and she relaxed ever so slightly, even before she was out of the room.
Ironhide waited until the door closed, then another several kliks of silence before he was certain she wasn't coming back. Which wasn't surprising, just making certain.
He waited, and then he dropped his helm into his hands, thumbs digging at the scarred plates around his optics. "Slag," he muttered, and then, when that didn't really seem as strong as the situation and feeling warranted, "Primus fragging glitch. Idiot."
He'd botched that one, no question about it, but backtracking and figuring out where and how was going to take some work. Figuring out how to patch it and pick back up again was going to take more work unless Shadow miraculously rebooted in a better frame of mind after her next recharge, and Ironhide wasn't laying any credits on that.
Labyrinth, Ironhide concluded tiredly, was steadily climbing higher on the list of mechs Ironhide would dearly like the chance to rip apart with his bare hands. Pity the slag sucking smelter sludge was already dead.
He let himself stew on that for a few luxurious kliks before venting hard and straightening up. He was going to need to talk to Jazz. Shadow was going to need some space for a bit. And when she was done having enough space to wallow in, whether she admitted it or not, well... there were advantages to being the mech who wrote the duty schedule. He'd give her until their next lesson before staging another intervention - his way, not Jazz's, because words weren't the first thing he or Shadow had ever reached for.