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.
Shadow vented quietly and tucked her faceplate against Bee's helm with a non-committal hum. "I'd rather not," she admitted after a few nano-kliks of silently hugging the scout. "You can, but I've been doing everything I can to avoid her. She..."
She fell silent, thinking back to her one meeting with the medic. Shadow didn't dislike Cleaver, but she wasn't comfortable with her, either, or with her conviction that whichever course she had chosen was the right one. Perhaps that was simply the kind of irrefutable certainty that came with being a medic - Ratchet's attitude would argue that it was - but it did nothing for Shadow's peace of mind, no matter how much Ironhide and Jazz liked her.
And Shadow didn't delude herself for an instant about what would happen if Cleaver took a dislike to her, not when she was barely part of the cohort as it was. Far, far safer to keep a safe distance, remain just another semi-anonymous Autobot, and never let Cleaver know her well enough to object to her...at least, for as long as she could manage it.
"She doesn't know I'm part/kind of/added on to Ironhide's cohort," she said finally, "and she's... I don't know how she'd feel about someone so glitched/broken/not normal in the cohort, especially when there's going to be a sparkling. The longer I can keep from being noticed/mentioned/discovered, the longer I can pretend..." She broke off with a grating squeal, and after a moment finished, "the longer it'll be before I have to worry."
Bee turned his face up a bit to look at the other mechanoid, a kind of soft worry coloring the ebb of his EMF. Shadow’s worry about being ousted from the strange and tenuous place she’d eked out with Hide and Jazz… Bumblebee understood it, perhaps better than he wanted to admit. Scouts were shuffled from unit to unit pretty frequently, separated from their teams when troop placements fouled their returns, making them an ever outsider among the troops. Bee hadn’t cared back in the beginning, when he was still linked into his cohort and therefore never truly alone – his thoughts snared in the aether to theirs. But afterward… he remembered that desperate, scrabbling, internal panic – the sucking loneliness that pressed the insides of your neural-net in on itself so hard your spark burned through your fragging chest.
Family. Cohort. Allies. Being the transient among the troops had been torment for vorns – him getting in close with one group then losing them in the next push. It was bad. Functioning had been a problem. He’d gotten over it. No. He’d gotten used to it – the perpetual sink hole of quiet thoughts in his head was that was Bumblebee, the scout-bot, making friends with everyone and careful not to seem as desperate as he was. No. He understood the fear. She didn’t want to lose them because she needed them and, if she was anything like Bee, she couldn’t get rid of the gnawing line of thought: that she needed them more than they needed her.
Bumblebee pulsed a quick, intimate frequency between them, nothing so simple as ‘I understand.’
“We’re family,” said Bee, even if the word was broken to him. “Jazz and Hide aren’t like that. None of us…” He paused, pressed the side of his head harder against her shoulder. “They/I/we couldn’t do that. You don’t leave/abandon cohort.” You carry them.
Shadowrunner shook her head a little, optics on the balloons bobbing above them, reflexively trying to track them all. "Things here are strange/different/not what I'm used to," she said, Basic rippling with her own inability to adapt enough to belong. The tension still cycling through her systems over Bumblebee's gift was a good example, but not one she wanted to bring up. "I'm probably not what they're used to/expected/want either. And if they have to explain me, they'll have to admit it."
They made a mistake, she didn't say aloud. They cared enough to want to help, she didn't doubt...but cohort was more than that, and she had nothing to offer them in return. The benefit of not being in a closed system, of course: the ability to shuffle pieces around until you had a good fit. And she didn't fit. She was expendable, and while she was used to being expendable for the sake of a mission, being expendable for the sake of cohort was strange.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re different!” said Bee, perhaps a touch too quickly, too fervently.
The reactive fervor in his voice, the way his spark clenched at the thought… he accepted there was a nerve there and her fears may have struck too close to it. The scout sat up, optics spinning briefly into a hard focus on the other mechanoid, a dim glow of anxiety radiating off the yellow bot in wobby waves. Basic made it hard to articulate everything in the intricate glyph-nuanced way that he wanted. How he wanted to wrap her name in signifiers and create a variable storm of what she was in precise definition, but couldn’t because one day, eons back, Megatron tore his throat out. Bumblebee shook his head, door wings arched at his back, stiff with this directionless kind of urgency, almost a panic.
“You’re not a charity case/invalid/patient/cripple! You’re part of the team/not useless; that means we need you. They/I/we need you because you’re you not because of… of stuff. There aren’t reasons/excuses/expectations/quota. You’re part of the team!” Like that was the end all clincher to it. It sounded stupid the moment he said he and he couldn’t take it back so he kept trying to make the Basic, chirpy, beepy, two-tonal binary of his words makes sense and when it wouldn’t he just blurted: “I’ll punch them if say anything like that about you!”
Last Edit: Jul 6, 2012 22:15:23 GMT -5 by bumblebee
Basic was a concept based language, lacking the nuance and precision of other forms of Cybertronian. Nonetheless, the cluster of charity case/invalid/patient/cripple came terrifyingly close to exactly what Shadow feared: that she was broken, and that the cohort she had somehow been drawn into was motivated less by the love/want/need she associated with cohort and more by pity, a desire to patch and preserve something already beyond repairing. It froze her in place for a fraction of a spark-beat, the horrible terror that Bee - who knew her best, who had heard more of her secrets than anyone else - saw that in her, too, no matter how fiercely he denied it.
You died with the Thirteen, Shadowrunner. Barricade's whisper crawled down her backstrut, made her plates shift and clamp tight. You died screaming with my claws in your spark and your new so-called cohort doesn't even see it. How much can they love you, if they can't even tell you're nothing but an empty frame?
Shadow shuttered her optics and shoved the voice away with an effort, shoved everything away and locked it all behind firewalls and focused on Bee's EMF, pulsing against hers with the urgent need for her to believe.
Bee would make all of it not true by pure will, if he could.
She reached out and grabbed him, pulled him close, pulsing love you, grateful for you, friends/allies/united at him. She held him like that until the tension eased out of both their frames, then she twisted, flipping him easily onto the floor and pinning him there. "I don't need you to punch anyone." She thumped his helm lightly against the floor. "I need you to help me get these fragging balloons out of my quarters."