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.
Hot Rod was built for speed, sparked to compete and to take risks. Sometimes those traits got her into more trouble than they got her out of, but the same things that had made her an elite-tier racer also made her well suited as a scout for her new family: the Order of Solus.
Best of all, she didn't have to stick to a single track anymore, and her races served better purpose than simply entertaining the rich mechs determined to ignore the suffering outside and party until the end of the world. It was a satisfactory change in career as far as Hot Rod was concerned.
//Hot Rod to Sola Dex,// she commed, pulling around a tight corner that would have flummoxed a bigger mech at that speed. //I'm en route to the source of the distress signal. No contacts so far, enemy or friendly.// It was actually a little eerie - the streets were deserted, abandoned even, and the only sound came from Roddi's own engine. //I'm continuing my run.// As if a few spooky streets were going to stop Roddi.
//Do you think I'll get to use my bow today? For real, I mean?// she wondered eagerly. //I've only ever used it on the practice range.//
This is so wrong, Flareup thought, looking out through Flamewing's optics at an abandoned city. Even if the unexpected distress signal proved someone was here, it didn't feel like there was.
Going back to Iacon was always a bit dangerous. Both factions sometimes returned to scavenge, and neutrals sometimes did as well. She'd argued to be allowed to go this time. The Order had a few objectives on this run, one of which was very near to Flareup's spark.
Her epic screw-up when Contour offlined had led to the loss of both Contour's memory bank and the sole memory backup they had aboard ship. Other backups existed, but tracking them down had proved frustrating. One might be here, in Iacon. The hive was looking for it. They were looking for it very hard. Not hard enough that they wouldn't heed a distress signal, though.
"Sola, we're responding!" she sent over the comms. Reburn regrouped to her, while Flamewing went ahead to scout. As she stood in the doorway of a frustratingly looted building, she saw Elita's standard bearer go by in a red flash and a general aura of "wheeee!!!".
She/they transformed down to her two-wheeled vehicle form and Reburn hopped aboard. "Hot Rod! Wait up!" she called, as she put on speed to try to catch up.
Last Edit: Sept 18, 2012 22:00:16 GMT -5 by Deleted
//Let’s hope not, spocket-aft// This very non-protocol correct response came crackling across their inter-bot radio. //I still harbor futile hopes of this being a gel-run of an op. Like a pile of abandoned turbo-puppies with a distress beacon strapped to their faces. Then we can give Elita One a fragging turbo puppy. I think that would improve upon her mood greatly.//
There was a thrum overhead, the mid-level smog over the city suddenly spiraling, splitting and disgorging a dark-plated helicopter from the gray sheet of ash and smoke – the cumulus atmosphere of a world still smoldering. The heli-bot spun a full three-sixty, swung left, then right, scan lights running across the shelled out skeleton of the nearest skyscraper. Iacon. This place had shone silver inch for inch once. The structures still stood but they were blackened, obsidian fingers thrust up from a rotted out core and they seemed to breathe soot and radiation. Even now.
The aerialist followed high overhead her ground-bound teammates, Flare straggling after a speeding Hot Rod.
//I still protest that you won’t just use one of my new auto-lock, long-range, neural-core targeting photon rifles… but I forgive you because your stupid fragging arrows blow up real good.// The heli-bot shot through the bombed out alleys between sky-rises. //When you put a molecular-grade laser tip through someone’s optic, you can thank me and not tell Elita that I’m a warmongering spawn of a glitch. Ah, here we are. Courtyard up ahead, keep a sharp eye out, girls.//
Last Edit: Sept 18, 2012 21:36:03 GMT -5 by Deleted
Hot Rod relaxed into Sola's companionable chatter, more comforted by the familiar, affectionate sarcasm than she'd ever care to admit. She'd had all of being alone that she ever wanted to experience.
The courtyard was half-covered in rubble from a series of buildings that had collapsed into each other like a sparkling's blocks, still pouring dust and sorrow across the walkways. Hot Rod transformed and threw a broad scan into the air. The distress signal was definitely coming from here, but there was a weird echo to it that made it difficult to pinpoint the exact source. Hot Rod didn't get any pings on her thermal scan, but from the life-source scan there was a faint blip.
//Contact,// she sent distractedly, //I think.// Her footfalls sounded entirely too loud, echoing off the walls still standing like gunshots, though she was a small build. The signal was coming from a little above street level, and Hot Rod squinted up at the nearest pile of rubble, slabs resting on top of each other. Easily climbable, she judged, but whether there was someone trapped in there...? "Hello?" she called. "I'm from the Order of Solus. We got your distress signal and we're here to help."
"I'm here," came the reply, weak and gravelly. "Please hurry."
The voice came from above her, muffled by the rubble pile. Hot Rod immediately leaped to clamber up to the top, figuring the speaker was trapped on the other side. "Just hang on," she called. "I've got medical supplies, we'll get you out-"
The pile shifted under her hands. "What-!"
With a groan of metal, the pile began to collapse. Hot Rod leaped clear at once, scrambling to get out of the way, but gravity proved quicker, a single slab of it knocking her to the ground and pinning her in place.
"Ah, slag!" she cried, and then froze. Above her, his voice not at all weak or pained, the mech she'd tried to rescue was laughing at her.
"Slag yeah!" he was crowing. "Worked like a charm, just like Onslaught said! You Solus femmes really are dumb." Hot Rod tried to turn, furious, but she could only see a bulky silhouette out of the corner of her optic. "You're not much of a prize, though. Oh well." The low whine of a cannon powering up pierced through Hot Rod's anger.
//Solus! Flare!// she cried over comm. //It's an ambush!//
Track distress signal. Scan the area. Keep contact with team.
Flareup was quite capable of doing three things at once, since she had two deployers out. What she wasn't capable of doing was driving at the same time, so her deployer Reburn was doing that for her. She floated, detached from her body, in gestalt awareness, gathering in sensory input from the deployers to determine the nature of the situation.
Just before she/they reached the plaza, Flareup's deployer Flamewing picked up a faint signal. Like all of Flareup's deployers, her sensors had been designed to find things under rubble. The deployer bodies had a different and lower energy profile than the average Cybertronian, allowing them to detect frequencies that would normally be hidden by self-generated interference.
The flier, trailing behind the hive's other two bodies, detoured to get a better fix. Something was way down in a crevasse between buildings, several levels below the plaza, hidden under the lowest of three different crumbling overpasses. Lifeforms snapped into focus as she dropped, previously hidden by the bulk of the ruins and some sort of stealth field.
Flamewing was far too close before the signals started to resolve... one shuttlemorph in transport mode parked under the overpass, one large warbuild, four small civilian builds loading the transport with energon (one seriously wounded), one freshly offlined husk, other fuzzy signals she couldn't get a fix on, and a dim but sizable energon signature down deep.
Then, up above, the rubble in the plaza moved and the situation suddenly went critical. Flareup was still some distance from Hot Rod when she saw what was going on and her body transformed under her to her more resilient root form. She sent out a team tactical update to add the two additional probable hostile signatures to the map, fluidly traded roles with Reburn, and focused down on her spark to bring another deployer to life.
Firebreak dropped out of her torso and skittered over to join Reburn behind a nearby pile of rubble. Leaving Reburn to handle comms for the moment, Flareup raised her laser cannon and fired.
{{Blast Off and one other Combaticon are terrorizing a bunch of civilians and stealing their secret energon cache over down thataway. Let's say one of the civilians set off a distress signal and then three of the Combaticons decided to drag it away from where they were working and lay a trap. Flareup's lasers... won't actually do any real damage to Brawl}}
Last Edit: Sept 16, 2012 23:52:44 GMT -5 by Deleted
Brawl (and it was Primus slotting, glitch-frakking Brawl, godsdammit.) ducked the shot from Flareup’s position, growled, but turned his cannon back on the pinned femme with the full intention, clearly, of taking some superficial armor damage if he could blow the recruit’s head off her shoulders. He glared down at her as the light spun up in the mouth of his arm cannon.
“Lights out, gearslip.”
And that was when Sola Dex hit the deck like a meteor. The sound was a sonic boom, she came in so fast, ground fractured where the helibot hit, transforming at the last second as she came screaming from her overhead holding pattern the instant she heard Hot Rod go down. Slamming into the ground behind her pinned team mate, her visor blazed blinding blue, before the seams all up her arms burned nephrite and with a snarl she threw a massive back hand at the gloating Combaticon. She didn’t hit him, not with her fists anyway, she was still ten technometers off from him, but a pearlescent sheet of energon blue light snapped like a hard-light ribbon and cracked across the mech’s face with the force of a contructicon haymaker.
Brawl was immediately launched several hundred meters down the nearest sidestreet where he bounce and was gone in the smog and rubble.
“Frak! Up, femme, that won’t even dent his armor. I’m serious, up, up, now!” Sola was instantly at Hot Rod’s side, grabbing the underside edge of the stone slab and levered it up. Energy wafted like blue steam from the shield generators in the middle of her palms and when she got impatient with the weighty cut of stone, a bubble of hard light expended like a balloon between the ground and the slab, leverage pushing off the trapped Hot Rod. “You okay? You can run? Because we’re running. Flare Up’s eyes in the sky say refugees, one street down, under the overpass. Priority one: get them clear.”
She caught Hot Rod by the shoulder, pulled her up, drag-dashing her toward Flare Up’s cover. “Flare, tell one of your deployers to make contact with the refugees; fly Solus colors in holo so they know it’s help. Hot Rod, you and I are headed down there to get them moving. Flare, keep optics out for the other Combaticons because –” There was a thunder from somewhere down the street she'd thrown Brawl. “… because they always travel in a group. Clutch-suckers. C’mon! Move!”
Last Edit: Sept 18, 2012 11:08:12 GMT -5 by Deleted
Hot Rod didn't need to be told twice. She scrambled out from under the debris and ran for it, transforming the instant she had enough clearance, and booked it in the direction Sola indicated. She surpressed the instinct to thank her rescuer. Elita-One had lovingly pounded it into her head along with every other recruit: thank-yous can wait until after the mission. You can show your gratitude by surviving that long.
She outpaced Sola, blowing past Flare in a charge that was at least half wild fear, far too close a brush with death for anyone's comfort. But she was also charging smarter this time. She wouldn't get caught out like that again. This time, Hot Rod would do the rescuing.
At least, she hoped.
Combaticons! She'd heard the name. They were like Decepticons turned up to 11 - more ruthless, more cruel, more sparkless than Megatron even. And they could combine, forming a behemoth that rivaled Guardians in size. Never let all five within pinging distance of one another, or you were sunk - that was standard tactics for combiner teams, but it went triple for this one. Divide and conquer. If you can't, cripple before they can combine.
Hot Rod had visual contact with a hulking figure, and it was pretty obvious this was another Combaticon: he was the only one not struggling to haul a load far too heavy for him. She and Sola could take him, Hot Rod was sure, but what if he targeted one of those captives to make them back off?
Tactic: be annoying as possible. Get him too angry to think straight.
There was a piece of free-standing scaffolding just off the road; Hot Rod transformed and leaped for it, climbing to the top in two jumps. Her bow was warm and humming in her hands, as eager as she was. She grasped the filament in her fingers, knelt for stability, and drew.
Still. Steady. Calm. Become one with the universe, and one with your target.
Hot Rod loosed. The twin energy darts flashed out, a nanosecond of beacon-light in the darkness of Cybertron's dying sparkpulses, and the Combaticon ahead howled in affront and staggered to one knee, smoke and sparks pouring out of his upper back.
I hit a seam! Hot Rod channeled her delight into trash-talk. "Yeah, that's right, ugly! Wide-aft! Come over here if you can move with all that rust in your joints!"
Flareup started moving back across the overpass they'd crossed to get to the plaza - not racing, but at reasonable speed for root mode. She sent the three deployers off in three directions - Firebreak skittered under the overpass to lay charges, while Reburn went up a building. Down below, Flamewing flew by the civilians near the shuttleformer (another part of the hive hit the siren and flashers for a few moments, on cue) then booked it upwards - there was no way she could have avoided detection so best to start evading now.
Other parts of the hive filtered information to Flareup, simplifying a complex situation to the points it was critical for her to react to. The mech Sola had hit was on the move and heading back towards them - she hoped she could get the timing right to blow the bridge with him on it. Something was moving up on one of the roofs - a questionable unidentified blip. Hot Rod had just hopped on a set of extremely aged scaffolding that, in her professional judgement, one stiff breeze from coming down.
And then she stopped and began to back up, because the hive was beginning to adapt their collective sensors to the odd stealth fields that were around. There was something in front of her, between her and escape.
He jumped out of a broken window on the second floor of a building just beyond the overpass, landing with an enormous thud.
"Now where do you think you're going?" Onslaught growled.
“HOT ROD! I SAID YOU’RE WITH – oh forget it. SHOOT HIM IN THE FACE I GUESS!”
Elita was go going to give her the Disappointed Look, but when your recruit ignored your command to come with you to the refugees to speed their escape from literally one of the toughest gestalt unit in the Decepticon Army you had to make due. Roddy was at least following the 'peck-off-the-limbs' strategy for combiner teams...just these were the Combaticons. Sola leapt into the air, back flipping, body coming apart and catching itself on the whorl of here alt-mode’s rotory blades, throwing dust and soot across the plaza as the aerialist target-locked whoever it was that Roddy was shooting at and immediately let loose a barrage of missiles.
A ping. Flamewing has the refugee’s prepping for takeoff . Good.
The resulting boom was, if anything, distraction enough. “Hot Rod! Get off that rickety girder and get better cover then you -!” She noticed Onslaught hazarding Flareup. “Slaggin Primus-slotting, lube-guzzling, spawn of a – Hot Rod! Cover the refugees!” She switched to data burst shortwave: //Firebreak laid charges on the overpass, once the refugees are clear we can blow the bridge for smokescreen, maybe flatten a Con. I’ll nuke Vortex if he tries to go aerial.//
And to Onslaught – who didn’t see Sola until she dove out of her alt mode at mach speed to come skidding to a stop beside Flare – she snarled, “Going to Six Flags Over Cybertron, glitch!” Then she punched him as hard as she could with a blue pentagonal tile of force-field energy. The distance was impressive, but again, no way that mech was hurt. “Okay. Running,” she said to Flareup. “I’m taking alt mode and covering the shuttlemorph from the air so no shields. Flare, take cover.” Then to both over comm: //You two protect each other and cover the civvies. I’ll be in air.”
And with that Sola was jumping into her alt and taking off after the slow moving shuttlemorph. With any luck, the Combaticons would just fight scattered and not combine while Sola took five minutes to get these non-combatants out of here…
Last Edit: Sept 21, 2012 4:59:39 GMT -5 by Deleted
//I got it!// Hot Rod snapped back, all her focus on the target she was lighting up from the scaffolding. The glitch was finally starting to shoot back, big concussive blasts that shook her perch. She leaped from it just before it came down, claiming her alt as she hit the ground.
Her sensors marked the position of Flamewing and the refugees as well as the Combaticon - and the Combaticon was still shooting at her, ignoring the captives and the deployer. Good. Shouting insults, she raced in an oblique path in front of her opponent, keeping his attention - and his weapon's sights - on her.
His blasts cracked the road around her, washing her in stinging heat that threatened to push her off her course. Sola had told her to find cover, but she couldn't just yet. Not until those refugees were safely away.
"Loser!" she cried in a fury. "Ugly! You can't hit the broad side of a shuttleformer, you cheap slimy knockoff!"
"What did you call me, you little brat?"
That got him. Hot Rod grinned and turned her back bumper to the mech, speeding towards a darkened building. She heard the snap of plates as the Combaticon transformed to follow. //Okay, he's following me!// she sent to Flamewing, knowing the signal would be bounced to Flare without giving away her location. //Soon as he's clear, get the civvies out of here!//
Reburn was on comms, but the substance of Sola's order to Flareup flowed through him to her. There was no cover here. She was cornered. She continued backing up even as she heard snarling swearing behind her, measuring his progress through Reburn's optics. The gestalt commander (she knew they were gestalt - they knew she was too) was casually walking forward, enjoying her apparent fear, his anti-aircraft guns tracking Sola in preparation to fire.
She would need to move soon, before they decided to stop playing with her.
The mech behind her was placed right. The mech in front of her was not. Firebreak wasn't clear. Nothing for it...
She suddenly broke into a run, racing towards Onslaught, taking fire now from Brawl behind her to no effect. The first charges blew when she hit a certain speed point, breaking the center point of the bridge behind her. Almost simultanously, charges blew behind Brawl and Firebreak self-terminated behind Onslaught. Flareup flung herself off the overpass and and threw her body into a tight ball as the blast hit. This was the tricky part - getting clear enough of the overpass. Armor seemed to hold, and she transformed down once the thermal shock was clear to hit on wheels.
That short a fall wouldn't terminate a mech. But the design of the blast was such that each of the two major fragments of the overpass would swing down towards the walls and then flip, crushing anyone who'd been crossing like a small crushable thing . She saw it through Reburn's optics, saw the loud mech behind her slide under the kill zone...
...and some unseen force yanked him clear. A black shadow flung itself down through the air past Reburn, transforming in flight, and more shadows moved below. Dust was blotting out the sky, but something massive hit the ground.
Sola Dex was some half a mile in the sky, the neutralist shuttle-morph igniting thrusters and rocketing toward atmo-burn to escape the long arc of anti-aircraft missiles as they came rocketing up from the courtyard far below. Sola, not unfamiliar standard aerial escort, saw it coming and hung in the ion path left by the shuttle-morph as it climbed out skyscrapers and into free air, waiting for the heat-seeker to sniff out the hot contrail left by the transport as it broke through the lower atmosphere and as half a dozen small rockets spiraled up the path of ion fumes, Sola transformed and fell onto them, a blue wall of energy blooming between her, the onslaught and the sky ignited white. The shuttle-morph vanished into the upper stratosphere, sparking, blinking, snapping out of reality via quantum jump.
A black cloud of smoke hung where Sola had met the volley midair and then, from the bottom of the black smog, a section of black torn free, falling from the sky and as the ribbons of dark smoke tore away it smear of darkness became Sola, unhurt and falling. She transformed, ignited thrusters and rocketed down toward the behemoth that rose out of the dust cloud below. Primus slotting glitch-frak, it was Bruticus. They were fighting Bruticus. Fragging great. Sola resoled that this was not one of her better days and fired off a two-dozen missile payload as she shot past the giant. The volley, she suspected, would certainly do him just enough damage to torque him off farther. Oh well.
//Had to piss him off didn’t you?//
The missile hit, detonating up the side of gestalt’s right flank, engulfing him again in smoke and fumes. Sola shot higher into the sky, circling overhead as she radioed the other two on the ground. She readied a second payload.
//Refugees are clear. I’ll provide suppressing fire. Hot Rod, let him have everything you’ve fragging got at the knees, try to cripple him. Flare Up, you’ve already blown one deployer, don’t make it two! Get out of here! Hot Rod you follow her after you light him up!//
Hearing about combiners was one thing, Hot Rod was discovering. Seeing one rise up before you and proceed to do its level best to reduce you to a colorful smear on the pavement was quite another thing altogether. Hot Rod tried to shout a challenge, to move, even to run away, anything would have been good, but her servos were frozen and the roar of crumbling road had gone faraway and fuzzy. Way back in the back of her processor, there was a calm voice telling her that she was about to die.
//Refugees are clear. I’ll provide suppressing fire. Hot Rod, let him have everything you’ve fragging got at the knees...//
Sola!
Hot Rod jerked once, like she'd been shocked. Then she lifted her bow and poured all the concentrated energy, fear, and fury into her small body into a single spot on Bruticus's nearest knee joint.
He didn't react, at first, but Hot Rod wasn't expecting him to. The really big ones tended to do that, ignore her or dismiss her as unimportant right up until her energy darts were taking out key connections and they were keeling over. Hot Rod grinned, the coldness of earlier turning into motion, heat, fury, bliss.
"For Solus Prime!" she cried, leaping to a better vantage point, laughing as smoke started to emerge from the joint. "For Solus Prime and Elita-One!"
"We are retrieving ourself." The message came from Reburn in typically unflappable hive tones as he skittered down in a series of jumps to the battlefield. He needed to meet up with Flareup so as not to be left behind. "Discussing extraction points with headquarters," he added, to explain the simultaneous comm traffic he was creating from Flareup on one of the Order's other channels.
Flamewing was gone, flitting through sidestreets to determine the best way to get up a level. A detailed route overview streamed into the tactical map as she flew.
//Get me that extraction and I will kiss you and the rest of your goofy gestalt,// shouted Sola over comm. Hotrod was engaged in the dangerous activity of shooting all her explody things at Bruticus, which seemed to have the effect of mildly irritating the gigantic glitch-frakker rather than slow him down at all. Sola readied another heavy missile payload, aware that she did not have anywhere near enough ordinance to do the behemoth any real damage. Nevertheless, she dove hard right, her helo-alt swinging a wide circle around her five-story target and unleashing another barrage.
The missiles ignited, a myriad of black contrails streaking the air in ribbons as each rocket ripped through the air to its destination against whatever bit of Bruticus’ anatomy looked promising. He didn’t seem to like it much when he got one to the face, then promptly took half a dozen of Roddy’s arrows to the knee, and staggered mightily.
//OKAY WE OUT! RUN RUN RUN!// The helo shot off, following Flareup