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.
“Brave mech!” came the taunting streak of laughter.
The blue star of Sideswipe’s jet in the darkness swerved right, hooked straight down beneath a band of road, swung immediately back up, the long tail of nitro-burn behind him marking the zigzag path he took through the ruins of what must have been part of the South Kalis Pancontinental Expressway. Once the pulse of the planet, a vein of transport, people, travel, trade – fragging everything. Mostly ruined now save those day of war when the fighting clogged the streets. Sideswipe gave the interstate graveyard no due. He rocketed, weaving through support columns and delighting openly in Air Raid’s persistence in keeping up.
If they been in a fight, a real dog fight, Sideswipe admitted that Air Raid might worry him. In truth, most sparked flight-builds tended to scare him in the air (not that he said) because what came natural to them was a grafted glory for him. Which in no way detracted from how much fun it was to fly, cut a sharp U-turn, and swing into what looked like a long dead aerial tunnel – dying bio-lume lights flickered, motion sensors bringing them faintly alive, blue strips glowing up in their wake as the two Autobots zoomed past. Sideswipe had lost half a unit in a transport tunnel like this once; the motion sensors and the lights give away their position and –
“Gotta go faster'n that!” he shouted, which wasn’t really true. Air Raid was very much right on him. “C’mon, flybot! I’ll take that twenty shanix!”
Air Raid wheeled around the hairpin turn with a lot less grace, his tail skidding hard through the yaw. He stubbornly held his wings level, and when he reoriented himself he saw the aerial tunnel ahead of his nose. Blue lights glowed wanly in the darkness and he briefly marvelled that even down here in the ruins they were still receiving any sort of meagre power at all. Kind of a nice thought.
Sideswipe's jet mod was a shrinking dot in the distance. No time for nice thoughts, Air Raid! Catch this guy before he flies off with your cash!
With a blast of his throttle the jet shot down the corridor. He made a little headway towards catching up with Sideswipe before he was forced to veer again, this time to avoid smashing into a tangle of rubble and wire that hung like moss from the tunnel ceiling. In the flickering darkness the effect was dizzying - he had flown through hundreds of these tunnels in the past, but always straight and level, unless there was a guy flying in the opposite direction that he felt like taking a dive at. He'd never had to feint and dodge like this.
It was exhilarating, but he had to admit... Sideswipe was a lot better at it than he was.
Another blast of power brought him onto the red warrior's heels. Air Raid strained, struggled to bump Sideswipe with his nose. Forget radar lock - this was turning into a proper game of tag all right, and nothing but a proper slap on the back would do. More debris struck the leading edge of his right wing and disintegrated into dust. Didn't hurt him but he staggered in flight, falling back a few precious feet. A broad wingspan did not help in a place like this, he reflected.
"Almost tagged ya that time!" he shouted. "How about a new rule! Ever time you're tagged 'it', you gotta fork over the shanix?"
“Blah, blah, blah! I hear talkin’ but I don’t see ya doin’!”
He laughed but in his head: Holy slag, did he just try to tag-tag me?!
Sideswipe’s spark burned in his chest, clenching hot and jarring at the feel of another mechanoid’s EM field crossing into his. They were still just play-fighting, but that didn’t stop parts of his brain from sounding proximity alerts and a small, intense thread of non-fear to snap like a volt of electricity through his chest. Replay of Air Raid falling, less than a few hours ago, from the sky with a Decepticon clung to his alt mode came back hard, burning an acidic bloom of combat-reactive dread through his body shell. But then that was gone and Sideswipe was hooking up a hard diagonal, rocketing up from the sub-levels toward the strips of the sky between the crisscross of overpasses.
“Clip me, mech, an’ I’ll shell out double th’ dare!” The radiowaves crackled with the raucous noise of his laughter, carrying aloud over the jet-engine roar of their combined propulsion systems. “Try me! You manage ta catch me proper an’ I’ll do triple! See what you can do, fly-bot!”
From somewhere beneath Sideswipe there was the sound of a lot of loud swearing as Air Raid tried to replicate his deft manouevre and blast upwards in pursuit. The white jet nearly skidded into a wall before he could right himself and point his nose in the proper direction.
He roared upwards, rolling his wings to avoid slicing a wingtip through a broken girder. More silt trickled down in his wake. In this vertical shaft full of debris his radar was nearly useless, so he switched it off and concentrated on his visual sensors instead. Dust and ancient soot hazed the air, but the blue spark that burned from the back of Sideswipe's jet-mod was bright enough to light up a path in the ruins for him to follow.
"I'm gonna make you eat those words, ground-pounder!" he hollered. Already he was closing the distance between them thanks to his powerful jet engine, but the moment he got within tagging distance he knew he would likely have to roll to avoid hitting something. And he simply was not agile enough to keep up with the other mech if he did.
So, Air Raid tried something new.
When he was at Sideswipe's heels he quickly transformed back into his robot mode. Immediately he began to decelerate, unable to keep up with his engine stowed. But before he could fall too far behind Air Raid launched himself at the broken edge of an overpass, where he touched down on toes and fingertips before kipping off again with a blast of his heel thrusters.
It was just barely enough. Air Raid wound back his hand and took an enormous swing at Sideswipe's foot, trying to tag him before he dropped back out of range again...!
Sideswipe felt the slap to his ankle like getting swiped by an IED mid-air, the hard sudden smack of physical contact jarring in the wake of windspeed and the limitless air pressure of the sky. The roadster took a moment – a split second of synaptic lightening through his brain – to admire both the reckless glee of the Aerialbot’s maneuver, and the fact the jet had managed to combo his root and alt mod fluidly enough to make his own attempt at ‘jet-judo’ as Sideswipe called it. Leg still stinging, the thought passed and Sideswipe immediately killed his thrusters, hooked directly up, arced backward, then rocketed straight back down directly at the jet-morph.
It was clear by his trajectory at this paint that he fully intended to tackle the other Bot into the second level of that overpass he’d just jumped off of. Tag, apparently, was no longer good enough. Not with every line of circuitry through his neuronet telling him to go faster, faster, go, go, go. Thinking wasn’t exactly going on so much as the sudden thought that this was a great idea tackling jets out of the sky. As though that might even the score and then some, so it were.
Air Raid hovered, one fist already thrust into the air in a frozen gesture of triumph. His elation at making the tag quickly turned into astonishment as he watched Sideswipe barrel towards him. His jaw dropped.
"Holy...!
Circuits fired, and in mid-air he tried to scramble out of the way, a comical flailing of arms and legs. But he was too late, and Sideswipe neatly tackled him at the waist and sent them both plunging downwards towards the overpass. Air Raid was too shocked to do anything other than grab on to the other mech before Sideswipe could escape.
They shot through a cloud of dust. Air Raid hit the overpass on his back with a tremendous smack. Static fritzed across his vision when his head banged off the rubble with a blow that made his audials ring, but he only shook it off and cackled as he realised that their game of tag had just turned full-impact. His favourite kind of everything.
Training kicked in. Air Raid tumbled backwards with the landing. As he somersaulted he did his level best to try and stick a foot into Sideswipe's midriff. With a gleeful battle whoop he kicked hard in an attempt to boot the red warrior off him and launch him over his head.
Nothing moved a mech faster than a solid kick at Mach speeds. Sideswipe kicked his jet mod on at the precise moment Air Raid’s pede slammed into his midriff, the blow launching him over Raid’s shoulders and hurlling him. The mod fired, bouyed him up long enough to twist in the air, reversing to land skidding backward on two feet, his right hand grabbing the ground so hard he ripped runnels in the road. He skated backwards almost ten full technometers before finally stopping, one hand full of pavement, black streaks in his wake. The blue of his optics in the aftermath was nuclear, his grin perfectly twisted.
He said nothing, just launched from his sprinter’s crouch and charged the Aerialbot like a grav-train, throwing a series of slightly more than playful punches at the other robot’s head and midriff, juking hard to the left and laughing, fists up as he circled the other Autobot. Grinning huge he snapped forward again, attacking in a rushed salvo of sideways swipes and enthused EMF.
“So,” he said, over the sound of metal on metal, “am I still ‘it’?”
Last Edit: Jan 22, 2013 15:07:12 GMT -5 by Deleted
The swift attack caught him off-guard. He was not expecting Sideswipe to be just as quick on his feet as he was in the air!
Air Raid had just enough time to kip back to his feet and raise his guard before the flurry of punches landed. He grinned back at Sideswipe from over his fists, one optic squinted against the barrage.
"I have totally lost track," he cackled.
The Aerialbot flowed with the blows, catching and deflecting them against his armoured forearms. Despite the initial lag in his reaction he moved surely now, his stance low and his balance spead between his feet, a reservoir of waiting power. He did not seem to mind the assault and returned it with equal enthusiasm, his own strikes lightning-quick but as measured as any trained close-combatant who knew the difference between playful roughhousing and a desire to rend metal and shatter joints.
He lacked Sideswipe's raw strength however, and when one punch slipped past his guard and clouted him across the side of his helm he was forced to reel back. He caught himself and shook his head. "Gah! I okay, I think I am. Back atcha, pal!"
Grinning broadly, he ducked and skirted low before sending two fists rabbiting towards the red commando's flank.
The sound of laughter and the metal ring of impact – Air Raid’s armored knuckles striking sparking off the curved alloy at Sideswipe’s flank, turning him into the hit, spinning him back to a defensive stance. Blue optics flickered bright, scans and EM flux signaling five million things at once, five millions things in a fight – the trick was knowing what of the five million was important. The way Air Raid favored one side or the other, how his optics did or did not give way the next attack, the sound of his hydraulics kicking up in the split second before he struck. You could get to know someone like this – just fighting them. Sideswipe got to know a lot of mechanoids in Kaon this way – never saying a word.
Another volley of strikes. He wondered how strange they looked, fighting one another on the tarmac of a ruined transcontinental highway. He wondered if anyone looking at them might have thought them a Bot and a Con fighting out one-on-one the neverending feud between the two factions. He wondered which of them looked, to an uneducated outsider, like the Con and which like the Autobot. As he slapped down another strike at his head, catching and redirecting the rabbit punch jabs with the palm of his hands, Sideswipe figured he wanted to know what Air Raid thought.
“Hey,” he said, narrowly ducking a shot at his head, breaking off to spring back from a knee-strike. “Say someone sees us.” He darted in again, jumping, whipping an armor-buckling round-house at the Aerialbot’s face, faded back again, grinning, circling. “Which one of us you think they’d peg a Con?”
"I bet you anything they'd just figure I was the Autobot," he said, grinning cheekily. He deflected the kick with an armoured forearm and circled with Sideswipe, while shaking his arm to rid it of the ringing blow. "It's the white armour. Totally heroic looking. You show up painted white and people just figure you have to be a good guy, a real white knight. Hell, fifty shanix says half the Knights of Cybertron are sporting the Air Raid look. I'll let 'em get away with it, because I'm a nice guy like that."
The Aerialbot laughed and crouched and abruptly vaulted backwards with a flicker of his heel thrusters. At the arc of his leap he flipped and landed neatly on a rusted beam embedded in the debris overhead. Few fliers could resist adding flashy aerial manoeuvres to a fight, and apparently this one was no exception. From his perch above Air Raid knelt on the end of the beam and laid his arm across his knee and gave Sideswipe a grin.
"Of of the most horrifying Decepticon I ever heard of was painted red!" he called down. "Melted his victims to slag with his bare damn hands. True story! Red is a kick-aft scary colour for badass volcano smelter kings, bro."
He scratched his cheek with a thoughtful look. "Then again, you know... most people see a flier these days and they automatically assume it's a Decepticon Seeker. So I dunno! I could be full of slag here. Somebody sees us fighting like this, they could just think, holy lord, those are some headcase Cons scrapping out there in the ruins, where is my gun. Their loss!"
“Don’t worry,” said Sides, grinning up at the Aerialbot, EMF all electric warm, his grin all vicious smug. “I promise not to let anyone friendly fire ya without an aft-kicking.” He gestured up at the perched flier-frame, sitting like some strange flitter on the rusted support beams of the wreckage. Wreckage was more than half their planet these days. Sideswipe didn’t even see it anymore really, wreckages was just a natural part of the landscape now – as normal as tectonic shifts. he said brightly. “Yur clearly too pretty ta die’n this war. Lookit all that shiny white armor. Could give th’ Librarian himself a run for his money, paintjob like that.”
There was a blip along his comm frequency, general inter-Autobot radio. Sides paused to tilt his head slightly, a flit of sub-routines parsing the comm for possible malware trace, but in this sector – so far outside the real software sabotage of high-interest sector – it was unlikely. Clean enough, Sideswipe connected to the chatter. Slightly garbled (wow, they had really flown a distance and into old frequency bleed) it was vaguely difficult to make out, but the jist seemed to be that he and Air Raid should head back. Sideswipe supposed Raid’s CO had come through about the supply pack and felt a soldierly surge of appreciation – the feeling of not hating a superior officer for once, a feeling so rare that it could have been genuine.
“Sounds like I can get back t’my unit,” he said, dropping his hand from his helm. That grin. “Race ya back.”
Oh man, he had forgotten all about the air base. Air Raid winced and touched his audial. Amidst the unfettered joy of flight and the thrill of competition and camaraderie the memory that they would be due back at the base shortly to collect Sideswipe's supply pack had, well... flown from his mind.
He was scheduled for patrol too. The medics had yet to beat the damage out of his airframe. Oh man. A hunting party of medics would ambush him as soon as he strolled back into the terminal, knock him out, and drag him back to the medical ward by his ankles. They would probably yell about irresponsible young Aerialbots and you punk kid we respected our medics back in the day. Yep. They were gonna skin his metal ass.
Back to the war. Air Raid gave a wistful sigh. This had been fun. He did not get to say that a lot these days.
And- wait a minute. Sideswipe had just said whaaaat.
"Oh hell yeah, you're on!" he hollered back down at the Autobot. Air Raid grinned and pivoted smartly on the beam. He smacked his hip once tauntingly. "You can just watch my pretty white tailfeathers as I whip your aft all the way back to the base, Red! Ha!"
Still laughing, the Aerialbot launched himself into the air and immediately snapped into his jet mode. He blasted upwards into the rubble, spiralling gracefully through the first available crevasse with his nose pointed to the unseen stars.
Sideswipe laughed into the dust thrown off the back-draft of the jet-form’s ignition. The sun over Cybertron was still burning and somewhere out there the rest of the war waged sluggishly on, and unbeknownst to him Cons and Bots he knew and didn’t know were dying. A scout took a headshot on his way to their outpost, his CO would be dead in four days when he suffered a sudden fatal neural discharge into the core of his brain module, Sunstreaker would decapitate three K-Class POWs to stop them falling off a transport into an Autobot barrack. These things were going to happen and were happening and the war crawled forward across the planet.
But for the next three minutes, Sideswipe sprinted across the road, jumped off the edge into the void and let the blue fire of his jet-mod carry him in a burning comet tail after Air Raid. Later, on bad days, in the worst days, when things were burning up and the dark side of Cybertron was black – he’d think of racing Air Raid across the Transcontinental. That, and his brother, and the thought of doing it again one day, would get him through to tomorrow.