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 would have elbowed him for the flickers of amusement in his field, but they were pressed far too close together for that. "I have time. It's not like I'm going anywhere.
"Besides," she added, and now her own amusement flared up, "I haven't even finished properly breaking in these guns yet. Which reminds me, don't let Jazz show you the footage from the raid."
Ironhide hummed a note of amusement. "Good show? Everybody get dinged? Jazz likes doin' those, good charge release after a mission like that when everybody's comin' back guns hot." He chuckled, optics cycling shut for a moment as he just held her. "Did yeh see what Bulkhead did? Primus, Wreckers. Crazy glitches."
He tapped lightly ticklish rhythms against her side, warm affection and amusement echoing through the touch. "Mine was just plain stupid. Ah'm standin' there with guns and this big 'Con femme - rookie, looked like - pulls out a fraggin' knife. Got in close 'fore Ah could do anything. Amateur mistake, an' meh feelin' dumb for it with mah hydraulics draining out." Chuckling, he pressed their helms together. "Show yeh mah footage if yeh show meh yers."
"Saw what Bulkhead did, mocked what Bulkhead did," Shadow said, twisting aside and swatting playfully at his hands. "It was only slightly more hilarious than Rattrap getting strung up in medbay."
She settled back against him with a sheepish grin. "You know all that target practice we did? Completely up in smoke. Didn't manage to do anything but bust out a Con's windshield. Stupid fragger did more damage to himself by running into me than I managed the entire fight."
"He ran into yeh?" Ironhide asked, alarmed. It brought to mind any number of alarming scenarios and another flurry of scans pulsed between them. His brows dragged down as he grimaced, but Shadowrunner insisted on standing there hale and whole and no more damaged than the minor collection of dents one would expect. Ironhide shook his head slowly. "He weren't one of their heavies, Ah take it? One of th' smaller ones? Yeh ain't limpin', so Ah'm assumin' he didn't clip yeh too hard."
"Oh he clipped me plenty hard. He clipped me hard enough to smash in his entire front end." Shadow beamed up at him, field rich with amusement, glyphs indicating that the entire encounter had been awesome. Gleefully, she sent Ironhide the image of Downforce racing away with his hood bearing the imprint of her own leg guards. "Lightweight little scout frame like that, his trick did him more damage than I did to him in the entire fight. All I ended up with was a couple of dents and some really gaudy blue paint. It hurt more when he bit me."
"He..." Ironhide found he didn't have words, not for the thought thread boggling and perfectly hysterical image of a lightmassed 'Con ground scout with hood more than half caved in as though he'd wrapped himself around a pole (or, more properly, two poles in the form of Shadowrunner's shins). "Scrap, are they throttlin' their processors? What th' frag was th' glitch thinkin'?"
On the other hand, as utterly ridiculous as it was - and really, the 'Con had to be more than a few circuit boards loose - it did mean that Shadow hadn't been hurt, which Ironhide could only be grateful for. Except...
"Whoa, wait, backup!" Ironhide pulled back, just far enough to look her over. "Primus in th' Pit - he BIT yeh?"
Shadow was getting used to that (over) reaction, between Ratchet's terse, "Here, soak that. No, don't move until I tell you you can," and Jaws fussing that she didn't know where that Con had been. She held up her wrist for inspection, pretty sure that if she didn't offer it voluntarily it was just going to be grabbed and looked over anyway.
"I pinned him, and he apparently thought biting me would get me to let go. I haven't been bit since I was a sparkling." She snorted in disgust. "It hurt, but it was pretty minor damage. Jammed up the transformation sequence in my wrist, is all. Pretty much the only damage he managed that wasn't cosmetic."
Ironhide shook his helm in sheer disbelief. A light scan told him that it wasn't just bravado - the damage really had been minimal, only a few cosmetic dents and a bit of line compression remaining, and he had enough faith in Ratchet's procedures to trust that it had been thoroughly decontaminated - Shadow might laugh it off but both Ironhide and the medic were more than old enough to remember rounds of technobiologic warfare, when a bite on the battlefield could be deadly with pre-contaminated troopers sent into the fray to do nothing except spread the plague as far and wide as they could among enemy troops.
He didn't think the 'Cons had stooped that low again. Not when taken by surprise on their own ship. Which left only one aberrant 'Con, probably glitched, and what sounded like, in retrospect, a harmless and fairly humorous fight.
More importantly... He pulled her in close again, protective, a thread of a growl susurrating through engine and chassis. "Who th' frag bit yeh when yeh were little?"
Shadow huffed a laugh, remembering when there had been thirteen of them, young and untrained and completely unaware of just how much they needed each other, living in such close proximity that petty squabbles blew up over nothing.
"Ask who didn't, the list'll be shorter." The memories still ached with loss, but right now, like this, they were more sweet than bitter. "Phaseshift never needed to; she was always a frame upgrade ahead of the rest of us. Relay never did, either, but that was just..." Her vocalizer glitched, and she burrowed into the comfort of Ironhide's hold, the warmth of living cohort easing the pain of the cohort she had lost. "...that was just Relay."
Impulsively, she sent him a still image capture of a tangled ball of red, green, and bronze; one of her earliest memories, of a conflict she hadn't been involved in beyond shamelessly egging it on, and even with the full memory file it was still hard to make the mess of clashing colors resolve into three smallish sparklings. "Wildfire, Viper, and Tundra. None of us ever figured out what got them started, but there was a lot of biting involved." She laughed again, only a little forced. "Lab did eventually break us of that, if it makes you feel any better."
Ironhide held Shadow close, engine thrumming, field a slow, constant roll of reassurance lapping against her. The image made him ache - Primus, so young, all of them, a tangled mess of tiny sparkling frames that he could have picked up wholesale between both hands.
The Thirteen, he realized numbly. Her first cohort, the Thirteen, and all of them only a little larger than Blue had been when they had first found hir. They had suspected - Jazz and he had had their suspicions - but there it was, in Shadow's memories, a collection of sparklings so small that no one could call them 'cadets', 'recuits', or 'in training', yet somehow already in Labyrinth's hands.
His arms tightened around her without thought, and their awkward cluster in the middle of the corridor was more awkward than reassuring at that moment. Scooping her up, Ironhide sank to the ground, shoving back to put his backplates to the wall. "More comfortable," he rumbled, reassuring her, with a thread of amusement - floors, it was their tradition, really.
In truth, it was a pang against his spark, a full frame curled in his arms when he wished to the Pit that he could have wrapped up a tiny black femmeling and kept her - and the rest of them - safe. Brainwashing. It was nothing short of brutal conditioning, at an age when they would never have known better, and he wondered, sickly, where Labyrinth had gotten them from.
There were no answers now. Ironhide shuttered his optics, pushing the growl that wanted to escape away because it did no good at all and tried to concentrate on the warm rush that the shared image file brought instead, a recognizable and cherished memory of a distant past. "Yeah, well... batch mates don't count when yer that age. Think it's t' be expected. Leastways, Captain of mah squad never did anythin' but roll his optics an' cuff us apart when Burn an' Ah used t' go rollin' around through th' ship kickin' up a fuss, an' both of us frontline grade frames makin' a mess." He laughed softly, the sound only slightly off, and shook his head. "Made sense at th' time, though frag if Ah can remember why. We'd both been online less than a vorn, back then."
Last Edit: Oct 25, 2012 11:10:26 GMT -5 by Deleted
Once they hit the floor, they weren't moving until they had good reason, Shadow knew from experience. She settled more comfortably against him, grinning at the mental image of him as a newspark, full frame but with all the questionable judgement she remembered from her own cohortmates.
"We used to get into all sorts of things that made sense at the time." That phase hadn't lasted long before Labyrinth trained it out of them, but even when they were older and knew better they'd had their rebellions, stupid little quirks that would make no sense to an outsider, things she once wouldn't have even considered allowing anyone to know. It surprised her to realize she was mulling over what she could share with Ironhide, fragments of her past to be handed over like offerings, like pieces of her self. "You'd have thought we hated each other, the way we went at it sometimes."
Earlier memories hurt less, and she pinged Ironhide with another image, this one pain blurred around the edges because Cam had two of her fingers clamped between his dente. Her free hand was flattened across most of Cam's face in an effort to shove him off. "Cam was the first one to figure out biting was a good way to get us to scream without a lot of visible damage. That's how I learned punching is a better way to make 'em let go than pushing is."
Put into the context of youngling rough-housing, the memory, even tinged in pain, brought a ghost of a smile to Ironhide's mouth. "Sounds like yeh all were a bit of a handful." He pulsed love and affection at her as he said it, helm pressed against hers.
So young. Young and innocent and unknowing of what would be pushed onto them. Ironhide hugged her a little tighter and dug deep through his own memories, looking for a distraction for them both, something that could be shared that echoed only to the happier memories of cohort and belonging.
It was an old file, tinged with the trace static of inevitable file degradation over millennia, and jumbled and shaky because they had been rolling, two frontliners shoving and struggling from one wall to the other in a tight ship corridor until they eventually ended on the floor and finally fetched up against an immovable object. That had turned out to be the Captain's legs, Wildstrike's face looming over them upside down, set in serious, exasperated lines that had given way to a grudging grin.
"Used t' take bets on us, when there wasn't nothin' else goin' on," he confided with a huff of a laugh, sharing the file. "Burn came online an orn after Ah did, an' back then Ah thought Ah was so superior for it."
"We were...numerous. And it wasn't a very big ship, unless you counted the places we weren't technically supposed to get into." Shadow vented softly, field going wistful. "Sometimes, I'm not sure how Labyrinth managed to put up with us until he could civilize us."
She relaxed into Ironhide's hug, laughing at the file he shared with her in return, the slight sadness banished. "Looks like you were as bad as we were." She wrapped an arm around Ironhide's neck, snuggling in close, content with a sense of the rightness of cohort sharing with cohort. "How good were you at living up to that sense of superiority you had?"
Ironhide shook his head. "Thirteen of yeh in one ship? Can't say Ah can even picture it." He pushed affection to the forefront, covering anything else in a surge of easy love. "Breaker - he was th' oldest of us - used t' say he didn't know how any squad managed more'n two younglings at a time." A slight shrug, matter of fact. "We had a fairly stable ranking, not much turnover - we were good."
Her teasing let him laugh a little, the chuff of sound low and deep in his frame. "Burn was our com specs. Could field almost as many incoming signal threads as Blaster does. Processor put meh t' shame, but he couldn't shoot for scrap, so Ah wager Ah came out th' better in th' deal." He vented sharply. "Pit knows they weren't payin' us for thinkin'."
Last Edit: Oct 13, 2012 22:15:03 GMT -5 by Deleted
"Thinking's over-rated; I'll take guns any day," Shadow said with an answering burst of love. She was already sorting through old memories for a distraction from the slight edge of his last comment, and she finally found something that would suit.
The memory was later than the others, though it would be hard to tell from just the video, except perhaps from the extra marks of wear and stress on frames ready to be upgraded. Still early in their training, thirteen of them packed into a room meant for eight, berths shoved out of the way so they could pile on each other instead. Only nine of the others were visible, and the images kept slipping out of focus; she'd been curled in with Phaseshift and Tundra, refusing to give in to recharge until Interlock finally joined them.
Not a bad memory - they'd been safe and together, after all - but still one that would be less likely to break the comfortable mood stripped of context.
"As for thirteen of us on one ship, picture it. Or at least, most of us; Phase and Tundra were under me." The raw video file that she sent was just a group of tired sparklings snuggling together, optics dimming and brightening as they stubbornly tried to stay awake.