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.
<<Jazz's long-overdue stop in medbay. This is in Ep. 0.5, and can be slotted in right after Stepping Up.>>
Jazz had never, particularly, liked medbay. Few mecha did, and fewer still spec ops. Spec ops agents had such specialized mods, such specialized coding, such utterly destructive defenses, that one could unwittingly harm and possibly destroy a normal medic simply by not warning said medic not to do this or for Primus' sake, THAT. This was the reason that spec ops had its own medics, specialized in disarming a spec ops agent's defenses so that they could actually fix what was wrong safely.
But his frame was dense with spacedust and makeshift autorepair, his systems chugging on kilovorn-old fluids, his joints no longer soundless with dirt and the wrong kind of lubricant, and he wasn't sure what that error his powerplant was throwing him meant, but he kinda wanted it to stop. Not to mention his code was throwing errors--HAD been throwing errors for vorns--and he couldn't fix it himself anymore.
Lacking a spec ops mech, Jazz figured he'd take the only regular-flavor medic that he'd ever really trusted. Especially when said medic was likely to demand his presence soon anyway.
Better to get the party started on his own terms.
Jazz showed up in medbay during a long stretch of nothing on Ratchet's calendar bearing his best charming grin. "Heya, doc. Got some time to yell at me about how much maintenance I haven't been having for the last oh...100,000 vorn?"
"One hundred thousand..." Ratchet paused in the act of putting away a freshly scrubbed set of class four circuit mounts and shuttered his optics, letting himself lean forward until his helm thunked against the cabinet he was standing in front of, vocalizer clicking sharply over the last word.
It had been a relief and a genuine joy to see Jazz again - the fission thrill of seeing someone Ratchet would, in the privacy of his own mind, have been willing to put on the list of the deceased along with every other spark they had lost all contact with so long before that hope seemed a minuscule thing at best. Ratchet didn't have time for faded shreds of hope. Oh, he could fake it - would, for the sake of patients who needed that hope far more than he did - but he was, at spark, a pragmatist, and sheer quantitative numerical data for the survival rate of their lost operatives demanded a very low prognosis. Jazz's survival beat all of the odds and Ratchet was glad to see it; for Ironhide's sake, and Bluestreak's, he was downright ecstatic.
None of which mitigated in the slightest some very clear memory files of just what an utter pain in his cortical processor working with spec ops could be.
Or Jazz in particular. Particularly Jazz.
"Well," Ratchet said sharply, without looking up or taking his head off of where it was resting against the cabinet, "that certainly explains why I can hear your actuators wheezing from clear out in the hallway." He lifted one hand to point blindly at the berth behind him. "Berth. Your aft. Make an acquaintance, and you'd better tell me you have the rest of the day free."
Last Edit: Nov 26, 2012 22:13:18 GMT -5 by Deleted
Jazz obediently hopped up on the berth. Not that this was going to be fun (because it WASN'T), but because it would be so blissfully nice to have his frame actually work right again. Or to at least be able to sneak up on something.
He made a sad face at Ratchet. "See? See? I can't even sneak up on a snarky medic. How can I possibly be of use when I can't even do that? You've got to help me, Ratchet. All the other spec ops mecha'll laugh at me." He did his best impression of Bluestreak's turbopuppy optics. "You're my only hope."
He clutched his hands in front of him, his glyphs taking on the fake antique of a bad historical vidshow. "I'll do anything, Sir Medic, anything at all! Just please...help a helpless mecha be useful again?"
The opticflicker was probably over the top, but Jazz couldn't bring himself to care. He'd missed Ratchet, and the least he could do was give the medic a reason to throw things at him.
Tubing re-thread, a complete fluids flush and scrub, pad and baffle replacement, coupling alignment, engine re-fit... Ratchet was making a growing list in his head for parts needed and time it was going to take to do each procedure, based purely on the grating sound of Jazz's systems even before he'd flicked a single scan over the saboteur. His hands gathered parts - B-3 grade for Jazz's frame size - on automatic while he unarchived the last medical records he had for the smaller mech; sadly out of date by a factor of quite a bit, and probably entirely too much to hope that the saboteur had kept much in the way of record annotations of whatever patch jobs he had done on himself.
The medic cleared his schedule for the next few days of anything non-urgent, slotting Jazz's maintenance into place on the duty roster for them both. Optimus had several notes about other duties for the saboteur - Ratchet overrode them, stamping medical priority glyphs over the top, and shot the file back to the Prime with a flag. This was not going to be a quick spot of routine maintenance.
Speaking of which... he scooped parts onto a tray with one hand and grabbed a steel bristled brush and a jug of medical grade cleanser with the other, pitching both over his shoulder in a casually accurate arc towards the other mech. "Then get your plates off," he barked, already pulling more bits out of sealed containers, "which is not an innuendo, Jazz, so help me Primus - and start scrubbing."
Jazz groaned as he plucked the brush and cleanser out of the air. "Don't I WISH that was innuendo."
It wasn't as if he couldn't FEEL all the crap in his joints and gritting under his plates. He'd kind of hoped that his extra-careful afternoon in the washracks would have gotten a lot of it out, though. Aside from the tedious process of not just loosening but taking OFF one's plates, scrubbing out what was underneath was an even more tedious and dente-clenchingly sensitive process...and NOT in a good way.
Jazz was nothing if not obedient, though, when it came to fixing up his battered frame. He pulled his legs up into a cross-legged position and started releasing the plates, one by one.
Jazz slumped as he was pinged with the changes to the duty roster, stamped with Ratchet's and Prime's authorizations. "That bad, huh? I mean...I knew it was gonna be bad, but--ow--" he winced as his pauldron clamp seized and needed a little convincing to actually unclamp "--forgot about that. Aaaand, that one's not even gonna...yeah."
Jazz left "that one" for Ratchet to deal with, as the coupling had been crushed, then corroded, then scarred over. He moved on to the others, every now and then wiggling his leg over the side to let bits of...ew, he didn't even want to know what that used to be part of...fall to the floor.
"Three days, huh? Just you and me? You really think it'll take that...uh...was that a screw? I think that was a screw." The screw rolled under the medberth. "Eh, must not be too important...."
Ratchet shuttered his optics and counted backward in fibonacci sequence through base sixteen until the worst of the urge to throw a few more things than just cleanser and brushes at the smaller mech passed. "You," he managed through gritted dente, "are a menace."
Items went onto the tray, the tray went onto a mobile worktable, and all of it was rolled over to sit beside the medberth in silent intimidation of the largest pain in his exhaust vents that Ratchet had ever had the pleasure - dubious as it was at times - of knowing. Glaring, Ratchet dropped to one knee long enough to flick the mag clamps in his palm on, coaxing the dropped bit - a double ought B grade coupling from Jazz's interior systems, probably from a circuit mount - into rolling back out from underneath the berth.
"Unimportant?" the medic seethed, climbing back to his feet and brandishing the tiny fastener between thumb and forefinger like a threat or an accusation. "Do you know what this is? Do you have any idea what it does?" He slapped the part down on the tray, hard enough to make all the tools leap and rattle. "NO! You do not, because - correct me if I'm wrong - you are NOT A MEDIC!"
Jazz was more than fast enough, in any state of repair, to avoid Ratchet's sharp flick against the ridge of his central helm. That he didn't do anything more than flinch, allowing the hit to score, was a long standing concession of what Ratchet was allowed and Jazz would agree was his fair due. The medic refrained from another jab, vents huffing. "Let ME decide what's important - and fasteners for your internal circuit mounts ARE IMPORTANT, slag for brains, unless you want an entire autonomic circuit board falling off and into your pede plates somewhere - and save me from your amateur attempts at diagnostics!"
Venting hard, Ratchet dragged his hand across his own faceplates. "Now. I don't suppose - by any remote chance - you have anything resembling a log of damage you've taken and what's broken in what order since I last saw you? I realize a proper medical history is too much to ask for, but surely even that circuit scrambled insecticon hive you call a processor keeps chrono logs."
Jazz blithely ignored the insult (on a scale of 1 to Ratchet, it barely registered) and held up the brush he was using to clear out a coupling in triumph. "Yes! Yes, I do. Let me...uh...find it. Hey, don't give me that look! It's here! All updated! Just haven't been seriously hurt in awhile, so it's...a bit buried."
Jazz's processor's filing system had gotten...interesting with age. Saying that his filing system was as specialized as his subspace indexing system was probably about right. He could find anything in it. Eventually. And it wasn't as if anyone had asked for his medical history lately, eh?
And it WAS, despite Ratchet's scoffing, a medical history. Not like a medic would do, but Jazz had done his best to document his injuries, when he'd had time to update them. He was certain that they'd make Ratchet laugh, with the mishmash of chronolog information, and Jazz's own notes on how the injury had felt (sometimes with vid, pics, and/or diagrams), what he'd done to repair it (inevitably prefaced with "Sorry, Ratchet, but..."), how long it'd taken to heal, and any lingering issues.
Jazz had been a properly-trained Ratchet patient for long enough to know that, as ridiculous as it'd all look to a trained medic, that the thought would count for some, and the INFO was all there, at least. Besides, it had been something to do, in the long downtimes...and an act of hope. That one day he'd get back home and Ratchet could...be Ratchet at him.
Jazz wiggled his toes, smiling to himself and the gunk that was sluicing away under the brush. Home.
His file search came up with the right thing, and Jazz pinged it over to Ratchet. "Here! Don't laugh too hard."
<<It's likely full of long stretches of being fine punctuated by injuries and one or two semi-catastrophic scrappings. His actual medical logs have been accessed and updated by a few medics or medic wanna-bes (with Autobot, Neutral, or Decepticon tags) who patched him up here and there, and there are several places where there's a discrepancy: where there was surgery performed without proper medical access (where Jazz or some other non-medic did the work with, essentially, a medical book off to the side for reference). There's been nothing new for hundreds of vorn.>>
Ratchet unpacked the file... and leaned his elbows onto the edge of the berth beside Jazz so that he could drop his faceplates into the cupped shelter of his own hands. "You..." Words failed him, at least words in English, but his glyph strings were multilayered works of profane art detailing the saboteurs manufacturing failings, forging flaws, processor glitches, and probability of unnatural interfacing acts and spark alignment with the spawn of Unicron.
On the other hand, it was 110% perfectly, utterly, JAZZ. Somewhere between laughing and spitting enough expletives to glitch, Ratchet managed to dredge up the ghost of a rare, indulgent smile. "Glitch," he managed at last, mildly. "Scrap for brains." Venting, he levered himself back upright, one hand coming down in passing on the saboteur's shoulder. "And Prime's making you an officer? Primus help us all, I should be checking HIM for glitches if he actually wants to try to decipher what you probably call reports. No, keep scrubbing, slag it all."
Venting, the medic moved away, steps purposeful as he began to collect another tray of parts from supplies. "If we had the means, I'd give you an entire frame refit. Frag, if we had the means I'd soak you in hot solvent followed by oil, until everything came loose and I could actually put you back together without any buildup. As it is... I'll do what I can. KEEP SCRUBBING, frag it - these cabinets are metal for a reason, I can see you!"
Jazz--who had commiserated with Ratchet's obvious mental distress by patting him on the helm consolingly as he leaned on the berth--stopped in the middle of his return to scrubbing. He stared off into the distance, voice dreamy, "Hot oil bath. Oh, mech, it's been forever...wait. I know Earth's primitive and all, but SURELY there is something on this base that can be welded into a large TUB? I mean, I've got a handheld welder...somewhere...in my subspace, and we've got a cohort of ENGINEERS for Primus' sake. Give 'em priority soaking rights--after medical necessity, of course--and they could probably have something self-heating that'll write your reports for you in a cycle or three."
Jazz dared to pause his scrubbing as he winged off a message to said engineers. He leaned toward Ratchet with a little wiggle in slightly-gritty linkages. "Just think, Ratchet. Oil bath. I know you're not a mech of worldly pleasures, but...OIL BATH." Jazz held out a hand to forestall protest. "All medically necessary, of course! I mean, like you said, it would be SO much better than a manual scrub job, right?"
Jazz flicked his fingers. "See? Solving problems already. TOTALLY officer material, eh?" His glyphs dipped into gentle amusement/sarcasm/self-mockery, clearly indicating Jazz's own bewilderment at the new rank that didn't quite feel HIS, yet.
Ratchet paused in the act of measuring out lengths of wiring, his hands stilling as he actually did look up into the semi-polished surface of the cabinets, narrowing his optics at Jazz's distorted reflection for a long moment. "You're not getting out of scrubbing right now," he said at last, "at least enough that I can start re-attaching some of the pieces that are corroding off of you. But..."
The medic huffed, one hand raising languidly in an old Academy gesture that admitted defeat in a singularly rude fashion. "If you can put together a suitable container in the next two days, I will allow as it might be medically advisable to soak out the rest of the ingrained slag in your joints rather than me taking you apart piece by piece and autoclaving it all. So yes," he added with wry sarcasm, "look at the newly promoted officer, solving problems.
Jazz opened a commthread to Rhinox immediately, bursting info including the words "OILBATH TUB, Y/N?", a timeline, and offers of shanix, blatant favoritism in scheduling the duty roster, or any other favors Rhinox might want in exchange for the goods.
He continued scrubbing dutifully, wincing as a few more things finally worked themselves free of the muck and tink!ed to the ground. He supposed it was too much to ask for Ratchet not to have noticed. Honestly, it wasn't JAZZ's fault that that knee had gotten crushed and had to be rebuilt on the fly by...oh Primus, that had been that one dodgy Neutral medic. Jazz looked at said knee dubiously, half afraid that the muck might be the only thing holding the mech's work together.
"Have I mentioned, Ratchet, how much I missed you? Your delicate servos and your wonderful bedside manner?" Jazz just so happened to lean back as something whizzed past his head. Wonder where that could have been? "But no, really...." He winced as he worked bristles around a particularly sensitive junction, then looked up at Ratchet, dead serious. "Have I mentioned how VERY MUCH I've missed having a competent medic? Because I have." He leaned his elbow on his questionable knee, flexing it experimentally. "Glad that Prime's had you. 'Specially since it looks like this has become the new front line."
Ratchet grimly tracked each piece - oh Primus, this was rapidly shaping into one of his more unfortunately memorable post-mission incidents with the saboteur, and not even on account of the scraplet nest that spec ops tended to make of their own processors - as it hit the floor. Crouching, he fished them out from the edge of the berth mountings, cataloging fastenings for the most part but scrap, that was part of a plate mount by the look of it and was that... frag, it was part of the glitch's rotor assembly, half crumbled and so corroded that Ratchet just chucked it towards the disposal bin with a heavy ventilation.
Climbing back to his feet, he caught Jazz with a heavy palm against the saboteur's chestplates, shoving the smaller mech back prone on the berth surface. "Lay down," he snapped, though most of the bite was missing. "How many sensor blocks are you running to be walking on that thing? The entire rotor's blown." Ratchet grabbed the brush and solvent away, pinned Jazz's leg to the surface of the berth with a firm hand on his shin, and began pouring the solvent liberally into the joint. "Sit still."
The medic set the solvent aside, his free hand transforming with a rush, finger plates bursting apart and reforming into myrid smaller tools that slipped easily between the plates and struts of Jazz's knee, plucking loose components as the solvent ate into the surrounding debris. "You can remember this," he told the other mech sharply, "the next time you let some unlicensed hack at your systems, necessity or no." He scowled. "Let me know if you want a better block than what you're running. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't have to hurt."
Micro parts came loose in showers, tugged and pried by Ratchet's deft fingers, the medic's weight put into keeping the smaller mech still as he quickly stripped the joint to bare strut, his touch barely brushing the neural lines. "I wouldn't say that I'm glad to be here," he said bluntly, tone turning heavier. "Filthy planet. Organic scrap that gets everywhere. Aft end of nowhere to be calling the front line, but here we are." He shook his head slightly. "And like scrap am I letting Prime go anywhere without me. Medics aren't that rare, but we only have one Prime."
Jazz had a cheeky reply all set up about being ordered to lie back on the berth, but then there were medic tools in his kneejoint and ow. OW.
He clenched his dentae, queuing up a reply that no, of course he didn't have blocks up, because seriously, that HURT. Then he checked and...huh. Yeah. He'd...forgotten he'd put those up after that one battle.... Evidently forgot to take them off, too.
Jazz made a noncommittal noise at the mention of medics not being that rare. Jazz had a slightly different picture from his time floating in the black, but he wasn't going to argue it when Ratchet was servos-deep in Jazz's leg. He merely said, "Any battle you can walk away from and any planet that'll have you. And this is a messy one, I'll agree, but it's got its good points. I trust the human governments even LESS than I can throw them, but the individuals can be nice. The kids're cute, and Fowler's tryin' his best to deal straight with us. S'better than some occupied planets'll give us."
Jazz lifted his head up a bit, the pain having receded as Ratchet worked. Something moved, and Jazz slumped in relief. "Ah, that feels better. How--" Then something ELSE moved, and Jazz gave up being stoic. "OW, owokyesblockplease."
"Glitch," Ratchet said, but it was almost fond rather than exasperated. Lightning quick moves flicked his fingers back to their base configuration, blunt tips deftly clicking a line into place, the first data packet rush all but screaming friendly-medic-safe in larger than life binary code with heavy authorizations.
Ratchet wouldn't admit it, but he vented a very small cycle of relief when Jazz's systems accepted the authorization. The defenses he had queued up - just in case, because with spec ops there was always a 'just in case' - were shunted to the side, heavy neural blocks transmitted instead, and he let himself smirk slightly as the smaller mech went limp on the berth. "There, that's better. AH! No, not one word out of you, I don't want to hear it. No amount of scrubbing is ever going to clear that Kaon filth out of your processor."
It could have been an insult - would have been, from anyone else, but Ratchet's glyphs, beneath the prim set of his faceplates, had a humous twist to them that only mockingly faux chastised the other for all the innuendo. The medic turned a scowl perfected over a lifetime of practice on the offending knee joint. "This had better not become a repeat performance like Optimus," he scolded. "Or I'm going to strip your plates, disassemble you for parts, and reassemble you into the world's cleanest toaster."
He gave Jazz's leg plating above the half disassembled knee joint a brief pat. "Don't worry," he added blandly, expression not slipping one jot. "If you're a terrible toaster I'm sure I'll still respect you in the morning."
Jazz's systems welcomed Ratchet with the firewall equivalent of "oh Primus YES", granting access with barely a pause. The vulnerability of having someone in your systems was never pleasant, exactly, but with someone as trusted as Ratchet, it was reassuring. Jazz groaned in genuine relief as the sensor block slid into place.
Then he checked the internet to make sure that there wasn't another meaning of "toaster" that he was missing, and grinned up at Ratchet.
"Toaster, huh? Oooh, appropriate. Would you like to to make a sandwich together? Oh, Ratch, I know I'm hot, but if you were interested, you just had to SAY, y'know? Don't be shy, tell me how you REALLY feel, big mech. How else will I know?"
Jazz sighed forlornly, "Ah, so much time we've wasted. Just think, if you'd told me earlier we could have--" His intended metaphor about the types of sandwiches they could make was cut off by Ratchet doing something to his knee that did not HURT through the medical block, but still jittered along Jazz's sensors like a crawling itch. "Did you just VIBRATE my STRUT? Kinky!"
Not that Jazz missed the mention of Optimus' eternal (and continued, evidently) tendency to get himself slagged at every opportunity. Some things never changed.
"Wait, wait," Jazz said, pulling a serious face. "What was that about Optimus? Was that related to getting him on the medberth, the toaster, the being hot, or the sandwiches? Because if it was that last one, I want vids. All the vids."
<<Jazz is being world's biggest doof, so Ratchet can feel free to thwap him one or five. >>