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.
It would have, perhaps, been anthropomorphizing on Barricade’s part, to say that the Phantom was happy to see him, but the systems did rather fairly hum to life when the Saleen police car came striding back into the hangar. He was feeling considerably better after his visit to medical even if he was not inclined to pop his plates for their resident physician. He got his weapons systems running again and refitted with a pair of standard plasma blades (the reason he’d selected the hard straight blades: they were common and easy to replace) and he was turning his attentions back to the mission at hand.
“Hey there,” he murmured, feeling the ship’s hull pulse with an EM that mimicked pleasure as best an AI could do something like that. He ran razor sharp talons idly along the bulkheads of the sleek black warship. He liked this ship, the design, the weight of its energy signature and the swing of its aerodynamics under his control. The ship pulsed familiar recognition scans across his frame as he pinged it for entry and the ship’s hull split open at the belly and opened a gangplank. “Missed me, huh?”
The infiltrator looked over his shoulder. “Oi! Windy! Hurry up or I’m doing this without you!”
Last Edit: Nov 18, 2011 12:10:32 GMT -5 by Deleted
After a pause, the cassette flew into the hanger and sailed in a high arc to circle the ship with a sensory scepticism. Much as Barricade was fond of the Fallen-tech and irresponsibly powerful warship, Fairwinds was more sceptical, and frankly a little jealous of his affection for the flier.
"Just giving you two some privacy to say hi," she purred back, finally descending to land on Barricade's automatically-offered forearm. Immediately, she tucked one foot up to reach her talons inside her undercarriage.
Megatron had been in a privately good mood all day, and had gone so far as to not slag her when he discovered her project with the twelve dismantled microwaves in her cupboard. Not needing to hide the construction from her Master, and with him giving her a power converter without her needing to ask, Fairwinds had completed the device within hours.
It wasn't perfect, yet. She needed a cutting press to make the little cog shapes, but being Lord Megatron's cassette carried the perk of having the Eradicons perform little inane tasks for her. Which Fairwinds was quite content to demand. Spoiled, yes, but he'd made her that way.
Producing a lime green stick from her undercarriage, Fairwinds tore away one end with her beak and chewed it whilst holding the rest out to Barricade. "Gummi?"
“No thanks,” said Barricade, whose attentions were already on the control console inside the Phantom. For all that this ship was powerful, it was designed for a small crew, either because this prototype only needed a few working mechs on it or because the minds that made it figured an over abundance of cold-sparked bots in one ship was not an overly good idea. You had to be cold-sparked to get in this ship and not find it worrisome. You had to have some kind of ice in your spark.
Barricade sat down in the pilot seat, moving Fairwind to his shoulder“Pay attention to what I’m doing. You’ll have to do it from the inside soon enough,” said the infiltrator, running through the start up sequences, the systems humming warm and reactive under his talons. He reached up under the armor plating at the join of his shoulder and arm, consciously reconfiguring the armor there to retract slightly, revealing a basic sensor jack. “You can link up if you want to download the kinesthetic hydraulic memory. It might be useful once you’re in the system. It might not. Either way I’d suggest it.”
The ease in which he offered this was, perhaps, the most significant comment on Barricade’s relationship to Fairwinds that one could make. He didn’t let a grand total of two other mechs get under his plates and only after eons of snarling at them and getting used them and he still didn’t really trust one of them.
With one optic fixed ahead on Barricade's hands on the controls, the other swivelled to look upon his face in profile. Fairwinds 'swallowed' the beakful of energon gummie and tucked the remainder back into her carriage. "Yeah, hook me up. Might as well be cosy."
Though her tone was lightly, truthfully she was glad to synch up with the older mech inside this ship. Parsing it through Barricade made the prospect of integrating with it fully in the very near future lessened the twist in her tank. She'd already extended a data jack as she spoke, clicking it into place and humming into the familiar signature as the infiltrator accepted her inside.
They were more than friends, now: cohort and kin through her master's alignment with him, and her delight of the fact thrummed out of her small field in the short periods when it could be revealed. Barricade was still just another soldier to the rest of the crew, Megatron's shadow-hand and top agent, but nothing more. Fairwinds knew how disastrous the wrong gesture or field-flare could be at the wrong time, and despite her sparkling-like attitude, she could school herself perfectly.
Her optical focus still split chameleon-like, Fairwinds folded down onto Barricade's shoulder and briefly rubbed the flat of her head against his jaw with a churr. The only entity in existence who could nuzzle him and be online afterwards. Just.
“Knock it off,” said Barricade without any real venom, more a reflex than anything to the cassette’s cuddly impulses. He was already initializing the start up sequences with the long ease of familiarity, pinging the hangar doors to open and giving launch and time frame details to the on-duty flight watch. They wouldn’t be out more than a few hours and would remain in shielded proximity of the Nemesis’ shadow. The usual air for flying lessons and Seeker maneuvers when open air flying was inadvisable.
“Looks like,” said Barricade, “Shockwave’s got the shields back up and running. Stealth systems are still active and the drive core’s been re-energized. This thing can actually feed off and convert almost any form of energy: energon, solar energy, fossil fuels. The minute I hit atmo, it launched planetary scans for useable fuels and besides the energon organic fuels seemed to be acceptable as well.”
The Phantom hummed around them as the hangar bay doors began to come open and with hardly a lurch the anti-grav vibrated online and suddenly the phantom lifted five feet from the deck. A familiar shiver of desire and anticipation slid through the Saleen’s circuits. Briefly, he smiled, then gunned the ship it shot out into bright open air.
"Certainly some perks to an unrefined appetite," Fairwinds mumured with obvious approval, leaning into the bolt out the hanger on instinct. Barricade's feelings didn't elude her, and she sidestepped to clutch at the outer curve of his shoulder so that he could better see her peripherally. "How come you never got flight-modded?"
Distracted by the great feel of the Phantom under his hands, pulsing around him with the heat and energy of a running vessel, seething with power and heat, Barricade was somewhat taken off guard by the question. He paused, slowing the acceleration of the ship and swinging her back round toward the Nemesis. The great battle ship loomed, like a massive spiny beast sliding through the planet's atmosphere and with a quick drop of the controls, the Phantom spiraled up over into the upper stratosphere.
"I was sparked a ground-bound," he said idly. "Racer model, a chase-bot. Designed to bring down the bad guys when they ran. Law enforcement down to the base code." He put the Phantom through a series of lazy turns, letting Fairwinds feel the arc and give of the systems in reaction to his coaxing. "I guess... I don't know, I like flight as an external thing." A pause. "And I couldn't take Starscream as a flight teacher. How the hell would I handle him as a Seeker commander?"
Fairwinds emitted a digital snort at the remark and associated mental images, though both optics were flickering from processing the data. Feeling the Phantom in its natural element, in the mode it was created for, was an entirely different experience to seeing it as a grounded, brooding and frighteningly powerful thing in Hanger Thirteen.
"No reason it'd have to be Starscream," the cassette replied lightly, her tone turning arch and, impossibly, even more playful. For a former ground-bound, Megatron flew exceptionally - out of sheer stubborness in the beginning, Fairwinds well remembered.
Her beak curving into a grin that exposed the micro-denta lining the razor-thin edges, Fairwinds flexed her wings in a restrained stretch. "If you like it so much, it's not too late for you to do anything about it. For things to, change."
“Maybe back on Cyberton,” said Barricade quietly. “Not now though. Commander Starscream’s been the top gunner for a while now and with just about every real seeker out there gone AWOL, MIA or KIA if I actually pulled off a successful outmode there’s no way I’d be stationed anywhere but beneath Starscream. More than that, a flight alt mode is never ever a decent stealth disguise. The airwaves are full of eyes human and otherwise but no one’s looking at the ground. Every big city and country on this planet has cars no one cares about, but a plane in the air is something to look at. Runs against my function.”
Barricade shrugged. “Besides… I like ships. The design of them I mean. How they feel.” The Phantom banked again, hard. “Feel that?” Barricade smirks. “I like that.”
Fairwinds hummed more at Barricade's delight than at the feel of the move, shuttering her optics with a sigh. When she onlined them again, still flickering with code scrambling across the tier beneath her conscious mind, she gave a huff. "This leash things sucks: let's get out of here. You said she's got her stealth capabilities fully operational - take me for a ride. Show her off to me."
“Yeah,” said Barricade, a smile warming his EMF and sliding up his mouth. He was a aware that there was a certain level of protocol that he was breaking just now, but on the other hand, having broken quite a few stranger protocols just recently, this felt like far less an infraction. “You know what? Let’s go.”
The Phantom’s engine sang to life, powered on and with a sudden dizzying burst of speed, shot off from the Nemesis and peeled away screaming into the horizon, the black bullet hull of the starship melting under a ripple of shielding and cloaking fields that turned the ship into a silent blur of metal howling through the cloud banks before breaching the upper levels of the vapor layer and coming into the burn of Earth’s sun against the ocean of cloud. The white banks bright gold beneath the bowl of the blue sky.
“You’ll have fun being this ship, Windy. Might not want to go back afterward,” said Barricade, spark still humming with the pleasure of flight. “But you’ll need to. Get me? You can’t inhabit a ship like this one. A Fallen ship, even handicapped will try to eat you as fast as you eat it. Losing you would be pointless. So be careful.”
Last Edit: Nov 20, 2011 16:56:58 GMT -5 by Deleted
"Yeah - not like I could sit on your shoulder any more, hm?" Fairwinds replied with ripple of amusement. More quietly, she added: "It'd be nice to be able to keep up with Master, though. He always has to carry me if we're booking."
“Well, Megatron is always moving faster than anyone else,” said Barricade idly, putting the Phantom through its paces, taking some time to enjoy the atmo break on this planet. Cybertronian skies were almost always clear, not snarled by the thick clouds of water and strange atmospheric densities. The infiltrator adjusted the angle of a turn, glancing toward the cassette on his shoulder, contemplating her role in the upcoming assault on the Autobots. “Doesn’t matter if you’re a giant living weapon or a cassette, promise you that mech’ll leave you eating slip stream.”
He paused a moment, feeling that anchor in his chest now, that hum of foreign frequency through his own spark. He wasn't exactly talking hardware specs anymore.
Last Edit: Nov 22, 2011 15:39:24 GMT -5 by Deleted
Fairwinds uttered it with a quiet conviction, not needing to impassion the words with any defensiveness to this mech. It was simply a statement of his error - as if Barricade had said that the Sol star was endothermic and they could sledge on its surface.
The cassette lowered her body and shifted her balance with the Phantom's movements, echoing its flight. "Take us lower - wanna feel how it feels the terrain," she murmured, pitched so as not to change the topic.
The Phantom dipped below the cloud, cutting a jetstream of cloud behind the invisible shape of the warship, the curve of the planet rushing up at the vessel as Barricade gunned the ship and shot toward the ridges of the mountains below. The ship twisted, hurling through the gaps of a deep valley and screaming through the low flat carved by a river bed through the mountains.
"I am?" said Barricade calmly. "Considering my position now I think I'm in a place to make an informed observation about the mech I've served since the start of the uprising. The leader of the Decepticon is not someone who waits for any one, Fairwinds." The Phanton spun, ripping a sharp curve, proximity sensors flaring across the control HD, going ignored by Barricade who had a more accurate grasp of the ship's position than the ship itself. "Those with him now are those who could keep up."