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.
Ironhide froze for a moment but... a wail of distress, whether uttered by organic palate and vocal chords via expelled air or through a cybertronian vocalizer, was still a wail, and the sound of it pinged a cascade of protocols that all demanded action.
Small thing, in distress, wailing. His motions were encoded on a near autonomic level, modified only for the fact that the human femme was smaller and infinitely more fragile than even Bluestreak had been at hir youngest. Sliding around the corner, Ironhide used both hands to carefully, gently scoop the girl up, one hand holding her, the other cupped up and over to keep her stable and safe as he quickly lifted her to his chassis. Once there he curved his hands carefully, cradling her against his chest plate, one palm providing a platform, the other shielding her from the drop back to the floor.
"Shh," he rumbled softly, his engine purring a counterpoint vibration of reassurance. "Shh, bitlet. It'll be alright. She wouldn't wanna leave yeh. We'll bring her back."
Soledad stiffened up when those huge hands went around her, a strangled squeak escaping her; but she didn't resist, even when Ironhide scooped her clear off the floor and nestled her securely against his chest like she was a kitten. Pressed against the metal, she could feel the power underneath; the rumble of his engine, deeper and rounder and somehow more substantial than either Starscream's or Shadow's, muffled by plating thick enough to shelter against explosions. This was a giant alien robot that Soledad believed could withstand millions of years of war; not only for himself, but on behalf of his cohort. Jazz. Bluestreak. ...Shadow.
Suddenly Ironhide was no longer every authority figure who'd ever lied to her. He was every teacher who'd known to be gentle with her. Who'd offered kindness, even if she couldn't accept it. Who'd asked her if everything was all right at home, and allowed Soledad her own comforting lie - yes, everything is fine. Soledad's hand found an edge on Ironhide's plating and gripped it as tight as she could; she held onto him and cried.
Ironhide let himself sink the rest of the way down to a seat on the floor of the corridor, his back plates pressed to the wall, hands carefully cupping the small organic. So very tiny, frailer than his own bitlet. His scans were passive, tracking the frantic beat of her heart, the sound of her broken respirations and verbal noises, trying to ascertain from his limited knowledge if it was just grief or if she was in danger.
The pressure plate tip of one finger served to gently stroke at her back with a feather-light touch. He routed heating to his exterior plates and palms, settling on a temperature a degree warmer than her own external radiant heat. A quick inventory of his subspace said he had nothing suitable for wrapping her in - grease stained work rags were not suitable for sparklings and he doubted there was much difference with distressed humans - so he sufficed with cupping her a little closer, letting the warmth radiate up from his hands and chassis.
His engine had tipped into the lulling rumble that had soothed Bluestreak's earliest memory fluxes. Soledad couldn't feel or parse his field but he managed to paint the ghost of reassurance and comfort into it anyways. The rage had drained out of his spark like a split primary line, evaporating, and what it left behind, even above the fear and low grade panic, was an aching exhaustion that sucked at him. Ironhide shuttered his optics, tracing Soledad's form in his hands by sensor and found that he had taken up the slow, heavy back and forth sway of soothing a sparkling. "It's alright," he told her again, voice low and rough. "Let it out. Shadow ain't here, Ah'm sorry, but Ah'll do what Ah can. It's alright."
Soledad cried herself raw in Ironhide's hands, wrenching sobs that shook her body against his plating and left her exhausted and wrung-out as an old rag when they finally subsided. Ironhide's hands were warm, curled around her in a way that felt like safety, not confinement. Though she was sure if she struggled, he would let her go. Slowly, to keep her from getting hurt.
He won't let me get hurt. Either Soledad was letting her wishful thinking run off with her, or Ironhide really was like Shadow. No wonder they were family.
She sat up a little, just enough to scrub at her eyes with her sleeve. She sniffed noisily. "God, I must look so gross," she hiccupped. "Sorry."
Ironhide had to look up 'gross' and then cross reference it with human cultural practices, and came to the conclusion that there was no polite or socially acceptable way to tell the femme that he honestly couldn't tell the difference between one human state and the other by visual cues alone. "Yer fine," he told her instead, stroking a fingertip against her back again. "It ain't any bother. Ah don't mind."
He left his hands cupped for her as he settled a little more solidly, half curling himself to press his shoulder into the surface at his back and let his helm rest againt the wall. There were errors crawling across his HUD in ghost flickers of temporary system power loss - recharge, he thought dimmly. He hadn't ever really cycled down his principal combat protocols until just then, and the absence of that laser directed focus was setting his systems in a loop. Ironhide shook it off with a ventilation, forcing himself to focus on the human in his hands. "Yeh alright?" he asked. "Yeh got..." but no, she had said she didn't have anyone, and he caught himself, remixing the words before they were spoken, "...somewhere t' be? On base?"
Soledad wiped at her face with her sleeve, despite Ironhide's assurance, and nodded. "Nurse Darby made sure I had a cot in one of the empty rooms." It wasn't much, but it gave her someplace to sleep and a little space to spread out what few belongings she had. Better than sleeping at a bus stop.
"What about you?" She glanced over Ironhide's shoulder as best she could. "Is that your room? ....Um, the doorjamb's a little..." She winced at the crumpled metal, evidence of Ironhide's mental state.
A cot; Ironhide looked up the item and winced internally. Nothing more then temporary barrack furnishing. Probably the best Mrs. Darby could do under quick circumstances but surely, in all of their assorted materials on base, they had better to offer. Even if it wasn't entirely human sized.
He held her a little closer, carefully. "Here, hold on a bit." Bracing himself, Ironhide shoved back to his pedes in one long lurch that left a streak of red up the wall, metal shrieking on metal. A power exchange in a hip that was more cobbled together replacement parts than it was factory specs flickered halfway up; the frontliner grit his dente and waited the .03 seconds for the flicker to resolve before easing his mass back onto the leg and standing.
The door frame of his own room was crumpled, half peeled back, but it didn't keep the door itself from opening. Ironhide surveyed it with a tired optic and shrugged slightly. "Yer metals are softer than Ah'm used to," he explained to Soledad as he keyed in his code and entered the room with a slow step that wouldn't jar her.
There was little but a berth and a worktable in the room, both many times the human femme's size. Ironhide made for the berth, settling onto it with a slow ventilation, and then gently set the girl down on the cushion. "Here. That read as soft t' yeh, or is it too dense? Don't rightly know what yer tolerance are."
Soledad slid from Ironhide's hand to the cushion and just sat there dazedly, legs tucked underneath her. Her eyes stung from crying when she blinked in bewilderment, unable for a moment to puzzle out Ironhide's purpose. Even when the answer occurred to her, she had to puzzle over it some more, just because it seemed so outrageous.
"It's... nice," she said slowly. More than nice. It was like a fluffy yet supportive cloud that smelled like hot metal and motor oil - comforting smells. And it was big enough that she could sprawl out and not have her heels hanging off the edge. She could easily sleep for a week on a bed like this.
She glanced up at Ironhide, the question of "why" hammering in her throat. Instead she asked, "I'm not going to have to worry about you rolling over and squishing me in your sleep, am I?"
Ironhide reset his optics, running the human's words through again to make certain he had heard right. She thought... oh. Well, it wasn't exactly what he had been thinking, but... "Ah can set that, yeah," he said. He tapped his fingers against the side of his chassis. "Proximity sensors. Set th' parameters before Ah cycle down, wouldn't hurt yeh none."
He didn't bother to tell her that Cybertronians in recharge had far less autonomic movements than humans did - unless they were fluxing. Or how likely it was that he would, if he cycled down right then. Instead, he pushed himself back up, joints groaning, to retrieve a clean bit of mesh toweling from his workbench, warming it between his hands before bringing it back to deposit on Soledad's lap. "Here. Ah was actually thinkin' Ah could cut yeh a piece of berth padding, whatever size is comfortable for yeh. Be better'n a cot. If yeh've got stuff with yeh as well Ah might have some findings containers that'd be about th' right size for a chest for yeh - somethin' yeh can lock, if yeh want. Ain't right, askin' yeh t' stay in a room with nothin' at all in it. We do better'n that for our own, can do th' same for yeh."
Ironhide settled back onto the edge of the berth, regarding Soledad closely and trying to gauge just what the human femme's expression actually meant - possibly exhaustion, he decided. "Don't have t' do that now," he offered quietly. "Yeh can rest here, if yeh want." He cycled a deep ventilation, taking a critical look at his own systems versus the list of things he had originally meant to do.
Leave a note for Bluestreak and Jazz. Collect supplies.
Leave the Autobots.
Something ugly and tangible spiked through his spark, stilling his ventilations for a nanoklik as he rode out the sharp pain of it. He ached, in ways that his forging date alone couldn't account for, or the masses of weld scars and old wounds. He ached in ways he didn't want to examine too closely, in mass and spark and code, and without the driving rage behind it he could more easily parse the futility of racing out after a femme built for speed who would be long gone from anywhere he had a prayer of catching up.
Reaching down, Ironhide cupped one hand around Soledad, offering her a support to lean against. "Jazz'll be back soon," he told her tiredly. "He'll find Shadow, even when she don't wanna be found. Ah... was gonna head out after her," he admitted, looking away, "but Ah've been runnin' on a Pit load of nothin' for a couple days now, an' Shadow's got meh beat on speed even on a full tank."
Last Edit: Feb 15, 2013 16:21:20 GMT -5 by Deleted
The cloth Ironhide draped over Soledad's lap was surprisingly soft and warm, for all she could tell it was made of fine wire when she ran her hand over it. She tugged it close, tucking it around her lap as she watched Ironhide putter about and endured the occasional leftover hiccup from her crying fit.
"I won't say no to new furniture." Even if it makes me feel like I'm a new doll you have to have all the doll-sized accessories for.
"I am pretty tired," she admitted when Ironhide curled his hand around her. It wasn't a grab or a pin, he was careful not to even suggest it, so she let herself lean back, her shoulders fitting easily into the crook of his palm. His hand was sturdy against her back, warm, supportive. "And... yeah. I guess... we should leave it to Jazz for now." She scraped up a weak smile, tilted her head up to give it to him. "Jazz is little and sneaky. He can do the finding. And then you can do the hugging when he brings her back."
If, said the part of her that Knew Better, but she didn't want to listen to that voice.
Ironhide shifted back until his dorsal plates hit the wall, drawing his pedes up to rest on the edge of the berth. It was awkward, but he could rest part of his weight on his elbow, bracing the hand that Soledad was leaning against, and he had certainly recharged in worse positions for less reason.
Though with a very real threat of fluxes worming their way through his system, it wasn't as safe as he would like. Ironhide shuttered his optics for a half a klik, locking mobility joints and pushing surface sensors to a heightened level, then setting his own systems and protocol alarms to dip no further than a first stage rotating partial recharge that would leave one portion of his processor online at all times. Only when he was assured of that did he let himself 'relax', pressing a reassuring fingertip to the human femme's back. "Yer safe here," he told her, and it was true to the best of his abilities. "If yeh need t' rest, go ahead an' do it. Can get yer room set up a bit better after yeh get some recharge."
His field pulsed reassurance to her, invisible, intangible. He let his fingertip slide lightly along the ridge of her shoulder. "Don't worry about Shadow. She's good, an' Prahm's puttin' his people on it. Jazz 'n Ah'll be on it soon as he's back. We'll find her. We don't leave our own." He tried to smile, not sure if it came out more like a grimace. "Bet she'll be glad t' see yeh when she gets back."
Soledad couldn't smile back, her heart twisting once again at Ironhide's words. She turned her face away, pulling her knees up and her shoulders away from Ironhide's hand. Her fingers curled in the blanket, worrying at the fine material.
"I don't know," she admitted, finally giving just a little voice to her fear. "We didn't know each other for very long. I've never made a friend in three days."
Never fallen so hard. Never given so much of her heart. But while to Soledad, Shadow was her savior... to Shadow, Soledad must have only been a mission.
Ironhide shifted more onto his side, sliding down onto the berth. It let him bring his free hand up and around, to tuck the mesh cloth more around the human's shoulder. "Don't think she'd have volunteered for th' mission if she didn't care," he told the girl. "An' one of th' first things she wanted t' tell meh about was yeh an' that rescue mission. Think yeh might've made an impression."
He hesitated, then cupped his hand across the human lightly, just for a moment, pressing a silent burst of reassuring EM and mild heat into her blanket wrapped form in lieu of any practical embrace. "Yeh'll be fine here," he rumbled quietly. "It'll be alright."
Something close to a smile escaped Soledad when Ironhide tucked her in. I got your number now, big tough soldier man. You're just a big fluffy marshmallow on the inside.
It was warm in the shelter of Ironhide's hand, warm and thrumming softly with the strength of his - engine? Whatever it was, it had some serious torque. Soledad leaned into it, closing her eyes, and listened to his voice.
I made an impression...?
It was, of course, entirely possible that Ironhide had no idea what he was talking about. But - he knew Shadow better than she did. And she didn't want to push away his kindness, not now.
"Maybe," she murmured with her eyes still closed, all she could concede to until Shadow herself confirmed it.
"It's a bet Ah'd take," Ironhide assured her - quietly, because the human was, by all indications, cycling down. He set a passive monitor to measure the sound of her breath and respirations, checking online to be sure that the comparatively quick (to a Cybertronian system) cycles were standard for her species. Assured, he settled down himself, setting his own systems into a brief cycle of partition defrag and letting his primary thought threads cycle down. Optics dimmed, he turned over measurements and plans for human sized furnishings and how to adjust the wood construction that they favored to the metal that he knew, without increasing the mass overly much.
Doable, though he might have to experiment with a few different metals first - easy enough, when his hands wasn't being used as a pillow by a tiny organic femme. The plans were a welcome distraction against everything else and he focused on them at the exclusion of other things, willing his own systems into the lightest cycle of recharge he was willing to allow himself with something so fragile curled up near him.
Tomorrow. He could re-evaluate tomorrow. It would be enough. It would have to be.