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.
Ratchet's optics narrowed into hard slits, dimming as he turned his attention inward to his scans. "Structural integrity is reading as within tolerable bounds," he announced a moment later, but the words didn't ease the pinched look on his face and his hand, when he put it on the femme's shoulder, was gentler than it had been. "I'll look," he promised her, "and if you want, when I'm done with the rest of your repairs, I can see what kind of cosmetic repairs can be done to minimize the scarring."
Which was the easy part, really. Ratchet exvented silently and took a moment to repurpose several processor threads away from critical triage, bringing up patient care protocols instead. It made it easier to keep the clipped snap from his voice and smooth his glyphs into something that, if it wasn't personal and caring, was at least professionally careful. "Do you have any idea of how many spark frequency traces I should be looking for? It's going to cloud your scans and the last thing either of us need is a mis-step at this point."
"Seven," Shiftlock replied, the fog in her processors clearing as Ratchet continued to set her insides back in proper order. "There's gonna be one more'n th'others. S'pose I shud be grateful, it'd be closer t'forty if I had'n been 'is fav'rite."
She closed her optics to catch a mental breath, finally able to let go of the overcharge of combat. She'd been living on it for a very long time. It was too much like the days of the endless retaliation, where she and her cohort had been sent to emergency mission after emergency mission with little time to fuel or recharge between. She had come close to breaking then, the extended stress pushing her far past what she had ever been intended to bear.
Shiftlock suddenly wondered if Ratchet was going see what she was inside, notice that her endoskeletal frame was far lighter and weaker than any combat model would have been allowed to have. She wondered if he was going to move past the modifications made by the Velocitronian bodyshoppers and see down to the welds made by the Kaonian medic that she had paid to illegally upgrade her ages ago before the war began. Suddenly it was as if Ratchet had stealth-cracker vision and could take her apart and expose all her weakness, all her secrets, just through the power of his optics alone.
Her optics shuttered back open, and she forced herself to remain calm...ish. "Don' worry 'bout cosmetics," she reassured. "Jus' get me back't where I'm fit t'fight. You c'n leave the scars. They're who I am."
And like that, easily, seamless, he was talking to a frontline Wrecker once more rather than a trauma patient. Ratchet shook his head "Yes, yes, yes - I've certainly heard that before. Medical prerogative - if it's a structural weakness that could compromise you in the future, I'm fixing it."
Better, by far, to do the repairs while she was on the berth - the alternative, as Ratchet knew well, was to beat his head against frontliner stubbornness and whatever glitch it was that made them define themselves by their weld scars (and avoid maintenance checks). Easier to do while the wounds were still within the first vorn, rather than waiting half a millennia to attempt repairs on top of shoddy patchwork.
There was something almost soothing to the medic in his work, done properly and to his own standards. It made it easier - now that his patient was out of immediate danger - to settle into a steady pace of repeated sequences; scan, test, weld, replace, patch, file, then move to the next bit and begin again. The femme's struts were overall sound - the cores weaker than he would have guessed from her size, with old traces of extensive body work done, but she was neither the first or the last civilian model turned frontliner that he'd seen on his medberth. It had been a less than professional job, by the look of it, but if it had lasted her that long then - short of a miracle and a fully stocked fabrication workshop - it would continue to do so.
Rough metal burrs and splits along her joint cups he could smooth, though, and did, erasing signs of forced transformations and wrongly tesselated joins. Her spark casing was a mess, the unstable scans from her spark making Ratchet hiss. Carved on, violated - he dampened his own field to nothing, a non-living sterile touch, only making certain by deep scan and fleetingly light touches that the structure was intact, and flagged it for more repair work later. From there he moved steadily across her chassis towards the greater mess of the transformation inhibitor, a handful of processor threads already running and re-running optimal means of removing the device with the least amount of repair needed afterwards. By the time he was satisfied that her struts and chassis were as intact - not counting removed plating - as he could make them, he had a viable plan of attack.
"Last chance to bow out," he warned her. "This isn't going to be fast - I can't afford to damage anything, a t-cog isn't something we can easily replace."
"And stay stuck in vehicle mode alla time? Slag no," Shiftlock rebutted. "I trust you. You're workin' fast an' your hands're steady 's a ship on autopilot. I'm guessin' you've spent a pit of alotta time puttin' wrecks like me back t'gether."
The femme smiled a little. "It'll take however long it takes. Dependin' on what uses th' commander on this base has fer me, I might be in here pretty off'n." Shiftlock really had no idea what to expect from what would eventually be her new CO - what sort of things she might be required to do. She'd long since lost any fear of the battlefield, crossing from brave to suicidal, and pain was a like an ex-boyfriend that kept stopping by "for old time's sake" long after the restraining orders had been signed.
She was enjoying the numbness for the time being, and exhaustion was creeping in around the periphery of her consciousness. She'd need to recharge and defrag, probably the latter before the former, in hopes that all the junk that had backed up through her cores wouldn't make her jump up halfway out of recharge with fists swinging.
Her thoughts returned to what he'd said before. "Y'kin fix anything y'need to, but I'm always gonna be weak at the frame'n cores. I was sparked a dispos'ble, 'n no one gave a slag about me bein' built t' last. Figger I'd tell y' that aheada time so's y'know what t'expect when somethin' in there finally gives out."
Last Edit: Feb 11, 2013 17:59:42 GMT -5 by Deleted
"I suppose that is a compelling argument," Ratchet agreed dryly. "At least if I frag this up you'll be stuck in a mode with hands." Not that he had any intention of doing so, but the a realist looked at the all the possible outcomes, and it wasn't beyond belief that something might go wrong.
Or somethings. A lot of somethings, but Ratchet made a habit of ignoring the odds and doing his best to thwart the universe anyways. He didn't always succeed - Pit knew Bumblebee was walking proof of that, no matter how little the scout seemed to mind - but the chance was always there.
The first incision was careful, micro torch carving out the clamped off powerline that fed into the inhibitor. Only once the power feed was severed did he begin cutting out the first chunk of the device itself, one thin sliver at a time carefully removed and dropped with a tink onto the tray beside him, though he held the first piece up where Shiftlock could see it with an exasperated smirk. "There - see? Coming out in pieces."
The rest of her words he let play over the portion of his processor not dedicated to his work, never looking up from the narrowed intensity of the space where his hands were moving. "Core weaknesses noted. TRY not to break things you don't need to - I realize this is falling on deaf audials with a Wrecker, but I don't have the resources to do massive reconstructions on this backwater organic dirtball. If you break something too large, I'm not going to be able to replace it.
"As to Optimus - he's not the sort of commander who wastes his team needlessly or uses them beyond their capacity." He vented, the sound irritated. "And if he did, he'd be hearing from me."
Shiftlock's optics traced over where the first chunk of the inhibitor was clasped between a pair of forceps. Gratitude washed over her expression. "Thank you."
She turned to stare back at the ceiling, so exhausted she was struggling to stay conscious. She had to stay focused and awake in case Ratchet needed her to be awake. She had to keep talking, keep thinking. As long as she could keep her mind on something she could force herself to stay activated.
"Y'keep goin' on like Wreckers don' givva slag 'bout keepin' themselves intact," she protested mildly, "But we'd be pretty fraggin' incompet'nt if we weren't tryin' t'keep ourselves'n one piece fer 's long as possible. S'just that, y'know, somebody's gotta step up'n deal with th' really bad scrap for it gets t'th' reg'ler army."
"We got th' same job, Doc. You're tryin' ev'ryday t'save lives. So'm I. I ain't lookin' t' throw my spark away s'easy - it's the most precious gift I c'n give t' evr'y bot that wants t' live free. I'mma make sure that when th' day comes, an' I gotta spend my fuel, it's 'cause I'm draggin' some evil summaglitch t'th' pit with me. I k'n take alotta scrap... so that's whaddeye do, 'cause if I take it, someone else don' haff to."
Shiftlock smiled weakly up at the medic as he continued to work, trying to look him in the optics. "I love life. I jus' choose t'keep bein' dispos'ble, so ev'ry other spark out there, past 'n future, can keep havin' it."
"From the medical viewpoint," Ratchet told the femme gruffly, focused on the piece he was extracting from behind her t-cog, "you Wreckers don't give a scrap of slag about staying intact. At least, not in my experience. Every one of you I've ever met seems to rely on medics to be able to pound out all the damage you pour onto yourselves."
The piece caught against a lubricant line and Ratchet stilled his own ventilations for a moment to leave his hands perfectly steady, bereft even of the vibration of his own frame, as he slid two hooks free from his opposite hand to clear the way. When it was clear he cycled his ventilations back up, double checked his patient's readings, and went back for the next piece. "What was I- right. Anyways." He vented sharply. "That's slag. All of it, all of that self sacrificing rubbish, it's nothing but Pit scrap."
He straightened, focusing on her sharply, his voice fierce. "Being disposable is complete and utter slag. Do you know how many Cybertronian sparks are left in the universe? I could give you a close estimation, but you'd purge your tanks." A pair of forceps, covered in energon, leveled themselves at her optics as he gestured. "We are, none of us, 'disposable' and I will beat that into every single slagging helm I come across, starting from the Prime on down, if I have to."
The medic held her gaze for a nanoklik more, then huffed, turning back to his work. "If you love life so much," he told her sourly, "then consider how many sparks you can't do a fragging thing to help once you're offline."
Shiftlock clamped her vents as Ratchet fished around inside her; she'd experienced it many times before, but nothing was as eerily dissonant as the feeling of internal movement without any other sensation to accompany it.
He barked at her, angry at her attitude. She could sort of understand why - after all he was a medic. Their whole world revolved around keeping sparks online no matter how badly slagged they were, so all their philosophy was filtered though that singular function of preserving life.
Shiftlock had only ever understood life through selecting who lived and who died on the battlefield, and this notion of preserving life through sacrificing others had become her world view. The only thing that had prevented her from staying and fully committing to the Decepticons was that she had never seen herself as inherently any more deserving of life than anyone else. Quite the opposite: being discarded so soon after her sparking had indelibly imprinted on her that she was worth less than everyone else.
Forceps were pointed at her optics and Ratchet continued to lecture her. It was a refreshing change of pace from her previous norms.
"Sorry I keep distractin' ya from your work," Shiftlock apologized. Her speech was finally clearing up. "But I'm so discharged that I gotta keep talkin' or I'll offline. Jus' tryin' t' keep conscious like y' asked."
She finally opened her vents again. "I know there ain't many of us left, trus' me. I'm well aware we're goin' extinct as a species. I sure as slag helped us along 'n that regard, all through th' war."
"Doc, I jus' came from a planet where th' resources are so low that when a spark's snuffed it means all th' other sparks can live a little longer. And the sick thing is... they're all gonna die anyway. Their sun's a red giant an' its dyin'. S'why they were all racin', it's somethin' to take their minds off their impendin' collective death. Even in th' fightin'... I remember there were times when the comm lines'd go down 'cause the star was sputterin', and no matter what everyone was doin'... they'd stop. They'd all stop and look up and wait t' see if it was finally time. Waitin' to see if their whole existence was gonna go up in one big hot fiery blast."
"Memento mori, Doc, for the individual, and the species. All y' can do is race until ya go."
"That sort of fatalistic scrap," Ratchet answered, the snap drawn out in a long sound that ended in a sharp pop as he extracted the next piece from behind her t-cog, "is a philosophy I will never subscribe to, so you'll have to pardon me if I don't applaud that sort of glitch headed worldview."
It was no sense badgering a patient with it, however - code blocked and drugged as she was, the femme was obviously in no shape to absorb a lecture, even if her helm wasn't thick enough to shake it off the way most frontliners were. So Ratchet bit down the rest of what he wanted to say and instead aimed for something a little less volatile. "Your chances are looking good for getting this all out intact. I realize you must be tired of your wheels, but you'll have to get a new alt first chance you can - there's an indigenous species here, organic, class three pre manned planetary spaceflight. We have a working relationship with the local government, but the public at large can't know of our presence. It's wheels or nothing outside."
"Y' don't have t' agree with it or like it, Doc," Shiftlock replied, flinching again with the next pop. "It's my choice as a free 'bot."
At the notion that she'd have to scan an Earth vehicle, the femme was less than pleased. She'd had enough modifications to her body for one vorn, and she wasn't terribly happy with the idea that she'd have to go around looking like whatever Knock Out or the Eradicons had copied to blend in. Getting her "land legs" back after all this restructuring and repair would put her out of combat-ready status until she could resynchronize her spark and body, and that meant breems and breems in the simulators or training stations. Wonderful.
Still, getting outside the base and back on the road was an appealing thing. That was perhaps the one thing about Velocitronian culture that she had welcomed leaving an imprint on her. The Velocitronian Autobots she had managed to speak with through the walls of her cell had plenty to say about racing and driving - they all but lived for the next Speedia even in the middle of a war - and they viewed staying in robot-form as something of an unpleasant necessity. 'Bot-Form' was the worst insult to bring up in the vituperation between prisoners and guards.
"Oh, so th' locals 'r plate-locked with us?" Shiftlock asked. "This ain't gonna be like Pova, issit?"
Last Edit: Feb 25, 2013 13:17:43 GMT -5 by Deleted
"It's nothing like Pova," Ratchet assured her, and if the sarcasm in his voice wasn't clear enough his glyphs were saturated in it, distaste forming on multiple levels. "A situation like Pova would require this planet to have a planetary government we could make a treaty with, and being aware enough of us and our war to have any kind of consensus opinion about it. When I said we have an agreement with the local government I meant the local government - the one which controls the immediate surrounding portion of the continent we're on. There's something like 196 independent governments world wide, most of them at war with each other, never mind anything about us."
He withdrew another portion of the inhibitor - almost done - and tossed it aside. "Class three pre-planetary spaceflight. The organic inhabitants of this scrap ball are utterly unaware they're not alone in the universe; they're still at the point of making up wild theories about it and sending out low range signals to try to catch anyone's attention. The alt mode disguises outside are necessary - there's a bare handful of the individuals from the local government that are aware of the truth, and part of our agreement with them is to keep it that way. The general public is to have no awareness of it."
The medic rolled his optics ceiling ward briefly. "In return, we have the use of this quaint base and some degree of basic supply requisitions - at least, what can be expected of a species at their level of development. So no, it's not like Pova - more like a covert operations outpost in the middle of a corroding sea of organic bits that you won't like when they get into your joints, and natives whose only claim to fame is some reasonably suitable transport models."
"Fun," Shiftlock replied, looking up at the ceiling as well.
"We're really in th smelter now, aren't we?" she asked. "Barely developed planet that probably doesn't have th' technological means t' support us, an' I'm assuming we have some kind of energon supplies or you mighta been drainin' me right now rather than gettin' me back on my pedes - an we gotta hide from the local fauna."
"I'm guessin' the 'Cons got a leg up on us as well in terms of numbers 'n' supplies, too."
She flinched at the sound of another piece of the inhibitor hitting the tray. It was purely Pavlovian at this point, thanks to Ruiner.
"Supplies are adequate," Ratchet replied grimly. "Which is not to say 'plentiful' or 'great', but we've had some good luck lately and this planet has some limited energon deposits." He vented, field waving a sharp glyph of amusement. "I'll save the salvage for the scrap metal I'm taking off of you."
Ting! went another piece into the tray. "One more piece," the medic told her, satisfied, "and then you can cycle down, if you want, while I'm closing up. I'm going to leave those blocks on for awhile, let your systems normalize without that inhibitor in place, run a full neural array diagnostic. Which involves a lot of you, laying there, doing nothing. You might as well run a defrag while I'm doing it."
"In answer to your question," he added, voice as steady as his hands as he carefully extracted the final piece lodged against the femme's transformation cog, "the 'Cons have Megatron's flagship, the Nemesis, in orbit. The disguises aren't just for the tender ignorant minds of the natives - we need to keep a low profile on their data nets if we don't want to bring an entire warship down on our heads."
He held up the last piece, wagging it slightly before her optics. "Operation success," Ratchet declared. "We should have you back on your pedes in plenty of time."
"Oh thank Solus," Shiftlock sighed, relieved. "Much as I like bein' on my wheels there's a natural limit t' that sort of thing."
She took the situation information Ratchet provided her and thought on it awhile. "Flagship, huh," she grinned. "Well, at least I got somethin' down here to wreck."
She shuttered her optics and began to power down. "Thank you, Doctor. I'd keep up the scintillatin' conversation but... 'm just too ... exhausted... "
She lapsed into power-down, taking that much needed break to defrag. Doctor's orders, after all.