Ep 1.5 - Back From the Dead - Closed

[Deleted]

“Prime! PRIME YOU BETTER PICK UP OR SO HELP ME!”

“What is it, Agent Fowler?”

Fowler had not thought it was possible for Optimus to actually sound peeved, but in that moment, lo and fucking behold, the giant robot Buddha sounded like maybe he was in the mood to run someone over. Fowler made note of this hour. This historic day. Maybe he would have made greater note of it, if he hadn’t been in the middle of a first class emergency and the nuances of the Cybertronian’s mechanical moods were of little interest to him in that moment. He was currently en route from Diego Garcia to Munich, the helicopter noise near deafening, making him shout to be heard over the thunder.

“One of our NEST outposts outside Munich is under attack. A certain police car just rammed the gates, stood up, and is currently attacking personnel. We need back up of the big Autobot variety yesterday.”

“Deploying Bulkhead and Crossfire. Provide coordinates.”

“What? The new kid? Prime, I have people under fire!”

“And Crossfire and Bulkhead are the only ones currently on base for immediate deployment.” There was a click of static and a chime, the audible signal that Prime had just opened a comm to other Autobots. “Bulkhead, Crossfire – Barricade is attacking a NEST outpost in Munich. Agent Fowler, will provide coordinates. Your orders are to secure the Base and eliminate Barricade if possible. Blaster, man the groundbridge and scan frequency for any sign of Soundwave’s interference. If it is more than just Barricade, I want to know.”

A chirp and a bad British accent: “Got it, Prime. Lookin’ for Sounders now. I thought Ratchet said no strenuous order-issuing for you? Doctor's orders." There was a buzz along the line that was somehow hostile. "Nevermind. I'm sure picking up a phone is totally non-strenuous. Heh."

Bulkhead. “I got Cross. ETA: thirty seconds if Blaster doesn’t fat-finger the local and send us to Siberia.”

“Shaddup. That was one time.”

Prime again: “Cut the chatter.”

Yup, the Bot leader wasn’t having any today. Fowler forwarded the coordinates. “Well,” he said grimly, “I guess that didn’t take long.”

“Clarify.”

“For Barricade’s back from the dead stunt to start being a pain in the ass again.”

There was a pause. “Yes, I suppose so. Prime out.”




[[OOC: Hey Lays, feel free to jump to the NEST outpost itself or the control room with Blaster manning the groundbridge while Bulkhead and Cross get ready to deploy. If you choose to open the scene to NEST, feel free to puppet them seeing Cade shooting up the place. I can puppet Bulkhead if you like. Let me know. ]]

[Deleted]

“Oh good, you’re here.” There was a girl, East-Indian, dark-complexioned in what looked like a police uniform, standing by the groundbridge as it opened. She looked over her shoulder at the pair of them, her expression vaguely bored, somewhat impatient, as though she had been waiting for them. “I’m in the courtyard,” she said, suddenly in Neocybex, the mechanical dialect ill-fit to her mouth. “I’ve killed some people. You may want to see to that.”

Barricade’s holo-avatar flickered and vanished.

Bulkhead turned a grim eye on Crossfire, already moving toward the courtyard. “You keep a distance. Shoot him while I punch his head in.”

And with that, the pair of Bots was off and running for the courtyard where Barricade was in the process of shooting up an armored truck. The burning chassis of half a dozen civilian and military vehicles lay flipped and blown around the Mustang, line of gasoline fire spider webbed across the courtyard through which he had, only moments ago, ripped through with the abandon of a mechanoid for whom stealth was no longer a concern. Several building were on fire, a flagpole snapped and run through the remains of a hummer. He’d clearly run someone over in the lawn. As Bulkhead and Crossfire came at him, the bloody drip of red off metal was the only proof he’d killed someone else.

There was not much left of whoever he’d struck with his gyro-flails. Great swathing lashes had been ripped from the pavement and the surrounding buildings. Occassionally a bullet ricocheted off the infiltrator’s thick armor. He glanced at the approaching Autobots.

“Oh look, fresh mesh!” he said, baring fangs at Crossfire. Reflector pinged him on a sub-frequency, an countdown to extraction syncing to his internal chronometer. Well, good thing he had everyone’s attention outside. Laserbeak and Reflector were about to make a big mess indoors. “Joined the Prime’s suicide squad have you? Well good on ya, bratling. I’ll make this quick then.”

He promptly dove right, toward the compound entrance, and opened fire on them both.

[Deleted]

“Ironhide?” said Barricade, dragging out the first syllable of the name. He ducked a volley of cannon fire, lashed with the gyroflail, the dark chrome whiplash of it ripping like a Cot-O-Nine across Bulkhead’s blocking forearm. Snarling, the massive Bot charged the black Decepticon, swung the titantic wrecking-ball mass of right fist at him, narrowly missed the Con’s head, smashed his opposite fist into the ground where Cade had dodged to only seconds previous, pressed the smaller robot back. “He’s not in time out or something?” Another punch, another ducked blow. “Last I saw of him, his Prime was telling him to heel like a good gearhound.”

Bulkhead picked up one of the burning trucks and hurled it at the Decepticon who did look rather alarmed before he dove out of the way, only to get instantly peppered by bullets. The beat of helicopter blades swelled up from the west side of the complex and a spotlight hit Barricade’s shoulder, bleached the black of his armor bone white, threw red relief on the dirty blood down his door panels. Barricade glared up into the lights, bared fangs as another volley of high power Sabot rounds battered his armor. There were soldiers filing into the yard.

“Slaggit!” Bulkhead didn’t like this human presence. “Cross, keep ‘em back!”

“Yeah, Cross,” said Barricade, seeing that the humans were attempting to cut off his escape route. “Keep ‘em back.”

And that’s when he ripped the helicopter out of the sky. Bulkhead open fire, put two rounds into the infiltrator’s chest, but not before the razor-edged lash of the Mustang’s flail cut the tail of the chopper clean off, hurled the helo into a tailspin. Swearing aloud, Bulkhead abandoned his fight with the infiltrator to run, hands outstretched beneath the falling helo, swearing as he narrowly snatched the belly of the chopper and prevented it’s slamming into the ground, narrowly avoiding getting his own face cleaved by the rotor blades.

Barricade transformed, hit the ground in his altmode and charged the gaggle of humans blocking the road. Now, a regular Saleen Mustang Extreme would have been more brutalized by T-boning any one of the military hummers they had blocking the road. But a Cybertronian pretending to be a Saleen Mustang Extreme sent the first hummer flying, bouncing backward, yellow sheets of sparks grinding up in its wake.

“Bulkhead, Crossfire!” Blaster’s voice through inter-bot radio blared slightly too loudly. “FORGET HIM! They’re bloody hacking the NEST database! He’s got mincons inside! ONE OF YOU GET OVER THERE AND CUT THE HARDLINE!”

Barricade was in his root mode again, tore the door off the hummer, ignored the bullets hitting him.

“Are you listening to me? Cut the hardline or they are going to get EVERYTHING!”

Cade winked at Cross, pulling the driver out of the wreckage. “Catch me if you can, kid.”

Then he transformed around the human and tore off out of the complex.

[Deleted]

Barricade hit the gas, accelerated, hit 90MPH, then hit the brake and swung right, spinning his alt in a complete one-eighty in the span and split second to face the Autobrat directly, driving backwards on the freeway almost nose-to-nose with the Bot. His highbeams instantly threw blinding bone-white across the new Autobot’s build – Ferrari Enzo, black, 12-cylindar mid-engine, false carbon-fiber frame, massively ugly squarish nose with intakes like a pair of nostrils sniffing up exhaust. Barricade wasn’t exactly a mech enamored of aesthetics, but he decided that the new kid was ugly and he would like to smash the smaller car’s godsdamned nose in just for being brazen enough to A: follow a Decepticon combat racer and B: think it was a good idea to glitch-frakking banter with him.

Barricade, Reflector’s voice in his head. We’re outta here. Calling for groundbridge evac. Bulkhead’s going to be after you.

Oh goody.

Driving backwards at speeds nearing 130MPH, Barricade’s sidesdoors splits open at the seams, two close range energon blasters deploying High-beams still on as a kind of blinder, he didn’t say anything. He just opened fire on the Autobot. The shots ripped up the road around the Bot, threw chucks of concrete the size of golf balls at 150MPH into windshield and hood, ripped paint off. Barricade’s rearview told him there were other cars coming up the way. He could turn around, race away, spit up the human and ditch the Autobot to deal…

Or: He hit the brakes again, swung, and slammed into the Ferrari so hard, both vehicle spun off the road, down a shallow embankment into the treeline. Barricade’s alien four-wheel drive grabbed the ground as his alt spun three-sixties for nearly thirty meters into the foliage, narrowly catching the earth in time to evade a tree. He popped open his passenger side-door mid-spun, dumped his captive human at about 40 MPH. Heard things break, hit a ridge that flipped his alt. Barricade transformed mid-air, hit the ground in his rootmode and took off sprinting into the woods, did not bother to check the damage of the Autobot, presumed him functional. Test of stupidity: would the New Kid give chase or tend the squishie?

[Deleted]

“Oh good. That’s great,” said the human, having recovered – albeit somewhat sluggishly – from being thrown from a moving car. A moving transforming car. A moving transforming car with a laugh like scrapheap falling down. If he appreciated being yelled at in robotic languages, he didn’t make mention of it. Rather, he produced a cell from a pocket and started an unsteady hike back toward the road, bleeding visibly and limping. “Command? Command I need backup to my location and possible clean up. Ident tracking Alpha, Bravo, Charlie…” As he relayed his location he wondered, briefly, how the shouty Cybertronian was going to do against the Decepticon police cruiser.

Meanwhile, almost half a mile into the woods, Crossfire was passing through a dense grove of evergreens.

There was a hiss, almost below the audible spectrum for most mechanoids. Then the trees directly to the Ferrari’s right ripped apart, the molecular-sharp edge of Barricade’s gyroflail slicing wood and foliage so cleanly it affected the velocity of the flail not even slightly. The screaming line of whip-lash metal snapped razor-bright at the new kid’s face and Barricade came directly behind it. His EMF, previously suppressed to non-existence, hit with almost as much force at the Con himself, a live-wire arabesques of hate-glyph frequency and kill-code snarling the air between the two Cybertronians immediately.

“Should have waited with the human,” he said, his dialect a nasty sub-dialect of Ianonian Neocybex. His right arm, not wielding a fail, but rather his arm mounted blaster, drove at the Autobot’s midriff. “Oh well!”

He discharged an energy shot at the Bot, near point blank.

[Deleted]

“You must be new here,” said Barricade. The slagger wasn’t dead – one point for the Ferrarri. There was something about hitting an Autobot that was so unlike hitting a Decepticon – that little noise in the vocoder, like they were still surprised by the capacity of the universe to inflect them with damage. Decepticons didn’t sound like that. The police cruiser bared fangs, optics flaring, snarling, all guttural engine noise and hate-speech in his glyph work. “Don’t worry, kid, I’ll make this short. I’ve got places to be and you’ve got squishies to clean off the walls.”

The Autobot attacked and Barricade moved – ducked the first swing, deflected a shot at his head, his spark. Counter attacked: took a swing at the Autobrat’s face with handful of titanium-sharp claws. The gyro flail snapped once, lashing a line of razor at the brat’s legs, directly at knee-level in a clear attempt to cripple the Ferrari-bot before leaping back and opening fire. Reflector fed him a status update, relayed a partial completion of objective and immediate evac to groundbridge extraction while Barricade charged and attempted to rip out the other Cybertronian’s main fuel with his bare hands.

“I thought you’d stay with the human,” he said, as if commenting on the weather. “That not a priority for you, Bot?”

[Deleted]

Plasma rounds were nasty. Part of the reason Barricade favored their usage when he could afford it. He was familiar, then, with the acid and sulphuric burn of the stuff when Crossfire’s final defiant shot at his face nearly ripped his head apart. Faster than one might imagine possible for a fifteen-foot robot, Barricade jerked left, knocked the barrel right, and missed losing important pieces of his cranial case. He pinned Crossfire’s gunarm in the dirt, straddling the downed Bot, his other hand clamping around the mech’s throat cabling and digging into the alloy, sparks flashing yellow between his claws.

The fusion burn across his optics was briefly blinding, pain and the chemical ozone stench of his own burning paintjob – almost overwhelming the raw energon fumes Cross was hemorrhaging down the front of his chest plates. Optics fritzed, shoulder and neck scorched, Barricade supposed he was going to forego shooting the little glitchfrakker in the head and do him the disservice of letting him bleed out into his own sparkchamber. Chrome fangs caught the blue light off Crossfire’s optics, the grind of metal almost drowning out the Decepticon’s low murmur:

“Lights out, Bot.”

“Heads up, Con!”

Bulkhead, contrary to what his size suggested, could be quite speedy quick when he wanted to. Barricade narrowly missed having the right side of his fucking body crushed like a soda can when the wrecking ball fist of the Wrecker plowed into his shoulder. He hit the dirt, rolling away, his shoulder now scorched, armor buckled slightly, and hurting like a glitchfrakker. Bulkhead, now standing between Cade and the fallen Autobot, opened fire on the police cruiser who supposed he could afford to not hang around. Ducking energon rounds, Cade saluted the frontliner before diving into his alt mode and racing away, the roar of his alien engines fading away into the distance.

“Fragger,” said Bulkhead. “Hey, kid, you okay?” He knelt down, EM field hitching a bit at the sight of the damage. “That looks bad. Ratchet? It’s Bulkhead. Crossfire’s down. Yeah, it was Barricade. Yes, I’ll punt his head a mile next time I see him, but I need a groundbridge stat. Kid? Hey, talk to me.”