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.
<< ooc - starts next day after "Negotiations and Guns" >>
Ironhide had gone over the data several dozen ways already, the schematics endlessly twisting and rotating through his processor, and had yet to find any elegant solution that begged to be worked with. It had been rolling through his processor tiers clear into recharge the day before and was still niggling at the edges of his thought streams the next day, through the remainder of his paperwork and a patrol and right on up to the block of time set aside for Shadow's lesson. Which was why, when she showed up, he had commandeered the table that he had meant to be laying another materials drill out on in order to spread out several small projectors which were displaying a set of vastly more complex schematics for a minicon frame.
Ironhide was in the process of inserting several more possible refits on separate layers when the door opened, and he waved Shadow in with an insistent hand. "C'mere," he told her, glyphs layered in love and a suppressed excitement underlined with a desire to share. "Yer gonna want t' see this. Never believe who asked meh for a custom job yesterday."
Shadow joined him at the table, drawn as much by his excitement as by his words, basking in the affection he offered so freely. She settled in beside him, as close as she could get without crossing the line to actually touching uninvited, optics studying the schematics in front of them...and then something she'd half-seen when he waved her over pinged for attention, and she turned to look at him, instead.
Scratches, nothing serious but sunk well into the armor of his forearm and covering most of his hand, as well. Not the kind of damage he'd pick up on patrol, and too deep and clean to have been made by terrestrial materials. Shadow suppressed a grin and returned her gaze to the schematics. "Does who have anything to do with you looking like you decided to study a human wood chipper by shoving your arm inside?"
Ironhide grimaced, but there was no way to hide the scratches and no amount of polish that would smooth over mesh wounds as deep as the symbiont's claws had cut. It was nothing serious and only moderately painful - nothing at all, once he'd cleaned it thoroughly, sealed it to keep the organic dust out, and promptly shut down the majority of his surface sensors again - and undoubtably looked worse than it actually was.
"If yer thinkin' there's on quadruped on base with claws, yeh'd be right," he admitted sheepishly. "Ah, uh..." he paused to reboot his vocalizer with a click, scrubbing the embarrassed static out of it - Jazz had already had a good, long laugh at his expense, with an offer of remedial symbiont cultural sensitivity training which Ironhide had dumped the saboteur off of the berth for. "Ah was runnin' scans. Grabbed him off th' wall. Guess Ah startled him."
Shadow could keep the laughter from escaping, but couldn't keep the amusement from her field...not that she tried very hard. She leaned in against his side, shoulder bumping playfully against him. "Just because I let you mechhandle me without any warning, doesn't mean you can randomly grab everyone."
"You know, I pick him up all the time, no problems." She reached up and caught Ironhide's wrist, trying to avoid the worst of the scratches. "I'm...kind of impressed he managed to mark you up as well as he did. I honestly didn't think his claws would do even this much damage."
There was nothing for it, really. Ironhide vented and turned his hand over, displaying the scratches that streaked up to his elbow joint. "Nearly took out mah secondary blaster feed," he explained, some of the embarrassment shaking out with the chance to explain. He twisted his arm at the shoulder to display the side seam of his forearm, reaching over to tap one particularly scuffed point. "Had his whole fraggin' arm shoved up under there, claws hooked on the neural line that goes t' th' blaster on that side - mid-range custom tight-beam shot, keep it as a backup." He shook his head ruefully. "Would've hurt like th' Pit for a bit an' been a fraggin' mess t' patch, but it ain't disabling. Now, if he'd hooked an energon line, THAT could've been ugly, an' Ah hadn't thought about how far under yer platin' he can shove, leastways when yer mah size."
Looping his arm around Shadow, Ironhide pulled her closer to both himself and the edge of the table. "Hadn't put a lot of thought t' his frame type at all, but frag - lookit this." He reached out to spin the displayed scans, twisting the image to bring Steeljaw's back into view, internal structures mapped out in translucent blue. "Glitch's made of nothin' but linkages. Ain't a solid strut in him, 'cept in his legs. Can put his rear pedes on his fraggin' helm - Ah've got scans, made him do it a few times just t' be sure it wasn't a fluke."
"Knew he was bendy," Shadow said, thoughtfully reaching out to zoom the scan of Steeljaw's spinal linkages. "Never got him to do tricks for me, though."
She'd spent enough hours turning Jaws into a molten puddle across her lap to have a rough understanding of how flexible he was under those thin outer plates, but she had never scanned him herself, taking a certain smug pleasure in being able to send him into recharge with no more data than she could gather through touch and observation. The scans fascinated her, giving definite shape to his endostructure. "Primus. How does that even work?" She zoomed the scan back out, tracing the elaborate interconnections that made up Steeljaw's frame, and said in a perfectly innocent tone, "No wonder he's so touchy about being picked up."
Ironhide vented, half exasperated, half amusement. "Alright," he mock grumbled. "Here, go on, have yer laugh." He pinged her the memory file; a short sequence from the moment he'd stepped forward, intent on his scans, to scoop the symbiont off of the wall via the cassette's flexible middle, and ending in a quick flurry later with said symbiont wrapped bodily around Ironhide's arm.
He paused the memory there, overlaying it with cybertronian engineering glyphs pointed at Steeljaw's head which essentially meant 'this end up', and another set of query glyphs pointed at the cassette's hindquarters which were easily rotated over 180 degrees from the former. "Y'see what Ah mean? He wants meh t' design guns for him - has t' be somethin' integrated, he don't have servos t' carry an external. Just holdout weapons, he said, somethin' in case he needs t' get outta a tight spot. Only spot on him that's got a structure base for it is his hips, but can yeh imagine th' mess of tryin' t' write targeting algorithms for a mecha that can shoot himself in his own fragging head from his hips?"
Last Edit: Jan 31, 2013 20:59:14 GMT -5 by Deleted
Shadow laughed, elbowing Ironhide good naturedly and pinging him with an image of a human toddler carrying a cat upside down. "Assuming I can get Jaws that close to you, you're getting lessons in the proper care of our feline overlord," she teased, tucking herself back in against his side as the most comfortable spot from which to study the schematic of Steeljaw's frame. "You're going to make me look bad, otherwise."
Impishly, she offered up a shark with a laser on its head and a machine-gun dog (complete with notations suggesting that stabilizing the gun between Jaws' audials would solve the shooting-himself-in-the-head problem) before deciding that, just maybe, Ironhide genuinely wanted to hear her suggestions. The possibility made her pause for a moment. "Hips wouldn't be a problem if he's just trying to slow down pursuit long enough to get into some impossibly small opening; mount something rear-facing, limited mobility, and he really would have to put his pedes on his helm to shoot himself. But if he's cornered..." She reached out, thoughtfully rotating the image. In addition to being ridiculously flexible, Jaws was compact, leaving little space to work with in the locations that would be most convenient.
"Forelimbs?" she asked before she could think better of it, flagging the area between his shoulder rotators and elbow joint. "Not much room, but if all he wants is to be able to shoot someone point-blank and run, it doesn't have to pack a lot of punch. He probably can't support anything with too much of a power-draw, anyway."
Last Edit: Jan 31, 2013 23:10:29 GMT -5 by Deleted
Ironhide rumbled a thoughtful note, neither agreeing or disagreeing, but his field pulsed encouragement at her. "Maybe," he allowed. "Think he's more worried about bein' cornered then he is about shootin' while runnin'. He can run plenty hard t' catch as it is."
He reached out with one hand to manipulate the image, keeping the other arm looped around Shadow. "Most of his front end's pretty packed - carries it all in his chest, an' by 'all' Ah mean all his primary systems an' loose bits for whatever he turns into - what th' frag does he turn into?"
It was a rhetorical question - it didn't really matter in terms of weaponizing the small mech and Ironhide shook his head impatiently to dismiss the matter, then tapped at the displayed rear pedes. "Back end is a lot emptier t' be stringin' stuff through, nothing but struts an' hydraulics. Power-draw's a weird one, though. See this?" He dropped another layer into the image, power feed lines springing up in energon-blue. "He's power efficient for his size, 'ceptin' this bit in the center, just behind his spark. Don't know what system that is, probably somethin' cassette related, but it's drawin' off th' lines that it'd be easiest t' run a feed to."
"Probably. He wouldn't need you to weld a blaster to his tail, after all." Shadow gestured at the neat clusters of microtools visible near the linkages of his neck. "Though I hear he has a decent surprise attack already, if you grab him from the front."
The overlay of Steeljaw's energy feeds focused her attention back on the question at hand; it took only a few nanokliks for her to realize what the anomalous energy draw must be caused by.
"It's cassette related," she agreed; it was, technically, the truth. "He has a secondary processor, highly specialized," and Primus, if that wasn't an understatement, "clocked high enough to have its own dedicated cooling system." And to carry the "ghost" of Steeljaw's carrier, but it was far from her place to bring that up. "Probably not something you want to steal power from, if you can help it; I don't honestly know what it'd do to him, and I don't think he does, either."
The larger mech huffed a sound of mingled agreement and distaste through his chassis. "Nah - that'd mean callin' Ratch' in an' then we'd all just be banging helms an' him fraggin' meh off tryin' t' tell meh how t' do mah job an' scrap." He hummed consideringly, spinning the image a few times to examine it from different angles. "Ain't gonna be able t' put anythin' solid state on him. Ain't enough room, an' anything that small'd be about human calibre - might do them some harm but couldn't do more'n take out an optic on us, an' that's only if yeh got th' perfect lucky shot in."
He pulled Shadow to a better vantage point in front of him, giving her access to the image and tucking her neatly against his plates as he rested his elbows on the table, curled around her back and chin resting against the top of her helm as he examined the schematics. The motion caught at him a little, a pressure sensor on his elbow twinging with a warning that wasn't pain - not with his tactile sensors dimmed - but a flag for a rough patch catching against the table top where a deeper scratch into his mesh had buckled the edges up. He shifted to ease it, then paused and thoughtfully rotated his arm, examining the scratches with a considering gaze. "Hm. What's th' smallest energon blade yeh've ever seen?"
Shadow considered, holding her hands a short distance apart, then moving them just a bit closer. "You thinking of packing bigger, nastier claws on him for emergencies?" she asked, leaning back into Ironhide just a little, relaxing in the comfortable press of plate against plate. "Something big enough to do some real damage?"
It wouldn't be an ideal solution - she would much rather Jaws be able to hit from a distance - but if things were bad enough that Steeljaw needed to defend himself...well, she'd seen what Viper could do with blades, and what Jaws could do with his existing set of claws. More importantly, she trusted Ironhide; given time to work on the problem, he wouldn't settle for the easiest solution if a better solution could be found.
Blades would, undoubtedly, be better than Jaws managing to shoot himself in his own head.
She adjusted the image again, as if that would magically create useable space somewhere that wouldn't make the symbiont more of a menace to himself than the enemy. "What about removing some of his microtools for space? Or would that suggestion just end with him clawing up your other arm?"
"Dunno," Ironhide answered, deadpan. "Why don't yeh ask him instead an' we can save mah mesh from gettin' any more shredded?"
He narrowed his optics, reaching to enlarge the image, and tapped the complex tangle of systems that comprised the cassette's micro-tool array. "Could supercharge some of these, Ah suppose. He's got a lot of redundancies in there, secondary and tertiary backups. Take out a few, run a thicker line. Still wouldn't be much more'n a practice level blaster, but yeh can take out an optic with a practice gun if yer not careful. Mount a stabilizer top-side of his head. Worst he could do there is..." the weapon specialist paused, switching the view to the video he had recorded of Steeljaw reversing direction against the wall in a space no larger than 3/4ths of his own body mass. Venting in exasperation, Ironhide flicked a finger at it. "Shoot off his own aft, Ah suppose, but it's better'n shootin' off his own fraggin' head." He growled, flipping back to the schematics. "Writin' that targeting is gonna be a pain in th' aft an' then some. Might be better off startin' with claws."
"I'll ask him, if you're, you know, scared of the itty bitty symbiont." Shadow grinned, cockiness followed by amusement pulsing through her field. "Assuming you WANT to give him better claws than he's already got."
Looping her arm around his good wrist in the next best thing to a hug, she sketched rough outlines against the schematic with her free hand. "If we can get him to give up these, and run that line over to combine with the line here, you could give him something better than a practice blaster. Won't solve the targeting problem, and," she vented quietly, resisting the urge to comm Jaws and inform him he was an unbelievable nuisance who needed to stop beating up her cohort, "that'll make stabilizing another pain in the aft, won't it?"
Ironhide chuffed softly, reaching out to tap and adjust a few lines. "Stabilizin' and targetin's gonna be a pain in th' aft no matter what. Just easier if we're stabilizin' on something that's already relatively stable - an' there ain't much of that on th' slagger. Made of nothin' but tiny movin' scrap. If Ah can't give him safe guns then Ah'll settle for givin' him better claws."
He leaned back, the arm around Shadow's waist pulling her with him. "Ok, bitlet. This is th' 'makin' slag up' stage of designin'. Start comin' up with anything yeh can, no matter how improbable. Needs parts we don't have, a frame refit we can't do? Don't worry about it. Just throw it out there, we'll see what makes sense in th' end. If yeh could design th' biggest, baddest, most useful weapon system a quadrupede ever had, what'd yeh do?"