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.
"No interest at all," Shadow deadpanned as she logged in. "Actually, I have some catching up to; I started a new hunter on the server, and it's going to be a while before she's as well equipped petwise as my Tauren is."
She pinged Jazz an image of her current game avatar: smaller, fuzzier, and rolly-pollier than the massive Tauren huntress she normally played. "Speaking of turtles, Pandarens start with a pet dragon-turtle. Sure you don't want to give hunters a try?"
"D'aaaaw, wookit your fuzzy-wuzzy cute widdle--is that an AXE?" If it wasn't, it was Azeroth's hugest dagger ever. Jazz dutifully admired it.
"And honestly, I do not understand humans' categorization of what's cute vs. what's not. I mean, small and cute I can see...most of the time. But the bears are huge. Furry, yes, and maybe cute to us, because of the size, but seriously, these things are massive walls of fur and muscle from a human's point of view, and yet...cute."
Jazz paused in the process of choosing alts, tilting his head back to look at Shadow. "And I dunno. Wouldn't be averse to some adorable hunterness for the sake of a pet dragon-turtle. S'up to you. You want a heavy-hitter to help out your new alt, or you want to show me around to all the low-level stuff?"
"I think humans think bears are cute because they're roundish," Shadow said. "Kind of the way they think scraplets are cute, with their huge round heads full of teeth." She shuddered a little. "And round is what they emphasize when they make toy bears. So they don't see massive wall of fur and muscle, they just see cute round thing. Or in the case of my hunter, cute round thing with an axe as big as she is."
Settling more comfortably against Jazz, she continued, "I already left the starting area with this hunter, but the Wandering Isle is one of the nicer spots in the game. I wouldn't object to creating a new hunter and running through the starting quests with you." She grinned. "I want to see how long it takes you to grab the flame out of Master Shang Xi's hand."
"Aha. Ahahaha, that sounds like lots of fun, if by lots of fun I mean that you're gonna laugh at me a lot, aren't you? Why you so mean, Shadow...?"
He pouted with expression and field while he flipped to the character creation screen, "Ah, see? Evidently it is only the MANLY pandas that are scary and buff! The lady pandas are...how do the humans say it?...STACKED. Primus, are those hips anatomically possible? And I am CERTAIN that actual pandas do not have mammaries that large. And I do not know how you fit THAT much hip into the hunter armor. Really, someone should take this up with Blizzard. THEY ARE WRONG ON THE INTERNET."
Jazz was just as amused as the next Cybertronian at upsetting human gender expectations (though there was a hilarious double-standard about cross-playing genders that made him playing a female not particularly transgressive at all), but he was even more amused by the combination of beard and long braid (complete with red bow) that he had going on his male pandaren, so he went with that.
"Honestly, the hunters could pass as Cybertronians. Lookit all the spikes on that armor. Reminds me of one idiot I knew in Kaon who had himself refitted with extra kibble and would knock his head on his own shoulderplates if he turned his head too fast. Okay, okay, I'm done making fun of the character models now. There. One pandaren hunter. Lead on!"
Last Edit: Feb 19, 2013 12:35:51 GMT -5 by Deleted
Shadow's hunter (who was, indeed, stacked and hip-endowed, though decidedly less spiky than her companion) did a little dance. "You sure you're done?" Shadow asked, with a perfectly innocent expression, while her glyph choices and subharmonics turned the question into something more along the lines of, Are you sure? Really sure? Completely positively absolutely sure? No, really, totally sure? Because I can wait.
The Pandaren stopped dancing and trotted down the hill to complete the first quest and accept the second. "Besides, you've been on this planet HOW long? You can't really be surprised that you're playing a wall of fur and I'm playing a cute bouncy little furball. I'm just surprised Pandaren females have hips at all."
Jazz thought that if Shadow was surprised by ANY female character having hips, that she'd obviously not delved far enough into the internet. Rather than traumatize his cohort with links to the relevant forums, however, he tried out his emotes. "Ok, my dance is TOTALLY more awesome than the caramelldansen one. That's pretty awesome, really. I'm gonna have to try that when I'm not, y'know, heavily invested in holding this couch down. Hey, hey, wait for me!"
Some mindless "here-is-how-you-fight-and-find-things" quests later, and Jazz was paying only cursory attention as they picked up another. Mostly he was still having fun alternating the "chicken" and "train" emotes. "You know, I have to give the developers credit for how much belly wiggle my dude has. I mean, I'm sure they just used the same algorithm as they did for the females' boobs, but still! Dedication! Wait, was that our quest-giver running off? Where are we supposed to be going?"
"I feel you owe it to yourself and to Rattrap to do that dance in full view of one of his cameras," Shadow said. "Run through it a few times, make sure he gets some really good angles."
Shadow's Pandaren had just finished sobbing and begging to know why in response to chicken emote number don't-make-me-hit-you-Jazz when they found themselves abandoned beside a lake. "We're supposed to meet her in a cave," Shadow said, pulling up the quest objectives screen. "Which is...over there?"
She returned to the game and adjusted the camera angle, regarding the cliffs around them doubtfully before opening the map. Their quest goal was helpfully marked, but unfortunately the map didn't have enough detail to show any kind of path. "Obviously, we've hit the 'run around until you figure out how to figure out where you're going' quest. Aimless wandering and accidental grinding, go!"
Jazz ran through "that dance" a few more times just for good measure. Having never even heard of this "shame" thing was, he thought that performing said dance at about 1/3 speed for one of Rattrap's "shows" would be incredibly fun. His hunter leaned down and made a kissy face at Shadow, just to show his appreciation of the idea.
Hey, it wasn't as if she didn't know him. It wasn't as if they'd never played together. It wasn't as if she hadn't BEEN THERE during The Let's See How Many Times Jazz Can Wipe Out Trying to Get a Vid of Him Kissing an Untamed Dragon episode.
"Right. Quest." Jazz decided that he was not invested enough in his quest vs. wandering around ratio to google it. "Welp, wandering it is! I am sure that we can find some trouble to get into along the way. Or maybe some places to fish!"
Playing with Jazz meant wondering why the programmers had never implemented a /facepalm emote, and also why they didn't play on a PvP server (though the answer to that was that she had no desire to fight other players, as tempting as smacking Jazz with an axe sometimes was). Shadow settled for being rude, which had enough "talk to the hand" to amuse her, and then poking him...which, sadly, lacked an animation, so she followed up by actually poking him.
"We haven't even been playing an hour. You can survive a couple more quests before you spend the rest of the day fishing, you glitch."
Last Edit: Feb 21, 2013 18:35:21 GMT -5 by Deleted
Jazz accepted his poke as his due. "So says the femme who an hour ago was going on about new animals to hunt and portents and brittlespines and tigers and really, come on. You wander all over the map looking for tracks and tracking tracks and LOSING tracks and flaring and training and I? I sit my aft down and enjoy the scenery in my stylish hat, with my comfy chair and umbrella drink. WHICH one of us is the glitchy one, here?"
Jazz poked Shadow back, settling more firmly against her side. "My chair is a very peaceful place. Zen, even. Much more zen than tromping all over the map to find tracks and then track tracks and then LOSING tracks and oy, with the flaring and the training and...pffft." He waved a hand even as he dutifully followed Shadow off into the panda-infested wilderness in search of their cave. "My chair, my pole, and my hat, all very comfy. Oooh, I can get a new hat! I bet that it will be comfy, too. Also, stylish."
"Hunting is doing things. Doing things that are not sitting. And I don't know where the fishing instructor for this area is, so you'll just have to wait before you get your pole and stylish hat."
They spent a little while wandering in entirely the wrong direction and being accidentally attacked by monkeys, before circling back to discover the cave in question didn't involve climbing impossible cliffs so much as going past a pile of rocks and around a corner. Some good-natured teasing and a brief battle against low level enemies later, they were off on another quest, this one involving getting attacked by monkeys on purpose.
"I may be developing a dislike of primates," Shadow said. She resurrected her hunter's dragon-turtle; the pair had strayed too close to a continuously spawning stream of hozen attackers, and the turtle had nobly tanked itself to death. "Let's turn this quest in and find something where the enemy doesn't drop on you from trees."
Jazz agreed that perhaps another area would be best. He was fairly used to dying a lot in WoW and generally took it in stride, but he felt bad for their poor abused dragon-turtles.
"Now, now, don't blame it on the primates," Jazz said placatingly. "They're just defending their territory! It's not THEIR fault that our quest takes them through their habitat. Really, it's WoW's fault. Coding them only to attack us and eventually be slaughtered. So sad." His hunter emoted how sads it was.
"We can't let it affect how we see them as a species, though. Otherwise, we'll just turn into Ratchet." His hunter stopped in the middle of the path. "Oh Primus, can you imagine Ratchet in WoW? I can't decide if he'd want to be a healer or not. He'd probably start out not, but then he'd roll one just because whoever was doing it was DOING IT WRONG, PRIMUS, KIDS THESE DAYS."
At mention of Ratchet, Shadow's hunter cowered fearfully, while Shadow laughed. "We could stick him in Bee's guild. They think it's hard finding tanks for raids now, imagine how much trouble they'd have if the party's healer cast holy wrath on them after every battle."
She set out away from the monkeys, detoured through town so they could sell some of the junk filling their bags and visit the profession trainer, and exited the town gate into a new area.
Where a stand of bamboo promptly caused the in-game camera to have a minor fit.
Shadow's hunter fell off the edge of a cliff, a fact that only became apparent when she hit the water at the base of the cliff and the camera reset itself, revealing that her panda had become tiny, green, and slimy. "I'm a frog." She swam a little ways into the lake. "Ouch! A completely unarmed frog," Shadow added, as a crane attacked her defenseless avatar. The turtle immediately moved to tank, while Shadow's frog frantically swam for shore, where it turned back into an only-slightly-worse-for-wear panda.
"Watch the water," she said, trotting back up the path to rejoin Jazz. "And the bamboo. Camera might be our worst enemy around here."
"I so wish that I'd seen that," Jazz said as he wrangled his own camera around to find that Shadow's avatar was gone. "Especially considering how many times you have laughed cruelly--CRUELLY, I SAY--at my own many, many...MANY cliff-related deaths."
Jazz's lack of game-playing ability was not about lack of reflexes, nor lack of understanding of the controls, nor a deliberate ploy to appear harmless. It was, Jazz was beginning to think, an honest-to-Primus GLITCH in his processing algorithms.
There was something about the translation of 3D knowledge into 2D controls that did not translate well for him. Even on Cybertron, only the highest-end, full-immersive 3D simulation games had allowed him to feel anything like a natural. Human games were exponentially more painful. The 2D graphics were always flat and hard to process, and the lag between his reflex times and what human technology could process only made it worse. Jazz ended up bumbling around mostly because he could not judge distances well and could never get the timing right.
Which was why he'd never met a cliff in WoW that he'd not fallen off of. Except this one that Shadow, for once, had fallen off of first.
Jazz inched his avatar closer to peer over the cliff. He groaned at the posts sticking out of the water, with a few pandaren apparently balancing on them or attempting to cross on them. "What you want to bet that there's a quest or ten requiring us to balance on those."
His pandaren cried. Jazz turned and started down the path to meet Shadow halfway...and promptly fell off the cliff.
"The pointing and laughing isn't cruel, it's educational," Shadow replied. "If I don't mock you, how else are you going to learn not to fall off cliffs and die?"
Unfortunately, the /lol emote didn't allow her Pandaren to attack at the same time, which meant this round of laughing would have to wait until she'd shot the cranes attempting to gang up on Jazz's frog. As she'd expected, they weren't so tough when you were on dry ground and armed, but the respawn was too fast to make clearing the area before doing the quests an option. Pity; this area seemed dedicated to dumping their pandas into cursed water. They were likely going to get pecked a lot.
Which did not stop her Pandaren from giggling at Jazz's as soon as he was on dry ground.
She led the way to their next few quest-givers; in spite of the water and the cranes and Jazz managing to walk off a bridge, the area wasn't bad, though they only managed the waterspout quest when Jazz set his panda to follow hers from one waterspout to the next.
Water spirit befriended, their pandas set out to find the earth and wind spirits as well (and to help an NPC give himself a concussion). Shadow considered it a satisfying run, even if they did both manage to die when the onyx dragon was on its last few HP, requiring them to re-fight the battle.
"First death in a boss fight. That's not bad." The dragon-turtle, of course, hadn't fared so well, and Shadow resurrected him for what felt like the hundredth time. Her panda sat down to restore some HP with a bamboo snack, while the turtle's HP slowly recovered on its own. "We've done worse in starting areas. Of course," she gave Jazz a sideways look, "the tauren start zone has a lot of cliffs."
<<A bit of quest-rushing handwaviness to get our pandas on their hot air balloon ride to talk to Shen-zin Su and swing this thread back around to Metroplex.>>