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.
<<totally fine with you handwaving whateverness! Just let me know if there's anything in-quest that Jazz would likely react to! >>
Jazz's panda wept like a small female. He turned his head to look--woundedly, mind you--at Shadow. "You promised. You promised that you would NEVER mention Mulgore again. I am disappointed in you. Bitterly, bitterly disappointed. See how disappointed my avatar is in you? SO disappointed."
His field pulsed mock-hurt over amusement. It had not taken him long to figure out that being a tauren was just not the thing for him. Besides, the fishing hats just did not fit his tauren avatar well at all.
Jazz's avatar sat as well, and Jazz found himself sad that the interface was not advanced enough to let him sneak bamboo from Shadow's character. He nommed on the first thing in his pack that was listed as edible instead. "This is a pretty good start zone, really. It's pretty, and the quests aren't too annoying, and if it weren't for the cursed lakes, it might rank up there as one of my favorites. I haven't looked ahead...are there any particularly fun quests you want to tackle?"
"If we drop our turtles off at the temple, we can tame tigers on the other side of the island," Shadow said, her EMF slipping toward the glee range. No matter how often she played a hunter, she never got tired of taming new pets, her collection limited only by the number of stable slots available.
Health restored, Shadow's panda bounced back to her feet. "First, though, we have to take a hot air balloon ride." She led the way through the next group of required quests, toward the cinematic sequence that was the centerpiece of the start zone. Normally, she liked the conversation with Shen-zin Su; today, it seemed uncomfortably connected to her earlier conversation with Jazz.
Unease slid beneath her field as their pandas headed toward the waiting balloon. "Guess it doesn't take anything this elaborate to get the attention of a cityformer, huh?"
Given their previous conversation, Jazz had been amused by the entire plot thread with the giant turtle-continent. That the idea popped up in an entertainment game indicated that the humans had a bit of a thing about large, benevolent creatures. Though from looking at their mythology and religion, he supposed he should have guessed.
The unease in Shadow's field was plain to feel. Jazz tilted his helm to look at her. "Nah, not really. They've got sensors of one type or other in just about all public areas. From the one I was in, all you had to do was go, 'hey, mecha, can we talk?' and you'd get a response. Maybe a DISTRACTED response, depending on what's going on, but a response. You could use a terminal if you wanted something in particular, but it was...well, from what I could tell, it was about whether you wanted to talk to the mecha or wanted to interact with the structure. It was kinda weird, I'll admit, but I was only there for a little bit, moving through. Didn't get a chance to really talk with Stratus or any of the folks that lived in her."
Jazz split his attention between the talk with Shen-zin Su and real life. Shadow seemed kind of weirded out by the idea of cityformers. Which was fine. "S'certainly not for everyone. Were plenty of mecha who didn't like living in cityformers or ship- or shuttleformers, either." He nudged her gently. "You got thoughts? You look like you got thoughts."
"Not a thought in my processor," Shadow quipped. Just questions, none of which Jazz was likely to be able to answer...or possibly even understand, given his social nature.
Their balloons drifted over the island, back to town, and deposited them on top of the tea shop. Shadow opted to jump over the rail as the quickest way down, taking advantage of the fact Pandarens only took half damage from falls. "Next quest takes us to the side of the island with tigers," she said as her panda trotted up the steps to the temple; her turtle, which had an AI smart enough not to jump off a building, scrambled to catch up. "We can drop our pets off with the stablemaster and go tame things."
Mmmhmm, I believe that, sure, I do...., Jazz thought, but he rolled with the subject change.
Jazz, giving into the inevitable, let himself fall off the tea shop roof. He could get used to this being a bouncy panda thing.
"Oooh, tigers are cool. Are they funky colors like that one we saw in town? Or, like, regular flavor tigers? Not that I have anything against regular-flavor tigers, of course."
He obediently followed Shadow's avatar to the temple, watching another player trot by with some kind of insectoid thing scrambling after it. "Speaking of large cats," he said, "how's Spot doing? His leg healing ok?"
Last Edit: Apr 26, 2013 20:22:27 GMT -5 by Deleted
"Regular flavor tigers, but they have a different stripe pattern from the tigers in Stranglethorne," Shadow said, with the seriousness of a collector. "They're only available here and Pandaria, and we can't come back once we leave, and we can't get to Pandaria for another seventy-five levels." She gave him a sideways glance. "Pandaria has the funky colored tigers. We could go later."
She led Jazz around to Li the Tamer. "Spot's as healed as he's going to get, I think. He mostly hunts on his own. The real problem is that he can't catch anything big enough to provide more than one meal. No buffer for the times he misses."
Jazz's avatar slumped, dejected at the prospect of no funky-colored tigers for a long time. Oh well, such was life in Azeroth: no grind, no gain!
"That's a shame," he said, glyphs making it clear he was talking about Spot, not technicolor tigers. "How do you think it's working for him? I mean, given where he lives, how much game is there, etc, etc? Does he seem to be getting along ok?"
Jazz tilted his helm to tink! it against her shoulder supportively as their avatars trotted off in search of regular-flavor tigers. "Just wondering if there's anything we can do. I know he's a wild animal and not a pet, but...he's a friend. And you know me and friends."
"I still hunt for him when he looks like he's missed too many kills," Shadow admitted. "And when I can't check on him, Jaws does it for me...though he draws the line at actually hunting. I have an unconfirmed suspicion that Spot's last dinner arrived in a box from Omaha Steaks."
There were eight more boxes filling one of the freezers in the human-sized part of the base, according to Jack, who had apparently been the one drafted to put them away.
"I don't know what else we can do. He's fine around Cybertronians - you saw how fast he took to you - but we can't bring him around the humans, and even if we could, I'd worry he'd get stepped on. You heard about Jaws' tail, right?"
Jazz snickered. "The Tail Incident? Who HASN'T heard of it? Bulkhead is still terrified to MOVE in the same room as Jaws. He checks like four or five times that he's got all five limbs in sight and then backs sloooowly away. It's kind of hilarious."
Jazz's panda fell off a bluff. Jazz's panda cried when he saw how far around he'd have to run to meet back up with Shadow's (very much laughing at him) panda. Then he pulled a mob of...Jazz wasn't even sure WHAT those were, but there were a lot of them and they were hitting pretty hard. He ran, trailing enemies like a banner after him.
"Your mockery," he said to Shadow, smiling as she snickered at him, "pains me. Physically. Also mentally and emotionally. Perhaps spiritually. I am scarred for life."
After they'd dealt with the Whateverits and Jazz could spare attention for something besides keeping his character from dying, Jazz said, "Yeah, bringin' him here is a no-go, unfortunately. Don't even know if he'd be happy here. I mean, underground, nothing to hunt except for uh...humans we don't want him hunting. Doubt that Spot would want to go down in history as the first cheetah to start an interstellar diplomatic incident. Not to mention, I wouldn't want to explain the kids getting a little gnawed on to Mrs. Darby."
When Jazz's panda was no longer grievously wounded, they continued on in search of tigers.
"Though you never know," he said. "Metroplex coming...some of the cityformers were really good at simulating a lot of different environments. Some of 'em were built for offworld colonization, diplomatic stations, that sort of thing. Don't know if Metroplex was outfitted with any of that, but maybe he'll have some ideas. He's huge enough...surely he'd at least have a nice big space for Spot to stretch out in."
Jazz grinned, his panda dancing in excitement. "Spot could be the first cheetah ambassador to the Cybertronian people! Who knows...maybe one day he could be the first cheetah in space!" He mock-sighed. "Maybe he'll meet a nice alien girl with some genetic engineering skills, and years from now, their cheetahlets will beg Spot for stories about how he met their Auntie Shadow...."
He looked at Shadow solemnly. "You would make an awesome Auntie. For real."
Shadow chuckled a little. "I may have...over-impressed upon Bulk how very very wrong it is to step on our feline overlord," she admitted, just as Jazz's panda vanished over the edge of a cliff.
The distant, pained "oof" of a panda landing after a non-lethal fall sent her into full-blown laughter, though she didn't point out she couldn't take him anywhere as she would have before. Instead, she just waited, intermittently snickering, as he circled around; when he aggroed a mob along the way she gave in and spammed the /lol emote at him. If video game pandas had needed to breathe, hers would have been rolling on the ground gasping for air by the time Jazz's panda dashed into range and she could start pulling the mobs' attack from him to her.
That distraction didn't last, and while their pandas were flopped down, eating their way back to full health, Jazz turned the topic back around to Spot.
"Observation suggests that if his food wasn't on the hoof, Spot would be perfectly happy not hunting...or at least, not hunting on any kind of regular basis. But that won't solve the human problem." Their pandas got back to their feet, and Shadow took the lead, mostly in hopes of keeping Jazz from accidentally getting them both killed, but her panda stopped when he brought up Metroplex again.
"Do you think he'd give Spot a place?" she asked, suddenly serious. "It wouldn't even really need to simulate his natural environment, beyond sunlight." Jazz continued on, spinning out ever wilder ideas, and she finally rolled her optics, her panda making a rude gesture at his. "Yes, fine, I'm worrying over an organic and it's silly." She elbowed him when he got to Auntie Shadow. "But really, do you think Metroplex would let him live there? Because it would solve everything."
Last Edit: May 27, 2013 13:04:54 GMT -5 by Deleted
Jazz shrugged one shoulder as they very, very carefully negotiated a pass. "Might! You'll have to see how he'll feel about organics, but cityformers ain't cityformers because they don't like havin' living things around."
He leaned his helm back enough to she could look at Shadow. "And you're not bein' silly. You're bein' worried for a friend. That's a good thing." He nudged her with glyphs that made it clear how good he thought it was before turning his attention to not falling off a cliff again.
"But yeah...you should ask him, when he shows up. Never know...he might like Spot as much as we do."
Shadow fell silent. The entire idea of cityformers, of living inside another sentient being, of never having even the illusion of being alone, still sent a crawling feeling under her plates. But revenge wasn't the sort of motivation that led to a long life, and if she failed...she didn't fool herself into thinking anyone else would take over caring for Spot.
Spot deserved better than to starve because she was unwilling to approach the mechanism who might be able to give him a safe haven.
"When Metroplex reaches earth, I'll talk to him." Bright orange tigers were visible prowling the digital jungle below them, and her panda trotted down the slope toward them. "It doesn't hurt to ask."