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.
"I can't imagine why women would want to mace you," Soledad muttered, glaring darkly sideways at the vagrant. The smoke floated to her and clouded the air, hazing her vision, but the all-too-familiar smell of cigarette smoke was completely absent. That's what made everything click for her.
It's a hologram. Like Smokescreen's 'Miss Pauling.' This is an Au-
...Smokescreen hadn't reacted like he was a friend.
"Are you a Decepticon?" she asked, and her voice came out remarkably steady. She'd faced down Decepticons before. This one couldn't even hurt her. She could handle this.
"I knew it!" he said. His eyes were bright behind his sunglasses - odd, tawny eyes. He grinned at her and gave another poke of his cigarette. "I knew it! I knew you were a smart one! When I first heard about the fake ID thing, I thought, 'oh ho, this is interesting.' So I stake out Ralph's place a bit. Just waited. Figured something was up. Then I saw you walk into that shop today and I could just tell, yeah, this girl's got a good head on her shoulders. I am totally not a stalker," he then added a little more soberly, as if he felt it were important to stress this point.
Smokescreen rocked on his tires. Whatever he was saying through his muted radio was probably not very civil.
The man ignored him. He hunkered forward, laid one foot across his knee. The beaded pendants jangled around his neck. He adopted a more serious expression and lowered his voice.
"I'm not a Decepticon either," he said. "Whatever might happen, whatever might be said about me... I'm not."
He scowled and waved a finger through the smoke. "But I'm no friend of the Autobots either. I'm nothing, man. I'm a voice. I'm here to warn you: your Autobots? They're gonna get you killed if you stick with them. They've got bad things coming their way, and if you're there with them you're gonna get in trouble too. I don't want to see a nice, smart girl getting caught up in their problems. I don't want to see a nice girl getting hurt. Getting killed. For them. You'd be better off on your own, girl. You'll only find pain with the Autobots."
Last Edit: Mar 21, 2013 23:17:18 GMT -5 by Deleted
...is he serious? A total stranger in a bad hologram thinks he can tell me how to live my life? Dude, you are the latest in a long and ugly line.
Soledad could feel Smokescreen rocking underneath her in impotent rage, but she wasn't angry. Soledad had experienced anger before, burning like acid in her veins, so she either had to lash out or explode. This was different. This was clarity, sharp and hard as ice. She wondered if this was how warriors, human or Cybertronian, felt in battle.
"Okay." The word came out as a whisper as Soledad slowly lowered her envelope to her lap, but her next words came out in a normal tone. "You don't know me. You don't know what I'm capable of, or what I've endured. I have been. through. hell, and that's before Starscream grabbed me to use as his experiment. It is thanks to an Autobot that I'm still breathing right now. It is thanks to the Autobots' willingness to take me in and not ask too many questions that I have a roof over my head and enough to eat and some actual protection. And believe me, there are humans, plain old primitive little humans, who would not hesitate to do things to a girl like me with no family and no protection that would make what Starscream did to me look like a day at Disneyland."
She lifted her eyes to glare at him. "So I will say this once, and then if you ever try to mess with me again I swear I will find a way to hurt you - mind. Your own. Business."
She reached for Smokescreen's volume control, ice in her eyes. "Smokey? Let's go home."
The man looked at her appraisingly for a moment in silence, as if he were regarding her in a new light. The cigarette hung from his lip, trickling smoke
"Well, kid, you've got guts, I'll give you that," he said. He leaned back and laid one arm across the edge of the window. "Now let's just cross our fingers and hope you've put your loyalty in the right people. Don't you think so too, Smokescreen? How's your spark feeling these days, buddy?"
His volume restored, the Autobot growled, "You've got it, Sole. Let me just toss something out first."
The driver's side door flew open.
The man's eyes bugged in surprise. He grabbed at the steering wheel with both hands to prevent himself from toppling over backwards. "What the-" he sputtered.
A hand swooped down and seized the knot of beaded necklaces around the back of his neck.
With a startled yelp, the man was abruptly dragged backwards out of the car and dropped. He hit the garage floor on his back and groaned.
"Ow! Fuck! Damn it! Ooh, well, hello there," he said, one eye squinted. "I can see right up your skirt from here, you know."
"And I should be feeling what, exactly?" said Miss Pauling.
The man howled when she stomped one of her neat little purple high-heels directly into his nose. He clutched his face. Then he fritzed and vanished, poof.
Miss Pauling climbed into the car with a huff and slammed the door shut.
"I think I'm going to do a little experiment," she said. Her voice echoed with Smokescreen's own, spoken over the radio. The car rumbled as it started its engine. "Maybe see if a taser will disrupt a holomatter avatar. I like the idea of tazing the nuts off pests like that. That was not my diplomatic psychologist side speaking just there, yikes."
Soledad grinned, flushing a little as the ice in her body melted in a rush of pure I-can't-believe-I-just-did-that adrenaline. "It was plenty diplomatic from my perspective."
The Subaru pulled out of the garage, as quiet and unassuming as it had come in, just a normal car with normal passengers to all appearances. Soledad fiddled with her envelope, already plotting ways to hide it from Fowler if he was there until she could plant it with the rest of her stuff like it had always been there. Come to think, maybe she should ask Smokescreen to run over the birth certificate a few times so it looked older.
"So," she started casually, watching the battered residences float by out the window. "You, uh, probably can't tell me very much about that guy, can you? Did business with him or something, I guess. Old partner or Moriarty to your Holmes or something." An odd thought occurred to her. "Not your ex-wife, is he?"
Though Smokescreen's windshield wipers flicked back and forth a few times, as if out of a nervous reflex, the Subaru drove steadily through traffic and with his usual care, always signalling, always mindful of his human passenger. And when Soledad spoke, he broke out into laughter.
"No, nothing of the sort!" he chuckled. "Thank god! I think I would be destitute and living in a van down by the river if I ever had an ex-wife like that. No, I..."
He trailed off. Miss Pauling kept her eyes on the road, to keep up the illusion that she was driving. But the voice over the radio hummed a little in a hesitant fashion, as if the Autobot were composing his thoughts.
"I only have a hunch, right now," he admitted. "I think - I think - I only encountered that individual once, just a random meeting. I don't even remember his name. I can't go into much detail without breaking rules of confidentiality, but, well... a while ago part of my work for the Diplomatic Corp involved trying to drum up support for the Autobot cause across the galaxy. Nothing big, just lots of handshaking, friendly talks, networking - that sort of thing. And I think that might have been one of the people I shook hands with. But, I dunno. I shook a lot of hands back then."
He sighed glumly. "I'm sorry. I think you were the one he was really interested in, however. I'm sorry you had to go through that. I should have been scanning the area more diligently. I gotta say, though... boy, you sure put that guy in his place. That was fantastic. I totally punched a fist into the air and said 'yessss' in my head. You're okay, I hope? Can I get you anything? A coffee, a taser?"
Soledad grinned, pleased with herself. "I'll take a taser if you think it would help. And maybe a frappuccino." She peered out the window. "Hey, there's a Starbucks. ...Didn't we just pass a Starbucks five minutes ago?"
As they pulled into the parking lot, Soledad fiddled with her envelope. "Is that... going to be happening again?" she asked slowly. "Strange holodudes being - interested in me?" She felt her shoulders hunch; she didn't like that thought at all.
Smokescreen was quiet for a moment as he hunted down a parking spot in the Starbucks lot, apparently considering her question.
"I would dearly love to say, 'no, never again,'" he said hesitantly. He found an empty spot and expertly pivoted into it, narrowly beating out an SUV bearing down for the same location. He shut down his engine, and Miss Pauling laid her wrists on the steering wheel and gazed out the front windshield. Then she bit the corner of her lip and looked over at Soledad with an apologetic smile. Worry hovered behind her eyes. Despite her deadpan demeanour she was quite an expressive avatar. "But I sort of suspect that won't be the case. I have this lingering suspicion you've been singled out for... something. Some purpose. I promise you though, I'm gonna look into it. I promise. And get you the biggest taser I can find."
She clicked open the driver's side door and set one foot onto the asphalt. With a wry smile back at Soledad she said, "Want to go drown our sorrows in frappuccinos and giant ass date squares in the meantime? On me. Okay, I can't exactly drink or eat anything, but shush. Let me live the dream."
Soledad was able to show a smile at that, though Smokescreen's words weren't especially reassuring. It helped that Smokescreen was honest. There were things she (he, Soledad reminded herself, but it was hard to look at 'Miss Pauling' and think 'he') couldn't talk about, but he didn't tell her the kinds of quelling lies she was used to.
"Um... I'll take the strawberry. No wait, green tea frappuccino. And one of those - what are those sticky things? Yeah. Yes please."
"Get a lot of napkins," the barista advised, fetching the sticky treat from the display case.
"Yeah, you got any wet wipes?" Soledad joked. "Or a bib?"
Honestly, what was she even supposed to think? Smokescreen thought she'd been 'singled out' for some 'purpose.' Did she look like a whiny farm boy? Soledad thought it far more likely she'd been 'singled out' like a chick in a horror movie. The next time she saw that asshole in the bad Hawaiian shirt he'd be wearing a hockey mask.
Wow. Morbid much?
Soledad took a big gulp of her green tea frappuccino and winced at the resultant moment of ice-cream-headache. "I wish you could try these," she told Miss Pauling, sitting across from her with her untouched latte. "They're really good."
They had found a nice table on the sunny side of the cafe, with a view out over the street. People chatted at the tables around them, happy to pay them little mind. Miss Pauling sat across from Soledad with her elbows on the table and her chin on her crossed wrists. A folded newspaper sat on the table in front of her, perhaps to explain why she was not drinking her latte. Wisps of steam drifted up from the cup.
"I wish I could too," she said wistfully. She looked down at her cup, then picked it up and gave it an experimental sniff. "I can't even smell it. No olfactory sensors like this. Everyone seems to love them too."
Miss Pauling pivoted the cup around, then peeled off the lid. She dipped her little finger into the hot latte without flinching and tasted it. "Nope. Nadda. Maybe we could just try pouring it directly into my gas tank when we're back in the parking lot."
She grinned. "Oh god. I can just picture our good medic's expression now. 'You put WHAT in your tank? Roarrgh!'"
Soledad laughed and mock-cowered. "Nooo! Not the wrath of Ratchet! Anything but that!" As Miss Pauling laughed, Soledad leaned forward with a conspiritorial grin. "Wanna know a deep, dark human secret? ....Coffee actually tastes nasty. That's why we add milk and sugar and all kinds of other stuff to it. You're not missing much."
She cut a corner off the date square and popped it in her mouth. "Mmmm." She swallowed. "This is pretty good though. If you guys ever get taste sensors, you have to get one of these first." She cut off another piece and waved it at Miss Pauling, teasing her just a bit.
Miss Pauling feigned a tragic look as coffee's most torrid secret was revealed. She sat up and clutched at her heart as if it had been shot. The gesture was perhaps a little out of character for the deadpan secretary, but it was pure Smokescreen.
"My heart," she said woefully. "Okay, now you're just being evil," she added a moment later as she watched the morsel bob back and forth. She grinned at the joke and stirred her latte with her little finger. "Boy, watching people eat and drink things like that makes me wish we could experience that sort of thing as you do. Our, er, palete is fairly limited in comparison. And there's only so much you can do with energon. Imagine drinking Red Bull all the time and you've sort of got an idea of what it's like."
She laughed a little wistfully. After casting an arch little glance at the tables around them to ensure that everyone else was too busy chatting to be listening in, she added, "You know, if I ever had the opportunity to be a hu-, er, one of you for twenty four hours, I would go for it in a heartbeat. Absolutely."
"Likewise." Soledad lifted her frap to Smokescreen in salute. "You all are pretty cool yourself."
Understatement of the century, but "head-explodingly amazingly awesome" was a little too fangirl for Soledad's tastes.
"What's it like?" she asked, after a thoughtful sip of cool green goodness. "I mean, I know it's hard to explain something you just are, but you can at least sort of be shaped like us for a while. I can't be - you know." She waved a hand in the general direction of the parking lot where Smokescreen's true form was sitting. I can't be shaped like a car. "From what I've seen, you all aren't - okay, you're different, but you're not as alien as I would've expected if I were, like, watching a movie about you or something. But your senses are obviously different, at least, right?"
"Pretty different, yeah," said Miss Pauling in agreement. She smiled slyly and tapped her nose. "We have many of the same senses that you do, in shape at least- smell, sight, hearing. It's just the manner in which that data is collected and analyzed that is different. You'll encounter plenty of Cyb- er, people like us with enhanced 'senses' as well, like that damned Ravage and his olfactory sensors. And I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark here and guess that humans aren't born with inboard radar."
She grinned a little cheekily at Soledad. Saying it reminded Smokescreen of something, and from where he sat in the parking lot he hastily pulled up his radar and swapped through submodes until he had called up air map. He disconnected the beam from his last steerpoint and allowed it to fan the sky at maximum range. Nothing. Well, a hell of a lot of human air traffic actually, but given their proximity to an international airport that was to be expected. It was nearly impossible to detect a Cybertronian target alone in that slurry.
Meanwhile, Miss Pauling kept on chatting. "When you get right down to it, discounting the obvious differences in physiology, we're not all that different. Maybe that's just my psychologist side speaking. I'm sure that as a medic Ratchet could give a passionate dissension on just how different we truly are. Or one of the Cons. For all they preach about superiority over organic races I think you guys have got it a lot better off than we do. We are not a particularly lovable people, and that bites us hard where it really counts."
She wordlessly pointed a finger to the sky, and space beyond.
Soledad glanced up in the direction Miss Pauling was pointing, and felt a little stupid when she saw only ceiling. She understood her companion's point, though.
"Yeah, well," she shrugged, letting her gaze fall back to her table. "I can't throw stones. The stuff I said about humans being worse than Starscream? I really wasn't kidding."
She probably didn't need to elaborate. Smokescreen was the type to devour every piece of information, news, and gossip he could get his hands on; no doubt he saw the news once in a while. Saw flashes of the wars, the ecological devastation, all the horrible things humans routinely did.
It sometimes amazed her, when she thought about it, that the Autobots' leader thought humans were worth saving.
"I think you're plenty lovable," she added, quietly but firmly. "I know I'm biased, but I prefer you guys to most humans. Just how I feel."