Fireblade: Cat and Mouse

[Jazz]

Eastside Gillyros, Speed limit 25 miles per hour.

Like that's going to make a difference at the moment, with no Gillanan traffic on the planet, and any other vehicle that might be coming the other way is going to be either inhumanly good at getting out of the way, or bent on killing Jazz anyhow.
But the corners are nice and sharp-- leaving a bit of rubber on a few particularly difficult turns, hoping that they'll be followed to the trap that's just up one of the next streets.

Emirate Xaaron's orders are rather chilling. It's not as though Jazz hasn't heard the order before, given the order before-- carried it out.
There have been losses before.

He can't afford to be distracted in the streets, however, and the sound of jet engines echoing....
Wait. The jet engines are echoing to the north and west. Car engine sounds... are fading, aside from his own.

Has he failed to get the attention of one of the Mirror images?

Engine purrs, slows slightly, as another curve is taken at a different speed.
This bait hasn't been taken, he'll have to go back and try again-- maybe help one of the others.
Jazz isn't about to let anyone down this time.

[Oracle-3]

Oh no, Jazz hasn't failed to get the attention of one of the mirror Autobots at all, the one chasing him just happens to like to stalk her prey when she can. Which at the moment means running as quietly as possible for her above him, waiting for the moment that seems perfect before striking.

When he starts to slow and seems to be considering turning back, she takes that as her cue to dive, claws and blades outstretched as she drops toward her target from above. She always wanted to get her claws on one of the Transformers from that universe, but she hadn't had a chance before. She was quite pleased by this chance for that reason, if nothing else.

Landing on her target with a solid thud, she tries to get a grip with her claws, as much to anchor herself at this point to keep from being thrown as to cause damage. That part she could get to shortly.

---

OOC: Pouncing Jazz with player permission.

[Jazz]

What is the sound of one startled Solstice?

"GEYAHHHH!"

Jazz was so focused on behind him, and listening for persuit that he didn't even think about a flier. He should've remembered, and will be kicking himself for forgetting about Oracle later. Right now, he's hearing news on the radio, and not letting the arrival of an Optimus Prime distract him from the sudden weight on his hardtop, and the claws sinking into his pristine finish.

"Slaggin' glitch, I just got that fixed right--" Swerve to the left. Try to shake her loose. "You got any idea how hard it is to find 'cool silver' on this planet?"

There's a trap coming up. Had Jazz been followed by a land based vehicle type, it would've been so easy to lure them through it-- him going at top speed, vibrating the keystone loose, and pinning the second car through...

But things never work out how they're planned, do they? And he has to improvise, yet again...

Gears shift. Engine roars. Subtle cues to indicate an accelleration. A glide to the right.

If he's managed to shake her loose, maybe he can get her pried off his back with the first trap.

[Oracle-3]

Sorry Jazz, for the moment Oracle is clinging to your roof like a very determined barnacle. It is very possible a closer encounter with that trap might just change her mind, but for the moment the weaving prompts a snarl and a hissed. "What are you trying to do, make me dizzy?"

Her actual attempts to stay put are a bit more direct though, as she drives both knee blades into his roof, then kicks down with her toe blades and locks her ankles, creating a straight line brace between both sets of blades to lock her in place. If she stopped to think about it, the irony of a Seeker clinging to a car while the car tried to shake them off would probably have made her laugh, but perhaps luckily for her that distraction didn't cross her mind at the moment.

"Cool Silver? Vain thing aren't you." Well at least she would know what color to call her newest set of paint transfers, and if he really was vain, she was going to enjoy putting scrapes and dents on him. Picking on people's weak points was fun.

Her attention sharpened and she attempted one more rake with her claws as she shifted her weight slightly just in case she had to suddenly disengage and take to the air. She didn't like that he wasn't taking more direct action, when she knew there had to be traps around Mirage-3 hadn't managed to find. She had expected Jazz to transform and strike back by now, not keep running.

---

OOC: Further injury to Jazz with player permission and input.

[Jazz]

Well, Jazz was distracted by a sudden weight on the roof, and certain stabby happy jetfemmes that like to make him into a pincushion, and just happen to look like a jet femme he knows.
And if she didn't know that he was going to try to shake her off in faster vehicle mode, test how far in those claws were before he transformed.

She might withdraw those blades with the threat of breaking them when he actually began the transformation, but he doesn't know that for sure. And Jazz doesn't want them cutting any deeper-- not that she's gotten under his skin that badly.

“Dizzy? You haven't seen Dizzy yet--” Ow. More blades. He'd better try and get away from her before she actually turns him into a knife rack. That being thought, Jazz triggers his own transformation, and begins the complicated process of turning into a robot.
On rollerskates.

Going 70 in a 25.

Watching a wall come towards hi---

Oh. That was where the trap was, wasn't it?

The knives come out of his back, thankfully. Probably left big holes-- and the sudden added momentum as the Oracle on his back pushes off isn't going to help him avoid hitting a blind curve.

Only a certain amount of practiced skill gets Jazz around the corner with minimal damage to both himself and the wall. He had to practically lay on the ground to get the mass shift to turn the headlong rush into a rough curve.

Now the only question is... will the current rate of speed that Jazz is travelling get him past the danger zone of the trap?

Oh. Two questions...
Will Oracle follow?

OOC: Oracle shoving off with permission.

[Oracle-3]

Hitting a wall going 70 and out of control was hardly Oracle's idea of fun, and having her blades snapped off in Jazz's armor when he transformed didn't seem like all that great an idea either. She could work on trying to pry the silver car open like a can further after she saw if he was going to save her the trouble and become one with the building he was heading right for.

Retracting her blades and pushing up and back off Jazz's roof, using her thrusters to give herself enough lift to become airborne, she opts not to follow the crazy Solstice directly through his acrobatic turn, and instead goes up and over the building in her way. She could probably manage the turn herself without leaving paint on the wall, but why risk it when there were easier ways to accomplish the same thing for a better result?

That this incidentally lets her avoid the trap he had been trying to draw her into prompts a laugh as she crests the building and looks down over the other side, interested to find out if the silver car has gotten caught in his own tricks. The irony if that was the case would suit her nicely, though as adroitly as he managed not to become a road smear she figures he'll make it through intact.

If he was still running once he got out the other side, she would chase again, though she didn't think she would manage another clean pounce like the last one, but she was enjoying the game however it played out.

A good hunt and a challenging fight at the end were her idea of fun after all, and the blades in her fingers slid out again as she looked down at the silver Autobot below with a grin.

[Jazz]

Skills.
Mad skills.
That's what it takes to get through the maze.

And whaddya know, around 50 is about what it took to get through the sensor trap without it crumbling on him. And realizing that this Mirror Image is most likely going to be laying in wait for him on the other side-- yeah. Jazz should probably do something about that.
Like unfold that handy shield-- which did so little damage against the last Decepticon type that he went up against-- Not thinking about the failures, just the successes.
Not thinking about what he's hearing on the radio.
ThudCrash
The wall, and part of a roof are probably shaking Oracle-3's roost right about now, if she's that close.
Yeah. These sorts seem to be the kind to lurk and laugh. If Jazz had wings, and wanted to point and laugh, he'd be sitting right up--

Zot

There.

Jazz still hasn't canceled that forward momentum yet, so he's having to make a valiant attempt to not wipe out, while turning enough to keep him from going too far away from his target, and into another wall. His chances of hitting the flier are low.
Why? She's a flier, He doesn't really know where she is, and he's still moving.

“C'mon down here you seeker wannabe. I'm gonna feed those wings to you in a minute!”
Not exactly in a playful mood right now. Jazz still has the motormouth running, and will hopefully live to regret it-- but then, this is Jazz. He can't help yapping when he shouldn't.
“Bring it down here, you glitchin' piece of flyin' scrap!”

Jazz doesn't cause trouble. He IS trouble.

[Oracle-3]

It was apparently a good thing Oracle didn't decide to actually perch on the roof of the building, or things might have gotten a wee bit wobbly. As it was, she simply gave a mock admiring silent whistle and smirked as she saw him avoid the potential trouble he could have landed himself in. He's pretty lucky she doesn't carry a gun though, or she would have had a nice chance to take a few shots before he got himself recollected. Well, use a gun anyway, since she admittedly had one, but she'd probably be more danger to someone on her own side she hadn't even seen if she fired it, and no she didn't mean Mirage.

Tipping her head to the side to watch Jazz's tossed off shot go by, her head snaps back around and she stares down at him furiously as his taunt registers. Losing a wing isn't exactly a joke, and since coming to this reversed universe she's already had one sacrificed at Spinister's hands, so Jazz's threat does not amuse her in the least. In fact, it rather pisses her off and the set of her shoulders just about screams her sudden anger.

Skipping right past further banter and going for action instead she dives down toward the Solstice, at first glance going for another grapple attempt, but while she is trying to grab hold, it isn't merely to cling this time. If the Seeker manages to secure herself a grip, she plans on attempting to put as much power to her thrusters as she can and turn her flight path vertical.

You want to talk about wings?

Lets see if you can learn to fly.

Oracle would be happy to give you a flying lesson, but watch the first step, it's a long one.

[Jazz]

And each and every one of the Autobots who arrived on Earth in Jazz's world landed there in protoform. Crash landed. If the Mirror Oracle is trying to scare him by showing him a long drop.... she's going to fail miserably.

The silver 'Bot had almost regained complete control over his momentum when the claws caught him again, to drag him into the air.
That's not a taloned foot that's dragging him to his death. There will be no helpless flips in the air, that end with Jazz being torn limb from limb...

Jazz is nobody's idiot. With Oracle clinging to his back in vehicle mode, he had no way of prying her off, other than transforming; and no way to fight her, since his weapons are generally not capable of being aimed at that particular angle. He had to get her off, and into a position where he could actually use a weapon... or a fist.

“Smart move,” He'd be smiling if his face weren't covered by battlemask and visor, despite the claws piercing through his armor.
Jazz can now hit her point blank.
Which he promptly does. With his fist to her face.

“Frackin' scratchin' me like that. I oughtta beat you with your own wings.” Yeah. Go ahead and blame her for that one, Jazz. Not like you couldn't have prevented the scratching with a little effort of your own...
But it's not exactly something that /should/ be done so frivolously, and he does want to see this fight through to the end.

(OOC: Forcefeeding of knuckle sandwich with permission of Oracle's player)

[Oracle-3]

Well the purpose of dropping him had been more to attempt to damage him then scare, but it wasn't like she had bothered to get a description of his usual travel arrangements from the Jazz she had contact with. So knowledge of repeated crash landings, while to her might explain a few things about people from his universe, didn't enter into her thought processes when she was considering what she was going to do with her struggling prey.

And then he hit her in the face.

Her head snapped back at the force of the blow and for a moment the shock had them both faltering in the air before she brought her head around to look at Jazz again with a snarl on her lips. The same expression might have been mirrored in the optic now visible through her broken visor if it wasn't for the cracked state of that same optic. If she had been angry before, she was furious now.

Oracle had no idea what sort of echoes of the past she might be bringing back for Jazz, though she really wouldn't care in the least, in fact as angry as she was at the moment she might well make an effort to enhance that fact as she abruptly released her grip on him before swooping down to secure herself a grip on his legs just above the wheels in his ankles. This resulted in a rather abrupt change of orientation for him as she flipped him in the air before diving down towards one of the buildings nearby and attempting to slam him into the side as she passed.

Suddenly just dropping him to the ground below didn't seem immediate enough, she thought using him as her own personal wrecking ball sounded much more interesting.

---

OOC: Game of catch and wrecking ball Jazz with player permission.

[Jazz]

And there's the tank-wrenching flip in the air, followed by the catch.
It's familiar, it echoes with the fading memories.
And it pisses him off mightily.
Claws sinking into the bearings that keep those wheels spinning. It's not going to be fun to skate when Jazz gets her to let go. And yes, he's planning on getting her to let go.
Shield arm swings around to try and pop off a shot at the stab-happy femme. Maybe if he can swing his body up to try and slice with the edge of the shield. It wasn't built for that, but this is survival.

BAM
Brick and mortar crumble as his body strikes the first building. Bits of glass and shards of metal and paint join the rain. Good thing there are no civilians on the sidewalk, or they'd get hurt.
The humans were so fragile-
Wrong battle.
Jazz grunts as he recovers from the first building, only to meet the next one.
He's going to feed her her own wings with duck sauce and a blowtorch.
First he has to survive the beating that she's giving him via the finest architecture that the classy neighborhood they're flying over has to offer.

WHAM

“Gonna break-- ” A clocktower. Wow. Too bad it's stopped... and now broken. “both of 'em off--”

Ignore the static. Keep trying to fire at her.

Don't think about the paint. Don't think about the information that's being sent along faction radio.
Don't think about how two are down, and a third is about to join them, and you're stuck upside down in the grip of the seeker who should really get the title 'crossed with a sack of knives'....

Things are not good, and the only thing Jazz can do is try firing up towards his own leg, where the claws are jammed through the struts.

Perhaps they can be broken, just like armor.
And unless he has a little more to his own armor, the next building is going to warp the spoiler on his shoulders, and render him unable to transform. A harsh push at a slightly unwise modification to an internal generator, and Jazz can already feel the strain.
“You ain't nothin' but a punk.” Jazz tells her, just before firing.

[Oracle-3]

The lashing out with the shield is easy enough to torque out of the way of, a combination of twist and motion taking her just out of his reach. When he starts taking shots, Oracle actually has to be a bit more active in her efforts to keep him from blowing a hole in her arm and forcing her to let him go. Extending one of her longer elbow blades she bent her arm and twisted it inward and down, intercepting the shots she couldn't force her body to spin out of the way of.

Slowly retracting the badly cracked blade, she took great joy in smashing the silver mech into another two buildings before he got uppity again and she had to consider finding another way to reduce him to scrap.

Admittedly the entire smacking him into building things had been more cathartic then damaging, but honestly it was downright amusing. He sure had made a funny noise when he tore through that clock tower.

Letting Jazz go, using the release and momentum to attempt to fling him into the side of another building on the way, she yanked her hands back out of the way of his shot. An elbow blade she might be willing to sacrifice for the time being to smash him into the side of one or two more walls, but her claws? Hardly. Difficulty of replacing them aside, they were her primary weapons and she wasn't used to fighting without them.

He wasn't the only one distracted by the faction radio either, but as flighty as she could be, Oracle knew when to focus, and in the middle of a battle was the wrong time to be worried about allies. She had to finish her own opponent first anyway.

Her burden gone, she circled around above to get a better vantage point for when she would get her next chance to attack again. Hopefully that last smash would leave Jazz disoriented, but she figured he was hardier then that.

[Jazz]

It's not a surprise that she saw that last shot coming.

Not to Jazz.

Though it is rather difficult to predict how she'll avoid it. Dropping him and moving seemed like the easiest, but he should probably have realized that she'd try the building trick again. Jazz crashes through the upper floor of the building, bringing bricks and glass with him. The shot that he'd been trying so carefully to aim...

Gouged a few holes on the tattered ceiling of the building Oracle just spun him into. Didn't hit the claws, frackit. Once the world stops spinning, Jazz will have to try and change that condition.

It shouldn't take long though. Internal messages aren't lighting up to tell him that he's just dented his frame beyond belief-- he's actually just scraped up. The alerts are low level, and have more to do with tolerance, capacity, and energy consumption.

And if she's really out to kill him, Oracle will be hanging around, waiting.

The middle of the battle is not the wrong time to be worried about allies. It's the wrong time to be distracted by that worry. Which Jazz is not going to let happen-- Three down. It just means he has to think harder, and figure out where the weaknesses are, so he can make sure that it's not more than that. And getting to that point means taking care of the business at hand.

This seeker hasn't shown any sort of weapon beyond the blades. Perhaps she doesn't have one. Perhaps the linebreaker needs to stay under cover, and keep shooting.
“Where's Ironhide when I need him?” Jazz mutters, as he rolls to his feet, and pushes his way back to the hole left by his spectacular entrance. “And I said the dual cannons were a bit much—”

Through the hole, and up....

There she is. Time to think-- but not much.

[Oracle-3]

Circling above the building, Oracle was starting to wonder if that last toss had done more damage then she thought it would. Either she rattled his processors more then planned and she was going to have to go in after him, or he was playing possum and the moment she poked her nose into the crater he made in the wall, he was going to try and shoot it off her face.

Decisions, decisions.

Carefully landing on the roof of the builing, watching her footing since she wasn't sure how much damage she had done to the structure and she might have to take off again quickly, she slowly grinned as that gave her an idea. Of course, actually putting that idea into action would be a little bit harder, seeing as she was lacking any heavy firepower, and her wrecking ball was stuck in the building she wanted to drop on him.

Instead leaned over the side and went tearing into the building, looking for load bearing supports. She didn't know much about engineering at all, but even a novice could probably figure out the important braces would be larger then the less important ones. So she looked for those and did her best to weaken and damage them before yanking them out when she found them.

The pieces of rubble falling past the hole Jazz was in were a pretty good clue as to what she was up to, even if the sounds of destruction weren't another strong hint.

[Jazz]

Decisions indeed!

Now, playing possum probably would be a halfway decent idea-- except that it's slightly more dangerous than jumping out into the open and saying 'I'm here! Hit me!' The sound of walls being torn away is loud and close.

Is Oracle sitting on top of the building to do this?

Jazz switches ranges on his visor to inspect a wall that goes through the middle of the half-room he's crouched in. Load bearing, perhaps? A closer inspection says it's got cracks in it already – totally not his fault. He was being thrown!
So, if he could maybe take that one out, the floor above it would buckle, and bring down the house.... Jazz checks the settings on the cryo-shield. Checks the composition of the wall...
Oh good. There's metal mixed within the structure-- standard for some of these buildings it seems.

Audible from outside the building would be weapons discharge, followed by a loud '[glow=black,2,300]woosh[/glow]'.... followed by a yelp.

And then the building buckles, collapsing a bit faster than either demolitionist would have expected.

Jazz will be trapped by this, leaving Oracle free to assume that he's been taken out of the picture, right?
Right?

Wrong.

After accidentally setting the inside of the building on fire while breaking down that wall (and the story below it), Jazz threw himself out the entrance hole, bringing the aforementioned shield to bear on whatever may be tearing at the building.

Hopefully the sudden collapse will give him an unguarded moment to shoot at Oracle. Not that Jazz isn't leaping out shooting anyhow. He's got to end this soon-- before certain generators decide that they've had enough of the strain, and quit.

There are already a few quiet protests-- but if Jazz lets up now, the chances of expanding that particular forcefield again are low, as are the chances of keeping his chassis intact if that stabby femme decides to grab him with the knives again without it.

And triage is welcome news over the radio. Where there is life, there is hope. Or so he likes to think. But still....

"Bang, Bang, you winged glitch. You ready to play?"