Pursuit Intercepted

[Oracle-3]

Coming out of the From the Dark Side of the Looking Glass thread chasing after Needlenose.


Following Needlenose wasn't all that difficult, even though he was quite a way ahead of her. That being said, she wasn't gaining any ground at the moment either, even though the other jet seemed to be staving off a collision with the ground possibly from sheer willpower. With the pain in her optics making her feel rather vicious about the whole situation, Oracle was more then willing to pursue the order to "Bring that idiot down" with vigor to spite all of that.

While focused on her prey in the distance, she's also not stupid enough to totally lose situational awareness. Even for her doing something could easily result in a serious hurting. Considering her usual approach to things, that was probably a lesson learned the hard way, but it isn't one she cares to learn again.

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(OOC:Thread set up to allow Spinister to intercept Oracle-3, she isn't going to reach Needlenose which is why this isn't posted in Rendezvous.)

[Spinister]

One: you lock the target
Two: you bait the line
Three: you slowly spread the net
And four: you catch the man!

Belgian electronica. Spinister would claim this is Needlenose's fault somehow, but the band was likely too obscure for the jet to notice. Shockwave had no orders for Spinister, because Shockwave cannot have orders for Spinister. Spinister gets his orders from Starscream or from himself. So it is Needlenose's fault that Spinister hauled out and stationed himself in a forest.

In fact, he hauled out as soon as things started to go strangely for Needlenose. Spinister isn't fast like jets are, just fast for a helicopter and he needs a head start.

So when Needlenose's tail comes flying above, Spinister uses that head starts to line up with Hairsplitter, mounted on one of his gun platforms. The helicopter stays under tree cover, in the small clearing caused by a river. It makes it rather hard to see him, especially given the dark, but he can see the jet quite luridly. Spinister dreams in infrared. He shoots to kill.

Oracle might find that peculiar. The Spinister she knows very pointedly never shoots to kill.

[Oracle-3]

Ironically the fact that Oracle can't see Spinister is probably what allows her to avoid the shot from below with only a light singe across the side of her plating. Doesn't make that close call any less painful, but it's a lot better then getting shot through the center like the shot had been aimed in the first place. Oracle is very against getting perforated like that. Makes things like surviving a bit on the difficult side.

It only takes her a moment to realign her priorities with taking out whoever is shooting at her instead of trying to catch up with Needlenose. First, it looks like Needlenose is more likely to crash then make it to safety which means someone can collect the pieces in a bit, and second, leaving someone trying to kill her in one piece is very much against her principles. Well and against good sense, but she never claimed she used logic for many of her decisions.

Twisting herself through a corkscrew turn, she followed the line of fire from the shot back towards the gunner responsible. As near as she could tell it looked like whoever it was decided to use the trees as cover so between that and the darkness she needed to get closer before she could get a good look at them.

[Spinister]

As soon as he fires, Spinister's moving. A reasonably intelligent enemy can follow the line of a shot back to its source. Spinister would like to be able to manage one shot, one kill, but for all those times where it's several shots, one kill, moving is a good idea.

Helicopters are supposed to be noisy. Spinister defies expectations in many ways, and in the dark of the night, he is as the whisper of the wind rustling through the leaves.

The heat signature of his target indicates that it is drawing nearer. He briefly swivels, pivoting around his main rotor and brings his tail boom down to pop is nose up to take another shot with hairsplitter at what the heat signature would indicate to be to the core of the target.

Then Spinister is moving again, off to shelter behind another patch of trees and to see if his target will dare drawing yet nearer, if his shot will be true and end the enemy, or if he will force a retreat.

[Oracle-3]

Arriving at the location she thought the shot came from, Oracle is only mildly surprised to find no one there. Considering the accuracy of the aim, whoever had been responsible was more then just some idiot with a gun, though that narrowed the field of opponents less then she liked. The fact that as far as she could tell it was supposed to be a kill shot narrowed things further, but not enough. This wasn't going to be easy.

Sliding back out of the clearing and above the tree line, Oracle started circling the area and carefully watching for another shot coming from the trees below her. If she was fast enough, she might be able to track the shooter back before they moved next time. Well, fast and lucky.

Might be time to add fuel to the fire though, if she could taunt whoever was down there into making a mistake, things would go easier. Opening a local general frequency she let a bit of her impatience slip into her voice. //Can we get this over with? I've got a jet to track down and pull the wings off of.// The fact that a Seeker wanted to pull the wings off a jet was maybe a bit morbid, but Oracle was more then slightly ticked off at this point.

[Spinister]

There is no response to the taunt, only the nighttime sounds of insects chirping and the low, eerie calls of nighttime predators slipping through the air like tiny stealth bombers.

Spinister does not respond to taunts. Talk is cheap, and if the enemy has radio telemetry capacities, he certainly does not want to give his position away. Spinister is no way chatty or friendly, and he certainly isn't stupid.

Pulling off Needlenose's wings? That son of a – Singe interjects into his mind, That's a broad. It's the voice – daughter of a unlicensed factory! Whatever, she's dead. No one so much as thinks about touching his Needlenose that way.

Whoever this is can dodge his shots. Spinister is a sniper. He can hit a target mere microns high from two miles away. That fact that he is hitting nothing vital on a much larger target is frustrating, to say the least. He hasn't even used ballistic-based weaponry, which could theoretically be dodged if sighted, as that only travels a bit faster than sound. He used a laser. By the time you see laser light, it's already there, and the sound will find you staring down a large, wet hole.

Preternatural?

They'd say Spinister is preternatural for being a soundless helicopter. He lines up another shot with Hairsplitter, and he moves. Spinister can play cat and mouse all night long and into the dawn, but it seems his prey's patience already wears thin.

[Oracle-3]

To be honest, Oracle wasn't expecting a response to her taunt. Well not one in words anyway, she was mainly hoping for a shot taken out of anger instead of calculation. Unfortunately it didn't look like she was going to be getting one of those either.

She was itching to either go head to head with her opponent here or go after Needlenose soon, since while she could be patient if she really had to, no one would ever say it was her strong suit. Additionally, even with her ability, waiting for someone else to take a shot at her when she knew it was coming wasn't exactly the most comfortable of feelings either. Painting a target on herself might be a viable tactic for her to use, but that didn't make it any less nerve wracking.

Luckily for her sometimes slightly frayed sanity it didn't take that much longer before she saw another shot lancing out of the darkness toward her. Of course this ended up presenting her with something of a frustrating choice. She could either dodge out of the way of the shot and by the time she got to the shooter's current location he was likely to have moved on again and the game of tag would continue, or she could only partially dodge the shot and have a potential chance at a little payback.

Choices, choices.

In the end it really wasn't much of a decision. Armor plating could be fixed once Perceptor had a free moment, but the sooner she caught up to the sniper the sooner she could get on with things. She didn't really feel like giving him any more free shots either. That said, Oracle twisted to the side just far enough to let the shot gouge a line across her side opposite the previous scorch mark, while she dove towards where Spinister seemed to be hiding. Transforming as she got close to his suspected location, she extended her fingertip blades and hoped for delivering at least a few nice gouges even if she didn't get the grapple she was hoping for. Well, that and hoping not to make a fool of herself if he had already moved. Pouncing a tree would be rather embarrassing after all.

[Spinister]

Enemies generally do not make Spinister angry. He is by nature a cold machine, and if he is not emotionless, it is not for lack of trying. Enemies may frustrate him, but he is mostly annoyed with himself, with his own inadequacies. No, it takes someone he trusts to anger Spinister. He won't let an enemy have the advantage of getting his dander up.

However, since the Seeker has finally found him, he rather hurriedly transforms, trying to get his fragile rotor blades into his back, a safer place. The downside of this is that his chest is raked before he hits the dirt.

Spinister does not like melee. Melee is for people like Bludgeon, Stranglehold, and Octopunch. However, he has a very good way of trying to deter people from engaging him in melee. Scrambling up into a sitting pose, he takes Singe into his hand and opens with the flamethrower, cranked up to 3200 degrees and aimed at the Seeker's face.

[Oracle-3]

Oracle was glad certain things had become almost automatic reactions when her blades dragged across her target at the same time she managed to get an actual look at him for the first time. Of all the people she might have been expecting to find at the end of her fingers, Spinister was pretty low on the list. He wasn't someone she would normally think of when she had ducked more then one attempt to put a hole through her. Something very odd was going on since according to his file, he didn't do that kind of thing. //What the frag Spinister? When did you grow a spine?//

Then she was busy dodging. No matter how surprised at the situation she was, potentially getting blasted in the face with a flamethrower was a really good incentive to get out of the line of fire. If she had been more confident in the situation she would have tried for a grab at Singe, but at the moment playing careful until she knew what was going on made sense even to her. As the flamethrower came up she was dodging down and sideways in an attempt to get out of the direct line of fire and set herself up for a better attack vector. Unfortunately for her, having never fought Spinister before she didn't realize all she had done was set him up for a better shot next time as well.

[Spinister]

Spinister is again silent. He doesn't need to grow a spine. That's for Pretender shells that are still developing. He takes up Hairsplitter in his other hand and slams the two Nebulan weapons together to form one super-weapon. As if Singe wasn't bad enough already, he's now a turbo-boosted flamethrower.

Spinister snaps the combined gun around and squeezes the trigger, aiming for her middle. Make a move, jet-glitch. Those extremities could use a smelting.

[Oracle-3]

It hits Oracle even as she starts to move, that this is going to seriously hurt. There was more then one way to get out of her current situation, though the options really boiled down to exactly how much of her dignity she was going to have left when she turned tail and ran. Not a welcome dilemma she found herself in at all, though if she was being honest it was mostly her fault for getting cocky in the first place.

Gritting her teeth she slid sideways and arched her body around as quickly as she could, but she still couldn't fully manage to stifle her howl of pain as she felt the flame curl around the end of her wing before basically reducing it to slag all the way down to just behind where her arm would normally hang in front of it. A fliers wings had to be sensitive to allow them to fly, and right now all that resulted in was an extra measure of torment for her, but it was better then trying to have the circuitry and housings encasing the blades in her arms and hands replaced.

Even as she was trying to tamp down the needles of agony lancing through her, Oracle lashed out at the cause of her pain, attempting to sink her fingers into his armor and tear the circuits underneath. Hopefully she could even possibly remove a piece if she could get a good enough grip. That was something of her last hurrah as she prepared to make a break from the area and get under cover as soon as she could. She had definitely been the loser of this encounter, but hopefully she would inflict enough damage before she ran not to seem like too easy a future target. After all, something very odd was going on here.

[Spinister]

Getting cocky and getting killed are close synonyms, in Spinister's book. He strives to avoid both, treating every enemy as dangerous unless proven otherwise.

Her talons rake into his already damaged chest, which now looks more the colour of exposed circuitry and internal struts and than pink. She likely comes away with a fistful of pink armour and circuitry, if she so desires a trophy. Spinister will need to cap off the worst of the damage and slap some special pink Duct tape over the gaping hole rather shortly, if he wishes to assist Duskwing and Skystrike or help guard Needlenose.

Spinister makes a quiet noise perhaps something like a 'she-agh!', being of the comics as he is. He then attempts to blow her away again, aiming for the middle of her torso. Stupid Seekers, doing melee. It's a great way to get shot in the cockpit!

[Oracle-3]

Luckily for Oracle, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. And apparently high powered flamethrowers as she has been finding out the hard way.

That new knowledge is reinforced as she attempts to dodge Spinister's next shot, even as she scrambles to retreat from this whole encounter. As she tucks the handful of circuitry and armor she pulled off his chest into subspace, she fires her boot thrusters and contorts herself around in an attempt to stay out of the way of the incoming fire. While her acrobatics do manage to basically dodge the shot itself, the cone of heat still manages to reduce her tail where it protects the lower part of her leg into a twisted piece of melted wreckage, causing even more damage under the surface.

Another snarled noise of pain escapes her as she makes a break for the trees. With a completely toasted wing she's not going to be maneuverable enough in the air to avoid any further shots but hopefully the distance she gets from using her thrusters and the cover the trees provide will allow her to make a getaway. Additionally, she's seriously considering making some kind of memento out of the handful she tore off Spinister. Any reminder not to be this stupid again would be good.

[Spinister]

Spinister pumps a shot after the fleeing Seeker. It would be lovely if she went up in a great ball of fire, right here and now, but he'll settle for a retreat.

He quickly assesses his damages and transforms, allowing his Nebulans to dissolve their merge and return to their gun platforms on either side of him.

Of the merge, Singe complains, Boss, that is always going to be weird.

Even in mind, Spinister has nothing to say. He needs to return to the training room, and he needs to alter the code so that the targets cheat. He'll eventually figure out how to take down even those, but he'll need to figure it out sooner rather than later, because if he had trouble enough with this opponent, how is anyone else, anyone with the aim of a mere mortal, supposed to fight her?

He had better get a move on. He'll need to go down for a bit to do field repairs, and then Duskwing may need extraction. It sounds as if Skystrike is going to be facing down two opponents shortly.

[Oracle-3]

Dropping down into the trees, Oracle looks up and shudders at the shot that roars overhead. She was really, really beginning to hate that weapon almost as much as she disliked the wielder. Aim like Spinister's combined with a mind willing to back up the threat it represented was a worrying combination, add in the level of firepower and you had a hazardous situation to encounter. Potentially a very deadly one too.

Radioing Skyfire, she heads for the second set of coordinates she gave him. Whether or not he sends Thundercracker to meet her or picks her up himself on the way back from rescuing Synapse, it was best to be where she said she was going to be. She kept a sharp eye out for another ambush just in case. She doubted Spinister was going to follow her now, but she had her fill of foolish mistakes for the moment and she wasn't going to assume again. Additionally, she had no way of knowing who else was out here.

Stumbling over another Decepticon right now wouldn't be healthy. She could still fight, but between her wing, leg and both sides of her torso she was going to be at a disadvantage. Of course now that she was thinking of it, she noticed Spinister's second shot had done more damage then she had initially thought to that side. Thankfully nothing that important had been hit, but it was just one more thing to snarl about quietly to herself.