Ultra Magnus
Major
Disappointing Fellow Autobots Since the Age of Internment
Posts: 565
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Post by Ultra Magnus on Mar 9, 2011 13:02:50 GMT -5
Magnus pays careful attention throughout Sentinel's explanation of stasis cuffs and their function, even murmuring wordless agreement that immobilisation and capture is a more civilised method than out and out killing. It's also obvious that Sentinel is quite proud of this bit of technology.
"So," he says only after Sentinel has nodded and appears to be done talking, "they block motor circuit and weapon system functions? And all you need do is clamp them on?" Such a tool certainly would have made a few of his security operations run smoother. He's half-surprised Shockwave didn't have something similar in his arsenal. "Quite the useful thing."
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Post by Sentinel Prime on Mar 9, 2011 14:02:21 GMT -5
This Ultra Magnus is a veteran of something that could be considered a Great War, and he doesn't object to non-lethal capture? That's... reassuring, actually.
"Uh-huh!" Sentinel Prime agrees, holding out his wrists to gesture. "That's right. After application to the wrists, the cuffs put the bot in a modified form of stasis lock. So there's still some skill involved in using them - you have to get in that close to your target to put on the cuffs without getting pasted. It's not like a point and shoot null ray." He sniffs disdainfully. "But anybot can use them. Any. That versatility's great. You don't have to hope for a team to have a bot with the mods you need for the job."
He actually seems quite pleased that this Ultra Magnus is interested in listening to Sentinel Prime yammer on about stasis cuffs. Massive self-confidence issues aside, at least his priorities are in order!
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Ultra Magnus
Major
Disappointing Fellow Autobots Since the Age of Internment
Posts: 565
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Post by Ultra Magnus on Mar 9, 2011 15:10:57 GMT -5
"That would take some skill," Magnus says quietly of applying stasis cuffs, taking in Sentinel's helpful pantomime with a deliberately jaded eye. "You'd need to be fairly agile… and adept at in-fighting, too, when you're in that close. If not training at close combat, then dumb luck." He tilts his head as if to defer to the younger Autobot. "Or a backup squad covering you." Quashing the urge to give Sentinel some sort of impromptu demonstration since there's already a pair of arms extended toward him, he instead tries to gently push Sentinel's hands back to the tabletop with his free hand.
He won't tell Sentinel how heartening it is to see that eager smile, but his own expression is grateful.
"Then you've used them before?" he wonders in a neutral tone, neither disapproving nor approving, but still curious. Sentinel seems to favour non-lethal measures if Magnus is to guess by how enthusiastic he is over these stasis cuffs; Magnus is even more curious about that.
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Post by Sentinel Prime on Mar 9, 2011 15:28:41 GMT -5
Sentinel Prime smirks smugly as Ultra Magnus enumerates the necessary things to make stasis cuffs a viable tool, though his smirk flags when Ultra Magnus suggests dumb luck. He explains, "Most of us are melee trained. We don't use conventional ranged weapons." Unbidden, his optics drift up and over at Ultra Magnus's rather prominent shoulder missiles.
He does admit, a bit more quietly, as if reciting something from rote, "Teamwork is key, though."
Sentinel Prime belatedly realises that Ultra Magnus's hand is over his. He should twitch or something, shouldn't he? Survivor of chemical torture and all? But the moment's passed; it would look forced now. He leaves the touch at that.
Instead, Sentinel Prime feigns affront as Ultra Magnus asks if he's used them before, "Have I? Have I ever! I'm Elite Guard! Scrap, even before, I taught usage in boot camp.1"
1 Technically conjecture, but all Autobots seem to know how to use stasis cuffs, and they'd have to learn somehow. Also, while we mostly see Sentinel Prime failing and flailing on screen, if he was a complete screw-up, they'd have fired him from the Elite Guard ages ago instead of putting him in charge of it, so I think it is a reasonable assumption that he has successfully used stasis cuffs on fugitives multiple times without incident.
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Ultra Magnus
Major
Disappointing Fellow Autobots Since the Age of Internment
Posts: 565
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Post by Ultra Magnus on Mar 12, 2011 20:15:20 GMT -5
Sentinel's pointed look at the missiles goes unacknowledged in favour of the spoken conversation; if Sentinel doesn't want to actually discuss it, Ultra Magnus will leave it lie. As soon as he parses the words "taught in boot camp", Magnus sits up straighter and regards Sentinel Prime with a more appraising gaze, optics taking on a shrewd tilt.
"I didn't realise you had experience as a trainer," he says. His fascination and, yes, respect are sincere. He withdraws his hand, too, loosely crossing his arms and resting his weight on his elbows.
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Post by Sentinel Prime on Mar 12, 2011 21:24:40 GMT -5
Sentinel Prime waves a hand dismissively, "It was thousands of years ago, anyway," which is a slight exaggeration of the timeline, "but yes, I was a drill sergeant back when I was just a Minor. One class of clogged headers after another."
He's a little startled that Ultra Magnus doesn't know. In his report on Waspinator, he explained as much. Bots don't read every report that Sentinel Prime writes? He feels disappointed!
Sentinel Prime's also not sure what to make of the fact that Ultra Magnus finds this fact interesting. Sentinel Prime considers it one of the less glamourous periods of his life, not worthy of mentioning if he can avoid it.
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Ultra Magnus
Major
Disappointing Fellow Autobots Since the Age of Internment
Posts: 565
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Post by Ultra Magnus on Mar 17, 2011 9:52:57 GMT -5
"Teaching the next generation," Magnus says in a quiet, melancholy voice, "rather than leaving them to fumble and hope they find a way is… admirable." His gaze displays the sincerity that his solemn expression can't; then, as if waking from a half-doze, he sits up straighter. "Was there anything else you wanted to know about my Sentinel Prime?" he asks. "Or something else I can at least do my best to answer?" Something in his manner implies that his best may not be up to par, but he'll try nevertheless.
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Post by Sentinel Prime on Mar 17, 2011 10:08:46 GMT -5
Sentinel Prime is a sucker for praise, but he's feeling a bit strange now. No one's ever praised him for his time as a drill sergeant, not really. He's always treated it as rather lowly work, for wash-ups, wash-outs, and burn-outs, but he had to get that opinion from somewhere and someone. If someone had told Sentinel Prime that it mattered, it really mattered, maybe he'd have paid closer attention to his students, and maybe he'd have realised that Fumblebee or Bumbler or whatever it was that kid's name was wrong about Wasp, if he'd been paying better attention, and that the real problem was, as always, the quiet one: Longarm.
Sentinel Prime briefly makes a face like he just chugged a bottle of lemon Pine Sol, lips puckered.
He wipes the expression off his face and replaces it with an incandescent smile, switching to something he does well: bragging. "Oh, of course! As soon as a protoform's a protoform no-more, there's a teacher-bot to instruct them and prepare them for civilian life. Should they wish to do their civic duty and take up the Autotbot badge, they'll do a turn in boot camp under the watchful optics of a Minor or Major, and if they show real talent, they might even study in the Academy and perhaps go on to become an officer or Elite Guard! We don't just decant protoforms and sent them straightaway into battle. That would be suicide."
He does amend, a little less vociferously, "At least in my reality. I am given to understand that in other realities, it is more common to create fully adult Transformers with viable skillsets at the moment of creation." This is all Botanica's fault, her and her ethics and her valuing multiple perspectives.
Sentinel Prime shrugs and asks, "What's worth hearing about him?"
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Ultra Magnus
Major
Disappointing Fellow Autobots Since the Age of Internment
Posts: 565
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Post by Ultra Magnus on Mar 21, 2011 9:37:08 GMT -5
The instant suicide leaves Sentinel Prime's vocaliser, Ultra Magnus looks pained. The younger Autobot carries on, however, sparing him the need to say something and cover his discomfort. At the ambivalent question on his former commander, his wince turns slowly into a pensive half-smile.
"I suppose I've said everything worth saying," he demurs, somewhat sadly. Then he falls silent; he wants to ask Sentinel some questions, but finds them too awkward and the subject an uneasy thing. It takes him several uncomfortable seconds before he can finally say, and then only in a low, hesitant voice, "What about… your Ultra Magnus." It feels like a kind of hubris.
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Post by Sentinel Prime on Mar 21, 2011 10:08:18 GMT -5
Sentinel Prime, ever watchful, takes in that pain Ultra Magnus is showing. He didn't mean to hurt Ultra Magnus, he read that file about Ultra Magnus's reality - that clipped little blurb about the Micromasters, but as he often does, he was simply speaking without thinking, speaking and assuming his way of doing things is the only correct way.
On the other hand, Ultra Magnus allows himself to be wounded far too easily. He holds himself out and begs to be bled. There's an Autobot intoxicated by the taste of the lash. Ultra Magnus blames everything on himself; Sentinel Prime takes responsibility for nothing.
Sentinel Prime leans back and looks up at the ceiling when Ultra Magnus asks him about Ultra Magnus. He says, voice lowered, "I'm maybe not the best bot to ask about it, and I know that sounds funny, coming from his heir in waiting, and it's not funny in the way you're going to be thinking." No, Sentinel Prime does not have overly sugar-coated things to say about his Ultra Magnus. "Ultra Magnus is... maybe was, I'm not sure, a complicated Autobot. He's done great things, I won't lie, but he's done some things that would get anyone else thrown in the stockade and the key in the incinerator."
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Ultra Magnus
Major
Disappointing Fellow Autobots Since the Age of Internment
Posts: 565
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Post by Ultra Magnus on Mar 24, 2011 1:49:30 GMT -5
Ultra Magnus is quite off in the head, it's true, and for various and storied reasons. He's beginning to doubt his own sanity at times.
"Please," he urges Sentinel, "just be candid. I'd rather not have reasons to let my imagination run off with your reticence."
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Post by Sentinel Prime on Mar 24, 2011 11:17:05 GMT -5
Sentinel Prime waggles an optical ridge and says, voice hushed, "I could get in trouble for saying some of this, if it ever gets back to home," but if half of what he's done here ever gets back to home, he's royally screwed with the king's sonic screwdriver, "but I've already said too much, so let me get to it, then."
He spreads his hands, and his looks turns pleading. "When I was barely more than a protoform, I idolised him. I wanted to be just like him. No. I wanted to be him. See, the teacher-bot made him out to be the all-Autobot super-soldier, as if he won the Great War all by himself. The image of the ideal made metal and circuit."
Sentinel Prime pauses and sighs, scuffing one hand along the arrow-marks on his blue gauntlet. "From the first, his drill sergeant, Impactor Major, named him Ultra, which boded well for his future. He trained with the cyber-ninjas, not a regime for just any bot. He was Elite Guard, too," and his hand drifts to the symbol he wears on his chest, just where Ultra Magnus did, "He... trained with aliens, even organics, learning their fighting styles, too, which is... not exactly legal. When he was promoted from Ultra Prime to Ultra Magnus, he became our leader and supreme commander. His first act was the sign the Decepticon Registration Act into law. In retrospect..."
Sentinel Prime looks like a thought just struck him.
"...in retrospect, that law might have just incited underlying tensions and worsened the situation. You see, in response, Megatron published a manifesto that helped drive up Decepticon recruitment. If the Decepticons hadn't felt so put-upon, I-"
Sentinel Prime shuts off his optics and shakes his head. He likes blaming everything on Ultra Magnus, but this is too much, Engineering a costly war just to be a hero? (Why didn't Sentinel Prime think of that first?)
"-but that's the thing. In public, he hated Decepticons. Why else would he force them to register like sub-bot mechanimals? But... he enjoyed their poetry, in private, despite that public condemnation. I didn't ever really understand that."
"The Great War ground on for a long time after the Cycle of Infamy. We even launched the AllSpark into space, and it stumbled along, headless," a wince, "with no clear objective. Ultra Magnus did win the war for us, in the end, but some of the measures they took, I can't really..."
"Anyway, Ultra Magnus speaks a lot of freedom and justice. I guess he does a pretty good job running the Autobot Commonwealth, but in person, I've found him a bit nepotistic, and... look, you know Jetfire and Jetstorm? Good kids; eager soldiers?"
"They were civilians, working in an energon refinery. Ultra Magnus wanted 'volunteers'," Sentinel Prime does the scare quotes, "for an experiment, grafting Starscream's flight technology and CNA into Autobot frames. Ultra Magnus didn't think we could risk trained Autobot soldiers. We're too valuable." Sentinel makes a sour face. "So when the Twins had an accident, they were drafted for the experiment. They didn't have a choice. There was no volunteering."
"They could have been turned into fragging Decepticon monsters by that experiment. We would have needed to kill them. They turned out all right, but..." Sentinel Prime trails off in smouldering anger, hands twitching. The Twins were nobody and no one to him when it all happened, but now that he knows them... yes, this was wrong, and all he did was offer token protest that flight technology doesn't belong in an Autobot, much as Jazz did.
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Ultra Magnus
Major
Disappointing Fellow Autobots Since the Age of Internment
Posts: 565
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Post by Ultra Magnus on Mar 28, 2011 10:04:50 GMT -5
Mention of this other Ultra Magnus being taken as the ideal Autobot, a soldier beyond compare, draws a shadowed look from this Magnus; many a time has he been called a model soldier, one of the finest in the Autobot army, and the parallel holds a mild sting as Sentinel carries on. It's faintly selfish of Ultra Magnus, he thinks, to hear the tale and find he feels somewhat less disgusted with himself. Yet he does – his sins are many and grave, without question, but he finds the wrongs done the twins wholly vile.
"Couldn't risk–" he sputters, then breaks off, resting his forehead in one hand. The other hand is a fist held so tightly his whole arm trembles. Sentinel is clearly uncomfortable – at the very least – with sharing all this. Outrage is likely appropriate on Magnus's part, certainly, but well-timed? Uncertain, Magnus tries for a page from Emirate Xaaron's book. "…Thank you," he says, and if it's still stiff with sympathetic anger, it's also sincere.
The duplicity Sentinel describes leaves a foul taste in Magnus's mouth, makes his fuel tanks churn uncomfortably. What else could this Magnus have justified, given what has already been told?
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Post by Sentinel Prime on Mar 28, 2011 10:47:55 GMT -5
Sentinel Prime looks vaguely haunted, and he leans in and reaches for one of Ultra Magnus's shoulders, to try to clutch it. His voice has dropped lower, barely audible, meant for no one else, should anyone enter the room, "I've already said too much. What I've said about the Twins could..."
Well, he's already told others about it.
"Tell me you won't tell a spark. It's your name, after all. It's what people will think when they see you."
Sentinel Prime draws back, for a moment trusting that Ultra Magnus will promise him. This Ultra Magnus admits to having worked for Shockwave, to having hunted his own kind, to having sponsored the Micromasters as nothing more than tools of war - but he admits it all and is ruined by his admissions, and therein lies the difference. This Ultra Magnus doesn't sweep what he's done under the floor plating; he allows it to drag him down into the smelter. Neither is healthy, Sentinel Prime is sure, but one is more honest than the other.
(Sentinel Prime could never do that himself.)
"Not most people - they know and think only what the propaganda vids tell them. Not even most people who know - most agree with what was done, I guess. But some people..."
Sentinel Prime shifts uncomfortably. "It takes a S.T.A.R.S. clearance to know this. I've already told Emirate Xaaron. You don't need to tell anyone else. During the Great War, we constructed Autobot weapons of mass destruction, the Omega Sentinels," what the frag was Kup Minor thinking when he named little Cadet Sentinel? "about the size of the combiners from your reality, I suppose, who transformed into space cruisers. We gave them the strength and weaponry to level mountain ranges... and programming you wouldn't even put in a drone. They were... children. Like... Holi and Clipper, but even younger. They were made mentally and ethically crippled on purpose, so they'd have no qualms over doing what weapons of mass destruction do, and they were made to need a mentor and partner who'd make sure they never went against the Autobot way or sacrificed themselves too easily, because they were programmed for sacrifice, too."
"The Omega Sentinels're all dead or comatose now. Ultra Magnus was Sigma Supreme's handler, during the war. Sigma Supreme's comatose, locked in cruiser mode." Sentinel Prime retreats a bit into his chair, his legs and arms coming in around him protectively. "We call him Steelhaven. I've flown on him more times than I could tell you. I wouldn't know he was ever a person if I didn't have my security clearance."
Sentinel Prime agreed with what he read of the Omega Sentinels when he first read of them. He thought they were nifty, a prudent measure to take to defeat the Decepticons. This reality's gotten into his head, though, subverted him and made him seditious and weak. Such a simple little thought, the thought that Omega Sentinels are people.
It gives him nightmares where his ship screams.
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Ultra Magnus
Major
Disappointing Fellow Autobots Since the Age of Internment
Posts: 565
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Post by Ultra Magnus on Mar 28, 2011 11:10:04 GMT -5
The pained expression that greets Sentinel's words isn't for Magnus's own acts now; it's for the reminder that he may be judged by this other Magnus and these grave acts he had committed. There's a bitterness to his hurt as well, that Sentinel would use it to ensure silence. The younger Autobot may find himself compared to the standards of a hero, but a true hero nonetheless – not the seemingly amoral extremist he describes in his Ultra Magnus. Is he deliberately trying to tear open the scars?
That bitterness taints the explanation of the Omega Sentinels and Magnus finds himself less inclined to offer Sentinel reassurance or comfort when he shrinks away from the table.
"I see," he mutters. Perhaps the chill in his voice and the hardness of his face can be blamed on his growing hatred of this other Ultra Magnus. He can't condone Autobot against Autobot – something he once justified only because the peace meant no factions while the rebels proudly wore their brands – but if he ever meets Sentinel's Magnus, he'll have to brig him to avoid killing him in a blind rage.
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