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Post by Crankcase on Jan 25, 2012 0:04:21 GMT -5
OOC: Month 4 Week 1 Day 5. Semi-private. Scourge's presence mentioned with player permission.
For a long moment after Scourge orders him to go steal some plane the humans consider advanced, Crankcase stares silently. He doesn't even move. It isn't that he thinks the mission is too much for him; all he seems to do lately is steal one thing or another. He's becoming quite good at it. He'd still rather be taking lives than taking prizes.
No, the trouble is that the order comes not from Starscream, an officer he recognises and to whom he will defer. This order comes from some whelp Prime who, as far as Crankcase is concerned, merely pretends at being a Decepticon. It's an affront. He's quite likely been obeying Scourge's orders, filtered through other Decepticons, all this time, and the thought makes him chafe. He has never refused an order in his life.
"No," says the Dread without flinching. He may be a monster and an unscrupulous assassin, but he still has some sense of principle.
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Post by Sable Conolly on Jan 25, 2012 0:09:08 GMT -5
"What's the problem?" Scourge snaps back when Crankcase refuses him. "The reports had not led me to believe that you are incompetent."
This is not hard, what Scourge is asking, he does not think. Go steal Scourge a shiny new toy that they can use against the Autobots. Crankcase retrieved that underground doo-hickey and the green crystal just fine. Surely, the SUV is not afraid of a few human soldiers?
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Post by Crankcase on Jan 25, 2012 0:27:16 GMT -5
Crankcase draws himself up a fraction of an inch straighter – already at attention, it's hard to get much more rigid – and all eight optics focus on Scourge, filaments pinning in tight. It makes them look brighter, turns the eight individual lights to four red slits.
"I take no orders from a Prime," he grinds out.
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Post by Sable Conolly on Jan 25, 2012 0:32:20 GMT -5
"All eight of your optics must be miscalibrated. There is no Prime here," Scourge hisses out.
His resemblance to his father is one of his hot buttons.
He adds, "I don't need a piece of magical jewellery to lead. Or to do this," and with those words, Scourge tries to clothesline the Dread across the neck with his forearm and slam him back first into the wall.
"Obey."
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Post by Crankcase on Jan 25, 2012 1:00:37 GMT -5
The trouble with poking mechanisms he doesn't know well, no matter how righteously incensed he feels, is that Crankcase has no idea how they'll react. He had no idea Scourge would turn physical quite so fast over the matter of his face. Crankcase shifts from attention to evasion with a pivot on light feet, but his unfamiliarity slows his reaction time. Several tonnes of angry robot ram him into the wall; the impact dazes him and he slides to the deck with a sound like nails on a chalkboard. Scratches and gouges mark the wall where his back and shoulders cut into the metal on his way down.
Then he hears that command. His stabilisers recalibrate and he snarls, rolling away from Scourge, onto a knee and one foot.
"Don't obey Primes," he spits. Now he knows it makes Scourge angry. He thinks he can handle whatever comes next.
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Post by Sable Conolly on Jan 25, 2012 1:12:50 GMT -5
"There's no Prime here," Scourge grits out, "but you're going to wish there was."
Crankcase is on a knee? Scourge tries to slam the weight of the rest of Crankcase's body into that knee, to break it if he can.
Certainly, Scourge could just skewer Crankcase to the wall or blow him up, but that is not the point here. He needs to thoroughly humiliate Crankcase with his bare hands to prove his mastery, and he needs to focus on inflicting pain rather than damage. Pain is temporary. Damage takes resources to repair.
Scourge needs to show he has control.
Does he?
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Post by Crankcase on Jan 26, 2012 18:15:11 GMT -5
As his knee compacts painfully, casing split wide open, under the next blow, Crankcase realises he's really screwed it up this time. He's let his temper get the best of him, something he usually left to Crowbar. He lets himself crumple to the side, rolling on his cracked knee with the force of the hit. Broken slivers of the casing shift with the motion, stabbing in deeper, but he follows through, trying for distance. He can just hear the tirade Hatchet will rain on him later for this phenomenal screw-up.
Then he remembers there is no Hatchet and the anger wells up again, hot and bitter. His team is gone and he's expected to bow to a would-be Prime. He growls, and anything he says is lost in vocal distortion.
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Post by Sable Conolly on Jan 26, 2012 18:29:23 GMT -5
"Whenever you are ready to admit I am nothing like a Prime, just let me know," Scourge growls.
There, he has made it very clear how Crankcase can get out of this beating.
Now, he lunges at Crankcase and tries to grab him by the dreads to drag him down the hallway. He's thinking he's going to dump Crankcase out an airlock to that Crankcase can contemplate his idiocy in solitude on the craggy, barren moon and lock the doors so that he can't get back in until he says what Scourge wants to hear.
Moon dust is a pain to get out of joints, too.
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Post by Crankcase on Jan 29, 2012 22:11:59 GMT -5
Crankcase may or may not have already spent some time on the moon. The stay in and of itself wouldn't worry him much.
The ironic thing, he realises even as he twists away just far enough to avoid being hauled off by his dreads only for one of his shoulder spines to be caught instead, is that Scourge is far more like the Primes with whom Crankcase is familiar than he probably knows. They could be extremely brutal when the mood took them.
But he doesn't say that.
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Post by Sable Conolly on Jan 29, 2012 23:39:22 GMT -5
Scourge will take a shoulder spine, if that's what he can get. He continues with his plan of trying to drag Crankcase along the floor. Along the way, he rants, "Vector Sigma. What did I do to get saddled with such shallow troops?"
"Just because I don't have mandibles and extra optics like... like... Blackarachnia! I look fine."
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Post by Crankcase on Feb 5, 2012 23:59:04 GMT -5
It sounds like Crankcase and Scourge have wholly divergent problems with Scourge's face. He contorts himself so he can draw one of the weapons from his back… and jam it point-first into the deck as an anchor. He may not want to get this any closer to a fight than he's already made it, but he doesn't have to let himself be hauled off somewhere without protest, either.
"Primes were oppressors," he growls. Or is Scourge more like the Fallen? Crankcase might be able to forgive him on that merit.
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Post by Sable Conolly on Feb 6, 2012 13:23:37 GMT -5
"Oppressors? Add 'inspiring build-line discrimination' to their list of crimes, too," Scourge growls, tilting his head up in an imitation of rolling his optics. He still thinks that Crankcase is being amazingly shallow. This is like saying, 'You look like Pol Pot, so you must be an oppressor, too'. There's no logic to it, only insipid build-line discrimination.
"So let's get this straight. It doesn't matter what a Decepticon or Predacon looks like as long as he serves our cause against the Autobots and their Maximal allies. If I find out you've been picking on any other 'cons for not being pretty enough for you, I'll give you to Tarantulas for his experimental trials. You won't be pretty when he's done with you, and then we won't have this stupid problem of your obnoxious vanity anymore."
He tries to yank Crankcase up off the floor, possibly along with a piece of deck plating.
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Post by Crankcase on Mar 2, 2012 12:03:54 GMT -5
There is a large part of Crankcase's processing power devoted to screaming at himself, wondering what has possessed him to do something this stupid and stubborn and angry, even as he hauls back against Scourge's pull and locks his grip on the spear. The deck groans under the strain, as does his endoskeleton.
Damn Scourge for making Crankcase have to figure out words.
"You look… just like them," he grinds out, distortion lending his voice a strained echo. He should shut up, he tells himself. Shut up and sit on the moon a while, lie about feeling sorry and learning his lesson, and go back to business as usual. Shut up, behave. Do his job and don't rock the ship. But he hasn't had a real mission in ages and he's insulted that this child of the Primes wants him to go steal another bauble. Some human toy, no less. He's starting to feel like a scalpel being used as a letter opener – the task is hardly beyond his abilities, but it's a waste of a good tool. "Don't deserve the respect you want," he keeps going in spite of his every instinct telling him to do otherwise. "Don't know you from Sentinel Prime."
Crankcase knows Starscream; Starscream has proven himself a leader, and though Crankcase hasn't met any other Starscreams, he'd likely be biased toward them because of it. Scourge, on the other hand, is a complete nobody. A nobody wearing the face of a Prime.
"You wear the enemy's face," he manages to elaborate. His shoulder is developing a painful twinge. "Don't know you. Why trust you?" For all he knows, Starscream is just waiting for an opportunity to rid himself of the security risk.
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Post by Sable Conolly on Mar 3, 2012 22:14:38 GMT -5
"You shouldn't trust me," Scourge answers honestly, "but you especially shouldn't trust Starscream, because you know him well and respect him. If he wanted to deceive you, it would be the easiest thing in the world for him, because you want to believe him. You are more skeptical of me. You might see it coming if I decided to steer you wrong."
This is something like the paradox of the man who says, 'I always lie.'
"But you should obey me, because Starscream does, and in defying me, you are saying that you know better than Starscream, whom you claim to respect. Starscream saved my life, once. He sees something here. Does that make him less worthy, in your optics?"
Then Scourge heaves, trying to yank Crankcase off the floor and into the ceiling. He roars, "And Sentinel Prime is the annoying blue snowplow!"
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Post by Crankcase on Apr 18, 2012 21:48:29 GMT -5
Crankcase would remind Scourge that they apparently have different Sentinel Primes in mind, but the ceiling comes down very quickly and he hits it very hard – hard enough to forget the crackling pain in his shoulder from being yanked off the deck, where he lies quite still upon coming back down. A piece of deck plating tears away with his weapon and clatters loose when he hits the ceiling; he lands on top of it, ragged edges digging against his midsection.
Obnoxiously, Scourge makes reasonable points. If Starscream so chose, he could kill Crankcase easily. In some respects, however, that is the prerogative of command – to dispose of a disposable operative as they see fit. Scourge might have that prerogative if Crankcase could stand him.
He really can't stand the big truck. He can't quite stand at the moment, either, processors still grinding unhappily with the aftershocks of his impact with the ceiling.
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