baby you can drive my car

[rapturemod]

It's anticipated. It's expected. We're all about expectations, aren't we? Sort of? Maybe? Regardless, it's the first official

TEST DRIVE MEME

 

You probably know the drill by now. If you don't, here's a quick rundown: test drive memes are a game's way of gauging interest and such. It's a way to play around in the environment without the commitment of apping, maybe see how well that character you're considering gels with the setting. This one will be open indefinitely, or at least until further notice. You don't need to be apped to the game to test drive a character, or even reserved, or even want to reserve. However, if your interest is indeed piqued, reserves are thisaway, applications thataway.

As of this writing, we don't consider anything that happens in the TDM canon unless you'd like to transfer any threads that happen here to the main comms (provided they don't interfere with pre-established game events, of course). TDM threads are just a way to get a feel for a game, or in case you need that pesky writing sample for an app in progress. We don't recommend you do a standard intro post, however - save that for the game proper!

We don't have a set entry date for the game proper just yet. Once we accumulate some interest, we'll be sure to let you know!

Some resources we recommend that you check out if interest continues to abound:

Cast | Setting | Rules & FAQ | Locations

PROMPTS:

i. do you hear the people sing?
You've heard the rumors circulating about Atlas and his bandits for months. Even the upper echelons of Rapture's high society were having trouble burying their concern under the careful veneer of professionalism. What you didn't expect was an open attack. You'd just been passing by, but the poor souls who lived and shopped and made their living on this street have just found their entire livelihood set aflame. People are saying it's a bombing, while others protest that it must have been something down in maintenance.

Right now, it doesn't really matter one way or the other. The homes and storefronts have been reduced to sheeting flame as hairline cracks go cobwebbing up the glass, the only thing separating the city from a watery grave. Whether you choose to get the hell out of dodge or help the wailing survivors is up to you, but regardless of what you choose to do, this section of Rapture is rapidly coming apart at the seams.
 

ii. who's your daddy?
You've no clue whose bright idea it was to tail the Little Sister. It might have been some gang of spliced-up nobodies thirsty for some extra ADAM. It might have been your best friend's idiot plan. Hell, it might have even been yours. All you know is that no matter how appealing the thought seemed at the time, you and yours are in for a world of hurt. The Little Sister just had to shriek once and her armored protector came barreling into the scene, drill humming to life with a sinister whine. Guilty as charged or caught in the crossfire, you're in for the fight of your life with a Big Daddy, one of the most dangerous things in Rapture. Good luck.
 

iii. a part of the masterpiece

Fort Frolic, they say, is the hub for creative artistry. Sander Cohen is either a wildly inspired artistic genius or a madman depending on who you ask, but the alcohol runs the same no matter how you slice it. For tonight, the Fort is yours to enjoy at your leisure. Take a gander, gamble everything you've got, have a drink, maybe sit in for a show. The only thing Cohen loves more than his exclusivity is rampant attention, and tonight he's on full display. He's even torturing - er, entertaining a lucky pair of dancers in Fleet Hall! Don't mind the wires threaded in and out of their clothing, doubtless unspooled over all those important parts of the nervous system and ready to unleash a burst of fatal electricity at a moment's notice. They've got to be just for show.

One thing is certain about the possibly-deranged Sander Cohen, after all: he certainly keeps you on your toes!
 

iv. wild card! make up your own scenario

We prefer third-person, present tense prose, but if you're just in it for the fun you can write in whatever floats your pontoon. Have fun!
 

Comments

Iman Asadi | original

[etherthief]

OPTION DEUX operation fuck the big daddy

Actually Iman knows exactly whose bright idea tailing the Little Sister was. It was hers.

"This way." She waves an arm - her right arm, the organic one - at her partner in tailing. "Just around this corner."

They are getting awfully close. This wasn't supposed to be a hands-on tail job, but it might have to get that way if she doesn't watch her goddamn step, and she knows it. But she just needs to see if she can make eye contact. Nothing threatening. Just a little glance, to see if there's anything human left in the little girl. Atlas' continued insistence that they're anything but never sat well with her. How unscientific can you get, trusting the word of a man you've never seen, who's provided no empirical evidence?

As it turns out, eye contact is all it takes.

"Get 'em, Mr. Bubbles!" shrieks the child, wild eyes burning bright, and Iman jerks back, catching the arm of her companion.

"Okay," she snaps as the Big Daddy lights up red, locking in on them. "All right. Plan fuckin' B."

She doesn't hae a plan B. She has a literal handful of plasmids, a shotgun, and a pistol. But no plan B.

[lottawork]

"Did you, perhaps," snarls Rush, his gaze withering and his diction merciless, "actually have a Plan B in mind, or did you simply not think to enumerate it as such?"

He has a policy.

A policy in which he does not get drilled through the chest cavity by something that is most assuredly far less intelligent than himself.

"Fucking excellent," he says, watching the armored hulk's manifold eyes hum vibrant red. Rush sighs and opens a hand with a shrill, electrical snap redolent of engaging circuits. The bright blue bolt of a high-energy, high-velocity, high-voltage electromagnetic current nearly burns his retinas as he sends it arcing for the target in question, which immediately howls its displeasure as it finds itself victim to the disagreeable sensation of being subjected to a continuous electric shock.

"If we die from this little maneuver," says Rush, the picture of indolence, "I will be very displeased."

[etherthief]

"Just give me a damn second," she snaps back as he hits the hulking abomination with a burst of blue. Her hand goes immediately to her pistol, armor-piercing bullets loaded (she'd had an inkling she might need them), and she fires as many shots as she can before it recovers from its paralysis and jerks forward again.

"Fuck!" She darts aside, narrowly missing the heavy drill, the point of it just barely catching her arm, shearing easily through every layer of fabric she has, nicking the skin. That's gonna get in infected if she doesn't deal with it, which she will, later. When they make it out of this alive.

She rolls and lands between the creature and the still-shrieking child. Probably not the best place to be, but she's nimble and the time it takes the Big Daddy to turn around is enough for her to raise her left arm and slam it with a wave of frost.

The smart thing to do now would be fire her shotgun as many times as she can, but her trigger arm is burning like a motherfucker and the girl is still crying, and some bullshit instinct has her turning away from the threat and reaching out to the kid.

"It's okay!" she says feverishly. "It's okay!"

Tim Wright | Marble Hornets

[postictal]

option one

It's like a wave breaking over him, if he'd ever really had any experience with waves or beaches or anything of the kind. The first surge of percussive force is enough to topple him, the blast of heat scalding and immediate. He can almost feel his skin crackle as it blisters. He rolls over, blindly, away from the worst of the flames.

Some immeasurable distance away, someone's crying.

He's on his back, watching the Pauper's Drop sign smolder into ash.

He has to get up.

He has to move.

Tim closes his eyes and groans and tries to lever himself to his feet. High above, with a high, splintering sound, the glass has begun to crack.

option two

The drill slams into the patch of floor that had, two seconds ago, been occupied by Tim's head, shrieking as it tears easily into the worn wood floors of Neptune's Bounty. Tim rolls, pitching violently to his feet, staggering unevenly ahead in a single-minded effort to get the fuck away from that thing someone apparently decided was worth pissing off.

The Big Daddy roars, the drill droning in eerie counterpoint to the its owner's low, menacing rumble.

Big Daddy. Someone here has a really sick sense of humor.

Tim picks himself up, eyeing the thing opposite him warily. It'll come at him quick, ramming him into the wall in what will doubtless be a perfectly calculated crushing maneuver. Once it comes at him, he'll have to throw himself to side. He'll have to move quick. He can't move too soon. It'll just adjust for the difference in angle and oh god, fuck, how is this his life right now? He doesn't deal with things like this. Not physical things, nothing as tangible and there as this.

His breath catches in his throat as the Daddy's eyes blink crimson and it charges.

let's do two, cause I am unimaginative

[deadeyedchild]

Jay doesn't have time to think. He is accustomed to being thoughtless - enough that either he acts on stupidity and impulse or freezes completely. It was thoughtlessness that pushed him forward, to this point, toward the little girl's shriek and the enraged, labored groans. People were scattering around him, probably the assholes who thought to provoke it in the first place, but it only took a moment to spot the person caught in the Big Daddy's glare.

So he doesn't, really does not, think before he opens his hand and releases a swarm of fucking bees from his fingertips. The creature catches itself in the path of its charge, thick arms flailing helplessly as the insects swirl around it.

Jay bolts forward. "Tim!" He reaches out and snatches at Tim's sleeve with sweaty, itchy fingers. "Run!"

[postictal]

He shuts his eyes with a sharp intake of breath as the Daddy's lumbering footsteps stagger into a charge - and then, abruptly, is replaced with the high whine of angry insects.

He didn't expect to see Jay here. Even less did he expect to see him splicing. Jay's palm is rough when he seizes Tim's arm - rough with the cobbled honeycomb skin you only get from a plasmid.

It looks wrong. He feels like he might be sick.

"Are you - " he begins angrily, and aborts the sentence when the drone of the bees dies into a panicked buzz. Fuck. Okay. They can handle this later, clearly. He hadn't gone out with the intent of picking any fights today; he's not carrying weapons, and he'd have to be at the end of his rope to consider splicing as some kind of viable option. The hell is Jay thinking, messing with his biology like that?

Wordlessly, Tim obeys and surges into a run as the Daddy regains enough wherewithal to realize it now has two targets.

Nicholas Rush | Stargate Universe

[lottawork]

option one

Ideally, optimally, preferably, this would not be the way in which Rush would spend his day. Possibly night. Such things seem purely fucking relative at the ocean floor which is, he cannot prevent himself from thinking with utter vehemence, a fucking terrible place to choose to construct one's isolationist capitalist refuge with the flawed masquerade of free market preached frequently and intolerably in order to somehow mask how completely and entirely this project qualifies for little more than industrialist onanism.

In short terms, as far as revolution goes, Rush considers himself completely fucking unsurprised.

The collective brisance of whatever chemical work went into the blast has reduced the vast majority of the storefronts to rubble, an outpouring of fire and black smoke being systematically belched into the confining, claustophobic system of magnified tubing that seems to make up the vast majority of Rapture's buildings.

He does not feel right.

Rush braces his palms against the ground, gritting his teeth, and exerts pressure and unidirectional force to press himself to his knees, then to his feet.

He puts a hand to his head. It comes away warm and wet and red.

He drops the hand to his side again.

He marks an unerring line past the tumbled debris, past the muffled cries of whatever unfortunate souls have been trapped beneath, and cuts his way cleanly to the glass itself.

The low, rending sound of two surfaces coming out of alignment is overpowering.

He turns and begins tearing through the rubble. He requires some sort of welding tool, absolutely fucking requires it and he will require it immediately unless they would all like to suffer the absolute misery that is drowning on the ocean floor, an undesirable fate that seems to be looming in their collective possible future.

option three

He's not been drinking. He is wholly uninterested in pursuing any sort of artistic bent for the benefit of others, much less himself. Judging by the way the dancers below subtly tremble with each slow, ponderous step, he's even less likely to offer any services to Mr. Sander Cohen in the near or distant future.

He does not watch. He turns and studies one of the nearest slot machines, running one finger along the elegant grooves and contours of its exterior, and in a fluid, continuous movement, drops to his knees at its base. He taps at it vaguely, almost lazily, in an effort that may seem to the outward observer, rather useless. Andrew Ryan has long since prohibited mechanical tampering of any sort.

Rush smiles faintly.

He's never been one to do as ordered.

Hope this is okay? (and not too late lol)

[7000days]

She didn't like the buildings much, anyway. They reminded her of Gas Town. She didn't much like Gas Town.

Not to say she was fond of the sudden raining carnage, but at least the sudden rush of adrenaline that tasted like guzzoline and combat in her mouth was familiar. With no War Boys around here, that just meant everyone was an enemy, so when she saw the man--no Buzzard, and no Pole Cat either--she grabbed at him with her good hand, aiming for his arm. Just enough to get his attention.

Her other hand, though, was ready for action in case she didn't much like the attention she got.

absolutely! i'm assuming you're responding to prompt 1? also feel free to fuck rush up he's an ass

[lottawork]

The sensation of fingers curling around his arm is unmistakeable and his reaction is immediate. He tears free of the foreign grip and backs away in a maneuver stunningly lacking in any muscular coordination and nearly sending him on a collision course with a heap of crumbling debris.

"What," hisses Rush between clenched teeth, "the fuck."

He should think it would be obvious that he was not the source of the explosion or its aftermath, but clearly such a thing was not made apparent enough to the passers-by. Or, potentially, law enforcement. He certainly has no idea what brand of security ostensibly exists in this 1950's American industrialist hell.

Joseph Joestar | JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

[yankovic]

[i]

[It took him months to build the Joestar Real Estate Agency up again. Now it was gone. Up in literal flames, and Joseph Joestar himself had just barely escaped. It wouldn't be entirely unbelievable -- he was way too tall and way too muscular for someone who was a real estate tycoon back home -- but he wasn't entirely unscathed either.

Cursing to himself, the old man picked glass out of his arm with a wince. He had to barrel through the glass just before the flames poured in. Damn it. He was pretty sure his back was burned too (it is), but at least his arm was alright (it's not). Wobbly pulling his huge frame up to stand, he backs away from the small building that used to be his and stares.

Joestar Real Estate. Completely engulfed. Joseph had to get several feet back just to get out of the heat. He lowers his arms and stares as bit by bit, it starts to collapse. His heart sank along with it.]

Oh my GOD!

[Joseph never felt like he belonged to Rapture. Especially when his real life was back in the surface, back in New York... but god dammit, he built that! It might not have been nearly as big as the international agency he ran back home, but...

Another explosion rocks somewhere nearby. Another storefront, another bomb. Joseph jumps and whirls around.]

Shit! [Did someone else get hit too? Crap. Well, pity party's over. The old man wastes no time sprinting in the direction of the latest boom. The closest person he sees is gonna catch sight of a hulking old man gunning toward them.] Hey! Are you okay?!

[postictal]

He was lucky to have only been passing by, and not to have been someone who actually lived down this street. Lucky to have been caught in the blast peripherally, and not right in the dead center of it. Lucky to have never cared to do anything more than glance at the headlines in the Rapture Tribune detailing the dangers of trusting Atlas and his 'parasites'.

So lucky, in fact, that the force of the explosion practically catapults him forward and lands him heavily on one arm with a sickening snap.

Pretty much the last thing he expects is a veritable giant of an old guy to be towering over him, wreathed in the blast's flames and debris.

"No," says Tim, completely honestly. He twists onto his back, groaning and hugging his arm to his chest, all the while trying - and failing, miserably - not to look at it hanging from a limp, unnatural angle. "Crap. I, uh." He grimaces. "I think it's broken."

Elizabeth || Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea || Open

[sea_bird]

ii.

It is a fool's errand which has her currently in her predicament: squeezed under a stairwell with the rattling of the department store all around her. It comes in regularity which offers no comfort for that fact. Instead the Big Daddy's thunderous footsteps are like a drum beat, promising death itself coming closer, and closer, with the same promise as the very march of time.

Time didn't used to have any meaning to Elizabeth but it does now, and as she holds her breath between the long strides of the Big Daddy, she is reminded that time is no longer on her side. A few months ago she could have created a tear through space and simply stepped away out of danger. She wouldn't have wanted to, given her mission here, but it is an option she isn't used to not having.

Elizabeth thought if she could follow a Little Sister she could find out better what was going on here in Rapture. Instead, she catches the attention of this Big Daddy now on her trail. Its horrible wailing makes her cringe and she curses herself as she stares up at the stairs spiraling up out of sight above her. She can almost hear Booker's warning her to get out of there, but even that doesn't help her. Elizabeth ends up feeling crushed with the memory of him, and even more stuck where she is.

[phthalo]

The rumbling thud of the big brute's footsteps is all the warning Lapis needed. This is not her home and it is not her quarrel. It had been the work of the moment to flit into the nearest building - human buildings, all of them - and sequester herself away where the thing would not spot her.

She crouches in wait, poised to launch herself from her hiding spot should the metal thing draw nearer. She almost doesn't realize a human has picked the same building to hide in.

She looks at her with chary disdain. She hasn't known many humans, truthfully, beyond Steven, but it had been her impression that his kindness had been the exception rather than the rule. But if she stays any longer, the human will spot her, if she hasn't already. A gem like Lapis would be rather distinct - blue skin, blue hair, slight and slender and subtly distinct from any typical human shape.

"What are you doing?" she hisses in accusatory undertone. Better, she thinks, to be on the defensive.

[gotsjokes]

Good vibrations.. what the hell was that song? Ellie drew in a breath as she felt her body vibrate to the beat of the Big Daddy's steps. They were probably the coolest pieces of metal hunks she's ever seen; she thought sarcastically. There were some posters up on the walls that were meant for entertainment around the risqué kind. So, anymore when she saw a Big Daddy she thought about the adult poster plastered around the rather risky parts of towns.

Ellie shifts her weight from one leg to the other as she was squatted behind a particularly large decorative plant in a pot. Of course it was fake as all hell due to the lack of sun and photosynthesis offered under twenty-thousand leagues under the sea.

Once the angered B.G. went down a level of six stairs from the platform she was on Ellie made her move quickly. From one ominous plant under the sea to ducking into the department store closest to her, Ellie was making herself further and further away from danger!

Ellie crouches and takes one step slowly beneath the window and making her way toward the stairwell which should lead her even further away. Unless the B.G. double backs and decides to get a handbag to go with its gigantic drill. "Woah!" She gasps with a skipped beat to her heart. Ellie shifted in her crouch and gave the girl she saw under the stairwell a pout. "I think it's not close enough to see us run up these stairs."

Lapis Lazuli | Steven Universe

[phthalo]

[iv]

She never believed in Earth. She had just wanted to leave. But she knows the sea inside and out, the pattern of the schools of fish and the reflective silver ripple of their scales.

Her hands pull into fists at her sides. She cannot bend or shape the water here. Something - something impossible is preventing it. Once the sea had been her only hope, and now it chains her here, at the bottom of Earth's ocean, alone and surrounded by humans.

Perhaps that's suitable. Lapis wraps her arms around herself. She made the choice to anchor herself in the middle of the ocean before. This is hardly any different.

Looking longingly into the sea will hardly bring her any satisfaction. There's one thing that still she may try.

Lapis closes her eyes. On her back, her gem assumes a luminous glow, its blue radiance shifting into the fluid shape of wings. She flaps them once, delighted, and, without hesitation, launches herself into a low glide through the city.

[johnny_truant]

He's been pretty sure he's seeing things all day, and that's normal, isn't it. When the small blue woman floats past him on wings, he watches her for a second or two, taking a nice slow drag on his cigarette before shuffling after her, following her.

An angel with wings made of water. That sounds like something someone would ask for in ink. Maybe on their back. Shoulder blades. Where people like to get wing art.

He'd never be able to draw something so lovely.

He stops a little beneath her, looking up.

"Are you real?" he asks softly.

[spectrolite]

Spectrolite wanders the city, trying to acclimate to her strange new surroundings. She hadn't expected to get trapped in an underwater city, but she isn't too disturbed with it. It was something new at least.

"This place isn't so bad," she thinks. She looks out at the city, glowing blue with artificial light, then shifts her view to the black abyss above her. Hm. No sky, no sunlight, no birds.

"But then again it's not that great either," she thinks.

She was about to move on when something caught her eye. She catches a glimpse of figure glides over a building about half a block away. Spectrolite quickly climbs up the staircase to the top of the building they were on, eager to see what that thing was.

She sees the figure once she reaches the roof. It looks like a person, except that they are blue and, well, flying towards her. She waves at the girl, motioning for her to land.

Booker DeWitt | Bioshock: infinite | option iii |my responses will be 3rd person present tense prose

[alternate123]

Booker sat in his office with his door closed to the bustling world of Rapture. It took him about a good few months before he finally felt like he could run his own investigation process. He figured no matter the setting, people were people and they behaved similarly in whatever scene you put them in. Even if it was a habitat deep within the sea.

For the most part people were social beings and thrived off of settings that involved the call of other people to flock to and be in the mingle of groups of people. Then there came the hierarchy of the group, sometimes not so invisible pedestals in which belonged to people who obtained power, wealth, fame, money, whatever that put them on there.

Then the fans, and the chaos of the in between of classes which separated the riffraff from the elite. The grey area is where the muddle of interactions came in conflict with reputation, where secrets lie, and the truth only just waited to be uncovered.

Thus, this is where Booker came in. Like anywhere, such as New York or Columbia, Rapture would have clients that would pay for the dirt of their rivals, where the artist would pay for the secrets of design, builders would crumble their neighboring building. It was all the same and rather poetically expected from any place, any time, and any group of people. The basic instinct to conquer, climb, and give satisfaction for the greed and soothe the jealousy that soured within each of them.

Booker went in without too much judgment, he would likely only get a small side of the story - over all - but going in with an open mind would lead him to many open doors rather than the few doors he would go to with going into something off any bias he had or his own objective.

He had a cigarette lit and the smoke lazily swirled up toward the fan that ran on low-speed on his ceiling. He gently tapped his forefinger on the cigarette stick to rid of the dry ash in the tray then brought the cigarette to his lips to take a puff.

“Yep.” He said to no one before he pulled the new edition of the Rapture Times onto his lap to read. It seemed like there were new people showing up frequently, people from the surface, people from alternate universes and so forth. All it meant was potential for prospective clients to satisfy; as it so happened he waited for his client to show up any minute now.

Just got to stay away from the slot machines… He kept himself in line as much as he could, but only so much. Booker reached for the bottle of whiskey and brought it to his nose to smell. There’s no water deep enough to wash me of the sins I’ve got..

oh hi

[etherthief]

She figures she could get used to this place. It's not Manhattan and it's not home but it's pretty interesting. Even if it's going to take her a lot of drinks to forget what's been left behind. A lot of drinks.

At least Rush is here.

Today she's mostly interested in wandering around. Seeing new places. Meeting new people. Something like that.

This is exhausting.

It's the unassuming, easily missable door that finally does catch her eye, for two reasons: one, the name on it is BOOKER DEWITT, which is an excellent name worthy of a pulpy crime novel. Two, beneath that, perfectly, it says 'Private Investigator'.

Oh yeah. Yes, please.

She has to see this.

She just wishes she had a cigarette in a holder. Could be more of a proper dame. She'll have to do without the holder, she thinks, pulling a fresh one from the crumpled pack in her jacket pocket.

She raps lightly on the door before letting herself in.

"'Scuse me," she says, enjoying this just a little too much. "I don't suppose you have a light."

(test) driving in your car, i never, ever want to go home || Eliot Alderson | Mr. Robot || Open

[paran01d_andr01d]

i.

Waking up to explosions isn't a graceful sort of thing. Eliot's thrown from the couch more by the concussive blast that beats at his windows and sends a cheap shelving unit rattling down from the wall in a hail of plaster, four inches from his nose than by the frantic jumble of sounds rising outside. His ears are ringing so high he can barely hear them. He rolls over onto his back and everything lurches once, hard and sick, then refuses to fall into focus.

This isn't happening, this isn't happening. None of this is real because there weren't supposed to be any bombs, we weren't going to-

He doesn't know what that means. He's pretty sure that's something he isn't supposed to know. There's a pulsing behind his eyes that's making it hard to chase that thought. He lets it go. At first he thinks that's what's making the ceiling tiles roil like that but, no, plaster is flaking free and settling in his open mouth like grimy snowflakes and he needs to get up now. He hinges forward, coughing, scrubbing at his face. Up. He's got to get up. Up and out.

He manages up, doesn't manage out, clawing at the painted-shut window in an apartment he only half-recognizes, muscle memory taking him through the layout of a space that could belong to him but doesn't feel like it does. The window comes up and he leans out, a blast of hot air against his face, tangled screams and the ponderous groan of buildings falling one foot at a time.

Fuck. Fire escape. It's not where he remembers it being. He bolts into the bathroom, feet slipping on a cascade of mirror shards that were probably there before all of this kicked off. Barely manages to catch himself, puts a towel-wrapped fist through a faux stained-glass window to spill out onto a metal grate that heaves in a way that doesn't inspire a hell of a lot of confidence.

His knees lock and then give, there's no going down from here. There is no down - just a rusted ladder to three stories' worth of sheer fucking drop. He presses himself to the wall, doesn't even feel the brick biting into his skin as his cheek hits.

This isn't fucking happening

OH HI HELLO THERE

[postictal]

He remembers the first tremor rippling through the foundations of the entire street, and then he was tripping and slipsliding through something thick and dark, an oil slick painted against the floor, the expanding viscous puddle leaching from a tumble of barrels. Not a minute later the stuff had ignited with a hot whoosh of flame that had just missed his face, singeing his hair and sending him crabbing backward -

- backward, and deeper into what might have just become a warzone. Tim's teeth are rattling in his head as he scans the inferno for some way out but there's nothing. Just buildings stacked high, ready to topple, and bright licks of fire gapped in between.

With nowhere else to go, he turns to the building at his back. It must've been someone's apartment complex, once, but the bricks on the outside are already charred and the whole structure looks about ready to collapse at the next impact.

Next impact. Because it's coming, isn't it. It's Atlas. It's got to be. Atlas and his merry band of 'liberators', massive scare quotes, because this? This isn't liberating. Tim might not know his politics, never even got his shit together enough to vote back home, but he's glanced at the news, he's heard the public service announcements. He knows the difference between liberation and mass bombing.

He looks up and catches sight of a face, several stories up, and the breath stutters in his throat. Oh, well fuck. That's a, what, a three-story drop? There's no way out from that.

And Tim doesn't play hero. That's Jay's job, he of the impulsive decisions and stolen tapes and fervent camcorder desperation.

But fuck if he's about to watch someone roast alive in their own apartment. He might not be Jay, but he's definitely not Alex either.

Tim cups his hands around his mouth and belts out as loud as he can to be heard over the roar of the flames: "Hey!"

Flashpoint | Transformers IDW OC | Option one

[shitflashpointsays]

Sure she's heard rumors of bandits. Why else would she be here, idly parked in alt-mode keeping an optic sensor on things. The mark of a good surveillance operative is keen senses and attention to detail. Also the ability to not fall asleep. What?! It's not full recharge, she just idled down for a moment and then next thing she knew--BOOM--all hell broke loose. 

Flashpoint's not sure what the scrap is going on but she's seen enough bombings to suspect foul play. She pushes up out of alt, the old Earth vehicle circa 1970 muscle car achieving bipedal form, ducking her head with a gravely curse as debris bounces off her helm in a shower of embers.

"Whoever blew out all my windows is gonna pay for that!" Because ouch, that stings! But that's when she hears it: voices from inside? She cranes her helm, peering past the flames. "Hey. HEY! Anyone in there!?"

[you_look_weak]

Surveillance is for losers and Autobots, so, yeah, none of that scrap for Deadlock, thanks. But when the ground jumps like that, and he hears the creepy glass cracking sound, Deadlock hits the streets looking for FLashpoint. Because he's above surveillance, but not above, you know, stalking. What? He knows Flashpoint has a tendency to do stupid scrap that might get her killed.

She promised she wasn't gonna die on him, and he's gonna make sure she keeps that promise. Rawr.

He rolls up as she's yelling, of course, and pushes up to his own alt. "The frag happened to you this time?" He doesn't say 'tsk'--it's just heavily implied. Heavily.

Deadlock | Transformers IDW | prompt 2

[you_look_weak]

Deadlock doesn't have a daddy

Excuse you, but none of Deadlock's plans are idiotic. Poorly thought out, yes. Reckless, sure. Involving a lot of violence, yepperoo. But idiotic? HA! He prefers to think of it that Deadlock naturally creates situations where he can do two of his favorite things: shoot things and blame someone else.

AT THE SAME TIME: so he's going to launch himself across a gap in the buildings they've been temporarily--TEMPORARILY--pinned down into, firing a blast at the big ugly fragger, while yelling at his companion, "This is all your fault!"

[shitflashpointsays]

Is this like that time he jumped off the parking garage roof just to land on that sniper? Because not gonna lie, that was pretty slick. ... And it was nice moves. Except for the part where he thought she needed saving.

She doesn't now either. Flashpoint's totally got this, steel girder in hand, trying to jam it into place to block the door shut. Except that sure is a big drill tip churning a hole through the metal door like it was soft cheese, metal screeching. "I just wanted to ask it the yellow eye glow thing was natural!!" What's wrong with that!?