Application for Kismet Loop
Mar. 28th, 2016 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
memorial_wingPlayer Information
Name/Alias: Dragon
Your Journal:dragondancer5150
Age: My "old enough to drink" is old enough to vote
Contact Information: dragondancer5150@yahoo.com, "OldMaidDragon" on Plurk
Characters already in the game: Xan/The Knitted Doll
Character Information
Character Journal:memorial_wing
Character Name: Thundercracker (AU)
Character Canon: Transformers G1 cartoon
Age: Equivalent of an upper middle-aged human still in a prime of fitness
Race: Cybertronian – specifically Seeker-class
Timeline Change Point: Pre-canon - Megatron worked his way up from his roots into the military to start his revolution from the inside out rather than begin attacks on the structure of society from the outside.
World:
The Golden Age of Cybertron, which has lasted for millennia, is not the gilded wonder that the Senate would have you believe. At least . . . not for everyone.
First were the negotiations, the talk of unification. Cybertron could only be stronger if it were a united entity rather than the fractured city-states that ruled each in its own happy little warring corner. But the negotiations didn't stay negotiations – not every city-state wanted to become a vassal of Iacon. Most deflected the overtures with as much grace and tact as they could manage . . . even when those overtures started morphing into carefully veiled threats . . . the veil getting thinner and thinner.
Vos – proud home of the Seeker classes – was the first to rip the veil off altogether. Seekers bowed to no one! And they . . . would be proven wrong. So very wrong.
Countless ages later, Thundercracker still remembered that day. He'd flown at the head of the waves of attacks as a member of the Command Trine of Vos. He'd been the second to their trine leader, Winglord Starscream, with Skywarp as their third. Everyone had fought valiantly . . . but in the end, the full military might of Iacon, led by Supreme Commander Megatron, had proven too powerful. Vos had been laid to waste, every high spire and landing tower cruelly razed to the ground. Every surviving Seeker was dragged – in chains – to the middle of the ruins where a platform had been hastily erected. Winglord Starscream – and all of his subjects – were forced to watch the vicious beatings of his second and third before it was his turn to be dealt with for his "treachery against the Empire". With a single blow, Megatron punched into Starscream's chest and pulled out his spark chamber. The body of the Winglord of Vos was left to rust in the ruins of his conquered home while his people, including his surviving wingmates, were dragged off into slavery.
That had been a long time ago. Sometimes Thundercracker wondered if he was the only one still living from those days. No one seemed to remember that Seekers belong in the skies . . . including his fellow Seekers. In the current society, there were the slaves and the free. Among the free, there were castes with very clear lines delineating who's better than whom. The same existed among slaves, based both on the model of free mechs and whether a mech was in chains due to a crime he'd committed or if he'd been built a slave. Seekers were the scum that grew in the puddle at the bottom of the social staircase. There were no free Seekers – the laws forbade it. And prejudice ran so deeply that no one questioned it. Seekers didn't deserve to be free. All Seekers built since the fall of Vos were slaves, beaten down and taught their place from the first pulses of their young sparks. Most had never even heard of Vos.
History:
Thundercracker and Skywarp had managed to stay together for most of the torturous time since the death of their trine leader. It had been hard – most trines were broken up by their masters without a thought, even when that same master had been the one to force his slaves to bond for whatever reason to begin with – but in the early days, a master who wanted one of them wanted the prestige of owning both of the remains of the Command Trine. Or the master selling them had demanded all-or-nothing of a prospective buyer (he could get more money that way). As knowledge – and care – of who they'd been in Vos faded from collective memory over the following mega-vorns, they were carried by a prestige of a different kind, as gladiators. Both in the air – when they've been permitted to fly – and on the ground, the two of them were among the best fighters on the circuits, plus even without his warp drives (which had been, as far as they knew, permanently disabled along with Thundercracker's sonic drives), Skywarp was one of the fastest and most agile flyers, taking first or second in most every race he was entered into. Thundercracker usually placed as well, though he never managed quite as well as Skywarp.
When not in the gladiator rings, they were usually used as house guards. And plotting their next escape. There were rumors, after all, of safe havens where Seekers could live freely. Thundercracker and Skywarp were never able to find hard clues on how to find them, though, until they began to believe they were in fact nothing more than rumors. Still, the pair escaped their masters numerous times over the mega-vorns, though sooner or later they were always recaptured. And each time, they paid dearly. Skywarp clung more and more to Thundercracker, despairing of ever truly seeing freedom again, and Thundercracker plotted fewer and fewer escape attempts . . . for his wingmate's sake more than his own. It always killed him to have to watch his wingmate tortured for something he'd instigated. He'd only try for it if he knew they could successfully get out.
But then, there was that one time too many. After they'd been recaptured and beaten within an inch of their lives, they'd been sold once more. Separately. Thundercracker never saw his wingmate again.
He continued to keep track of Skywarp as best he could, paying close attention to talks about other fights and races in other circuits, catching Skywarp's name now and then. But those instances suddenly got fewer, and then quit altogether. An vorn or two later, Thundercracker made one of his escape attempts – his last one. He'd been injured in a fight at the arenas, his right wing torn off. Hiding out in the seediest parts of the city, he came across a Black Market dealer. It was bad enough that the mech carried disembodied Seeker wings (which Thundercracker had to sift through to replace his own lost wing since he had no intention of going back to his master for it), but one of them was black with distinctive white and purple stripes. He had his answer about the fate of his wingmate.
He found someone to put his wingmate's wing on him. It's normally very, very wrong for one Seeker to wear another Seeker's wings, but in this case, Thundercracker did it as a tribute. It's all that he has left of his wingmate. Of his trine. He wears his fallen wingmate's wing to honor him, to always have him near. He was recaptured shortly after, and his master tried first to remove the wing, and then to repaint it to match the rest of him, but Thundercracker fought him with such shrieking fury, and no amount of threat or reality of punishment would get him to submit, that the master finally just gave up.
To this day, Thundercracker is a scuffed, worn, dented blue with faded, scratched white and red stripes up one blue wing . . . scratched white and purple stripes up the other, worn black wing.
Personality:
Thundercracker is guarded, stoic, not much of a conversationalist, more than a little cynical. He's been abused, and the hurt is visible in his optics. In many ways, he is a broken mech. Thundercracker has had everything ripped out from under him – his home, his trine, his freedom, his dignity, even his honor is all but gone. Why bother? He's a survivalist. He keeps going out of sheer spite . . . and to preserve the memories of his trinemates.
He's distrustful, at best, of anyone who is not a Seeker. It's not out of prejudice against "groundpounders", but because any other mech can and almost certainly will turn him in to the authorities for some extra pocket change, leaving him dragged back to his master for a severe beating and whatever other punishment the mech decides to put him through until he "learns his place." Any non-Seeker, at best, he expects is going to jeer at him, tell him how worthless he is, how he takes up space, dirties the air coming through the other's intakes. And he has to just take it – at worst bow and apologize for existing and being an inconvenience.
Beneath it all, though, is a simmering rage. A hopeless rage. He's beaten but he will never, NEVER be broken! He also has nothing more to lose. He's been punished and tortured enough times that he knows what his limits are, has developed coping mechanisms and methods to deal as best he can through the agonies, and he has no fear at all of pain. Or death. When he obeys, it's because it's just not worth it at the time to fight. He bides his time. Press him hard enough, or push the right buttons, and he will lash out, violently and without heed of the consequences. Yes, he'll be punished, but why should he care? He can be punished just for seeming to look at someone wrong, or for no reason at all but that Master needs a scapegoat and stress releaser for something completely unrelated. If he's going to be beaten anyway, he'd damned well prefer to have earned it.
The mere sight of Megatron – any Megatron – will also elicit the same, nearly mindless response. Unlike his canon self, this Thundercracker has absolutely no fear of Megatron, only intense hatred. He will attack with a blind fury – this mech took his home, his freedom, his birthright, his TRINE from him. He has no illusions that he could actually beat Megatron . . . but if he died at the mech's hands, he'd be satisfied. If he can leave the mech wounded and make the fragger remember what he did, he'll die with his trinemates avenged.
Also? Don't touch the wing. ~E~V~E~R~.
Powers/Abilities:
Like all Cybertronians, Thundercracker has the ability to transform between a root- and alt-mode. In alt, he mimics an F-15 Eagle and can fly at 1500 mph. (We'll ignore that he's never heard of Earth, let alone been there - in this AU, Seeker alts happen to look VERY LIKE certain human military hardware of a MUCH later age in the universe's timeline...I happen to REALLY like fighter jets and am not so fond of the tetrajet look, myself.) He can also fly in his root-mode, if not nearly as fast or with as much agility. He has a pair of arm-mounted rifles – they tuck under his wings and are still functional in alt-mode – that fire incendiary rounds of heat-resistant ceramic bullets. His namesake maneuver is the ability to produce deafening, controlled sonic booms audible to a 200 mile radius. However . . . all of this is locked down, even his ability to transform, by the limiters in his collar. He can't currently access any of this, not even his subspace.
Inventory: N/A
Writing Samples
First Person Sample:
So . . . "haven", huh? What kind of "haven" are we talking about? A haven for who? Or...what? What are the laws here? Who's actually being protected? Is this outside of the Iaconian Union? Does the hand of Lord Protector Megatron reach here?
[Shit, how's that for dripping sarcasm and bald hate? There's a pause . . . then a snort.]
Whatever. Not sure it matters anyway. So whoever dragged my slagged carcass here, you might as well step forward. So I know whose orders I'm supposed to be taking.
[Whether he'll ACTUALLY obey them...well...]
Third Person Sample:
Thundercracker shifted from one flank to the other, rolling carefully over his canopy. This wasn't the most comfortable position to try to recharge in, especially on the floor like he was in his tiny cell of a room, but lying on his back was out of the question. Again. An electro-whip had ripped his plating open from wingtip to wingtip, rivulets of stale energon and staler cydraulics fluid trickling down his back and throughout his substructure. But . . . he'd won. After a fashion.
He shifted to look around his vent at the wing behind his right shoulder. It was faded black, worn almost to a point of being more "dark grey", with scuffed, scored stripes of once-white (which did now count as "grey") and deep purple. It didn't match his color scheme at all. It wasn't supposed to.
"F-fraggit, Skywarp..."
The words came out quietly, choked and muffled into his elbow joint as he turned his head again and buried it in his folded arms. He'd always known that it'd happen, that one or the other of them, or both, would finally be killed. In a sense, he was glad it was Skywarp. Warp hadn't been the same for . . . for so long. The younger mech had finally been broken by everything that had been heaped on them since That Day. Thundercracker didn't think Skywarp would have managed to survive much longer without him to help ground and stabilize him.
Suddenly, he wasn't so sure of the same for himself either, without his wingmate. He'd always been the stronger of the two, the titanium strut that kept them together and took care of them the best he could. Now . . . now what did he have to live for? When he'd found his wingmate's wing, he's sworn he would go on for his wingmate's sake. But really . . . was it worth it? Thundercracker was tired. He was so tired. And hurt. The physical pain of his punishment diminished in the face of what lay in his spark. The once proud Second-in-Command of Vos wasn't an emotional mech . . . but that night, he cried himself into recharge, broken-sparked sobs echoing between the walls of his tiny prison.
Name/Alias: Dragon
Your Journal:
dragondancer5150Age: My "old enough to drink" is old enough to vote
Contact Information: dragondancer5150@yahoo.com, "OldMaidDragon" on Plurk
Characters already in the game: Xan/The Knitted Doll
Character Information
Character Journal:
memorial_wing Character Name: Thundercracker (AU)
Character Canon: Transformers G1 cartoon
Age: Equivalent of an upper middle-aged human still in a prime of fitness
Race: Cybertronian – specifically Seeker-class
Timeline Change Point: Pre-canon - Megatron worked his way up from his roots into the military to start his revolution from the inside out rather than begin attacks on the structure of society from the outside.
World:
The Golden Age of Cybertron, which has lasted for millennia, is not the gilded wonder that the Senate would have you believe. At least . . . not for everyone.
First were the negotiations, the talk of unification. Cybertron could only be stronger if it were a united entity rather than the fractured city-states that ruled each in its own happy little warring corner. But the negotiations didn't stay negotiations – not every city-state wanted to become a vassal of Iacon. Most deflected the overtures with as much grace and tact as they could manage . . . even when those overtures started morphing into carefully veiled threats . . . the veil getting thinner and thinner.
Vos – proud home of the Seeker classes – was the first to rip the veil off altogether. Seekers bowed to no one! And they . . . would be proven wrong. So very wrong.
Countless ages later, Thundercracker still remembered that day. He'd flown at the head of the waves of attacks as a member of the Command Trine of Vos. He'd been the second to their trine leader, Winglord Starscream, with Skywarp as their third. Everyone had fought valiantly . . . but in the end, the full military might of Iacon, led by Supreme Commander Megatron, had proven too powerful. Vos had been laid to waste, every high spire and landing tower cruelly razed to the ground. Every surviving Seeker was dragged – in chains – to the middle of the ruins where a platform had been hastily erected. Winglord Starscream – and all of his subjects – were forced to watch the vicious beatings of his second and third before it was his turn to be dealt with for his "treachery against the Empire". With a single blow, Megatron punched into Starscream's chest and pulled out his spark chamber. The body of the Winglord of Vos was left to rust in the ruins of his conquered home while his people, including his surviving wingmates, were dragged off into slavery.
That had been a long time ago. Sometimes Thundercracker wondered if he was the only one still living from those days. No one seemed to remember that Seekers belong in the skies . . . including his fellow Seekers. In the current society, there were the slaves and the free. Among the free, there were castes with very clear lines delineating who's better than whom. The same existed among slaves, based both on the model of free mechs and whether a mech was in chains due to a crime he'd committed or if he'd been built a slave. Seekers were the scum that grew in the puddle at the bottom of the social staircase. There were no free Seekers – the laws forbade it. And prejudice ran so deeply that no one questioned it. Seekers didn't deserve to be free. All Seekers built since the fall of Vos were slaves, beaten down and taught their place from the first pulses of their young sparks. Most had never even heard of Vos.
History:
Thundercracker and Skywarp had managed to stay together for most of the torturous time since the death of their trine leader. It had been hard – most trines were broken up by their masters without a thought, even when that same master had been the one to force his slaves to bond for whatever reason to begin with – but in the early days, a master who wanted one of them wanted the prestige of owning both of the remains of the Command Trine. Or the master selling them had demanded all-or-nothing of a prospective buyer (he could get more money that way). As knowledge – and care – of who they'd been in Vos faded from collective memory over the following mega-vorns, they were carried by a prestige of a different kind, as gladiators. Both in the air – when they've been permitted to fly – and on the ground, the two of them were among the best fighters on the circuits, plus even without his warp drives (which had been, as far as they knew, permanently disabled along with Thundercracker's sonic drives), Skywarp was one of the fastest and most agile flyers, taking first or second in most every race he was entered into. Thundercracker usually placed as well, though he never managed quite as well as Skywarp.
When not in the gladiator rings, they were usually used as house guards. And plotting their next escape. There were rumors, after all, of safe havens where Seekers could live freely. Thundercracker and Skywarp were never able to find hard clues on how to find them, though, until they began to believe they were in fact nothing more than rumors. Still, the pair escaped their masters numerous times over the mega-vorns, though sooner or later they were always recaptured. And each time, they paid dearly. Skywarp clung more and more to Thundercracker, despairing of ever truly seeing freedom again, and Thundercracker plotted fewer and fewer escape attempts . . . for his wingmate's sake more than his own. It always killed him to have to watch his wingmate tortured for something he'd instigated. He'd only try for it if he knew they could successfully get out.
But then, there was that one time too many. After they'd been recaptured and beaten within an inch of their lives, they'd been sold once more. Separately. Thundercracker never saw his wingmate again.
He continued to keep track of Skywarp as best he could, paying close attention to talks about other fights and races in other circuits, catching Skywarp's name now and then. But those instances suddenly got fewer, and then quit altogether. An vorn or two later, Thundercracker made one of his escape attempts – his last one. He'd been injured in a fight at the arenas, his right wing torn off. Hiding out in the seediest parts of the city, he came across a Black Market dealer. It was bad enough that the mech carried disembodied Seeker wings (which Thundercracker had to sift through to replace his own lost wing since he had no intention of going back to his master for it), but one of them was black with distinctive white and purple stripes. He had his answer about the fate of his wingmate.
He found someone to put his wingmate's wing on him. It's normally very, very wrong for one Seeker to wear another Seeker's wings, but in this case, Thundercracker did it as a tribute. It's all that he has left of his wingmate. Of his trine. He wears his fallen wingmate's wing to honor him, to always have him near. He was recaptured shortly after, and his master tried first to remove the wing, and then to repaint it to match the rest of him, but Thundercracker fought him with such shrieking fury, and no amount of threat or reality of punishment would get him to submit, that the master finally just gave up.
To this day, Thundercracker is a scuffed, worn, dented blue with faded, scratched white and red stripes up one blue wing . . . scratched white and purple stripes up the other, worn black wing.
Personality:
Thundercracker is guarded, stoic, not much of a conversationalist, more than a little cynical. He's been abused, and the hurt is visible in his optics. In many ways, he is a broken mech. Thundercracker has had everything ripped out from under him – his home, his trine, his freedom, his dignity, even his honor is all but gone. Why bother? He's a survivalist. He keeps going out of sheer spite . . . and to preserve the memories of his trinemates.
He's distrustful, at best, of anyone who is not a Seeker. It's not out of prejudice against "groundpounders", but because any other mech can and almost certainly will turn him in to the authorities for some extra pocket change, leaving him dragged back to his master for a severe beating and whatever other punishment the mech decides to put him through until he "learns his place." Any non-Seeker, at best, he expects is going to jeer at him, tell him how worthless he is, how he takes up space, dirties the air coming through the other's intakes. And he has to just take it – at worst bow and apologize for existing and being an inconvenience.
Beneath it all, though, is a simmering rage. A hopeless rage. He's beaten but he will never, NEVER be broken! He also has nothing more to lose. He's been punished and tortured enough times that he knows what his limits are, has developed coping mechanisms and methods to deal as best he can through the agonies, and he has no fear at all of pain. Or death. When he obeys, it's because it's just not worth it at the time to fight. He bides his time. Press him hard enough, or push the right buttons, and he will lash out, violently and without heed of the consequences. Yes, he'll be punished, but why should he care? He can be punished just for seeming to look at someone wrong, or for no reason at all but that Master needs a scapegoat and stress releaser for something completely unrelated. If he's going to be beaten anyway, he'd damned well prefer to have earned it.
The mere sight of Megatron – any Megatron – will also elicit the same, nearly mindless response. Unlike his canon self, this Thundercracker has absolutely no fear of Megatron, only intense hatred. He will attack with a blind fury – this mech took his home, his freedom, his birthright, his TRINE from him. He has no illusions that he could actually beat Megatron . . . but if he died at the mech's hands, he'd be satisfied. If he can leave the mech wounded and make the fragger remember what he did, he'll die with his trinemates avenged.
Also? Don't touch the wing. ~E~V~E~R~.
Powers/Abilities:
Like all Cybertronians, Thundercracker has the ability to transform between a root- and alt-mode. In alt, he mimics an F-15 Eagle and can fly at 1500 mph. (We'll ignore that he's never heard of Earth, let alone been there - in this AU, Seeker alts happen to look VERY LIKE certain human military hardware of a MUCH later age in the universe's timeline...I happen to REALLY like fighter jets and am not so fond of the tetrajet look, myself.) He can also fly in his root-mode, if not nearly as fast or with as much agility. He has a pair of arm-mounted rifles – they tuck under his wings and are still functional in alt-mode – that fire incendiary rounds of heat-resistant ceramic bullets. His namesake maneuver is the ability to produce deafening, controlled sonic booms audible to a 200 mile radius. However . . . all of this is locked down, even his ability to transform, by the limiters in his collar. He can't currently access any of this, not even his subspace.
Inventory: N/A
Writing Samples
First Person Sample:
So . . . "haven", huh? What kind of "haven" are we talking about? A haven for who? Or...what? What are the laws here? Who's actually being protected? Is this outside of the Iaconian Union? Does the hand of Lord Protector Megatron reach here?
[Shit, how's that for dripping sarcasm and bald hate? There's a pause . . . then a snort.]
Whatever. Not sure it matters anyway. So whoever dragged my slagged carcass here, you might as well step forward. So I know whose orders I'm supposed to be taking.
[Whether he'll ACTUALLY obey them...well...]
Third Person Sample:
Thundercracker shifted from one flank to the other, rolling carefully over his canopy. This wasn't the most comfortable position to try to recharge in, especially on the floor like he was in his tiny cell of a room, but lying on his back was out of the question. Again. An electro-whip had ripped his plating open from wingtip to wingtip, rivulets of stale energon and staler cydraulics fluid trickling down his back and throughout his substructure. But . . . he'd won. After a fashion.
He shifted to look around his vent at the wing behind his right shoulder. It was faded black, worn almost to a point of being more "dark grey", with scuffed, scored stripes of once-white (which did now count as "grey") and deep purple. It didn't match his color scheme at all. It wasn't supposed to.
"F-fraggit, Skywarp..."
The words came out quietly, choked and muffled into his elbow joint as he turned his head again and buried it in his folded arms. He'd always known that it'd happen, that one or the other of them, or both, would finally be killed. In a sense, he was glad it was Skywarp. Warp hadn't been the same for . . . for so long. The younger mech had finally been broken by everything that had been heaped on them since That Day. Thundercracker didn't think Skywarp would have managed to survive much longer without him to help ground and stabilize him.
Suddenly, he wasn't so sure of the same for himself either, without his wingmate. He'd always been the stronger of the two, the titanium strut that kept them together and took care of them the best he could. Now . . . now what did he have to live for? When he'd found his wingmate's wing, he's sworn he would go on for his wingmate's sake. But really . . . was it worth it? Thundercracker was tired. He was so tired. And hurt. The physical pain of his punishment diminished in the face of what lay in his spark. The once proud Second-in-Command of Vos wasn't an emotional mech . . . but that night, he cried himself into recharge, broken-sparked sobs echoing between the walls of his tiny prison.
