capencowl2020 | [OPEN] Even if they come for us...

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[OPEN] Even if they come for us...

WHO: Knock Out (CNC2020 AU) & YOU
WHEN: Event duration
WHERE: Government compound + the City
WHAT: Starters in the comments. Knock Out is a reluctantly dutiful government affiliate... for now. (AU Recap) ETA: Added a starter for post-defection, for resistance members!
WARNINGS: TBA as needed.

Knock Out didn't go to ground when the government hammer came down on metas. He didn't disappear overnight like many of his friends and acquaintances had chosen to do. Not that he blamed them; not that he hadn't considered doing the very same.

But practicality won out. He just wasn't the kind of mech to make decisions based on moral outrage, no matter how founded it might have been. He hadn't been a Decepticon for four million years because of a burning desire for revolution. He sure as Pit wasn't about to go out in a blaze of glory on some backwater ball of dirt for something as trivial as principles.

Knock Out, as he always had, chose the winning team.

He's spent the majority of the past six years since the crackdown restricted to one of the government sites within the City limits. Knock Out's considered high risk, so he doesn't get assigned to regular Meta-tracking activities like a lot of others. Instead, he's regulated to being on base and creating tech for the other enforcers to use for hunting against resistance Metas. Various inventions of his that incapacitate, restrain, and contain Metas of all types and power sets. For the most part, the government requests his weaponry stay non-lethal, but some of the more zealous enforcers (some of them Metas, some of them just government agents) know how to get creative with them.

He does as ordered, because there are unseemly parallels between this human government and the hard baseline of the Decepticons, namely that only the useful ones are worth keeping around.

And the government controls the only source of energon on this planet. For now.

He'd tried to give the resistance Metas an edge, that first year. The tech he put out had been designed to fail at irregular intervals, crafted to look like accidental malfunctions. Even if it only bought one in five Metas a chance at getting away from the enforcers, it was better than nothing. He always took the "faulty" pieces back, promising to make sure it wouldn't happen again. But even though he'd been careful with the sabotage, he'd been found out, and they'd laid him out flat with enough electricity to take down a Titan before cramming him into an unused bunker and sealing him in.

For seven months.

Locked in a concrete box not even tall enough for him to stand up in. Seven months of nothing but his own voice and thoughts, without external light sources, and without any energon. It wasn't enough to kill him — his kind could go that long without any fuel through selective shutdowns and careful system prioritization, though it was far from pleasant — but it had gotten their point across. Knock Out had emerged with the full theatrics of appropriate contrition for his rebellious actions, and been put back to work.

His new inventions didn't fail.

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OOC: Will match prose or brackets! Hit me up at

sojourney or just tag in if you want something different than the scenarios in the starters below.

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One of Knock Out's most prominent inventions is modeled off the Resonance Blaster from his world. He'd had a chance to examine the Iaconian relic before being drafted into the City years ago, and adapted its effects into pulse blasters for government enforcers. They're wickedly effective, capable of taking down Metas by disrupting their ability to hear and maintain their balance. It's essentially targeted, weaponized vertigo. It doesn't work on every Meta, but it works on enough of them that they've been adopted as standard issue for enforcers.

They do, however, occasionally become uncalibrated or outright damaged in battles, and repairs are finicky, so it's not unusual for enforcers to come directly to Knock Out to get them fixed. Other times, they may stop by to pick up additional tools like electrified nets or upgraded inhibition cuffs, depending on what equipment they've been issued.

When he's not doing repairs on existing tech, his handlers have him working on new scanning devices or tweaking their brainwashing programming. Sometimes he's even called upon to play nice for visiting people of importance, whether they be politicians or prominent Metas cooperating with the government.

And of course, a tech site like the compound makes it an attractive target for resistance raids. Whether to steal or sabotage the very weapons being used against them, or try to hack secure information from the site systems, they might encounter Knock Out in the engineering bay. Tinkering away at tall workbenches or, depending on the hour, tucked into a corner in his alt mode to catch a few hours of recharge.

The worst part about all of this, Jane has determined, is the compounded tragedy of her friend’s memories being taken away and that this world likely would have changed them regardless. This world has ripped out all of the hope and kindness from so many. She’s one of them. Even though she still holds onto some “old-fashioned” principals, injuring others or lying or sabotaging computers to further a resistance goal or help fellow metas escape doesn’t make her flinch anymore. She certainly will not cross the line by killing someone, but still.

If it will lead to this corrupt government burning, she’ll probably do it.

Today is a rare day that she has been given some time off. A reward for making a so-called breakthrough she made years ago, before she even came to this world. Visiting Knock Out is hard. She has to keep it professional and sometimes very quick and to the point. Rarely is there a time where there could be a “conversation”. Approaching his part of the engineering bay, she gives him a smile.

“Afternoon, Knock Out. How are things going?”

Probably not well, but she still wants to ask.

This Knock Out is certainly different than the one she knows, his memory having nothing but recollections of this world and the City. No inkling that he and Jane have ever had acquaintance in anything other than the capacity of two government operatives. Prisoners in varying degrees of captivity.

"Doctor Foster," he returns her greeting with the same meticulous politeness he uses whenever he talks to anyone affiliated with the government. Gone is the sly wit, the spirited banter, the casual superiority that he never meant spitefully but was always there. To most he seems like the dutiful worker, doing his part for their administrative overlords without fuss or complaint. He meets their deadlines just like she does.

But sometimes, sometimes, there's the way Knock Out stares just a little too long and too hard at his handler (a cold, calculating military man named Lowery) before answering whatever question is asked of him. Like he's mentally taking the man apart in particularly heinous ways. Or the way he studies the structural supports of the engineering bay, like he knows which ones are load-bearing, which ones could bring the whole place down.

"Things are going fine, thank you for asking. I hear congratulations are in order for your latest project," he adds. The words are rote and punctilious; he doesn't sound congratulatory. He may as well have been remarking on the weather.

On the workbench in front of him is a large, heavy silver disk, case cracked open and wiring exposed. His new assignment: a wide-area power nullifier. One with a much larger range than the ones currently in use by enforcers.

“Yes, I suppose so,” she replied, not enthusiastic at all. Her research was going to be used in awful ways unless she came up with some way to successfully free herself and everyone else. But that would take a miracle.

Many people were unnerved by Knock Out—that gaze was terrifying no matter where it was directed—but he had yet to give her that sort of look. She had no intention of ever giving him a reason either. She heard of how hard he resisted and what they did to him. What they continued to do to him and it made her blood boil.

“I see they’re having you work on another nullifier prototype?”

Miracles, it seemed, were in short supply these days.

Knock Out makes an inelegant noise in his vocalizer when Jane correctly identified the project he was working on. "In a sense. More specifically, they're telling me to rewrite the laws of physics versus power consumption," he answered tiredly.

"This new unit is supposed to output a field of 300 square meters, for at least six hours, and they want it under eight kilograms. The power core alone weighs almost that much. Then I have the emitters, the signal generator, and the dispersal engine to contend with. And that's not even allowing for the shielding it requires so it doesn't fry itself the nanoklik you turn it on."

He ex-vents, pinching his helm crest for a moment in a remarkably human-seeming gesture. He'll have to figure something out, even if it means reinventing this thing from the ground up.

Failure's not really an option.

“Seriously?” she exclaimed. “That is just plain unreasonable. It’s one thing to fix security breaches or fix a design flaw but—do I really need to pull out my thermodynamics power point presentation?”

Because of course, she would have one.

She rolls up the sleeves of her plaid shirt.

“Okay. Where can I help?”

Failure was not an option, but neither was abandoning a friend.

The Knock Out that Jane is familiar with would certainly have welcomed the help on such a problem, and had a good time trading banter about the technical advantages of dispersed power cell collation versus alternating power efflux.

But this is not that Knock Out, and this one gives her a coolly suspicious look. "Why would you want to help? This doesn't affect your work at all."

If he failed at the task, it wouldn't impact her. It might even give her more of an edge with whoever manages her projects, able to offer something that the mech couldn't. Why wouldn't she keep that leverage to herself?

Jane knows that, but this is where her logic ends. Logically, she should do all the things he said she should: not help, use it to her advantage, celebrate it.

“Maybe, but as if I’m going to let another scientist suffer because of some politician or bureaucrat. We’re better than that and there was enough of that in my home world. I won’t let it continue here, not when I can do something about it.”

"That kind of thinking will get you in trouble sooner or later," Knock Out says, but it's not refusal, and he moves the power nullifier so it's between them on the table.

They work at the task for a few hours while people come and go in the engineering bay, but for the most part they're undisturbed. They trade hypothesis, run calculations, mock up new configurations. It's the most Knock Out has interacted with anyone other than his handler in months. When they finally decide on a direction to proceed, he's surprised by the hour.

"You should get something to eat," Knock Out says, replacing his tools in their spots for the night. "It's gotten late."

Jane beams up to him and gets to work, glad she carries her tools around with her at all times.

Working on the project with him is not like what she remembers, but there are echoes of it. She wishes that there was more she could do for him, but if he were to attempt an escape of any sort, it would be nearly impossible to pull off and would put him in danger of starving.

“Huh?” she asks, taking a screwdriver out of her mouth, because she needed both hands for a moment. Her stomach predictably growls right then. “Oh, you’re right. I probably should. You want a break as well?”

"I'm not allowed to leave the base," he reminds her blandly. He wasn't strictly limited to the engineering bay -- technically the entire base was within his limits (secure sections aside) -- but he only fits a few of those areas, making his access even more limited.

Once upon a time, he'd have enjoyed a relaxing drive after a productive day's work like this... maybe even a street race, to burn off some excess charge, to just feel like himself. Unbidden, his axles twitch restlessly above his shoulders at the thought. Now the only times he'd been granted a temporary leave was when he was deployed for high-yield firefights against metas, and even then, he's been leashed by a tracker.

"And it's not my day for fueling," he added after a moment, pauldrons lifted in a halfhearted shrug. "Not for another two days. First of the week." One energon cube a week from the government.

“A break on the base then,” she shrugged. “Anywhere you’re comfortable. I know the height restriction doesn’t give you a lot of options.”

Something the government should address. Seriously. They were here against their wills from the get-go, why was the government putting forth no efforts to make their stays a little more comfortable in an attempt to develop some sense of fondness? It might go a long way in their overall efforts and goals … but she supposes Slytherins didn’t exist here.

“If you don’t mind me scarfing something down, we could see if we could find a window at least.”

Sadly, it boiled down to a simple fact: they didn't need to accommodate Knock Out any further than the bare minimums they were doing, because he had so few options. There was no evidence that the resistance could provide him with energon... defecting to them would ultimately result in his starvation. It might take a year -- though realistically it would take less, given how little fuel they'd supplied him with these last few years -- but they were confident it would happen.

(Knock Out viewed it differently. The government might have control of their synthesized energon, but he had the Synth-En formula that he'd kept carefully hidden from them. It was just the materials and the facilities he'd lack, if he made that choice.)

"No... of course I don't mind," he responded, faintly touched that she'd even consider asking. No one else had ever given him a consideration like that.

They ended up in a shipping area, where there were windows and large roll doors for moving equipment. Knock Out perched on a large shipping pallet, and there were plenty of smaller boxes that Jane could use for a seat. At this time of night, most of the workers had already gone home, and the few that remained only tossed the occasional curious glance in their direction without ever drifting close enough for them to be overheard. It was some measure of privacy, at least.

"Thank you for your help earlier, with the nullifier. They have been pressing me for updates for the last few days, and I've had little to give them."

And with something so necessary for his survival, he had to make that decision. Even if it did take a while for that horrible end result, it was not like he was the peak of health or that there wouldn't be other factors to consider. They had a good hold on him and weren't letting go.

(Perhaps, though, there would be hope for the future.)

She smiled and only grabbed a quick snack to eat, something to tide her over until later. There was no need for a full meal yet. It was a pity more people weren't considerate towards him, towards each other. She could see a number of problems getting solved.

"You're welcome. I hate what it's going to be used for, but we have to pick our battles."

"If their abilities are rendered inoperative, enforcers have less cause to use deadly force to capture them," Knock Out offers, but they both know it's a thin thread of truth. Some enforcers worked under orders to eliminate, not contain. Some would claim it was 'unavoidable' in self-defense.

And that wasn't even taking into consideration what happened to the most headstrong metas who were brought in for 'reconditioning'. It was never made a secret around the base the lengths to which some of them were taken. Knock Out's, comparatively, could have been considered mild.

Unbidden, his gaze slides toward the roll doors -- open, beckoning -- and holds there for a long moment. He hates that his chrono tells him exactly, to the day, how long it's been since he was able to drive freely. He's no Seeker, but he imagines this is what it must feel like when they're deprived of flight for too long. If he ever gets back to his world, he might just owe Starscream an apology for ribbing him about that missing t-cog.

His tanks rumble grumpily, low-leveled and barely above dry. He ignores it.

"What do you think they'll have you working on next?"

"Perhaps it could help with those who don't have much control over their powers," she added. "Sometimes they're completely new to it all when they arrive."

Another thin thread, another baseless hope. Especially when it came to certain targets. Jane knew that if she were to break away right now, there would be quite a bounty on her head, in some sense. Jane broke a coffee mug upon learning about that. It got her being watched extra well for two weeks, but she hardly cared. She was already sabotaging them from the inside out with renewed gusto.

Seeing him look out the doors make her wish that she could cover for him, let him have even ten minutes of freedom. But it would just endanger them both.

"Probably something in security for now," she sighed. "The servers have been getting attacked more frequently, so we need to patch those holes before we can resume work on the portal."

Knock Out doesn't point out that you wouldn't need a wide area nullifier for something like that, when a much smaller scale one could be used. They're both just ignoring the elephant in the room, knowing exactly what such a device will actually be used for.

"If you need..." he began, and immediately doubted his own impulse to offer. He didn't owe Jane anything. True, she'd helped him tonight, but that could have been for any reason. There's just no way to tell. There's no one here he can trust.

But...

It's a long minute before he continues the aborted sentence, haltingly, quandary in every syllable. "A second opinion, with the server security. You know... where to find me."

And that there wasn't anything they could do to stop it, not without making the situation worse.

She knows what he is trying to say, and smiles gratefully.

"You'll be the first person I ask."

Jonathan's another meta that the government had to break, though his own 'lesson' was to get him to cooperate with the government at all. Of course, he couldn't be sealed up for seven months without food and water, or else they'd open the door to find a dead and desiccated meta. Instead, they tortured him on a daily basis, each session bringing surprising new techniques.

One day they'd just slice into him with white hot blades that would cauterize his wounds as they'd cut so he wouldn't bleed a hole in the floor. The next they'd put him in a freezing cold chamber, then offer a heat source. He'd crawl toward the heat source, because he's a lizard and that's what lizards do, and they'd ask him questions. If he didn't give the answers they wanted, the heat would be turned off...or turned up until it burned him. When he was in shed, they'd lower the humidity. All he had to do to make it stop was say and do what they wanted. And eventually, he did.

Except Knock Out might have noticed Jonathan doing what he used to do. His equipment would break frequently, and that's when he didn't just 'forget' to bring it with him, or just 'didn't think' he'd need it where he was going. He plops his pulse blaster on the table.

"It's broken again."

Which is really impressive for it to be broken again when Jonathan only very rarely used it.

In reality, Knock Out knew that his stint in 'solitary' could have been much worse. He suspected that his Cybertronian form presented some unique challenges to physical torture. Not insurmountable, but enough that they'd elected to try other methods first. True, his frame had started cannibalizing itself by the fifth month without energon, but the harder part had been the isolation for him. He wasn't used to being alone, cut off from any external input.

They hadn't needed to break him. They'd just needed to show him that they could, if they chose too. Knock Out was a smart mech; he could acknowledge when he'd been outplayed. It was a self-preservation instinct that had kept him alive for millions of years. He'd tried rebellion, it hadn't worked out for him, so he'd play along for now. The government didn't need his loyalty, just his obedience. And they'd been smart about it. When he'd been released, they continued to regulate his energon consumption: one cube a week. They made him drink it in front of them, like an unruly child taking his medicine, so they could be sure that he wasn't storing any for later. It was enough to survive on, but it meant that he hadn't been properly, adequately fueled for six years.

But he could wait. He was in the unique position due to his lifespan that he could outlast this registration policy, this government regime, this civilization if needed. Pit, he could probably wait out the humans' whole evolutionary chain in a worst case scenario.

That was if his other government colleagues didn't drag him down with them while trying to play hero.

Knock Out raised an orbital ridge when Jonathan presented his weapon for repair yet again. It hadn't been hard to figure out that the reptilian was the cause of the constant malfunctions that his equipment suffered. The medic was a little miffed, truthfully; Knock Out had been careful with his own sabotage, but he'd still been caught. Jonathan seemed to get away with a lot more leeway. Rude.

"How utterly unexpected," Knock Out deadpanned as he picked up the blaster, not bothering to disguise the irritation in his tone.

Edited 2020-01-25 20:12 (UTC)

"Yeah, sorry. It's this cold weather. It makes my lizardy appendages all clumsy. They'd probably be better off letting me sit around base until the weather warms up, but you gotta do what you gotta do, you know?"

It's bullshit, but it's good enough bullshit to get by. He thinks. Honestly, he has no idea how long it'll last. It's only been about six months since he was released from his previous torture.

Knock Out, who has been restricted to the base for the last six years except for specific allowances, fixes Jonathan with a faintly sour look at that remark. What he wouldn't give for a long drive every once in a while.

But he says nothing, cracking open the case on the blaster and poking long claws through the wiring inside of it. "Let's have a loo-- why is there mud in here?"

"I was running after a meta, and I slipped. In the mud."

Said with a completely straight face. He has an explanation ready for everything Knock Out may find.

Ordinarily, Knock Out would have just handed Jonathan another pulse blaster at this point, but his stock was currently depleted. His handlers had issued every available one to enforcers in the wake of the new Porter arrivals, leaving him with no spares. It seemed he has no choice but to clean this one out and rewire it.

"How extraordinarily unfortunate," he said, pulling a tall metal stool closer to sit on while he works. "Considering most mud in January is frozen solid."

"Not in Heropa it isn't."

In his defense, they really did have him doing a lot of work in Heropa, since that's where the now active porter is, so that is where he'd most likely be when things went wrong with his blaster. Again.

"I see," the mech replied. Gripping the cluster of muddy wires, he pulls the whole node of them out before reaching for a new transistor from a nearby box of them. At least the government keeps him well-supplied in materials to build his own parts. He begins unspooling a fresh length of wire, transforming one clawed digit into a microwelder.

"So I take it your mission was unsuccessful, then?"

Knock Out isn't sure how information for this particular raid target was gleaned, but he'd been surprised when his handler had ordered him to accompany the squad of enforcers. Evidently the tip had indicated that at least a dozen rogue Metas, some from the recent influx when the Porter had turned back on, were holed up in a rundown factory building in a sketchy part of the City — perfect for a clandestine meeting of underground Metas.

Or so they had thought.

He wondered if one of their own had leaked the information to the enforcers for reward or protection, or whether someone had just been sloppy covering their tracks. Either way, they had threescore of heavily armed, hungry for promotions enforcers descending on the building.

Gunfire erupts.

Knock Out is stationed on the perimeter of the factory property, sensor net cast wide to identify anyone trying to slip the tightening web of enforcers ringing the building. Those attempting to flee may have to use their abilities to get past the mech, and if he manages to subdue them, he'll produce inhibition cuffs to keep them from fighting back. If they manage to slip him and take off on foot or in a vehicle, he'll drop into his alt mode and tear off after them.

It's not personal. He's just looking out for himself first.

He may never know exactly what had been the last straw, whether it had been the carefully formulated reasoning presented to him by resistance sympathizers that had finally presented a better option. Maybe it was the promise of energon not leashed to the government's whims and fickle moods, even if for the moment it was a theoretical supply. Maybe it was one of his guards muttering "move it, machine" just one too many times within Knock Out's audial range.

Either way, he's here now. It hadn't been a clean escape from the government compound; there was no stealthy slipping away in the night. This had been an explosive, violent, messy exit from the captivity Knock Out had submitted himself to six years prior.

It had been fitting. He was hardly a front line frame type, but even a light-class mech like him could do a lot of damage to human structures and human detachments of soldiers when he got going, when he decided he was done letting the humans control him. He'd made personally, unambiguously sure that the only way they'd be able to collect his handler's remains was with a mop.

(Breakdown would have been proud.)

Sitting with his back against the wall in one of the safe house's larger areas (a garage, perhaps, or someplace more industrial like a warehouse floor), his escape had not been without consequence. His armor is heavily dented, scraped down to bare metal in places, and the rest of his form is peppered with bullet holes. Where they'd punched deeply, there are splotches of pale blue energon; some dried where he's clamped off the leaks, others still weeping, coursing slow trails down the red plating and puddling. Someone's fetched him several towels, but they're scattered around him on the floor, now sodden and stained with the substance.

"Don't touch the towels," he says without looking up at anyone's approach. Maybe whoever it is has come to bring him some clean ones. "Energon is caustic to organic skin."

Leg panels opened, his hands are buried in the internals of his thigh, and his lower pede is completely disconnected and resting a few feet away. For the most part he works in silence, but there's an occasional waver on his faceplates that belies this being a completely painless process. Like he's not in the middle of a casual disassembly of himself, he flicks an absent nod at an old table... more specifically, at a data stick that sits on it.

"Specs and countermeasures for all the tech I designed," he says. "Including the frequency harmonic patterns for the pulse blasters I built for the enforcers. There's some communications shielding intel on there as well, but they've likely already changed that. Still, you might get lucky."

Edited 2020-01-18 22:08 (UTC)

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[OPEN] Even if they come for us...

GOVERNMENT COMPOUND;

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[CW: Mentions of government torture and brainwashing]

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RESISTANCE SHAKEDOWN;

POST DEFECTION;