#Crosscut

[what-have-i-unleashed]

so uhhhhh long post ahead

(cw: emotional manipulation, toxic relationship, survivor's guilt, if there's anything more please tell me)

underverse-adjacent, so it's cross being in the same team as nightmare and killer only. xchara is there too but his presence does nothing to comfort cross.

cross is touch-starved because he was stuck in the empty world for such a long time, and he also craves interaction with another person. and ink used to be that for him until cross realized he could not depend on ink for his goal (restoring xtale) and he felt somewhat betrayed by that notion. this man has trust issues now, not only with other people but also with himself. can he trust himself to be attached to another person? can he trust his decisions, when his past actions only brought him more grief than they're worth?

enter nightmare and killer, who do not care about the morality of his idea to steal and hack the codes of other universes to create his own. in fact, they're enabling him and xchara, only because their goals intersect. but that is more than anything he could hope for. after xtale, after the situation with ink, finally someone is on his side, silently assuring him that what he's done is for the greater good.

killer… does not like cross, mostly because of the whole xchara thing. but someone has to teach the newbie on how things work around here, and it's not going to be nightmare for sure. so he takes cross under his wings, pointing out how things are done. his teaching leaves a lot to be desired though, mostly because he's a cryptic asshole who just won't say directly what he means.

but as cross gets to slowly hang around killer, being mentored by him, he starts to observe how killer carries himself and feels a nagging thought probing at his mind, a thought definitely not from xchara at all. killer is the only source of affection cross can have in this situation - killer is free with his physical affection, always touching cross like patting cross' head, glomping on him, or resting his arm over cross' shoulders. cross likes these gestures from killer, but he cannot show it because he knows what killer will do upon seeing a weakness. his morality and killer's are different - they shouldn't be compatible.

and yet, that nagging thought gets louder and louder in his head. why does he look at killer too much? why does he anticipate any form of praise from killer? why does he hate it when killer contradicts him? one day, xchara will bluntly tell cross that he has an obsession with that guy. it's exhausting watching cross acting like a complete middle schooler with a crush who adamantly denies it. and like, there's no freaking way, right? there's no way a person like cross can have a crush on a sadistic multiversal terrorist. he has better tastes than that!

and like, cross is partially right. he has better morals than that, but it doesn't stop his soul from latching onto the first person who can offer him some physical and emotion comfort, however little there is. but also... cross likes the idea of killer, because he doesn't really know killer. he's in that queer phase of "do i like that person - or do i want to be them". killer is, for all his flaws, a good soldier. he's dutiful by nightmare's side and an excellent fighter. he's decisive, witty, and scarily smart. everything cross aspires to be, his ideal self. he doesn't want to be unsure, he doesn't want to be scared, he doesn't want to be weak. cross' conflicts within himself are multiple, and no doubt nightmare and killer take notice of that.

cross wants to be decisive and self-assured, but he also wants to be told what to do, to follow someone's will. because he's scared of himself - he's still not processed the guilt over his decisions and actions in xtale. he wants control but he also craves guidance, so if he's wrong, at least it's not his fault this time, right?

and killer would play with his head like that. "it's ok, i can show you", "it's ok, it's up to you", "i'll take responsibility for this". if cross listens to killer, then every mistake is on killer's shoulders and not his. "you don't have to feel guilty, because i will be your sacrificial lamb" type of situation. but also, cross will feel he owes killer for this, and he'll stay, over and over and again and again, despite all the horrible things they've done, despite all the times killer guilt-trips him into doing something not in his morality. but it's okay, because it's killer's hands guiding him to do it, and cross will do it if only to make killer happy with him.

and i think sometimes killer will use his wiles to get cross to agree to be his lab subject. cross has such a fascinating soul, and killer won't mind tormenting xchara for a bit. killer will assure cross that this is just something to strengthen cross, to make him a better soldier. a little bit of praises and surefire conviction will get cross relax in his presence. nightmare sure has found a perfect toy for his bloodhound, something that will keep his interests up and boredom away in the down time.

[murderinthemoshpit]

how my crew looks

[coco9728]

Find the correct answer below, after answering the quiz question. And no cheating please!😁

The answer is 4!

Scott is seen to use 4 grapple packs when abseiling down the mine.

Though later in the episode he also uses 1 grapple pack to rescue Marion Van Arkel from the falling elevator. So that's 5 grapple packs in total for the entire episode.

Plus, at the very end of the episode Scott is seen using (hmmm, maybe a lazer pack?...) for his grapple gun to (is he welding?...with no protective gear!...) seal the uranium mine.

[transformers-mosaic]

Transformers: Mosaic #503 - "Home Is Where The Laser Core Is"

Originally posted on June 16th, 2010

Story - Juan Pablo Osorio Art - Oscar Choquecota Letters - Franco Villa Edits - Zac DeBoard Diaclone designs - Benjamin Galley

deviantART | Seibertron | TFW2005 | BotTalk

Later revised and annotated for Transformers: The Lost Seasons

wada sez: The first of three strips written to bring a Transformers Animated character into Sunbow continuity; I've bumped up the other two, which were originally posted not long after, for a better reading experience. Bulkhead’s group here has a mixture of origins, as explained in the comments on deviantART, but includes a couple of Diaclone bots, who were slightly redesigned by Galley for the sake of variety. The blue bot is actually a Brazilian character, Camaro, who was renamed "Sprint" after Windcharger's preliminary name. In the final panel, the bots present are the main cast of Animated, and to cement the homage Ratchet is seen fixing his forehead chevron, a cheeky reference inserted by Choquecota. Bulkhead’s original design was done by Choquecota, and Osorio wrote the whole story based on it; later, Osorio would create a separate character model for Bulkhead along similar lines for The Lost Seasons, which was widely shared online and seems very likely to have inspired the later official release of the G1-style Legacy Bulkhead. See below for all of this relevant artwork.

[granatu888]

I‘m sorry but…

[flyboytracy]

[askvectorprime]

Dear Vector,

Hello! It's a simple question but I wanted to ask- can two forged Cybertronians come out looking the same, or will they each be unique?

Dear Fraternal Forger,

Certainly. We can look to the examples of Crosscut and Skids, Hoist and Trailcutter, Dominus and Minimus Ambus, Bumblebee and Cliffjumper, or Ratchet and Ironhide. It's one of the many ways Cybertronians can count others as their siblings.

[trypoed]

Such a great plot 😳😳😳

[transingthoseformers]

Also, Megatron has gotten involved in a new art scene that is exploding under the new government with poetry and essays and plays.

He and Crosscut and a few other more lit focused Cybertronians get together. He ends up dealing with the Camiens a lot as the more "artistic" representative, and they are all interested. This is how he meets Nautica and some of the other Sorority members.

Megatron kind of collects Camien "ducklings". Starscream teases him about this but since he has adopted baby Windblade he has no room to comment. They are working on swordfighting together.

Yessssssss ohh that's gotta be so fun

It's a Renaissance sort of situation isn't it

Oooo, yes yes

Awww! yESS!

[thelastgherkin]

LEGACY EVOLUTION Deluxe Crosscut

More like this:

Thrilling 30 Deluxe Class Crosscut

Legacy: Velocitron Speedia 500 Collection Deluxe Class Diaclone Universe Burn Out

Kingdom Deluxe Class Road Rage

[dustbunny105]

Title: Bodyguard Moment Fandom: Transformers IDW2 Ship: Road Rage/Nautica, Crosscut/Nautica, others/Nautica (all one-sided) Word Count: 1500 Rating: PG Summary: Pre-series. Road Rage wakes up in a medical bay after saving Nautica but what is she forgetting... A/N: For Femslash February and for the @fembot-prompts prompt “Yours is a body I'd like to guard.”

.

Road Rage came sluggishly online, processor seeming to creep closer to redline the closer she crept to consciousness. She activated her audial suite first and found herself relaxing at the reassuring sound of a medical bay. Next came motor control and her body eased as her mind had-- which brought her nervecircuits screaming awake in response to new wires and fresh welds being pulled in ways they shouldn't so suddenly be. Her optics flickered on and her processor really did feel ready to overheat as she tried to interpret all of the input at once, at the same time as she tried to process the alerts popping up on her HUD and to realign her frame too. When she was finally able to make sense of what she was seeing, she recognized Crosscut peering down at her, exasperated but not unkind.

"Do I not pay you enough?" asked Crosscut.

"You're asking me that now?" Road Rage grunted and grit her dentae at the grinding noises that accompanied her attempt to sit up.

Crosscut put a staying hand on her shoulder. Then, sounding far more amused than seemed appropriate in the moment, at least in Road Rage's opinion, he said, "I don't see how you can blame me for that when you're the one who ran off looking for new job opportunities in the middle of a fire fight."

Road Rage squinted at him and kept squinting at him while he did her the courtesy of adjusting the medical slab so she wasn't flat on her back. Her processor hadn't actually redlined, had it? She'd have gotten an alert first, probably, and she was awake and aware enough to have recognized one…

"What are you talking about?" she asked, half her attention on him and half on acknowledging and dismissing the slew of popups still blinking for attention on her HUD. Some of her short-term memory was corrupted and she winced as her processor warmed yet again at her attempts to sift through what remained. "When the summit was attacked-- yes, when the summit was attacked, I did my bodyguard thing and got you to safety. I was right behind you. Then…"

Then what? With another grunt, Road Rage poked more insistently at her memory banks. Crosscut was saying something, probably telling her to take it easy, but a new fragment of a memory file finally came up clear. It was a sudden, striking fear and she had to flex one hand, feel the pull of fresh welds, to remind herself that whatever had caused the feeling was done and over with. Then her overtaxed processor recovered another piece of the same memory-- the cause of the fear. Road Rage almost didn't realize what it was, it was in such a tangle with the feeling itself.

It was a scream.

She was doubled over before she realized she'd tried to move, before she'd even realized where she knew that voice from. Crosscut was speaking again, rapid and insistent, but he was drowned out this time by a flood of feedback she only slowly realized was coming out of her. Warnings flashed, so many and so insistent, that she couldn't make sense of her visual input past them. There was a second set of hands on her, unfamiliar, and she would've fought back if she could've remembered how. This was no time to be still. She had to get to-- to--

"Oh, thank goodness," she could hear Crosscut saying. "Just-- talk to her, would you? Tell her you're alright. Let her hear your voice."

"She wasn't supposed to be trying to recover short-term memory yet," said an unfamiliar voice to match the unfamiliar hands.

"Um," said a third voice, one that dismissed a solid third of the warnings and let Road Rage start to relax again. "Hello again, Road Rage. I'm okay, we're okay. We're in medical now. Here--"

Another hand, more familiar than Road Rage thought it should be, wrapped around one of her own and squeezed. The rest of the warnings were dismissed one by one from her HUD and this time it was Nautica's uncertain smile she found waiting for her.

"Hi," said Nautica. Her antenna was twitching with her nerves but she followed when Road Rage was eased back against the slab and then still when the attending medic readjusted it so that she was lying down flat again. Her fingers twitched, too, against Road Rage's, like she wanted to offer comfort but wasn't sure. "Are you alright now?"

"Are you? Really?" asked Road Rage. She cast a critical look over Nautica and didn't see any damage but an impression left on her spark, the ghost of a corrupted memory, made her doubt it. "We were… I…"

She pressed her free hand to her forehead as her processor protested. The medic, not someone she recognized right away, said, "Stop before you burn out your entire brain module. You need to give your processor a chance to do its own maintenance before you go picking at traumatizing memories."

"You did take a lot of damage," said Nautica. Her fingers twitched again, this time in small circles, and her optics took on a pale cast. "I'm pretty sure you took all of it, actually. Thanks for that, by the way." She quirked another smile, more certain but still awkward. "It looks good on your resume, if that helps."

Road Rage had barely begun trying to process that when the medic scolded, "Stop that."

Nautica squeezed her hand and pulled away, leaving Road Rage feeling cold. She shuffled a moment in place, then said, "Well! I'll let you rest up and recover what you can. Thank you again, for what you did for me. If--" she shot a glance at the medic, "I don't want to stress you out too much with reminders but you'll know what I mean when, if, it comes back to you. If you really meant it, consider the position yours." She cut a look at Crosscut this time. "I guess you'll need to discuss--" the medic synthesized a cough-- "right. Well. I'm glad you're alright."

She scurried out looking like she was on the last bar of her social battery. The medic, after a curt instruction to rest, went out after her. Road Rage, lost, looked over at Crosscut. She opened her mouth to ask for even a hint as to what was going on but cut herself off with a hiss as another memory file fragment, this one fuzzy with corruption, played out in her processor.

A cramped, closed space, a chorus of explosions right outside the door. A puddle of energon growing beneath her, sparking wires that really should've been inside her helm and her chassis and the right arm that was missing. A gun clutched tight in her other hand, override after override keeping her conscious.

Nautica's terrified face. Nautica's lips moving but all Road Rage could hear was static-- until one little snippet got through, or maybe that was all that was left in Road Rage's memory banks.

"-- Road Rage, right? Crosscut's bodyguard?"

Of all the memories that could've escaped corruption was the memory of what Road Rage had said in return. In her mind's eye, Nautica's face came into stark focus. Then came the words, rough with static but still, somehow, so very clear, "Yours is a body I'd like to guard."

Road Rage blinked back to the present with her fans running on a high setting and her poor processor still struggling on the edge of overheating.

"Came back to you, did it?" Crosscut asked.

She turned to look at him, engine letting out a sputter and then a long whine. She wished what he'd said earlier-- what Nautica had said earlier-- didn't make so much sense when she factored in the possibility that Nautica had told him about that conversation-- or at least how Nautica had interpreted it. Any hope she might have had, though, that he didn't know or at least didn't understand what she had meant in the moment was vanquished by the look he was giving her.

Part amusement, part pity, all understanding.

They were silent for a long moment. Road Rage's sincere desire to fall suddenly, tragically offline did not come to pass, which seemed more unfair the more she thought about how touchy her condition obviously was.

"Well," said Crosscut, "I don't imagine it will be too much trouble to have you transferred, if that's what you really want."

A moment passed before Road Rage realized the way his optical ridges rose was because she was nodding. He huffed another laugh at her, still not unkind. Then he patted her on the shoulder and repeated the medic's instruction to rest.

"I'll get it taken care of," he assured her on his way out. He paused at the door and gave her that same understanding look over his shoulder. "For what it's worth-- I wish you better luck than the rest of us have had."

[toyboxcomix]

Random Old Comic: Combiner Wars Finale https://www.toyboxcomix.com/2017/05/21/combiner-wars-finale/ Combiner Wars Finale

[backup-datatrax]

[transformers-mosaic]

Transformers: Mosaic #538 - "Lament"

Originally posted on September 3rd, 2010

Story, Script, Letters - Seb Script - HdE Art - Roy Stiffey

deviantART | Seibertron | TFW2005 | BotTalk

wada sez: This Crosscut spotlight is absolutely the funniest Mosaic I've read in ages. On deviantART, Seb said: “Well, my dictionary defines 'soliloquy' as "the act of a character speaking to himself so as to reveal his thought to the audience" (whereas 'colloquy' would be a regular conversation between 2 parties). Technically, Crosscut doesn't 'speak' here, which makes this a 'monologue' instead of 'soliloquy', but since the piece is all about big words, the latter one sounds way more 'literate' ;p”. HdE added: “With LAST STAND OF THE WRECKERS, Roche and Roberts gave us the horrors of war, musings on insanity, sacrifice, betrayal and a huge helping of death and destruction. With LAMENT, Seb and HdE give their audience... big words. And waffle. Lots of waffle. Mmm... waffles... [...] Our intention here was to put Crosscut over as being far-too-verbose and serious for his own good. But hopefully, you can still feel a pang of pity for him at the end.” See below for a mirrored version of Seb’s full commentary for the strip, originally shared to his own deviantART account, along with clean colors and even an Italian translation.

Now to explain the not-so-pure motivation behind this piece, sigh.... :) Mainly, there are two reasons:

1) I was always amazed (not always positively) by how TF fandom takes pride in (sometimes even competitive) knowledge of insanely obscure trivia, situations and characters from within the franchise. In 25+ years, said franchise has accumulated an insane number of somethings than can, depending on the case in question, be labeled as a character, "character", pitiful excuse for a "character", and pitiful excuse for a word "character". No matter, for as long as someone is "official" (appeared in some officially sanctioned part of the franchise), poor he/she/it "deserves some love", regardless of the fact that 2 minutes of someone's mental effort can result in a MUCH better "character".

This is only partly "derogatory", for I myself indulge in such things. I'm poking fun at myself as well. :D

Now, I knew this had to be pulled of with a Mosaic starring Crosscut - a (let's face it) pitiful excuse for a word "character" who appeared only on 2 panels of a Marvel TF issue from '86, the first one depicting him in a glow of energy while testing the Space bridge, the second one depicting him explode into pieces due to Bridge's faulty fuel line....but one thing had set him apart from all the others "hi-then-die" guys - he was NAMED.

So, the idea was giving that sorry li'l dude a back-story most profound, not knowing what it'll be. And it waited....

2) I had a discussion with HdE about overly serious and over-the-top writing bursting with pathos that can be seen in writing in general, and how a whole lotta NOTHING can be disguised with big, dramatic words. The talk (d)evolved into a hilarious exchange of pretentious and verbose pseudo-poetic ramblings, and thus the idea of Crosscut the Poet was born!

I compiled that pompous mumbo-jumbo, adapted it for the situation, added quite an amount of equally verbose pretentious fillers, distributed it among the panels and sent the draft to HdE. He Shakespeare-ized the ramblings even further (which I didn't think was possible, but it was!), added several additional juicy passages, and VOILA!

All the script needed was master Roy to bring this fragile beauty and innocent vulnerability to life! :)

...and here it is - a blank slate given the deepest depth imaginable. ;)

[tfwarfareincorrectquotes]

Crosscut: Uh-oh.

Road Rage: What?

Crosscut: Somebody's in love.

Road Rage: Pfft, please. I just respect Nautica as a friend. It's not like I lay in berth at night thinking about her.

*Later That Night*

Road Rage:

Road Rage: Oh no.

[flyboytracy]

the floor is lava