#failsafe coding au

The concept of this continuity soup AU is that Warframes, particularly warframes with slave coding can trigger a heat/rut through submitting to a stronger opponent in battle.

It makes them limp and pathetic, unable to activate their weapon systems, just about able to string a sentence together between chirrups of binary, the only hard part of them is their spike so it's easier for the victor to cart them off. They'll just mewl and roll around on their back to present their spikes, a failsafe to deter the victor from just killing them. However, if a mech has been on a winning streak & suddenly looses it forcibly activates.

This is inspired by a Tokyo Ghoul Fanfic Series I've been reading particularly the fic ( https://archiveofourown.org/works/48210463/chapters/121576942 ) I recommend reading that entry even if you're unfamiliar with the source material it's absolutely fantastic. Also this is somewhat inspired by my love of the X-Men & Ajin: Demi-human.

Maybe it was something conjured up by the Quintessons during their occupation to deter more violent troops from killing their coworkers because if they lost they'd become docile for a time & if they won they'd end up sparked, harder to cause trouble that way. The quints also found it's excellent entertainment at parties.

Anyway in the modern day Gladiators have to wear chastity devices because there's no way that the arena masters are giving people a free show, instead if a bot drops into heat they'll be carted out of the arena to a private afterparty for the high society bots to attend.

The managers don't want their star champions to end up sparked & have to take a break from performing.

Sometimes Gladiators can even be rented out to private arenas in Senator's homes or high end nightclubs for Fight & Spike parties where the fight is just an appetizer for the main event of watching some hulking warframe present themselves begging to be touched. Ridden or pounded by the victor, often pumped up on aggression inducing drugs, then turned over to the guests. That's all perfectly legal, in the gladiatorial contracts even, ignore that little detail about most of them signing said contracts under duress. What isn't legal is using these Gladiators as studs for the breeding of trafficked unregistered Outliers.

Which is where our intrepid undercover investigative journalist Orion Pax comes in. He's gotten into one of these parties to investigate the possible links to the disappearances of prominent Outliers & civil rights activists on behalf of Senator Shockwave. His cover is that he's some arm candy secretary picked up from the archives for (senator of your choice who Shockwave is blackmailing to go along with it). Orion sometimes works with fellow independent journalists Jazz & Blaster who primarily travel from city to city, event to event, interviewing interesting people with a political bent (think all gas no breaks / channel 5 the youtube channels if you're familiar but Jazz & Blaster aren't sex pests like the hosts of those channels 💀 if you're not familiar I'd recommend looking up someone reacting to one of their videos don't give the og channels views). They're helping him, monitoring the situation & relating his wire to their police contact Prowl who's been kicked off the missing Outliers case for getting too close to the truth.

Thus sets the scene for Orion to meet Megatron. He's aware of the gladiator of course who wouldn't know the face of the reigning champion of the pit, but seeing clips of his fights is not the same as seeing the mech sprawled back on the dancefloor, hazey optic'd & undulating to show off his spike. Whirring & beeping like a mechanimal. Orion has never seen something so hot before in his life & he hates himself for it. Which is about when the host of the party brings out Starscream who's been legally registered as dead for several months. Makes him ride Megatron until he's sparked up. Of course to make sure he's carrying an Outlier spark that's inherited his abilities the host blows a hole through his processor mid second round. After a few seconds Star jerks back into action, this isn't his first rodeo & he wants to get it over with asap before the host gets bored of boasting about his sales pitch, already starting bidding on Star's unborn bitty, & decides to shoot him again for the spectacle of it all.

Megatron is Distressed his heat partner just died, without any fight response he's working himself into hysterics. His processor is mush, energon & fragments of processor boards splashed across his face, whimpering he can't understand it His Mate just died he felt the death flare in his EM field but he can also feel the body is still moving.

Star absolutely loathes those noises & Megatron's expression because it breaks the immersion of all the training he's been through to see himself as an object because this bot is treating him like a person asking if he's hurt in base binary chirps & it makes him hate himself more. Maybe he's got a scold's bridle on so that he can't speak, he's not nicknamed Screamer for no reason.

Orion attends a few of these parties. He also goes to interview Megatron while he's sober after winning a match. Officially it's because Orion is writing a puff piece about Megatron so they have a conversation dancing around the subject, aware they're being monitored. Orion doesn't realise he's been found out as a mole until he's being dragged into the arena ring at a party. Thrown down in front of a drugged up Megatron, he's completely berserk, unable to be reasoned with, going to rip Orion to pieces. So thinking quickly Orion just surrenders mimicking a warframe's defeat induced heat driven to a fever pitch Megatron frags him until the drugs are out of his system. The party goers love it & want an oncore meanwhile Megs is coming back to his senses, an absolutely wrecked civilian mech underneath him. His handler is screaming at him over internal comms to give the ppl what they want & frag his throat open like he just did to that medalling journalist's valve. Orion just tells him " I'm sorry they're making you do this, I will endure it, don't blame yourself for what they're forcing you to do"

Of course they don't just let Orion go afterwards so now he's a missing person. Jazz, Blaster, & Prowl were tapped into Orion's audio visual feed & saw the whole thing up until Megatron crushed his Audials & Optics while fucking his face until it falls apart.

Orion is now being trafficed with the Outliers, his sensors are limited to tactial & olfactory only, luckily most of the trafficked bots know Sign language & Chirolinguistics so they teach him. Both Star & Orion are sparked up so they're housed together. Being moved from safehouse to safehouse. Star decides to use his own parts to try and repair Orion since even if he ripps out an optic it'll just grow back when he resets. His owner doesn't intervene because he finds it funny & it is keeping Starscream occupied. They are planning to repair Orion after the sparkling is born so they can get a repeat performance. But maybe they subject him to empurata since his face is already smashed.

Not sure what happens from here, maybe Jazz, Blaster, & Co decide to break Megatron out of the arena to help them track down Orion & the missing Outliers via his fledgling Sire bond.

I'm making Blurr an Outlier also, quicksilver type shit. He's fairly well-known by the general public as his disqualification from participating in any sporting events was highly publicised. With his fellow Velocitronians finding it to be highly offensive that he's barred, some more zealous individuals believe Blurr's speed to have been a blessing by their colony's patron Amalgamous Prime. He's lapping up being the civil rights movements' poster child. I'm also making Senator Shockwave Velocitronian royalty, rumoured to be a direct descendant of Amalgamous Prime. It's traditional that the royalty of Velocitron are Conjunx to the winner of the race celebrating their coming of age ceremony, whenever they choose to have that celebration after they reach adulthood is up to them, so Shockwave has postponed his in protest until the cybertronian government would recognise Blurr as the winner. They decide to do some fake dating 'the government is forbidding our love from being recognized in the traditional manner of our people' type shit for the tabloids to lap up & sway public opinion. They're a real celebrity couple.

This makes both of them frequent targets for assassinations & kidnappings. Starscream was a hired guard for Blurr & 'died' in one of these attacks, with the traffickers realising that Star was an Outlier & taking him after watching him wake up from a decapitation. Shockwave goes missing during one of these attempts, carted off to be subjected to empurata, the surgery triggers a mass/shape shifting mutation in him. He breaks out & returns to office hiding the fact that he's now an Outlier himself, maintaining his original form for long periods of time stressing out his body to the point of seizures. Blurr caring for him & helping him hide himself leads them to develop genuine feelings for eachother.

Please send me asks about this au or reblog & add comments please 🥺👉👈

Signed

First, I would love to know how Megatron was in the situation of being a Gladiator slave in the first place. I imagine Megatron, original was a miner in D-16 who worked with other miner fellows, and one of them was Terminus being his caretaker/creator. It was a tough job and tough life, but they still earned enough to get the basic necessity for their lives. Until one day, the mine that they were working at was collapsed, resulting in the mine getting shut down and the miners losing their jobs. Unfortunately for D-16, Terminus was severely injured due to the mine incident, and they basically couldn't afford any medical care to cure his injured. Then, he met some bots offering him to work as a Gladiator in this one seemingly legal arena with a hefty amount of shanix that was enough to pay for his caretaker' medical bill, so he agreed to the offer, without realizing he was trafficking himself to be the property of the arena (I'm thinking about D-16 signed a shady contract that basically tricked him to be in debt through additional fees/services provided for him when he worked at the arena, and he had to pay back those fees plus very high interests. Also, if he loses a match, he has to pay for that loss. So you can imagine the arena master did everything to sabotage him and slowly trap him and threaten him to comply with their demands, leading of current situation of him). This is my idea for this AU, but I would love to hear your ideas for Megatron's background.

Second, I can't help but wonder what would happen to Orion Pax when he got caught and became the victim of trafficking. I know his face got very damaged due to the attack from Megatron's losing control, and may be his current owner did consider to put him through empurata and reduced him to a breeding slave. However, what if the reason why Orion Pax got discovered being a mole is because the current owner of Orion had taken into liking him when Orion still pretended to be the eye candy of any random Senator at these deranged party? Probably, this mech wanted to approach Orion but got rejected by him, which was a serious misstep from Orion Pax. So this mech (either a ring leader of Outlier trafficking organization or one of the rich clients) decided to dug into Orion's personal life like a creeping stalker he was, and he finally found out about Orion's real identity... which led to Orion getting exposed and well, becoming the trafficked mech like other Outliers and activists. So after Orion got ravaged by Megatron as spectacle for the deranged and vile beings (including a bunch of corrupted senators and governors), Orion got auctioned off and get bought by the same mech that exposed him being a mole. The Orion's master at first, seeing how Orion's face got almost destroyed, decided to reduce him just a breeding slave so no need to get him a new face. However, this deranged master also missed Orion's handsome face and his beautiful optics full of fire and defiance and he enjoyed to see Orion's faceplate when he broke him down into an hopeless and defeated cage bird. So he decided to fix Orion Pax's face once he birthed his and Megatron's first child. Though, when his face was fixed, Orion was forced to have a retractable facemask to hide his identity (but mostly to tempt the clients to pay extra fees if they wanted to his face in a private setting. Plus, the owner was possessive of Orion's pretty face). This is what I come up and I would love to see your ideas of what happened to Orion Pax when he became the trafficked mech or how he got discovered.

I actually would like to come up with more details of Orion's predicaments and hellhole conditions as being a trafficked mech. I wonder if you would have him just being a breeder or him being prostituted by his owner. Also, would love to see or imagine how he interacted with Starscream and other trafficked mechs. Do you know who else was being enslaved under the owner.

Awwwwwwwww i really love this what a great first ask for this blog

I'll give a little response here while I'm figuring out some world building stuff, im not gonna be shy about my influences & thinking about Gladiators stuff is making me want to rewatch some documentaries on Rome & also this https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0GHjKMoz98-cIDeNe9pngGKR-6lseGvr animatic series

The great thing about fiction is even if you're inspired by history is you can also just make shit up still i want to scratch that nerd itch so there's going to be Gladiator schools & taking from some naval history like a lot of mechs are pressganged into stuff

First of all i like the idea of D-16 being made during the gorilla fighting that eventually drove off the Quintesson occupation, his alt form is first and foremost a gun, tho in this it's more like Black Rock Shooters massive arm canon that has to be wielded by another bot,

As for his history we could take some inspiration from Spartacus & say that he was accused of deserting & that's how he ends up in a miner's chaingang

Lots of warframes end up going through something similar since the ruling classes/casts are firm believers in religious functionalism & think that the warframes will just fight constantly if they aren't tightly leashed

The gladiatorial rings were something introduced to Cybertron during the occupation with the Quintessons using them much the way the romans did, to execute criminals & entertain/threaten the masses, shipping in animals from distant planets & such to tear the sentenced apart, then they started training/designing their own executioners after exhausting the predatory fauna of numerous worlds (fun fact rome nearly drove lions to extinction in several places), leading to the system of gladiators & there being less death in the ring if no less bloodshed because who wants to destroy their bespoke killing machines, the general populace begin to associate these mech with the Unmaker maybe some of them begin to venerate the Fallen as a cultic figure, here using the roman meaning of cult/cultic etc, patron of the ring

Maybe D-16 was originally destined for one of these Gladiator schools being a custom commission but was stolen by a gorilla resistance & that's how he ended up as part of the resistance, regardless he meets Terminus in the mines & that's a strong influence on him

He ends up in the ring having been sentenced to execution idk why yet but probably for defending another miner from an overseer, but against all odds he survives the fight, "I Still Function!" & he ends up being sold to a school despite ostensibly having won his freedom yet again. The other gladiators induct him into the cult & over time begin to venerate him, which the Managers of the school catch wind of & give him the stage name Megatronus after the Fallen which he shortens to Megatron, 'come see the gladiator blessed by the Unmaker himself' etc etc.

Orion gets found out as a mole because the Senator that Shockwave coerced into getting Orion into the private parties sold them out. Which is also how Senator Shockwave gets empurata'd because the traffickers have sponsors from the council. But i love the idea of other party goers harassing Orion. These things are always masquerades with bots wearing masks/battlemasks & holographic clothing to disguise themselves, in this verse bots can change their colours nanites at will if they have enough energon to spare which adds a layer to their disguises. Bots will often dress up as historical or mythological figures so Orion gets dressed up as a mini Prima. Which definitely caught the eye of the trafficker since he's playing up Megatron's status as a cultic figure to make him more appealing/unique to the high cast bots hiring him for the party.

I haven't worked out how exactly i want cybertronian reproduction to work yet but there's definitely multiple ways a bot can be born with pregnancy being highly risky & very rare.

At first Orion is being housed/moved with Starscream but once the sparklings are born and sent off to their new owners. The manager started bidding on the sparklings as soon as they confirmed it had taken at the party. They get separated & Orion gets subjected to training so he can put up some mock fight before he gets fucked six ways to sunday at the next party. He also gets /trained/ on how to please the party goers beforehand. I can definitely see the tracker prostituting Orion out where he wouldn't be as willing to do so with his high value Outlier stock. It's through tracking sightings of Orion that Jazz, Blaster, & Prowl are able to close in on the trafficking ring.

I haven't come up with who else has been disappeared yet tbh.