((Hey dudes! I mean, I feel like I hardly have to say it at this point, but it’s pretty obvious this blog is inactive. I’m working a LOT this year, and my schedule keeps me from the off-tumblr in-character activities that might otherwise keep me in the flow of things. On top of that, keeping other people interested, with few exceptions, has just been hard, and ultimately kind of discouraging.
So, for all those factors, this one’s going on indefinite hiatus. I don’t want to string anyone along with false promises, or anything--maybe next year if things slow down, I could see myself picking back up, but I wouldn’t count on it. I might write a final standalone to explain where Whirl disappeared to, but in case I don’t, the short version will be, “the multiverse yoinked him again.”
If this is it, I had a lot of fun! Overall, a positive experience, so thank all of you who stuck with me, endured my nonsense, and I hope you had fun, too!))
"It turns out that putting me on kissing probation may have been wisdom on your part, as I have just been rudely informed that I spread pinkeye and cold sores by putting my mouth on people."
“Of course it was wisdom on my part. I only ever have very good ideas.” Whirl had to stop and think, because the terms “pinkeye” and “cold sores” obviously meant nothing to him. He weighed the possibilities in his mind, and decided that it was equally likely that they were actual ailments as it was that they were nonsense terms devised by Windchill to mess with him.
“If pinkeye is a disease, mech, you’ve got it. And you’ve had it. You’ve got the pinkest eyes I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been around.”
“You’re going to need to be a little more specific because eye-related disorders have been Other Peoples’ Problem for a long, long time now.” There was, at least, one advantage to having the incredibly rudimentary and limited optical system that Whirl possessed: simpler, hardier structures were less likely to go wrong in interesting ways.
“It’s a human affliction, where the eye becomes infected with cooties.” He could recite everything there was to know about conjunctivitis, but ‘cooties’ was simpler, infinitely funnier, and he cared about the details about as much as Whirl would want to hear them.
“I have a lot of cooties, so from that we can conclude that I must not be allowed to put my mouth on your eyeball, ever.”
“One of my blanket rules for generally getting about in life is not to let anyone’s mouth near my eyeball,” Whirl replied, “so good news: the adjustment period will be brief.”
He could have let the conversation end there--such brief inane interactions wasn’t terribly uncommon for them--but Whirl rallied his wits about him and decided to be sociable. “What’re you doing these days, aside from filling your eyes with cooties?”
Not tagged or anything but as if I would let a small detail like that keep me from making Whirlcat. More scar tissue than cat, really, if we’re being honest.
"It turns out that putting me on kissing probation may have been wisdom on your part, as I have just been rudely informed that I spread pinkeye and cold sores by putting my mouth on people."
“Of course it was wisdom on my part. I only ever have very good ideas.” Whirl had to stop and think, because the terms “pinkeye” and “cold sores” obviously meant nothing to him. He weighed the possibilities in his mind, and decided that it was equally likely that they were actual ailments as it was that they were nonsense terms devised by Windchill to mess with him.
“If pinkeye is a disease, mech, you’ve got it. And you’ve had it. You’ve got the pinkest eyes I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been around.”
“Oh yeah, that. My optics are not contagious, else quite a few mecha would be suffering the same by now. It’s not a disease, it’s a defect. I mean the other kind of pinkeye.”
“You’re going to need to be a little more specific because eye-related disorders have been Other Peoples’ Problem for a long, long time now.” There was, at least, one advantage to having the incredibly rudimentary and limited optical system that Whirl possessed: simpler, hardier structures were less likely to go wrong in interesting ways.
"It turns out that putting me on kissing probation may have been wisdom on your part, as I have just been rudely informed that I spread pinkeye and cold sores by putting my mouth on people."
“Of course it was wisdom on my part. I only ever have very good ideas.” Whirl had to stop and think, because the terms “pinkeye” and “cold sores” obviously meant nothing to him. He weighed the possibilities in his mind, and decided that it was equally likely that they were actual ailments as it was that they were nonsense terms devised by Windchill to mess with him.
“If pinkeye is a disease, mech, you’ve got it. And you’ve had it. You’ve got the pinkest eyes I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been around.”
«Rally point.» Ping. «We’re on a nearby planet. Survivors are currently being organized to evacuate to our Cybertron. Unicron is within eyesight, but that’s not saying much, considering that at this point he’s an unusually large planet. We’re not running recon yet. I’m—still trying to figure out what’s already happened. So far I’ve got two fuzzy videos and a dozen contradictory witness statements.»
Interesting. Whirl was quite used to being the stopgap between “something we don’t understand, but is probably dangerous” and “everyone else” thanks to his years on the Lost Light, but he could deal with a bit of overly cautious behavior on the part of what amounted to his acting commander if he had to.
...okay, maybe not overly cautious. This might be an incredibly destructive planet-sized god they were dealing with, so the word for Prowl’s behavior was probably more close to “reasonable.” Whirl pinged a wordless acknowledgement back, and after a moment opened yet another gate, this time popping into existence in the air over the rally point. He made a beeline for Prowl himself, unconcerned with the rest of the rank-and-file, and transformed shortly before he landed, transferring his momentum into a few final, almost-hopping, birdlike steps.
“A planet,” he said, looking up once at the sky, and then to Prowl, “you said we might be fighting a planet? Hot damn. So, where d’you want me?” The prospect of imminent battle had him in a surprisingly good mood, and Prowl would be privy to a mercifully easy task in regards to getting Whirl to do what he wanted, for the moment. “If you need volunteers to go up and poke him, you’ve got one.”
Prowl wasn’t the least bit surprised that the first person to respond to the call for assistance was Whirl. He was, in fact, on Prowl’s top 10 list of most likely responders.
«If it were an emergency broadcast test, it would have said “emergency broadcast test.” Although that’s a good idea.» A monthly test of the citywide apocalyptic event communication system. He’d bring that up when this was over. «Here’s the situation: a neighboring Cybertron has already been eaten, survivors are being evacuated here. Unicron is currently dormant, and I’m hoping he’ll stay that way; but I’d put odds at over 75% he’s just taking a break before chasing down the survivors. We currently have no plan to stop him and no weapons capable of disabling Unicron. Do you need a bridge or just coordinates?»
“Sounds like my kind of fight,” he replied, eagerness trickling into his voice, “I can--one second.”
He wasn’t sure whether or not his bridge privileges had been restored since the incident, and a quick check confirmed they were. Within moments, he was rocketing out of a blue portal above Iacon. Whirl didn’t head for Prowl’s offices or anywhere in particular, because he was fairly certain he was about to leave in a moment.
“Coordinates--to where he is? You asking me to run recon, or are you sending me to a rally point?” Whirl was perfectly willing to go up to Unicron’s possibly dormant form right at that moment, of course, and he figured the former was the more likely, considering Prowl had just said that there was presently no plan.
The first few tentative forays into burying all of his problems down into a dark hole where they’d never again see the light of day were at least a partial success. Whirl had at least left the shuttle a handful of times and had actually spoken to other people, which was good. It wasn’t, however, until an emergency broadcast from new Iacon crossed his communication array that Whirl genuinely perked up for the first time in a long time. That transmission contained a pair of magic words that had Whirl peering at the rest of the world through the fugue that had descended between him and everything else:
Apocalyptic event.
Hmm. That was... not really alarming, but that had more to do with dealing with multiple apocalyptic events all the time than anything else. It was interesting, though. He listened to the broadcast again, and it yielded further treasures. Whirl craned his helm towards one of the datascreens, his antenna swiveling forward, reading the words he’d already heard aloud.
Unicron sighted. Combat assistance needed.
Whirl debated whether or not he should move Killer and the tire-creature, but if there was fighting to be done, it wouldn’t likely be all the way out here. They were probably safer. Silently, he fed Killer metal scraps until the barnacle refused to eat any more, overfilled the curved bit of sheet metal that had been serving as the tire-creature’s makeshift bowl, and put the ship on emergency power, to keep it secure longer.
The tire-creature watched him worriedly when he left, but obeyed his command to stay put.
Whirl was flying towards Iacon (he wasn’t about to bridge just yet) when he commed up the first person he could think to turn to in times like this. “Unless I’m finally going crazy, I think I just heard you put out an all points bulletin on Unicron,” he said to Prowl through the comm-line, “what the hell is going on? And where do I sign up? Please tell me this is not some kind of emergency broadcast test.”
For the most part, the aftermath of the entire incident was relatively uneventful. Whirl didn’t have any flashbacks, and only a few bad dreams, which stopped after the first week. Aside from the initial violent reaction in which he’d tried to show Soundwave exactly how many horrible things a Cybertronian could live through (after all, he couldn’t kill Soundwave; even in his rage, he wasn’t about to hurt the deployers), Whirl hadn’t really done anything in regard to what had happened between him and Soundwave.
He’d simply left Iacon when the situation had been explained to him, quiet and inscrutable, and he’d not gone back.
Whirl had been subjected to many indignities in his life, so he supposed it had only been a matter of time before someone managed to find a way to get into his head and cause trouble there. The worst part of it all was that there was no target for the rage, the sense of violation, because there was nobody at fault. It would have been easier to have been able to pin this entire mess on someone’s malicious intent, hunt them down, and enact slow, painful, utterly satisfying revenge. But there was nobody.
Soundwave hadn’t been acting of his own volition. Viewed objectively, Whirl had to say that Soundwave was probably worse off for this whole experience than anyone else. It was one thing to have terrible things done to you, and yet another to be forced to do terrible things to people you didn’t want to hurt. It wasn’t that Whirl had forgiven Soundwave, because there was nothing to forgive. He’d recognized that. He’d accepted it. He genuinely didn’t know if that was the product of apathy or some kind of—God forbid--personal growth, and Rung wasn’t around to explain it to him, so he just decided not to think about it.
And, when all was said and done, divided between the reality where some nameless, faceless thing had hurt him, and the reality from someone he’d gotten to actually kind of liked hurt him, he would honestly rather take the former.
The anger didn’t go away, though, but there was nothing Whirl could do with that anger except fester in it. There were no Sweep corpses to dismember, no nefarious interdimensional enemies he was allowed to maim, no remains of the prison shuttle he’d cannibalized. It was an impotent anger, a rage without an outlet, and in that way it reminded him of Garrus-1, a time and place he’d rather have forgotten. Whirl was used to rage fueling him, supporting him and shoving him forward, but this anger felt like a weight that was pinning him to one spot.
But, like on Garrus-1, the solution eventually came to him. At some point, something simply clicked at the back of his mind and Whirl felt as if he’d stepped out of his own head, blissfully disconnected. Time would make everything easier to deal with. All he had to do was wait, so he did. Aside from tending to Killer and his tire-creature, he did little more than sit, stare, and drift in and out of a sort of blank fugue state. Sometimes, he went flying, and sometimes he just stayed on his berth for the day, unless the tire-creature came to try and rouse him, which it sometimes did.
Even the boredom was barely touching him anymore, which was a benefit Whirl felt he’d honestly needed long ago. Every now and then his thoughts would just drift aimlessly until he remembered he was doing something else, but those somethings rarely were important. He didn’t feel any particular urgency to do anything at all. Maybe that was a good sign? He was, at least, calm. Every now and then he checked in on the city. His shuttle had working power, so he was able to intercept news broadcasts and the like, but he often found himself zoning out in the middle of them.
Multiple times he told himself he’d get out of the shuttle, settle back into the rhythm of things, go back to pretending like nothing was wrong and nothing had ever happened. Movie nights were still going on at Dancitron, after all. How long had it been since he’d had some high grade? Normally in times of trouble the thought of drinking himself into a stupor was one of the more appealing options, but the urge wasn’t there, for the moment. He wouldn’t say no to some noxious liquor, but he wasn’t about to seek it out.
Whirl kept telling himself he’d go out, go somewhere, but he’d find himself staring at his chronometers, watching the calm blink-blink of the digital display. Just a few more minutes, he told himself, and I’ll go.
But he didn’t.
If you just sulk around people will think you’re afraid, he tried to tell himself, you’ve got to prove that you’re not. That didn’t work, either, because nobody knew what had happened, and Whirl had already set a precedent for keeping to himself over the course of the past year. Nobody had any reason to suspect anything was wrong (more so than usual) so he could probably safely assume that nobody was making wildly incorrect assumptions about his bravery or perceived lack thereof. Next time, he told himself, for the dozenth time.
((In the interest of moving along, some of this blog’s RP events will be backlogged! An actual for real status post is going to go up but for now:
Whirl survived the Phobia Wave incident, and after a brief furious attempt at Soundwave’s life is aware of the particulars of what happened re: Soundwave is not a direct threat to him any longer, and is not actually to blame. Whirl’s been keeping away from basically everyone unless someone goes out for a hike to his hermit hovel.
And, most importantly, he still has his Pokemon. He has not yet named the Pokemon, or figured out a way to communicate beyond pantomime and a few repeated “words.”
The short version of the status post is as follows:
Only Hiro could have developed some kind of modern , yet not, tech that would help express himself the way the other mechs did. He couldn’t use his own eyes, seeing as they weren’t natural for the planet and, obviously, he couldn’t use optics like the rest. A visor would have been nice, but with no mouth to express a smile or anything, how would anyone know what he was feeling? Too much effort to push it into voice, so he left it to the visor.
“That’s exactly right. I gambled and won. You know, the right way.” Meaning he swindled his way through the game. “Thanks. Thought you might think that was cool.” Or normal.
“Luck is kinda fickle sometimes. Doesn’t mean anything.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I mean, it’s taken me… how many years? Four? To even remotely develop a plan to get home. That’s pretty shitty luck, if you ask me.” Still, being wherever Whirl had been seemed to be, for the most part, worse. “You bet I’m not gonna sit and wait for you. I’m gonna go looking for you. Again.” He crossed his arms, head tilting.
“Maybe you should just stick around with someone. I’ve got nothing better to do, I could be like your tiny security mech.” He snorted and dropped his arms to his sides. “I didn’t leave because I wanted us to finish the project together. That’s how we started it, I think that’s how we should finish it.”
His pixel expressions formed and his metallic voice seemed upbeat. “I’m just glad you’re okay and you’re back. Not because we can finally finish the project, but because… well. I was worried about you.”
“Mine’s always been pretty consistent,” Whirl replied, “consistently bad, anyway.” A fair bit of this probably had something to do with Whirl’s own bad decisions and his self-destructive tendencies, but honestly, it was so much easier to blame it all on luck.
“You’ve been making your own, though, I see. Nice. Never let ‘em catch you.” Somewhere deep down, he was proud of Hiro for swindling his living out of a universe that was hostile to him, and all for the purpose of leaving it behind. Hiro was probably doing what he did out of necessity (and because it was fun) rather than out of spite, of course, but Whirl had to salute him, all the same.
I was worried about you. This had Whirl hesitating a moment. It wasn’t as if Hiro was the only person who would worry that he was gone--Whirl had somehow managed to amass a small circle of people who cared about his well-being, despite how difficult such a thing could be when Whirl was, well, being himself, but it was still a little jarring to hear someone just up and say it out loud. “Well,” he began, and then paused, uncertain as to what to say next.
“I’ve already got security. I’ve got Killer, don’t I? But seriously. If I vanish, I’ve either gotten sucked out into another timeline, or have finally gotten put down, or have gotten arrested, so don’t--hmm.” A pause. “I mean, I wouldn’t say no to a jailbreak, and I doubt they’d see you coming, but, regardless. I’m at least self-aware enough to know I’m not dependable. So don’t you go depending on me.”
This was said with more amusement than rancor. Whirl couldn’t help it. Talking with someone about disrespecting the laws of the civilized galaxy in the name of camaraderie tended to put him in a good mood.
“Nobody likes Drunk Whirl, people just like the effect Drunk Whirl has on his environment,” Whirl replied, “and even then, they only like it when that effect doesn’t happen to them. But you’re right. They might show up, after all.” That’s right, he would be going to a Lost Light that had one of his doubles on it–which was frankly kind of interesting. He vaguely hoped he’d see the guy. There seemed to be a dearth of Whirls out there in the multiverse, for some cosmically unfair reason.
If that other Whirl showed up and got drunk with him, then maybe they could wreak enough havoc to make up for all the times Whirl hadn’t gotten a chance to get up to the sort of shenanigans having Another Him around would have allowed. “Sounds good to me. You’re on, mech. I’ll comm you the day before I’m ready.”
“Sounds good! I’ll keep my comms open so anytime’s fine!” This would be awesome. Once they had a day set for Whirl to come and get drunk off his aft, Swerve could start advertising tickets.
It was absolutely going to be a good time, no matter what Ultra Magnus had to say about it. (Maybe he’d call Rodimus as a buffer to keep Magnus out?)
Bluebottle smacked her lips to show understanding. Whether she would heed Whirl’s wisdom remained to be seen. One could only hope that, in the far flung future when she might be presented with the possibility of an electrical wallop, she would make the right choice. In the meantime, she could learn from example. Her single eye grew larger, taking up more and more of the screen in subtle increments until it had consumed all. She didn’t want to miss another zapping.
Whirl’s pain—because of course he got popped again—was rewarded with a chortle, an ugly, grinding sound that would be alarming if it wasn’t coming from a bug. She clapped her three fingered hands and pulled a blanket over her head for warmth, her red optic peering out of the cowled darkness.
It was all a little ominous, for a one-year-old.
She waited like that, quiet but not slumbering as she should have been until the barnacle was revealed. Her fat head emerged, protomandibles twitching with suspicion as Killer unfolded. It looked…edible, but not tasty. Why keep such a thing around? Her mouth opened to demand an explanation, but was cut off when it attacked. She uttered a little gasp and pointed with far too much enthusiasm at the ineffectual violence.
Lacking any sense of tact, likely a hereditary defect knowing her progenitors, Blue gave Whirl an unconvinced look at his words. Her gaze shifted back between him and the Killer, trying to see the connection. No matter.
“Ah! Ah!” She shook her finger, trying to point out objects to feed to the thing.
Whirl didn’t seem in any way bothered by her joy at his pain, which was equally likely to have been from his inexperience with young creatures (at least, the sort that Bluebottle was) or his experience with them (where the murderous little cloud of scraplets that Whirl had called “Sparky” was involved).
At any rate, she responded appropriately to the demonstration he’d given her regarding Killer, which, in Whirl’s reckoning, was an instant desire to feed it. Or, at least, that’s what he (correctly, as it were) identified her pointing as. “As you can see,” he said, dryly, “Killer eats garbage.” He pulled his claw out of its mouth at last and squatted down, rummaging through the rubbish bin that he’d set near Killer’s perch. “But it prefers garbage it can actually swallow.”
He began to hold up potential snacks: spent bullet casings, shreds of metal, and even small pieces of glass. “I’ve also got actual food for it, but I safe those as a treat. Peanut butter, too.” Bluebottle was going to have to wait for the breathtaking spectacle of Killer messily trying to eat peanut butter off of something.
Once he had an item that was worthy of Blue’s approval (or on that was unworthy if she took too long), he carefully offered it to Killer who, after some blind scraping, finally accepted it. The tidbit disappeared as the three beaks retracted, followed by the delicate, feathery cirri. Whirl held up a claw, signaling for silence, and after a moment, a very faint grinding noise could be heard. “There it is. Chewing. Pretty cool, huh?”
Whirl let this go on for a few moments before he stood up. “Now, I’ve got an errand to run. You’re not asleep yet, so I guess you might as well come with me.” The datapad was picked up again, and once more Blue would find that her world through the screen reduced to a confusing series of blurry, moving images, until Whirl managed to wedge the datapad into place in his cockpit. “There we go. This is the only time you’re going to get a view from in here, Child of Gigantor.”
From inside, Blue would hear the sound of Whirl transforming, and in the next, the screen was tilted towards the sky as he rose, before Whirl rolled once (for flourish) and leveled out over the blasted, lifeless wasteland. “And this is where I’m living, currently,” he said, his voice coming through a small intercom in his interior, “as you can see, it’s a massive dump.”
Soundwave watched the tire creature’s antics from his hovering position high overhead, displeased. The host frame’s files had not shown any data about the odd organic next to Whirl when first investigated. Now they popped up like the creature itself, leaping to the surface one at a time. It was a protective little thing, as well as a source of friendship of sorts; Soundwave would have to work harder to get under Whirl’s shell as long as it stayed around.
He drifted lower, combing through past memories for something more useful. Nothing was too complex to be considered; the phobia shields had constructed stranger, more difficult fears. Of course, they had instant holograms, and Soundwave himself did not. The question, then, was whether or not Whirl could be made to ignore his sensors.
…There was a place Soundwave could mentally recreate in sharp, perfect detail, primarily because he’d been there himself. Twice, in fact, though he only remembered the second time. No need to worry about small differences in design; he could tweak portions of it to better resemble the technology found on Prowl’s world.
But not too much. No, not too much. All he needed was basic similarity.
It took him a few minutes to finish building the room in his mind, and another handful to slip it into Whirl’s head piece by piece, where it waited for the key that would unlock it and unfold it, trapping Whirl inside: the bridge about to appear beneath Whirl’s feet and take him - just him - further into the wilderness.
If the machinery dangling overhead and the nearby table covered in bits of a progressively disassembled brain module didn’t make Whirl panic, the too-familiar mech busy having his hands severed might do the trick.
Whirl’s first reaction to being dropped through the portal was a bit of stumbling and a reflexive whoosh of air from his rotors but his feet had hit solid ground within a moment, so he didn’t transform. Once this instinctive action was done, though, he didn’t move at all. The suddenness with which it had all happened had left Whirl stunned, and he stared, motionless, at the nightmarish scene before him.
He didn’t move for so long that Soundwave might indeed wonder whether or not he’d somehow forced Whirl into a catatonic state, but he eventually shook off the horrible, stifling blankness and finally reacted, very slowly arching his neck and taking a few slow steps back. Whirl didn’t speak, but his mind was racing, and his normally tightly-coiled EM field was unspooling wildly about him, horribly discordant, tearing at the surroundings like invisible lashing limbs. Soundwave, of course, was privileged to the machinations of his mind, so Whirl didn’t even need to speak. I haven’t had one this bad since...
His mind slid from one set of memories to the second as easily now as a vehicle switching gears, shifting from one track to the other with all the precision of a carefully-crafted mechanism. Since Sunder. Sunder wasn’t here, though; he couldn’t be. Could he? Whirl’s brush with him had been mercifully quick, unlike poor Skids’s, but—Whirl shook it off. No, revisiting the memories of the brief tussle with Sunder that had ended with him getting turned inside-out wasn’t a good thing to do right now.
He stepped back, slowly. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. “Get a hold of yourself, idiot,” he muttered, more of the sake of hearing his own voice (something real) than anything else. His helm swiveled around, pointedly not looking at the mech currently being dissected. There had to be a way out of here.
Miles away, Whirl’s newest companion suddenly swiveled, seeing Whirl vanish at the last moment, but unable to roll over quickly enough to stop it, or follow him. “Whirl!” it cried. Too late—he was gone. It began to roll around, looking behind the ship, under the ship, and with some creative hopping, on top of the ship, but its wayward blue friend was nowhere to be seen.
“’Pede!” it shouted, but there was no answer except a faint, lonely echo.
"When I get married, I want you to walk me down the aisle so you can be my daddy one last time."
“First of all, if you ever call me ‘daddy’ again I’m… going to do something. I don’t know what it is yet. But it’s going to be something bad, and it’s going to happen to you, and you’ll never know what it is until you’re reeling in the aftermath of my wrath.”
Whirl paused. “Secondly, I’m pretty sure I’m banned from any hypothetical weddings you will or won’t have. The groom isn’t my biggest fan, after all.”
“Let’s agree to both use our imaginations and that’ll be the end of it.” Windchill sounded smug despite the threat. He was laughing, on the inside.
“Luckily for everyone involved I have no intention of participating in some hokey ritual, so you and Gigantor will both be spared my machinations. This time.”
Whirl figured that Windchill knew him well enough to take threats on his life as signs of affection. It was tricky, telling which ones were genuine and which ones were Whirl’s way of confirming friendship, but with practice, anything was possible.
“Thank god,” Whirl said, “the only hokey ritual anyone needs to cement their relationship is a good side-by-side fight. The bigger the opponent you take down together, the better. Or, you know, that ultra-secret helicopter courtship ritual I’m not allowed to talk about. Either of those work.”
