There's a flavor of whump I'm always craving that I don't see very often, I think because the possibilities are so context-specific. You can do some things in some universes that you can't in others! You can do certain things with non-human characters that you can't with others!
But hear me out:
Whumper making physiological changes to Whumpee's body.
Could be through programming for robot characters, dedicated brainwashing for humans, magic for fantasy settings, weird biology for aliens...
A few examples off the top of my head:
Alien species that instinctively responds to neck squeezing by going limp like a scruffed kitten, because this helped them survive encounters with predators. Delicious all on its own -- now throw in a quick surgery to permanently clamp the nerve responsible. Whumpee wakes up in a permanent state of relaxed submission and can't even show how terrified they are.
Obedience programming/training that's wired directly into a character's brain. When the system detects unwanted thoughts, it applies pain. Even after rescue, Whumpee can't think of themselves as an autonomous being because their mind is desperately protecting itself.
Characters with magic having their magic corrupted or bound so it either hurts them to use, or it can only be used to serve Whumper's purposes. Bonus points if Whumper has full control over their magic AND the use of it hurts them.
Characters given a brain implant or parasite that stimulates the reward center of the brain, which would be great, except they can't turn it off. They're kept in a constant state of bleary euphoria... with just enough sense of self left to know they want it to stop.
Characters being spelled or programmed so they physically cannot function independently. Characters who very literally NEED to be given permission to do things like relax or take a walk or even use the bathroom. Not being given this permission leaves them in a state of locked stasis -- fully aware of the time passing. Bonus: Caretaker can't reverse it, so they just HAVE to navigate All Of This.
Alien species that will a develop chronic physical illness if deprived of touch for too long. Said illness can only be treated through regular physical touch. Defiant Whumpees will often be locked in solitary confinement and fed through a slot in the bars until symptoms start to manifest. Sometimes they'll be left even longer, to make sure they end up a severe case. And now, oopsie, the only way to ease this horrible pain is by letting your captors put their hands on you!
Just. Physiological whump. The horror of someone else controlling your body or your mind. Betrayal of body. Etc. Do you understand.
Content: heatstroke, passing out/loss of consciousness, whumperless whump/environmental whump, alien whumpee, whumpee x caretaker
Whumpee followed Caretaker through the unfamiliar Earth city as she spoke.
"You'd love it here in the winter," Caretaker said. "Everything freezes and it can snow up to three feet!"
Everything freezing sounded amazing, Whumpee thought. He felt as though he was trapped in an oven. His head was pounding and each breath of hot air he took felt suffocating.
Whumpee couldn't let Caretaker know that, though. He knew that she had missed Earth terribly, and he refused to ruin their vacation. Besides, she was so beautiful when she smiled. Even though they would have to return to their ship in a few days, he wanted to let her have as much time as possible in her home.
"What season is it now?" Whumpee asked, trying to hide the strain in his voice.
"Summer!" Caretaker responded. "This is our hot season. It's my absolute favorite."
Throughout their travels through space together, Whumpee had heard about how Caretaker loved hot weather. He thought he would love it too, coming from an ice planet and all. But his biology made the heat intolerable. Whumpee's thick green fur, which had kept him comfortably warm back home, trapped the heat, making him even hotter.
He suddenly felt lightheaded, and he loosened his shirt collar with a hand from his bottom set of arms, and brushed the fur off his forehead with one of his top arms. Whumpee really wished he could sweat like humans did.
As Whumpee took another step behind Caretaker, the world started to spin and he felt nausea rise in him. Despite his best efforts, a whimper escaped his throat. Caretaker turned around, frowning.
"Whumpee? Are you okay?" She asked.
"No," Whumpee managed as his vision went black.
He stumbled and fell, but instead of landing on hard ground, a pair of familiar arms caught him.
Whumpee heard Caretaker frantically calling his name, then silence.
Whumpee awoke with a start to the wonderful feeling of cold water on his face. He opened his eyes to see Caretaker's worried face looking back at him, an empty plastic water bottle in her hands.
"Whumpee!" she exclaimed as soon as she noticed he was awake. "I'm so so so sorry! I completely forgot about the temperature difference."
A breeze blew, chilling Whumpee's wet fur. It felt amazing.
"It's okay," Whumpee responded, smiling weakly at Caretaker. "You were able to save me."
Alien whumpee + humans gone wrong is always so great
Imagine being a regular person and meeting this species thats intelligent like yourself and the first thing they do is treat you like an animal
And it’s even better if whumpee doesn’t look human at all, reduced to a creature because they look so different
And it doesn’t even have to be the classic “captured in a lab” plot. Give me workplace discrimination against aliens. Give me humans and aliens mutually meeting and it going bad. Give me language barriers and shaky peace contracts. Give me culture clashes and opportunistic cruelty. Give me your standard basement torture victim plot but the victim is an alien. Give me your standard basement torture plot but one whumpee is human and the other’s an alien!
Alien forced to navigate/use/live in/etc places and objects and other things that are not built for them…
Or an alien captured to be used as some kind of supply of valuable/useful material. Alien captured to be an attraction at some kind of zoo or made to be an “exotic” pet…
alien puppy!! (a Shale POV version that continues to bedtime)
contains: living weapon whumpee, rescued whumpee, nonhuman (canine) whumpee, young whumpee, telepathic whumpee, fear, (referenced) shock collar, human caretaker, and caretaker new master
•••
The alien in the weapon’s quarters is scary. New. They feel… empty, like if it looked away, it’d forget they ever existed at all.
Might be a mind-wall, but mind-walls usually let something out, and it’s never seen a mind-wall it couldn’t crack. It’s good enough to scare some of the testers (and handlers) into punishing it.
“Orders?” it asks, when the inspection seems to run too long. Flinches.
Yesterday, it was shocked for speaking out of turn.
Its new handler (Empty-handler) doesn’t seem to care, just orders it to eat and gives it a new command. “Heel?” it asks, because it sounds like what heel is. They accept it.
They get it cleaned up—its fur is soft, now, didn’t know its fur could be that soft—and tested by Gabriel, who is not a sir but a Dr.
Named by Gabriel, who doesn’t ask Empty-handler for permission, but is granted it anyway. She barely tests it, but it can’t say that to a tester. Maybe it’s a behaviour test. Maybe it has something to do with the ‘blood sample’ she takes. But, either way, it gets to know it passed with a sticker on its new sticker-chart.
There’s probably a file too, but it isn’t allowed to read those.
“Heel,” they say. “Now, we don’t have a free room for you, and I’m not keeping you in the brig, so you’re staying in my room. The Captain’s quarters. It’s too big for me—big enough to fit Atlanteans for accessibility reasons, but we’ll need to see the quartermaster for supplies.”
The ‘quartermaster’ is a familiar alien. One of the tentacle ones. Large and purple-black, with one eye in the centre of her face, and the tentacles dangling from her head have gold undersides. Like Empty-handler’s fur, only… not.
“Captain Edgar.” She telepaths surprised-pleased. And— ‘Stay out of my mind, little dog. It’s rude to pry.’
No shock?
No shock. It presses a hand to its neck when no one is looking, hoping there isn’t a camera. No collar, Captain Edgar still has it in his pocket, so hopefully he’ll forget about it.
The weapon is shown a room with stuff. Pillows and blankets and clothes that are too big for it, but it doesn’t matter.
Weapons don’t need clothes. The scaly ones that walk like it don’t need clothes either.
It puts on multiple clothes that don’t have enough arm-holes and are too big. The Quartermaster promises to ‘tailor’ the clothes to fit it.
“Pick what you need, and put it in here,” Captain Edgar says, pointing at a cart. “Then, we’ll bring it to the room and get you settled.”
It picks a basic cushion and blanket. He sighs, putting two extra blankets—one heavy, and one fluffy—and a couple extra pillows in the cart.
“Sir, with all due respect, the weapon doesn’t need—”
He ignores it, adding eight things it doesn’t recognise and a piece of rope to the cart.
“Anything you don’t claim is getting sold, Shale. And it’s good to have extras.”
Slowly, reluctantly, it adds an interesting blanket to the cart when he isn’t looking. Puts a similar, less interesting (but softer) blanket in too. If he takes one away, it’ll still have good blankets.
They go up to his room.
The bed is a large pillow. There’s even a smaller pillow on the floor. “Dandelion, my dog, used to sleep there, or curled up at the foot of my bed.
“You’re welcome to sleep in either spot, and we can set up a nest if that’s more comfortable.”
Either spot. Either spot, and one of those spots is on a handler’s bed. It’s never even seen a handler’s bed. It looks….
Its new bed isn’t a vaguely fluff-stuffed sack with a thin blanket on top. It’s a real pillow, rectangular, with a nice soft border around it. With its new blankets…. The weapon suppresses a buzz, keeping itself as still and calm as possible.
Letting its new handler know it likes the bed will make him use it as leverage.
Across from the beds, there’s a fabric hanging over the wall. Covering it completely. It doesn’t know why.
“Your dog, sir?”
He shows it a picture. “Non-sapient companion from my ancestral planet, Earth. Er… non-thinking. Less intelligent.”
“Like me.”
“Your file says otherwise,” Captain Edgar says. It must, since it’s been corrected for thinking too much. “You can crack mental shielding?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll get you set up with lessons from Hex about telepathing appropriately. Cracking shields is, according to what I’ve heard, painful, so you shouldn’t do it unless….”
According to what he’s heard, it thinks, with no small amount of horror. Not experienced, heard. It hasn’t experienced it either, but it’s strong. It can’t even see his mind-walls.
How much stronger than it is he?
How much stronger than it is he?
“Now, would you rather go to bed now, or after a proper tour of the ship?”
If the tour—can he hear it think? It can hear simple thoughts, even if they aren’t telepathed, but it’s strong. If it can’t hear that, he—
Is still waiting for an answer. “The ship.”
Wrong answer. If the tour takes too long, it might not get enough time to sleep.
But it’s too late to say no, so it just follows him. It likes the cafeteria the most, which has nothing to do with the non-ration food Captain Edgar gives it. The bone looks like one of the things it didn’t recognise before.
The gym is nice too. All the stars in the window……….
How long has it been since it’s seen the sky? It can’t remember if it’s ever seen it, struggled with the words until Captain Edgar….
“—Shale?”
It jumps. “Sorry, sir, I—”
“Hey, easy,” he murmurs, scratching its head. Running his hand through its fur. “Do you want to keep stargazing, or do you want to play for a bit now that the tour is over?”
“Play.” It’s the safe choice, even if it doesn’t know what it is. Choosing a punishment makes it hurt less. It—
Pulling at the rope with its teeth, it thrashes its head to get Captain Edgar to let go. Draws a touch-sight illusion of his hands dropping the rope—
He twists it out of its mouth while it’s distracted. While it’s expecting him to be confused.
And they do it again. And again. And again. And again, until it learns he isn’t distracted by illusions and starts winning the rope.
“I don’t think I can tire you out before the day-cycle,” he pants.
Its legs are sore. Its jaw hurts. But if its new handler isn’t done with training, it’ll work until it collapses. It says nothing.
“You win, Shale. Playtime’s over, we’re going to sleep.”
It manages to get halfway to the Captain’s quarters before tripping over itself. Before Captain Edgar picks it up and carries it, clearly fed up with its struggles.
Gently, he sets it down on the half-sized bed at the foot of his bed. Pushes aside the fabric to reveal a window filled with stars. “There you go,” he murmurs. “Today was a lot, wasn’t it? Now you should to sleep, and I’m going to check your file to see if there’s anything I missed about getting you to sleep—”
“The weapon has no sleep command,” it says. “Would you like to—”
“No. Not happening. There is nothing I want less than to have to give you permission to sleep every night, kid.” He drapes a soft blanket over it. “You like stars, don’t you?”
“I do, sir,” it says. It feels wrong to say, but he already knows, so it isn’t revealing anything this handler couldn’t already use against it.
The soft blanket, the one draped over it, is covered in stars.
Shale waits for Captain Edgar to fall asleep, and waits another couple minutes just to be sure. His mind is as silent asleep as it is awake.
Curling up, tucking its snout into its fur so its speech is muffled, pulling its mind-wall up as high as it goes, it chokes a tiny, quiet, “Thank you.”
May or may not be about my new character Shale who i’m working on:
(nonhuman) living weapon Whumpee who has a shock collar. It can be easily removed, but when (human) Caretaker tells it to take it off, Whumpee stiffens. Presses all its hands to the floor.
“Sorry, sir, but I’m not allowed to touch it. It has only been removed for maintenance by a Handler, and they give me the spare as a replacement.” Whumpee does not mention that it hates the spare, that it’s much worse, because it knows what its Handlers would do with that information.
When Caretaker removes the collar, Whumpee takes a careful, even breath through its nose, but the only thing that touches its neck is a hand.
Caretaker, its new handler, doesn’t think it needs it.
au where Kev is an alien experiment sort of like Stitch
Oh I love Stitch SO MUCH!!
Scientifically engineered alien humanoid, hm? I like that 👀...
---
Experiment 5541R is nowhere near the first attempt. It is not the first of his kind to survive, either, if you count a handful of barely alive husks in suspended animation.
However, it is without doubt the first to be called a successful weapon.
He's an extremely strong and fast creature, with innate fighting instincts and, according to testing, a feral propensity to violence.
The gaggle of scientists deem him semi-sentient, somewhere between a very smart dog and a toddler. He can understand one-word commands, but also simple sentences. He is not capable of speech, only animalistic growls and snarls.
5541R is a lot more "sentient" than they think. His vocal cords are not made to replicate human sounds, but he understands language just fine. In fact, he learned to understand all three languages his main captors habitually mutter to themselves thinking no one is listening.
He's overheard a whole lot of things from them, about a world outside of the lab. He didn't get what any of that meant at first, but as time passed he started puzzling together things he's never seen.
He lets them think most things go over his head. Lets them drag him around by chains and strap him to tables with almost no resistance - just the occasional mindless backlash to confirm their conviction he's a dumb animal.
In the long stretches of time when he's alone, chained in the dark, he thinks of a way out.
Alien whumpee who gets captured by a scientist who wants to study them.
Alien whumpee who crash lands in the woods, and is found by a crazed conspiracy theorist who wants to keep them trapped in their home all for themself, scared the government is going to take them away.
Alien whumpee who crash lands in the woods, and is found by an alien enthusiast. They help tend to their wounds while learning all about alien biology. Maybe caretaker is also a mechanic and tries to help repair their ship to get them home.
Alien whumpee who's the size of an apple. A group of immature teens put it in a shoe box and take it home. Maybe there's multiple. You know that Hamster Hell YouTube video? Yeah, basically that but with small aliens. (TW: claymation animal abuse if you click the link)
Alien whumpee who's a part of an invasion program that's incredibly taxing. The training program treats them like living weapons, who's only goal is to compete the invasion for their leaders. They're nothing more than discardable drones. Perhaps the alien successfully infiltrates human culture, and in the midst of their deception they get a little too lost in the role. Is this still a part of the act, or have they come to care for these humans they're supposed to be invading? Perhaps the humans are much more thoughtful than their own. Perhaps Earth has become their home... (I'm absolutely obsessed with an Invader Zim AU of this idea you guys)
Alien whumper who kidnaps one person from each planet they invade, collecting various species like they're trophies.
Alien whumper who gets obsessed with a particular person from their recent invasion, deciding to take them back to their home planet to keep them as a pet.
Alien whumper who's job it is to travel space and study planets' most intelligent species. They're do this in less than ethical ways, and, unbeknownst to their boss, may smuggle one back to continue their studies off the clock.
Alien caretaker who finds themself having to care for a creature (be it human or otherwise) that they aren't too sure of. There's a language barrier, and they have no idea what biology the creature has. But they have to try.
