In The Aftermath
Jul. 14th, 2025 06:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hat_writes_stuffTitle: In The Aftermath
Author: Almighty Hat
Fandom: Transformers For No-one Else To Hear
Characters: Whirl & Whirl Junior
Word Count: 1,598
Rating: Everybody? Ish?
Pairing(s): Gen
Warnings: Mild body horror, Whirl has lost so many pieces of his body but most recently a foot (offscreen), Junior is a little bit The Thing but make it baby, there's-- there's body horror here
Author's Notes: Sometimes, you make a suggestion about narrative comeuppance that turns into a whole thread reminiscent of your LiveJournal days, and you end up writing a quick little ficlet so that your favorite terrifying, adorable, that's not a child that's a thing can exist in someone else's fanfic if she's needed in order to dispose of an antagonist in a satisfying manner.
Okay, warning notes, I do not mention empurata, because I think I read somewhere that Gemma isn't a fan of it, but Whirl lost an eye and both his original hands well before the start of the fic, long enough ago that his prosthetic hands are a little clunky by current in-story standards (but probably super advanced by our own real-world standards). He could get a cybernetic eye and he's aware of that, but he'd rather have an eyepatch and a cavity nobody ever thinks to search. Was this a horrible accident, a series of horrible accidents, or a punitive measure by somebody who had power over Whirl? This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Much more recently, offscreen now-dead nameless Bad Guys amputated one of Whirl's feet. This is deeply annoying and he's going to get a prosthetic at the earliest opportunity.
Whirl Junior, here, is a bit like John Carpenter's The Thing, if said thing were a lab experiment instead of an alien. She can only duplicate individuals whose DNA she knows, although she can get creative assembling and extruding various Parts.
There is a faint implication that Whirl Senior might be trans. It wasn't intentional, but I liked the possibility enough I left it vague. Maybe Junior is a girl because biology, maybe Junior is a girl because that's an easy adjustment for her to make to biology.
Summary: In the shadow of an extremely dubious bioengineering facility, a one-eyed pilot and an experimental thing work on figuring out what to do now that they've killed and/or eaten everyone who got in the way of their escape.
For Gemma Inkyboots, on the occasion of wanting a narratively-satisfying way to dispose of an antagonist in a Space Cowboys Human AU.
The facility behind them did not burn.
But that was only because the experiment beside Whirl didn't want to set it on fire, because it had issues with fire. Whirl would happily have torched the place, given the loader sled he was using as a walker/pram/luggage cart combo happened to be full of evidence and information he could turn over to justify torching the place. Very much on purpose. Whirl wanted to burn the place down-- but there were other alternatives.
"So I'm thinking about blowing the place up," he told the experiment, "only I'd need to do that from a ship and I don't quite have all the parts I need to get mine off the ground." It was hard to work the pedals when you were missing a left foot. He'd been pushing the loader sled by hopping along... because the support of the sled was easier and faster than just hopping would have been.
"Sorry I ate your foot," the experiment said.
"You ate it," Whirl said, because it had, and there wasn't really any way to make that... anything but what it was. "You didn't bite it off."
The foot had at least been neatly amputated, but he wasn't thrilled about another amputation, tidy or not, or about the fact that the sickos running the facility had intended to feed him to their experiment one very fresh piece at a time. Or about needing another prosthetic, a new prosthetic, which would lead to conversations about getting an implant for his eye, or refinements to his hands, or whatever all else. Cybernetics had come a long way since his last upgrades blah blah blah. He wasn't pretty anymore, he knew that, but he didn't need to be pretty. He just needed to function.
And anyway, not having a cybernetic replacement eye left him with other options.
"Here, hold this a second," he said, and pulled off his eyepatch. The experiment took it, looking at it-- and the translucent silicone orb in Whirl's eye socket-- curiously. He popped the ball out of the socket, squishing it to find the hidden button... and activated his I can't shoot my way out of this, come get me distress beacon.
The lab assholes had cut off his foot and broken his comm implants, and he wasn't sure what they'd done with the hopper he'd been assigned (not that he wanted to try flying it with a fresh stump that didn't hit the floor how he expected it to), but he had a pile of evidence that all the killing he'd just done was justified, so calling for a pickup seemed like the smartest idea.
Of course, there was the experiment to consider.
"So, can you do a less-creepy shape than this?" Whirl asked. "Extraction should be on the way pretty damn quick, and if this is the best you can do, okay, but..."
But right now the experiment sort of looked like a semi-human gremlin thing, legs too short and arms too long, no effort put into pigmentation or hair, and wiry muscles so dense they looked twisted. Considering it had originally looked like a twenty-kilo tumor with a mouth, the weird proportions and vaguely-simian face weren't bad, but they wouldn't exactly charm anyone.
"I don't have the mass," the experiment said, offering Whirl his eyepatch back. "They denatured most of my proteins," which was why it balked at arson-- it was a hard thing to really kill, or so it had explained while they were still parked in adjoining cells. Its consciousness was somehow distributed through its body mass, dead flesh easily revived, but if the lab sickos who'd made it cooked that flesh... It couldn't do anything with cooked meat but eat them like a regular creature. Whirl shoved his beacon back into his eye socket, fitted the eyepatch back over its subdermal magnets, and scratched at the back of his head, thinking. The experiment continued, "I could be anyone whose DNA I have, but not at this size."
Whirl looked at it.
DNA and mass were two very different things.
From what the experiment had said, and from what little Whirl had bothered looking at of the files he was leaning on, the experiment was supposed to be a specific sort of assassin, one that could make it look like its victims were still alive for hours or days after they'd gone the way of Whirl's left foot. It existed for those special moments where you needed somebody dead, but also needed them to do something out of character, or needed to obscure time of death, among other convenient-to-assassination things. It couldn't duplicate somebody whose genetics it didn't know, and it learned genetics by eating its targets.
"Do you have to be an adult version of whoever you're copying?"
It hesitated-- and then rippled a bit, though it was less gross than watching it turn from a flesh lump to its current funky homunculus shape.
The head enlarged, and got rounder, the plates of the skull visibly separating and flexing under its skin; the face flattened out, and the eyes got big, and shifted from a sort of soft-boiled-looking blue to an amber hazel. Its legs lengthened, its arms shortened, and the ropy muscle melted away, shifting to baby fat, a nice healthy layer of it smoothing out a body that looked much, much more proportionate. It sprouted black hair that curled as it grew in, and the pasty-pink hide bloomed over with just a little melanin, obscuring the blue tracery of veins and going more matte and less... sticky-looking.
Healthy human child, somewhere around five to seven years old, with Whirl's exact coloring.
"Is that my DNA? Straight up just mine?" Was it trying to flatter him? Make up for the foot somehow? Since the foot was absolutely definitely how it had gotten Whirl's DNA.
"I could change it," it said-- and it sounded like a child, now, too, and not like an adult woman playing a child in an audio drama. "If you don't like it."
Whirl... considered. "You've got yourself plumbed female," he said. "You want she/her pronouns, or something else?"
It shrugged. "External gonads seem risky."
Whirl tried not to snicker.
"Anyway. Also. Do you want to stick with me?"
"I don't know how to be a human," it said-- she said. "You don't seem to want to set me on fire about it."
"Young things are supposed to be learning how to be what they are anyway," Whirl told her. "People will forgive more mistakes, looking like that. Looking that age," he corrected. Looking like him would just make people wonder what fresh fuckery Whirl had gotten into to get her.
"That's good," she said, hesitantly, almost but not quite a question.
"As a bonus, it's easy mode for who you should and shouldn't, uh, eat," Whirl said. "I'm no pacifist and I probably won't care as long as you don't kill anybody I like, but-- looking like that?" he said, shucking out of his shirt and pulling it over the experiment's head, "Anybody who tries to hurt you is the sort of person who deserves to get eaten."
"That's useful," the experiment said, cooperating with Whirl's attempts to get her arms through his sleeves. "I get to eat other things, though, right?"
"Food, place to stay, medical care, fair legal treatment," Whirl agreed. "If we can figure out medical care without getting you stuck in a quarantine tube. Also, if you can eat rations and stuff instead of just fresh meat. I can get a prosthetic foot, but I'd like to keep the limbs I have left as long as I can."
There were people who'd need to know what she really was-- he had all that evidence, and trying to keep it a total secret would get him court-martialed and her... probably humanely euthanized, or something, or less humanely if she decided to fight it. But most people could hear rescued lab experiment and see the "family" resemblance and assume clone or something, and that would be fine. That would give Whirl an excuse to get a little territorial over her, if he had to. She hadn't gotten chased around and torched with flamethrowers because she went on a killing-and-eating spree, after all-- she'd displayed a little too much independent thought for her creators' liking and had gotten punished for it.
Which Whirl was all too familiar with.
He wouldn't trust himself with a kid, a real kid, but with someone who was just a kid-shaped thing...
... He might need to ask for adjoining quarters rather than shared, though.
Later, when the transport showed up and got the rough explanation of what had happened, if not what the experiment really was, Firestar asked her, "What's your name?" and Whirl had a moment of blank panic.
Damn good thing she wasn't a real kid, he'd gone and forgotten to name her.
Anyway, the kid-- experiment-- she said, "Whirl," which wasn't even a name, not really, even if he used it more than he used his actual given name, and the resulting convers-argument about names versus callsigns, and how small children who were not in any way military didn't really need callsigns, and anyway didn't she want her own name, it would be confusing to have two Whirls, and so on and so forth, lasted the rest of the way back to the fleet.
And Whirl accidentally ended it himself.
"If she wants to be Whirl Junior, she can damn well be Whirl Junior."
And so she was.
Author: Almighty Hat
Fandom: Transformers For No-one Else To Hear
Characters: Whirl & Whirl Junior
Word Count: 1,598
Rating: Everybody? Ish?
Pairing(s): Gen
Warnings: Mild body horror, Whirl has lost so many pieces of his body but most recently a foot (offscreen), Junior is a little bit The Thing but make it baby, there's-- there's body horror here
Author's Notes: Sometimes, you make a suggestion about narrative comeuppance that turns into a whole thread reminiscent of your LiveJournal days, and you end up writing a quick little ficlet so that your favorite terrifying, adorable, that's not a child that's a thing can exist in someone else's fanfic if she's needed in order to dispose of an antagonist in a satisfying manner.
Okay, warning notes, I do not mention empurata, because I think I read somewhere that Gemma isn't a fan of it, but Whirl lost an eye and both his original hands well before the start of the fic, long enough ago that his prosthetic hands are a little clunky by current in-story standards (but probably super advanced by our own real-world standards). He could get a cybernetic eye and he's aware of that, but he'd rather have an eyepatch and a cavity nobody ever thinks to search. Was this a horrible accident, a series of horrible accidents, or a punitive measure by somebody who had power over Whirl? This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Much more recently, offscreen now-dead nameless Bad Guys amputated one of Whirl's feet. This is deeply annoying and he's going to get a prosthetic at the earliest opportunity.
Whirl Junior, here, is a bit like John Carpenter's The Thing, if said thing were a lab experiment instead of an alien. She can only duplicate individuals whose DNA she knows, although she can get creative assembling and extruding various Parts.
There is a faint implication that Whirl Senior might be trans. It wasn't intentional, but I liked the possibility enough I left it vague. Maybe Junior is a girl because biology, maybe Junior is a girl because that's an easy adjustment for her to make to biology.
Summary: In the shadow of an extremely dubious bioengineering facility, a one-eyed pilot and an experimental thing work on figuring out what to do now that they've killed and/or eaten everyone who got in the way of their escape.
For Gemma Inkyboots, on the occasion of wanting a narratively-satisfying way to dispose of an antagonist in a Space Cowboys Human AU.
The facility behind them did not burn.
But that was only because the experiment beside Whirl didn't want to set it on fire, because it had issues with fire. Whirl would happily have torched the place, given the loader sled he was using as a walker/pram/luggage cart combo happened to be full of evidence and information he could turn over to justify torching the place. Very much on purpose. Whirl wanted to burn the place down-- but there were other alternatives.
"So I'm thinking about blowing the place up," he told the experiment, "only I'd need to do that from a ship and I don't quite have all the parts I need to get mine off the ground." It was hard to work the pedals when you were missing a left foot. He'd been pushing the loader sled by hopping along... because the support of the sled was easier and faster than just hopping would have been.
"Sorry I ate your foot," the experiment said.
"You ate it," Whirl said, because it had, and there wasn't really any way to make that... anything but what it was. "You didn't bite it off."
The foot had at least been neatly amputated, but he wasn't thrilled about another amputation, tidy or not, or about the fact that the sickos running the facility had intended to feed him to their experiment one very fresh piece at a time. Or about needing another prosthetic, a new prosthetic, which would lead to conversations about getting an implant for his eye, or refinements to his hands, or whatever all else. Cybernetics had come a long way since his last upgrades blah blah blah. He wasn't pretty anymore, he knew that, but he didn't need to be pretty. He just needed to function.
And anyway, not having a cybernetic replacement eye left him with other options.
"Here, hold this a second," he said, and pulled off his eyepatch. The experiment took it, looking at it-- and the translucent silicone orb in Whirl's eye socket-- curiously. He popped the ball out of the socket, squishing it to find the hidden button... and activated his I can't shoot my way out of this, come get me distress beacon.
The lab assholes had cut off his foot and broken his comm implants, and he wasn't sure what they'd done with the hopper he'd been assigned (not that he wanted to try flying it with a fresh stump that didn't hit the floor how he expected it to), but he had a pile of evidence that all the killing he'd just done was justified, so calling for a pickup seemed like the smartest idea.
Of course, there was the experiment to consider.
"So, can you do a less-creepy shape than this?" Whirl asked. "Extraction should be on the way pretty damn quick, and if this is the best you can do, okay, but..."
But right now the experiment sort of looked like a semi-human gremlin thing, legs too short and arms too long, no effort put into pigmentation or hair, and wiry muscles so dense they looked twisted. Considering it had originally looked like a twenty-kilo tumor with a mouth, the weird proportions and vaguely-simian face weren't bad, but they wouldn't exactly charm anyone.
"I don't have the mass," the experiment said, offering Whirl his eyepatch back. "They denatured most of my proteins," which was why it balked at arson-- it was a hard thing to really kill, or so it had explained while they were still parked in adjoining cells. Its consciousness was somehow distributed through its body mass, dead flesh easily revived, but if the lab sickos who'd made it cooked that flesh... It couldn't do anything with cooked meat but eat them like a regular creature. Whirl shoved his beacon back into his eye socket, fitted the eyepatch back over its subdermal magnets, and scratched at the back of his head, thinking. The experiment continued, "I could be anyone whose DNA I have, but not at this size."
Whirl looked at it.
DNA and mass were two very different things.
From what the experiment had said, and from what little Whirl had bothered looking at of the files he was leaning on, the experiment was supposed to be a specific sort of assassin, one that could make it look like its victims were still alive for hours or days after they'd gone the way of Whirl's left foot. It existed for those special moments where you needed somebody dead, but also needed them to do something out of character, or needed to obscure time of death, among other convenient-to-assassination things. It couldn't duplicate somebody whose genetics it didn't know, and it learned genetics by eating its targets.
"Do you have to be an adult version of whoever you're copying?"
It hesitated-- and then rippled a bit, though it was less gross than watching it turn from a flesh lump to its current funky homunculus shape.
The head enlarged, and got rounder, the plates of the skull visibly separating and flexing under its skin; the face flattened out, and the eyes got big, and shifted from a sort of soft-boiled-looking blue to an amber hazel. Its legs lengthened, its arms shortened, and the ropy muscle melted away, shifting to baby fat, a nice healthy layer of it smoothing out a body that looked much, much more proportionate. It sprouted black hair that curled as it grew in, and the pasty-pink hide bloomed over with just a little melanin, obscuring the blue tracery of veins and going more matte and less... sticky-looking.
Healthy human child, somewhere around five to seven years old, with Whirl's exact coloring.
"Is that my DNA? Straight up just mine?" Was it trying to flatter him? Make up for the foot somehow? Since the foot was absolutely definitely how it had gotten Whirl's DNA.
"I could change it," it said-- and it sounded like a child, now, too, and not like an adult woman playing a child in an audio drama. "If you don't like it."
Whirl... considered. "You've got yourself plumbed female," he said. "You want she/her pronouns, or something else?"
It shrugged. "External gonads seem risky."
Whirl tried not to snicker.
"Anyway. Also. Do you want to stick with me?"
"I don't know how to be a human," it said-- she said. "You don't seem to want to set me on fire about it."
"Young things are supposed to be learning how to be what they are anyway," Whirl told her. "People will forgive more mistakes, looking like that. Looking that age," he corrected. Looking like him would just make people wonder what fresh fuckery Whirl had gotten into to get her.
"That's good," she said, hesitantly, almost but not quite a question.
"As a bonus, it's easy mode for who you should and shouldn't, uh, eat," Whirl said. "I'm no pacifist and I probably won't care as long as you don't kill anybody I like, but-- looking like that?" he said, shucking out of his shirt and pulling it over the experiment's head, "Anybody who tries to hurt you is the sort of person who deserves to get eaten."
"That's useful," the experiment said, cooperating with Whirl's attempts to get her arms through his sleeves. "I get to eat other things, though, right?"
"Food, place to stay, medical care, fair legal treatment," Whirl agreed. "If we can figure out medical care without getting you stuck in a quarantine tube. Also, if you can eat rations and stuff instead of just fresh meat. I can get a prosthetic foot, but I'd like to keep the limbs I have left as long as I can."
There were people who'd need to know what she really was-- he had all that evidence, and trying to keep it a total secret would get him court-martialed and her... probably humanely euthanized, or something, or less humanely if she decided to fight it. But most people could hear rescued lab experiment and see the "family" resemblance and assume clone or something, and that would be fine. That would give Whirl an excuse to get a little territorial over her, if he had to. She hadn't gotten chased around and torched with flamethrowers because she went on a killing-and-eating spree, after all-- she'd displayed a little too much independent thought for her creators' liking and had gotten punished for it.
Which Whirl was all too familiar with.
He wouldn't trust himself with a kid, a real kid, but with someone who was just a kid-shaped thing...
... He might need to ask for adjoining quarters rather than shared, though.
Later, when the transport showed up and got the rough explanation of what had happened, if not what the experiment really was, Firestar asked her, "What's your name?" and Whirl had a moment of blank panic.
Damn good thing she wasn't a real kid, he'd gone and forgotten to name her.
Anyway, the kid-- experiment-- she said, "Whirl," which wasn't even a name, not really, even if he used it more than he used his actual given name, and the resulting convers-argument about names versus callsigns, and how small children who were not in any way military didn't really need callsigns, and anyway didn't she want her own name, it would be confusing to have two Whirls, and so on and so forth, lasted the rest of the way back to the fleet.
And Whirl accidentally ended it himself.
"If she wants to be Whirl Junior, she can damn well be Whirl Junior."
And so she was.
