Kem's Robot Worldbuilding Yellhole Apparently

Wheeljack gets roped in to do engineering and he's more of a shenanigans-causer than any of the apprentices

[Bulkhead voice] No you can't use a grenade to demo a tower!!! Jackie NO!!!

 

I've been thinking of writing some post-war cultural differences where Bulkhead and his little team of Vehicon construction workers get comfortable with each other, too! Although moreso from the angle of getting the Vehicons to connect to their cultural heritage b/c I doubt that was a thing for them during the war.

 

Like, labour mechs probably have some wild superstitions, and abiding by them is a part of building an ingroup, and Bulkhead starts out feeling weird with his whole work force ignoring them before he realises that they literally just don't know about peacetime activity like that and gets a little bit emotionally overwhelmed.

 

YES!! Aaaaa, if you do end up writing that pls let me know because that sounds great!! I'm with you on the Vehicons, that would be a really interesting thing to explore 8D

(I don't know if Wheeljack has a canon occupation before the war, but I've always headcanoned him being an engineer of some sort, and now i'm wondering if he'd have some of his own ingroup traditions/superstitions to pass on. brb checking the wiki lmao)

 

I forgot to look until now but it appears that in Aligned canon Wheeljack has always been a Wrecker, but 'Wrecker' meant different things before the war... the Covenant of Primus has them as "freelance peacekeeping agents helping to protect the peaceful settlements from bandits, gangs, and other marauders." ...which sounds rly fuckin Questionable to me and so I'm going to ignore it completely.

(tbh that's yet another reason to hate the Covenant of Primus lmfao. Freelance cops?? What the fuck??)

In my headcanons (and therefore worldbuilding for Rise) the Wreckers are a wartime invention, a bunch of black ops with a specialty in, basically, getting into enemy bases and completely wrecking their shit. Lot of them have engineering backgrounds, of which Wheeljack is one. Jackie himself was created by a tier-3 engineering clade as a replacement for an older member who'd died, worked with the rest of the clade on large-scale civil engineering projects like hive city expansion, but chafed at the expectations and restrictions placed on him and ended up being kind of a Bad Boy, generally toeing the line but it was obvious he wasn't happy about it. He taught himself chemistry so he could make moonshine energon and discovered that he actually liked sciency shit as long as he could decide what to work on himself. Initially when the war broke out he sympathised with the Decepticons and was thinking about signing up to fight the Government with them, but Shit Happened and he ended up picking the third option of Optimus (who at the time was holding onto neutral territory trying his hardest to oppose the government loyalists without much success). When the government loyalists fell apart and the Decepticons turned around and declared war on Optimus' people, he joined the Autobots, gained notoriety as a saboteur, and eventually helped form the Wreckers.

 

Wheeljack is involved in some more sciencey things in the books (and also his abilities as a mechanic in the show itself are *chef's kiss*), so the backstory I use for him is that he's a former upper-midde caste engineer and was a fairly well-respected researcher before the civil war, during which he initially served as a combat engineer -- then got attached to the Wreckers and from the perspective of his former colleagues, lost his whole damn mind and stayed a Wrecker. By racer frame standards, Wheeljack was extremely offbeat and kind of socially unacceptable even before the war, and the Wreckers were jus the first social space where he could stop masking so hard and kinda just be himself.

Like, the hill I'm willing to die the hardest on is that Prime Wheeljack and G1 Wheeljack aren't even that different, Prime WJ just has absolutely awful empathy burnout :'D

 

Oooh, that's good to know XDD The Covenant is the only one of the Aligned books I've read the whole way through, so I'm glad that's not all there is to him, lol. (And yesss, Jackie as mechanic is great <333 I like your headcanons too, the idea of mild-mannered (masking his spark out) researcher Wheeljack getting involved with the Wreckers and going "Oh slag it's me!" is so good XDD)

I can 100% see this :'D It's been a while since I've watched the show in more than youtube clips but I keep thinking of how he obviously likes being around bulkhead and always keeps coming back to him, but also tends to make the decision to leave after something bigger happens. (Which i guess can just be put down to the episode format, but idk how to word it, i have Feelings about this XD)

 

Wheeljack's hot-and-coldness with Team Prime is very interesting if you're willing to just kinda go with it =v=) I like the interpretation that however much he likes Bulkhead, there's all these other fucking people he doesn't know at all, and he just doesn't have the extra bandwidth to get comfortable with them. Even after he stays on Earth he doesn't exactly stick around, and has to make the conscious effort to stop doing that.

(This way it also becomes highly entertaining that Bulkhead clocks Makeshift almost entirely based on him being too eager to get along and not showing the correct amount of grouchy in-group preference xD Bulkhead has Wheeljack figured out at fifty paces.)

 

Like I have so many Big Feelings about how despite how aggressive Bulkhead can be towards any perceived outsider, he is kind of still a big squishy extrovert whose ingroup-outgroup boundary is malleable and unconditional and who strongly mirrors his environment and is terrible at carrying a grudge, meanwhile Wheeljack is all pointy introversion who has to be in control of whatever conversation he's in so he knows exactly how much of his weight he has to throw around to get out of them and is pathologically incapable of just letting that shit be.

 

Been thinking more about the vampire story and I think I can jam the rock magic system in there too lmao. It’s overtaken BnHA and Transformers as my designated ‘movie to imagine when bored’, which is kinda exciting. Nobody has names still tho.

Spoiler

• The root mechanic of the magic system is this sorta dusty energy thing that settles on things as they get old and gives them power. Rocks are great reservoirs of power bc they can be extremely old. Living things collect power dust a lot faster than non-living things but usually they don’t live long enough to get to a comparable level.
  
• Humans figured out magic about the same time we figured out smelting. (Idk who had the idea first but it probably developed separately at least a couple different times, lemme look up metalworking first xD) Humans do not live long enough to get strong, so we borrowed the rocks’ power instead. (And occasionally trees!) We can’t use it properly, but it’s close enough for most ppl’s purposes. Regular technology took over in terms of usefulness at some point so magic went out of fashion among the rich and gradually dropped out of human use almost entirely. (A lot of different groups keep their versions alive but most of them are very secretive/closed religious traditions. The vampire hunters are one of the first sort.)
• Someone tried to invent a way to make humans immortal to get at the dust power, because of course they did. It failed, and that’s how we got ‘vampires’. (They have a bunch of different names but that’s what stuck in English. The hunters have so many dracula jokes.) Vampires don’t die unless they’re killed, and they don’t age much physically beyond a point but they do keep collecting dust, so eventually they can become pretty strong if they survive long enough. They tend to stop caring and start causing trouble before that point tho — it’s rare for one to be more than about 500 or so.
  
• Vampires that were made via the botched immortality ritual are colloquially called ‘sources’ bc they can turn other humans into vampires as well. Those vampires are counted in ‘generations’, and the more generations between you and the source, the weaker you’ll start out. Some source vampires have Specific interesting powers, like healing, which they can pass on to their ‘bloodline’; these also weaken the further you get from the source.
• Vampires have predators — wraithlike things that drift about feeding on dust. The more dust you’ve collected, the tastier you are to them. Most regular humans are bland and not their preferred snack bc not aged enough yet, but vampires are more flavoursome. (Except for the handful of real ancient ones, those are like the wraith equivalent of a really really hot chillie to eat lmao. Or like... looking at colourful pretty art vs the sun.)

 

Welp, we got covid again. Auckland into level 3 lockdown again, the rest of us to level 2. I can’t remember if that means my uni lectures and shit go online again, but I think so. 3 days to figure out if we need to come down harder again.

 

The covid plot thickens! So it's looking like we shut stuff down fast enough to contain it in Auckland (plus two cases in Tokoroa that were direct contacts iirc), and the rest of the country is staying at level 2 precautions for now. So my lectures and shit are back online (no change for me, I've been using the online versions this whole time lol), and now I get to figure out how to record and submit a video of me saying my mihi through the online submission portal instead of just turning up to the tutorial class.

Also... the genome of this outbreak has been sequenced. We're now pretty sure that it was NOT circulating quietly through the population since the last lockdown and also that it hasn't come from any of the quarantined returnees we've been looking after at the border, because apparently this particular strain hasn't been seen in NZ before. So... where the heck did it come from? I'm so fucking interested XD

 

I've got 2500 words of an update to Rise that I've just realised I have to scrap. ;A; Don't know how much of it I can scrape out and put in a different place but I suspect it's very little. Might post it as a lil side thing later tho, I can't bear to delete it skhdghjg

 

oh noooooo

Why do you have to scrap it?

 

Been trying to sort out what the power dynamic is in robot politics lately bc it's starting to become Important, so here's a bit of a ramble while I try to get my thoughts down in a form i won't immediately forget about:

• Faction 1 is 'religious conservatives' -- big time theocrats basically. Technically their opponents are also theocrats bc they all want the Prime to rule and have decision-making power, these guys just want the various broadstreams of the Mythos to have more of a say than the other guys. (By which they mean they want the Ordo Imperium to have a say; the other broadstreams get kinda left out.) Currently they've got their hands on the reins of power thanks to reforms made by Zeta ('the Zealot') Prime, who was secretly a member of a... doomsday cult, I guess, he thought the End Times were coming and he forced through a lot of stuff that brought the Ordo Imperium into power big time before being assassinated because, turns out, forcefully reorganising your entire power structure makes you a lot of rich and powerful enemies.
  • Occidens and Oriens Orthodox broadstreams could be competitive if they teamed up, but they're not good at teaming up because they hate each other more than they hate Ordo Imperium. The Imperials take turns throwing them little bones to make sure that it stays that way. Ordo Rige and Pax Enigma are too small to bother much with. Ordo Austrum has the numbers to maybe be competitive on its own but like.....why do u think the Southern States are so messed up??
• Faction 2 are 'secularists' -- which is an accurate name only by Cybertronian standards. They still want the Ordo Imperium involved in government, but they want other organizations there to balance it. They tend to be rich, hereditary members of powerful groups who have either been educated offworld or have had extensive experience in offworld societies. (Cybertronian colonies count for a bit here; they're often less attached to homeworld power structures and more willing to experiment.) This can be a really loose grouping - some of them are big fans of the caste system, some of them have their doubts, and some of them are against it entirely (although these ones mostly tend not to be vocal about it for fear of attracting unwanted attention). They tend to argue and fracture a lot, but since Zeta gave them all a fright they've banded together more closely than usual and have managed to claw back enough power to be competitive again.
• Faction 3 are the 'progressives'. They're more of a splinter group from the secularists -- mecha who think that the issue with Cybertronian society is deeper than theocracy and would like to reconstruct the nation entirely, but for the most part aren't really sure how or where to start. Some of them are people who've had experience with Cybertronian society outside of the high-caste bubble, some of them are highly-educated idealists, and some of them are just REALLY concerned about the economy and think that Factions 1 and 2 aren't taking the issue seriously enough.
  • Given that the level of reform they're thinking is necessary would completely upend the current power structures, these guys tend to keep their ideals very close to their chests. The sentiment is there in a surprising amount of people, but they tend to congregate in very small groups and a lot of them don't know about each other.

 

I came to the conclusion that it doesn't really do anything to advance the story -- it's just checking in on something that's happened previously and a bit of worldbuilding that was fun but not really necessary. Also I was having trouble figuring out how to bridge the gap between it and the beginning of the actual action, so I think I'm just gonna skip that and jump into said action.

 

in that case perhaps it would be good to make a sort of 'bonus scene reel' in a little extra fic where you store stuff like that if/when it comes up, yeah!

I'd certainly be interested in reading it, I love your worldbuilding.

 

tbh that’s exactly what I was thinking about doing! XD I do like what I’ve written—it’s quite slice-of-lifey, lol.

 

I am no imaging a Rise outtake wheel and its's a hilarious concept (and probably 90% Jazz by volume)

 

Trying to start on my geology term project and got thoroughly distracted. Have some more rock magic stuff.

Spoiler

• Felsic rocks are good for light and airy stuff. Quartz will help you work with air; it’s light and buoyant and wants to float on top of other things. High-quartz sandstone is a good beginner’s rock, rather forgiving and easy to compartmentalise. Pumice, in the hands of a powerful mage (or one with a good handle on a potent external source of power) will full on make u fly. (No comment on landing ability.)
  
• If you wanna work with metal, find urself a good source ore of that particular metal. They tend to be excitable tho, so not recommended for a beginner. There are a lot of good career opportunities for a mage who knows their way around metal deposits and ores, so in the modern world they often end up in mining geology as a day job. :D
  
• Conglomerates, argumentative as they are, work well with water. Mudstones are a better beginner’s rock, they’re not particularly energetic but they have a much more agreeable personality, as long as you don’t ask too much of them. Young mudstones mostly just want to sit there and do nothing for a few million years. Older mudstones get bored after a while, and are more willing to help u out.
  
• More options for water are gypsum, travertine, and similar chemical deposits. These are much purer water source rocks, which means more refined energy but also more persnickety personalities. If they’re gonna work with you, it’ll be on their terms. :’D
• You can tell loosely how old a riverbed is by sitting down in it and listening to the background buzz of the rocks. Allowing for different rock types, younger rivers are quieter and less coherent; they aren't sure what they're gonna be a few million years from now and they probably weren't there at all a few million years ago. Older riverbeds have gotten used to the course and know how it all goes. They're louder, more confident, and they're not going anywhere in a hurry.
• An old experienced mage walks onto a continental flood basalt and a shiver goes up their spine. “Holy shit,” they whisper, “I gotta get out of here.” Large igneous provinces are heat and fire on a frankly terrifying scale, and if you can sense dust at all you’re going to be aware of that on some level. Young mages tend to just come down with sudden anxiety, while the older ones can feel the power outright. You could try working with a flood basalt if you want to scare the shit out of yourself, but you’d probably want to pick up just a small piece of rock and then go sit in the ocean while you tried it, just in case.
• Wanna work with ice? Find a nice friendly glacial erratic. Tillites will work at a pinch, but they have the same issue as conglomerates in that they’re argumentative and you’ll Inevitably waste time trying to coax them into teamwork. Erratics will have different qualities based on what sort of rock they are, but they all remember the ice.
• Wanna work with fire? But, like, sensibly? Tbh most rocks will let you do at least a little bit of fire work, although certain sedimentary rocks have no talent whatsoever. (Chalk and limestone, looking at u here especially.) Quartz is a good all-rounder here as well; it melts at a low temperature and generally won’t run out of control on you. If u can’t find quartz, granite will do nearly as well. Rhyolite is generally not a good idea, it likes to explode. Basalt is also definitely not a beginner’s rock, it tries to run away. In general, volcanic rocks are often Rude and Do Not Behave. (Pumice is the exception, being perfectly well-mannered if rather enthusiastic.)
• Wanna mess with living things? If it’s a plant, pick coal or amber. If it’s a critter, body fossils or gtfo. It doesn’t strictly matter if the fossil is related to the living creature or not, you just need something that vaguely remembers what a living thing is. Trace fossils don’t work for living things, but they can occasionally show you an impression of the environment in which they were formed. (Don’t try this with a coprolite.)
  
• It is technically possible to create a curse or a charm, that sort of thing, BUT. You can’t directly curse a person or a place, you have to use a rock as an anchor which then has to be in close proximity to the target, or the programming won’t react. Then you have to be really specific (and reasonable) about what you want to happen, otherwise the rock will just go sleep on the job. Wanna give yourself good luck? Nah man, rock don’t know what luck is. Want a sunny day in a rainy place for ur wedding? Naw, rock can’t control large-scale weather patterns. Wanna remember lots of stuff for an exam you’re worried you’re going to bomb? Sure, rock can help with that! Get urself a sheet silicate and program it with all the stuff u need to remember, then put it on a necklace and wear it in the exam. ;D
• Tectonic forces are really not to be trifled with. Wanna make an earthquake happen? Good luck bro, u gonna die. Wanna make an earthquake not happen? We’ll scrape ur remains up off the dirt, if there’s anything left. Wanna make a volcano blow its top? Congrats, ur gonna be the first casualty. There’s like two or three people ever who’ve successfully tried this shit and lived to tell the tale, and none of them ever did it more than once because there’s nothing like a natural disaster to make you realise how small and fragile you are.
  
• Mages that congregate in a general area tend to be those that specialise in whatever the area’s geological traits are. Like water magic? Settle down on a river with a nice floodplain. Maybe u like to live on the wild side, and your specialty is basalt? Find a nice shield volcano and profit. Like working with plants? Coal country will probably work for u, as long as it's not like a complete desert. Fault zones are your thing? Find a convergent plate boundary and knock yourself out. :'D

Of my main characters, half-vampire doesn't know any of this shit, she's still figuring out wtf magic even is. Hunter boy was born and raised on sandstones and mudstones, but would like to branch out; he's interested in fault zones, to the chagrin of his parents. Weirdo vampire man, meanwhile, doesn't really have a specialty - he's tried everything and had fun doing so. :D He's one of the known survivors of messing with actual earthquakes. In his defense, the fault was going to go off anyway! He just nominated a date and time, as it were.

There's another new character, also nameless thus far. I'm calling this guy the vampire historian bc that's what he is, lol; he's not interested in much practical magic use but he's very good at recreating paleoenvironments. Sedimentary rocks are his favourites, especially conglomerates and breccias. He's loosely affiliated with Hunter boy's parents' group, but spends most of his time reading and doesn't show up much. :D