Kem's Robot Worldbuilding Yellhole Apparently

For once, something that is not robot worldbuilding:

Spoiler

under cut bc huge.

I wanted to have a go at character sketchpages for ages but never quite got around to it until now lmao. I'm really happy with how this came out - it's not exactly a sketch, lmao, but it looks good and it shows off what Karamea is like, so... mission accomplished XD.

Karamea is my main BnHA OC, I ship her with All Might because yes, and she's got an enormous fucking profile over here on dA. Her Quirk is Human CPU, basically her brain is a weirdass but awesome computer and the bright things on her forehead are plug sockets. TF fandom spoiled me lmao.

 

I'm rewriting/editing some of the earlier chapters of Rise, because it's been nearly five years since I wrote them and there were a few scenes and sentences I've known I should probably try and make a bit clearer for ages, but hadn't gotten around to until now. (Also I was a little stuck on the next chapter and I thought maybe refamiliarising myself with the older chapters might help, lol.) I'm about halfway through the third chapter rn and somehow I've managed to add about 2000 words to the full word count? Not what I expected, cause the last longfic I did a rewrite like this on lost about 20K instead XD

 

time to do another reread I think...

 

:D

I just updated ch.3, might be able to get ch.4 done today as well if my concentration holds and I don't strike anything that needs major rewriting lol.

 

I got distracted working on my new shiny geography headcanons post for the Ao3 collection and I am not gonna be able to post it all in one chapter again, it's 12k words rn and i've only got... i think nine out of 45 done. Definitely gonna have to chop some stuff, or just split it up into the regions... idk yet. I also have to fix the formatting somewhat cause parts of it have come from the old summary post, which was written for my old RP blog and has got some weird formatting lmao. I do like the bolded keywords tho.

 

Also Starscream's family have the coolest fucking Towers clade name I've come up with yet and every time I see it it reminds me of where it came from -- the epically cliche OCxCanon fic I was plotting out for fun back when I first got into Transformers in 2012, 2013. Horizon Blaze, goddamn. The OC was gonna be Starscream's little sister, more or less, and their family was... a clusterfuck of Starscreams, in short, and this sister was kind of the black sheep because she was bad at being Like That. IIRC she was eventually sent away to just do whatever. I was gonna ship her with Ratchet at first, but then OpRatch hit me over the head and dragged me into the dark, so I never wrote anything from that story lmao.

 

*sits here chinhanding profusely* are you telling me you're writing that travelogue you teased in the fic notes because g o d i'm here for that

 

Alas, it is not; that one's undergoing terminal indecision on who to use as an 'author', lol. The thing I'm doing right now is going to be kind of the basis of that fic if it happens, though - background worldbuilding like the other things i've been sharing, yanno? XD I'll drop the link in a day or so, it just needs a bit more formatting to make it readable.

let's see if i can copypaste a bit here, but long story short it's part atlas entry and part me mining tfwiki for interesting locations and related worldbuilding tidbits.

Spoiler

━ IACON.
{ throne of the Imperial Government

OFFICIAL LANGUAGES: High/Vulgate Iaconian, Polar (‘Primal’) Vernacular
POPULATION: 91,000,000

[insert fancy description here, i've got four large paragraphs from 2013 ish to salvage lol]

NOTABLE LOCATIONS:

• Iacon Sanctuary — Iacon’s main Sanctuary and Cathedral, to which the Prime’s residential complex is attached
• Memorial Plaza — a ceremonial plaza and amphitheatre built around a sunken crystal garden to commemorate Cybertron’s victory in the Third Quintesson War
• the Celestial Spires — a group of seven towers built by an investment banking group to represent the stars of the Celestial Sisters constellation
• Trion Square — old city center marker, currently covered over by the Iacon Hive
• Iacon Hall of Records — largest historical archive and active library in the world
• the Council Towers — government complex, including Iacon Emporiums, High and Common Council Chambers, Senatorial offices and public debate chambers
• the Chamber of the Ancients — the only remaining relic of First-Generation Iacon, a church hollowed out of part of the Lunar Observatory; major cultural icon
• Iaconian Aerial Academy — aerial branch of the Elite Guard Academy, focusing on Cybertron’s best and brightest flighted civil servants
• Springs Junction Station — public transport hub, one of the largest single structures in the city and an excellent example of High Iaconian architecture
• Six Lasers Over Cybertron — world’s largest amusement park
• Maccadam’s New Oil House — exceedingly popular bar, cultural icon
• Rivets Field — open-ground park in the western fringes of the city, the site of a momentuous battle fought during the Third Quintesson War

 

*chomps down on this*

good. I can't wait for the proper link, your descriptions are always so vivid!

 

:D thank you! Here's the link; it's still very much a WIP but at least it's mostly readable now. Have some initial notes under a cut:

Spoiler

• As far as I can tell, all of these cities are canon EXCEPT for Meridia and Triscanion, which I made up so long ago that I no longer remember why, and Breaker City, which I borrowed from a friend a long while ago and I'm on the fence about keeping it tbh except it's on the map so I feel like I may as well. That said, i'm not limiting myself to what's canon on any of the canon ones, so what's the difference, really lmao
• Also still trying to decide if I should keep the slight levity of tone in the descriptions, which are mostly from the original headcanon post from 2016. I like it, but I'm wondering if it might be a bit grating lol.
• I will be adding descriptions for a few more non-city geographical features at some point, including the Mare Occidentalis (which I made up), Mare Mithril (the sea by Triscanion, which is canon), and the Titanium Highlands (which I thought was canon but google is telling me it's not??). Maybe the Southern Rust Belt too, since it's kinda relevant to shit that happens with the early Decepticon formation.
• There are a fuckton more Cybertronian cities, but these are the ones that have 'state' status. Hexima and Proximax would both be 'satellite cities', i.e counted inside another city's state, if they weren't so fucking far away from everything. Hyperious used to be the same, but then the tourists arrived.
• I actually need to redraw the map again tbh. It won't change much, but i'm seeing a wee few things that contradict my headcanons and also the text is horrible.

Also, as it happens, I added some related description in the bit of Rise where Orion and Jazz are on the train going to Burthov and I really like it, so...

Dawn stole over the mountains north of Thunder Passage, rousing a soft white glow in the mist that threaded along the valleys. Orion had the window seat; he’d spent much of the journey with his face all but pressed to the glass, looking out at the landscape that flashed by at two hundred leagues an hour.

Admittedly, there hadn’t been much to look at for a while. The closest Iacon came to mountains were the flat-topped, steep-sided mesas of the Observatories. In Rodion, further south along the Imperial Trunk Highway, the horizons were dead flat aside from the distant rise of Iacon.

Then, a joor south of Rodion, the land rose up in a series of sharp fracture ridges, intercut by dramatic gullies and larger flat-bottomed valleys. The train slowed as it tackled the heights, giving Orion time to soak up the moonlit landscape like an eager sponge. They sped into a tunnel, interrupting Orion’s gawking for five minutes, then emerged onto a flat terrace on the banks of an enormous river valley. Braided channels wound down out of the mountains and along the broad valley floor. A bridge across a larger tributary flashed by. Orion rewound his optical feed to grab still images of a waterfall further up the tributary.

According to a cheery poster at the front of the carriage, there was an onboard Datanet connection. Orion scanned for the connection frequency, put in the passcode listed on the poster, and thereafter split his attention between marveling at the scenery and researching the geological processes responsible for it.​

This post brought to you by every single time I've gone through the Southern Alps. I love mountains so fucking much, aaaaaaah.

 

G o d i feel that about the alps. Middle germany ain't flat but the first time i went to Muinich and like, the Northern approach when you're still like 100 kilometers out from the alps proper and you can already see those sniwy peaks? Blew my tiny 14 year old mind

 

Mmmmm, yep, someday I have an ambition to visit all the big mountains and the Alps are definitely on the list, lol. Google tells me the Southern Alps are a fair bit shorter, but also you can't get that far away from them in the South Island so they're almost always just there in the distance. There's a particular river valley on the Arthur's Pass road I had in mind writing that piece - I think it's the upper Waimakariri - that has the braided river and the terraces and mountains all around, and it always gives me this particular feeling, so I kinda just scaled it up for Cybertronian sizes XD. I've done something similar other times - the Main Divide in one of my other fics was inspired by Fiordland.

Found a pic of the valley I'm talking about on google, i think - it isn't at the right place, there's no terrace visible, but this is more or less it:


Edit: and I’m stopping for the night at halfway done with chapter 5, so far we’re up 500 words, which I think is the most so far. If this keeps happening I might break 120k words on the fic without even needing to post a new chapter lmao

 

I didn't know New Zealand had its own tfwiki page lmfao. Apparently the dinobots crashlanded in the south island about ten thousand years ago, specifically on the franz josef glacier. I've gotten distracted trying to figure out what the land might have looked like to them! We had our own ice sheet over the southern alps, although it'd started retreating about 18k years ago so they were a bit late for the full Ice Age experience. The Waiho Loop moraine was created about 12,000 years ago, so perhaps the ice might have been visible in this photo, about where modern Franz Josef township is at the middle far right. I think I can just see the bridge, although it's hard to tell because the bridge is munted half the time anyway lol. I can't find any goddamn decent info on google but iirc in the 1800's when the glacier was discovered, you could still see it from the town.

 

Turns out I have Maximum Dinobots, so here's my brief geological review: didn't read the actual story, too wired on geo stuff to pay attention. The Franz Josef stuff is mostly just a crater in a pretty generic high-altitude snowfield, which seems more or less accurate for both now and ten thousand years ago lmao. The only issue is that the Franz Josef glacier moves really fuckin fast for a glacier, and if the ship had really crashed ten thousand years ago, it'd be somewhere out on the Waiho River floodplain by now. XD At my inexpert estimate, it would have taken less than a thousand years to fall out the receding face of the glacier. Unless it got caught up in the neve somewhere or some shit, idk, I'm not an expert yet lol.

Which honestly gives me some really funny ideas, lol. Like imagine trying to find your spaceship, ten thousand years later, and finding out it's buried under one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country. "Well, it was up there in the mountains somewhere when I left it, but the glacier's run off with it and now I can't get to it without running into a fuckload of squishies with cameras." "Why don't you go in alt?" "Because my altmode is a fucking giant dinosaur." "Fair."

 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Spoiler

???? Photo's rotated upon being inserted into comment box?? Here's a link to the original in case it's more readable.

but yes. I FINALLY know what the Polar Depression looks like, outside of my own head!

 

LOOKS GREAT!!

 

Thank you! :D The southern hemisphere will be tonight's task, if I can get ch.6 of Rise edited by then XD

An updated description of Pion, fitting the geography theme of the last few days:

Orion watched Alpha Trion dump his luggage on the intricately-tiled hotel floor with carelessness wholly at odds with his previous experience of the elder. Striding out onto the balcony, Trion spread his arms wide, the paper-thin components of his facial array fluttering in the wind. “I do love this city!” exclaimed the elder Archivist.

The ornamental curtains flapped in a sudden gale; something fell off a table close to the door. Orion hurried out after him, pulling the doors shut.

Alpha Trion turned to him, something in his optics glimmering. “It is so very beautiful. Don't you agree, Orion?”

Orion blinked. “I suppose so, yes.”

Pion glittered in the bowl of an ancient impact crater, built around the shores of its famous near-circular lake. Surrounding the city were the northern Manganese Mountains, the eroded stumps of an ancient mountain range that had fueled the technological advancement of the late Second Generation. The smooth, eroded flanks of the mountains glimmered with snow under the double-moon twilight.

Their hotel was a thirty-storey tower rising above the outskirts of the central business district that ringed the lake. Their balcony faced south, overlooking the ancient, picturesque downtown district that perched above the lake on deep piles, reaching out to a walled island well offshore. Canals radiated outward from the lake like wheelspokes into the surrounding city. Orion counted the barges in the water, little black specks at this distance. He gave up at about ninety.

Alpha Trion shook his venerable head. “You suppose so, hm. Where is your sense of aesthetic?”

“Inside, where it's warm.” Orion rested his hand on the doorknob, turned it until the latch clicked open a thread. The icy wind kicked up a notch, tugging at his frame. “Are you going to be out here long? The local metservice is saying there's going to be a storm.”

“Then I had better enjoy the view while it lasts, hadn't I?” Trion waved a dismissive hand at him, optics fixed on the city below. “Go get settled in, Orion. We have tonight to ourselves.”​

 

Alpha Trion probably spent a lot of time in Pion, once upon a time. Where else do you go when you're a retired god of scholars looking for something to do but a city full of both academia and religion? :'D

 

Alpha Trion spends all of his time in Pion arguing over people's interpretations of the Books of History and comparing what's in said Books to what's in his big Book and going What The Fuck

probably enjoys himself but there's definitely some "wow you guys are dumb, you sure you're our descendants?? really?"

also i outlined Grimlock vs. Tourists on a new doc and it miiiiight happen? Magnus and Fowler decided they wanted to come along.

 

Been thinking about Cybertronian weather systems and wind patterns and I just realised they’re probably a Fucking Mess due to the presence of three fuckhuge mountain systems that stretch more or less from pole to pole in each hemisphere; the main divide and iron ridge in the west and the tagan heights in the east.

...Simfur must be so fucking windy lol. It’s right in that narrow gap between the main divide and iron ridge. And if I have my prevailing winds right, then tyger pax and the tagan rus are both probably kinda wet for cybertronian regions, both of which I’m pretty sure I’ve written about before. :D