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tiamatschild) wrote2015-10-14 12:05 am
tiamatschild) wrote2015-10-14 12:05 am
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Cheerly, Transformers G1
Cheerly, because I've been thinking about her a lot lately. I have a longstanding ambition to write a More Or Less G1-ish Dockworker Origin fic about Optimus' first several centuries as Prime. This requires a lot of ocs, because I'm pretty sure that G1 Optimus didn't meet most his current cadre until pretty well into the war. Elita's the obvious exception, and Alpha Trion would be around too, being less helpful than Elita and Optimus could wish – but nearly all the other canon autobots would be off living their own lives at that point. If they'd even been constructed yet! Which most of them hadn't been.
Cheerly's one of those early Autobots from well before Optimus is actually in charge of much of anything.
“Cheerly” means “with a will” or “cheerfully” or “bravely,” and survives in English mostly as an archaic sailor's expression. Therefore, Cheerly's a sailor although when a transformer is a sailor, mostly they're a ship. Cheerly herself works the harbor and just outside it. She's a tugboat, so she's pretty big in mech mode, because tugboats may be small boats, but they still usually displace several tons and ooooooooh boy is she strong. (Optimus and Elita keep being thrown by the fact that they are pretty much the same size as her now, which is disconcerting. Cheerly is supposed to comfortingly loom, darnit! Not be a scant handspan taller!) She earns a less than stellar living doing harbor tug work and occasionally rushing out on a salvage rescue, and spends her unfortunately considerable downtime either half in recharge (it's important to conserve energy when you are as large and powerful and require as much fuel as Cheerly, especially when you're basically supporting two other mechanisms) or chatting around the docks.
Unlike her partner/lover Maelstrom's, Cheerly's talk is rarely overtly political, but despite or perhaps because of that, she's one of the Longshore and Harbor Mechanisms Union's best recruiters. She hadn't yet made up her mind to invite Ariel and Orion Pax to a meeting when the docks were targeted (an attack she survived by the simple expedient of not being there – she'd had a salvage operation out of the harbor), but she invited Optimus Prime and Elita-One on what she thinks was their second conversation. (Optimus after all, is a Prime, but that doesn't really mean anything. Who cares? Well, all right, there are some people care, mostly those who belong to sects where that has various kinds of religious significance, and some people who are old enough to remember the last Prime or have done research, and some who just know Alpha Trion – but all of that is as likely to be bad for their response to him as good. Optimus and Elita have to build a coalition.) Cheerly will concede that her invitation was maybe more reckless than she usually is, but she had an intuition, and anyway, they both actually talked to Gyre, and made it through an entire conversation with Maelstrom without seriously ticking her off, which is usually a sign that someone's likely to be a good fit.
Cheerly is big and strong and potentially dangerous even though she's entirely civilian (there's not much military purpose you can put a tugboat to – beyond salvage) so she cultivates a cheerful, good natured, steady calm. It's hard to make her angry, harder to make her angry so she shows it, pretty much impossible to get her to throw a punch from simple emotion. She has no particular objection to violence in self defense, but it'd be too easy for her to become a bully, so the resort to physical force is a decision she takes extremely seriously. She doesn't like to yell, either, that's something that scares people too, coming from her, from someone as big as her, and people who win debates by scaring people haven't done anything praiseworthy, to her mind. So Cheerly is upbeat and low voiced and smiles a lot and doesn't move too fast, telegraphs her movements.
Because she is a tug and was actually built for rescue and salvage, though she's wound up doing a lot of basic harbor work, a goodly chunk of her processing power is set aside for risk assessment and calculations of angles of force: things she needs to do her job without sinking either herself or the ship she's seeking to take in tow. If she does something stupid and reckless, believe her, she knows exactly how stupid and reckless it is. She's got half her brain flashing alerts and percentages and probability and possible response trees at her. It's just that, sometimes, it's important to do it anyway, to go ahead, bravely, with a whole heart – cheerly.
I don't know what happens to her ultimately, or to Maelstrom and Gyre. Probably a lot of heartbreak and horror. I have a bunch of other ocs for this story cycle, many of whom I've already determined to kill off, or who have been mentioned as dead in other fics of mine. I don't know if she joins their ranks. I um. Kind of would rather not, because it feels totally unfair that she should never get to run salvage on the Great Lakes or off the Pacific Coast, never end up on this glorious weird water planet of ours. If she does make it it's likely because someone or other stripped her down to processor and laser core and put her in cold storage the way they did to the Combaticons.
...which is. pretty horrific in itself. Hmmmm.
Cheerly, because I've been thinking about her a lot lately. I have a longstanding ambition to write a More Or Less G1-ish Dockworker Origin fic about Optimus' first several centuries as Prime. This requires a lot of ocs, because I'm pretty sure that G1 Optimus didn't meet most his current cadre until pretty well into the war. Elita's the obvious exception, and Alpha Trion would be around too, being less helpful than Elita and Optimus could wish – but nearly all the other canon autobots would be off living their own lives at that point. If they'd even been constructed yet! Which most of them hadn't been.
Cheerly's one of those early Autobots from well before Optimus is actually in charge of much of anything.
“Cheerly” means “with a will” or “cheerfully” or “bravely,” and survives in English mostly as an archaic sailor's expression. Therefore, Cheerly's a sailor although when a transformer is a sailor, mostly they're a ship. Cheerly herself works the harbor and just outside it. She's a tugboat, so she's pretty big in mech mode, because tugboats may be small boats, but they still usually displace several tons and ooooooooh boy is she strong. (Optimus and Elita keep being thrown by the fact that they are pretty much the same size as her now, which is disconcerting. Cheerly is supposed to comfortingly loom, darnit! Not be a scant handspan taller!) She earns a less than stellar living doing harbor tug work and occasionally rushing out on a salvage rescue, and spends her unfortunately considerable downtime either half in recharge (it's important to conserve energy when you are as large and powerful and require as much fuel as Cheerly, especially when you're basically supporting two other mechanisms) or chatting around the docks.
Unlike her partner/lover Maelstrom's, Cheerly's talk is rarely overtly political, but despite or perhaps because of that, she's one of the Longshore and Harbor Mechanisms Union's best recruiters. She hadn't yet made up her mind to invite Ariel and Orion Pax to a meeting when the docks were targeted (an attack she survived by the simple expedient of not being there – she'd had a salvage operation out of the harbor), but she invited Optimus Prime and Elita-One on what she thinks was their second conversation. (Optimus after all, is a Prime, but that doesn't really mean anything. Who cares? Well, all right, there are some people care, mostly those who belong to sects where that has various kinds of religious significance, and some people who are old enough to remember the last Prime or have done research, and some who just know Alpha Trion – but all of that is as likely to be bad for their response to him as good. Optimus and Elita have to build a coalition.) Cheerly will concede that her invitation was maybe more reckless than she usually is, but she had an intuition, and anyway, they both actually talked to Gyre, and made it through an entire conversation with Maelstrom without seriously ticking her off, which is usually a sign that someone's likely to be a good fit.
Cheerly is big and strong and potentially dangerous even though she's entirely civilian (there's not much military purpose you can put a tugboat to – beyond salvage) so she cultivates a cheerful, good natured, steady calm. It's hard to make her angry, harder to make her angry so she shows it, pretty much impossible to get her to throw a punch from simple emotion. She has no particular objection to violence in self defense, but it'd be too easy for her to become a bully, so the resort to physical force is a decision she takes extremely seriously. She doesn't like to yell, either, that's something that scares people too, coming from her, from someone as big as her, and people who win debates by scaring people haven't done anything praiseworthy, to her mind. So Cheerly is upbeat and low voiced and smiles a lot and doesn't move too fast, telegraphs her movements.
Because she is a tug and was actually built for rescue and salvage, though she's wound up doing a lot of basic harbor work, a goodly chunk of her processing power is set aside for risk assessment and calculations of angles of force: things she needs to do her job without sinking either herself or the ship she's seeking to take in tow. If she does something stupid and reckless, believe her, she knows exactly how stupid and reckless it is. She's got half her brain flashing alerts and percentages and probability and possible response trees at her. It's just that, sometimes, it's important to do it anyway, to go ahead, bravely, with a whole heart – cheerly.
I don't know what happens to her ultimately, or to Maelstrom and Gyre. Probably a lot of heartbreak and horror. I have a bunch of other ocs for this story cycle, many of whom I've already determined to kill off, or who have been mentioned as dead in other fics of mine. I don't know if she joins their ranks. I um. Kind of would rather not, because it feels totally unfair that she should never get to run salvage on the Great Lakes or off the Pacific Coast, never end up on this glorious weird water planet of ours. If she does make it it's likely because someone or other stripped her down to processor and laser core and put her in cold storage the way they did to the Combaticons.
...which is. pretty horrific in itself. Hmmmm.