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tiamatschild) wrote2015-10-25 10:30 pm
tiamatschild) wrote2015-10-25 10:30 pm
Entry tags:
OC October: Maelstrom and Gyre
Maelstrom and Gyre, Transformers G1
Maelstrom and Gyre are a pair of twins who got the bad and creepy end of what should have been a fairly routine labor contract. They broke it the first chance they got and, through a complex series of misadventures the details of which I am still pretty hazy on (I have several ideas about what might have happened, but I haven't pinned down any solid thoughts or written anything) they ended up in a position to get fished out of the path of an oncoming storm, refuelled, and put up for the night by Cheerly. Maelstrom, who is their self appointed spokesperson and also the one who's more likely to break your fingers, took the night to think and talk it over with Gyre, and in the morning told Cheerly that they had no where to go, no prospect of anywhere to go, and no job or any prospect of one.
Cheerly, being Cheerly, responded by telling them not to worry about needing to get out of her apartment, there's plenty of space, and offering to hook them up with the local employment advocacy people. So they lived in her uh. Her tiny office that was probably actually a corridor at some point (the apartment was in an old subdivided dwelling that had been hacked up in strange ways), and did odd and mostly underground economy type jobs around the harbor and accompnying town (with Maelstrom driving Gyre round the bend the while, because if you want to jump Cheerly's struts that bad, says Gyre, why don't you just do it, why all this fury at yourself over it I don't even understand you how are we twins why) until Cheerly managed to land a better than usual salvage contract and asked for their help.
Maelstrom and Gyre are submersibles. Weeeeeee tiny ones. They're both on the small end of the scale for minibots, and packed full of sensors and recording equipment and other such. They were originally built to be commercial underwater surveyors, and their expertise would allow Cheerly to hit all the terms of the contract that would trigger the bonus provisions and without losing anything like as much time from her other work. As it turned out, they all worked together well, made the partnership permanent, and Maelstrom and Gyre dropped all pretense that they were really planning to move away from Cheerly.
(At some point after that, although I am not sure exactly when or how, Maelstrom and Cheerly started dating.)
Maelstrom is sharp and fierce and eloquent and angers easily, sometimes over things that make sense to be angry over - someone hurting Gyre or Cheerly or herself or their feelings, injustice in her world, her own limited range of action. Sometimes over things that it really doesn't make sense to get really angry about – she knows at times like those she's not really angry about the simple existence of curly straws, she's simply angry, and the curly straws happen to be there. She thinks Cheerly puts up with much too much, and is viciously protective of Gyre. (She's seriously hurt people protecting Gyre before.) She's very loyal and affectionate if she likes you, and she took to Cheerly's carefully selected personal library, and then the various left wing lending libraries Cheerly introduced her to like a turbo duck to liquid mercury.
Gyre, on the other hand, is generally very quiet and with drawn. They don't talk much in company, and were quietly surprised when, quite early on, they realized they liked talking to Cheerly. Gyre can and will react with violence if their sister is threatened, but is more likely, if it's just them, to respond with silent endurance. After all, they say, they were built to take pressure. When they're bored they run calculations in their head (they love their inbuilt surveying equipment, and tend to treat the way it interacts with their central processor almost like a toy, a fun game to play when things are hard or scary or just dull). They're as well read as Maelstrom – who likes to give them her last book the instant she's done with it and demand they read it – but less likely to seek out philosophy and political treatises on their own. They like the physical sciences, though they have no real illusions about anything more formal than a lending library education: they and Maelstrom have to keep a low profile. What they did with their first contract was illegal. Unlike Maelstrom, who tends to fly into rages that she struggles to control, Gyre is more likely to experience bouts of deep apathy and emptiness. They usually push through these, because it terrifies Maelstrom every time, but sometimes they don't feel like a real mechanism, like perhaps they don't actually exist and are only someone someone else dreamed up. How would they know, after all, if they were just a game someone else was playing?
Both Maelstrom and Gyre have deep emotional connections to their alt modes, associating them with safety and freedom (despite being aware of the dangers of deep diving) but Gyre's feelings are even stronger than Maelstrom's. Gyre stops worrying about whether they're real or not when they're deep deep down, cradled and held by pressure that could potentially crush a mechanism less well reinforced. The sensation doesn't make the disassociation go away, but it does make it less of a problem. It is no longer distressing when they're down deep.
Maelstrom and Gyre are a pair of twins who got the bad and creepy end of what should have been a fairly routine labor contract. They broke it the first chance they got and, through a complex series of misadventures the details of which I am still pretty hazy on (I have several ideas about what might have happened, but I haven't pinned down any solid thoughts or written anything) they ended up in a position to get fished out of the path of an oncoming storm, refuelled, and put up for the night by Cheerly. Maelstrom, who is their self appointed spokesperson and also the one who's more likely to break your fingers, took the night to think and talk it over with Gyre, and in the morning told Cheerly that they had no where to go, no prospect of anywhere to go, and no job or any prospect of one.
Cheerly, being Cheerly, responded by telling them not to worry about needing to get out of her apartment, there's plenty of space, and offering to hook them up with the local employment advocacy people. So they lived in her uh. Her tiny office that was probably actually a corridor at some point (the apartment was in an old subdivided dwelling that had been hacked up in strange ways), and did odd and mostly underground economy type jobs around the harbor and accompnying town (with Maelstrom driving Gyre round the bend the while, because if you want to jump Cheerly's struts that bad, says Gyre, why don't you just do it, why all this fury at yourself over it I don't even understand you how are we twins why) until Cheerly managed to land a better than usual salvage contract and asked for their help.
Maelstrom and Gyre are submersibles. Weeeeeee tiny ones. They're both on the small end of the scale for minibots, and packed full of sensors and recording equipment and other such. They were originally built to be commercial underwater surveyors, and their expertise would allow Cheerly to hit all the terms of the contract that would trigger the bonus provisions and without losing anything like as much time from her other work. As it turned out, they all worked together well, made the partnership permanent, and Maelstrom and Gyre dropped all pretense that they were really planning to move away from Cheerly.
(At some point after that, although I am not sure exactly when or how, Maelstrom and Cheerly started dating.)
Maelstrom is sharp and fierce and eloquent and angers easily, sometimes over things that make sense to be angry over - someone hurting Gyre or Cheerly or herself or their feelings, injustice in her world, her own limited range of action. Sometimes over things that it really doesn't make sense to get really angry about – she knows at times like those she's not really angry about the simple existence of curly straws, she's simply angry, and the curly straws happen to be there. She thinks Cheerly puts up with much too much, and is viciously protective of Gyre. (She's seriously hurt people protecting Gyre before.) She's very loyal and affectionate if she likes you, and she took to Cheerly's carefully selected personal library, and then the various left wing lending libraries Cheerly introduced her to like a turbo duck to liquid mercury.
Gyre, on the other hand, is generally very quiet and with drawn. They don't talk much in company, and were quietly surprised when, quite early on, they realized they liked talking to Cheerly. Gyre can and will react with violence if their sister is threatened, but is more likely, if it's just them, to respond with silent endurance. After all, they say, they were built to take pressure. When they're bored they run calculations in their head (they love their inbuilt surveying equipment, and tend to treat the way it interacts with their central processor almost like a toy, a fun game to play when things are hard or scary or just dull). They're as well read as Maelstrom – who likes to give them her last book the instant she's done with it and demand they read it – but less likely to seek out philosophy and political treatises on their own. They like the physical sciences, though they have no real illusions about anything more formal than a lending library education: they and Maelstrom have to keep a low profile. What they did with their first contract was illegal. Unlike Maelstrom, who tends to fly into rages that she struggles to control, Gyre is more likely to experience bouts of deep apathy and emptiness. They usually push through these, because it terrifies Maelstrom every time, but sometimes they don't feel like a real mechanism, like perhaps they don't actually exist and are only someone someone else dreamed up. How would they know, after all, if they were just a game someone else was playing?
Both Maelstrom and Gyre have deep emotional connections to their alt modes, associating them with safety and freedom (despite being aware of the dangers of deep diving) but Gyre's feelings are even stronger than Maelstrom's. Gyre stops worrying about whether they're real or not when they're deep deep down, cradled and held by pressure that could potentially crush a mechanism less well reinforced. The sensation doesn't make the disassociation go away, but it does make it less of a problem. It is no longer distressing when they're down deep.