This wasn't supposed to be written

[koilungfish]

29/8/07 - Day Off
30/8/07 - 1126 on unnamed fantasy story
31/8/07 - Fail


1/9/07 - The Shawsheen Embarassment II

         "I can't feel my legs," Starscream said as soon as his vocal processor became functional again.
         "You don't have any legs," said a familiar voice.
         Starscream started up his right optic since the left one was failing to respond. Everything was blurred - the optic crystal had been compacted, crushed into its shortest focus by intense pressure. Presuming the data from the last of his gyros was correct, he was looking up at a ceiling - a grey-purple blur, therefore a Decepticon base. Over him hung an indistinct shape in red and yellow. "Hot Glass? That's you, isn't it?"
         "Yes sir!" The bright shape blurred, possibly saluting.
         "Where are my legs?" Starscream asked, running through the catalogue of dysfunction in his body. His left arm wouldn't move if it was there at all and his right hand insisted it had no fingers. His wings were crushed into flat sheets of alloyed pulp, hanging limp and useless from his back. Every joint was jammed with something hard and crunchy that would have kept him immobile even if his motors weren't ruined from long submersion in ocean depths.
         "We think they're somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, sir," Hot Glass said, perhaps making a gesture Starscream couldn't make out. "You were bitten in half, boss, remember?"
         "Of course I remember, you idiot," Starscream said. "Why am I feeling so mellow about this mess?"
         "You're on a system shunt," Hot Glass said. "I had Bonesaw bring you back up that way before repairs -"
         "If you think I'll beat you any less harshly for leaving me at the bottom of the ocean," Starscream snapped, trying to grab Hot Glass but only causing gears to grind in his arm, "just because you woke me up when I can't move -!"
         "Actually, I thought it best to, err, inform you of what Bonesaw said he'd need to do before he did it."
         "Hot Glass, you're crawling," Starscream snarled, testing the focus motors around his optic and finding them all severed from the compacted crystal. "I don't like weak officers."
         "Sir!" Hot Glass said with more firmness of tone. "Starscream, sir, your body is a wreck."
         "I had noticed," the Air Commander said bitterly.
         "Bonesaw insists that an entirely new body is necessary, and there have been some interesting advances in cermets -"
         Advances? Starscream felt a tweak of anxiety. "How long have I been offline?" he asked immediately, glad for the moment that his face was crushed to paralysis, unable to show the twitching of nervous expectation.
         Hot Glass flinched. "Eighteen vorns."
         "What? How dare you leave me at the bottom of the ocean for that long?" Starscream's rage was enough to make him twitch, what was left of his body spasming. One of his wings cracked and fell off. Starscream was bleakly glad of the system shunt that prevented him from feeling the pain of his damages.
         "There - there were retrieval problems -" Hot Glass stammered.
         "Obviously," Starscream hissed, his vocaliser crackling. "Eighteen vorns worth of problems. Explain!"
         "The Shawsheen -"
         "That big fish-thing?" Starscream had a momentary vision of a huge pink-red maw filled with teeth the size of mountains as it slammed shut around his waist.
         "That was one of them, yes." Hot Glass shifted around a bit, blotches of red and yellow overlapping in Starscream's vision. "The Shawsheen were a large and hostile species capable of biting through the armour of our siege submarines."
         "So I presume you didn't bother trying the siege subs?" Starscream asked, wondering if he'd managed to pick a prize moron for the head of his personal guard.
         "Well, we did, but not until we were short of other ideas." Hot Glass sighed. "We tried to retrieve you by stealth. We sent in specially built deep-sea salvage operatives. The Shawsheen chewed them up and dumped the pieces in a deep-sea trench. We created a fleet of kamikaze drones to protect our salvage operatives. The Shawsheen detonated the drones with long-range sonar pulses, which destroyed the salvagers. We tried blowing up some of their food-cluster city-things, but that just made them angry, so they attacked our land-base with a tidal wave. That submerged the island our base was on, and they started swimming into the base, so we had to retreat into orbit."
         Starscream groaned. "How long did you waste on this foolish head-to-head-butting?"
         Hot Glass made a small, pained sound. "Three or four vorns..."
         "And then what?"
         "We tried to boil their oceans dry using a giant solar powered laser."
         There was a pause
         "And?" Starscream prompted savagely.
         "They designed orbital-reach missile launchers," Hot Glass admitted.
         "They shot down my Spearhead?" Starscream yelled.
         "No, just the laser and the solar power station," Hot Glass said, voice thin. "After that we pulled back and built a base on one of their moons to think things over for a while. Our next plan-"
         "Who came up with these plans?" Starscream said, bemused at the outlandish foolishness of his guards.
         "Err, well, we rather worked together on them," Hot Glass said. Starscream could hear his fingers clicking as he wrung his hands. "Myself and Bonesaw and Jetchaser -"
         "Who?" Starscream asked, unbelieving.
         "Jetchaser. Err, he's the head of the deep-sea salvage unit. He, err, gets distracted."
         Starscream groaned and wondered if he should just shoot his entire guard staff. "Get on with it."
         "Well, we tried causing tidal waves by changing the orbits of their moons, but that didn't work, so we then we just built a dozen really big hydrox processing stations and tried to turn their oceans into energon."
         Starscream imagined a world covered in seas of energon. A more pleasant thought than what these idiots have been up to.
         "After they wrecked the generator-stations, we pulled back for another rethink and ... well, err..."
         "Let me guess," Starscream sighed, giving up trying to focus his optic. "You tried making an allegiance with them against the Autobots?"
         "No," Hot Glass said, sounding surprised at the idea. "They were the enemy..."
         "Idiot!" Starscream yelled. "If they were powerful enough to hold Decepticons at bay, they were powerful enough to damage the Autobots."
         "Nobody thought of that one," Hot Glass said sadly. "Besides, they knew we were out to get them and after seventeen vorns they were out to get us too."
         "And what did you do to them?" Starscream asked dryly.
         "Nothing," Hot Glass said.
         Starscream waited silently, trying to glare Hot Glass into speech with one barely-functional optic.
         "They'd been so focused on fighting us off for all those years that when we pulled back, they thought we'd retreated. Some of them wanted to build spaceships and chase us down and finish us off, and some of them wanted to throw the bombs in the bin and get back to doing whatever giant horrible fish monsters do when they're not shooting at us."
         "And then..." Starscream prompted.
         "They had an all-out bombs-and-screaming civil war," Hot Glass said. "We sat on our tailfins for twenty years and watched as they turned their planet into a smelting pit."
         "I'm so reassured to hear that your efforts to retrieve me were persistent," Starscream muttered.
         "Well, they were throwing a lot of firepower around and we didn't want to get the Spearhead wrecked. So we just waited for the booms and shouting to stop, then we flew in, dug you up and here you are."
         "And the Shawsheen?"
         "We're still in orbit," Hot Glass said. "Would you like to see the planet?"
         "Better than looking at you," Starscream grumbled.
         Hot Glass leaned closer over him, poking something that was probably a cable at him. His senses folded inside out and he saw through the sensors of the Spearhead, hanging in orbit above the planet of Shawsheen.
         Below him, the planet smoldered, reduced to a cinderous hulk wrapped in shredded veils of black radioactive dust. The molten core of the planet glowed and spat through rifts in its savaged crust. The oceans were gone, leaving only seabeds grey with fired clay and the pale bones of a civilization that had fought against Decepticons for so long that it had sought to become them, and perished for it.

Final Version Posted

Comments

Pretty deep message

[aragem.livejournal.com]

I wasn't expecting a continuation of Shawsheen so I was pleasantly suprised. I liked the ingenius ideas Hot Glass and co. tried to come up with to retrieve Starscream and then Starscream suggests the one idea that could have solved the problem and gained them a powerful ally.

I wonder if that idea would have worked if the Cons has sent an envoy to the Shawsheen requesting the retrievel of Starscream.

But the last paragraph gave a deep message to me.

Re: Pretty deep message

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

I wasn't expecting it either. I just couldn't think of anything else to write. Poor Hot Glass, he's a good subcommander but a bad lieutenant. The mental shift required to think of a plan like the ally one is a bit beyond him.

It would probably have involved a loud chomping sound. The one who bit Starscream in half did so without a blind bit of provocation.

Did it? Yay? Boo?

Re: Pretty deep message

[aragem.livejournal.com]

Definately a Yay.

Re: Pretty deep message

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Hoorah :)

[lunatron.livejournal.com]

Hot Glass doesn't strike me as quite believable. He just seems a bit too much of a doof to have ended up where he did. That's a general mark of your work - doofs get into positions where they shouldn't be and then get owned.

[aragem.livejournal.com]

Maybe he got promoted through brawn instead of brains. Like killing his superior and landing the job?

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Actually, no. It's mentioned in the other Shawsheen piece that Hot Glass was promoted because the senior officer in the Fire Divers developed an unpleasant political stance and was fired. After that, the whole unit had to go through a shakedown. Hot Glass was the most senior officer left afterwards, hence why he got the job. This happened not long before the Shawsheen Embarassment, so he hasn't had time to grow into the job yet.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Well, having to explain to your boss that he's been at the bottom of the ocean for a thousand years because you couldn't come up with a good enough rescue plan is never going to do wonders for one's nerve.

I shall have to write him on a good day, for balance.

[tiamat1972.livejournal.com]

Hee, hee! That goes double if your boss is Starscream. Or Megatron. They expect perfection of themselves and everyone around them.

[ravenclaw-devi.livejournal.com]

That ending (i.e. the revelation why and how they finally got to retrieve Starscream) was quite the twist, yes. At first, it actually made me laugh from the irony of it, then the final paragraph made the laughter get stuck in my throat.

Made me think of how someone (I forgot who) once said that when there's scarcity/harsh conditions, people will stick together for the sake of survival if nothing else, but when there's abundance, they'll squabble about how to distribute the wealth. Except in this case, it's "when there are Decepticons (or any kind of external foe) to fight, people will stick together, but as soon as the outside threat is gone, they'll turn on each other." I guess it was the matter of the Shawsheen having built a huge war machinery in response to the Decepticons, and once it was there, they couldn't just stop using it. Well, maybe they could have, but the years and years of living under Decepticon threat had already conditioned them into being warlike, sorta thing, yeah? They no longer knew how to be at peace.

The Spearhead is what, Starscream's flagship?

Also, this is whumped!Starscream at his finest - "I'm so wrecked I can't move and will likely need an entire new body, but don't think I won't kick your aft for your incompetence!"

[ravenclaw-devi.livejournal.com]

*it was a matter of

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Acting like Decepticons is not something an organic civilisation can withstand. The pace is too harsh, the demands too severe.

As said, eighteen vorns of Decepticon aggressive harassment. That's about 1500 years Earth time. The Shawsheen are huge and presumably live longer than humans, but that's still going to be half a dozen generations of alien invasions and world-killing plots. Their entire culture had to be slaved to a military complex to keep the Decepticons at bay, but without an opponent, the system turned in on itself.

Yes, the Spearhead is Starscream's flagship [at this time, he got through several over the course of the War].

Of course. He has much to be annoyed about.

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

I'm curious--why didn't anyone attempt to say 'can we just go down there and get our guy, please? It'll take, like, two seconds and we'll give you a bag of Cheetoes for it'. Better than an orbital laser to boil the entire damned ocean.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Remember how said guy got there in the first place? (http://www.avif13.dsl.pipex.com/fics/text/tf-shawsheen.html) These guys already gave the Autobots a drubbing just for being there, what reason would they have to any kinder to the Decepticons?

And indeed, Starscream's rather annoyed that they didn't try finding such a reason ...

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more along the lines of buying his body back.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Well, that would require the Decepticons to think a long way around their standard operating procedure, for them to make contact with the Shawsheen without being bitten in half on the spot, to actually find something the Shawsheen want badly enough that they're willing to go and look for and find and dig up Starscream, and then for the Shawsheen to not go back on the deal, take the 'cons stuff and bite them in half.

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

Seems a lot less complicated than what they did.

[stalkermadeline.livejournal.com]

Very nice. I liked it a lot; it was amusing yet had a deeper message. Some authors find it difficult to write dialogue, let alone a snippet that's almost entirely dialogue, but I hardly noticed that until I reviewed it because the speech seemed so natural. The imagery is also wonderful here too, particularly in the last paragraph.

One minor typo:
"We tried to boil their oceans dry using a giant solar powered laser."
There was a pause is lacking a period.

Anyway, hi, I'm new here. After reading some of your works on ff.net and your webpage, I was thrilled to see you had a livejournal, and even better, one that you use to post drabbles and new writings you may not post elsewhere. Thus, I have friended you in order to better watch your work.

Also, I see you have apparently written this epic, Stormhangar, that has now been taken down in what I can only assume is a fit of perfectionism. After reading your delicious short with Sidewinder (http://koilungfish.livejournal.com/6462.html) in your journal, my curiousity is even more piqued. I can't imagine anything you could write that would be unworthy of posting, and you're depriving us new readers of a no doubt very great pleasure... so is there any way I could persuade you to repost it, or show it to me? Pretty please? ;)

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Hello, new person :) Nice to meet you.

I'm really not sure where the 'deeper message' crept in. Perhaps I was just reaching for an end line and hit deep by accident.

Ah, typos, blast it.

Stormhangar isn't quite an epic. It's about 40,000 words long, so a novella at most. It was taken down some years ago, before I got ill and started having memory and concentration problems. The reason it was taken down was because a lot of the prose was overly florid [take a look at my FF7 fics for something of an idea] and because it needed a couple of scenes rejigged. I do intend to put it back up once it's reworked, but that's been a very long process due to my concentration problems, bouts of illness and so on and so forth.

[stalkermadeline.livejournal.com]

It's not bottomless pit deep, but it's a statement about where becoming accustomed to violence as a way to solve your problems will get you. It was poignant without trying too hard to be profound, so I liked it.

Sorry to hear about your illness and good luck with the fic.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Ah, good. I sometimes get the impression most of the problems with my fics are caused by me trying too hard.

Thanks :)