Fanfic -- Untitled snippet
Jul. 26th, 2007 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dunmurderinTitle: Untitled, fanfic snippet.
Originally Posted: February 9, 2007
I started writing this because the bunny jumped into my head (because the map isn't here to protect me from it) and it just grew and grew and now it's 2000+ words and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it.
The idea is this is a conversation between Elise Presser and Chip Chase about TF sex and other things. It starts nowhere and goes nowhere, but I like some of the ideas I came up with while writing it. It is posted here to get it out of my brain!
Chip rolled into the break room, wheels bumping over a raised place in the doorframe. Spinning sharply to the left in order to head over to the vending machines, he caught sight of Elise Presser sitting hunched over a laptop, her fingers moving furiously over the keys as she typed.
"Hey, Elise," Chip said, altering his course to roll over to her table. "What's up?"
Elise grunted at him, but otherwise didn't answer.
"Elise? Hey, what's up?" Chip tried again; silence wasn't Elise's style. She was at best bubbly and at worst a chatterbox, depending on how much the person talking to her liked her. "Everything okay?"
"Oh, sorry, I'm just trying to get some things down before I forget them," Elise said, fingers still flying over the keyboard. "I'll be done in a second."
"More stuff for the ethnography you're working on?" Chip asked.
"Not exactly," Elise said, hands hesitating as she titled her head to one side, then began another burst of rapid-fire typing. "I mean, yes, it's for the ethnography, but it's unlikely to ever be published. Might circulate some of my findings more privately, it just kind of depends."
"Depends on what?" Chip asked.
"On how much I want to be known as the woman who writes about Transformer sex."
"Excuse me?" Chip felt his eyes get wide. "Did you say, 'Transformer sex'?"
"Yup." Elise was quiet for a moment, then paused in her typing. "Look, let me get the rest of my thoughts down and I'll explain, okay?" she said.
"Sure," Chip said, rolling over to the vending machines. "Want a Coke?"
"Make it a Mountain Dew," Elise said. "I was up late last night, pulling a watch shift with Tailgate and Springer."
Chip nodded and purchased a Coke for himself and a Mountain Dew for Elise before rolling over to the so-called "Wheel of Death" and selecting a Reuben sandwich. As he waited for the microwave, dubbed Lady Vesta the Second, to heat his sandwich, he heard Elise stop typing.
"Okay, I'm done," she said, leaning back in her chair and groaning with satisfaction as her back popped. "Bring me the caffeinated goodness and I'll spill all."
Chip laughed, rolling back to Elise's table as he got up and moved the chair across from her out of the way. "Thanks," he said, handing over her soda and positioning his sandwich on the table. "Okay, so...Transformers sex? You mean gender or do you mean 'sex' sex?"
Elise opened her soda and took a long drink, head tilting back so that the bottle was almost vertical. Lowering the bottle, she let out a loud, satisfied sigh. "Both," she said, muffling a belch with her hand.
"Interesting," Chip said. "But...why? I mean, no offense, but why would you care?"
"Because my job is to study Transformers' culture and sex and gender roles are an important part of culture," Elise said. "At least, that's the reason I'll be giving if I ever publish these findings in any kind of an official capacity. Unofficially, I'm just curious. The Transformers are the first alien species we've ever interacted with and they are a strange mix of like and unlike in respect to us. Like us, they're social creatures, they have a desire to understand and manipulate the world around them, and they're the only other species we've found that we know for sure can reason abstractly."
Elise leaned back in her chair, setting her soda down and typing in a few more notes on her computer. "Need to remember that, I can use that in a lecture," she said, grinning at Chip. "Any way, where was I?"
"How Transformers are like us," Chip said, swallowing a bite from his sandwich. "You were getting to how they were unlike us."
"Right," Elise said, standing up and walking over to the vending machine. She half-turned as she plugged coins into the machine. "Sorry, your sandwich is driving me nuts. Anyway, the biggest difference is -- of course -- that humans are organic and Transformers aren't. And that is where things get tricky."
Elise pressed a pair of buttons on the vending machine's keypad and a bag of Ruffles dropped to the bottom of the machine. Elise reached in, grabbed the bag and walked back over to the table.
"Okay, I think I can see where this is going," Chip said, wiping his hands on a napkin. "Since Transformers are not biological, they don't have the same reproductive urges that humans do, so their approaches to sex and gender are going to be, well, different -- to say the least, right?"
"You got it," Elise said. "See, the way the media and the popular science articles skewed things at first, all Transformers are either male or simply conveniently don't have a gender. Arcee's arrival on Earth back ‘92 threw a huge wrench in the works. A lot of researchers never considered the idea that there might be female Transformers. The news that there were female Transformers and that Arcee wasn’t an anomaly caused an uproar.”
“I remember,” Chip said. “She was pretty embarrassed by the attention. Not that I blame her; the paparazzi were pretty brutal -- though they helped Red Alert tighten his perimeter security. Which might be the only reason a couple of them survived.”
“Shame, really,” Elise said, tearing open her chip bag. “But, yeah, I can see why she was embarrassed. I mean, the photos are bad enough but have you ever read any of the articles about her? Seems like Hot Rod and Springer and the other male Autobots are all 'brave' or 'vigilant' or 'stalwart' while she’s 'feisty' or 'spirited' or, God forbid, 'spunky.’”
“Written by somebody who’s never seen her tackle a Seeker and rub his face in the asphalt,” said Chip with a laugh.
Elise’s laugh was more of a snort, her smile rueful. “Exactly,” she said. “Or, more accurately, by someone who is insistent on applying human gender roles -- and Western ones at that -- to a species that just doesn’t work like we do. From what I’ve been learning, female Autobots in particular and female Cybertronians in general aren’t expected to sit at home and have babies while the male Cybertronians go out and fight and bring back food.”
“So what do they do?” Chip asked.
“That’s just it,” Elise said. “I have no idea. Transformers apparently have genders -- they have distinct concepts for ‘male’ and ‘female’ but there isn’t any apparent physical need for them to exist. Transformer reproduction seems to be entirely asexual -- if they need new Transformers, they build them. Body and soul, as it were. Gender just seems to be one of those immaterial, demographical descriptors you know about another person. Like me having brown hair or you wearing glasses.”
“Right,” Chip said. “So...what does that have to do with the other part of your questioning? Why would a non-biological species have a need for sex if they‘re not using it to reproduce?”
“Why do sterile humans have a need for sex?” Elise grinned as she flipped the question around and shot it back at Chip. “Why do homosexuals? Or paraphiliacs? I mean, hey, did you ever watch Barney Miller when you were a kid?”
“I think so,” Chip said. “Cop show, right?”
“Right,” Elise said. “Wojo, one of the detectives said a line once that stuck with me -- I was that kinda kid -- something about how you could point to anything in the Sears catalog and somebody out there would want to sleep with it. It was funny then, though I’m pretty sure I didn’t understand it completely. But, the thing is? If you look out there at any kind of a list of human sexual paraphilia, you’ll see Wojo wasn’t far off.”
“Abasiophilia,” Chip said.
Elise blinked at him. “Excuse me?” she said.
“Abasiophilia,” Chip said again, grinning now. “The sexual attraction to the disabled, specifically those in leg braces, orthopedic casts or...” He paused, tapping the arm rests of his chair. “Wheelchairs.”
“There’s a word for it?” Elise said, sounding surprised and curious even as a faint blush started on her face. “I mean, okay, I should know better, of course there is such a thing, but I didn’t know there was a word for it!”
Chip laughed. “Me either,” he said. “Not until a few years ago, anyway. I knew it existed and taken advantage of that fact a few times, but yeah, you’re right. You name it, somebody wants to sleep with it. Okay, so non-reproductive sex is common, but that’s still among humans. We’ve still got the biological urge to want to have sex. How can Transformers have that same urge?”
“Again,” Elise said. “We’re getting into ‘I have no idea’ territory. I know Transformers have romantic entanglements; I know Transformers have something they consider to be sex and I’m pretty sure they do it for the same reason humans have non-reproductive sex: for recreation and/or emotional intimacy, and because it makes their toes curl...if they have toes anyway. Basically, I know that it happens, but I have no idea about why it happens or what causes them to have this need.”
“So, no pictures, huh?” Chip grinned as he asked the question. “Or even some spicy anecdotes?”
“No,” Elise said, grinning back at him. “Though, not for lack of trying. I do have a feeling if I asked Perceptor, he would tell me. But, the problem with that is, I don’t know if I would get him to shut up. Carly warned me once that he was a complete nut about human reproduction when he first came here and that his curiosity about the subject never fully went away. I’m not sure if I want to subject myself to one of his lectures for the sake of research that may just be buried in my files.”
“Why would it be buried?”
“Because I’m not sure I want to be the one to open this particular can of worms,” Elise said. “Humans are crazy enough on the subject of our own sexuality; I don’t know if it’s fair to subject the Transformers to our hang-ups. Transformers are mostly male and most of the couples I’ve observed here in the Ark are technically homosexual -- though I don’t think they think of ’homosexuality’ the same way we do. It seems to break down along design lines more than genders. Not that humans would care about that distinction.”
Elise pursed her lips, wiping her hands on her jeans. “Think about how hard it is for some humans to accept that homosexuality exists among our own species,” she said. “You think Red Alert had enough trouble with paparazzi; think about the headaches he’d get from Fred Phelps and his ilk.”
Chip nodded. “Point,” he said.
“And, well...I’m not sure if I want to subject myself to the kind of scrutiny this would bring. I mean, Xeno Studies as a real, working scientific field is barely fifteen years old. Those of us working as closely with the Transformers as I am...we’re the potential leaders in the field and as such, we’re being subjected to almost as much scrutiny as the Transformers themselves.” Elise broke off with a laugh. “I’m sorry, I forgot who I was talking to.”
“I was gonna say,” Chip said. “You should have been there when I was helping present my paper on Preceptor’s shrinking machine. You’d have thought I’d walked in saying I’d just discovered Illudium Phosdex and was looking for crewmembers to go to Planet X.”
Elise grinned. “Yeah, but at least you could show them that it worked. With me...well, I suppose I could but I doubt I’d find many volunteers and I’m not about to dress up and demonstrate myself.”
“Too bad.” Chip sighed, mock-disappointed. “That would be a lecture I wouldn’t mind sitting through.”
Elise laughed, slapping the table. “I’ll bring a pair of Tonka trucks in tomorrow and put on a puppet show, how’s that sound?”
Originally Posted: February 9, 2007
I started writing this because the bunny jumped into my head (because the map isn't here to protect me from it) and it just grew and grew and now it's 2000+ words and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it.
The idea is this is a conversation between Elise Presser and Chip Chase about TF sex and other things. It starts nowhere and goes nowhere, but I like some of the ideas I came up with while writing it. It is posted here to get it out of my brain!
Chip rolled into the break room, wheels bumping over a raised place in the doorframe. Spinning sharply to the left in order to head over to the vending machines, he caught sight of Elise Presser sitting hunched over a laptop, her fingers moving furiously over the keys as she typed.
"Hey, Elise," Chip said, altering his course to roll over to her table. "What's up?"
Elise grunted at him, but otherwise didn't answer.
"Elise? Hey, what's up?" Chip tried again; silence wasn't Elise's style. She was at best bubbly and at worst a chatterbox, depending on how much the person talking to her liked her. "Everything okay?"
"Oh, sorry, I'm just trying to get some things down before I forget them," Elise said, fingers still flying over the keyboard. "I'll be done in a second."
"More stuff for the ethnography you're working on?" Chip asked.
"Not exactly," Elise said, hands hesitating as she titled her head to one side, then began another burst of rapid-fire typing. "I mean, yes, it's for the ethnography, but it's unlikely to ever be published. Might circulate some of my findings more privately, it just kind of depends."
"Depends on what?" Chip asked.
"On how much I want to be known as the woman who writes about Transformer sex."
"Excuse me?" Chip felt his eyes get wide. "Did you say, 'Transformer sex'?"
"Yup." Elise was quiet for a moment, then paused in her typing. "Look, let me get the rest of my thoughts down and I'll explain, okay?" she said.
"Sure," Chip said, rolling over to the vending machines. "Want a Coke?"
"Make it a Mountain Dew," Elise said. "I was up late last night, pulling a watch shift with Tailgate and Springer."
Chip nodded and purchased a Coke for himself and a Mountain Dew for Elise before rolling over to the so-called "Wheel of Death" and selecting a Reuben sandwich. As he waited for the microwave, dubbed Lady Vesta the Second, to heat his sandwich, he heard Elise stop typing.
"Okay, I'm done," she said, leaning back in her chair and groaning with satisfaction as her back popped. "Bring me the caffeinated goodness and I'll spill all."
Chip laughed, rolling back to Elise's table as he got up and moved the chair across from her out of the way. "Thanks," he said, handing over her soda and positioning his sandwich on the table. "Okay, so...Transformers sex? You mean gender or do you mean 'sex' sex?"
Elise opened her soda and took a long drink, head tilting back so that the bottle was almost vertical. Lowering the bottle, she let out a loud, satisfied sigh. "Both," she said, muffling a belch with her hand.
"Interesting," Chip said. "But...why? I mean, no offense, but why would you care?"
"Because my job is to study Transformers' culture and sex and gender roles are an important part of culture," Elise said. "At least, that's the reason I'll be giving if I ever publish these findings in any kind of an official capacity. Unofficially, I'm just curious. The Transformers are the first alien species we've ever interacted with and they are a strange mix of like and unlike in respect to us. Like us, they're social creatures, they have a desire to understand and manipulate the world around them, and they're the only other species we've found that we know for sure can reason abstractly."
Elise leaned back in her chair, setting her soda down and typing in a few more notes on her computer. "Need to remember that, I can use that in a lecture," she said, grinning at Chip. "Any way, where was I?"
"How Transformers are like us," Chip said, swallowing a bite from his sandwich. "You were getting to how they were unlike us."
"Right," Elise said, standing up and walking over to the vending machine. She half-turned as she plugged coins into the machine. "Sorry, your sandwich is driving me nuts. Anyway, the biggest difference is -- of course -- that humans are organic and Transformers aren't. And that is where things get tricky."
Elise pressed a pair of buttons on the vending machine's keypad and a bag of Ruffles dropped to the bottom of the machine. Elise reached in, grabbed the bag and walked back over to the table.
"Okay, I think I can see where this is going," Chip said, wiping his hands on a napkin. "Since Transformers are not biological, they don't have the same reproductive urges that humans do, so their approaches to sex and gender are going to be, well, different -- to say the least, right?"
"You got it," Elise said. "See, the way the media and the popular science articles skewed things at first, all Transformers are either male or simply conveniently don't have a gender. Arcee's arrival on Earth back ‘92 threw a huge wrench in the works. A lot of researchers never considered the idea that there might be female Transformers. The news that there were female Transformers and that Arcee wasn’t an anomaly caused an uproar.”
“I remember,” Chip said. “She was pretty embarrassed by the attention. Not that I blame her; the paparazzi were pretty brutal -- though they helped Red Alert tighten his perimeter security. Which might be the only reason a couple of them survived.”
“Shame, really,” Elise said, tearing open her chip bag. “But, yeah, I can see why she was embarrassed. I mean, the photos are bad enough but have you ever read any of the articles about her? Seems like Hot Rod and Springer and the other male Autobots are all 'brave' or 'vigilant' or 'stalwart' while she’s 'feisty' or 'spirited' or, God forbid, 'spunky.’”
“Written by somebody who’s never seen her tackle a Seeker and rub his face in the asphalt,” said Chip with a laugh.
Elise’s laugh was more of a snort, her smile rueful. “Exactly,” she said. “Or, more accurately, by someone who is insistent on applying human gender roles -- and Western ones at that -- to a species that just doesn’t work like we do. From what I’ve been learning, female Autobots in particular and female Cybertronians in general aren’t expected to sit at home and have babies while the male Cybertronians go out and fight and bring back food.”
“So what do they do?” Chip asked.
“That’s just it,” Elise said. “I have no idea. Transformers apparently have genders -- they have distinct concepts for ‘male’ and ‘female’ but there isn’t any apparent physical need for them to exist. Transformer reproduction seems to be entirely asexual -- if they need new Transformers, they build them. Body and soul, as it were. Gender just seems to be one of those immaterial, demographical descriptors you know about another person. Like me having brown hair or you wearing glasses.”
“Right,” Chip said. “So...what does that have to do with the other part of your questioning? Why would a non-biological species have a need for sex if they‘re not using it to reproduce?”
“Why do sterile humans have a need for sex?” Elise grinned as she flipped the question around and shot it back at Chip. “Why do homosexuals? Or paraphiliacs? I mean, hey, did you ever watch Barney Miller when you were a kid?”
“I think so,” Chip said. “Cop show, right?”
“Right,” Elise said. “Wojo, one of the detectives said a line once that stuck with me -- I was that kinda kid -- something about how you could point to anything in the Sears catalog and somebody out there would want to sleep with it. It was funny then, though I’m pretty sure I didn’t understand it completely. But, the thing is? If you look out there at any kind of a list of human sexual paraphilia, you’ll see Wojo wasn’t far off.”
“Abasiophilia,” Chip said.
Elise blinked at him. “Excuse me?” she said.
“Abasiophilia,” Chip said again, grinning now. “The sexual attraction to the disabled, specifically those in leg braces, orthopedic casts or...” He paused, tapping the arm rests of his chair. “Wheelchairs.”
“There’s a word for it?” Elise said, sounding surprised and curious even as a faint blush started on her face. “I mean, okay, I should know better, of course there is such a thing, but I didn’t know there was a word for it!”
Chip laughed. “Me either,” he said. “Not until a few years ago, anyway. I knew it existed and taken advantage of that fact a few times, but yeah, you’re right. You name it, somebody wants to sleep with it. Okay, so non-reproductive sex is common, but that’s still among humans. We’ve still got the biological urge to want to have sex. How can Transformers have that same urge?”
“Again,” Elise said. “We’re getting into ‘I have no idea’ territory. I know Transformers have romantic entanglements; I know Transformers have something they consider to be sex and I’m pretty sure they do it for the same reason humans have non-reproductive sex: for recreation and/or emotional intimacy, and because it makes their toes curl...if they have toes anyway. Basically, I know that it happens, but I have no idea about why it happens or what causes them to have this need.”
“So, no pictures, huh?” Chip grinned as he asked the question. “Or even some spicy anecdotes?”
“No,” Elise said, grinning back at him. “Though, not for lack of trying. I do have a feeling if I asked Perceptor, he would tell me. But, the problem with that is, I don’t know if I would get him to shut up. Carly warned me once that he was a complete nut about human reproduction when he first came here and that his curiosity about the subject never fully went away. I’m not sure if I want to subject myself to one of his lectures for the sake of research that may just be buried in my files.”
“Why would it be buried?”
“Because I’m not sure I want to be the one to open this particular can of worms,” Elise said. “Humans are crazy enough on the subject of our own sexuality; I don’t know if it’s fair to subject the Transformers to our hang-ups. Transformers are mostly male and most of the couples I’ve observed here in the Ark are technically homosexual -- though I don’t think they think of ’homosexuality’ the same way we do. It seems to break down along design lines more than genders. Not that humans would care about that distinction.”
Elise pursed her lips, wiping her hands on her jeans. “Think about how hard it is for some humans to accept that homosexuality exists among our own species,” she said. “You think Red Alert had enough trouble with paparazzi; think about the headaches he’d get from Fred Phelps and his ilk.”
Chip nodded. “Point,” he said.
“And, well...I’m not sure if I want to subject myself to the kind of scrutiny this would bring. I mean, Xeno Studies as a real, working scientific field is barely fifteen years old. Those of us working as closely with the Transformers as I am...we’re the potential leaders in the field and as such, we’re being subjected to almost as much scrutiny as the Transformers themselves.” Elise broke off with a laugh. “I’m sorry, I forgot who I was talking to.”
“I was gonna say,” Chip said. “You should have been there when I was helping present my paper on Preceptor’s shrinking machine. You’d have thought I’d walked in saying I’d just discovered Illudium Phosdex and was looking for crewmembers to go to Planet X.”
Elise grinned. “Yeah, but at least you could show them that it worked. With me...well, I suppose I could but I doubt I’d find many volunteers and I’m not about to dress up and demonstrate myself.”
“Too bad.” Chip sighed, mock-disappointed. “That would be a lecture I wouldn’t mind sitting through.”
Elise laughed, slapping the table. “I’ll bring a pair of Tonka trucks in tomorrow and put on a puppet show, how’s that sound?”
