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rxttenfish · 2 years

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valerie redesign...we talked ab it a bit but i would love to hear more...

,valerie (and catfolk) are.... one of the redesigns who i have worked on the LEAST

i have decided that they arent werewolves, at least. i really like grouping multiple "types" of monster together - because i don't actually want ANY one monster to truly be what its mythology suggested it to be. the words "werewolf" or "mermaid" are painted onto them, borrowed from the myths that exist outside of those monsters, because theyre the closest comparison and easiest word to loan to providing a name. this is also why i rather like how they all have multiple different names, all referring to the Same Thing, and none of them are even their real name, which is what they give to themselves and call themselves (and even this changes, based upon which of their languages they're using!)

but i do like the idea of having werewolves, catfolk, and humans all be this group of VERY similar sapients, enough to vaguely blend together in lots of various cultures - but having the differences between them be stark and wild enough that once you get to know them, you can easily tell them apart.

catfolk, i think i'm going to go for - they're a type of feline that adapted to an aboreal lifestyle roughly convergent on primates. at a distance, they probably look a lot similar to tamarins or marmosets, just similar enough to both cats and primates to REALLY throw someone off if they're looking at them from a distance.

i miiiight also make them more aboreal in nature, compared to the other sapients, trending more towards scurrying around quadrupedally on the ground and having very awkward and facilitative bipedal gaits. they're most comfortable off of the ground, where they can hold onto stuff with their feet and tails (which i'd have to doublecheck on, but potentially evolved to be prehensile, working a lot like spider monkey tails)

for this, i might also make them a lot smaller than everyone else? i dont feel like i have a lot of small redesigns - and i like having catfolk kind of call back to things like the fair folk or the little people, as small not-humans who you should be kind to lest they wreck your shit.

the face might be where i'm most torn on catfolk - we already DO know what a cat that has a human-like face would look like! and we know because we bred them to look like that, pushing for that same neoteny in brachycephalic cats that us humans also obtained in comparison to our great ape cousins

( behold, A MAN )

but i'm not sure. humans seem to have obtained it because we focused less on our jaws and more on our larger brains. while this would certainly help explain how catfolk achieved their sapience and make sense with their anatomy, it is also fairly tempting to draw comparisons to clouded leopards, starting first with chasing prey up trees and pursuing other arboreal prey, which i could then use to give catfolk the nice fangs and more typical feline profile as we would expect.

but i may also make this entirely a feature of their past. that their ancestors has the more typical feline profile, but once they formed a niche in the trees, they needed larger brains to be able to navigate through the branches and 3d space in a far more complicated way, their eyes also getting larger as they focused more on vision to do so, which reduced their jaws, so they then bridged over to tools to accommodate for that reduced jaw power, which made their brains then grow bigger, and so on and so forth.

i do know ill likely keep their protractable claws, but i will adjust their hands to be... weird.... cat-hands..... they may keep their beans, but i also think they may entirely lose them, favoring dexterity over the need to walk silently. they'd also absolutely be using their tail as a fifth limb, which absolutely would be useful for a quadrupedal scurry. very whiskery too, as i can easily see them having things like arm-whiskers like squirrels do, to also be able to navigate through the trees. and yeah, they would have round pupils, since slitted pupils wouldnt be any use to them. i think they actually might be the fuzziest of all the redesigns, even if they might still end up with some bald patches just to deal with heat and such.

i think the biggest loss would just be that valerie can't be purple and her dad can't be blue, though coach could absolutely retain a tawny color with stripes. spots could also be fairly common as well, and maybe even some domestic cat colors too? i'd have to ponder over it.

#monsterprom #monster prom #monster camp #monstercamp #imagine the weirdest persian cat to ever exist #also MIRANDA IS BIGGER THAN HER WIFE DAMN.......#val would be able to ride on miranda tho so its fine #antisocial-author #antisocial author #Monster Prom Reanimated #Monster Prom: Reanimated #all the care guide says is 'biomass'

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twitchesandstitches · 5 years

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Three Tides Turning

Odina was, perhaps against her preference, an expert on magical things of all kinds. Academic knowledge, with a lot of firsthand experience, and the joke was that she had approximate knowledge of pretty much any magical thing.

She was very surprised to have Toast, of all people, asking her advice; she was pretty certain the little robot hated her guts, and would in fact have been happy to SEE her guts spread all over the wall. It wasn’t personal, he simply hated every single human to ever exist. It was a democratic sort of loathing, an almost genteel hatred that ignored cred and origin and country and deeds, all in favor of resenting the great teeming mass of humanity and proclaiming them all equally guilty of being absolute bastards.

She’d never asked why he hated her species so much. She had her suspicions. The magic that powered him was fueled by his own hatred and anger, but the special kind that came from pain. Emotion magic had its own flavors, and he reeked of suffering, and in his impassioned rants she heard the echoes of absolute despair so painful the only sensible response was to make it into kindling. He had suffered, and given the reputation of humanity among its mechanical offspring, and the optic that had been torn out of his head, she could guess what KIND of suffering he had endured.

Even at his most sociable and miserably lonely, when he had no choice but to seek out company that might include humans, he tended to avoid her. So seeking her advice out was, well, a really big damn deal!

Toast hunched over on a small overturned table, a little red robot apparently designed for a quadrupedal stance. Here and now he looked a lot like a mechanical dinosaur, but one that was oddly cute. He was just so… small, and compact. His wiry tail lashed around, and his boxy head tilted around, his single remaining eye blinking as he twisted his head around to see her.

Both his arms articulated as he tried to explain himself. One arm was slender and ended in a kind of paw. The other was a massive taloned gauntlet, larger than he was, the obscene mass built around an elemental fire core that fueled his various powers. It made him a truly fearsome heavy hitter, but it also severely hobbled him, and only now did she appreciate just how awkward he moved with it; his claws alone were a painful sight, when all his other movements were fluid, if so jittery you could expect he was impatient to finish moving and making little gestures.

“It’s… it’s my friend,” he managed, and pointed, and some of the things he had been telling her clicked. Ah, she thought in the back of her head.

Looming behind them was a monstrously huge figure, apparently the size of a house, draped in a tent crudely worked into a rough cloak. Atop it was a feral head, snout poking out of a projecting head but still obscured by a massive set of puffy lips.

God, it was so big. No, she was so big. Femininity radiated from it, like the psychic tide you couldn’t help but hammer you with pleasant vibes and sudden surges of hormones, and the desire to… do things. Animal things, rutting and breeding and delighting in the most basest of pleasures...

Odina’s absorbing powers sucked away the worst of it, so that she was a whirlpool of negated essence right there. Her total lack of interest in sex of any kind also provided a defense. The great mother-monster noticed this somehow, and turned to see them. A massive pair of breasts, big enough for Odina to fit inside them, shifted behind the cloak, and were so large they dominated the heft of even this hulking frame.

An aberrant hand, or perhaps a paw, raised its two webbed fingers. Claws longer than Odina’s arm wiggled playfully at her. “Sup, hun,” she rumbled, her voice deep, resonant, like an echo of the primordial sea.

Odina waved back nonchalantly. “Hey, terrifying monster lady.”

The eldritch monster mother - Tiashar was her chosen name, according to Toast, who had made himself an expert on her - chuckled at that. It was hard to make out details with that big cloak she wore; Odina could make out a massive mane of hair, or perhaps feathers, growing down her neck and shoulders and expanding outwards into a huge floor-dragging cloud several times larger even than she was. Some bits of it had become little tentacles, or tongued mouths. There were eyes, many of them, beneath it, but were quite invisible behind the long bangs. She did see a hint of multiple floppy ears, tweaking vaguely in response to stimuli no mortal senses were capable of perceiving.

Most of the exposed body was deep black. The shade differed; upon her face and the smoother parts of her skin, it was the color of ancient tar. On the patches of scales, a blue-black like the deepest parts of the sea. The armored plates on her shoulders, forearms, or the enormous tube that was her tail? It seemed to be even darker than all that, oily and rich. And oh yes, there were patches of other colors here and there; the gills lining her neck and sides were the same magenta as her mane, her huge lips and various other parts were a brilliant green… and in fact green seemed to be a secondary color, as if to offset her other shades.

Pebbly scales, slabs of chitin, features of ten thousand different phylums all mashed together in a strangely ideal form with her, and she suspected that was the key to understanding her. So many things that didn’t seem to belong, but with her, they did.

Presently, she seemed content to now ignore Odina and laid down, cooing at the dirt. Apparently whispering to the bacteria.

“...I’m worried about her, “ Toast said, his smaller hand rubbing its claws against a single digit of his big hand, his normally grouchy expression winding up into something forlorn and distressed. “She’s being so… so weird lately!”

“Weird by what metric.” Odina indicated her vaguely. “This is the same lady who spent half a month living in an attic, eating our garbage cans and screaming at mega-possums.”

It was amazing how Toast instantly shifted into hostility; he flared up, flames exploding around him, and a fireball appeared in his hand. “You talkin’ shit about her!?” he snarled, embers flying from his mouth like spittle.

Odina let herself instinctively eat the magic he was throwing off, but if he noticed his flames dying, he didn’t notice. They just flared up again, and her butt expanded, shelf rising over her waist and her skirt creaking in protest at it slid up, her hips expanding sideways. ‘Do NOT push him,’, she reminded herself, he absolutely would try to kill her instantly if he felt even slightly irritated, regardless of needing her help or not.

It didn’t come easily to her to play nice, but she would do her best. “I’m not making fun. I’m just saying, she’s kinda weird. Like the rest of us?”

He grunted, depowering. The local magical quotient went down, though her backside scale remained embiggened. “Yeah, okay.”

“So what do you MEAN, she’s acting weird?”

“I don’t know. The other day, she’s all calm and serene, hanging around with the men and women that wanna be around her all the time. Y’know, she feeds ‘em, gives ‘em baths in her milk and stuff, sometimes they feed themselves to her and she pops ‘em out as monstery versions of their old selves, but mostly they just… adore her?” He shook his head. “I don’t know, its weird. It's like… she needs it?”

“Sounds like they’re worshiping her,” Odina said vaguely, an idea coming to mind.

“Seems legit.” he tweaked his fingers, popping them off and chewing on them anxiously. “Then the next few weeks, they do none of tat, they just hang out with her and we go exploring? Fighting monsters together? The other folks, they fuse together and stuff, its like its a big adventure party? And it's fine, but then, just a few nights ago, she got hungry. Really hungry.” he looked uncomfortable. “And horny. Like, even more than usual.”

“Sounds like a lot of effort,” Odina said, who regarded all things sexual as an alien endeavor way more trouble than it was worth.

“She just wanted nothing but sex, twenty-four/seven, for almost a solid week! With all of them! And then they let her gobble them up, and now…” he gestured at her. Odina noticed her belly was very ripe, round and projecting outwards. A gravid, super-pregnant belly, with both the offspring sired with them, and the cultist’s reborn souls. “She just did nothing but eat continuously, barely speaking a word. I tried to talk to her and she looked at me like… like she couldn’t remember how.”

He paused.

“She kissed me.” He hugged himself, looking faintly lost, like he couldn’t quite understand how anyone would want to do that to him. “She couldn’t talk anymore, but she was happy to see me.”

“She’s talking now.”

“Yeah, I mean, she’s back on her regular mindset, where she’s being a chill mom and stuff but… shit. She keeps going through these phases and! And! And I’m really freaked out, is something wrong with her, is she sick, is she going to go away and ascend or something!?”

He shook Odina by the neckline desperately. “I can’t deal with that, okay!? How do I help her!?”

She gently but firmly pushed his claws off. “Calm down, she’s okay. She’s just trying to balance herself out. It’s part of what she is, okay?”

Toast stared at her. “Part of… what she is? What, a chimera monster girl?”

“No. You… do know she’s something else altogether? One of those things that…” she gestured vaguely. “Come from Outside?”

He stared blankly.

“The far realms?”

His optic blinked, slowly. “Nuh uh.”

“The parts of the multiverse that exist outside the set that has anything at all to do with mortals or our understanding of reality?”

“I’m drawing a zero here.”

“...The mad things that were here before the gods?”

“Still nothing.”

“...Okay, she’s an eldritch abomination that decided to be like a mortal, okay!?”

He nodded. “Ohh, right. Like that. Got it.”

“...You really get it?”

“Honestly, no.” He shrugged. “Could not give a shit, to be honest.”

She sighed. “It’s like this. Creatures like her tend to develop certain traits in common, because they’re forming minds like ours, but they’re still working in a totally different way. They’re not exactly elder beasts, they’re a little bit like gods, but they’re something a bit in between. And SHE is learning her way around that. Every day, and sometimes backsliding or losing her sense of what she is.”

Toast seemed to understand that, at least. He nodded.

Odina sighed. “Right, okay. So, if she’s like the other sorts of things I’ve heard about, she’s basically formed a mental state made out of three different parts that influence her in different ways.”

“What does this have to do with her being weird?”

“Because these are giving her contradictory urges, and she has no impulse control! She IS her desires!” Odina snapped her fingers, producing a little magical sign that said ‘get it??’. “Firstly, what you probably think is her ‘regular self’ is really just the parts of her mind she’s forced to think like a mortal.” A troubling idea came to her. “Or… what she thinks mortals are like. But she’s so different that even that is just guessing games, and she’s forced her brain into patterns completely unnatural to her, and it's always shifting around and trying to become something else. Because change is what she DOES.”

Toast looked baffled.

Odina tried again. “Look at it like this. When she’s worked out some kind of balance between her natures here, this side of her is the one that probably wins out and makes a happy medium. She wants to please herself and please other people, in moderation; it comes off to us as weird and constantly hungry, but that’s just what happens when godly hungers get curbed. That’s still moderate, by HER standards. The kind of things she doesn’t really get, like abstract causes, and long term stuff; she’s able to deal with those things more easy. She’s able to think more like you can.”

“Okay, I get THAT, at least.” Toast scratched his metal ears sheepishly.

“Now, you probably noticed her gathering people to her. That’s just a function of what she is; she’s a sort of proto-god. Gods want to be worshiped and admired; she needs a cult, and it's her nature to build them. So that's the bit of her that’s the most divine coming out. Probably also why she goes off and fights monsters; she probably sees it as protecting her people.” She paused, thoughtfully. “Or maybe she’s just getting into the ‘guardian kaiju’ vibe. She does have the look.” Another pause. “And getting people to breed with her might also be a god thing; she’s probably compelled to do it, as a function of what she is.”

“And you said something about a beast, earlier?”

“Right, her third nature. That’s the part of her that’s… well, monstrous and ravenous. A beast, nothing but hunger and desire. Not that its bad or evil!” she said hurriedly, noticing Toast’s temper starting to rise on Tiashar’s behalf. “Just… she’s already impulsive, but that part of her is literally nothing but instant gratification and satiating herself! Like…the bit of her that wants to be pleasured and satisfied all the time, that wants to be constnatly gestating monsters and having sex whenever she’s not eating? And then eating them right afterwards, and turning their souls into MORE things to gestate so they can stay with her forever in new bodies. ITs the part of her that runs on instinct and animal hunger, forever.”

He nodded, in a dour sort of way. “Okay, I think I get it. So…” he tried to process it all. “She acts weird because she’s got a whole bunch of competing drives and urges, some of them at odds with each other, constantly changing how she thinks and feels?”

Odina shrugged. “Her actual feelings are probably pretty, uh, consistent. The way she responds to them and acts on them does change, depending on which way her brain is working. Like if she likes someone and she’s pure beast, she probably wants to just jump on them and rut until the sun goes down, and them nuzzle them for a full month. And when she goes full god, she wants to shower them with blessings and love. And if she balances it out and can think properly? Then she just wants a friend, or maybe a tiny spouse. As long as she can hold onto that scale.”

He looked uneasy. “God… and she has to live like that…?”

“I don’t think it bothers her,” Odina said, not sure if she was actually trying to reassure him, or herself. “It’s just the way she sees the world and prioritizes stuff changes. She probably doesn’t really notice her perspective shifting. It’s just part of what she is. The tide turns, because that’s what it does; same thing with her.”

Toast looked troubled. “But..”

“Most eldritch entities, the ones that are making an honest effort to really understand us, wind up something similar. Plenty of them strike up a balance. The trick is them holding onto it.”

Toast wiggled. “So… Mama Tiashar…?”

She noticed, but didn’t say anything about it, his use of the honorific.

A small slip of the tongue, but a big, big deal for someone so miserably spiteful and suspicious of the whole world.

“Nothing’s wrong with her,” Odina said. “Her nature is just to change to different extremes. Sometimes she’ll be wild and ravenous. Sometimes she’ll be weird and think like an old goddess. And sometimes, more often than not, she’ll be like a regular weird mortal thingy. Just depends on the way her tides are turning.”

He whimpered. “But I want her to be happy.”

Odina looked at him, with something she didn’t dare admit might be pity.

It was a hard thing, to find out what love was at this point in his life, and to be afraid to know it.

There was a heavy stomping noise nearby.

Tiashar had stood up and slowly approached. Her massive tail lashed around, her enormous thighs slapped together as she approached, and slowly she leaned down, her head looming over Toast’s body. Her mouth opened, and she whispered softly.

“Toast, buddy,” she said, the words sounding distant and carefully picked. “Something bothering you?”

He shivered, and suddenly hugged her lip. One arm too skinny not to just sink in and instantly vanish, the other a huge and awkward club that started to fall on its own weight. “I’m just worried about you,” he whimpered.

She giggled, and gave him a soft kiss, pulling him right off the ground. She stood up, to her full height, and with another smooching pop, deposited him neatly into her cleavage, where he immediately snuggled up. “Aww, you’re a sweetie, little buddy. Don’t you worry. Mama Tiashar has herself figured out.” She gave her gravid belly a hug. “Be chill, my little dude, and don’t beat yourself up over it.”

“Can’t,” he said shortly. “I just worry a lot about you…”

She chuckled. “I don’t worry about nothin’, and I’m totally chillaxed forever. Try it some time, sweetie. It’s fun.”

She nodded at Odina. “Later, short stuff.”

Odina waved vaguely at her, trying not to instantly butt-bloat up to the size of a building just from being in her presence. “Later.”

Tiashar skipped off, her gargantuan butt jiggling like literally all the gelatin there ever wars, her tail even smacking it possibly by accident, as she cooed gently to the still fretting Toast.

And Odina thought about the tides turning, and how they were fortunate to have wound up with an eldritch horror that seemed perpetually stuck on the ‘be a sweetheart’ side of things, regardless of her current flavor of impulses.

#my writing #fics #my OCs #twitchy!tiashar #twitchy!toast #twitchy!odina #queued

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grifalinas · 6 years

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There’s another episode by the way, that post just got hella long is all. Episode two!

The episode opens with Jas and Dynamite walking through the woods when they get attacked by bandits. They fight- it’s clearly just a means of showing their combat prowess, because the battle is over quickly.

Jas’s main weapon is a metal staff, which he uses as a quarterstaff, and while he doesn’t really do anything magical with it in the fight, we get the idea that it’s probably not just a regular staff.

Dynamite has two fighting techniques, inherent to Bombshells: one, she retracts her hands and feet and makes a powered rolling attack, the other, cracks appear on her shell and expand outward in a small radius explosion before compacting back into her normal shape. She also never seems to take any damage from the attacks the bandits throw at her- weird, right?

The battle is over quickly, and the bandits drop something as they leave. Jas picks it up- it’s a rune-stone, but when he touches it, the rune on the surface glows for a moment and then appears on one of the stones on his bracelet. Dynamite is startled, but Jas tells her that’s not the first time that’s happened, and shows her another symbol on his bracelet, similar in nature.

(Runestones are magic, by the way, but I haven’t really decided how they work. I do, however, know how they work as part of Jas’s bracelet, and the fact that he’s human is related to this unique artifact and property.)

The two carry on walking, discussing the battle they just had. Jas is impressed about Dynamite’s abilities; his education about the various monster species that make up their world wasn’t able to cover every type of monster, and most monster species actually keep some of their abilities secret, known only to others of their kind. (In a world where magical combat is a genuine worry, this is actually a pragmatic approach- probably not a good idea to tell the world your species’ weaknesses, you know?)

However, since they’re working together, Dynamite explains her third unique species ability to Jas: when Bombshells are hit with non-magical attacks, rather than take damage, they absorb it and add it to their health bar. They’re not exactly immune to the damage, of course: if they exceed double their max health, they explode dealing a lot of damage, and unlike the shrapnel ability, they don’t just reform this time. Magical attacks actually reduce their health bar, and if they hit zero, they implode, creating a temporary black hole.

(Dynamite explains this in natural terms, but I think of it in terms of mechanics, so apologies for the awkward way this is worded.)

Jas is a little bit worried about the fact that Dynamite could explode or implode based on the damage she takes, and tells her that his staff can be used to deal both magical and non-magical damage, so if she’s ever getting too close to one end or the other, let him know and he’ll work on evening her out. She also informs him that the absorbed health dissipates after a few hours, so she can’t store it indefinitely.

While they’re discussing this, they get ambushed again- this time by what basically amounts to the big brother variation of the bandits that attacked them before. While the previous bandits were just low-level mooks, this is a genuine boss, high-level and high-damage, and a genuine threat to our heroes.

The fight is going poorly, and at some point, Jas sees Dynamite in real, serious danger. His split second realization that he couldn’t get there in time to help her is punctuated by the three runes on his bracelet glowing (the big one and the two little ones), then rotating until one of the little ones is sitting on the biggest stone. Dynamite starts glowing too, and in a blast of white light, transforms into a quadrupedal form that I haven’t decided on yet, shaped out of the void and wearing armor made of her casing. This tips the battle in their favor, and they’re able to beat the bandits, sending them away for real this time.

Once the battle is over, Dynamite reverts to her normal form, and Jas has a moment where he freaks out about what the hecky just happened??? His bracelet glows and spins again, placing the first rune back on top, which then projects a holographic screen with details and information about a Bombshell’s transformation ability, which allows the energy in their core to expand and take on a new shape. The shape is stronger and has greater utility, however, because the casing that usually protects them from harm is now covering far less of them than usual, they have smaller defense, and lose their sliding scale health bar trait.

Jas is still freaking out a little, but at least that’s one question answered, right?

#this story needs a title but i'll think of something later #monster story

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