Stablehand: The mystery beings of the "Borderlands"

Most things in the world of Stablehand seem pretty straightforward and unmysterious. A dragon? Sure. Pretty unremarkable. A dragon that looks like a griffin? Weird, but not that weird. A unicorn? You don't want to be around one, but it's not as if they're magic or anything.

However, in a few scattered nooks and crannies of the world that few have seen personally and the few more who have heard of them don't even believe exist, there are some very strange things. Some extremely, incredibly strange things.

Observers are medium-sized canine-looking beings which seem to periodically alternate between two different life phases, somewhat like the mythical werewolf. In one phase, they have a head-located mouth and webbed limbs, while in the other they have a chest-located mouth and a patagium that extends between their limbs and tail, enabling them to glide. When they wish to express emotions, they light up one of two pairs of perceptive organs on their snouts, or both.

Transitors are vaguely avian-looking beings that just seem to glide through the air endlessly at a steady pace, their mantle-like tail and spiked "feet" seeming to merge into the air behind them as they do so. Occasionally, other beings can be seen riding them.

Insulators are large, bulky beings with vaguely fox-like heads and great, shield-like chests. They are mostly quiet and slow-moving, but will irritatedly flash their perceptive organs brightly if they detect anybody they think might cause trouble.

There are also other strange beings that appear in the same places, including cloud leijonœrns, weird gigantic mountain- and angle-dinosaurs, totem-snakes, and zigzag-lizards. And much, much more.

Stablehand: Explaining the aethereal trio's weird outfits

I randomly thought about it today, and this is what I came up with:

• Stolen Heart's jackal mask and bladed gloves are kind of like his "business uniform", and thus he wears them whenever he is "at work" but will often take the mask off when he is "off work".
• Arkturuse is enough of a show-off that he probably wears his falcon mask and elaborate formal attire almost all the time. Now, he may have a couple of variations, or not wear a suit all the time, but I can't see him ever intentionally revealing his face to any of his subordinates with the kind of self-esteem problems he has. (The reason he can't see is that he has freaky void-sockets in place of eyes, so his fears about people's reactions may be justified.)
• Aiyalam kind of arbitrarily sometimes wears the mask and sometimes doesn't, though he tends to wear the claw-gloves pretty often. He takes his "job" a lot less seriously than Stolen Heart does, so he tends to act like he's "off work" at random times, regardless of whether his subordinates are working or not, and when he's "taking a break" like this he tends not to wear the mask. However, there will also be times when his subordinates are not working and he's also "taking a break" but yet he's wearing both the mask and the claw-gloves and seems to be plotting his next move or something. He also has a tendency to seem like he's in a normal, fairly non-threatening mood and then abruptly appear in full nightmare mode with the mask and the claws just to startle people. He's kind of weird and unpredictable.

I'm probably going to keep Stolen Heart's tail as part of his design, even though it seems kind of weird, and perhaps give Arkturuse's limbs a little bit of bird-style scaling to match it. I think it might actually fit best if Aiyalam didn't have one, to kind of go along with the way he thinks Stolen Heart and Arkturuse are eccentric idiots and he's the normal one.

Also, another thing I've tentatively decided is that Aiyalam is deaf and instead of trying at all to figure out what people are saying, he just kind of has these hilarious one-sided conversations with himself, mockingly filling in caricatured versions of how he thinks the other person might reply.

How his subordinates could ever stand him I have no idea. Maybe they're equally weird and insane?

To-do list

Just as a reminder, and as I said on my tumblr, what I'm doing now is re-exporting the rest of my Tyrian and Stablehand songs with timidity and audacity. (Yeah, I'll never get over the way the two of those programs combine in a sentence.)

When I'm done, I'm going to try redrawing Stolen Heart, Arkturuse, and/or the four main characters with anatomy that doesn't look weird, and then maybe make something like the circle pages I did for the hexarts. After that... well, I don't know.

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Edit: you know, actually, there's something called a to-do list. Maybe I'd better make one of those.

• Fix "On the Lift to Ruin" and upload
• Fix "Hymn to Absurdity" and upload
• Fix "Jianglongdui theme" and upload
• Fix "Murasaki" (low priority because nowhere to upload)
• Fix SH's theme, which will probably be very hard because as far as I can tell the guitar seems to be sounding bad because of a TiMidity bug and not anything easily within my control; not looking forward to this
• Re-arrange Qamar's theme, which is to say, actually arrange Qamar's theme
• Attempt to draw aethereal trio correctly
• Attempt to draw main characters of Stablehand correctly
• Wyvera?
• Create awesome Hinotorian astrapia-pheasant
• Pardeans?
• Ensure college books are ordered (this just has to end up at the bottom of the list, doesn't it?)

Stablehand: El Halcón del Aéter

I finally finished the instrumental track for El Halcón del Aéter.

Okay, here we are at long last. Arkturuse's theme!

Its name is El Halcón del Aéter, or The Falcon of the Aether, and according to my computer, this instrumental track took me about 10 days to produce. I'm somewhat proud of it.

The lyrics are here, and you can download the song here.

(This is the first time I ever used a pipe organ in a song, and the first time I ever completed a song with an ud in it; the updated version of Qamar's theme will be the first song I ever tried to use an ud in once I get it done.)

(OhgawdIlovethissongIlovethissongIloveit.)

Also, note the neat Internet Archive audio player. I'm going to be using it whenever I upload my songs to the Internet Archive from now on, which will be pretty much all the time for Stablehand, and probably fairly often for Tyrian. When I use it, I'm going to tag the posts "audio inside", as you can see below.

For anyone that was confused or misled about that, the colours on the Destiny Attribute chart were not meant to be the colours of the attributes. The attributes are strictly black and white, and that was for three reasons:

1. To go with the general monochrome theme of Stablehand
2. Each character has their own colour, and I didn't want the attributes to "interfere" with that by bringing another colour into the mix.
3. Part of the whole "thing" of Destiny Attributes is that any given character can express the same attribute in a slightly different way, in addition to having a bunch of attributes to choose from to start with. So, attributes are monochrome so that any given character can visually show their own take on an attribute by choosing a colour for it themselves.

I hope that clears things up. Sorry for any confusion! XD

(Edit: Um... two reasons? How did I not notice that?!)