Stablehand: Ahalatl, Eternituga, Veriasaurus, Hlardraho, Adumbrator, Shoǔshi

As you might or might not already know, I'm currently on a quest to get all 27 (which means 29 since I already made two extras) mystery beings designed. It's an arduous quest, yes, but I'm not going to stop until it's done.

Also, if you haven't figured it out by now (and I'd be really surprised if you hadn't) each of the mystery beings is slightly themed around a particular attribute(s). I'm in the process of making a rough table of all 29 of them, which consists of three columns: Directed mystery beings, Undirected mystery beings, and neutral mystery beings (can be either Directed or Undirected).

Anyway, here are the new ones!


Ahalah (singular Ahalatl) are peculiar leaping beings that look something like a kangaroo, a frog, and a salamander all mixed together. They seem to be capable of soaring to great heights with each leap, and also of moving incredibly fast at times. They can be both extremely adventurous and extremely timid.

Eternitugas are tortoise-like beings that seem to be made out of some kind of crystalline substance that's partially translucent and partially opaque depending on the angle. They seem to have a strange ability to make infinite clones of themselves going upward or downward, creating a massive tower of eternitugas that can then possibly reach very high or very low places. The top (or bottom) of the stack will then just step off and leave the rest to fade away one by one, leaving only a single Eternituga at its destination.

Eternitugas never really seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere at all, though.

Veriasauruses are beings that strongly resemble theropod dinosaurs; they are usually white or a similarly light colour with a darker colour as a border. They always seem to be wandering around in search of something, though nobody knows what. Sometimes they will just pause in one area, standing there like some kind of strange numen, before eventually moving on.

Hlardraho are hexart-like beings with very sharp needle-like projections on their bodies and often bright, dazzling colourations. Unlike hexarts, though, they seem to be capable of spewing fire out their mouths, and this fire seems to have a strange piercing quality to it that allows it to obliterate practically everything in a narrow radius of its path for many metres, leaving only an incredibly long blackened tunnel in its place.

These beings are usually fairly calm and docile, but can sometimes be extremely violent and destructive thanks to this piercing fire ability. Because of this, a lot of people are afraid of them in places where they have appeared.

Adumbrators are unusual floating beings with a four-part "shield" surrounding them and a somewhat normal-looking upper body that gradually fades into a constantly-reforming cloud-like lower body with spikes randomly coming in and out of it. The "shield" revolves around very slowly and stays very close to the body most of the time, but sometimes it will start whirling very rapidly and move further away, the cloud-like part of the body churning much more violently and tending to become much spikier. This most often happens when the Adumbrator is stressed, angry, or feeling some kind of danger approaching.

Shoǔshi are large white quadrupeds that look vaguely like fulvopards, and also a lot like gigantic hands. They have the ability to use all four of their legs to grasp things, and their grip is said to be incredibly strong. From time to time, they seem to like to grab random things and run off with them, using their powerful tails to somehow just sort of swim through the air, though it's not really known what they do with said things. It's thought that at least a few times, they've simply set them down other random places in a "Robin Hood" fashion, though.

When they're not travelling around empty-handed looking for things to steal (which is most of the time), they're almost always seen carrying or batting around large pearl- or gem-like orbs, which they seem to be highly possessive of when they have them. It's unclear how many orbs an individual typically has, as no one is definitely sure of having seen the same Shoǔshi more than once, and nobody has ever found a cache of spare orbs anywhere. Actually, nobody even has any idea where the orbs come from, or what kind of function they serve, if any. One idea is that they may be a kind of status symbol.

Stablehand: song drawings

My friends and I occasionally do this thing where we each pick a song and somebody else draws music to it. Anyway, I drew Sleipnir and Hughes from Stablehand! As I said, Hughes thinks he’s great friends with Sleipnir but Sleipnir doesn’t really care about him most of the time (it depends on the day; sometimes he’s on okay terms with him but most of the time he just finds him annoying), so it wouldn’t be unlike Sleipnir to just decide to leave him behind one day without saying anything.

Yeah. This is actually my first decent drawing of Sleipnir OR Hughes, so I thought it was worth posting here.

And this is... Lance. This one isn't really as good but at least it gives you an idea of what I want his Stablehand appearance to look like.


11-22 Edit: looks like I have one more to add!

This is completely stupid, but every time the song [The Riddle, Gigi D'Agostino] said "Sly looks in corridors" I couldn’t help but think of Sleipnir ("Sly") trying to look through corridors carefully without being detected but Hughes just out singing this crazy song out in the open like, whatever.

Stablehand: Aethereal trio revamp

I kind of got around to revamping these guys, at least partially. I decided that all three of them should have projection-wings to make things consistent, but that all three of the wings should have different styles in order to keep them different from each other.

I still have a little work to do on SH's wings; I think for his overall style I will be leaning a more toward the top picture and kind of like the way I drew the wings there, but I feel like the wings in the bottom picture "fit" better. So maybe they'll end up being a combination of the two or something.

Aiyalam's wings were a pretty random, ad-hoc choice, but I think I'm sticking with that decision.

Stablehand: Synergiser & Seuwayote + a little more about mystery beings

At top is the Seuwayote, and at bottom is the Synergiser! Or a rather rough version of it, anyway. The Seuwayote is probably not totally final either. But at least I can tell you about it now.

The Seuwayote (Say-ooh-wa-yo-tay) is like a coyote of shadow. Though individuals' colours can vary, every Seuwayote's body is split into two distinct colours which are usually fairly unsaturated. Usually, this split is symmetrical, but some Seuwayotes' colours seem to be able to shift such that more of their body is the light colour or more of their body is the dark colour, or even such that they are only the light colour or the dark colour. It's not really known how or why this happens, or even whether Seuwayotes do it at will, but people suspect they can. Their bodies are extremely mutable and seem to be able to change as quickly and freely as a shadow, and also seem to camouflage well in shadows, allowing them to accomplish otherwise near-impossible feats like weaving around closed doors. They're often curious, but almost never attack anyone, or even make a single sound. When they do, though, their call is said to be extremely eerie and otherworldly.

Also, every Seuwayote has a hat, and it's literally inseparable from that hat. If the hat gets blown away in the wind, the Seuwayote will disappear and reappear from inside it, wherever it ends up. Destroying the hat may or may not destroy the Seuwayote itself, since sometimes they have never reappeared after the hat was destroyed, but others, they've just reappeared from the shadows and sprouted new hats out of their heads.

I already told you about the Synergiser, and I've edited this picture into that post for a little more chronological sanity too.

Oh, and here are better drawings of the "main" eight mystery beings' feet. My goal was to make them all "different", so none of them would look quite the same.

This posed slight problems for creating a number system for them, until I realised that if each one is different each digit could represent a different mystery being and they could just use base eight. (If you haven't guessed what the theme is among all of them now that I've accidentally given you a huge hint here, I'll be pretty surprised.)

By the way, "heterogeneous" in the diagram means that their surface has various pigments and textures like "normal" animals, like patterned fur or scales, and "homogeneous" means their surface mostly just has a single texture that doesn't really look much like any you'd find on a "normal" animal, though the colour may vary a little.

Stablehand scrap update: 9/04~11/11

Quick Wyvera thing and a dream I had.

I may or may not use the “griffin” in Stablehand, I dunno.

A couple of... um... well, let's just say that when I fail to design a mystery being right the first time, this is what happens.

I drew the Insulator (which was supposed to be Yanha) before making the sculpture, so the proportions are a bit off still, but they're overall closer to what I wanted than in than the initial drawing.

A very quick attempt to draw the Observer’s colour palette between classes!

Basically, the entire thing is mostly a deep greenish blue. The head horns, spikes, and ears have subtle light blue on the end and both the ears and the rest of the forehead section are a little lighter than the rest of the body. The patagium is close to the light blue colour but a little darker and greener, and the “boss” (upright) form has a V-shaped marking across its chest that is a sign of dominance and absent in the quadrupedal form.

The creature’s four “eyes”, which are not supposed to look super eye-like but are kind of shiny and gem-like, glow brightly, and they’d glow even more brightly when the creature is experiencing strong emotion of any kind. The “eyes” could probably turn different colours, but they don’t really have a standardised code of using any paticular colours to communicate.

  1. Even though the Stablehand universe has dragons, winged equids, griffins, and other similar animals, there are no winged cats. However, after one person set up a hoax to try to "prove" the existence of this animal (which the hoax artist called a cœlailurus), they've nonetheless become embedded in Grævonian and world culture.

    A number of people treat the cœlailurus as a cryptid and keep insisting it exists somewhere, but most just mockingly use as an example of something really improbable, kind of like people in this world talk about flying pigs. Hence, when they hear a really weird idea, people tend to say things like "well isn't that a fine cœlailurus you have?" and "that's totally pardwings".

    I'm not sure how you'd pronounced the letter "œ" when spelling things out, but for now I'm going with "way". Especially because that could lead to some pretty funny chatspeak/meme-type stuff. I mean:

    "No œ!"
    "Yes œ!"

    etc.

  2. I had a suspicion the "get out of here" thing had been done like a million times, but I still couldn't get over it for some reason and had to draw it.

    (Of course, since it was about 23:00 then, I was finding almost everything funnier than it should have been...)

    Somehow as I was doing that, I about two-thirds accomplished the revamp of Stolen Heart I'd wanted to do.

I rewrote the Stablehand about page finally.

The thing was, even though I thought I had a pretty nice page describing what kind of story it was going to be, nobody seemed to care about that, and everybody instead kept asking me what kind of medium it would be told in. So, I rewrote that page to very concretely explain what kind of medium the story would be told in and what existing media it was most similar to, while still touching on details of what the story is about and what my goals are for it.

I feel like it's lacking something now, but I don't really want to add any more words to the page than it already has, and I'm done with rewriting it for like two weeks. So I think I'll just leave it.

Stablehand: "Will I live to face another day?" Remix

I finally got around to remixing Stolen Heart's theme. There were two reasons I did it: first, the GM guitar and saxophone I picked sounded HORRIBLE in TiMidity, which is supposed to be a "real" synthesiser, and I couldn't seem to find a version of the MSGS wavetable soundfont I was using where that wasn't the case. Second, the guitar really wasn't the way I wanted it to sound. It took me the longest time to figure out that what I wanted were grace notes, but while I was searching for a guitar that would sound like I was playing grace notes (:p) I found a much better-sounding lead guitar anyway, plus some pretty good background guitars. So I just basically remixed the entire thing.

I think it sounds much better now, so this is the one I'm putting on the Internet Archive page, but I'll leave the old link up on tindeck for now.

(Lyrics are still here.)