Stablehand: Infiltrator, Obtruder concepts, and... Xzhyrxiel alive, another expansion?

Hoo boy, another mess. Let's start with the Infiltrator.

Yesterday River Monsters reminded me that skates existed, so I looked them up and I was just like whoa look at these things they're so crazy. They almost look like an MB already, haha.

So, I thought, why not turn them into one? And I started designing this skate/ray MB that can flatten and extend its body seemingly endlessly in order to eavesdrop on everyone and everything (yeah, somehow its skin can just kinda hear I guess. MBs are weird :p).

A little later, I was thinking about how with the Nebuliser and Observer and Eventuator and Seuwayote and shoǔshi there were a bunch of cats and dogs already, so the Infiltrator might be adding a bit of needed diversity. And I thought about Commander, this creature I'd come up with really recently that was just going to be a really exotic big cat basically. (Commander is an individual, not a species by the way, just so you don't get confused. :p)

Then I got the stupid but neat idea to turn Commander into a big cat with skate-mantle-wings that looked like the Infiltrator's body on top. It was a really weird idea but on the other hand, oddly awesome. By the way, the word "skate" kept making me think of ice skates so I added some vague ice-skate-like shapes to Commander's design and I think it actually looks kinda cool that way.

Also on this page are my early concepts for the Obtruder (I drew the Machination parody first and turned it into a creature second), a flaredrakeicorn doodle, and early attempts to figure out how the heck to design a creature called the Orienter (it's supposed to look like a compass but with eight floating arms pointing to attributes instead of directions).

On a sidenote, the Orienter and Infiltrator both are a type of MB I wasn't intending to design originally. Believe it or not, I've expanded out my MB table AGAIN, separating the more "purposeful" creatures (whose names end in -er or -or) from the creatures based on attribute symbols and random things like the lightray eel I just tossed in there.

Part of this is because I was just wary of all my MBs looking like regular animals rather than weird abstract things like the Insulator and Adumbrator, a problem that was pretty widespread in the creatures in the second table. The other part was that there wasn't really a place for the Orienter or another thing tentatively called the Incenser (which I haven't drawn yet) in the table if I didn't do this. So, I feel like it was necessary.

Finally the thing in the upper left-hand corner is my first doodle of a character called Sonata. She's not for Stablehand, but rather an odd little side story idea called "Song of the Refugees".

(archive.org's edit page is doing weird things today, so the images I put there aren't showing up right now, sorry. They're just crops that show each thing a little cleaner though, so you're not really missing anything.) Ah, finally.

Stablehand: MB Gender System

Recently I've been thinking about the fact that no matter how hard I try to call Yanha "it" and "they", I keep accidentally thinking of them as "he" for some reason. On one hand, it felt wrong because nothing about them is really all that "male", but on the other hand, I just couldn't stop myself, and I thought that was really weird. I wondered if it was just the fact that as a human, I was just too used to everything being forced into the categories of "male" and "female" or what.

Then recently, when I was kind of messing around trying to think of new MB ideas, I realised that in my task of trying to create an MB that looked like each of the attribute logos, one I hadn't gotten to was Esteem, so I tried to think of what would look like the Esteem logo. A hexart, duh. But it has to be surrounded by flame, I thought, so maybe it's a phoenix. Actually maybe it's a firebreathing phoenix-dragon-unicorn that's 'maaaaaaaagical'. A Flaredrakeicorn. Haha, that's such a ridiculous idea, why don't I go ahead and do it. (The thing is, I'd already had the idea that in-universe, people would still imagine fire-breathing dragons, flaming and/or reborn phoenixes, and magic unicorns even though none of those specific things exist, and I realised it would actually be pretty funny if there was a thing that had all those qualities but it was just one really incredible creature.)

Then, unexpectedly, after deciding Arkturuse would probably ride one of these things around since it would probably be a fairly flamboyant and majestic creature, and realising that by accidentally calling that creature "Sir Flaredrakeicorn" I'd kinda made an accidental Adventure Time parody, I made the odd realisation that once again, I was thinking of an MB as male even though nothing about it was male (other than the bright colours technically I guess :p) so I really had no reason to.

Eventually I started to think about MBs and gender a bit more, and realised that oddly, some of them I thought of as being gendered and some of them I didn't, and some of them were in an odd middle ground where I thought of them as being sorta-gendered, but only in the most abstract way, like "Sir Flaredrakeicorn".

So, eventually I came up with this gender system for MBs:

	Male	Female	Other	None
"Cis"	---	---	---	None
Zeta	Xai	Zed	Neutral Zeta	---
"Trans"	Male	Female	---	---

Basically, every MB starts out as "None". That is, no gender at all. But from there, depending, they may end up identifying as something else.

"Trans" genders, that is, male or female, are extremely rare because most MBs would have an extremely hard time wrapping their minds around what "male" or "female" even meant even if somebody tried really hard to explain it to them; it's just not a concept they have in their conceptual vocabulary. However, a very, very select few (like, five of them or so period :p) have managed to sort of more or less get it. (Vergozsya in particular actually identifying as female is actually pretty important for the story.)

For most MBs, the more likely option is Zeta genders. Zeta genders are more abstract; they don't really have specific definitions the same way male and female do, though there are still distinctions between them.

Zed, a lot like my own gender, means "sorta female but not really". (Zeta genders take their name from Zed, obviously, as it was the first one I came up with.) Zed creatures tend to be formidable and threatening, not to be messed with, but also reflective and curious, and above all, mysterious. For a long time I'd thought of Observers as often being basically this gender. I don't know if this will make any sense but they could be said to be "dark", kinda like a yin/yang thing.

Xai (pronounced "kai" like the Greek letter, though leaning a teeny bit toward "ksai") is the opposite of Zed, meaning "sorta male but not really". For a long time I'd felt like there had to be a "male" opposite to my own gender, so... this is my name for it now. Ssiassi is Gender Xai, as is Xera Flaredrakeicorn (Xera is the Xai version of Sir :p). Xai is sort of... open and candid. Xai creatures can be strong but they don't really radiate strength and threat the same way Zed ones do. Instead what they radiate is more like... maturity, or dignity. Calmness? Restraint? Purity? Something like that; they're like, deferentially cultured, a very teeny bit like Esteem but not really prideful or confident in the same way. They're oddly suited to being exemplars though they also tend to be like but why do I deserve this, I'm not all that special. Alternatively, they could be more like Ssiassi and be oddly friendly in a kind of "bro"-like way, sort of treating everybody as worthy equals and messing around like there are no rules. Anyway, if Zed is "dark", Xai is "light".

(I feel like both of those definitions were pretty incomplete and perhaps a bit skewed as far as describing the genders Zed and Xai as a whole, because given that this is kinda new stuff I was basically just describing specific examples of each: The Ingenious for Zed, and Xera Flaredrakeicorn plus this big cat thing I'm tentatively calling "Commander" for Xai. But, that's the best I can do right now.)

Neutral Zeta is a more nebulous Zeta. Basically, something that's Neutral Zeta is not genderless, but can't be pinned down as male, female, Zed, or Xai. It has personality in a way that suggests it has a gender, but... it just doesn't fit anything. I'm tentatively thinking Xzhyrxiel (the angel thing of Faith) will be Neutral Zeta. In a way I guess it's pretty close to nonbinary in meaning though I feel like it's much more narrow, as "nonbinary" could include things like Zed and Xai but Neutral Zeta doesn't. Also, Ssivyin is nonbinary but not Neutral Zeta, and kinda leans toward Xai but isn't necessarily quite Xai either. (I'm not really sure what Ssivyin is honestly... gender-mixandmatch with Xai as the base piece and other gender-lego-pieces fittable to it as needed? That's as close as I can come to describing it. :p)

I might end up adding other Zeta genders to the canon later, given that with more abstract standards to them there could potentially be any number of them. A power of two would be good given that almost everything about Stablehand is about powers of two, but as this isn't something that's super necessary I won't really be rushing to come up with new Zeta genders the way I did with more central things like attributes, attitudes, and attunements.

Footnotes

1. I argued with myself over whether genderfluid was "the" appropriate designation or not at the time I wrote this, but now that Ssiv's gender has kinda been confirmed for their rôle object, I think it's a pretty apt description.

Stablehand: Evermore Albatross, Inquisitor, Obtruder

First up, we have... a mess! Recently in an effort to save paper, I've been leaning more toward filling up pages with a bunch of unrelated things than keeping them neatly segregated. As a result, we have the same Hinotorian ideographs yet again, some drafts for attitude symbols, an attempt to reclassify attributes, a rose thorn monster, and the evermore albatross.

The idea of attitudes being heraldic poses visually came from, well, attitude meaning just that. As I said before, one of the things that was supposed to be a thematic element of Stablehand early on was making heraldic monsters come to life, and given that, I felt like this would be a wonderful way to bring that back a little.

Reclassifying the attributes is something that takes a bit more explaining. Basically, when reorganising my tumblr blog, I realised that Duplicity and Flight were really not that distinct, and were more or less part of the same theme: the idea that you're responsible for everything and you can't fight, you just have to suffer. So, I ended up merging them into one attribute, which I jokingly called Flightplicity for a few days until I decided on its current name, Compulsion. After that I was left with one empty attribute slot that I had to fill, so I was trying to fill it logically by classifying the attributes and extrapolating based on the classification of the missing attribute (a technique I'd used before to fill in my initial set of attributes).

The eventual product of all that was the Clarity attribute. I'll describe it a bit further down with its mascot of sorts, the Obtruder.

Lastly, the thorn monster and the albatross. As for the thorn monster, I literally copied it from a design of arranged broken tiles on a wall I was looking at, mainly because I didn't have a camera. So, that particular drawing is perhaps a little less "mine" than what I might make it into (:p). I have no idea what it was actually supposed to be on the wall if anything, but I saw a leviathan made out of thorns in it and that's what I'm probably going to make the MB of Scrambled-Frustration. Honestly, I really like the idea of sentient spiky branches.

As for the Evermore albatross, well... it's an albatross that rather annoyingly repeats the word "evermore!" as its call, and seems to live for a very long time if not forever. It really likes to taunt people that get lost or otherwise have no hope.

The albatross was an MB idea I'd had for quite a while, but only gotten around to drawing now; I tried to make its body overall look like the Eternity symbol by incorporating asymmetric arrows that would form circles if curled up. Another two things to note about its appearance are that its actual vision sensors are Eternity-shaped, and the thing in the centre of them isn't a normal eye, but just a faceted crystal. Also, I actually paid attention to my attribute numberings this time, and gave its feet exactly one toe each. I'll likely revisit all the MBs a little to make the foot/number thing more consistent a little later.

I don't have nearly as much to say about this one. It's just an Esteemed... doggy. Or something. I might use it, if I can find a place to put it.

Its appearance came to me rather suddenly when I was listening to "Cavern of Time", much the way the Shikunbao's did.

Next, the Inquisitor. Inquisitors are nasty beasts that enjoy trapping things inside their cage-like bodies and slowly tormenting them until they break. (They can alter the inside of their bodies a lot, like the way a rôle object works but even more freely, giving them a lot of options.) They can then consume them, or let them loose and watch them chaotically stumble around ruining things for everyone else. Or, you know... die. Some of them don't survive it.

(Though most people in-universe don't know it, a lot of them answer to Aiyalam, and are... helping him with a certain something.)

I tried to design them to be kind of the opposite of Postulators—instead of white birdbats with winghands, they're black batbirds with foothands—and base their wings on the symbol that used to be for Flight and now is for Compulsion. (I discovered in the process that hand-feet are very hard to draw in perspective. I gave up on the anatomy of the one in back fairly quickly and I still feel like I made one of them either too big or too small. :p)

By the way, this creature up at the top left is one of my personas, "The Ingenious". As I described once the Observers were basically created so I could have a persona that was a faceless alien werewolf with glowing facial accents, and, well... here they are. "The Ingenious" has pterosaur wings instead of just a patagium as kind of a biological counterpart to Kate's feathered gloves.

Finally, Obtruders! Obtruders are, well...

this big, white, stupid, vacant, rubber cute ugly duckling without any explanation [...]. I could literally call it a "derp elemental" if I wanted to. :p

It should have a couple of black dot eyes too but I couldn't add them cleanly with vertex paint so I didn't bother.

Yeah. These guys are the mascot of the new Clarity attribute, which basically describes someone who tries really, really hard, but just keeps screwing up, either because they didn't know something, or just try too hard to be something they're really not that good at, at least not yet. They don't want to believe they're just "that stupid kid" who just isn't good at being strategic/mysterious/majestic/underhanded/whatever, but at the same time... they also kind of are. They have an air of blank mystery about them, tending to be highly candid and unpretentious but at the same time not knowing much about themselves or their aspirations at all. Both their past and future are kind of an empty slate, so they sort of just live in the present.

So, Obtruders are basically the most pure, innocent, blank, oblivious, stand-out-ish thing that exists. The only colour they come in is glaring white (though their shape does vary slightly), and the only size they come in is "way too big" (actually that varies too, but generally speaking, they're usually big enough they block out your field of vision and it's really awkward to try to pick them up and move them). If anything, they seem to exist mainly just to be oblivious obstacles, just idly looking at everything around them with a blank innocence and sometimes making an odd little noise. A lot like a stubborn baby, they seem to have the ability to vastly increase their weight whenever anyone tries to move them, preferring to move around in a rather aimless, carefree fashion that seems to be a perfect dictionary example for the word dawdling.

If people treat them nicely, Obtruders will sometimes carry them around in a boatlike way, but unfortunately, their navigational skills are horrible. Not knowing much in general, they tend to get lost a lot if they try to go anywhere in particular, and even if given very specific instructions, it's still likely they'll find something they managed not to know to screw up on.