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.
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