Stablehand: Abyssal

Finally got around to drawing a proper picture of an Abyssal.

This is one of those drawings where I drew exactly what I set out to draw, but don't feel like it quite captures what the subject is supposed to be and how it's supposed to "feel". Maybe if I had the energy to colour it with proper darkness/contrast/texture I could make it look better.

Abyssals are supposed to vary in shape some amount, and also, as I tried to show here, churn and shift a lot. This one is supposed to have scattered claws randomly forming out of nothing since as a creature of Nothing, I feel like they should have zero coherent limbs.

Stablehand: Planestack, Expurgator

Two more MBs! Both of the still semi-new Clarity attribute.

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Planestacks are a creature of both Synthesis and Clarity. They aren't well-known at all.

They're made out of many square planes of a strange glassy material, each taking on one of many colours. The stack of planes spirals and slides around dynamically as the creature moves, branching off into four similar but smaller stacks that form the limbs. They have a rather loosely-composed body; I drew the planes right up against each other but they can have varying amounts of space between them.

The Expurgator is a concept I'd had sitting around for a while. Basically I wanted an S-Clarity creature that erased things, and I joked about calling it the Eraser and making it a literal eraser. Well, I did the "literal eraser" part finally, but decided to name it the Expurgator because that sounded cooler.

Expurgators are really mysterious. They don't even have sensors unlike most MBs to sense their surroundings with, just random holes through their form that might somehow accomplish the same thing. Or maybe they just know. Either way, they worm around furtively, sometimes using their correction pen to white-out seemingly random objects, which then disappear, never to be seen again. Well, seemingly. Occasionally, they reappear.

At first I randomly tried to draw the Expurgator as a weird biohazard-symbol-like thing, before I came up with the idea of the correction pen and then decided to go for something different.

(I did indeed write "head look dumb". I am not sure why. Maybe I left it that way because I thought it was funny.)

Lastly here's a "tame" Abyssal I drew. (I forget why I drew it but I think it may have come from the idea of them eating missing socks.) It's difficult to see but its "toes" are supposed to just be a bunch of randomly-placed churning blobs, as is much of the rest of its body.

Stablehand: Qualifier and almost-current MB table

From today on, as I said on my deviantART journal, I'm going to be posting all the creature announcements and similar things here first before I post the pictures to my dA, since I now have a place on archive.org to put the images. It might throw off the download count on the page, but oh well. :p

Anyway! This is the Qualifier. It's kind of the opposite of the Evacuator, though since I haven't explained what the Evacuator actually does for reasons, that's not really saying much. Anyway, the Qualifier is a very complex creature with many, many different characteristics. Usually these characteristics have something to do with all the Directed attributes, or all the Directed attributes and all the Undirected attributes (which is what I drew). Practically nobody outside of its home... place has seen one, but within its home place, it's well known as being able to give some of its many qualities to other creatures. A little like a genie.

Actually that's a really good analogy, because it actually has a usually bottle or vase like thing on its back and it will give you what you ask for if you ask it for specific qualities. Unlike jinn though, it's not really malevolent or mischievous... as a general rule at least. I guess those are qualities it could have, though. I see them as being really varied in their qualities and potentially kind of unpredictable and shifting, but usually nice, agreeable, and silent.

The second thing is this. For a while I'd been sitting on a handwritten table of MBs, about identical to the one I already posted, which also had the Salvager, Crystalvox, and doodles of the Abyssals on it.

The Salvager (cracked, winged chameleon-like creature) is the creature of Hardened-Ruin. I'd decided that all the "Hardened" mystery beings would take Undirected attributes and basically turn negative things about them into positive things. So, the Salvager "eats" broken things through the mouth in its back, even things completely beyond repair, and spits them out good as new. It literally feeds on Ruin. :p

The Crystalvox, or "Henobia hrisala", is literally just a Volvox (big round colonial alga) made out of what looks like broken glass. It seems to have some sort of weird hive mind where different points on the sphere can experience sudden emotional impulses independent from each other but the sum of them translates into the behaviour of the whole sphere. It's hard to tell whether the colony as a whole is capable of self-awareness or conspiring against anything else, but it doesn't seem totally unlikely...

The Abyssals are actually based on a weird phenomenon I sometimes experience in real life. I've already described it here if you want to read more about it, but basically, when there are dark open spaces in front of me or I'm standing near the open door to a completely dark room, particularly if there are walls or similar surrounding surfaces I can't see well, I'll get this odd, unsettling feeling that there are these dangerous beings made of darkness that are hiding in unseen corners and crevices and moving along the walls and floor and they're going to attack me at any moment when I'm not looking.

When I described them in that post, I suddenly realised, whoa, this is a really interesting creature concept. How about I include them in Stablehand? My thought was that if I could convey to somebody else how legitimately scary these things are to me but at the same time, how cool the idea was to me out of context, that would really be something. And just maybe, if I fictionalised them and gave them a name, it might even help me stop seeing them everywhere. (...That last part didn't really work, by the way.)

Anyway, in Stablehand, Abyssals are really unpredictable beings with diffuse, shifting bodies that vary a lot in shape. They lurk in dark night air, in shadowed crannies, and in deep, dark chasms. This is one of their favourite places to be, hence their name.

At random, seemingly arbitrary moments, they leap out of their hiding places and snatch passers-by almost instantaneously, which are then never to be seen again. They seem to be able to project their presences such that everyone nearby can faintly feel their existence and their movements, but never has any idea exactly where they are or what their intentions are. Sometimes, they come completely out of their hiding places and allow others to see them face-to-face, but accounts of what exactly happens after are oddly... nonexistent.