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.

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: 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?

The rest of the "aethereal trio"

My various methods of coming up with new details had already suggested a lot of underlings for Stolen Heart, as well as a rival (his name is Arkturuse, and he's the avian-looking one, as you can see). Yesterday, though, I randomly decided that there should be another major player in whatever it is these weird masked spirit guys are doing, and the three of them should somehow "make sense" together as a whole—since Stolen Heart mostly lacks emotion and there was another one, I kind of figured the other two should be lacking in other things.

So, Stolen Heart mostly lacks emotion (but is pretty good at reasoning), Arkturuse mostly lacks reason and common sense (but has a lot of emotion), and Aiyalam lacks a sense of morality (but is decent at seeing things "as they are" in a harsh, unforgiving reality, aside from the fact he tends to overdo it).