Where whims and dreams blend into reality...
Recently I just realised that I'd literally NEVER done coloured pictures of any mystery beings except the Insulator and the Eventuator. So I decided to fix that.
From top to bottom: Instigator, Nebuliser, Synergiser, Observers, Ostentator, Conductor, Postulator, and an attempt to make a default colour scheme for hexarts.
Well, after looking at the Ostentator and thinking, well this is sure a cool thing but it sure looks a lot like these other things for a while, I finally revamped it. Mostly I just ended up revamping the feet, but it also made me notice a couple of things on the other mystery beings as I was doing it.
So, here it is. Now the Ostentator has some very weird digits that are halfway between a bird (more toward a raptor) and a camel. How that makes any sense, I'm not really sure, but I'm more satisfied with it because it's more distinctive and mystery beings are supposed to be weird to begin with. My guess for now is that the claws stay out of the way but still allow it to grip surfaces if it needs to.
(I'm not sure what to do with the spurs it originally had, though. On one hand I want to eschew them for simplicity's sake, but on the other hand it somehow seems clumsier without them? I don't know how that works.)
As for the others, I'd been trying to get each mystery being to match up with the number I'd assigned it and the Instigator was kind of defying that rule, so I revamped it to where it only has two semi-retracting claws; it felt like an intuitive thing to do when actual crocodiles also have two clawless digits. I also noticed when I was doodling the Observer here that I'd been drawing the patagium fully extended all the time and I started to question whether that made any sense whatsoever as far as the thing moving around. The answer was... no, it didn't. In the future I'm going to draw it folded, as you can see on the rough Zfetagransza I drew if you look closely.
Lastly, here's "Lord Ostentatious". Click up the picture, and you'll find it's even weirder in context.
I had to make a diagram of the mystery beings' various sensors, because not even I could get them all straight. :P
As you'll notice, many of them can see in either infrared or ultraviolet, and the extra-special Instigator can see both. All of them also have a strange extra sense, which practically nobody in-universe knows the exact purpose or mechanics of (or at least, practically nobody outside the mysterious Borderlands; it's unknown how many people live inside them, if any). This sense is a little weaker in the Instigator than most, nearly absent in the Ostentator, a little better than most in the Conductor, and very strong in the Postulator, which seems to be able to use it in place of sight.
(I said Postulators don't usually echolocate before, but now that I think about it, I can actually see them using sound/radio waves in conjunction with this sense a lot, so that is probably no longer canon.)
There are a lot more mysterious beings coming up, I can tell you that. For now though, I just have two more.
Conductors are vaguely dragon-like floating beings which almost always carry a baton. Incredibly proud and domineering, they almost always have an idea of what everybody else should be doing, which they will often very emphatically try to "hint" at by moving their hands and batons. When they are being particularly expressive, the stripes and spots on their tails may randomly cycle backward at varying speeds. Insulators often hate them for their pushy, rather egoistic nature.
Instigators are restless, mischievous beings that like to stir everybody up. They are not necessarily bad, but they do get bored easily, and as such have a bit of a reputation for spreading lies, playing pranks, and otherwise being sneaky and causing trouble just because they have nothing better to do. Their tail ornament can act as a beacon and make a number of strange sounds, and their tongues, which are literally both sharp and silvery, are effective at hypnotising others to do their bidding. It's common to see them form small bands with others (Instigators or otherwise) to accomplish some kind of secret personal objective that's completely mysterious to everyone else.
(Cockatiels, of course, have nothing to do with Instigators. That's just something else I drew that happened to be on the page before that, and I didn't want to let the rest of the page go to waste.)