Pronoun Tester

A friend of mine was musing about pronouns and creating new ones lately. Namely, about what would sound the least awkward but most fitting in each inflection. As this was happening, I was like, why isn't there a place where you can just type in pronouns and have a passage change so you can see how awkward (or not) they sound?? So, I decided to make one.

Of course, writing sample passages with a focus on pronouns is hard, so I fell back to what I knew best: eldritch nonbinary birdpeople. Pay it no mind. You have a pronoun tester now. :p

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Ingenious examined the illuminated ceiling. She'd never seen its likes before, and her plumes ruffled with uncertainty.

A stately creature, few could top the simple splendour that was hers. But her grace showed much better in familiar situations; even the likes of her were no match for this. One even less composed than she might well have shattered.

She steadied herself. Who assists a specially tuned avian from the outer reaches when she's not ready for prime time? If she wants to make it through this, the slick feathered figure reasoned, that problem is hers alone right now. She'll just have to throw herself into gear.

she/her/hers

Subject	Object	Possessive determiner	Possessive	Reflexive
Would	Will	Is/Are
			Pl. present verbs

Presets: He She They Ey It Ze Xe Ze (Zed - RFS) Xe (Xai - RFS)

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 scrap update: 4/20~10/31

The interval between these only gets longer, but at least this time it's mostly because I've actually been posting things as proper posts instead of in here. Still, there are a few things.

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First, the Observers' colour is apparently called "atoll" as I found out on this neat website. Neat bit of trivia. I remember back when all MBs were going to be variations of that colour, a time this post still hasn't gotten out of.

My mind couldn't think of the word "papaya", so it tried to pull out the word "pomegranate", but it couldn't come up with that either, so I accidentally ended up noting that a bunch of "Portent seeds" had spilled all over the floor and for at least five minutes intermittently laughed about it while picking up "Portent seeds".

Then there was the portent seed incident.

I had to settle on appropriate background colours for... shh, a super-secret thing, and went back to my swans to pick them, resulting in a new set of single "official" attribute colours. Later I had to re-pick a couple colours again, partly thanks to Clarity replacing Duplicity.

A number of process pics happened.

And also Fuchsia.

I may as well say a bit about Fuchsia [...]. She's one of a number of side characters that played important roles in Aluma's history; to be a bit more specific she was a superhero of sorts known as The Superpower, and the first of the Superpower archetype. In present times there's at least one comic about "The Superpower" very loosely based on her, but almost everybody forgets it was based on an actual person. Kris, one of the main characters, was greatly influenced by this comic.

I'd had the basic idea for her design with the big poofy wing-shaped hair and the "feathered" cape for some time but then recently I found out about SU and realised it would make way more sense if Kris with her vague mineral theme admired somebody who also had a connection to minerals... so I shamelessly gave her a dark pink topaz stone clasp as a rôle object. :p

(Fun fact: Fuchsia is supposed to represent Faith, so her original name was Fiducia [trust/confidence in Latin], but that sounded like Fuchsia so I decided she'd probably go by that more often, and then fuchsia became the colour of Faith, so her gem is meant to match both her attribute and her name)

[C]haracter logo sketches I plan to vectorise soon. Lance's, Ssiv's, Sleipnir's, and Ariana's in a counterclockwise circle around the Yanha shape I drew to draw markings on but didn't (:p), to be specific. There are also some attempts at Io's logo but I don't really like how any of them came out.

Yeah, the rest of the main character logos are going to be a post some time in the near future. Here's Ssiv's:

Lastly, some chroma scribbles (that post conflated them with genders because it was an early version):

Me quickly scribbling out the gender symbols used for each chroma.

The current version of this particular worldbuilding facet, if you're totally lost right now, is that mystery beings don't have a gender, but have something called a chroma, which is related to their behaviour and general nature and as such people see it as kind of like a gender. People also sometimes identify as "gender Zed" and "gender Xai", etc., sometimes while also identifying as a "traditional" gender, like Flash Karkira who is malezed.

From top left: Xai, Zed, Omega, Omicron. Omega is Zed + Xai, kinda the "Totality attribute" of chromas, and Omicron is sort of the "Nothing attribute" of chromas. If it looks familiar from Ssiv's logo, it’s because Ssiv is more or less gender Omicron. I should have mentioned that. :p

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: Orienter, Portensilisk, Cragwing, Wanyanszar

This post was supposed to post some time ago but I never got the Arbiter's design done so it just sat around instead until I had the good sense to take the Arbiter out and put it in a new post.

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The Orienter (Synthesis + Desolation) is a kind of living compass, with eight floating arms that each "point" to one of the Directed attributes. It has a great directional sense, and will gladly give directions to whoever wants them, drawing from what seems to be an uncannily great knowledge of the layout of the universe. Despite this, though, it tends to wander around a single, fixed area giving off an odd sense it has no idea where it should be going.

Below their arms they appear to have a strange double armillary sphere. For them, it functions somewhat like an elaborate compass, and interestingly, some human Navigators have mastered the art of using similar spherical compasses to plot their courses.

(New development I didn't tell you about: Nassak and Portent Rider both lean toward the Navigator archetype, a new archetype I just added. Nassak probably doesn't use one of those, but PR has one.)

The Portensilisk is a frightful creature that seems to be able to conjure up dark and terrifying hallucinations just by showing people its eyes. It also has a very limited ability to make such things actually happen, but not to a much greater degree than typical cirque techniques. For instance, it can conjure up small, corrosive waves of darkness-fluid around itself temporarily in a very limited radius, or bend the landscape around it temporarily to make a large structure easier to knock over.

Portensilisks tend to be peaceful and withdrawn most of the time, a lot like ordinary snakes, but unlike ordinary snakes, at times they will seemingly just randomly decide to be destructive. The good news, though, is that they will just as capriciously decide to stop being destructive.

(This is hardly even a concept picture of the Portensilisk, I'll do a real one later)

Cragwings (Fantasy + H-Clarity) are literally just huge chunks of cliff rock with... wings and a tail. That's it. That's all they are. They fly around randomly in the air and seem to thrive in deserted places with a lack of coherent logic, like cloud islands with floating mountains (i.e.: not normal places). They also sort of have a theme song.

Wanyanszars (H-Incongruity) are fluid, springy, vaguely lizard-like beings that appear to be made of some kind of unusually violent and bright energy that tears through their surroundings. They thrive in ambiguous environments, which, apparently, they have the power to warp to their liking, as if certain types of environments inherently had loopholes (e.g.: environment appears to be a lake at night, Wanyanszar jumps onto it and reveals it's actually a tar pit in front of a blue hazy screen; sees sidewalk drawing and jumps onto it, turns fake illusion into actual hundred-foot-tall tower). If one thing's for sure, they definitely don't mind chaos at all, though they don't necessarily delight in inflicting confusion on others. They're just at home in a chaotic environment.

The rounded Wanyanszar would be called a Jianjianszar if/when I use it, but I don't even have any idea what that one would be like yet so... no cool description on that one. Sorry. :p

(The Wanyanszar was from my initial concept drawings before mystery beings were entirely a thing; I forgot to really give it background and a name and integrate it so now I'm finally doing that. I realised it was a lot like a creature named Wanyanxi ("zigzag lizard") I'd made for a parody of Chinese Pokémon bootlegs, so for its name I just took Wanyanxi and mashed it up with -szara, the ending equivalent to "-er/-or" in MB language. It's basically a crazy bootleg name that literally means "Zigzagger" but I'm using to mean "Contorter".)

Stablehand: Observer update

Here we are! I wanted to make a more quality drawing of The Ingenious, and I did, but at the same time I also drew more updated versions of the two more common Observer forms. Those forms are now called the Yunia (Unity) and Vontada (Will) forms, and Ingenious' form is now called the Sinteszia (Synthesis) form; as it's a sort of combination of the two I felt like I needed to have a good reference of the other two to compare it to.

It's good I got to drawing the main two forms again, though, because their design has changed a bunch by now. In particular the Vontada form looks a lot more like a theropod dinosaur by accident; its arms could probably be a bit more substantial actually because I liked the ape-ish look on the colour palette test one. Another, actually intentional design element is that now, all forms' hands have exactly one clawed thumb but the rest of the digits unified into a single unit by default, which separates out into separate fingers (up to 7 counting the thumb) as needed. (That's my sneaky way of obeying the "MBs have either digits or claws reflecting their attribute number" rule while still giving them normal hands.)

Also this time I actually drew the sensors seriously instead of scribbling them, for the very first time. I'm not totally sure I won't change them the next time I have to draw these things but at least I have an actual design for the sensors now. :p

Stablehand: Brownnose

This is an example of an idea I just really randomly got and then created on paper in probably less than ten minutes. It's the brownnose! Its... nose is brown. And it's incredibly cute, but once it starts following you, it's never going to leave.

I see Mega-Mierundaro as having a very uneasy relationship with them, with them making Arkturuse look like some kind of crazy cat lady as they just kind of wander in and he doesn't want to cast any of them out because they're just so cute! but everyone else alternates between welcoming them and finding them super-annoying. :p

And before you make fun of it, I've already got you covered:

(Actually, I made this picture when a random verb generator was giving me terrible suggestions for MB names.)

Also, here are some renders of a basically finished Obtruder model:

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.

Stablehand: Mystery being numerology revisited

Yesterday I had to re-evaluate the numbering system I used for the attributes because it didn't quite make sense to assign the Undirected attributes to the same numbers as their Directed counterparts. Nothing practically had to be zero and Duplicity kind of had to be two just because of its "two-faced" motif, for instance.

So, I thought about it a bit and redid the number assignments like so:

0	Synthesis	Nothing
1	Unity	Eternity
2	Machination	Duplicity
3	Fantasy	Frustration
4	Verity	Portent
5	Faith	Flight
6	Esteem	Desolation
7	Will	Ruin
8	Totality	Incongruity

I deliberately assigned Portent to 4 because of the "four equals death" thing in Chinese and Japanese culture. Ruin got 7 because of catastrophe theory, and Desolation got 6 because of 6 cardinal directions and the idea of a compass-related MB sounding cool to me. Incongruity had to be 8 to be in the opposite position of Synthesis, and Frustration just got 3 because that was the only slot left.

Now to go back and see if I can make the Lost MBs' digits fit these numbers the way I did with the Empowered ones. And also look at the other columns, I didn't so much pay attention to that in those though now I'd like them to match too.

Stablehand: Carp concurrent

Well, here are the Carp concurrent finally. If you hadn't noticed, I'd always just been scribbling vaguely fish-shaped blobs where they were supposed to go because I was for some reason dreading actually trying to make them look like fish.

But, if you hadn't known, April 1st is "Fish Day" for me. I don't really play pranks on people, so on that day I either submit something that's just kind of weird and silly or... in this case, actually related to fish. And so, I got up off my butt and actually tried to draw these guys seriously for once.

I'm not totally happy with the way these turned out (the bottom one looks weird, and... whoa how did I never notice I left the hind fins off the top one XD) but the theme I chose, where quadrilaterals are a big part of their design to match the Unity symbol, is likely staying.

Stablehand: Holey Yanha and Swooshy Yanha

Ok, now that our patchwork roleplay has fallen apart (see this post), I think everybody deserves an explanation of what these two forms of Yanha actually were.

The "holey" one at top was Nothing!Yanha, or Nullified!Yanha to be more precise (Nullified means Lost-Nothing; there are going to be adjectives like that for every attribute-attitude combination, but as I'm still figuring out what to call some of them I haven't posted them yet). Due to... well, an accident (you know what happened if you were in the RP, but if not, I'll leave it at that), it ended up losing part of itself, and that shows as visible holes literally missing out of it. At first it didn't really know what to do and was just kind of suffering, moving and acting somewhat aimlessly. That's pretty much what the Lost attitude is—you just surrender to an Undirected attribute or try to ignore it and suffer.

A bit later on, Nullified!Yanha kind of started conquering its newly-gained nothingness, which allowed it to be way more durable and kind of be everywhere at once. At that point it was more Hardened-Nothing, which I sadly don't have an adjective for yet. But anyway that's basically what the Hardened attitude means, it's where you take an Undirected attribute that would otherwise be a disadvantage to you and turn it around to where it's an advantage.

The "swooshy" one at the bottom was Unified!Yanha, that is, Empowered-Unity!Yanha. (The Empowered attitude means the same thing as Directed did before; I renamed it just to avoid confusion between Directed attributes and the Directed attitude.) When one of the characters decided to sing a song to H-Nothing!Yanha, I realised that it could kind of use the song to fill in its holes, and that would make it Unity because I see rhythmic music, particularly trance music, as being kind of a Unity thing thanks to this faction called the technotranscendents I added to the project pretty early. If you hadn't figured it out, the holes filled in as black swooshes just to make Yanha look more like a taijitu (original, I know :p). It was also supposed to look slightly like Amaterasu but I don't think that showed through much.

Unified!Yanha still kept some of the abilities of H-Nothing!Yanha because they kind of applied to Unity too. It also gained new abilities, such as the ability to just kind of transform into any shape it needed to (it only got to transform into a boat but it probably could have assumed other shapes too). This is basically what Empowered means: you harness a Directed attribute to gain new abilities.

I think it's likely I'll use a similar design for Unified!Yanha in the actual story, though I don't know for sure.

Stablehand: Lightray eels

These are another creature I somewhat synaesthetically created from listening to a song. I'm not totally sure whether I'll use them but if I do, they'll be MBs, and it's not unlikely.

As they're vaguely based on auroras, they have very bright glowing bodies. They're supposed to be very fluid, with any rings or such around them moving dynamically kind of like water ripples. Also, I'm probably going to draw them with small floating "hands" next time.

"Lightray eels" was just something I made up on the spot when I had to give the picture a name on my hard drive but then suddenly as I was typing it I realised it was actually a pretty decent pun. So... I guess that name's here to stay.

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.

Stablehand: Evacuator

Well, here it is finally. The Evacuator.

For a long time, I was on the fence about whether to reveal much of anything about this one early since it's extremely rare and enigmatic in universe, to the point that I almost felt like revealing it would be a spoiler. But then I introduced it in my friends' patchwork roleplay, and I couldn't really keep everything about it a secret any more. So here it is. And here's a little bit about it:

The Evacuator is a creature of intense nothingness, which seems to be made simply of empty space surrounded by armour. It's extremely rare for anybody to see one, but rumour has it that it's also extremely dangerous. In fact, to some, an Evacuator appearing is practically synonymous with death.

The thing at the top of the page is a very quick and not very good doodle of "knight cat", who will be a part of the Ariana storyline. You'll hear more about it when I get to Ariana herself.

Stablehand: Mystery being palette doodles

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.

Stablehand: Chaoswork chimaera

Concept thingies for the Chaoswork Chimaera!

It's a very unusual beast made out of an odd material that seems to naturally levitate and consist of various (mostly) geometric shapes—a little bit like clockwork, except nobody knows its origin, it isn't really crafted to any specifications, and it doesn't make the slightest bit of logical or intuitive sense. Hence the name "chaoswork".

They're rather mischievous beasts that seem to delight in "creatively" rearranging their form to distinguish themselves from others and also in making things go terribly, horribly wrong. Although they aren't necessarily ruthless and evil by nature, they really don't mind seeing other beings in absolute misery, and if they see enough suffering/carnage/whatever, they can develop a taste for it. This can make them exceptionally dangerous. (Of course, on the other hand, if you happen to be a nightmarish bakuluki who delights in seeing the disorder of the universe increase faster than necessary, you might find them very useful...)

They also may or may not have been inspired by DHMIS. I'd lean toward not though since I think I designed them before I saw it.