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.
