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.)
Postulators are fluffy bat-like beings with great hand-like wings (or wing-like hands, maybe) that like to live in dark places, but have made it their task to assume that figurative light extends everywhere and to strongly argue that no matter what happens, things are not as bad as they appear. Though they have no eyes, the pads of their wing-hands appear to act as sensors that can somehow intuitively "feel" the world around them, allowing them to navigate without even using echolocation in a much wider radius than bats (though they do apparently have that ability too). Nobody really knows how this works.
Ostentators are showy quadrupedal beings that look somewhat like llamas with leijonœrn faces. Each one wears a large, showy fur coat over its back which it is very rarely seen without, even though logically it would not only not need one but could easily overheat wearing it; for some strange reason, these coats do not seem to cause them any problems. Oddly, the markings of these coats seem to vary randomly from individual to individual without any real connection to anything, even though all Ostentators' body markings are more or less identical.
Nobody really knows where Ostentator coats come from, either, since while they are separate from the being itself and young Ostentators seem to start out with full-sized coats that never change in size, nobody has ever seen an Ostentator without a coat first get one. Some have boldly suggested that the coats may simply materialise out of nothing the moment the Ostentator is born, or weirder yet, that the coats are somehow born first and then the being grows out of them like a sporophyte. But, again, nobody even knows what the most probable explanation is.