Speculative Evolution piece based on an enemy from Orsoniks' beta game "Casualties Unknown".
Inspired by the cross-section work of an urchin by Alex Ries and my own dissections/notes as a biology student. I tried to design a very believable creature, but I realize now that I forgot to explain how they deal with nitrogenous waste (lets just say they compress it into regular excretions like birds do even though they are not under any kind of water stress given their habitat). (idk man they're an alien).
One of the sessile animals in CasUnk is said to contain large heavy metal crystals, so I decided that the shade crawler also uses these in its skeleton instead of calcium. This is reflected in the Plumbosses grouping (idk some high level phyla its aliens so linnaeus's system falls apart anyways)
It makes extensive use of hydrostatics and has no conventional muscle (in-game it never drops food, only its exoskeleton). They also usually EXPLODE into orange blood when killed so I figured them having the anatomy of a fuckin fruit gusher would explain that.
I tried to do some subtle worldbuildy things based on what I know of the CasUnk lore at this point, but I haven't found most of the lore docs in-game and haven't read the wiki. Expies are called EXGS (EXperimental GunSawian) in the document since "experiment" is confusing for a scientific doc and "expie" is too affectionate for the humans of the setting. Also I THINK they were called gunsawians as a blanket term in Orsoniks previous game gunsaw.
OH I also tried to explain why/how they made sound, why they were only found in the first layers (which have water pools), how they didn't get lost in the caves, why they have eyes, why they are bioluminescent, etc etc etc it was very fun.
An atmospheric technician about to walk through the last holographic barrier between them and a 30,000 Kelvin plasmafire. I wish that holofans made noise. VERY rough animation moreso a proof of concept. I might make a cleaned up version of this where she actually is activating the fan (probably with a 3d model or something idk I made this in like 1.5 hours)
Posthumous commission for Karl Marx
"The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: hot sweaty buff construction workers wearing overalls and tool belts"
Featuring my Space Station 14 character Zoey Triptych, an Unathi (lizard person) who works as an Atmospheric Technician / Station Engineer for the NanoTrasen company. She may not be as strong as some chromed out no-ganic fullborg or a molten genemodded biopunk but she could still definitely throw an tritium canister through the ceiling.
Art of another space station 14 character. This guy is an eyeless vulpkanin who used to work for the U.S.S.P. I usually play him as a salvager or security officer. He got burned badly in a shuttle incident and named himself Zhuchka (one of Laika's nicknames, meaning "little bug".) afterwards. Said incident might also be why he has no eyes and why he's now working outside of USSP space.
Zoey finally confronts her husband about his syndicate affiliations.
How cruel that she found out during someone else's wedding.
(based directly on space station 14 round events)
So basically Zoey (my character, lizard) didn't know about Grey's (my boyfriend's character, moth) whole Spinward Syndicate terrorist cell affiliation (he has kinda been an uploaded mickey 17 AC6 621 arasaka soulkiller style merc with a clandestine PMC [GorLex Maruaders] for a realllllly long time). Like not only is he with the syndicate, but with the part that is responsible for the infamous blood-red suited nuclear terrorists. She found out about it during a wedding.
She and Grey were supposed to go together to attend the wedding between their mutual acquaintance/respected Head of Security and his combat android wife, but Zoey thawed from cryosleep in her nice traditional solarian red suit completely alone. She was glowering for the whole preparation ceremony because Grey was just mysteriously absent. Worse, among the many groups outside of her company's wheelhouse that were flying in to attend was a rival corporate wetwork team. They claimed total non-aggression, and the overall parent company wasn't a technical rival of them, so they were permitted access under careful supervision. She sat on the pews and just stared at the mercs for half of the vows before growing uneasy with the one who had moth wings.
She kept it together through reception, smiles, idle talk, wine. Corporate bought the groom a custom-fitted security hardsuit for personal use. Zoey checked the distal electrical conduits within the most remote parts of the asteroid station, working quietly with the tools and skills that had never abandoned her. She found someone's stash of canned steak and 13 era wine and ate it on a plastic chair, surrounded by the invasive crabs that grew out of one parthenogenic atmosian pet a few years back. The crystals in the asteroid's walls reminded her of the caverns of Europa. She could appreciate their beauty a lot more when there weren't mudraptors prying open her friend's JIMSuit.
She eventually rotates back to the service area of the station, watching the HOS share drinks with all sorts of old soldiers and odd friends. She kept her eyes on the moth, the others in his band called him operative Keeper. He didn't look like Grey, the scales on the wings didn't match and his voice was scrambled by some corny anonymizer mask. His mannerisms were upsettingly familiar tough. Loud, crude, spontaneous, spending half of his time wallowing on the floor for a practical joke. He roughhoused with the other mercs in a way you'd expect a bunch of idiots given power armor and alcohol would. Grey acts like that.
The mercs occupy the arcade, pulling machines from the walls and overloading punching games, treating it no worse than the crew to be fair. The moth is in a corner playing tetris. Zoey slowly weaves her way nearer to him to watch. He addressees her curtly and keeps his helmet pointed towards the screen. She watches with crossed arms. As he plays on, people filter out of the cramped arcade. The two stay, they're invested, the game's been going for 30 minutes at this point. She had watched grey play this many times before. This moth made the same mistakes he did, swore the same way in response. He messes with the filters on his mask so that he can see better. It doesn't help much, he loses a few minutes later. He turns to look at Zoey inside the hood of the cabinet, forgetting to reset his mask. She sees Grey's face. He sees her recognition. The only people left in the arcade are other mercs. She tries to read his compound eyes for any clue. It never worked. He shakes his head so slightly, a microscopic "dont". He resets the mask and leans out, falling back into character. She stays looking at the ruined tower on the screen. Its not safe to make a scene. The mercs, most of which were bored and waiting on grey to finish anyways, leave the arcade. Zoey sobs until the shift change shuttle is called.
Oh also at some point apparently some gungho security officer or maybe the captain killed one of the mercs, leading to the rest of them addressing the crowd at Evac and simultaneously activating their death acidifiers. So yeah uh Zoey then saw grey just fuckin disintegrate into a pile of organs. (He has been cloned many times since they got together so its not like he's really dead (he does have that cortical stack too so he gets frequent memory backups)) but still its horrifying. People swarm the remains of the mercs, trying to steal their brains so they can be implanted into MMI's and interrogated or borged. Zoey grabs greys and hides in the dark corner of the shuttle's atmospherics manifold. She takes out the gunmetal blue artificial atlas and axis attached to the stem. The lights are still blinking. Its horrible, but she's been told to do this if anything ever happened to him. The rest of the fatty matter was useless and she didn't hesitate to vent it to space. She sat curled and alone in a gravseat, clutching the tiny pieces of metal that held her husbands entire mind. He betrayed her, lied for years, why? She could throw him out the airlock. She could toss the stack into a supermatter shard and convert its atoms into quarks and pure energy. She could kill his memory of this day. He was defenseless. He was wordless. He was hiding in this puck of plastatitanium and positronic matricies. The gees of the FTL nearly flung her from her seat. The pipes hissed and the power grid groaned. She couldn't bring herself to hurt him. She began to doubt that she even had the power to do so. He could have uploaded today's memories to the servers already. She wished she could erase hers.
So basically the confrontation in the drawing-
is something that happens a few weeks later. She finally wants to talk to him about everything that went down that day and this is the response she gets. My bf and I are still planning how we want to write it lmao but it will occur soon....
Oh also like a few weeks after the wedding she fell into a pocket dimension of torment and recursion (admin teleported me to the fuckin backrooms and put me through a ton of stuff it was awesome I'm writing the story of that round out in first person prose with very very few embellishments but i'm only halfway done and its already 5700 words long. when its done I might deadass post it to like ao3[?] or some other idkwhere you put writing) But yeah like a reoccuring thing throughout that round and for many after is that the admins will spawn in a copy of grey's character in an impossible place (inside of black hole engine, inside of plasma storage tank, etc.) and he'll cry out for zoey before horrifically dying. (also usually my bf is actually given control of the copy so he can be convincing. and also he likes to mess with me) Also sometimes apparitions of him will appear and if she makes eye contact with them then they also melt into acid and die. annnnd there's like this whole spindly quadropedal warp entitiy that she accidentally let out of the dimension that has been haunting her annnnnnd the phobia of cleanfoam since that's how the portal went. And like she's been scrawling art on floors and maintenance tunnels of the entity and the foam and grey. So like TLDR the reason it took so long for her to talk to him about it is because she was in denial and also like the fucking marker from deadspace has been in her head (again literally, the admins torment me its peak).
based on the events of a round where I died stopping a supermatter reactor meltdown at the last possible moment with a dewer of liquid nitrogen I jury rigged from our air supply circuit. The captain ordered us to abandon ship, the chief engineer was screaming at me to GTFO, I just kept ripping up pipes and shunting cryogenic loops. I overrode the lockdown blast doors and approached the screaming core. I entered the final containment vessel and was a meter away from the all-consuming crystal. I set the output pressure on my dewer to max and tore off the valve. The fire, lighting, radiation, stopped instantly, but it was too late for me. The captain and chief engineer had to staple my medals to a bodybag. My vacuum-rated firewoman's bunker suit kept the heat out, but did nothing to stop the extreme radiation emissions of the crystal or the Megapascals of chamber pressure. There was little the doctors could do, all their supplies had been moved onto the salvage shuttle per captain's orders.
