Amber Skies Sideblog @deeper-ever-deeper - Tumblr Blog

Translators note:

I promised myself I wouldn't talk about my murder mystery but my beta readers are enjoying it which makes me happy.

I will say I love writing something that occurs in a more normal part of the AS setting. Like yeah there's Malaysian shrimp people dw about it, you would not *believe* what is happening offscreen.

terrafey

i’ve been looking at a lot of old pulp fiction and noir book covers and wanted to try my hand at one for @cryptotheism’s Six Stomach Murder!

Silence-Between-Strikes has abs because she is a combat cyborg who is constantly being pumped full of steroids.

Kali does not have abs she has four stomachs. Student does not have abs she is constantly malnourished from burning through her bodies lipid deposits to set things on fire. She also has chronic jaundice.

Nico, Marin, and Lunine have exoskeletons. Teacher is a single celled organism. Sorcerer is almost entirely mechanical. Kip and Oey are just normal fat.

87 eats like one slice of bread and water every day and somehow maintains muscle mass, but has no abs.

Digit also has four stomachs but she is constantly malnourished because she "doesn't deserve gravy"

what would be the hypothetical average infant mortality rate under the amber sky?

Better than medieval Europe but worse than now, and with some caveats. The biomechanics of conception and birth are pretty tricky. And the biological diversity of people extends to unborn infants. Babies can be born with anomalies that can be hazardous to the parent/s and the child. Midwifery is an important and respected profession.

A culture beneath the amber sky has to dedicate ample manpower and resources to midwifery. Historically, this has been the source of many biomedical advances.

i read everything i read aloud, and for some reason my reading of digit has a Russian accent. I don't know why.

Oh thats a fun read. She is partially based on a friend of mine who is from Boston.

Hi! Huge fan of the AS universe. I was wondering if you've dropped Emerald Seas in favour of other projects, or if you have more plans for the Teleth-diving series? Thanks!

I have. I realized if I wanted to actually finish the story I wanted to tell, it would take me 5 years. Amber Skies has always kinda been where I try ambitious and experimental things, and attempting ES was a good learning experience, but I'm not going to return to it any time soon.

I would like to revisit the characters eventually. They're a fun ensemble. But I'm not sure if they're right for Shaft Diving. For the time being, I want to tell more stories outside of the Teleths.

cryptotheism

Re: Disco Elysium. It’s implied via one of the merch drops that different people have different skills. Given that, what might some notable skills among the Amber Skies/Emerald Seas crew be?

Student - [NOTHING TO LOSE]: (motorics) Act first, think later. Skill for having bad ideas, and executing them with style.

Teacher - [DEEP HISTORY]: (Intellect) Knowledge of the old world. Your understanding of the world before the sky was amber.

Sorcerer - [THE METHOD]: (Intellect Your understanding of that which processes information. Commune with minds and machines as if they were extensions of your own.

Nico - [BLOOD OF HONEY]: (Psyche) your understanding of Hive Church doctrine, practices, and history. Choose the right phrase, understand religious symbology, bind your body to artifacts of the saints.

Kali - [DEEPER EVER DEEPER] (Physique) Skill for shaft diving. Navigate the Teleths, understand their history, architecture, and shape. Listen when the city speaks.

cryptotheism

Marin de Trozier - [POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE] (Psyche) Your knowledge of the courtly arts. Observe etiquette, compare the decor to the canapes, understand the subtleties of social power.

Kip - [SCHMOOZIN'] (Psyche) Keep it cool. Keep it real cool. Sell bridges. Keep confidence. Inform your new best friends about a fantastic business opportunity. Know when you're being sold up the river.

Silence-Between-Strikes - [VISCERA MACHINA] (Motorics) "I am the flesh perfected, the machine made wise. I am the mind that guides the hammer that drives the nail. I am force applied to form, and from this all things flow."

cryptotheism

Master Linus would also have [THE METHOD] but would have a much higher stat.

cryptotheism

Digit - [SYNAPTIC TWO-STEP] (Motorics) Lock in, tune out, calibrate the dials of the body and mind, slip the razor of discernment between what is, and ought to be. Find what matters and never let go.

Detective Mack - [TENTH BURROW] (Psyche) Smell history on the breath, see the weight of generations on the shoulders, pick a troubled child out of a crowd. Know when she wants to talk, but won't open her mouth.

Detective 87 - [ATARI] (Intellect) "Do not be quick. Surround an opponent on three sides, and know he will move to the fourth. Wield anxiety like a shepherd's crook. Allow your quarry to weave a noose from their own frayed nerves."

mjhartwork

For class, we got to pick a book we liked to design a dust jacket and some illustrations for it, and I picked @cryptotheism's Amber Skies!

A tower so huge that it leaves a wake in the sky is just such striking imagery to me, so I had to use it for the front cover!

cryptotheism

Oh my God I love the Cairns on the back cover that rules so much

mjhartwork

For class, we got to pick a book we liked to illustrate a few scenes from it (and design a dust jacket), and I picked @cryptotheism's Amber Skies!

cryptotheism

holy SHIT dog

cryptotheism

For want for grilled yams, Digit the Witch resolved to commit suicide by regular employment. This was not a decision taken lightly, but her hand was forced by the realities of yams. Witching was not a growth industry. It meant night after night of sleeping in barns, flipping junk cybernetics, and being paid not in money but in whatever vegetables were on hand. Queen amongst these, that sweet regent of vegetable life; the yam. Digit had many almost fond memories of the tuber. A thankfully dead father used to cook them beneath the ashes of the campfire, but they never came out quite right, too mushy, too hard, overdone, underdone. The subtle application of heat to tuber lay always beyond her mastery, and her father was happy to remind her of that.

But now her father was dead, his outrunner repossessed by the caravan, and his half-complete pet project of a daughter left with a head full of cybernetic implants, and no place in the world. Wandering witch was the closest thing to a sensible option. So a wandering witch she became. This worked for a time. Digit was good at being a witch, and she learned many things, but her dreams were plagued with grilled yams. Something inside of her, something she did not quite understand but was nonetheless loud and powerful, needed to perfect the art of the grilled yam. Being practical, Digit made a list of what she needed. One, access to a steady supply of yams. Two, a means of grilling the yams. Three, a place to perform the grilling of the yams. The chief obstacle here was money, and not just money, but a steady supply of money. This meant a respectable profession, which witching was not.

This changed in late summer of the year 11527, when a town crier outside the gates of the great city of Isin hollered of a job opening for anyone skilled in the arts of neurosorcery. Providence! Here lay the blessed next step on the path to grilled yams. The job, Digit later learned, was in law enforcement.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

chips1977

my buddy Slicer just got locked up for selling black market modded larvae

cryptotheism

What's Arcadia's most dogshit rig series? Like how the Y400 is an unkillable tank, which one tried to go for some kind of luxury-aesthetic kind of thing and immediately shot themselves in the foot? (Considering your statement of how Y400s are essentially Ninth-Gen Ford F150s, the analogue/comparison here is the Tenth Gen; bad motors that are fixable but almost not worth it, serious rust issues, bad packaging for everything, bad at being A Truck but honestly pretty comfortable)

The city of Rhoyne sits at the mouth of the White River, the largest on the continent. This places it neatly between the regions three major economic powers, who are constantly jockeying for influence. Horde caravaneers, hinterland river traders, and the mercantile arms of the Thousand Houses have spent centuries using Rhoyne as an commercial battleground. This has a history of crashing the cities economy.

The Arcadia Freight Company, is --like many good things-- a barely functional compromise. It is a ramshackle bundle of trading rights and conglomerated guild houses that effectively functions as a state-run "generic brand" for all the products running through Rhyone. Its purpose is to make cheap, available, goods at a deficit. No longer can some caravaneer with a hairbrained scheme crash the price of eggs and lumber for six months.

The AFC answers to the government of Rhyone, which means "an army of clerks" which means "people who might not know much about exo-rig design." A common fault in this vein is attempting to make a rig that does everything. A one-size-fits-all frame that fits the needs of every worker and consumer. This theoretically perfect frame would be perfect: It would have optimized neurocircutry for organizing libraries, generalized flexibility for bricklaying and message-running, and optional high-torque augurs for heavy lifting. What's more, it would be cheap enough for the average day-laborer to afford.

This line of thinking gave us the Arcadia G1, a frame so poorly designed it never finished its initial production run. It was a disaster. The solutions for its design goals bordered on the psudoscientific. Such features included a ficticious "ULTRAZINC" alloy which was actually just iron with antimony impurities, and an experimental ultra-low-cost "aucoustical" control interface that failed to function whatsoever, and looked a bit like wearing a harp as a helmet.

The trick is, it was never actually intended to function as a work rig. It was a purely financial vehicle, and at this it was a resounding success. In reality, it was a commercial suicide bomber. A product designed and marketed to kneecap a lwes-atalan horse-trading scheme. The idea being to produce a limited run of highly-marketed new general purpose rigs, and keep an eye on anyone in the city who came into miraculous possession of "secondhand refurbished" Arcadia G1's for a suspiciously low price.

It is ready.

Amber Skies Murder Mystery is currently at 6K words. I will post about it when I reach 40K

Student couldn't beat Silence Between Strikes but Sorcerer could

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