Recently, I went to planet Velise, the closest planet with multicellular life on it. I mainly went to discover what alien "birds" look like. Birds and flying have always interested me, and I finally, for the first time, decided to leave the solar system.
These are only pages from the first day of my travel. I hope to be able to upload the rest of my travel soon (although uploading photos in space takes way too long)
So, here's some imposter speculative biology & worldbuilding that im using for my among us show au. I've been calling them 'stoneborn' bc I'm a fantasy nerd of course i'd call them something cool like that. also their eggs look like rocks so-
i prolly will make a separate full blown anatomy post later tbh.
anyway yeah I ended up writing... a lot of general spec bio and worldbuilding for them, that's going under the cut bc dear lord it's LONG. Also keep in mind that a lot of things that i've mentioned have VERY MUCH been affected by the fact that MIRA is committing atrocities against their species.
The ‘imposters’ of this au are Boneless, worm-like creatures that are sapient, with skin covered in chromatophores that the species can use to change colors and textures. Combine that with their boneless, easily compressible, soft bodies and they can compress and therefore blend into just about anywhere. They are also fairly hardy, with their skin coated in a thin layer of slime that has been proven to have some minor medical properties, (specifically for preventing wound infection and encouraging healing) and acts both as an extra layer of protection for their skin when rubbing against surfaces and a ‘greasing’ type of substance, allowing them to slip easier through spaces much smaller than they are while avoiding getting stuck. The species does also have some variance, with mutations or varying rarities leading to individuals with abilities and skills that others do not.
The only thing keeping them from being perfect mimics is the fact that they struggle to see fine details, and therefore can’t copy fine details on something they’re mimicking. For example, many ‘imposters’ that mimic the appearance of clothes on a crewmate for example, end up missing or having seams in the wrong places, since they physically can’t see them. Some stoneborn have taken to stealing crewmate clothing to circumvent this issue, but since most crewmates don’t think to look for seams on clothing, they can get away with it.
You would think it would be the use of hands that would out a stoneborn mimicking a crewmate, but that is only a thing with younger, more inexperienced stoneborn, and very quickly stoneborn will be able to do realistic movements and even tasks that don’t require a whole lot of dexterity. While stoneborn have to be taught or otherwise figure out how to properly use hands, since the species actively teaches each other and/or copies each other it seems likely that the only limit on what they can figure out how to do with their copied hands is based on their eyesight rather than physical compatibility.
While not as outwardly social as crewmates as a species, it is noted that they are communal brooders, with several stoneborn of different unrelated families converging on one spot to lay their stone-like eggs. Before MIRA took out a good chunk of the species to further their own goals, stoneborn would gather in massive clusters to brood on their eggs and assist each other with rearing the young. (And of course, there were individuals who just laid their eggs in the brooding grounds then went out for milk indefinitely, confident that the others would be able to pick up their slack.) Stoneborn have also been recorded regularly ‘stacking’ together in the same place in massive ‘worm piles’ when they are feeling comfortable with both their surroundings and each other.
When it comes to courtship, most of it happens during the ‘breeding season’ for the species, and individuals gather near or in brooding grounds in order to display for a potential mate. While pairs courting each other outside of the breeding season isn’t unheard of, most only tend to start doing it during the early stages of the breeding season. Stoneborn will often display bright and complex patterns, while also showing off their skills and their collection of copied sounds to attract attention from other stoneborn. A major part of the courtship between two stoneborn is also mutual gift giving, normally in the form of food or nesting materials, though it has been noted that viper morphs are often seen giving potential partners stones or bone fragments that have been worn smooth by their acid.
Upon the courtship being finished and a partner selected, and depending on how crowded the brooding grounds are, a pair of stoneborn will either immediately start beating the tar out of each other like marine flatworms to choose which one will gestate/create the eggs, or leave to an area near the brooding ground and then proceed to beat the tar out of each other. This is a behavioral/instinctual relic of their non-sapient ancestors, since egg making is costly, their ancestors would fight in order to fertilize the other first. Modern day stoneborn aren’t in as much risk as their ancestors were, (well at least until MIRA arrived) so the fighting is mostly just foreplay and to ensure dominance while mating.
If the pair feels safe enough and they like each other enough they may even take turns fertilizing each other so they both end up developing a clutch, though this is more common in large brooding grounds with a lot of individuals. Monogamous pairs like this aren’t too common though, since it requires a combination of the right environment and situation. More commonly in monogamous pairs, one will gestate and create the eggs while the other assists with the nest and gathering resources. However, it is just as common for individuals that don’t lose the dominance fight to go right back into the courting again, seeking to mate with as many others as possible.
Their young start off as parasites, latching onto the closest adult after hatching and feeding off of their blood (and sometimes their flesh) until they reach a certain size. Compared to their young, adult stoneborn are massive, and with the species’ quick healing, hosting a clutch is no issue. In fact, many stoneborn who are raising their young at the same time will often take on feeding and sheltering multiple clutches while the other parents go off to either recover their lost blood and/or flesh, or go out on a resource gathering trip for the collective individuals in the brooding grounds. It likely helps that the hatchlings overproduce the slimy coating that the adults have, ensuring that when they burrow into the adults for food it is less likely to get infected, and less likely for them to get stuck on something while feeding.
In addition, ‘trading’ hatchlings across different parents will increase the amount of skills and knowledge that a hatchling gains, as well as expose the hatchlings to a veritable smorgasbord of different ideas, personalities, and styles from which they can choose from. By the time their skin thickens and they have been ‘weaned’ off of adult blood, they will have picked up the skills and knowledge needed to survive on their own. While many hatchlings stick around groups of adults and/or follow adults that they like as ‘mentor’ figures for a longer portion of time, many others choose to only take the knowledge and skills that they learned in the brooding grounds and strike out on their own.
Often times hatchlings born in specific brooding grounds will return to them year after year like how salmon do. (well without the whole ‘dying at the end’ thing) This appears to mostly be a choice thing, and it’s not a mandatory instinct. Individuals have been seen to have switched brooding grounds before, normally because of a lack of or increase in resources, or because they recognize the scent of a specific individual they are fond of and decide to drop by. Individuals who have no interest in mating or individuals who are too young to mate will often tend to make regular treks to brooding grounds, either to socialize with other stoneborn, or to just mess around and explore.
Individuals will regularly communicate and cooperate with each other, with individuals often trading information and teaching each other any new skills they might’ve picked up on their various adventures/travels. There is a large amount of vocal traditions, a good chunk of it having unfortunately either become lost or endangered due to MIRA’s actions against the species. Before MIRA, the main conflict between groups of the species was over places of high resources, brooding grounds, or differing beliefs due to their own vocal traditions. With MIRA having done what it did though, the surviving ‘wild’ stoneborn have put aside all differences to focus on the very real overarching threat that they all have to deal with.
There are four currently known ‘morphs’ of the stoneborn species.
‘Classic’ stoneborn are the average for their species, while capable of shifting hues and changing the textures of their skin, unlike Phantoms or Shapeshifters this process takes time, which most simply choose not to do unless there is a need to change ‘faces’ or identity. While they may not have the same abilities or skills as their fellow morphs, they are no less capable of harm.
‘Shapeshifter’ stoneborn are slimmer than their classic morph counterparts, with a slimmer set of jaws, and in general being less chunky. They make up for this lack of bulk with a vastly increased speed of being able to change the color and texture of their skin, even able to swap identities out on the fly with a small delay. Theorized to be either a co-dominant trait, with two shapeshifters leading to phantoms, though there have been no confirmed evidence of this.
‘Phantom’ stoneborn are similar to shapeshifter morphs on first appearance, with slimmer jaws and bodies. They have more chromatophores than the other three morphs, and it is to be noted that their eyesight is slightly better than the average, allowing them to be able to copy things better. While they have the same texture changing speed as a classic morph, phantoms have extremely increased color shifting capabilities, with individuals being noted to become all but invisible in seconds if they desire. This appears to come at the cost of them being noticeably smaller on average than the other three morphs. Recessive morph, with the most common theory of how it came to be being two shapeshifters breeding, though that has yet to be proven.
‘Viper’ stoneborn are very similar to their classic morph counterparts, with the main visual difference being a set of enlarged fang-like teeth. Ability wise, the main thing that sets viper morphs apart from their fellows is their capability to weaponize their own digestive fluids in a form of ‘spit’, the mixture, which is a combination of stomach acid/contents, saliva, and some of the viper’s own slime has been proven to be extremely corrosive towards flesh and bone, though it does take time for the acidic mixture to eat through an entire corpse. If given enough time, the only signs of a crewmate even existing after a viper attack will be a puddle of liquified flesh and blood. Vipers are also the rarest morph of stoneborn, though whether or not it is from vipers actually being extremely rare, an artificial scarcity, or simply a lack of viper morph stoneborn infiltrating crewmate ships is unknown.
Technology wise, crewmates still have stoneborn beat in a pretty major way. Most stoneborn tech is salvaged/reverse engineered crewmate tech, albeit modified in a way that makes it easier for stoneborn to use. Early on MIRA wasn’t outright antagonistic towards stoneborn, hiring interested individuals on and training them like any other crewmate. This did last a while, long enough that the stoneborn species was able to spread and even start colonizing other planets both in and outside of their home system, before MIRA’s darker side reared up, and they started stealing/abducting stoneborn hatchlings and eggs.
This understandably, ended up causing problems, problems that MIRA decided to solve via purposefully sabotaging nuclear reactors on many stoneborn-populated planets to cause meltdowns and explosions to get rid of the stoneborn population so they could take and essentially do cult programming to the stolen stoneborn hatchlings without any resistance. Stoneborn eggs had been proven to be able to survive things that even the adults can’t, (plus they can go into a stasis so the hatchlings inside dont die and can ‘resume’ development when under certain conditions) so it wasn’t as if was going to be a loss for the company if they did that. While they did succeed in eliminating most of the species, there is still a small (relatively speaking) population that have now shifted views into getting rid of MIRA in order to ensure their survival. Which is when the attacks on ships carrying ‘ore+’ started. It’s been a guerilla war ever since then.
This cabagu is eating something analogous to a rice ball or a dumpling or A mochi, maybe. Basically this is some kind of soft dough wrapped around a yummy meat and gravy filling. Cabagu can't really taste sugar because they're carnivorous, but fat is oh so yummy yummy yummy.
Cabagu have taste buds in their hands and in the tips of their mandibles and pedipalps. Eating with utensils is really weird to them, it basically halves their sense of taste. Like eating with your nose plugged, sort of...? This is also the reason why, when not eating, they typically wear gloves. Also their handsoaps are made to smell AND taste good (to the hands) so that disinfecting your hands isn't just absolutely fucking unbearable.
was messaging my girlfriend that she would be like a bird with very long legs (she has very long legs) and then I was like birds with very long legs are kind of awesome in general... I should reblog some on tumblr 😌
I don’t think adding nonbinary to Victorian’s gender system would’ve fixed their weird sexism. If anything I think it would’ve made them weirder and sexismier
Of course, fashionable Honorables may be consternated by the proper open collar blouses as there is no way to tie a bow or cravat around it. In such cases a bow may be worn upon the top hat. Or a slim ribbon may be tied around the bare neck, however, given the salacious reputation some hold for such an accessory, that is best left to married Honorables.
YES. the way this hasn’t left my mind….Like okay they’re still Victorians. They’re still sexist and homophobic. My thought for this alternate history is third gender people are expected to only marry into already married couples. And they’d probably throw in a lot of Christian Holy Trinity and Mary Joseph God imagery to religiously validate triads.
Or three people (of all different genders of course bc again. They’re Victorian) could marry all at once but the courting situation would be a nightmare.
First thought: coverture. Coverture is the legal idea that a married couple is one entity, with the wife not having an actual legal identity of her own. This is why there's the old-fashioned convention of women taking on their husband's entire name (e.g. "Mrs. Robert Smith"), why men could control any inheritance or money their wives had, and also the origin of some now-obsolete laws (like making it impossible for a wife to sue her husband for damages, because it's as if she was suing herself).
This is why it was so important for women to marry well: even if you worked as a married woman (and many women did), your money wasn't actually yours. It's one thing to have to live with a drunk asshole; it's worse to have that drunk asshole be the sole person who decides if that paycheck goes towards rent or more booze.
So, having a trinity/three parts of one whole entity would totally fit Victorian ideas of coverture. I think you'd still have it be men > everyone else, because they'd expect some kind of hierarchy, and even within the Trinity, God is still the leader.
Second thought: separate spheres. The Victorian era was very heavily focused on men being involved in the "dirty" business of work/politics/etc., and women being more morally pure and better suited to the domestic sphere (the whole "angel of the house" thing). Obviously this wasn't actually or practically true a lot of the time, but it was the aspired-to standard, the thing you'd measure people against to say if they were acting appropriately as members of their gender or not.
So you'd need a third sphere for Honorables to inhabit that is completely separate from the work/domestic dichotomy, or create an entirely different three-way dichotomy. Basically, you'd need a thing to point to, like "X is very ladylike" or "Y is not manly," but for Honorables.
So, extrapolating:
You'd still have "Mr. and Mrs. Robert Smith," it'd just be, "Mr., Mrs., and Mx. Robert Smith" (differentiating by title, not by first name). I could actually see there being a different title for unmarried vs. married Honorables, like Master vs. Mister or Miss vs. Madam/Missus. Mix vs. Max, maybe?
I think Honorables would definitely need to have some kind of dowry. It actually might be even more necessary, because unless the guy is insanely wealthy on his own, you're going to need enough money to support three people, not just two.
I'm having trouble coming up with a third sphere, but whatever that third sphere was, you'd need to heavily police it. "You can't do X, that's for Honorables" has to be part of the culture. And you'd need to police it with as much weird pseudoscientific and/or religious justification as possible. Like, you need "women's brains physically can't handle the strain of learning math" but to explain why Honorables can't swim, or whatever.
Non-leadership admin, teaching, and academia as the third sphere.
The idea of who should be in charge of household accounting has always waffled between a man’s job and a woman’s job. Is teaching the realm of governesses and school mistresses or lecturers and professors. Academics are too weak and frail to be masculine but too logical and rigorous to be feminine.
Clerks and accountants and secretaries and teachers and scholars.
I can see it becoming a Mind (Honorable) Heart (Woman) Soul (Man) kind of separation, all three together making up the body. Women are suited for feelings, nurturing, caring. Honorables are suited for the pursue of pure knowledge, but lack the Will to put it to any practical use. Finally men are the one leading force that brings all the parts together and leads it into an action.
Thus, men, even if they're unqualified on whatever area of knowledge they're dealing with, and even if they have no understanding of their or other people's feelings whatsoever, still possess an inherent and intangible quality that makes them the only part truly suited for decision making.
Guy with cataracts and scarred from an explosion has a fail toymaking shop in front of a rundown temple and he has a crush on a disfigured lowly priestess whom he suspects is a stealth trans guy because she always picks the boy option when they play board games (he’s right btw)
He's from Kalantiaw, but his mom is diaspora, and I thought her to be half "Japanese" (coded) - still trying to figure out how japanese ethnicities come to play.
She was a sailor turned pirate. She didn't know the language spoken in Kalantiaw (more akin to Khmer), and she spoke a different language (more austronesian), and she named him Kahilingan, which means "wish". But in Kalantiaw, where she settled, his name means "curse" or "bad omen" 💀 it doesn't help that her life ended with the beginning of his. So.
Kahi spends much of his life chasing the image of his mom and trying to.... live up to her- because sailing is the most esteemed occupation in their world. Only very very very very very few people have managed to work on "dragonships".
Basically, their world is physically broken (like living on an asteroid belt) and they sail to and fro each sundering / country on specialized stone ships called "dragonships" / "bakunawa"- and the ships themselves are semi-alive? They're like.. Stone ships laminated with the spirits of devas and dragons and other great beings who have all died because of (redacted).
Anyway, his mom, Maaya, was a renowned sailor- she tamed a dragonship that was imbued with an infamously wild dragon called Duksa- Dragonships are Sponsored, but those who sponsor the ships are almost never in command, and they also easily lose ownership to their hired captains- because the ships themselves are sentient, and they never obey anyone who they deem are incapable of commanding them. Only Maaya could control Duksa hehe. So she became known throughout all their world as this wild woman who loved fast boats and only accepted voyage commissions "if they are very fun". Anyways blah blah blah she fell in love w Kahi's other parent (who is nonbinary) and she got pregnet with him. And they eventually settled in Kalantiaw, in it's countryside near the subterranean capital (Kamharik).
Kahi always annoyed his other parent abt his mom because he too wanted to meet Duksa, but his parent kept warning him not to go near the ship because after Maaya died, it went even more mad with grief. Kahi more of an engineer than a captain like his mom, but his goal was simply to acquaintance with Duksa rather than actually captain her. But Duksa did not accept anyone, not even anyone who was part of Maaya's original crew.. Kahi went to an apprenticeship on shipbuilding-
he became somewhat popular for being clever with his hands, and all around Kalantiaw, everyone thought of him as reliable and very creative when it came to problem solving. So he went from normal ships to fixing dragonships.. ..
The Greatest dragonships are ones that are imbued with the spirits of actual ancient dragons and qilin, bc some are imbued with "lesser" dragons or false dragons, and some are with non-dragon albeit great spirits- like minor gods, wind spirits, phoenix,naga, etc etc..
Duksa was a true and great dragon, and Kahi knew that she was suffering from severe neglect, so all he wanted was to patch her up-
Everyone, every single one of Kahi's peers discouraged him, bc it is known that anyone who even approaches her is immediately kilIed by her; but Kahi, he is different. When he approaches Duksa, she was a shadow of herself, a ghost ship- She senses Maaya, and she even thought that Kahi was her at first- so she lets Kahi patch her big crabclaw sails, fixed her boilers and really tried to replicate how she used to look when Maaya lived.. and Duksa didn't know it wasn't her, because her eyes were covered in barnacles.. The "eyes" of a dragonship is its lodestar, and Kahi was purposefully saving it for last because he is frightened of what Duksa could do to him;;
But before that, Duksa spoke to him, joked like "ah beauty, what happened to you?! Your voice sounds like you swallowed a frog.. are you ill? Why did you abandon me?" Fhjsjs
"Why are your hands so gentle now? I want you to be rough!! Stop this at once! I am not old!"
But when Kahi started scraping finally at the lodestar, and he opened Duksa's eyes to the world once more, she cried in great anger because who tf was this intruder! And why did he carry Maaya's spirit with him !!!
Her entire deck creaked so hard the floorboards broke again, and she swayed her whole body so Kahi nearly fell from the lodestar;; he tried to reason with her, and it sort of mirrors how his mom tamed Duksa. She barrelled in head on and confidently, but Kahi was meek and gentle.
Eitherway.. an angry dragonship is like highly radioactive, its like being in a storm in a contained environment, and she started puffing steam- it's like microdosing being in fukushima; And she called Kahi a fool, he'll never measure up to Maaya, he will never be her- aaaah, but she didn't kiIl him. Maybe because she knew he was Maaya's boy. She warned him never to return, and tossed him into the open shallows. So, he was absolutely brokenhearted. He was 19.
~intense lonely lovestory between him and a closeted trans guy raised by mean transphobic priestesses in a cult the antithesis of a loving and wise lesbian death goddess occurs.~
There she is.. her name is Viharana Magayarin
Names-
Maaya's name is spelled a certain way in kanji, I want it to mean "True"
Duksa's name is Tagalog, it means "grief"
Kahilingan's name is tagalog- and it means "wish". Inspired from.. in tagalog, "curse" is a contronym of sorts- "curse" and "promise" is the same word ("sumpa")
Kahi's trans boyfriend's name is Tala, and it means "star" 😌
I drew Kahi's "girlfriend" (closeted trans guy whom Kahi would love without question or limits eitherway.)
His name is Tala / Sitara. His name means "Star" in Sanskrit and Tagalog !
He was raised by a cult to be a priestess too, and the goddess speaks to him as a ghost, trying to instruct him to liberate himself and the other orphans being indoctrinated by the priestesses..!!!! BTW in the world's lore, the goddess has a wife who is a nonbinary trans woman !
And this is Duksa, the dragonship
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