Polderland

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Little Valerie the lab rat

I feel like she probably wasn’t raised in a lab like Jukka was though. Makes me sad that we will probably never know anything about her past ;_; like how old she is when the story of Echopraxia takes place and more importantly how long has she been a vampire and why was she moved from Budapest all the way to WestHem…

My completely irrational headcanon is that Val was still a human when Theseus launched. Maybe as a kid she even had to write essays about the Theseus mission. When I grow up I want to go to space like the Theseus crew yada yada. Then life happened and she got made into a vampire and things went downhill (and uphill) from there.

Anyway I feel like she and Jukka’s lives as humans must have been quite tragic for them to end up as vampires. I found it kinda interesting that when Jim Moore scolds Brüks in private about disrespecting zombies he shows a lot of compassion/empathy for people forced to become military zombies by their circumstances yet none of the compassion is extended to vampires. No one in either book wonders about the vampires’ former lives or where they were sourced from. I kinda like that. Just a big sinister human rights-violating elephant in the room. Many such creatures in the firefall universe.

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Mostly Jukka doodles

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Can’t stop thinking about this description of Jukka from Peter Watts’ blog. When I read about the filed teeth thing in the book the first time I thought I must have been understanding it wrong because Siri just … kind of acknowledged it nonchalantly as if it was something normal to see on a vampire.

Why are Jukka’s fangs filed,, why does Valerie (who seemed to have spent her life in civilian institutions with highly questionable security measures) have a full mouth of dagger sharp teeth. Jukka’s record states he has never resorted to overt violence before, and Valerie is seen as highly cooperative and harmless by the researchers in Orientation Day, so the teeth filing is probably not a result of undesirable behaviors…?

Watts has also said that Jukka was raised in a lab (“in a glorified terrarium under strictly controlled conditions” I think was how he put it). Was he young enough to have vampire equivalent of baby teeth when he was turned into one?? Did they file both his baby teeth and adult teeth? Do most reconstructed vampires have filed fangs? What do humans usually feed them? When will Watts finish writing Omniscience?? Losing my mind here

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A Jukka drawing from like a month ago. I started this with some sort of ID card design in mind and gradually realized that they probably don’t need primitive ID photos like this in the Firefall universe

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Rakshi Sengupta and Lianna Lutterodt you will be missed

命不够硬是无法做Brüks的朋友的，你看连Valerie都被克死了

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hii i really like your headcanons and how creepy and cat-like your Valerie is!! there's some medical information on vampires in Vampire Domestication if you haven't read it yet :)

Hi!! Thank you so much ;w; Watts compared his vampires to cats quite a few times and I think it’s super neat (obsessed with how vampire food is compared to cat kibble in Orientation Day aljdhdkskdjhahsh)

Vampire Domestication is that PowerPoint presentation video right? I’ve watched it a couple of times I think I’m due for a rewatch ( ^ω^ )

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Valerie and Dan Brüks best friends forever (?)

I imagine Val to be around 205 cm maybe even 210 cm and Jukka to be around 200cm.

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Idk what possessed me to draw this

And yes that is the “Sit. Please.” scene from Orientation Day,,,,im obsessed with it im obsessed with Valerie

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WIP of Valerie in her mimetic body stocking (I will probably be drawing her in it a lot for obvious reasons)

My headcanon is that Val is taller than Jukka (by like 5cm). Based on vibes. And Siri is taller and fitter than Brüks.

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St. Valerie & Portia, or the End to Loneliness

Go aspidontus girl go snap that arm

(I know Portia probably doesn’t really look like that texture-wise but it’s hard to make that oily grey spilled paint look pop at my skill level,,,,,,, plus you have more fun drawing Portia pixels on a blobby surface

Time to study anatomy because I have no idea how to draw a skeletal creature with highly defined steel cable muscles and the vampires deserve better (👈prey mentality)

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A sketch that I liked

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Prehistoric AU little Valerie doodles.

I feel like infant Wattsian vampires probably vasodilate more frequently than adult/subadult ones. Expecting humans to just raise creepy corpse-cold infants/toddlers with offputting reflexes without resorting to fatal neglect or infanticide seems to be an unreliable reproductive strategy. If people react to kid vampires the way they react to adult vampires (EWW WTF IS WRONG WITH HER WE NEED TO KILL HER WITH FIRE + PLEASE GOD DONT LET HER NOTICE ME I NEED TO STAY AS FAR FROM THIS MONSTER AS POSSIBLE) I doubt the whole cuckoo thing could work. A more human appearance in early life helps with parent-child bonding (one sided) and makes it more likely for the humans to invest energy and resources in the survival of their vampire kids. By the age of 5 or 6 though I think the vampire traits would become quite obvious (but can still be rationalized away by a concerned mother). Anyway. Here’s little Val practicing her apex predator skills. Her mom is Janna from Orientation Day.

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Valerie prehistoric AU again. Val’s mom is based on Janna from Orientation Day because I liked their interactions in that story a lot.

I think infant Wattsian vampires would probably look & feel less off-putting than adult ones. Watts said something about ancient vampires parasitizing human social groups and making humans give birth to and raise their offsprings like cursed cuckoos and I’ve been thinking about that ever since. My headcanon is that infant/toddler vampires definitely seemed “off” to humans but the difference wasn’t enough to provoke a immediate “kill it with fire” reaction (or an “ewww I’m not breastfeeding that” reaction). Eye difference would have been subtle for the first couple years of life (eye colors change a lot during childhood even for humans). Vasoconstriction noticeable but not so, um, corpse-like. Deciduous teeth probably looked more like human baby teeth but adult teeth would come in early (4-5 yr?) and sharp.

Judging by Valerie’s canonical ability to imitate Janna’s voice and predict the exact things people were going to say (tone and all), watching a baby vampire getting her first words would probably be a horrifying experience. Well, not “kill it with fire” horrifying, but still far from wholesome. Jim Moore said Vampires have idiomatic speech patterns and Val did use a lot of stock phrases (interestingly Jukka didn’t; he felt a lot more…well-socialized) so my headcanon is that they are gestalt language processors.

Since the human retina and visual cortex go through a huge amount of development during infancy & childhood, ancient vampires probably weren’t born with full blown Crucifix Glitches ready to kick in and kill at any moment. Kids tend to have lower seizure threshold as well as less acute visual processing abilities so that could lead to some interesting implications... Another thing is that photosensitive & pattern-sensitive epilepsies in humans usually don’t present until middle childhood to late teens (mediated by many other factors but still).

I really really really hope we’ll get to see more vampire physiology in Omniscience,,,,,,is that an unrealistic expectation? Will I even live long enough to see that book come out??

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Wanted to see a Simon Fraser training slideshow with Valerie demonstrating the physiological side effects of Anti-Euclideans. Fixed dilated pupils is the easiest one to spot (just ask Sachita Bhar!)

My headcanon is that lab raised reconstructed vampires all have completely fucked circadian rhythms and chronic eye strain from being in artificially lit environments pretty much 24/7 (I don’t think humans would give them lights out time for sleep because not being able to visually monitor a vampire in a dark/dim cell for even a couple of hours each day seems to be a security risk even with other protocols of surveillance in place). Jukka Sarasti probably feels better with his dark visor on.

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Comparison of Wattsian vampire and human morphology at 5 yrs old. The vampire kid is, of course, based on Valerie.

Part of an AU where Val is the child of a human mother and a vampire father and grows up in a neolithic human settlement. Her mom is living out her version of the We Need to Talk About Kevin movie in constant terror and confusion. Very Changeling narrative. There’s virtually no intersecting true right angles in Val’s environment, but she still has pattern-sensitive epilepsy and would occasionally have focal seizures when she sees things that come close to a cross or a bunch of near right angles taking up too much of her visual field (fabric patterns, looms, weaved baskets, lattice fence, etc). People couldn’t help but associate her extraordinary abilities with divine power or spiritual possession, and these focal attacks only strengthened the belief.

{I wish the Sacred Disease and mad prophet archetype connection was explored a bit more (or at all) in Echopraxia. I mean we have a Moses type character who suffered repeated seizures and went on to develop almost mythical abilities through the very suffering. Who’s to say Val didn’t have her burning bush moment during one of the Simon Fraser experiments. Also the whole thing about the Crucifix Glitch is that prehistoric vampires usually didn’t survive them in nature once a true generalized seizure set in. Making them suffer dozens (or even hundreds, my headcanon is that Val was extensively involved in crucifix glitch researches) of attacks and bringing them back is going to cause unprecedented changes to their sophisticated brains. I mean hello, seizure induced neuroplasticity? Vampire Geschwind syndrome? Seizure related consolidation? Valerie might have started off as a neurotypical vampire (as neurotypical as a reconstructed vampire can be), but I very much doubt she could still be seen as one after a couple of years in crucifix glitch land.}

Anyway. Neolithic vampire AU kinda inevitable after reading that unhinged (or very hinged) comment on his blog. Now what would our boy Jukka be doing in this setting…Poor Siri would end up getting a trepanation for sure.

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Valerie doodles

In a perfect world Echopraxia includes another 200 or so interludes where Sengupta discovers more Valerie-related videos, classified documents, experiment logs, etc and shares them with Brüks. Some of those interludes would be 5000 words long and have excerpts from papers written on Valerie. Brüks would look through results from Valerie’s SPECT scans and cardiac enzyme panels from different points in her captivity and do his little “oh my god we tortured her” thing. And both of them would end up having horrific biblically themed sleep paralysis episodes with Val as the sleep paralysis demon because they got subliminally programmed from watching too much Valerie content