#buttonseller

[spookygibberish]

i finally managed to make a design i’m satisfied with for Buttonseller. I also wrote some stuff about them over on toyhou.se if you wanna know more about this thing. 

[spookygibberish]

A Few Vauge Ideas for Residents of Holliday:

The Lighthouse Keeper, who has been doing this same job for several hundred years now. He never leaves the island building. They say he looks the same as the day he took the job, with the only change being in the weight of the bags beneath his eyes.

The lady who lives above the café she owns and her adopted son. They’ve been very close since the day he just sort of, showed up out of a rainstorm. He’s a perpetually disheveled kid, but she does her best to keep him together.

The centipede man, who is a man that really likes these 12 foot creatures colloquially known as centipedes. He began owning them as a young teen because of the violent, cage-fighting culture that surrounded them, but gradually began to appreciate the beauty and intelligence of them, and recognize the cruelty of the ‘sport’. He’s a grown man now, and a passionate advocate for centipede welfare. He works part-time in a bakery.

And

The Buttonseller: an extremely long, serpentine spirit that stalks back alleys. It’s body is made of black fabric and it has hundreds of thousands of buttons of various sizes, colors, shapes, etc. sewn to its back as ‘scales’. No one has ever seen its tail, and it’s unclear if its body actually ends. Its head looks like a giant sock puppet, and lacks any facial features beyond the wide muppet mouth. Its hair is like very fine, strong thread, and pulled up into a loose bun pinned in place with sewing needles and such. It has four very thin, nearly skeletal arms, one of which is always holding a pair of tiny, golden scissors.

It approaches people at random, and very insistently attempts to peddle the buttons that adorn it. It doesn’t ask for anything in return. It just wants you to have these buttons. It can speak any language, but only ever talks about buttons and sewing. It is unclear if it is truly sapient.

The buttons are normal buttons in every way but one. Anything that they are sewn to becomes sentient and animate. The behavior and intelligence of the animate objects ranges from ‘slime mold’ to 'frighteningly Human’. Study of them is very difficult however, since every single instance is tracked down and devoured by the Buttonseller at most a few hours later. This can only be prevented by removing the button, which returns the item to normal.