⭐THE MAGNIFICENT FERENGANG⭐
My first ever mass-attack for ArtFight2025! I based it on the DS9 episode "The Magnificent Ferengi". I worked on this for an entire week almost non-stop.. my GOD! I am so thrilled to have gotten to get to know all these really rad af Ferengi and they deserve all the love honestly <3
(Side-note: imagine all of them being responsible for murdering a single god damn vorta)
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All characters belong to their respective owners:
Ferengi whose hobby is making slick, glossy, totally impractical replicator patterns. Like these things look cool and photograph great but they break in the middle of their first use.
Since she’s stuck at home bored, she makes so many of these damn things. She takes requests, and since they don’t actually have to work, she can fill weird niches no one else has made patterns for. They dominate every list of replicator codes, even though everyone who uses them gets SO annoyed immediately. Many assume they’re “using them wrong” and re-replicate them to try again, so they seem really popular even though they suck. All of them have a discussion thread a mile long, which perversely just increases their profile even more. Of course, she can’t read… but modern computers have text-to-speech, so she gleefully follows every complaint.
The FCA is convinced she must be making a profit somehow and keeps auditing her. But no. She’s uploading everything to Federation replicator libraries, so there’s literally no money anywhere in the system. She’s just open-source scamming for the love of the game.
Eventually she’s had so much practice that she gets genuinely good at pattern design. At that point, she starts inserting flaws on purpose just to troll people — and maybe re-submitting a couple of those rarer objects, now working and filling a previously unmet niche, under a separate pseudonym. She’s a legend in Starfleet Engineering because they keep being called in to troubleshoot her crappy items, and they’re always banning her alt accounts when she inevitably sneaks into the system again. A few of them recognize her style in the working objects and lose their absolute minds.
Some time later, she starts making holoprograms filled with surreal geometries and just-off-kilter physics (the physics she imagined, with no textbooks and little contact with the outside world, when she first started making patterns). She hides the program rods inside the replicator patterns for other unrelated objects. Every engineering team worth its salt has at least a couple rods from the series. She’s designed multiple specialized scanner patterns that haven’t been beat, although she’ll stridently deny it if you ever ask.
She never makes a single slip of latinum. But who needs any of that junk, when you’ve been quietly replicating the parts for your own starship?
Can we talk about how Florida (esp. Orlando) is literally Ferenginar? I’ve been here for a week and they charge you to park, to drive, to drive FASTER, hardly any prices on menus. Get me outta this ferengi-ass state omg
My ideas of what treni cats and jebrets might look like! These animals were only mentioned in passing in the DS9 novels The 34th Rule and Twilight. They're both kept as pets on Ferenginar.
More notes + biology stuff under the cut!
I thought it would be fun if treni cats had some mustelid traits, so I used martens and weasels as inspiration along with feline species like marbled cats. (Did you know that some mustelids like minks have horizontal pupils?)
They're arboreal, nocturnal hunters. Due to the lack of consistent moonlight on Ferenginar, treni cats developed highly specialized scent organs under their eyes and on each side of their nose, and also lots of whiskers for feeling their way around. The "spikes" near the tail are actually used to scent-mark their territory and aren't dangerous, just stanky. Treni cats are the same size as Earth's domestic cats.
I also wanted to explore how the ferengi might selectively breed their pets. The domestic breed in the first image is a "mousing" breed, originally used for keeping warehouses and other places free of pests. The one in the second image is bred to be cute. I was thinking, do ferengi find animals with small ears cute in the same way that humans find animals with big eyes cute, because those are traits our infants have? Meanwhile the "mousing" breed has larger ears as a symbol of cunning.
The word "jebret" makes me think of jerboas, so I used those as inspiration along with muskrats and jacanas. These guys are diurnal and spend a lot of time in the water, using their large feet for swimming and for walking atop aquatic plants. They're the size of guinea pigs. Both novels refer to them as being "cotton tailed" so I included some fluffy fur at the base of their rudderlike tails.
