game portrait-style icons of some of my starbound ocs. i started making a fourth one of a friend's hylotl before getting annoyed by how inconsistent hylotl official art is
Third birthday time for void mans! Here's Dark as a Novakid from Starbound. (For anyone who doesn't know, Novakids are literal star people, and have a brand/symbol on their face. Dark's is like broken glass.)
Do you want the lore? I think you do: here’s some ramblings under the cut! Please mind that the rambles are structured like, rambles, so grammar may be strange.
Novakids don’t reproduce; instead, they reincarnate. If a Novakid is killed, or dies in some other way that doesn’t impact their brand (the shape on their ‘face’), the brand will sit idly for several decades. Usually, unattended brands are scooped up by other Novakids. Sometimes theyre left out in the wilds, and sometimes they’re sold and bought by curious merchants wondering what it’s made of, blah blah blah.
For decades, the brand from a dead novakid will discreetly start chemical processes within itself, with plasma coursing and altering for a while - until eventually, boom! A Protokid is born! The brand develops a plume of tangible plasma, and the plasma develops a squishy casing (if we’re following starbound-canon and not my own offshoot lore), and it becomes… a little thing
The Novakid that’s born from this brand will generally be in the same color range as the previous Novakid that had the brand, but the color fluctuates depending on where the brand gestated the new Protokid at, what temperature was common, what stressors it endured, etc.
The Protokid remains as a Little Strange Thing until about 2 years old, where it starts taking on a more elongated form, and at this point it may also start walking upright.
I think it’s not extremely rare for a Novakid’s brand to become a Protokid, then that Protokid becomes something that’s not a Novakid. AKA, maybe its raised by space-wolves, or something. Chances are, it might grow to look more like the thing that raised it
Novakids are not a species which evolved, but instead, they were created from the remains of an impossibly ancient God called the Cultivator, which sacrificed itself a very, very, *very* long time ago in a battle against a cosmic-consuming entity called the Ruin. When the Cultivator perished, it exploded into millions or billions of pieces, and those pieces scattered across the stars. Many of those pieces landed on planets, and then they gestated, and they became the universe’s first Novakids. This makes Novakids an impossibly ancient race - and yet, the Terrene Protectorate (the “good guy multispecies union” of this verse) barely knows a damn thing about them.
A singular Novakid can often live anywhere between 600-900 years, depending on color and lifestyle. Colder colors live longer than hotter colors. So Beryl has a longer lifespan capacity than Lex, for example.
Most of this is purely headcanon based off of lots of years of existing in the community for a game that barely gives you a crumb, of course
