#ohwitiil

[jayrockin]

I always get a lot of questions about how aliens dress themselves, because people have difficulty imagining their range of motion and dexterity I think. The beak is used a lot as a manipulator when avians put on clothes, in particular to reach the back and the outside of their wings.

PATREON | Runaway to the Stars

[notanocelot]

A snippet taken from the hypothetical dirtball groupchat.

I would have to assume it is mostly taken up by long protracted arguments between Cheevwut and Ohwitiil.

[jayrockin]

Sorry, but despite everything, Cheevwut is too much of a normie have a woke opinion about carnalists. Microdosing avian cocaine at work is normal, but "sex drugs" (sex hormones and spring inducers) are for weirdo perverts.

Avians don't really chew their food and have a poor sense of taste, so a lot of the experience of meals for them is visuals, texture, and after-effects. Recreational drugs are a very common additive to normal foods. Most psychoactive drugs get filtered from an avian's bloodstream very quickly by their large hepatokidney, but this doesn't prevent dependency from forming. Addiction is major problem in modern avian societies.

Avians also had a global warming crisis, but its scale was more comparable to the human ozone depletion crisis. Their lack of land certainly made things more urgent to those with the power to stop things, but because their planet has much less accessible fossils, their transportation and energy systems were less dependent on them overall. Switching to alternatives was easier because large-scale alternative infrastructure already existed.

PATREON | Runaway to the Stars

[jayrockin]

The tail on the speech bubble there looks (to an avian) a bit like a lip corner. Or, if the whole thing is interpreted as a super cartoony earless head, the tail is a neck.

PATREON | Runaway to the Stars

[jayrockin]

I don't normally respond to excessively broad or dense topics for AMAs but this one nerdbaited me.

Saturated light blue/cyan has about as poor contrast for avians as yellow and white has for us.

PATREON | Runaway to the Stars

[jayrockin]

Uunraashi City is the same place Sirawit was born, btw.

Avians are typically considered adults at 10 years old. That's in Terran years. The Dominion of Tiiliit does not have mandatory or government sponsored educational programs, and childhood education is considered the responsibility of the dunparent and their "house," a social housing block funded by a bright "alimony" tax. As adults, Tiilitian citizens are often narrowly educated in the field of employment they enter unless they pay for a wider education at a university. Brights will often sponsor the education of children they believe to be good candidates for employees or financial successors, with first pick going to the children of their dunsiblings. A bright sponsoring their direct children is a Tiiliitian taboo, except for the highest echelon of royalty. The taboo is fueled by bright anxieties about the duns they mate with discarding their eggs, mating again, and then lying about the child's parentage to secure their sponsorship. Your siblings' kids are considered a better guarantee of kinship.

Avians are way too big to be on the menu for omnivorous simiformes from their homeplanet like Eswii, but those animals use hunting strategies similar to this to capture smaller flying prey. Since humans are massive, it's an easy place for an avian mind to wander... helped by the fact that videos of humans restraining avians in a similar way frequently circulate through avian social media. Sometimes the context is positive (rude avian starting fights gets OWNED by giant security guard!!!) and sometimes it's negative (human ruthlessly attacks innocent avian!!!!) but either way, most avians find humans physically intimidating. It's similar to fearful human attitudes about centaurs, and can have negative consequences for humans working with avians.

PATREON | Runaway to the Stars

[jayrockin]

Cheevwut and Ohwihtiil: why do you keep hooking up?

These two are minor characters in the book I'm currently working on. Ohwitiil is Cheevwut's elderly manager, and the two often pair in spring, despite their clashing personalities.

[jayrockin]

Evicting some older Runaway to the Stars concept art from Patreon. These are some set-pieces and characters from the book I’m currently working on (which you can read the first 70 rough pages of, on Patreon, if that tickles your fancy.)

The device Idrisah wears turns the human approximation of Tiiliitian she speaks into live captions and synthesized audio, for the non-English-fluent avian interns and occasional Dominion of Tiiliit governmental workers who visit Ixion recycling plant. The human temps also sometimes need translation help for the work they do. Gillie does bug ferret translation and liaison for Ixion, but she “works from home” at her and Idrisah’s apartment block in the tiny habitat dome connected to the plant.

The temps that work at the plant tend to be oddballs without a lot of personal connections, since they enter contracts working in the middle of nowhere for between 3 months to a couple years. The permanent employees are even weirder.

PATREON | Runaway to the Stars