With MerMay coming to a close I decided to finally draw a rough concept for an alien species from The Greater Universe - the Qik (KEEK) featuring an all-new side character who will appear later in the story, Wenkye (WEN-KEY)!!
The Qik are a very mermaid/siren-like species from the planet Nauticalia, an ocean world with no continents, only small, scattered islands, and oceans that are miles and miles deep. The Qik are designed for life underwater, and cannot survive very long on land - although they can (and actually need to) breathe air, through special blowholes on their chests. Their language consists mainly of flashes from the bioluminescent patches on their heads/torsos/tails and hand movements, but does involve some clicking and whistling noises, like dolphins on Earth. Their senses of sight, hearing, and even smell are superpowered, much stronger than most other sophonts, highly adapted for life underwater where light, sounds, and scents can be harder to detect. Their tail flukes are very important to their ability to swim, but they can fold these flukes in and use their prehensile tails to grab things, much like a seahorse. All Qik are, by definition, genderfluid, and can change sex at will - therefore gender norms are much less defined in Qik culture, to the point of practically being nonexistent.
Wenkye is going to be a very, very minor character, but I already have some interesting ideas for how they’ll interact with our protagonists, so keep an eye out for them in TGU updates! (Which I’ve definitely been working on lately and absolutely didn’t take a break sometime and March and haven’t touched it since… 🫠)
