I finally came back to Derrick to do some maintenance. Turns out opening your mouth immediately after leaving saltwater is still gonna get something damaged- and this time, it happens to be the voice box. Go figure, that's one of the most important parts! Hope he can fix it before that storm rolls in, it looks nasty.
This pic was done for the Hetherev prompt, "Little Mermaid: you can't speak all of a sudden."
I joined an art Discord and instead of bringing Bori (which was so tempting), I brought Derrick! However, I needed to make an updated reference of him- and given I'm giving him a hard reset involving an original story and world of mine, he's not fully robot anymore. He's a Wermitt now! I'll put details beneath a readmore to avoid stretching out folks' dashboards.
They're an original species of cephalopod-like creatures that once hid in cramped hiding spots and ambushed prey, but when the prey learned to avoid those hiding spots, they started to carry those spots somewhere else to protect their soft bodies. Eventually, as they evolved and started adapting to land, they learned to make more and more advanced 'shells' for themselves, until finally those could lure prey into a false sense of security of thinking they're among their own, then striking.
The secretions they use to glue the pieces together grant the pieces an inexplicable flexibility; with enough coats, any substance can bend, stretch, and move about as though it were musculature. When they cannot find any more of a given prey species -or when they've outgrown the shell they've assembled- they'll start building a new one and leave the old behind, possibly for another Wermitt to inhabit.
They eventually turned their eyes to the Voluxians (vo-LOO-shuns), another sophont species of their home planet who had greater technological advancements, and started to make shells mimicking them. However, shell materials were very different in Voluxian settlements, so some Wermitts returned to the wild, or settled for encounters in more easily adaptable locations. Those persistent Wermitts eventually learned how to manipulate processed materials such as plastic, rubber, and even metal!
The Voluxians proved to be significantly harder to trick into thinking they were one of them, and in studying them, the Wermitts came to learn about their form of community, culture, language, and most of their advancements. This led to a shift in their approach from hunting to sincere contact, but by then the damage had already been done; too many Voluxians had been hunted, and their reputation as house-shredding menaces and fae-like trickery had poisoned the well.
Most went into hiding, not wishing to be hunted for something that was in their nature. Some Voluxian communities were more open to contact, and established trade and collaboration with them, but those communities were in a stark minority. When the Voluxians started to enter the Space Age, it was a nightmare trying to prevent Wermitts from sneaking aboard as stowaways; they wanted off the planet for their own safety, and could squeeze into the very control panels if they had to. It led to a kill-on-site policy, but this didn't stop colonies of Wermitts from successfully stealing -and launching- a few ships from their neighbors.
Those who landed on the planet Vestapol found a world ravaged by drastic climate disasters and the aftermath of an apocalyptic war, with few survivors still around to pick up the pieces, and even fewer hidden away in vast bunkers sealed from the surface centuries prior. Not wanting a repeat of their history with the Voluxians, the Wermitts elected to adapt to this world and help it heal- and in making new shells for themselves to resemble the most advanced species known to them on this planet, they can clean it up, too.
Derrick, being a 22nd generation Vestapolish Wermitt (they have a lifespan of 40 years on average), has very little knowledge of his people's history on their home planet beyond the basics of being hunted by another people and driven off of their homeworld. He wonders from time to time if reparations or fresh starts could be possible, but at least acknowledges that it's idealistic musing at best.
