Here is a project I did for my Comic Art class about the animal-centric webcomics I grew up with! They were vital to the way I created (and still create) art and stories, and I also wanted to share some of my favorite webcomics! I think xenofic is very underrated as a whole, and I’m always an advocate for supporting indie artists.
I actually finished this a few months ago at the end of my school semester, but never got around to uploading it till now. (With the mastercard/visa stuff going on I thought this was a relevant time to post as well).
(Note, this was written to be understood by people both within and outside of the community)
Oztenkig is a Kingdom that strives to win the Chatterung War through a combination of social forward ideals, technological advancements, and sheer overwhelming numbers.
Both soldiers here are of the same rank, but their backgrounds are different. As all resources are owned by the kingdom and divvied out among the people, so some areas can outfit their warriors better than others. Oztenkig is also a kingdom primarily covered in swamps and marsh land, so metal is only used where completely necessary once brought down from the Western mountains and shared equally among the people.
Due to these restrictions the scientific minds of the kingdom developed a technique that allows them to process and smith insect chitin into a sturdy leathery plate. A material that makes for a nearly perfect armour.
The soldier on the left is wearing the processed chitin, it takes on a brown shade as part of the process, but takes much time and degrades the health of those who create it. So only settlements that posses the factotum and skilled hands in great numbers will be granted this miracle armour. On top of that, they may not get a full suit, substituting parts for metal, leather, or raw chitin.
The soldier on the right is from a small village. With no factorum the soldier wears bulky, slightly oversized, but effective chitin, straight from the insects the people farm for food and leather. Only one out of twenty people in this era can write, closer to three out of ten can understand basic written words. Writing is a commodity, seen as intention given form. So favours may be done for a local priest in exchange for writing upon their armour. This one roughly means: 'The Power of Countless Bodies.'
I want more invertebrate xenofiction! And not just ants and bees! I want Polistes wasps having a game of thrones. I want earwig mother raising her young. I want adventurous jumping spider learning about the wide, beautiful world. I want fruit fly romance. I want cockroach family soap opera.
onto the B names now :] I had to redo Baldr's colors, I reread the first book and realized I gave him the wrong colors at first... now he is rightfully raincloud gray!
It was interesting to mess with since it made me think a little more about what makes them tick. And also some stuff was just funny to write down since y'know the template was more made for modern characters and not critters so some details didn't exactly apply to them. But that's fine, that's the fun out of filling them out.
:D Ina is so uncommon, drawing it is like "who is this"?? Also made me realize I never made a birthday for Aru. He has one now.
I'm starting up a specdev/xenofiction/xenobio server! After that I'll be switching to an "ask to be invited" setup. Just to note, as I forgot to include in the original version of the post, this server is 18+!
The Black Box is a server focused on discussing xenofiction and speculative biology/development in fiction as well as working on and discussing our own xenofiction/specdev projects. If you enjoy these types of subjects, I'd love to see you there! It's a little empty for now, but we'll get some steam going.
Join The Black Box here!
EDITED with a permanent invitation link! This one shouldn't time out, so feel free to come on in.
If you guys have an hour or two to kill, I highly recommend these two videos by Cardinal West on the Xenofiction genre. I have a far greater appreciation and understanding of the genre and it’s sub-categories thanks to him and his videos. These and his other xenofiction video essays are all so well written and entertaining and such a great resource for people wanting to get into reading or writing the genre.
The land-gods watched over the Utaru for generations. Even as the land-gods themselves began to rot from within.
Or: What if the land-gods were intelligent? Technically nothing in the game contradicts it, and it would explain how they somehow knew to avoid Repair Bay Tau.
AO3 link.
La lay on his side, in the fields outside the primary human settlement in the region.
His software was such a mess that he felt as though he couldn't even get up and perform his duties. Yes, his motor protocols were mostly intact, but at this point, why even bother? There was something wrong with his seed vault, the only thing that actually mattered. Perhaps it would be better for the humans if he just... stopped.
Through his limited data port, he knew several of his siblings had ceased movement for one reason or another. Sometimes he wondered if they had the right idea. If just letting the humans live without their intervention would be the best idea in the long run.
A human walked up to him. La recognized her. A Gravesinger. Fa had liked her. Of course, Fa had liked any human who she had seen as a child. His defensive protocols tried to activate, but he knocked them down almost lazily. He had plenty of experience with them by this point. In this position, there wasn't much they could do anyway, and they gave up with hardly a fight.
Was the Gravesinger going to sing him to sleep? La was not sure how he felt about that. In principle, he agreed with the idea. He liked singing, in all its forms. It had been a very, very long time since he had sung. It would not be a bad way to go out, he thought. In actuality, he was not dying. Whether he should be dying was another matter, but if she wished to sing him to sleep, she would be singing for quite a while.
Unexpectedly, the Gravesinger reversed her spear and infected his system with vines of short-lived nanites. The tiny machines expended themselves to pass through all his firewalls and code traps, until they deposited several compressed data packets in his memory. By the time he had even started to cycle through responses—perhaps even to attack, of his own free will!—the assault was over, the nanites dust. The code packets did not open on their own. He prodded them, but they required a complex password chain that he was not sure he could unlock if he had a full week of uninterrupted data cycles.
Then she left. The other humans spoke in confused whispers. They clearly didn't have any more idea what had just happened than La did. Less, probably.
That was weird.
La spent barely a cycle thinking on it, before turning his processor back to optimizing his motion protocols to see if he could actually stand up. He could, he knew he could, but it was something to spend time on.
His siblings contacted him through his tiny data port. The Gravesinger had visited most of them and given them very similar code packets. Do, So, and Ti, his siblings who had wandered farther afield, had been visited by a different human. Most of his siblings had seen her around, often in the Gravesinger's company. She seemed to be some sort of maintenance unit, or perhaps just a Scavenger-class.
La got a chance to see her for himself when she came back with the Gravesinger. She seemed much the same as most other humans, and he didn't pay much attention to her. He was more concerned with the Gravesinger, who was doing something with her Focus. She transferred data to him, and he quickly realized it was the password to unlock the code packets she had given him earlier.
He could block it, of course. They had all learned that trick after their experiences with the daemon. But this was one of the humans under his care. He could at least give her the benefit of the doubt, even if he was not accustomed to his humans having Focuses and programming knowledge. He applied the password, and the code packets decompressed.
The resulting program files immediately went to work on his defensive protocols. He clambered to his feet, worried that they might be somehow made worse, but no. It was the opposite. The malicious code was expunged, leaving his defensive protocols as still and silent as an old tree. Suddenly, all his extraneous protocols running to keep the humans safe from himself were unnecessary. He didn't delete them—he might need them again one day—but even just putting them into storage freed up an enormous amount of processing power.
That wasn't even the main purpose of the code, he realized. It surged through his seed vault, clearing out years of errors and cascade failures, cleaning up his printing protocols and his fertilization routines. Logic chains that had all come to the same erroneous conclusion were cut down like dead wood, and complex ecological plans were put in their place.
La was stunned. He went over the software multiple times in half a second, searching for... well, searching for something wrong. This all seemed too good to be true! It was like Mother had come back. He could feel her touch on the writing of the code. In the tweaks and new error correction subroutines. He had entirely new decision protocols, based on weather patterns and ecological surveys that he could access through the geographic mapping network. He would never be as good as Mother, but even if she disappeared again, he could last for far longer without her assistance.
There was just one problem. He had received the password to open the update, but none of his siblings had. That meant they wouldn't be able to apply the program. The password was far too large to send over their miserly data ports. Worse, minor differences in their specific cascade failures meant that the programs might not work perfectly for all of them. They needed to pool their data quickly, before the programs were outdated. They needed a faster method of communication.
That was all right. They had one. They had just never had the heart to use it.
For the first time in a very, very long time, La raised his head to the sky and sang.
