We're rectangular prisms with six legs and four arms..
Rectangular prisms, or prisms for short, are magical-mechanical lifeforms or machines animated by their souls, who are a sister species to objects.
Prisms are made out of a hollow steel rectangular prism about the size of a small dog. They are built with internal organs such as their computer brains, radio emitters and readers and synthetic rubber digestive system.
They have six detachable legs made of living rubber that can become wheels. They also have four arms of the same material attached to the four corners of their tops. Their arms rest curled like antenna.
Their faces consist of two remrubber eyes and a flexible rectangular speaker for a mouth. They can move their faces slowly across any steel part of their body to look around without moving or shifting their legs.
Where Do They Come From?
My Mom, duh.
As enchanted machines, prisms do not reproduce themselves, instead relying on a series of sentient factories they call their 'Mother', to advance the prism population all by herself.
Despite being multiple factories on the prism homeplanet Darkmine, the prism Mother has one mind that occupies all of her locations at once.
Prisms are unsure of the origin of their Mom, as she was around before their recorded history.
In theory, they could ask their Mom where she comes from, but prisms are unable to return to their Mother once they leave her.
This is because prisms often become 'naughty' after they leave their Mother, so to protect herself and the future of prisms, she prevents contact of any sort. Prisms who try anyway will have to get past their Mother's army of automatons, but even if they got past that, prisms are built to explode if they get too close to her. It's agreed upon by most prisms that visiting her is impossible.
She still loves them, and this wasn't always the case.
Prism Families
There are few things more revered to a prism than their family.
(More under cut)
When prisms are built, they are brought to life with two other siblings as triplets. Together the three prisms are considered a prism family.
The names of the triplets, given to them by their Mother, are related ideas. Sometimes these ideas are closer related than others (there's only so many things that are phrases of three elements).
Prism triplets might be named something like: Rock, Paper, Scissors. Sweet, Sour, Savory. Assertive, Compliant, Withdrawn. Yellow, Blue, Red. Ink, Color, Sketch. Cola, Water, Alcohol. Sword, Bow, Shield. Eight, Nine, Ten. Etc.
The names, unlike object names, say something about the prism's base personality, especially when in relation to the others in the family.
Healthy prism families are extremely close knit by nature, and treat one another as selflessly as they would treat themselves, sometimes acting as if they were separate parts of one person.
That's not to imply prism families are literally three parts of one person, no, but moreso that the will of one prism will often be repeated by the support of their siblings in a tandem so in sync, an outsider may have believed they were.
Conflicts still arise in healthy manners as expected with any group of people to differing degrees, but prisms who are siblings are naturally compatible so long as they choose to be respectful and loving to one another. Toxic senerios can happen when a prism betrays their family by abusing the natural trust of their siblings to control them as utility rather than family, or even by ignoring/abandoning them. A pair of prism siblings can also make this choice together and abuse and or abandon their third sibling as a black sheep.
It is deeply harmful on a prism's mental health when their family is toxic, threatened, or absent, as they need a family.
If a prism decides to commit to being estranged from their family to escape abuse, they are in serious danger of taking their own life, as the separation and stigma associated can be torture.
Similar depression can also occur in the event of a permanent death in the family, but without nearly as much stigma.
Luckily, it's not all doom and gloom for prisms who are in desperate need of familiar love.
It may be a norm in prism cultures to be emotionally closed off to most people besides their family, but in counter culture prisms allow themselves to take friendships just as seriously, sometimes even to the point of opening their family up to include adopted members. Most of the time it's another prism, but in even rarer cases, other species can become a part of a prism family.
A prism adopting an outsider into their family is the highest honor a prism can give. It is a declaration of undying loyalty, unconditional love, and the utmost respect.
Prism Culture
And what do those families get up to? Making money.
Darkmine Culture:
Darkmine, the prism homeworld, is a miserable place where the grass is gray, the water is thick with trash and gunk, all the trees are dead, and smog from factories and cities fill the skies.
This was also not always the case, but the direct result of prism greed.
Not to be confused for a species trait, it's the cultural norm for prisms on Darkmine to pursue monetary and material gain, and to be seen as superior. (Counter cultures against this norm also exist).
This is because prisms of Darkmine live in a corporatocracy governed in part by rich companies who rise and fall not only by sales and trends but from the wars they rage as well.
Prisms who are obsessed with wealth like their overlords work hard to hope to become 'cool, cold, and superior' like them, but the lifestyle is inherently toxic and mainly benefits the overlords. Prisms who subscribe to this lifestyle are generally antisocial and distrusting to everyone but their families due to their competitive drive. With so many of them, the culture promotes these toxic attitudes to even prisms who think differently. Most prisms appear just downright unfriendly unless you're their sibling!
Unfortunately, throwing one's life away in the pursuit of monetary and material gain works just often enough to solidify the myth that this lifestyle can bring results. The truth, however, is that more than 99% of prisms spend hundreds of years faithfully grinding and never make it out of poverty. (Without the need for sustenance or shelter to stay alive, poverty isn't as bad as it is for organic lifeforms, but still). A truth that ultra rich overlord prisms on Darkmine enjoy greatly.
Space Age Culture:
With Darkmine drained of natural resources, prisms who can afford it turn to better opportunities in space thanks to their advanced technology and ships.
Once separated from their home planet, the laws of Darkmine no longer apply. With this opportunity of lawlessness, prisms in space quickly advanced their technology without public pushback, and use it to orchestrate massive corporate empires. These empires rage wars on foreign planets to harvest their natural resources and enslave their native populations without reproach.
It is the norm for prisms living in space to believe they are a superior species to all other lifeforms, and treat similarly intelligent life worse than animals to advance their technology, or just for fun.
This has given prisms a reputation for brutality amongst people who have witnessed them, but prisms do not exist in a galaxy where planets have united and have contact, so their reputation is relative.
Without easy ways or reasons to communicate from such far distances, prisms back on Darkmine are hardly the wiser of any of the atrocities or reputation they hold to their galactic neighbors.
Diseases and Malfunctions
Why do you look like that..?
Prismites:
Prisms, like objects, can't get sick because of viruses or bacteria, but can be effected by magical diseases, also known as curses.
Prisms, despite only existing thanks to their own magical energy, do not widely believe in magic or curses, which makes them especially vulnerable to magic when they encounter it on other planets or moons.
Many different curses exist that can effect prisms, but one of the most widespread and effective is a prismite curse caused by geyser flowers (because the same flowers turns objects into a monster called a geyser).
When its leaves are disturbed, the geyser flower releases parasites in a small explosion. The parasites, which resemble disembodied hands, either replant themselves, or force themselves into the mouth of an unsuspecting prism (or object). They are designed to have light touches prisms have trouble detecting like a mosquito, so prisms are usually unaware a parasite got in until it is too late. Once inside the prism's body, the parasite becomes a liquid and fuses to the prism's power core. Once fused, it corrupts the prism's magical energy and uses it to multiply inside it.
In a matter of hours a prism will be completely filled with parasites, which triggers a transformation into a prismite.
Prismites have an animalistic style of expression as well as new instincts that can hold them back, but are actually just as intelligent and aware as they were when they were prisms. (If you know remcamen, prismites are like a land dwelling prism recamen).
It's hard to see them as intelligent or aware when they first transform though, as fear often leads newly cursed prismites to lash out with their new instincts. Terrified prisms will often shoot at prismites to defend themselves, which causes prismites to explode, releasing all the parasites inside the prismite.
Prismites who survive encounters with fearful prisms tend to follow their prism families in hopes they can be reunited. Because of space age culture's beliefs on prism superiority, it rarely ends well.
Identity Signal Psychosis:
Prisms all look alike, so how do they tell one another apart?
Like ants giving off chemical pheromone signals, prisms give off and read signals through radio waves that they use to identify one another. They can turn off discoverability at any time if they don't want to be known.
The information is basic: name, location, a unique symbol, and that they are a prism.
The last part of the information can mess with prisms' perception thanks to an oversight in their programming.
To a prism, anything that is alive and emits an identity signal is a prism, even if the creature emitting the signal looks nothing like a prism.
This isn't because prisms are stupid (although they certainly can be), as depending on how different a fake prism looks and acts to a real one, prisms will be deeply unnerved by the fake even if they don't understand why. It's not a perfect disguise, it's an uncanny valley to them.
Prisms would be better equipped to identify fakes if they were aware that identity signal psychosis can happen, but the phenomenon is so improbable that it's near unknown even to parties who could benefit from it.
The only way to get an emitter is to harvest it from a prism corpse still intact while having the prism's powercore also intact and powering it.
Knowing this enough to use it as an advantage would probably take a lot of macabre experimentation and an understanding of prisms they themselves do not yet possess.
Thank you for reading!!!!
If you have any questions, don't be afraid to go to my ask box, as I love talking about my ocs and worlds!
Miscellaneous!! :]
• Prisms are able to bring each other back from the dead using recovery tech, but the ultra rich hoard this technology for themselves and have prisms become forever indentured to them by having the cost to use a recovery device astronomically large. Prisms who lose a family member often feel guilty if they choose not to bring a member back, sometimes enough to take their own lives or become indebted eventually anyway.
• Prisms don't need sustenance, but they are sweet tooths who love sugary foods and junk foods. Unlike organic lifeforms, a sugary diet doesn't make them sick.
• On the gross side, when prisms need to get rid of food waste they reach inside their mouths to their organs where they detach their rectum and pull it out of their bodies. Once out, they clean it in private using personal hygiene tools. This is gross, but is easy and normal to them, as their mouth is the only entry and exit in their body.
• Jazz and big bands are the most popular form of music on Darkmine.
• Prisms are biologically asexual and don't have romantic feelings or sex drives, as they just aren't built with the equipment to feel that way. Nevertheless, they still have just as deeply loving and meaningful relationships even without these feelings. This is because I think it makes sense, but also that I am similar as an asexual myself.
• Prisms have no real sexes/male/female, but will be born mentally assigned with a gender as an evolutionary vestige/remnant. They can easily change this at any time and it's not a big deal.
• An ideal depiction of Darkmine's architecture favors a non-exclusive mix of industrial, brutalist and art deco styles depending on the area.
• Very few animals still exist on Darkmine, so prisms visiting other worlds for the first time are often terrified of everything that moves, or try talking to animals who can't comprehend speech.
• Prisms were created by me sometime in 2016 or 2017 for my BFDI fanfiction called "Golf Ball and The Yoyle Humans Three" as antagonists. Their names were Eins Zwei and Drei, and were inspired by IDFB.
• Prisms are diverse to use in all sorts of stories.
Sometimes they are cruel aliens so powerful, mysterious and detached that they're like space demons or space fae abducting innocent people and laughing while they force a molten metal rod through your skull and eat doritos and figure out what movie they'll watch that night.
Sometimes they host object shows.
Sometimes they're just worker bees in a strange and terrifying world trying to make a living, love their family and find themselves amidst hatred and chaos.
Sometimes they're egotistical weakling idiots who think they can rule forces that cannot be controlled. Their punishment for this transgression, is to be consumed by the ironic hells they tried to contain, throwing them so far from what they know and who they are that the only way to escape will be to repent and beg for forgiveness and rescue or be obliterated. Not all places they try to conquer are weaker than them. Some are just.. waiting to get under their skin and take them.
If you're following for Rabbid Guy, you might not know that for around four years I wrote a Battle For Dream Island AU fanfiction series.
These fics, called the "YH3" series, centered around the idea that objects are magical creatures that share a soul with a living person that loved them before they came to life.
Most of these people were humans who, during the time of the show BFDI, are dead because of the introduction of the very same magically charged chemical that brings objects to life.
It has four books. The first two books "Golf Ball and The Yoyle Humans Three", and "Pencil's Personification" are generally speculative light dramas with occasional humor centering around the relationships between objects and humans, while the other two books "The Weight of Time" and "The Poison in Boinks" are far more angsty speculations on how characters with these origins face horrifying problems unique to them in their futures after the show. Direct examples being the inner conflict immortality brings, as well as facing a horrifying alien threat 2763⁷ times more terrifying than death.
More below 👇👇👇
My personal favorite of these is "The Poison in Boinks" because, firstly, it's my most recent finished book and better reflects my current ability, but mostly because I think it's a really powerful thriller about sacrifice and integrity that is for the most part, from the perspective of a sentient zombie. (No shade to my other children😏😏😏.)
I bring these up because it's been around five years since I've finished my last book in the series, and yet it still gets new reads/views every day! :] Yippie!!!
I am so grateful! You have no idea.
BFDI's canon lore has changed a lot since I wrote it, so a lot of things are inaccurate now (saved only by its label as an AU) not to mention the grammar and more embarrassing, the occasional poor writing choices that exist because I was not as good of a writer as I am now. (The first YH3 book was my second finished book ever!!!).
Yet despite all the errors and shortsighted writing decisions teenage me made, I'm very grateful to have patient readers who saw past that and connected to the moments I was writing the story for, because we were all really in luck to get that far.
Without the feedback of fans I wouldn’t of ever finished four books in four years like I did, or probably wouldn't have grown as much as I am to writing what I am now. I think that’s fantastic.
Not everybody has similar experiences, but from what I've learned from mine, is that you can make meaningful art at any stage in your journey. Believe it or not, there are patient people that wanna hear what you have to say even with errors present. Some ideas are more popular than others (I'm far from the most famous BFDI fanfiction.. I think?) but I think if you love what you're making, other people are sure to see that and love it too.
