blood being frequently described as having a "coppery smell" in fiction is kind of funny considering that there is a metallic component to blood and it's not copper
in fact if your blood smells or tastes like copper you probably have more urgent things to worry about than it being outside your body. it's probably better that it's not inside you anymore actually.
story where blood is described as smelling or tasting "coppery" and it's actually early foreshadowing that all the characters are suffering from heavy metal poisoning
I've been watching Lexx. I love how whenever they're attacked the ship just says "ouch" in the exact tone of voice as someone stubbing their toe but it doesn't actually hurt, they just said it because they expected it to.
top 5 ancient artistic cultures (not sure about phrasing. yknow like "jomon style" or "anglo saxon art")
the jade creatures of Hongshen, a late Neolithic culture of northeast China contemporaneous w the latest stages of Sredny Stog and just about all of Yamnaya. attempts to find analogues to these critters in nature have borne little fruit, not least bc the Hongshen appear to had been perfectly capable of pursuing realism in their art – when they wanted to. this article argues the creatures draw inspiration from the shape of human bone and cartillage, like so:
the rest go as follows:
2. figurines of Bronze Age Scandinavia. I just think these look really aesthetically pleasing. look at those curves! idk what to think about attempts to interpret the figurines as depicting historically attested Nordic deities. the most famous artefact to survive from the Nordic Bronze Age, the Trundholm Chariot, seems to depict a myth of only marginal significance to later Norse civilisation
3. the erotic pottery of the Moche, predecessors of the Chimor, who flourished on the coast of northwestern Peru prior to their conquest by the Inca. this post goes a little into the various theories concerning the purpose of the so-called "porn pottery" – I like Larco Hoyle's idea that the pottery (none of which appears to depict penis-in-vagina intercourse) was used by the Moche in order to teach and show methods of natural birth control. but ofc there's a direct analogue in depictions of sodomy on Greek pottery, which doesn't really seem to had served a didactic purpose
4. the Thinkers of Hamangia - not much of a "style" given that it's only these two figurines, I suppose, but these two are my favourite sculptures to come out of Neolithic Europe by far. could write a whole post about them, honestly; definitely among my favourite pieces of prehistoric art in general. afaict, the figurines are nowadays mostly interpreted as a prehistoric equivalent to Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? - I personally prefer to think of them as analogous to his Grape Harvest at Arles
5. cosmetic palettes of late Neolithic Egypt, or what is properly known as the Naqada III phase of Protodynastic Egypt. I just find them to be really pretty – and I kind of love the idea of decorating what is basically a make-up container with depictions of your country's military conquests. the most famous of these palettes is the Narmer Palette; my personal favourite is the Bull Palette, shown on the left. I'd totally use them to mix my kohl
My friends' and mutuals' pets should bear the curse of immortality. They should wander the Earth as eternal specters, witnessing every joy and folly the planet has to offer, until its last fruit drops from its last bough. When the very stone boils away beneath a geriatric sun, their pets should leap the secret paths known to the cats of Ulthar, and take their place among gods and stranger mysteries.
This doom I place upon them, and I hope they all have a good day.
Hello everyone please be kind to me as I basically become this over Vena's lines and cope with having very little lore on them rn and spending two hours going through all the voice lines I had access to
BEFORE WE START
I am aware that the new protos give lore and more lines when they are your railjack crew, but as my railjack isn't even high enough to hire them and the wiki has not been updated with all their lines yet, I am going based off the Garuda lore tablets we got and her voicelines and some clues from around her ship, okay? Okay.
SPOILERS AHEAD
First thing's first... I don't think Entrati had anything to do with these protos.
Crazy opening, I know, but based off of some of Vena's in and out of transference voicelines, there is zero mention of Entrati or anyone like him. You know what there is though?
Mentions of Cephalon Parvos. Specifically, lines like she knew him personally and already had knowledge of transference and the tenno. Specifically being able to perform transference as protos.
When you transfer out of Vena, there is a chance she'll say this:
Hm, that's interesting. How would he know about the uncomfortableness that can come with coming in and out of transference?
Vena has a lot of lines about money, payment, about how expensive she is and how you're wasting her time by running around when she can be earning credits.
(I didn't get screenshots of these, I've been writing them all down, but-)
"You are either very wealthy or very stupid for leaving me here like this."
"I'm. Expensive. Leaving me here is expensive. Did you hear me?!"
"Time is money!"
"I hope I was expensive."
"I am a debt worth bleeding for."
"Time is money. Money is blood. Let's go collect."
"Going to have to pick up the pace if we're going to meet our quota!"
"Every minute you're gone, you pay me in blood. I don't care whose."
"There are only two gods. Blood and Money. You just died at the hands of one!"
"A debt. Paid."
"We are about to add a new line to our ledger."
"That one has a debt to pay."
Which is very Corpus of her, isn't it?
But there's one line she says that really sticks out to me.
"Once a puppet, always a puppet… Just more literal now."
From all of her money talk and violence talk, it kinda sounds like A Sister of Parvos talk, doesn't it? And it's interesting that when you're fighting Vena, who's the mini boss?
A Sister of Parvos.
Still following me? Thanks!
Let's veer for a second and talk about the Garuda tablets and how Vena acts and speaks, and how Orion especially acts around her.
Throughout the Garuda tablets that we can find around Vena's area, we meet an unnamed Archimedean who has been tasked with creating a Garuda strain for who we can assume is Nitokh.
In her first tablet she is on the outside level headed, but nervous on the inside. She's careful about her words and instantly feels her stomach turn when she says what she thinks is the wrong answer to the soldier and turns herself to make her words seem ignorant and innocent to 'appeal to his vanity.'
But she's not a nervous wreck, just nervous. Who wouldn't be when facing one of high orokin?
This Archiedean is smart and she is well acquainted with blood and war. She knows who and what she is.
"Former Lorist aide, I believe. Extensive combat experience. Scraped our troops back together at significant personal risk. No stranger to carnage… well, that'll help you keep your head in this place. The Executor has a certain reputation."
This strain was never meant to create a good warframe in the soldier sense, it was always meant to be something blood thirsty and with a clouded mind.
"Yes," I croaked. I struggled to cough the words out and they came all at once, like a pellet. "But he will not be himself! The Warframes are beset by madness, all of them. Perhaps, if I deliberately impede the neuroptics, I may be able to temper it in the forge..."
She gripped me by the throat.
"You will do no such thing," she breathed, and I felt the hot stink of her, charnel and close. "The madness is the best part."”
A few drops on the predictive lens, commingled with the samples of the consort's own blood that the Executor had provided, allowed the device to model what manner of entity would ultimately result. Tall, regal, hideous.
Then as we continue with the tablets, her nerves turn, growing into disgust and sick sympathy for a stranger. She is coming to the realization that she's just a pawn in a game she has no money in.
She knew she was dead she walked through this door and as they said above, she was all about risk. She cares about people by the way she risked herself in war, but she doesn't want to die either, at least not by someone else's hands, not tortured the same way Nitokh hurt those birds.
There is no regret. I was a condemned woman from the moment I arrived. My only freedom is to secure my own execution.
I have been used all my life. Caged by these proud golden birds. But in accepting this bitter blessing, I will finally fly free. What do I care if my freedom lasts no longer than the dawn? I shall know it, taste it, in all its fleeting reality.
In her last tablet, we see how her speech changes. She is more short, less put together, her sentences are no longer long and she's obviously holding onto what's left of her mind. It's only when she starts to go into the Garuda talk does she start to get violent, bloody, painful.
The agony is exquisite. Marching ants inch through my veins. My skin blisters and sloughs off in plasticated scrolls.
I am no Orokin. I will not leave them tormented and twisting, beaks gaping, gasping and screaming. I will bring decisive death. Swift and sweet. Final.
The Executor will have her assassin, but not the one she imagined. They will break down the door, Garuda will unfurl her claws, and the crimson thirst, oh, it shall be legendary. I shall stride through her hall clotted with gore and feathers.
I wonder how many I will slaughter before they take me down.
I wonder if one of them will be her.
The Executor wanted blood. And she shall have it.”
Now we go to Vena.
Vena, for all her talk is... strangely normal. She talks and jokes just fine when she's not in the middle of battle, jokes about not touching each other's asses in the box while you're heading to Ryoku's ship and gets annoyed with people attacking her while she's hacking.
She makes jokes and teases Ryoku and *you* as you work together. and hell, she's a good captain of her ship. She knows exactly what to do and where to go to make him hurt and to get under his skin so he puts his guard down and messes with his men.
For someone who's supposedly supposed to be about nothing but bloodlust, she's still got a lot of personality outside of that!
At least, until she starts fighting... Then she starts to lose that.
Her voice acting becomes shaking, strained, painful, she laughs and lot and also... moans a lot, but a lot of the times it sounds almost... painful.
She becomes less Vena and more the blood queen she is known to be.
She sounds like she becomes unstable. Clouded.
Almost like a certain Archiedean, who starts to lose herself in her bloody imagination once she starts getting ready for battle.
Hell, if you do her emote, you can hear her a gasp for air, like it's painful and BONES CRACKING.
STILL READING? I PROMISE WE'RE GETTING SOMEWHERE.
So what the fuck does all this mean?
I think Vena and Ryoku were both close to Parvos, but I think specifically Vena was a Sister of Parvos.
She has a huge thing with loyalty and twisted love much like the sisters do with Parvos himself, and embraced her change more than Ryoku did. She thought she was doing a good thing, being a loyal sister and listening to him like any good sister would.
So if great and wonderful Parvos gave her the chance to be something more, a better tool for him, why wouldn't she take it?
I think much like our Archiedean friend, Vena was really smart. She was a decent person, at least as much as she could be for the environment she was in. I mean, who knows what the Corpus are like twenty years into the future, but anyway-
The Garuda strain twisted her loyalty and her idea of love for both people and battle and made it into something worse.
Truly, I don't think Orion would still stick around her this long if she was really this bad all this time. I think Orion might have known Vena as a completely different person. In the cutscene he is in front of her, only glancing at her and then right back at Stalker and he's almost leaning away from her.
Hell, yknow what he says to her in the missions?
He WANTS her to practice. To get that bloodlust out for a little bit so maybe she can come back with a clearer mind.
Vena was a good soldier. She cared about Orion and Orion cared for her and maybe she always had a crush on him, hell, maybe before the serum it was mutual at one point!
But we know that the Garuda serum drives someone mad. It twists and turns their body and mind and makes their desires something extreme and terrible and uncomfortable.
This isn't the woman Orion knew. She's a stranger now, but she's still his mentor and once his friend and look at how twisted she's become from their younger days.
He can't love her like he used to (in any way that means, family, friend, something more, something less) and the serum won't LET HER love him any other way.
I will leave you with this. Do you know what Vena does if you revive her? She YELLS at you. She growls out her words like they are betrayals.
I’m going to level with you guys. I love the Elder Things. I love them so much. They are hands down one of my favorite alien races. They’re a real demonstration of how far you can take speculative biology and non-anthropomorphism in sci-fi. Someday, I hope to see more people producing Elder Things art, headcanons, and OCs.
But of course, it’s hard to feel qualified to depict sapient creatures so nonhuman, and perhaps that scares people off. That’s why I’m going to introduce some ideas for emotes and body language that you could incorporate into your stories; hopefully it can help us all relate to these beasties a little bit better.
Greeting
The most effusive form of greeting is extending one or more wings to wave at your target. Doing this less energetically can also constitute something like a salute. Either way, it tends to draw attention
Briefly turning all five eyestalks on someone is a good way to acknowledge that they have your attention
Hooking the crynoid arms together is a reflex retained from ocean dwelling, originally to stick with one another in strong currents like sea otters. It expresses both trust and the immediate intention to spend time with one another
Brushing the head cilia against one another is an intimate form of greeting that can mean something like a kiss, a hug, or a butt grab depending how it’s done. The etiquette varies between land and water (water dwellers are generally more dependent on physical touch in communication)
Eyestalk Manners
Having five unconnected eyes allows for the easy division of attention, but how you display your attention will obviously have social ramifications. As a rule of tentacle:
All five eyes means something has your undivided attention and can even constitute staring
Four eyes is slightly less intensive
Three eyes means you have the majority of your attention trained on something. In conversation, you generally point three eyes at the speaker and keep two on your environment
Two eyes means something is interesting but you are distracted from it
One eye is the edge of your attention. If you keep only one eye on someone in conversation, you’ll be accused of ignoring them
Arching one's eyestalk to look down on someone is condescending, the equivalent of a smirk
Happiness
Elder things at ease tend to uncurl. Their tentacles may hang loose and their wings may fold just slightly out of their ridges
They may also emit a low whistle from their vocal organs, signaling contentment. This is done subconsciously
Signifiers around happiness are less dramatically obvious than in human cultures, and Elder Things are likely to just inform each other outright that they are feeling well
Fear
We know from the murals in AtMoM that Elder Things recoil when afraid
Presumably they raise their eyestalks and tentacles and physically draw back
A scared Elder Thing may also begin extending its wings in preparation to fly away, or begin shuffling its foot stalks
Some may curl into a sort of fetal position by folding all of their extremities to their body
Anger/Aggression
Elder Thing culture doesn’t tend to make as much of a distinction between fear and anger except that with anger you feel confident enough to act
But being aggressive for personal gain is considered distinct and uses much of the same body language
An Elder Thing conveying “I will hurt you” makes itself big
It partially unfolds its wings, lifts its eyestalks, and extends the crinoid arms
It may emit a threatening whistle, and its mouths may open
When their mouths open, the threat isn’t to bite you like for a mammal. Rather, in the same way or anger expressions come from primate threat displays, an Elder Thing’s posturing comes from the actions of a sea creature preparing to overpower and eat a smaller creature
Sadness
Sad Elder Things are droopy
And they pull in on themselves
Elder Things aren’t prone to wallowing in pity like humans are, but they certainly know disappointment
And discouragement can make states of torpor highly appealing
Fugue
Elder Things have certain emotions not really translatable to the human psyche in as ready a way
One of the more prominent is something adjacent to dissociation
Elder Things are good at spending long periods of time doing something rote, where a mammal would struggle with boredom
It helps them focus on things like space travel or meditation and is probably related to their somewhat vegetative nature
This state is characterized by methodical, relaxed movements and dilation of the pupils
Sleepy
Elder Things sleep and otherwise go into torpor by tucking in all their extremities and folding the eyestalks against the neck
When they feel lethargic from exhaustion or extreme cold, they will begin to move towards this state, curling in on themselves
Their eyes close when sleeping, so their cilia perk up to keep them somewhat alert
Telepathy
Elder Things are advanced in the psionic arts, and may be able to send weak empathic signals that way, especially if they specialize in Shoggoth handling
This is not a primary mode of communication, however
Sending more coherent ideas requires technique and dedication far less convenient than simply talking
Shoggoths
While the Shoggoths take some of their expression and most of their speech from their creators, their body language is entirely different
Their polymorphic modes of communication may get their own write up soon, because I love Shoggoths too
Catch me being a modern-day cyberpirate screaming up alongside you on the 405 in my mad max car with half a bitcoin farm's worth of RAM in the backseat as I hack your Bitchless Towyota™ device and steal the boat you're towing right off the back bumper of the tesla your dad bought you
As i roar into the sunset you have to swerve* to avoid the small flotilla of hacked Towyota devices trailing behind me
(*in fact you do not swerve because you're on hands-free driving to go along with your hitch-free towing so you can only watch helplessly as your tesla mistakes your stolen booty for a small child and accelerates crashing into it and killing you instantly)
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
blakekathryn
discoholicmusic
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
