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The Green Knight

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Oblivion by Haiyang

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Black-backed Jackals (Lupulella mesomelas), get into a squabble, family Canidae, Tanzania

photograph by Ward Poppe

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• just a prey

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The Common Chupacabra (F.N. 03761, I. gastroferrugo ) is a common sight for paranatural workers of all stripes. Occupying an ecological role not dissimilar to a fox or other mid-sized canid, they are often dealt with in very similar ways and thus hold minimal threat to humans.

While their feeding habits can be gruesome, chupacabras remain skittish around humanity and avoid areas of human contact. Indeed, the titular "goat-sucking" that they are so named for is only known from specimens who were already injured or displaced, and thus habituated to humans and their livestock for lack of more suitable prey items. They can, and often do, act defensively if backed into a corner, but the most common chupcabra defense mechanism is that of flight and avoidance, only taking more drastic actions if forced to or if young are threatened.

It is because of this that paranatural agencies will commonly use them as training material, assigning newcomers lost, confused, hurt, sick, displaced, or habituated chupacabras as their first mission. Due to their straightforward nature and lack of threat to humans, many hold positive views of chupacabras, some even using their local morphological strain as mascots.

It is not uncommon to see chupacabras in captivity, as they take well to basic training for veterinary assistance, research purposes, or education among the agencies who keep them. While far from the training associated with domestics such as the dog, chupacabras can still be taught using methods spearheaded in zoos, and are often food and toy motivated. Small rodents, pre-killed, or disposable pouches filled with warmed blood are often used as treats, and enrichment is provided through offerings of different sources of blood.

Chupacabras are sangivores, and thus primarily feed on blood. However, this is where the subtle gradient between sangivory and typical carnivory becomes apparent, as certain morphological strains of chupacabra will vary in their feeding methods. Certain strains local to parts of South America or Northern Africa will inject a digestive enzyme into their prey to liquefy their innards. Other strains found in Arctic locations or high altitudes will demonstrate a lack of preference towards food choice, consuming solid parts of the muscle and organs alongside their primary target of blood. Other strains, most commonly associated with Oceania, have a "messy" feeding style that will force the entire head into the body cavity, both manually blending the flesh into a liquid, and in more accidental consumption of solid matter. Most chupacabras will target prey that is a fraction of their own body size, but will readily bring down prey targets as large as deer as well.

The most notable trait of chupacabras is their large variety of morphological strains. Those who are not yet familiar with the paranatural may assume that there are many different species of chupacabra and that they are an ancient lineage which has experienced much speciation.

They are not. Early researchers made the same mistake in categorizing them, assigning the chupacabras they were most familiar with as the Common Chupacabra and providing a list of, now defunct, names for the other varieties that they saw. Some speculated that chupacabras were not, in fact, a genus, but that they were a niche that multiple different animals had specialized into.

Later research proved them to be wrong. All chupacabra are a single species, fully capable of interbreeding with every other member of their species, regardless of the differences in morphology, reproductive strategy, or feeding methods. The variety of morphological strains observed, then, is a highly visible demonstration of chupacabra relatedness and gene flow. A population will be equally related to each other, and thus arrive at a standard for morphology, but as this population is split up and gene flow is disrupted, more isolated populations will begin to veer wildly from their initial appearance.

Indeed, this has been used to form maps of chupacabra genealogy and movement patterns, as well as serving as excellent indicators for other monster activity. The most isolated populations can appear nothing at all like their forebears, due in large part thanks to their supernatural skills of adaptation. All chupacabra have a high degree of mutation when they breed, with a high number of these mutations being not only survivable, but thriveable, and occurs with a high prediction for environmental stresses. It is commonly accepted that local strains will remain close to their initial body plan with minimal variation, but research is still being done on the genetic drift over time, as well as reports of sudden, abrupt change in response to environmental catastrophe.

This is exaggerated even further when chupacabra from only distantly related populations interbreed. Further research needs to be conducted.

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A little sketch and blurb for a Monster of the Week game I help co-DM with @carthus-flame-arc! One of our players took home a chupacabra joey last time, and so I thought it best I draw some growth charts for it.

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Mountain Coyote & Northwestern Wolf | James Yule

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"I had not touched a cat in 15 years when an orange kitten wandered over to sit with me in the grass one day. I was left without adequate words to describe that experience. It reminded me that I am alive. It instilled in me a raw, unbridled happiness that I had never felt before, not even as a child. 

I have spent many hours with those cats, and still I am amazed at how perfectly they reject everything it means to be in prison. They are playful and unselfconscious, curious and silly, soft and cuddly.

Sometimes it is even more interesting to watch my fellow prisoners interact with our cats. All those hard cases doing hard time melt like butter on a summer sidewalk when they visit the felines, feed them, watch them chase the birds and bees, and when they make toys to entice the cats to play with them. 

I don’t think about the past when a cat hops in my lap. I don’t think of what I should or could have done. I don’t think about courts or life sentences or parole boards. What comes to mind is peace, and a sense that everything is going to be OK. What’s in the past needs to stay there if I want to have a future, if I want to be grateful for today and for the fact that I am no longer the person I once was.

The cats, of course, already know this. They are gracious enough to spend their time with us so that we might learn, and so that we can enjoy a few quiet moments of warmth, softness, non judgment, and freedom."

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got a phonecall from my dad and he said "hey. you gotta come out here. i want you to see something" in a very serious tone so i went outside and

Bnnuy

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Alien by Paolo Rivera

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Finally finished 😭 Timelapse at the bottom! I had an idea for my Wings of Pages series, where instead of text, it's a book full of botanical illustrations. The majority of the time was spent on the individual flowers for each feather/page of the wings. I really love the look of old botanical books with the water color paintings and the scientific names written in cursive. So I spent way too many hours painting out 20 of these flower pages, and even then, it wasn't enough for the wings so I did have to duplicate some.

Here are the 20 flowers! The HD image of Atlas Botanicus, and all 20 HD flower studies without watermark will be DMed on Patreon.com/Yuumei on May 5th, along with the hours long video recording of how I painted everything.

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[on the verge of having a complete breakdown] i need to make some kind of list or perhaps sort things into categories