#Hasai ehs'Pheress

[dduane]

Seems to come earlier every year... :)

Anyway: we appreciate ours.

[dduane]

So I mentioned (I think) a couple-or-few weeks back that I was starting to look into what Hasai’s human form would look like (since that’s data I’m going to need when we get to his novella in the Tales of the Five group). And what the heck: after some shopping around, I found it. That’s his basic shape, there.

It suits him for a number of reasons. It’s easy to forget (if not being attentive to backstory) that despite having become the most senior Dragon presently resident on that Earth, in terms of out-of-the-egg time, he’s also the youngest. He was the last-hatched Dragonet before the Journey, which makes him “now” (in story continuity) fully adult, but still in his earliest adult years in Dracon terms—just a young guy, and (in terms of his Dracon body configuration) a skinny one. His magic-using spouses, though, while devising his human body for him, wouldn’t have forgotten.

(And the design stages would’ve been interesting. While considering this the other day I abruptly found myself in the middle of a humorous but fairly heated discussion regarding the usefulness/uses of nipples for entities identifying as male. I made some notes for story purposes, but escaped as quickly as possible... because, seriously, when Freelorn gets started in talking-dirty mode?...) (eyeroll) 

...Anyway. That’s merely his human shape; there’s more design to be done. Dragons are culturally extremely sensitive about their hide and spine colors. “Livery” (as Segnbora translates the far more deeply-nuanced Dracon term) is profoundly important to Dragons for historical and personal reasons, being a visible indicator of family history and other issues. And even in human form, there’s no way Hasai would completely discard his original skin.

So this is a first stab at it. Various creators platformed at Daz offer products that let you do skin-on-skin overlays. This is going to work a lot better once I figure out how to add a proper overlay of scales rather than a texture labeled “Blood Zombie”. :) ...But the color’s generally right, and it’ll do for the moment while I experiment.

...Duplicating scaling made of living black star sapphire is going to be an entirely different challenge. But for the moment I’m taking one thing at a time.

[dduane]

...Pausing in the middle of the mid-afternoon attempt to clean some more files out of the laptop’s hard drive to try adjusting Hasai’s wings again. ...One of the Daz dragon-management apps has a script for this, but almost without fail it messes more things up than it fixes. The Daz Dragon’s wings are so weirdly rigged... and there’s nothing you can do about the slack membrane between the body and the (sort of) pinky finger. (muttering) It’s the Daz version of “bingo wings”. Very annoying.

Meanwhile, I really need to do something about that MK Air plane’s (mostly-off-the-shelf) livery: The present colors are way too KLM.

(re the above image in general: it’s a restatement of a very old in-joke--an image I made for one of my editors in the 1980s while attempting to explain how big Hasai was. ...NB that the Daz Dragon unfortunately doesn’t have anything like the same width of wing membrane as the proper MK Dragon does. They evolved from gliding creatures--hence the wing conformation that supports a fairly high glide ratio (1.2:1 or thereabouts). They kept that body configuration even when their evolution took a very different branching toward raw-energy consumption and the direct manipulation of gravitational fields for flight.)

...But the “MK Air” idea has been lying around here for a while. The image below claims to be from 1999, but could be older. Look how granular that fill is, it’s practically halftoned...).

...I guess the idea was that if the Middle Kingdoms had an airline, the Dragons would be it. Well, whatever. They’d be too busy for that now, what with the startup of the Kingdoms’ space program...  :)

[dduane]

An afternoon in the Middle Kingdoms: Segnbora d'Welcaen tai-Enraesi (L) and her wife, her royal Grace Eftgan d'Bort tai-Éarnesti, Queen of Darthen (R), out for an afternoon at the beach...

...with their most junior husband. Hasai ehs'Pheress, DragonChief.

(Not included in shot: the picnic lunch, and the three other husbands currently arguing with each other over the best way to get the firepit going without using sorcery, the blue Flame, Dragonfire, or the assistance of the eighth spouse, who's just lying there on the sand smouldering and having way too much fun watching the others struggle.)