#ccs.text

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come and read my play it's finally done :+)

An experimental piece of antitheater meant to supplement the Cold Case Simulacrum narrative, which is currently not too finished. Visit the CCSimulacrum website to find out more.

This play follows tangential stream-of-consciousness storylines examining characters in ways marginally foreign to their presentation in the main storyline. It was written to exercise the setting and the people of the story, though it stands on its own as a current of fragmented scenes dealing with roughly 20 people dealing with existence far away from all other forms of life.

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cube e/em i may make posts. wach out.

full bout here + extra

art blog @strangerheadsprevail | my website | twt

most of what i draw nowadays are just my characters from my ongoing wip project ccsimulacrum. read about it on my toyhouse

header image drawn by my friend stanley!

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trainstory quiz i made in like 4 hours ☝️ tell me about the guy you got ok

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decided to fill out some charts....

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ISEL POSTER DREAM LORE PLEASE…

RIGHT SO. for about an entire year now i’ve had this inside joke with my boyfriend about summoning isel into our dreams. which i think started off because it had a dream about isel and like the only thing it retained from that was having the very strong thought of ‘i wish isel was my dad’ and we both thought that was funny as fuck. so we go on to propose the isel dream challenge and it like became a thing for a couple of weeks that like. at the end of every call we’d wish one another a beautiful isel dream full of hot handsome men

for context. this was before i got on prozac and before that i didn’t have particularly vivid dreams and i didn’t remember most of them. additionally a lot of my dreams do not feature me or people i know. and so for a few nights i was genuinely like Alright i have to train my mind for this i’m gonna think about isel before i go to bed and i’m gonna look at pics of him before i go to bed.

so eventually miraculously one night i have this dream where i find myself in a fantasy tavern. like dnd ass dimly lit room orcs with beer old man barkeep daggers being thrown type shit. and i’m walking around trying to just like get a feel for the area when i see a poster of isel that is simply his face with the word ISEL written out in impact font below, and it’s like just printer paper taped to a wooden wall, very anachronistic. so i look at that for a little bit and then i start hearing isel’s voice taunting me and like offering me a mysterious challenge? i think part of it was like. oh yeah he was encouraging me to listen to his offers and if i completed them he would actually appear before me. and at this point the room changes and it’s just a little attic sized place with the isel poster crowding my vision but it’s not like cool or anything he’s not moving it’s literally just a piece of paper sending out an isel monologue in my mind. i don’t remember the exact details unfortunately. i wish i did. i remember it just being very pompous and meaningless though. and i woke up before i got the chance to reply

now. this dream is funny both because of the visual it conjures. as observed in the classic mockup i made.

and because it is actually a part of like. a reoccurring torment i have of only being able to interface with people and characters as posters in a scene? like as if that is the full extent of my lucid dreaming capability like i have had my boyfriend my boyfriend’s characters and my own characters show up in dreams but only as like. pictures on a poster. that i see briefly while i’m like running through a castle dungeon’s hallways or whatever. and the isel dream is notable for happening after like weeks of trying to will him into my dreams for the sole bit of it and also for being the closest thing to actually being able to talk to one of my characters in my dreams. i think like a couple of months later o had a dream where i saw olzhas on a poster in a similar fashion but i didn’t even get to talk to em or anything. and since then i have not had any train dreams whatsoever

so that’s the isel poster dream lore

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25 for end of year asks!

25. Did you create any characters (in games, art, or writing) this year? Describe one

GODDAMN DID I! came up with most of the ghosts in ccs this year and it was fun but i think i’m gonna soapbox a bit about the facsimiles because i haven’t really anywhere else….

these guys have technically existed in the narrative since last summer but i hadn’t really developed them nor designed them until like. literally this summer so about an entire year later. their whole deals just being sentient bits of code derived from the memories of two other existing characters. person who made them (marjolaine) has been experimenting with evolving human consciousness from raw code and the facsimiles endeavour was basically just another expression of that with the addendum of an animate human origin point

in the past i’ve like described these two as “new shoots of a plant growing from the same root of an established organism” because they both arise from younger incarnations of their bases and have like. basically fully split apart in ego despite maintaining the memories and foundation of them.

these two guys also just basically exist in the computer. which is also the sky of the entire world. don’t worry about it. but they don’t exist corporeally and can only really commune through a computer interface

frances on the right is a younger copy of marjolaine…. for context marjolaine used to be a prestigious opera singer who ended up straining her voice so heavily she retained permanent vocal strain that completely killed her career and also weakened her ability to consistently speak at all. frances was built from memories PRIOR to that as a way for marjolaine to relive her glory days but frances themself became like. very unimpressed with that responsibility and was much more interested in manipulating their own existence and partial omniscience (as a result of being expanded on with code) to just become a major gossip basically hehe. they love peoplewatching the living and coming up with absurd ‘theories’ and assumptions about their behaviours, making bets on things that will happen, peeking into potential ‘timelines’ for fun….

eventually though marjolaine grew extremely ornery with their waywardness, and started to pressure and berate them into fulfilling that desired snapshot of her own life. this placed a lot of stress on frances and they basically just shattered into code under it which. although not a permanent affliction is something that requires a prolonged period of recovery. and prior to ‘dying’ they basically vowed to never commune with marjolaine again so. that bridge is burnt. fucked up your clone real bad!

(also yes they’re named after that One Album. for no reason really)

sezim on the left derives from another guy (olzhas, who has many problems, such as being friends with marjolaine) who basically ‘donated’ eir own memories for this experiment only to like. very quickly regret it once it turned out sezim developed into kind of just. an embarrassing immature bratty version of emself from like 5 years back. he’s much more vexed about setting himself apart as a distinct individual than frances was, to the point that it’s what occupies his mind most…. his main pastime WAS hanging out with frances and testing the precise vastness of their knowledge, together, but once frances exploded and shit, seething about his general existence kind of took priority lol. he’s basically just got an entire thing of “i’m a terrifying being of great wisdom and power but i have to be tied to this random motherfucker that i hate and i wish i could shed all that influence off. and also i’m confined to a computer.” he sort of just ‘fled’ once frances exploded (which he’s EXTREMELY bitter about btw) and has formed an undying grudge against marjolaine, thus never contacting her again afterward….

these two have a weird role in the story where they’re kind of just setpieces for their bases’ story arcs. funnily enough. but they’ve got a bit of meta to them that i think is interesting…. mostly just embodying the idea of “here’s ‘people’ who both literally and figuratively sit ‘above’ the narrative and the traditional idea of being developed characters” by design they’re kind of just witnesses or, more aptly, critics of the main conflict of the story which is all about really convoluted and annoying interpersonal drama radiating out into more serious conflict. they kind of think it’s all stupid and avoidable and they are 100% right. but who’s going to listen to them! nobody’s really casting an ear to them since they’re so above it all to begin with….

or something like that. i like these two catty fucks

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question for you... top cc divorces?

GOD where do i begin. i think there’s more like divorce than actual maintained relationships throughout the whole thing LOL might as well run through all of them

the fucking. one that’s ruled my mind and heart for the past few months nonstop has been isel and olzhas specifically because their whole dynamic revolves around how much these two care about each other even in spite of like. the loose conceit of a breakup haunting them. they both have this thing about, despite mutually deciding on separation, making exceptions for one another in terms of aiding and even being outright affectionate with one another… they’re still being very tightknit whilst also refusing to let other people pry into these ‘transgressive’ acts that contradict the broadcasted external image of their relationship. they’ve got a very private kind of love between them and their whole divorce is basically just a charade built off a misunderstanding but it’s still this constraining force that just. guilts the both of them out of genuineness. it’s fucked up. it’s my favorite thing in the world. i’m glad everyone else just finds the whole ordeal gormless and i’m glad people like freya and dalisay exist to make fun of these guys for being soooo unbearably facetious

beatrix and marjolaine are also complicated…. with them it’s less a thing of them like. tugging at my heartstrings and more just being like the most twisted fascinating puzzle of codependency LOL. like the two of them met each other whilst they were very young and they were both kind of just like. superficially enthralled with one another. very artistically pretentious pair of wayward fiction writer/famous opera singer which like. slowly lost its spark over the years and like two decades later they’re basically both just tugging on one another. utterly refusing to break things off despite then both obviously only being captivated by the past veneer of their old young love. with beatrix in particular it’s fun because he’s got like. this whole complex about seeming well-put together and accomplished and classy and whatever and he’s basically holding onto marjolaine as a status symbol like “hah look at me i’m an accomplished woman who is MARRIED” and he basically views outright divorce as like. admitting to making a mistake in choosing to marry marjolaine. and him admitting to a mistake would basically like kill him so eh. in the dull relationship he must stay. like something i adore about the whole situation is that beatrix basically DID divorce him and quickly walked back on that for aforementioned prideful reasons which is like. yeah. he’s a bit of a disaster it’s fine. similarly i’m fond of the way marjolaine latches on to beatrix for a similar reason of like. “i already started this marriage and ever since my life’s gone down the drain (especially socially) so i need to keep this flame alive if nothing else” whilst also. only really being half-hearted in her interest of beatrix as an individual. they’re both just very devoted to. not really one another. but the period of time that their inversion represents.

cas and lanuola are like a complete nightmare to explain i’ll do it separately if anyone wants it but like MANNNN they’ve got a mixture of things that kick my ass which is like. a) born arose from very heavy performance-based careers and both never really had profound connections with other people nor managed to really effectively evade the public eye. got to do the latter on the train quite plainly and also got attached to one another quite quickly due to shared experiences. they’re both each other’s “first person to really understand me”. b) they both died trying to protect each other it’s all in vain and it fucked!!!! they turn into weird abstract ghosts and you think it’d be fine BUT c) divorce happens due to a convoluted domino fall of events basically boiling down to “cas is extremely bent on revenge for her early death and exerts it on someone completely unrelated by sending them vague scary visions meant to warn the living of the person who killed her and lanuola finds this completely uncouth and breaks things off for moral purposes. however cas is also conflicted about her actions and is incapable of admitting it. lanuola also misses cas but maintains his morality steadfastly. ahhhhhhhh!” to harken to an old sketch made by my good friend stanley:

there’s like some smaller divorces that don’t quite matter that much. like faris and volkan. latter of whom is literally an absolute speck of dust of a character he literally just exists to be faris’ ex boyfriend who barely even comes up. this dude’s job is to simply get a divorce. it’s not even that dramatic they just cut things off because faris wants to leave for the scary train that’s rumoured to probably just kill people once they get on there and it’s like. amicable enough. faris hardly ever gives him much thought afterward LOL

mazin’s divorce also like vaguely matters but it’s another more metaphorical thing. dude literally just disappears without a word to his wife because he’s just THAT ravenous to leave for the train and sabotage it from within. only ever brings her up to get pity from other people and was never really that attentive to her or anything. he sure is a really lovely guy

the brief rendezvous between olzhas and faris is also funny to me just because these guys have been like. good friends for years and like the first thing olzhas does upon breaking up with isel is go AW SHIT i feel useless and bad on my own are there any other beautiful bears on this train that i can tie myself to. and so e kind of just jumps into a relationship with eir old bestie only for faris to like. no more than a week later. go “yeah i do care for you and i want to see you get better but also i am Not isel and using me as a rebound is bad both for you AND me” and olzhas is kind of just like. “Shit yeah. sorry. let’s go break chairs over each others heads.” and they do. they’re still friends and this whole incident basically means nothing to either of them nowadays but it humors me. the woes of the gay italian man….

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🍕🍀🍎 for dalisay !!

🍕 - What is their favorite food?

canonically their favorite food is just a good slice of mango, which is a fruit they are allergic to. based on my own foolish experiences

🍀 - What originally inspired the OC?

HMM they were very loosely inspired by raz from psy.chonauts both designwise and in terms of like. the protagonist niche they fill. very much wanted them to be a very responsive very opinionated surveyor of the different people they’re talking to, something lightly lifted from raz’s own funny occasional snide child comments. funnily enough though the first drafts of their design occurred before i even got into psychonauts and just knew of his design but me interfacing with the game coincided with the early days of working on ccs so the inspiration ended up being quite relevant anyway :+)

i think i also just got the vague idea of a character design where a characters hair looked like rainclouds and so i branched off from there….

i’m sure they have a lot more inspirations but that’s the most vibrant ones in my mind….

🍎 - What is the OC’s relationship w/their parents like?

OOH this one’s fun. honestly textually it’s left pretty vague. dalisay is an adult but freshly so and they haven’t pursued any secondary education but they’ve also been engrossed in programming all their life since their youth to an absurd extent. whether it’s a thing of like. “yeah dalisay’s parents are very ‘in’ with emergent trends and wanted to secure a good future for their kid early on and so encouraged them toward this line of education” or moreso something like “dalisay just developed a passion early on and their parents were supportive” that is to say like. generally. it’s implied that dalisay’s on good terms with them but the level of their supposed ‘strictness’ or control is left a bit more ambiguous. dalisay’s a very mysterious character i think it’s fun to have that kind of thing permeate their backstory

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7, 22, and 23 for ulises !

7 favorite animal? why?

she’s a horse girl through and through it’s like. might be a niche experience but you know those people who have like a huge phase of getting into cat breeds and genetics as a kid. yeah she’s like that but she can tell you all about specific horse colourations and shit like that. i think it was just kind of an arbitrary animal she latched into in all honesty but maybe she had like some experience with horseback riding as a child that endeared her to them greatly hah….

she also likes most dogs, especially ones on the bigger side :+) similarly to the potential horse thing but actually textual is that she had like a border collie as a kid. definitely fond of those kinds of ‘herding dogs’

22 do they sleep well at night?

hmm she has a very tilted sleep schedule wherein for the longest time she just relied on random naps throughout the day to keep her going, which was maintained until she noticed demeter was often uncomfortable at night, thenceforth deciding to return to a more uniform composition of rest to both be there for them and “set a good example” for them…. i imagine that’s contributed positively to her overall liveliness and attentiveness in conversation but earnestly she was very used to pulling allnighters and utilising things like coffee to stay afloat. so her choice to sleep a bit better was entirely done to support her partner rather than arising out of any major problems with exhaustion or whatnot….

23 how would you describe their voice? can they sing?

most important facets of ulises' voice to me are 1) very nasally, kind of has a lighter 'layer' of speech under a coarser one 2) pace varies a lot but tends to be quite quick, occasionally taking awkward pauses before launching into a lot of really fast wordage as if making up for lost time hah. in the past ive also described her voice as being the type thats like. "good for telling a campfire story" like when she's very focused on what she's saying she can really use pacing and timing to add effect to her speech....

i think ive also made it canonical that her singing voice is kind of awful but shes very enthusiastic HAH she can sing things that are like. about midrange fine but if a song goes really high or low her voice starts wobbling a lot

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WOE, MORE OLZHAS QUESTIONS BE UPON YE: ✨🍕🥊

OLZHAAAAAAS I GET TO TALK ABOUT MY FAVORITE GUY 🫡

✨- How did you come up with the OC’s name?

was looking for an excuse to use qazaq names for an oc for ages because i think theyre extremely pretty sounding and i finally got the chance to with em, olzhas was a name i landed on very quickly because the zh digraph caught my eye.... other contenders for eir name early on were karim and kamshat the former of which i incorporated into eir last name anyway!

🍕 - What is their favorite food?

this is genuinely the most important trivia about em i think it puts everything about em into perspective. eir favorite dish is just like. a mid as fuck plate of cooked polenta. e is a simple italian man who can cook all kinds of wonderful things but The Slop is eir uncontested favorite food in the entire world

🥊 -What do they love to do? What do they hate to do?

UGH what does this guy NOT love to do e's literally obsessed with accruing as many hobbies as e possibly can. i think the most effective way i can answer this is just like. what are the FUNNIEST things e likes/dislikes doing.

to that i say: e's the type of guy who gets all excited and relaxed whenever e cleans. like it helps em unwind very easily without fail, if e's ever insanely antsy and nothing else is working out e will just grab a broom and spend the next 3 hours with it in hand and e WILL have a great time

conversely e notably detests doing any kind of drawing or artistic work in general because whenever e approaches a hobby e's most typically going into it with the mentality of like. ok yeah i can become really good at this if i just follow these steps and the pathway to art improvement is just too asinine and improvisational for eir usual "ill just brute force attempts until i do it Right" methods for other things. like e just gets very quickly discouraged and impatient with it all... at least e has the bass to play whenever e's feeling inspired hah

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hi cube 🌎🌎🌎🫶⭐️i would love to know 🎯['what do they do best'] for olzhas. e is super epic and my favorite and has a lot of hobbies sjghd;gd so i've always wondered what e excels at most. or seeing 🧊['is their current design the first one'] would be cool to see for anyone!!!! i hope ur doing well!!!!!

OLZHASHEADS ROLL OUT LETS GO

🎯 -What do they do best?

honestly though e's known best for eir cooking and mixology know-how id say its a mostly opportunistic "best at". like e's nowhere near an expert but nobody on the train presently surpasses em lol. thats honestly true for a lot of eir hobbies where its mostly a case of like. oh nobody else here knows how to do this thing i should at least have a backing knowledge in case it's needed. i think something that betrays this tendency is eir skill with playing bass and chapman stick since that was wholly a personal venture e came to really like tossing a lot of time and effort into.... though to be fair chapman stick is ALSO an obscure ass instrument theres not much competition

behold old pics of instruments

🧊 - Is their current design the first one?

euegeheghhhh while im talking about olzhas. heres the first few passes i ever did of eir design compared to eir current one it always makes me fucking laugh

trying to think of other design drafts that look interesting. difference between marjolaines is interesting. i dont know what on earth i was thinking with the weird shorts on the early design

OH early peixins are extremely removed from their current look it humors me

i have a whole folder full of early designs you can peruse it i love retaining stuff like this

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also since i wanna rewrite it to fit with a redone worldbuilding tidbit heres like. some slightly older lore from when i wrote about the unique outfits and motifs everyone from train has. putting it under the cut cause its long

in general the system of ‘fast fashion’ has kind of collapsed and instead there’s a huge focus on durable/magically enhanced materials and also generally, having knowledge of sewing and other misc haberdashery type shit. i’d compare the importance and prevalence of it to a skill like cooking i suppose? i imagine there’s just a lot of redistribution of old fabrics with weird patterns and whatnot, which people often just integrate into existing clothes of theirs. getting into this more extensively in a second but on the flipside there’s also a lot more revere toward tailors and anyone who produces custom outfits on demand, so people who aren’t skilled with customising their own clothes often seek out this manner of purchase… there are also some small stores that sell ‘pre-made’ items of clothing with precise patterns and motifs, though these are usually seen as ‘tacky’.

another thing is like. what i’ll call the habit of characters just wearing the same outfit seemingly ‘all the time’ — which at first was kind of just meant to be a play on the weird time dilation presented on the train, but i’ve taken it as a canonical in-universe thing. that is to say i imagine everyone has like a ‘main costume’ they wear in their day-to-day life, and technically speaking i imagine it involves owning multiple copies of the same outfit lol. but it’s basically someone’s most important, most presentable and most epitomic outfit that’s supposed to put on display their chosen motifs

to properly focus on the idea of ‘motifs’, they are also an acknowledged construct with a lot of cultural importance! motifs are basically ‘signatures’ a person has to identify them and set them apart from others, with most people having two. motifs can basically be anything from plants to animals to patterns to like. really obscure iconography like soundwave diagrams to alchemical symbols and whatever. motifs are often combined with a ‘skeleton’ of an outfit — often part of a job ‘uniform’, such as a waiter’s suit or boilersuit, though globally most workplaces keep dress codes lenient and open to customisation. this both further adds ‘panache’ and ‘depth’ to a daily outfit and often gives a person a good starting point for their daily outfit. also perhaps it sounds a bit too dramatic but i’ve been loosely rattling around the idea of calling daily outfits ‘paradigms’ and will continue to refer to them as such because it’s a shorter word lol.

anyway another important aspect of paradigms, and clothing in general, are colors! due to the whole scrapbook nature of fashion in the 22nd century, it is indeed more about loose color groups than like precise hex codes and shades, but people often associate themselves with one or two particular colors and try to incorporate them into many outfits. though not as important as motifs, with some people forgoing strict color ‘loyalty’ altogether, many do appreciate consistency!

motifs have a huge social aspect to them. in general. like quite loosely there’s the attitude i implied about certain motifs being seen as ‘generic’ and hence, a signal of unoriginality. for example anyone with a stars motif or a leafs motif, without any further specification or interesting secondary motif, is often seen as extremely boring! prime example of this is lusine, who’s clothing style is quite generic and involves a lot of ‘ready made’ clothing… it itself was often too preoccupied with programming to care much for its appearance, thus the very general motif — literally wearing ‘stuff you’d find in a store.’ conversely valerie has a very simplistic but unified paradigm, intentionally playing on first-view assumed minimalism — although her pants have very meticulous heart inscriptions at the bottom, which is kind of her just flexing her sewing ability, and the ribbon in her hat has a wire in it twisted to maintain a heart silhouette, etc though it isn’t as gaudy and evident as someone like marjolaine or olzhas’, it quietly displays a lot of ‘tricks’ that signify her prowess at design. which is deemed very very cool. to go over the aforementioned ‘gaudy’ two: marjolaine’s outfit has a lot of subtle symbolism such as the necklace, use of gold and boot patterning, alongside subtle design choices like the dna belt embroidery, the carved clover pattern on the monocle, and the general clover pastiche in the neck/sleeve/skirt frills, but it’s like such an involved outfit that it basically says “oh you’re very rich and you paid a tailor to make all this for you.” she didn’t literally, having summoned it via object-pullers, but it still has very strong connotations to wealth and ‘showing off’ that anyone could easily detect lol. like it seems too busy and ‘pre-made’, so to speak. conversely olzhas has a very focused pattern on the apron, seen as a rich person thing again, but it’s balanced by the cool factor of balancing 4 separate colors on a paradigm and having them look nice… alongside this there’s a lot of subtlety in the harlequin pattern being repurposed as ‘diamonds’ repeatedly and the harlequin costume-based shoes, alongside things like eir shades and dress hem harkening to the blockiness of brutalism, which is just seen as good use of composition. in short e has some touches of the same ‘trying too hard’ habit that marjolaine has, but it’s offset by seen ‘tastefulness’ and personal effort in coordination.

alongside having some reputational significance, motifs are also often important when it comes to romantic relationships! upon getting engaged or married, people will often start to ‘share’ their motifs in certain ways. this can be generally done by just exchanging clothes or sewing things onto paradigm components… but a more subtle and momentous marker comes in the form of ‘marriage tokens’ — iterating on the idea of wedding rings, but with the scope growing to ANY kind of ornate accessory worn by someone that is decorated with their partner’s motif. people often go all out and splurge on customised items, and as opposed to things like engagement rings, a couple will decide on matching items together AFTER a proposal has already been made. it’s often common to get ornate rings with carvings of motifs (as is the case for beatrix and marjolaine; marjolaine owning a ring with a stylised star, beatrix with a ladybug one) or earrings with motif shapes (eventually the case for olzhas and isel — olja wearing a sun-shaped earring on one ear, and isel wearing a diamond-shaped earring on the opposing one) to more involved things like pins/badges, ribbons, etc. honestly there’s less strain about ever losing marriage tokens because often, people will choose to ‘renew’ them anyway to keep up with paradigm changes over the years.

thiiis brings me to a digression which is that motifs can be freely changed! of course! and there are three major causes for it; either it’s teenagers who are already given this ‘grace period’ to experiment with motifs so it’s not a big deal; or it’s a couple who chooses to ‘swap’ motifs entirely, kind of seen as an insanely romantic gesture often used as a trope in fiction; or it’s a personal change often done after a grand event in one’s life, seen as a quite serious and gravitous ordeal. i have two examples for the lattermost one; isel abandoning his old marigold motif in exchange for the bobolink one, to mark his acceptance of his life on the fornax train; and peixin modifying its general digital audiovisual motif into the older historical devices one to signify its connection to fornax and its visions, and its feelings of time displacement as a result.

to get back to paradigm changes upon marriage, i’m bringing back the thing about colors! these are also often incorporated into outfits upon a union, whether with someone just wearing clothes containing the other’s main colors — such as cas and lanuola, with cas’ makeup and boots utilising lanuola’s blue (if you’re wondering, cas’ presence in lanuola’s outfit actually presents itself as a restructure mostly related to shape instead of color lol. she did not wear that multilayered cape beforehand and it intentionally mirrors cas’ dress) — or people ‘tinting’ their main colors with their partner’s. the latter is extremely evident with olzhas, whose main color used to be blue, though e changed it to eir current purple by attempting to inch it towards isel’s marigold yellow! (and again for contrast, isel later just ‘stole’ the purple from olzhas wholesale as his secondary color, and later transformed it into his classic pink by he himself attempting to inch it to freya’s red lol. which is to restate that partners do not necessarily mirror each other’s motif/color incorporations via the same method, and also to state that motif/color matching is NOT necessarily romantic, and i guess more precisely a simple signifier of a deep emotional connection, which can indeed be platonic. also note that isel technically stole a color that had a basis in his own outfit, which comes across as mildly egotistical to people who are very precise about color sharing lol!)

in those examples also it’s important to state that both pairs actually changed their outfits before getting properly engaged, which is seen as kind of immature and overzealous — to a degree there’s this attitude about ‘being responsible’ for your motif and, if you’re old enough, not changing it arbitrarily for anyone and only doing so for a serious commitment lest you remove the ‘honor’ from the act… and perhaps there was too much eagerness involved, since both pairs literally knew one another for no more than a month before they decided to be all involved about it lol but it’s fiiiine.

conversely another interesting example comes in the form of beatrix and marjolaine, who kind of convey a disjointed sharing of color? marjolaine’s main colors used to be, simply, red and green though the red became relegated to a tertiary/accent color in the wake of incorporating yellow, completely just taken from beatrix. conversely beatrix used to have a LOT of red on his outfit, which he quickly kind of ‘scrubbed’ by the time he boarded the train — kind of adding insult to injury, regarding the whole ‘entering the train just to divorce my terrible wife’ thing… he incorporates it into his skirt again by the time dalisay arrives to the train but it’s much more barren compared to the frequency of it prior, kind of commenting on the unbalanced nature of their relationship… marjolaine’s fully preserved beatrix’s color and still has it overtake her former colors, kind of as a ‘show’ of dedication, but beatrix doesn’t buy it and keeps her own incorporation of marjolaine’s color kind of degraded, more or less showing he’s visibly reluctant about it… frown

children have a ‘bridge’ motif between their parents motifs (never finished elaborating on this lol)

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#4. Isel!!

4. how crafty/resourceful are they?

HMM probably moreso than he'd give himself credit for. like in general he's very proud of his like. artistic inclinations. is usually fond of the purple-prosey way he speaks and he finds himself exceptionally adept in most social situations. is not shy about appearing outwardly smug about how he presents himself at all. HOWEVER when it comes to more "practical" or casual matters i don't think he has like. enough life experience to really know how to improvise solutions LOL like this guy's lived a very pampered life. has mainly depended on other people to cook food for him his whole life, has never really lived alone, has always resided in big convenient cities where it isn't too hard to move around and just acquire things.... posing the trait of resourcefulness as a question along the lines of "how long could this guy survive in the woods by himself" id say like a day at most. he'd eat a poisonous berry and keel over. SAD!

oc ask game

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🙌 💀 for any of your guys ?

🙌 - How many sibling does your OC have?

a couple of train guys have like. siblings that go unmentioned or are currently just names at this point. most important pair of siblings that actually matters iiiiiis míra and demeter and they kind of want to kill each other forever and ever. whoops

💀 - Does your OC have any phobias?

while i’m already on about these two….

míra has a fairly significant phobia of fire, especially large-scale ones and also complimentary fears of things like smoke or burning smells. mostly because it’s how her parents died!

demeter lacks this fear mostly as a consequence of being the one who cooked food for both themself and her and also a later digression into copious smoking. honestly i don’t think they have any significant fears, they’re a bit jaded and resigned to the world in general and nothing can really shock them that much anymore….

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✨ for dalisay and any other ocs you'd like to talk about :-)

✨- How did you come up with the OC’s name?

ok so for nearly every character my process for coming up with oc names is just looking through lists of names respective to their ethnicities and noting down names that catch my eye. i think for dalisay it was instant without much competition because i think the name has a very pretty sound….

lightning round for other ccs character names i don’t think i’ve talked about before. uhhh mazin’s a name i wanted to use for a character for ages was the name of someone i knew. somsak i partially picked because i was deep into hy.lics when i first made him and the shortening soms held significance hah. demeter and ulises i vaguely chose on a whim cause i thought itd be cute if they had matching greek origin names. olzhas i found really cool as a name since it was one of the first times i’d seen the zh digraph in a name and i didn’t know the sound existed outside of romanian before. isel i thought had a very cool meaning (sole/alone in nahuatl) and later i retconned it into being a shortening of marisela which is just very euphonic. marjolaine i very specifically sought out like, a french plant-based name for and i liked the complexity of it. valerie i picked to riff on her whole valentine’s day theme since they have the same shortening of val. faris is another arabic name i’ve wanted to use for ages for a character so he got it. 👍

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🎹🧊🧠 for ISEL !!!

🎹 - Do they have any hobbies?

QUITE A FEW ve’s notably fond of just researching birds and training ver eye for identifying them (which is a bit of a romantic hobby considering birds don’t exist naturally on the train); ve writes some poetry and snapshot bits of prose every now and then though has never really written a ‘complete’ work or anything, it’s a bit too taxing on the mind and it usually ends up frustrating ver; ve plays the piano every now and then and often tries to mess with overlaying twin melodies or shifting time signatures, ve was taught the instrument as a kid since ver parents were very insistent on ver knowing an instrument; by the time the story starts ve’s fully sunken back into ver old passion for painting, which ve’d retreated from for a while in the wake of worsening disability, ve was afraid of disappointing verself… fairly sure that covers all the major ones. OH ve’s also fond of listening to music especially in the form of like. what’s seen as exceptionally old-fashioned vinyls by the 22nd century. most of the records ve owns oscillate between 80s-2000s glam rock and prog metal albums ^_^

🧊 - Is their current design the first one?

NAH he’s gone through a couple of changes. this was the very first ‘reference’ i made of ver. general form of the outfit didn’t change much but MAN did the rest of ver do

for comparisons sake this is ver most recent ref. HOWEVER it is missing some minor new details i draw in nowadays, namely his beard carrying some patches of white hairs

🧠 - What do you like most about the OC?

honestly so much. making this dude up quelled a lot of dysphoria i was having at the time, gave me a lot more confidence about my own bad eye and the way it affects my drawing process, in general helped expel a lot of frustration that seemed obscure wrt being disabled and doing art…. but i think the most distinct thing is and always has been managing ver speaking style in dialogue because it’s very heavily steeped in my own ability to unwittingly sound overly formal and theatrical, alongside my own frequent grammatical and homophone-based mistakes. like isel retains a lot of my linguistic troubles and i specifically note down verbal mistakes i or my friends make to use in dialogue for ver, i usually don’t edit ver dialogue much and sort of revel in it being very instinct-based, if it sounds goofy or overdone i leave it as is…. it’s fun being able to just go full stream of consciousness for a character. :+)