#cosmodesy

[nyktomorphia]

I'm still not sure where the city of Mazhar is in the multiverse - the dilemma is that my version of "a city known for mysterious masks and strict laws that annoy basically everyone who didn't grow up there" fits in a little too well on Takiwa, to the point I have a hard time imagining Mazhar having any kind of eccentric reputation there. (Its history also doesn't really have an obvious place to fit in alongside the other cultures I've thought of, but they're still rather vaguely defined.)

But I did like this mask design so much I made up an entire character to wear it.

For a city that grew prosperous as a trading hub, the people of Mazhar aren't really seen travelling much themselves. (The city is small for its prominence, limited by the size of its aquifer.) Zayis, on the other hand, left home and followed the trade routes all the way to the ocean, where she promptly fell in love and managed to hire herself onto fishing boats and eventually sign to a merchant ship. Mahlayani custom is not to remove their masks in public spaces (they evolved from sun-protective headgear) and for Zayis that means always whenever she goes ashore and usually when she's above-deck, even though crews eat and bunk together so all her shipmates know what her face looks like anyway. I think there's something about the tone of that companionship that appeals to her as much as the sea itself.

Zayis' current mask covers her missing eye with a cartouche (kind of pompous and gauche back at home, but who's going to stop her here?) and artistically-arranged calligraphy of things that were important to her. She rarely meets anyone else who can read the script, though, so when anyone asks she usually spins them out into improbable stories that do absolutely nothing to dispell Mazhar's reputation as a mysterious and fantastical place.

(The tallest tales are reserved, of course, for when someone asks why she left.)

[nyktomorphia]

I have a strong distaste both for humans being exceptional and humans being the baseline by which everyone else is measured - same issue, different manifestations - so while I don't really make worlds where a lot of fantasy races interact with each other (it's more like, populate an entire planet with just one subspecies of hominins and explore how many societies they can diverge into and still feel like they share something abstract and basic), I do have an idea of where Homo sapiens sapiens fits in to the others, and it's right there in the name: when humans discovered phylogeny, they decided what was special about them was that they were wise, and to prove it they said so twice for emphasis. Logically, their theme is hubris, and it may not be a unique quality but it certainly is a prominent one.

I don't care about Dungeon Meshi otherwise but "Tallmen" is SUCH an elegant solution to placing humans in a fantasy setting that it's still blowing my mind. Just the term itself is enough to instantly recontextualize humans. They're no longer the default race. They're those big goobers with long legs, striding about all the time. I can so easily envision much more interesting relationships between humans and non-humans because of it. Like perhaps "tallmen" are stereotyped as shepherds by other races because they can watch over their flocks better, or as vagabonds because they are better suited to long travel on foot. And of course, they don't *literally* have to be taller than everybody else, they were just the tallest around whenever the label became the norm, or something like that. I just feel like it's so much better than what I've seen in settings like D&D that go "and humans are the... adaptable, generalist people :)!"

[nyktomorphia]

I imagine it's a bit like riding a camel which is also a goose

[nyktomorphia]

An Ace Attorney mood may strike at any time without warning

(Phalene and Mykale)

[nyktomorphia]

(I've started the worse habit of taking pictures of sketches and getting partway through explaining them and then forgetting it's still in Drafts)

The reason I was sketching fantasy camels a while back, by the way, was... okay, let me back up

In the NieR games there's a labyrinthine desert city called Façade, inhabited by the Masked People. Façade is governed under a long list of esoteric rules that outsiders find frustrating, but the Masked People are all pretty content with it, and there are indications that every rule originally had a really good reason it was created no matter how pointless it seems now.

This would just be a Neat Thing sitting in the back of my brain... if not for the fact that in Sunless Sea there's an island called Visage, inhabited by descendants from Amarna who now live by a complex system of esoteric social norms dictated by the kind of animal mask you wear.

To my knowledge there's no direct influence between them, which catches my imagination further. "Cities of masks and rules" is so distinct it feels like an otherworldly fantasy archetype, a trope that only caught on in another timeline the way elves and dwarves did in ours. (A friend pointed out it has a certain hint of orientalism - veiled courtiers whispering in desert palaces - though a rather abstract kind.) But exploring strange human cultures is part of what I like doing with Cosmodesy, and the seeds of my own version finally clicked into place.

The Mawlayani say that the city of Mazhar was founded centuries ago by their ancestors, former slaves lost in the desert on the verge of death who discovered a hidden oasis. They took this as a sign and settled there, giving their thanks to Sarab, a trickster god of secrets and illusions. Some centuries later, changes in trade turned Mazhar into a convenient stop for merchant caravans. The city has flourished to the limits of the aquifer below, and water supply has been carefully managed ever since overuse led to a nearly disastrous drought. To merchants, however, the problem is invisible, and it is counted as merely another of the Mawlayani's many eccentricities.

The statue in Sarab's temple is famously faceless, signifying the god's infinite appearances. The desert buries its blessings in the shifting sand, and the sun hides them among countless tricks of the light. For the same reason, the scarves worn to prevent sunstroke became the Mawlayani custom of concealing their faces in public at all times, which by the era of Mazhar's prosperity evolved into personalised masks. Traditional Mawlayani masks rarely resemble an actual face, with historical examples ranging from elaborate floral embroidery to minimalistic shapes framing the eyeholes. Symmetric calligraphy is a popular modern style.

I have no idea if Mazhar is in any of my existing worlds or if it's its own thing. Probably Takiwa if any of them.

[oneirophasia]

I was not expecting my use of ghouls as a metaphor for enforced hierarchy to become so literal but in hindsight I don’t know why not

YA’LL....

Mainstream Media Now Openly Reporting on the Elite Lining Up to Ingest the Blood of Children…. Seriously

Once the talk of conspiracy theorists — the rich ingesting the blood of the young to foster longevity — is now a reality and an actual business in the United States. Not only is it a business but billionaires are actually admitting their interest in it. Now, even the mainstream media is reporting it.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and adviser to Donald Trump told Inc. magazine:

“I’m looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting. This is where they did the young blood into older mice and they found that had a massive rejuvenating effect. I think there are a lot of these things that have been strangely under-explored.”

As Vanity Fair reports, Ambrosia, which buys its blood from blood banks, now has about 100 paying customers. Some are Silicon Valley technologists, like Thiel, though Karmazin stressed that tech types aren’t Ambrosia’s only clients and that anyone over 35 is eligible for its transfusions.

Aside from the gruesome historical and occult background of such practices, there is literally NO DATA that suggests the process even works.

“There‘s just no clinical evidence [that the treatment will be beneficial], and you‘re basically abusing people‘s trust and the public excitement around this,” Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who conducted a 2014 study of young blood plasma in mice, told Science magazinelast summer, as reported by Vanity Fair. 

#STAYWOKE

[nyktomorphia]

I may have gotten a little distracted in the course of figuring out what to put in the surreal junkyard

If anyone has a good reference for what a train car looks like underneath, please send help - image search only wants to show me them from the top and side

[nyktomorphia]

Worldbuilders and mythmakers have been mysteriously silent on the subject of camels. There is like one miraculous camel I could find in Arabian folklore, and that's it. I am irrationally annoyed by this.

Ratites are the obvious animal to fill the same ecological niche, but flightless birds are also the go-to horse-of-a-different-colour in fantasy settings of any climate, everywhere since Nausicaä and then Final Fantasy, so it feels underwhelming on its own. What if it wears a lambeosaur crest? backwards? definitely not because I forgot, and if I did it was for artistic reasons

In fact what if I put backwards lambeosaur on a horse too? Not really especially camel-like after all, but there's a legendary creature called a shadhavar that Arabian bestiaries claimed lived in Byzantium, which was a unicorn with a hollow, branching horn it could play like a flute and I like the idea of a hadrohorse

Alternatively, what if camel but just really big? Maybe Bergmann's rule makes that unlikely but consider its majestic appearance! No, not the question of how does the driver see around its neck, stop considering that

[nyktomorphia]

Okay, so I have some flexibility to not do the obvious. The mineral is supposed to react to electricity or magnetism, not actually be electromagnetic (this is D'ni Fantasy Science); and a kinetic reaction could be rotating or vibrating rather than attraction or repulsion.

...but it's pretty funny to imagine Atrus getting really excited about an age full of... diamagnetic bismuth. Several decades after Anton Brugmanns. And on further consideration, bismuth can be pretty visually distinctive already in a very Myst-like way. (In fact, wait a minute, Spire's whole theme was electromagnetic crystals and a topography that looked deceptively artificial, why didn't Spire look more like bismuth?)

I'm feeling inspired by this recent ranked list of Myst elevators. Elevators are transportation. Elevator needs to go up and down, bismuth provides that in the form of levitating in response to an external magnetic field. (Okay, superbismuth.) Giant variable-strength magnet at the bottom of the shaft, floating platform raises to different heights corresponding to specific strengths. Notably, the magnet is not on the elevator, which means the magnet controls probably aren't either, creating a potential inconvenient nuisance puzzle opportunity where you can/must hold the elevator in place while using the controls or send it to another floor without you.

Bismuth elevator!

I made an art prompt based on conversations at this last Mysterium :D

[nyktomorphia]

Okay yes I know how big Dwarf Fortress says they each are but this is what I'm willing to believe

Obviously they're all related species, and beak dogs in particular are basically naked flightless seagulls the size of a pony so who knows how goblins managed to domesticate that

(As soon as I ask the question, the answer that comes to mind is that beak dogs are brood parasites that goblins managed to out-cuckoo by tricking them into leaving their eggs in fake nests, so they're more like elephants in being consistently tamed but not actually selectively bred for domestication, this seems in-character on all sides so I guess it's my headcanon until further notice)

[nyktomorphia]

Redrawing an old concept, the Königsberg Snail. Only centimetres long when hatched, the soft plate on a newborn snail's back slowly grows into a chambered shell full of air. By the time it is large enough to hide in, it is also neutrally buoyant and too bulky for constant swimming. Those that have not yet been picked off shift increasingly toward drifting in the current, catching detritus and small inattentive fish to rasp into digestible fragments and hiding in their shells from anything dangerous.

Eventually, the shell is so large it begins to snag seaweed and sessile anthozoa. This is an even harsher population filter - most snails succumb to predation at this stage of growth, too large and delicious to avoid attention and too buoyant to swim. But those that survive benefit from becoming host to a growing symbiotic ecosystem, a reliable source of food for itself shared with enough predators to protect it from most threats. It is this stage which inspired their name - königsbergs of this legendary size were long dismissed as nautical folklore, and there are rarely more than half a dozen in the ocean at any time.

[nyktomorphia]

More DF faunart

[nyktomorphia]

A very small planet called Hedron, which needs more trees but it was hard enough keeping the overall geometry this clear already

[nyktomorphia]

I think rutherers are one of my favourite DF creatures, next to beak dogs and their relatives - they don't fit anywhere obvious in an earthly phylogenetic tree, but still feel extremely mundane and plausible (aside from not being very likely troglofauna, obviously)

Thinking of mammoths, seals, monitor lizards, and Cotylorhynchus

[nyktomorphia]

[nyktomorphia]

Mab's Drawlloween Club - Ghoul Scout

I know Sonnambul has a Scouts-like quasimilitary youth program, though I haven't named it or worked out all the detail yet; given Sonnambul's culture, it's focused on more urban adventures than camping and hikes, with the intent of fostering financial engagement and civic compliance. It's also a valuable pipeline for enthusiastic community-minded children to take an interest in law enforcement and apply to join the Estate Security Department... as certain characters can testify.

Pictured: Bramanthe before she became a disillusioned noir investigator.