#they used to be like generic scifi octopus people so I’m happy with the change

[kangasauras]

Lore/design concepts for the last of the aliens from the high-tech trio: humans, Azi lana, and lomanos. I’ve done a lot of lore for humans and the Azi lana, so I realised it’s time for me to start exploring the ideas I have for the lomanos. None of this is truly canon until it’s on the website, though.

Lomanos are a species of, uh… slug-fish-squid things. They hail from New Europa, the moon of an extrasolar gas giant. This moon has no life on the surface, but instead has a lush, teeming ecosystem present in the freezing ocean under its icy exterior. It’s here that the lomanos evolved remarkable capabilities to deal with their hostile environment.

Lomanos are capable of more neural plasticity than any other known lifeform. Their brains are extremely flexible units that can grow multitudes of new cells, and even new hemispheres. It can change shape entirely over the course of a few years, and retains this ability throughout their entire lives.

Lomanos do not have shells, hands, or even eyes, but they have remarkable learning abilities unparalleled by any other living creature.

To say lomanos are inherently sapient would be a mistake. In the cold, dark seas of their home moon, they live as unusually intelligent animals with a capacity to adjust to virtually any situation or environment by observing the animals around them and replicating their behaviour. But as the first humans to study them for their unusual abilities realised, non-sapient animals are not the only lifeforms they can change their brains to replicate.

By closely observing the behaviour of the scientists studying them, these lomanos adjusted their brains to perfectly replicate the abilities of the human brain; to experience the human condition, and to become sapient.

After some initial confusion, the first generation of sapient lomanos were established as people, and with their ability to rapidly learn new skills and concepts, they went on to create culture, infrastructure, and technology that rivaled species who had been sapient for hundreds of thousands of years.

Today, lomanos are present in and creators of some of the most powerful nations in the Local Systems. It is, for instance, a primarily lomanos nation that owns one of the three dyson spheres in this area.

However, their fragile, slug-like bodies are not capable of living out of water, let alone these wonders. So, sapient lomanos spend their whole lives inside an artificial robot body. Their incredible neural plasticity allows a newborn lomanos to adjust to both being sapient and being able to control such a foreign body with relative ease.

They can even make big changes to their artificial bodies with ease, or adapt to having prosthetics their brains never evolved to support, like eyes. Such is the nature of their incredible brains.

[yellingmetatron]

웃✿😡♀♫

Gonna make a charm bracelet from all these symbols!

웃 : An existing character you’ve played in the past that you miss? 

Three, all OCs.  I’ll concetrate on just one for the question:

Israel Salvador, Brazilian-American Sephardic Jew and general pleasant violent nutjob.  He was in Fallen London looking to avenge the murder of his daughter.  Liked bashing things over the head.  Had a throat injury that made him sound like Zelda Rubenstein.  Wore tattered clothing and green goggles.  Perpetually grinning, and his best friend was a foul-mouthed Lusophone white raven named Calixto.  His valet, Ecclesiastia, was an octopus-headed deadpan snarker who spoke through sign language and note cards.  She was another character who was super fun to play.

✿ : Fondest role-play memory, between muns?

I take this wording to mean it’s supposed to be between you and me particularly?  Mm.  We’ve got so many.  A big one is discussing PearlRose together.  Always fun talking about shared interests.  I also love every time we experiment with scenes in DMs.

But who could forget what originally cemented our friendship?  The terrifying gayness of Metatron and Bill.  The thread where Meta broke his arms and fucked him unconscious was just delightful.  Very wholesome.  Both of them were so happy.  And we got to be weird together.

😡 : Worst role play-related encounter and what advice you would give to others to avoid similar situations?

Think I mentioned a while back where I was basically just being conscripted as a ghostwriter.  That is to say, the person I was playing with was giving me constant instruction about what my character was supposed to being doing, and I went along with it.  Gave up when he asked me to change the muse from being a bee to being a human.

All I can say is that you should never let someone dictate your own muse to you.  Roleplay is collaborative, and you have a right to assert yourself in any kind of collaboration.

☿ : A trope you dislike?

I hate treating non-humans as humans.  It’s a disservice to non-human characters, and frankly boring.  Please understand I’m not saying non-humans shouldn’t be treated as people, just that aliens and paranormals probably have a lot of stuff going on that has no exact human parallel.  Likewise, humans may have stuff going on that has no exact xeno parallel.  Or at least that’s what I prefer to read about and watch.  To use a Steven Universe example: Fusion isn’t the Gem equivalent of sex.  I thought it was when I started out, and now I’m annoyed at certain media implying that it is.

I stopped watching Doctor Who at about the same time they started making a big deal about getting into the character’s “human” side, because this show is about a millennia-old time-traveling alien.  What’s the point of watching scifi with alien presence if that’s not the focus?  Gimme that good xenofiction.

♫ : Are there parts of your own personality that you reflect onto your character? How do they work?

I remember once Jhonen Vasquez did a little mock-interview in which he explained that all characters had a little bit of the author in them.  Of course that doesn’t mean that the author and the character are identical.  Given what he writes about, you get why he stressed that point.

I’ll admit, sometimes I add some of my own life experiences and preferences to a character.  Over at @kitsuningtonshippouknockoff I added a detail from my own life to his: Sneaking into the livingroom while everyone else was asleep to watch anime on Adult Swim.  For the Bee, his sense of humor is basically mine with all filters off.  For Metatron, there’s his way with words paradoxically coupled with difficulty genuinely communicating– same.  I could go on. 

These kinds of things help as touchstones to the character, but importantly, once I’m done defining our similarities, it’s easier to define our differences.  The bee’s got a raging libido, sex makes me a little uncomfortable.  Meta swears like a sailor, I (offline) don’t so much as say “damn it” when I drop a hammer on my foot.  Kit was force-fed the heart of his mother, I just helped mine replace a doorknob, etc, etc.

It’s a little like sculpture: I take away similarities bit by bit, like chiselling at stone.  It’s not a perfect metaphor, because I usually know what some big differences will be from the start, but you can kind of see what I’m getting at, yes?

And I don’t just use myself as base.  There’s a character I’m writing for a book who I describe as “Percy Weasley, except he puts his family first from the beginning, he never puts on airs, he’s not as high-strung, he’s a lot more snarky, he has no magic powers, and he’s Afro-Colombian-American.”  To which the keen-eyed observer might respond, “So not like Percy at all, then.”  And that’s fair enough, but Percy was my base.  A finished sculptured really shouldn’t look like an uncarved stone.  Unless, you know, it’s for some kind of “uncarved stone” exhibition.

Sorry this ran a little long.