Oh man, it’s been a while since I did this, but I would LOVE to take a shot at some questions from anyone out there today if they have ‘em about my headworld! It can be just about anything, seriously. Hit me with your best shot!
Anything’s great for keeping me occupied today.
… oh whoops uh I forgot to post this too didn’t I.
… Faces!
Probably going with something akin to the one beside the top right (with an arrow and secondary jaw action doodle) because I like the lines.
I also have tentative plans for introducing another sapient thing into the falsieverse soon that’s originated from this beast, too, though it’s of far lesser story consequence. Eeyup.
(I swear I’ll actually produce some relevant content for this blog again soon.)
Falsie ‘god’/origin entities again. This one’s definitely much closer to the ‘real’ thing I’ve been trying to unearth.
I’m still in a staggeringly downtrodden place at the moment and I feel pretty emotionally hungover to the point of just not knowing what to do with myself. I’m sure it will go away before too long, but right now it’s just sort of the perfect storm for ruining drive and productivity. This is literally the only thing I have done today and it was 20 minutes of smearing values around.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll find my stride again.
Still thinking about that vet thing.
Still feeling very unlike my usual self in that I have little motivation to do anything but cry and feel lonely or existential. .
I’m tired, and on the verge of collapse, and this is probably the most horrifically messy doodle I’ve ever shown publicly but whatever, man.
If nothing else, I like the direction the head is going. The body not so much; I may turn it into something more serpent-esque tomorrow if I have the drive for it after commissions.
False gods and things. Bleh.
Yep, I’m elaborating even more on the human side of headworld stuff tonight, because there are still lots of things to cover and I really want to talk about WEREWOLVES… Because no seriously, Wyrd’s been in the process of making a canon werewolf in falsieland and it makes me very excited. BUT ANYWAY.
I already wrote a little about how supernatural entities live and “die” in my initial info dump about the ether. Rather than expire physically as we are accustomed to, instead, ether life forms go through a sort of (mostly gradual) degradation process, losing the strength of their energy frequency/wavelength proportionally as their individual traits bleed away. Physical structure, appearance, mass, thought, personality and memory will all just sort of deteriorate until the entity is no more, melted back into the endless Vis flows.
Now, as these entities lose their ‘energy’ during the process, their overall wavelength/frequency decreases, and they start to sort of ‘fall’ towards our plane. By the time they’re truly on Death’s Door (or whatever analogue the ether has for such an expression), they may even be able to manifest here for a very brief period of time and, under extremely rare circumstances, prolong their life by binding to a living Esper. It doesn’t happen often, though; most ether entities don’t have the strength of will to stay intact long enough for any manifesting and will just fizzle out silently.
Still, very rarely all the circumstances line up and a dying ether spirit may just be lucky enough to come in contact with an Esper. There’s hardly anything left of them at this point— maybe some broken fragments of the personality that used to be, or the warped memory of a disembodied trait. All they generally know is a desperate urge to ‘save’ themselves, and so they’ll leap into the mind (and Vis load) of the first compatible being they find. The Esper generally won’t know what’s hit them until it’s too late; they may just feel like a ton of ectoplasmic bricks fell on top of them and then BAM. Suddenly, they’re aware of a very real and extremely confusing new consciousness living in their brain.
I don’t know if possession is quite the right word to describe it, but that’s… sort of what it is. The key difference is that the ‘possessing’ entities are so weak and broken that they’re more like a desperate parasite on their host, at first. They’ll scour their host’s mind for the most compelling and palpable thing they can find to take as a new form— be it a wolf, a dragon, a god beast, whatever. It doesn’t even have to be real so long as it’s tangible enough to seem real in the host’s mind. Likewise, the entity will help “reconstruct” its broken personality by filling in any gaps with traits of the host, too, which can be dominant tendencies (a calm host’s calmness) or even parts that have been suppressed in rare cases (like a venomous temper).
I imagine there’s probably a rough acclimation period for the host more than anything; it must be quite a system shock to suddenly be sharing your brain space with a strange new thing, but at the same time, having what’s essentially a living spark of raw ether Vis living inside of you opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Often a person may find themselves able to ‘switch’ places (with consent) after they’ve come to resolution with their odd new partner, and even twist their bodies into the entity’s adopted form. Whatever Esper abilities they had prior will inevitably develop more, as well.
Hence how things like werewolves and shape shifters have the potential to (and do, rarely) exist in the falsie verse. They’re definitely a one in a million sort of fluke, and most have enough self preservation to keep their heads low and way off the radar— but they’ve been around in various forms for millennia, and both the falsie and human side seems scarcely aware of them.
Anywho, though, I’m rambling again! I’ll leave it here and pick up again tomorrow. I’m always up for questions though if anyone has one to ask!
Ah, man, I’ve been terrifically unproductive (… again) on art tonight, but I’m damned determined to get back on that horse tomorrow and re-establish workflow. In the meanwhile, though, jotting all this stuff down helps me feel a bit less idle. There are still so many things to touch on and discuss about this new ether dimension in my headworld!
I covered some basics in my last post about how the ether is essentially a plane that exists… mostly within the same space as our earth, but on a much higher energy/wavelength. It’s pretty well and beyond our senses, comprehension, or awareness, so for the most part it exists in its own little bubble.
Except that there are ties, between the two. The Vis Feeder and Seeder bacteria are perhaps the most critical link in the chain, as the only (currently known) “life forms” that can directly feed on or produce Vis. The Vis Feeder types even go a step further to make the otherwise abstract energy ”tangible” enough in their cells for other secondary entities (like falsicorns) to consume, use, and become linked with as well.
Falsies aren’t the only ones who’ve been linked in, either— at some point in history it seems that human populations were also exposed to some more “tangible” form of Vis like the pools. It’s definitely a rarity by comparison, but there are people born who seem to possess varying degrees of Vis perception, sensitivity, or adaptation.
(I’ll put the rest of this in a cut for the hugeness!)
Oh wow I can’t believe I haven’t touched this blog in so long— super sorry, everyone! Still, though, I haven’t been resting on my laurels entirely, and Wyrd’s been helping me with a ton of wonderfully rich world building. I have a ton of very relevant information saved in conversational chunks that I’ll tweeze through later, but the most important overarching (and sort of new) concept I’ve finally tackled would be some more hardcore Vis specifics and, even more importantly, what lies beyond our early plane as beings know it in canon.
I have yet to settle on a particular name for the giant supernatural otherworld, but for now I’ve just called it The Ether, and that’s what I’ll stick to until something better comes along.
The very general theory I’m running on is that there are multiple dimensions/planes of existence/whatever you may call them and they more or less “overlap” in space, but exist on completely different energy wavelengths/frequencies. The earth— with all its falsicorns, humans, and other life forms, is a plane with a very low energy wavelength, and the ether is of a much higher one. It’s… something akin to what many interpret as a heavenly plane, but its life forms and terrain are so scarcely tangible and overwhelming to us that we’d probably think they were the most nightmare fuel inducing eldritch abominations ever. It is believed that a certain essence of earthbound life (possibly the “soul” as we like to think of it) gains some accumulation of frequency through living and more or less “ascends” toward the ether, but the truth on that is hard to say.
Inversely, as life forms on the ether plane enter a phase analogous to death, they gradually lose frequency/energy/wavelength, and for the most part, their ‘essences’ just dissolve seamlessly into the flow of Vis drifting between spaces. I can’t imagine this is a very pleasant way to go, really, just sort of degrading until you’re literally nothing, but on very rare occasions, a sentient essence may be so strong that it either survives in some fragmented fashion by sheer stupendous luck (which I’ll get to later in another post, I promise!) or somehow manages to leave an “imprint” of itself in the endless Vis flows.
The latter is essentially what birthed falsicorns— in a roundabout way. A lone but unusually powerful entity, most likely the last of its kind, attempted to birth more like entities from itself in the latter stages of “dying”. It didn’t succeed, already too degraded to maintain itself, but the essence and form of it never quite dissolved into the ether and instead began to concentrate, slowly, in the now famous Vis-Feeder pools those first falsicorn ancestors gorged on.
The entity (which is the closet thing to a literal “god” falsicorns have that isn’t just mythos) probably shared a lot of features that modern falsies have, since its imprint is what shaped their sudden mutations. I haven’t really got it pegged properly yet, but I see it as being a very lithe, predatory shape, with long jaws, nearly endless rows of teeth, sunken eye sockets, a long clawed whipping tail, and an enormous fanged horn with the quintessential eye. It’s… basically all the attributes of falsicorns without their ‘given’ equine features or builds, run through a blender and injected with steroids and psychotropics. Yep.
Wow I need to cut this off here— but it’s a good jumping off point to talk about more later! I’m seriously just so delighted to finally tackle this subject (and have Wyrd for such fabulous brainstorming), because it’s opened up a load of unexpected and delightful new possibilities to build on in the future.
Okay, this doesn’t counts towards any real canon, but it does involve falsicorns and practice sketches, so it’s going here anyway!
Toby and Gale (who belongs to Billybartos) have kind of an adorable dynamic that I’m shamelessly enamored by, and since Falsicorns do have the (theoretical) potential to be nearly immortal in terms of getting ‘old’ (so long as their Vis Feeder bacteria load is refreshed by something akin to their precious source pools and/or it somehow mutates or becomes more resilient, they can stave off the degradation of aging wear indefinitely), I had kind of a silly, sappy thought of Toby becoming a long time companion for the ol’ guy. She’s a lifelong learner and a strong believer in the potential/good spirit of humanity and all other things, so the opportunity to watch and interact with it alongside someone like her favorite magical uncle would just be par for the course.
I could see them just sort of walking the earth and seeing what they could find. My excuse for her resilience would probably involve her bacteria mutating due to Hhoota’s weird energies or something, so she’d wind up living… well, pretty indefinitely, until she suffered a grave enough injury to do her in or something some time down the line.
I’m going to blame the sentiment for all this on having been exposed to Dr. Who for the first time in the past couple of weeks. The thought of long lived people just sort of wandering through time together is really kind of charming to me.
Anywho, enough rambling! I need to write up more information on canon stuff at some point, but bawww sappy fluffy feelings what dooooo
Holy crap, it’s actually a picture!
Both my mom and I managed to catch some kind of ugly flu/cold bug on Thursday (which was both the date of my big illustration show for school AND her birthday!), but we survived! I’m now going on my third day of being sickish, though, and I think my art brain is suffering for it. Either way, I tried to bumble around on a sketch and something semi-presentable came out of it! Man, my skills with CS6 still feel pretty rough, but ah, well. Every picture’s a step forward.
This critter’s actually a falsicorn, believe it or not! It just happens to be one who’s taken the (illusionary, in this case) form of a red deer to roam around its native territory undetected. I think red deer (or even domestic horses) are probably the illusionary guise of choice for pretty much every falsicorn patrolling England, since their gait isn’t terribly dissimilar from an equine and their size isn’t THAT off either, so they don’t have to worry about their movements looking too suspicious with the visual translation. I’m still working out the logistics of how illusion magic works compared to genuine transformations, though I know it takes a lot less Vis consumption to maintain and therefore is a much more tolerable body strain, and techs have a much easier time making hexes for forms vaguely ‘similar’ to their own than other kinds of animals.
This particular critter is also in the process of breaking their form down in some scary reveal at a victim, hence the awful teeth and things. Maybe I’ll take another shot at this idea a bit later tonight once my eyes stop watering and itching uncontrollably.
I keep thinking back to Lockjaws and how they can melt in all kinds of freaky and disturbing ways whenever I toy around with the idea of how falsies slip in and ‘out’ of their illusion guises. They can probably make for some pretty horrific nightmare fuel visuals if they want during the process.
Another fun fact: the ‘easiest’ way to pick out what may be a falsicorn in any guise is seeing if they blink. Since their heat pits are completely covered at all times (and their visible ‘eyes’ in guise are the analogue to said pits, albeit completely fake), they aren’t generally used to blinking as a regular thing, so they just don’t remember to mimic it in a false body either. Even when they make genuine shifts into a solid body, they’re usually rigged up with a vaguely matte looking protective lens thing over their pits (which has the appearance of an eye, but isn’t), so blinking isn’t necessary to keep their pits from drying out.
I promise I’ll stop derailing this blog with non-headworld things soon, but this is still relevant, I swear! I just wanted to make a little celebration post to announce that I am (technically!) back in art business again, and looking at CS6 for the first time ever. Admittedly I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by how vastly different it looks (and more or less feels) from CS3 (which I’ve been working on for years and gotten extremely accustomed to), but the learning curve is probably a lot slighter than I’m thinking it is and I’m sure I’ll be wrangling it in soon.
New doodles I throw up here just may seem a little offish looking stylistically for the next short while as I figure things out, but oh man, it feels good not to be dead in the water anymore. HURRAH. \o/
I even managed to track down most of my old favorite brushes from deviantart to download again, barring Sullivan’s amazing wildlife brush pack, which she apparently took down (for a while at least) while cleaning her gallery out, boooooo. :C Those fur brushes were great for finalizing edges and strand definitions and stuff.
