Worldbuilding

I have been using DokuWiki for a while to archive my worldbuilding stuff, but recently I've been playing around with Bookstack. DokuWiki is more versatile, but it looks dated and that versatility is achieved through a slew of interdependent plugins that may make future maintenance hard.

Some people have also said that it's harder to find stuff on DokuWiki. To that end, which of these two sites do you think is better?

DokuWiki: https://constructed.world/

Bookstack: https://book.constructed.world/

One of my favorite tidbits about Oblivion is that, when Bethesda brought Patrick Stewart in to play Uriel Septim, they gave him this big 90-page booklet detailing the character’s history and background and motivations, and they were really worried that they’d gone overboard and given him too much. Meanwhile, Stewart was delighted--he’s said that it was the best character prep he’d ever been given, and he wished more people would do that.

For these purposes "cold blooded" means having a low metabolism. Let's say we have a race of cold blooded sophonts. They have to regulate their body temperature externally by basking, and go a long time between feeding.

Between meals they only move to get in and out of the sun or artificial heat source. They're physically lethargic but mentally they're just as active as a human would be when awake. The result is a lot like when I have insomnia. Can't/don't want to move, but brain going a mile a minute.

They have grasping hands but can't use them well or at all when in this low energy state, but they can speak. Since most of their life is spent this way, they develop a strong oral culture, writing little but saying much. They spend these extended periods of torpor in groups, swapping stories and philosophizing.

Material culture is scarce, since any large structures must be built very slowly in stages during their active periods or in parallel with many many workers. They don't need to develop agriculture, since their caloric intake is much less compared to a human, and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle can support a much larger group.

I imagine them becoming a society of monks and philosophers, meditating and pondering the nature of things. They're not perfect pacifists but are less likely to engage in conflict because it wastes energy.

Here's something I haven't done yet surprisingly enough. This is the word for the Commonthroat language in Commonthroat itself.

It's romanized rJhqjHcMr which is pronounced /chuff, late falling strengthening growl; huff, early falling strengthening growl; short low strong whine; long low strong grunt, chuff/

It's a compound word that consists of the roots rJhg meaning throat or language and qjHc, which is the adjective universal or standard. gjHc in turn consists of the adjective qjH whole and the suffix -c meaning related to or associated with (compare English -y or -ish). Etymologically it means pertaining to the whole. -Mr is the 3rd person proximal noun suffix, roughly meaning this or this thing here. The dictionary form of a word is usually the indefinite 3rd person form ending in -g, but Commonthroat is a proper noun, so it can't really be indefinite.

Commonthroat is read right to left. The blue glyphs are vowels and the red diacritics (and the red glyph at the end) are consonants. If a consonant begins a syllable it's written as a diacritic. If it ends a syllable it uses a full letter.

This was a response I posted to a prompt on the worldbuilding subreddit.

The Partisans don't use prisons. They use oubliettes. you are placed in a capsule that fills with neurogel. The gel acts as a liquid ventilation medium and an interface between your brain and a computer system.

You can only see, touch, hear, smell, or taste what the computer shows you, and in an oubliette, the computer doesn't show you anything. You are completely devoid of sensation while remaining fully conscious, your naked mind floating in a see of oblivion. Worse, the computer can alter your time perception to make time seem to pass more slowly. Outside it was only six minutes, but inside it felt like a month of complete and total isolation.

Eventually, the neurogel drains and you collapse onto the floor, expelling gel from your lungs and stomach. After you're done coughing and vomiting, you try to get up, but you've forgotten how to walk. You're hefted onto a stretcher and unceremoniously tossed outside into the bitter cold like a sack of garbage.

The first tactile sensation you feel is the bitter cold nipping at your fingers and toes. You're only clad in a thin shirt, pants, and stockings, all still covered in a yellow patina of neurogel. You look up at the sky. The faint sun is near the zenith, but its distant feeble rays only manage to bathe the area in evening twilight.

You hear the clicking of claws on pavement.

"It's another human!" You recognize the words, but the melodic yips and growls are unutterable by the human vocal tract. More claws dig into your sides and you're flipped on your back onto a rickety furniture dolly. A thin shear blanket is draped over your entire body. It smells like it's been slept on by a thousand outdoor dogs. "This is just for show," says another alien voice, female this time. You barely have time to wonder what she means when the dolly starts moving.

In your periphery you can see the hind legs of one of your rescuers, covered in smokey gray pelage. His left rear paw seems to be missing its outer thumb. His long sinewy tail is wrapped around a handle near your side.

You hear the metallic thud of paw gauntlets on the pavement. "Halt, citizens!" barks a voice from behind a helmet. The guard lopes up to you. "State your destination and reason for travel."

"We're taking this body to the processing plant," says the male voice, loudly as though addressing an unseen observer above and off to the side.

"Processing plant?" the guard says skeptically, making an odd gesture with his tail.

"Correct," says the female. She awkwardly positions herself as though trying to avoid the gaze of the unseen observer. She rummages through a pocketed band around her right foreleg and produces a few plastic coins and palms them off to the guard.

"Processing plant," the guard repeats, rubbing the coins together and discreetly pocketing them. "Good and dead then, this one?" He walks up beside you, balls his rear paw into a fist, and donkey kick-punches you in the ribs. You bite your tongue to stop from wheezing. He rears up on his hind feet and lifts the blanket. Your eyes meet. His head is obscured by a bulky powered armor helmet but you know he's staring right into your slimy goo-filled human eyes. He grabs your head in his forepaw and slams it down onto the dolly. "Yup, only good two-legs is a dead two-legs," he's still projecting his voice to the same unseen observer. "Go about your business, citizens." The metallic thud of his paw gauntlets fade into the distance.

You continue along for several minutes. Your rescuers smell your confusion at what transpired back there. "Oh he knew you're alive," says the male under his breath, "but they don't get paid enough to care. But we gotta give him some plausible deniability, hence the blanket. Vid sensors are everywhere." He gestures with his muzzle up at what looks like a matte-black square flush with the dull gray concrete wall to your right.

A few more minutes pass, the only sound the rickety wheels of the dolly and the clicking of all eight of your benefactors' paws on the pavement. "We're here," yips the female. She throws the blanket off you and you get a good look at her for the first time. She's completely furless save for her whiskers, like someone grafted the head of a Xoloitzcuintle onto the body of a baboon with alopecia. Her back and shoulders are dense with musculature, a physique befitting a species built for swinging through the trees.

"Healer?" you manage to mutter. She tilts her muzzle upward in silent affirmation.

"Can you walk?" she asks. You try to move your legs, but can't.

"ugh," she growls. "We'll have to carry you down the ladder." She wraps her tail around your left shoulder and the male does the same to your right.

"Sorry in advance," says the male, "This is gonna suck for all of us." They pull you off the dolly and kick it down a shaft next to you. It clatters on the concrete a story below.

Their tails are gripping your shoulders so tightly your arms are losing circulation. Despite your feeble grunts of protest they drag you like a sack of potatoes to the edge and position your feet toward the hole. "Yeah yeah I know," says the healer, lifting a rear paw and making a grasping motion with her digits. "This place isn't easy for tailless bipeds on the best of days."

They heave you over the edge. There's a ladder leading down to the floor below. They begin climbing down, their rear paws a second set of hands gripping the rungs. They manage to clamber down and lower you onto the cold concrete floor.

Their tails uncoil from around your shoulders and for the first time you can move your arms. you flail them feebly trying to return blood flow to your fingertips.

"Ah! Progress!" the healer yips, walking out of sight and pulling some things from an old plastic bin. She waddles up to you on her hind feet. "Take a big whiff" she says, thrusting a rag soaking in some foul-smelling liquid under your nose. "It'll help with the residual effects of the oubliette."

A sharp scent burns your nose, but your brain fog slowly begins to lift.

You still can't remember why they put you in there, but flames of vengeance are already kindling. The healer sniffs the air. "Don't even think about it," she growls. "We don't know what you did to be shoved in an oubliette, but just be thankful you got out with your sanity. Anyone going on two legs here in the Outlands already has a target on their back. For all we know you sneezed in the direction of the wrong person. Trying to settle the score will just get you in more trouble."

"If you want my advice," says the male, "you catch the first ferry back to Moonlitter then take the mass router to Hearthside. It's much more human-friendly than the Outlands. Why any human would willingly live in this Light-forsaken pit in the first place I'll never know."

I'm writing a short call of duty fan fiction and wanted advice on writing one

Introduction…

Humanity has built an interstellar civilization based on the replication of technological artifacts of the Xenoculture, an extinct alien civilization. Interstellar travel is achieved through the “x-engine”. The first x-engine jump occurred in 1138 IE (Interstellar Era)

The wealthiest, most populated systems in the galaxy are the seven Primate Worlds. The highest among these is the planet Andar, a temperate world whose landmass is concentrated into one massive supercontinent. These are the other six Primate Worlds…

• Kasika: Considered the closest to nature, they are the most highly developed in the areas of environmental conservation and renewable technology.
• Njorde: The youngest of the Primate Worlds, theirs is a frontier-oriented culture of quiet toughness.
• Mavaros: The most martial and stratified society in the Primate Worlds. The military and police are integral parts of their government and social structure, with conscription as a long-standing policy. Forced labor is a common form of punishment and gladiatorial combat is their preferred sport.
• Chandora: Their culture is based around the study of cosmic cycles and ancestor worship.
• Shuiya: Their society prizes technological advancement and the experimental ethic, as evidenced by their development of the x-engine.
• Anlel: Seen as the most radical of the Primate Worlds, they have produced many of the most renowned writers and other artists, as well as skilled jurists.

The Primate Worlds were settled by sleeper ship colonists. Eight massive arks departed the mysterious Planet Zero, the homeworld of humanity, in 1 IE. These escapees were the last survivors of an apocalyptic event. The various Primate World cultures have different accounts of what doomed Planet Zero and what the planet was even called. The seven Primate Worlds are all located in the galaxy's First Quadrant. It was on these worlds that humans first encountered artifacts of the Xenoculture.

During the millennium of isolation from their peers, the people of the Primate Worlds developed physical adaptations to their new environments. Some developed stockier forms adapted to high gravity, others more graceful forms for low gravity, etc. Some people were also changed by their exposure to Xenoculture artifacts. Despite these changes the people of the Primate Worlds were still interfertile by the time they made contact after the development of the x-engine.

Long before humans left Planet Zero, the Xenoculture founded settlements on worlds throughout the galaxy. The galaxy is littered with their artifacts. It is estimated that they went extinct around 5000 BIE (Before the Interstellar Era). Speculation abounds as to what ended the Xenoculture. Some scientists theorize that multiple species composed the Xenoculture, while others surmise that extensive gene engineering wildly diversified their forms.

Xenoculture artifacts are often “alive”. They may generate fields with a variety of effects. One example is the refraction halo, which distorts the path of fast-moving projectiles within a certain volume. Combat in such a situation places a high premium on one’s melee fighting skills and equipment.

The Quadrants…

The galaxy is divided into five major regions...

• First Quadrant
• North Quadrant
• South Quadrant
• Lost Quadrant
• Core Zone

The First Quadrant encompasses the galactic West. It is where humanity arose millennia ago, on the now-mythical Planet Zero. Political power and economic leverage extends far from the Primate Worlds, influencing events throughout the galaxy.

The North Quadrant is richer in heavy elements than the rest of the galaxy, the remnants of a particularly violent cluster of supernova bursts millions of years ago. As a result, industrial operations dot this region.

The South Quadrant contains worlds that are the most pristine, with the least development by human industry or contact with the Xenoculture. Biodiversity is at its prime here, as evidenced by the existence of Loth: the site of the most prized trophy hunting creatures in the galaxy. Another such lush world is Rishma, the source of the galaxy’s most exquisite fabrics.

The Lost Quadrant encompasses the galactic East. is a large swathe of the galaxy full of hazardous anomalies like high-energy radiation belts and rogue nanite swarms. It is likely that these phenomena are leftovers from whatever destroyed the Xenoculture. There are no known worlds harboring multicellular life in this Quadrant. The largest expeditionary fleet ever fielded for exploring this region was turned back in 1781 IE after many of their ships were consumed by metal-eating lifeforms known as the feraxen.

The Core Zone is bordered by all four Quadrants. At its center lies Titantua, the galaxy’s supermassive black hole. The high density of star systems in this region means interstellar travel times are on average much shorter than in the Quadrants. As a result the Core Zone systems have frequently changed hands throughout galactic history.

Large stretches of galactic history revolve around the expansion of Primate Worlders into the various Quadrants, punctuated by periods of redivisional warfare for the interstellar spoils.

The Sectrons…

There is a reclusive faction of sentient machines called the Sectrons. They were created by a group of scientists in 2048 IE to serve humans as a labor force. The scientists then decided to purge them because they showed signs of sapience in the 2090s. By 2160 IE, all Sectrons who survived the Discontinuation fled to distant sectors of space in the Core Zone. In more recent years they have branched out to worlds in the Lost Quadrant, beyond the easy reach of humans. As mechanical lifeforms, the Sectrons are uniquely resilient against the Lost Quadrant’s dangers.

Some Sectron worlds are host to populations of humans who have elected to have their brains placed into life-sustaining vats as the culmination of many years of enlightenment training. Known as the Ascensionists, they are something between a monastic order and an ambassadorial corps.

The Ravelers...

The expansion of the Universe is a perpetual unraveling, a fabric that stretches at every point. Some people can sense the flow between every atom.

Most people are not sensitive to this because they have evolved to block out their awareness of this expansion. If one could perceive the flow, they would see their own cells drifting apart, the floor crawling under their feet, and air molecules slipping away into the distance. They would be driven to madness.

The brain has developed a neural dampener that blocks this sensation automatically. It is like ignoring the blind spot in your vision or the feeling of your own tongue.

There are ways to pass through the inner firewall. Different organizations use different techniques but it typically requires years of meditation, sensory deprivation, and controlled exposure to cosmic radiation to recalibrate one’s neurology. Many who tried to do this have died or lost themselves in a waking nightmare of dissolution.

Those who pass typically have an unusually thin firewall, a high degree of psychological resilience, and privileged access to trainers. But this ability comes with the price of constant alertness. Maintaining the sense is like holding a muscle flexed indefinitely. One moment of distraction, be it from fear or complacency, and the barrier will shut again. It may take weeks of intensive re-sensitization to pass through again.

With sufficient attunement to the expansion of the Universe these “Ravelers” can temporarily direct the cosmic flow and effect superhuman abilities. Telekinesis, levitation, and illusionary apparitions are but a few of the strange manifestations of these individuals’ extraordinary powers. Ravelers are the subject of legends and rumors, often the target of persecution. It is known that they existed in a raw and unguided form on Planet Zero; some say these proto-Ravelers contributed to that world's demise.

Sectrons, being non-biological, cannot become Ravelers. However their monastic allies the Ascensionists are famous for the strength of their raveling powers.

The most infamous Raveler in history was Jaredon, known to his enemies as the Mad Warlock. Claiming to be the reincarnated personification of the Xenoculture, Jaredon gathered a large mass of followers who looked up to him as a messianic figure. His greatest exercise of raveling powers was the creation of a new moon, Serina IV-K, out of the rings of a gas giant. This moon served as a base of operations held together by the sheer force of his will. He violently established his cult as a major power in galactic politics during the 24th century IE; interstellar travel throughout the North Quadrant was a hazardous proposition in this era. The Mad Warlock’s rule came to a sudden end in 2377 when he was assassinated by one of his many ex-lovers, triggering the disintegration of Serina IV-K into a debris field.

The fourth millennium…

The present date is 3134 IE.

The dominant power in the galaxy is the theocratic Andarian Kingdom, with its capital on the Primate World of Andar. There are outside powers that have varying relations with the Kingdom; chief among these are the privately-owned domains of Interworld Incorporated and the Sectron Autonomous Assembly.

The state religion of the Andarian Kingdom is a sect of the Demifaith known as the Ultimatum Brotherhood. The Brotherhood waged a bloody war against the Triadists, the founding sect of the Demifaith. Now the Triadists are all but extinct, their holistic and peaceful teachings corrupted by the power-hungry Brotherhood.

Power within the Andarian Kingdom is contested between the King, who derives his divine rulership rights from the Brotherhood, and the House of Worlds, a secular legislature composed of lawmakers from the settled systems throughout Kingdom space.

The largest corporation in the galaxy by revenue and employees is Interworld Incorporated. They own subsidiaries that provide nearly every good or service imaginable. Entire star systems have been purchased by Interworld executives and now operate like company towns. Unlike the zealously religious Kingdom, Interworld is known to do business with the Sectrons.

The most militant opposition to the Kingdom is the Allied Revolutionary Coalition (ARC), a network of urban councils, labor union representatives, dissident intellectuals, and militia groups. They were formed in response to the Brotherhood’s consolidation of power. Though various segments of ARC differ in finer ideological points, they share the goal of overthrowing the Kingdom and building a society beyond class divisions and private property. On more than one occasion ARC has fought against the extremist group known as Black Horizon, another faction which claims to oppose the rule of the Kingdom.

The Freewinders…

Another distinct culture is that of the Freewinders. They are the descendants of one of the eight sleeper ships that left Planet Zero. Unlike the other seven ships, these travelers found a world rendered uninhabitable by a cataclysmic volcanic eruption. They have since adapted to space-dwelling life and are the most noticeably distinct from baseline humans of all the sleeper ship descendants. They are playfully called Windies and derogatorily called Nonworlders.

They were chased out of the First Quadrant around 1500 IE and have since diversified into new branches in the North, South, and the Core. At various points throughout galactic history they were permitted to undertake pilgrimages to the Iton system, where they pay respects to the world that died to give them their way of life. The Freewinders live on the fringes of galactic society and face discrimination based on stereotypes.

I read an interesting post about this on the worldbuilding subreddit that I was going to "cross post" here for the sake of having more content that isn't just me talking about my own stuff. Unfortunately I can't find the post again, so I'll just summarize it and put my own thoughts.

Basically, zombies and vampires resonate strongly with the modern mind. Zombies represent the loss of individuality and subsumption into the horde. Vampires represent a parasitic aristocracy literally sucking the life out of those beneath them. But werewolves don't really stand for something that modern man can latch onto.

Some of the comments suggested that lycanthropy is usually depicted as a part time transformation, so getting bitten doesn't mean a total loss of self or humanity, compared to becoming a zombie or vampire which is usually permanent, so it's not as impactful as the other two.

It's also possible werewolves represent the dangers of the wilderness, getting attacked or eaten by wild animals (wolves especially) or dying of exposure. In the past those were problems faced by more people, so the trope resonated more, but modern advancements have pushed the savage wilderness back, allowing humans to live in relative comfort without such fears.

The last point that was brought up approaches how I imagine lycanthropy, namely man's inhumanity to man, the worry that beneath a thin veneer of social convention we're all just naked apes acting on the same savage instincts that our hairier tree-dwelling cousins do. Werewolves represent what happens when that thin veneer is stripped away. Indeed, there's a Latin phrase that embodies this. Homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man).

But I think I'd take the idea in a slightly different direction. What if we start with the conceit that werewolves are humans who turn into literal regular wolves every month, as opposed to superpowered bipedal wolf men. Wolves who think and act like the nonsapient animals they are in real life. Real wolves don't maul everything that moves. A wolf is more likely to run away at the sight of a human. A wolf who isn't currently starving isn't going to risk life or limb on a meal that fights back. So what if when a werewolf turns, he just slinks off into a corner and sleeps, or if hungry, seeks less risky prey than a human.

For a brief window of time, a human gets to experience a life without dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. He simply acts, without worrying about the morality of his actions, because he's an animal, and animals don't have a moral framework.

Perhaps some part of his humanity is accessible while transformed, but it's a faint echo of emotions evoked by familiar sights and sounds and smells. He has no idea what a house or a couch are, and even less what ownership is, but he recognizes his human house and human couch as places of rest and safety. So he just quietly curls up on his couch and, for the first time this month, gets a good night's sleep because he's incapable of worrying.

Humans are hardwired to interpret certain physical features as cute, triggering our nurturing instincts, regardless of whether the animal in question is safe to interact with. I'd personally love to give scritches and belly rubs to all sorts of floofy animals that would at best strongly object to me intruding on their personal space and at worst rip my face off.

Do you have any dangerous critters that evoke the same feelings? Are there other sophonts besides humans who have a different schema for cuteness?

The Lonely Galaxy has tree dwellers (or tree-dwellers), which are nonsapient congeners to the yinrih. They're visually identical to their sapient kin as far as humans are concerned.

Adult yinrih have a very strong sense of personal space. Their wild ancestors did not engage in allogrooming, since their jungle home had plenty of bristly plants that they could rub against or wallow on to get rid of mats and bugs. Gestures that involve physical contact are vanishingly rare among unrelated adults, including between parents. So when humans try to go in for a snoot boop or belly rub they're likely to be met with an assault charge.

However, pups are more physically affectionate. Siblings will thump each other across the back with their tails, sires and dams will "kiss" their pups (touching the wet tip of the nose to the muzzle, top of the head, or back of an ear and quickly exhaling), and parents will often intertwine their tail with their pup's to give comfort. As pups get older, they start rejecting physical affection from parents and litter mates, though they may resume them to some extent as adults.

Tree dwellers display similar developmental stages, with kits and pups actively seeking physical interaction from sires, dams, and litter mates, but rejecting (sometimes violently) this affection as they near adulthood.

Tree dwellers are almost as long-lived as yinrih, with more or less the same ~50ish years to reach adulthood, with a good 30 or so of those years where the pups are cuddly. So you can probably see where this is going. A human illegally buys a tree dweller pup, which will be all cute and cuddly for potentially the rest of the owner's life depending on the ages of the pup and owner, and by the time that pup grows into a violent adult, the owner has died and this critter who will live longer than the Western Roman Empire is now someone else's problem.

Because content!

This was supposed to take place after The Tornado. Sarah gets a tour of the Dewfall, then Tod gets bandaged up by Sunshine. He brings his powered armor with him when going back to town to meet Jim. Tod is an AW peacekeeper and is familiar with disaster relief operations, so he intends to assist the rescue operations in the wake of the tornado. That's what I intended to write, anyway. Here's what I managed before ADHD kicked in. I write scenes as they come to me regardless of order, then stitch them together, so it jumps around a lot.

::: spoiler here ya go. The tail lights of Mark's truck had barely disappeared from view when Sunshine turned to Sarah. «Well, now's your chance to see how a yinrih healer gets things done.» she said, walking over to the spacecraft and beckoning Sarah to follow.

"I still can't believe you spent two hundred fifty years in here."

«It's not so bad.» said Sunshine as she traced a pattern with her writing claw on a small panel next to the hatch. Her ink lingered briefly before being quickly absorbed into the smooth surface. A haptic motor in the panel pulsed in confirmation as the hatch noiselessly glided open. «Come on in, but mind the low ceiling. Womb ships aren't built with giant bipeds in mind.» She wrapped the tip of her tail around a control knob near the hatch and rotated it a few times, dialing the interior lighting to a frequency range that Sarah could see.

Sarah ducked her head and climbed through the hatch. She could just about stand upright if she bent her head forward. A melange of odors greeted her nostrils, a combination of lavender, disinfectant, and the musty smell of a kennel, a well cleaned kennel, but a kennel nonetheless. Six ovoid capsules lined the walls, three to a side, each just large enough to fit a single yinrih. They seemed to float freely just off the floor, but closer inspection revealed them to be attached by gimbals to the wall. Sunshine pawed one of the chambers, causing it to rotate forward revealing a door. Sarah could tell it was originally transparent, but the interior surface was coated in a translucent yellow residue.

«This here's an amnion.» said Sunshine patting the capsule demonstratively with her tail. She pressed a button, causing the transparent section of the chamber to swing open. The lavender smell intensified as the interior of the chamber was exposed to air. Inside was a harness to secure a traveler in place, as well as some drains and other things Sarah couldn't identify. «You get strapped in here and it fills completely with neurogel.»

"You're completely submerged?" Sarah asked. She couldn't see any breathing masks, tubes, or anything other than the harness meant to connect the occupant to the capsule.

«Sure. Neurogel is wonderful stuff. It's a cushion against high G-forces; it holds dissolved oxygen like nobody's business, so you just let it fill your lungs, and it serves as an interface between the nervous system and the ship's electronics. Oh, and it halts metabolism, that's the important part. It does all the work of keeping the brain nourished and oxygenated while your body is preserved for centuries.»

"I thought yinrih couldn't go unconscious. You're telling me you just floated in there like pickles in a jar for two hundred fifty years?"

«It only felt like a few days to us. While we were in interstellar space the amnions slowed down our brain functions so that time outside seemed to pass more quickly. When we entered Earth orbit they went back to normal. We were still in suspension when we heard Bob on the radio. Stormlight was the one who answered back, and he did it while floating in that amnion over there.»

Sarah reached her hand out to touch the patina of gel coating the door, but Sunshine gave her a warning look. «I wouldn't touch it.» she admonished. «I don't know enough about your neurology to say if it's toxic to humans. In fact, let's close this for now, just in case the fumes get to you.» Sunshine hopped up on her hind feet and pushed the door closed with her front paws.

Sunshine moved further into the tiny craft. «Mind the paw loops.» she said, using her right rear paw to tug on a cloth loop attached to the floor. They covered every free surface: walls, floor, and ceiling. «Most structures built in microgravity have these loops everywhere to help you pull yourself along. They also double as handles for lifting floor panels.» She said as she pressed four spring loaded buttons at each corner of a tile on the floor. The tile popped upward slightly and Sunshine lifted it up and set it off to one side. Beneath the floor were bags, boxes, canisters, and other impedimenta all bound by elastic cables to keep them from floating away.

«Did you forget why we're here in the first place?» Tod barked. «We're not here to give tours.»

«Don't get your tail in a knot. I'm getting my equipment as we speak.» said Sunshine. «Take this box and set it next to our impatient little patient.» She handed Sarah a transparent container filled with various oddments. «I'm right behind you with the rest.»

...

«Ouch! Don't they make stuff that doesn't sting so bad?» Tod complained as Sunshine smeared antiseptic on his forepaws.

«The pain is how you know it's working.»

"Is he okay?" Sarah asked.

«He's fine. Just some superficial lacerations and expressed ink sacs--self inflicted, I might add. And all over a little wind?»

«It wasn't 'a little wind'.» said Tod, looking at the human for affirmation.

"Tornadoes are no joke." said Sarah. "Don't you have violent wind storms back home?"

«Wayfarers' Haven? Certainly not.» said Sunshine as she put away her tools.

...

Tod lifted a floor panel covering the basement storage area. He pulled out a large canister and unscrewed the lid, allowing the contents to spill onto the floor. The flexible pseudosinew of a torso jacket crinkled quietly as the garment unfurled slowly from its two and a half century sequester in a vacuum cylinder. He took a cursory inventory as he spread the components out on the floor: One torso jacket, one tail sheath, four paw gauntlets, two drone capsules, which were already snapped into brackets on either side of the spine of the jacket, and one helmet.

Lying on his back atop the jacket, he slid his hind legs into the two rear sleeves, then his forelegs into the two front sleeves. He wriggled his tail through the hole at the hind end of the jacket. Once all five limbs were where they needed to be, he zipped down the front, covering his belly in glossy black artificial musculature. He gripped the tail sheath in his rear paws, slid his tail inside it, and snapped the sheath onto the gasket surrounding the base of his tail. His hindquarters were now protected by the best, most durable tech the lowest bidder could offer.

Next came the paw gauntlets: Front right, front left, rear right, and rear left. He flexed all six digits on all four paws to see how the pseudosinew mimicked his fine motor movements. The front right paw was a bit stiff, but otherwise the gauntlets had endured the test of time.

Finally, he picked up the helmet. The colored chevrons on the back of the ear guards fluoresced as brightly as the day they were applied. He gave it a quick once over. The HUD visor was clear, the air inlet filters along the muzzle were free of dust, and the umbilical port on the back of the neck was still magnetized. Once he was satisfied with the external inspection, he donned the helmet and began a checklist of the internals. He flicked some of the tongue-actuated switches and made sure the ball valve on the hydration line was clear by giving it a few licks. Once he was satisfied that nothing was amiss, he flipped back over onto his feet and quickly tossed his head back to snap the umbilical in place, connecting the helmet to the rest of the suit.

With all the passive systems in order, it was time to apply power to this powered armor. Tod pressed his inner thumb against the control ring on his left writing claw and listened for the subtle whirr of the inlet fans of the micro fusion reactor as they began drawing in ambient water vapor. Some of the water would be electrolytically separated, with the hydrogen going to feed the reactor and the oxygen either exhausted back into the environment or added to emergency air tanks. The rest of the water would serve as coolant or be added to the hydration line to be lapped up as needed.

«Lefty? Righty? How are you little felllas holding up?» He affectionately patted the two drone capsules with his tail. A haptic motor in each capsule gave a quick pulse letting Tod know their firmware had successfully booted. He flicked a tongue switch, pulling up the video feed from each drone onto his HUD. The retroreflectors on his ear guards shone back at him in the darkness.

...

"What do you mean we can't go back?" asked Jim.

"Sorry, sir, but that whole side of town is under strict curfew until 7:00 tomorrow morning." It was the same cop who had dropped Jim off at the clinic. "There may be other people in that trailer park that need help, and you'd just get in the way. I'll see to it personally that your belongings are safe. You can return after sunup and go through your things."

"I can help you get the other people out." Jim suggested.

"Sorry, but no. We need trained professionals for this sort of thing. You could just end up making things worse if you don't know what you're doing. Here," The officer pulled some bills out of his wallet and offered them to Jim. "There's a motel across the street. This should cover a night for you and our little visitor. Y'all get some rest. I can pick you two up in the morning.

"Excuse me, sir." Tod had donned the HUD specs and keyer and was sprawled out across three of the waiting room chairs. "First, allow me to introduce myself properly this time." He patted his abdomen but skipped the more formal greeting. "My name is yip, whine, yip, whine, grunt," he said in Commonthroat then continued speaking using the synthesizer. "but you can call me 'Tod'." He pulled a card out of a pocketed band wrapped around his right wrist and offered it to the officer. "If you need experienced first responders, I happen to be a veteran of the Allied Worlds peace keeper corps. This sort of thing is my crackers and mustard."

"I think he means 'bread and butter', officer." Jim corrected.

"What he said." Tod continued. "I have experience with civilian relief operations. I think I could be of some use."

The officer politely pretended to read the alien writing on the card, then turned down to look at Tod. "We are short on help. OK. You come with me

I stumbled upon this spec evo video and it reminded me of the weird stuff I'd come up with in middle school, and I mean that in a good way. This gets at the heart of what I like about conworlding as a standalone hobby, seeing people's rough and raw unfiltered imagination.

I think my only qualm is that he pretty quickly ignores the conceit of this being a microbiome inside a Micky D's cup, like there's not much done with the fact that the "land" is crystalized sugar and the "water" is soda or that photosynthesis and conventional vision shouldn't work in the dark. But again, the fact this is rough around the edges is part of why I like it.

Finally something cool for humans! This is a dual grav suit, which is powered armor designed for humans living on the Split Horizon, an orbital colony located in the inner belt of the yinrih's star system. Its most notable feature is the caudal prosthesis, an artificial tail emerging from the middle of the suit's back (rather than the base of the spine as would be expected). It's meant to tether the center of mass to paw cables and tail bars designed for vulpithecine use. The Dual Grav name comes from the fact it's designed to be equally effective in zero G and the centrifugal gravity of the Split Horizon.

The caudal prosthesis works like an octopus tentacle. The human gives a small embedded AI general directions like "grab this" or "anchor me here" and the tail interprets the commands and takes care of the specifics.

The hand print on the pauldron is meant to evoke the red ochre hand prints left by stone age humans found in caves around the world.

Mine's the Eastern Roman Empire during the time of Justinian. The mixture of Greekness and Romanness of its society at the time is in a sweet spot according to my preferences.

Cats, Wolves, Foxes, as well as generic reptiles and birds seem to be pretty well represented. You've also got hyenas in the form of gnolls, as well as frogs. I don't see a lot of insects borrowed wholesale, but plenty of pixie-esque creatures borrow some anatomy here and there like wings and antennae.

One thing I see very little of are domestic dogs. The above mentioned wolves and foxes seem to fill that niche. Shame IMO, as the staggering variety in appearance and behavior of dogs (I believe they're the most phenotypically diverse species known) is excellent fodder for different cultures. Ironically, I myself ended up homogenizing my own diverse canine kobolds into the more vulpine (and less anthropomorphic) yinrih.

Admittedly I didn't have much developed on them, but there were two subraces of kobolds based on corgis that filled the dwarf role (short, hardy, stubborn, and practical) but they were pastoralists as you'd expect of a herding breed.

Primates, even other hominins, would make a great foundation for fantasy races. My previous conworld, whence came the above kobolds, did this, with human subraces based on neanderthals.

Sorry for the double post, but this popped into my head on my way to work this morning and I have to share it before the ADHD kicks in.

'Member the eusocial swarming carnivorous zap rats I mentioned a while back? Well what if they're not just eusocial, but a quasi colonial organism? They're physically stuck together in a manner similar to a rat or squirrel king, perhaps with tree sap, which is how it often happens to squirrels. They learn to not just survive like this, but thrive, coordinating moving, hunting, and feeding.

They don't have a hive or borrow, rather the entire colony, queen, young and all, moves in unison. The queen is at the center of the swarm, constantly popping out little zap ratlings. They're nurtured near the center of the swarm and gradually migrate to the edges of the mass as they age. Food and air are transported inward via vacuoles that form at the periphery and work inward, ditto for waste moving out.

The fittest and strongest members of the swarm form the outer shell, and are responsible for coordinating movement and engaging in combat. Prey is engulfed ameba-style, stunned by the rats' biocapacitors so it can't struggle, and devoured by thousands of tiny mouths.

Wow that went places I wasn't expecting when I started writing this.

I posted a while back about colossal orbital fusion reactors that acted as artificial suns. Here's one I drew in Mario Paint. It's purple because I originally thought of it as a neutron star, but dialed it back a bit later.

Both of these are snippets of stories that I started and then abandoned as my ADHD brain lost interest. The first is a response to someone on the CBB who asked about a human turning into a yinrih, so I wrote about a yinrih turning into a human. The second grew out of a game called Analysis Swap, where the goal was to learn about someone's conlang by interviewing a character in-universe. I was more interested in the role playing/storytelling angle, so wrote this as a continuation after interest in the original analysis swap game petered out.

Okay, so in another life I was a meteorology major. Had to quit two years in because I love math, but it's an unrequited love. I failed calc II twice.

But I do remember some things, and want to use what I remember to see what a typical sounding of Yih's atmosphere looks like. This is an important question that the research monks have to solve. Before they can get to space they have to get in the air.

Yih has the following relevant stats (relative to Earth)

mass: 0.90
radius: 1.01
surface gravity: 0.88

Or in absolute terms:

Mass: 5.37×10^24 kilograms Radius: 6.442×10^6 meters Area: 5.215×10^14 square meters Gravity: 8.63 meters per second squared

Finding the surface pressure is relatively simple. Let's start by assuming the atmosphere of Yih has the same total mass as Earth's atmosphere, 5.1441×10^18 kilograms (side note, WolframAlpha is your friend when doing stuff like this). Since pressure is force divided by area, and since force is mass times acceleration (of gravity in this case), we can get the surface pressure by multiplying the mass of the atmosphere by surface gravity and dividing by total surface area of the planet. So we get the following pressure:

85100 pascals (0.8399 atmospheres)

That's about the same as the station pressure in Denver.

Now that we have a surface pressure, we can try to find out how it changes with height. For reference the pressure at a typical jet cruising altitude is 200 hectopascals.

Per Wikipedia, the change in pressure with height, geopotential height, is the negative of density times gravity.

dP/dh = -rho*g

And the ideal gas law is

P = rhoRT, where R is a constant specific to dry air.

We can rearrange the ideal gas law to solve for density, and substitute it for density in the equation for geopotential height to arrive at

dP/dh = -Pg/(RT)

And that's kinda where I hit a wall. I'm pretty sure this is a differential equation, and here be dragons as far as my brain is concerned.

I wrote this last year to express my frustration at not being able to express my world visually. I have very vivid pictures in my head of things like indoor spaces, pieces of furniture, computers, vehicles, etc, but I can never draw them to my satisfaction.

The process of making art is relaxing for me. I love putting on a video in the background and just putting marks on a digital canvas until something vaguely resembles what I'm imagining. I love the process of going from blank slate to realized idea. But there's only so much I can do.

Anyway, here's an angsty rant thinly disguised as a story.

Ron sat in an overstuffed armchair hunched over an iPad, stylus in hand. The tablet's screen cast a feeble bluish-white glow over the rough popcorn ceiling of his darkened living room. The midnight silence was punctuated by the quiet ticks of a cheap wall clock, one that Ron had little use for. It was just a white circle on the wall as far as he was concerned.

The front door quietly opened and closed.

"You're not asleep," Lodestar growled, looking at the shifting glow coming from the tablet. He slipped the wallet from around his foreleg and tossed it onto the table next to the door, then flopped belly up on the loveseat opposite Ron's chair.

"Yeah," said Ron.

"What's that thing you're holding? A pen?" Lodestar asked, waving a paw at Ron's stylus.

"You might as well call it that," said Ron. "It's a drawing stylus." He offered it to Lodestar to examine. He sniffed the stylus and brushed it against his whiskers, then attempted to grip it between his writing claw and inner thumb the way he saw Ron using it.

"...For making visual art?" he asked, awkwardly tracing around the pads of his open paw with the stylus.

"Yes," said Ron, turning the iPad to face Lodestar.

The yinrih cocked his head and fluttered his bandpass membranes, trying to tune his eyes to a frequency range that matched the screen's output. "Is that supposed to be one of us? It's pretty good." Lodestar scented the air and immediately noticed a shift in Ron's emotions.

"But it looks nothing like a yinrih," Ron sighed. "Do you know how frustrating it is to be a blind member of an overwhelmingly visual species?"

Lodestar stared in silence at the random pattern of ridges on the ceiling.

"I have so many ideas in my head, ideas I want to bring to life, but my eyes get in the way."

"Have you tried an art form that's less visual? You said that statue in the library was made by a blind sculptor. It looks amazing."

"Yeah, sculpting... with expensive supplies and a big studio. Digital art has the lowest barrier to entry and its out of my reach. Sure I'll get better, but I'll never get good."

"If you enjoy making it, does it matter if it's good?"

"But I want to enjoy making art that's also worth looking at."

"I'm not blind," said Lodestar, "and blind yinrih don't have it as bad as you do. Our nose and ears and paws get just as much use as our eyes, so losing vision isn't as much of a problem. All this to say I'm afraid I can't sympathize. But I'll be here for you for as long as you need me to be, bad art or good art. I hope that counts for something."

"It does," said Ron, rising to his feet and stretching. "that means a lot."

This is the original overview of the Lonely Galaxy (not yet named so) that I posted to the worldbuilding subreddit. A lot has changed or grown in the years since. The biggest is probably the yinrih's body plan. They're still depicted as bipedal here. The taboo regarding eating in public (shamelessly ripped from an episode of Star Trek TNG) was hard to develop, so I dropped it.

As a bit of IRL backstory, the Lonely Galaxy started out as a maladaptive daydream in reaction to an extremely stressful time in my life. In addition to the certification exam mentioned in the original post, which I never did pass even after five more attempts plus two more on a different track, I was dealing with a family member in the hospital with sepsis, as well as coming to terms with the aging of my then retired, now late, guide dog. Since I couldn't handle the real world, I made my own that made sense to me.

I’ve been hyperfocusing on this all week, but I’m supposed to be studying for a very expensive certification exam, so I was hoping I could finally put this out of my mind by sharing it. It isn’t part of a larger project or story, and likely never will be. I suck at drawing, writing, pretty much anything “creative”. just the product of idle daydreaming when I should be studying. So I present for your consideration, the Monkey Fox! This was basically born out of me pondering the Fermi Paradox, and also feeling kind of lonely. I also wanted to play with some of the typical First Contact tropes, so instead of our rationalist heroes fighting off religious fanatics trying to blow them up (see Contact) it’s the religious people desperately looking for aliens. I also think the idea of space Mormons is kind of funny in an endearing way. The aliens, while much further along on the tech tree, so to speak, aren’t part of a galaxy spanning multi-species civilization that humans haven’t found yet. They’re all alone, crying out into the void just like us. I originally conceived of them as more dog like to signify their status as Man’s new best friend, an intelligence that isn’t our own that can walk through the hardships of life alongside us. It’s not organized; it’s just a bunch of ideas.

Anatomy: They’re about 4 feet high on average, with bodies covered in fur save for the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet. They have two arms and two legs, as well as a tail. The hands, feet, and tail are prehensile, and the feet look like slightly larger hands. Speaking of hands, they have six digits, with an arrangement like humans’ but with an extra thumb on the other side of the hand. One of the digits on each hand contains an ink sac, with the claw being modified into a sort of pen nib. So they have a natural writing utensil. The torso and limbs are proportioned like a human’s (hence “monkey”). The head looks vulpine (hence “fox”) with a muzzle, rhinarium (wet nose), and erect, triangular, well-furred ears.

Yinrih are the sort of small, furry critter that triggers a human’s nurturing instincts. After all, they look like a cross between a fox, a red panda, and a lemur. The only physical feature that mars this otherwise adorable image is the eyes. They’re black, as in no pupil, iris, or sclera, and there’s no reflection whatsoever. This appearance is due to the structure of the surface of the eye, which consists of millions of nanoantennas that couple with the ambient electromagnetic radiation the same way a radio antenna does. The result looks disquietingly like they have empty eye sockets.

Natural History: Before “asking ‘why’”, which is their term for achieving sapience, they were social tree-dwelling carnivorous animals living in large “family” groups, though see below for why “family” is in quotes. The natural pen finger was used to mark territory. They grouped together for protection from larger predators and to make reproduction easier, but they hunted alone and did not share their kills. Kits were expected to hunt as soon as they were weaned. This food strategy will have a huge impact on their culture later. They began asking “why” around the same time as modern humans, so around a hundred thousand years. However, they reached level II on the Kardashev scale (consuming 100% of their sun’s output) around the time we discovered agriculture. The secret to their rapid development lies in the fact that they didn’t invent written language, they evolved it. They’ve been able to preserve information between generations for as long as they’ve been speaking. This is in sharp contrast to humans, who only invented writing around 5000 years ago.

Reproduction: If you could come up with a procreation method that you could explain to a class of kindergarteners without blushing, this would probably come close. Monkey Foxes are monotremes (well, they evolved convergently into monotreme-like creatures). The females lay eggs and sweat milk from the palms of their hands to feed kits, hence the common oath “by the palms that nursed me!” The males also ley “eggs”. Technically they’re spermatophores, but they’re still called “eggs”. Female eggs have yolk sacs while male spermatophores do not. The males do not produce milk. Both genders have a cloaca and lack external sex organs. Upon reaching sexual maturity, members of the den will start laying eggs, and females will produce milk, all on a regular nesting schedule. When breeding season comes around, sexually mature den members put their eggs and spermatophores into a central nest. A protective membrane forms over the clutch and forms a sort of external womb. The eggshells dissolve, and the combined genetic material from all the contributing parents mixes into a soup, which is then used to form zygotes which eventually grow into a litter of kits. The kits feed off the yolk sacs from the female eggs while in utero. The number of kits in a litter depends on the number of contributing parents.

There’s no intercourse, and Monkey Foxes completely lack a sex drive. This means that human concepts revolving around reproduction like courtship, marriage, or the concept of having a mother and a father that you can point to as your progenitors don’t really compute for Monkey Foxes. Kits are raised by the grownup den members together. The phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” is literal in their case. Uninformed humans often mistake the Monkey Foxes’ lack of “Eros”, as C.S. Lewis would term it, to mean they’re cold and emotionless, or that they’re somehow an entire race of uptight prudes. The fact that most Monkey Foxes interacting with humans are missionaries only reinforces this misconception. You can no more praise a Monkey Fox for his chastity than you can accuse a bald man of having red hair or measure the temperature of the vacuum of space.

Monkey Foxes do know what “love” is, in the sense of “willing the good of the beloved” and they are more than capable of forming friendships and acting selflessly for the sake of others. They do, of course, have their own cultural taboos and disordered appetites, and unfortunately some of those taboos intersect with human customs that we would find not only normal, but necessary.

Customs: Because Monkey Foxes lack the concept of modesty, and because they have fur, clothing is optional. Any clothing that is worn is utilitarian, like hats for shade or raincoats to keep dry. Monkey Foxes living and working on earth will wear clothes to better fit in with humans. We humans say a lot with what we wear, after all. When on their native world, the more communicative function of clothing is filled by perfumes. Their stronger sense of smell means they can detect individual volatile compounds that combine to make up a single odor. So, where a human police officer would wear a uniform and a badge to let others know what he’s doing and who he is, a Monkey Fox police officer would have a particular scent that communicated the same. Luckily for us what a Monky Fox thinks smells good largely overlaps with what a human thinks smells good, so nobody’s strolling around smelling like a broken gas line.

The big “hangup” in Monkey Fox culture surrounds eating. Because their ancestors hunted and ate alone, they have a strong resource guarding instinct, and altercations around food can and do lead to serious injuries. Eating in public is shockingly taboo for Monkey Foxes, though that’s not to say there aren’t people who do it anyway. Normally, Monkey Foxes eat once every week or two, and enter a state of torpor for about 24 to 48 hours immediately after, which functions like sleep for humans. Monkey Foxes do not sleep in between meals. The food itself is bland, not unlike hard tack or, as technology progressed, a dietetically engineered flavorless nutrient paste. Drinking publicly is fine, although it’s also rather plain, with the only elaboration being the addition of alcohol for relaxation or caffeine for stimulation. Most Monkey Fox faiths have strict restrictions surrounding eating, not unlike how sex is seen in human culture. Even talking about your feeding habits is the sort of delicate conversation reserved for medical professionals and religious confessors.

This eating issue is a huge cultural barrier when Monkey Foxes first meet humans. Humans, as I’m sure you know, have a ton of social and religious traditions around food. Sacred hospitality is a very common human custom and naturally the first go-to for a human to make a guest feel welcome is to offer them something to eat.

First Contact: The dominant faith in Monkey Fox culture is called the Bright Way. The Bright Way can be traced back to nearly the beginning of Monkey Fox history, which again, is around 100 thousand years. It’s had its ups and downs, taking turns as persecutor and victim, with plenty of peaceful tolerance (in the sense of putting up with something you disagree with for the sake of social harmony) in between. Apologists will put forward, half-jokingly, that surest proof of the Bright Way’s divine mandate is that it’s managed to survive so long despite the profound stupidity of its leaders. However, around the time of First Contact, much of Monkey Fox society has secularized, and most who self-identify as believers are merely culturally attached rather than practicing members. The central tenant of this faith is that Monkey Foxes are to be apostles to the rest of the universe. “Go and spread your light to the stars, and ye shall become brighter yourselves.” is a common scriptural quotation.

Religious doctrine requires that there be other sapient species out there, but much like humanity’s attempts at finding aliens, the Monkey Foxes have had no luck thus far, even though they discovered radio while we humans were still squatting in a ditch poking berries up our noses. Being confronted with the Fermi Paradox is a big reason why The Bright Way has lost relevance. There’s not much point in preaching to the blind infinity, after all.

Monkey Foxes who claim to have encountered aliens are the same sort of people who on earth would claim to see Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun, and they’re dismissed off hand even by the otherwise devout. That’s not to say the faithful haven’t made serious, intellectually rigorous efforts to find ETs. This pursuit occupies a similar cultural position as missionaries do on Earth. They’d been sending probes, launching manned vessels, and otherwise screaming into the void for longer than we humans could possibly imagine, and they were only greeted with empty, pitiless indifference.

A typical Monkey Fox missionary journey went like this: build a pod about as big as The Titan, except hopefully less implodey, stick a dude inside, put them into hypersleep, and yeet the pod in the general direction of a star system with a planet in the habitable zone. If the onboard AI doesn’t pick up artificially generated radio signals after orbiting the planet for a while, begin the long journey back home. If, however, the computer detects artificial radio signals, the ship pulls the intrepid explorer out of hypersleep, whereupon he or she would put on their best ironed white dress shirt and tie (or cultural equivalent) grab their Good Book, and get ready to go door to door spreading the good news.

Of course, even at the relativistic speeds achievable by current Monkey Fox technology, these round trips take hundreds of years at a minimum. This might seem unmanageable, but Monkey Foxes regularly live at least 600 earth years, and don’t age at all in hypersleep. Certain ground crew members would also be popsicled in parallel with their missionary charges in order to preserve institutional continuity. Also keep in mind that, to a species whose cultural memory extends back to the dawn of their very existence as a sapient race, it really isn’t that long at all. They also have some tricks up their nonexistent sleeves for preventing “generation gap” from developing between the long absent traveller and the folks at home.

While it’s called “hypersleep” it’s really more of a way to halt metabolism while keeping the brain active and connected to the Monkey Fox version of the Matrix, which they call the Data Plane. While they haven’t figured out how to send matter faster than light, instant information transfer is possible thanks to The Underlay, a kind of subspace that allows superluminal communication. Interstellar vessels are equipped with an Underlay tunnel endpoint, with a corresponding endpoint located back home. Missionaries are able to interact with mission control and their loved ones back home via the Data Plane, sort of like a Clarke’s Third Law version of Zoom. Having said that, interstellar missionaries probably won’t ever see their loved-ones in the flesh again, so it is customary to hold a living funeral for friends who are preparing to venture into the infinite unknown.

Language: Monkey Foxes and humans have very different vocal tracts, and cannot directly produce one-another’s speech sounds. Any “loanwords” from one language to another, are thus more properly seen as onomatopoeia attempting to mimic the other creature’s speech sounds. Monkey Fox vocal articulation happens mostly in the chest, throat, and nostrils, with the mouth, tongue, and teeth barely involved at all. To a human, Monkey Fox speech sounds, rather adorably, like a dreaming dog, so lots of quiet growling, yipping, and breathing through the nose. It’s also frustratingly quiet by human standards. The best approximation of a Monkey Foxe’s word for their own species is yinrih, which, again, sounds more like a pair of quiet yips ending on a sharp nasal exhalation. Rather unhelpfully, the word translates roughly as “of the earth” or “from the ground” or in other words “earthling”, go figure.

As far as how we sound to the Yinrih, we’re basically constantly screaming. If you’re an American, you’re probably used to this reaction anyway. It is possible for us to understand what the other is saying, although the yinrih are most comfortable when we’re talking just above a whisper, and we have to be in a pretty quiet environment to hear what they’re saying. Eventually humans and Yinrih develop a lingua franca sign language to communicate directly. Their body plan and ours is similar enough for this to work.

Yinrih aren’t terribly strong compared to a human. An unarmed human could easily kill an unarmed Yinrih. However, it’s a good thing to remember that Yinrih civilization as a whole reached level II on the Kardashev scale around the same time humans discovered agriculture. While they’re not quite “sufficiently advanced aliens”, some of there tech flirts with Clarke’s Third Law, like the aforementioned underlay tunnel endpoints.

While the Yinrih are much further along technologically than us, the fact that they’ve been able to write since they became sapient means they’ve missed out on a lot of very hard lessons that we humans have had to learn. Since we spread out across the globe millennia before inventing written communication, we’ve had to “rediscover” our fellow humans. When we think about contacting alien intelligences, we often pattern the experience after these historical instances. Yinrih culture never sundered completely after the dawn of their species, so they’re far more homogenous as a result. One could compare the full spectrum of Yinrih culture to that of the Romance-speaking areas of the former Roman Empire. Sure there are different languages and cultures, but they’re all pretty recognizably related. There’s no Yinrih equivalent to the Basque people or Native American groups. This lack of experience with culture shock means that the Yinrih have a much harder time meeting humans than we have meeting them. In spite of all that, the Yinrih are eager to get to know us better.

Even though first contact is established for religious reasons, the missionaries have made it clear that “conversion by the sword” is strictly off the table. The long history of The Bright Way means that believers have had plenty of experience as both persecutor and persecuted, and they don’t want to repeat that cycle. Nevertheless, they are not indifferentists, and will happily debate those whose views differ from theirs. They may not change their mind, but they’ll at least change the subject. Unfortunately there are other Yinrih factions besides the Bright Way, and they’re not as eager to engage in peaceful cultural exchange.

The biggest of these less than friendly factions are the Partisans. Historians differ on why exactly they formed. Some say they were a hardline religious sect, others say they were anticlerical iconoclasts. Most likely it’s a little of column A, a little of column B. If you think that’s impossible, you’ve never heard of the horseshoe effect. The Partisans occupy a large swath of territory on the fringes of the Yinrih’s home star system.

I'm stuck between Reddit's platform decay and Lemmy's... Lemmy-ness. Sigh. This community is pretty good though.

From the perspective of the outside universe, the planet Hestia experienced a brief solar eclipse only a few standard UCC years ago. From the perspective of those on the surface, thousands of years in darkness passed due a time dilation effect by the interaction between primordial crystals on the planet and moon.

A CYCOL military force that had been landed to harass the human colony was cut off. They developed a method to reproduce without a nodesphere, and their culture changed over the long timespan. Tranq is a distant descendant of the original CYCOL in the planet. Like all CYCOL, its brain is still entirely organic, but it doesn't have a humanoid mechanical body that its distant ancestors had.

Tranq is shown here deep inside the ruins of the human colony, evading the attention of the post-human offshoot species that now haunts the old buildings.

From what I remember, most (all?) of the heat in the atmosphere, or at least in the troposphere, comes from the ground, with convection carrying heat into the upper atmosphere.

Looking at my temperature graph from my weather station in my backyard, overnight the temp dropped about 1 Freedom Unit per hour. So at the absolute quickest, and assuming an average surface temperature of 60 F when the sun vanishes, here's what I have

This is likely way too fast, as I believe the colder you are, the less heat you lose. Also, melting/boiling points depend on the surrounding pressure, which will get effected by the other gases precipitating. 70 below isn't unheard of, and the coldest temp ever reached was -128 in Antarctica.

What do you think. IDK I'm le tired.