The Femme Fatales

These gals (gender neutral) are the bad bitch squad of my cybernoir world, the City of Albinoch. From left to right, Ailbhe Casey, violent party girl and heir to the Casey Crime Empire; Esmerelde Marcone, wealthy, razor-sharp creature of the night; and Liam Shay, professionally known as Sara Femme, the drag darling of Albinoch and Esme's favorite midnight snack. They're terrible! I love them!

The Monster Club (1981) dir. Roy Ward Baker

I have great news for you!!

The book is still very much a work in progress, but you can read the first chapter here: https://www.olliedevoid.com/projects/albinochproj

And if you keep your eye on this tumblr I'm gonna keep posting lore drops, ✨vibes✨ and art!

Welcome to Albinoch, the last, best, biggest factory town that Earth has to offer.

Humanity has always found it easier to run away from its problems than to fix them. So it should come as no surprise that interplanetary space travel was prioritized over unfucking our own environment. Terraformers deployed to Mars and Venus and the Moons of Jupiter wouldn’t work at home because of the way they made things worse before they made them better. So the Earth, our Earth, was dying. And we were running away. 

And that’s where Albinoch comes in.

Albinoch is a megacity founded around resource extraction. Humanity may be fleeing our planet in massive spaceships, but someone has to stick around and fucking. Build the massive spaceships, yaknow? So while most of the world was being left barren and derelict, several of these megatropolises dotted across the globe, spreading outward like concrete cold sores. 

Our dear Albinoch in particular was focused on extracting and refining the raw materials needed for building (though some ambitious businesses are trying to break into industrial machining and manufacture). The city is sandwiched between several mines for coal, various ores, and minerals; a huge quarry that spirals into the ground like the mouth of a titanic deep sea suckerfish, and an offshore oil rig whose lights we can see more clearly than the stars most nights, bobbing and rocking in the swells. As a result of all this bustling industry, the land got unstable. The whole damn city *settled,* sinking below sea level and flooding the streets. These days narrow canals are everywhere, almost as plentiful as the streets and back-alleys, populated by gondolas and riverboats, for living on and for taking people where they need to go.

The Allercorps mined deep for the fleeing colonists, and when they did, they discovered a dormant, prehistoric amoeba that colonized infected people's bodies, turning them into strong, fast, sensitive corpses with a hunter's mind and an insatiable craving for human blood. 

Scientists all over Albinoch immediately set about looking for a cure, but what they found instead is that by manipulating the Amoeba's genetic code, they could essentially manufacture a treatment for eternal life, youth, and beauty...... With a few side effects.

Of course this treatment was only available to a select few. The upper echelons of society's best and brightest. 

Meanwhile the infectious amoeba, transferring in the blood and saliva of its hosts, continued to ravage Albinoch's faceless masses. 

So, bringing us up to speed—the people of the city are ruled by beautiful, charismatic, wealthy vampires, both loathing them and longing to become one of them, while being haunted in their nighttimes and nightmares by the bloodthirsty faces of their dead loved ones, calling out in the mimicked voices of those they've killed. The UV Lamps along the more populated streets feel like a bandaid, and just because you’re scared to go out at night doesn’t mean you always have a choice. If the wind turns right, the parties from the wealthy quarter are audible, reminding folks of the gulf between their lives and ours. Never go out alone if you can help it, unless you want to become another stolen voice in a dead man’s chest.

gonna make a cyberpunk setting with prosthetics and cybernetics that outlast their owners. even with advanced medicine, humans only live for a hundred years tops -- but titanium doesn't age, doesn't rust, doesn't break down. and it'd be a waste to destroy it, so the insurance cartels just repossess it upon body-death, flash-sanitize it, and then put it back into stock for some other poor bastard. they're cheaper, pre-made, already calibrated - only problem is that some people who get refurbished prostheses complain about phantom reflexes, nerve inputs they never sent.

Today's aesthetic is cassette futurism

vampirism poses the question "what if there was a fundamental, horrible, unending well of want in your soul that, if truly satisfied, would lead to great pain for all those you hold closest and, in turn, their absolute and total revilement of you?" and naturally as a person with no problems I don't relate to this in any way at all.

trying to motivate myself to be a little more active here, i want to discover some new writeblrs to follow!! feel free to reach out if you wanna!

i'm particularly interested if you...

🎧 write adult fiction, especially literary fiction, horror (gothic or otherwise), gothic romance, fantasy, or really anything with a gritty/emotional feel

🎧 like any bands from the 90s grunge scene (or 80s hard rock) (i can and will yap for days)

🎧 like vampires, pirates, or cowboys

🎧 are a fellow college student (we can struggle together!!)

even if we don't have any of this in common, i'd love to chat anyway! hopefully this finds some folks <3

The Shiprat

Rat is a character from my queer cybernoir story, Our Lady Albinoch. He's a vampire hunter with amnesia.

This was a really fun challenge!! I'm trying to get better at backgrounds and landscapes, and this was my first time putting something painted like this together without one direct photo reference to work from.

American occupation era Philippines but our girlie here is secretly a vampire hunter at a fancy party looking for her target 🦇🧛‍♂️🌴

oh no cigarettes for me thanks i just wanted to be in this dank alleyway with you

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Henry Rollins & Dina Meyer, Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in Blade Runner (1982) outtakes

honestly instead of writing off monsters like vampires (or just monsters that look more human in general) as being unscary/unsexy why dont you consider the implications of being a thing that can theoretically pass amongst human society but is forever set apart by a deeply inhuman violence a hunger that both elevates you to a position above them (the predator to their prey) and simultaneously debases you (your feral animalism to their sapient complete personhood) why dont you think about the constant control necessary to inhabit this in-between and the vulnerability of shedding that disguise even if only to feed or to kill why dont you contemplate the fear and eroticism of it all. bitch.

we should talk more about cities that are vampires. cities that are cold and wet and sink into your bones and stay there. cities that are hungry and want to live. dead cities that dont know they're dead and suck the life force of their people to maintain the delusion. cities with harbors that are actually mouths; one-way entries. cities that are devastatingly lonely and see consumption as love

love characters who are like "this is how the world works. this is how it has to be (because if i'm wrong i have to face what i've done // if i'm wrong i have to face whats been done to me) "