Introductory Post

Hello, and welcome to my blog! Above is an infographic I've made detailing the Milky Way as well as the commonality of life and intelligence itself across the galaxy, which will serve as an important base of reference for all else I plan to post on this blog. I won't say much in reference to this image that isn't already included in the infographic, so I'll go on to explain what my project is about, which I will elaborate on with future posts:

In short, the primary focus of my speculative biology sci-fi project takes place around the mid-Centaurus arm, as indicated on the infographic, in a region of the galaxy locally known as "Ruminaaan Space", which is the single largest interstellar community in the history of the Milky Way! Although the majority of these Ruminaaan residents have only began their joint interstellar societies within the past 3,000 years, an ongoing battle has been waging for the past billion years and counting between a species known as the Yn and an entity known as Xii, and while I'll leave more detailed elaborations for future posts, this is a story of a single species divided and disfigured by their own conflicts and the long-term consequences it holds on their stellar neighbours, even one billion years later.

Onto the blog itself, to help with organisation, I will use the following tags on my posts:

#Alien Person Asks (for when I answer asks in my inbox (feel free to send any if you want to know more about my world!)), #Ruminaaan Theomachy (for posts relating to the central aliens of my project and the communities they've built), #Alien Person Spec Bio (for posts relating to the more biological aspects of my worldbuilding) and #Alien Person Worldbuilding (for other posts about miscellaneous or more general features of my worldbuilding process)

Besides transcripts for the featured image, that's all for my introductory post, so stay tuned for more!

{Main text-wall transcript}:

The Milky Way The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy about 100,000 light years across, which happens to be the galaxy in which Humans are located, as well as over a couple hundred other intelligent species. The galaxy is estimated to be about 13.6 billion years of age and has thus far been identified with two major arms (the Perseus and Scutum-Centaurus Arms) which branch off into many smaller minor arms.

The galaxy is estimated to contain anywhere between 100 to 400 billion stars, most of which host a minimum of one orbiting planet. Although on Earth many may consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life to be a rarity, it is more common than one may think, with there being roughly 14.33 billion planets and moons combined which host native life. However, only about 8.59 million of these worlds host multicellular life (around 0.06% out of the total life-bearing celestial bodies), which is due to eukaryotic multicellularity being a very challenging hurdle to get over for life everywhere for a variety of reasons.

This being said, approximately 91.67% of these worlds do host sapient life forms, as high intelligence is almost an inevitability with multicellular organisms given sufficient time, though an extremely lower fraction of these planets and moons are actually home to sophont, technological civilisations comparable to anything humanity has accomplished throughout the past 200,000 years, with there being only 237 star systems with native sophont life (as indicated by the bright white dots shown to the right), and 268 sophont species overall, accounting for only 0.000028% of worlds with multicellular lifeforms. Among these 268 civilisations, very few actually aspire to be spacefaring, with there being less than 40 such civilisations, such as the Jodomii or Sirt, who even have space programs to begin with. Most either do not have the desire to explore outer space, as is the case with the Shreau, Uut, Samrinians or Aniin, do not even have the means to discover that outer-space exists in the first place, such as the Fline or Udrae, who have limited or nonexistent vision, or the Katudit, who live in the subglacial oceans of a rogue planet, or may never leave their home planets for any other multitude of reasons.

While the abundance of technological, cultured civilisations across the Milky Way is fortunately higher than most may be led to believe, it’s important to keep in mind the fact that the space which separates the majority of these civilisations is tremendous, with even the closest being hundreds of light years apart. Despite this, only four interspecies interstellar communities have managed to spring up across the interstellar medium (not counting the Yuruuc, who have yet to encounter any other intelligent species despite how far they have dispersed throughout their corner of the Outer Arm), which is simply due to the fact that interstellar travel is nigh-impossible without the use of warp technology, though only one of these such communities has managed to grow to such an extensive size which incorporates over a dozen unique civilisations; Ruminaaan Space. Ruminaaan Space (the blue area marked along the mid-Centaurus Arm) is the single largest community of interstellar civilisations with the widest reach in interstellar space in the entire history of the Milky Way thus far, with the Boueue and Scerere only having came into contact nearly 3,000 years ago. This region of the Milky Way will be the main focus of my ongoing project, titled ‘Ruminaaan Theomachy’, as you’ll all get to see more of as time goes on, so stay tuned, and welcome to the Ruminaaan Theomachy project!

{Milky Way Labels Transcript}:

Norma Arm, Sagittarius Arm, Perseus Arm, Orion Spur, Scutum-Centaurus Arm, Outer Arm

{Sophont Labels Transcript}:

Scerere, Boueue, Udrae, Samrinians & Aniin, Shreau, Jodomii, Humanity, Sirt, Yuruuc, Fline, Katudit, Uut

siggy give me as much wyvern info as possible

ENABLER!!!!

-Wyverns is invertebrates. They have a lobster-like shell-skeleton-thing beneath their skin that keeps their shape and protects their organs. Their beaks and resonating chambers are coated in keratin to reinforce them. Its much more "Wyvern-shaped" than Earth vertebrate skeletons.

-Wyverns don't have feathers, but rather coarse "hairs" like insects. The hairs are very thick (some individuals acclimated to colder climates can have up to 10 hairs per follicle, but its usually 1 or 2) and stiff. Touching a Wyvern feels like running your hand over a soft-bristle hairbrush. They usually range from 1-4 inches in length and stand straight up and away from the body, but sometimes can be longer and/or "shaggier."

-They come in lots of colors, from purples and blues to reds and oranges! Their color runs down to their skin, so a hairless Wyvern would still retain their color and pattern. Colors are genetic and related clanmates usually share similar colors, inherited from their parents. Brighter colors are considered more attractive, with the exception of pink. Pink wyverns are a form of hypopigmentation where the skin and hairs don't fully develop normal color, so they appear varying shades of pink depending on the levels of pigment in their skin. Rikki is a good example of a hypopigmented Wyvern- he retains some red pigment but is mostly pinkish in color. Pink is often used as an alarm or threat color, as their blood is magenta.

-Wyverns have a bisex system, but it doesn't quite work the same way ours does. One sex can only reproduce sexually with another Wyvern, while the other can reproduce parthenogenically (asexually) as well as sexually. There is no sexual dimorphism between the two. Exclusively sexual reproducers can mate either with the opposite sex or with each other (hence why I hesitate to call the sexes "male" and "female." The closest analogue here on Earth that I can find is gynodioecy, where females and hermaphrodites coexist, with the asexual reproducers being the "females" in this scenario. Confusing, I know. This is also totally prone to retcons as I'm not sold on it yet.)

In line with reproductive stuff while keeping it as SFW as possible, Wyverns are sort of marsupial-like in young development. They form a marsupium (a sort of weird external sack to hold developing offspring in. Isopods do it, its totally cool and weird) on their abdomen, where the offspring develop for a few months before they break out as little scraggly cotton balls called whelps. The whelps can't walk on their own, and are totally dependent on their parents for the first few years of their lives. They can eat solid food from birth but depend on their parents (and other adults in the clan) to carry them around, feed them, and protect them until they're old enough to start flying and their wings get strong enough to walk on. As soon as they're fully flighted, they're considered adults in the way of becoming a full-fledged clan member, but don't become fully physically mature until they're about 20, when their resonating chamber starts to grow out into its full display structure (which takes another year or so to finish.)

That's all I got off the top of my head without further prompting atm!

“Species C” walk cycle

i made these weird alien animals for @yellosnaccs contest thing. they have three limbs and weird diagonal mouthes

shoutout to the best characters in homestuck

blindsight (2006) is funny bc peter watts packages a postscript with a bibliography of over a hundred references and a plurality of them are just. obsolete cogsci or downright bad psych

prefacing with this is my cringetober today because i think making aliens more complicated than they have to be counts as a niche interest

hello invader zim fans. all 12 of you. today i bring more xeno irkens. thorax removed because it was a little awkward before. fused into that soft stomach section there - there's some minimal plating on the back, but these guys essentially just have an extra segment. they go head -> thorax -> abdomen -> thorax.. 2!

also i'm still on the fence about the mouthparts, since while they DO help significantly with making him look extremely alien and buglike, they also sacrifice a lot of expressiveness in the face and remove the iconic irken zipperteeth. sound off if you have ideas

Tagged again by @2btheanswertothequestion!

Rules: in a new post, show the last line you wrote and tag as many people as there are words

I'm not sure this particular WIP is actually ever going to be posted, because despite spending many hours of my life watching TOS/TNG/DS9/LD, I still don't feel like I know enough to write confidently in this universe. Nonetheless...

Steve shrugs. “You know what they say about Orions.” “What the hell, Steve!” Robin whacks his arm, and he yelps defensively. “Not like that! I just mean—maybe he’s got, like, shady pirate contacts he’s hiding out with?” “Steve,” says Dustin sternly. “That was not a statement befitting a Starfleet officer, and I hope you can take this opportunity to reflect on your biases. But yeah, Eddie’s mentioned a pirate friend once or twice, let me see if I can find anything in the databanks.”

ok here it is

you can run away with me any time you want (AO3) explicit, Vash/Wolfwood/Livio, ~12K The new orphanage is thriving, and so are Vash and a resurrected Wolfwood. Livio has healed in so many ways - he's learned to love and be loved - but he still can't help feeling alone. He would never try to come between the two men he loves more than anyone else in the world. Unless, that is, they ask him to.

THE ULURANT REPRODUCE LIKE PIPEFISH THATS SO FUCKING COOOOLLL

sophont but its a *throws a dart at a board* semi aquatic *picks a paper out of a hat* ambush predator *spins a wheel* cephalopod

I remade the “Species C” (now called Acatlan) model

TThe horrors auugHH

scavengers reign is like . annihilation by way of mooninvalley . subnautica as a ghibli production

The sadness of wanting to do art trades with your friends but all your OCs are hard to draw 😔

iterator refs! again. just the sibs for now

Some design notes and headcanons:

I tried to make their color palettes swap as much as possible

Their outfits I tried very hard not to make just generic robes. Moon's is based on Catholic clergy wear with an academic stole (yellow stoles represent a scholar in the sciences apparently?). The stole is velcro'd on lol

She has slightly more complex clothing due to her age. Pebbles is closer to the casual wear for his citizens, with his body covered in bandages underneath.

My iterators have little screens on their faceplate to emote if they want to! Pebbles is more prone to using it, whilst Moon will only use it if interacting with her citizens.

Collapsed Moon's body is covered in dark stains—the dried void fluid-based blood of iterators. Parts of her body are scarred or misshapen, where her endoskeleton cracked and healed back wrong. She's also missing her right hand. Her robe is tied with some monster kelp stem, courtesy of monk, perhaps. That robes probably got e. coli.

In my rw canon, Pebbles does not survive his collapse, so pictured here would be around Rivulet. The Rot has hijacked into his main nutritional supply—the rarefraction cell can keep him conscious, but he's beginning to degrade into a husk.

The dark spot on his forehead is an empty eye socket that puppets are grown with but have removed. Ill do all my iterator xenobio in another post someday. Moon actually has her third eye! But it's fairly useless.

Sick Pebbles robe is falling apart rather fast due to his new habit of picking at things when stressed. Not to mention, with his puppet weak, injuries are quick to happen and slow to heal. He's resorted to tearing off pieces of fabric to wrap open wounds. You can see here that he's used his belt to cover his hand.