Four Months Later And I’ve Finally Finished The Next Character, And The First Non-human.

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Slaters

Common names in English:

Isopods, rolley pollies, webspinners, weavers, long spiders

Binomial name:

Sericutextor Sp. (Silk weavers)

Description:

Slaters are a genus of dodecapodal alien sophonts and were a founding member of the USS.

They posses an exoskeleton composed of a mineralised core covered in a layer of organic polymers, consisting of a tegus and a sternum. The body is divided into four tagma: the head, the neck, the body and the abdomen. The head consists of a single plate and possesses three pairs of eyes, two pairs of antennae, three pairs of external jaws and a pair of cephalic limbs. One pair of antennae act as chemoreceptors, audio receptors and to detect gravity, whilst the other pair bear a semaphore-like structure used in communication. Of the three pairs of external jaws, one pair act as pincers and food manipulators, whilst the other two act as both a seal to the oral cavity and as masticators. An additional pair of heavily derived internal jaws separate the oral cavity from the rest of the digestive tract. Lastly, the cephalic limbs posses two manipulators digits and two specialised for silk production. The neck is divided into three segments, the first segment bearing no limbs and allowing greater flexibility of the head whilst the latter two each possesses a pamprodactyl hand. The body is made up of six segments, each bearing a limb with a anisodactyl foot, with each appendage being able to act as a manipulator, especially those of the front segment, however typically they are relegated to locomotion. Finally, the abdomen is also made up of six segments, with the final segment bearing a pair of spinnerets whilst all other segments are limbless.

The respiratory system is made up of two booklungs within the abdomen and a series of spiracles between each segment, linked by a pair of trachea. The circulatory system is centred around two major hearts, one at the rear of the abdomen and one at the base of the neck.

Slaters are capable of producing organic fibres often referred to as silk,and posses silk glands on their cephalic limbs, their manipulatory limbs and their spinnerets. The most complex silk strands are produced by the cephalic limbs, the spinnerets can produce the most durable silk, and the manipulatory limbs produce the most simple silk. The adhesiveness, tensile strength and other factors of the silk produced can be controlled by the skaters.

Slaters have a bisex system, with the primary differences being in sephamore colours, pheromones and social cues, and whilst there is a slight weighting of mass and colour (males on average being slightly paler and lighter) there is significant overlap. They are also bidirectionally dichogamus, naturally undergoing the process when exposed to certain environmental, social or chemical stimuli. In the modern day many slaters use artificial methods to at least kickstart transition, as this is typically swifter and causes less inconvenience.

Between two and eight eggs are laid within an ootheca weaved from silk similar to that used to package faeces. After about a month, these eggs hatch into small, soft larvae, which grow for two years before their exoskeleton begins to harden, with adulthood being reached at about eighteen years old.

Ancestrally, slaters lived in large, communal burrow networks and above ground structures made from wood, silk and soil. Due to these fossorial habits their fore and ventral eyes are quite shortsighted, with their dorsal eyes providing a wild field of vision but poor depth reception.

The modern genus of slaters is thought to have evolved 2-3 million years ago. Due to their subterranean nature, they gained a familiarity with metallurgy and fossil fuels much earlier in their history than most other sophonts. This lead to a comparatively rapid technological development, allowing them to have the longest continuous spacefaring history of any extant sophont. They were also the founding members of the precursor to the USS after making contact with two other homeworlds before the beginning of the Great War. Following the establishment of communication with terrans and formids and the end of the war, they assisted in the founding of the USS.

Finished the character sheet for Alyssia, one of the characters in the setting with the formids

Car lights - James Marriot

ATTENTION

If you see this you are OBLIGATED to reblog w/ the song currently stuck in your head :)

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

You have built your dwellings upon the bones of those you damned, your cities upon the mass graves of countless beings, and your countries in the burnt and scarred remains of what was once their homes.

Every last breath, every lineage cut short, every forest, fen and fallow torn asunder feeds it; with every wisp of smoke, every incremental creep of a warming world, and with every drop falling from retreating glaciers it grows. A beast of fire and ice, choking ash and swelling seas, the roaring core of the earth surging forwards and the heartless cold of the endless reaches above plummeting down in its infernal halo.

This is not the gentle, loving death that carries souls softly into that good night, nor is it the wrath and rage of a mere god of war. It is the great equaliser, the callous harvestman scything wheat, wildflower and weed alike so that a new world may grow in its place. And when the slate is cleared, when the Earth’s lungs cough out the last of the soot and the ballard of life rises into a new chorus, you will be forgotten, the king of kings whose shattered ruins are razed by roots and rot, the mocking hand crushed beneath a universe it thought it could command, and its ruins buried not beneath that barren sands of a world that couldn’t live without it but the joyous songs of a planet unshackled from your iron grasp.

Meep morp

ATTENTION

If you see this you are OBLIGATED to reblog w/ the song currently stuck in your head :)

I would actually evaporate if this happened

i love dating tgirls cus a lot of the time they have bad self image so all u gotta do is compliment them and they get so adorably flustered.

pestered

Dear god, I’ve been pestered

Finally finished the most widely used Formid writing system. Be been working on the numbers for months now, and the alphabet for the past couple days.

At some point I’d like to make a conlang for it, but if I did that rn I would genuinely explode

(Also sorry the formatting is a tad shite, this has all been transcribed from a very messy stack of paper)