#<- i guess??related??i mean they're slugcats

[hdra77]

Turned some characters from various fandoms i like into slugcats!

Can you guess where they're from? 😁

[i3utterflyeffect]

the slugs are done cooking!

anyway here's yellow, blue, and red!

Blue

Blue has the ability to store more than one thing, including extra food, in cheek pouches!

They also can make baits for other creatures if given the correct resources. This can be great for them to lay out to attract an eggbug or something, but isn't a sure-fire way of getting food before the cycle ends. Admittedly, Beckon's cycles are much longer than Pebbles', so they get a solid amount of time outside before the rain.

Can and will eat anything! This includes things that are not digestible by slugcats. Probably has eaten a spore puff and immediately thrown up. Also sometimes will die spontaneously and be the one to discover that something is poisonous. If they were playable you could probably eat certain things that'd take your pips instead lol

instead of netherwart, they eat bubbleweed! similarly exotic and not found in Beckon's surroundings, and probably grows more around Abberant Creation/Crafter of Connection. actually did i mention that alexcrafter/CoC and AC are the same person. i don't think i did. that's unrelated tho

instead of getting scars from lava, it's instead from toxic waste like you might find in the Garbage Wastes. They can walk okay still, miraculously, but the skin has become extremely sensitive and any injuries in that area would hurt a LOTTTTT. They learn this after trying to pluck a paincone and getting swarmed.

Also related to the scarring, has a very high scav reputation due to saving a baby scav.

Yellow (there's no yellow text so it's orange. oops)

Expert with explosives and can craft grenades on the go. Grenades are made with a cherry bomb and a rock. They can also make a spear explode on impact-- different from an explosive spear since it's made with a grenade rather than the red cloth(?)

VERY VERY bright. had a habit of eating beckon's neurons when he wasn't looking and by the time they learned not to they were already glowing like a flashlight

probably started wailing upon learning they were eating beckon's brain on accident also

can basically craft anything like gourmand. has made VERY dangerous things before by complete accident. such as previously mentioned nuke.

Has probably broken a karma gate by trying to figure out how it works. probably the karma gate to the void if beckons even has one. no ascension for the kids. not that i think they'd ever WANT to

Has some degree of electric resistance. you'd be surprised at the centipedes they can survive

can and will fix things for beckons with only the motivator of love and sheer willpower

Red (imo the most interesting)

can and will befriend anything.

for comedic value these creatures are included in the pool of things red can and will befriend. i mean maybe not the centipede but also it'd be very very funny

is differently colored because their niche is in mimicry! their tail has eye spots to scare off vultures and if they slap their tail it may look like it's about to bite! it's used to scare off predators, which red deals with more often than you'd probably guess.

looks like something else on first glance but don't worry about that

high lizard reputation! just more likely to survive beasts in general actually

i was initially going to say the monster school is an interspecies lizard pack but then i thought of what monster school would be like in rain world and that's the funniest fucking thing ever so i'll leave it up to y'all. dropwigs learning how to dropwig from a giant fucking miros? maybe a guardian if you're feeling extra silly? or train lizard who has taken in a ton of stray lizards. who knows...

gets gifted a yellow bandana by Abberant Creation or scavs maybe

surprisingly low scavenger reputation. they're not kill-on-sight but definitely 'oh shit troublemaker incoming. watch out' (they get better reputation after blue helped the scavs out tho)

their pig friend (reuben) is a yeek btw. if you don't know what a yeek they're the best critters in rain world

anyway i thought of some interesting things that might be able to happen but i want them to be surprises in case i end up writing slugpup shenanigans :3 if you want to write a fic you can ask me though

i'm working on green but they suffer a chronic lack of significant abilities i can work off of :pensive:

[firedjinni]

more sketchbook art! starting to get an idea of how i want to draw iterator puppets... (ft. some ancient concept scribbles)

some notes/transcribing and headcanon stuff under the cut:

My puppet headcanons lean very biological - they're basically purposed organisms in their own right, just without a full 'brain' and lacking a number of organs needed for self-sufficiency. It's basically a fucked up little cyborg fetusthing designed to be on permanent life support and possessed by a giant supercomputer 24/7. The process of constructing and installing one is horrifying and gross because I think they deserve a little of that, as a treat.

That's not to imply the puppet is the core of the iterator, though - they're more like a limb, wired up to the iterator's nervous system (i.e. the umbilical) to control as an extension of themselves, but also with an autonomic nervous system and some local computing hardware for convenience? Sort of like how cephalopods have a bunch of neurons in their tentacles, I guess?

They have a mini Mass Rarefaction Cell as a backup battery in case of emergencies, and contain some processing organs, circuitboards, etc so they can run some processes locally, especially sensory feedback/motor control related stuff. Going off the string would be sort of like the iterator equivalent of running Doom on wildly insufficient hardware, except instead of Doom it's an entire consciousness, lol.

Their spines are also super fucked up - the lower part of the spine curves out and protrudes from the back like a tail to provide a connection point to the puppet arm, to help them more easily control the finer movements at that end and store relevant muscle memory all in one place. This means their spine doesn't connect to their pelvis and their weird atrophied little legs at all, though, which is fine when you live in semi-permanent zero-G, but would be a problem if they ever had to actually walk.

Also i like the idea that if Ancients have snoots, their kids have snubber/flatter faces, so the puppets looks Like That because they're meant to look neotenous and cute by Ancient standards lol. They're also about the size of a child, scale-wise (which I guess puts slugcats somewhere in large raccoon/Maine Coone cat/midsize dog territory?) A lot of decisions about how puppets work were made on the basis of what their creators would have found pleasing to interact with rather than what would have actually been useful for the iterators... unfortunately...

[mxxnstxne-lxve]

slugcats to me are both in the sense their customs and reactions are of a wild animal but their complex dynamics with other creatures mean they're 100% sapient. they're sapient enough to get the mark of comm which i think has a lot of prerequisites to work. originally, even before downpour, there was concept art of a scavenger with the mark of comm, but no other animals! so i think its a show that only sapient creatures can get it

primitive humans are our guess of the likeliest comparison that slugcats are like. although we wonder if scavengers are one step after? or... ...like neanderthals, which did have some mixing with the homo sapiens in historical analysis and other studies. nerding out aside.

it seems completely that slugcats (alongside scavengers) are sapient. language barriers is the issue or perhaps used to an advantage to do as they please. in certain points of the timeline with each slugcat, its clear there is some times where they are peaceful and others where they are not. regardless of how you choose to behave. so... ...considering the dynamic with an iterator, there can be many... dangers or inhibitors active. an iterator could just remove you from their vicinity typically. but some of them seem even unwilling to even do that with certain circumstances. while others could be unusual and just plainly not care. theres many possibilities of power exchanges going on.

related note. slugcats and scavengers have so much potential too.