#<- 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.

[amerricanartwork]

Welp, I'm absolutely saving this for reference! I too am a bit torn between whether or not Suns is actually part of Moon's Local Group, and I hope to at least resolve my personal headcanons on that soon. I tend to lump them in just for ease of talking about the main iterators and because they seems to have been good friends with both Pebbles and Sig, but all of this seems like reasonable evidence to suggest it's more likely they're officially part of a different local group, but still relatively close as implied by Spearmaster's journeys.

Given the info you laid out, here are my current guesses as to the distances from the other iterators to Moon and Pebbles's facility grounds, from closest to furthest:

Unparalleled Innocence - They were able to get their overseers inside his superstructure for the rot pictures and discover his condition before anyone else, and their overseers (I currently believe they own the white ones, since I was told Wind's are most likely the purple ones) appear only in the Outer Expanse just beyond Pebbles and Moon's facility grounds, so they must be pretty close to them, and likely in whatever direction the slugcats travel to get to OE.

Chasing Wind/Grey Wind - Besides seeming to be an official member of Moon's local group and thus "in the loop" of what goes on between them, their purple overseers also only appear in OE, and them bringing up Erratic Pulse always gave me the impression they were suspicious of Pebbles's activity early on or frequented some of the same chat rooms he did. I'm willing to bet they're also pretty close to explain how they got that information about him so soon. They could be about the same distance from Pebbles as Innocence, and likely in a similar direction too, once again given their overseers' presence.

No Significant Harassment - Like you said, Hunter probably traveled a decent distance to get to Moon, and I agree strongly with the idea that Hunter's rot came from Sig rushing to finish them out of desperation. But without any internal navigation means, which that rushed creation implies, Hunter would have to either be exceptionally smart/have a good memory to figure out where to go, or more likely, the distance isn't quite as far as Suns is to Pebbles, so he was able to cut those corners without jeopardizing the success of his mission as much. It's also likely that he's to some degree west of Pebbles and Moon, since Pebbles's pilgrimage quest places the Farm Arrays, where Hunter starts, as to the west, yet also in a similar or adjacent direction to CW and UI because the green overseers (assuming they're his) also appear exclusively in OE and Subterranean.

Seven Red Suns - Based on your above info, Suns is probably the furthest away from Moon and Pebbles and thus the least "in the loop" about what happens between them, outside of when he and Pebbles were friends and probably talking frequently. However, in the past I've also contemplated the same implications you brought up about Spearmaster being able to complete the journey from them to Pebbles at least four times with minimal assistance. Combined with the fact their overseers can reach all the way to Pebbles's puppet chamber, Suns likely isn't too far away from him and/or the distance is otherwise easy enough that Suns would trust a relatively small animal to travel it without a ton of guidance. Additionally, because Spearmaster starts their campaign in what seems like some kind of sewer or other pipe system in the bottom of Outskirts, right before the gate that leads to Outer Expanse, it's possible that they are in a similar direction to Wind and Innocence.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Thanks for compiling the info on this subject, shkika! The location of these iterators in relation to each other is something I've been thinking about for quite some time now, so it's nice to have more details to develop a clearer hypothesis!

Also, if anyone else sees this, I'd love to hear any other details/hypotheses for the locations!

[RECORDED BROADCAST : 1681.662] - PRIVATE Seven Red Suns, Chasing Wind

CW: Have you had any contact with Five Pebbles recently?

SRS: Not in a long while actually! Unless worrying about him counts.

CW: One of his neighbors, Unparalleled Innocence, sent an overseer to his can and got some images. They were made public in the local group, in an effort to be mean I suppose. There's no other way of putting it he looks awful.

SRS: Tell me.

CW: He's got the rot, very badly. Big cysts have become mobile and are scattering down the west and middle legs. He does listen to you, and few others by now, so you should talk to him.

SRS: I will try to contact him. Does Moon know?

CW: Moon has been unavailable for some time.

[Pending upload to local group records by dispatched Overseer. Unit will enter read only state in 432 cycles.]

UI leaked pebbles rot images in the local group, but suns didn't know until CW told them, which might imply that they are not part of the local group

THIS DISCUSSION IS GOING!! I've gotten a bunch of asks about this along with tags and replies oh my. Just gonna state that Suns to me and in my ask-blog is part of the local group and honestly at this point even if James himself came up to told me I'm wrong I can't change that cause I set it up already ..? SO UHH hm

ANYWAY LET'S RAMBLE!!

I honestly think the strongest pointer to the implication that SRS isn't part of the local group is the fact they didn't know about Pebbles' situation first. So Chasing Wind had to tell them!

I see it! I've always made the assumption they just weren't active in the local group messages (just like how we haven't seen a single word about Innocence in the game even if she's canonically closest to Moon and Pebbles out of the others)

^ Especially, because I assumed this meant that UI spread the information further than just the local group. Which! I don't know!

I don't think my assumption is FULLY baseless, just because of how the approach the conversation with NSH is?

They're being vague about hurting someone. If the chats were in the local group, which NSH has access to, but SRS doesn't it feels so bizarre to me they'd try to vague point at it as if there's any chance NSH wouldn't have already seen. Like what hopes do you have buddy?? The fact that Pebbles has the rot and is in such a terrible condition is like uhm... well yeah.

Still they've never been active in a local group chat and it was through Chasing that they found out about the rot situation so I don't know!

Also a good point!! Once again I read it differently! I thought the "She's very close to Five Pebbles" wasn't a descriptor, but more so a reason on why he's worried about her. "She's close to him (rot infested doofus) and I'm her friend man"

Them not knowing Moon very well isn't too much of evidence for either statement. What they did not understand about Moon is why she wouldn't force Pebbles to stop dead in his tracks and save her life. Which is an extremely valid question, because as his administrator she had the power to do so. NSH is a close friend of hers group or not and explains.

They do still call her Big Sis Moon which is rather weird if you're not part of her local group? Aside also shortening her name to just Moon. (which could be either familiarity or convenience, no solid evidence)

They also got into contact with Five Pebbles VERY soon after he was put online according to SRS themselves which is possible both ways! Just felt more likely if they were part of the local group.

AND SPEARMASTER.

We don't know what "local group" means, but I always assumed, because of the name it partly meant distance.

Iterators are VERY far from each other, usually. Like quite far even local group wise. I assumed that for a slug cat like Spearmaster to have been capable to make the journey to Pebbles and back... and then do the same AGAIN, it meant that SM made a long journey, but one that was like... y'know not from one part of the continent to the other big.

I assume distance plays a role, because in a cream pearls..

The implication is that Local groups held out together the longest.

I can't imagine this poor creature covering a such a massive worth of land on foot..!

SM was given the pearl inside their chest mainly for it to be hidden, but also as an instinct that's true! So they know where to go.

Hunter doesn't have that not because it isn't needed, but because NSH was rushing. As implied by these lines.

NSH was rushing them so much they ended up with the rot, I doubt there was any time left to perfect a homing instinct or do much of anything really. I think NSH is probably closer than SRS (just for poor Hunter's sake honestly), but I don't know by how much really- iterators seem to be built PRETTY far from each other. The only other closest neighbor is UI. Which means NSH is farther than her.

But either way yeah. I've dug info for a WHILE now I can't seem to find any super solid evidence for either. I'm just sharing my interpretation as always. You can headcanon either one of these and call them canon in my book really.

[angstandhappiness]

Cute

Turned some characters from various fandoms i like into slugcats!

Can you guess where they're from? 😁