#..sort of

[bloodorangee1]

trying to improve on pixel art

[worldruins]

Meet the Remnant, my "slugcat" oc. Because I have no sense of moderation, it has an entire campaign loosely mocked up in my head- I don't have the modding ability or time to make anything of it but I enjoy thinking about it! The two iterators on the sheet are the central npcs of the campaign.

Remnant is larger, more aquatic, and faster on all fours than a slugcat. It struggles to use the same tools, carries items in its mouth, and can eat batnip and bubble weed. And, though it doesn’t know it, it is one of the last four of its kind left.

More about the campaign below VVV

BONUS: Remnant obviously resembles a slugcat, and they are sort of a slugcat ancestor! The genomes of the pipe slugs slugcats evolved from had remnant DNA as well as the simple tool-worm base that ancients used for many creatures. The blueprints were present in the modified organisms, and over several generations and mutations began to express themselves once more. Anyway…

To start, the Remnant is living with their family in an idyllic natural landscape much like survivor and monk at the beginning of their campaigns. The incident kickstarting their journey would be them wandering off from their kin and- gameplay starts here- getting lured off by something interesting, before the wall closes quickly behind them and the player realizes they have been trapped. They find themselves in a crate lined with wet plant matter, which gets shaken and turned around for a bit before settling down. It continues with a gentler rattling and remnant is clearly being taken somewhere, but the game acts like you're in a den and, once you've eaten the food set out for you in there, you sleep.

You are woken when the train carrying you crashes. You are able to escape and wind up in a light drizzle. Numerous overseers, some purple and others seafoam green, follow you around. The artificial, dilapidated surroundings are alien to the remnant.

During the first cycle an overseer will direct you to the nearest den, but you don’t have a rain timer until the first time you hibernate. You’ve never experienced rain like this before, after all.

The fact is that the remnant and their family are primal fauna, from the old world before bioengineering and iterators. They have spent their whole lives in a carefully controlled environment, maintained at first by ancients and then the systems the ancients left behind. The mass ascension happened, and nobody really knew what to do with these creatures- depending on the species, animals in captivity were generally released to fend for themselves or set for years of being maintained by machines scheduled in advanced, automated to care for them.

Remnant is taken when the iterator Ink Stained Palms orders a specimen of one relatively hardy species to study and potentially have the rest delivered to their regions. Something goes wrong- their delivery is sabotaged by their semi-active former senior, Calls To Stony Skies. And out Remnant goes into an alien land, with each of the two rival iterators trying to lure or force it to go to them.

This generally takes the form of projections like Iggy uses to get the slugcats to Moon, though it’s two different kinds of overseer guiding you in opposite directions at the same time. There may also be introduced environmental hazards- some of the chases in Little Nightmares come to mind- to corral you toward wherever the iterator causing it wants you to go.

ISP was the one who was getting the remnant delivered to her facility. They’re a bioengineer interested in long-term ecosystem restoration. It’s come to believe there’s a natural ‘balance’ to the world that could, in time, let living things leave the cycle of their own accord if it was realigned properly.

CTSS is in a condition not unlike spearmaster moon, though his decline has been steadier and over a longer period of time. They’ve been replaced by another iterator as group senior, and derailed your journey in the hopes of using a rare animal as collateral to get ISP’s help. Watching the remnant’s struggle to survive, however, he ends up very attached to it and can’t bring himself to kill it as he originally planned to.

Though they might want to, CTSS can’t save the remnant from a more insidious fate. The air, the soil, the water itself is toxic to you, whose kind has lived countless generations shielded from the heavy metal byproducts of industry and the artificial metabolisms of those great boxes in the sky. Ascension is an option, but so is going to ISP, whose body itself possesses a complex with artificial environments much like the one you began in. It can’t protect the remnant fully, but it can offer them a longer life. There are multiple endings to the campaign, based on the order you visit the iterators in.

If you read all this thank you so much and feel free to send questions!! About my little guys.

[secretlyhuntokar]

2012 Cecil be like

[ponds-of-ink]

Welp, off to run after some salmon again. Sure hope there won’t be a reason for peanut emojis to be in my inbox when I get back.

(Unless… Actual Scraptrap merch tonight? 👀

[fell-court]

okay! I have a lot of random notes that i'm going to throw all into the same post so here we go

I'm about to do the last couple of level 67 quests, so I only have a couple dozen quests left of Stormblood! Which is quite exciting. What is not quite exciting is that the current quest I'm on is the one before the Lakshmi battle, but through the power of skipping all the cutscenes i will hopefully be able to get through it before/without dissociating any more than i already have.

Almost every single job in the game that I've played or intend to play is now at level 70 or very near it, with the only exception being summoner still stuck down at 61 (and astrologian forever being stuck at 34 - sorry astrologian, but I am not going to do well as a healer using my controller, I can already just sense it). I'm quite happy about this, but it's also causing a great deal of choice paralysis regarding which jobs to then go and use.

Also outside of combat I am now already a level 81 weaver because I went slightly mad with glove-making power and I regret absolutely nothing about this process.

..I've been using Lorenza's intended Shadowbringers appearance (minus the headgear) for enough of these recent play sessions, because it's an aiming set and I was levelling up machinist, that I now want to come up with a different outfit for her in Shadowbringers, oops. I'm still fairly set on her fighting as a dancer on the First, because she picks up the fighting style from Lyna (and subsequently ending up doing the dancer 60-70 questline after coming back to Eorzea actually sets things up pretty well for Endwalker, given what those quests are about!). So I apologise in advance for potentially lots of rambles about what to make the new outfit.

I also still haven't figured out what job to use for Endwalker. Probably black mage for the sake of the whole theme of "returning to the Source from the First = going back to her roots of how she fought when first arriving on the Source from the Thirteenth" (and also because I miss playing as a black mage!!) - but i'm not 100% set on it. However, I did just have a fun idea that has basically cemented Lorenza being a reaper post-Endwalker, so that's that part sorted at least. This makes her current full job progression chain black mage (or possibly also summoner)-machinist-red mage-dancer-black mage-reaper!

I also need to figure out an appearance for Endwalker, which may in turn have an impact on the new Shadowbringers appearance because of symbolism and wanting to be different and all sorts of other things stemming from me thinking about this kind of thing far too much. I had the idea of Endwalker being the first time Lorenza's eyes were visible to some extent, with post-Endwalker then being where they were the most visible of all, but I still need to decide which gear specifically will be used to achieve this effect.

It is now gone midnight and I'm quite tired, so I think I will leave it here for now, but thank you to anyone who has actually taken the time to read all of this. If you have any questions or comments, then please know you can always send me an ask!

[cptnwynnie]

also this au is kinda sorta based on an original project i’m working on that so if and/or when i start posting about that. if u see stuff recycled from this au........................................ no u didn’t

[hydrattan]

I was feeling agitated and artblocked yesterday so I decided to give my brain a rest by watching TV and then the next thing I knew these were in front of me

[foolfortune]

[vamprisms]

me: you literally have a disorder. this is symptoms

me: no perhaps my soul is rotten

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

we need more divorcebaiting. how strongly can canon imply (without technically outright stating) that these two characters are bitterly, acrimoniously divorced? essential we explore this

[so-many-ocs]

[on the verge of having a complete breakdown] i need to make some kind of list or perhaps sort things into categories

[sparrowlucero]

like the most politically neutered movie of all time unironically

[saddest-girl-in-the-whole-world]

I will NEVER not fuck with women using a traditionally masculine title. Tell me more about that girl that's also a prince.

[arliedraws]

Being in a fandom for 20+ years is weird because you’ll see posts like, “How come I never see people mention x” and it’s like. We did. We talked about that a lot, actually. Actually it’s something that came up. And it’s hard not to be like, “Yeah, we discussed this fifteen years ago.” Half of this fandom wasn’t even born when these discussions happened. Wild.

[carlsdraws]

miku but she’s in a medieval manuscript