#casiopea revamp

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anyways if I make the ship a km long, it wont be even 50x the lenght of the longest dragon onboard and I don’t know how to feel about that

on the other hand there’s dragons that have less than a meter in both wingspan and lenght so it’s all just.

wack.

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this is everything I’ve ever wanted... tasty lore... and big artwork of the Cloudsong...

also...

lads....

the airship is circling within the Twisting Crescendo now :)

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“we’ll ship it through the fucking forbidden portal if you pay us accordingly” Gilnar, at some point, probably,

the bottom one’s closer to how the airship should actually look, but, not there yet,

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ok so this is mostly for my own reference, but I went through the airship dragons and:

Eris is both the dragon that’s longest (20.46 m) and with the biggest wingspan (23.81 m) while Liacadau is the heaviest dragon onboard (fucking 11805.09 kg)

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seeing all these cool mith characters makes me want to make the remaining one (1) free role I currently have on the CASIOPEA (assistant medic/nurse bcs Kyrsten is just So Tired and has just Raahen to help her out, who's more of a surgeon than day-to-day diagnosis and medicaments help, and Sapphire has her role at a very different point of treatment) to be one...

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While I'm on the topic: CASIOPEAS mk. 0 and mk. I were made old-school - really just straightforward engineering as we know it. That's Yivree's field of expertise. Mk. I had some parts that were passivelly enchanted with some wind magic, but that was it. They were both built before the magitek boom, also.

On the other hand, mk. II, the current airship, has magic literally pulsing through it. Flux was much more active during the big magitek boom and switched to it from traditional engineering. The modern CASIOPEA is more or less his creation (Yivree helped out a bit, but she was too emotionally wrecked after mk. I went up in flames to be the lead engineer, and she passed it over to him).

Mk. II is so radically different from the previous ones, you probably wouldn't connect them at all. And in a certain sense, it was the first step on a long way of realization from Yivree that she could, in fact, rely on dragons around her, and that she didn't really need to be the captain, and things could change, and that was okay.

And then Nebula took over with her blessing :)

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over the years I’ve been playing fr I’ve kept so many kids of my progens’ bloodline that with time, the ‘I am your parent and thus you must listen to me’ fizzled out of the relationships, since... lot of them live on the same airship and they’d probably throw each other off of it if that didn’t happen at some point

“But Gilnar, how can you stand being a subordinate to your daughter?”

“She’s my captain. That I trust. That’s fine by me.”

“But still, she’s your daughter! You should be superior to her, not the other way arou-”

“She’s an independent, capable and very skilled adult, Deborah. And I am too. If I had a problem with that, I’d leave her ship, where she was elected as a captain. Now you’ll either help me load that cargo or I’ll kick you out.”

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hc that dragons just sorta. stop caring about age at some point. it just becomes a meaningless number and they don’t give it any societal status once you reach the ‘adult’ age. then you’re just an adult. so act like it and nobody’s really more adult that noone else.

esp. given that some dragons (like imperials) have unpredictable lifespans and if I remember correctly, dragons basically die of overflowing of magic, which can make certain dragons be extremely long-lived. caring about age becomes cumbersome at some point so they just stop doing that.

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That box. There's a strong, lingering feeling of unease that seems to be eminating from it. It makes it hard to breathe, like it's sitting on top of your lungs. It feels wrong. Like you shouldn't be here. Like it shouldn't be here. The crew seems to be absolutely oblivious to this. They'll tell you that it's just an old, somewhat pretty chest that a certain guadian took as her charge forever ago. There's nothing out of the ordinary about it. And they're partially right. It's not the chest. It's the... thing inside. It does not show itself to the world. It doesn't want to. It shrouds itself in darkness, trying to hide the fact that it's not from here. That it does not adhere to any rules of anatomy, wherever you count magic into the equation or not. Thankfully, it seems to be pretty good at hiding it's presence. Perhaps unnaturally so. Let's be honest, it's not exactly the easiest to exist in a plane that's not your own. A plane that you've been thrown into by force and whose rules you violate and distort just by being there. And then imagine your shock, when one of the residents of this oddly restrictive world decides to protect the shell you're hiding in (Or perhaps, you?) with their life. Thorough the years, the creature has grown oddly fond of all of the CASIOPEAs and their residents. And apart from aquiring a very angry and occasionally stabby guard, it might've had... other effects.

(I wanted to acompany this with another illustration but my head hurts and I don’t think a screen set at my drawing brightness settings is a good idea :’) So have just some written lore of the creature that probably has a name so different that I wouldn’t be able to say or write it, but who I will refer to as the Polterguest bcs I need to give it a tag lmao)

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You want to rob CASIOPEA? Here’s some tips!

don’t

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what do you mean by ‘your lair is not a star trek ship’

Leaders of the divisions are these:

Helm - Nebula (she’s the captain ofc)

Commerce and support - Gilnar

Medical - Kyrsten

Research - Wikeo

Technology - Flux (formerly Yivree)

Battle - Restille (formerly Shijuni)

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A bit of history behind the CASIOPEA airships before I stick them into the corresponding ghosts’ bios:

CASIOPEA MK. 0 wasn’t even called Casiopea while it was operational, it stuck as a nickname basically post-mortem. At first, it was just a floating complex, very Cloudsong inspired, but mainly residing on the plains. It wasn’t very mobile and was of a rather slapped-together construction, using a mixture of whatever was accessible. It was solid though- it didn’t take much effort to rebuild or adjust it to many things.

Mk. 0 was destroyed when Arvens joined the clan. Good lord Arvens has a lot of enemies. An unknown group lead a night ambush where they un-anchored the complex, and since the crew was 0% ready for this, they didn’t manage to redirect the complex in time and it got sucked into the Twisting Crescendo, where it got ripped into pieces.

Mk. I, the second airship, was build as a mobile, armed ship in response to this. It was faster than Mk. II and functioned on a system of clever small sails, wind magic and hydrogen in the main baloon. It had an unified construction and mainly ran on good ol’ technology and physics. It actually survived a solid amount of years, but then the main baloon set on fire one day for unknown reasons. It migth’ve been a sabotage. It migth’ve been a shortcircuit somewhere that sparked the hydrogen. Nobody’s sure, because the entire structure went up in flames INCREDIBLY quickly and basically all their things and equipment was destroyed. Thankfully, the evacuation was sucessful, though.

After this, Yivree retired as the head engineer and Flux took her place.

Mk. II, the current, third airship, is the most robust and giant out of them. It doesn’t use sails anymore, but it uses helium as a lifting gas and a complex of lightning-powered lightweight engines, and, well, A LOT of magic-based technology. It’s not the fastest, but it’s incredibly stable and can carry massive weight, which makes it an ideal trading ship. It’s so stable that Flux keeps insisting that it could fly through the Crescendo, but nobody tried it yet. (’I mean, it would totally shake a lot but we’d get through,’ he says, with excited lights in his eyes)

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there’s currently 4 ghosts on my airship and one ‘poltergeist’ that’s responsible for all of them

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some things I worked out in the lore revamp so far:

the clan will stay in the Wind territory. Considering they’re on a cargo airship, they travel a lot, but they still have Wind as their home!

I wrote down some stuff on Casiopea’s size. It’s not a tiny ship at all

I’ve spent solid few days of thinking about the constant accordion music accompanying it being interrupted by folk metal at random times and laughing my butt off, so it’s canon that occasionally there’s random ‘VODKA!!!!’ being screamed from the ship

Shijuni is the one with the accordion and also the one that has the stereotypical Pirate Cap‘n speech

Yivree is now the old-school techie I always wanted her to be. She is the designer of the mk. 0 and mk. I, but she designed the mk. II with Flux in favour of more modern technology that isn’t her field anymore.

she’s no longer one of the original imperials, but she’s still old lol

the ship has 3 computer/technological souls inhabiting it but nobody but the engineers believes it. some engineers are also sceptic but shh

there’s also a fire ghost living in the balloon, but since basically only Kernel (Trojan’s re-make, a heavy-duty maintenance robot) ever goes in there, he’s unknown to the crew

Conulata is now a meteorologist, but also a slightly dubious seer-thing

Raahen switched profession from architect to a surgeon lmao

Arven’s the merchant that makes most of the ship’s deals. He is also thoroughly pro-customer and sometimes a little bit too unashamedly likes to dig up nefarious practices of other merchants. Like a good third of the shadow territory merchants want his head on a silver platter

that sometimes makes things very difficult bcs TRADE ROUTES GODDAMNIT. ARVENS YOU BUTT NOW WE HAVE TO FLY AROUND THIS ENTIRE THING

Nebula’s the current captain and Gris is her commander

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(picture source)

Anyways, since I feel like the sense of scale of CASIOPEA MK. II is really important to drive home: have this comparison of Hindenburg, the biggest actual airship that has ever flown, to some REALLY BIG PLANES (including Boeing 747-8, the largest passanger aircraft)

Hindenburg had 245m.

CASIOPEA has at least 400m. I think that’s gonna be the lenght I’m gonna stick to. Realistically, considering that just the captain has nearly a tonne and 18m, and there also needs to be crew quarters, cargo space, several laboratories and stuff... it should probably be even bigger, but we’ve got magic engines that keep this thing partially afloat, so shush.

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Meanwhile: The CASIOPEA crew is just happy delivering the supplies! I mean, multiple customers from all over, but they all aim to a single place? Ideal.

actually participating in the dig, though? No. No. Absolutely not. For dragons that spend most of their time in the air, it feels way too claustrophobic to enter the caves, and Nebula is also extremely reluctant to leave anyone there before they leave for the next supply run, as the idea of them being grounded if something, anything bad happened is sort of terrifying.

Nobody is too keen on going down anyways, thankfully. Liacadau is the only one actively interested in the event, but he's more than fine with just chronicling it from a distance, actually.