#dude was the paragon of their imperialist capitalist society and was forcibly molded into that role

[verdemoth]

i got invited into @skies-seas space headworld a while back and offered my beloved immortal space captain from spore 2008. and then it took me several months to finalize a design for them/their species

Captain Sondetten was once just a guy, but is now a spaceship puppeting around a clone of their old body. This is because they made the mistake of captaining the first expedition beyond their home star, and the first to encounter sapient alien life. Now they are not a person to the empire, they’re a living symbol progress and expansion and conquest and they can’t be allowed to die. So when they did, solutions were found. [more under readmore]

Several centuries later, Sondetten is still kicking. The same mind, more or less. They’ve accumulated so many memories that after a certain point, it was easier to transfer their mind into servers aboard their ship. Easier for the empire to maintain digital backups for when the ship is destroyed and needs to be rebuilt. Easier to filter out extraneous data that would only take up valuable space.

Son’s none too thrilled with their lot in life. Everything they do has political consequences that can make or break an alliance. Despite their influence they can’t do anything to change their situation. They don’t recognize the world they were born on. They can’t remember the names or faces of their countless dead friends. They’ve mostly stopped making friends, as no one else can understand fully what they’ve experienced. They’re a ghost haunting their own ship, which is more their true self now than the flesh they wear for the sake of being presentable.

In this shared setting, Son finally snapped and went rogue. They broke into a memory bank to hastily download a big file of that old ‘extraneous data’ (not a clean install, it’s not totally coherent or chronological but they’re glad to have the chance to invite old ghosts back in), then they made their exit and wrecked some shit on the way out, vanishing off to the other side of the galaxy. Son may have been a pacifist once but they’ve long since grown desensitized to violence.

There’s nothing stopping the empire from making another Sondetten, and becoming even more selective with what memories are returned to them to prevent this from happening again. But that’s a problem for that Sondetten, not this one. This Sondetten finally got away, and is for the first time in a long time somewhat mortal. They can make another body clone given enough time if the current one is killed, but if their ship is destroyed there will be no one to rebuild it and restore these memories. This Son will end if the ship dies, which is a novel experience.

In the meantime they’re trying to figure out how life works now in a place where they’re not being strangled by their own legacy. They arrive into the plot as just the ship with severe hull damage and some very atypical technology. They find themself put up as a grand prize to be won in some competition, which is not exactly what they were hoping for. They decide to play along for a time in hopes of getting free repairs, and only reveal themself as a sapient being when some folks try snooping into their memory servers or cloning process.

~ Anyway i made this species in spore in like 2012 or something? they were one of my main playthroughs and Sondetten is my go to when i’m playing the space stage :]

the original Maaydes + Sondie in game

i’ve been trying to draw/design the species but it took me sooooooo long to settle on what i wanted! the initial concept was marsupial + bird but it evolved past that. there’s plenty of thylacine in the jaw range of motion & general posture/body anatomy, but also some rodent proportions and upright posture. head cones from great crested grebe and austroraptor. wing anatomy and proportions are pterosaur, a single long digit supporting a membrane. with a wing covering of moth like scales. also a bit of pangolin but it’s more obvious on some subspecies than on Sond here

the idea is that the predecessors of this species had some kind of fur like covering, which over time changed into fused structures somewhere between a scale and a feather? they’re primarily equipped for insulation and ornamentation (colourful) but the wing scales help to provide lift, and there are larger variations that provide effective armour. stomach ‘plumage’ is more similar to the original ‘fur’