#selkieverse kabbu

[mantisgodsaus]

2 for selkieverse kabbu and zasp wrt their selkie teammates

(for this ask game)

2. What role would your OC fill in a friend group?

As this question is Very Vague, we are going for the provided explanation of "how they would help handle and accomodate for the hurdles that Existing As A Selkie causes in society and in general for their teammates"

For Kabbu, a lot of what he does is along the lines of just - keeping an eye on things, and running interference if necessary. He can hold a pelt for them, if needed, in order to keep it safe - mainly he does this for other selkies, since Vi doesn't really... have one to watch over, anymore, and Leif's pelt is kept with his family, but him being a Bulky And Trustworthy Beetle Who Looks Intimidating Enough To Chase People Off is very useful.

He keeps an eye on his teammates to make sure that they aren't getting too far into the call of their elements, and tries to pull them out if needed - a lot of what he does is just keeping Vi from succumbing to either instinct or the pull of Fire, since both of those are a LOT stronger for her after... the incident.

Beyond that, it's mostly just - dealing with emotional backlash, if that makes sense. Offering emotional support. Making sure that Leif can get the time to draw himself back to normal after a particularly bad moment with the call of the water. Caring for Vi after she gets burned again. Making sure that no one's health is actively going downhill.

Not a whole lot different that usual Kabbu, in that regard, but with the fun extra aspect that sometimes he is Very Viscerally Aware That There Is An Entire Demographic Of People Who Can Get Mind Controlled With Access To One Random Pelt And Who Cannot Be Too Far Separated From It Without Major Consequences And Two Of Them Are His Teammates Evenm If They Aren't In Particular Danger Most Of The Time and he's handling it normally and gracefully and he is Not on the verge of a panic attack sometimes while listening to people talk because by the name of venus you people LIVE like this???

For Zasp... he does his best, but there's not a lot he can do to help. He can work with Mothiva to help her meet deadlines or cope with actions forced on her by her pelt. He isn't the old who holds her pelt, nor does he have means to get her pelt back - selkies weren't really something people Knew About back in his old hive, and partnering with Mothiva was his first brush with that whole shitshow.

He can't do much but act as a buffer and an assistant to help her cope with the demands of her job - and really, that's something he does in Normal BF, too? He has no special powers to use to help, Mothiva actually specifically asked him to avoid interfering too much with her pelt after he learned exactly why she was forced to do things and the cause behind those occasional bursts of fucked up sensory feedback.

Interfering with anything to do with her pelt causes more harm than good, from her perspective - thus, don't interfere, and just let her higher-ups do whatever with it that they want. He... has mixed feelings about it, but he lets them slide. Who is he to decide, after all, the workings of a world he doesn't know?

[mantisgodsaus]

@niko-jpeg We are putting this in a reblog so that we don't end up grappling with Tumblr's reply system (tragic fate, we know).

So, funny story about the Mothiva Thing - you actually just hit on the subject of a fun little whump fic we finished a while ago! That particular fic's pending until the specific person who we asked to do the cover finishes it (it's been in progress since December) but! Holding a selkie's pelt allows you to control them, not only with the threat of death, but with the actual Effect of holding a semi-magical vital organ in your hand! With Mothiva specifically, the effect extends past actually physically holding it - that is to say, they don't need the threat of killing her to keep her in line, because she already has to keep in line.

Mothiva's pelt is not currently in her possession! Instead, it's held by her manager - she doesn't really get to see it beyond the bare minimum proximity to keep her reasonably healthy. She doesn't enjoy the situation, but she's resigned to it - it's all she's really known, and it's hard to imagine things being different. The public doesn't know she's a selkie, and her agency isn't particularly interested in letting them know.

Why assign them harp seals when there are so many seals to choose from? Mothiva and Leif's particular strain can land on pretty much any pinniped, and though Mothiva is shorter than Leif in moth form, if either of them had access to seal form she'd be about twice as long as him, because leopard seals are massive, murderous torpedos of death, and ribbon seals are Not That.

She's got the sort of... mildly murderous aura about her that comes from being a seal which eats Other Seals. Leif has not picked up on this once because like with many parasites, his sense of threat is kind of nuked. He really doesn't need to worry about predators. He's made of fungus. Predators are just bonus hosts waiting to happen.

Vi's Thing is, uhh... Well, listen, we've got 5k words currently penned down for that story, and it shows absolutely no signs of stopping soon. We'd love to hear your speculation, because it's likely to be months before that gets done. All we'll say is that she was running from something, and her exit from the hive was just a bit more stressful this time.

Kabbu is... listen, Vi's Whole Thing makes that thing more complicated than really needed, because without a skin the waters of selkie get a bit muddied. Leif doesn't even know he's a selkie until later, thanks to the massive range that being more than a century old grants him combined with the fact that his memories are a bit screwy. He blocked out any memories that might interfere with him acting like a normal moth - here, that just so happens to include all memories of being a selkie.

Kabbu is... less "left out" and more "unceasingly glad that he had the good fortune to not be a selkie". The pull to the sea, the craving for things that are overwhelmingly likely to kill him, the issues of having a pelt separate from his body that someone can steal and have full control of him... he has enough nightmares about having to return to the swamplands without that. A selkie can feel whatever happens to its pelt, and having your pelt slowly dissolve in someone's stomach is not a fun way to go.

He might feel left out on occasion, but between how Leif spent more than a year in less than perfect health thanks to being separated from his pelt and Vi's firsthand example of exactly what desperation and fear to do to a selkie, he has some very good reasons to not want that for himself.

If he were a selkie, he'd be some sort of leatherback sea turtle. Zasp'd be either a lionfish or some sort of moray eel.

Zasp is not a selkie, but he knows Mothiva is a selkie. The whole thing doesn't sit right with him, but she says it's normal, and he doesn't have another point of comparison - social bug hives need that rare mutation to trigger to turn out selkies at all, if the Queen or one of her drones wasn't already a selkie.

In terms of legislation, it is illegal to buy or sell selkie skins, but only in the Bee Kingdom. Elizant has never seen them as a big enough group to need protecting, the Termite Kingdom doesn't care, and the Wasp Kingdom is too isolated to have issues with it - besides the fact that they're almost entirely made of social wasps that only rarely produce a selkie, of course.

Queen Bianca has her own motivations for putting the law in place, but it's good PR and it's more protection than the other kingdoms offer, so she's got a higher population of selkies than anyone else, despite a few - if you'll pardon the term - skeletons in her closet.

New blog moment /pos

Hello! I am here to formally request you may or may not tell me more about this selkieverse. Is it an au where everyone is a selkie (or at least, some bugs are)? Do they just turn into aquatic like bugs instead of actual seals? If actual seals, do you have species picked out for the selkie characters yet? How does it work? Are they even selkies at all? Once more, you don't have to answer if its information you'd like to withold but as local marine biology (mostly seals and jellyfish though) nerd I must know if this may be an au that is like. Right up my alley.

Oh boy, we can answer questions! Technically, we've had this blog for a bit, we just... haven't been using it (we are afflicted with a chronic need to illustrate our worldbuilding and we just Haven't Been Drawing recently).

Not everyone is a selkie, but some bugs are - actual species varies! They're seals, or other assorted... vertebrates, mostly. "Selkie", here, is less referring specifically to seals and more referring to the general category of Bugs With Bonus Pelt. We've got actual species picked out for the selkie characters, but we do want to keep a few under wraps - of the few we can reveal, Leif is a ribbon seal, Mothiva is a leopard seal, Cenn is a yellow-bellied water snake, and Vi... well, her pelt was an ermine.

In terms of how it works - selkies are, more or less, bugs that come in two... pieces, or with two forms. It's genetic, though it can very much skip generations and occasionally appears to manifest from nowhere - generally, you have a few main strains of selkie in an area, maybe with a scattering of other species around. Seals are by far the most common around both Bugaria and The North, and the gene's most common in moths (as far as anyone knows), though it can appear in other species - and, as previously mentioned, sometimes you just get a kid who's a selkie without any previous selkie relatives.

A selkie's pelt isn't present upon hatching, but manifests later - generally either when they metamorphose, in the case of bugs like moths and butterflies, or during one of their first few instars on bugs who do That. It is, functionally, a part of them - a selkie cannot be separated from their pelt for too long, though they can wander farther from it with age and practice, and trying to keep away from it causes fun side effects (like organ failure, and feeling like you're being physically peeled out of your shell, and death).

The pelt itself is, as is typical with selkies, a pelt - seal, or snake, or ermine, or whatever else someone might be. Looks like you'd expect a seal pelt to be - although a selkie's pelt contains a few more bones. Generally, you've got a skull, spine, and ribcage, but it's not uncommon to have a few other bones - they shape the skin, more or less. As is standard, once the skin is donned, they gain the form of their pelt, but the selkie has some control over it - as well as some control over how the pelt moves.

The thing about selkie pelts is that, as they're a part of the selkie, they're functionally "alive" - an extension of the self, an extra limb. Technically, anyone can don a selkie pelt and take on the form of whatever creature they are, but it'll be... strange. Uncanny. They aren't the selkie, and this isn't their form - they're just wearing their skin. Unlike on the selkie themself, the bones aren't going to merge to them properly, they're just going to stick in there, wearing away at their shell until they eventually take it off. A pelt only retains its transformative properties while the selkie it belongs to is alive - once they bite it, it becomes just a piece of leather, though with selkie skin being the only real option as far as skins go, it's still pretty damn valuable dead.

If a selkie's pelt is destroyed, the selkie dies. Likewise, if a selkie dies, the pelt becomes inert. It's a bit like holding a vital organ in your hand - and if the selkie and the pelt are taken too far apart, the connection is severed and the selkie will die even if no damage is dealt to either them or their pelt.

As is standard for selkie mythology, having a selkie's pelt gives you some measure of control over them. Specific degree of control varies, largely based on the selkie - though all selkies can be commanded while you're actively holding their pelt, if they'll keep following that command once you've put it down is a whole 'nother ball park. If you had Leif's pelt in hand and told him to do something, he'd keep doing it even if you put that pelt down later, but if you tried the same with Vi (again, while she had it) she'd stop the second you put it down. With Mothiva, just possessing the pelt is enough - you don't need direct contact, you just need to have it. The effect's at least partially psychosomatic - while it's a direct compulsion with direct contact, anything past that is largely based on if the selkie thinks you should be able to tell them what to do.

The selkie form itself is fairly standard as creatures of its species go, albeit downsized for bug scale. They're around the size they'd normally be relative to a human, relative to an average bug (using an ant as your Standard Human works, here). A selkie is, functionally, both their bug species and their pelt species - behaviors in one form will affect the other, and vice versa. Generally, this'll manifest most noticeably in either tics or diet - a craving for raw fish, an odd sense of territorialism, an impulse to drag dead things to your dumb, bad-at-hunting teammate. It does, however, vary - and a good chunk of selkies do try to keep the fact that they're selkies hidden, especially if they might have reason to fear a stolen pelt.

...this is a whole lot of rambling on Selkie Magic Mechanics and not a whole lot of marine biology, uhh. Hope this helps sketch out the general mechanics for ya! We're always glad to talk about Cool AUs!

[mantisgodsaus]

we have another Highly Specific Question while we work on the beasties. is selkieverse mothiva resistant to leif's ice because water alignment. or has her resistance to water stuff like, faded because she hasn't actually worn her pelt in ever. feel free to be vague if this spoils anything we are just curious because most of the mothivas we have are semi-resistant to leif's magic but for a different reason (genetics)

She is still resistant to Leif's ice, just not as much as she could be. She is also resistant to Leif's ice normally due to genetics, as she is a Northern moth in pretty much all of our AUs and built for tolerating temperatures well below Leif's combat output for months at a time - Northern moths are the only species in the area that Kabbu would know as The North who are active throughout the winter while still remaining aboveground.

Selkie Mothiva would have an advantage over normal Mothiva, as she has the capacity to put on a small amount of blubber in normal form - however, she is not currently eating well enough to have normal Northern moth standards of body fat, let alone extra selkie blubber. Still around the same in terms of ice resistance, she just breaks out when encased a bit faster. Being heavily cold resistant doesn't help with being physically encased in ice, it just keeps her from taking actual damage from the cold.

Your alignment to an element will not fade no matter how little you wear your pelt. You can be heavily attuned to an element without having worn your pelt almost at all - but this requires actively making an effort to attempt to attune to that, and Mothiva really doesn't have the time for that. Her connection to water is weak, but it would still be weak if she actually wore her pelt, as it's mostly weak due to her terrible horrible lifestyle.