#she is based on a mantidfly :]

[ssomepersonn]

girlbug.........................

[parakaryote]

And here's Lenst's official reference sheet! I decided to just draw over the sketch for the main picture, as I liked her design as it was.

Her robot body is largely based on a praying mantis, but with the unique starry eyes of a mantidfly. Also, the placement of her heat vents is mean to be similar to that of the specialized spiracles of a Madagascar hissing cockroach. Her feet look like those of certain birds, but are actually holdovers from an earlier robot body and based on creatures from her home planet. Part of the reason why she likes insects so much is because some of them remind her of her own kind, as they had arms similar to mantises and a reproductive strategy similar to bees / wasps / ants (eusocial and haplodiploid).

[parakaryote]

[Image description: A character reference sheet for Lenst, a robot character resembling a praying mantis with a somewhat dinosaur-like head and X-shaped feet. Her one visible eye has a multicoloured star shape in it. Most of her body is grey, but her neck and most of her feet are blue and her hands are light purple. There are a couple of smaller drawings in the side, one showing how her hands can change shape from humanlike hands to things like scissors and the other showing the wing-like solar panels in her back. End ID.]

I redid Lenst’s ref!

General info:

Name: Lenst

Species(?): Uploaded consciousness (originally a neceira)

Gender: Worker female (neceira are / were eusocial and haplodiploid, like hive insects)

Age: 5 billion years

Design notes:

Her robot body is based on a praying mantis in terms of general body structure, with some ketaspra-like features (feet, general head shape (minus ears), default hand shape). It does not look anything like her original organic body - neceira are / were furry humanoids.

5’9” tall

Her face is immobile, so she relies on tone to communicate.

Her eyes are like those of a mantidfly, with the star shapes in them.

Unlike the rest of her body, which is solid metal or plastic, her hands are made out of nanotech clusters and can shape-shift. Their default shape is that of a ketaspra (or human) hand.

Tips of arm spikes are blunt

She has heating vents on the underside of her body, which are made to evoke insect spiracles in appearance.

Zygodactyl feet

Underneath her “front wings” are a pair of thin, foldable solar panels resembling wings. They have photovoltaic cells on both sides.

Personality:

Compassionate: If Lenst sees that somebody is hurt, she will drop everything to console them.

Optimistic: She is extremely optimistic. Possibly a coping mechanism.

Affectionate: Lenst never hesitates to show affection to the people she likes.

Passive: She often doesn’t say exactly what she wants, in part because the thing she wants most in life is so impossibly big to ask someone.

Lenst is the only neceira - or being of neceira origin, at least - that the people of the Milky Way Celestial Community have ever known. Her species are / were (it’s unknown whether they or any descendants of them still exist) extremely ancient and originated from the galaxy of Caldwell 5 / IC 342 in the Maffei Group. No civilization since the neceira is known to have succeeded in making wormholes that connect locations in different galaxy groups, so there’s no real way to know for sure. (Celestial Community is not meant to be an especially hard sci-fi setting, and this might be most apparent in the way that the wormholes work. I’ll explain it some other time.)

The neceira used to visit various Local Group galaxies, including the Milky Way, but then stopped. Lenst got left behind on a moon on one of their last visits, and was left waiting for help that never came. Eventually, she uploaded her consciousness into a computer and went into an extremely time-dilated virtual reality. Five billion years later, a ketaspra craft exploring that moon accidentally woke her up, and the rest is history. (Ketaspra are an alien species that look kind of like raptors, but with external ears, zygodactyl feet, and prehensile tails ending in claw-like hooks.) 

The crew of the craft decided to take Lenst to the ketaspra homeworld. While learning about various Community member civilizations, she became fascinated with Earth, and ended up making herself a robotic body that was mainly modelled after its insects. She eventually decided to go to Earth and try out living there for a while. There she meets Miranda, the human co-protagonist of her story, and they end up embarking on a grand adventure…

Lenst often tells people about the neceira and her old life, but she is rarely believed. Most people assume she’s an AI originating from a Celestial Community species.