#the world-building I do for my hperfixations

[pinkandgreenarepurpleandyellow]

Part 2 of me slowly irritating the fandom to death with mediocre pencil sketches and world-building concepts!

A quick disclaimer: A lot of the stuff here is just me fleshing things out bc I love filling in small world-building holes. The base for the style guide was @soledadcatalina's post from several years ago (that I currently cannot link bc Tumblr hates me) but with a lot of additional stuff based on my personal concepts and various experience/people I've met who have done some versions of these things (not the fighting and killing stuff, just bits and bobs). Although I'm a bit of a clothing nerd and love both analyzing and constructing design elements for wardrobe I am not a professional. (Image ID at end of ramble below the cut)

Ok so in my quest to find any vital descriptors I re-read the first there books, then Silent Night, then the bonus chapters, and then Lockdown again. The clothing is described as grey in a few places but the cover of Solitary shows Alex's jumpsuit to have stripes, so I finally came to a compromise. The jumpsuits start out as black and white striped classics but the warden is cheap and so the ink is shitty, quickly blotting and fading and staining so the older jumpsuits are a greyish color. (This will be come relevant for bandanna section of this post, towards the end). The actual Furnace logo is something that a little extra effort was put into, possibly being embroidered into the fabric (tbh yes I think the warden would do something like that just to be an extra level of asshole). The material itself is also not the best kind, and can shrink if overheated for too long.

Each latest batch of inmates is given a brand 'new' jumpsuit with distinct stripes for their first day. After they go into the showers, their uniforms are now officially part of the prison-wide circulation. There's always a very slight surplus for the sake of laziness and mild convenience, but not enough so that popped can vandalize the torsos of the jumpsuits or smuggle a second one out. But that doesn't stop people from fucking up the legs and the sleeves.

So, as a general rule, sleeves are fucked with more than legs partially for safety reasons and partially because shorter than expected sleeve are less of a pain than being tall and dealing with pantlegs that fit like capris on you because some short assholes just have to make it all about them even though plenty of the jumpsuits have shrunk over time so you think they could just vandalize those instead. So there's a certain amount of jumpsuits around that will actually fit on shorter kids, with very few additions or removals due to the risk of getting beaten up for constantly fucking up the uniforms. A good way to tell a short old-timer from a new fish is that the old-timers will push and shove for the ripped-leg jumpsuits while the new fish will try to go for either the less worn out models (that don't fit in the slightest and have the stripes still) or the leftovers.

Aside from the ripped legs, the solution most short kids have is the roll the excess up somehow. On someone taller, the baggy look is an option but when the fabric is a foot longer than your legs, you gotta do something. New fish go for the very big and bulky cuffs that have to be rolled up like 7 times to let their feet touch the ground directly. More experienced kids tend to make stylistic cuffs. Maybe it's mis-matching the height to which the pantlegs are rolled to, maybe it's rolling one leg the usual way and rolling the other one inward, but the cuffs end up looking more stylistic than necessary, which adds to the overall look.

Moving up, we've got sleeves. Most are also too long, but are usually shorter than they started due to inmates instantly ripping small pieces off of the edge for toothbrushes, hair ties, or just boredom. The life cycle of the sleeve is 'Starting length', 'fraying at edges', 'loose t-shirt sleeve length', and 'sleeves torn off completely'. Most of the older jumpsuits are in the latter two phases. Sleeves are narrower than the legs by a slight margin. Again, despite the inevetable degrading of the material over time, the number of shorter-sleeved jumpsuits is relatively stable, although it does go up and down more frequently.

With these basics, you can start telling apart people's time spent in the prison, level of deference to the warden, their hierarchal status, and their odds of survival in encounters with the other inmates. Of course, some of the excess or completely worn out jumpsuits are stolen and scavenged or ripped apart and passed around for anyone who needs more fabric tan there is in a sleeve or who needs a big square/rectangle of material.

Finally, the part that I personally get excited about, bandanas, accessories, and miscellaneous usage!

Skull Bandanas: Canonically all surface items are confiscated and I have no doubt that includes the gang bandanas. On the surface they probably either buy them or use paint (depending on area and resources, etc) but neither of those are really an option within the Furnace itself. So, to make a proper Skull bandana: take an extra jumpsuit, cut out a decently sized square, bleach out a rough circle in laundry (put some extra focus on the black stripes to make it look more natural), either burn the fabric at laundry /kitchen or get soot/the blackest dust available in the chipping and turn the white stripes surrounding the Skull black this way, and then use the same process for rough eyeholes. More detail-oriented members can heat up shanks/small pieces of metal and also add on rough teeth and holes in the nose area.

The finished product is a roughly black square with a roughly white skull in the center, to be worn only by the Skulls. Atempts to mimic the design to blend in don't work as the Skulls are relatively selective. Most of the bandanas were made within the first month (using just striped squares for the first part) and to get one now usually requires ousting a previous member unless Ambrose makes an exception (made twice within the span of five years).

Fifty-Niner Stripes: Usually made with the a mixture of dust and dirt from chipping. Some of the more unhinged members had tattoos from the surface but nowadays it's mostly dust/soot used as paint (can be stored in some extra rags and mixed with some of the chemicals in the laundry).

Leopard marks: These are established as cigarette burns on the surface and shiv-made holes in gen pop but I do think someone suggested 'hey what if we just use dust like the others' and promptly got shanked for it.

Accessories: So that sounds a bit weird, but allow me to explain. Strips roughly the length of sleeve's circumference can become improvised hair-ties, good for anyone who can't/won't see a slicer and anyone with long hair, which I imagine isn't too small of a population. Longer and thicker strips of cloth wrap around feet to act as (shitty) improvised socks. And even though wearing a bandana even remotely similar to the ones the Skulls use will get you killed, plenty of inmates make a similar version (sometimes just a long and wide rectangle) to act as durags or very basic headbands to keep sweat out of their brows during hard labor. Unlike the Skull ones, these tend to be either striped or faded grey.

Miscellaneous: Obvious, but the the sleeves and pantlegs frequently act as bandages since no one wants to go to the infirmary. There's also the pre-emptive use as a basic form of wrist/ankle tapes and a shitty version of a boxing glove by wrapping cloth around the hand. Shorter strips wind around shanks to make handles. Scraps and useless pieces of the jumpsuits quickly add up and some clever people figure out that they can sweep up all the pieces, shove them into the pillow case or under the sheets and get slightly better sleep.

[Image ID:

Two pictures of black and white pencil sketches on paper. The first shows four generic inmates dressed in the Furnace jumpsuits lined up and facing the camera. Aside from one with black stripes on his cheeks and one with a bruise on his face, they have no facial features. The focus is on the uniforms and their distinctions. The second page has more small notes about Skull bandanas.

Inmate Uniform Notes (going right to left for inmates, head to toe for notes):

On the first kid, who is dressed in a striped Furnace jumpsuit zipped up all the way with baggy sleeves and extremely rolled up-cuffs the notes are: "Surface hair" (referring to clean and neat haircut), "Zipped up", "New uniform, bolder stripes", "bulky sleeves covering hands", and "very rolled up legs".

The second kid, who has messy long hair and a partially unzipped jumpsuit with faded stripes, baggy but uncuffed legs, and ripped up sleeves (down to wrists), has the notes: "Can't/won't see the slicers", "mostly faded stripes", "worn/torn sleeves", and "baggy legs, maybe a little rolled".

The third kid is significantly taller, with hair in a slightly neater cut pushed back and two stripes on his face, marking him as a Fifty-Niner. He is holding something in his right hand and there are bandages wrapped around his left fist. His jumpsuit is completely faded and partially unzipped, with the sleeves ripped off and the legs fitting almost perfectly, if a little big, and he has the notes: "better cut since in a gang" (hair), "coal/dust lines" (gang markings), "arms completely torn off", "stretched and worn out after years" (in reference to whole jumpsuit), " 'bandages' made of ripped sleeves" (fist), "stripes fully gone", and "excess bit [of pant leg] tucked under".

The fourth and final kid is shorter than the first three, with closely cropped scruffy hair, a bruise on his left cheek, and cloth wrapped around his right wrist. His jumpsuit is zipped all the way up, the sleeves are rolled to the elbows, and the legs are mismatched, with the right ripped short and the left cuffed. The notes around him read: "scruffy cut (wounds hidden)", "Zipped up but other details make this a fashion choice", "fading stripes", "casual sleeves", "improvised brace for wrist", "shrunk from overheating" (referring to the uniform fitting him despite him being smaller than average), "mismatched legs" (one ripped, one rolled up), and "stylistic cuff" (referring to rolled up leg).

Skull Bandanna Notes (and misc) (going roughly right to left, top to bottom):

Bottom right corner shows two small hair ties, one made of just one scrap, and one with a second scrap twining around, mimicking an elastic hair tie. Above, in the main square, are two versions of the unfolded Skull bandanas, roughly square-ish with the Skulls having circular eye sockets, small slants at the nose, and vague outlines of teeth. The top version is more detailed and the bottom is more likely to be what was worn in gen pop.

Across the top are three rough sketches of inmates wearing the bandanas. One is wearing his to cover his scalp, with the skull front and center. A small note on his points out the grey area in the middle, cutting through the black and white, reading "stripes faded but not gone". The one in the middle has his bandana tied around his neck and is looking up. The last boy wears it around his forehead, still leaving the top of the head uncovered as he glares down.

At the bottom of the page there is a simple sketch of part of a jumpsuit, with the stripes and a note "bleached out with time". The picture next to it shows a rough square (the starter for a Skull bandana) with visible stripes. A note to the black stripe reads "bleach (laundry)" and the one to the white stripe says "burn or cover in black dust (laundry/chipping when guard is distracted)".

Between the boys wearing their bandanas and the starter sample are small pictures of a few shanks and sketch of a Fifty-Niner in profile, glaring to the side. A note points to the mark on his cheek, reading "soot".

End ID]