#twitchy's oc storebox

[twitchesandstitches]

A Gun For Tia

Walls shook and floors subtly bent as Tia ambled through, her expression the calm and benevolent blankness of someone who might as well have elevator music playing in her head. Today her pink hair-tentacles were short and soft lumps glowing around her head, her glasses bobbing faintly on a snout halfway between being fish-like and froggy (and very cute either way). Massive lips were slightly opened, as if framing a thought she’d lost hold of a while ago, and onward she moved, without any particular indication that she really cared where she was going.

The floor bent beneath her feet. For a while, her feet had remained fairly stable, so it was probably a configuration she was happy with. The basic structure was surprisingly birdlike, with considerations for her great weight and mass and the needs her feet needed to be to support her body; a broad foot, with three very wide and short webbed toes, arching into a high shin. For the moment, though, she was not walking on two legs, but on all fours.

It should have given her some trouble. Her gigantic breasts were so big, and billowed out in front of her and outwards, that they were smacking into the ground. They rolled beneath her, slick skin wobbling and jerking with a liquid heaviness, and it should have been uncomfortable. She didn’t look like she was walking, exactly, but dragging her expansive endowments beneath her.

She hummed contentedly to herself, giving no sign that it bothered her at all. Possibly she’d just forgotten to feel discomfort, right them.

Her massive tail flapping behind her (And today, many thick and fleshy flaps sailed out from the sides, many times larger than her actual tail, which would have been perfect for swimming), she paused and noticed something. She’d wandered somewhere she wasn’t entirely familiar with.

The walls were heavily dented here; to one side, a long passageway had been converted into a barebones shooting range, with holographic projectors rigged to display various monsters. Perhaps activated by her presence, one of them turned on and projected the moving image of a demonic-looking beast, snarling silently.

She regarded this calmly. Considering that her other general reaction to an apparent threat was to instantly lash out with overwhelming force, it was probably best for the integrity of the habitat that she felt more mellow than that.

A nearby door lay ajar, prone to a lot of attention. She paddled over to it. “Yo hoo?” She called out. No one answered her.

She entered into a small room, managing to squeeze her disturbingly flexible body through the comparatively tiny door. There, she was met by a number of lockers, hanging off the walls; locker was a bit of a technical term. They weren’t stationary metal boxes, but big containers like giant hamster wheels, large enough for a human to fit into comfortably; in the strange, fluid nature of local space, they seemed a lot bigger on the inside.

She came close to the nearest one. A counter-weight mechanism allowed them to rotate at a steady pace, and as she came close to one, light glinted off many implements of destruction. Sharp edges glinted just barely visible through their ports; plasma capacities hummed faintly, ready to draw the cosmic energies of the universe into a combat-ready form; gigantic miniguns rested, ready for their under-arm grips to be taken by anyone big enough to properly use them.

Tia studied them for some time.

She felt a little uncertain. On the one hand, she had an aversion to most things specifically designed to (and Nevnir and the other weaponsmiths hated it when she refused to play nice about this) kill people. That’s what a weapon was. They were for killing things.

She ran a huge webbed finger awkwardly across the hilts of swords and the integrated power sources that would, when activated, project a cutting field that would carve through whatever they touched. It was too easy to imagine those blades piercing flesh; her breath caught as some part of the back of her mind rifled through scabbed memories and she heard brief gasps that sputtered out, the echoes of blood splattering on the ground, and the distinctive smell of spilled… internal bits.

She stared at them for some time. Her expression was somewhere between grim fascination and a sort of existential revulsion. For someone who had been alive for so long that continued existence was just part of the way her life worked, the idea of a permanent ending, or a tool specifically created to hasten that, was… uncomfortable.

Her stomach turned. Additional pockets for digestion, accessible from pretty much any orifice of note, formed on the spot.

On the other hand, she felt limitless curiosity for pretty much anything, even if it was profoundly unsettling to her, and a bit of hard pragmatism hammered into her by grim necessity. Yes, she was immortal; her flesh repaired itself, she automatically adapted to most things that hurt her, and even if her body was destroyed, she’d eventually rematerialize soon enough. But the people around her wouldn’t.

It was a duty to stop the things that would hurt them. Even if it made her stomach churn.

The lockers spun underneath her hand, her fingers gently tapping it to apply just enough force to spin them around like a prayer wheel, a comparison that struck her as both amusingly ironic and kind of mean.

She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. But perhaps she’d know what it was, when she found it-

The wheel stopped, her finger pressing against it hard enough to lock it into place.

A-ha.

There, sitting there, was a gun. A firearm. It was one of the ones that drew its ammunition directly from the background energy of the multiverse; not something that blasted projectiles with tiny explosions or accelerated its payload with electromagnetic catapults. It spun cosmic essence into its ammunition, and she carefully lifted it out, studying what it could do.

It was… bulky. Bulky all over. It was a cross between a one-man minigun and a light machine gun; a big gun probably meant to be wielded with two hands and a mount if at all possible. She carefully maneuvered it around, noting that it was nearly as tall as the average man; anyone wielding would be nearly dwarfed by it. Much of this bulk was from the surprisingly simple machinery that would harness its cosmic ammunition, shaping it into projectiles based on the weapon’s settings.

Yes; she found a dial on the side. It went from 0 (STUN), a little higher at 1 (ZAP ZAP) all the way to Ten (ARMOR BUSTER)... and then a hastily scratched 11. She played with it a little, twisting the knob, and as it moved up, it rearranged itself, various mechanisms switching around on the fly. She felt them powering up, pumping more juice into increasingly destructive processes, little vents shuddering and releasing acrid steam, bolts of energy grounding themselves from larger capsules along the sides.

It started shaking around level 6; alarmingly, little spikes and ominous angry faces appeared on the screens, and she hurriedly put it back to zero. The gun sealed itself up, back to its more friendly original appearance.

The barrel was long and heavy; more like a cannon than a gun. She found a switch of sorts and clicked it; this setting was marked ‘SNIPER’ and the barrel extended considerably, various power-augmenting batteries visible within it. There were a few others: ‘ROCKETS’; ‘BOOMSTICK’ and, in tiny scratching so as to actually fit into the space: ‘DROWN THE WORLD IN GLOW’.

She hit that one. The gun extended and swelled out, into something that looked very much like a laser minigun.

Some part of her that was a little more enthusiastic about the prospect of lots of automatic shooting made very happy noises, in the back of her head.

Tia gave it a tap on the side, casting a spell, and abruptly the gun grew bigger, instantly fitting her hands and growing nearly as big as she was. “Well, if I GOTTA have a shooty stick, this one looks pretty nice,” she said to herself.

She turned around and headed off, to have a conversation with Cocoa and Nevnir. Maybe she could see about getting a few improvements to this weapon.

[twitchesandstitches]

Tia walked through the crowd of people, of friends, and she thought that something felt different.

She had walked a thousand lifetimes, and a thousand more than that before the gap in her memories carved right out of her mind. On thousands more of different worlds, across every plain of life: she had been a rabble rouser urging revolution on a distant world of humans bloated with their own cruelty and malice, she had been a Quarian engineer silently working her whole life as an ordinary janitor. She’d been a Murk Gourmand a few lifetimes ago, stirring the soda rockets, and she’d been something lost in the sea, so long ago that there weren’t words for how long ago that it was.

And in all those lifetimes, she had taken those other shapes, truly been them. She had wrapped the nature of human or Gourmand or some other thing around herself, merged with the lifestream, and had been born again as one of those people. Always with the true nature of herself buried beneath; for all intents and purposes, one of those beings she lived among.

And somehow, still, they always knew her for what she was. Sooner or later, it came out. She remembered what she was, and they always knew it first.

She knew the unpleasant sensation of eyes upon her body, straying at the little tells where something looked wrong. She was intimately familiar with rejection. The land accepted her, and the beasts of land and sky and sea loved her, but the thinking things did not. Perhaps could not. There was a little love, sometimes, from an individual. But a people were a group, and they saw her, and there was little love for something like her.

She didn’t know what they was. But perhaps they just knew something that didn’t belong anywhere at all when they saw it.

(and it is times like that, that the urge to sleep away the ages grows so tempting. Again and again, dreams beckon, and it is easier to sleep than it is to suffer the certainty that no matter how hard she tries, no matter how furiously she fights, sooner or later, the small things she loves will betray her. It is her story; this heroine, this mother, this monster.)

Sooner or later, she changed back. The true her, rising out of the adopted shape like a great beast rising from the sea. And then, it would no longer be home for her.

Yes. She knew what it was like for eyes to stare at a shape that part of her thought was beautiful beyond measure, and the rest of her thought an unlovely and ill-shapen ruin.

(It is easy to think that you are ugly, when the rest of the world recoils in horror at your approach.)

But now?

She turns around. The eyes around her stare up, and sometimes down, in something like admiration.

It is not something she is used to seeing from those who were not born from her body, adopted into her family, or wedded to her in the sacred ceremonies of common law.

She is not lovely; she suspects this. She is something apart, something other and wild. She does not care to be anything else but what she is, and it wounds, all the same.

But now?

These are the eyes of people that love her. That do not, will not, reject her.

Something has changed.

And now Tia slinks off into the dark of the habitat, more bewildered than grateful.

And as she does, she thinks that she has had much experience with rejection and alienation, but she doesn’t know how to cope with admiration.

[twitchesandstitches]

idea for the undead army i’ve been mulling over; they grow from mindless ghost peon-type units by absorbing mass into a skeleton framework, and then go up from there.

essentially the deathlord and her minions start by using one of several objects in their possession, related to terrbile crimes and suffering, and death on a mass scale; a weapon used by a mass murderer, a piece of architecture from a planet-killing superweapon, and so on. They use their magic to summon forth a bit of wild emotion from the death, slip enough magic to give it some volition, and boom, you have a predatory ghost girl.

at this point they’re generally feral, mindless things; they’re just intelligent enough to have some cunning, but they have no real concept of strategy and just swarm. Their ectoplasm can solidify enough to hit things, and while they can pass through solid objects with ease, a solid hit will usually dispel them. however they can be made in huge numbers, so there’s a LOT of them all at once.

as they consume others, they get smarter and more independent. eventually they condense their stolen essence into a skeletal frame, which gives them more stability. thus we get a skeleton girl. eventually, as this continues, they will accumulate mass or actual flesh from the things they consume, and build a fleshy exterior that their ectoplasm gets infused into. Now they are a zombie girl!

as time goes on, they may continue to mutate in new ways as they grow ever more powerful; they might get more ferocious and monstrous and massive, becoming similar to ghoul-type creatures, or refine their hunger and become vampires. (all the undead here feed on life energy, usually through the medium of blood, so in a sense they’re all technically vampires. but they don’t always fit the specific aesthetic.) some also tend to simply remain in a specific stage while growing more powerful, or might be created as a specific undead type for tactical purposes

some other features of their transformation can include: icy/other elemental protrusions that make armor or constitute a large part of their body; flesh that appears ghostly for those transitioning into zombiehood but don’t have enough flesh to make a whole form just yet; giant versions made specifically to be huge titans or giant mech analogues or serve the same roles that vehicles/transport would (and the necromancing artificers didn’t feel like making undead animal calvary or whatnot).

in general, the undead here have a more straightforward military-vibe in terms of specialized units and organization, and are generally created to fulfill specific roles rather than some units gravitating towards those roles on a whim (fae) or mutating in a way that happens to work for that role (demons).

[twitchesandstitches]

If a skele-girl ate someone, would they just slide through on end up in a ghost/spectral/magic stomach?

they’d end up in a ghostly/spectral belly!

I’m thinking of them devouring/killing enemies as being pretty central to how the individual units grow; similar to how many zombies are mindlessly ravenous, but in this case there’s an actual purpose to it; the more they digest or destroy, the more an individual unit gains power and transforms into a corporeal state, from skeleton to zombie, from zombie to vampire/ghoul/whatever else makes sense for them, and so on.

the belly can also be made of ice or another substance that makes sense for the particular unit.

[twitchesandstitches]

Tiny Friends in the Dark

“Why is there even a sewer here!?” Sussy cried out, stamping a quarter of her blobby lower section against a catwalk.

The sound echoed against the long corridor; ancient netal seemed to creak faintly, as if in response. Liquid flowed beneath them; fortunately, it was only industrial waste of some kind, produced by the mysterious processes of the hab. It had to be doing something, with all its machinery clicking away to at times unknowable purpose, and after eons without any maintenance, it couldn’t be a terribly efficient process.

Tia looked around, light spreading out from her as if the various glowing patches on her body were mounted flashlights; she’d turned up the bioluminesce of her body to extremely high levels, enough to shed light. It displayed long tunnels, and other ones twisting away upwards and downwards, and walkways over the whole thing. “I’m not sure it is a sewer, y’know?”

Sussy gave her a look from somewhere around Tia’s chubby belly. “It’s way below the other chambers, there’s weird stuff flowing underneath us. It’s a sewer.”

“I don’t think most sewers are designed for people to walk around in ‘em. Like, there’s those walkways EVERYWHERE. I know sewers have maintenance access ways for people to fix junk, but they ain’t designed for people to, you know. Move around in them. This place super looks like it was!”

Sussy gave her a sideways look again, but her bubbling hair eased into a low-grade carbonation. Like a volcano that might erupt in the future, but not right now. “...How do you know about sewer stuff anyway.”

“Oh, I used to live in places like this,” Tia said indifferently as she took the lead, her massive tail rising upwards and beaming a particularly huge light from the tip of her tail to light the way forwards. “I um. You know, what’s the word? Picked up some stuff here and there.”

Sussy stopped. Her whole body became extremely blobby; her embarrassment and mortification so heavy that she lost cohesion. “OH. Um.” She took a long moment to figure out what she could possibly say to that. “Sorry, buddy.”

“It’s alright.” Tia’s tone was mildly reproachful, but she seemed sincere enough. Her hair glistened a brighter shade of pink, and began to glow a bright neon color; her hair tentacles rose up, masses of latex-like jelly swelling up with a solidified form of raw magical power, rapidly converting into a semi-solid substance that looked like liquid light. It shone vibrant colors distinct from her usual fuchsia hair, the blues and purples flickering steadily, but Sussy had seen that before. She had no doubt that if hostiles revealed themselves, those tentacles would be fully capable of firing potent neon beam attacks; independently, at every angle, whether in burst fire or sustained beams.

They also made good flashlights. The glare of them swept the floors, right over a tiny crab-like robot. Unexpectedly, it turned towards them, tiny forelimbs clattering in something like alarm. Tia stopped where she was, surprised. “Uh, hey there?”

Sussy put a hand on Tia’s massive hip. “What is that?”

“I don’t know. Kind of looks like some kind of service bot.” It looked old, or at least like an extremely old design. It was a squat thing, roughly the size of the smallest of the cats that had colonized Tia’s migrating living quarters, and it’s forelimbs only resembled crustacean-type claws, splitting apart into small and very dexterous fingers. It was hard to appreciate this detail; the creature was covered in complex burn marks, careful cuts that closely resembled ancient hieroglyphs, and discolorations of it’s paint job.

It all looked very deliberate, suggestive of a cultural mentality and practices unknown to either of them. And its small optics were blinking up at them with something like awareness.

Tia waved at it.

Sussy hesitated; it looked small, sure. But they had been under constant attack ever since they’d been marooned up here, and pretty much everything they’d met here had been hostile, actively opposed to the continued existence of mortal life as it presently existed, or outright malevolent on an existential level. Most often, all three at once.

Still, there were heroic things you just had to do, and she prided herself on being an ideal heroine. She waved too, doing her best not to look frightening.

After a long moment, tensioned growing thick like a string about to snap, the robot cautiously brought up a little forelimb and waved back.

And then, under the lights, it retreated into the dark.

“Where’d that little guy come from?” Sussy wondered, after the moment passed.

“It looked like it had been here a really long time,” Tia said, mostly to herself. “...Sussy. Do you think it’s been living here all this time?”

“Define ‘all this time’.”

“Since this place was built.”

Sussy glanced up at her, and realized what Tia was getting at. “Honey, you know this hab was commissioned way over a few thousand years, right?”

“Best as we can tell, I know. But think about it. Didn’t that little guy look like a maintenance robot?”

“I guess so. Are you suggesting that they made maintenance bots for this place, and they’re still here?”

“Maybe. Locked up in these lower levels, until we opened it up by messing with stuff? And it's been so long that they might have… woke up. Gotten smart.”

“To achieve their own culture and sapience? It’s not unheard of.” Sussy mused. “Still, the demons and other things have been here for a really long time; they’d be a threat even to the robots. I don’t know how they would have defended themselves.”

Tia moved on. Best to leave them to their own devices. “Well, I’m guessing, long as we don’t antagonize them, we won’t have to find out first hand!”

And in the dark, many small, mechanical forms watch them go.

Ten thousand pairs of optics studied them, curiously.

Strangers, but not mean strangers.

That was new, they reckoned in their fashion. Newness demanded… investigation.

They scurried away, into the secret paths only they knew. An attentive mind might notice that a lot of them had fae teeth, demon bones, and other trophies mounted directly onto their frames.

[twitchesandstitches]

Tia sighed, pawing at her eyes. “Ugh, dag-nabbed lenses! Someone pass me a wash cloth. My eyes are getting foggy again.”

Odina was, by circumstance, standing there. She undid a bandana and tossed it over to her. Something about the what Tia had said that, though, stuck in her mind. “’Lenses?’ You’re talking about eyes, not prosthetics or something.”

“Same difference for this set,” Tia said.

“Come again?”

Tia leaned in close, her long neck bending slightly. She nudged at one eye, and it shoned with a plasticine sheen, the lens in the center glowing faintly. Odina saw that it was mechanical, a tiny camera or perhaps a prosthetic eye after all.

“What the heck?”

“I got lazy and didn’t feel like figuring out what works best for a land-based build,” Tia said. She poked at the side of her head, probing deeply like she was trying to dislodge something there. “So many problems with light reception and injury! So i just grabbed some cameras out of the garbage and shoved them into my head. But they’re a nuisance to clean.”

“Okay, I guess I see that-”

Odina was interrupted by a faint pop. It was one of the cameras being forced right out of Tia’s head.

Unconcerned, Tia caught it. “There you go!” She said brightly, and industriously began wiping at the camera. Odina stared, muted and mouth wide in horror.

Tia went to the other eye. Her skull subtly changed shape, perhaps without the pressure of her eyes to keep her soft body in place. One after the eye, she cleaned them, and them popped the eye back into a completely random part of her head, which shifted around as the eye... migrated, towards a position like the original one.

Tia blinked furiously. The lens flickered through a variety of colors, until settling on a soft pink. “There! Clear picture!” This put her in a position where she could see Odina’s look of distraught revulsion. “...What.”

“Please, next time you do that... warn me first. That was the most disgusting thing I’ve seen since the undead weirdos tried out the...” She shuddered. “The entrails titan.”

“You know I bet I could probably get someone to help me make a pair of robot eyes that turn into little hands,” Tia mused. “I could blink and little robot fingers come out from my face, wiggling and waving.”

“OH GOD YOU’RE TRYING TO SCREW WITH ME AREN’T YOU,” Odina blurted, looking genuinely nauseous.

“I might be,” Tia acknowledged, looking contrite. “Come on, honey, let’s get you some stomach medicine. Or possibly some brain bleach.”

[twitchesandstitches]

The dressing room, surprisingly, was able to accomodate a hyper endowed woman of Tiashar’s size, which was no mean feat; even the monstrous beauties of the Fleet would have been impressed by the sheer, space-warping size of her body.

The nature of her body and its mysteirous was a subject of great interest to their group of... Odina wasn’t even sure. Friends? Coworkers? Other dudes rounded up and stuck in a weird situation? But she was forming a fanbase of sorts, with some notably reverent, worshipful behavior when she wasn’t around if they didn’t watch themselves. Scientists, thoughtful sorts, envious modders and perpetually lusting suitors speculated on how she worked.

Take her boobs, Odina supposed. Most people would have liked to, or at least hold them. Those gigantic black spheres weighted many hundreds of pounds, at least, of soft, yielding flesh that took squeezes and soft nuzzles so very easily... and she produced so much milk that she alone could have fed the entire mini-colony. In fact, she produced more milk than she should have; she’d never yet run dry, even after putting out thousands of gallons of milk without her breasts getting any smaller.

Her body was... roomy. People who had been engulfed into her (Whether through eneuthisastic kisses, emergency healing, or just the normal course of getting shoved hard into her while she was using an absorbing power mix up) were starry eyed, talking about how her insides were... so massive. They described what felt like an infinite space of wobbling black flesh, moist with fluids filling them with euphoria and endless delights, overwhelming some with aphrodisiac pleasures while others were soothed into a gentle sleep and rocked by her body. There’d been no limits to her inner space, and it didn’t seem to follow the same set of dimensions as her actual form.

So. She was probably multidimensional. That was... a thing.

Odina was pondering this when the door opened. She braced herself, her own crush on the monster heroine threatening to make her swoon...

And what stepped out of the door was Tiashar in a normal T-shirt. A cute pink one, with ‘MOTHER LOAD’ on the front right across boobs that were so huge they swelled down to slightly above the lower curve of her knees, projecting out from her ody by almost twenty feet.

“Ta-dah!” Tiashar said, stepping forward on broad feet very much like a frog’s, though structured for her immense weight and balance. Her huge tail curled behind her, and at the tip was a big bulb capped with what looks a lot like huge lips. She gestured, flamboyantly at herself, clearly wearing nothing but that t-shirt, but not in a particularly sexual way. “Sexy clothes!”

Odina blinked dully at her. “...I thought you said you were here for lingerie.” She pronounced that last word, if not with distaste, at least with flippant disapproval.

“Yeah. Sexy clothes! And what’s sexier than a t-shirt?”

Odina did feel a strong surge of affection-linked warmth inside, but supressed it. Yes, it was objectively sexy at hell; the outlining of hips so massing Odina could have fit her whole body between those thick mattress thighs, boobs you could sleep on and just sink into, those pillow green body-sucking lips... the multi-colored eyes, and the thick cutesy glasses...

But, still, there were expectations. “Lingerie is more than just a t-shirt.”

Odina tried to explain the concept for her. Behind Tiashar, a number of shoppers, employees and other people caught brief glances of her gigantic butt alone and immediately fell for her, staring in open awe at such curvaceous beauty just... standing there.

Tiashar wrinkled a flat snout. “Honestly? that sounds a lot like a lot of hard work and I don’t really see the point.”

“That kind of underwear is super sexy to most people. I mean, I don’t get it either but... honestly, I sort of figured you knew all about this sort of thing. It’s a fashion thing; I figured someone would have shown it to you?”

“What’s fashion?” Tiashar said bluntly.

Odina stared at her, wondering whether or not she was being screwed with. Tiashar’s innocent, guileless expression was hard to understand; it might have been trolling.

“How would you not know? Aren’t you like... billions of years old?”

“Yes, but I’ve never run across that specific word’s meaning? No one bothers to tell me anything...” She shrugged, and in that, Odina remembered that while Tiashar had been alive that long... the specific language Odina spoke had not. Doubtless, she was familiar with the concept, just not this way of describing it. “Also I am so BAD at paying attention to things.” A small bug fluttered past. “Oh, hey, what a pretty butterfly.” She followed after it. “Hey, come back!”

[twitchesandstitches]

How does liches and ghosts then work?

the answer to this depends on two questions: do you mean in the undead army, or in my settings in general? I will answer based on either assumption:

1. Ghosts would come into two broad varieties; their own sort of unit (possibly saboteurs/rogue-type units) who can materialize and dematerialize, and the basic unit I mentioned before that upgrade from mindless ghosts to increasingly more powerful undead. The former are actual ghosts, or at least drawn from the echo of a dead person. the other sort of ghost, the basic ones, are basically just feral emotions from traumatic death. Liches, conversely, would be very high-tier units, perhaps close only to the Deathlord in raw power, and certainly be intelligent and constitute characters in their own right.

2. There’s a lot of different varieties, who all work very differently! Some ghosts are ACTUAL ghosts; someone who has died and their spirit is unable to move on, a person who has lost access to their body and is trying to get ahold of another one (most common with my ‘no real permadeath AUs’), or weirder thinsg, such as dimensional splinters that have taken on the mindset of a person who did die but are not that person themselves. And of course, there’s always the classic ‘powerful emtions made a mental imprint here, endlessly repeating the moment that made it’.

Each variety of ghost works differently, with the first type of ‘true’ ghost mentioned here having the most variety; they tend to demonstrate a wide variety of powers based on their abilities in life, as well as new ones related to the way they died, so someone killed by beasts may demonstrate command over them. They can potentially bond with living hosts to empower them and gain a body to experience stuff with in return.

Liches are a very broad category, and they’re not necessarily evil. Plenty are actually Good-aligned, with different means to attain their current form. (Many Good liches are more akin to mummies, in fact, and derive their transformation from religious rituals bestowed on the most worthy or those entrusted to safeguard the future.) Those similar to classic evil D&D liches or folklore are certainly extant, however. One major difference is that most evil methods involve binding ones soul or potential to die into a talisman or other object, from which their body will regrow afterwards, and require horrendous acts to create the talisman, while Good liches tend to be tied to a given place and allow themselves to actualy die first before their body is ritually prepared and their soul shoved back in.

[twitchesandstitches]

You could also go with the headcanon some Undertale fans gave Sans and Papyrus, where when not wearing clothes they look like normal skeletons, but when they put on clothes, you see their "figure", forexample Sans looks chubby while Papyrus looks ripped when he puts on a sweater. Maybe this is the same here, the female skeleton mostly just grow in size, while also getting wider hips, but the moment they put on a sweater, you got boobies that's there for not apparent reason other then magic!

I do think this is a very interesting idea, though I’m admittedly partial towards Sans and Papyrus legitimately having a bony skeletal form that IS in the body type they seem to have; Sans having chunky bones and a broad built while Papyrus is closer to actual bones (thin and... bony), which is apparent given his outfit. Given that they can physically emote, I’m partial towards the idea that those two aren’t exactly actual animated skeletons, but are magical constructs that look so similar that at casual glance, there’s no real difference.

perhaps some of the skeletons are like this? I expect this to be the case for some skeleton monster girls out in the wider world, rather than just a feature of the undead army.

[twitchesandstitches]

something that bears emphasis: for the most part, the antagonist facitons of the OC Storebox are all monster girls (with some monster boys)

the undead’s zombies are like... zombie girls. some zombie boys. yes they are a threat to all mortal life because they will devour evertyhing, but it’s more like swallowing things whole rather than what zombies normally do. Even their brain-eating may be more metaphorical, with them drainign the brainpower from whoever they consume, making them individually smarter and dominating zombie packs.

not sure how skeletons would work in this context; perhaps they’re the remnants of zombies not good enough to get any prey, decaying past the point of no return and used exclusively as mindless soldiers? Liches would be an exception to this. not sure how skeleton monster girls would work!

the demons are all monster girls, and for some inspiration, might be based on monster girl-ified versions of the enemies from the Diablo and Doom games: a high ranking legion commander with an interest in cyber-augmentation may be a Cyber-Demon analogue, with super round and stacked magic users being akin to Cacaodemons. As for Diablo vibes, goat themes may be a popular aspect for these demons (and goatmen were EVERYWHERE in diablo), and a physical avatar of the demon goddess they all serve may resemble a monster girl Diablo. (Moreso than her actual appearance as such in 3.)

The fae being monster girls is probably a bit easier to get, since fae being attractive is pretty popular, but these are explicitly not just elves; they vaguely resemble them, and may represent the source of elf-style mutation, but they’re something different; they have a more chaotic, eldritch vibe, and could well incorporate beings associated with pure chaos, having bene picked up by the fae queen’s wars and assimilated into their ranks in previous wars: illithids in the style of D&D, the toad-like slaad as a distinct sub-culture within their ranks, and any number of creatures warped into monstrosity and wicked intent by the fae’s influence. (Unicorn centaurs, old-school trolls and ogres, and fairies, all monster girls!)

there’s still some horror vibes since their plans are very bad for the mortal plane as a whole, but the main intent is ‘antagonistic monster girls to fight who will absolutely devour everything or worse if they get loose’.

[twitchesandstitches]

Storebox Threat Ratings

so, at the top of our protagonist lists in the OC Storebox, the first thing to consider is who’s the heroes, and who they fight against, in a rough order of willingness to work with them or not!

AT the top is our heroes; the ones dedicated to the duty foisted on them. This includes Tia and the more heroic of the bunch.

Below them are the people who are willing to do so, but would rather not. These are the civilians like Odina, as well as minor, possibly unnamed characters.

Next, is the actual antagonists; the bad guy OCs who fight the heroes.

At the top is the ‘no hard feelings’ gang; the ones who might be pursuing vendettas or intend to take control of the hab, or otherwise find the heroes in their way. still, they’re not malicious, and they may even hang out together with the heroes when not pulling schemes. They also work together against the invading monsters. This includes Jord, her gang, and most of the lighter villains.

Below them are the nastier antagonists, the ones who are more malicious or at least ruthless, and more likely to be played as actual threats. Their goals may be darker or at least less sympathetic. They work with the heroes when need be, but its probably super tense. Parvus is here, as is Edhitha most of the time.

Then, there are the true threats: the hordes of monsters that want to break out of the storebox to invade the material realm. The heroes’ goal is to stonewall them, and one day figure out how to seal them away or stop them once and for all, but for now they fight them as they come or attack them in their own turf. In rough order of genuine existential threat:

The Demons. A vast horde of demon girls of varying size and power, emanations of a goddess who embodies traditional warfare. They intend to take command of the hab so they may open portals to every world and invade them, battling everything in sight to make all stronger and eliminate all forms of battle their maker considers unsporting (that is, anything that isn’t smashing someone in the face with a sword). Their way would lead to an eternity of slaughter, with nothing but endless war, but they are less horrible than the other two.

The Fae: a set of apparently nonsensical courts based around elements distinct from the classic sets (such as Oil, Bone, Wood and so on), they lead organized warbands under the control of a dread fae queen. These are beings of nightmare who would happily like to slaughter all mortals to hear the noises they make, or drag them into their nightmare realms to reshape them into playthings and ores. depends on their mood. They are mercurial, heartless and generally chaotic, though they do ascribe to their own stramge dream-logic rules.

The Undead: A vast and organized army of the walking dead, formed from every variety of undead known: skeletons, zombies, flesh-eaters, flesh golems and more, they are here! Most are mindless but capable of tactics and the use of complex weaponry, they are commanded by vampiric superiors who can use magic. Finally, they are ultimately created and sustained by a lich who embodies the notion of death as a negative thing, and would like to simply kill all life, and then destroy the stars and make sure no life can ever arise again. This army has the largest numbers; corpses materialize in their realm inexplicably, and hungry ghosts are summoned daily.

If any of these threats successfully make it out, it’s probably the end of everything; however, most of their forces exist in seperate parts of the hab that make up their own weird realms, and can only emerge in smaller groups, when doorways to these realms open. Accordingly, their ultimate goal is to take control of the hab and gain power over its doorways. whoever rules the hab, can also access any portal in the universe, opening portals at any point borders on all sides (Such as any actual door).

The key to doing so would seem to lie in a number of arcane artifacts lost within the depths of the hab, as well as manually reactiving the hab and convincing its systems to recognize them. It is ultimately a race between heroes, antagonists and threats, as well as our heroes keeping the threats from breaking free on their own!

[twitchesandstitches]

Sariel tested Tia’s arm, pinching it gently. She was mildly concerned by how much her fingers sank in. They just get passing down into the black flesh, faint pulses of neon light just barely visible around the pressure.

She raised a row of scaly brow when her fingers met. Her fingers and hand were completely lost in Tia’s thick, tentacle-like arm, like a stick poking into a water bed, but she still met in the middle, without much resistance. “Miss Tia?”

Tia lowered her head, bendy neck twisting downwards. “Bad, is it?”

“Oh, no. I don’t think so. That depends. I mean, I’m not sure because I’m not familiar with your species...”

“Do not got one,” Tia replied evenly. “Why you ask?”

“Oh. Well. You don’t appear to have a skeleton. I was a little concerned and unsure if that was... bad... for you or not.”

Tia blinked slowly, her glasses shining dully. “...What’s a skeleton?”

“Internal framework made of bone,” said Fixerup, who by this point was used to Tia being oblivious enough to have spent eons in the company of oxygen breathers without apparently knowing what a skeleton was. “Good for protecting organs and keeping a body in a specific form.”

“Ohhhh, I see!” Tia nodded smartly. “Y’okay then. Nope, definitely do NOT have one of those.”

“Then what DO you have?” Sariel wondered, poking her. No matter where she touched Miss Tia, every inch of her was soft, giving, and wobbly. There was not a single part of her that was rigid or hard in the slightest.

“Soft internal structure,” Tia said. “Imagine something like gel but really very thick. Kind of liquid. Makes me very flexible, but I suppose, not so good at the damage resistance?”

Sariel blinked. “Your body is supported by organic water balloons?”

“‘Organic’ probably is not the right word but, yeah. Sure, why not?”

[twitchesandstitches]

gotten a few suggestions from a friend for OCs to add into my storebox scenario to live with everyone else, so if you want me to use your OCs or AU versions of characters you like, give me the head’s up!

some rules or notes to keep in mind:

1. I will take you sending these in as confirmation that you are fine with me using them in the AU. usually this will include whether they are more pred/prey, if applicable, and how you feel about them being romanced, especially with Tia, who tends to ‘reward’ or treat others that way. (If you don’t say anything, I assume they are middle on the pred/prey scale and are fine with at least sweet smooches from Tia or other characters)

2. i won’t use them outside this specific scenario, unless you want me to! Let me know.

3.be aware that the scenario can be both domestic (hanging around, being romantic, smut, or fluff vore) or action-centric (doing battle against the horrors invading from other realms in the habitat, invading their realms to beat the shit out of them, or otherwise going all RIP AND TEAR on ‘em)

4. compliance with my regular AU stuff is not required. You can use characters I also use without concern for how that fits into my AU as a whole, such as homestuck characters, total drama, or your own versions of these characters, such as ones based on the commissions I’ve done before. i can come up with stuff to explain it (they are clones split off from them, for example) but you don’t need to worry about it!

5. be as detailed as you want, and take as many messages as required to do so.

[twitchesandstitches]

one assumption for the OC Storebox i have is that while Tia is a leader from a meta POV (she’s one the one I mainly focus on, most stuff so far starts with her perspective, and most everyone looks up to her or at least acknowledges her usefulness), she’s more of a spiritual leader. she’s not a commander, strategist or a city builder. a mixture of impatience, being easily bored, and her knowing full well that she doesn’t get people most of the time means that she’ll mostly do her own thing.

Tamitayo, I’m thinking, is probably a good pick for being an actual leader; it fits in well with her essentially wanting to create a dominion she can protect and defend from attacks, much as she has to do on a daily basis against the three existential threats. she understands people, she gets respect, and she can command others, and they will follow her.

people look up to Tia, they listen to Tamitayo, and so just as far as things go between them, they make for an inspiring duo.

[twitchesandstitches]

The fae commander, if commander he was (though the slightly fancier arrangement of physically impossible armor suggested that he was) raised a blade at the group that had arrived to meet him in single combat. “Do I espy a challenge!?”

His blade pointed at Tia, who hadn’t actually meant to challenge him. But she was the biggest of them, and her stride carried her just far enough to be standing in front of everyone else. “Are... are you talking to me?” she asked, genuinely baffled.

“Indeed I am, beast-woman of meat and what I can only presume is... latex?”

“Well, okay then.” She wobbled forward, the broad flipper-like width of her hands shoved into the pockets of shorts better suited for the beach. “So, uh. I assume we’re fighting then-”

He flipped thirty feet into the air, disappeared, and reappeared behind her, his blade flashing. “HAVE AT THEE-” There was a sound like boing. His sword bounced off her back, the blade sinking into her soft flesh and then rebounding right back, her body absorbing the impact and shooting it right back. “Ah. I did not expect that.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘yep’!” She swung her tail, and the huge length loomed over the fae. He had a moment, perhaps, to muse about how it was bigger than him, and he dove beneath it with only seconds to spare, his armored boots grinding on the floor.

He took several more swings at traditional weak points: her plump belly, her massive thighs; they all bounced off. Finally, he hopped onto her knee and up again, and she swung her arm too slow to knock him away. He spied her shoulder, suspecting a weak point.

He swung.

Her joints, unfortunately, were not as resistant to sharp edges as the rest of her body.

“Hey,” She said, sounding mildly annoyed as her severed arm dropped onto the ground, iridescent black blood splattering against the ground. “I just regrew that one! Oh man. High fives will be a problem if I don’t get that put back.”

He cast a bolt of eldritch fire that incinerated her arm; separated from her and her regenerative powers, it was dissolved into a pile of biomass that was probably way too gross for her to bother with.

“Hey!” She said, more genuinely perturbed now. “I needed that arm!” She held her hand out. “Guess what powers I got loaded up today!”

“A fine question, if a rhetorical one, I presume,” the fae replied, cleaning his sword of the blood.

She said, “I took a few different abilities that combined to make the power to concentrate air into the body and then blast it out again, and I stacked some serious enhancements onto it, with a little bit of extradimensional storage, a bit of elemental power so what comes out is actually just pure destructive power, and I folded in a neat spiral-patterned muscle arrangement with some super strength so my arm muscles are really strong and power it up with some compression... oh, right. And a little bit of bio-magnets in my palm, so it shoots stuff out real fast and mean like a railgun.”

At this point, the fae realized that the strange wobbly nubs that appeared all over her body, like soft spikes, had changed into something like nozzles, and they were sucking in air. And now her arm was swelling up, expanding like a balloon into a totally round shape, muscles twisting inhumanly around it like the teeth of a blender.

And in the center of her palm, there was a glowing exit port pointed right at him.

He had a surprisingly sedate expression. “I suspect,” he said. “That it was a mistake on the whole to challenge you.”

“The mistake was cutting off my arm and then destroying it!” She said. “I put so much work into that! Do you think my body just turns up like this?!”

From the crowd, Cocoa raised a hand. “I sort of assumed it did.”

“Well, it. Uh. It does not. There’s a lot of hard work involved.” Tia became aware that her powered up arm was now roughly as large as the rest of her, and it was getting painful holding it in. “Oh, never mind...”

She released the blast. To her allies, it looked like a briefly lived laser, or a bolt of immense force that hit and then promptly erupted outwards like a directional explosion on par with a natural disaster.

For the fae, everything just exploded, and he was gone. (Until he respawned, anyway.)

“And I STILL don’t have an arm!” Tia cried out, angrily.

[twitchesandstitches]

an interesting detail for the antagonist armies of my storebox scenario/AU is that each army fits on a sliding scale as far as their weaponry goes, from realistic to most absurd.

the undead army is explicitly intended to be relatively militaristic, so their weapons are actual practical weaponry; they make use of firearms, firing lines, and conventional means, though with a certain spooky flair. Their miniguns might be made from dragon spines and skulls and shoot ammo made from blood condensed into a projectile, but it’s still a minigun, in function and form (Sorta). Their organization is more heirarchal, and they’re the most inclined to do things like adapt to make tanks, vehicles and other such weapons of war with an undead vibe.

The demons are kind of in the middle: the visual inspiration for them is the weaponry we see the demons of Doom Eternal using (the glowy magic axes and swords), and elaborating on that towards a diverse assortment of demonic legions who are created from the principle of ‘war is best when you stab someone in the face’. Big emphasis on melee, with that magical aesthetic, but they are still practical weaponry. It might be glowy, unsettling to look at, or the business ends comprised of baleful demon light, but it’s still a sword or something! They do tend towards a certain bias of bioessentialism; your body being suited to a task before a tool is. They don’t so much make tank or ride beasts to calvary, and would rather just breed a demon who is so huge and strong it can function like an armored vehicle, or is a centaur and can run down infantry. (Which makes them terribly ill-suited against certain tactics, but they don’t care. The blood must flow, their own or the enemy’s.)

The fae are blatantly the least realistic; their panoply is literally dreamed up, assembled from nightmares and idle fancies, using the idea of what a weapon is as a scaffolding. The resulting weapons are thus only vaguely functional in appearance; you get swords that are these ridiculous clusters of blades not even really connected to each other, with feathers and little paws extending out as well, or bows made of a lot of gears clearly not even connected to one another. Their armor and weapons are certainly effective, but are very complex and ridiculous looking messes that shouldn’t even be able to exist. They do make use of modern weaponry such as tanks and mechs, but draw their understanding based on fanciful ideas: their idea of a mech may be an actual entity fueled by the desire to crush, rather than a machine piloted by at least one person.

(This does not include the mechs that are artificial attempts to create hearth spirits as AI analogues!)