siliconereptilian

androidmaeosauridae

  • they/them

tabletop rpg obsessed, particularly lancer, icon, cain, the treacherous turn, eclipse phase, and pathfinder 2e. also a fan of the elder scrolls and star wars, an avid gamer and reader of webcomics, and when my brain cooperates, a hobbyist writer.

 

the urge to share my creations versus the horrifying ordeal of being perceived. fight of the millennium. anyway posts about my ocs are tagged with "mal's ocs" (minus the quotes). posts about or containing my writing are tagged with "mal's writing" (again, sans quotes). posts about my sci-fi setting specifically are tagged "the eating of names". i'd pin the latter two if they were actually among my top 15 most used tags lol. fair warning, my writing tends to be quite dark and deal with some heavy themes.

 

avatar is a much more humanoid depiction of my OC Arwen Tachht than is strictly accurate, made in this Picrew. (I have humanoidsonas for my non-humanoid OCs because I cannot draw them myself and must rely on dollmakers and such, hooray chronic pain)



Why am I having a harder time coming up with the general body configuration of a species of robots than I had coming up with it for a species of plants?

The reason that the faiehn as a species have a body plan they usually stick to in the first place, instead of building whatever body form suits their needs, is because they were made in the image of their extinct builder species whose memory many of their cultures respect and honor in one way or another. For cultural reasons the faiehn usually don’t deviate too much from that design, though there are exceptions as usual. Body modding subcultures, workers who need a different configuration for their occupation, individuals who want to experiment with their self-expression, counterculture movements that challenge the widespread reverence and even worship of the builder species, and many more groups have plenty of reason to change their bodies. It’s just that even though they are machine life and thus have greater freedom to alter their physical forms than organic life, there is deep-rooted reluctance to do so in many faiehn cultures. It isn’t exactly taboo, but if you picked an average faiehn rando off the street, the odds are likely that they wouldn’t want to change their body’s general structure without an external impetus to do so.

The tocala, on the other hand, are plants. Plants don’t give as much of a fuck about the fine details of their bodies’ shapes, so long as it grows more or less right and serves its needed purpose. A plant can have a crooked stem or a misshapen fruit and so long as it still supports the plant or nurtures and spreads its seeds, it doesn’t matter too much. But if an animal has a crooked spine or a misshapen vital organ, then something has gone wrong and the animal’s health is very likely to suffer for it. So I figure plants are, on average, more freeform than animals, though much less so than machine life.

Despite this, I already have a pretty clear mental image of what a tocala’s body looks like. Granted, the tocala are sapient, motile, carnivorous plants from an irradiated megaflora world with a rapidly mutating and evolving biosphere, so they’re not your average plant. I imagine the tocala have ten limbs: six for walking on, two bladed arms (think praying mantis) for hunting with, and two manipulator arms for tool use and the like. Their whole skin is a photoreceptive organ as well as a photosynthetic one, so they have no specific eye analogues and can generally see in all directions. Their stance is like that of an ostrich or similar birds, in that the torso is held mostly parallel to the ground but the long and flexible neck curves upright. The neck actually ends in a flower with an enticing smell, though the flower conceals a mouth at its base. The natural pollinators of tocala have evolved to be resistant to the adhesive substance secreted by the flower petals, and tocala who don’t mind being pollinated leave them alone and let them do their thing, though if they do (or if they’re hungry) they can use their prehensile filaments to entangle an unwanted pollinator and drag them into their mouth anyway. Most of a tocala’s meat diet, though, comes from larger scale animals than their pollinators, hunted in ancient times using their viciously sharp blade arms and then eaten, though in modern times more of it comes from animals farmed for their meat (and, in the case of animals native to the tocala homeworld of Gotola, their metallic skin and other such useful byproducts) than from hunting.


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