mollyhawk

Latest Posts by mollyhawk

Another human as I put off the dread of having to draw a Formid not in side on perspective

First regular human character

Pretty basic question but ah well- are the faeries aliens? Or seed world organisms that originated from earth?

The faeries, slaters and formids are all aliens, however the slaters are from an ancient seedworld/colony world of a now extinct alien.

Absolutely speedran this one (how the hell are feathers less of a pain in the neck than a front-facing perspective?)

Four months later and I’ve finally finished the next character, and the first non-human.

The flag of the Faerie Revolutionary Alliance, the first of many resistance and revolutionary movements to collaborated with the Allies during the Faerie War to overthrow the Faerie Empire (names are a work in progress, I know that’s a lot of faeries). The war hammer represents what was seen as a “people’s weapon” due to needing little metal, the tree represents the home trees many faeries build/built their civilisations in.

Perspective is pain

Cart :3

Eight detonations toll like bells as the leviathan finally fell still. Behind it, the hulking mass of the vessel split like a maw, mechanical arms grasping desperately like pharyngeal jaws attempting to stuff the corpse down its gullet. Lifeless eyes that had seen the passing of near a century slip above the surface a final time as it is dragged into the metal cavern under the unseeing gaze of its kin.

As the soulless beast of steel snags upon the pier the mighty corpse is hauled from the gloom into air choked with smog and the roars of flame. Its fat feeds the furnaces, it’s flesh fuels the half starved skeletons that scamper beneath the showers of sparks and screaming metal, over watched by stone faced enforcers and bent to the whim of the monsters that lurk in dens gilded with gold far beyond the land scarred with soot they use to line their pockets.

To compare those lords of depravity to the dutiful guild of scavengers, to the ever inventive legions of parasites or the humble handiwork of plagues would be a disservice to these pillars of nature’s establishment. They are a cancer, a corrupting rot spawned from a broken system, a self perpetuating scourge that bloats and grows as it draws the life from all that surround it until the entire house of cards collapses under their weight. This is not survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw, not pulling yourself up by the bootstraps nor the mandate proclaimed by some long dead god. It is a death cult, an ouroboros swallowing itself until the bloated head chokes on the famined tail, a self fulfilling prophecy of destruction doomed to fall.

But when the ash and dust have settled, the countless cohorts of creeping things have worked their time honoured role, when the unrelenting tides of time have weathered steel and skeleton alike, these kleptocratic kings of ruin will lie forgotten, merely another scar among the countless upon the Earth, the graves upon which they had built their foundations finally finding closure beneath silt and soil as the chorus of life sings on without them.

-bit of a vent post to try and deal with whatever the deep fried fuck is happening to the world rn

Meep morp (moots and whoever feel free to join)

ALL MY FELLAS!!! 🗣️🗣️🗣️‼️🦅🦅🗣️🗣️🗣️

Make YOU using THIS PICREW and tag 5 people!!!!

Yep, it's a chain!!!

@eyesofrhodochrosite @taaaaaaawnyfrogmouth @mikebeanz @ofthefrogs @kredena-dark

Car lights - James Marriot

ATTENTION

If you see this you are OBLIGATED to reblog w/ the song currently stuck in your head :)

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

Great burgundy flag-goose

The great burgundy flag-goose is part of a clade of grazing tapajarids originating in the eastern continent of the known world and spreading across the planet. Exploiting the now vacant niche of large terrestrial herbivore following the most recent mass extinction, the clade moved from omnivores and frugivores into bulk feeders, evolving into both the heaviest flying pterosaurs of Feorrlund and into a flightless clade. The flag-geese is a polyphyletic grouping of basal members, with Odontorostruvexilla and its relative evolving a cropping beak and psuedoteeth to feed on a variety of grasses, migrating between feeding grounds in vast flocks. Although never domesticated, their seasonal abundance plays a crucial role in a variety of cultures across multiple sophonts.

Touché

pestered

Dear god, I’ve been pestered

pestered

Dear god, I’ve been pestered

Jäegers

The jägers are a clade of terrestrial, predatory fantails native to Crescentia, although some species (primarily jaegerdrossel) can be found in Omnedomum. The most basal jägers are the aforementioned jagerdrossel, thrush-like predators that supplement their diet of large invertebrates with songbirds and small lizards. More derived are the harrierhens, filling niches akin to Terran foxes, but most cases maintaining the ability to fly, with one species having reached the tropical rainforests of Omnedomum and with others filling the niche of apex predator on many islands in the T-SIC (Trans-Straits Island Chain). Despite their continued success, their diversity in recent millennia has decreased due to competition with the more robust larklynx. Finally are the typical jägers, including groups such as the phoros, jägerhirsch and mohawks, the latter two having evolved keratinous spurs amongst for intraspecies fights amongst males. These birds are medium to large pursuit hunters, chasing flocks of fanfowl, rheapidura and other ground birds, typically avoiding the sturdier iguanas.

The lunar harrierhen is the most basal representative of an extremely successful group of jägers, the fowks. These nocturnal predators hunt a variety of lizards, birds and large invertebrates. The lunar harrierhen in particular is native to much of southern crescentia, being especially prevalent in the fog forests in the eastern side of the Boss range, stalking the forest floors from the setting of the sun till it flutters up to rest in the canopy come the break of dawn.

The konigsjager is another denizens of these woodlands. Unlike most other jagerhirsch, this titanic avian is not a swift pursuit predator, but a powerful ambush hunter, specialising in the large iguanas dwelling amidst the fog. These giants have only recently claimed their title, having evolved from a fairly typical lithe jäger less than 2 million years ago, dwelling to its great size in the absence of the predatory iguanas to the north and a population crash of the local macropredatory larklynx following an outbreak of a transmissible cancer similar to that which decimated the Tasmanian devils of earth.

A rare visitor to these cramped forests, the fire-crested mohawk is a classic example of a typical jäger. Patrolling the highland grasslands and open woodland of the Boss range, they form fission-fusion packs to pursue the swift grazing birds that feed upon the herbs, grasses and heaths. During spring the males group into leks and compete for females attention, singing and flashing their bright red crests and, if a winner cannot be decided by looks alone, coming to blows with talons and spurs.

The western scaly-shouldered jagerdrossel is a member of a species complex encircling the Boss range. Fairly large for a jagerdrossel, these birds hunt songbirds and large invertebrates amongst the undergrowth and branches, pursuing their prey on foot or chasing them in rapid bursts of flight, subduing prey with swift pecks from a hooked bill and stabs from an enlarged second toe.

Pasodau is a seedworld established alongside its sister world Snekens in the far future to study the dynamics of evolution without the intervention of sophonts, recalling the numerous worlds established by the Old Ones in time immemorial.

The affair of seeding, as is typical of Terran lead terraforming, was a chaotic undertaking of measures and countermeasures to establish a sustainable atmosphere and biosphere, a process born from the frantic attempts at stabilising the fragile, almost mono cultural terraformed worlds established by Terran factions following a number of narrowly avoided and even total ecological collapses leaving thousands dead and millions displaced. Whilst successful at preventing such planetfalls through redundancies and diversity, this method of seeding a world makes determining the full list of species introduced near impossible due to many extinctions, failed introductions, hybridisations and genetic modifications that occur at a species, genus or even family level amongst microfauna and flora. The list of species that are larger, more distinct, or introduced later in the process is much more complete, with all vertebrates seeded being recorded.

The map above shows the planet at the time of seeding.

@dragoninaki @spicy-rat-2 @cloudberry-candy @gingerjaydraws @unexpecteddinolesson @trans-fem-menace @gayoticbeing @lesbianhouseplant @paluboligo @sashathegirliepop , y’all are chill, and cheers for being moots

rb to tell ur mutuals ur fond of them

A world of ghosts

Deep beneath sun and soil they lie, compressed between strata like a flower pressed within a book. Mineral echoes of beings that had perished in time immemorial, mimics of stone crafted in remembrance of the majesty each colosal femur and the intricate filaments of each tiny feather, eulogies to the gods of old who’s true remains have long since been reduced to nothingness, every treasure telling the story of a life long extinguished.

Upon the soil where they rest, the living still sing of those left behind. Menacing thorns and colossal fruits tell tales of ancient behemoths whose bellows and roars once filled now empty forests, viscous horns and nimble hooves speak of predators that now hunt only in nightmares, pointless flowers mourn silent wings with tapestries of colour and abstract portraits.

Artefacts too recall the years near forgotten. Spear points dredged by unsuspecting trawlers recite ballads of those ancient hands napping flints in a sunken world, clays and charcoal adorning cave and crag echo those lost beasts of yore and the equally forgotten hands that depicted them, potsherds and rubble mark the graves of empires once thought immortal.

Countless stories of those that came before surround us in our world of ghosts, a transient beauty, a great tapestry that will stretch from the sweltering forge of its birth to the cleansing flames of its destruction, and a story we all shall one day join.

Finally finished the most commonly found sophonts on mars (and those with main characters in the comic I’m planning). Gonna finish the character reference sheets now

Some slater anatomy

Respiratory system in blue, digestive system in green, and skeleton in red

Slaters

Common names in English:

Isopods, rolley pollies, webspinners, weavers, long spiders

Binomial name:

Sericutextor Sp. (Silk weavers)

Description:

Slaters are a genus of dodecapodal alien sophonts and were a founding member of the USS.

They posses an exoskeleton composed of a mineralised core covered in a layer of organic polymers, consisting of a tegus and a sternum. The body is divided into four tagma: the head, the neck, the body and the abdomen. The head consists of a single plate and possesses three pairs of eyes, two pairs of antennae, three pairs of external jaws and a pair of cephalic limbs. One pair of antennae act as chemoreceptors, audio receptors and to detect gravity, whilst the other pair bear a semaphore-like structure used in communication. Of the three pairs of external jaws, one pair act as pincers and food manipulators, whilst the other two act as both a seal to the oral cavity and as masticators. An additional pair of heavily derived internal jaws separate the oral cavity from the rest of the digestive tract. Lastly, the cephalic limbs posses two manipulators digits and two specialised for silk production. The neck is divided into three segments, the first segment bearing no limbs and allowing greater flexibility of the head whilst the latter two each possesses a pamprodactyl hand. The body is made up of six segments, each bearing a limb with a anisodactyl foot, with each appendage being able to act as a manipulator, especially those of the front segment, however typically they are relegated to locomotion. Finally, the abdomen is also made up of six segments, with the final segment bearing a pair of spinnerets whilst all other segments are limbless.

The respiratory system is made up of two booklungs within the abdomen and a series of spiracles between each segment, linked by a pair of trachea. The circulatory system is centred around two major hearts, one at the rear of the abdomen and one at the base of the neck.

Slaters are capable of producing organic fibres often referred to as silk,and posses silk glands on their cephalic limbs, their manipulatory limbs and their spinnerets. The most complex silk strands are produced by the cephalic limbs, the spinnerets can produce the most durable silk, and the manipulatory limbs produce the most simple silk. The adhesiveness, tensile strength and other factors of the silk produced can be controlled by the skaters.

Slaters have a bisex system, with the primary differences being in sephamore colours, pheromones and social cues, and whilst there is a slight weighting of mass and colour (males on average being slightly paler and lighter) there is significant overlap. They are also bidirectionally dichogamus, naturally undergoing the process when exposed to certain environmental, social or chemical stimuli. In the modern day many slaters use artificial methods to at least kickstart transition, as this is typically swifter and causes less inconvenience.

Between two and eight eggs are laid within an ootheca weaved from silk similar to that used to package faeces. After about a month, these eggs hatch into small, soft larvae, which grow for two years before their exoskeleton begins to harden, with adulthood being reached at about eighteen years old.

Ancestrally, slaters lived in large, communal burrow networks and above ground structures made from wood, silk and soil. Due to these fossorial habits their fore and ventral eyes are quite shortsighted, with their dorsal eyes providing a wild field of vision but poor depth reception.

The modern genus of slaters is thought to have evolved 2-3 million years ago. Due to their subterranean nature, they gained a familiarity with metallurgy and fossil fuels much earlier in their history than most other sophonts. This lead to a comparatively rapid technological development, allowing them to have the longest continuous spacefaring history of any extant sophont. They were also the founding members of the precursor to the USS after making contact with two other homeworlds before the beginning of the Great War. Following the establishment of communication with terrans and formids and the end of the war, they assisted in the founding of the USS.

Messing around with some words, me and one of the Formid characters called Handra Kisund

Finally finished the most widely used Formid writing system. Be been working on the numbers for months now, and the alphabet for the past couple days.

At some point I’d like to make a conlang for it, but if I did that rn I would genuinely explode

(Also sorry the formatting is a tad shite, this has all been transcribed from a very messy stack of paper)

Finally finished the most widely used Formid writing system. Be been working on the numbers for months now, and the alphabet for the past couple days.

At some point I’d like to make a conlang for it, but if I did that rn I would genuinely explode

(Also sorry the formatting is a tad shite, this has all been transcribed from a very messy stack of paper)

>:3

“”“He””” probably should have realised a tad earlier tbh (dead gods there were so many signs 😭)

Open tags for y’all

Picrew tag game!- Create yourself now vs how you looked when you were a kid

Link

I was tagged by @cutebisexualmess for this but the chain was too long so I'm restarting!

If only that little girl could see me now (she'd probably think I was cool tbh)

uhm tagging: @b3achfagz (ik you dont do tag games so u can just ignore this but i though u might find it cool) @cassiecryptic @viktheviking1 @depressedgremlinbitch @ramencat12 @inkyslimee @the-horrifying-digital-circus @patipati @cute--thing @musicalsiphonophore @tastetherainbow290 @disenchantedwarlock @bookishcatcafe and anyone else who sees this and thinks it looks cool!!

Just need to finish the write up for one more sophont and I’ll have finished all the ones with main character rep, then it’s on to character design

Some faerie anatomy sketches, including a distant ancestor

Faeries

Common names in English:

Kites, gulls, imps

Binomial name:

Fantispiritus Sp. (Fated spirits)

Description:

Faeries are a genus of volant, bipedal hexapods who were the instigators of the Great War and the second alien sophont encountered by Terrans.

They posses a mineralised endoskeleton throughout their body, in addition to a mineralised cranial exoskeleton covered in a layer of organic polymers. They posses a dorsal notochord within a vertebrae-like structure, with a series of overlapping internal plates filling a role similar to the belly ribs of some earth tetrapods. The four thoracic limb bones are derived from two parallel rods of bone, leading to each limb segment possessing two long bones akin to those of the tetrapod radius, ulna, tibia and fibula, with the forelimbs possessing two segments and the hind limbs possessing three segments. Each long bone in the upper segments are connected to the a scapula-like structure with a ball and socket joint, with the two bones for the forelimbs fusing into a disc for increased rotational flexibility. Each limb possesses five fingers, with the outer rear digit bearing a wing in both the fore and hind limbs.

The head possesses a bony crest, a pair of cephalic limbs, two lower jaws fused into a single structure, and two inner jaws. The cephalic limbs posses two main limb segments and the hands possessing four segments.

After being processed in the jaws, food passes down the oesophagus either into a crop-like structure or into a gizzard before continuing on to the stomach. Meanwhile, air enters the parallel respiratory tracts either through external nostrils between the plates of the skull or through internal airways in the roof of the mouth, entering an air sac in the back of the skull before continuing into a pair of lungs within the thorax.

The faerie circulatory system bears general similarities to those of Terran vertebrates and cephalopods, with a heart adjacent to each lung and a larger central heart located between the two longs pumping their haemocyanin blood around their body.

Faeries feel little to no effect from ethanol and some other simple alcohols due to early life of their planet utilising this byproduct of their aerobic respiration as a defence mechanism against other organisms.

Faeries have a bisex system similar to that of Terran vertebrates, with males (tercels) typically being smaller and lighter built, with red skull plates, blue head and eye crests, and red and blue tail veins, whilst females (formels) are typically larger and bulkier, with orange skull plates, purple head and eye crests, and black and lilac tail veins, however there is large individual and population variation.

Between one and five leathery eggs may be laid, which hatch into fuzzy, clumsy eyasm after roughly fifteen Terran weeks. After a year of bulking up, eyasm rapidly develop into volant flaplings, loosing much of their down and becoming much more active and curious. Infancy is considered to end after a year as a flapling, gradually developing both physically and mentally until adulthood, typically considered at sixteen years old.

Ancestrally faeries lived in arboreal communities heavily dependant on a symbiotic xerophyte, with those living in more forested habitats typically living in sprawling, low density and interconnected groups, whilst those in open environments tending to live in high density, isolated communities within stands of trees.

Fantispiritus is generally considered to have evolved three to four million years ago, with the modern species having reached a global distribution by roughly half a million years ago. Shortly after venturing beyond their home solar system, an extremist faction originating on one of their home planet’s moons attempted to seize control over the other faerie factions. Whilst this control was often tenuous over much of the homeworld, it was absolute across the vast majority of faerie space. Following an expansionist policy and a number of attempted coups and civil wars, they came into contact with a lose assemblage of alien sophonts which made up the precursor to the USS. A rapid first strike was carried out that started the Great War, leading to sweeping short term advances and the threatening of multiple homeworlds before forces could be rallied against them. Shortly before the peak of this offensive, accidental contact had been made with the Terrans and formids, opening another front in the war. It has been debated amongst scholars how much this additional front contributed to the collapse of the faerie front lines, however the consensus is that between supply line issues, internal resistance and simple resource disparity, the rapid series of defeats was inevitable, followed by a hard fought offensive that ended with the invasion of the seat of government on the homeworld’s moon. During the following reconstruction period, the faeries joined the USS.

I would actually evaporate if this happened

i love dating tgirls cus a lot of the time they have bad self image so all u gotta do is compliment them and they get so adorably flustered.