So now we also get more info on Baso and his connection to Goshen and Keyla.
Speaking of Keyla, I wanted to make a female member of the Ulon Dosi without having to resort to the typical female alien attributes of eyelashes, breasts, and lipstick. So I left out the lipstick. Ha ha. Actually, I have found that the eyelashes and chest really do help to some extent in conveying a female character, so kept those with Keyla, but I tried to keep them both to a very bare minimum. Most of the feminization came from giving her a leaner physique, no horns, and a hairstyle reminiscent of a real-world woman’s ponytail. I also gave her a slightly more feminine color scheme with the yellow outfit, which is a slight departure from the mostly brown leathers and red accents of the male Ulon Dosi.
The story is moving at a fast clip, even while the main characters are a captive public to the context outlay.
Btw, I think Keyla is a sensible construct. Lipsticks would make sense mostly if you have plenty lips and have a lot of visual face communication going on, as we have. (Lucky us, we could have been stuck with red-painted female butts chimp style!)
Actually, while it hasn’t been tested what I know of, the outstanding feature of eye whites in humans (as opposed to say, chimps) is hypothesized to have been evolved to enable us to easier model (i.e. speculate or even understand) where fellow humans are looking at. Incidentally, AFAIU chimps do badly on that score.
So presumably Bennesaud’s (all white eyes) and Cember’s (all black eyes) species don’t rely much on (certain) facial cues. Makes sense, Bennes’ face is fairly rigid. And no one would know what Cember was focusing on anyway! (Literary and figuratively – scatterbrain seems to go with “scattereyes”. :-o)
Torbjörn reminded me of a question I had about Cember. Is that entire, black region a functional dome of vision? Or is it a huge, fluid-filled structure and the actual eye is a floating, tethered organ within it (akin to what some jellyfish have that self-uprights to the plane of gravity) and provides vision in an overlapping cone straight out of each stalk?
The latter idea came to me thinking back on how he could move around so violently and still shoot with pinpoint accuracy so efficiently. That his eyes stay completely focused and stable regardless of how he is moving.
As for Keyla, it reminds me of an speculative article I once read on biped breasts. I wish I could find it now. The core of it was in that even if a species evolves from something with over two nursing sites, all but those most efficiently accessed by a carried child will atrophy as more emphasis is placed on the ones most easily accessed. So Keyla might have nips galore under that fur, but only the highest would turn into essentially a breast. Evolution! Putting all your milk in two bottles! Or something. 😀
Interesting hypothesis on breasts. Also, a smaller litter size would tend to reduce the number (which I assume is what happened in monkeys).
“nips galore”
As a male I can’t decide whether that sucks or not.
@ Torbjorn: Very cool theory about the eye whites in humans. I had not heard about that, but it certainly makes sense.
@ Exxos: To be honest, I haven’t really given too much thought to the internal structure of Cember’s eye. Perhaps I’ll get around to figuring that out when I do my story about him going in for Lasik surgery. 🙂
For some reason, on this page I’m especially noticing the way the firelight accents everything. It looks neat.
And you could always use a big hair bow as an indicator of female characters! 😉
Also, it was nice to talk with you at Modern Myths the other night.
I read “big hair bow” and pictured Keyla dressed up like Cyndi Lauper circa 1985.
She pulled it off admirably.
Wouldn’t that look require lipstick though?
Would that then make the big tough Ulon Dosi guy Captain Lou?
Yes.
Hey Sean, Yeah, I’m pretty happy with how the firelight accents came out. Definitely adds a little something visually to the sequence. Glad you like it! And it was fun talking with you at Modern Myths too. Sadly, I don’t make it to the store as often these days, so it’s nice to make a special trip once in a while. Plus.. cupcakes!
I’m bored, so I am going to guess the value of the crush.
Looks like 3 bricks per yak, 40 yak, and about 1kg per brick – so 120kg of crush. If a used escape pod costs 1000 u.c., that might work out to $10k USD. So if a gram of earthly analog was $1k, then a gram of crush is about 100 u.c. So 120,000 x 100 = 12,000,000 u.c.
I was right! He is his son!
(pats himself on the back)