Yasmine Wüster

Concepted this character, named the species a 'Zurg' and ended up 3d modeling it for vrchat

reblog to be eaten by this thing

Concept: fursonas with non-human senses. Not just canine "can smell better" ("My fursona has no nose." "How does she smell?" "Terrible!"), but actually different senses. (Under a readmore because big surprise, I write a lot)

Sharks who walk into a dark room and go "hey guys!" to the people about to shout "surprise!". Electroreception, yo. They can feel the electric fields in bodies. They have a good job as an electrician, because they can tell which wires are active and which aren't, without needing a tester. One of the guests is a snake who says "I told you this wouldn't work", as they can see in the dark through thermoception.

Corvids who don't watch human movies, especially not in theaters. They're just flickery slide-shows to them. Their vision is too fast, persistence of vision doesn't kick in until like 200 FPS.

I know the mantis shrimp colors aren't real (it's actually just a thing where they have extra cones to make up for not having enough brain to merge them. Like, humans have red/green/blue cones, and we see "yellow" when the red and green cones are both activated, but shrimp can't do that merging. So they have a yellow cone) but fuck it, this is fantasy. Make your fursona have access to all the forbidden colors.

Hell, have them able to see outside the "visible" spectrum! Imagine a furry working at a human-majority office who gets pulled into a meeting with her manager one day, who has to tell her that even if she's covered in fur, she can't wear a top that revealing, they have a dress code. She goes "what? But.. Sally in accounting wears that semi-transparent blouse most weeks!" and then they both come to realize that humans can't see near-IR and therefore don't realize that a lot of their clothing choices are transparent to that wavelength. The furry has just been seeing all these exposed chests and going "wow, I had heard the humans could be prudes about nudity, what with not having fur, but apparently not." and decided to join in one day. Whoops.

Hell, let them see radiation! Who needs a giger counter? They're digging through an junk shop and WHOA, shouldn't this be in the back or in a safe or something? The owner (a Shetland sheep dog) is like "what do you mean?" and they go "it's pretty radioactive, man! Can't you tell?" "uhh.. No. Why don't you put that down quickly and I'll go grab a lead bucket."

An octopus that goes to see a 3D movie but turns down the glasses. No need. They can see circularly polarized light just fine on their own.

You go over to visit a bat's warehouse to get an old computer they offered to loan you and they sheepishly (is that offensive to sheep?) admit that they never bothered installing any lighting inside. Why would they? They can see fine with echolocation. And their friend Skippy never complained, either! Mind you, they are a dolphin.

A park ranger who is a jewel beetle. They can detect fires miles away, but only if pine trees are involved. They're a firefighter in a pine tree forest, so that's fine.

A bee who keeps giving directions in terms of cardinal directions and forgetting that not everyone has an innate sense of North/South thanks to being able to sense the magnetic field of the Earth. And this is after they went to all the trouble of giving the directions in words, instead of dancing!

Tangent idea: a bee pirate who writes a pop song, and it's not until another bee hears it years later that they realize that the dance instructions in the song are actually a treasure map.

Creatures who can sense RF directly. Some of them can't even get near human-style cities, as they're "too noisy". It takes the more mundane inhabitants a while to realize they aren't talking about sound, and earplugs won't help.

Others can pull off amazing mental tricks like the Scramblers from Peter Watts' Blindsight, and the first time they get near a human city they figure out how to decode all these FM signals and within minutes they can watch TV, listen to the radio, or log onto the wifi. They're not robots or cyborgs, they're just unholy smart and frighteningly fast.

And there's no reason it should be limited to natural things... The supernatural is there as well. A furry who mentions they hate going to some human cities because they're so crowded with ancestors. It's not for a while until someone realizes that word isn't being translated exactly right, and they don't just mean "old humans". They mean the ones who lived there before, but are dead. They still see them, and are surprised that the humans can't.

Hell, how about a fursona with an asymmetric design? Different fur patterns, heterochromia, things like that. But it swaps sides from time to time. It's not an art mistake, they really do that. No one understands why until they casually point out a missing item is in the drawer of there, the locked one. Then they reach around all six sides of the drawer and pull it out. What, you can't see in four dimensions? Yeah, sometimes their body swaps left/right because they rotated through the 4th axis and inverted their body. No big deal, but they have to be careful with what food they eat sometimes. All those chiral molecules... You don't want them backwards. Fortunately they've got a pretty strong digestive system so it's not a big deal. And vodka always goes down smooth, alcohol is symmetric!

Speaking of which, fursonas with vulture-like digestive systems. They yell at their roommate for throwing out that expired meat. It's only expired by human standards, and they're just a bunch of wimps who can't handle a little putrefaction in their lunch.

And I know I said "not like canines with just better senses of smell" but there's some interesting options for having beings who can smell things humans just can't. A fursona that detects a gas leak because they can smell carbon monoxide, not just the bitterants added to help humans detect it. Or can pick up on human pheromones, although that one is often covered in werewolf media, I hear. But instead of just arousal/fertility/pregnancy, they can also be like "hey you smell different... Have you talked to your doctor about testing for diabetes? I think your a1c might be high."

Speaking of pheromones, how about fursonas that do things like ants, who automatically put down invisible scent trails and follow them? They are a pain to go hiking with, since they just assume you can follow them if they get out of sight, and you gotta remind them to slow down sometimes.

Hell, fursonas who have quorum sensing, either type. The bacteria-like type have gene expression that changes based on population density. Members of their species in the wild, in rural areas, and in urban areas have radically different phenotypes. The social insect type make decisions with an implicit silent democracy, bordering on a hive mind. They are always surprised when humans and similar want to talk out decisions. Can't they just tell what the majority want and just do that? It seems so much similar.

Speaking of which, ACTUAL HIVE MINDS. You're dating a nice worker bee and and another member of the same hive comes by and says "hello love!" and gives you a big kiss. Your partner is surprised you had any problem with this. They're the same person, basically? And they feel their love for you just as much. (obligatory A Miracle of Science reference: Mars thinks you're cute)

Combine that with insect-like lifespans for some extra weirdness: the one you're dating isn't even the one you started with. The bee-people only live a month or two, and you've been dating for nearly a year now. Hell, even when your first partner was still alive, it wasn't always the "same" bee that came by to visit. Of course, that's putting a human-like kind of perspective on if it's the same bee. To the hive-mind bees, it is. It's the same hive. They have the same mind, just in 70,000 separate bodies. So of course it's the same person. Just not the same body.

Heh. How about magnetic sense? This may be overly specific to my interests, but you hand a furry a floppy disk and they hold it for a few seconds and then hand it back. "Thanks!" "oh, don't you want it?" "oh yeah. But I already got all the data off it." "but... You didn't put it in a floppy drive?" "no? What's the point in that? I just read the flux transitions off the surface. It's not hard."

More esoteric senses, too. You're driving down California one with your partner, listing to some Decemberists and they idly go "huh, Diablo Canyon is still running? I thought they had shut it down!" You're like "what?" They point out the window at the two cooling domes. "The power plant! It's still running. Can't you taste all those neutrinos?" "uh, no." "what, really? They're quite fresh compared to the usual solar ones." "I can't 'taste' those either" "oh. Weird!"

Your plasma-lifeform boyfriend who evolved in space sometimes has dizzy spells where he nearly drives his containment vessel into a wall. "sorry, that was a big one. Those gravity waves must have been from, like, an 80-90 solar-mass black hole merger? A close one too, only a few dozen megaparsecs."

You've long since given up explaining that you have no way of detecting events that take place over 30 million light-years away.

The atemporal energy being who proposes the first time you meet. You're shocked, but they point out why? You have/are/will spent/spending (tenses are hard) over 60 years of your experience of years with them. They just don't really see how this time is different from all the times you have/will spend together. They thought humans liked this "till death do us part" ceremony, even though death has no meaning for them. They're not immortal, but their death is just like their birth (or the energy being equivalent): a discontinuity on the edges of their lifeline. They don't exist past there, just like you don't exist outside of the 3D volume of your body. So what does it matter? Besides, we've had this conversation before, or is it later? Either way.

A hive mind being who only has one body you can see, because they're actually a hive mind across themselves in different timelines. They sometimes get mixed up which version of you they're talking to, and ask odd questions like how your son is doing in college. You don't have son, or any kids for that matter. "whoops, that's the other you. Lemme... You're married to Tony, right?" "Who's Tony?" "Obviously not. Uhh, is Sarah your girlfriend?" "no? I'm not a lesbian!" "Not this you, at least. Oh, I've got it. You work at the newspaper?" "yeah. I'm an editor" "oh cool. Got it. Sorry, it's easy to get all the yous confused sometimes."

Later that week, your boss introduces you to a new reporter, Sarah Torres. You can't help but wonder of this is the Sarah another you is dating. You don't see it. But apparently another you does.

And that tangent makes me think of another one: mind reading, either full or just empathic, isn't that unusual in aliens and such, but imagine a race that doesn't go around reading minds unless given permission, but they have a persistent problem with pronouns. See, they can just tell what your gender is. And closeted trans people keep getting outed accidentally. Sometimes outed to themselves, because they call you by your "true" pronouns, not the ones you're using now.

And the same goes for orientation. Like your coworker will be like "why don't you ask out Steven on a date?" and you're like "Steven? I don't even know if he likes guys, I've never gotten any hints from him..." and they go "what? No, of course he does. Can't you tell?"

(I just invented a species with perfect gaydar. That's weird, right?)

Someone who has that ESP "there were strong emotions and events here" sense, but it goes both ways. They would never visit Hiroshima for the same reason they will never visit Chicago. They don't want to explain to you what will happen there, but they go a bit teary-eyed when you bring it up.

A species that magic tricks just don't work on, and no one can figure out why. They can't see through solid objects, they don't seem to have a super-fast vision, they can't read minds, but everytime you show them a magic trick they're like "the ball is in your hand" or "you have a fifth ace in your sleeve" or "there's another rabbit under the table". They don't even seem to realize it's supposed to be a trick. They're just slightly confused at what you're trying to do.

A species that has the equivalent of a spectroscope/chromatograph built into their body. You hand them a drink and they can list the molecules in it and their concentrations. You'd think they'd mainly be scientists, but a lot of them are bartenders. They make perfect mixed drinks (down to the nanoliter of exact composition) and they can spot a spiked drink from across the room.

A species that can taste your DNA when you touch them. They're a weird blob that rewrites their own DNA on a daily basis, and find static-DNA beings "weird and unusual" and always want to help you with that. Wouldn't you be happier if you had a couple extra arms? Maybe claws? How about switching sex? Just for the weekend, they can put you back to "normal" if you want. Or maybe you'd like to spend some time as a dog? Your two species are pretty close, evolutionary speaking. It shouldn't take more than a day or two to rewrite every cell in your body. Sometimes you "humans" are so boring. They can't imagine staying in the same form for more than a few days, and you fuckers do that for, what, up to a century? Before you "get old and die"? You know, that's a choice. They can fix that. You don't have to age, if you don't want to.

Speaking of which, species with radically different lifespans and approaches to life.

The Dragon's Egg beings occasionally give humans gifts, of books of poetry about their unrequited love for you. There's no point in responding, even if you do come to love them from their writings. By the time you have opened the first page of the book, they're dead, their children are dead, and their grandchildren are getting old.

Similarly there's a race of trees where you can be dating one for 40 years before they reveal that they've considered this just a minor flirty bit of fun. They don't get involved with humans and human-likes, they'll be gone in the blink of a century, so what's the point. You ask them their age one time and have trouble grappling with the fact that when they sprouted, your ancestors hadn't yet mastered the written language. Their still-living parent remembers visiting earth before it had any life outside the seas. You had dinner with them last Thanksgiving. They liked your broccoli casserole.

So... yeah.

"We'll struggle through this, together, no matter how much we change."

"We'll support each-other, until the bitter end, no matter where or when we find it."

022: WINTER WARMTH FOR COOL CATS magazine comm, 2020

Spiedies at the firing range! (a commission for Raarden [@compulsivecurios] and Fiskpinne over on twitter)

officially started writing my book also, its going to be a mixture of prose and comic methinks. here is a style test of the protag Ryn

Art by  Skvor