She Carries Death On Her Back

Just had a moment where I thought Two Road’s sequel, Make It Home was going to be longer- turns out my mock-up was one page short

26 pages each, all painted by hand ❤️‍🩹

Drew pearl because,, artblock

au where Cellbit ascends to godhood for seemingly no reason and has No Idea what he’s the god of. And so naturally he teams up with Roier, the priest of a mysterious unknown god, to figure out what he’s actually the god of

Leo Bonita & Richas are back! So it seems like the perfect time to reveal my graduation cap design.

(I’m so excited to graduate and have more time to make egg art again! One more art final!)

its pearlie pop !!

close-up under :D

(XCOMau this would just be cute but Cellbit insisted on a lore dump and angsty internal monologue)

It is ten o'clock in the morning, and Cellbit feels barely awake. Roier is away visiting friends, Pac and Mike are holed up in their lab, Felps is... somewhere, doing something, he is sure. Bagi is about, playing in the mud with the children while Cellbit blearily sips at his coffee.

Give him another ten minutes, and he can use Pepito as bait to get Bobby and Richarlyson into a bath. Empanada is there, too, sat on her mother's shoulders more for the height advantage than the claimed attempt not to get mud on her petticoats.

That's four of the five children of their community, but where- he knows she has a tendency to turn invisible when stressed, a side effect of her genetics, but it shouldn't be that stressful, he thought-

A little hand tugs on his trousers.

Cellbit looks down, and let's his heartrate calm.

"Hope," he smiles at her. "Is everything okay?"

She reaches up her arms, and a thought nudges against Cellbit's mental shields. He puts his coffee down and reaches back, scooping the tiny one up and into his lap.

Pepito is, he thinks, physically a little younger than her. Pepito is so much less frail, though, roughing and tumbling like any child, rather than riddled with bruises and breaks and exhaustion from the slightest knock.

Cellbit loves her anyway, just as she loves him, and planting trees, and decorating the castle or Felps' hut, and helping run buckets of water up and down from the well. At least she is a quiet child anyway - if Richarlyson were sick in the same ways, he doesn't think he would manage.

Sick, ill, frail... Cellbit hates all the terms for it, what they mean for his little girl, but the one he hates most is the Federation's label of 'defective'. Both of the children who were his first - Hope and Richarlyson both - were labelled with it, like so many of the others. They are not defective, they are children, just children who needed to be loved.

Hope must feel his anger, for she looks at him with big eyes.

"Not you," he tells her. "Never you, you're perfect, my little girl."

Her doubt sounds in Cellbit's mind. She offers another thought, of herself, and Pomme, and Tallulah.

It takes him a second.

Ah. She's asking if her sisters can come visit.

There are already five children for him and Bagi to look after, two more... well, he needs to speak to Philza anyway. And whichever of the French wish to come, they are always welcome.

"If their parents come too," he tells her. "Tia Bagi and I can't watch seven of you."

The smile he gets is bright but small, before she pulls up her legs and curls against his chest.

Cellbit... he wonders, sometimes, if she doesn't remember something of her rescue. She was too starved, too abused, to unwell to even approach consciousness, a tiny, dwindling flicker of life in an otherwise deserted cell. And yet... every time she sits against him, she always curls up the same way - head on his right shoulder, ear to his collar bone and face turned in, legs curled so her left side presses against his torso, arms limp in his lap.

It is exactly how he picked her up, before, how he tucked her safely against himself and took her away.

He kisses the top of her head, and already she is half way to sleep. It worries him, it always worries him, how her stamina is so thin and her body so weak. Doctor Ruiz says it is unfortunately predictable, after six years of near total neglect - not even getting the food the other rejected children did. If she were human, Hope would be dead years ago. As she is not...

Nobody can tell if she will keep improving, or if this is her life forever. Nobody knows if this was the condition she was cast aside for, or a mark of the neglect. Nobody knows what tomorrow brings, only that they still have a today.

It is not the end of the world, though. It is not a death sentence, and not a crime; Felps' condition is different, but in that regard they are the same. Just because they both need more rest does not make their waking hours mean any less. Neither does it make them any less precious, or loved, or mean that that Cellbit will not perfectly happily curl up with either - both - of them in a pile of pillows for hours on end.

"Would you like a story?" He asks his daughter, knowing how she fears the oncoming dark, how terrified she is that any time she sleeps he might abandon her again.

A nod against his neck, and Cellbit melts at the progress to have found something that she loves, something she agrees to - asks for, sometimes - outside of her sister.

"Alright" he tells her. "Story and a nap, and when you wake up your sisters will be here."

Triplets, two rejected for their disabilities, the third given away simply because her sisters were "flawed" and their creators worried about a "contaminated batch". Richarlyson, too, with a missing leg, and Flippa's eyesight and Bobby's temper and Chayanne simply not being sonically adept... it goes on and on and on and Cellbit hates the Federation somehow even more than before, now they have decoded the documents on their children.

Calm, calm, calm, they're already dead and he's a little one to help to sleep.

Bagi has Empanada and the boys, he has little Hope. It is fine, it is fine, they are all going to be fine.

"Once upon a time there was a princess who lived in a beautiful castle," he tells her. "The princess had three brothers, two sisters, and a great many cousins and siblings and friends. The princess was kind and gentle and beloved by all, but, one day, an evil witch came up with a curse..."

It’s fall, y’all

Double Life: Umm… Opps?

4/6 of my PearlescentMoon Double Life Thumbnail series for my Illustration class. Episode 4 has the most difficult pose of all the thumbnails (as my professor would fondly remember), but I love the final result.

Each illustration is sketched in red colored pencil, colored with watercolor and gouache, and lined with red ink. For this project, I focused on different coloring and shading techniques.

Day one of @anonymous-dentist spiderbit prompt week

Pirates | Dancing

(Still working on some spiderbit week art, a little sketch sneak peek) - Stars ✨