Ambush

Imsee Cuisine!

Imsee are opportunistic obligate carnivores so most of their diet consists primarily of meat and animal fats.  

Imsee lack taste, literally. During their evolutionary development  they lost the ability to taste all flavors except for salty and as a result imsee cuisine generally tends to emphasize, appearance, smell, and texture. Much of their food is very aromatic or pungent and is not always appealing to other sophonts. 

Imsee were kinda late to the whole using fire to cook things, mostly due to the difficulties of maintaining a fire pit close to their preferred living areas, i.e close to the water, and that their main appendages used to manipulate their environment sits on their face. Cooking gets a little dicey if you’ve got to put your face right up to an open flame. So cooking with a flame was not something that was done on a regular basis and was relegated to special occasions. Instead Imsee utilized either acid or parasite-cooking. Acid cooking works on a similar principle as ceviche, raw meat is soaked in a mild acid to clean it and to denature protein. Acids were typically derived from plants. In some instance food could be “cooked” in the harvested stomachs of other animals. Fire worms are small 6 limb vertebrates which spit acid as a form of self defense against predators and are a common source for acid in many imsee cultures. 

Now for parasite cooking:

Imsee are usually filled with parasites which they get from the food they eat. This isn’t particularly a problem for them as a healthy Imsee can live a long and happy life as they have a pretty strong immune system and advanced medical technology. Parasites are pretty prevalent among aquatic life on their home world and some are prone to breaking down their host tissues when they begin to proliferate making meat that is easier to break down and digest. They also provide a lot of intriguing texture that the imsee palette tends to like.  Early imsee farmers would purposely infect their animals specifically for that type of meat. Due to ethical concerns modern imsee no longer use live hosts for this but instead lab grown organ meat  instead. 

While fire stoves are pretty much non-existent in most Imsee households, they do utilize chemically heating pads. Sorta like a hot patch but gets hot enough to simmer water. Most heat pads can be reused multiple times but generally lose strength with subsequent use. 

Finally finished this, some constructs

I refer to sapient/sentient machines in my setting as constructs partially because the term AI is really broad and can apply to a lot of different type of synthetic forms of life/existences. So to keep it simple all constructs are AI but not all AIs are constructs.

These two are some typical designs among CSG/Human (left) and Brakken (right) constructs. The first is a mobile assistant, a type of specialist construct that is meant to go places where an AI network can't while the other is a Brakken mother unit. The majority of human civilization is governed by the CSG, central service grid a vast AI network that manages all aspects of human civilization. They've governed earth and its many colonies for a very long time and most people under their care life relatively safe, post-scarcity lives. All the CSG has historically had problems with control and governing overreach.

The brakken are eusocial aliens who have a queen. The queens primary role is to produce new members for the colony, provide generation knowledge, and support colony cohesion via the psychoactive pheromones she produces. When the queen dies, a whole is left in the colony and in some instances another queen is unable to take her place. Sometimes colonies can reject the queen. Mother units are essentially bio computers which take on the role of a queen of a colony when needed.

Two headed dragon

portrait of one of my D&D characters

Another sketch WIP

Still have more aliens to draw, this one is for the Vreem. A diminutive species of alien only slightly larger than a mouse. They have an interesting symbiotic relationship with a species of plants collectively called the Tyreem. The plants are not sapient themselves, but they they are able to pass as intelligent very well, at least to the Vreem and have evolutionary co-opted vreem intelligence into cultivate themselves. Its an idea I'm still in the process of work-shopping but in the meantime I've been redesigning these guys

Some more world-building notes, still experimenting with line-art, thinking of doing my line art traditionally in the future. Anyway some notes on early Imsee writing implements.

As a species with long lifespans, the imsee have incredibly detailed and extensive memory retention. So for a very long time, most of their knowledge was retained through oral tradition. However as settlements grew in size and social life more complex, they realized they needed a method of information storage. As an amphibious species, where water is a key aspect of everyday life, mediums like paper or ink simply weren’t an option for them. Instead Imsee's early writing utilized wax. Early wax tablets were derived from animal fat, which were then poured into a dish and hardened. Text is scrapped onto the surface using a needle. If the author wanted the text to be permanent a layer of resin was applied to its surface and placed into storage.

Old art - Comics

A short webcomic I made for the WOMBATS, a local art group I used to be apart of. It was a fun little project to make, and the characters are very much inspired by Miis.

colored in background, Almost done with it, unfortunately, like half of it is going to be covered up. This is my second attempt at this drawing actually, the first one was really crusty and pretty bad. Much happier with this version.

This one was my first try.

Slight redesign of the brakken, working on making another info-graph for space-encyclopedia but a few bits I'll share now, unlike a few other sophont species, the Brakken weren't originally a space fairing species in-fact they weren't even sapient. A few centuries prior they were genetically modified by the Imsee and uplifted further by them. So compared to other species in locale space, their societal history is incredibly short. They may look a bit like cats, but their social structure is similar to eusocial insects.

A bit more on the Imsee