Oh My Gosh, I Love This So Much!!!! Glass's Concept And Design Is One Of My Favorites, So It's So Cool

glass

The sun of Deslotair burned bright above. Stark white blended into yellow, infecting the sky around it. Rays of light stabbed the sky like burning knives, searing the air, cutting through that which crossed their path. Anything that stood in their way bled shadows, patches of darkness spreading from their touch.

The glass robot did not bleed shadows, ey did not feel the burning heat of the sun. Those deadly knives passed through eir translucent skin, shining off the machinery inside, swallowed by the burbling liquid that flowed through eir body. The tip of a spear was held low at eir side, its point gleaming.

No sun stabbed through the skin of the glass robot, but sharp gazes burned holes in eir back.

Whispers floated in the footsteps of the traveler. Suspicious words accompanied by fleeting glances trailed after the figure like wisps of smoke. The glass robot returned their glances with a blank curiosity, unbothered by the restless murmurs of discomfort. Ey simply observed, and walked.

The wooden doors of an old saloon swung open with whining creaks, announcing the presence of the traveler to those inside. Few heads turned, all new blood (the regulars were accustomed to the creaking of the doors, and to the uninteresting passerby they so often brought). Yet they started another round of whispers, and more heads turned to the glass robot, boisterous conversations morphing into a suspicious hiss at the arrival of the newcomer.

The glass robot turned eir head this way and that, returning the gazes of staring strangers with eir own gleaming eyes. Outside the eerie glow was swallowed up by the sun, but here it cast a white halo around the traveler’s face, surrounded by the gentle green glow of the vitrel  that flowed inside of em.

Ey walked.

The glass thudded against wooden floors, steps going unbroken as the small crowd parted to make room for the traveler. Ey nodded eir appreciation, and approached the bar. The bartender stood up straight. The robot she had been talking to, sitting on one of the hourglass stools with an untouched drink in front of him, remained perfectly still.

“Well,” the bartender started. She set down the empty glass she had been holding, put it upside down on the counter so its rim kissed the wood and left a ring of moisture. “What can I get ya?”

“Nothing to drink, thank you.” The glass robot spoke with eir hands, the fluid inside of them twisting and shifting with each movement.

The bartender eyed em warily. “Uh, sorry, I don’t know what you’re sayin’...”

“Nothing to drink, thank you.” The glass robot repeated the same motions as before, only slower, hands making clear arcs through the air.

“Ey doesn’t want anything,” the robot spoke up, nodding to the bartender before turning to address the glass bot. His eyes glowed a faint blue, piercingly contrasted with the hazy brown light that filtered through dirty glass bulbs above them. Tubes curled around him, jutting out from the fabric of his vest and wrapping around his joints. “What are you here for, then, if not a drink?”

Saloon

Glass and Sprocket's first meeting, way back when. Added a couple of ports for Sprocket's tubing to flow through, which makes a hell of a lot more sense than them just kind of sticking out at his joints or junctures in the plating. Better for consistency's sake too.

Tags: @glacierruler

Dr. Wade Urbanczyk

new oc, leader of some sort of prosthetics development department for a catastrophe lab. I think he stuffs the consciousnesses of his dying coworkers into digital appliances in the hopes of keeping them alive til better days come along… But maybe he should just let them die.

kinda obsessed w/ him actually

OOO fun!

Planet Deslotair is a sci-fi western story I've been working on. It takes place on a mostly desert planet, covered in craters with nearly never-ending storms raging in the upper atmosphere. The craters crack the ground open to bring forth vitrel, a liquid power source that nearly everything on Deslotair runs on. The storms, meanwhile, make the planet a treacherous place to travel to and from, and many ships crash instead of successfully making the journey.

Scavengers, those who visit the ships and pick apart their corpses, provide a valuable service as they fight over the remains.

The story follows four main characters:

There's Sprocket, an ex-mining robot and mechanic who leads them. Glass, a glass bot that left eir cult-like upbringing to wander the sands. Desmona, a teenage girl caught in a vitrel harvesting accident that left her filled with wild, uncontrollable energy. And Alonze, an ex-bandit who just got out of jail, and is Sprocket's ex. (Kinda. It's complicated.)

It's very found family, just following the adventures of this group as they try to work together and protect each other. Very heavy lean into western aesthetics while bringing in a lot of sci fi. Sort of retro futurism at times? Asks a lot of questions about robots and outcasts and what it really means to be human.

I've been reworking the plot a bunch lately, so it's hard to say much more, but I have a lot of worldbuilding and character development on my hands!

ALRIGHT

I want to talk about my podcast, but my brain's being a bit rude today.

So we're going to a project share, to anyone who sees this feel free to participate.

This share can be about ANY projects, fanfic, fanart, or original that you want to just yap yap yap about.

Here's how it works: You reblog the post and talk about your project you're working on/thinking about/want to do/etc...

Then, you go up the reblog chain and find a project you're interested, and SEND ASKS to the person who made the info about the project!

I'll start: I'm writing a podcast, and it's about Glacie, and their coworkers, who work at the Meeting Point. The Meeting Point is a restaurant/shop located near the Mad Forest. Coming back from a pretty long break, due to their own unreality problems popping up, Glacie is warned that the forest grows hungry. After some incidents, Glacie's hallucinations start getting real bad, and they eventually venture forth into the Mad Forest.

Incredibly dumb doodles on what would happen if Sprocket and Alonze met @glacierruler's oc, Fig

Whereas Sprocket and Alonze live in a world where bots are fully realized beings that have to fight to be recognized in society,,, Fig's world is still cruising with boston dynamics style military drones. Shenanigans ensue.

As the storms ebb and flow, those ships foolish enough to get caught in their swell drop down from the sky.

It's a good time to be a scavenger.

'Drop season' is the period of time on Deslocar when the storms start to cease, as the scavengers call it. It's both a time to trade your goods with off-worlders, and collect from the ships that aren't quite used to the rougher conditions...

Tags: @glacierruler

Thoughts on robots and people and how maybe the little rituals we do to show we care don't have to actually mean anything, brought to you by Sprocket and Alonze.

Worldbuilding notes: Under normal conditions, you wouldn't be able to see the stars from the surface of Deslotair. However, this takes place during drop season, when the skies are cleared of storms. Since Deslotair is a planet that's somewhat behind developmentally and lacks a lot of big cities, it's fairly free of light pollution. Scavengers traveling the deserts have an especially nice view. The planet is also in a fairly... cluttered(?) solar system, so there's a lot of comets passing by and bits of space debris burning up in the atmosphere. Most of this is natural rock and mineral, although some is space trash from neighboring planets. But hey, that's a bonus if you're scavenging, right??

Taglist: @glacierruler

Saloon

Glass and Sprocket's first meeting, way back when. Added a couple of ports for Sprocket's tubing to flow through, which makes a hell of a lot more sense than them just kind of sticking out at his joints or junctures in the plating. Better for consistency's sake too.

Tags: @glacierruler

Some notes on black holes for a short story I have in the works. Not going for too hard of sci-fi. I know some of the basic rules here but am also going to be breaking and twisting them around a bit. Really, these are some very, very basic notes. I'm more interested in sensation and experience than knowing a bunch of complex physics, with a dash of the right vocabulary to make things seem smart.

Yesss, so glad this finally made it!!! <3

The present @duck-in-the-universe made me finally came in!!!

Now to just find a place to put them <3

They also have me cute stickers :D

OCtober Bingo: Multilingual

“Come here,” Glass signed.

Sprocket shifted forwards, sand sliding over and into his joints, tubes bending to follow the movement. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground, hands folded in his lap. Opposite him, Glass kneeled in the sands.

The mid-morning sun fell through eir body, refracting and splitting through the glass, shining brilliantly on pieces of metal and bulbs of green liquid before falling onto Sprocket. It would be warm, if either of them had the skin to feel it.

(Natural heat was lost to Sprocket in the storm of his own whirring processors and grinding motors. He just had the vague impressions offered to him by an internal thermometer ticking up or down: 42.3°C.

He’d once asked Glass if ey could feel warmth, could feel the sun beating down on them.

Ey said it felt like life, which sounded very different from 42.3°C.)

Glass pressed eir palm against Sprocket’s chest, warping the way the light fell, and hummed three notes.

They slid together like the gradient of a sunset, each higher than the last. They sat somewhere in the middle of Glass’s vast spectrum of sound, a neutral sort of tone that shook around in Sprocket’s chest but didn’t quite stay there. He raised a hand from his lap to grab onto Glass’s forearm, fingers clinking into place. Another point of connection, without the leather of Sprocket’s vest separating them.

“Go again,” he said.

The same three notes played. Sprocket could feel the vibrations humming against his sensors, sound washing through him. It brushed over those parts of him designed only to detect pain, to alert to problems, gently passing by without alarm.

The sweeping rise in pitch felt whole in some way, complete. Someone with more musical knowledge than him, with more knowledge of the language Glass was trying to speak to him, could have had the right words to describe it. Sprocket had neither of those things, so all he had to offer was-

“It sounds nice. What does it mean?”

Glass nodded. Ey pulled eir hand away from his chest, and Sprocket followed suit, disengaging.

“It’s supposed to sound nice,” ey signed. “It means ‘to give comfort.’ We have many words like this, that represent concepts, that can be used in many different ways as long as the emotion is there.”

Those bulbs of liquid rolled around in Glass’s chest, occasionally colliding with each other to become one, other times clinging to the clear walls surrounding them. A pool of it splashed in eir head, right behind the pair of white, glowing eyes that watched Sprocket intently, making sure he understood. Glass continued.

“It means ‘it’s okay.’ It means ‘it’s alright.’ It means ‘it’s over.’ It means ‘I’m here.’ It means whatever it needs to mean.”

“And does it… work? Do you feel comforted by it?”

“Of course. That association has been well-established for me. The same will be true for you, eventually.”

Glass hummed the notes again. Ey nodded at him to do the same.

Sprocket took a moment to find the first pitch, letting it hum in his speaker before he climbed to the next, and then the next.

Glass tilted eir head at him. “You’re climbing stairs.”

“What?”

“When you move from one syllable to the next, you find in betweens and jump to them, instead of sliding up the scale. Here, try it with me.”

Ey reached out, pressing a hand against his chest, the globs of liquid in eir fingers twisting and reforming. Sprocket reached back, grabbing onto eir arm. The tubing that coiled loosely around him flexed and shifted, filled with that same blood.

Glass held the first note, leading the way for him to follow. Sprocket could hear the vibrations, could feel them thrumming in his veins of tubes, buzzing where cheers of metal met each other. The sound rattled discontentedly while he tried to find the right note, warping and grating until it fell into place.

Glass raised eir pitch, and Sprocket clumsily followed em up the scale, resting together at the three notes along their journey. When Glss nodded, Sprocket already knew what ey meant, and they starting over, and he led the charge.

They traded off like that several times, taking turns to find the right notes to play, each time getting closer to each other’s rhythm. Until the need ceased for a lead at all, and Sprocket and Glass spoke as one.

Liquid danced in Glass’s body, bulbs of it twisting in eir chest, all surrounded by singing glass.

Sprocket’s metal sang, carrying waves of sound. Gentle hands, not ones that poked or prodded, cupped his sensors, pressed against his vest.

They reached what Sprocket knew would be their final iteration and grew silent together, the last of the sound fading out of reach. Only when every last bit of it was gone, when Sprocket couldn’t possibly feel it, did Glass pull away. Sprocket’s hands fell into his lap.

“Like that,” ey signed.

“Thank you,” Sprocket responded. “I understand.”

@glacierruler

Another square down! I actually wrote this story a while back, it was one of the first things that went into my Deslotair notebook. Just some thoughts on the glass bot language and how we can communicate even when we're so different. Languages are very important to Glass (ey used to be a translator) so this was a really good prompt for em!