CodyLabs

This was drawn hastily after my first session in this game, and you can kind of tell from the design decisions, many of which are just plain wrong. FOR example: I made her red thing be a cape instead of the turtle-necked conical poncho it actually is (though that's mostly because I drew her naked first and then just drew that on top of it) ALSO I drew her head being her actual shell instead of the mask that it actually is, ALSO I gave her insect feet instead of spider feet (which look nice and would probably work better for a biped, but she's a spider goshdarnit). Long story short, I like the look of this, but if I'm ever gonna put out a REAL fanart of this game, it'll need some rework.

As for her torso, that also turned out to be distinctly non-canonical, but I still stand by it. My goal was to make her be the spitting image of her mom, except that since she's an ageless demigod she'll never get massively fat and old as balls like her mom was. That means 8 limbs (with a distinct main walking pair and arm pair and 4 weird smaller ones inbetween) each on their own body segment. I imagine she uses the middle 4 for spooling silk and managing tools, freeing her other hands to operate the needle and do sick parkour.

The majority of the fauna found within Transverse Bearing Truss 286351 of the Garden possess an enlongated, exoskeletal body plan, consisting of a large number of segments, each with its own pair of limbs. Though the base structure of each limb and the layout of its plating and musculature is fundamentally similar, they have speciated out into a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and purposes depending on its location around the body. This is typical of evolutionary processes across worlds and ecologies, but on the Garden this is understood to have not occurred to quite the extreme degrees seen in other worlds, such that each body segment is still distinct and similar (compared to humans, for example, where segmentation is nearly invisible beyond the core bones, or even on insects, where wing and walking limbs bear no resemblance to one another.) Therefore, the Garden has been theorized to represent a 'younger' or less evolved biosphere, one in which environmental pressures caused sentience and language to arrive unusually early, before natural forms had attained the level of refinement and diversity of other worlds. However, this conclusion is largely unsupported, as only the small segment of biosphere which happened to be present aboard Transverse Bearing Truss 286351 has ever been studied. It's possible that greater 'refinement' exists elsewhere in the Garden, or that the documented forms are some sort of ideal soultion for an unknown environmental pressure.

In any case, the Serpents, rightful owners of Transverse Bearing Truss 286351 and the Garden's ancient tenders, are typical of this layout. Their ten largest limbs, located near the center of mass, are responsible for ambulation and the majority of dextrous tasks. The foremost and longest of these is specialized for groping and feeling with long, thin fingers, (to compensate for their poor eyesight), but can also help greatly with climbing, or handling of larger cargoes. The second is directly comparable to human arms, with shorter, stronger fingers and greater flexibility, specialized heavily for tool use. The third through fifth are the strongest, with the heaviest palm pads, and do most of the work involved in walking and climbing. The serpents seem best suited for swampy environments, in close symbiosis with a species of vast-rooted tree which they can either climb or swim/dig underneath. No surviving sample of this tree has been found aboard Transverse Bearing Truss 286351.

In front of the main limbs are the six limbs which compose the mouth; four clamshells for gripping/cutting/chewing, and a foremost smaller set between them: a ring of teeth specialized for swallowing. Their diet is omnivorous, and primarily consists of fruit and small animals. Their digestive system does not contain any muscles of its own, but regular motion from walking, moving, and breathing (combined with close-spaced bony plates) helps grind down food and force the slurry through a narrow, straight intestine toward the anus at the terminus of the tail.

Aft of the main limbs are a few specialized appendages devoted toward reproductive secretions. On males a single pair of claspers are used for delivering spermatophores. On females these are replaced by three pairs containing soft, fatty leaves which newborns can eat. However, the actual gonads exist at the forward terminus just above the swallowing limbs. On males this consists of a small hole which secretes the spermatophores that he grips with his claspers. On females this consists of the wider birth canal, and a pair of spikes (the thumbs of her swallowing limb,) which are used for implanting newborns into symbiote animals. A village of serpents will typically go into heat and birth around the same time, and use a shared cow-thing to host their young. The young will consume the animal from the inside over the course of about a month, until its death. At this point the young will dig their way out, and find their way to their mother by smell, an event often made a center of traditions and ceremony. The evolutionary reason for this parasitic life stage is unknown. Several now-extinct environmental pressures have been proposed, and the serpents themselves have offered religious explanations, but definite conclusions are difficult.

Just behind the reproductive appendages lie the most numerous limb; between 19 and 30 sets of feathery external gills. These are tyically kept elevated, and move and ajdust independently to match air currents and maximize gas exchange. Though the serpents have small movement-sensitive eye spots on every body segment, these spots become much larger and more sensitive toward the end of the tail, until the final 2-3 sections are actually able to focus pictures and discern some detail. It was these limbs, with their elevation, constant articulation, and complex eyes, which formed the basis for the Serpents' semaphore-like silent language system, wherein 'words' were formed as patterns of waves, that travel up the tail from the base.

A serpent 'brain' stretches the creature's entire length, with logic and higher reasoning focused forward near the dextrous limbs, but the visual cortex near the back, on the other side of the language cortex. This means that actual perception and understanding of images only occurrs with notable delay, after extensive postproceessing looking for familiar objects and semaphore words, as the signal passes through the language cortex. This gives the Serpents a rather abstracted way of understanding the world, and a strong need to touch and handle new objects in order to truly understand them; a common shock for foreigners.

The high complexity and flexibility of the Serpents' bodies make them the most intricate and beautiful dancers in the known universe.

CONCEPT ART: