@renmarrr 's Batrons. A couple WIP pics under the cut

@nurtleteckk 's Eschatos. Random WIPs, ramblings, and more pictures under cut

This made me genuinely lol I have no idea how you were able to remember it

I love thinking about...Neuston...her personal life... I have been thinking she grew up on a homestead and wanted to be a vet when she was younger because she spent a lot of time around animals but found that training and education were just too intensive so she went into research instead. She started out analyzing afterlife pool microfauna as part of a more comprehensive study on how the afterlife itself works (I like to think of it as a living megaorganism) but became quickly infatuated with wayne larvae who started spreading through the pools. Something about they're able to dig into places they shouldn’t be digging into and making sort of gall things in its flesh and siphon nutrients from it, allowing them to grow super fast and spread. Neuston piloted research about it but in the politically volatile region of Foglast, funding went dry and things had to slow down significantly.

Getting a job offer as manager for a lab specializing in Wayne research was so absurdly specific to her interests that she thought it was a joke. I think she ended up getting a visit from one of Odozeir's advisors to confirm the offer's authenticity, which she was wary of, but after some days of consideration she eventually agreed.

The caveat of the lab was of course that Odozeir wanted soldiers. Neuston's job was to conduct research to 1) establish a self-sustaining colony and 2) make them strong and obedient. Which involves an intimate understanding of wayne life cycle, behavior, and physiology, things that only she was really looking into before as part of actual research. Her first little while was spent esablishing a baseline for development, mostly progression of body structures and hormone levels, which was when most of her more egregious studies were performed. Which quickly led to burnout and disgust with her job.

She quickly learns that she is pretty much irreplaceable, though, especially with growing seniority. She's very dilligent with reports, so it wouldn't be impossible for someone to pick up her work if she got fired, but her expertise is finely tuned to this very specific field of study, and it would take years to gain the amount of knowledge about your average wayne to the degree that she has. So the superiors begrudginly allow her to veer away from the borderline torture they were expecting for quick results and she starts doing stuff her way. Which doesn't make it happy fun times for the waynes but it makes things much better for them and for her.

One of her biggest problems ends up being Enan. He was selected by her for a maturation trial after demonstrating higher (though not by much) intelligence and generally having a good attitude about things. The protocal takes a much greater toll on him than she expected and it generally does not go well. In fact it goes quite badly. I'm conflicted on some of the specifics but... I know that it tears her apart. She likes waynes very much, she wouldn't have dedicated so much of her life to them if she didn't, but she doesn't really care much about the individuals. She can't afford to get attached to them. Enan is different though. She expects him to be around for a while so she has to be friendly with him (which sounds like its a chore, it's not, she does like him). When things start going bad she doesn't know wtf to do, both because she didn't expect the bad reactions and because she expected him to take it gracefully and he doesn't at all. Everyone gets angry and suffers.