Dragons (and other fantastic creatures) Described

“Trouble sleeping?” one alien asks.

“You too?” another asks in return.

In the distance, vast fields drenched in eerie light can be seen. Accompanying text explains where and what this place is.

“The Kiss is a mutagenic garden where the sun never sets, and plants never stop growing. It’s an agricultural miracle that feeds half of the Temple States.

You don’t want the Kiss’s light to touch your skin.

Workers live in a ring around the circular borders; venturing into the bright for the day’s work, and returning to the shadows when it’s done.”

“Cataloging artifacts. No two artifacts are alike. One can only make educated guesses about their properties by looking at them. Figuring out what an artifact does takes patience, and careful documentation. Only when its characteristics have been thoroughly explored is an artifact safe to use.

First, the artificer gives the artifact an exploratory wash of energy. They look for weak points, where energy can be applied to the artifact.

Next, they begin to carefully explore these inputs. Gently prod them with energy-what do they do? What effects do they have?

Each node gets marked with a ceramic tack, and a tag. Each one has its properties recorded. If there’s something exceptional about the artifact, it might be marked down for more research. But most of the time, it goes into storage.

Most artifacts are junk, with properties that are too weak or too esoteric to be useful. The federal archives are full of artifacts that produce a little light, a little heat, or give the user a strange muddled feeling in the pit of their stomach. These will sit in storage, or be ground down for components and ceramic dust.

More useful artifacts have strong, specific effects. They produce a clear feeling-satisfaction, fear, anxiety. They manifest useful physical phenomena, like a cutting torch. These will be issued to Federal artificers, sold, or donated to Families as a gesture of goodwill.”

Griffon sketch

Messy griffon sketch. TBH the wings were a tacked on afterthought, so they don't quite look right, but that's okay

Griffon, with cat anatomy for once

BEHOLD

An international research team has discovered that the fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra) is biofluorescent. A study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science shows that the salamander reflects turquoise light when exposed to ultraviolet radiation. This phenomenon had gone unnoticed until now, despite decades of research on this amphibian species.