Jellyfish_honk

Wait there’s something else I can think about. Valerie my Moses-Jesus-Prometheus-Babeygirl. Valerie the Creature. Valerie,,,,,,,,,my crazy vampire prophet who died gazing at the promised land ughshhghwhajhwuueueuwuue why is Echopraxia so short I want more Valerie I want more unethical Vampire medical experiments details included I want a deep dive into Vampire epilepsy and the mechanism by which Anti-Euclideans suppress their pattern recognition abilities I need to know the long term vampiric health consequences of being raised in labs and eating human-designed diets + protocadherin supplements I need to know the neurological and morphological implications of being turned into a vampire as a small child V.S. Being turned as an adult I want to know about vampire-specific health issues that in-world humans were never motivated enough to do research on Please Peter Watts Please Omniscience please

In a perfect world Echopraxia includes another 200 or so interludes where Sengupta discovers more Valerie-related videos, classified documents, experiment logs, etc and shares them with Brüks. Some of those interludes would be 5000 words long and have excerpts from papers written on Valerie. Brüks would look through results from Valerie’s SPECT scans and cardiac enzyme panels from different points in her captivity and do his little “oh my god we tortured her” thing. And both of them would end up having horrific biblically themed sleep paralysis episodes with Val as the sleep paralysis demon because they got subliminally programmed from watching too much Valerie content

I feel like infant Wattsian vampires probably vasodilate more frequently than adult/subadult ones. Expecting humans to just raise creepy corpse-cold infants/toddlers with offputting reflexes without resorting to fatal neglect or infanticide seems to be an unreliable reproductive strategy. If people react to kid vampires the way they react to adult vampires (EWW WTF IS WRONG WITH HER WE NEED TO KILL HER WITH FIRE + PLEASE GOD DONT LET HER NOTICE ME I NEED TO STAY AS FAR FROM THIS MONSTER AS POSSIBLE) I doubt the whole cuckoo thing could work. A more human appearance in early life helps with parent-child bonding (one sided) and makes it more likely for the humans to invest energy and resources in the survival of their vampire kids. By the age of 5 or 6 though I think the vampire traits would become quite obvious (but can still be rationalized away by a concerned mother). Anyway. Here’s little Val practicing her apex predator skills. Her mom is Janna from Orientation Day.

Time to study anatomy because I have no idea how to draw a skeletal creature with highly defined steel cable muscles and the vampires deserve better (👈prey mentality)

And yes that is the “Sit. Please.” scene from Orientation Day,,,,im obsessed with it im obsessed with Valerie

I imagine Val to be around 205 cm maybe even 210 cm and Jukka to be around 200cm.

命不够硬是无法做Brüks的朋友的，你看连Valerie都被克死了

Anyway I feel like she and Jukka’s lives as humans must have been quite tragic for them to end up as vampires. I found it kinda interesting that when Jim Moore scolds Brüks in private about disrespecting zombies he shows a lot of compassion/empathy for people forced to become military zombies by their circumstances yet none of the compassion is extended to vampires. No one in either book wonders about the vampires’ former lives or where they were sourced from. I kinda like that. Just a big sinister human rights-violating elephant in the room. Many such creatures in the firefall universe.

our vampires are like,, the christiest christ figures that ever christed,,,manic pixie dream christs,,,,died and left their human companions christing in their wake,,,truly imagine christ on the cross stuff,,,

Valerie doodles

I incorporated some green elements into Lianna’s design to show that she’s with the Bicamerals although I think the book makes it pretty obvious that they don’t have a dress code and she probably just looks like a regular person (whatever that means in the firefall universe). I have nothing to say about Sengupta except that drawing random shit on her ears has been a life affirming experience

She’s wearing someone else’s suit of course hehe ( ^ω^ ) I loooooove how Val keeps stealing other ppl’s skins (so to speak) in both Orientation Day and Echopraxia. She’s so delightfully creepy

A Jukka drawing from like a month ago. I started this with some sort of ID card design in mind and gradually realized that they probably don’t need primitive ID photos like this in the Firefall universe

And the people that are scared and attracted to Valerie