For my art

I am cringe and free. Wall of text below, and a bonus silly as a prize if you make it to the end.

-Rio is pretty young to have completed her nursing degree, and that’s because she went straight from high school to college with maybe a week or so in between. Rather than feeling proud of that, Rio feels more like the time she was supposed to spend learning how to be a functional adult was taken over by a career she didn’t exactly choose for herself. She doesn’t hate nursing, but sometimes she wonders how life would have turned out had her future not been decided for her by the grandmother who raised Rio with high expectations and little tolerance for anything but success. Who up making fish rn. She was the type of grandma to forbid video games and television because it “rotted your brain” and “wasted time you could be spending at a job or studying for your next job”.

-Rio has a retired racing greyhound named Sock Puppet. He stays with Rio’s dad whenever Rio is traveling for work. She did not intend to name him Sock Puppet, it was supposed to be a nickname, she wanted to name him Shadow since he’s black with white spotting on his chest/neck but he refused to respond to anything but Sock Puppet so it stuck. Rio calls him “Sock” for short. He’s a shy, introverted dog who prefers the company of his people and gets nervous easily, but he’s incredibly sweet, quiet and gentle. He had separation anxiety on the more severe side at first but he’s gotten a lot better about it. He’s got some odd behaviors as a result of spending his entire prior life in a kennel and then a race track, such as swatting at toys with his paws like a cat because he doesn’t know how to play with them properly, Rio just finds it endearing.

-Rio has so far been on at least one full voyage while under the Pony Express’s employ. By the time the Pony Express goes under, Rio had already built rapport with the crew she was traveling with, and followed them to another company which also dealt in space travel, but in transporting people between space colonies and not cargo, serving as the on ship nurse. She likes her new job a lot better, it’s not perfect but she feels valued and like her work matters there at least. This company also likes to cut corners, but nowhere near as bad as the Pony Express. At least this company installed locks in the sleeping cabins.

-When the Tulpar is declared missing, and especially after the company declares bankruptcy, Rio joins demonstrations calling for the Pony Express to take accountability for their missing crew. She was held back by her fear of losing her employment at the time but when that fear was made real, she stopped caring because the worst had already happened. Realistically in the corporate hellscape that is the Mouthwashing universe, protestors stand no chance against a mega corporation like the Pony Express and with the company already basically defunct, theres little that can be done legally. However, the disappearance of the Tulpar has badly damaged the reputation of the Pony Express and cast doubt on any companies considering working with their prior benefactors and shareholders. Rio’s new captain isn’t exactly thrilled with Rio’s choice to protest publicly, because he’s aware of the risks involved with locking horns with an unethical business and concerns about retaliation, but he doesn’t really have it in him to stop her because he’s seen first hand just how much the Pony Express does not deserve to be shielded. He also isn’t as keen to voice his disapproval now that the company is bankrupt and less likely to be able to afford to hire private investigators and lawyers.

-Post Pony Express employment, Rio gains back a lot of the weight she lost due to stress and malnourishment and makes a lot of progress in improving her sleep schedule. Rio’s dad is very happy to see the dark circles under her eyes disappear, and Rio smiles more often. At her new job, Rio has a UV lamp in her private cabin on ship to simulate sunlight, which helps tremendously with a consistent sleep schedule and overall improved mood. She never wants to repeat that experience with constant sleeplessness and agitation like she did working for the Pony Express. Amazing the improvements that happen when a company doesn’t enforce a limit on how long you can sleep. A silly for your troubles.

I adore them, minus Jimmy. I find him intriguing in the way I want to study him under a microscope, everyone in the crew except for him deserved so much better. (Mainly because it’s his goddamned fault everything bad in the story happened, minus the Pony Express dissolving. That’s like the one thing he didn’t do.) I did my best to make their facial shapes different and remain true to their design’s while adding my own touch. Btw yes, Curly has long blonde eyelashes, his pre crash character model has them and you think I’m NOT gonna add them to my design of him? Foolish.

-Helhe is pronounced “Hel-heh”

-She is about the same height as your average middler and while Helhe is half mountaineer, the only mountaineer traits she displays are her short tail, her longer coat length overall, and her grey coat color.

-Helhe has XY sex reversal syndrome, ie, she outwardly appears as a mare but has the chromosome combination of a stallion. Helhe and everyone else have no idea because Helhe is saphic, has never tried to conceive a foal and for the most part she looks like a standard female swordbearer. These characters have no access to medical care or testing thus have no way of finding this information out, so to Helhe she’s just atypical from most mares and she has no idea why. She can understand stallions when they speak to her but they cannot understand her, and like Chiro she sounds muffled but understandable to mares. Helhe and Chiro initially bonded over being able to understand each other clearly in a world full of swordbearers who do not.

-Helhe was born in a small herd of mountaineers, with her mother being a full mountaineer and her father being a wandering middler rogue. Until she left, she was the tallest member of the herd and thus stuck out like a sore thumb, and Helhe was not treated particularly well by the others in her herd who held less than savory views of outsiders, which is why she left with Chiro.

-Unlike Chiro, Helhe is more involved in social life in the Matriarch’s herd. She still lives on the fringes of the group, but is more present and involved with their affairs and she gently encourages Chiro to take part every once in a while. She acts a lot like the bridge between Chiro, who is much more used to being solitary, and the other mares of the herd who aren’t sure themselves how to close the gap between them.

-Helhe hates conflict and violence, strongly preferring to run rather than to fight, and she’s not good at fighting as a result. If she’s forced to fight, her kicks are clumsily aimed, she’s more likely to beat you over the head with her sword than she is to stab or cut you and she’ll only fight as much as needed to escape the initial altercation. Helhe struggles to summon the willpower needed to actually land a blow on an enemy that actually hurts, mainly because growing up she took a lot of hard knocks from her herd and the memory of how it felt sticks with her and makes her hesitant to hurt others. The one thing that can motivate her to fight is if she is fighting in defense of someone else, but when it comes to her, she’ll hang her head and take the hits because she genuinely has an easier time taking the mistreatment than she does fighting back. She’s become more confident with Chiro’s support, but she has a long way to go.

-Growing up an outcast and not well liked, Helhe’s already present during foal-hood speech impediment was exacerbated by being isolated and only rarely speaking, and even then only in single word sentences. Helhe feels very self conscious about it, which causes her to be hesitant to speak to others which in turn feeds into the impediment because it worsens when she’s anxious or stressed. While it has improved since she first met Chiro, Helhe still stutters, hangs onto syllables in words too long, repeats words and generally experiences cluttered speech. The only ones Helhe barely stutters around are her younger half brother and Chiro.

-Helhe’s favorite foods are lichen and lingonberries, both of which were common where she was from., especially reindeer lichen. They’re less common outside of the mountains and craggy woodlands her herd claimed as their territory, and she is very giddy when she actually finds some.

Started reading Songdog’s comic Swordbearers and I thought the world building was super interesting so I decided to try my hand at designing a swordbearer of my own. Balancing my more complex character designs with Songdog’s more simplistic character design schemes (No more than three colors in the body, solid colored eyes, hooves match the darkest fur color) was challenging but super fun, designing characters with other peoples design guidelines is fun af provided the guidelines leave room for unique, individual characters who can be recognized in a crowd. If I didn’t have concerns about my phone’s storage I’d make a CF account so I could interact more directly with authors or other audience members but alas.

character notes;

-Chiro is pronounced “Kai-roh”, the CH at the start of her name pronounced like a hard c like in the words “loch” or “chimera” .

-Chiro is around the same height as a mountaineer, and a fully mixed middler who doesn’t really resemble any specific type. Her parents were middlers and their parents were as well.

-She would probably live in the Matriarch’s herd but on the fringes of it, basically right on the edge of being a loner but still in close enough proximity to be considered part of the herd. Chiro doesn’t know how to socialize properly and thus wouldn’t be super popular, but if a wolf attacked the herd Chiro wouldn’t hesitate to plant herself in it’s way and attack. That’s actually how she got her leg scar, a coyote went for a foal in her birth herd, Chiro got in the way and took the bite and then she grabbed the coyote by the neck and shook/stomped it to death.

-Like Bruxly, Chiro can understand other mares but they sound muffled. The speech barrier has resulted in Chiro becoming aloof and very introverted as she’s come to associate social interaction with conflict. She could understand Wik, or individuals like him, very clearly, but swordbearers like him are in the minority. If she’s not acting standoffish, she’s not really sure how to behave, so she has two modes of behavior; Defensive aggression and painful awkwardness.

-While the standard for swordbearers (or any equine) is to tend towards flight and not fight, if Chiro feels like she cannot outrun a predator (or aggressive swordbearer), or if she feels like she has a good chance of winning, Chiro will absolutely stand her ground. She tends to fight more like a real horse than a unicorn, favoring biting and kicking to clashing swords or shoving matches. It’s a little different with stallions, if a stallion approaches too quickly with obvious intentions to partner before even trying to introduce himself she’ll try and run or keep her back end facing him so her sword is as far from his reach as possible and will kick and squeal until he either leaves, gets physical, or the commotion attracts the attention of another more physically imposing mare. Her goal is to either stay out of range of the “song trance” or if the stallion gets too close, interrupt it. Physically, if need be.

-If you can get Chiro to be comfortable in your presence, she’s much more meek than you would expect when she’s not being outwardly aggressive. She prefers to listen while another talks, only adding her own thoughts if she feels it’s important, or if she’s directly asked. Sometimes other’s take it as her not wanting to be around them, but Chiro opts to be quiet more often than not for fear of saying something offensive, but in doing so she still offends others. Pain and suffering on planet earth.

-Chiro’s favorite food is water weeds and catmint. She enjoys eating catmint but she also enjoys the scent of it and will roll in a patch of it if she finds it, so she often has the scent of catmint clinging to her coat. Because she also likes to eat water weeds she also often smells like mud and pond water, which is the more common scenario because ponds and creeks are easier to find than patches of catmint. In the summer and late spring she also likes to stand in/submerge herself to the shoulders in a body of water to stay cool.

Name; Green Eyes

Species; Eastern coyote

Mother; Sleet

Father; Storm Cloud

Siblings; Thorn (Sister) Pebble, Twig (Sisters, deceased) Sky (Brother, deceased)

Partner; Senna

Children; Gorge, Aspen, Raven, Reed, Stone, Snow, River, Scrabble (Sons), Scree, Splinter, Willow, Lark, Gold, Dawn, Creek, Needle, Dark (Daughters)

Pine (Son, deceased)

Bio; Green Eyes’ father died shortly before his birth, and that set Green Eyes and his siblings up for a very hard childhood. Sleet did her best on her own, but unable to defend a territory and bring down large kills, Green Eyes’ littermates, except for Thorn, succumbed to starvation and illness. Sleet followed them soon after. Thorn and Green Eyes stayed together for a year or so until Green Eyes and Senna met at around two years old. She went her own way to establish her own territory once they got settled and revealed they were expecting, though they keep in touch. Four years later, after much struggle and strife, Green Eyes and Senna have had several litters with many children, and are currently tending to their newest litter. Green Eyes remembers the hardship he lived through when he was young, and is motivated to give his family a better, safer and happier life than he and his siblings had. The years have left both Green Eyes and his partner with scars, physical and mental, but their love for each other and their children is all the stronger for it.

Name; Senna

Species; Western coyote

Mother; Sunset

Father; Prickly Pear

Siblings; Sandstorm, Tumbleweed (Sisters) Twister, Drought, Cloudburst (Brothers)

Partner; Green Eyes

Children; Gorge, Aspen, Raven, Reed, Stone, Snow, River, Scrabble (Sons), Scree, Splinter, Willow, Lark, Gold, Dawn, Creek, Needle, Dark (Daughters)

Pine (Son, deceased)

Bio; Senna had a very average upbringing and two doting parents who gave their pups the best childhood a coyote could ask for. Senna leaving her parents wasn’t exactly her choice though, her parents territory was taken over by a rival pack, and she and her siblings were chased off and threatened with death should they return. Senna spent a lot of time traveling from the dusty, arid shrublands where she grew up in order to reach the plains and sparse woodlands of Missouri, where she met Green Eyes. They clicked together almost instantly and before long, they were expecting their first litter. After being alone for so long and struggling to hunt and defend herself, she was thrilled to have her own family again, though she soon realized motherhood would put her in harms way in ways she hadn’t imagined. The years have forged Senna into a tough, dependable leader and mother, and while defending her family may have cost one of her ears, she’d gladly lose the other, and more, if things it came to it. She fought hard for her home, her partner and her children, and she’d die before anyone took that from her again.

Name; Barbwire

Species; Domestic cat

Mother; Smoke Plume

Father; Lilac

Siblings; Oilslick (Brother) Smokestack (Brother)

I’ve launched a fundraising campaign with the goal of raising $40,000 to relocate my family to a safer place where my children can grow up in peace and have a chance at a brighter future. 🕊️🇵🇸

Unfortunately, my previous fundraising efforts were abruptly halted when my account was terminated without explanation. However, I remain determined to keep fighting for my family’s safety and well-being. 🫶

If you could take a moment to read our story, consider donating, or simply share our campaign with others, it would make an incredible difference. Every act of kindness, no matter how small, brings us one step closer to safety and a new beginning. 🙏

Thank you for your time, compassion, and support. ❤

https://gofund.me/fd1faea2 🔗

I’m impoverished with no form of income and in no position to help myself, and I have no idea how much traction this will even get but anyone who sees this and IS in a position to help, please do. The border to Egypt is currently closed but when it opens, Mohammed and many like him will need all the funds they can get, as Egypt charges a very large sum of money to cross from Palestine. Allah protect you and your loved ones in these frightening times, Mohammed.

Name; Descent

Species; Long eared owl

Mother; Gale

Father; Updraft

Siblings; Ascent (Sister) Incline (Brother)