#flawseer

I don’t know how it happened exactly, maybe I couldn’t ride the wind current well enough with my weakened wing muscles and took an odd turn, but I somehow got myself tangled up in a large creeping vine in the royal garden. This was a problem because you can’t cut down plants in there without a good reason or the gardeners will get real scary mad at you. I suggested that Jambu should wake a gardener or get a healer to help out, but I guess he wanted to impress me and tried to untie me from the vine himself. Long story short, he also got tangled up in it and we were stuck together. So with nothing else to do we just kind of... talked for the entire time. About ourselves, about what kind of fruit we like, and about how Liana can be a real tail face sometimes. I accidentally admitted that I thought his pink color was really pretty, and that made him even more pink and prettier. It was a really sweet time, even though it took them two days to find and free us.”

Arctic

by @americanman18

PRINCE ARCTIC: “You think Animus magic has restrictions?” Arctic barks a brusk, mirthless laugh. “Animus is a savage beast that stalks you wherever you go. It leaves no trail, has no face for you to recognize it by, and no form you can make bleed. It never tires. It just hunts, day after day, year after year, preying on your good intentions and desires until it slays you with your own claws. No, there are no 'restrictions'. The malice of magic is bottomless and infinitely vast. What you call a ‘restriction’ is likely merely a whim of one Animus user in history who placed it there. Maybe they were trying to tame the beast, or it was a foolhardy prank. But magic never stays still. Another short-sighted malcontent will find some way to unchain it again, and then it will devour the world and every creature within it. This is why magic should have never left the talons of Icewings. We instinctively understand the danger this power poses when allowed to run rampant unchecked. The other tribes are too young and immature to know that danger. They treat it like a toy, or worse yet, a crown. There will come a day when those who think they command Animus magic are made to surrender the privilege of that delusion, once their folly unravels everything. I pray I won’t be alive to see that day.”

Flawseer (that's me)

by @captain-crowfish

For me, my comfort meal is cow, can’t ever go wrong with cow! So I’d try to find the closest thing to a cow in each region. Dromedary for Sandwings, manatee for Seawings... Skywings, uh, mountain goat? Yak for Icewings... Rainwings make this more difficult. I don’t know which fruit is the most cow-like. Maybe some kind of big melon or gourd. No wait, there’s a thing called a ‘milk fruit’! I read about it! That’s kind of cow-themed, yeah? I think it’s sometimes called “star apple” too, so it would also work for the Nightwings, being night-themed and all that. Wow, I didn’t think I would figure this out so easily, ha ha! Now how quickly can we do this?”

Flawseer (that's me)

by @chickenclip

FLAWSEER: “I consider myself rather omnivorous, so I can work with either of those options. I’ll eat anything as long as it is fresh. For instance, I don’t understand what insanity Battlewinner was putting her subjects through or what that bathbound cretin was trying to accomplish. But if I had to pin down a personal preference, prepared is the way to go. You can’t beat a decent roast on a bed of fluffy rice. If you want to know more about food, you should come over! I make a rather mean river fish stew.” FLAME: “’Mean’, yeah, you can say that again! Don’t come over, he puts blasted peas in it! It’s mental!” FLAWSEER: “Peas are good for you, Flame. Their taste is fairly neutral and there’s some good minerals in there.” FLAME: “Bleagh!! They’re little bombs of mush that ruin everything! Like tiny, globby, clumpy explosions all over my mouth! If I wanted minerals, I’d rather lick rocks for two hours! Little green wastes of plant matter, why’s everything small and green so annoying!?” Flawseer laughs. FLAME: “What?” FLAWSEER: “Nothing, just, your mother said something very much like that to me a few years ago. The pea vendetta must run in the family. All right, all right, I’ll leave the peas out next time. But we’ll have to find something else to replace them with. How do you feel about string beans?” FLAME: “I’m leaving!!”

Toad?

by @xdugatheskelex

FATESPEAKER: “I’m really sorry! I’ve looked everywhere but I can’t find any dragon by that name. Sadly, that means we will have to move on to—“

NEWT: “I’ll take it from here!” FATESPEAKER: “Wha— Newt?” NEWT: “Yes, this is a food question so I’m taking over! You can go, shoo, git! Go suck on a bug, nightcrawler.”

“BOY! Where do I even START!?! Everyone needs to eat to survive, allegedly, that’s what they tell us. You wouldn’t guess that from the kinds of atrocities some dragons put into their mouths! Like, how about Icewings, the WORST of the bunch by far! They don’t do ANYTHING; no cooking, no seasoning, no sides... Just meat! Raw meat, raw, raw, raw, meat, meat, meat, all the time, every time! You go to some creature that calls itself an “Icewing Gourmet” and they serve you the same uncooked meat slop you get in every other joint! And then they look at how thoroughly unimpressed you are and say “The artistry is in the presentation. Look how finely sliced the walrus liver is, it’s like paper thin.” Why don’t you go munch on some scrolls then if you want to eat paper that much?? Unbelievable!!

And then, and THEN the worst part is the other dragons who go apologizing on their behalf! Like, just last week in cultural exchange class, they try to tell me “nweehh, it’s because Icewings have delicate palates, they taste everything much more intensely than we do.” And that’s why everything has to be bland over there? Well, Sunshine, zero times a hundred is still zero! Bland is bland no matter how strong you taste it! I hear the mewling of the Icewing I bunk with. “Ooo, my sensitive tummy, don’t put the bell pepper in there it’s too spicy.” Since when on this moonforsaken earth is bell pepper spicy, you blue ninny!? I swear you wouldn’t believe how hard our people struggled against these jokers in the war! Me? I would have put one well-seasoned steak in the middle of the battlefield and all those lily-livered snowbacks would’ve immediately wet their tails and flown back to their icicle hole!

And then there’s Skywings! Moons alive, I’ve had to hold my tongue so much since we were allied with them. They’re better than Icewings, but not by much. Everything is overdone, charred black!! You watch them slow-roast a pheasant to perfection, juices dripping, skin crisp and golden, gorgeous... I weep. And then they go “nope!” and toss the whole thing back in the furnace at full blast! GAAHH!! You wanna eat char, why don’t you just shove a talonful of coal in your red gob and spare the rest of us the heartache!? Sandwings, they make more sense. Everything is seasoned at least, a bit strongly some times but you can still eat it. They really like to put things on sticks, lizard on sticks, veggies on sticks, roast cactus on sticks. Where do they get the sticks? You’d think the reason they build their houses out of sand is because they used all the blasted wood for their sticks! Of course don’t offer them a good, hearty Mudwing stew. It freaks them out. They’re like “Oh no, I have to watch my fluid intake, this will make me sick.” UGH!! What kind of evolutionary dead end creature is allergic to WATER!??

Nightwings, I’m not even going to dignify their crimes against taste with a response. Rainwings, I don’t have much of an opinion on. They’ve got good ingredients, but everything they make is too sweet. It’s just fruit all the time. You can tell when you go to a food place where there’s a Rainwing in the kitchen because the whole menu will be stuffed with apples. Roast goat with apples. Spicy risotto with apples and apples. Grilled apple, with apple slice garnish, filled with paste of apple. It’s the apple-ocalypse! And Seawings, they’re all about that raw fish nonsense! Try making a nice fishy stew with some potatoes and carrots, and they’ll blink at you all uppity and call you a double-ended spoon or something.

No, what I’ve learned from interacting with all these guys in here at this school place is this; The world, every tribe’s territory, is full of beautiful, scrumptuous ingredients... and half-wits who RUIN them! We should all just agree that Mudwings had it right, that we’ve written the scroll on what good and decent taste is. I don’t think we should rule the world, but we do need to liberate its food and tell the other tribes what to eat! If just to protect them from their own impulses! Like, just the other day one of them new guys, what, Silkywings? I saw them try make Colonel Buttonbush’s famous gourd layer stew. Probably read about it in some scroll and went “ooo this looks fun, I’m gonna make this really historically treasured Mudwing dish, and I’m not gonna read up on any of its cultural significance.” And then she went and put blasted sumac berries in it!

SUMAC BERRIES! That’s a Sandwing thing! Mudwings didn’t have access to sumac berries until the 4300s! Colonel Buttonbush made that stew for his troops in preparation for battle in the Saffron War, a war our people fought AGAINST the Sand Kingdom!! I swear I almost leapt across the table and dunked her head in the spice bowl! There need to be laws against this kind of assault on my— Hey, no!”

“No, put me down! I’m not done! NOT DONE!!! This isn’t over, arrghh!!!”

_____

What ultimately decides a dragon’s color is probably much more complicated than this, but for this example let’s examine two genetic traits: Pigment color, and pigment density. The denser the pigmentation of a dragon's scales, the more opaque the final color.

For Sandwings, their pigment color is usually yellow. They have low pigment density, so the yellow is muted and comes out looking pale. Some Sandwings have so little pigment they are almost white.

For Nightwings, their pigment color tends to be black. Their pigment count is usually very high, resulting in heavy shades of dark gray or black.

If these two dragons mate, their offspring will inherit a combination of these traits. For instance: The pigment color may be yellow like a Sandwing, but their pigment density is unusually high due to the Nightwing influence.

This makes the usual pale yellow appear very saturated and almost golden. That’s why Sunny is a brilliant beacon of saturated light: She has her mother's color but with her father's pigment count.

Part about Sunny is over.

Now, if we switch those traits around, we might end up with the inverse instead: Black pigment color like a Nightwing, but a much lower pigment density like a Sandwing.

This weakens the black color and makes it appear like a dull gray. That’s how you get the general basis of Flawseer’s color scheme.

If you’re interested in my OC, I actually received a few more questions about him that I’m probably going to answer in-character... as soon as I find out a way to do that without putting people to sleep. For now, there is a ref sheet attached to this post.

As for lore, uhm, part of me shudders to attach this to the main blog where people might actually read it because it’s rather daft, but there is a post on my side blog where I talk a bit about the inception of the character and what he is about.

About the you/they thing: It’s probably most appropriate to talk about Flawseer (the dragon) in the third person, unless speaking to him in-character. He’s sort of this blog’s mascot, but an entity separate from me as a blogger (even though I’m also calling myself “Flawseer” here and sometimes speak through him, confusingly). He is a much better and more graceful person than I am, so I can’t exactly claim to be him.