hey hey dont cry. shh. fishie

regularly scheduled under-the-cut-rambling-time lol. it has occurred to me that if i’m doing this as a job i should probably draw something Other than blorbos every once in a while (tragic), so i’m trying to go back to oc ideas i’ve had floating around in my head for a while! i always get like single-sentence premises for characters & a general design, but once it gets to lore i get completely lost & end up just abandoning it. had the realization recently that i can work with this - i always get nervous buying merch of characters i don’t really know that well, but if there’s not much to know to begin with that’s not a problem. my job rn is just to make cute charms & stuff, and assuming other people out there are like me it’s probably for the best that they don’t have pages & pages of lore

i has also occurred to me that, again, if i am doing this As A Job, i should probably try a little harder to get my name out there . however that is scary and i don’t wanna. tumblr u will always be my one and only home the other social medias could never take me … so the current idea, just to start with, is to have “branded” merch with the ocs. please note that i hate every single word i am using here oh my GOD the corporatespeak is getting to me someone save me. anyways yeah point is fanart won’t have any sort of name on it, not even my signature is on any of the scp charms or anything i’ve been making (though the versions of the images for posting do have it!), & oc charms/stickers/etc will have that little logo that shows up in the lantern here. whether anybody actually buys this stuff remains up in the air but whatever maybe someone out there will think they’re cute LMAO

anyways. augh. sorry i’ve been talking so much about Work Stuff lately, it’s just a big change in life & a lot to think abt & for some reason i feel compelled to express my thought processes through it all lol. for anyone who’s read this far, here’s a little treat - the original design sketch of this guy from january of 2024! crazy that that’s getting close to 3 years ago now lmao

a lot of this is obviously really cluttered & not that good but i still think i was cooking with the “lantern on the tail” thing. i still think he does that he just alternates depending on how much he needs a free hand

999 in the original article is described as being very amoeba-like, and whatever the fuck the fire suppression department did to it resulted in a slime mold (which is basically a colony of amoebas), so that’s the direction i went with! specifically, it’s based on Dictyostelium discoideum, a slime mold capable of forming a little “slug” (which is also how 999 moves here - there’s a video of it on the wikipedia article!) & which is also useful in researching all sorts of human diseases, including cancer, arthritis, & asthma. there’s tons of other cool things about these guys, seriously read that wikipedia article they even engage in farming of their microscopic food it’s crazy. more importantly than any of that though, the species name has the word “disco” in it so clearly it’s perfect. YES that’s where the little rainbow details come from WHAT ABOUT IT

there’s actually no mention in the original article of 999 having a face, but the little :3 is so iconic i couldn’t just leave it out (and i can’t lie i am also a personal enjoyer of it. 999 :3 is real and true to me), so i had to get a little creative with that. i thought it would be cute if the face was something 999 did intentionally for mimicry reasons and/or to seem less threatening (i feel like we are all vastly overlooking the fact that this is a giant 6ft wide gelatinous goop pile), so the face is made out of a couple of buttons & a piece of string it holds onto - probably leftovers from a time foundation employees tried doing arts & crafts with it. it’ll shift the mouth around a little depending on how it’s feeling, like being sad if something gets hurt while playing, but generally it’s in :3 mode