Flowing

Astrologers helped design the study

No one did better than random chance, even though they only included people in the study who are experienced with astrology and stated that they expect themselves to do better than random chance

They gave every astrologer a set of 50 things about a person and 5 birth charts to choose from. They weren’t even coming up with the chart themselves!

After taking the test, most thought they nailed it. Zero out of 152 did better than 5 out of 12. None nailed it

Astrologers who rated themselves highly experienced (“world class experts”) did the same or worse as those who said they have limited experience. Both performed the same as random chance

Man it is so weird looking at their younger selves. The whole time I was drawing this I was like "Well that's not what they look like, these kids need to figure themselves out". Anyway.

Spearmaster and Hunter were a decent bit more dour and serious when they were younger. They were also sometimes dressed for special occasions by their iterator parents. They are both significantly more chill now. (Some of this is stuff I want want to cover in Undergrowth, but I can at least talk about it for now.)

As a kid, Hunter was mad as fuck at everything all the time. She was a sickly little boy who got into fights with everyone, and everyone got into fights with her. Her sickness was to her superstitious community an ill omen, so she was ostracized. When she became associated with NSH, to her community that just meant she was the metal god's thrall, so they treated her with even more suspicion. Then one day she was a girl in a community that was significantly less accepting of gender variance and, well. You see the pattern.

She was an angry kid who carved a place for herself in the world until she didn't have to anymore, with her fists and her words. Nowadays she is given a lot more respect and understanding, but it took a lot of punching, apologizing, and 3am talks to get there. When people wanted to give Hunter shit, she had to kick it out of them before they'd listen when she told them she didn't want to fight all the time, that she wasn't the metal god's thrall, that she just wants to relax and be a girl. She got herself figured out, and now her old colony knows too. Now she doesn't have a reason to be so angry.

Spearmaster was much more docile as a child who saw the world with a kind of curious innocence, but that started to change as he came of age to run deliveries for Seven Red Suns. As a purposed organism who could only feed by killing also undergoing puberty, he struggled to reconcile with his new, destructive role and changing body. He cut swathes through local ecosystems wherever he went and did very real damage wherever he was sent. His strange features alienated him from people he met on deliveries, while his body started to alienate him from himself. His greatest skill was killing. He began to lose weight and ached constantly. He concluded that his alienation and pain must be because he was a tool, a creature created for a purpose and not for a comfortable life.

When Hunter began to transition, it awoke something in Spearmaster, a sort of realization like, "Oh, so we can just do whatever we want" and had his own gender revelation. It was largely through observing Hunter that he started to trying to reassess his place in the world. He started to take care of himself, fed himself properly and gained weight. He started to figure out not what he was made to be, but who he wanted to be, how to live in deeper understanding other creatures, how he could be himself in a way that didn't necessitate destroying the world around him.

So yeah, that's an overview of Hunter and Spearmaster's transition. They're much more relaxed and a lot wiser now, and they're the sort of people everyone counts on to have a handle on the situation and know what's up, but they didn't start that way.

Also here's the uncolored version because I just think it looks really nice.