Some surprise art today, but not by me - this phenomenal painting is by my good good friend Wolf-Rayet, who posts all kinds of other amazing space art on her tumblr! Go check out her stuff!
She's captured all of these worlds very well - I'm absolutely in love with the texturing here, especially the oft-neglected deserts of pr'Sefone. Perhaps a future story scene must be set here...
Noira followed the others up the path. Each step seemed heavier than it should have been, as though the biting wind had liquified, a frigid molasses swirling around her legs and under her petra coat. The ancient stone of the mountainside broke and crumbled underfoot, worn by months of movement from workers like herself. Her own crewmates trudged just a few yards ahead of her, yet their passage felt wrong, transgressive. Some deep-rooted fragment of her mind recoiled as the overlook drew nearer, as she trailed the others across what felt like forsaken ground.
She risked a glance over her shoulder. Far below, beyond the treacherous cliffs of the shore, Ark Royal loitered upon the restless tide. Its hold yawned open, a great dark maw, force-fed a choking landslide of misshapen slag from the chute above. Noira’s eyes moved upstream along the creaking trough, winding as it bent and warped up the side of the mountain. Ahead of her, just beside the overlook, the chute disappeared over the rim of the pit.
Her heart throbbed in her chest, pounding from exertion in the freezing air, the rhythm quickening as anxiety seeped into her veins. The edge of the mine drew ever nearer, the mechanical din of the pit emerging through the howling wind. Columns of dense black smoke towered over the platform, whipped into unnatural apparitions by the tempest. Her colleagues marched on with renewed fervor. Piercing white floodlights on iron towers cast their omniscient gaze past the dark procession. Inexplicably, Noira felt herself drawn, an icy metal chain gripping her stomach, tugging her towards the looming edge. Her breath came quickly, her footfalls erratic as she willed herself up the short staircase to the overlook.
The clang of her boots resonated through the metal platform. The others had lined up along the railing, overlooking the mine below. Among the faceless bundles of clothing she saw Kori, beaming her warm smile, beckoning Noira excitedly towards the edge. The grip on her core tightened, each footfall a knell ringing out above the cacophony below. She gripped herself tightly, as though to keep her body whole, and at last stepped up to the railing beside her recent friend.
Noira gasped, a choked sound that crystallized in a flurry about her face.
She was staring into the underworld.
Marion Montaigne, he/him, late 40s?
[In which Beverly attempts to draw someone who isn't a young adult femme]
Marion's life story is largely that of his career. Born to a well-off family, Marion has enjoyed some of the highest quality education to be found in the developing society of the Rosa system. Throughout his studies and eventual employment, he's been a part of the sweeping industrial revolution that's catalyzed the recent population boom. Marion's exceptional talent gave him a ringside seat for some of the most influential technological rediscoveries in recent memory.
Somewhere along the way, perhaps at one of the foremost academies of his time, Marion met his (now estranged) husband Elias. A soft-spoken, sage, and artistic type, Elias' personality was a stark foil to Marion's rather more detached nature. Despite several happy years, their union would not last, grounded more in prospects and practicality than in mutual support. Marion still grapples with this failure, finding it difficult to understand exactly what went wrong.
While working part-time aboard Ark Royal as a senior technician, Marion began to mentor Noira. After its destruction cost her a job, and nearly her life, Marion created a position for Noira at the mining company which governs Orus, where she continued to learn under him as an apprentice engineer. However, when she discovers the true nature of their work, their subsequent schism - and her dramatic departure - leaves him questioning his place in the world.
Marion is stoic, reserved, and more than a bit broody. Though his steadfast commitment to his work as an engineer has carried him to success, it has also driven away those who might otherwise have been closer to him. Marion tends to lose himself in his work, finding it an effective distraction from the doubts that often plague him. Though he has trouble showing it, he does form deep attachments to people in his life, making it all the more difficult for him to come to terms with his own antisocial tendencies. The growing revolutionary crisis on Orus will drive him to places he could not have expected in his search for a truer purpose.
Clare Prescot, they/them, ~23
Clare has spent their entire life on Orus, living in the shadows of the bustling interworld spaceport in its capital city. Their family is small but tightly-knit; during times of hardship, Clare has been particularly close with their younger brother Jaqui, looking after him while their parents work long hours in industrial processing.
They've frequently lived in poverty and on the knife edge of survival. Recently their family has finally begun to thrive, and Clare's taken up a job working at a local café, while Jaqui is even able to attend a small trade school. Clare feels a strong pressure to make the most of their newfound opportunities in life, and this comes with its own anxieties.
Clare is friendly, outgoing, and adventurous. They love to try new things, but they rarely stick to a particular habit or interest for very long. They've accumulated a lot of small skills - some mechanical tinkering, artistic abilities, acting, identifying vehicles, picking locks, reading people scarily well - but have never found anything they feel comfortable pursuing as a career. In truth, they avoid settling out of a fear of choosing wrong, thereby locking themselves into a particular pathway forever.
Clare's life experience has shaped them into an emotional rock for the people in their life, particularly Maliyah. Their calm and levelheaded perspective makes an invaluable reference point, when others need grounding or a second opinion. However, this role quietly weighs on Clare, as much as people like Maliyah do their best to return the favor. When tangled in rebellion, Clare seeks comfort from more experienced mentor figures, learning to better balance their own needs with the support they provide to their friends.
Maliyah Toran, she/her, ~24
Maliyah was born on the lush capital world of irid'An, but a political crisis drove her and her parents to Orus when she was very young. There, they started a small glassblowing business, which has given them a fair amount of stability. Maliyah developed strong artistic talent growing up in this environment, and took well to the craft, though she yearns to get out of the inner city and make her own career.
She is an aspiring pilot, having acquired a small flying boat from a family friend, which she uses to skim the icy waves around her home. The sea - or the air just above it - is a perfect escape for her, particularly when she's upset and needs to step away from the world. She often dreams of piloting the great passenger liners on irid'An, flying low over its picturesque archipelagos.
She's been good friends with Clare for some time, frequently visiting them at the café where they work. Beneath their sarcastic banter lies a strong relationship of mutual support and respect. Though Maliyah perceives Noira as somewhat naive, she conceals a quite strong affinity for her, which Clare is all too amused to help her navigate.
Maliyah is headstrong and confident. She can be hotheaded when she feels strongly about something, and is quick to speak her mind, sometimes against better judgement. Nevertheless, she is still very empathetic, and her fiery demeanor is often motivated in defense of her friends and family. A natural leader, she has some trouble accepting outside authority. When she and her friends are caught up in a revolution, she must learn humility and introspection to earn the respect of others.
Noira Isabel, she/her, ~21
Noira was raised on a small farm on the twilight prairies of pr'Sefone, the innermost world in the Rosa star system. Her mother always wanted the best for her, and encouraged Noira's knack for working with machinery from a young age. Her career eventually took her to Orus, an icy ocean world, the most distant in the Rosa system. There, Noira spent some time as a mechanic aboard an enormous flying cargo ship, Ark Royal.
When Ark Royal was destroyed in an attack by aerial raiders, Noira was left physically burned and emotionally traumatized. Her old mentor, Marion, helped her get back on her feet, hiring her as an apprentice engineer for the mining company that controls Orus. There she explored Orus' capital city, meeting her new friends Clare and Maliyah and slowly coming into her own.
However, the three of them gradually begin to uncover dark truths about their world, and about the company which dominates every facet of their lives. A terrible revelation about her own work causes Noira to break away from Marion and the company. The ensuing moral crisis will lead her and her friends to be caught up in a mysterious rebel organization.
Noira is introverted and shy, but desperately lonely. She is a very skilled mechanic, and takes to engineering design work just as well. Her work gives her a steady sense of purpose and a meager income, but she's still sorely missing those personal connections. She struggles with finding a sense of belonging, and has trouble being so far from her home and her family. She loves her new friends dearly, and blossoms with their support. When the three are ultimately swept up in revolution, her newfound family helps Noira to forge her fears and anxieties into a fierce passion for change.
Hello! It's already been over a month since my last post! Sorry to my 0.7 readers! I've just been dealing with college confusion, motivation crashes, and social events. I've finally been admitted to grad school after a mix-up regarding recommendation letters, and the late search for housing has also taken up some of my time.
Nonetheless, I've made the very smart decision to participate in Art Fight this July, which I've been enjoying even if I'm characteristically running behind on everything. (If you're also a part of the event, you can find me here!) This has motivated me to put together references for some of the main characters in Roselight, including both artwork and associated lore! Some of this is completely fresh content! Exciting!
Art Fight is another reason I haven't been posting here - everything creative I've been doing lately has been in service of this goal, and although a lot of it is relevant to this blog, I....forgor.
So! I'm going to upload these references as I make them (the first three are done), along with the character bios I wrote up for Art Fight. Hopefully this makes up for some postless months!
Well hello again.
Recovering from the post-college brain emptiness is a slow process so far, but I've managed to rally together to paint two pieces in as many nights - so it's time to share!
(Be sure to open these up to see them at full res!)
The first one here has a bit more of the creativity I've been looking for lately. This started as more of a doodle than anything but eventually became a more involved visualization of the Rosa system as a whole. The scales are not accurate of course, and I've talked plenty about the order of the worlds, but it was fun to properly depict the whole system in an artistic but structured way, like you might find on a NASA webpage or in the kind of books I read as a kid.
Obviously we have Rosa, the parent star, and her three little worlds. Today, we use a default naming scheme for exoplanets in which the star is considered object "a," and its worlds (in order of discovery, or just distance) are named starting from "b." Exoplanet enthusiasts from a particular Discord server will be happy to note that I've amended my embarrassing 3AM mistake of starting with "a."
As mentioned many a time on this blog, this is a pretty compact system, with a pretty small star - Rosa is only about the size of Jupiter (but considerably more massive), and her children, each smaller than Earth, orbit much closer than Mercury does to our own Sun. They're probably locked in some kind of resonance that makes their orbits stable over billions of years. I considered adding a greenish disk to represent Rosa's habitable zone, as I've seen in other representations, but since all three worlds are settled I figured that might be a bit redundant.
I haven't talked about the Outer Disk much on this blog, mainly because it's remained a nebulous concept in my head for some time. The Outer Disk is a population of small, mostly icy bodies lying out beyond Orus (Rosa d, the most distant planet). Its existence makes sense to me in a cosmological way, but I think it may be quite depleted by the time of the story. Long before our narrative begins, humans in the system harvested the majority of these objects in their conquest of the stars. With their disappearance, the fate of this material is unknown to the reborn civilization. As the people of the Rosa system began to reconnect and return to the skies, they turned to the remnants of this disk for raw materials once again. Almost all remaining mass in the Outer Disk was eventually deconstructed in support of infrastructure, including massive orbital foundries in orbit of Orus, vast fuelling depots, and the grand interworld castles that cycle amongst the planets. To this day, there may in fact be some very traditional space settlements (small pressurized habitats! The novelty!) scattered amongst the debris out here, and this could even figure prominently in the story.... I'll have to noodle about that one.
In any case I had an interesting time making that disk look right. I used the more granular tool with bigger particles to paint a disk, and spent a lot of time trying to shade it convincingly to be orbiting the central light source. I experimented with some radial spoke shadows but couldn't get them to my liking. When I finally added the finer cloud as an afterthought, it actually did a lot to sell the overall effect, so I guess that's a nice win.
The painted background was fun to do, with its sweeping brushstrokes and varying hues. The glow effect was a neat little innovation for me - I started with just a basic airbrush glow, then used a brush with no paint to sort of smear it into visible strokes while maintaining its transparency. It feels a little more organic and less sterile, which I'm always a fan of.
On to the next one!
Here we have Orus, an icy ocean world on the fringe of habitability. Its distance from Rosa and slow rotation period result in extreme day/night variability, in effect more like short seasons than days. Orus' population runs on an irid'An-based schedule, with recurring "days" just 15 or so hours long, and Orus' seasonal cycle takes around 24 of these days to repeat. The global ocean freezes over during the dark Vigil, and warmth when Rosa is overhead is still fairly minimal. The world never seems to escape its biting winds and terminally capricious overcast skies.
In the distance, closer to Rosa, we have pr'Sefone (top left) and irid'An. The former generally appears to be a tidally locked desert world from afar; only close inspection reveals the temperate band of settled land lining its terminator. The lush irid'An practically glows with brilliantly reflected Roselight, a result of its own, significantly more pleasant world ocean.
Overall this piece definitely feels like an improvement over the previous single-planet highlight I made of pr'Sefone. I'm enjoying using these warmer, more saturated hues, and some more creative techniques to shy away from photorealism. Both of these pieces feel more inspired and alive than older ones I've done, even if they're a bit less intricate. I like this style a lot and will be hoping to develop it further in due time.
That's all for now - one of these days I've got to get to sleep at a reasonable hour....
Oh god it has been many months since my last post oh jeez.
This unfortunate hiatus was generally caused by my final semester of undergrad forcibly extruding every last driplet of creativity out of my withered corporeal form like a 40-ton steel rolling pin atop the world's wimpiest tube of toothpaste.
However I am happy to report that I survived the ordeal and even managed to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering. So that's pretty cool.
With any luck I will be posting more frequently again. I don't have much in the way of summer obligations; I did apply for an M.S. program for the Fall, but it's looking to be somewhat less of a godawful nightmare than my undergrad, so I'll do my best to keep the momentum.
I've definitely had ideas bouncing around in my head lately, so I'll try and hit a consistent cadence of getting some of these out! Time and the blog archive will tell whether I succeed.
Marion’s gaze moved sluggishly across the paper, weighed on by the first signs of fatigue. He sighed, resting his head with a hand on his temple. Just three nights into Vigil and the low-light strain was already impeding his productivity; not long ago he might have worked straight through the season, with only the biting wind outdoors to remind him of the long dark. The corrective eyeglasses he’d so reluctantly incorporated into his workflow seemed less a crutch and more an ankleweight, his dependence growing by the day. He loathed the thought of those wires permanently affixed to his face, like retrofitting machinery past its service lifetime. Raising his head again, he moved to adjust his electric desk lamp. Defeat.
Relaxing his eyes, he returned to the document at hand. Figures leapt off the page in the warm light, documenting the assembly process for the rockbreakers’ new end effector. The powder-driven chisel was proving difficult to reinforce against fatigue; this latest revision in the design would hold up well, but introduced significantly more complexity for the crews meant to deploy it in situ. Even he would have lost track of the version number, were it not printed in block letters in the corner of the page. He knew, of course, that all this iteration was necessary, critical; still, he’d be glad to see the final revision shipped.
As he compared an older version against his present charge, the secondary articulation point caught his attention. That joint had seen more significant improvement than any other part of the assembly. Only minor adjustments to the arrangement of these components had been made, but the result had almost totally resolved the risks associated with this joint. It was elegant work; the kind so characteristic of her.
That subtle weight had returned to his chest. Noira had been a truly remarkable asset on his team. She had taken his direction and magnified it, exceeding his expectations for any of his engineers, let alone a junior trainee. This was the quality of work that his division had needed to leap ahead of schedule; the entire program benefitted from a mechanic of her caliber. In return, it was clear that she was flourishing in this environment as well. He had seen such growth from her in such a short few months that nothing could have possibly tempered his expectations for her future.
He sighed again, sitting back from his work. The howling Orine winds scattered icy flurries across the window of his office. She had been impressionable, as she always was. Tanura was such a novelty to her. He had offered his best guidance, knowing the kinds of influences that lay beyond the company district, the cacophony of voices that could lead her naivety astray. It was just what he had been afraid of, with Noira so vulnerable after the accident. The last thing she needed were the insidious seeds of distrust; distrust in the company, and in him. He remembered her face vividly, tormented by fear, confusion…and betrayal.
As it had then, the memory pierced deeper than he cared to acknowledge. It hadn’t been the same helplessness he’d seen in the accident; there was another, more sinister component. All her anxieties had become twisted into a vicious anger, directed towards the company which had provided so much for her, had housed and fed her to a standard of living far beyond what he knew she’d left behind. An anger directed at himself, who had moved mountains to take her under his wing, to provide her with every ounce of instruction and mentorship he could, to help her blossom into the accomplished engineer he knew she could become. All of his efforts had been cast aside, burned down and replaced with this tangle of confused morals she had found in the rakish halls of Tanura.
The ice continued to fall, born from the depths of Vigil, coating every surface in its brittle sheen. Before him, the document lay still, bare. He felt his own deep-seated chagrin creeping in from the corners of the room.
Surely there was some way he might have acted differently. Perhaps he had been overly stern; she had felt stifled, it seemed, unable to meet him where he stood. His unwavering ethic had certainly incited this response before. Elias had been much the same. Marion’s commitment to his craft, the insatiable desire to improve, to push his own boundaries, had been unpalatable for his partner – former, he reminded himself. Time and again he had grappled with this snare, how the pursuit of his own fulfillment could nevertheless drive others away, as it had Elias, and Noira.
Marion closed his eyes, listening to the clattering of the tempest. He would complete no more work tonight. At length, he tucked the document into his case, standing blearily from his desk. At the touch of his finger, the electric lamp went out with a crackle.
I don't expect that there's, like, lines of people waiting for this, but nevertheless I figured I'd make an announcement here:
I have a Redbubble shop open now! There's a few Roselight pieces available in a wide variety of products, as well as some art I've done for Proxima: A Human Exploration of Mars. If you really want Noira looking fierce on a throw pillow, or stickers of the kids, or a poster of the planets, or any number of other things - consider checking it out:
As an incentive, I just finished this poster that I am very proud of, which you can find on the shop:
The image of our timid protagonist standing fierce and defiant abruptly popped into my brain and I had to try and realize it as best I could. This is a pretty low-quality rendering but I might try to make a larger, more polished version sometime in the future. I definitely had fun with it!
The scene is meant to allude to Noira's increasingly important role in the Roselight resistance organization, fighting corporate oppression on the distant world of Orus...
You may want to view the above image at full-size! Blogger compression takes a lot out of it.
I had a blast with this painting of the three inhabited worlds in the Rosa system. Only pr'Sefone had previously been depicted from space, so I figured I'd take a step back and try to render the other two in this more familiar sci-fi lens. The sizes were just eyeballed, but are intended to be pretty representative. The direction of Roselight indicates the relative ordering of the planets as well. A quick breakdown:
pr'Sefone, the small, innermost world, is tidally-locked and so resembles what many have termed a "hot eyeball planet." The Roselit side is a scorched desert, while a narrow band of temperate climate exists right along the day-night terminator. Deeper in shadow, a mysterious tundra wasteland looms in the eternal darkness. I've depicted a bit more surface water than previously envisioned; I think we've got some rivers and perhaps dammed artificial lakes now, in addition to more ancient dried rivers and deltas. I like to imagine pr'Sefone had dramatic canyons and waterfalls and such globally before it became tidally locked; most of those features are now lost in tundra or desert. The green is, technically, Earthly vegetation, although in Roselight's setting it's perhaps thousands of years removed. I've also depicted the primary spaceport out of Eterna, pr'Sefone's capital city, near the north pole.
irid'An is a lush, tropical ocean world, with a few small archipelagos and atolls springing forth from the gentle, temperate sea. irid'An is the most Earthlike of the three, with a rapid rotation period of around 15 hours and an atmosphere supporting lots of dynamic convection and such. Small ice caps are present, probably composed entirely of transient patches of sea ice. I had a lot of fun with the clouds; I duplicated the cloud layer, darkened it, and offset it slightly to get the shadow effect, even offsetting different portions at different distances to mimic the changing light angle.
Orus is the largest and most distant of the three, and is similarly covered in a deep ocean, albeit colder and more turbulent than that of irid'An. The islands jutting from the chaotic waves are harsh, rocky, and barren. Orus is a slow-rotating world, not quite tidally locked, but sluggish enough to generate pretty big temperature swings between the temperate days and absolutely frigid nights. The ocean gradually freezes over when Rosa dips beneath the horizon, making Orus resemble a "cold eyeball planet" despite retaining a day/night cycle. I did illustrate this, but it's barely visible at the terminator under the cloud cover. Incidentally, the cloud pattern is inspired by that of Venus' similar slow-rotating atmosphere when viewed in infrared.
More on each of these worlds can be found on the "The Rosa System" page up at the top of the blog! And, of course, lots of worldbuilding and relevant artwork can be found using the tags in the left column.
Sunrise and sunset? Nay, we have rosris (ROZE-eye) and rodin (ROW-din).
What follows is a sort of haphazard study of timekeeping in Roselight, and its relationship to the culture of the Rosa system’s inhabitants. As some ground rules, I’m going to maintain the use of hours, minutes, and seconds, but everything else…….we’ll see. Also, be advised this was all typed at like 3 AM so it may or may not be totally coherent.
I think irid’An has a day length similar enough to Earth that the people there can live a recognizable day/night schedule; maybe substantially shorter than ours, like 14 or 15 hours, where people sleep shorter intervals or maybe alternate whether they sleep a given day or not. I think the natural diurnal functions in our brains are probably more receptive to short sleep periods whenever it gets dark (4 to 5 hours?) so that would likely be the norm on irid’An. Shorter days but a pretty recognizable cycle.
On this world, the physical day/night cycle can just be referred to as consisting of calendar days, which would be the system-wide standard for timekeeping (dates, events, trade, economy, stonks). This is fun from a narrative standpoint as well because it sets the stage for the almost oblivious influence the people of irid’An have over the rest of the system. They’re privileged with a lifestyle that feels so pleasantly familiar that they’ve never known the fundamental upheaval of basic existence that others have had to endure.
On Orus the situation is quite different. The day/night cycle is more like weather variation on a weeklong timescale, not something rapid enough to build a sleep schedule based on. So, as mentioned before, people here probably run on irid’An time. Their clocks would be synchronized, despite the time delay ruling out real-time communications anyways. So people probably rise and sleep on similar schedules to irid’An, perhaps sleeping for longer during the nights and shorter during the days. Here we will need to distinguish between physical day/night and the calendar days.
I’ve been trying to figure out a good alternate name for a calendar day, like “sol,” so that “day” and “night” can mean light and dark. But what if we take the opposite approach? Rename the periods of light and dark on Orus, since in a way they’re more like seasons than days. The climate changes for a significant period of time, but the cycle of life continues. Daytime approaches and shifts into nighttime even as multiple “days” go by. What could we call these periods?
“Vigil” is a phenomenal name for the nighttime on Orus. Continuing the theme of liturgical hours, I like “Laude” for the daytime, but I’d honestly prefer something less biblical for both inclusion and realism (how many thousands of years has it been by now?). I’ll noodle on it some more.
Despite human society being focused on irid’An, while colonization of Orus occurred within the last 100 years or so, people have still developed new cultures and customs suited to this unique world. You’ll find the use of Vigil and Laude to be more prevalent the further you go from ASMC’s upper brass. Those closer to the company (and thus further from the world itself) view these new customs as frivolous and meaningless, while the people in villages and communities most removed from ASMC (like Noira’s friends) have already been raised under these traditions. They began among the working class who sought to make a home of this world they were contractually bound to, and have since spread to people who don’t work for ASMC at all. Noira herself is in the odd position of having lived on Orus for some time, but still being a relative outsider to the inner culture here. She’s largely been a working immigrant to the world, and so spent most of her time in a heavily company-controlled life.
On pr’Sefone things are even stranger, albeit simpler. Rosa does not rise or set, and this world’s orbit is too tightly shepherded after billions of years of resonance to have any appreciable eccentricity. So the only way to keep time is to look beyond Rosa, to the other worlds. Timekeeping here is marked primarily by the passage of irid’An in the sky, as this would’ve been the most important celestial object to the Sefones during the flightless era. This is a lot like how the month on Earth is based on the cycle of the moon, but instead of being something like an orbit, a “month” here might refer to the synodic period of pr’Sefone and irid’An. These worlds’ motion relative to each other repeats on a set timescale that both worlds could observe, so this might even be a formalized calendar definition as well. Actually, the synodic period is very important for spaceflight, so once interworld travel returns this would be a crucial measurement of time.
I’m not sure what wake/sleep periods look like on pr’Sefone – naturally, the onset of “globalization” (multiple globes in this case) means most people on pr’Sefone just follow regular irid’An time, but I wonder what the Sefones did while they were mostly out of contact with irid’An. Maybe people slept in rounds or shifts, set to a natural division of the synodic month. This could be a good tie-in to some of their cultural quirks about vigilance and the constant presence of Roselight in their lives; as Rosa never rests her watchful eye, neither must the Sefones. The influence of universal irid’An time thus becomes an existential threat to a huge part of Sefones culture. This would be a fun thing to explore amidst Noira’s immediate family – maybe some of her younger siblings have already taken on more responsible roles in the family, as someone needs to remain awake and watchful as their mother Telma sleeps.
So that gives us some semblance of an understanding as to timekeeping and its cultural implications in Roselight. I need to sleep soon but my next aim is to try and craft a more comprehensive calendar. Some notes for then include the fact that the planets are probably in resonant orbits, due to the compact size of the system, which may help to keep timekeeping nice and neat.
In the past few weeks I've found myself with a lot of extra time for doing art and things, so I figured I'd compile another art post. Today we're looking at irid'An some more!
An important development in irid'An's design is the presence of these volcanic hot springs down in the calderas of some islands. I'm envisioning something sort of like if you took Yellowstone's springs and geysers and transplanted them onto Hawaii. I've kept the idea of boardwalks bridging across some of the thinner crust around these springs, and in some cases even over the water itself. Of course, Yellowstone's "water features" are incredibly dangerous, so on irid'An these sorts of features would only be built where the water temperature allows.
In any case, I love this vision of thriving, bustling marketplaces and such all clustered down in the caldera floor, with lush environments fed by these springs and all sorts of rich cultural settings to be had. Further up the crater rim are the gleaming idyllic cities, home to corporate headquarters, political offices, and rich housing, elevated far above the common people.
Not too much to see here, other than another concept of an island with this central hot springs caldera complex. In this case the heated water outflows into the sea. I've used a rich, reddish-orange color for the soil around the springs, which in Yellowstone's case is the result of microorganisms living in the water. Since these worlds have already been colonized in advance by our own Earthly fauna, we're probably seeing something similar. In the background is not a moon, but another world - pr'Sefone, I suspect. The Rosa system is densely packed, much like the TRAPPIST-1 system, so the other worlds might appear quite conspicuous in the sky.
That's all I have for now, but I'm happy with the consistent aesthetic I've been able to develop for this world. irid'An has historically been underdeveloped in my brain, which is ironic since it's the most well-developed world in the canon of the story. Hopefully these paintings help to do it justice!
So if you've read the "About Roselight" page, you may know my original take on the story was a post-apocalyptic sci-fi one, in which humanity flees a solar-system-sized cataclysm and settles on a new set of planets - Rosa's Children. In my head this looked something like the end of Interstellar, where (spoilers for an 8-year-old movie!) Amelia and CASE begin unloading supplies from a spacecraft for a concerted colonization effort on the late Wolf Edmunds' planet. I had pictured society pretty much continuing where it had left off, maybe with some rough spots after being in space for centuries, but nothing too major.
Now, I've already cast aside any notion of hard sci-fi for Roselight, and I'm trying to steer clear of establishing any real details about the apocalypse that drove humanity from its home (other than that it must've been pretty bad). However, I've started to think I might want there to be significantly more time between humanity's first landing in the Rosa system and the setting of the main part of the story.
I'm imagining the initial colony setup begins, but is already at a significant disadvantage - the journey was really rough. A lot of equipment doesn't work after the very long flight, some technology and skills have already been forgotten, and the population was struggling even before landing. It took a monumental effort for even a few people to stumble across the threshold of another world, and it wasn't a strong start. Despite a concerted effort to establish a foothold on several worlds, population collapse decimated the nascent society and left it teetering on the edge of extinction for a few generations. This caused something of an information choke point; for modern society, very little is known about the time beyond the veil, and any truth about what happened to bring us to this point has been totally lost in the landscape of myth and legend. There could well be some interesting mythology that in some way tangentially relates to the truth, but it's hard to know for certain.
Overall, human culture loses a lot of what it used to have - I don't want to say "regresses," because non-industrial societies have so much value of their own, but they do lose a lot of explicitly useful and beneficial stuff like healthcare technology and the lessons learned about sustainability from the old worlds. Sure, these people will be starting anew and living in harmony with the land, but with the loss of detailed knowledge about what happened and where they came from, they're wide open to the possibility of making the same mistakes twice. The context lives on in something of a religious way: of course they're going to retain the sense of being a displaced people, alone in a foreign landscape after something of a fall from grace, dare I say a paradise lost.
One big advantage of the ancient world concept is that it helps to justify the very patchwork technology set I want them to have - a strange mix of old and new, where it's really more about what's practical than being in line with a particular overall level of advancement. The entire manufacturing industry needs to be redone from scratch, so you'll find no microchips here - but computers, jet engines, and spaceflight were once solved and can be rediscovered with some expedience, interpreting ancient texts and instructions with a sense of mysticality.
There's another really interesting thread here. irid'An is the obvious candidate world for human settlement as a Plan A, if you're intending to just set up shop and have it work out (which it won't). pr'Sefone and Orus are comparatively less appealing, but you know they'll be useful so you establish some early colonies or outposts there. Then, the collapse occurs, and suddenly society is crashing so hard that these colonies become isolated from each other. It's possible that radio communications are ritualistically maintained during the long dark, but spaceflight would have entirely ceased, leaving different populations to grow apart culturally and even physically. This opens the door to pseudo-"indigenous" populations that differentiate from each other before the eventual reunification. Furthermore, I sense that while pr'Sefone's offshoot colony might survive and grow pretty well (I'd already conceived of the "Sefones" people), an isolated, skeleton crew outpost on Orus would fare pretty terribly, and might even go fully extinct. Anything they'd learned about this world would be lost behind the veil, and it leaves the world vulnerable to the rampant exploitation we'd see centuries later from ASMC - after all, it's a dead planet that kills anything it touches - surely it can have no further value than to be stripped of its resources and cast aside...
This began as a comparatively minor adjustment in my brain, but the more I type the more I realize there's a lot of potential here to really strengthen the worldbuilding. It's late now, but I definitely need to come back to this and start developing these concepts further. Soon!
Mmm, steaks.
No, I've been thinking about stakes, in a narrative sense: what makes them effective, what makes them relatable and engaging, and the implications thereof on the story of Roselight.
I have big, grand plans for the conflict in this story. Perhaps a bit too grand, at least for the short term.
When I talk about "stakes" here I'm talking specifically about the stakes of the conflicts and engagements in the narrative - what do our characters stand to lose? What does their society or world stand to lose? What happens if they fail? How weighty are the tasks and battles they're undertaking, and do they make sense?
An illustrative example is the Star Wars universe. In the so-called "Skywalker Saga," basically every character is highly influential over the fate of the entire galaxy and its trillions of citizens. The main characters are godlike space wizards and chosen ones, prophetic mythological heroes, and the villain is literally evil incarnate. The fate of the entire universe hangs in the balance, and that gets...pretty boring, sometimes. I know the sequels are easy pickings, but they wrote themselves into a big circle where the only meaningful conflict they could think of was to bring back the evil space wizard and have him be literally every evil space wizard put together, with the goal of annihilating the entire universe or something with a vast navy of enormous planet-sploding spaceships.
Contrast some other spinoff media like the extremely engaging Andor series (no spoilers within). Andor focuses on a much smaller scale; our heroes aren't godlike space wizards, they're drifters and washouts and nobodies, people picked up off the street; their objectives are small and local. We know eventually this story will feed into a more high-stakes plot that, in turn, supports the Skywalker Universe Saving Saga of Destiny. Nevertheless, what feel most impactful are those small stakes we can directly relate to and understand - none of us have saved the universe from pure evil before, but we know what it's like to have arguments and complicated relationships with people, or to be in tough situations in life that we can't seem to find our way out of.
As a window into the overarching plot I'm looking at for Roselight, I can offer a quick and dirty outline of what's outlined so far:
This of course largely excludes any interesting character arcs that take place during the story, in favor of highlighting only the most essential points and events.
So the question I arrive at is: what do I want to get out of this story? How high should the stakes really be here?
My Grand Plan, at a glance, reads like Noira being at the spearhead of a planetwide (small nation-state?) rebellion, which can't happen overnight. The story is naturally about her experiencing the world; we follow her narrow perspective pretty closely until we meet Roselight, where we really see the bigger picture of the issues she's been seeing. There is room, when we meet the revolutionaries, for major events to not include her, and for the story to exceed her direct experience.
However, I do really want to have her and her friends be in most of the main arc. The only one of these bullets that I feel comfortable leaving them out of is Roselight's strike on an ASMC razing operation - this doesn't have to include them for its impact on the story to work. By contrast, the subsequent bullet point - ASMC retaliating by annihilating Roselight HQ - should have our heroes front and center to witness and really internalize the consequences of that event and how those impact their character development.
Furthermore, to get exactly into the issue of today, I have a lot of really big steaks stakes written in there right now. The big one I'm having trouble with is Roselight's very existence being threatened, to the extent that people like Noira and her friends - who are pretty new to this whole thing - being involved in the last-ditch effort to save the group. It implies that the org is at a point of having like 12 people left over, with the goal of those 12 people being to save the entire cause and bring down the giant of ASMC.
There's a couple ways I can deal with this, and a lot of them are mostly just "think about the logistics of the story for 5 more minutes." Some points that could help:
This is also important for them to even be able to execute their exposé plan; I'm envisioning a lot of infiltration and espionage that means you still need some deep connections and good hardware available. To this end, I think the island of Cantor, which is what I've been calling the Roselight HQ place, is primarily an airbase, the place they stage the interdictors and some combat ops out of. It's the obvious strategic target for ASMC to eliminate, it's most easily traceable after the attack, and it cripples the organization, but it's not like.....the hideout where the entire resistance lives.
Also, the "last-ditch" exposé plan is probably not that critical, in the sense that it's not the only shot they have left at survival. When I originally conceived of the idea, I thought the destruction of Cantor was a great way to up the ante for the exposé - now they have to succeed, as it's all they have left, fleeing directly from the ruins of Cantor to ASMC headquarters on irid'An. Realistically, a resistance group like this, though not swimming in personnel and capital, has the ability to do multiple things at once; the exposé is a very important mission for their future, and will still be the centerpiece of their activity after the razing of Cantor, but it's not quite a desperate dying breath.
I think those are definitely the big notes for now. It's worth noting that high stakes are not necessarily a bad thing in a story, if they can be tempered and contextualized. What I don't wanna do is to drop my characters abruptly into a situation where they're responsible for saving the world - they have to naturally develop into that role. Really, I don't have a great idea of the time scale of the overall story (or, for that matter, how that's even measured in-universe), and I think the things I want to have happen lend themselves to a longer story duration.Those interim plot points can occur in multiple places; prior to the destruction of Cantor, Noira and friends might be helping with gathering intel and equipment for the attack on ASMC, or otherwise laying the foundations for that work - or, as above, for other things that Roselight might be working on at the same time. It can also be before the destruction of Cantor, to allow our characters to contribute to the big mistake that has big consequences. Room for development!
There's tons of room to incorporate all kinds of fun character interactions and arcs into this. It's one thing to have big obvious story points, and it's another thing entirely to stitch those together. I don't want the overall story to be a vessel serving no purpose besides transporting the plot from A to B to C - again, the events should progress naturally in between, and it's going to be the much smaller-scale stuff that makes that happen.
One last bit before I forget - I'm in the early stages of formulating new characters that our trio of kids will meet when they first take refuge with Roselight. We need to have some known members of the resistance, and I'm looking forward to developing them in time. Some names have popped into my head: Donner (he/him) and Kierstyn (she/her). These two might be closer to peers of our protagonists, or they might lie higher in the command structure, occupying leadership roles - I'm not sure yet, but the structure and details of Roselight itself are a whole new can of worms that I'm not going to open right now.
That's all for this one - mostly a log of my own storymaking process. Also, happy 2023! Here's to many more posts in the new year.