Roselight merch!

 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:

Link to Redbubble!

As an incentive, I just finished this poster that I am very proud of, which you can find on the shop:

Spontaneous Noira Poster

Noira!!

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...

Rosa's Children

 

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.

Timekeeping

 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.

More visions of irid'An

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.

I'm pretty proud of this one, depite its odd framing (I don't always consider how I'll need to capture the artwork later while I'm making it). This is the logical extension of the previous image, showing an entire atoll of these small islands, and a thriving city distributed among them. This might be the kind of environment I'd like to see for the world's capital. One of the hot springs is under the sea here, creating an effect alarmingly similar to that seen in Shin Godzilla. Hopefully he's not hiding down there.

Finally, something more like a doodle - by now the vision of these islands is well-established, so here we have a ground effect passenger liner crudely rendered on its way towards one of the islands. Although many have steep cliffs rising from the sea (making airships a convenient alternative), this island has a gentle enough grade to permit a busy port to be constructed at the shoreline, reminiscent of Orus. 

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!

Ancient Setting/Beyond the Veil

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!

Noodling about Stakes

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:

• Noira gets new job after Ark Royal incident, meets friends
• Friends help Noira come out of her shell
• On a trip with friends, Noira discovers the company (ASMC) is razing villages and other bad things
• Noira and friends are hunted by company law enforcement
• They take refuge at a hideout with a resistance organization (Roselight)
• Roselight attacks ASMC's razing operation
• ASMC obliterates Roselight's hideout
• Roselight flees on a desperate mission to run an exposé on the Company
• Many more unknown future events?????

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:

• Roselight is not down to like 12 people. The base of operations that is razed catastrophically is a huge loss of power, but mostly leaves the group homeless rather than decimated. There will certainly be significant casualties, but there's still a structure and chain of command and groups of people doing different things. There are also other places they can operate out of - they've just lost a lot of equipment and their big foothold. They're scrambled and lost, but they can regroup with a lot of work.

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.

• Remember that the goal is not to save the world. We're focused on one planet, Orus. And, we're not trying to save it from destruction, or even to bring down the big bad company ruling over it, ASMC (although a healthy dose of trust-busting may be in order). Roselight learned from the destruction of Cantor that it can't handle everything on its own. The resistance is hoping to run this exposé on ASMC, which is really just meant to bring its crimes into the public eye and force the hand of the Rosarium government. They're fighting to be treated like people; the degree to which that changes the status quo is up for negotiation if ASMC can at least just NOT RAZE ENTIRE TOWNS.

•  The plot doesn't happen overnight. As I mentioned before, Noira and friends aren't going to end up on the front lines after being at Roselight for a week, but I can give them more things to do, more intermediate steps. It will take them some time to grow acclimated to the environment and to the cause; they need to gain experience and get more involved in the group before they would ever feel comfortable volunteering for that mission, let alone actually be allowed to participate by the chain of command.

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!

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.

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.