Earliest Update EVER?

Maybe. I'm too lazy to check.

Okay, now to talk about shiny-eyed noseless girl from yesterday.


...and her friend.

A pretty LOOONG time ago--it was around the time I got into Fire Emblem, so... three or four years ago, I think?--I came up with a fantasy world I call Ethera. For no particular reason, really, I just thought Ethera sounded right. Well anyway the basic concept of Ethera was that there were humans and there was a lot of magic, and the magic would change a human's physical attributes to better adapt them to where they lived... in the end there were five adaptations, each based around one of the classic Chinese elements (Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, and Fire). Stories involving Ethera usually revolved around groups of humans who refused to give in to the world's magic and adapt, the adapted races hating them for it, elves wood people hating dwarves metal people for being industrious, conspiracies to take over the world, motley crews of people wanting to unite all the races, blah blah blah blah every single fantasy story you've heard before.

I've been thinking about it again recently for no real reason. I still don't have a non-trite plot for the world, but I've always liked the designs I'd come up with for the different races and I felt like drawing them.

The water people (who are, in some notes, referred to as Cetaceans, after the name of a mammalian order containing whales and dolphins, wow this note is getting long) have appeared on the blog before, and I just used their outfit from the old design in these quick reference sketches. It's still like something they'd wear. I imagine that most live in underwater cities, but that those cities have some air pockets within them (something like Otoh Gunga from Star Wars Episode I). It's cold, so their clothing is appropriately thick. As they're relatively androgynous, I imagine that they don't make much of a distinction between the sexes. Maybe that's what the direction of the triangles and the length of that center fabric strip indicate? Also, they stopped trying to make shoes to fit their flipper-feet a long time ago. The wraps aren't the most protective thing in the world, but that's what's common.

I imagine that there are a lot of different variations for skin/hair color among Cetaceans, mostly in the cool color range and including some grays and the like. Color is totally independent of sex and probably depends more on the body of water a person lives by (freshwater Cetaceans probably have more neutral colors that tropical or other saltwater ones).

So... that's them at a very quick glance. I may talk about the other races here someday as filler, but for now, I'd like to get back to Nightmare City, VT.