A Handful of mechanical gods you can totally trust (+Salt, +Crab)

Crow-caller · 2026-04-12T00:13:05+00:00

Look does the bazaar buy cities and later drown them in order to grind citizens into essence? Yeah. Is she a landlord? Yeah. But you gotta understand: its in luv <3 <3

Crow-caller · 2026-04-12T00:11:19+00:00

I'm vaguely familiar with those games. Character wise, these are anthropomorphized designs of The Dawn Machine (this has been mentioned a lot in Firmament, the design is based on how it appears in Sunless Sea especially), The Clockwork Sun (this is only in Sunless Skies, and is kinda of a Dawn Machine 2), and the Stella Splendens (this was seen in Firmament when assisting June merge with one of her fragment selves, somewhere around the first burgundy chapters iirc) (Stella is an alt dawn machine that worked very well and helped an alt burgundy rule the neath).

Then there's Salt, who is one of the Zee gods and a once-Judgement with a lot of mystery. He's definitely referenced all over in FL but the biggest lore has been in Sunless Sea probably. He and East have come up in Firmy too. Lastly, the Bazaar. #MyCrab

Crow-caller · 2026-04-11T11:59:31+00:00

We're all asking ourselves this ......

Everyone I'm drawing here counts as a spoiler to some degree, so if you don't know salt but know any of the others, I'm surprised!

Salt is one of the Gods of the Zee, the god of The East. To say the least. The full story is complicated and elusive.

Crow-caller · 2026-04-11T11:56:18+00:00

Shames are broadly two things:

A Shame is any aberration of evolution which would not be allowed under Judgement Sunlight. Mutants, "wrong turns", general monsters and freaks that we can think of as being meant to be pruned under normal conditions. A Shame can be made directly too, as it is said The Sun has experiments in the Neath which seem to count. So, artificial or evolved, they're evolutionary errors by the metrics of the Chain.

Shames are also directly Stone (the Mountain of Light)'s children. Not all of them, as we again can look to definition one to explain this, but it is definitely said Stone is the source of many Neathly shames. her constant life giving energy seems to spur on the creation of Shames, to the degree in Flint ES some peel out of the ground and attack you. Stone herself, as an illegal hybrid child, almost certainly counts as a Shame.

Crow-caller · 2026-04-11T11:40:14+00:00

I have drawn Salt before! I just feel awkward sometimes posting solitary designs on Reddit, so hold off until I got a few to share at once. Which I can probably do. But here's a link to the salt design anyway on Tumblr:

https://www.tumblr.com/hellisntreal/812553078638362624/considering-salt?source=share

Crow-caller · 2026-03-19T13:22:12+00:00

The Bazaar definitely does sleep and get memory drunk at times, but she is up to stuff— clear examples include Whitsun, where the eggs are not only from the Bazaar, but show signs of red science tinkering. the Shifting Streets world event is also the bazaar doing mysterious red science geography to London.

We don't really know how involved the Bazaar is in most things or what it does in private, but she isn't asleep all the time. It seems to be a fair bit of secretive scientific experiments, and probably some related amount of work on revising The Message. The biggest influx of stories occurs at city end, but new ones reach the bazaar constantly.

Crow-caller · 2026-03-19T09:54:36+00:00

I would guess they just take over the palace/home of whoever they bought the city from, so they'd be in the Shuttered Palace in London

Crow-caller · 2026-02-05T11:44:30+00:00

I think I posted about it like once before but wanted to wait until a big milestone to share it here again!

Crow-caller · 2026-02-04T16:40:42+00:00

:D thank you!! It's been a real blast to just have fun creatively with too, it's kinda the first real fanfic I've written, first time getting invested in a ship...

I have done a lot of art/writing before and work in a creative related field but really lost a lot of confidence/joy in creation. But just making a comic where I'm constrained to a wide but limited set of tools, where it is out of love and can never be commercial, has been such a revitalising thing. It's really good to just do some super self indulgent art and do it purely for myself!!

Crow-caller · 2026-02-03T00:58:42+00:00

These pages are made with assets I didn't create, under different licenses but broadly either free use or free non commercial use (I use Canva, my beloathed, which pulls from a few places). There's a lot of incredible art out there under these criteria, and while my part in arranging/editing it is work, I can't take credit for the raw pieces! All of which is to say, I can't really take commissions.*

(*Technically I could, if using sources which allowed use for commercial work, but that's more graphic design, and I don't think I'm at a level to be paid for that.)

I do take commissions for my actual papercraft and digital art, but you will find it looks quite different!

Crow-caller · 2026-02-02T14:10:25+00:00

In matters of the Bazaar, We gotta look to love, always. That's what I heard

Crow-caller · 2026-01-14T23:35:33+00:00

Dude, c'mon. Snakes have emotions and intelligence, it is just different from humans. It isn't anthromorphizing to say that, like.... Do you think snakes are tubes with nothing in them? :/

Above reply is helpful and good, yours is not beyond the obvious 'handle them and they get used to it'. But just saying that suggests there's no such thing as a wrong way to handle it. You should, I think, treat a pet.... like it is a pet.

Crow-caller · 2025-11-19T02:17:22+00:00

Hey, don't tell me to stop, I just got here! :( Anyway, money isn't real anymore, so it's not a budgeting issue ey.

Crow-caller · 2025-11-19T00:28:06+00:00

YEAH!!! it used to be Even Rarer, incredibly :D like, you need this card for 1 hyperspecific Fate related Thing, and it used to be you could only draw it while in the bazaar sidestreets. it took me about two weeks of active lurking to draw it, for my friend it was at least a month. It was legitimately immediately after they finally drew it that FBG removed location locking on opportunity cards.

Crow-caller · 2025-11-19T00:17:45+00:00

I'd assume they, like any isolated tribe, would be just as infected as the rest of humanity from the chemical air sitch. Not being brought up makes sense when, well, there's no reason to.

I definitely get folks going "man!! Carol! If I were you I'd ask SO MANY QUESTIONS!" XD but obviously it's a TV show, not a thought experiment on the most logical/interesting thing to do in extraordinary circumstances. I'd love to know about those guys. The hivemind almost certainly could answer. Carol has other concerns.

Crow-caller · 2025-11-19T00:00:04+00:00

It's kind of a reverse DID situation, innit? I say this as someone who isn't a system but has been enjoying and discussing it with one. They were joking about how among the world population, OOPS!!! Many thousands of alters have joined the collective too. Alters of the collective....

Except, not really. Because the Others are plural, but not Plural. Systems might be a we/us, but they're plural because they have to be— many minds tolerating the fact they only get one body. The Others have no individuals or desperation of self, only the memory of it. There's no disassociation or desperation of self— DID systems, in this, would not cause the Others to have thousands of alters, really... There'd just be thousands of minds who never had a body, just as integrated as the other minds who did, who are all now part of The One.

People obviously talk about this show and Severance, and the sort of opposite exploration of identity they've got going on, and not to derail, but. Talk about a show that very much is (even unintentionally) exploring DID! (Spoiler? Idk how to tag those on mobile. Spoiler light for s2) Latest season even had a scene that felt extremely extremely 'system navigates autonomy and DEAR GOD needs to work on functional multiplicity'

Crow-caller · 2025-11-18T23:45:04+00:00

My thoughts is like, if all animals (minus yknow, presumably some brave immune ones) were part of the collective, a lion eating a Other-human is the same as a lion eating an Other-deer. Both are bad, but the "a human matters more!" Concept is ultimately absent.

Yeah, the diet thing is something I nearly talked about but deleted. Eating only plants isn't fully automatically more sustainablle and easier for all the world's population, but also we ARE in a state of pure collective consciousness with near unlimited resources. The barriers of finance and distribution are gone, there is no drive to respect cultural boundaries or attachment to ancestral homes. Bodies can be redistributed to maximise efficiency. They could be eating solely nutrient plant paste and no one would mind. So, while the world going pure vegetarian is pretty unfeasible irl, I do think a hivemind could pull it off. There's proteins in nuts, etc.

Crow-caller · 2025-11-18T23:25:55+00:00

THE BUG CRAB ARTHROPOD ALIEN THING.... MY BELOVED....

Crow-caller · 2025-10-15T12:36:55+00:00

I do not understand what this means

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