OOPs #373
Oct29
All right, looks like everything’s up and working! I’ve been sitting on this site redesign too long, and just needed a couple days to get everything remade. And in a strange bit of good (?) timing, my Wacom tablet died a few days ago, which I assumed was the universe’s way of telling me to get off my ass and update the site already. Thankfully Wacom made a speedy repair and delivery back, so I’ve already sketched up the first few panels of the next OOPs page.
And a special shoutout to Xandispin, who first suggested a site update several months ago, then set up this snazzy new WordPress layout for me to customize (which I then sat on until this past week). Thanks man; it took me long enough to get around to it, but without you the site would still be looking like something from the early 2000’s!
Seriously, I was manually creating pages and re-entering every altered link when there was a new page, using a long-defunct version of Dreamweaver 2001. That gets tiring real quick.
Anyway! There’s some new stuff in the Art & Extras section now as well, which you might not have seen if you don’t frequent Deviantart and such.
The fact that the yinglet child getting physically taken from vizlet is at most only mentioned by her in the text as her being “punished” is interesting.
Well, she did say “…ze females… longtime friends, sisters… all sent away” on the previous page.
That DOES appear to be a female Younglet, given the little poof they have.
Yeah, I noticed that too.
So… all because of the rivalry between the House Ivenmoth and the yinglets.
The impression I get here isn’t that it’s about “rivalry” with a specific house so much as “Human’s cannot have these. Even the scraps, none of it.” Probably because with enough scraps they might discover things about them and Yinglets that they don’t want Humans figuring out. Same reason they can’t have Yinglets being born under human control (my theory is the voices of the ancients aren’t just Narklet’s religious ferver, some Yinglets are getting some input from somewhere and they can’t risk one of the ones with that talent being born outside the Enclave)
Okay then. The rivalry between humans and yinglets.
Wait a minute. Vizlet had asked Beizel and Kattajak to tell their subordinates to not take orders from Narklet… was that order completely pointless?
I think the local Yinglet population—or at least a large contingent of it—are still loyal to her. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of the younger males know nothing of this power structure that exists behind closed doors. But Narklet has the backing of the central enclaves. If she pushes too much he may dispense with all pretensions of who’s in charge and pull rank on her, or even call in the central enclaves.
Ouch 🙁
I doubt Narklet and the Central Enclaves were too explicitly public about the shakeup in leadership, because if that were the case they’d have just deposed Vizlet and saved the effort. It’s probably just Vizlet and the Patriarchs who are keenly aware, and maybe some of the smarter yinglets. It’s also hard to tell how much of this was explicit, overt punishment and how much was more subtle threats and the central enclaves exerting standard practices but just more heavy-handed than usual as vague punishment.
I’m curious if potentially the area around Val Salia is particularly rich in antiquities, and/or this enclave is particularly good at finding things and/or Vizlet is an extremely capable administrator and leader and they don’t want to waste her talents if they can keep her in line.
It’s in part because she doesn’t KNOW why this was so bad. And nobody’s telling her. If they thought she knew whatever secret it is, they’d have come down harder. But, while this wasn’t great, the fact she was only trading what she thought was useless scraps saved her. We’ve seen Narklet’s thoughts, even he as a zealot does believe her heart was in the right place (#119). They need to make it very clear that that particular order is ABSOLUTE, but she doesn’t have to go as long as she understands that. Narklet’s got opinions on how she runs things but that’s not his assignment. The moment he thinks she’s still doing anything other that what’s she’s been told to do with Artifacts, including, as she observes, having this conversation with Kas at all, he’ll go all out takeover.
It was stated that the further north you go the more arrifacts you fimd and val salia is the northernmost yingthing enclave.
I suspect that if Narklet actually pulls that trigger, he’ll discover that the local patriarchs are Vizlet loyalists. It might take an army from the central enclaves, and a small civil war, to really force the issue.
Thing is, I doubt Vizlet has the stomach for the slaughter. And as much as she likes humans, I don’t think she’d see submitting to House Ivenmoth for protection as an improvement on submitting to the central enclaves.
…
i am…
speechles
What could dese antikwitys be?
Oh NOOOOOS zhey founds za Technozdrome… or maybes za secret of ze Healzhies Healzhies Juic… errr…
I knowz nozhinks! *immediately pulls out an flashies self wizh Ying in Black pen… FLASH!*
*Happy clueless yinglet soundies…*
This story feels a bit fishy to me, and not because I think Vizlet is lying.
If antiquities gathering is so incredibly important to the Central Enclaves that Vizlet and her enclave were punished this harshly, you’d think that they would’ve had a Patriarch of Scavenging already installed in every enclave (because why risk any screw-ups?) or have an envoy from Central show up to chat with a brand-new Matriarch about how this is VERY important and maybe give her a vague sense of why so she doesn’t trade Valuable Ying Secrets for basic material goods.
And, despite the harshness of the punishment, Vizlet is left in place with a very powerful local ally and they send Narklet as a replacement overseer. Yeah, sure, he’s a fantastic head scavenger and a true believer, but he’s also managed to antagonize all of the other Patriarchs without appearing to realize it, gets easily distracted by telling him that he’s a Very Special Boy, and is such a zealot that he didn’t even consider using Kass’s position in Val Salia’s command structure as a way to recover antiquities that got into Viracroix’s hands… which would seem like a golden opportunity if Vizlet trading away “useless scraps” provoked this vicious of a backlash.
My suspicion is that the Elders used Vizlet’s “sin” as an excuse to spread around a bunch of Yinglets who suddenly had a lot of new building techniques and transferable skills, and after the first Patriarch of Scavenging confirmed that she hadn’t traded away anything important they dumped Narklet on her to get him out of their fur and gave him a bullshit snipe hunt to keep him occupied. It makes sense with how he appears to be looking for something very important but doesn’t appear to know what zhat zhing actually is – otherwise, he’d probably be a little more suspicious about the random adult female yinglet that appeared out of nowhere employed by the guy Vizlet traded a bunch of antiquities to.
Naw man I think this is exactly what they say it is. This is about the artifacts 100%. The fact that there was at least 2 artifacts that turns things into Yinglets suggests that there’s more. I think artifacts are far, far more important to Yinglets than anybody realizes. My theory is because they were made by/for them.
Could be a bit of both.
Hmm… bit of a wild guess here.
Since Humans seem pretty content advancing on their own, with possibly only Val Salia pushing so hard for Antiquities of any kind, perhaps the Central Enclaves are far more advanced than they let on?
They’ve specialized and focused SO hard on finding Antiquities and scouring the world for them, that perhaps they are the primary reason for their advancements?
…What if all these ‘special Yinglet inventions’ are mainly Antiquities, or from Antiquity knowledge?
Heck, what if they even have machines, perhaps war machines, back in the secluded Central Enclaves, which they don’t want anyone else to know about, or not yet?
They don’t want to risk anyone else getting an advantage, no matter how small, so they just blanket order ALL Antiquities to be sent back, to make sure they can be properly analyzed and learned from. Or, at least, out of the hands of potential enemies.
Here’s my full on crack theory: Antiques are made for Yinglets, or at least they consider themselves the rightful inheritors. This story is a low-key scifi. When the original humans came, they had technology far beyond anything in this world, which makes sense if they were capable of spatial and/or dimensional travel. They took a species close enough to our own template, social cooperative mammals, and used that as a genetic template to create a gene-rewriter (presumably some kind of nanotech) to make humans into something best able to survive here. Wheather this was out of desperation, creation of a slave class, or simply some freaks sick creation for giggles, something went wrong, because there are also humans here and the mothership either left or got incapacitated, probably destroyed. This is why there is no evidence of the previous greater civiliation.
Might be the Baxxid. Either another creation for different purposes or an unrelated alien intrusion at hte same time, this bioweapon species created to destroy things also went wrong. Their hive-mind connection was disrupted, leaving these sentient intelligent creatures first distressed, then thinking about what they actually wanted to do and deciding to embrace civilization.
Whatever the case, you had humans and yinglets now sharing the space, with humans who had to rebuild society from scratch. But Yinglets? Yinglets remembered. The original transformed Yinglets realized quickly their transformed species had many disadvantages, the impulsivity and mutations meant the secrets could not be shared with all, they’d surely get out. So a small elite are fully aware of the truth. And if they get the right artifacts, they can find the mothership, or rewrite the genetics to tweak the Yinglet genotype, or maybe just conquer the world. The fact that some “hear the ancestors” makes me think the mothership or something important from it like an intact server core is out there, it’s sending signals and some Yinglets (likely all taken to the central enclave when the talent is observed) can hear it. It helps them find artifacts, but it can’t identify which artifacts are the right one. But humans might be able to figure some part of this out, even just with scraps so they can’t have ANYTHING. No risks taken with this.
I think even the ‘useless’ artifacts hold some power or importance in this case. A shiny rock that anyone could easily mistake for trash transformed a Human and a section of the floor into a Yinglet. Who’s to say there’s not more to them? Or there being some truly scary power in what appears to be scraps of metal?
The more significant artifacts appear to be our equivalent of modern/spacer technology in a medieval world (toaster, sword, planetary globe, a high-tech coffee mug), so those are obviously valuable, but other stuff can also have significance.
One can consider this like in Rimworld – the Yinglets, the scavs (scavengers!), are finding Archaeotech nobody can reproduce and are hoarding it, either to use it (what if EVERY female is artificially made?), safeguard it from other species abusing it or destroying themselves, or as some form of genetic memory duty (if they are an engineered species by those that left the artifacts behind). They might be aware of some latent power in them (e.g. transformative radiation).
Said scraps could be dangerous in even the simplest forms – a chunk of metal could be forged into an superalloy. A weird rock might be deathly radioactive without anyone noticing, or be a simple chemical reaction away from becoming an atomic bomb. The list goes on.
thats a great point, the artifact that transforms you into a different species would normally look like a raygun or something, but to them it just looked like a shiny rock that broke.
wait, why does she care about building techniques? Im not complaining just not sure why shed need those in particular. I assumed their villages are made out of grass and stuff because they like it like that
Because she understands the concept of “On the Shoulders of Giants” and as it just so happens some giants in the settlement right next to them are willing to provide the tools and knowledge to uplift their enclave rapidly in exchange for worthless old trash, while the “good stuff” would be sent back to the central community. Like the one little aside compared put it, amd all the evidence we have seen, most Yinglets seem to be having to constantly reinvent the wheel because their standard tech base is pretty non-existant compared to more advanced civilizations/races.
Buddy(Kass) should interrupt her(Vizlet) story to offer to kill the twat(Narklet).
Can’t. That option is off the table.
Viracroix already offered and was turned down.