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rakashavia http://ift.tt/2g5bkrB:
andailtinfanach:
kanafinwhy:
Potential story concept: space selkies. In their lithe, articulated skins - part spacesuit, part ship, part solar sail, part cybernetic exoskeleton, and somehow not quite any of these - these creatures glide through the galaxy, in the quiet of interstellar space, sometimes alone and sometimes a few together. Sometimes they will come to a solar system, taking delight in frolicking through asteroid fields or dancing in a comet’s ion tail or skimming the tops of planetary atmospheres in the narrowest of flybys, propelled by gravitational kicks from solid bodies or simply carried along on the solar wind.
Sometimes they might land on a planet, and sometimes that planet is inhabited. Space selkies are curious creatures, so sometimes they will take off their skins to walk on the organic, delicately-webbed feet that their species hardly ever have any use for, a relic of a time when they lived in a far-off galaxy on their own misty planet of swirling hazes and shifting seas, now long gone and largely forgotten.
The skin folds up very compactly. It makes a tiny ceramic ellipsoid - like a pebble rounded by flowing liquid, but dry and slightly warm to the touch. They carry it with them wherever they go on a planet’s surface, guarding it fiercely as their most precious possession, because their life and their freedom is inside.
But sometimes it is taken from them. Sometimes they meet the local inhabitants, who take away their skin to study, or to protect them. Perhaps because they are tricked… or sometimes perhaps, they fall in love, and choose to stay. Without the skin, the selkie is trapped, confined to an alien world. And whether they are there willingly or not, they are always looking up, always on some level longing for the quiet vastness of space and the glimmer of the endless stars from whence they came.
First of all, I love this.
Secondly, in Orkney and Shetland folklore, the seal-people are sometimes said to live in a realm under the sea; they need their skins in order to travel through the sea that parts their realm from ours. This works really well here.
Third, hybrid children. People who look almost human except for the delicate webbing between their fingers, and the subtle shimmer and sheen of their skin. People whose black irises are a little too big, whose eyes reflect the light of the moon a little too well. People who always know where Orion rests in the sky, who stay awake at night watching shooting stars with a nostalgia that they can’t explain.
@poplitealqueen
andailtinfanach:
kanafinwhy:
Potential story concept: space selkies. In their lithe, articulated skins - part spacesuit, part ship, part solar sail, part cybernetic exoskeleton, and somehow not quite any of these - these creatures glide through the galaxy, in the quiet of interstellar space, sometimes alone and sometimes a few together. Sometimes they will come to a solar system, taking delight in frolicking through asteroid fields or dancing in a comet’s ion tail or skimming the tops of planetary atmospheres in the narrowest of flybys, propelled by gravitational kicks from solid bodies or simply carried along on the solar wind.
Sometimes they might land on a planet, and sometimes that planet is inhabited. Space selkies are curious creatures, so sometimes they will take off their skins to walk on the organic, delicately-webbed feet that their species hardly ever have any use for, a relic of a time when they lived in a far-off galaxy on their own misty planet of swirling hazes and shifting seas, now long gone and largely forgotten.
The skin folds up very compactly. It makes a tiny ceramic ellipsoid - like a pebble rounded by flowing liquid, but dry and slightly warm to the touch. They carry it with them wherever they go on a planet’s surface, guarding it fiercely as their most precious possession, because their life and their freedom is inside.
But sometimes it is taken from them. Sometimes they meet the local inhabitants, who take away their skin to study, or to protect them. Perhaps because they are tricked… or sometimes perhaps, they fall in love, and choose to stay. Without the skin, the selkie is trapped, confined to an alien world. And whether they are there willingly or not, they are always looking up, always on some level longing for the quiet vastness of space and the glimmer of the endless stars from whence they came.
First of all, I love this.
Secondly, in Orkney and Shetland folklore, the seal-people are sometimes said to live in a realm under the sea; they need their skins in order to travel through the sea that parts their realm from ours. This works really well here.
Third, hybrid children. People who look almost human except for the delicate webbing between their fingers, and the subtle shimmer and sheen of their skin. People whose black irises are a little too big, whose eyes reflect the light of the moon a little too well. People who always know where Orion rests in the sky, who stay awake at night watching shooting stars with a nostalgia that they can’t explain.
@poplitealqueen
