⭗ REDIRECTIONS XVII⭗

⭗ ZOA ON THE MYRTILLE WAY #2 ⭗

⭗ WATCHERS OF THE PELTIER PLAINS ⭗

A Report By Lleva Vyeldisana, Naturalist and Zoa Conservationist

For transmission to the Vert-Kelly University of Natural Sciences, Emerald City.

Naturalist-Philosopher Antoiraj Vivikre of Safranj is the only scholar that I know of who has made any significant attempt to study the Watchers of Peltier Plains. Of course, everyone who has read his posthumous work Voix De Glace knows what happened to him in his pursuit of more knowledge about these enigmatic life (plant?) forms. I won’t belabor the point by detailing it here, but I think that what happened to him might be the primary reason why so few have been willing to study the Watchers in the years since.

Nuts to that, I say! I am a naturalist, and it is my very reason for existence to take the risk and watch creatures like the Watchers of Peltier Plains. Dear reader, I can say that I have done so much more than just watch them. I have walked among them. I have touched them while they slept.

Typically when the Watchers of the Peltier Plains are seen by caravans crossing over the Myrtille Way to the Emerald City from the Bluelands and the North, they appear only as grassy knolls incongruously spread out across patches of high desert scrubland, particularly in the stretch between Blue Hand Shrine No. 7 and the settlement of Cornflower. One doesn’t need a keen eye to realize that something is off about these hills (besides the fact that the biome the Watchers inhabit is not conducive to sprawling mounds of luxurious green grass.) Firstly, the Watchers are covered by a fine green fur that only looks like blades of grass until you come right up on it. Secondly, even when a Watcher is sleeping, significant seismic vibration will cause them to open an eye to search for threats. Strangely enough, even a fully-stocked caravan of many animals and vechs (like the Vermeil Vein) is not enough for a Watcher to register it as a threat. What such a creature would run from, I can only speculate, but it must be much larger and much faster moving than any caravan. 

The Watchers of Peltier plains are nocturnal. They lay about during the day, hibernating and sunning themselves until night falls, and only then do they begin to hunt. Generally, even in the darkest night, the Watchers will steer clear of caravans on the road, so most experiences of caravaneers who come across the Watchers consist solely of waking in the morning and asking “hey, wasn’t there a hill over yonder last night?” Indeed there was a hill over yonder, I would say, and then add the rather unexpected statement that, during the night, it rose up and walked off. 

In my nocturnal observations (at a distance) of the Watchers, I have noticed that they have a preference for hunting smaller prey than Rainbowlanders. Generally, the smaller, slower and stupider an animal is, the more likely the Watchers will be to hunt it. As such, mostly their diet consists of fat lizards and insects which they comb from the dirt and sand of the wastes like a massive vacuum cleaner. Prey are swept up by great fronds of green needle-blades hidden in the grassy fur around a central foot/mouth upon which the Watchers move. Occasionally, there have been reports of Rainbowlanders being swept up into the mouths of such a creature, but attacks on caravans are so rare that they are surely only rumors at best or the result of madness or starvation in a Watcher at worst. Rather, it seems that, as the Watchers are terrified of fire, torches, candles, and crowds, only foolish individuals wandering out into the Peltier Plains at night without a light are likely to become a meal for a Watcher. Per the standard procedure of the Vert-Kelly University of Natural Sciences in the Emerald City, I would propose that the L.R.U.V.G. classification for the Watchers of Peltier Plains would be Towering Watcher (L3, Vacuuming). 

Personal note on my new traveling companions: the "Oracle," her pet polybody cultist and their enigmatic hanger-on, Charred-Hand are most definitely bound for somewhere in the Redlands. I spent an hour today just listening to the Oracle babble on about dreams and manifestation and other such high-minded occultist ideals. Sometimes, I think she sounds absolutely half a stack of bricks short of a tenement, but other times, the things she says actually seem to make a kind of sense. When I look into her eyes and she smiles, sometimes it is like her thoughts worm themselves into the meat of my mind and nest there, chewing away at my memories until I can translate her madness. Maybe there is something to it. Maybe that is why Coda 1-3 is so in thrall of her. Maybe she is part cat. I cannot say. More research is needed. Perhaps Charred-Hand will be able to provide more insight into whatever powers this bluefolk spirit woman thing possesses, but does not speak openly of.

⭗ OUR PARTY (SO FAR) ⭗

Lleva Vyeldisana, Greenfolk Naturalist and Zoa Conservationist

"Charred-Hand" a perfectly ordinary and unassuming wastelander

The Blue Oracle, Dreamer of Dreams

 

Coda-1, Coda-2 and Coda-3, a bluelander polybody pilgrim, allegedly.

⭗ WHAT ARE REDIRECTIONS? ⭗

My goal with REDIRECTIONS is to add my own contribution to the Psychedelic / Heavy Metal / Ligne Claire art RPG space.  Much in the way that people inspired by Tolkien’s style helped give birth to the modern genre of High Fantasy, the style of Jean “Moebius” Giraud (and others like him) seems to be spawning a sort of genre of its own right now, and I want to expose more people to the wonders of it. I want to share it. I want to be a part of it. Most of all, I want it to grow.

    REDIRECTIONS is a collection of wondrous places and resources presented in story format (as a game in play, specifically traversing the universe of UVG (Ultraviolet Grasslands) but it is also kept more general for your own RPG characters to visit and explore regardless of the system you use. Each place is unique and wholly original, with a bevy of interesting stories, plot hooks and characters to color your experience. The format and many of the specific terms are from UVG. I'm just playing in Luca Rejec's universe. If you like these posts and find them useful, let me know! As of this point, all art in these posts is created as a collaboration with AI. Basically I trained an AI art model on my own sharpie marker drawings, then generated a bunch of pictures and trained a series of other models on them. I generate images with these models, sometimes using these as source images, and sometimes using these models to refine output from DALLE-3. There is, literally, in every image, a little bit of me. Consider these images to be homages to the genre and pretty pictures, but nothing more. I greatly respect the skill of people who work with pen and pencil and have the skill of hand to make things from scratch. This is a series, and each entry is numbered. If you like things like this, please support the true artists whose works are part of the genre, such as the works of Moebius, Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands, Luke Gearing's Acid Death Fantasy and Raw Fury's game SABLE.