Pet of the Month Club #2: Meet the Candidates (Patreon)

Hey folks!

Because some patrons have expressed interest in reading the Pet of the Month Club candidate descriptions, we've decided to make them available to all patrons. (To get the pet itself, you still have to be Arconaut [$5] or higher, and to vote, Barathrumite [$10] or higher.)

Here they are! The vote ends tonight at 11:59 PDT, so stay tuned for the results (right now, it's a dead heat). 

Live and drink, friends.

Lyngbaskr

Athwart the rust-shelves of Qud, the glass snail lives in equilibrium with its ecosystem. They are exceedingly rare but play an important role. Any more of them and the rust-reefs their hatchlings feed on would crumble. Any fewer and the fertilizing mites they carry would remain trapped in their lightless nooks. Virtually never are they spotted directly, but for years arconauts have told stories about the tricks their torches have played in deep chasms, how the light was cast in strange and wrong ways. The snails are prized, of course; anything that vitrifies is. They appear in art, as expected, and among the artifacts of the Gaad are even shown crawling side by side with human folk, as friends.

either/or

Where they always there?

As a child you would swear

that shadows stood at the edge of your sight.

And at night?

When you shouted at the Beetle Moon,

From the banks of a porcelain river strewn

with nenuphars, and someone answered,

were they dancers?

Rhythmic shades who perform the subtext of all your affairs?

Or you theirs?

Porphyryptus

O, to be a vine on the Hanging Hills! No accounts of the peculiar customs of humans have enchanted me like the pillow books out of the courts of the fiefdoms of Odrum. Allow me to recount one of the more colorful practices. In court, it is common to display wealth and status through the keeping of fanciful caged birds. Particularly in Doria, the courtiers have bred birds to a stunning degree of ornamentation. The books are filled with the antics of these avian beauts and the trouble they cause their possessors. They've ruined suppers, soured alliances, and even killed their noble breeders in the course of court displays gone tragically wrong. Occasionally, the birds themselves rise to power and supplant their aristocratic progenitors. Some, however, abide by their natures more straightforwardly, taking advantage of an ajar gate and simply flying away to another life.

-Collected notes from the Baccata Yewtarch

Ebenshabat

"WOULD YOU LIKE A STARAPPLE, FRIEND?

THEY ARE LOVELY. THE JUICE IS INSIDE.

OH, MYSELF? HAH HAH HAH. NO, FRIEND. I WON'T BE EATING ONE.

I COULDN'T.

MUST I, ANYWAY, TO APPRECIATE THE JUICE? 

CAN'T I ADMIRE THE AESTHETICS OF THE APPLE FROM AFAR?

AREN'T I IN A BETTER POSITION TO JUDGE THE APPLE, ABSTAINING FROM THE JUICE, AS I DO?

HAH HAH HAH, FRIEND! 

I ENJOY OUR CONVERSATIONS.

THERE, THE HIGH SALT SUN! IT CASTS NEXT TO NO SHADOWS.

BUT SOON IN WILL TRACE AN ARC ALONG THE WIDE SKY.

AND THEN, WHY, WOULD YOU SIT WITH ME? IN THE SHADE OF A STARAPPLE TREE.

YOU MAY EAT A STARAPPLE WHILE YOU DO. THE JUICE IS INSIDE."