Swalun & Swaluminum
Designation: the ALUMINUM FOIL LEFTOVERS SWAN cillimorphs
Group: BIRDISH
Native Biomes: PLANET BRRR & PLANET URBANIAK
Size: SMALL
Interesting Facts: The silvery skin helps them insulate, trapping massive amounts of heat. They store food under the skin, which cooks it and helps the flavors mingle. Swaluminum tries to store too much and often bursts open, releasing a cartoonish scent trail that makes hungry cillimorphs chase it around.
Ammonacci & Nautifrac
Designation: the FIBONACCI SEQUENCE & FRACTAL cillimorphs
Group: SPINELESS
Native Biomes: PLANET SPLISHY & PLANET BOLDERO
Size: SMALL & MEDIUM
Interesting Facts: Ammonacci has a mathematically perfect shell, the purpose of which is unknown, so we’ll assume bragging rights. As Nautifrac, the shell is covered in endlessly diminishing versions of itself that would surely drive a man to obsession, madness, and death, so just look at its cute grumpy eyebrows instead.
Welcome to Helens, where books (looking an awful lot like people) show up to have their genres assigned by the publishing courthouse. The gorgeous and vivacious Valentine Lots appears, claiming to be a contemporary romance, but the sour soggy publishers say she has to be labeled as erotica.
Enter her representative Austentatious Punk: passionate, funky, and wearing as thin as her home. Valentine’s public defender will stop at nothing to see her get the genre label she deserves, but there might be time for a few breaks to get to know each other, bake a decent dessert, and talk love lives in this metafictional courtroom procedural slice-of-life novelette!
(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 37 minutes)
Austentatious Punk
Attorney-at-Genre
by
Blaine Arcade
The Valentine Case: Public Reading 1
Double doors burst and the works flooded in. None of them had any idea where they were going, hence the guides with their red sashes and gold calligraphy titles. ‘Right this way please’ they say, polite as a first time flight attendant, white gloves beckoning in slow motion: the flight of serene and knowing doves.
Using cues only they have memorized, the guides split the new works based on one glance, into different tributaries of shuffling feet headed for their very own doors. The space was tall but tight; you had room to breath but not to run. Wooden doors were stapled into buzz cut carpets. New works never brought any odors along from the imaginary places that spawned them, so despite the crowds the publishing courthouse always smelled like office printers breathing their last and spine glue.
A pair of dovely gloves fluttered in her face, momentarily nonplussed, then grabbed her and pulled her into another line. Nobody else was so much as touched. She couldn’t catch the plaque on the door before she was pushed through into a dimmer room, quieter too, so much quieter that it left her stunned. Continue reading
Whirlyfig & Vitabeetwo
Designation: the SAMARA & ALSOMITRA MACROCARPA cillimorphs
Group: GROWER
Native Biomes: PLANET URBANIAK, PLANET WOODZY, & OUTER SPACE
Size: SMALL & LARGE
Raptisserie & Baldbecue
Designation: the BALD EAGLE cillimorphs
Group: BIRDISH
Native Biomes: PLANET BRRR & PLANET SCORCHER
Size: SMALL
Interesting Facts: These two knuckleheads really can’t get their act together, only ever covering half their body in insulated feathers. Raptisserie, depending on which planet it is on, always has a hot head or a cold body. Baldbecue is the reverse of that.
Angwell & Abdungler
Designation: the ANGLERFISH & UFO cillimorphs
Group: FISHY
Native Biomes: PLANET SPLISHY & OUTER SPACE
Size: SMALL
Interesting Facts: Angwell is sexually dimorphic, with a much smaller (and more cheerful?) male. A male and female must fuse to mature into Abdungler, which can then lay eggs on its own. Anything Abdungler can’t catch with its grabbing claw it manipulates with the tractor light underneath it.
Neanana & Neanono
Designation: the BANANA SPLIT cillimorphs
Group: COLONIAL
Native Biomes: PLANET BRRR & PLANET BOLDERO
Size: SMALL & MEDIUM
Interesting Facts: Neanana has three minds, each of a different personality flavor. They only mature once they all agree on everything. As a Neanono, they never stress about anything. If something presents as a conundrum, it just pokes the conundrum with its banana bunch stinger until it goes away.
Ankhlien & Illumumm
Designation: the ANCIENT ALIEN & SARCOPHAGUS cillimorphs
Group: REPTOPHIBIAN
Native Biomes: PLANET SCORCHER & OUTER SPACE
Size: SMALL & MEDIUM
Woollywarp & Mothaxy
Designation: the WOOLLY WORMHOLE cillimorphs
Group: SEGMENTED
Native Biomes: PLANET BRRR & OUTER SPACE
Size: SMALL
Interesting Facts: Woollywarp never fully comes out of its portal, like a bagworm back on that blue marble planet, or whatever it was called. The half that hangs out in the regular world does get pretty cold, so it grows a fur lining on the portal. Mothaxy’s wings contain the mysteries of the cosmos. If it stopped flapping long enough we might be able to figure them out and end all suffering…
Cancarrot & Burlescarole
Designation: the SALACIOUSLY SHAPED CARROT cillimorphs
Group: GROWER
Native Biomes: PLANET WOODZY & PLANET URBANIAK
Size: SMALL
Blaine Arcade 