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I wanted to do something silly for Opposite Day, so I drew the siblings doing my Twoleg job!

I have my dash set to chronological so I don't miss anybody's updates but I stg it keeps turning itself off and it's pmo so bad

Moon 3, Part 1

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“Stop breathing on me.”

“I’m not anywhere near you, Fogpaw.”

“You are, because you’re close enough to be breathing on me.”

StarClan help her.

“What’s your problem?” Moonpaw asks, unable to keep claws of exasperation from sharpening her voice. She’s not anywhere near him. They’ve been walking side by side for ages, up this horrible, hot mountain to the highest edge of their territory, under the horrible, blazing sun, and only now he’s going to fuss that she’s been beside him this entire time?

“What’s your problem?” He mocks in a poor imitation of Moonpaw’s meow, sticking his tongue out at the end of his sentence. 

Moonpaw scoffs. The fur along her back is so warm it feels as though it’s been set aflame under the full force of the greenleaf sun, and her paws ache with the near-vertical climb up harsh ground. Short on patience, she lifts a paw and bats Fogpaw with it. He should consider himself lucky she kept her claws sheathed.

Fogpaw whirls on her, astonished and angry, and whaps her with a paw of his own. Her ears flatten and her fur bristles as she rears back, tail fluffed up to twice its size.

“Seriously, what is wrong with you?”

“You hit me first!”

“Because you’re being an idiot!”

“Well, if you would stop stepping all over me–”

“FINE!” Moonpaw screeches. A few songbirds lift from the sparse trees that cling to the cliffside, startled. “If I’m just so in your way, I’ll get out of your fur!”

“GOOD!” Fogpaw yowls back. “I’m going hunting by myself!”

Fogpaw stomps off and Moonpaw hisses at his retreating back, her own arched and angry. What is he being such a mouse-brain for? She whips around, intending to get her emotions out by sinking her claws into something, but her head is too cloudy with anger to focus on the scents surrounding her. It doesn’t help any that somebody had her training cut short because her mentor got buried under a pile of boulders.

Angry tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, she crouches down in defeat. She can’t do this. She can’t do this – pretending that everything is fine, walking in some random direction and hoping for a miracle. She’s walked every inch of this territory since her earliest apprentice days. The best place for a camp was drowned in rocks and rubble. They’re not going to find another one.

Despair sinks quick claws into her chest, overwhelms her with the thought, I wish StarClan had buried me, too.

A sharp blur of color speeds past her. Pupils dilating, her despair fades to the back of her mind as she hones in on a rabbit that’s sped by and settled several fox-lengths away, sniffing and nibbling at some grass that’s struggling to grow through the cracks in the rock.

She flexes her claws against the rough ground. Catching a juicy piece of fresh-kill is the best kind of therapy. 

Dropping into a hunter’s crouch, she drags her belly slowly over the mountain as she creeps up on the rabbit, closing the distance between them to a few tail-lengths. The wind is in her favor, and the rabbit hasn’t spotted her yet.

An ear-splitting yowl cuts through the air. The rabbit’s ears go up, eyes round and frightened, and it bounds away. Alarmed, Moonpaw’s ears also fly up, head swiveling in the direction of the noise.

Fogpaw.

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Moon 5 Part 4

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Fogfreckle’s body hits the ground hard, rolling halfway down the slope as Moonstar slides down after him, pebbles skidding out from under her paws as she rushes to his side.

“Fogfreckle?” Moonstar’s voice wavers as she reaches him in a spray of stones, hovering a scraped paw gently over his bleeding body as she hesitates. He’s just lying there, chest rising and falling shallowly, as blood oozes from thick punctures along his back that stains his pale fur red. Should she roll him over? What if his bones are broken? He’s not dead, by the grace of StarClan, but she’s no medicine cat – she has no idea how close he is to death or how much worse she’ll make it if she tries to move him.

The circling shadow of the eagle drifts over them with another ear-splitting, screeching cry, and Moonstar’s fear makes the decision for her. She grabs Fogfreckle by the scruff of the neck and begins to haul him farther down the slope. She doesn’t want to injure him more than he already is, but she knows it’ll be worse if they’re caught out here on the open mountainside once the larger predators in the area catch scent of his blood and come to investigate.

Fogfreckle doesn’t make a single nose of pain as she pulls him through the dirt. She drags him as far as a tumbled collection of boulders and stones, squeezing into a space between the rocks that is just big enough for Moonstar to fit her body through and drag Fogfreckle in after her. The space is tight, without a lot of room to move, and Moonstar has to swallow panic and bile as the walls seem to press in around them. 

“This is best,” she says aloud to herself, “foxes or fishers can’t reach us in here. It has to be here.” The self-soothing doesn’t do much to abate her claustrophobia, but Fogfreckle makes a pained noise in response to her voice and all thoughts of herself vacate her mind.

Fogfreckle whimpers as Moonstar licks his wounds clean, flinching as she clears dirt from the punctures with her rough tongue. She doesn’t say anything while she works, but she nearly sags in relief with every flinch and whimper from her brother. He’s okay. He’s okay. He’s alive and he’s okay.

“Stay here,” she says at last when she’s cleaned most of the blood and debris from his fur. It’s still oozing sluggishly from his wounds, bright and wet. “I need to find cobwebs. Do you think you broke anything?”

“I don’t think so,” Fogfreckle murmurs, voice weak and faint with exhaustion. 

“Reckless,” Moonstar murmurs back, licking his forehead once. “Alright. Okay. Stay safe. Please, please, stay safe. I’ll get us help, okay? I’ll find someone to help.”

Moonstar scrambles out from under the claustrophobic press of rocks and pelts back up the mountain, swerving trees and boulders and leaping roots as she climbs higher and higher. Panic and grief strangles her thundering heart, pushing her to run faster and faster until her legs are burning. She reaches a break in the pines, a ledge buffeted by the wind, and yowls at the top of her lungs until her voice runs ragged.

“HELP! SOMEBODY, HELP! PLEASE! HELP!”

Her voice echoes back to her across the mountain, mimicking her fear. When it fades, there is only the sound of the mountain. Wind in her ears, the rustle of leaves in the trees, insects that hum in the sun. A sob escapes her, then a full blown wail, and her body collapses beneath her as the lack of response presses against her.

They are alone. At sunrise, she awoke as the leader of this clan, and at sundown she is so terribly, horribly, awfully alone.

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Moon 27.8: I'm sorry :(

🌍 and ✍️!

-Direclan

i'm gonna put some of this under a readmore because it got SO long hahaha

🌍 What are some of your irl inspirations for the lore/worldbuilding of your comic?

hmm! this is tough, i'm not sure if this includes media (but if it does i'm going to include it later because i'm in a rambly sort of mood, haha).

so as far as the kitty cats go, i definitely take a lot of inspiration from my own dreams. i am very bad at taking my medications at the correct time and i currently take one where the first withdrawal symptom that makes me definitely aware i forgot to take it is that i have really vivid, sometimes very scary dreams. i kind of seek to depict these vivid dreams, so i will likely be doing a lot of experimentation during future dream sequences to capture that feeling of dreamlike unreality.

i also have a small document that includes a list of common foliage in the alaska wilderness. i so far have not taken a whole lot of time to depict it in my art but the chugach mountain range has been a particular focus of mine when i do research about shrubbery and tree diversity. i was a dual ecology & math major in college, so if there's anythign i'm kind of determined to get at least sort of correct it's the environment. (that said, there are tidepools on the coast of this setting where reefclan hunts, so take it with a massive grain of salt. it's fantasy)

my partner's d&d campaign has also had a massive (and i really do mean massive) impact on just like. how i create and how i conceptualize characters, symbolism, colors, and the rest of the works. we've been playing a 1-20 campaign since 2017 and we're in the end-game right now--it's a world-spanning, time-spanning adventure and i am NOT the same person i was coming out as i was going in. half of that is other life stuff but the other half is just that it's made a very profound impact on me as a person, and i consistently seek to emulate the sheer depth of the world he has built, the decades of thought he put into it, the strength of even the most convoluted mechanics and stories. it's rock solid. i'm normal. i'm so normal I PROMISE.

and, as far as media goes, i've definitely taken a lot of inspiration from the lore and worldbuilding of the destiny duology. it's kind of hard to get a handle on the story, but once you do, it really opens up into this incredible saga and some of the worldbuilding is just, SO sick. the idea that you could use conway's game of life as the origin myth for a whole universe really gets me so good. i said this earlier but i have a degree in applied math and i NEVER looked at any numbers or proofs and thought "i could make an origin myth out of that" and it's just SOOOOO cool to me that someone did do that. also it's like sword and sorcery with guns. which rules.

there might be some visible star trek (tng/ds9 specifically), bloodborne, nier automata, pokemon, ffxiv, and hollow knight, but it might be a bit of a challenge to point to anything directly. i think it corresponds to what i've made playlists for, really, hahaha.

✍️ What inspired you to make your clangen comic/ other media?

i've been wanting to publish a comic for a really long time! i've always been hesitant to because i have a really hard time sticking with anything long-term--i tend to cycle between several activities, where i do one or two very intensely for a few weeks to a few months and then switch. not something i do consciously, it's just naturally how my interests tend to manifest. you can actually see my first attempt @/starclan-clangen, which............................. i plan to return to eventually but lost the file for hahaha.

but i never wanted to do a comic sort of half-interested that way--i always wanted to make something that was good, that i could be proud of. it wasn't until i saw other folks making clangen comics that it clicked for me that a comic doesn't have to be my magnum opus and that i can just have fun with it if i want to. folks like @/ranchclan, @/direclan (hehe, thats you), @/nimbusclan, @/cutieclan, @/fallenclan, @/splinterclan, @/sporeclan, @/juniperclan, and @/vaporclan helped me realize i could just... do it, that i didn't have to wait until my art or my writing were more honed in order to like. make something i liked and have fun with it. there are SO many more that i haven't listed here that i love very dearly. the clangen community in general has been such a wonderful galvanizing force for me.

other inspirations that aren't clangen-related include my friend earthtonequeen on comicfury, who does more short story comic work. they've been making comics for a long time and their work is such a huge inspiration to me--i love the stories they tell.

@/jumalanpelko, WOW. the style is so gorgeous, their color work is absolutely phenomenal, and i love love love the worldbuilding.

@/whatlurksbean, what lurks beneath was HUGE for me in the past year or so. i found them after there were already like 500 pages and binged the entire comic. they write characters with such skill, it's incredible to see a story where there's such nuance to each player.

@/thewhalesheart is such a beautiful comic. i love the way they draw lambpaw, it's influenced how i differentiate characters!

@/milosfromhome is a HUGE inspiration to me. this is one of the comics that helped me really decide that comics were what i really actually wanted from my art, and helped me realize that seeing someone's improvement throughout a comic is actually really sick, so i just gotta hit the ground running. huge, huge inspiration for sure hahaha.

the comic "i didn't know" on comicfury has also been a recent but huge inspiration, it addresses real-life issues in a very nuanced way with kitty cats and i'm a huge fan.

@/caemidraws has been an inspiration to me as an artist in general and recently she's started her own comic so i recommend checking her out too! her compositions and general symbology are SO cool.

if i think of further inspirations i may come back and add them but off the top of my head, those are the ones i've been checking back with regularly recently! thank you so much for the ask, i love your work! <3

Moon 7

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“All that’s left to do is to find some more cobwebs for you, bring you water-soaked moss, catch us both something to eat…” Moonstar ticks each item off on her claws, recounting the list in her head for the sixth time since waking. She’s been going over it since the sun rose, making sure she won’t forget anything her brother may need while she’s out. “Are you feeling okay?” She asks, reaching a paw towards his cobweb-covered flank. “Does it hurt at a–”

Fogfreckle’s tail easily flicks up between them, blocking her paw. She leaves it hanging awkwardly in the air between them for a heartbeat, confused, unable to tell if he had done that on purpose or not. “Really getting into that leader mindset, huh?” Her brother mews, and though there’s a slight smile to his mouth, his words fall flat as they reach her ears.

On purpose, then.

Moonstar blinks at him, trying to remember where her thoughts had gone before they’d been so succinctly cut off. “I’ve got to stay on top of things with my deputy out of commission, yeah?” She mews lightly. Her neck fur prickles with unease as the smile drops fully from Fogfreckle’s face.

“Yeah.” His voice is painfully blank. He turns his muzzle away from her, as if the boulders crowding in around them are somehow more interesting to look at. “S’pose so.”

Moonstar fidgets from paw to paw, unsure of the sudden tension stifling the two cats in the crammed space. She runs through her mental list yet again, turning each item over in her head like smooth pebbles to see if any of the contents could have pricked at her brother in a way she hadn’t considered. Try as she might, she can’t figure out how the term ‘water-soaked moss’ would have been able to turn his mood sour.

“You’re being really brave about this,” Moonstar starts, switching tactics. Her brother is still staring blankly into the darkness, turned away from her. “Sticking it out through the pain like this. I know it must hurt.”

She reaches out a paw once again, intending to rest it against his flick, but his ears flick backwards and he pushes himself out of reach. Her paw drops, the confusion at his attitude starting to morph into a hurt that yanks at her like brambles.

“I’m not a kit anymore, Moonstar.”

“...Yeah, I know,” Moonstar mews slowly, feeling like she’s padding on thorns. “You’re– you’re my deputy! You’re–

“Could you just leave me alone?” Fogfreckle curls into a tight ball, wrapping his tail over his nose. His shoulders are sharp in the dim light that issues from the crawlspace entrance, the fur along the back of his neck spiky and agitated. Moonstar frowns at the shape of him in the gloom.

If he doesn’t want her emotional support, fine. She swallows down the ball of hurt that is lodged in her throat like a bird bone and lets it out with a rough sigh. Screw her for trying to be helpful. He can rot, for all she cares, as long as he stays here and stays out of trouble.

She stalks towards the entrance of their makeshift den, shoulders brushing the boulder above her. “I’ll go get your moss.”

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🌙 for Magpiepaw! (from talesofcloverclan)

@talesofcloverclan hi thank you for the ask! 🧡