raspy, standing, nosy – AI Artifact #7

This is the 7th AI Artifact, a magic item based on an image generated by an AI from randomly generated words. In this case, those words are “raspy“, “standing“, and “nosy“. If you want to know what this is about, you can find the rules here.

Finding a working Prompt

While I will try the “standard” prompt, I do not have high hopes that it will yield a satisfyingly weird result based on past experiences. But I am no stranger to tweak randomness in entertainment’s favor – although that is probably a rather harsh way to put it. It is more like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Which is probably an apt description of what Midjourney is doing, anyway.

In order to give that fabled randomness room to thrive, I took the original prompt and rerolled it three times. There are some themes that keep coming up, including that “nosy” apparently leads to big noses. At least it is not as boxy as some of the other prompts turned out, but at first glance there was no instant favorite among them (spoiler alert: the second glance changed that).

But then, something strange happened. One of those options grew on me. I would let you guess which one, but that would not be time-effective so I will tell you right away. Top right, original prompt. This one is just too cute to pass up, and the fact that it is looking at a pile of glowing poo certainly adds the required randomness.

The Image – raspy, standing, nosy

I had Midjourney do variations on that particular offering, but for some reason they all lost a bit compared to the original. Either the poo changed, or the mask/nose.

Thus, I decided to upscale my original pick. Since that process tends to add details that were not present in the original, I was weary at first, but it turned out that this time, the upscale function did not remove any of what intrigued me about this image.

Yes, the pile is not quite as poo-like as it used to be, but I am willing to deal with that. So, the question becomes, what is raspy, standing, and nosy? Glad you asked.

The Glowing Leftover

This magic artifact is a glass jar that fits into a hand, holding what can best be described as a glowing pile of poo that for some reason always sits at the glass’ bottom despite its orientation. That’s it. That’s the item. It is often disregarded for looking insignificant, appearing meaningless, or being a mere parlor trick that any semi-decent mage could reproduce with ease.

What makes the Glowing Leftover unique, though, is that it is not alone. There is a creature following it that makes itself known only when the Glowing Leftover is unsupervised. While it is possible to spy on the being as it appears next to the glass jar, it will vanish as soon as whoever sees it becomes too obvious.

Curious scholars have tried to catch it, but it has evaded all traps that were devised to hold it. In addition, if the attempts became too intrusive and reckless, the creature would pick up the Glowing Leftover and leave, bypassing any locks or gates in their way.

The Nature of the Pile

There are many worlds out there, encompassing many different sizes, lifespans, and creation myths. Some are tree-based, where one such growth is said to support the world – and it does. And some of them shrink and wither away. One such world, with one such tree, had a group of guardians who had been tasked with protecting their world at all cost.

When it became apparent that their world was not facing destruction by an outside force, but was rather dieing naturally, they chose to preserve what they could. They gathered chunks of resin from the tree, one for each of them, and left their world through portals before it fell apart.

The Nature of the Companion

One of the tree’s protectors placed their chunk of arboreal energy in a glass jar, and allowed it to be found by curious minds. It travels with it, follows it, and allows it to experiment with the remnants of another world in the hopes that one day it will sprout again. In the meantime, the guardian will do its utmost to protect its ward – usually by wisking it away – and invest a little time and energy every now and then to brighten up the world it finds itself in.

Random Fixes of Things in no need of Fixing

After I had decided what this little critter would do, ideas kept popping in my head for what would be cool and interesting. But they were very specific, and even harder to press into an easily digestible random table shape. I hope what this turned into is serviceable, and allows for a wide range of surprise art to enrich people’s (or players’) lives – or cause due confusion.

Since all these tables rely heavily on the environment, there will always be options that just won’t work. For example, if the only light source is the sun, it would be hard to modify that. But you might be able to tweak it, and turn it into something that pretties up the sun’s reflection. And the things to fix might not even have been visible prior to the fix.

Unlike previous tables, this works best if the companion is actually part of the story, or can influence it in any meaningful way. But as always, that is up to you, and you might include some of these fixes for no other reason than to hint at the potential of something awesome having come through here.

Do you feel more raspy already?

Looking back, it occurs to me that the original prompt was the one that produced this item, which should restore my faith in the original (made-up) process. I am curious to see how that works out in future itterations. Make sure to take a look at past ones here.

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Thanks for stopping by, and remember to Be Inspired!