Talita is a socially anxious aerospace engineer and cross-species foster kid. She was left as an infant on the Nexus Jovia youth foster care facility doorstep in a cat carrier, and no one is certain of her origin. She has spent the vast majority of her life around humans and isn’t very familiar with her own species or their myriad of cultures. Talita hates talking about herself or being the center of attention, but will light up if asked about aerospace topics. Her hobbies include ripping apart old electronics and building new things, collecting and designing wind spinners, and bodybuilding.

Talita is the resident engineer of the Runaway, a torchship space ferry with two z-pinch fusion power plants. She lives with her crewmates Idrisah, Gillie, Sirawit, and the Bip the A.I. pilot. She is in a long distance relationship with Shyam Joshi.

More art and comics of Talita can be found in her tag on my tumblr blog.

Clothing and Subculture

Skimmer avians are generally very conservative dressers, often to an impractical degree. Although they are known for making very light and slippery fabrics, a lot of their fashions toe the line of what they can wear and still manage to fly, not to mention that long periods of clothedness can irritate and damage their feathers. They wear lots of body powder under their clothes to prevent this, and tighter formal outfits are usually only worn in brief public outskirts. Among wealthy avians, extremely heavy and elaborate clothing is worn as a status symbol that announces that the wearer of the garment is rich enough that they have no need to do anything as exhausting as flying to get around, vehicles and attendants do that for them. This became even more popular in the age of space colonization, because having a large and heavy wardrobe is also very expensive to push around between planets.

Conservative dress standards are much higher for duns, who are expected to cover more of their torso, tail and limbs than brights, as well as the back of their neck (a very sexy area). Traditionally duns are discouraged from wearing any saturated colors, but the younger generations will wear romantic hues associated with blood and flushing skin, like oranges and magenta; or less forward shades like bright red, ultraviolet, and purple. It is very frowned upon for them to wear yellows and blues, the color of a bright’s crest. It is akin to crossdressing, which is a strong taboo.

Brights can get away with showing much more skin, especially on the neck (not as sexualized for them) and traditionally wear saturated blues and yellows even before they develop their crest at puberty. Defiant bright youngsters have started to wear more muted colors, much to the chagrin of their elders. Today’s youth have been tainted by alien influences from humans and ferrets, they say. Have you seen how skimpy their outfits are? Absolutely unscrupulous!

Tiiliitian society has even more specific rules about color, mostly greens. Green hues are exclusively worn by royalty, and a specific shade of mint green is only worn by the Tiiliit, their monarch. Commoners can possess items with these colors, but wearing them within the legal reach of the dominion is a crime.

Carnalists:

Literally translated “flesh-lovers,” Carnalists’ name refers to their embracing of sexual freedom, body modification, and hedonism. They frequently wear clothing as skimpy as they can (or can’t) get away with under decency laws— neck and torso exposure is a frequent point of controversy in skimmer dominant cultures. The subculture is also very accepting of queer avians, with a style of dress that doesn’t change much between sexes and spiritual beliefs about souls being fluid and androgynous. The colors they wear and pattern aesthetic they use to decorate also reflects the subculture name, as magenta is the color of spilt blood and orange is the color of bare flesh (which is associated with violence too, because pale skin is only visible on a plucked avian).



Carnalists are big on body modification, and view it as a very futuristic practice. Avian bodies are fairly delicate and historical practices of deliberate self injury, even ear piercings, are rare on the homeplanet. But improving medical technology has made body mods safer than ever before, and taking influence from alien culture has carnalists trying all kinds of things to themselves. In addition to supporting piercings, avian ears are very rigid and well suited for elaborate patterns of removed chunks, gauges, cutting and grafting strips of flesh into knots and loops. Feather dying is of course seen in addition to makeup, but feather plucking (partial or whole body), feather splitting, and decorative clippings can also be done to wild effect.



Politically, Carnalists are mostly anarchists and communists. The movement tends to be especially popular with non-skimmers living under skimmer colonialist authority.

Concealists:

Concealists were mostly funded by brights rejecting traditional expectations of their bodies, namely that they should be competing with other brights for sexual attention, but the hyper-dual androgyny of the movement has attracted a fair number of duns as well. They wear a lot of blacks (a dun-associated color) and whites (a bright-associated color) with different ratios sometimes dependent on how the individual feels about their gender. The pointed absence of any saturated colors removes sexual undertones from their dress, though, as does their tendency to wear things that obscure the shape of their body through pattern and bagginess.

Many Concealists reject sex entirely, and will either meditate or take chemical suppressants during the mating season. They also generally disapprove of recreational drugs and excess socializing, viewing these as corrupting influences. The most extreme Concealists undergo fasting and take on ascetic lifestyles and distance themselves from unnecessary social connections. Despite the comparison to monks or nuns, they also tend to reject spirituality as another corrupting social influence.

Concealist political views are a bit scattered, ranging from anarchists who don’t like the hedonism of Carnalists to libertarians who think avian society should be even less social. Demographically, most concealists are skimmers living under skimmer hegemony.