World of Interest #1011:

hojpoj

Location: Storybook Space

Classification: Silly

Theme: Hodge Podge is thought to be a manifestation of childhood imagination, play, and social dynamics; notably, although the outward symbology of residents varies dramatically, the symbology of every surveyed resident appears to reflect that resident's own interests and hobbies.

Pardon our stardust. This file is in a state of conceptual decay after surveyors allowed resident "The Jabberbecky" to use the computer. Each of her heads said it was very sorry.

Regions

Rainbubble Ocean, an eye-straining Lisa Frank paradise for the nautical and artistic kids

Klickensnap Kingdom, a metropolis of erector sets, legos, kapla blocks, and all construction toys and technology

Tombstone Hollow, a cursed forest dotted with rotting mansions for spooky halloween kids

Plushmallow Valley, a cozy quilted land for gentle types who like dolls and crafts

Kneeskinner Wasteland, a rad blasted desert of skate ramps and broken skyscrapers for X-TREME rowdy and sports kids

Dreamcaps of Sample Residents

Image: A doughy white specter who looks like marshmallow. Ghosty tail makes a peep shape. Chubby girl with puffy cinnamon roll helmet hair. Girl scout uniform where the vest looks like graham cracker and the sleeves and skirt look like chocolate. Acne looks like burnt marshmallow bits. Huge cartoony hands. "This is the legend of STACY PUFT, the ghost girl scout!!! All that she desired was love... and camping... and a cute boyfriend... until one day she died... of HEARTBREAK! Hehe"

Stacy Puft

The Ghost Girl Scout

Tombstone Hollow

Crushy, Gushy, Clingy, Loud

Gets a new crush every three minutes and a new heartbreak every five. But she’s too young for actual dating; she just tries to hold hands with the person or write letters or like giggle from a distance.

Exhaustingly exuberant about her friendships and always glomping. Totally sweet and wholesome heart. Really needs attention and gets lonely or insecure instantly. Gets overexcited about everything fun and always chatters.

She’s the kind of person that keeps extolling the virtues of the outdoors as if she’s going to make everyone else love it.

Ghost, Camping, Melty

Her ectoplasmic body gets melty and sticky with strong emotion, and maybe shows red heat inside. I figure she can reshape herself like clay and can go intangible and fly. She has never actually died; ghost is just her natural state.

She belongs to the Hollow Coven (that’s the coven of spookies that lives in the Hollow) and she’s the only one who treats it like Girl Scouts. She's just glad to be meeting up with other kids in the outdoors and doing activities, even if frequently witchy and evil. She always tries to start the sing-along. She’s always loading up on new tangential practical skills, and she gets the coven elders to make her little sash badges when she learns them. I guess I forgot to have a girl scout sash in her design lol.

She loves ghost stories but she doesn't actually want them to be scary.

Image: An android shaped similar to a lego minifig with a Mindstorms NXT backpack. Short and compact. Palette is white, grey, orange. Hair is black cables tied in two ponytails. Face is an led screen. Braces are lego studs. "I can’t believe I’m late for the first day of coding camp!"

Mindy Storms

The Lego Robot

Klickensnap Kingdom

Shy, Anxious, Nerdy, Brilliant

A genius at anything related to building, from models to city planning, but completely bashful. Shy and nervous and humble about her own abilities to a goofy extent. Working on a body that can fold up into a box to hide. Worries all night about what people think of her and whether her cable management is elegant. Extremely easy to push around. One time she got pressured into going in the pool and it electrocuted everyone.

But with Stacy she’s uninhibited and they can both yell and run around like idiots. Until Stacy tries to take her to a party.

Master Builder, Digital, Moddable

She's into the physical, blocky part of building, and she's also into programming and making things go. She programs hyperadvanced software in Scratch.

She’s always producing futuristic technology. One day it'll be, like, a Dyson sphere made of millions of interlocking satellites for collecting the full energy output of a star, and the next day it'll be a fridge that scoops ice cream for you with a little arm. She's also involved with building towers and monorails and stuff in the kingdom.

Her actual mind is in the NXT backpack. It can separate from her android and plug into a computer or any electronics. Her face can appear on a huge screen. She can surf in cyberspace – which totally takes the form of goofy Cyberchase-style visual metaphors. She downloads tons of information quickly (and that’s even if she wasn’t a robot). IRL she would love to go to coding camp.

When shy, her body keeps itself compact and unobtrusive. But when she’s working or excited with Stacy, it totally Inspector Gadgets out and really just provides any adjustment of form or tool or dramatic effect she wants.

She can also take personality mods that plug in like cartridges.

Image: Stocky tough girl made of mismatched chunks of construction paper. She’s flat, but changes pose as if 3d. All her edges are straight and sharp, as cut out by safety scissors. Muscles simplified and emphasized. Huge forehead, hookish nose, ironically cute eyelashes. She has cute doodles all over like tattoos. She has oversized staples instead of stitches, and an oversized safety pin for an earring. Her face and all other internal lines are drawn on like the doodles. Bright purple, green, and blue. Short spiky hair, purple like Franny K. Dressed in minimal black wrestler gear. "Say, buddy! Ya really need all those teeth?"

Kismetstein

The Paper Frankenstein

Kneeskinner Wasteland

Bully, Showoff, Fangirl, Artist

Bullies the soft girls alongside other villain kids like Wicka West. Taunts and mocks, gives noogies, arbitrarily takes over locations and steals objects. There's no particular malice in her heart, she just has muscles in a world full of punching bags. Bullying is fun and you can get quarters for the vending machine. (In the Wasteland they eat every meal from old rusted vending machines, but it’s like awesome.)

Unlike West, she really needs everyone to know how strong she is. She’ll accept any challenge to wrestle or do stunts. She’ll win anything that’s brute force, but some of the other Wasteland kids will beat her by skill, and she’s easily cocky enough to get tricked. She is a child with no self-awareness and will grandstand as early as possible like the Hare (of Tortoise fame).

When she’s not being evil, she reads YA, comics, and retro scifi. If she could go to a convention she would gladly swap out her limbs for cosplay purposes. She wants authors’ autographs. She will drag West to see Star Wars, where West is like ‘What?? I don’t have freaking eyes.’

She also doodles all the time and makes her own totally badass comics, like a kid's idea of John Wick. If she had to go to school she would ABC (always be coloring). But she doesn’t show them to anyone. She has to get them published first so everyone knows they’re great and no one can criticize.

Paper Construct, MMA

She is made of construction paper and technically flat, sort of. It’s all about perspective. She can unstaple her various parts for maintenance – like smoothing creases and erasing smudges I guess – or to swap them out temporarily with other paper monster parts.

Any time she starts a one-on-one fight, the area becomes a kind of wrestling ring and an announcer is heard. But the announcer is heard at other times, too. Sometimes she announces things Kismet's proud of, like that she beat a bulldozer at arm wrestling. But other times it’s exactly what she doesn’t want to reveal, like that she was touched by a kind gesture. The announcer is her frenemy.

When she fights people, there’s impact effects and onomatopoeia made of paper. She can also boot them offscreen with an explosion like Smash Bros.

Namesake: “Kismet” was one of the things Franny K. Stein considered changing her middle name to. It’s badass.

Image: A straw-stuffed scarecrow made out of a little girl’s witch costume. She has a wide green head with painted-on white spiky teeth. Crosshatched burlap texture shows like blushies. Her huge, ragged brown witch hat is attached, covering where eyes and nose would be. It’s got a black ribbon tied around the base. Her torso is a simple dress in an upside-down solo cup shape, ruffling at the bottom. The top has a clasp with one huge orange button. The torso is black with a light grey lace ringing around. At the bottom the black ends in dripping shapes to become pumpkin orange with lighter vertical stripes. Her limbs are all thin and noodly. Her arms are brown with darker brown farm gloves, the fingers always splayed weirdly. Her legs are black-orange striped footies stockings.

Wicka West

The Scarecrow Witch

Tombstone Hollow

Prankster, Jealous, Scatterbrain

Wicka lives to cause mischief and trouble, which magic is great for. She’s not cruel or sadistic, but she will never think about anyone else’s feelings unless absolutely forced. She has a wretched grating cackle that carries for an unnatural distance (especially considering her lack of lungs or even usually a mouth hole) and both precedes and follows disaster. She hates when people have things she doesn’t, and her first instinct is to ruin the items even before thinking to steal them.

In fact, she’s a real upside-down scatterbrain on the whole. She can’t plan, she can’t take standardized tests, she can’t read social cues. She speaks in garden path sentences that end up somewhere different than she started saying something. She comes up with completely random nonsense taunts and threats and cracks herself up. She’s ADHD and dyslexic (because her brain is wired to read ancient Latin). She also has a Habit of archaically capitalizing significant Nouns.

Stuffed, Floppy, Ojamajo

Being a scarecrow made of straw and clothes, she sometimes needs to be taken apart and restuffed. She can also be stuffed with different things that may change her personality. Once, they made her nice by filling her with snips, snails, and puppy dog tails, but she caused more disaster trying to be helpful.

Her face – meaning just her toothy mouth – is painted on, but moves. Normally it is a flat image, but to eat (for fun) or to stick out her tongue and such, it can open in a big messy zigzag seam right between her painted fabric teeth, revealing straw inside and a tongue of white paint.

West is the kind of kid that needs to flop around and pose and do gymnastics at every moment. Devoid of bones, she can and does bend every which way. She’s extremely clumsy when actually locomoting on her feet rather than her broom and may resort to all-fours for speed.

She can perform all of the witchy disciplines, such as casting spells from her fingertip with a silly chant, mixing up potions of gross stuff (much in the manner of a mud pie), communing with the devil, and riding a broom. (She would also dance naked in the woods, but she can’t, because she would just be a pile of straw.) She gets everywhere on her broom, clinging to it like an ungainly raccoon – even indoors, when not prevented.

She’s a real mess of a witch, and her spells never turn out how she intended, but always cause at least as much disaster as she wanted. She’s happy with her abilities, but one of her main stresses in life is being made to study and test and pay attention by the Hollow Coven.

Image: A mermaid with glittering rainbow scales (and fingernails). She has light blue skin and light green hair, in a curly Nancy Clancy style tied up with lots of different faux-expensive clips (multicolored, or red-pink for simple), with a low, short fishtail braid. The clips always take different shapes, such as spongebob flower clouds, clamshells, and goldfish crackers. Her tail is covered with ranbow scales that shine brightly, and she wears a shiny pink heart-shaped seashell ‘bra.’ Her body is all about round shapes and tapering shapes, to match the mermaid tail itself, which attaches to her torso with a pair of big translucent ‘lips’. Her belly is a little larger than her chest. The segments of her arms have stylized tapering, thicker inward, and her fingers are cartoonishly thick. Her face is madoka-wide and amphibian, with huge round yellowish eyes with big wheel-spoke lashes (may be colorful too), a flat pair of nostrils, and a roundish mouth ringed with sharp little teeth that makes goofy sbahj-face. Also, gills on cheeks.

Sparklemaid

The Rainbow Fish

Rainbubble Ocean

Fancy, Bossy, Vain, Covetous

Sparkie is the queen of tea parties and other “high society” events in the undersea. She directs teams of sea critters to set up and staff the venues, and defines the precise rules for her few guests, usually her sea friends Sumiko and Davie. Since none of them shares her exact idea of fun or wants to be bossed around, they have a kind of routine of uneasy compromise that involves constant struggle and conflict potential.

Sparkie knows it is not polite to say you’re the prettiest one there, but she gets mad if someone acts like she’s not. She flounces. Her rainbow scales make her unmissably reflective and shockingly garish, which is how a little girl spells ‘gorgeous.’ She supplements with stuff from the costume chest, which is gathered from shipwrecks.

Sparkie cannot and will never share. Okay, it’s not an absolute rule, but it is a challenge area for her. She’s extremely concerned with dividing things up into fair equal parts. Anyone getting something of hers is not fair. And anyone borrowing something might not bring it back. Such things can break her polite composure.

She uses gratuitous French to be fancy.

Fishy in the Sea, Siren, Decorater

She is a fish, not a mammal, and needs a diving helmet to breath above water. She feeds carnivorously on smaller fish and also any form of dessert. She sleeps with one half of her brain at a time. She can also morph into a slightly weirdish human form, like Ponyo. When she does, she gets really into running on the beach with her feet.

As a siren, she has an instinctive ability to offer people exactly what they want, which is often how she bribes them into her tea parties.

Her obsession with beauteousness and fanceousness gives her a kind of tacit control over the aesthetics around her, and with her critters’ labor she can dress a place up with impossible speed and specificity.

Image: Digital development sketches. Earlier Mindy where she has a regular lego face instead of a screen, short orange tied-up lego hair, and wires from the backs of her hands to the NXT. Explorations of how to do her joints based on Mindstorms. Earlier Stacy where she's only a little chubby, has normal-sized hands, and has the swirl at the top of her hair. Unnamed sleepy girl with orange skin, huge curly yellow hair, and space jammies. Sparkie with short 'art girl' hair. Sparkly gem-encrusted sushi labeled 'キラキラずし'. Girl with rubbery rainbow skin and a jellyfish for hair, which covers her eyes. She has white jellyfish fronds as a dress. Sandwich filled with green jelly. Black-and-white girl with a 40s hairstyle and a short dress based on a WW2 uniform, shooting a finger gun with a ratatata. Image: Paper development sketches of Stacy and Kismet. Image: Paper development sketches of Mindy. Image: Paper development sketches of Wicka and an unnamed monkey in overalls.