Seeking ideas: Creepily hard-SF sugarbowl characters

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by DataPacRat

* My Little Pony unicorns. I'm thinking of crossing Piers Anthony's unicorns with hollow-ish musical horns, that blue guy from Guardians of the Galaxy who could control a thing with a whistle, and Charles Stross's Equoid parasite. Resulting in a horn-shaped, barnacle-like symbiote which can glue itself to various critters' heads (eventually integrating into their nervous sytems), and which itself contains its own tiny, flying bioluminescent symbiotes that respond to audible cues. (I can even throw in Care Bear style flank-marks on most equines.)

So the ponies are just normal ponies infested with a cthuluoid symbiote (which acts cute and cuddly)?

* Ghosts. I am still feeling my way around, but I'm hesitantly considering something based around every sapient inhabitant's mind being digitally uploaded to the hub, and generally given amnesia and inserted into new fetuses. I want "death" to still generally involve the loss of most things most humans would consider important about that person, but with enough demonstrable continuity for the locals to have various philosophies based around being close enough to immortal for death to be less worrisome.

You could have the brain backups only happen on a schedule dictated by the Great Cloud Keeper, so that if a cuddly dies, it loses recent memories (a year, month, week?). That would confirm the immortality, but still provide a sense of loss.

[Culture20]

Cabbage Patch Kids: Pod People clones of the original station human crew. They don’t get the immortality backups of the other cuddlies, but they do have a hive mind which has adapted to the other species (which it can not clone in its pods). The clones die quickly in the low gravity, so they’re always babies or toddlers.

Strawberry Shortcake and friends: hominids spliced with fruit genes for some weird reason.

Betty Spaghetti. *shiver* Beware her noodley appendages!

Polly Pocket. Tiny, Completely human-shaped mice bred for drug testing. With mouse level intelligence.

Wuzzles: Standard chimeras.

Gummy Bears: Giant Ameboid colonies fused together in a semi-solid outer shell which they excrete for protection. Unintelligent, but delicious.

[DataPacRat]

Originally Posted by Culture20

So the ponies are just normal ponies infested with a cthuluoid symbiote (which acts cute and cuddly)?

Exactly.

(I might throw in something about the symbiote being pseudo-inheritable, with its spores passing into a uterus-or-equivalent.)

You could have the brain backups only happen on a schedule dictated by the Great Cloud Keeper, so that if a cuddly dies, it loses recent memories (a year, month, week?). That would confirm the immortality, but still provide a sense of loss.

I do like having more clarity about the backup timing - scheduled backups rather than continuous ones gives more interesting plot opportunities. Though I'd still like full-fledged revival to be uncommon, requiring some kind of significant effort to accomplish.

Originally Posted by Culture20

Cabbage Patch Kids: Pod People clones of the original station human crew. They don’t get the immortality backups of the other cuddlies, but they do have a hive mind which has adapted to the other species (which it can not clone in its pods). The clones die quickly in the low gravity, so they’re always babies or toddlers.

Strawberry Shortcake and friends: hominids spliced with fruit genes for some weird reason.

That reminds me of various other interesting plant-animal hybrids, such as the lamb that grows from a bush. (And then eats all the surrounding plants, and dies of starvation; which would require some careful ecological tweaking to come up with a justification for to prevent near-immediate extinction.)

Betty Spaghetti. *shiver* Beware her noodley appendages!

Not particularly familiar with that one.

Polly Pocket. Tiny, Completely human-shaped mice bred for drug testing. With mouse level intelligence.

Pretty much exactly the level of superficially-cute-but-disturbing-deeper-down I'm looking for.

(With various related subspecies, such as the tailed Borrowers, to add variety.)

Wuzzles: Standard chimeras.

Yep.

Gummy Bears: Giant Ameboid colonies fused together in a semi-solid outer shell which they excrete for protection. Unintelligent, but delicious.

Now there's a lovely image. :)

I'd been trying to think about other forms of animate food, with little success, but had missed this one.