Facilitator

No, it’s not an organic version of a Martian Tripod, though that would certainly be a reasonable assumption. This odd fellow is actually one possible variant of a creature I drafted up for Zippo4k’s "A Mind is a Beautiful Thing" contest, but which I didn’t have time to successfully execute before the contest deadline. Originally I wanted to do several different versions and even a 3D model, but obviously it’s taken me this long just to complete one finished drawing, so what you see is what you get. : P

The Facilitators are an ancient synthetic race created by the Originators, an even older species of massive, radially symmetrical floaters living in the atmosphere of a fluid giant planet. The Originators saw the potential for seeding life on the tiny, rocky terrestrial worlds orbiting close to their sun, but had no way of directly facilitating such a project, nor of interacting with the resulting organisms. Hence the Facilitators were created, their design template encoded into hardened spores sent adrift across the gulfs of space to take root on the rocky surfaces of barren terrestrial worlds. The Facilitators were then to exploit local resources to prepare the planets for an appropriate form of more substantial, gravity-bound terrestrial life, and produce the necessary genetic templates for such life to evolve. Finally, they were directed to encode the most successful resulting gene libraries into spores of the kind that bore the Facilitators themselves, and disseminate these seeds throughout the universe. This all happened billions of years ago, and the Originators and Facilitators are long since extinct—but thanks to their efforts, we’re still here!

My concept for the Facilitators was something purposely awkward and in some ways inefficient; I wanted them to look like organisms designed by beings that really had no working sense of an efficient biomechanical structure for gravity-bound locomotion and physical functioning. The Originators had only their own case example of life to work from, and naturally created beings that were radially symmetrical in form. I pictured the Facilitators moving with a kind of whirling motion, spinning the lower body and unfolding the legs ahead of them to move in a linear fashion while the upper body remains stationary. Their sensory apparatus and manipulatory organs are likewise supposed to look somewhat awkward and inefficient, vaguely artificial…I wanted that sense of something designed by committee, with the various elements thrown together with an eye towards basic functionality rather than aesthetics or symmetry.

I feel like that concept for the "whirling" locomotion isn’t entirely original, but I can’t remember where I might have seen it before…Barlowe’s Guide, maybe? I’ll have to take a look.