Tale of Woe

I encountered this fellow on a tubecar on my way back from a theatrical sculpture exhibition in one of the Jovian sectors. I’ll tell you about that—and about the humorous mishaps resulting from my use of an improper model of envirosuit!—in a bit, but first I want to tell you about this gentlemen. Like I said, I sat next to him aboard the tubecar, and noted that he was of a species with which I’d had very little experience, a sthrunney. My net queries informed me that he did have translation capabilities, but regrettably, neither of us possessed patches for the others’ language. So, I purchased a translation service from the tubecar’s systems, and within a moment we sat within a field of mutual intelligibility. After this, I still had no idea if the gent had any desire to chat—I was only paying by the word, luckily—so I broke the ice with a “How are you doing?” or some reasonably similar phrase.
The sthrunney—his name was Issuth Thagnabanam of the Still-Rushing-Waters (which I will henceforth shorten to Issuth)—informed me on no uncertain terms that he was miserable. He told me that he had recently suffered grievous injury in a heptathlon in the Sub-Firmament. His mishap occurred as he was transitioning between the mesogliding and aero-spelunking events. A common time for error, he told me, due to the intricate nature of the harnesses and toe-holds of the equipment involved. I never quite ascertained the exact nature of his accident, but its unhappy consequences were legion. He tore one of the medial sinews of his quadrilateralis profundus and as a result, threw his entire upper abdominal spindle out of alignment. Worse, he suffered an inflammation of his integumentary canal, and endured terrible bruising on his hindsheath. His mid and foresheaths, he said, were among his few members spared in the ordeal. His pineal plexus inverted, while his olfactory nexus everted. His columnar process overextended while his reverse dewlap overdistended. His pentacarpals decalcified even as his supratarsals oxidized. He even broke a nail and received a painful rap on his elbow.
As a result of his myriad injuries, and of his complication-plagued recuperation, Issuth had been left unable to properly whiffle, and would not be able to do so again for another fifteen dozen rotations. He could also not sufficiently oil his joints or engage in hab-sbithath, and could only make the most rudimentary offerings and pronations to his matron saints. Refurbishing his umbrella canopy to reflect the season and latest fashions was possible only through very painful effort, and he’d had to hire special assistance for his periodic bouts of insapience. Pseudoprocreation, he said with what my translators informed me was the equivalent of a sigh, was entirely out of the question.
I expressed my sympathy for his terrible sufferings, but could not help but observe that he appeared perfectly intact to my eyes. The physical wounds have healed, he told me gravely, but the psychic scars still run deep.
Pessimism and an almost disturbing level of candidness of speech are common tendencies amongst the sthrunney, I have since learned.
Anyway! About that sculpture exhibition…

***

So, I've had the idea in my head for quite a while of a humorous tale of an alien expounding upon his various injuries, using unlikely and evocative terminology for its extraterrestrial anatomy and ailments. So, I wrote it to fit into my Ring universe, and it was fun. However, I wrote it before I actually drew the alien.
That posed a problem. It turns out that it is significantly more difficult to create an alien to go along with the text than to create a description that goes along with the alien. Plus, I was partly of the opinion that it would be better to not show this alien at all, thus making his anatomy and injuries more mysterious and giving readers more imagination room. So, rather than create an alien to go along with this story, I just decided to post the various Ring-related doodles and drawings I've made over the last few months. The central batch of ink sketches is a composite of two separate scans that don't quite match up. My apologies for that.

If you feel like it, you can have a go at depicting the alien of this story. If anyone actually does this, I'll combine their drawings and post them here.