chalcedony_starlings | [α.s0] New MUCK description for now

Reflecting ongoing changes:

It's a small population of [drackels]! Little reconfigurable birdlike creatures, that is, who are normally for making dragons out of. About... oh, seventy, eighty of them? Maybe a hundred if there's more hiding than it looks like. These ones are mostly whitish-colored, though there's some light-to-medium grays in there too.

They're currently not stacked up into a "solid" form, but that's okay, because they've gotten their talons and wings on some kind of mobile platform, consisting of a complex of birdhouses, on a three-meter-wide enclosed disk of grassy-looking artificial ground, on stilts (that is, metal pillars with crossbars and a wiring column down the middle), on four omni wheels. The visible birds are perched all about the little trees and the roofs of the birdhouses, and if you can hear high-pitched, quiet sounds, you can tell there's a bunch more who aren't immediately visible.

The 'habitat' has little trees scattered around it, which look like they might even be real ones. There's a pole in the middle that leads to an umbrella over the top, with separately openable sections for adjusting incoming light and weather protection. If you get close enough, there's a palpable "field" coming off the sides, a little electricky repulsion that forms a fuzzy but definitely present boundary---one which might be able to zap you in self-defense if you decide to get touchy with any birds or structures that aren't deliberately available at the edges.

Off-center, there's a circular building with unusually ornate carvings and symmetrical patterns of colored paint on the top. It looks capable of holding about six drackels, and is much more heavily guarded than the rest: there always seem to be three attentive drackels surrounding it, carrying little spears to augment their already-sharp talons with. That must be some kind of palace.

In interaction, the birds seem to act as a flockmind, combining their chirps to make better harmonics of speech, operating their wheels in an orderly and unified fashion, and generally being... 'persony'. Sort of. Maybe they're more completely personlike when there's more of them?

I made some ordering errors while shuffling the text around—I'll fix that later.