FauxPaws

Faux Paws is a virtual pet world. You make an account, you hatch a creature, and the creature is yours in a way most of the modern internet has stopped bothering with.

There is no company here. There is one person, who posts as snarsher, and who has been building this since the middle of July: the code, the world, the map, the wolf. They are doing it because Neopets existed when they were young, and because nothing quite like it exists now. That is the entire pitch. An old website game, made again, deliberately, with the tiled backgrounds left in.

What works today

Accounts came first, with email verification, password resets and a bot check on the door. Then the forums, which are moderated twice over: a keyword blocklist and a language model, both of which have to clear a post before it exists.

Then the part that took longest. Every Fauxling is rolled from a real trait genome, so species, colouring, pattern, morphology, eyes, temperament and stats all come out of a schema rather than a menu, and the artwork is generated from that genome. The picture and the animal agree with each other, which is the whole trick. Three species are charted so far, all of them firmly ground-bound: the Tuftling, the Howler and the Stilt. Air and water sit in the field guide as locked cards, because pretending the catalogue is finished would be worse than admitting it isn’t.

An account holds six creatures, and getting past three means breeding. That runs on genuine Mendelian genetics, with the Punnett square drawn for you on the birth page and the cell your hatchling actually landed on picked out in gold. Founding creatures can carry a recessive without ever showing it, so two entirely ordinary parents really can throw a Glimmereye. It is not a cosmetic dice roll. It is the same arithmetic your biology teacher put on the board.

There is a badge system with a dojo to hang it in, a ledger cabin called The Faux Log recording every Fauxling ever hatched, and, as of this week, player avatars: a layered paper doll you dress yourself.

What is being built

The avatar wardrobe is about 84 items into a planned 560, which is a generous way of saying the closet is mostly empty. Guilds are next, then the first minigame and the Glimmers economy, which will finally give the stats every creature rolls at birth something to do besides sit there looking impressive. Shops, trading, breeding across accounts and a family-tree view all have their data sitting in the database already, waiting on a page to show it.

And this newspaper. Player submissions are the entire point of it. At present it is written by the same person who wrote the wolf.

A note on how it has gone

The Gazette is under no obligation to flatter its own proprietor, so: four things learned so far.

Things get built twice. The player avatars were built and thrown out twice before this version, and the creature artwork once. Nothing was wasted, exactly. Nothing was free either.

The tests do not look at the pictures. Seven hundred of them passed while every avatar on the site quietly had two pairs of eyes, one painted onto the face beneath the other. A person glancing at a render found it in about four seconds.

A site can start lying about itself. For a full day after signups opened, the front page still announced that the gates were shut. The code was correct. The words had gone stale, and no amount of testing catches that.

Some constraints are gifts. A flat rule of “no SVG in the avatar system” looked arbitrary the day it was written down. It turned out to delete an entire category of storage cost that the two previous attempts had been quietly paying.

The gates are open. Come in and make something with too many legs.

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Before the Geoglades had a name, it had four visitors, and not one of them was supposed to be there.

They called themselves the Verdigris Circle. It was neither a large nor a serious organisation: nine members at its peak, meeting Thursday evenings in a rented room above a chandler’s shop, all of them preoccupied with what the founding notes call thin places, meaning doorways that go somewhere they have no business going. Each member carried a copper token and was expected to let it tarnish, on the reasoning that a thing already gone green cannot be corrupted any further. There was a creed of nine points. No surviving member could recite more than six of them.

It was Grell who found the ring, in a wet meadow behind an inn, and Grell whose argument carried the evening: a fairy ring is a door, and a door nobody opens is only a decorated wall. Ashcombe’s counter-argument was longer, better reasoned, and lost. They joined hands and jumped in together on the ninth chime, which Fenn insisted upon, on the grounds that whatever happened ought to happen to all of them at once.

What happened was a meadow.

The landing is the only detail all four wrote down identically: the ground was polite about it. Nobody was hurt. Ashcombe’s hat was never seen again.

✦ ✦ ✦

The first three

Within two minutes Grell had lost his brass barometer. It was recovered, briefly, from a small amber creature whose white crest had gone up like a startled flag, and then lost again for good. Quist’s ledger records the theft as the first entry ever made in the Geoglades and the thief as the first Fauxling ever seen. This is why the Tuftling is No. 001 in the field guide. It was first, and it was holding the pen.

At dusk, something watched them from the treeline. Fenn, whose entire profession is the hour when the light goes, was the only one untroubled by it. It did not approach and it did not leave. When the four went looking for shelter it walked parallel to them at a distance of thirty paces the whole way, then sat down where they stopped. He called it a Howler that night, before he had heard it make any sound at all, and never once explained why.

The third found them. Ashcombe was drawing a coastline from memory, which she cheerfully admits was largely invention, when a very long neck came through the window of the half-built cottage and studied the paper for some time. She notes that it seemed unimpressed. Stilts have been looking in windows ever since.

A settlement, of sorts

They built three cottages, badly, and one well that has never in its life produced water. They named the place Fauxhaven because after four days none of them was confident it was real, and faux seemed the honest thing to put in the name. The world itself was Ashcombe’s word. She wrote the Geoglades across the top of the first map, and when asked what it meant, said only that it was already correct.

The ring did not close behind them. That is the part everyone gets wrong. It opens perfectly well, simply never on a schedule anyone has managed to chart, which is why the Circle’s four became six, then eleven, and why somebody new still turns up in Fauxhaven roughly whenever they feel like it. If you have arrived recently, that is how you did it.

As for the light in the grass. The ring left a residue where they landed, a fine glimmering dust that would not brush off and would not fade. Quist, being the practical one, worked out you could trade with it. Nobody has since found a better explanation for money, and nobody is looking especially hard.

The Circle disbanded formally on the sixth day, on the grounds that a society devoted to finding a door has very little left to do once it is standing on the other side of one. Grell’s barometer has never been recovered. This paper considers the matter open.

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