May I ask how did you choose the various daemons for the AU?

bicatperson:

For the Night Vale one? Of course!

There are a ton of ways. The easiest characters are the ones with animal names. Lauren Mallard gets a mallard, Tuck/Tak Wallaby gets a red-necked wallaby.

With some people, I pick something related to their profession, which is how John Peters (you know, the farmer?) got a cow. For Earl Harlan, I looked up animals associated with the Boy Scouts, and learned that the Silver Beaver Award was a thing. Martin McCaffrey, local TSA representative: went looking for the bird that can fly the longest without stopping, and lo and behold, it’s the kûaka.

Or you can pick any other character detail and look for animals that share it. Leann Hart: looked for a noisy bird that will aggressively run off its larger competitors, got the rainbow lorikeet. The Faceless Old Woman: looked for animals without eyes, settled on the Texas blind salamander. Vithya: trawled the category for bioluminescense, picked a firefly.

Sometimes a daemon has to fall within a certain category, so you just have to narrow down options. For Khoshekh, I checked out every non-extinct species in the Felinae subfamily. Then I wanted Pamela Winchell to match — besides, she’s very similar to Lord Asriel, so a largeish cat seems fitting — and ended up with the desert lynx. Josie needed to have a bird, ideally one that lives in deserts, thus the peregrine falcon. (Which, as a bonus, also lives in the arctic.)

Sometimes someone else brings a species to my attention — maybe in a post on Dreamwidth, or a photoset that comes across my Tumblr dash, or a link shared on Facebook — and I either think “whoa, that would be perfect for [character],” or “whoa, that’s an awesome animal, it should totally go in somewhere.”

This video of African buffalo banding together to totally pwn some lions was the inspiration for Tamika’s daemon. (It’s also the reason you can look forward to Strex employees with lion daemons.) Saw a Tumblr photoset of Jacobin pigeons and immediately thought “o hai, Marcus Vansten.” (Look at those gorgeous, useless fluffballs. Look at them.)

Meanwhile, there’s a section in my notes file that is literally just “Someone needs a tiny squid. Can I write anyone with a waterbear? Someone should totally get one of those self-cloning lesbian lizards.” (So if you see any of those show up later in the story, now you know why.)

Finally! If somebody needs a daemon species and absolutely none of the above strategies are coming up with anything, then it’s time to go trawling the Wikipedia pages for phyla/orders/genuses that haven’t been represented in a while. Intern Stacey has a Pomeranian because dog daemons should be common, but I had barely written any. One of the scientists got a binturong after I realized that, as carnivores go, there were plenty of felines and canines represented, but no viverrids. Another got a poison dart frog because there hadn’t been a lot of amphibians.

(I have learned so many crazy things about animals and taxonomy while doing research for this stuff. Waterbears, man. And extinct mammaliaforms. And basically everything about molluscs. 90% of what I know about Animalia is the vertebrates, and even then I only just learned that “fish” includes three classes rather than a single one like mammals or reptiles, and, wow, there are just whole swaths of unexplored weirdness out there.)