More kitties for @loves2color's project. Space.
Thallium is the best- er, worst thing since arsenic. It's a highly poisonous element that is completely unremarkable in practically every other way. However, thallium is a better murder weapon than arsenic because it hasn't already been used to death (ha). Police know an arsenic poisoning when they see one. Symptoms of a thallium poisoning include vomiting, hair loss, delirium, blindness, and abdominal pain. Note the fact that each of these is a symptom of many conditions, making it less likely for a poisoning to be suspected. There is a brand of perfume called Thallium, which I hope doesn't actually contain thallium. Polonium will also kill you, but in a completely different way. It's so radioactive that if you somehow obtained a solid block of it, it would glow from the excitation of the air. As in, its most common isotope has a half-life of 138 days. To put that in perspective, uranium has a half-life of about 4 billion years. Ten nanograms (ten billionths of a gram) of polonium can be fatal if ingested. Despite all this, polonium's main application is actually in antistatic brushes used to preserve phonograph records and film negatives. When Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium, she named polonium after her home country of Poland, thinking that it would cause the worldwide sensation that Radium eventually did. Design notes: Thallium's fur patterns come from the appearance of a block of thallium, plus the lone green stripe in its electron emission spectrum. He should appear to be suffering from thallium poisoning, as well as being in generally poor health. I tried to draw him as a total sleazeball because, well, poisons. Polonium is literally just a radioactive fluffy thing. For his base color, I blended colors found in those antistatic brushes I mentioned and some found in some uranium ores, where polonium occurs naturally. The little sparks around him are detections from a spinthariscope, a device used to detect alpha particle radiation. Toy ones were once manufactured, using polonium as a source of radiation, which was terrible idea. Song is Elsa-Maria by Sele-P, feat. MAYU.
