This was originally uploaded to DeviantArt on May 21, 2022.

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"Yes, I know this looks strange, but I'm doing this for my safety and yours! Just...make sure to take me places, this shelf gets lonely and boring."

If you aren't following me on Twitter, you may have missed the announcement earlier this week that I tested positive for COVID-19. Thankfully my symptoms have been closer to that of a cold so I have not experienced things like loss of taste or smell, or difficulty breathing. Just nasal and hearing congestion, cough, sore throat, sometimes a headache, dizziness, etc. Ultimately I have been doing relatively fine and found myself off of work for at least five days, so I've been finding ways to pass the time. Easy for me to do, but I found myself working on some art in the meantime, which spawned this!

Allow this to be a visual of what Softies do to themselves when they aren't feeling well. Despite the fact that Softies don't have bones or internal organs, they can still experience illnesses, one of the most common is Oversoftening, which has thankfully been controlled through the use of vaccinations. But they can still experience cold or flu illnesses, or feels very close to it, and while they can just isolate or quarantine in their own homes, it's alot more common for Softies to place themselves into containers for the time being. Compressing a Softie into a tight space causes their bodily functions to slow down dramatically, as everything is now close together and there's very little movement that burns energy faster, so a Softie's body requires alot less.

So here we have a recently new invention brought to the table, and it's just like Doughshi to be one of the first to use it. Thanks to Team Guardians' medical services, a machine takes Doughshi and uniformly flattens him to the width of a pancake, and then carries him in and out of a chamber multiple times while dousing him in sanitizing formula, massaging and kneading it into his body meant to help stop the spread of germs. Then, he's stuffed into a jar with a vacuum-sealing time-locked lid placed on top. The recommended quarantining time of two weeks is set on the lid, and it cannot be opened until the timer runs out. Trying to do so will make the lid vacuum-seal again, so hopefully you have a friend there to take you around!

Honestly, the sketch that I used for this picture wasn't at all how I was going to use it, it was more for wallpaper use, but I felt like for the material that I was going to make a picture for, it worked well enough, it just surprises me that it sat in my sketches folder for more than a year. While this doesn't quite belong in the description for this piece, this is one of seven or eight other pieces I was also going to upload first before this, as this is the newest one I have to show off, but considering that this is a picture made for current events, I believe it warrants the ability to be uploaded first.

Anyway, thanks for looking! I'm doing alright and I'll be out of this thing before you know it...! 🫙