mrcrypt's steganography challenge - puppetry

artificial intelligence generated image in a charcoal sketch style of a scary looking skull-headed marionette with a number 9 floating in the background. there's an enlargement of a portion of the image, outlined in a red square and showing the faint image of the whale glyph from the video game Skyrim.

the number nine and the dangling strings hint to there being a string hidden in
the data of the image file. the flag is revealed appended at the end of the image bytes
with a program like strings or ghex.

cropped screenshot of a strings terminal readout revealing the flag: DC610-N0-57R1NG5-0N-M3
cropped screenshot of a ghex readout revealing the flag: DC610-N0-57R1NG5-0N-M3

there's another hidden shape in this image, although not that well.
it's best revealed in the 4th thru 6th color RGB planes (stegsolve or aperisolve).

grainy version of the whale similar to the enlargement in the first image