I'm, uh, back, to quote Sam. I didn't actually die sometime during the last week, though there were times when I seriously considered seeking out high places and jumping off. Work. Gak.
Anyway, somehow I survived, and here I am! Just one image today, for reasons of time -- and also, this one is as much painting as render. It actually took just as long to paint this as to set up the 3D work. I call it "Avenging Angel." Those are the Icarus Wings, and the sun staff from the Sun Edge set, and DM's circular shrine, and odds and ends of props. That's Michael 4 wearing a face and body morphs designed by me, plus various bits from Powerage's Supreme Armor, and the loincloth from The Wood God, with all the textures changed. Neat! (I uploaded it at full 1:1 size in case you want to see the details...)
If you have a long memory, you might recall that I promised a story to accompany the CG comic art pieces from my last post -- about a week ago! (Ye gods, where did the week go?) Asian guy, katana, evocative textures and smoke and lighting. A story had popped into my mind, and those images evolved from it. And here it is:
The story is a tale of magic, madness, science fiction and fantasy (and if I had the time, good golly, I'd write this one). The character you saw in the art in the last post is a ronin, in a world gone askew, about 15 years from now. His name is Chen. He was the first human being born in the 21st century, and he grew up "off the grid," under the radar ... the child of a woman who was the last of a great warrior house, and who died defending him from shadowy enemies when he was still just 14 years old.
Alone on the street at that age, he survived on his wits and the skills learned from his mother ... and he's different. Maybe the male line of this family have always been different, or maybe it was because he grew up in a place where radiation levels were insanely high due to the laboratory experiments of the old scientist, Roban who was his mother's only friend through the years when those shadowy enemies were hunting for Chen.
Now, the scientist is very, very old -- and is he insane? His experiments into starship engines have mutated him physically as well as changing his brain, how it works, how he thinks -- he never had proper funding or oversight; his research has always been done in the basement of a great deserted skyscraper which is said to be haunted -- in fact, it's not haunted, but strange specters do appear there as a result of the dimensional forces at work in the experiments. But the shadows hunting Chan are still there, and there's no more Roban can do to protect Chen, save to give him a device which was developed out of the experimentation...
But Roban warns Chen never to use it unless his very life is in jeopardy, because the results can not be fully predicted, and it can't be tested without using it. Chen is skeptical, but he takes the device when he leaves the lab, and sets out on his superbike to leave the city -- find somewhere else where he can be safe, live some semblance of a normal life. He's known for years, he should get out and stay out, but he's lived all his life here. Only the three big fights he's had, and survived, in the last five days, have convinced him to go. His enemies are getting closer -- and he doesn't even know why they're hunting him.
He doesn't get far. The shadows are right behind him, and they hunt like a wolfpack. They corner him on a bridge, and the fight is terrible ... he holds them off but there are too many, and when he finds himself out in the girders, a hundred meters over the stormy river waters, Chen realizes his only chance of any kind of survival is to use the device.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where the fun really starts...!
Told you it was a comic -- but what a comic. Basically, what you have here is a whopping great prologue. The device has to cause mayhem, the shadows are never far away, Chen is hunted, someone helps him, he meets another ronin warrior, there's a love story on the side ... Roban's work turns out to be less madness than genius ... starship/dimensional engine? Whoa.
I need to see if I can hammer out the rest of this story, don't I?!
Jade, 16 August
