Archive for November 13th, 2013

#6 High Lord General Thygip Quoah

Quoah is a decorated warrior. Like his fathers & his fathers’ fathers. You can tell by the tattered war banner he adorns as a cape. They don’t just fasten that onto the back of any grunt. After singlehandedly putting down the Shleepori Revolt on EGP-0210, carpet bombing every square inch of the moon of Ponpurrum’s surface in the Great Replicant Conflict, & repelling the Confederated Bandit Hordes out of known space, his legacy is undoubtedly secured amongst the United Planets’ Alliance. After several millenia of fighting though, Quoah was actually kicking around the idea of retiring. He needed to rest. But that wasn’t going to happen.

Quoah has fought for many reasons: precious resources, territory, to prove a point, profit, he’s even engaged in a holy war or two. This, now, is entirely different though. Because now, all he wants is some peace & goddamn quiet! But can a war hero get any? No! Why? Because some puny, pissant, young civilization in the galactic backwater has made an egregious error: loudly & naively broadcasting their inane detritus (as well as their exact location & the extent of their warring capabilities, quite stupidly) incessantly like a drunkard screaming to himself in the center of town. Obviously, most of these transmissions were meant to only be seen by the civilization responsible. Clearly, because most of it would be too damn embarrassing to let leak out. And yet, these inconsiderate punks seem to have the gall to believe they’re the only ones living in their god-forsaken stretch of the universe. They’re completely unaware & insensitive to the fact that maybe, other sentience a) might be out there, b) have no wish to hear of or from them, & c) may actually use those very same frequencies for telepathic communication. Perhaps to them, it all comes across as cacophonous mental noise pollution to them, driving them to want to commit large scale genocide.

The United Planets’ Alliance has special policies regarding how to deal with a civilization who has yet to achieve the same level of achievement as the founding homeworlds, but this time Quoah feels it’s perfectly okay to make an exception. He’s had his mechanized battle armor refurbished & reshaped into something similar to the shape of the lousy children because he always likes to fight his enemies on their terms, to prove he’s more skilled as a warrior. He’s taking a fleet of FTL space cruisers to reign down holy hell upon these punks, but he’s pretty sure he could smash their entire, meaningless society with his own two, mechanical hands if he were to ever set foot on this “Earth” himself.

Ultimately, the joke is on Quoah though. Even if he does succeed with his plans of wiping out all of humanity in the timeframe he estimates,  there’s still roughly another 20 years left of signal bombarding his beloved homeworld. By the time he makes it back, he’ll be just in time for the dawn of reality television & the rise of the Kardashians.

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Playing off the Stephen Hawking notion that our own unchecked broadcast radio chatter might be our own undoing. But more from a noisy neighbor standpoint. Haven’t heard an alien invasion intent on just shutting us up before. The drawing took way longer than it should have for me. I wanted to toy with perspective some but wasn’t happy with any of the results. Also got kind of bummed I didn’t do anything to make his form truly alien but tried to save that in the story. I imagine his physiology is this huge frog like mouth/neck/shoulders/torso with a multitude of tiny spindly legs & arms controlling levers & things inside his suit. Think Ed Bighead from Rocko’s Modern Life. That shape sorta, I guess.

Not quitting yet but I’m quite a ways away from being anywhere near on schedule. I had another thing come up. It takes priority but doesn’t occupy 100% of my time. And since I’m doing this to catch up with my own character thing anyway, I’m not just going to bow out. I’ll just keep going whether I hit the goal of 30 for the month or not. I do have a couple of others on the verge of being finished but I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to sit down & really work on them. But be on the look out.