Tag: art student

#18 – Pygmalion

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

You are a struggling art student, trying to make your way in the big city after coming from somewhere in Middle America so boring you thought you would die, only to find out that the kind of excitement you can’t find in Nowhere, Oklahoma is the kind you have to pay for. Only two hours after your first class you realize the horrible mistake you’ve made. Your teachers are either pompous know-it-alls or complete whack-jobs and neither of them likes you or your work and don’t have any real aspirations of you mattering in any sort of significant way.

Let’s not even discuss your classmates and save us some grief.

You have two jobs and barely make tuition, survive mostly on ramen noodles and peanut butter, you don’t have any shirts that aren’t stained with paint, ink or both and everyone already has a preconception of you five seconds after you enter any room because you are an art student.

This, in a nutshell, was Aubrey Doolittle’s life.

She probably would have gone to graduate and go on living in obscurity as yet another unemployed Arts mayor, but destiny seemed to have a different plan for her. Or, you could say that destiny had a different plan for Prof. Walter Blackwell.

Mr. Blackwell, the head of the Arts department in Aubrey’s school, was an old and crotchety bastard from years of trying to make it big in the art community with nothing but failures and terrible reviews to his name, relegated to having to teach people with not even half the talent he possessed. It was around this time that Blackwell heard about the myth of “Pygmalion’s Touch”, a rare gift the Muses would give to their favorite artist in every generation and would make the artist capable of breathing life and conscience into his or her art.

It took Blackwell most of his life to research, locate and acquire the source of Pygmalion’s mythic power, a multicolored ancient necklace that seemed to shine and change with a life of its own.

It took Aubrey about three minutes to see the package outside of Blackwell’s office and steal it in revenge for a recent critique he’d done of her work.

Now imbued with the magical power of Pygmalion, Aubrey has the ability to bring to life everything that she draw, sculpt or create in any sort of way with whatever materials she has at hand. She can use art supplies to affect the environment around her in a million ways, either creating objects out of thin air, editing or erasing existing objects.

However, there are also drawbacks to her powers.

Mostly the fact that she has no control over whatever she creates.

She could just be doodling in her notebook and suddenly the doodles will stand up and start running around, causing mayhem. And she also has no control over what kind of personalities her art will have once they come to life. She could draw a ferocious lion that will end up being tame as a kitty, and then sculpt a piece of conceptual art that will stand up and start punching people with whatever it has instead of fists. And finally, she cannot control what she creates. The only control she has over her art is the ability to erase it, and if her art is crafty enough, it could escape and go into hiding.

Still, Aubrey is mostly enjoying her newfound powers and making the most out of them without drawing too much attention to herself. This in order to keep her powers a secret from the World, to keep fooling Mr. Blackwell who is already more than a little suspicious of her and to specially to keep evading the mysterious Order of New Dada, a secret society of crazy artists and philosophers that seek to bring the end of the World through art and look to harness Pygmalion’s power in aiding their cause.

Add to this the usual quota of wacky villains like the Back Alley Carnival of Carnage, The Mime, Copycat Salvatore, Mushroom-Head, Death Nature, the Mean Clique, Beret Barrionuevo, the Idea Conqueror, the Hummel Figurine Gang and Casanova Contra-Revolución looking to terrorize the big city, not to mention deadlines, tests, lack of inspiration and sudden visits from her parents, and Aubrey has more than enough on her plate to keep her happy until she graduates.

If she even graduates.