Tag: mythology
11/17/2012: Blisterbelch, Troll Tyrant
NAME: Blisterbelch  SPECIES: Mountain Troll  ORIGIN: Jotunheim
Considered small by Jotun standards, in the mountains of Jotunheim, Blisterbelch was a hermit and a scavenger, living off of the spoils of his greater brethren, mountain goats, or the occasional Midgardian foolish enough to climb the path into the land of the giants. After the Red King crisis, Blisterbelch fled the Techno-Sovereignty, taking refuge in Nexus City. There, he found himself to be a true giant, his tall stature, vast strength and fiery breath causing all in his path to tremble with fear. After several travelers found their way into his belly, Circle Securities apprehended Blisterbelch, banishing him to Dark 22, a secret Circle-Tech sponsored prison colony on a Terran compatible world cast in eternal night. There, Blisterbelch quickly rose to power, the other inmates treating him like a king. Those few who don’t end up in his stomach, their bones littering the floor around his “Throne of Skulls.”
Model designed in Sculptris and TinkerCAD (3d print pending….)
https://tinkercad.com/things/gxqWQP8g6rc-blisterbelch-troll-tyrant-wip-30characterschallenge
#5 – Roxanna Artani
Those first few years out of college are hard enough for everyone, finding a real job, finding love, finding yourself, transitioning into becoming something roughly shaped like an “adult”. These things can be complicated further when you’re the daughter of a Gorgon.
Roxanna is a 23-year-old girl who currently makes ends meet working too-long shifts at the Lyceum Bar, an establishment that serves other creatures like her alongside human customers who are none the wiser that they’re sharing drinks with a creature of legend.
Creatures of myth have always existed in Roxanna’s world, but as time passed and faiths changed, people began to see past them, see beyond them. Now, they walk among us on every continent, trying to make a life for themselves just as everyone else is. Noticing them isn’t a matter of being gifted, or opening yourself up to the possibility, a small percentage of the population will be walking down the street one day when the planes of reality begin to shift and they realize that the hotdog vendor they always say hello to is actually a incredibly amiable troll who makes the best chili dog in town.
Roxanna graduated from college eight months ago, and still isn’t sure where her life’s supposed to go from here. She lives with her best friend, Jolene (who cannot see her as a Gorgon), in a small apartment they can barely afford, and whiles her nights away watching terrible reality TV with Brandon, a Satyr she met at a terrible concert one night. She’s still trying to convince her mother that she will not be immediately murdered as a result of finally moving out of the house.
Roxanna’s father was human, meaning she is half-gorgon, which is to say, she can “pass” much easier than others. Her hair always seems a mess, and when she is brought to any kind of emotional extreme her true form begins to show. This has made dating a problematic experience for Roxanna, who has had multiple unrequited crushes, but ended up pushing several different boys away out of fear that she would end up hurting them, whether she wanted to or not.
Roxanna frequently quibbles with her mother over her heritage. She considers her human side most people see as her “natural” form, and that the form always lurking just inside her reflection is another person altogether.
To most people, Roxanna appears as a shortish girl with a mess of black hair she never seems to tame framing a warm, pleasant face. She occasionally receives comments on her eyes, one almond brown, the other a bright hazel.
A bright student, with a sardonic streak a mile wide, Roxanna spends more time “between worlds” than any others like her. Every day, she deals with her desire to be “normal” against her loyalty to her heritage and to others like her.
#30 Don Dada, The Dream Merchant
Don Dada, The Dream Merchant
“I’m all up in your head, like colors when you shut your eyes†– Raphael Attar, “There’s A Lot of Numbers”
Don Dada, the Dream Merchant, aka the Sultan of the Surreal, aka Stacks Visions, aka Black Morpheus. In the Great Marketplace, he is the bringer of dreams, but not necessarily dreams that are good for you. Where attention flows, energy goes, so he’s more interested in getting you hooked on dreams that appeal to you rather than forcing you to process the information you need or stumble onto some great insight. When Don Dada took over the dream racket, he realized one important thing: the dreams people want can be standardized, and people will choose pedestrian dreams they can understand over the actual mysteries of the subconscious damn near every time. And either way, your dreaming activity still generates the same amount of energy for him.
If you should meet him in a dream, he will tell you this. He will always tell the truth, and share the deep mysteries, to those who want to hear it. Or he can feed you the dreams of riches and success that television told you you wanted. It’s all the same to him, he’ll keep dropping gems in the R.E.M. Due to his mix of bluntness and wisdom, he is occasionally invoked by gods and sorcerors who will trade rituals, dreams or secrets for answers.
The crown over his head is how sentient beings interpret his aura of raw power. His baleful eye, ringed by blue flame, pierces to the heart of things, and it’s something you don’t want directed at you personally. The disc in the place of his other eye records all dreaming activity for the Akashic Record. Needless to say, you don’t want to cross a dude who can be in your head at any time; and that pimp cane ain’t just for show. If you don’t know, now you know.
#24 Caldera
Volcano Nymph from way back in the Roman Empire.
She’s a real hothead. Amirite?
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Sorry. The one character I don’t really have much in the way of back story of, & quite frankly, I would bullshit one but I’d rather just keep moving. My jump off list had ‘Roman Volcano Goddess’ & I just thought it’d be interesting to draw. The idea of course is that the back of her head is a constant eruption, but I think I spazzed on that some so it’s a bit of a crummy interpretation. If colored, her skintone would be a maroonish, pumice-y gray, & the cracks by the ridges in her head & the corner of her eyes would be bright magma orange. Man I wish I had the time to color it. It’d help sell it so much more.
#27 Sister Scissors
Sister Scissors
Sister Scissors is the spirit of broken connections. Romantic breakups, estranged families, that moment when you realize that a longtime friend is now just dragging you down, the person you cared for yet somehow lost touch with, all these fall under the purview of Sister Scissors. It’s nothing personal, just business. Sister Scissors harnesses the emotionally atomic energy created by breaking ties, and uses it to trade with other entities.
She is encountered by Tess Himmel during her search for The Infinite. The Infinite’s broken connection with the rest of the universe has made her far more powerful than she’s ever been, and people everywhere are starting to feel the effects, losing their empathy and not being able to maintain connections with colleagues and loved ones.
Her color is aquamarine, and her animal is the praying mantis. Even though she can’t be seen by mortals, you’ll know she’s nearby when you feel like you’re drowning.
#5 Alcina
My fifth character is Alcina, a faun hanging out in NYC. She didn’t live right in Ancient Greece but she was a follower of Pan’s. When she and the rest of the world’s fauns heard of his death, many of them, distraught, committed suicide. She had never met the god in person and so, though she was devastated, wasn’t quite devastated enough to out and out kill herself.
After a bunch of wacky misadventures in Europe and Asia she hopped a boat to the barely-a-century-old USA and was surprised to see how huge and thriving it was. New York’s Central Park was just being built and she decided to stick around there to see how it would go. She’s been there ever since.
Now her official job is a ranger for the park, but she also likes to make the rounds to the about 1,400 other parks in the city (yes there are apparently that many). She hides her legs with really long, fluffy skirts and boots and her horns with hats that she makes herself. She can’t hide her square pupils but tells people they’re just contacts. They don’t tend to notice or ask anyway, which is another thing she likes about NYC.
Alcina is usually pretty laid back and attempts not to draw attention to herself lest people discover her disguise. However, if anyone brings up a topic she feels passionate about, she will launch into a very knowlegable yet lengthy and opinionated rant about it. People who know her tend to try to avoid such topics as the environment, animal cruelty, urbanization, genetic engineering and the like. She is very liberal, having absorbed radical ideas for centuries. Her lectures, however, tend to be less about swaying others’ opinions and more about making hers loud and clear.
#11 (The Infinite) Tess Himmel
(The Infinite) Tess Himmel
Poor Tess. She’s always to vast or too small. Never the right size. She touches the infinite, it courses through her — it’s kind of her job to keep the universe going, just by being her. But she also feels, sometimes, ever so small, and then, when one can float in a bubble or get lost in the tall grass, the world seems full of gifts.
Her father was a German immigrant, her mother is Mongolian. A burgeoning punk/artist, her desperate parents sent her at 13 to the Madewell Girls’ Academy, a private ultraconservative Christian academy run by ex-radicals and bikers. They berated her, telling her she was small, nothing, a worm before Christ. Her rebellious nature meant she spent a lot of time in the Get Close to God room, essentially a small closet. She escaped into her imagination, and met an angelic being who offered her a deal: if she agreed to take on the responsibility of the Infinite, she would be allowed to escape. The Infinite wished to be mortal, but needed someone to mind the store while it was gone. Tess was determined to have the proper nature for the job.
After that Tess escaped the Academy easily, going to the City of Angels and blocking out her painful memories of that place. But eventually, she tires of the responsibility of the Infinite, and when she tires, she also remembers the Academy, and begins to feel smaller. (Since she still has the Power of the Infinite, she actually gets very small and this causes trouble until she can get her mind right again).
But the Infinite has gotten lost, and forgotten its true nature. The angelic being returns and tells her that if she ever wants to return to a human life again, she needs to find it, or she’ll have to be the Infinite for eternity. She agrees to help search, but she has mixed feelings about being a normal person again.
Track: Big Harp, “Everybody Pays”
#3 Keeper of the eternal peace
Day three!
Maybe you recognize him, this is the true form of Ankour, who I have uploaded yesterday. Ankour is an young inhabitant of the netherworld and is supposed to take the place of Charon someday. But he still has to grow into this position (that’s the reason why his robe is too large for him. On the day it fits him he will become the new ferryman of the death). But until this day it is his duty to watch over death peoples resting and to take care that nobody and nothing disturbs it. Because he is very talented in calming people down he also confinces restless souls to follow him and leads them to the netherworld.
When Anlour started at his job he was very easily scared and needed a lot of devotion. He is still a bit scared about darkness but he has learnd how important it is to appear confident to the souls of death people and he also wants his older colleagues to be proud of him. They always keep an eye on him.
One day he was asked by Charon to take care for a certain person, who was still alive. So Ankour created the identity of Ankour Stjarnason, the older brother of Elin, whose parents had died and left her all alone. Surprisingly he had to realise, that another inhabitant of the netherworl has allready startde to watch over Elin…
The name Ankour is based on “Ankou”, a personifcation of death and known as “grave yard watcher” and “henchman of death” in breton and french mythology. Every graveyard is supossed to be guarded by one Ankou, whose duty ist to lead souls to the gates of the netherworld and to protect the peace at a graveyard. Some people say thats the reason for feeling uneasy at graveyards.
Because Ankous are often described as wearing a large black hat I decided to give a black hood to Ankour
Edit 6.11: I replaced the outlines with the colored version
#2 Blazing Arrow
Blazing Arrow
“I got my arrow/ I got my bow I got my fire /and I’m walking through the darkness/ slowly on a tightrope wire” – Blackalicious, “Intro: Bow & Fire”
The young man known to the gods of Earth as the Blazing Arrow was exploring abandoned buildings in a run-down part of his postindustrial hometown, when he happened across a magic compound bow. Â For it turns out that, in their endless intrigues and squabbles, the gods can get careless with their power, allowing it to manifest on Earth in ways mortals can use.
When he picks it up, he transforms, in clothes and in aspect (into amore idealized version of himself). He is given the name Blazing Arrow by a goddess he helps, and now he takes on the gods, keeping them in check so that humanity can develop freely.
Some of the mythological/conceptual arrows he has include:
“The slings and arrows of outrageous fortuneâ€
The Arrow of Time – accelerates entropy
Cupid’s arrow
Artemis’ arrows of silver moonlight
Astras – Hindu supernatural weapons most often invoked into arrows
thunder-arrows
Loki’s mistletoe arrow, which killed Baldr (seeks out hidden weaknesses)
Arrows of the Egyptian goddess Neith – the blazing arrow (limitless sun) and weaving arrow
Track: Blackalicious, “Intro: Bow & Fireâ€
(notes: here is precisely what I had beforehand, from my notebook: “Blazing Arrow: Black archer hero
Someone who uses magic arrows, the favor of a goddess s/he released from a crystal prison… rather than trick arrows a la green arrow or hawkeye, s/he fights with the idea of an arrow. speed, velocity, direction, piercing, cupid, robin hood, artemis, wayfinding, divination, ancient arrowheads.”)
#2 – Nike
In case you aren’t familiar with Persona, my 2nd entry here is connected with my first. Nike is Ulrike Sommerheim‘s persona! Maybe also her sponsor in the Juniors…who knows! I keep laughing about this.
Based on the Greek goddess of victory, Nike (who has really long hair for some reason) is of the Star Arcana like Ulrike and is strong against Physical and Fire attacks but week against Darkness. She has various Agi skills, physical enhancing buffs and attacks, and will eventually get God’s Hand because that is the best. She’s well balanced as far as physical and magical powers but doesn’t excel in one or the other. I would use her mostly for buffs…and God’s Hand…because that is the best.
I’ve depicted Nike in a very traditional way with her torch outstretched in her hands, but instead of the other hand holding her laurel I used it as the neckline to her dress. And again, for some reason, gave her really long hair. I did not feel like adding texture to her wings right now but I may go back and fix up some of these characters when I have more time.
Now I have to think about Day 3…which technically has already started.
#2 Acheron, Lost Warrior Boy of Hades
#7 Hosiah the Original Idolater
Before showing himself to Moses, Yahweh appeared as burning bush to Hosiah. However, Hosiah had recently uncovered a most pleasing and terrifying idol in the desert. Though the bush cajoled, threatened and pleaded, Hosiah refused to cease his worship of the graven object. In fit of pique, the flaming shrubbery condemned Hosiah to walk the land bearing unspeakably horrible plagues upon all the peoples of the land, though he himself would remain on the earth until the ground was rent asunder in the Final Days.
Hosiah didn’t much care, because he really dug that idol.
#4 Gometh and Lilly
Hi all.
I’m posting an illustration of Gometh and Lilly. No story or background this time.
Enjoy!
#30Characters Chatter…