NickonAquaMagna

So I've finally started working on Nova Orbis again, and I whipped up this amusing exchange between Piras and Vezon discussing (and critiquing) fleshy people like us, and delving into their own origins while they're at it. Enjoy this scene. Consider it a longer than usual preview of the next chapter. "So that's where babies come from." "Incredible... and perplexing," Piras commented as Vezon finished informing him about the flesh people's method of... continuing. "I mean, I knew these 'fleshies' reproduced by some means. There are many fully organic animal species around Miro Nui, mostly fish, who do the same thing. But the way these natives change as they grow, spending their early years as these, what did you call them?" "Children?" "Yeah, those. Your description of a child sounds a lot like how I'd describe a Matoran." "They're EXACTLY like Matoran. Well, to a point, so maybe not. But their growth from childhood to adulthood is very similar to a Matoran's transformation into a Toa. It just takes longer and they don't need magic stones to do it." "So, before, you mentioned Verlammen's father- her male parent- and her, um... grandad? Who is that?" "Her father's father." "Riiiight, wow, these people have really short lives." "I know. It's funny. Back on the old world, I remember meeting people just like them, these fleshies. They were more robust, you could say. Some of them rivaled our own life spans thanks to implants that granted them unnatural strength and longevity." "Really? And you lived alongside them for a time? Why didn't they come to the new world with us?" "I wouldn't know. I wasn't around when you left the old world. I left, and arrived here, much earlier, and via different means." "Okay, okay, one story at a time. So were they as different from us as these natives are, or were they more similar?" Vezon thought for a moment. "That's where things get weird. They were a little more like us. In fact, you modern Toa and Matoran remind me a little of those people. Aside from implants, they had no mechanics in their bodies whatsoever, though I do believe they had metal bones. In some ways, their bodies were a little more complex than ours, with about thrice as many internal organs as my generation and, hmmm.... about twice as many as yours, I'd say. I believe our creators based our design on their appearance, and to some degree, their physiology, but our bodies were more efficient. We were more streamlined, durable, and didn't require as much substanence or rest to keep working." "And those people from the old world, they 'reproduced' the way these people do?" "Oh lord, don't remind me. I actually walked in on such a ritual about to take place, once. It's was awkward like nothing else." "I'd imagine so." "And you modern types, you 'reproduced' some thousands of years ago by doing what? I didn't really catch it when a Matoran tried to get me to understand some centuries ago." "The current generation of Matoran began life as the 'Natum.' It was a new word I don't believe existed in your time. It means newborn in the modern tongue. We also call them Protos." "So they're essentially 'baby' Matoran? Don't tell me you people have evolved enough to-" "No, no, it's not- well, actually it is sort of like that, in that they inherited some of the old generation's biology. They start out as empty frames, part Protodermis and part bone, and the softer organic components are grown inside the frame. The frame can even change shape a bit over time to better accommodate the organic portions of the body, even after a Natum is released from their pod." "The the organic parts-?" "Are grown from samples of the previous generation. Bits of organic matter donated by the likes of the Turaga and the other people of their- I mean your time." "Hmmmm..." "What? Have you remembered something?" "No, just another theory, is all. How much you wanna bet some of the old desert peoples' biomass was in that mix as well? That there's a bit of them in you, and that's why you're more alike than I am." "I never thought of that. The Turaga made no mention of such people, after all." "They probably wanted to keep the story from getting over complicated." "But it's not a story, is it? How did your generation come about, anyway? You say you were created, but how?" "We were... well, it sounds a little cold to say it this way now, but there's simply no other way to say it. We were built. We were constructed, like children's toys. Our organs were synthetic. Our brains engineered. And not bio-engineering, I mean like a clock. It's not all that different from how your generation was made, but it's not all that different from how these people build their Mechanicles. Is it any wonder they mockingly call us 'robots' sometimes?" "It does sound rather cold." "We were never REALLY like the Mechanicles, though. At least I don't think so. We were always more alive, in some ways. All it took was someone granting us the gift of independent thought, and that's when our evolution began... and just look at you, now." "This is a lot to take in." "Well, I've had a lot of time to take it in. but you know, there is one thing I will never, ever get about these people." "What is it?" "The way they curse. They have this compulsion to constantly make reference to parts of their body, or worse, the things their bodies expel." "Yeah, I've heard them say such things a few times. You're saying those are their swear words?" "Yeah, and it's weird, like, they know on some level that the way their bodies function is actually REALLY disgusting, so they laugh it off, but it just comes off like they're admitting how needlessly complicated and messy their bodies are." "Do any of these make sense to you?" "This one's always sounded kind of funny to me, and it's about as articulate is their curses ever get, but more than a few times, usually by the new guards, I've been called 'old as $#!%." "That..." Piras was genuinely stumped. "What does that even mean?" "I don't know! It just sounds funny and stupid." Piras shook his head. "These organics are strange." "Their entire outer body itself is an organ that carries the other organs. Just try wrapping your head around that." "Wha-? What do you even call that?" "I've called them many things, but I find 'meatbag' rolls off the tongue the most musically. Still, strange as they are, we're not that different. Somewhere, I realized Turaga are really just the surly grandparents of our kind." "....Oh my gosh, they kind of are. That is so weird." Aaaand that's it for now. I hope this scene isn't too inappropriate. Feedback is deeply appreciated.

Erosion.

Meet the blue Venator. This guy is one of there more out there Venators. His power makes people lose control of their everything. ...just like Verlammen's. And Traag. And.... you know what, these guys are all about rendering their opponents unable to fight. Not very chivalrous knights, at all. Feedback is appreciated. Only one more of these character pieces left to go.

Yeah, I can see that. All of the Venators are all "off" colors, like sand red on Traag or dark tan on Leedvermaak. Verlammen in Thok's shade of very light grey. I mainly added the coat (which is only on her right side) because I wanted at least one of these characters to be asymmetrical, and she seemed like as good a choice for that as any. Her mask paralyzes the body completely, as seen in the last chapter, and if someone is weak minded, it freezes their thought process, too.

There is nothing in the void.

So here's something, finally. Just a little something very late in the works to try to get myself back in the mood to work on Nova Orbis. This is Verlammen. She is the leader of the Venators. Her mask power paralyzes people.

Oh, geez... I'm sorry, guys. So much stuff has been happening lately, I just... I'll get back to this, I swear.

Look at the scars on his head. I think they be danish. As for everything else, wait and see. Also... ehhh. I guess that voice works. Vezon isn't quite as much of a hammy cad these days, though. Sorry everyone, but there's no chapter today. I just didn't have time, this weekend. I'll get to chapter 6 at the end of this week, though. One last note, I think I may've found Vezon's favorite song. Kinda fits the feel of him and the current story, I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppZblOO6pA4

It wasn't so much a big reveal as it was confirming some suspicions people have probably had for months or even years, now. And it's only going to get crazier from here. Notice how Vezon never refers to himself along with the MU residents who came to Nova Orbis? He never says "We." The way he distances himself from them, you'd think he was never there for the ride, but then... how could he be here? And how would he know so much? That is the mystery! But, probably not for much longer.

Rocks are neat.

Chapter five is online! You can find it here >> http://nickinamerica.deviantart.com/art/Bionicle-Nova-Orbis-Journey-Chapter-5-Witchery-639207274 So yay, Nova Orbis is back, after... what has it been since the last one went up, like, a month? More than that? Well, anyway, here we are, and this chapter is a biggun. Sure, not that much actually happens, it's just a flashback and some talky scenes, but the implications of it are big. I bet Vezon's ramblings about the time before time (which is actually a very relevant phrase to the new characters in this story since they were born in the time AFTER the time before time, which I guess is just... the time.) should be a treat for long time fans of Bionicle. We also get the see the Venator's full range of mask powers on display, and I do plan to make posters of the remaining three that I haven't, sometime. So, the Venators' names are Verlammen, Vloed, Warnord, Leedvermaak, Traag, and Te Veel, and their masks cause pain, general sensory overload, disorientation, distraction, lethargy, and paralysis... the the order of powers I just listed doesn't match the order of the Venators' names, as some may already know. Anywho, these are just the evil sorts of powers I've always wanted to see dark, mask-wearing villains use in a Bionicle story. That's it for now! Hope you enjoyed this one. Also, never forget, you MUST read Vezon's dialog with Mark Hammil's (early) Joker voice in your head. ...you know, if you want to.

Chapter five is written, and the illustrations have been drawn. I just need a couple of hours to finish coloring them, and chapter five will be released for everyone to read later today. Nova Orbis is back.

Sorry for double posting, but I had to share something. Just read this in a post on tumblr. "So it was never established that only stones could be empowered by Toa Energy. Which means any other items can be imbued and transform Matoran. Which probably means a King Arthur-style story is plausible within BIONICLE. Like probably some Toa of Water gives her Toa Energy-charged sword to a worthy Matoran, that Matoran transforms into a Toa, goes to travel across the land searching for some ancient artifact with a Toa Team consisting of members based on the Round Table." Well.... that sure is inspiring. Kinda makes me want to draw a Toa like that, now.

I'd rather not say anything about that, yet. Also... I'm sorry guys, I just didn't have time to put together an entire chapter over the weekend. I spent a night at my brother's place and we moved some stuff around, and I didn't get much sleep, and yeah, that Metroid Prime trilogy review I just finished did mess up my schedule pretty bad, so... nothing until this weekend. I'll be sure to set aside time to write chapter five, and Nova Orbis will return this coming weekend. At some point before the year's over, I'll probably just set aside an entire month to work on nothing BUT Nova Orbis. This is a stretch, but I'm hoping to finish both Journey and Return this winter.

Thanks for learning that up for 'em, dude. I've been very busy lately, but I just finished the project that kept me away, so I should be able to put up a new chapter this weekend.

If I can't come up with a good justification to bring back things from the old story, it's a bad idea to do so. Toa Kapura? Yes, he will be in a flashback. Turaga Takanuva? On Spereus Magna, yes. He's not coming to this planet. He has his own duties back home, and has no idea where in the galaxy these characters wound up. The Exo Toa? .....eeehhhhhhh. Maybe an exo suit of some kind, maybe even something built by the natives of Nova Orbis, something alien that reflects their culture, but definitely not the ones we saw in 2002. That would be unnecessary fanservice, and that's bad. It wouldn't do anything to improve the story, which is the only reason to include such material. I'm including Vezon in the recent chapters because I think he gives them an edge, not just because I like Vezon. Also, sorry everyone, I've been working non stop on a review of the Metroid Prime Trilogy, and I'm going to be at it for another week, maybe. Next weekend, I should have a new chapter to share.

Fixed.

Tsk, I WISH G2's story was treated as well as Ninjago.

Chapter 4 is online. http://nickinamerica.deviantart.com/art/Bionicle-Nova-Orbis-Journey-Chapter-4-Gunpoint-634265815 This has taken quite a turn... Rest assured, this is pretty much as violent as this series is ever going to get. Throwing Vezon into the mix has shaken things up. That's it for today. Discuss!

SPOILER ALERT ....yes.

They already have a character who fulfills that role, though. His name is Ahkmou. He's the new Toa of Stone/leader of the Toa Novus. Also, Piras is meant to be a lot like Tahu, both in appearance and temperament, sort of a successor who ended up losing his way, as we'll see in this latest story. I'm sorry, but I can't drop the diary format of Voima's side of the story. Mainly because... well, everyone else likes it. If everyone hated it, I'd stop telling the story that way and tell it like a "normal" story, but so far, people seem to like having a sense of the passage of time, and hearing the way Voima describes things, rather than having another narrator describe things for her. It gives us an idea of what kind of personality she has, how knowledgeable she is, and exactly when certain events take place. It's like... you know how in Amnesia- The Dark Descent, you find Daniel's journals left around the castle, along with various other written accounts from other people, some of them centuries old? That's basically what this is. That was one of my favorite things about the game because, honestly, the story you could piece together from the journals was one of the scariest things about the game to me. And Voima's logs seem to have had that same effect on people. There's something incredibly tense about it. It's a fun mystery, and if the story was told conventionally, well, there'd be no mystery. Voima herself wouldn't even appear until very late in the story, giving her less character. By the time she'd finally show up, it'd be like, "Okay, who is this again?" Going back to the Matoran, remember, this is picking up a LONG time in the future. Asking them why they would ever want to go to space and explore other worlds is like asking humans "Why would you want to do that?" The answer is obvious. It's cool. After living alongside the Agori and the other races of Sphereus Magna for a time, they'd become such an advanced race that the next step was to turn to the stars. Things didn't go well for this particular group, and after they crashed, they ended up regressing and becoming isolated, not unlike on Mata Nui. The reason they came to this particular planet, how things went so bad and why, that'll be explained in next year's story, which is a prequel that focuses on Macku and some other recognizable characters from back in the day when they first came to the planet. As for Av-Matoran... that will be explained in time, like the Fa-Matoran.

Only in a flashback. I am eventually going to fill the gaps between this story and where the old serials left off, show what happened to Velika and the Toa Nuva/Mata on Sphereus Magna an' all that. But again, if Tahu and the others appeared here, this would become a story about them, and that would not be okay. I'm sure there are some who would like that, who would love to see Calor and Uira and the rest shoved to the side because they don't want new characters, and just wanna see Tahu and the rest again, but... too bad. That's not what Nova Orbis is about. Nova Orbis is like... the Bionicle equivalent of Mega Man X... or ZX, or even Legends. You know how you've got classic Mega Man, then the X series jumps ahead a hundred years, then Zero jumps another century or two after that, then ZX is like, five hundred years after the classic series, and the Reploids are becoming more humanlike by the day, and by the time Legends comes along, it's been 8000-9000 years and the world has changed completely? Yeah, that's what Nova Orbis is. It's "Bionicle in the future," not so much a direct sequel, even though there are a few of the old characters still kicking, and tons of references to old stories sprinkled here and there for fun. Do you mean Voima's diary?

Well, sure, I'll bring back or at least reference a few characters eventually, but.... why? Like, if I bring back too many of the old characters, how will the new ones have enough focus? The only reason I brought Vezon back was cause he's this weird variable that'll put a wrench in almost anyone's plans by nature, and he's one of those types I figured most of the other characters would've forgotten about long ago. Well, that and I just found the mental image of him in a prison... kinda funny. As for the red star, they didn't use that, but they were able to reverse engineer its technology to make new spaceships. And as for the Matoran, I've always known they were alive. Every time someone's called them robots over the years, I've corrected them and told them "no, they have organs an' stuff." They're just, I dunno, not necessarily more alive, depending on what one classifies as life, but they are more organic than they used to be.

These Matoran are very different. There's still a few from our generation kicking, like Ahkmou, at the start of the story. Most of the other characters, these modern, more organic Matoran, were created sometime between the end of the serials and the beginning of this series. They're basically a combination of Matoran and Agori, not "reproduced," just modeled after Agori anatomy to some degree, with the hardiness and durability of a Matoran's body. Although I've never delved into this in the story, no, the Matoran alive now still aren't anatomically correct enough to make babies. They do need to go to the bathroom, thanks to their more complex digestive systems, but the "exits" are.... much simpler than on most life forms, we'll say. They aren't that far along yet. So no, Matoran do not breed. Perhaps someday, a new "generation" will be created that will be advanced enough to breed new Matoran on their own, at which point they'd be fully alive, but not this batch. I will be explaining exactly how these modern Matoran were made in next year's story.

Woah... that's weird. I swear it was in the description, earlier. I must've accidentally removed the link when I edited the description during the day. Here it is, people! Hopefully this won't happen again! Here's the text! http://sta.sh/0zekdn5vh31