The 1st Shadow

Every so often, my local Bricks and Minifigs will get some stuff in and call me if they find anything good (Having worked there in the past helps there) and I'll come in to check it out. If I find anything I don't already have (or parts to complete something I have a partial of) I'll buy it. But yeah, last few years, haven't done more than pick up a mask, a disk, or a couple krana within a 12-month period. Honestly, I don't think I bought anything Bionicle since we got the house last year. The few masks I need for the collection are all the high-priced ones that Covid drove through the roof. Silver Nuva masks used to be $20-30, but within a couple months of Covid, they went up to $100+ and have never gone down.

In Marvel Comics, there are characters like Kitty Pryde whose powers make their minds unstable, and therefore, unreadable to telepaths. Zaktan's minds being dispersed between trillions of protodites probably works the same way. We see Kongu actively able to read the subconscious of the Kanohi Ignika itself, and project those thoughts into the unstable mind of Vezon. and when he was first learning his mask's power, he picked up on Hewkii's general discomfort about the sudden change of armor color, rather than an actually coherent thought. If he couldn't pick Zaktan's brain the same way, then it has to be because Zaktan doesn't exist the same way other beings do, and something about his makeup makes it impossible to read his mind.

Ooh, one of the better Exo Force sets combined with Bayverse Starscream? I approve. the color layering works really well with that shape.

Probably better to just browse the BBC or SBC subforums for builds that already exist, because people frequently built things from their favorite movies and tv shows over the years. (Also, this is technically a "post-it-here" topic which, if I remember correctly, isn't allowed)

How would LEGO manage the elements? I dunno, let's ask the various Elemental Masters from Ninjago that have popped up since season 5 and their 57 different elements. In all honesty, probably just keep it down to a marketable number, anywhere from 4 to 7, I'd guess. Combining similar elements would be the most likely approach.

Concealment (total invisibility), Stealth (really hard to see or hear), Illusion (create an illusion of the surrounding environment or shapeshift into a generic individual in a crowd), Kindred (by technicality, copy the ability of a Rahi with camo abilities), and (by a real long shot) Emulation (can briefly copy the powers of others) can all theoretically be considered a form of camouflage. So, technically, we got like five.

NGL, that's actually pretty cool. Even though it lacks the smoothness and shaping of the actual piece (due to the nature of fitting a human head) it's still immediately recognizable as the Shelek and manages to keep that menacing look. Nice job!

Looks good, but as the Chronicler pointed out, the symbols do have a layout. If you were interested, here's how they should line up: That said, I love the size you've done it at. Great little display piece to have sit at a desk or something.

Every single one. Even the useless Mahri things. Why? Because I'm a hoarder collector, that's why. In all honesty, though, I used to use them to store each Toa Mata/Nuva and any of their extra masks I'd collected, and the same went for any Bohrok (Kal) and their krana or the Toa Metru with their disks. From there on, keeping the canisters was just part of the collection for me, and I've never had reason to get rid of them since.

I think this is probably the most accurate description. Gold might have been the intended color, and Greg does often describe more fancy colors in the books than the sets would suggest, like how Mata Nui was described as gold in the TLR novelization. Real-life-wise, gold sockets would get brittle and break really easily, so making the Toa Ignika gold would have been a QC nightmare. Keetorange was the closest, tone-wise, so I can get behind the idea that it's silver, black, and "gold" to represent the countdown stages. That's an awesome thought and I'm accepting it as my new headcanon.

Or they decided that actually speaking the words "fancy helmet" didn't quite roll off the tongue as well as "fancy mask," which makes sense. For one thing, the "A" in both words is pronounced more or less the same, and the following "C" and "S," respectively, produce the same sound, where "helmet" shares nothing in common with the sound of "fancy." So you end up with "fAn[S]y mASk" which sounds nicer and is more comfortable to pronounce. Just try saying "fancy helmet" out loud and let me know how ugly it sounds to you.

Cheesy is correct. Toa generally focus their power through their hands and tools, but there have been a couple instances of Toa manipulating their element "telekinetically" without directly moving their hands or tools. The Nuva could do that elemental time-bomb thing, which didn't require anything more than focusing on a spot and setting the elemental charge for later. Regular Toa haven't shown such abilities much, if at all, and if they did, they were probably very experienced. That said, if a Toa of Sonics were talented enough to focus their powers without using their hands, they could, potentially, direct a blast of sound from their mouth. More likely, though, is that they would scream normally, and then use their powers to amplify (manipulation of element) the sound so it does more damage. This is probably the only scenario in which that could work.

Chain lightning is a sub-power of the Lightning/Electricity element. In this case, Chain Lightning is just a more focused version of that one ability, while the elemental power offers a wider range to a lesser extent. It's possible that it's an ability that takes a lot of training to use, like how Takanuva had to struggle for a long time to learn how to make holograms of himself using his light powers, a Toa of Lightning probably could do it with a lot of training, because once the lightning leaves their body, they would have to redirect it between other targets, meaning it would require a lot of focus to direct and aim that particular ability.

If I recall correctly, it was something Greg answered a long time ago, but it ended up being a longer version of "Here's my take, but don't think too much about it." Like, the twin suns above Metru Nui are actually the eyeholes, but there's two parts to it. 1) When the robot is active, it generates light of its own, and the movement of the "suns" and stars is attached to a sort of moving grid system that allows for day-night cycles (this is the part you don't think too much about). 2) When the robot is inactive, the stars still function, but the light of the suns is now whatever ambient light comes from outside the robot, not what it generates via lightstones or whatever, and the suns now become stationary while the stars only move a little bit. The other domes were supposedly lit by giant lightstones that during the day cycle kinda just made the whole sky bright. Because Greg was so vague about this, I assumed that the only "suns" were in Metru Nui and everywhere else just had a reasonably-bright artificial sky that would go dim during he night cycle. Like I said, he gave some vague answers, but there were just too many holes in them to paint a really clear picture.

PM sent!