#protectors of the plot continuum

Birthday Gift Art: Squid IcarusbySkarmorySilver

Why settle for just a two-armed hug when you can have a twelve-armed one? Meet Stephanie “Steph” Podd, a PPC agent written by Voyd, and her boyfriend, my own Cupid Carmine!

The lineart for this picture was created in 2015 as part of my 30-Day Monster Girl challenge, specifically the penultimate “Monster Girl and Her Significant Other” entry. Voyd’s birthday is today, so I decided to finally do the inevitable thing with sketch arts I particularly like and color it as a gift for him - and I liked it even more, so I’ve decided to post it here as well. Happy Early Valentine’s Day, y'all!

Cupid started life as a Sue-wraith I found in a Kid Icarus badfic in February of 2015 - and since the mission in question was in fact posted on Valentine’s Day of that year, his third out-of-universe birthday is therefore just three days away! From my recollections, Steph was created later that same year, and originally the two of them were just meant to go their separate paths. Voyd had his own characters and story arcs to work with, and I had mine.

HOWEVER… the fact that I used to collaborate with other people quite a lot in the PPC missions I managed to publish in the past few years meant that I could never predict what would happen to anyone me and my buddies had created. Even a simple “what if” scenario could end up becoming canon at the drop of a hat, and that’s pretty much what happened with this pairing here. Cupid has a liking for tall, beautiful women and used to be a tad more lecherous - a property which, thankfully, I’ve toned down quite a lot after consulting with multiple other Boarders on the subject - and Steph, being a Monster Musume fan-character (though she’s actually a Kraken monster-girl, her appearance being derived from the Monster Girl Encyclopedia’s depiction of the legendary sea-beast), had more than a few traits straight out of an ecchianime like her home continuum is, especially a love of tentacled hugs and a fondness for cute guys. You’d think they’d go so well together!

Not long after his first written mission with Steph was published, Voyd randomly asked what would happen if she ever met Cupid, and I was a little taken aback at the implication that the two of them would fall in love. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized not only that pairing them made perfect sense, but also that giving Cupid an actual girlfriend would be the perfect way to keep him from flirting too much for the Board’s comfort. So I agreed to co-write a mission with Voyd where Cupid and his partner met and worked with Steph and hers.

Well… To make a long story short, tol squid + smol angel = adorable official couple that wound up becoming totally canon to PPC lore.

Sadly, due to real life and scheduling constraints, Voyd is no longer able to participate in the PPC community, and honestly I haven’t been able to publish any missions in the past year for similar reasons. That hasn’t stopped Cupid/Steph from being enjoyable while it lasted, though, and I’m glad we were able to make something great out of it. (And now I’m reminding myself againto return to my PPC writings, which I’ve wanted to do for a while now but couldn’t find the motivation… Goddamn dumb awesome personal projects and software consulting job. X’D)

So from me and my agents to you, Voyd, Happy Birthday! I hope your path in life leads you to great things, and I hope we get the chance to collaborate on future writings sometime soon - especially if more Squid Icarus is involved.

Original lineart: armorbirdpress.tumblr.com/post…

Kid Icarus © Nintendo
Monster Musume © Okayado
The Monster Girl Encyclopedia © Kenkou Cross
The Protectors of the Plot Continuum © Jay and Acacia
Stephanie Podd © Voyd
Cupid Carmine © me!

Team FAWN: Anais Armenus and Whitney Fitzgerald

After a bit of an absence, here are the other two members of Team FAWN! Aside from the theme of folk heroes, the four team members are all based on OCs of mine from various writing projects both planned and public. The boys are both derived from my original fiction, but the girls are both based on some of my agents written for the Protectors of the Plot Continuum; I figured that these two in particular were the best candidates for a RWBY AU facelift of sorts. Details under the cut!

Anais is, lore-wise, based on the Armenian folk heroine,  Anahit, whom you can read more about here, but she actually owes much more to Lapis Lazuli, who was not only one of my favorite agents to develop, but also had one of the longest stints in my creative history, and has been floating around the Interwebs since 2008. She started out as a Pokémon anime OC on DeviantArt, specifically for a writing project involving another artist’s fakemon which has long since been abandoned, but since then she’s cropped up in various forms and incarnations in a couple of my writing projects before finally finding a home in the PPC. Anais, being her RWBY-verse counterpart, has inherited much of her high-strung, snappy personality, but I decided to give her a more sensual feel than Lapis, since I needed a way to make her character and fighting style distinct and Lapis’ outfit made me think of an exotic dancer. I also couldn’t not include the shark’s teeth that Lapis has in the PPC canon, so that led to Anais being a great white shark Faunus, which gave me a few good design cues for her outfit - it’s themed around dangerous fish, including sharks, and I imagine it’d be various shades of blue like the ocean with some tropical reef color flourishes. Her Semblance is teleportation, which is also a nod to a period when Lapis had a similar ability, though it has since been written out of the latter. Naturally, Anais is also aged up a great deal compared to Lapis, in fact being older than Fallow despite looking tinier - in fact, all four members of Team FAWN are the same age with the exception of Fallow, who got enrolled in Beacon a year early like how I went to college at a younger age than usual. :P Anais’ weapon, Abanarsti (from the Armenian words for “sea” and “spear”), is a Dust Axe/Trident Amalgamate, a dual-headed staff whose trident/axe heads, which are shaped like shark tails, have revolver chambers like Myrtenaster which can be loaded with Dust, usually Water Dust, for various offense/defense purposes; the staff can also be split into dual hand-axes for close-quarters melee.

Anais, like Naja, lived in Vacuo during her youth, but most her childhood was far less memorable. In fact, she pretty much went off the grid for a while after her parents died when she was 10, wandering from town to town until she found her way into one of the few training academies in the nation that accepted Faunuses. She struggled through lots of racism during her academic career regardless, though - partly because everyone knew who she was the moment she opened her mouth, even before she could get the chance to speak. This gave her a highly detached temperament until, by happenstance, she ended up being accepted at Beacon, where she was schooled on the values of empathy and self-worth by her partner and fellow Faunus, Fallow, and the other members of Team FAWN. It was bonding with her teammates that helped her through the fall of Beacon, because until she realized that they more than filled the void left by her late family, Beacon was her only attachment and the place she considered her home… Now, her home is with Fallow, with whom she’s formed a sibling-like relationship, as well as Whitney and Naja who regard her as one of their closest friends and as a reliable means of keeping her teammates’ more overzealous tendencies in check.

Whitney’s look is unashamedly lifted from the AU outfit for the female Wii Fit Trainer in this picture by CoronaDiTempesta, and all credit for the original concept goes to them, though I made a number of changes to avoid outright plagiarism such as including bandages on her arms and legs like a Muay Thai boxer (as seen on the male WFT in the source pic) and lots of scars all over her upper body. Her lore basis is Étaín, the Celtic heroine of the Tochmarc Étaíne, who was identified as a sun goddess by linguistics scholar T.F. O'Rahilly, but she’s also based on the aforementioned Wii Fit Trainer as well as another PPC agent of mine, simply known as Whitney. I came up with Agent Whitney and her partner purely as proxies to dip my toes into missions involving video-game-specific continua, but I’ve slowly taken a liking to them both to the point where expies of them may show up in my original writing as well eventually - RWBY!Whitney, in fact, is pretty much Agent Whitney with a different outfit, abilities more fitting of a Remnant native, and a Solar-Powered Telescoping Flail called Lorganfaid, after the Irish Dagda god’s magic staff. Said flail functions like a giant wrecking ball with a retractable chain, so it can be used as a close-range bludgeon or a mid-range whip with a big spiky death orb at the end, and paired with her Solar Absorption Semblance - i.e. absorbing sunlight to power herself up or regenerate Aura - it can generate a plasma field that can burn things while smashing them to bits.

Whitney and her brother, Wynn, were originally from Mistral’s capital, and were raised by a single mother (modeled after an older version of Dawn from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, who was another one of my waifus back in the day :P), but since their mom was a sculptor and had to spend a lot of time doing commission work, they had to eke out a living on their own as street performers during the daytime - and vigilantes in the night. The two of them were inseparable as children, but went their separate ways when Wynn got accepted into Haven, while Whitney found her way into Beacon instead, which is where she met her other teammates and her partner, Naja, who may or may not have a crush on her. Whitney is the Only Sane Woman of the team, being calmer and more rational than all three of her teammates combined, as well as the first one to respond with justified incredulousness to whatever craziness the gang encounters, though she’s long since learned to stop questioning things in general out of tactfulness. She’s very collected even in the midst of battle, likes to incorporate calming yoga routines into her techniques of bashing Grimm to oblivion, and spends almost all of her spare time either meditating or cooking the healthiest food she can for the team. As such, it’s difficult to incite her into intense emotions, but woe betide anyone stupid enough to do so - only a few of the individuals who’ve genuinely angered her have managed to survive the ensuing carnage, and all of them have scars.

RWBY © RoosterTeeth

Team FAWN © me