Concepts

[There's a lot of written content on this particular page. Don't like that? Well... too bad. HAHAHAHA!]
Ach, and the number-description system isn't quite in effect yet. It'll save me a lot of time later, as I have an unimaginably large number of stuff to scan and add yet.

In addition to drawing, I write stories. My drawings inspire my writing and vice versa. However, I'm an artist first and foremost... The only writing I do that ever seems to reach a state fit for public consumption are the essays I tortuously type up for school. In general, I can't share my personal writings because it is disjointed and scattered, the literary equivalent of very rough sketches. Now, while I can bring myself to share some of my rough sketches with humankind, I simply cannot do this with such unrefined writing. So, of all of these "worlds" I create within my cranium, I can currently only share a portion of the illustrated aspect.

"Worlds." I don't know how else to describe it. They are independent stories, often composed of many stories within stories, in unique environments with unique characters that have been born from my imagination over the years. Certainly, like any human being, I tap countless sources of inspiration, but, by and by, these "worlds" are completely mine. They are my intellectual playgrounds. Even if they never evolve into the readily-shareable form I have always envisioned, they are limitless sources of creative experimentation, psychological exploration, etc., that will always be a part of me.

You can expect to find all sorts of things here. Dinosaur-derived creatures. Dragons. Reptilo-mammaloids. Heck, there are even humans, albeit members of unique races of my own creation. My artistic bias is towards organic forms, so that's mostly what you can expect to find. Anything's possible here, though.

HASTERN / "WRH"

This is actually the name of one small planet in a "universe" that has gotten so huge and deep over time that I can hardly keep track of my own ideas for it. It started out as a video game concept when I was but a sprout, with the rather corny title of "Windrider". Although, in my "project"'s current state, "Windrider" actually has some symbolic bearing, I generally find the title unfitting and have been pressing my cerebral folds to come up with a wholly appropriate and convenient term to refer to this whole Hastern-Windrider mess, with no success thusfar. (Well, it'll come when it comes.) Meantime, I'll just call it WRH for the sake of practicality.

WRH may have started in grade school or earliest middle school. I never gave it much thought back then, but it lingered in my mind long enough for me to slowly add to its base set of concepts. The central character (of the "base" story thread, anyway) has remained essentially the same. She has gone from a pirate to an assassin, which isn't too much of a stretch, but she still dresses more or less the same, dabbles in "witchcraft", and only looks somewhat different because I couldn't draw humans worth styrofoam peanuts back then. I still call her "Magenta", even though that name is unbearably tacky and, by indirect association, brings images of Tim Curry decked out in garters to mind; I have not been able to bring myself to change it or otherwise get rid of it, so I just made "Magenta" the assassin code name most people know her by.

Anyway, yeah, Mag is the only thing that's really remained constant. Maybe a few abstract concepts stayed, but most of the original ideas for WRH died premature deaths. Still as a video game concept, I added to gradually as it as it flickered quietly on the backburner. Other story ideas of mine that otherwise faded away left behind concepts that I recycled into WRH, making Mag's world a conglomeration of a myriad creative fragments. Some stuff had to be carved away to make it work. More so, though, it grew. It stopped being a "video game" idea and gained its own life in my mind.

In spite of all the "icing", WRH is essentially a story about humans. How typical, one might think. A human writing about humans. However, I have found much value in exploring my own thoughts on the gigantic mess called the Human Condition, and it has helped me further understand and accept both myself and others. Now, if only I could put this deluge of imaginative thought into something compact for all posterity to ponder. The primary thing keeping me from doing this, aside from my utterly fickle nature, is the gigantic gaps of conceptual underdevelopment I encounter whenever I TRY to write the actual story. Hopefully, those gaps will fill as I am forced to take required college courses and soak in whatever other random knowledge I am exposed to. WRH grows as I grow. --Jun.19-01

I write the made-up names in a consistent, phonetic manner. Some of the more "ambiguous" pronunciations: a as in father, a' as in sang, aa as in paid, oo as in boat, th as in thistle, u as in muck.

THE HUMANS (and their friends)

FAUNA OF HASTERN



FAUNA OF PA'ROM

[Talis] A character who is incredibly dear to me, he's also the only one thusfar who has had something 'finalized' written about him (a short story called "The Branding", which was only executed because it rather nicely fulfilled the requirements of one particular English assignment in 12th grade). He originated as a "love interest" for our main 'hero', Mag, and had nothing in common with his current incarnation save the name and a bit of "magical" ability. The original Talis supposedly instructed Mag in "witchcraft", which is pretty much was this Talis does, except replace the "witchcraft" with "Parsis". "Parsis" is basically the Force crossed with Wicca; exactly what it is, even I'm not quite sure, but it's the central pillar of Talis's faith, which probably could be called "Parsism", though I seem to recall referring to it as "Parsis" as well. Oh, mayonaise, now I'm confused... The Parsists are not just a religious sect, they're an entire unique race of humans who developed on the world Pa'rom, though, aside from their earthly coloration (dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes), exactly how they are different is a mystery. Poor little Talis is, as a good color image of him would relate rather quickly, an impure Parsist, which is entirely his parents' "fault" -- his mother was Parsist, his father was "Anira" (the Golden People, who had long ago colonized Pa'rom and generally had a habit of persecuting the natives, though Daddy was a bit of an oddball in that regard). Talis eventually winds up on Hastern, all alone, at the tender age of twelve, and over the next eight or so years his already-profound personal problems are compounded incredibly. His story is a long, sad one, and I definitely can't even begin to get into it here and now. I may babble about Tal some more in the future, if anyone actually cares. (I don't care if anyone cares, though, because TRS is first and foremost for myself, but, as I say way too much, that's beside the point.) --Jul.21-01

[Paarin] Yet another tortured young man, but there is a world of difference between him and Talis (literally as well as figuratively, but that's beside the point irrelevent). His story is also long and sad -- though, compared to Talis, Paar's got it easy -- but lends itself rather easily to the short story format, so instead of summarizing it here I'll just hope I write the dang thing sometime soon. At the heart of Paarin's problems is the fact that he's one of the few hundred remaining of his people, but I'll talk about the latter rather than Paar's issues. These are the so-called 'Dark Hasterns', differentiated from their paler-skinned subterranean kin the Buroos, though both groups of people are technically the same race of humans indigenous to Hastern.

They are unique in many ways from other races: Perhaps most prominently, their skin is 'striated', that is, it alternates between bands of lighter and darker pigment. Their hair is bicolor, i.e., it grows in two distinct colors, which naturally vary on an individual basis; the difference can be so subtle as to be virtually unnoticeable or, in Paarin's case, they can be as sharply contrasting as gold and dark brown. Paarin has a typically Hastern hypnotic-like stare that is attributable to the coloration of his eyes; all Hasterns have an iris with very light pigment ringed by that much darker. Their sense of vision surpasses that of most humans in at least one way: They can perceive wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum (I think that's right...) that others simply cannot see, thus, Hasterns are acquainted with a few colors beyond our imagination. This can create a few minor problems between Hasterns and "outsiders", such as the Case of Paarin's Coat. See, Paar' absolutely loves this coat-jacket-thing of his and almost no one can understand why, being as, to them, it is a wholly unappetizing shade of greenish-brownish-yuck, but, to Paarin, it is an infinitely groovy color that looks absolutely smashing on him. Hasterns have this capacity for no real reason in particular; in physics class that year, we were learning about wavelengths and the like, and it occurred to me, "Hmm, if we could actually see all of those other frequencies, would we perceive them as completely indescribable colors?", and, completely at random, my newly-created Hastern race became the testing grounds for this idea. -- Jul.20-01

[Westlee] The closest thing to a "villain" that WRH has. Westlee originally began as an incredibly cliched baddie named "Westley" in a very old thread for Ember, and the only thing the two of them really have in common is a certain skill in the "mystic arts". This guy is such a messed-up character, even I'm not quite sure what to think of him half the time. I've written pages and pages on his psychology and I'm still bloody confused. I wouldn't hesitate to call him "insane", though, because he definitely is. His personality is a knotted conglomeration of cruelty, lust, virtue, and compassion. He is a man of extreme extremes who contradicts himself constantly, yet he cannot be considered bipolar. He simultaneously warrants both loathing and pity. As a character, his nuttiness means a lot of fun for me, though is role in the main story is regrettably small. However, he and Teeren have a terribly demented story between the two of them that definitely merits being written one of these days. --Jul.21-01

[Teeren] The only person who could even come close to being a match for Westlee, though Teeren never, ever admits it. The only person for which she allows herself to have any regard is for herself, but at the same time she denies herself what she truly wants. The only people that she cares about are also the ones that she hates the most. She has a strange sense of duty that she constantly disguises as something less honorable. Teeren is incredibly intelligent and has vast innate ability, but her various complexes lead her to create adamant boundaries for herself, and a trap of her own creation eventually leads to her downfall (though, as it went, she has a perfect scapegoat). Her psychology is, like Westlee's, plenty of fun to work with, if only because she's so bloody messed-up. Unlike Westlee, however, Teeren never makes an appearance in the main story... or does she? <<maniacal laughter>> --Jul.21-01

[Yoota] Why the fluke is there an unsightly spider-thing under "humans"? Well, even in WRH, humanoid spider-things aren't a natural occurrence. This individual, who is now known only as "Yoota" (after a certain lobster-sized arachnoid predator indigenous to Hastern), is technically still human, but it's obvious "something bad" happened to her some time in the past. The product of sorcery, no doubt, but the power to so greatly alter someone's form is extraordinarily rare, virtually unknown on Hastern itself... Yoota isn't so much interested in getting her human form back -- she regards her former self as being long dead -- as she is in eventually exacting some form of sick revenge that will do no good for herself or anyone else. As might be expected, she's dark, brooding, and enigmatic, and, to the annoyance of other characters, keeps her alignments and intentions very ambiguous. Yoota comes and goes as she pleases, very rarely allows herself to be seen (one can imagine why), and absolutely does not tolerate any witnesses to her dining ventures.

She plays a pretty minor role in the grand scheme of things, but Yoota is one of my favorite characters. She's also one of the oldest, date-of-creation-wise (well, age-wise, as well). Yoota started out as an "Iota" in a short-lived thread from Ember, something about a gang of 'mutants' who were all designated by Greek letters. Her design has changed drastically over the years. For the longest time, she wore a black, vaguely ninja-like body suit and seemed more or less human, save for the extra four limbs (which I believe were all arms, originally). When WRH was still a video game idea, I recycled "Iota" in as a playable character, and she slowly began to take her place in the demented storyline. Meantime, I was getting fed up with "spider people" who really didn't have anything in common with spiders (besides the eight-limbedness) and Iota became the 'guinea pig' for my deranged new ideas.

Granted, the humanoid form can only be arachnicized so much... I had some issues with the difference in body segments -- arachnids only have two, the head and the body, while the human form can be divided into three at the very least. Thus, I took some liberties: For instance, arachnid limbs are all joined to the same point on the body, and for a humanoid this simply wouldn't work, so I just wound up splitting the limbs up between the arms and legs. Some time after WRH was abandoned as a video game concept, "Iota" started sounding unbearably tacky, so I mutated it into "Yoota", and all the meanwhile my beloved spider-woman was becoming as spider-like as I could conceivably make her. To the disgust of anyone thumbing through my sketchbooks, I eventually trashed the body suit idea, but, then, it doesn't really matter if Yoota goes around naked does it? As far as she's come conceptually, Yoota still has a long way to go, or maybe I just have to figure out how to draw a head that doesn't look so ... er ... "dodgy". ::> --Jul.21-01

[Amega] Trying to find an explanation for six-limbed vertebrates is troublesome, but the question can be ignored, more or less, when the critters are from an imaginary planet. Still the question remains why some of Hastern's fauna have six well-developed limbs and everything else on that world and every other one known have the expected four. Such mysteries to be had in universes of one's own devising... Amegas look kind of like dragons because, well, that's what they started out as. In fact, in the beginning they were a mere single individual named "Omega" who, following a great tradition in adventure video games, would provide Magenta with a steed to make things easier for a little while. Over time, "Omega" got larger and larger and increasingly strange-looking -- less traditionally draconian, incorporating more traits from a variety of other sources. Then I got sick those tacky Greek letter monikers and changed one mere letter to get Amega. Then I decided I wanted it to be an entire race of dragon-like beasties, so Magenta's friend sacrificed his own name for the sake of his species; he did get a new one but it was never committed to memory, so he's nameless until I actually find it.

[Golanth] The terror of the Marsh Cave! (No relation to the annoying dungeon from the first Final Fantasy game! I never did get past that thing...) The immense subterranean network of Hastern, designated Marsh Cave only until I come up with a clever handle for it, connects the Kett Desert to a somewhat more hospitable marshland on the other side of the mountains and is basically the only realistic means of passage for wee little humans -- assuming they know how to get into the caves to begin with. Starting beneath the Kett and weaving its tangled passageways under, into, and beyond the towering earth, these caves house an immense, hidden ecosystem -- the secret of the Buroos' underground survival. However, with this blessing of life, large and unpleasant creatures inevitably evolved to 'take advantage' of it (help maintain a semblance of ecological balance). And thus we have the golanths. (The name is almost certainly the result of my brain deforming "goliath.")

The golanths bear much of a resemblance to the priorly-created t'aks, which, oddly enough, I didn't do consciously, but it works out beautifully. The golanths would have evolved from a t'ak-like creature, as they obviously share a common ancestor. Whatever led the golanths to become so big is beyond me (and consider that the t'ak is small enough to sustain itself on insects), but it suits them fine, considering the immensity of the Marsh Caves and of some potential prey items. They are much more specialized than their tiny relatives, having lost their eyes completely (but still possessing a light-sensitive 'third eye', like a tuatara or an iguana if memory serves), reduced their metabolism to an incredibly lethargic level, made various modifications to the cranial morphology, and become generally bulkier. The life of a golanth is rather uneventful: A little skulking about, a lot of lying around doing nothing, much waiting for juicy tidbits to wander near its jagged maw, with reproductive festivities limited to once every several years. They're not the sort of creature one would want to run into; to them, humans are little different from any other slow-moving bite-sized item. --Jul.20-01

[Theeska] I can never remember what the actual species is called, which is rather pathetic being as I created and named them! Oh well, I'll find my notes on it one of these days... These loveable monstrosities seem almost like a demented cross between golanths and tookees, though I'm not quite sure how they are related to either one. Little is seen of them in the story itself (at least, as I have conceived it thusfar), save for an individual called Theeska. As adults, her species is definitely one to stay far, far away from. An adult male, one might be able to get away from in one piece, but for reasons I won't detail here the grown females are utterly ruthless, with no capacity for mercy or moderation and next to none for compassion, so brutally harpy-ish any male in his right mind is very, very afraid. As youngsters, though, both genders are strangely adorable, innocent, harmless even to the point of taking to humans as revered parental figures. Their childhoods are incredibly erratic and variable, and they fill a niche completely separate from the adults until ideal environmental conditions trigger a sudden and intense maturation. The intermediary phase is extremely brief considering the amount of growth accomplished and they are virtually never sighted 'in between', feeding the common lore that the adults and the young'uns are actually two separate species.

Theeska was captured as a juvenile in the wild to be peddled as a "pet" in a human settlement -- one could almost call it a city -- far away from her homelands. A character named Eeon, who is briefly-featuring and primarily-unimportant but I've managed to develop him quite a bit nonetheless, takes to the little caged critter and purchases her, completely ignorant of the adult she will eventually become. (There are no pictures of Eeon right now because, well... If you knew what he looked like, his absence would be relieving.) The bond that develops between Eeon and Theeska is very twisted and convoluted, increasingly so after little Theeska hits her infernal adolescence, and eventually brings much misery to both of them. I won't dare go into it further (go ahead! consider the sickest and most perverse possibilities you can!), being as those details are completely inconsequential. --Jul.20-01

[Sapel] This hardy little carnivore owes its creation to the paleks; it originated primarily because somewhere in my attempts to write something the 'natural predator of the paleks' is mentioned, so naturally I had to draw and name the bloody thing. For all I know, "sapel" is somehow derived from "sable" (as in small-little-weasel-creature-prized-for-fur-with-car-named-after-it), but aside from the fact that they're both small, potentially nasty flesh-eaters, the similarities end -- but the name isn't particularly important anyway. My first drawing of a sapel looked like an unearthly cross between an aardvark and a thylacine (Tasmanian 'wolf'), but it eventually developed into the cutie you see here. (And the body seems bizarrely reminiscent of a quadrupedal ornithopod. Oh dear.) This piece materialized outside of the home of the Deikes', where I was waiting, for whatever reason, in the grass across from this nice-looking tree. In order to keep myself occupied, I incited myself to hallucinate (I'm exaggerating a bit) and imagined a young sapel under the tree, panting heavily over a recently-slain palek. I pulled out an H-type pencil and a plastic bag full of magic markers I happened to be carrying with me, got the sketch pad, and went to work. As it went, the others probably ended up waiting on me. --Jul.20-01

[Pa'rom-beest] I actually made up a name for these critters, but it's lost on a little piece of paper along with the First Doodle™. I'm fairly certain it was a very good and fitting name, so, optimizing that I shall eventually find that piece of flattened tree pulp once again, I hesitate to re-name them. For the sake of practicality, though, they are temporarily dubbed "Pa'rom-beest", mostly because they're native to Pa'rom and, while never truly domesticated, serve as the Parsists' favorite beasts of burden. They're supposed to be lanky but sturdy, vaguely ungulate-like (perhaps even cameloid, sans the hump(s)), with a goofy-looking, beaked, toothed head that would ordinarily seem unfitting for such an animal (but it suits the 'beests just fine). The full-body drawing is still nice, but definitely too lanky, and its Kopf represents a conceptual experiment that really doesn't work for me. I messed around with the idea of giving them furry tufts around the rim of their skull, which creates problems considering Pa'rom's indigenous reptilo-mammaloids aren't supposed to have any 'hair' (aside from the whiskers, which next to all of them possess). However, the head crest works so well in the more recent drawing that I'll just have to break my own rules. -- Jul.20-01

[Addendum: I finally found my original labeled drawing of this critter, named, at the moment of their creation, "fernen". And as it goes, this little doodle represents the critter so perfectly, in spite of its incredible simplicity, I really wish I'd never lost it to begin with. Would've saved me the trouble of trying, unsuccessfully, to remember what I had invented. -- Sep.20-01]

EMBER

This originally developed when I was in middle school and happily consuming Piers Anthony's "Xanth" novels. Ember started out as my own cheap Xanth imitation and lived up to its pathetically unoriginal name. The setting, a NJ-sized island in the Pacific Ocean filled with "magical things", has become a dead end. Ember itself poses far too many creative limitations for me, so I have, more or less, abandoned it. However, many of my concepts for characters, places, biota, and various plot elements have plenty of "recycling" potential... Ember shall live on yet. --Jun.19-01

NEODINOSAURS

My cheap imitation of own take on an idea popularized by Dougal Dixon's fun "coffee table" book, The New Dinosaurs. Go borrow it from the library or do a web search; it's a lot easier than me trying to explain it here. I started calling these hypothetical species "neodinosaurs" (etymology should be obvious enough). Rather than having them inhabit the Earth in an alternative timeline, I made up a whole plotline to explain both the extinction of the dinosaurs (::whisper:: They didn't all die out, by the way...) and how these neodinosaurs happen to exist on a distant planet that resembles Earth in a very suspicious way. Think of some classic staples of science fiction and you'll see how unclever my whole premise was. At any rate... I still think many of these drawings are rather cool, so here they are! --Jun.19-01

MISCELLANY

Miscellaneous drawings from a hodgepodge of unenduring concepts. Makes sense given the header, eh?

rachel.k.clark@comcast.net

 The Raptorian Sector -- The Gallery: Concepts, version 1.1. [07-21-01] All images and writing © 1996-2003 Rachel K. Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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