Imber WIP

_{12/20/13 5:20am: Edited stuff because it was scaring me.}


A crop of a character art I've already spent approx. 20 hours on. I'm tired. I have to pull odd and extremely long hours just to be able to use the computer, and worse yet is coordinating this with the hours I'm able to wear my contact lenses.

About Heart of the Realm:
Ok, just imagine what if Square Enix had made a Kingdom Hearts 1 prequel BEFORE they made Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts II, and so forth. Ansem would still be the BROWN king of a world called Hollow Bastion, we would not even have a concept of Nobodies, let alone Organization XIII, Riku would still be imprisoned inside Kingdom Hearts, and Sora's and Mickey's keyblades would still be the only two known in existence. (We were shocked when Mickey pulled out his in the Normal ending, and outright mystified when the unidentified "Blond Haired Kid" summoned two at once.) The infamously overused black zippered trench coat was also new to us; Of the five characters known to wear it only Mickey Mouse was identified, as fans were not willing to say for certain that the silver-haired "Blind Unknown" could not possibly be anyone other than Riku.

Heart of the Realm is an opera-length fanfiction I've been brainstorming in high-gear for the past 3 years or so. (It began as a poorly written 2 page drabble in 2007.)

In 2010 I tried to just hammer it onto paper in a month a la the NaNoWriMo writing challenge. I wrote 46,000 words (about 68 printer pages at 10-size type) of my 50k goal, and yet only covered 1/12 of my outline!!

It has many original characters as well as Final Fantasy characters in major rolls. (After all, Hollow Bastion originally served as the base for all Final Fantasy characters in the game, yet included originals too like Ansme and Kairi.)


About Imber:
At first, I just decided that what the series really needed was a silver-haired chick. Separately I had already decided to recycle some fanfic Ansem Reports I wrote back in 2004; Those Reports called for the creation of two more original characters, so I decided to design one girl and one boy, say that the boy later became the mysterious "Dual Wielder" (aka "Blond Haired Kid"), and design the appearance of the girl so that she was easily mistakable for Riku and say SHE, not Riku, was in fact the Blindfolded Unknown in Deep Dive.

This idea sort of went to rot for a while, as they would not not appear until the very last---fourth--act of the story. Then two names occurred to me----Rain and Clay---and I couldn't resist fleshing them out at last. (Eventually I went with the Latin translations of rain and clay, Imber and Lutum)

Since it's likely to be over a year before I get that far along in writing the story, I don't mind giving spoilers.

Imber and Lutum are two small children created by Ansem in further experiments he conducted after surviving his defeat by Sora. Ansem's theories of the heart now revised and completed, the last thing he had to do was create a heart from scratch, and then for scientific purposes prove that the result was repeatable.

Imber and Lutum consider Ansem their father, but for reasons I haven't decided on yet, run away. They meet Savanna, a former 1s Class SOLDIER before Hollow bastion's destruction, whom as luck would have it just happens to be Ansem's oldest living friend. (She, Ansem, Ansem's brother, and another friend ruled as the four kings and queens of Narnia when they were children, before Ansem lost his memory shortly after they returned to Hollow Bastion.) Savanna takes the two under her wing, and teaches them both Niten Ichi---Japanese dual-wielding---which was her signature style while in SOLDIER.

As hearts that have no bodies, they grow up inhumanly quickly as their minds mature; The dark state of the universe does not help in this matter.

Later on, Ansem developed some theories about the origin of the Keyblade, and discovered that new ones can be made out of metal relics gathered from an ancient battlefield on Hollow Bastion.

I kind of imagine Imber and Lutum succeeding Sora and Riku as defenders of the universe someday. I also like imagining that Sora grows up to be incredibly like Leon.