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DEAD SPACE: NUM63R5 - ''The Messier-4 Massacre''

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I can't make up my mind about the title.... Either just "Fatigued" or, "The Messier-4 Massacre". :skeptical:

This is Marlow Valentine, an original character I came up with for a "Dead Space" fanfic that I started writing as an experiment. What I was testing (or rather, DEMONSTRATING because I myself was already convinced) was that the "Dead Space" series would have been WAAAAAAAAAY better (and I say that as someone who generally LOVED it) if Unitology had been replaced with Numerology (a la Jim Carry's "The Number 23"), instead of just a pesky cult. (With an incompetently-stolen lexicon. ಠ_ಠ)

I only got two and a half chapters into writing my fanfic because, just one week after I started it, my border-collie became critically ill, and I spent the next YEAR devoting every resource I had (including time, energy, research, and my own spine) to trying to undo the damage that our vet had done to him.... T.T

However, even to this day I still LOVE how that fanfiction was turning out. I daresay it even RUINED THE GAMES for me, because around every corner I'm reminded of how annoying Visceral Games's Unitology rhetoric is and how astronomically-much-more interesting Numerology would have made the villains... So supposedly Isaac Clark is a pretty smart guy, being a space-age engineer and all, but IMO almost ANYONE would look smart going up against the Unitologists; imagine if, instead, the universe had been overrun by a bunch of evil Charlie Eppeses! :nuu:

I just.... haven't gone back to this project because I'm still traumatized from all of 2016...... I actually did this sketch back in early September or even late August. Never finished it because I set it aside for a while, because I needed to 'refresh my eyes' and get another look at Isaac Clark's canon Level 5 RIG (my personal favorite RIG :meow:), and then started procrastinating.............until (about three or four weeks after drawing what you see here) my GRANDMA suddenly died, too. :cry: I can't really say it enough: 2016 hit me like a cement truck.

Given that I lost two close family memebers within weeks of each time I worked on this project, I'm almost SCARED to ever take it up again. IF I was superstitious, I'd be asserting that it's probably jinxed! OMG - Watch that -reverse-

But, you know, here it is. :shrug:

I'm just having a hellova hard time concentrating on artwork, Pepakuras, and creative writing because I still miss them so much. Plus what happened to my dog was a perfectly legal medical screw-up, so on top of simply missing him, I'm still FREAKING PISSED!!!! I kid you not: I've just been focusing on my garden lately because planting things in Arizona invariably requires a jackhammer and if you don't have one then you just have to blast rocks apart by hand with a regular shovel, and that's how I've been taking out my issues......literally on the World. :roll: You would think that after planting 30-someodd rose bushes, 19-someodd fruit trees, and A FEW DOZEN other pretty things, I'd be right as rain by now; no, seems the size of my garden just gives visual perspective to how upset I've been....

So, sorry to all my loyal Watchers (I've noticed that no more than about three people have unWatched me :hug:) that I haven't been very productive. I'm sure you're probably more forgiving of me than I am of myself.... Being unproductive (apart from gardening like an actual maniac), or worse, working hard and long on something and still having nothing finished to show for it!, always just pissed me off even more. :rage: Go figure. (Such items include: Artorias armor template, Berserk-Dragonslayer template, Toa Tahu's sword template, Edward Elric's dragon spear template & Disney-Atlantis mask template, my articulated Steampunk wings, my (the original) Pendulum Wings, my Apocalypse Heroine Glove pattern, my "Heart of the Realm" story, THIS very story "NUM63R5", my cyberpunk "Avatar" anti-fanfiction, my papercraft templates for the regalia orb and wand from "Frozen", a papercraft template for my original keyblade Anima Verglas, my Morgul Blade papercraft from tLotR, and my VERY old Dr. Horrible Freeze Ray papercraft template ...the list goes on and on and on!!! :shakefist:)

I'll feel better when AT MINIMUM my website Towerdweller.com is renovated to my liking, and, you know, if people turn out to be happy to actually pay me for the resources I design.....
I need to buy more plants!! Or better yet, another dog!!! :sniff: rvmpSimper Tail Wag Icon



Oh.... Points about this drawing I forgot to mention:
See? Did I not just say I can't focus on anything?! ...............dang, look at ALL that stuff I spaced.  O__o

:bulletblack: Marlow is holding a 'violin' (really a viola) because it's electric with a built-in ionophonic amplifier; ionophonic speakers are a REAL thing, a kind of speaker that uses a beam of plasma to play programmed sound in the same way that lightning produces thunder! :la: So, in my little custom episode of "Dead Space", Marlow here has hacked this viola so it can overload and zap things, in effect throw lightning!, and uses it as his main weapon instead of a traditional Plasma Cutter. (I might also bequeath him a saber from a wall-mount in the captain's quarters. :skeptical:)

:bulletblack: The alien script on the wall actually says things; I used the official cipher code from the "Dead Space" games. It has been so long since I drew this, I don't even remember what most of it says. So, have fun translating it! ;) Don't try too hard, though, because I DID make up SOME of the symbols, just so that all that graffiti would look more like alien math problems instead of just the mad prophesies of canon Unitology.

:bulletblack: In my story, instead of having all of the characters idiotically reiterate that "the Markers are unlike anything ever seen before" the way that Visceral Games did in all its canon material, I actually wrote in a whole list of things that I personally would say the Markers could look like. Most importantly of all, I'd say Markers look like infinity signs, which IRL were historically based on the Ouroboros----a mythical snake that eats its own tail as a symbol of cyclical creation and destruction.

:bulletblack: As for that prominent mark in the window that looks like a Treble-Clef, Treble-Clefs are another important thing I think Markers could slightly resemble. Same as in "Dead Space" official canon, the Markers in "NUM63R5" emit electro-magnetic waves (light, including non-visible frequencies) that remotely rewire peoples' brains. Now, in DS canon, smart people like Isaac Clarke and Michael Altman were able to 'process' the waves in their brains properly and see alien symbols which amounted to blueprints for building new Markers, whereas stupid peoples' brains just liquefied, turning the people into necromorphs. I'm not straying too far from that in "NUM63R5", short of cleaning up their vague and inconsistent scientific explanations as much as I can; but something huge I'm doing differently is: my character, Marlow, has pre-existing acute Synesthesia, and so, instead of SEEING the Marker's blueprints, for the most part he HEARS them in his head as symphonies!

:bulletblack: Back when I first played the "Dead Space" trilogy, DLCs, and even read the novel "Martyr", I must have gotten terribly confused about at least one detail----what Michael Altman looked like! Makes sense in the games because he's long dead by the time they take place and all we ever SEE of him is a big gray statue, but IMO "Martyr" had no excuses. I think it is the duty of every novelist, who isn't taking creative licence to be vague on purpose, to describe what all prominent characters, and particularly THE MAIN character (if there is one), look like. At least in basic detail. Like......what AGE GROUP they're in! I didn't remember the statue when I read the book, but even so, since the book was a prequel, it might not have been anything to go by anyway... The statue was of an old man, but somehow for the entirety of my "Dead Space" experience, I imagined Altman as A BISHOUNEN WITH LONG SILKY BLACK HAIR!Can't Stop Laughing - NaNoEmo Day 2Well, I guess screwing that up worked out in my favor, because now I get to use that character design on my own original creation: nerdy little Space bishi Marlow Valentine! :giggle:

:bulletblack: In general, I merely love giving characters posh names, but in this case "Valentine" is in reference to the Christian martyr whom every February 14th we all conveniently forget died an especially bloody death! Also, a third thing that I compare the Markers' physical likeness to is: a woman's headless, limbless torso! and by extrapolation: succubus! A 'singing', upright, giant corpse! Who, one might say, is trying to court Marlow... Even Visceral Games's novel "Martyr" almost went that rout when the Black Marker took the form of Michael Altman's girlfriend in a dream and told him that it wanted (figuratively) "to have a baby". O_o

:bulletblack: The central ship, the one in which Marlow is pictured standing, is named the Scheherazade in reference to the themes of mass slaughter in "Arabian Nights". It's a huge cruise-liner that I've loosely based on the Titanic, and as such, the characters who named it in-story (the "Ivory Star" company, in reference to the infamous White Star company, but even more ivory-tower-ish) were only trying to invoke impressions of opulence and highbrow company (because Scheherazade was both a Persian queen AND a model intellect) for good advertising. I never would have read "Arabian Nights" except that I had heard two conflicting summaries: one where Scheherazade marries the evil king unwillingly and is motivated in her schemes by survival instinct alone, and the other was that Scheherazade married the evil king of her own volition for a chance to end his murder streak, compelled by compassion for the thousands of other women he'd already murdered and may yet have murdered. It's a small footnote of a difference to most people, even to most other bibliophiles, but it made ALL of the difference to ME. I found out that, at least in the English translation that Barns & Nobel sells bound in gilt leather, Scheherazade was in fact the later, which as far as I'm concerned makes her a bonafide hero imbued with true bravery and love of mankind---not simply a clever victim who's love is limited to the small scope of herself.

:bulletblack: Messier-4, the setting of my fanfiction, is a REAL astronomical object; it's an especially ancient star-cluster that happens to be easily visible in the constellation Scorpius.

:bulletblack: Messier-4 is considered a "stellar graveyard" because the stars in it are generally SO old that they're no longer fuelled by nuclear-fusion; that means only 'embers' are left, technically not "stars" anymore. I thought that this would be a PERFECT setting given, you know, what goes on in "Dead Space"----even the stars themselves are dead!

:bulletblack: The oldest planet known to present-day Astronomy is in this cluster! It's official name is "PSR B1620-26 b", but non-Borg human beings just calls it "the Methuselah planet", after the Biblical person in Genesis who lived to be over 900-years-old.

:bulletblack: Being approximately 12,700,000,000-Earth-years-old (making it one of the very first planets ever formed after the birth of the universe!) isn't the only thing unusual about it. It orbits a binary system, which in our era consists of a pulsar and a white dwarf. In other words, it has two suns in its sky! (The age of the pular is how astronomers figure the age of the planet, by assuming, maybe also considering orbital measurements, that they formed together.)

:bulletblack: (Now THIS is why I find the Methuselah planet so fascinating!) ANY planet orbiting a pulsar would have a sun that flashes like a strobe-light! Seizure La 2 Now, were any manned spaceship to pass through such a system, I think a strobe-sun shining through all its windows would probably drive all its poor occupants a little extra crazy.Psycho :Emoticon: Everywhere there's a window, even WITHOUT human gore everywhere and zombies swarming toward you, would feel like a Halloween funhouse! You know, AFTER that critical point where the 'funhouse' isn't 'fun' anymore, and you just want to get OUT.... :diabolic: Frankly, I don't even know how you were able to read this far with just that demonstrative little emoticon right there. My eyes!!!! :angry: 
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