Inspector Unicorn

Apparently police procedural shows are a big hit phenomenon thing. There’s like ninety of them. I don’t know of a single one that stars a unicorn man. PDR proposes we should fix that.

Murders happen in the big city every day. What is less frequent is murders that are overtly supernatural in nature. But lately, things have been getting weird: Trolls found shot to death and left in garbage bins. A mass grave of fairies unearthed in a public park. Mermaids have been dying in gang fights down by the docks. Magic wands and voodoo dolls are turning up as murder weapons at an alarming rate. It’s terrible. Luckily for everyone, Elton J. Unicorn is on the case. As the newest member of the police forensics team, supernatural history expert Elton seems aloof and arrogant to his colleagues, but he gets the job done, and that’s what matters.

For the show to work, everybody else on the team would have to be normal-human-type chumps, but victims and criminals could be every kind of mythological person you could think of. That’s something you won’t get on those other shows. Also, eventually I’d have to have some story where Elton meets the Panda Detective or Securitaur.

Norma Weinrich

Norma used to be a ghost and as far as she knew, that was the sort of thing that was supposed to be permanent. She’d been killed in a train accident decades ago, and spent the time after that as an unseen presence in a train station. She could tell that she was supposed to move on to somewhere else, but never worked out how to do it. So she wandered the station for longer than she’d even been alive. Things changed very suddenly. Norma “awoke” suddenly, physically being pulled out of some rubble by rescue workers, being told that lightning had struck the station and caused an explosion. The medics are treating her as if she’s suffered amnesia or brain damage or something, but Norma knows the truth: she’s alive again. But she has no idea how or why.

This is one of those cases where I had a sketch of a person and absolutely no story in mind. I whipped up the above at the last minute. Sometimes characters like that have woven themselves deep into my mind. Let’s see if it happens again.

Natalie Lincoln

A long time ago, someone pissed off some powerful supernatural entity. That entity put a curse on that man, one that his family would carry with them forever. The curse marked all who carried that man’s blood with a mystical sigil visible only to those skilled in the occult arts. It told them “Attack this person and you will be rewarded”. The supernatural being was good on its promise, any sorcerer or demon who killed a member of this family was granted whatever they could wish from the supernatural being. This meant the family was under constant attack from greedy mystics and monsters, but the family did not die. They were a hardy group, they were survivors. If anything, this curse has made them stronger. The members who survived to procreate were those most skilled in fighting supernatural threats, and they passed their skills on so that, in the modern day, the family is the source of the world’s most skilled supernatural-fighters.

Natalie Lincoln is one of that man’s descendants. She was fighting off wizards by the time she was nine and survived her first ghost attack at twelve. She now possesses a magic boxing glove that deals special damage to mystical threats. The occasional idiot still makes an attempt on her life, but Natalie finds it little more than a minor annoyance.

One of Natalie’s cousins in the Lincoln family has already appeared in a PDR work. A handful of others are out there, so maybe I’ll squeeze another one in before Supernatural year is over.

Heldimor

The besieged city of Mendonia was the setting of a climactic battle against an army of evil dark gods and monsters that had rampaged across the land. from all over the world had fallen. All seemed lost until Heldimor’s arrived with the weapons and armor of his ancestor Lodimor and leading an army of enemy prisoners that he had freed. Heldimor had found a potion that turned the prisoners into mindless slaves, who only acted at his command. This rush of unexpected reinforcements was just what the good guys needed. They drove off the enemies at last and the world was safer than it had been for generations. Heldimor was, of course, regarded as a hero. For a time anyway. Eventually it was realized that the army of prisoners was stuck in that state, just a mindless army that answered only to Heldimor. It allowed Heldimor to build himself a castle with an incredible staff of servants, but other people started to wonder if it wasn’t a horrible thing. Heldimor had enslaved living beings, even if they had once been enemies. Tension grew between Heldimor, who now also had a number of non-mindless followers, and the Mendonian government who appreciated what he had done, but saw problems with what he was doing. Eventually Heldimor withdrew, keeping to his own small realm not far from the city he had once saved. There, it is said, he begins to feel angry toward those he feels have rejected him and now the Mendonians worry if there isn’t a new evil army that will someday sweep in to conquer.

This is me starting to fill out my fantasy universe. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve got a ton of characters for this among my notes, but for some reason I still haven’t dipped into those. Heldimor, like Weggles before him, is just someone I made up on the spot. Digging notes out of a filing cabinet is so much work, after all.

This is the last of the alien wizard buffer I had built for myself. I could do more Wallfixers later in the year if it comes to it, but I may not. Who can say?

Mivvle

The sea-serpentine Wallfixer called Mivvle is one of the many Wallfixers to come from an aquatic world. Born into her world’s equivalent of royalty, when her powers first began to manifest, it was taken as a sign that she could be some kind of messiah. That thought terrified Mivvle and she fled the way only a Wallfixer can: by traversing the transuniversal gulf. Unaccustomed to her abilities, Mivvle travelled far, across countless dimensions and universes, until she was hopelessly lost. Though she eventually met the Order of the Wallfixers and was trained, her home universe is so distant from the local multiverse that even the Wallfixers are unable to pinpoint the location. Though she keeps busy with the work that Wallfixers do, she does hope to one day see her home again. She doesn’t know it, but that world holds out hope that its savior will return some day as well.

Mr. Zoip

Mr. Zoip uses his magic powers mostly to play tricks on superheroes. If that doesn’t seem like a particularly valorous use of his abilities, it should be noted that he believes that doing it will make those heroes into better people. The Beams of Universes White and Green had an adventure that revealed to them the multiverse, so Mr. Zoip did his Wallfixer duty to make sure that they weren’t liable to break anything. He accepted their color-themed naming of the local universes. Using his magic to subject the Beams to various pranks, Zoip ensured that they would be able to think their way out of circumstances that involved other resolutions than violence. He never bothered to explain that to them, though, so they just think he’s a jerk.

Jurjen

Jurjen fights evil spirits. He’s a plush toy. A mother gave the toy to her daughter and told her it would protect her. The mother, a wizard, did not make this gift and promise idly. She knows full well that evil spirits are real things and that they’d strike at her through her daughter. But the toy, Jurjen, remains vigilant. The thing about evil spirits is that they’re essentially imaginary, they’re more things of mind than matter. The little girl’s imagination is strong and fuel’s Jurjen’s jaunts into the mental realms where the spirits dwell. There, Jurjen fights the evil spirits, to protect a little girl’s life.

I drew this little guy and didn’t quite know what to do with him. The above is pretty vague, but I feel like it is something to work with. I kinda expect to expand on it in the future. The little girl’s mother, the evil spirits. There’s plenty to work with for future posts.

Princess Dazerra

I usually like to put a bit of the character’s story here, but I’m just gonna launch into the background stuff for this one. I like video games where you have to save a princess. It is so simplistic and satisfying. Someone has been kidnapped and needs to be saved. Sure, it doesn’t have to be a princess (Adventure Dennis had to save the Mayor), but there’s something about princesses that just makes it work. Obviously it can be problematic to present princesses as weak and, essentially, objects to motivate the hero, but suppose I want to create a Zelda-style game someday. I need to have a princess there to rescue, right? Correct, but Princess Dazerra is not that princess. Princess Dazerra is the protagonist of the game. She’s on a quest to save her younger sister, who has been kidnapped by the forces of evil. Two princesses, man. This game would rule.

I figure the mechanics of the game would involve finding different gemstones that, when placed in her crown, give Dazerra different abilities to solve puzzles and fight monsters and all that video game hero stuff. I also figure that, man, I suck at drawing swords.

The High Coronach

Death comes to all things that have life. This is the truth of the universe. Nowhere is this more apparent then the city of Cemeteria, the city that borders the spiritual realm. Naturally, with that proximity to the beyond, a system of ritual and religion has built up. The majority of Cemeterians revere the idea of death, not only as an ending, but as a source of continuance. The apple dies, but the one who eats it gains nourishment. So it is for souls. When a person dies, the afterlife becomes stronger. The crux of it involves the quest to make sure the souls feeding the afterlife are good ones. The head of this religion is the High Coronach. Elected pope-style, from the lesser clerics. When the city of Cemeteria is exposed to the world by a supervillain’s attack, the Coronach wants to start spreading the religion to the rest of the world. This proselytizing is not welcome everywhere in the world, and so the ruler of Cemeteria, Queen Deathknell, has to try to smooth things over politically.

I remembered Queen Deathknell just recently and figured “Hey, that’s a pretty ‘supernatural’ idea, lets build on that” so I’m doing it. The next character is also from Cemeteria:

Morrie

Cemeteria is not a perfect place. As with any large city, there is a criminal element. But they have to deal with Morrie. Morrie has served as the police chief of Cemeteria for over a century. With supernatural gun-summoning abilities, Morrie has stopped the soul smugglers and ghost bandits and, of course, grave robbers that are brave or stupid enough to try their luck. Morrie is a grizzled, rough old man, who was a great ally to Queen Deathknell’s mother and is now especially protective of the current monarch. While this is very welcome when it comes to him doing his job (Cemeteria doesn’t have a military, at least not yet), he has been known to cause some embarrassing situations when dignitaries from the outside world are in town.

It doesn’t come across too well, because I’m not good at this, but Morrie is supposed to be unnaturally tall and lanky. I had the Arch-Vile from Doom in mind. I named him Morrie as a reference to the phrase Mememnto Mori, which seemed appropriate.