The Wine Taster

Suppose you’re at a party, or any kind of social gathering for that matter, and you see one person among the crowd wearing a strange mask, sipping from a glass of wine, and seemingly focused very intently on you. Maybe you turn to someone you know and ask what the deal is, but when you turn to look back, they’re gone. You’ve just been a victim of the Wine Taster.

The Wine Taster is an Unsettling Oddity, a being who exist solely to cause confusion, create insecurity, and make people ill at ease. These sorts of emotions cause the psychic plane to roil and bubble, generating the energy on which the Oddities feed. While more predictable entities might try to create outright fear in their victims, the Oddities look down on those as lacking in subtlety. They’re the snobs of the mystical entity set.

As with last week’s entries, I’m exploring characters who would exist in the world of the Secret Government Robots comic, in which the Oddities are one of SecGov’s fellow weird governments.

The Sword-Snout

In the forests of Upper Canada a most strange and monstrous creature has been reported. Hunters have spotted a large rodentlike beast, the size of a wolf, but with a blade protruding from its face. It has been seen running through other animals, such as deer, rabbits, or even birds. It has been seen feasting on their remains. But no hunter has reported being attacked. Or at least, none that has ever been attacked has managed to report it.

This one was at least partially inspired by a recent few hours I spent reading about Fearsome Critters. I like that sort of thing. After I’d done the sketch, I figured it would be a good opponent for Horribloid.

Squarbok

Hiding on Earth to avoid having to pay off his gambling debts in his native demonic realm, Squarbok now lives in a cheap apartment above a Thrakodacian restaurant in Miami. He likes to keep it low key, he generally eats food that gets thrown out at the end of the night, but lately a detective from his demonic world has been sniffing around and asking questions. Squarbok is going to need help, but who would help a demon like him?

As always, I am drawing inspiration from elsewhere. I drew the guy just because I wanted to draw a weird bighead demonguy, but when it came time to give him a story, I recalled the way that in the Buffy and Angel shows, a lot of demons were basically just weird looking dudes with average lives. So thus so is Squarbok.

Abigail Red

Ghosts greatly outnumber the living, that’s obvious. The Secret Government doesn’t like any group that outnumbers them. To help keep SecGov City safe, the Secret Government has declared it a No Ghost Zone. All SecGov robots randomly gain special abilities at their “birth” and Abigail Red is a 2003 Generation SecGov Robot whose powers included seeing beyond the normal light spectrum, auditory enhancements, and control of a strange otherworldly energy field. In a rare competent move, the Secret Government put her abilities to a good use, making Abigail the official Ghost Hunter of SecGov City. In a more typically incompetent move, the fact that she couldn’t locate any ghosts in the City led her bosses to send her abroad to hone her skills under the teaching of some monks. SecGov City is currently unprotected from ghosts.

This is the first time I’ve done a Super Sunday post for a character in a work I’m actually doing (admittedly slowly during the school year). I just don’t think I’m likely to have a reason to introduce this character in the story of that strip any time soon, so I figured why not? It’s my website. I do what I want.

It’s the season of exams and final essays, so I’m going to revisit the Order of the Wallfixers, the group of alien wizards I use when I am running behind on sketches:

Drinnz

On Drinnz’s homeworld, travel between the universes has been known and utilized for generations, so when Drinnz was approached by the Wallfixers who had detected his potential for extreme cosmic magic, there was less culture shock than most new Wallfixer recruits go through. Drinnz quickly caught on and became a hero of great renown among the many species and universes in his neck of the woods, then he used that fame became a politician. Now a high-ranking Chief and uses that position to try to promote causes that benefit the Wallfixers. He’s also a frequent target for assassination attempts by criminals from all over the multiverse.

Plplppow

Plplppow was born in a particularly crime-ridden neighborhood, where it seemed like the only way out was to become a criminal yourself, or die a victim. Plplppow proved them wrong by developing magical powers that only occur once in ever several billion sentient beings. Nobody had thought of that one. Plplppow was quickly recruited by the Wallfixers and had no qualms about leaving her scumhole home to find adventures. And so far, she hasn’t made any plans to go back.

Plplppow, like Lupplol from last time, is a Pllvm. But Plplppow is from an Alternate Universe Pllvm Homeworld. I think that, among the Wallfixers, Pllvm are the most common species. They and their alternate homeworlds take the place of what would be humans and alternate Earths if this group had been made by someone who thought humans were worth reading about, instead of by PDR.

Fyurgh

Fyurgh is the kind of demon that just likes to have sacrifices done in his name. If you call him up and show him that you’re willing to kill someone for him, he’ll help you out in whatever way he can (usually by killing someone else). He may not be good at possessing people, or undermining society, or even much of anything at all, but he’s a hard worker and that counts for something.

I’m going back to the Floaty Round Monster well pretty soon after the Tonguecatcher, but only because they’re really, really very easy to draw. This one is less of a Cacodemon/Beholder and more of an evil Slimer, though. Fyurgh looks to me like a demon Adventure Dennis would have slaughtered in about two seconds, but obviously he’d be a tougher fight for basically anyone else.

Jo Melville

Jo Melville is an ordinary person. She’s not a champion of justice or a fighter of evil, and she doesn’t want to conquer the world or anything. She’d be happy just going about her day like anyone else. But that plan is consistently ruined by a strange mystical power she has: namely, when Jo Melville sleeps, she opens a portal to mental realms through which all manner of spirits and demons can pass, allowing them to take a physical form on Earth.

This makes Jo a hazard in the eyes of people who want to prevent those beings from coming to Earth, it makes her a would-be tool for those who are actively trying to come here, and it makes her the Chosen One to at least one group of ancient wizards who are curious to know if it is possible for physical beings to go through in reverse, heading into the dimension of thought. Jo’s just wants the complication removed from her life, and as time goes on she may try more increasingly desperate ways to accomplish that.

The impetus for this sketch was just browsing through my character sketch folder and noticing a pointed dearth of people who wear normal-people clothes.

Twinklyn

Uncertainty. Is a particle in one place or another? Both at the same time? There’s no way to know. Reality is a trickster. As with most concepts, there is a Space God to embody Uncertainty. Twinklyn is the trickster of the Astrolympians. He has a thing for preventing people from knowing things hat could help them, usually with the intention of causing chaos on a broader scale. He only tends to associate with his Space God family when there’s a chance for some mischief.

I kinda threw this one together to prove to myself that I can still expand on specific elements from the Superhero/villain years. Twinklyn here is the Astrolympian equivalent to chaos gods like Eris, but filtered through the omnipotent alien type, like Mxyzptlk or the Great Gazoo. Unlike those guys, though, I envision Twinklyn being extremely dour, taking his job extremely seriously. I just want to be different, I guess.

Hatwearer

Sometimes, when someone is alone at night, they might see a figure off in the distance. In the darkness, it is impossible to make out any features, except for the hat. The figure is always described as wearing a hat. Often the experience lasts for hours, in some cases it has even happened over recurring nights, but it always ends the same way: The person who saw the Hatwearer is found eviscerated.

It seems likely that the Hatwearer has been active for centuries, but it is only in recent times, with the advances in technology like texting, that has allowed the victims to get the word out about what they see.

Hatwearer is my attempt at creating a monster in the style of the Internet horror stories that are, regretably, called Creepypasta. He’s a pretty generic monster (which is actually quite appropriate for the genre), but I could find a use for him someday.