I‘m warming myself up for the zine-artwork and thought I might share this. As an appetizer :D
This started as a size-study for these two (Royd is so big and beefy right beside our beloved depressed breadstick) and after some flat colors I thought, might as well shade a little. And some highlights. Okay fine, a simple background. With the outlined mech suit because why not. Which would look cooler with some flat colors...
And as per usual a „quick study session to get into the groove of things right before bed“ turned into a late night „I’m just gonna add a liiiiitle more-“
And if you haven‘t heard, check out @synergysurgezine for updates, contributor spotlights and general info on the zine :D
The C Team has assembled! You'll be hearing about all of them in the weeks to come, but first: our cover artist, Poke Skamin! We're super excited to see what she creates!
And for the first of our page artists, we have @bananaink ! They'll be creating a piece with Robert & Royd - after all, synergy isn't limited to superheroes alone!
I've been writing for the first time in years again (yay me!) and I started with something that's a bit more like a character study on "Robbie" Robertson II and Elliot Conner for the Dispatch Pacific Rim AU before their fall out and Robbies death.
Had to decide how they define the drift and what's "compatible" since they invented the whole thing in my AU and how it will affect Robert and the Z-Team.
Don't know if I bit more off than I can chew though... wish me luck ✌️
everyone in the notes we are all holding hands. everyone who hasnt worked on a wip in weeks or months or years, its okay. we are going slow but we are going
omgg hii im a long-time follower (i think we did an art trade once like literal years ago lol) and im SUPER into dispatch rn ((robert has become my special little blorbo)) so im glad you are also into it and i am eating up your au
Ayyyy, I remember you! :D
Even found your OC Bernard again after a quick search in my Archives™ :D Thanks for sticking around for so long!
Yeah Dispatch somehow activated me like a sleeper agent and reignited my need to throw characters in a container and shake really hard [affectionally]. Robert and the whole Z-Team provoke in me very hard cuteness aggresion. And for that I put some Kaijus into the container with them :D
I had a very busy week (again... sigh) so my process is slow going but I haven't had so much fun thinking about a new AU in a while! :D
First of all, I really like the way the Astral Pulse looks in the game. It's just so recognizable that I almost didn't want to change anything but when I thought about how it's gonna work in my AU it needed a tiny bit of Kaiju in it :'D
What you see here is a maybe slightly illegal piece of tech, fused with some Kaiju bits, only Shroud can tell you where he got it from. I'll write how it works in detail at a later time, since it's more relevant for Robert than Shorud or Robert the second :D
But let's start here:
In my AU, Elliot and Robert "Robbie" the second had been friends for a good chunk of their life's. A kind of friendship and platonic relationship you don't remember forming, instead it just suddenly is and now they couldn't even remember ever being apart or having seperate lifes. Which was more or less the base for their quite unconventional solution to Mecha Mans problem.
Since Robbie was supposed to inherit the suit, he had been already working on it since he could hold a screwdriver. Maintaining, upgrading and piloting it whenever his father took a break, making sure he'd be ready as soon as his father would not be able to fly it anymore. His education, his free-time activties, his everything was based on if it could help him with the legacy of Mecha Man in the future. Elliot, with his ability to see probabilities and predict them accurately was a perfect friend for someone destined to do great (Bobbys words) but quickly it became clear that these two just clicked. They worked. As best friends, as family, as whatever life threw at them.
And Elliot quickly grew up to be a brilliant engineer and inventor, ready to support Robbie in all the ways necessary. At first it was all about making the suit safer, adding safety measures to the hull, to the controls. Then it was about being more effective, faster, weapons to keep Kaijus far away from causing harm to the pilot in the first place. Then it became more about being offensive, designing weapons and systems for the pilot with more ways to survive a fight, some fail-safes to get the pilot out, more ways to connect to the machine, to the mainframe and wouldn't it be so much more efficient if you just thought about moving and the suit would just do it? We just need to strengthen the neurological link, lessen the ping between the signal and the suit, Robbie, what if we-
And then Roberts father, the first Mecha Man, had a minor stroke.
And Robbie got into the suit.
For a while.
Until his first black-out and fall from the sky. His consciousness just... blinked away. No warning, no symptoms, just one moment he was awake and in the next he wasn't. It didn't hold long, maybe a couple of minutes and he was fine afterwards. Every medical test afterwards giving him a clean bill of health but it was no question that the suit causend these black-outs.
Still, Elliot designed even more fail-safes, more protocols in case the pilot wasn't able to fly anymore, tried to work on every probability and counter it - but it didn't matter what he did. A human brain had its limits. The neurological load was too much for one person.
And even though father and son rotated their times in the suit to give each other breaks, Bobby's health declined rapidly with every flight and even though you couldn't measure Robbie's issues in the same way, they kept happening closer together for longer periods of time.
And Elliot was terrified. Terrified of losing his best friend, his only family, his other half, to something he could have predicted and prevented, if he only made the suit better, made the suit an extension of the body, gave it everything he had, his inventions, his every waking hour. And as he held watch at Robbie's bed – another black out, the longest he ever had till then – Elliot thought “If only I could share your burden.”
And the idea of sharing the neurological load was born.
Robbie was against the idea. As much as Elliot was afraid of losing Robbie in the suit, the thought of flying with Elliot together, dying together in something that was supposed to be Robert “Robbie” the seconds duty, terrified Robbie. Elliot was brilliant, smart and his better half. He always knew what to do, had an answer to every problem. Robbie would gladly live with the burden of fighting in a suit that slowly burned through his brain if it meant keeping his city and the people in it safe. While his father tried to safe the whole world, Robbie wanted to keep just one person in it alive.
And that person just presented him with drawings and ideas so he could fly with him together.
They talked, they discussed, they fought and when Elliot threatened to just build his own suit to follow him into battle, Robbie caved. You know what, fine, let Elliot try. Let him invent, let him occupy his mind with something else to do. Robbie helped him find more problems, more roadblocks, more things that didn't work, questions without answers, let Elliot work the kinks out. They had time. His father was fine, they had a system, it worked. The Kaijus hadn't grown in size for at least two years. Elliot would never find a way into the cockpit, as long as Mecha Man was still able to fly solo.
I have some unfinished chapter-wips lying around and some notes I never published but I've fallen out of the fandom and just haven't felt like adding to the AU or posting sooo... I guess that's all folks.
Thanks for stopping by and interacting with it though :D
This took forever to finish (4 days) and then I chickened out on the coloring because of course I did. Look at all these windows, smoke and bits and bobs - ain't nobody got time for that. (Especially me, I'm small and full of very tired™.)
Since it's the actual first fanart of my AU, I'll tell you people, I start with the fun bits first and have no control over where I'm going next. So this is part of the end-battle between Robert the third and Shroud. Maybe Shroud is in the Kaiju or maybe he is controlling this thing from afar, still not sure about that, but the fight is epic, brutal and of course dramatic. I'm gonna have Shroud being a parental-figure to Robert the third in like a the-uncle-who-saw-more-in-him-than-just-a-successor kinda way. Don't worry, Chase is still gonna be the-uncle-who-stepped-up, but Shroud is gonna have history™ with Robert.
If you people are interested in the first world-builind-part of my AU, after the cut :)
I have some more ideas for this Pacifi Rim Dispatch AU. Basically in this AU the world has more of an “infestation”-problem, than a hostile take-over from these Kaijus. There is not one inter-dimensional rift in the sea but multiple small ones, that pop up randomly over the world, I'm talking even smaller than a canon-category 1. Maybe the first few Kaijus are like, as big as a bus? And lets say, they came in pairs because why not. Kaijus just keep slipping through small rifts and they tend to smash first, ask later. And while people are trying to find out why they do that, humans build weapons and what not to fight them (no supers yet). Some half-baked suits hit the military market but most of them too clunky, heavy or slow. The Human Vs. Kaiju Battlefield ratio was pretty much “We won, but can we keep this up?” with scientist and engineers working non stop for better solutions, advancing technology with record speed. Basically, Kaijus became a huge problem™, but not too huge to be a humanity-problem™, you know? No humanity-coming-together-to-solve-an-alien-threat just yet.
Quickly though the rifts became bigger and of course the Kajius grew with the bigger tears in reality, which was starting to eat up soooo many resources just to keep them at bay. At the same time, humans with abilities started to appear. At first at random, but It became apparent that sudden rifts close to human settlements had an effect to the human DNA and started to change said DNA. (Don't ask me about the flora and fauna, I'm working on it, just.... shhhh)
So at random, people just became “super”. And then these “supers” had babies and it turned out their kids also had abilities, look at that! (Cue some highly illegal child-super-soldier-programs in the background, COUGH Coupé COUGH)
Then the first successfully piloted Robot was of course Mecha Man (Robert Robertson I), a privately owned and developed Suit, because millionaires are still a thing, unfortunately. This “Robot” proved so effective, he essentially became the first Full-Body-Mech-Suit officially used against the Kaijus. And even though he was a big hit with the military and a people-favorite, super-humans started to hit the Kaijus back as well. Quickly, willing supers could enter the military and got spit out to fight the Kaijus in record time. Not all of them actually ready for war, most of them died to be honest, but some of them were conveniently young, fully-trained and battle-ready with tactical knowledge... weird.
The first trained super-humans proved to be just as effective as Mecha Man and teams formed to fight for their cities. The Brave Brigade became the most marketable and, since it was a privately owned thing from the beginning, stayed independent but worked with the government. Sometimes a bigger threat needed a bigger team, collaborations between countries happened, but for a good chunk of years humanity managed to get a system going were some semblances of stable living conditions were achieved. The Brave Brigade became some sort of blue print for Super-Hero-Teams all over the world with different sponsors but the Mech Suit stayed a trademark secret. No one but the Brave Brigade knew about the in and outs of the Suit, so no international collaboration here. (Though, of course, a suit design like the Mecha Man invites copy cats and failed attempts all over the world over the whole course of it's existence. Later in the story, some suits get pretty close to the original COUGH Royd COUGH.)
But then, the rifts became even bigger. And more frequent. And with them, the Kaijus grew in size as well. The Mech-Suit got upgraded and upgraded and upgraded and bigger and bigger, until Robert Robertson I got his first stroke from the mental strain in it. Not a big one, a “mini” stroke as the press calls it, which he recovered quickly from but of course, that's a big warning sign that the suit is reaching it's limitations with a human pilot. The supers of the Brave Brigade tried the suit on next and it worked for a short while, but their powers affected the suits interface too much and too irregularly. It would overheat in the weirdest places, get stuck in motions, stop working all together or start shooting on random. Basically, the tech wasn't compatible with the DNA of Rift-afflicted supers. And no other human had the same training and experience fighting in the suit...
That's were Elliot and Robert II come into play >:)
That's it though for the day, I think the next post is gonna be just about Elliot, Robert the II and how they revolutionized the Mech Suit.
I just finished my third run of the game and then watched pacific rim right after, and, you know, I felt the urge™
Soooooooo... new au?
I don't have a name, but I had this idea for a smaller scale Pacific Rim-version, kind of. Like, Robert is flying the suit solo since it's a smaller version of the other Mechs out there, which he is only able to do because the Astral pulse is helping him with the neurological load.
And of course, Shroud still wants it back and managed to hijack Kaijus to control with his inventions. I have an idea for a plot line and some scenes in my head that may work, including humans with powers in giant mech suits. Thank you game for including synergies for my headcanon-convenience.
This right here is just a sketch and color composing because I literally came up with the whole thingy this night, and I'm currently in the strange void between Christmas and New Year.
I imagined Shroud either sitting in a cockpit, stapled on the back of the Kaijus or remote-controlling them via some inferior neurolink that slowly steals his sanity (or something). And that's why he wants the Astral Pulse back? I'm still workshopping some things, bare with me.
Maybe I'm gonna draw more, maybe my current hyperfixation dissolves into nothingness, but I love my big beautiful mecha suits and i want to design some for the whole z-team!
A long crack mars the side of the bottle. You pry out the cork. A book falls out; its spine splits open on the deck. Red eyes blink in the fog—watching—as you gather the pages.
You now hold the zine in your hands.
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