CL-11 "Mirror of the Dawning Morn" Ix Raq'lapuj Chue'q Buluk
An AU where she is salvaged and given a robot body similar to Ineffa’s (Ineffa is still separate and safe in this AU)
Alright time to talk about my design choices for a looooong time
Her body would just be made of Ineffa spare parts, but since she's so violent and deranged I tried to make her look weaker than Ineffa, because it would be inadvisable to arm her with immense power right? I gave her a lot of creepy hollow areas in an attempt to make her look flimsy
It occurs to me that this is kind of a lite version of Ajaw's century of humiliation, do you think Ineffa would be a better or worse bully than Kinich? They're both "iron fist" type people so it's not looking good. ...Kinich and Ineffa will have another parallel in the sense that Raq'lapuj will spend all of her time trying to kill and absorb Ineffa. Huh.
I think she would initially just have light blue hair like Ineffa, but of course, she's not going to have the same "anything you choose is what I want, Aino!" attitude that Ineffa has. So I had to start thinking about what Raq'lapuj would want to look like, and thankfully I found some good arguments that at least cover what colour scheme she is likely supposed to have.
It's easy to miss this because Ineffa ended up with an electro moonwheel so the purple pixels just feel Normal. But I believe the pixel effects are manifestations of dragonlord power, completely separate from Ineffa's moonwheel and Kinich's vision. Like, keep in mind, the reason why Ajaw's power share was such a good bargaining chip for his contract with Kinich was because Kinich did not have a vision at the time.
When you look at the pixel effects around Kinich, they are yellow, green, and... teal? I will admit Ajaw doesn't seem that teal forward so I'm not fully confident that every pixel colour you can pick off Ineffa is going to be an indicator for Raq'lapuj's design. But purple, peach and pink go so well together and do a great job of creating the impression of a dawn skyline.
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A lot of the dragonlords have titles that are lowkey just plain descriptions of them, like what your first impression might be. So I think the meaning of Raq'lapuj's title is just that she gives the impression of a beautiful sunrise due to the colours of her scales/fur/plumage or whatever. With this observation and what we've seen of Ajaw I now have this vision in my mind that all of the dragonlords had beautiful bright colours like tropical birds.
(Although, given how brown tepetlisaurs are maybe they weren't all so vibrant. Yeah, I'm still thinking about the connection between 3rd Lord and modern iktomisaurs that was suggested in the Rainbow Serpent's Rain Bow weapon lore, a connection that I still don't really understand but makes me wonder if every modern saurian had a dragonlord counterpart)
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When Ineffa's eyes glow, they turn turquoise. That's practically reason enough to give Raq'lapuj turquoise eyes but as usual I have a lot more to say (you probs heard me say some of this before)
In 8th Lord's diary, she mentions that 2nd Lord has turquoise eyes. In the Rainbow Serpent's Rain Bow weapon lore which concerns 3rd Lord, it says something about turquoise eyes. In these records from 9th Lord's "bone-chilling well" it says that 9th Lord has turquoise eyes. When you catch ingame Ajaw on a really bad and ugly frame of his animations (very rude btw!) you can see he has beady little turquoise eyes. I really do think every dragonlord has turquoise eyes. 9th Lord's core that the traveler has rolling around in her backpack until the end of time is also golden and turquoise, which at the very least adds to the association between dragonlords and that colour.
Speaking of cores... I used to think Raq'lapuj's core that we see in the archon quest was a stock standard random ass secret source core simply because the devs were too lazy to recolour it. I have changed my mind, I now like to believe that she lost her original core long before she had any screentime. I think that similar to how she copied Ineffa onto a standard stock core, she was forced to put herself into a stock core, OR someone did it unto her, similar to how 9th Lord was sealed inside that statue. She was defeated and several instances of bad things probably happened to her before we see the state she is in when decides to split herself. Is this not a valid crashout? I won't get into it now but I do believe that dragonlords had flesh bodies (because they have bones). The amount of degradation that she went through before we even meet her, man. Her life fucking sucks
Well. I finally got tired of feeling sad about her and have decided to become completely delusional, which is why I made this AU and design. I hope she can be happy someday