okay so I wanted to get something done done today for May the 4th, but it’s been a hella busy week, so have some WIPs!
Hera will undoubtedly be Galaxy’s #1 Combat Mom, but she’s also got a Rebellion to lead -- luckily Jacen’s got two uncles ready to love him to the Outer Rim and back
the bottom bit is actually the second of a four-panel sequence I’m still working on, but this was the most complete of the lot (except poor Zeb’s stripes). When these two spar shit gets intense, and there’s probably an audience and a betting pool every time too (bless those beefy nerds)
SO I read @white-rainbowff‘s The Goal Is Not To Fall last night and it kinda rocked my socks so um, here’s their reunion from chapter 14:
“Zeb?!” Kallus gasped the same time he heard. “Kal?!”
Dodonna practically leapt to the side as Zeb pushed through. Kallus choked out a laugh and a sob, throwing his arms around Zeb’s neck and was practically lifted in the air as Zeb wrapped his arms around his waist and held him tight. Kal buried his face in Zeb’s shoulder. Tears filled his eyes. Every part of him trembled.
“Zeb… Zeb…” No other words came to him. He felt Zeb stroke the back of his head, hold him tight around his waist.
Needless to say, I was your Secret Santa <3 It was pretty obvious one of your favorite dynamics was between Robespierre and his not-mentioned-enough bodyguard Nicolas, so here they are! I had a lot of fun coming up with a look for Nicolas, I hope I got the tall, dark, and scruffy look to your liking :3 For his outfit I stuck with something fairly simple but also called in bits of the sans-culotte uniform. Sometime at some point in my life I remember reading a passage about Nicolas and others of Robespierre’s bodyguard often carrying canes or truncheons, so I made sure to include that too.
With the way you talked about their relationship, I wanted something sweet but subtle, so here they are briefly holding hands while Robes settles in to work~
I hope the holidays have gone well for you so far, and a merry, merry Christmas to you!!
(oh! and if you give me your email, I’ll send you a full resolution copy!)
Ref sheets for Nate’s partners and outfits for Rounds 3 and 4! These were both super fun to design, and I love both challenges. Hopefully I’ll get to do something for both of them X3
It was about time I put these on tumblr, cause this was an insanely fun way to kick off the event! Showcase different locations, catch up with some of Nate’s old buddies, play around with environments, good times~
SOOOOO, back when I had aspirations of getting caught up before Round 2 (I'm getting there I swear), I put this together both to fulfill the meme and to provide a pajama reference. For anyone who's trash like me and way behind, it can still fulfill that role XD But even so, it's still a really fun meme that I wanted to complete.
This is a tank that Nate's brother got him shortly after moving to the Islands. Considering that it's five years old and Nate both works out and sleeps in it, the shirt has seen better days, but Nate is never giving it up. The sweats are the same old sweats from his policing days with Goldenrod City PD.
Nate grew up in the rural areas around Goldenrod City, but moved into the city proper to attend college and afterwards joined GCPD as a police officer. He was on the force for eight years and was a well liked officer. He also logged time as a social worker, and occasionally acted as a probation officer for offenders he’d become invested in. He was forced to medically retire after receiving a severe leg injury while responding to a call that led him into a much more dangerous scenario than he was expecting. After a brief period of feeling directionless, Nate quickly rebounded and attended a vocational school, completed an apprenticeship at one of the big autoshops in Goldenrod, and eventually started up his own garage on the edge of town, where he can service cars and farming equipment. He’s found the hands-on labor and meticulous attention to detail in mechanical work very rewarding, and was happily settled into a new phase in his life until the disasters struck Ohana and he failed to be able to reach his brother, later seeing his name listed among the missing, and so packed up and shipped out.
Nate had worked for construction companies before, so he immediately signed on with Valkyrie as a mechanic, construction worker, and driver. Those first few weeks were filled with nonstop relief effort, and all the while Nate desperately searched for any sign of his brother and sister-in-law. As time went on though, and relief work transitioned into reconstruction, Nate stopped hoping to find his brother alive and just hoped he could find a body, and eventually he stopped even hoping for that, conceding he may never know what happened at all. He carried on his work though, knowing that these islands had been his brother’s home, and the home of thousands of others, and committed to seeing them rebuilt.
In the wake of last year’s second round of disasters though, his resolve has only strengthened. As the ecological crisis reached a fever pitch, Nate pulled out of the tournament and joined the ever more over-burdened rangers and engineers trying to combat the environmental and architectural collapse caused by the ice storms. Once the dust settled, large portions of Ohana were again in ruins, and reconstruction began yet again. Nate has been living on the islands for four years now, and has stopped thinking of himself as a temporary resident doing relief work, but has begun to think of Ohana as his home. He’s stayed on as a Valkyrie employee this whole time, eventually becoming a site overseer. He was sad to see Mr. Pink go, but has admired the Oneirics’ administration and greatly supported their suit calling for a tournament ban. After having felt the losses from the first crisis and personally experiencing the second, he has no interest in seeing anything like that happen again.
The details of Nate’s history can be found in his Pokemon’s bios, which are listed in the order of their coming into Nate’s life. (however, the important information is in Fielding and Marcus’)
Pokemon
Fielding
Ampharos / male
Fielding was Nate’s first pokemon, raised as a mareep when Nate was a boy for a community agricultural competition (think 4H sheep shows). After the showing, Nate couldn’t bear to part with the mareep at auction and his parents let him keep him. Fielding was a fully grown ampharos by the time Nate joined the force and actually trained as a service animal while Nate was at the academy, and they rode together for years.
Partly from his natural personality and partly from all the arcanines and houndooms he romped with on GCPD, Fielding is very physically affectionate and has a rascally sense of humor. He’s also very chivalrous and has high respect for perceived hierarchies, be they official chains of command or unofficial pecking orders.
Fielding’s tuned in to just about every thought and emotion Nate has, knowing just when to give his partner a sympathetic headbump or to zap him and bound away snorting. The last four years have been hard on him too though, both from his own sense of loss and watching Nate’s.
*******
Diesel
Skarmory / male
Diesel is a crazy bird. He’s loud, boisterous, chronically oblivious, loves a good fight, and thinks everything is a game. Nate picked up Diesel after they busted a cockfighting ring, and unlike most of the other violent and broken pokemon there, Diesel appeared unfazed, greeting the SWAT team with bouncy cheerfulness and trying to get Fielding to play tag. Diesel’s thick-headed obliviousness managed to spare him the trauma of the circumstances he was in. His steel hide and high defense meant he could take hits all day long, and the fact that the other guy was trying to *kill* him just never clicked. It was all a game.
Nate agreed to take him, as the skarmory had decided that Fielding was his new best friend, and Diesel’s life took a turn for the better. He still doesn’t get the significance of his rescue, but he does know that Nate is *way* nicer than those other guys and that Fielding plays with him and he loves his new flock very, very much. Nate has to watch him though, cause he’ll run himself into the ground if a wiser head doesn’t tell him when to stop.
*****
Marcus
Machoke / male
Marcus was born and raised in the criminal underworld, his mother a prized fighter, and eventually wound up sold to a racketeer working for a crime lord in Goldenrod. Marcus is quiet, loyal, and utterly professional, and while he did his job as the 800 pound gorilla in the room very well, he never went out of his way to be cruel. However, while people rarely told a man “no” when Marcus was standing behind him, additional ‘persuasion’ was sometimes needed, and it was while collecting protection money that Marcus and Nate crossed paths.
Nate responded to a call that he thought was a simple domestic, and instead found himself confronting members of the leading crime syndicate shaking down a small business owner. While the details are known to very few outside the department, at the end of it all, Nate wound up with a crippling leg injury, and the racketeers and Marcus were all arrested. However, in a shocking move, Nate testified and negotiated for a lessening of Marcus’ sentence to the minimum of one year, and even offered to take responsibility as his parole officer. While Nate’s flagrant conflict of interest would normally have prohibited this, when Marcus made the even more surprising move of accepting the offered arrangement, the judge allowed it. Marcus then served his year, and has been a parolee under Nate’s supervision ever since.
*****
McQueen
Walrein / female
McQueen is vain, cocky, and loves to show off. She loves a challenge and revels in competition as an opportunity to flex her muscles in the spotlight. She’s very consciously cultivated her self-image, keeping her beard styled in mutton chops and often painting her face to accentuate the whole skull imagery thing she’s got going. She insisted on participating in Nate’s decision making process when he got motorcycle, because no way was she letting him get something that wasn’t as stylish as it was functional (while Nate tended to focus on the latter).
Nate got McQueen the same time as Val (who can be seen on Nate’s old app), because a water/ice type is useful to have around as an emergency cooling system or fire extinguisher when working around machinery. While she can be a braggart, she includes the team in her ego-bubble and brags about them as often as herself, and gets just as offended if anyone insults them (except maybe Fetch).
*****
Fetch
Zigzagoon / male
Fetch was actually just a pest that settled in around the shop and made a general nuisance of himself. He has an irresistible compulsion to steal and horde all things shiny or otherwise interesting, and so he was perpetually making off with tools and small parts. Nate’s feelings towards the zigzagoon went through a lengthy evolution, from disinterested to annoyed to rather amused, with the little varmint throwing off his well ordered world, and the zigzagoon, while always darting away scared, never left the shop’s vicinity no matter how many wrenches were thrown at him. All in all, the steady stealing and recovery of items became a part of Nate’s daily rhythm. After a particularly eventful bout of chase with Nate desperately trying to retrieve a drill bit before the zigzagoon squirreled it away, a piece of equipment ended up falling on the small pokemon and injuring him. Nate realized just how much he cared about the little bugger and rushed him to the Pokecenter. All pretenses were dropped and Fetch became part of the team.
*****
Philippa
Gogoat / female
Shortly before the Ohana incidents, Nate was looking for some additional income and took a temporary work transfer to Kalos on a large construction project. While there, he took a real shine to one of the company-provided skiddos, and when it came time to transfer back to Johto, he found he was quite sad to leave the little gal. So he contacted the Pokemon Resources head and asked if he could purchase Philippa from them. He had just cleared all the paper work when the disasters hit Ohana and he shipped out to the islands. The change in address caused a hitch in the adoption process, and the Y2 crisis halted it entirely. Everything got sorted afterwards though, and Philippa joined the team just in time for the second round of reconstruction.
Philippa is an absolute people-pleaser, and a very hard worker. Her strength and sure-footedness allow her to traverse any terrain and climb just about any obstacle, making her an invaluable addition to the past years’ construction efforts. She was still quite young when she first came to Ohana, but has thrived on the islands, and evolved in her second year here.
***************
Valentine
Heatmor / male
For those who remember Val, he’s still around, but was pushed into semi-retirement after a work accident. He’s been having to take things slow for the past year, and when not on light-duty on site, he spends most of his time back at the house.
oh wow thanks so much!! I’m still experimenting a lot with how I do things tbh, so comments and feedback like that are great! I’ve been unusually productive lately, and while I know school’s gonna start kicking my ass again soon, I’m hoping I can ride this wave for a bit~
I initially hoped to have these done done today, but given that it’s Clone Appreciation Day, I’m totally still posting the WIPs~
These are going to be my first contribution(s) to the Clone Pinup Calendar! This is a project that all started in a conversation with @the-last-hair-bender over [here] and has spiraled into quite the project!
While I was contemplating who do to first and how, suddenly I connected Kix the Medic with sexy nurse pinups aaaaand then this happened. I also did an “in universe / in character” version too with Kix in half the clone doctor’s uniform (damn I love knee high boots). I think I prefer that one? But I couldn’t not do the nurse, so screw it I’m doing both XD I had a ton of fun designing that nurse outfit though, lemme tell you
Clone Appreciation Day! I had a number of pieces I was considering finishing up just for today (and I will hopefully have two more posted by the end of the day), but this one was at the top of my list because hello one of my many Star Wars OTPs and also because 6/6 and who doesn’t want some tears with your fluff? The amount of love and loyalty between these two forever slays me
I tried a new approach to rendering on this one, and I quite like how it came out, so I’m definitely gonna keep playing with this method
@punsbulletsandpointythings turn! Her [Clone Dads AU] series is quite possibly the cutest thing ever and I just read and reread it when I need some happy cute fluff in my life. This is from the [first entry], and the different ways Sunshine Dad and Grumpy Dad handle mornings.
stormborns
andulkaphoto
izzy806
2087
dededos
jbbartram-illu