#disaster avatars

[quasarlasar]

STORM SURGE

Oh hey, look, we don’t even have to go to the beach. The beach came to us!

[quasarlasar]

EVEN MORE HUMANS!!

Some more of those human allies of Gaia, in the vein of Melissa, Sam, and Kersen. 

This girl is Chastity, an atmospheric physicist and of the lead scientists of the Gaia’s Allies. As can be seen, she tends to partner with hurricane avatars, finding them to be especially loyal to the cause of stopping wetland destruction and global warming (if usually by giving a physical demonstration to unfortunate humans of why these things are bad.). 

Melissa first bumped into Chastity a long time ago, but only after being accidentally put in charge of two hurricane avatars did she realize that Chastity was doing far more than she seemed...

Chastity’s grandfather Allejandro is one of the last remaining descendants of an ancient Caribbean people that had developed techniques of taming hurricane avatars as part of their religion. Unfortunately, he was banished into the depths of the Everglades after casually summoning Hurricane Andrew to Miami-Dade County. 

Chastity still can call on the avatar of Andrew, though she generally leaves him with her grandfather. 

Instead she travels around with the avatars of the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane and Hurricane Camille, which she keeps in the ribbon on her chest when not in use.

In case you haven’t already guessed, Labor Day and Camille are a couple.

The second picture shows the unobstructed view of their full size forms.

[quasarlasar]

DARTBOARD

Melissa and Sam make their debut here. Mini San Andreas returns. I especially love his cute little restraining bend in the forth panel. 

It is here I should perhaps explain disaster avatars. Disaster avatars are basically a portion of a force of nature’s soul given physical form. They can be summoned by humans, contained inside special enchanted objects, and take on a variety of sizes, both miniature and full size. For instance, San Andreas can manifest as only ~7-10ft long (as seen here) or as an entity comparable in size to his true fault body (~700 mi long). A select group of humans chosen by Gaia to be her Allies can see them as conscious entities instead of mindless forces of nature, becoming the only person to share a close bond with them (most disaster avatars are indifferent towards human affairs). They can then use the powers of the disaster avatar to help protect the balance between humans and the planet...or just sort of chill like here. 

Disaster avatars, it should be noted, CAN PARTNER with humans, but they CANNOT be CONTROLLED by humans. They are simply too powerful, and never can be tamed like animals or forced to do something they do not want to do. For instance, Sam can’t command San Andreas to create an earthquake. If San Andreas is not ready for it, he will basically ignore Sam. 

For those who are wondering, the actual fault line, plate boundary, or whatever you call the San Andreas Fault, is still in the same place it always is. San Andreas essentially has had a piece of his soul turned into a magical copy of him to hang with Sam. I imagine he does it in part to escape from his horribly stressful home life. 

The fault seen adding another dart to the map is his devilish son San Jacinto. He wears a combination of baby clothes and a business suit because he demands he be given a big job, but San Andreas insists he is not mature enough for it. San Andreas has thousands of brother, sister, son and daughter faults to take care of (since their mother Farallon-Pacific Ridge is dead, and Cascadia wants nothing to do with them) so he isn’t quite up to speed on how much SJ has grown. 

I should probably clarify that San Andreas’ defense is actually true here. He sort of just throws magnitude 2 and 3 darts at the map when he is annoyed, but the vast majority of the time doesn’t follow through on any of his threats.

[quasarlasar]

(TROPICAL) STORM IN A TEACUP

Because @seismogenic was my first follower, and also because I moved to Los Angeles, most of the natural disaster comics I’ve posted on Tumblr have been about fault lines. But I just got back from visiting Galveston this weekend, and realized that to be honest, out of all the natural hazards, hurricanes will always have a special place in my heart. Not in the least because I grew up in an area that amounts to their shooting gallery...:(

Hurricanes are probably the easiest natural disaster to personify. I mean, they’ve already got eyes, and human names, they grow up from babies to adults, and they sort of go wherever the wind takes them. Despite this, compared to volcanoes, thunderclouds, and tornadoes they don’t seem to be personified often. (Kracko from Kirby comes soooo close, dammit...) I know of only one other person that has done so (though to be fair, @seismogenic is the only other person other than myself I know of who has personified faults.) 

Perhaps it is because they are the most common force of nature to wreak destruction on a regional scale. Tornadoes may be more common, and earthquakes may be more destructive, but only hurricanes reliably strike every year and devastate whole swaths of a state. So given destructive hurricanes are always in recent memory, perhaps people are loathe to turn them into cartoons.

Nevertheless, if there is a natural disaster I’d love a teacup version of, it’s a hurricane. I’ve had a weird dream for a decade of having a miniature hurricane as a pet. I’d keep it in a heated pond for tropical fish, and I’d go float on the water and stroke its nice soft cirrus canopy. I imagine it would be fluffy and snuggly to hold.

Of course I’d probably shear the poor thing’s circulation apart, but I can dream, right?

NOTE: the reason the hurricane seems to go clockwise instead of counterclockwise when he sucks up the tea-water is you’re looking at the underside of his circulation

[quasarlasar]

PROUD TO A FAULT (zone)

I was watching Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood last night when I realized that Pride’s shadows looked kinda familiar...but I wasn’t sure why.

Then it struck me: they resembled an alternate form I imagined for the avatar of the San Andreas Fault that would be when he was rupturing. (It helps that his human partner is a little boy...more on this later.)

 Needless to say, I really had to draw and upload it. 

San Andreas is something of a dork most of the time (even amongst disaster avatars, who are all kinda aloof when it comes to human affairs). He’s awkward, slow moving, eccentric, and whiny. When it comes to combat, his primary strategy is burrow underground and hide, or just let himself get attacked (it’s a good thing he’s made of rock).

That being said, you don’t want to think you can get away with making him mad. 

When he finally does snap, he changes completely. His voice drops several octaves, his pupils narrow to slits and his eyes turn blood red with rage. And of course, he rushes forward at rapid speed, shearing apart anyone unlucky to be in his way. 

It should be noted while it is typically referred to a single fault line, the San Andreas is really more like a big zone of deformation with many subsegments. As such its avatar is really many different fault avatars in one. Normally this isn’t noticeable, but when he goes into full on rampage, he loses control of his components and they basically sort of turn into a giant swarm of fault line avatars. It ends up looking a lot like Pride’s shadows in FMA:B., hence what I drew.

That being said, there is one big difference between the two (besides the obvious that one is magical shadows made by a homunculus, and the other is a crack in the ground). San Andreas, while he may crush and shear enemies apart in his jaws, has no interest in eating them. After all, he’s powered by tectonic energy, not human souls!

He is fond of saying that only happens in movies.

[quasarlasar]

NEVER A DUH MOMENT

The hurricanes are in sort of a weird position when it comes to their digestive systems. Most people would think someone who craves water is just thirsty, but Labor Day and Andrew actually use warm water as their energy source. So...is it their food? Or is it more like a drink to them? 

For the record, I interpret it as their main food source, given that they use it for energy. But to the imperfection that is human language, water and food are kind of two different things. 

So when this is pointed out to Labor Day, he can’t help but get confused. 

Everyone knows Hurricane Andrew scrambled peoples’ homes and lives, but few realize he has the power to scramble others’ brains too.

...but seriously, with regard to the last line, if you had a sentient wave, where would its body end?

[quasarlasar]

WE COULD ALL USE MORE CYCLONES

Newly posted characters under the “Natural Disasters” page on the webcomic site.

-Hurricane Camille Battle Form

-Alternate Katy forms

-Katy Mothership (miniature and full-size forms)

Basically Katy is a sentient tornado, so she is capable of altering her elemental powers by sucking up different materials. (in this case, from left to right, water, ions, burning fuel, snow, toxins, radionuclides, rocks, and pathogens.) She’s sort of like a female Kirby, if Kirby were actually an EF-5 tornado. 

She is generated/is a part of the Katy Mothership, a supercell avatar that adopts the form of a massive airship. Some people like to call supercells “motherships” because they often look like flying saucers, and needless to say I took this literally.

After all, everyone knows tornadoes are aliens.