#mavrah

[bagea]

mavrah and his pet kavinika, as well as my interpretation of what the inside of the red star looks like.

[toomanyinterestsart]

Whenua, Tehutti and Mavrah need to stop messing up the fucking archives, man. I can’t learn shit

[neon-ufo]

the end of a legend

[sammykat2hb-blog]

A Whenua headcanon I got after reading Voyage of Fear:

In his flashback sequence about Mavrah, Whenua seems to be a biologist or zoologist. He’s one of only three people studying dinosaurs/sea monsters in an extremely secret project, so he clearly knows his stuff.

But when we meet Whenua later he’s an “archivist” — a broad title, but he seems like more of a librarian. He mentions cataloguing. Toa Lhikan finds him doing what looks like data entry on an exhibit of nondescript mechanical bits.

After Whenua almost died on the job, after the project was scrapped and Mavrah vanished (presumed dead), when all he and Onepu could do was mourn privately and keep their mouths shut…I bet Whenua transferred himself to a different field.

[randomwriteronline]

The anguish is dull, distant, indistinct. The muscle pulled off the bone by ill-chosen equipment would be so much worse in any other cirumstance, but not now. Not like this.

A door opens. The room freezes over. Fast angry steps crack the ice beneath them as the Kestora tries to pry his frozen feet from the pavement - his mostly organic body is slammed against the operating table, the back of his head comes into view. His chest is held by someone a little too far back to be visible from this angle, with a hiss that condenses the air in a frigid cloud as he squirms.

"Put him back together this instant or I'll freeze your limbs until they fall off."

"Which - which - which one would fall first?"

The sound of frost creaking to life: "Are you so keen to find out?"

The Kestora shakes his head. He is turned around harshly, and he sets to work frantically: he pulls away the stakes, sews back the organic fibers, closes the chest and stomach, reattaches the joints... The second he is done a white hand grabs him and throws him away - his scuttling across the icy floor as he makes his escape goes unnoticed by the white visage that enters the field of vision, focused as it is on what it looks at with some kind of horrified relief in his blue eye, the other hidden under a battered scope. A mask with a broken visor clicks into place on the unmoving face: its power seeps into the laying frame with a faint tingling sensation. Fingers rest gently on the orange brainstalk.

"Pohatu," the Toa of Ice calls, "Pohatu, please, get up."

The body sits up in complete silence. The Toa looks it over without talking, awfully antsy, checking if the repairs have been done correctly, if there is anything that could cause it pain when it will inevitably stand up and walk; his own armor bears signs of extensive modifications after what probably was a terrifying fight. At last he carefully holds one of the limp hands in his own and pulls towards himself: no reaction.

"Get up," the Toa insists, "I'm taking you home."

The body stands up.

There is a Matoran in the room. Black body, purple Mask of Strength, dim eyes: revived Onu-Matoran. He looks at the figure standing still with a dull expression: "What are you doing?"

"He is my brother," the Toa replies: "I'm taking him with us. I'm taking him home."

The Matoran stares at the silent being and says nothing.

They walk through the winding labyrinthine corridors, through the swarms of Matoran wailing to be allowed to work, the Turaga struggling to herd them in spare rooms, the Toa roaming restlessly through the halls, the Skakdi attacking everything they cannot recognize, the beings crawling along the floors still half mangled as they struggle to function even in such a sorry state for they cannot work otherwise and to work is all they were ever made for, the Kestora chasing anything that moves in a frenzied need to vivisect. Nothing has a mind of its own, not anymore, not so far from the quiet whispered riddles of a god: still the Toa of Ice perseveres deeper into the dedalus curling around him, holding the Matoran in his arms and gripping the mostly limp hand like a lifeline as he drags the silent body behind himself.

The Turaga without a mask, roped into following along, looks at it with a dull expression: "There is no need for that."

"He is my brother," the Toa replies: "I'm taking him home."

The Turaga stares at the silent being and says nothing.

The halls are longer, longer, numbingly long. The Matoran are antsy. They need to work. They need to work. They need to work. They were made to work, and they were repaired to work, but they cannot reach work, so what must they do? The Turaga herd the together, crush them against one another, but they are antsy too. They were made to supervise, they were made to guide, they were made to coordinate, but they cannot do any of it like this. The Turaga tell the Matoran to work: the Matoran, with no other option, dismantle to create.

They dismantle themselves to make Toa. They dismantle Toa to make Turaga. They dismantle Turaga to make themselves. They dismantle Skakdi to make fish. They dismantle Vortixx to make snakes. They dismantle Kestora to make horrors left undescribable. They pick up pieces of broken bretheren to create tools, anything, anything, to busy themselves with work, for there is nothing else they were ever made for except work. They do not fight when they are struck by the Kestora's disabling tools - they go down pliantly, trembling from the shock, allowing themselves to be dragged away to be torn open without any of their siblings to notice or care as the work absorbs their every thought. The only way to escape from the torture awaiting is to be found by a Toa, but Toa are seldom fighting. Most often they are seen standing idly, or laying limp, or wandering aimlessly, devoid of purpose and community and objective: their work was interrupted and their own existence is now incomprehensible to them, and they do not know or feel the prongs stabbing through them or the blades opening their bodies. They retaliate to violence distractedly, without intention behind their automatic movements, strike down to their hearts' content. Nothing is ever dead for long anyways; death left this place long ago anyways.

The sharp-toothed beast that struggles to pull himself upright, let alone teleport successfully, looks at the body dragging its feet numbly while it is pulled along with such impossible affection with a dull expression: "A diversion?"

"He is my brother," the Toa replies: "I'm taking him home."

The sharp-toothed beast stares at the silent being and says nothing.

There are so many he wants to bring along. If he could, he would drag the whole thing down, so they could all breathe in the open air again, learn to be people again: but he can't, and so he brings along only those he can - those he, so desperately selfishly, wants to bring along. The weight in his palm is comforting, it is a promise he has made, an apology, a remedy to something that would have been final, a thread he so desperately wants to collect and spin back into its spool, unraveled and clean and perfect: a good ending, a proper ending, the ending that should have been. He will bring his brother back home and things will be fine. Now that things are a little easier, now that Teridax is gone, he will bring his brother back home and he will understand. They will help him and he will be fine. He will be with them again. Things will be fine again. Like they should have always been, if only he'd spoken a little better, explained a little better, been a little gentler, been a little clearer. He failed his brother twice and he will not fail him again. He will not fail him again. He will save him, this time. He will. He will. He has to. He will. He has to.

The room is crimson, pulsing, buried deep within the structure like a horrifying heart, and the exit is there, right there, just not working, just not working yet. The Toa stands side by side with the dull figure whose hand he refuses to part from, guarding the door, as the smaller beings work on the commands and the large one forces the teleporter wide enough for the four of them through his mere brute force, while the howling shrieks of the Kestora come closer and closer to the only entrance. The bright ends of their tools spark with electricity, crackling madly as they come closer, closer, closer -

A loud buzzing sputter fills the room as the barely functional machine wheezes awake, its intermittent glow slowly picking up the pace. The Matoran jumps into it, the sharp-toothed beast approaches it; the Turaga turns to the remaining two beings, settling his eyes on the quieter warrior.

"Fight them!" he orders.

The body lurches thoughtlessly forward towards its doom. The Toa loses his grasp on the until now unresponsive hand.

He tries to follow in a desperate attempt to pull the figure back, to drag it to the teleporter and leave with him, with him - but a strong arm yanks him away harshly, securing him in the sharp-toothed beast's grasp as he crawls into the pod; the Toa screams, screams, squirming to escape, as he watches powerless his brother seize when a burst of electricity passes through the orange armor and the stocky build falls onto the floor shaking slightly from the charge as though struck by rigor mortis, and he screams and screams and reaches out with both hands, to grasp him, calling, calling, calling desperately: "POHATU!"

He wishes he could see anything in his brother's gaze, he wishes he could hear anything said with his voice; he wishes he would move, reach back, respond, show him anything, any hint of his mind's state, any hint of feeling.

His wailing sob is met by empty eyes like a slaughtered animal.

Then Kopaka disappears, teleported away with the living corpses who followed him away in the last voyage back to life before the machine completely gives in, turning unusable beyond repair; Pohatu's body lays perfectly still, without thoughts nor will, as the Kestora grasp it in their small hands and drag it once more into the horrors of the Star to again break apart the vacuous shell his brother so vainly hoped would have still held even just a bit of the broken soul that had drowned in its own poison.

[ctrl-alt-tahu]

Nuparu's Longing

Somewhere around his 30,000th year, Nuparu reckoned, he'd forgotten how to make friends. Not that he'd ever had many, but there had been a time, when was a newly-minuted Onu-Matoran going through training in Ga-Metru, when it had seemed like you were just thrown together with people and before you realised it, you were friends. When he returned to Onu-Metru with the incoming class of Onu-Matoran to their first assignments, it had seemed like this was just how life worked: you were thrown together with others like you, you spent time together, and then you were friends.

But no one else was thrown together with him when he first started to experiment with Kralhi, and even Mavrah talked to him less after that. Officially, Nuparu was still on the roster as a Rahi Receiving Official at the Onu-Metru dockyard, but the Kralhi project had been commissioned by the Turaga, so the shifts became fewer and more infrequent until they had vanished altogether. It was thrilling work, engineering the enforcers, and then frantic work, when they failed and had to be decommissioned. By the time Nuparu emerged from that debacle to again take a normal shift, several hundred years had passed, and he no longer had friends, only acquiantances--and Mavrah.

And that was enough. Nuparu didn't seek social gatherings, either those for Onu-Matoran alone, or those for the entire city at the Coliseum, content to do his work and his research, and he avoided the elbow-rubbing of neighbours at shops or in the streets, preferring to be "efficient": going to the market dark off-hours or having things delivered outside his residence. The neighbours--by now mostly more newly-made Onu-Matoran who had never known him in a normal setting, knew him only as the infamous inventor of the Krahli.

It didn't bother Nuparu when Mavrah stopped visiting. At first he didn't notice. They were still friendly; he just wasn't interested in the Rahi-centric pursuits that Mavrah was now getting up to with Whenua and Onepu. And he was getting busy again: Turaga Dume, almost alone in the city, didn't see him as the failed inventor of "Nuparu's folly." Instead, he saw Nuparu as a brilliant mind who alone had the talent to engineer the Vahki. With a little more guidance from Dume and with Nuparu learning from his failures, the Vahki would be everything the Kralhi had been meant to be.

When the Vahki were finally commissioned and the tinkering had ended, Nuparu had not seen Mavrah in so many decades that even he discerned that theirs might no longer be an active friendship, perhaps only a past association, and Nuparu considered that while he regretted the end of their camaraderie and their chat, he couldn't imagine a way to say that to Mavrah, especially as Mavrah clearly didn't need him: after all, Mavrah had done nothing either to tie them back together. He was happier in his new pursuits with Whenua and Onepu.

So Nuparu was along, and the Vahki were deployed, and Nuparu was both lonely and idle, for though Dume kept him employed as the Vahki technician, it was infrequent work fixing damaged units and adjusting subroutines to please the Turaga. Without a task or a great puzzle to employ him, Nuparu felt keenly his isolation, but it was a problem he could not fix, that he could not imagine fixing. Instead he hoped for a puzzle that might distract him and give him again a sense of purpose.

It did not come, but disaster did. Mavrah was lost. When at last he was declared dead, there was a memorial at the Coliseum. Those who wished to pay their respects, those who remembered him, came and laid a hand on a faded Pakari and left a candle to burn out. There were already dozens of candles burning when Nuparu made his way across the great arena at the end of the vigil hours. There was only one face he recognised.

"It's been a long time, Nuparu," said Whenua, and there might have been a trace of judgement in the words, though perhaps it was just banter. "There aren't many of us left who remember Onu-Metru before they dug the North Gallery. My newest assistant was promoted before he ever realised it wasn't part of the original plan."

"There are so few chances to speak of the past," said Nuparu, who could scarce imagine a rotating cast of assistants. "The future is ever beckoning."

"Well, some of us help it along, don't we," said Whenua, and it definitely seemed like he might be saying something. "Of course, in the old days, a little more idle chatter was permitted."

"Is it not permitted now?" asked Nuparu, unclear what Whenua meant.

"Loiter during work hours with friends and see how the Rorzahk feel about it," said Whenua, and the Rorzahk's inventor squirmed a little.

"I don't have friends," said Nuparu, quietly, though Whenua heard him. "Not anymore…" He looked at Mavrah's memorial. "Once…" He stopped. "I wish…" Then he sighed. "Friends came easily, once, but I let them slip away just as easily. Now they are all gone."

~~~*~

It wasn't that long after Mavrah's memorial, as the Matoran reckoned things, that things came apart at last. Living alone and rarely consulted, Nuparu did not complain when the Vahki came, even for him, but followed them to the Coliseum almost eagerly: he was ready to be thrown in with the other Matoran, no distinction being made. That is how friendships form. Only with a hint of misgiving did he enter his pod, and then all was forgotten.

~~~*~

Nuparu might have been the oldest Onu-Matoran left, Turaga Whenua mused to himself, looking at his villagers on the shores of the new island. Nuparu had been shielded from the dangers of Onu-Metru by his removal to his strange fate. Whenua had never known him well, and still found that he disliked him a little, unable to forget that the odd inventor had made the Vahki, but as he watched Nuparu and the other Onu-Matoran mingling, he shook his head.

He's as young as any of them now. They're all young. And if Turaga Whenua had his way, they would all grow old too. Nuparu would have to just be a normal Matoran with a normal job, though--Whenua wasn't about to set him apart. He'd just have to mingle with the village and work shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of them.

Neither he nor Nuparu knew it, but this was exactly what Nuparu had long wanted. This is how friendships are formed.

[turagapohatu]

Whenua: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Onewa: The friend of my friend is my enemy. Onewa: *looks at Mavrah* Onewa: Fuck you.

[enigma-actual-art]

Matoran of Metru-Nui Mavrah

What do we know about Mavrah? He wears a purple pakari, he loves Godzilla, and Greg doesn't think he should be dead.

Due to a lack of purple parts existing, I decided to make purple into his secondary color and support it with the wealth of black and dark bley parts. Which works for me, because Metru-Nui is full of dark bley.

I've NEVER liked the Metru matoran chest Dorito, so in an attempt to find something that would restrict articulation less I settled on the marginally better rahkshi foot. That will cause a lot of problems later if I find other metru build matoran I want in my collection since it only exists in a couple of dark colors.