Last month-ish I got my my copy of the Mortasheen TTRPG book, I've really been enjoying it. For those unaware, Mortasheen is the creation of Jonathan Wojcik, who you may recognize as the person behind Awful Hospital. The book is a collection of monsters from their website, but also with tons of added information and locations and game mechanics and overall just a lot to chew on and explore in a hypothetical campaign in the setting. I don't actually know if I'll be able to play it anytime soon, but if nothing else I wanted to imagine my own Think Tank of OCs, because I have a compulsion to imagine stuff. Unfortunately I've had a bit of dry spell with ideas for this.
And then something happened.
Waaaay back when Splatoon 3 was still new I toyed around with a... What are they called? Splat-sona or something? Basically reinterpreting the way I liked to play and turning it into a character. I named them CD, then later changed it to Wii U. And since I loved Salmon Run I was like "might as well," and made a Salmonid OC named Xbox 360 S to make fun of the long names Salmonid name titles and Xbox console names. This is why CD became Wii U. They didn't really have a real character beyond being a Steel Eel and having a unique face mask. I never really gave them a story, they're just things to turn over in my head.
Then came last week, where I was tossing over character ideas for Mortasheen characters. One "player race" in the game is the Merrow, essentially Fish People. It also has a "player class" called Engineer that lets you gain robotic upgrades. I think as I was rereading those pages, and I thought "I already have a fish. I guess I could recycle them-" and then I thought "Grizzco cyborg" and now she has new life.
Xbi is not my first idea for a character, but the ideas for her came a lot faster. If you don't know Splatoon, the game mode Salmon Run is framed as you taking a part time job at Grizzco, the shadiest of shady businesses, fighting off hordes of Salmonids to collect their power eggs. Why? Shady business reasons of course! It's so shady thar sometimes you'll get mode exclusive Grizzco brand weapons, all modified versions of preexisting weapon classes, all with ridiculously broken abilities! Like snipers with rapid fire, or rollers that go faster then cars! They're even partially inspired by real world illegal weapons and with pill bottle ink storage!
Having that kind of tech as part of your body is such an interesting idea that I've not seen in fan works before, probably because full on cyborgs are probably a bit out there in the context of Splatoon. For Xbox 360, now Xbi (feels more like a real name now,) this manifests as a Grizzco Brella arm and some Grizzco Splatana like back... things.
The Engineer in Mortasheen allows for upgrades to your character, but you actually start with two, one as a weapon and one as a movement mechanic. Brella is obviously the weapon (and a personal favorite of mine to use) but why is the Splatana movement? Well, part of it's absurd modifications is a nonexistent range, at the upside of being able to one hit almost everything, especially when you charge it up into a dash-slash. That dash-slash thing is what Xbi has, just without sword. Now, I would've loved to make it the Roller, but I have no idea how to incorporate that into a design.
Speaking of, I didn't stop the references there! Xbi's whole outfit is deliberately all Grizzco brand gear. Granted, I went with less distinct items, but this is my first drawing of her. I'm hoping to try different outfits in different drawings.
That's most of what I have right now. It's mostly lots of Splatoon stuff in the shape of a Mortasheen character, so I still need to think about the Mortasheen aspects, I'm not just going to steal Grizzco whole sale. But the more I thought about it, the more similarities Mortasheen had with Splatoon.
Merrow, the fish race that Xbi became, tend to live in water predominate locations, and tend to give themselves titles based on their achievements. Splatoon Salmonids are also primarily aquatic, and gives themselves long titles that bare more weight then their actual names. The settings have similar-ish aspects of "retrohumanity" being less dominate than they were in the past, but leaving deep enough footprints to influence modern society. There's even a shady business capitalizing on brutalizing aquatic life in the form of Scolex, where instead of using their profits to spread mammals, it's to spread awful mind parasites! Mortasheen is just like that!
I even made a Morta-fied Grizzco X Scolex logo using Sourtout, a fish parasite monster in Morrtasheen. This isn't relevant to the character, I just thought it was a cool idea. It's super scuffed, but I dunno, the idea's neat. Might remake it in the future.
