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Thanks for the feedback, guys.
Time to roll out another hero team: The New Olympians
Instead of doing the straightforward god interpretations, I thought it’d be interesting to make them ordinary people…sort of. With the gradual decline of polytheistic worship in Greece, the gods abdicated Mount Olympus and traveled to the modern day American city of Olympia, WA, where they gifted their powers to certain chosen mortals in an effort to pass on their dying legacy. Each of the chosen New Olympians was born with a birthmark representing the god they were meant to replace.
As you’ll see, where Clockwork is kind of like my Avengers team, the New Olympians are more akin to the X-Men.
Let’s kick it off with Javier Zayas, the team leader and new bearer of the lightning bolt of Zeus:
Javier Zayas is the oldest New Olympian and team leader. He was chosen by Zeus to become the new king of Olympia, but times have changed since Zeus’ day. Besides, Zeus no longer has a say in the matter. Zayas has seen many strange occurrences around his hometown of Olympia, WA, and in addition to using his fists of thunder and lightning to fight crime in his youth, he now runs a martial arts school with his wife, where he helps other New Olympians cope with their emerging powers through meditation and self-discipline.
Era Campana-Zayas is Javier’s wife and the chosen vessel of Hera’s power. She can channel energy into her fists, giving her enhanced strength. She serves as business manager of her husband’s Mount Olympia Martial Arts Academy, as well as being second-in-command of the New Olympians.Thanks, Jeimuzu.
I really love the new hair items, and one came in handy when I was designing the head of my Poseidon character for the third time. He’s the only New Olympian so far to have his powers manifest physically.
Trent Aegaeus was born human, but his trident birthmark began to change his appearance when the boy reached puberty, transforming him into an amphibious hybrid with the ability to communicate telepathically with marine life and manipulate the state and form of nearby water (including drawing moisture from the air) to use as a weapon or for short-distance flight. His mutated appearance made the young Trent a social outcast and led him to seek asylum at the Mount Olympia Martial Arts Academy. But as his new form began to manifest more strongly, Trent could no longer live on land and had to be transferred to the Atlantean Lyceum, a school that was initially established by Icthya to help the detained hybrids re-enter Atlantean society in the wake of their failed invasion. In Trent Aegaeus’ time, it has become a sort of finishing school for gifted Atlantean youth. Icthya’s daughter, Amphitrite (who also becomes a member of the post-Meridian Clockwork team under the alias “Binary”) is a student there, and quickly becomes a love interest for the “new fish.” At the Lyceum, Trent learns to control his Poseidon abilities (all the time concealing his birthmark, the true origin of his power, to avoid causing any superstitious uproar among the students and faculty–with the exception of Amphitrite) to the point that he can shapeshift from his amphibian form to human and back again without compromising the integrity of his hydromancy powers.Here’s my Demeter character, wielding her twin-bladed scythe of fire:
Karen Demetrius was marked with the torch of Demeter, giving her pyrokinetic abilities. After losing her home and family in an unexplained fire, Karen was placed with a foster family, but when she came of age her powers began manifesting more uncontrollably than before and she ran away from home. While on the run, Karen crossed paths with a young Javier Zayas, and the two became romantically involved. But he also shared with her the secret of his own power and how he was able to take control of it; in a way, Karen was not only his first love but also his first student.
In present day Olympia, Stephanie Zayas (Javier and Karen’s daughter, and recipient of the mark of Persephone) has joined with Peter Orcus (Hades’ chosen mortal) and the New Pantheon, a neighborhood gang composed of delinquents who were marked by lesser gods. Karen has come to the Mount Olympia Martial Arts Academy to ask Javier’s help in steering their daughter back on the right path.I’d like to thank Can’tDraw for the pose behind my Athena character, Tina Pallas.
Tina was marked with the olive branch representing Athena. Tina’s power is the ability to summon a suit of energy armor that protects her from even the most destructive of conventional weaponry and provides limited protection against Olympian and Pantheon abilities, including Peter Orcus’ death touch, as well as giving her the ability to fly. The mark of Athena also imbues her with a warrior’s instinct for stealth, strategy, and natural mastery of any given self-defense discipline.
Yearning to discover the nature of her strange gifts, Tina persuaded her parents to let her move to Japan, alone, at the tender age of eight. Her travels in Japan led her to join a martial arts school with an ancient and particularly unorthodox method of instruction; it was a place where ninja were made and broken, a training academy for Yakuza recruits with special talents. With her innate skill, Tina rose to the top of her class, making both allies (Nihonto and Shirudo, a.k.a. Sword and Shield) and enemies (Purple Dragon) for her minimal efforts. But the school failed to provide any enlightenment as to her origins or her purpose in the world (of course, there was also the fact that the Yakuza are evil…), and Tina thought it prudent to put her newly accquired Ninjitsu talents to good use, escaping on penalty of capture and death to the city of Athens, Greece, where a woman named Oracle told her of the goddess Athena and the gods’ efforts to pass on their dying legacy to deserving mortals in Olympia. Oracle also instructed Tina in the use of her armor before giving her a mission to return home to share her knowledge with the other chosen New Olympians.Here is a villain from Tina Pallas’ past, her Yakuza academy classmate, Purple Dragon:
Similar to the New Olympians’ birthmarks, Purple Dragon derives his power from a dragon tattoo he was branded with at birth in hopes that he would be the next leader of the fearsome Ryuunin (Dragon Ninja) clan. He is able to focus the energy from his tattoo and forge his sword into a harder, sharper blade, or fire the dragon energy at his enemies in whatever form he chooses.
Having no desire to be either a leader or a slave to destiny, Purple Dragon used his power to slaughter the entire Ryuunin clan, drawing the interest of their Yakuza enemies. Purple Dragon’s only purpose for being enrolled in the Yakuza academy was to fulfill his unending desire to kill, and Tina Pallas’ presence there stood in the way of him achieving that goal. He has no allegiance to any but himself, and will kill Tina Pallas, the entire Yakuza organization, or whoever else crosses his path, if it gets him closer to watching the world burn at his own hand.I liked the idea that Ares was the one god hated by all the other gods, so I made the New Olympian version of him a cop.
Martin Spears was born marked by the shield of Ares, and took it as a sign that he was meant to be a police officer when he grew up. He lived in denial of his New Olympian powers and fought day by day to keep his martial desire for war and bloodshed from spilling over into his budding career as a police officer, and both Mount Olympia’s policy of making peace with their abilities and the Pantheon gang’s desire to use their powers for ill served as unwelcome and constant reminders that Martin’s destiny was one of crimson-tinged chaos. So he made it his personal mission to shut down both sides of the growing conflict at any cost. And his affair with a certain promiscuous, under-aged Mount Olympia student hasn’t made Martin’s existence any easier. O how the Greeks do love their irony….@Timedrop23 said:
I had to double check to make sure that was my pose! Nicely done! Merry Christmas!
@Keric said:
@Timedrop23 said:
I had to double check to make sure that was my pose! Nicely done! Merry Christmas!
I changed the hands and the torso (I don’t like dressing the bent/fat/three-quarter bodies) a bit, but yeah, it’s your pose.
Merry Christmas, Keric!I’m still stuck on the twins (Apollo and Artemis), but in the meantime, here’s my Aphrodite character, Scarlett Ford:
She’s a bit sexually suggestive in dress and appearance, but Scarlett Ford doesn’t have to be. Branded with Aphrodite’s Rose, Scarlett exudes a supernatural pheromone that makes men fall in love with her and do pretty much whatever she tells them. This has had some fatal consequences in her past (men jumping off of bridges or drowning in lakes after she utters an offhand figure of speech in their direction). Her ravings about how all the men around her keep dying led Scarlett’s family to have her committed. As her powers increased, so did incidents in the asylum and her frequent insistence that she was a danger to others. The asylum granted ultimately granted her requests for a straightjacket, a mouthguard, an airtight room, and an all-female staff to attend to her needs.
But things were getting intense outside the asylum’s walls as well, and a compound had been approved and constructed to house Olympia’s super-powered criminals. Scarlett (designated “Cerberus Patient A” under the new facility’s coding system, as she was to be the Cerb compound’s first detainee).
Unfortunately, as can happen when bureaucracy gets involved with public safety, the transport team sent to retrieve Scarlett was headed by Martin Spears, who was not made privy to the nature of his prisoner. As a chosen mortal himself, Spears was immune to Scarlett’s suggestive power, but her pheromones still caused Martin to fall in love with her on sight. When he returned with her to the transport, Scarlett pleading with him to go away and let her go, the rest of the team immediately fell under her influence and walked away as she asked, but Martin would still not leave her alone. His immunity to her power intrigued her and after a moment she calmed down.
Martin took Scarlett home with him and cared for her, homeschooling the girl, cooking her meals, neither of them aware for the majority of their time together that the other was also a chosen mortal.
One night, Scarlett made the mistake of asking Martin if he truly loved her or if he was under her power. He asked her what she was talking about, and when she told him what she could do–had done in the past without realizing she was the cause–he became enraged and threw her out of the house.
Keeping out of sight as much as she could, Scarlett walked the streets of Olympia in search of shelter until she came upon the Mount Olympia school, where she was taken in by Era Zayas and introduced to the other New Olympians.I’ve submitted several of my old characters into the Old School Flying Contest, including Locust, Beelzebub, Lady Icarus, and Tina Pallas. But here’s an original character with a rather unusual power that I created for the OSF Contest:
Whirlybird has the power to make her hair do whatever she wants. She thought it would be fun to spin her braid like a helicopter to see if she could fly, and it worked. She works as a performer in a traveling stunt show for Universal Studios, and uses her income to pay entrance fees for hair-sculpting competitions.
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