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When the original Mantis retired from the life of crime, his sister took up the identity. This much more violent Mantis was responsible for a series of murders along America’s eastern seaboard and was eventually tracked down and brought to justice by Vespa.
Seeing his sisters imprisonment as a personal insult, the original Mantis returned while his sister was incarcerated,
But now Lady Mantis, as she has come to be known, has escaped from prison and has continued her killing ways.
Lady Mantis
I’ve been trying to make this guy for a looooooong time. I got slightly obsessed with making him look like an actual komodo dragon. But that just didn’t work so I did this.
Komodo
Apex knows the city like no other. That’s not just some poetic nonsense about being street smart. He’s literally connected to the city via a mental link. Out in the middle of nowhere, Apex is powerless but in the city, he becomes super strong, fast, agile, can leap great distances and is practically invulnerable. He can climb the side of buildings, communicate with them and even “control” them, to a certain extent.
To Apex, cities are living, breathing entities and he sees criminals and those who would do it harm as a disease.
“Crime is the disease. Apex is the cure.” – Epic voice over guy.
Apex
An gifted but unhinged toxicologist and virologist, Toxin will and has gone to great lengths in his search for lethal poisons and “The perfect virus” and thinks nothing of using living people as his guinea pigs.
Toxin
This is an attempt at a new costume for Anansi because when I posted the last one, someone contacted me over on Deviant Art and very politely informed me that they thought it bore a few too many similarities to their own character of the same name. I have to admit that I didn’t see a whole lot of similarities other than the name (which is the name of  the trickster god in an African folktale btw) and the “spider legs” but I still felt terrible and wanted to change my Anansi so I asked which parts he’d like me to change. Unfortunately I never heard anything back so the character just kind of hung in limbo while I tried to figure out a new look.
Anyway, I finally got around to making a new costume that (hopefully) isn’t so similar.
Anansi
Willow doesn’t know why she knows the things she knows, like who James Basson is, how to perform a tracheotomy or where to find the Dalilah crater on Jupiter’s moon of Enceladus…She just knows.
Thinking that the rather nerdy Willow has a photographic memory and just likes to read about things online, her friends (who happen to include one Serenity Miller) gave her the nickname Wiki. While this is partially true, Willow knows that there’s more at play here than just being a good learner.
Wiki
This is a remake of Serenity Miller. I don’t know if any of you actually remember this character but her story was always one of my favourites. The original image I made for her, however, was kind of…Meh.
So I finally went back and made another one. I like this one a lot better…Let’s see how long it takes for me to hate this one too.
Including her story here too, for anyone who’s interested.
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Not everyone who develops meta-human powers becomes a superhero or a criminal. Most simply want to have a normal life.
Serenity “Ren” Miller used to have that. In fact her life was pretty great. She came from a rich family, had a large home and lots of friends. She was popular and was one of the best cheerleaders her school had ever seen. She was smart and was already on track for a full scholarship at a top college.
But on one fateful day, Ren’s perfect life all came crashing down.
After discovering her father was having an affair, Ren ran off in shock and disgust. She was so blinded by her own tears that she didn’t even notice she had run onto the road. She didn’t even see the car coming.
Ren was immediately rushed to the hospital. The doctors managed to save her life and did their best to treat her injuries. Unfortunately, due to swelling in her brain, Ren wound up spending several weeks in a medically induced coma.
>When she finally awoke, her life was turned upside down. Not only because her fathers secret had come out and her mother was filing for divorce, but also because of the little creature that climbed onto the foot of her bed. Ren’s blind panic confused everyone. She was claiming to see a monster and lashing out at thin air. Ren thought everyone had gone insane. Why weren’t they doing anything? There was a gremlin on her bed but everyone was acting like they didn’t even see it! She only calmed down slightly after she battered it over the head with a bed pan and it scurried away somewhere. But she was still panicking enough that her doctor warranted sedating her. Once again, Ren fell asleep.
The doctors became concerned that Ren had suffered some brain damage after her accident and was now hallucinating. True, this was a world where super humans were known to exist. But brain damage after a major head trauma was simply a more logical answer. No one really considered that there may be more at work here.
Concern only grew when Ren awoke and continued to rant about the monster in the corner (and then monsters) and her parents eventually and reluctantly agreed to have her admitted to a specialist psychiatric hospital for treatment. It was during the several months Ren spent here that she began to realize that the creatures she was seeing had no intention of harming her. In fact they actually seemed to want to help her. She slowly began trying to communicate with them. Mostly with the little gremlin that she had first seen after waking up. She named him Scar, because of the scars over his right eye. She didn’t understand a word scar was saying as he seemed incapable of speaking English and instead spoke his own bizarre language. He did seem to understand what she was saying though, for the most part, and Ren learned that he and his friends would do whatever she told them. Again, for the most part.
Ren was initially concerned that she had indeed gone insane. No one else could ever see these things she was seeing. But then they started to actually interact with the world around them, picking things up, opening doors and eating any kind of food they could get their hands (or respective appendages) on. Maybe she wasn’t so crazy after all. But no one would believe that if she kept telling them she saw little monsters. So she decided to pretend. She would tell them what they wanted to hear. The treatment had worked and she no longer saw things that weren’t there.
It seemed like young Ms Miller had made a full recovery and she was released to return home with her parents. Unfortunately, news of Ren’s stay in “the loony bin” had spread. Everyone now looked at her like she was still insane. This theory was backed up when she was occasionally caught seemingly talking to herself. The once popular girl now became a social pariah. No one at school wanted to be around her, except for her two best friends. It was quite a step down for Ren and she admits that if it wasn’t for these two friends, she may well have gone off the deep end and really lost her mind.
Her friends, Cassidy and Willow, became the only people Ren felt comfortable enough with to tell about the creatures. They had noticed all the strange things happening around Ren lately that were actually the result of the invisible creatures getting up to mischief. They proved surprisingly OK with their friends news. After she assured them that they weren’t dangerous of course.
Cassidy dubbed the creatures Ren’s “minions” after their tendency to (mostly) follow her orders like she was some kind of overlord. Willow, a certified genius and comic book geek, came up with a couple of theories about the minions origins. The first of these theories, and the one that Ren likes the most, is that they actually inhabit a parallel universe or pocket dimension and Ren’s powers simply act like a gateway for them to enter and partially interact with our world, which would explain why they only seem to appear within a certain range of Ren and vanish when they get too far away. The second theory, which Ren doesn’t like at all, is that Ren is somehow creating the creatures herself. Like they’re a figment of her imagination given solid form. Partially anyway.
Whatever the truth is, with her friends support, Ren has come to terms with her new life and is learning to regain some semblance of normality in her life. There does however remain one speed bump on the road to normality.
A large, terrifying speed bump she has come to refer to as “the dark one”.
The dark one first appeared in a series of nightmares Ren had about a creature that looked like a tall, elongated version of her beloved Scar and his fellow gremlins. But while the gremlins had a playful innocence to their mischievous nature, the dark one oozed malice and filled Ren with terror. She comforted herself with the knowledge that it was just a dream. This comfort was not to last though. One night, while studying late at the library, Ren noticed the usual racket created by the minions had quieted down. She looked up to find that they had all gone. She didn’t remember the last time she was truly alone. But she was far from alone. The lights went out and Ren found herself in almost complete darkness. A chill came over her as she began to realize that something was very wrong. And then out of the darkness stepped a figure. An immensely large figure.
Ren forgot to breath as she realised who, or rather what this was. The Dark One!
It loomed over her with it’s menacing, psychotic grin, breathing the scent of death on her face. Ren felt paralysed by the creatures gaze. She wanted to run and hide. She wanted to scream out in sheer terror. But she was too scared that if she moved or made a sound, the creature would be on her and her life would be over. And then it was gone. The lights came back on and the dark one was gone, seemingly in the blink of an eye. The only noise Ren heard was the sound of Scar, whimpering beneath a nearby table, seemingly as terrified as she was.
After that terrifying night, Ren tried to go about her life, pretending as though nothing had ever happened. Maybe it was just a bad dream she told herself. Maybe she was just hallucinating like the doctors thought. But deep down she knew the truth. The dark one was real. She saw the monster lurking in the shadows several more times. Each time as terrifying as the first.
Ren continues to have nightmares about the dark one. She dreams about it killing her.
She worries that she has unleashed something terrible on the world. Worse still, she worries that same thing will eventually take her life. And what happens then? Will the dark one fade away with her? Or will it finally be free in the world?
All Serenity Miller ever wanted was a normal life.
What she got was far from normal.
“What’s the matter with you?” – Serenity Miller.
