Real Bad Timing For a Crash

Explanation of silence and my medical hell first, then breakdowns of my Nate reference notes, with Kimban’s ref sketches in the body of the post too. (I’ll repost the above sketch when I get there, so you can scroll directly to the Momentum trivia.)

Folks, I had PLANS. I was gonna try to use my birthday month to get stuff done for myself and maybe do a charity thing where I sold books (or the few Precocious art pieces I have left) to offset my massive medical bills - like, I am too sick to fight the system, so I’m stuck paying $200 a week to stay alive, which means money doesn’t mean anything cuz I’m spending so much asking for help is pointless - and I THOUGHT I was gonna be able to circumvent a setback caused by *that* doc not listening to me yet again. But surviving that way required me to have more unprotected hours in my day that normal, and I panicked on one physical therapy day, cutting my dosage below what is normally used for those appointments. It backfired worse than I could have imagined. My body was so stiff trigger point therapy couldn’t work, meaning the next time I tested the muscles the would explode. And sure enough it happened. I have two friends left in the world, and one is about to disappear. I can only see him when his ex does weekend custody of their kid, but the ex is such a garbage mother she fled the state rather than deal with the ball of sunshine she gave birth do, and 100% custody means weekend visits are gone. So there was one last hurrah when guilt-ridden grandparents took the kid, and my body couldn’t handle a normal amount of talking because I had strained it earlier. I blew it. For a good cause, but I went from assuming I’d be posting a pile of Patreon posts to weeks where I could barely move. And then Botox left my system, so migraines are whalloping for the next week. (And bruising from injections will knock me out for two weeks after that.)

(Here’s where I remind you I can only write updates on impulse in a fugue state, so I spew out crazy stuff with little control, and I’m so spent after I can’t go back and edit! Please forgive.)

ON TO THE GOOD MOMENTUM STUFF!

The sick joke is I’m over three years behind in making Momentum character ref sheets, because I never factored that one awful doctor botching my treatment repeatedly into my plans. I comic’d until my body gave out, and since then I got worse, so all filler projects got snagged, in a huge embarrassment! Here is where I give up and try for a cheap gap. I am not getting commissions - cuz money issues - but I set a goal to make ref sheets, cuz the process would help me defer rust, and it could make others connect with my beloved in-my-head crew. (Oops, almost no details for over three years! All of that is in half-finished docs I will one day get to… right?)

It is progress to get the Nate notes out there. All three of her default looks are there! (You can see why I prefer sundress Nate.) I can share the rikava plant design on her emergency potion bottle necklace! And I got to drop hits of that magic plant, which I’ll share cuz I like the story.

Rikava is a “remnant” plant, meaning it was constructed by ancient mages who were so overpowered the will of the universe eventually intervened to tamp things down! (That’s a whole other Momentum mythology post.) What’s interesting about remnants is that trying to outdo nature often reveals stuff the mages overlooked. One remnant plant is the Traveler’s Berry, that was meant to grow in harsh environments to make sure humans in those areas wouldn’t starve. But the berry just meant animals expanded to those areas! So mages made a second plant to protect the berry - a thorny vine that kept the berry so safe even people had trouble getting to them! Another variety of Traveler Berry is meant to grow in low light - but what it really did was send tendrils to the tops of trees or out of caves to make a canary that fed the whole plant. Ok, it choked out a few trees, but it worked right? Well, guess who forgot to specify where the berries would grow!

Rikava is an infamous remnant. It’s meant to be the ultimate food. One bite nourishes you for days, and radiates healing energy in you. The flavor is crisp and mild, so it won’t annoy anyone. It’s a miracle. But how does it get all that power in it? By sucking the life force of the nature around it dry. In the wild, it sucks a little health from a wide radius around it, and if it dares propagate, or it’s bad soil, the plants can fully kill off everything around them. When energy runs out, they grow slower and slower, and they’ll begin draining an adventurer to wanders into such a scene! As for wild fruit, even with strong leaves that form an armor to protect the precious treasure, fruit rarely has time to fully grow because INSECTS can climb between the leaves. They were supposed to just pollinate and leave, darn it!

In private, rikava cultivation requires pumping a lot of resources into the plants. They take in more than the fruit can provide - but the thought was it’d still be worth it, because a little drain over time is survivable if you plan for it, and one magic bite saves lives. (There’s a famous fable, Rikava For Breakfast, about a wealthy person who put immense resources into growing the fruit, and ate it for every meal, to ensure his body was increasingly healthy and optimized, cuz it really does so much for you! He spent so much money on his plan to extend his life indefinitely. Then he fell down stairs and broke his neck, which even magic fruit can’t heal.)

But rikava isn’t a lost cause! The fruit is too efficient to be of practical use in medicine, even tho it of course makes the best potions, but YOU DON’T NEED THE FRUIT! Turns out, if you keep a rikava plant tightly pruned, so it can’t produce the fruit, the made-by-people exploit kicks in and the plant keeps on building its healing power for new tries IN THE ROOTS. And *that* is what makes up Nate’s ultimate potion. She’s got rikava root potion around her neck, which can (and does in-story) save a life when it’s otherwise be doom. And she has spare harvested root in her kit, so she always have potion ready. It’s an exploit of an idea that wasn’t well thought out, and it works! Rikava root may be half as strong as the fruit, but it takes a fraction of the resources to maintain.

Look, I’m assuming you can click the images and read most of my scribbles, so I’m sharing the bonus stories that have accumulated over the 25+ years the Momentumverse has been in my head. And I’m doing the same with Kimban!

I’m actually more excited about Kimban’s side story, because it’s a tweak I only figured out a week ago! Cuz Momentum is like that. It’s been around forever, but only as scratch paper to play with. It was never meant to be real, so I only played with scenes I wanted to, and ignored the rest. It was a FEATURE that the story was 99% [SCENE MISSING], with any existing scenes being fully rewritable. (Heck, Momentum exists in, minimum, 11 forms - the book form, the cartoon form, and the nine video game stories - so I have lots of room to goof around!)

I have yet to finish that Patreon post (the draft is 15 month old) but a tweak made after I thought about the video games having the potential for all nine to be main characters, combined with how much I loved Meret exclusively using her gravity stone, was to have each character tied to an exclusive stone. Nate’s, as you saw, was the light stone. Until recently, Kimban had the capacity stone. That would be the good old bag of holding. It was a late addition to Momentum quest lore, once I realized the stones should be quest helpers, not powerful things that could be weapons. And being able to store lots of stuff inside a stone is super handy for both the characters and storytelling! Matching it to Kimban made sense, since he’s a lazy goof! It also made sense to give Aaron the foremast stone, because he’s the interpreter, meant to figure out clues and lead the team, and sometimes HE NEEDS HINTS.

But I got to thinking about Kimban’s emergent power of telekinesis - again, lazy! At the end of book two, it’s revealed that the quest is shaping the team to be more, because they are meant to shape and optimal future. They’re getting magic powers! (I’m not too enamored with the idea narratively, but it was perfect for video game progression and would make for good teen cartoon special effects, so I let magic stay.) The original plan was for Nate and Jerrod to display power first, or rather not display it, because their skills are passive. Only Aaron would know. (Nate’s a yellow mage, which is passively radiating life force - she’s walking rikava fuel, and ever so slightly charges you up just by being near - while Jerrod is a black mage, which is a passive connection to earth elements. It manifests as good luck, with the connection helping his hunches, and an innate sense of direction. Btw, yellows are fairly common, and black mages are SUPER rare, cuz if it’s the slightest bit active, the black connection disappears and he’s be a blue manipulator mage, or red energy mage.)

Problem is, Kimban gets his dolls at the end of book/season one! I don’t want them sitting inside the capacity stone for a book, cuz why would he have them out when his power emerged? And I figured it out! I’m proud of me!

Book one ends in the city of Breckonridge, which banned magic, with outer walls that negate all magic in the city, and made mages uncomfortable so they can’t enter. But, hey, remember Kaori? She’s an evaluator because magic resonant items don’t affect her. Which means the elites can still place similar null mages in the city! In this case, it’s Gulliver, Phoebe’s former commander in the war. I brought him in because Phoebe was raised in a religious group that worships the elite council - particularly The Battle Judge - as gods. Phoebe reject it and ran away from home, but it still freaks her out that she witness “gods” at the Battle of Breckonridge 16 years ago. And here’s Gulliver, who hasn’t aged like he should have, revealing he’s not only working with those demigods, but he’s been a secret mage this whole time! Wait, did I mention Phoebe’s arc is the core of book one? Yeah, this is why it all dumps on her at the end.

But check this out: Gulliver’s power is being a pure blue (manipulaton) mage, so it’s basically telekinesis. And a quirk about lower level blues is that it’s easier to train them to move only certain items. There’s a certain ore that’s standardized for these mages to use. And Gulliver’s apartment is full of those things. And Kimban is in that scene, cuz he’s a Breckonridge native and he, Phoebe and Meret are the core three. (Meret’s on a sidequest with the rest of the group during this.) What if… Kimban is the first to show magic potential?

Even if it’s before he can actually use it, I imagine Kimban reacting to one of Gulliver’s ore pieces - and Gulliver will lie and say magic devices kept passive build up charge from Breckonridge’s walls. To test his theory, Gulliver asks Kimban to find another magic device. And Kimban finds the heart doll! It’s a tool for Gulliver. Gulliver offers it to him to keep, because he has three more, and Aaron could figure out it’s operation! (This is a BIG moment, because Aaron’s been in a coma, and Gulliver just revealed he’s awake. He knows becaus the elite mage Cyrril is there outside the city, meeting with Rhenna, who was watching over Aaron. And Cyrril’s power is being able to connect to anyway and teleport anywhere. He teleported a note to Gulliver.)

Kimban would refuse the doll at first, cuz he doesn’t get the significance at first. (Kimban is chosen for his genius, but the genius disc translates his role as “mathematician,” so he can be socially oblivious! Phoebe then mocks him and points out the Aaron reveal.) Gulliver insists Kimban is leaving with the doll on the mantel, or the three backups! Kimban, Mr. Math, chooses the three. As they hurry back to Aaron, Phoebe wonders why he chose the three. Kimban gets his turn to be savvy, by pointing out the one displayed on the mantle was clearly Gulliver’s favorite.

These are new details atop the preexisting Gulliver scene. (Originally, the dolls are left by Cyrril as a “get well soon” gift, with the idea that Cyrril’s super observation knew they’d be of use soon - tho I don’t think his power works in that way? Oops.) Now we know the dolls are Kimban’s. And Aaron would have received a heads up that Kimban was a potential blue mage. Aaron is kind of a coward about it, so he wouldn’t be immediately honest. (Aaron being scared of the escalation, what the team would think, and other emerging things, is the big story at the end of book two.)

And here is what I’m proud of. The forecast stone functions like this: The first one gives you a brief blip to help you. It’s a freebie to establish what it is. After that, if you use the stone for a hint, it drains a LOT, and the stone replenishes slowly. You can’t cheat through the quest, but you deserve help if you get stuck. Kimban is the one who finds the stone, and when he tried using it, he gets a flash of the dolls, and once he focused on them - rather, the ore inside them - they move!

And so Aaron’s cowardly deceit begins! Aaron uses the stone twice, gets a BIG hint, and says it’s because the stone is bonded to Kimban. He claims it’s a passive effect, and Kimban just needs to focus on the ore while keeping the stone on him. Since Aaron drained it by pushing too hard, if Kimban tried to force it, it’s drain completely! So Kimban has no idea it’s HIM doing all this, and the stone just clued him into the ore connection, and he also holds the stone, with a warning it’ll drain if anyone else tries to use it, so no one else uses it for the freebie preview. (As Aaron assumes the others will also see magic, and he’s just not ready to have the talk. In some defense, Aaron is a channeler mage, with sorta empath powers, so he knows only Kimban is active at that point, and he’d just cause panic and frustration by revealing the news then.)

Sheeeeesh, I wish I had started this post on the computer, cuz the Patreon app is clunky enough I felt I had to go all the way through my story post, cuz I forgot how to save a draft.

But that’s also the benefit of the fugue state. I only notice the passage of time at the end, when it allllll comes crashing down on me. I’m suddenly so tired. But I got to share something, dumb and selfishly indulgent as it is. I’ve been so sick, and so frustrated. Forgive my sloppiness.