- Height: Variable. Typically
hangs out around seven feet tall when with humans, but can shrink to 2"
or grow to 900' (~280 meters, the height of Godzilla according to
Godzilla 1985.) In a mecha battle he'll scale to whatever size makes it
an even match.
- Weight and Build: Also variable,
obviously. Varies from a few ounces to a few hundred tons. At normal
size, 375lbs. Yes, this is REALLY light for a seven foot tall humanoid
plus wings, tail, and armor; he has to fly by the strength of his own
muscles and normal aerodymic principles, so his structure is generally
more avian then human - light and a bit fragile. Being scaled a foot or
two taller then the rest of the GMCA fighters really only levels the
playing field as far as toughness goes. These considerations continue to
remain true as he scales down, though his wings become more and more
hummingbird-like as does his flight pattern, but going up from seven or
eight feet things start to move beyond the realm of what is possible
without adding supernatural energy fields, materials, or the equivalent.
In this case it's the routing of personal energy into a sort of
spiritual power armor, combined with uneven scaling that bulks him up
from a swimmer look to the classic hugely muscled kaiju, able to kick
aside mountains. Well, small ones, anyway. Theoretically he could apply
this bulking up at human size, but has never done so, and for GMCA
purposes will continue not doing so. Likewise, he can scale to any size
between his extremes at will and remain so for an indefinite period, but
that would be far to cheesy for a balanced fighter. In the story
segments, though, anything goes, espescially for a laugh. If he gets
embarrased in a non-combat situation, he'll literally shrink, though not
often all the way down to two inches tall. At minimum size he will
sometimes wear a Smurf costume just for the sake of messing with
people's minds.
- Appearance: Basically human
proportions, but coated in soft, medium grey fur except for his wings,
which have slightly darker grey pinions and small feathers in matching
grey. Build is somewhat muscular, like, say, a gymnast or swimmer,
without being huge. Add to that a head that's almost pure aardvark in
shape albeit with a higher, humanoid forehead, a tail that's 2/3 as long
as his current height, and a pair of gull-like wings that at full
extension are 3.5 times his height.
He typically wears a partial suit of armor in silver-white and matching
green, including a utility belt, though it has never been revealed what
is in there beyond a cel phone, a bag of jellied ants, a grilled cheese
sandwich, and several packets of just-add-water Liquid Twinkie mix. The
armor has a pair of chest plates (green), a multisegment abdominal plate
(silver), a, er, an, ah, "athletic protector" (silver), hip guards
(green, held up by the utility belt, also green with a white "D" on the
buckle), eaupaulettes with bicep guards (green), bracers (silver), and
armored boots (green) with built up kneecap plates (silver).
Drogn also has a nifty techno-watch with a glowing blue watchband (more
on that later) and a helmet in green to match the rest of his armor,
that has cutouts for his ears and a built in heads up display, mainly
used to give range information - the wideset eyes of an aarvark don't
have a lot of overlap in their fields of view, giving only a narrow cone
of binocular vision. A handy side effect of this is being able to know
the exact range, speed, and approximate path of anything he can see.
This has already been accounted for in the ability to fight; it's
mentioned here for inclusion in the story-side of things.
Alternate Appearance: Drogn2 (yes, that's his actual name) is a doppleganger from before Drogn learned how to deal with time paradoxes completely. Instead of armor, he wears an eyte-desropying neon green labcoat with cutouts for his wings, but otherwise operates exactly the same as ClassicDrogn. See also "A Fistful of Aardvarks"
Secret Alternate: Droganna, a female version of ClassicDrogn, who has deep orange-gold and grey armor instead of green and silver. Drogana has her own profile sheet, here.
- Fighting Style: artificial
looking video game martial arts - this wouldn't be too out of place in
the actual game (though the reviewers would probably pan it as an
attempt to justify skipping a better set of motion capture sessions),
but in person it's a bit surreal to see someone instantly shift from a
generic ready stance to the beginning of a punch, instantly shift from a
ready stance to flying foreward horizontally and spinning, or jump high
and do a flip then hold at 45 degrees untill they get close enough to
the ground for the landing animation. The reason for this is that he's
literally using moves programmed into himself like a fighting game
character.
- Button Style: Slightly modified
Toshinden III, as the only game I'm familiar enough with to even
remember. Specifically, the controller is set up with the left top
buttons being screenwards and antiscreenwards dodge, the right top
buttons as two of the special attacks, (pressed together without enough
energy) the third special, or (with enough energy) a Super.
- Bio/Prologue to the Intro: Drogn
is an Author of the Superguy Multiverse, and as such normally has an
amount of power close to that attributed to the current idea of the
Christian God, but without the omniscience - he has to specifically
think about it to know something. However, he is an Author of the
Superguy Multiverse, and therefore generally doesn't think much beyond
his Characters, personal convenience, and juvenile pranks on the other
Authors. For the tournement, he's bound his Authorial powers (hereafter
referred to as "Edit") to avoid unconsciously using them when he's in
trouble, since the whole reason he's here is to get used to combat
without Edit. He tends to avoid making drastic changes to any reality
he's currently present in, anyway, because it "feels wierd", he says.
"Drastic" means events of biblical proportions; little whims like
obliterating a block or five, putting a car in every stew-pot and two
chickens in every garage, or casually reviving the dead are too piddling
to worry about unless it's an everyday thing, and Editing up
cash/documents/food/etc. is the usual, not an exception.
Drogn only recently joined the other Superguy Authors in producing a
physical manifestion in the Author's Altiverse (aka
233DON'TTRYITAUTHORSONLY, the apostrophy making it impossible for
Characters to travel to) and deliberately chose his avatar to have
innate, non-Edit based powers to avoid being helpless the next time
something like the Edit Vampire plague or Nerflander came along to strip
them away. However, since in the Author's Altiverse too much firepower
is never enough, (and after a 36-hour Ranmafic binge) he decided to
become a martial artist. Just Editing the skills into his mind wouldn't
work, they'd dissappear if the Edit did, and he discovered that there
were no three hundred year old martial arts masters in the Author's
Altiverse insane enough to be willing to be assosciated with an Author,
if indeed there were any at all.
Therefore, he constructed a Kinescopic Hypnomatic Oscilating
Ultraviolent Device to program himself with Xtreem Mad Fighting Game Martial
Arts SkillzzzZZZzzz, then happily retired to a copy of Tokyo to fight
some robots Edited up just for the purpose. After a sound
butt-thrashing, he realized that he still hadn't really learned to
access the moves properly, and would need to practise them. This
presented another problem, as there were no 300-year-old martial arts
masters in the Author's Altiverse insane enough to be assosciated with
an Author, and unskilled as he was the moves were still powerful enough
to make sparring with anyone who wasn't a master incredibly
irresponsible. Just as he went to irresponsibly find some sparring
partner inexperienced enough not to know better, his cel phone rang.
With a slight grimace of pain he pulled it out and answered.
"hellowww?"
"Hello, Drogn, I'm Gladys Knight from the Psychic Hotline. One of our
most talented psychics just recieved a message for you."
We see a quick flash of a slightly unkempt-looking trained monkey
sitting in front of an IBM Selectric typewriter, typing with one hand
and scratching itself with the other.
"oww?"
"A mysterious mental presence contacted him, saying that it couldn't
find your mind, or in fact anything but the desire for odd foods and the
mental construct of an executive desk toy. It said to tell you that you
could get lots of practise with your new '... extreme? mad fighting game
martial arts ... skills?' if you enter the Grand Merchandisable Clash of
Authors, and you could get there by-"
At this point the signal faded out into static, as the three buildings
Drogn was buried under collapsed further and their combined weight drove
him through the ground into a subterranean parking garage. Despite this,
Drogn was happy, he now knew a place to practise his skills. Gladys
Knight was happy, she'd clairvoyantly read the numbers off his credit
card while on the phone and charged the standard $10 for the first
minute, $3.50 for each additional minute to his account. Now, the only
problem was how to get there.
"If only I had someone to guide me...", he muttered.
Just at that moment, a psychadelic VW microbus popped out of a
dimensional tear a few feet in front of him. "Need a lift?", asked Zen
Navigator. Unwisely, Drogn agreed.
Note: Zen Navigator is an aspect of The
Swede, another SG Author, and has nothing to do with the well known Zen
of anime fandom.
- Theme Songs:
- Game Theme:Tongue Trick (Blue Nothing/Bewilderbeast Studios)
- Alternates:The Immigrant Song
(Led Zeppelin), City Under Siege (Vince DiCola, TF:TM soundtrack),
Double Agent (Rush), Cliffs of Dover (Eric Johnson)
- Vs. Droganna: Who Made Who? (AC/DC) ( o/~ "The video games they play me..." o/~ )
- Stage: The observation platform
at the top of the dome of the flying city of Olympus, as it floats
through a subspace of pastel color swirls, having been swallowed into a
reality storm after its mooring line to the former floating city of New
Atlantis broke (just as well, it was sinking at the time, having been
pounded to pieces by an Axis intercontinental railgun) and cleared of
the quasi-demonic invaders that seemed to come from nowhere immediately
afterwards. The remainder of the population is only too glad to host a
few fights if it means one of the reality-warpers will get them back to
a planet where they can live, as the city is not self-sufficient and has
only a month or so worth of supplies. Drogn will do it himself if no one
else does by the end of the tournement.
Alternate Stage (Appearing when it's time to
bring in the Laemonites): The Artificial
Lemon Hatchery - The battle area is again an observation platform, this
time raised only a few feet above rows of artificial lemon incubators.
Inside them sit rows of head-sized yellow eggs, which hatch from time to
time to release 2-4 normal sized artificial lemons to join the multitude
of them milling around on the floor and peeping. A few dozen rows of
them seem to be watching the fight and will peep appreciatively whenever
a particularly impressive move is performed. Three catwalks lead away
from the platform, one of them to another platform set up as an employee
lounge area with a truly massive snack machine.
Mecha battle stage: City of Tokyo, filled
with buildings to knock over. Alternately, the flight deck of an Ergav
class Escort Carrier, scaled up a tad so that its mecha troops (which
act mostly like Macross units, except for having five arms, four legs,
and two heads; I can provide a picture as I have a very cear image of
them - one tends to develope a clear mental image of things one makes a
transformable model of, even if the model is just clay and doesn't last)
are Super Robot sized. For pictures of the Ergav and its alien crew, go
ye to
http://www.sover.net/~merryhwd/ and looketh in the
area designated as "The Calatunian Sector of TSUP". There's a link to a
diagram of the Calatunians that shows thier... unique... physiognomy off
far better than I can describe it. The picture is rather more insectile
than I really wanted it to look, though, very segmented in appearance.
The Ergav and a host of other ships (including my personal fave, the
Gazzok) can be found by scrolling down the page some.
- Weapon: Shadow Zephyr, a
greatsword made of shadows. It is slightly transparent flat black, with
no optical refraction. The distortion balls it fires are only visible as
a traveling refraction, like that OpenGL screensaver that looks like a
lens being bounced around over your desktop. It tends to leave trails
behind it when swung, as most Toshinden 3 weapons do.
Note: The real Darkwynd fires baseball
sized black holes, that act in all respects like a real black hole. They
are permanent. It is also constantly surrounded by a patch of
distortion, and can actually bend the path of light around it like a
black hole (only not as strong) itself. The blade is absolute black
edged with the blue of cherenkov radiation, the hilt appears to be
tarnished silver and is rather ornately engraved. Despite all this, it's
just a sword, neither cursed nor intelligent nor with an attached
destiny nor with dependent daggers. Of course, any being that can't affect
the laws of reality themselves would be collapsed and their miniscule
mass absorbed if they got within a half inch or so of touching it, but
hey, them's the breaks. Now you see why Drogn is not using it.
- Special Resources:
- The Superdimension Yo-Yo - One of Drogn's favorite little toys, it's also mindbendingly irresponsible to use, as it utterly abuses the local fabric of reality. Using the yo-yo normally, palm-down, will affect the light transmission properties of local objects - as long as it keeps spinning, clear things (like, oh, say, the air) will turn opaque every time it reaches the bottom of the string, returning to normal when it's back in hand. Using it palm up (The Waterfall) has the opposite effect, in that opaque things turn clear as it reaches the bottom of the string and return to normal when it stops spinning or is caught, making everything (including the walls and ground) for about a hundred feet invisible when the effect is at maximum. "Walking The Dog" will render the user immaterial and out of phase with reality, again until it stops spinning or is caught. Doing an "Around The World" lets the user teleport to any place they can see, and "Over The Rainbow" opens a portal to an alternate universe - that's something he's only done once, and the universe that time was mainly different in that everyone there was reversed in gender. The portal remains until a "Reverse Over The Rainbow" is performed. There is a special effect assosciated with this, detailed below under "Glitches"
- Drogn's glowing blue watchband is in fact a Time Loop, which he stole from One
Mad Planarian. One Mad Planarian wasn't sure if that was the original or
a time-looped duplicate he'd picked up one time when he was really
hungry but only had two waffles, so he ate them then went back in time
and ate them again, but stated that he'd originally got it from a time
looping copy of Drogn who was fighting a time looping copy of Drogn
after turning evil, thereby stranding evil-Drogn at the beginning of
Time until an earlier version of the evil Drogn went back in time before
he became evil and was killed by Evil Drogn who then escaped but was
stopped by XDrogn. No, nothing to do with M@rvel's mutants, XDrogn was a
reverse-time doppleganger created by too much time travel. This has
almost no impact on the fights at all, since he's sealed away control of
it except for the preprogrammed attacks. Explaining the Time Loop's
history might make a good attack as well now that I think about it, as
the opponent's brain might implode trying to keep it straight.
- Openings:
- vs. self (first matchup): CD blinks, and asks, "D2? What are you doing here?" Two replies, Getting ready to kick your tail, of course." See also Glitches.
- vs. the (\/)ajin: (semi-glitch)
(\/) looks at Drogn then shouts off screen to teammate. "Hey, I thought
we were going to fight a dragon, not a mutant aardvark!"
The background for a few feet around Drogn fades away to a rocky
precipice with lightning in the background. He begins to powerpose, then
looks at a loss - the background returns to normal as he says, "Yeah,
well, I thought this was going to be a mecha battle against someone
piloting one of the Majin series super-robots. Too bad, they're cool."
(\/) blinks and says, "I don't get the reference... But allow me to
show you MY power pose." The entire background fades out to a once
picturesque mountain range that has been destroyed by a giant nuke
with the sun backlighting (\/) in his purdy power pose. "Now
top that you freaky aardvark-man!"
At this point, the Drogn-player is presented with the option to fight or
continue the powerpose war. Doing nothing for three seconds or hitting
the Start button will end the opener, hitting Select will play one of
the taunts before moving on to normal combat, and hitting one of the
slash or kick buttons will sleect one of the following powerposes to use
next. Drogn will begin by saying, "If you insist..." All of the
following... attacks? do 5% damage.
- Slash: The setting fades back
to the same devastated mountain, but this time rather closer to the
crater. Close enough that (\/)ajin has to flail his arms comedically or
fall in. Drogn takes the opportunity to eat a pair of Twix, then crosses
his arms and pronounces, in the Voice of [DOOM], "Two for me!" He
uncrosses his arms to point at (\/), and continues, "NONE FOR YOU!" Then
things return to normal, with (\/) right back where he was. To have (\/)
flail his arms to stay up, erratically move the joystick/d-pad.
- Kick: Drogn does his double-kick
Special (fwd-fwd-X) in a random direction, then the frame freezes and
the background is replaced by blue speedlines and the text, "Adventures
of Drogn: The Series will be back after these messages!"
Now, (\/)'s player gets to respond:
- Slash: (\/) looks frustrated,
then gets an idea and pops a Mentos. Again we are returned to the
devastated scene but even closer and on the opposite side of the crater.
Drogn looks down, flails comedically, and falls in. (\/) looks at the
screen, holds up the package of Mentos, and grins as he says "Mentos,
the fresh maker." Then we are returned to battle arena by means of a
quick fade-to-black-and-back.
- Kick: (\/) scoffs at him and then
raises Zero Hour above his head. Then there is blinding white light. A
still picture of (\/) with his right foot on Drogn's back grinning and
giving the V sign and Drogn lying down swirlly-eyed with a bump on his
head, against a yellow to green graduated background with the words "Now
back to the New Adventures of (\/)ajin!"
- 1st round: The opponent's intro
plays first, then Drogn flies in and lands in the classic "supernatural
winged critter looking impressive" configuration, the frame freezing as
he does so, then cutting to a few stills of him in various "Gosh, aren't
I something?" poses, untill a stone apparently gets thrown through the
screen and it shatters away, leaving the normal stage setup. As the
opponent winds down from throwing something, they ask "Can we get on
with this?"
- Standard: Drogn flies in and
lands in the classic angel/devil pose he starts with above, but just
settles into a ready stance.
- Mecha/kaiju battle: To the
raggedy trumpets of Godzilla's theme, a full size Drogn surfaces in
Tokyo bay and wades out, runnels of water pouring off of him in cheesy
forced-perspective slow motion. This regardless of whether the actual
stage is Tokyo, or even a coastal area.