#sorxa

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OC-tober day 26: Cosplaying as Bridget

(prompts)

Happy birthday, Bridget! I came out to my family 2 years ago today, in honor of the character whose theme song finally broke my egg :^)

(feat. a rare appearance from one of my few OCs predating sorXa, Nikolai Greypaw, who's changed even more over the years than sorXa has)

[chaosbound-official]

(Anon I would suffer the bite of 5000 winters for you please know this. I wasn't sure what to do bc unfortunately Hiraeh is a bit of a shut-in but hopefully this is something! Maybe I'll make a separate post for holiday ideas ive had later… Prompt from here!)

14: What is something that never fails to make them excited?

Hiraeh: Oh, xhax’s easy! Being able xo xalk xo people!

Hiraeh: Especially when you can jusx relaX and nox worry aboux xhem gexxing all weird on you because of blood color.

Hiraeh: Needless xo say xhis dream is among xhe besx social experiences I've ever had.

36: Are there any holidays or celebrations they dislike?

Hiraeh: Oofh, you mighx be asking xhe wrong xroll here. I can'x really say for sure? I'm sorxa ouxxa xhe loop on mosx holidays, or I don'x gex xo do anyxhing because I rarely leave my hive. Or xhe ocean.

Hiraeh: Then again…/-/m. I have heard xhax xhere’s a communixy of xrolls xhax celebrate The Condesce’s haxchday sxill. As like some sorxa reverence xo her as followers of xhe old ways or whaxever. Makes me fuckin sick xo even consider xhax’s a real possibilixy honesxly. The holiday and xhe followers.

Hiraeh: I'm hoping xhax’s jusx some weird rumor xhough xbh… Even my worsx neighbor doesn'x wanx anyxhing xo do wixh somexhing like xhax and I kind of consider her a measure for xhe wrongs of all xrollkind so ideally ix’s jusx somexhing xhax gox blown oux of proporxion, like one whacko who did celebraxe ix gox on xhe newsfeed so people began flapping xheir windchuxes and saying xhax xhere’s more, you know?

Quirk free:

14: What is something that never fails to make them excited?

Hiraeh: Oh, that's easy! Being able to talk to people!

Hiraeh: Especially when you can just relax and not worry about them getting all weird on you because of blood color.

Hiraeh: Needless to say this dream is among the best social experiences I've ever had.

36: Are there any holidays or celebrations they dislike?

Hiraeh: Oofh, you might be asking the wrong troll here. I can't really say for sure? I'm sorta outta the loop on most holidays, or I don't get to do anything because I rarely leave my hive. Or the ocean.

Hiraeh: Then again… Hm. I have heard that there's a community of trolls that celebrate The Condesce’s hatchday still. As like some sorta reverence to her as followers of the old ways or whatever. Makes me fuckin sick to even consider that's a real possibility honestly. The holiday and the followers.

Hiraeh: I'm hoping that's just some weird rumor though tbh… Even my worst neighbor doesn't want anything to do with something like that and I kind of consider her a measure for the wrongs of all trollkind so ideally it's just something that got blown out of proportion, like one whacko who did celebrate it got on the newsfeed so people began flapping their windchutes and saying that there's more, you know?

[anondeahyun]

sorxa replied to your post: Hey there.

I’m Sora, Park Sora. Nice to meet ‘ya Daehyun.

You too Sora, Park Sora (/he chuckles softly as he rubs one of his eyes; How's it going for you hun?

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OC-tober day 7: Happy memory

(prompts)

This was actually sorXa's first kiss, not just with Jos but in general :^)

Since I haven't posted the relevant drawing yet, I should mention that this is the body sorXa was originally dumped into, which was the final catalyst for her realizing she's a woman.

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(May 2023) I have extremely poor impulse control as it turns out, so here's an Oracles-inspired sorXa I drew instead of going to bed

Original post bodies under the cut:

I'm getting way ahead of myself by drawing this, but I'm in too much of a Zelda mood not to, y'know?

I like to imagine this version of her would be called Soraha, in a poor localization of the Japanese way of transcribing Sorcha (which would be written ソラハ, or something like that). I guess she's also Hylian, on account of the pointed ears? I debated giving her round ears to signify her being from Labrynna or Holodrum, but the pointed ears felt too iconically "Zelda" to leave out.

... This did also remind me that she really does kinda look like Ralph, with a touch of Malon, which I guess isn't the worst thing?

#In hindsight this is actually a bit closer to the GBA revisions of the ALttP art stylistically #ah well

-

I'm pretty rusty at spriting so there's some stuff I could have done better, and I might go back and revise this, but it feels so nice to have a passably authentic looking sprite of one of my characters in a style I'm so fond of from watching over my brother's shoulder when we were kids, y'know?

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OC-tober day 4: Outfit swap

(prompts)

I was originally thinking of keeping their palettes the same as normal (red for sorXa and green for Jos) and only swapping the designs themselves, but that looked incredibly jarring, especially sorXa's boots being green on Jos :^I

(Also Jos's lip tattoo is still there under the lipstick; meanwhile, sorXa is just making use of her chromatophores for all these color changes, she just normally prefers the purble faux-bodysuit look)

Note: I remembered a few hours after finishing this that Jos only has one wristband :^( I can't believe I forgot my own character's design TT_TT

Outfit descriptions:

sorXa is wearing a white tanktop and olive green pants, black wristbands, grey boots with buckles, a white headset with green ear coverings, a green neckerchief, and a toolbelt. Her hair is in a ponytail. Jos is wearing a pinkish-white choker, a pinkish-white croptop with red straps across the middle of the chest, bulky golden cuffs, red belt with two straps and a gold buckle, pinkish-white cargo pants with a hole in the side of each thigh between the pockets, and chunky red boots with black accents and gold zippers. Their hair is down, with some dreads hanging on each side, framing their face.

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(April 2024) Finally drew sorXa in the robot body her mind was originally dumped into

Tfw you get dumped into a robot body for… reasons… and in the process have your egg broken because the body is feminine 🏳️‍⚧️

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(March 2024) Decided to try something a bit bigger than what I'm normally comfortable with

#innuendo in title not intended but fully acknowledged

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(March 2023) morXa sorXa armorXa

Note: this post originally was only b&w sketches; I'm using the colored version of the first image here because I figure I might as well post it now.

Original post body under the cut:

These are still WIPs and I want to further refine the vambrace buster concept before I get to coloring any of this, but I'm getting antsy sitting on all this unshared progress I've made with sorXa's armor design, so fuck it, I'm posting what I have so far!! I've more or less said "fuck it" and started leaning into the Χ/χ motif à la X (particularly his X8 design), though the besagew is actually also meant to evoke a clover, partly because sorXa's name is pronounced like the Irish way of saying "Sorcha" (which would make it a shamrock), but also largely because I'm nothing if not a huge MMZ dweeb and I love the lyrical version of MMZ2's credits theme from RTRZ: Idea, which is called... Clover. (the original song is Awakening Will, for reference, which itself is a reprise of the hypest intro stage theme I've ever fucking heard, Departure, which plays during what's also probably the most badass opening to a game I've ever seen. Zero 2 isn't my favorite in the series, but that intro goes so fucking hard!!... I think I got a bit off-topic here, haha)

Transcripts under the cut, since even if I'm not done yet I figure I might as well help people make out what I wrote if I'm posting these as WIPs:

Page 1 (sorXa armor concepts):

gold rivets? (pointing to the forehead plate of her helm, accompanied by a sketch showing the positioning of the three rivets)

speakers (pointing to the circles on her facemask)

Megamix-style arms (next to her big bulky round forearm armor; this idea is altered in the third image to be more like Mega Man Volnutt from the Legends series)

Page 2 (sorXa armor concepts):

mask can detach if lip-reading is needed for clearer communication (near her detached mask, which is connected to her helm by a tether on each side)

❌ no (next to a besagew shaped like a Phillips-head screw)

sapphic! (next to a besagew with indents shaped like the violet used in some versions of the Sapphic pride flag)

Clover + "Χ" (next to a variant of the previous besagew with only 4 indents; an arrow points from the Sapphic violet besagew to the clover besagew)

historical! (next to a besagew with a shallow cone in the center of a bowl-like rim)

gold or red ring? (pointing to a variant of the above besagew with a lighter-colored ring around the central cone)

maybe only 1? → R or L? (above a small mockup of sorXa's torso with only one besagew; "L" is circled, which is reflected by the first page's design of her armor)

Page 3 (sorXa armor concepts (buster cannon)):

vents on top | slides up & out (pointing to a raised part of her vambrace, which is now more cylindrical than the previous images)

thruster (pointing at jetpack-like structures on the back of her cuirass; note that these will be revised in a future drawing, probably)

(duplicated at the back of her calf, which also has a visible jet of sorts)

[various color ideas for her boots] (the poleyns will probably be gold with red "fan plates"/hinges, which will be replicated on her ankle adornments as well; the calves themselves are black (of course), and the notes show her boots as having white outsoles and red soles, though I think I might reverse that in practice)

4 holes (pointing to the beveled edge of her vambrace hear the wrist, accompanied by a simple drawing showing roughly the positioning of those holes, which are in an X-formation)

Model A + Bridget (pointing at the bumpy protrusions on the outsoles of her boots, which are meant to evoke the boots of Model A from Mega Man ZX Advent and the shoes of Bridget's Guilty Gear Strive Design)

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OC-tober day 19: Villain turned hero

(prompts)

sorXa was... not exactly a great person for most of her life, up until about the age of 22 or so (she's currently 23), and even then she still has a fair amount of growth ahead of her.

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(August 2023) sorXa, armed and armored

Original post body under the cut:

Finally got around to doing a finished illustration of sorXa in armor (instead of just concept art)!

I think this is actually the first time I'm posting a few of the ideas I've had for her armored form, namely the energy shielding over her artificial skin, the Mega Man Megamix-style grip pads on her hands, and the single-tail scarf (which was actually a design element in my first ever D&D character, Valia, who was a dragonborn Fighter).

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(October 2023) Made a ref sheet for unarmored sorXa

(last updated 10/24/24)

(April 2024) And now a ref sheet for armored sorXa

(August 2024) And finally: a ref for naked sorXa

Some of these need revisions (e.g. re-scaling the weapons section of the armored ref), but for now they're serviceable enough

Notes under the readmore (currently only for clothed sorXa; I'll add armored and unclothed if I ever get around to them):

about 8.5 heads tall

wrist cuffs optional (used to summon her armor, so not needed if not anticipating combat)

4 equidistant holes along hand-facing side of cuffs

pupils glow when experiencing intense emotions (positive or negative)

sclerae are same purple as her skin, just darker

thick eyelashes on bottom eyelids

hair is symmetrical

middle bang is S-shaped, sticks out perpendicular from face and then hangs parallel

side bangs - curve in at eyes, out at mouth, back in at neck, then curl up

hair in back is NOT upturned

ponytail available as alternative option - incorporates side bangs

upper lip is same red as lower lip, just darker

darker parts of cheek markings are along the edge of her eye sockets, and the lighter parts run down her cheeks to her jawline

inner edge of dark part centered under eye, outer edge goes a bit past outer edge of eye (roughly in line with eyelashes)

underside of jaw is purple, like her neck

has an Adam's apple in "inverse choker" (ring of pale skin around neck)

purple "bodysuit" is actually artificial skin, so it's flush with her pale skin (e.g. her "inverse choker")

despite ostensibly being the same material, has a dull metallic sheen to it

has artificial chromatophores in her skin, so she can change it to different colors (e.g. red when armored)

divots on arm resemble speakers - concave, with a raised convex section in the center

line down center of arm is like cheek markings (shallow indent)

finger joints visible

abdomen has discrete panels that open to reveal ports used to power wired weapons

belt buckle is raised toward the center, with an X-shaped cutout

belt is two red straps

middle section in front of top is red straps/strands connecting the white sections

top and pants have slight reddish tinge, NOT pure white

boots and jacket have Venus-symbol-shaped zipper pulls

jacket has red iridescence

croptop preferred over jacket

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OC-tober day 1: Newest & Oldest

(prompts)

Selena was created in late June of 2023, while sorXa was originally created in mid-to-late 2005 (but even if you only count her most recent iteration, she was revived in late January 2023)

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(April 2023) Coquelette (AKA sorXa as a Resistance member)

Original post body under the cut:

It seems only fitting that I should draw sorXa in the style of MMZ, seeing as a nontrivial portion of her design and the ideas for the setting around her were inspired by the Zero series.

The style imitation here isn't perfect, though it really doesn't help that one of the two pages I drew this on had a rougher texture because I drew on the wrong side (the smoother texture of the upper part works better for the MMZ artstyle, I think). That being said, if you showed this to 14-year-old me and said "you'll be able to draw like this someday," I'd have lost my fucking mind, seeing as there was a period of some months in mid-to-late 2011 where I was trying to emulate Toru Nakayama's artstyle (after which it started morphing into my own style, though that didn't give way to what would become my current style until... late 2012, I think? Or maybe early 2013?)

Also, I mentioned this when I posted the WIP, but I went with "Coquelette" for her name to keep with the Resistance's "French bird name" naming scheme, and "coquelette" is a feminine version of "coquelet", i.e. cockerel, i.e. a young rooster, as in Rooster, my old FFTA Thief who I also had a Lego minifig of (like some earlier incarnations of sorXa).

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(January-February 2023) Don't mind me, just transing a vintage OC's gender

I opted to skip the original palette proposals for her and jump straight to the finalized one (which later got revised with dark sclerae), and that pistol concept is slightly edited from the initial posting to have a shorter barrel, for reference

Original post bodies under cut (warning, long as fuck):

Post 1 (sorXa & her armor)

Update (1/31/23): Now with mostly-finalized color schemes! The design of sorXa's armor itself needs a little more work, but I think these palettes fit her pretty well (I swear I wasn't intending to make her vaguely cohost-colored)

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When I woke up I miraculously had the energy to draw, so instead of getting up and taking a shower I spent a few hours brainstorming a massive overhaul of one of my old Lego OCs, because while looking for Zero's missing right hand in my bedroom (as mentioned here) I stumbled upon his old mech walker in a drawer, with him inside it, and because he was vaguely self-insert-y (in the way that many of my long-term D&D PCs tend to be, in that they're not meant to be me per se, but they definitely borrow heavily from my IRL traits) I decided to make him a trans girl¹. I then very quickly hit upon the idea of making her an android (or more properly gynoid, I guess? I'm gonna call her that, anyway), and then further the idea that her old lore was in some capacity canon, but at some point her consciousness was transferred from her old AMAB supersoldier body into a more feminine artificial body untouched by the processes that made her original body a supersoldier. I'm not 100% sure on her name, though I particularly like the Gaelic name Sorcha since it's roughly equivalent to my IRL name, Clara, and I have both Irish and Scottish ancestry²; I might sci-fi it up a bit, maybe, since her deadname was sci-fi nonsense based very loosely on my deadname (same first letter, same ending phoneme, same number of syllables). Maybe borrowing a character from a different alphabet to transcribe the "ch", like Sorχa or something? Possibly just Sorxa, since the voiceless velar fricative is rendered as "x" in the international phonetic alphabet? I'll figure that out later, I guess. Edit: I think I've settled on rendering it as "sorXa"; starting with a lowercase letter gives me vibes similar to chaos from Xenosaga, which I think fits the sci-fi setting (not to mention that her design has some similarities to chaos's, now that I think about it)

I'll transcribe the notes under the cut since I know my handwriting is pretty illegible here (it's not always this bad, but when I'm cramming notes to myself around a drawing on a 3"x5" card, it tends to get sloppy)

Image 1: casual wear

Sorcha(?) | she/her | gynoid, formerly AMAB human

glowy eyes when needed

auburn hair (pointing to darker part of hair)

strawberry blonde? orange? gold? plat. blonde? (pointing to lighter-colored bangs)

chromatophore-like tech allows face markings to be hidden & hair color to change, among other aesthetic things

Image 2: armor

Sorcha(?) | she/her

glowy gold visor

black helm (blue accents? red accents?)

black w/ gold (or copper? rose-gold?) accents (pointing at breastplate and spaulders)

black? (pointing at forearm)

blue? grey? blue-grey? red? (pointing at upper arm, abdomen, and thigh)

poleyns? (next to knee)

MMZ-style big boots (next to side-view of one such chonky boot)

Bridget-like? HJB-like?³ (next to another boot, but with something on the ankle à la Bridget's GGST design)

speaker? (pointing at circle on the bevor of a mildly revised version of her sallet)

add earpiece?

Notes from another drawing I'm not posting on this page but that I think might be relevant:

modular limbs? (i.e. could attach extra limbs or swap out some of her normal ones)

not actual choker, just pigment per... (has arrow pointing to next bullet point)

chromatophore-like skin pigment - can change colors, good for both camo and looking more organic (can hide cheek lines, but thinks they look cool)

Notes: (I feel like I have these on every chost, I guess footnotes are my Cohost calling card now??)

I remember, actually, that one time I played out this scenario where he ran into an alternate universe version of himself who was a girl, and they... teamed up or something? Hung out? Fuck if I remember, and it actually may have been a different sci-fi Lego-based OC, but I'm pretty sure it was an early version of him which had a very different appearance barring the red hair and laser sword (though even then, the not-lightsaber went from yellow to blue). I do remember that their first interaction was passing each other on their not-speeder bikes as she came out of her universe, which was linked to his universe by some sort of cave opening or whatever? I'm getting way off track, the point is this isn't the first time this character has been a girl, even if at the time my younger self had no idea that might be related to me being trans. #JustEggThings

I'm not exactly sure how much Scottish ancestry I have on my mom's side, but in terms of Irish ancestry on my dad's side, my grandfather and grandmother were from a town in County Fermanagh and a tiny village (really more of a homestead, it's only a few houses in a small cluster) in County Leitrim, respectively (my dad and my aunt were born in New York, though). I actually visited Ireland in Summer of 2019 for a family reunion, and we visited the (heavily renovated) house where my Nana Bridie grew up (one of the families who lived there when she was young is actually living in that house now, though it's substantially more modern than the dirt floor and hearth farmhouse she grew up in), as well as the rowhouse my Pop-pop Mickey designed and had built in his hometown when he and my grandmother briefly moved the family back to Ireland in the 60s because of the rioting in NYC (which was, as you might image, the exact wrong time for a family of Catholics to move to Northern Ireland; luckily they were unharmed, but they still returned to New York after only about a year or so).

"HJB-like" refers to the high jump boots from Metroid, which add forward-facing spikes to the ankles of Samus's power suit. In case you couldn't tell, this armor leans heavily on the character design aesthetics of both Metroid and Mega Man Zero, with a splash of late medieval/early renaissance European armor (hence the sallet and poleyns). I'm a huge sallet fangirl, if you hadn't noticed (did you know that some designs of Samus's helm have a very sallet-like shape? I did, and I pogged IRL when I noticed it, like the fucking dweeb that I am)

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Post 2 (updated unarmored palette and weapons)

I think I've finished all the designing I need in order to finish this drawing of sorXa that I've been working on, namely the dagger/beam sword and handgun she carries normally, plus an update to her color scheme.

A general note that applies to both the sword and the gun: energy-based weapons in the setting I'm developing around sorXa require too much energy for a compact power source to fuel for any significant length of time, so they often have cords to be plugged into an external power source for added functionality. Normally this would be something like a clunky battery pack or generator, but being an anthropoid¹, sorXa's abdomen can open up like KOS-MOS using the X-Buster (Xenosaga Episode 1 spoilers in that cutscene btw), but instead of the X-Buster it contains a set of jacks for said cords, and then she can plug a weapon in to draw from her internal power supply à la Heavy Metal L-Gaim.

To briefly touch on the updated color scheme: Pink is a pretty color. Simple as. (Well, okay, the idea is that it's more of a white jacket with reddish-pinkish iridescence, or maybe it's just a very pale pink, I'm not sure)

Weapon descriptions under the cut:

Dagger ("Devilhorns")

Based primarily on a cinquedea and the version of the Z-saber wielded by Girouette in Mega Man ZX, but also a kabutowari. I need to update the design to reflect that the guard flares out into more proper quillons when it's powered, but still I'm quite proud of the idea of the wire spool being in what would normally be the palm-swell of a typical cinquedea hilt. The name "Devilhorns" is in reference to the fact that relative to a cinquedea, it's missing about 2 "fingers'" worth of physical blade, not entirely unlike some variations of the "devil horns" hand gesture (particularly a hypothetical variant where the thumb is raised flush with the index finger, but I don't know that I've ever seen or heard of that version being a thing), though I'm not particularly married to the name since it feels... clunky? Also, the yellow beam blade is in reference to an ancient iteration of her², when she was some sort of Lego bounty hunter whose main weapon was a lightsaber with an opaque yellow blade (since I didn't have a translucent yellow blade for her to use and wanted hers to be ~special~).

Handgun (unnamed)

Based on the two handguns most heavily associated with Mine Fujiko from Lupin III, the Browning Model 1910 and the Remington Double Derringer (based moreso on the appearance of the Browning than the Remington), combined into what's essentially a MMZ/ZX-style buster pistol. Normally it relies on a magazine-shaped battery that can power... 12 shots, maybe? before it has to be swapped out, but when plugged in it can shoot effectively indefinitely without needing to reload, or it can draw on the internal battery as well as the external power source to fire a charge shot³ (which consumes what would have been 1 or 2 shots from the battery normally) in the vein of Mega Man and Metroid. The ventilation on the obverse (which in this case is the left side, since this is meant as an off-hand weapon for a right-handed character) is meant for releasing excess heat, meaning that while it wouldn't be pleasant to have your hand there when it shoots, it's certainly not going to blow your hand off like the small drawing in the middle might make it seem. I went with Fujiko's iconic guns as a basis for this pistol since they're both relatively small and concealable, which suits the needs of this particular gun as an emergency sidearm to use in self-defense when sorXa isn't necessarily looking for a fight. Considering that this is literally the first time I've ever tried to design or even draw a semi-realistic gun (in no way, shape, or form do I consider myself a gun enthusiast, I'm much more of a "medieval and early-renaissance hand-powered weapons" kinda gal), I'm surprised by how happy I am with how this design turned out (though it probably helps that this borrows so heavily from the real-world Browning Model 1910)

I'm leaning toward "anthropoid" as a gender-neutral catchall for humanoid robots in the setting, since "android" is explicitly masculine, and while I have no problem calling sorXa in particular a gynoid, I feel like having a broader term is important. Apparently I'm not the first person to arrive at using the term in place of "android", but I personally learned of the word via... anthropoid-hilted Celtic swords, of all things (though "anthropomorphic" seems to be the more common term to use for that hilt shape these days).

We're talking, like, gradeschool here, maybe early middle school at the latest. She also had a starry black cape (which would have been from a Harry Potter Hairy Pooper set; the mild irony of a character who previously incorporated something tied to a Rowling IP in their design winding up as a violently anti-fascist trans girl is not lost on me) and a red bandana on her head, if memory serves? A later version of her had a more traditional translucent blue lightsaber (maybe 2 of them?), but that version of her is now part of her backstory when she was a (less-than-willing) supersoldier (I need to flesh out that lore better, so I won't go into it here, but there's a lot going on there), so I'm going back to the classic yellow for her new beam sword.

This particular pistol is actually meant to be a fair bit more robust than some others in the setting, at least when it comes to charging shots. I had the idea that in a firefight while using a temporary civilian-grade body (while her custom combat-grade gynoid body was still being built), in an act of desperation when faced with a hallway full of enemy soldiers advancing toward her, she'd have tried to power a weaker pistol plugged into a port on herself that wasn't designed to handle the amount of power drawn by a charged shot and, in the process, blew up the gun, wrecked both arms, launched herself backwards into a wall, and severely damaged her body's power core (as well as accomplishing her goal of killing everyone in her line of fire, of course, essentially following Mega Man charged shot rules, i.e. they pierce any enemy they destroy). This incident, in addition to helping her gain the trust of her new comrades (who would have mistrusted her as a former member of the enemy forces), also led to her receiving a pistol capable of firing charged shots without destroying itself (the one shown here). (As an aside, she didn't count on the charged shot having that much blowback, since she was used to using military guns while wearing power armor, as opposed to a relatively flimsy pistol scrounged up by rebels while in a body that's not much more resilient than a relatively sturdy but otherwise ordinary human; she certainly figured it would be a risky maneuver for her, but nowhere near the "possibly get yourself killed in the resulting explosion" kind of risky that it wound up being.)

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OC-tober day 22: Taking a well-earned break

(prompts)

I didn't have to make today's drawing gay but like. Why wouldn't I.