Like many others, I too downloaded Aiko from DAZ. She's presented me with the opportunity to render something I've wanted for some time, Yukito Kishiro's Gally from "Gunnm", better known in the US as "Battle Angel Alita". Gally (or Alita) is a full conversion cyborg, an organic brain housed in an otherwise totally robotic chassis. She makes her living as a bounty hunter in the "Scrapyard", a dyspotian slum literally overshadowed by a seeming utopia constructed at the base of a "space elevator". In the earlier chapters of Kishiro's manga, Alita has no memory of her life before being reactivated by Dr. Ido, a kindly cyber-surgeon and outcast of the "floating" city. As she hunts her bounties, she awakens fighting skills, techniques not developed on Earth but Mars. Displayed above is a scenario all too familiar to Alita fans. The poor girl seems to go through cyber bodies like underwear. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but if I remember correctly, she "wears" at least 5 shells since Ido found her. We can only wonder how many she sported before her amnesia. More than once Kishiro has depicted her as little more than a head and an upper torso. At least when she was playing MotorBall, it was under controlled conditions, not from destruction. She's hoisted like an engine block as her "pit crew" tunes her chassis for the next match. One may wonder if the production crew for "Star Trek: First Contact" may have been inspired by those images for the grand entrance of the Borg Queen. Alita has a couple of distinguihing features (behinds the obvious cyber-body). One, Kishiro tends to draw her with pursed, almost puckered, lips. This goes against the usual trend in anime and manga within which the characters have barely defined lips, if any. Two, Kishiro connects the outer edges of the upper and lower eyelids. A recurring motif in much of Japanese cartooning has a noticable gap between the eyelids. Three, after Ido discovered Alita on the MotorBall circuit, she sported metallic bands under her eyes. This is why I'm glad I purchased DAZ's "Bishonen for M3" a long time ago. One of the face textures has an almost identical band under the left eye. Using PaintShop Pro, I selected that region, flipped the copy and aligned the mirrored selection under the right eye. Though intended for Michael 3, the skin appears quite feminine with no hint of male pattern beard stubble. "Bishonen" roughly translates as "pretty boy". I didn't have to alter the texture any further before applying it to Aiko. I had been using the Vorg V3 texture for some images, but for this one I selected one of the Bishonen body armour patterns because it didn't display "robo-nipples". Her spine and "innards" are pieces from Davo's "MadLab 2" set. The "wig" is MayaX's Yuna hair simply darkened. Those of you familiar with Kishiro's works, let me know if a did a decent job. Sincerely, Bill

Tempt the Hand of Fate and it'll give you the "finger"!