(The Bug Comic) I'm jumping ahead very slightly to show you a page from a book that Mrs. Lindholm loaned Dragonfly. It's one of those Osprey Military History series books. (You'll see Blade looking at it in a bit, when Shadow is going through Dragonfly's stuff) Unfortunately, in that image the book page is a little hard to see, and it's important to the story. The book is about the Azali Empire, and is a bit inaccurate, since the records are so scarce. For example, the power pack on the plasma rifle held by the Aer doesn't go with that gun, and of course no Aer would hold it so that it pointed anywhere near his foot. The numbers on his collar are his battalion number and his own number, so that's his name (22-301). The lit lines are part of the Aer's force field armor, rather like Claudia's light armor in "Orientation" http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1976051&user_id=354046&np&np The Mer's uniform (on the left) does come with sleeves, but they attach by the snaps at the top of the sleeve cap (which you can see if you look closely) so that the Mer's veins are accessible when needed for patching up the Aer. The artist apparently didn't feel like showing the Mer's damaged fingers, since he would have been declawed. The detail of the attached medical/surgical box is correct, and the Azali cyborg "Minder" is accurate as far as I know, since it's copied from one in the Ellesburg War Museum. _____________________ The Azali Minder is played by a really awesome model by Mestophales, the BEO2k10. I fiddled with it to make it more insectoid, added the antenna, extended the X scale and the feet to make it more obvious it wasn't a human exoskeleton. I also changed out some of the materials, adding a plainer hematite mat to some of the ambient maps. The Mer's texture is from MaskEdit,a set of M4 maps-- and that set has the most amazing Maori texture just put in with no fanfare. I have to think of something to do with it just to show it off;) The hair is Daz's Beach Hair, the outfit is painted with some inspiration from the old Techno Maelstrom for V3. The Med kit is a pgmeri01 freebie from Rosity, retextured, and the chain is from TrekkieGrrl, also freestuff.