Ruehl's New and Improved Crapbook

[Necroka (He/Him)]

New profile and long leave, I may as well start a fresh thingy for creative things of mine for people to amuse themselves with or ask for sketches or whatever. Of course life and commissions and such will come first, but sketches are quick and easy so feel free top ask for one or two.

Not sure if I mentioned it while I was here last time but I'd had an idea for a game of mine that I wanted to make, and figured I'd use some of the things I learned here to make my own things. Naturally, time constraints have made that mostly impossible for the time being, but I did put up a chapter of the written version I have to see what people thought of the main character since he's so... "different".

I realize it's rough and there's probably A LOT of errors in it, but I'll put it in a spoiler for whoever is curious to read it. It's got death in it, but not enough for me to think it'd actually be mature, but what do I know. the warning is here at least.

[spoiler]"Finally!" uttered a boy's voice, hushed as it to avoid detection even though the dirt tunnel carried the sound anyway. "What a week it's been, but I'm almost there. Those religious rag wearers will regret the day they rejected a hero's audience."

The boy continued through his tunnel, crawling along the soft dirt littered with sharp rocks and stray roots that caught his long, dark, unnaturally blue hair as he brushed past. The expression he wore was that of determination. Tonight was his night, and as far as he was concerned, his journey began the moment he climbed into the hole he had been tunnelling for the past five days.

Eventually, the filthy, unkept boy reached what looked to be a dead end. He parted the dirt and revealed chipped rocks and bricks, then began jamming a small, ruined dagger full of scars and scratches into the cracks between the stones. Weakened from his earlier attempts, the wall came out in chunks. It wasn't long before he could step into the catacombs. "Perfect," he said as he studied his surroundings. Bodies placed in coffins or burned and kept in urns were lined up side by side in large shelves carved into the soft dirt and decorated with stones. The walls were made of these shelves, separated by pillars. In this place, families were buried together and would get three burial shelves assigned to them at marriage – one for each of them and one collectively for their unmarried children – so every set that the pillars sectioned was one shelf wide and three shelves tall. The boy took a step forward, knocking over an urn which crashed loudly on the stone floor.

"What was that?!" Not far around the corner one of the grave keepers nearly jumped a metre high. The other grave keeper told him to calm down, and to go take a look.

Except for those two... thought the boy. He scrambled until he found a loosely closed coffin and climbed in, closing the lid of it as he nestled himself against the coffin's dead body. When the grave keepers turned the corner they saw nothing but a shattered urn surrounded by the ashes it used to protect.

"We'll need another urn..." one of the grave keepers said. He reached for a broom as the other grave keeper left to get a new urn.

The boy decided to himself that, to get out and acquire the necessary equipment he would need, that it would be have to kill the two grave keepers. The grave keeper that was sweeping up the ashes started to recite a long prayer, and luckily enough for the boy in the coffin, the man's back was faced towards the wall that the boy was in. The boy slowly opened up the coffin and crawled out, daintily placing his feet on the rocks so he wouldn't make a sound. He took with him a broken leg bone from the coffin and leapt at the grave keeper, forcing the bone down from the neck into the man's back. The man howled so shortly that there was nearly no volume to it before the boy snapped his neck and dropped him on the ground, dead in the scattered ashes. Then, the boy gathered some of the larger shards of the urn and wedged one into the end of another bone that he had fetched from the same corpse's other leg.

The boy breathed one heavy lungful to ready himself as he stood up against the wall. Footsteps, no doubt belonging to the urn-fetching grave keeper, drew nearer until the man began to turn into the room. A blur was all the grave keeper saw before blood sprayed from his jugular veins. The urn crashed against the hard floor and the boy took another swing at his throat. The grave keeper fell to the ground, cut up by the urn, and glanced weakly at the boy. He tried to speak, his mind becoming confused by the lack of blood and oxygen.

"Sorry about that," the boy said somewhat quietly. He knelt down so his young, almost delighted face could be more easily studied by the dieing man. "I meant for that to be more effective. I was hoping it would take your head clean off." The grave keeper barely heard that last part before his life slipped away.

Picking up where he left off, the boy started down the opposite path from which the grave keepers had come. The walls turned and split like a tree's branches, but the boy had no difficulty finding his way. The thickest path was going to be the most important one. It was common knowledge to those that paid attention to the heroes, warriors, and kings that passed through the kingdom. They would always take the thickest, most well-kept road.

At the end of the corridor was a short, wide, varnished wooden chest embroidered with some of the most intricate and beautiful designs in the boy had ever seen, all done in polished, dazzling gold. The sword was laid atop the chest on the lap of a statue easily ten times the boy's size. Saizonnen was the name of the man for whom the statue was built. A fearless leader and warrior who had apparently come from the heavens, chosen this land, and destroyed all the demons that had inhabited it at the time before making it a home to some of the first people to live. A god.

Even the boy approached with some amount of awe before he climbed onto the statue's lap and broke the locks on the chest. Inside of the long chest was a crude, strangely shaped sword that seemed to leak black air. Etched into the sword was a symbol that consisted of two joined words that had been found many times in deserted or cleared out demon ruins. The boy had no idea what the symbol meant, or how it could be important, just that he had found what he had been looking for. The sword was being kept for purification so that it could be given to a likely candidate for hero that would go clear out the new overlords of the demon kingdoms.

He took the sword, grinned, and said "I'm Jaiden the hero!"


-----A few hours later, just north of the city-----


Jaiden used to make his way pickpocketing and mooching off of people in the taverns, but there was a wall in that place that guards would post duties for anyone who dared. The duties were for many things, like helping with a farmer's land to going to war, but one of the duties posted had been for a cave in the north. Rumours about an overlord moving into the place had been confirmed when a travelling merchant was attacked, but managed to make it to the kingdom in enough pieces to still function.

As the sun rose, Jaiden set out on his quest, still clad in a blood-covered rag vest and pants that were ripped so much they were shorts, but this time, he had a sword tied to his body that glowed with an eerie, dark fume.

His first encounters out in the monster-filled wilds were with little beasts, like mice and rabbit-like creatures, and small birds of prey. They were nothing to him, but the boy's imagination was making the cruel slaughter of animals feel like a hero's training montage.

He was giddy from his own violent actions and skipped along, murdering things until he came to a cave. The entrance was covered in an orange-red moss with transparent teal slime trailed along the ground and lower walls. Jaiden stretched, sword in his right hand, and ran fearlessly into the cave – right into a clump of slime.

Immediately, the slime moaned and turned, and then began to consume Jaiden in an attempt to suffocate him. A slime beast! I'll slay my very first slime beast, Jaiden thought. Wildly and excitedly, he began to swing the sword, cutting into the slime. Unfortunately for Jaiden, the slime beast could put itself back together. A nearly black orb deep in its body glowed with a light blue haze as the spatters of slime moved back to the monster and formed its body over and over again.

Jaiden grinned, and his imagination seemed to burn with excitement. He imagined what it would be like to have fire powers to use against the beast... then black flames suddenly took to the sword. Jaiden swung the sword once and created an opening for him to jump out of, and when he peered back, he noticed the slime beast was having trouble recovering. The areas where the black flames grazed wouldn't fuse back together. Every swing cauterised the slime so that it couldn't just put itself together. He cut and shaved off chunks of the beast until all that surrounded the glowing orb in the middle was cauterised slime. It couldn't even move anymore; the long chunks of slime that had been cut off from the monster fell lifeless. Jaiden's cruelties did not end there, though. Instead of leaving the orb behind, the boy jammed his sword into the orb and unknowingly released all of the cells in it that felt pain. It was only when he'd broken the orb in half and sent the creature's dark blue blood flying everywhere, that he finally left the creature alone, walking way covered in the blood of his victim and the pride of having killed another monster, as it died a slow and pain-filled death.

Not too much farther into the cave, Jaiden found another slime monster. The cave seemed to be full of the slimy creatures, and Jaiden still had to figure out how to use the demon sword he stole. The physical attacks had done nothing – and then he realized that this particular slime beast was asleep. It had made no move against him, even as he ran towards it. Carefully, Jaiden climbed a nearby rock and searched for the orb. Once he found it, he dove in, sliced around the orb and ripped it out. Without the cauterizing power of the black flames, the slime tried to move closer to the orb. In a bit of a panic, Jaiden wiped off as much of the slime as he could off of the orb until luckily, the glow of the orb faded and the slime that was following him stopped. Maybe the slime can't find the orb of there's no slime on it, he thought to himself. Another resourceful, heroic victory for me!

He tucked the orb into his pocket with the intention of selling it for money later, and just before he would go farther into the cave, he stopped to think. He had never heard of a slime beast attacking another slime beast. He looked down at the remains of his last victim and studied how the goo seemed to be able to hold together. I could wear that, he thought as he sealed up the pocket that contained the orb. Maybe the slimes will leave me alone, thinking that I'm one of theirs. He threw the pale purple and teal slime coat over his head and let the goo drape over his scrawny, blood-covered body. It was still warm. He didn't think monsters could be warm, but it didn't matter much to him. Slowed by the weight of the slime, Jaiden marched forward, once again, in a bloody mess of pride.

For the next couple of hours, Jaiden found himself in few struggles and dumb luck victories against various sizes and fifty shades of slime monsters, but he was able to pass by most of the beasts with ease. Each victory he did have to fight for was either stranger or crueler than the last. It wasn't long before he found himself at the base large, stone gate covered in drawings of bloods, paints, and arranged minerals. The door of the gate, luckily for Jaiden, was made out of a varnished old wood. He took a deep breath, preparing himself for his "epic" entrance, then kicked the door down and charged into the middle of the large, stone walled room.

"Hey, overlord! I'm Jaiden, the hero that's gonna kick your @#$," he declared proudly. His bold declaration echoed in the room for what felt like a whole minute as he kept himself locked in eye contact with a bewildered demon child not much older than Jaiden himself.[/spoiler]

Also had a huge league thing until they stopped caring about their characters so I did things.
[spoiler]

And a 10 minute sketch on Microsoft paint:

[/spoiler]

Might even redo some old sketches for some peeps, I know there's a few I could fix or redo better now than I could have before.

[Salanewt]

Wow, nice work! I had a little chuckle when I saw Tryndamere, but I like him a lot. Soraka is also really neat!