Garm: The Surgeon and the Children of Xyn.

Garm: the Surgeon is easily my favorite (personal) character.  I've explained him a bit before, but didn't go in-depth into the cult itself.

The origins of this whole sprawling mythos came from a drawing I fell in love with when I was in junior high. 

That drawing is so bad I refuse to post it here.

But the ideas of biomechanical fusion and beings that were some sort of horrible techno-zombie, rotting and still able to come after you, stayed with me.

Of the multitudes of books I've collected and hoarded over the years, the Undead Green Blood art book is a particular favorite.  It also led to this illustration:

You can really smell the Yasushi Nirasawa.

And so, their legion grew and the mythos changed.

I started to draw on more mythology from around the world and combining them with several unified stories.  The biggest of these is a thing I've only been calling Sylvertongue (the protagonist's familial name) and as I wrote it, editing the beginning (horrid) parts, the Xyn rose again, clattering and screeching in the dark, lusting for attention.  So I worked on them, hammered out the stupid ideas and patched them into a dystopian future full of strange cults and a society balancing the knife's edge of doom.

The  Children of Xyn draw their name from the malevolent force their "leader," Goukai Gin, also known as Ragnarok, channels.  As the stories go (told by the oldest of the Children), Gin was nearly killed by another, who also channeled Xyn's malevolence.  As he lay, eviscerated and perforated, Xyn took hold of him and forced his body back to life, pulling the waste from around him into a body.  To aid in his breathing, he donned a gas mask bewitched by Xyn itself.  He became the first, and others were drawn to him by the dark whispers of Xyn goading puppeteer's strings to burn reality.

 

Garm (on the right) before the Children.

Garm became more interesting given this idea.  The idea of hierarchy in an anarchist cult that wanted the end of all things was silly.  In a world were magic suddenly began to exist (I refer to prevalent use of an energy source that bends physics and not the occasional ragged edge of reality one finds now and then in our current world) science has a whole new field of unexplored variables.  Garm studied at MIT and majored in "metaphysics and physiology" with a double minor in faerie and lycanthrope biology.  his thesis on the use of magic to manipulate the human genome was almost cause for an arrest.  His job was with the Black Water military contractors designing super soldiers.  Most of those he grew didn't survive outside the embryonic tanks they were birthed in.  So he started to test fully grown subjects.  He was expelled from the organization with a huge cover-up and was drawn to the Children of Xyn for obvious reasons:  They let him work on whatever and whomever he pleases.

Also on the way are some more finds from Dr. Jones, a translation of one of the hand pages, and some of Dr. Shiloh's notes.  Work and an internship (on top of my duties at the ESS and for Mr. N. Tep, esq.) is consuming most of my week.

 

The doctor will see you now.