This piece was done for the R3 Jam, the character being Colossus, of the X-Men.
My original concept for this week was to draw Colossus from the Age of Apocalypse series, but Tulio came to the forum with an illo of Colossus slamming our TRDL character Bellicaust, and I wanted to follow suit. So here we are! Universes smashed!!!

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute: Colossus
2. TRDL Character Factory, No. 105: Bellicaust
3. R3 Jam: Colossus

Reverie is a rogue posthuman, with an agenda to ruin the national posthuman program in revenge for the loss of her family while under government protection.

Art and Origin: Thom Chiaramonte

:::

Reverie

Name: Michelle Mattesi
Affiliation: n/a

Attributes:

Melee: 20
Reflex: 25
Muscle: 15
Vigor: 15
Acumen: 20
Observation: 35
Will: 20

Life: 75
Influence: 75

Posthuman Latency Nullification: Reverie’s latent posthuman ability involves a mutation of her endocrine system, releasing an organic chemical compound, similar to a synthesized pheromone, that disrupts the nano-cellular activity in the bodies of posthumans in close proximity to her. The compound is released voluntarily, and is odorless and colorless, and has an Intensity of 50 and Range of 3 meters. Any posthuman within range must make an Orange Cell Save using their primary Ability Intensity, or be effected by the compound with a complete disruption of their bio-enhancements, of which the vast majority of true posthumans carry, from nanobots to chemical synthetic enzyme releasing agents. Victims suffering from this effect witness a complete collapse of their posthuman abilities, with a dynamic result: each affected posthuman must make a Vigor Save: a Red Cell result means that the posthuman is rendered powerless for 1d10 rounds. An Orange Cell result means they are rendered powerless for 1d6 days, and take 20 DP of internal damage from their system disruption; a Yellow Cell result means powerlessness for 1d10 weeks, and 40 DP of internal damage; a Fail means apparently permanent ability loss, 60 DP of internal damage, and a third Save, also Vigor, or the posthuman falls into a coma that lasts for 1d10 weeks. All posthumans, regardless of the results of their initial Ability Intensity Saves, also suffer localized malfunction of their sensory input: an Observation Save must be made, with a Yellow, Orange or Red Cell result resulting in -1CS to all Observation Actions, and a Fail preventing her presence from being registered either through sight or smell, though the affected posthuman may hear or feel her. All secondary sensory effects occur for the duration of combat, and must only be resolved once, at the beginning of the encounter. Lastly, and of greatest potential impact, each posthuman who is affected by an Ability loss must make a one-time Ability Intensity Save: a Fail results in a single round overload of their Ability’s manifestation: if the posthuman generates ice with 40 IV, for example, they would manifest an involuntary full-power release of this Ability at maximum range, which affects their own Life (regardless of any Invulnerability they may have to their own Ability), others in range, and potentially Reverie herself.

Origin:

Michelle Mattesi was a mid-level executive at TraumaSafe, the leading mobile surgical station deployment provider in the United States. The mobile surgical station concept was developed by TraumaSafe as a prototype for wartime medical units, but the concept was stolen by a rival company and deployed for civilian use, leased to major hospitals for on-site medical emergency needs at accident and disaster sites. While TraumaSafe was eventually able to gain dominance in the market, the losses associated with buying out or legally challenging their rivals were considerable, and the company teetered on the edge of bankruptcy before an in-flux of investment capitol from a silent partner allowed the company to survive. Ultimately, TraumaSafe would go on to become the industry standard in mobile medical services, but not without controversy. Rumors of mafia connections and government investigations dogged the company for several months before slipping out of Wall Street’s awareness as the posthuman national hero movement began to accelerate in the public consciousness.

TraumaSafe was very much involved in the mafia, and the capital that saved the company was made money. Mattesi became aware of this through her annual account audits, and became troubled over the moral implications of this secret deal. An undercover DEA investigation tracking the movement of gray-market surgical supplies approached her about certain material in TarumaSafe’s supply facility that were being watched as part of the operation, and Mattesi revealed the larger scope of the conspiracy, fearing prosecution. The feds, suddenly aware of a much larger underworld operation at work, manipulated Mattesi into cooperating with the investigation, spying on TarumaSafe executives and turning over financial and administrative records, in order to help build a case against the executives apparently responsible for the mafia connection. As part of the deal made with the feds, Mattesi would testify against Leo Gamintola, TraumaSafe’s CFO and the executive responsible for bringing in the made money that saved the company, in return for witness protection for her and her husband and three daughters.

Days after her family went into government-sponsored hiding, her DEA liaison reccommended Mattesi for the fledgling posthuman development program being sponsored by the United States, which was, at that time, recruiting viable candidates for treatment through law enforcement and military connections. Mattesi, being a former college-level athlete and remaining active in endurance sports as an adult, fit one of the desirable profiles as established by the Posthuman Planning Directorate’s public relations thinktank, and in fact, she was fast-tracked into the program as an ideal candidate, and was promised that her considerable salary for participation would be available to her family, who would remain in hiding. With no career options remaining with TraumaSafe, and desiring to leave the company well before the investigation would be made known publicly, Mattesi took the offer and became one of the posthuman candidates intended to seed a post-Liberty Group team.

While her posthuman treatments were initially successful, they did not perform at the level expected. She had been conditioned with a course designed to, they hoped, stimulate her endocrine system to release an organic chemical compound, similar to a synthesized pheromone, that would cause others in close proximity to suffer localized malfunction of their sensory input, preventing her presence from being registered either through sight or smell. The objective, at the time, was to design a posthuman team for covert operations to perform actions om domestic soil that might negatively affect the approval ratings of the popular Liberty Group team. Mattesi’s abilities were intended to allow her to perform stealth operations against other posthuman and non-posthuman agents, as a preventative measure, as the United States was beginning to detect resistance to the US/NEAI-driven posthuman programs abroad.

Unfortunately, when Mattesi’s abilities did not manifest in field tests, her recorded chemical analyses were marked erroneous, her training halted, and she was forcibly retired from an active role in the program. While she remained an employee of the federal government, and was given an option to assist in the training and management of other posthuman candidates, her reduced role was troubling and frustrating for Mattesi, as she had grown to greatly anticipate her posthuman identity and professional future. Reluctantly, she accepted a role training new candidates, and found herself managing the athletic regimen for her former co-candidates.

Three weeks later, despite the DEA’s attempts to cover up the error, Mattesi received word from a friend in the Justice Department, that she should check in with her family immediately. As part of the deal reached with the feds, her family had been moved to an undisclosed location and was to remain in hiding until after her completion of the posthuman program and creation of a new identity as part of her reassignment after graduating and entering her professional arrangements as a posthuman operative. However, after pressing her DEA liaison for their whereabouts, was horrified to learn that a contractual legality required that the witness relocation program for her family be terminated once her active role in the posthuman program ended. Due to this technicality, her family was left unprotected, and their identity masking was lifted within government records. The were found brutally murdered and disemboweled, stuffed into a supply container in vandalized TraumaSafe vehicle in an industrial area outside of Detroit.

Enraged and deeply in shock, Mattesi lashed out at her fellow program aides, severely injuring two and mortally wounding a security officer. When posthuman candidates in her field training group burst in to restrain her from further attacks against her staff, they were rendered immediately disoriented and apparently powerless. Susprised to realize that her abilities had indeed seemed to have manifested, but only against posthuman targets and beyond mere sensory deprivation, Mattesi swore revenge against the program that led, in her eyes, to her family’s murder. Before she was done, the entire graduating class of posthuman candidates were de-powered and either murdered or severely injured by her attacks. Fleeing the facility, Mattesi went underground, only to resurface months later in an assassination attempt on members of the Liberty Group, thwarted only by the intervention of 21st Sentry who, as a normal human, was unaffected by her abilities.

The murders of her husband and children were never formally solved because the crime was buried, as the DEA attempted to distance itself from the crisis, the family officially declared victims of a traffic accident in the local paper. While TraumaSafe might have escaped involvement in the scandal as well, the mysterious and abrupt suicide of two members of the TarumaSafe executive group, including Leo Gamintola, raised questions about the stability of the company, and it was soon bought out by former rival LifeLine and closed operations the same year. Under the assumed name Reverie, Mattesi escaped to Europe and began targeting posthuman national heroes, promising to relieve them from the burdens of their posthuman roles, permanently.

:::

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Universe Gallery.

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Character Factory, No. 102: Corona
2. TRDL Character Factory, No. 44: Republique
3. TRDL Character Factory, No. 21: Arctica

This time, the character selection is Loki.
You can do any Loki you want…

Traditional:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki

Comics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki_(comics)

Or something in between?

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute – Loki 01 [New Thor]
2. TRDL Tribute – Loki 02 [Original Version]
3. R3 Jam: Cloak and Dagger

This should put you more safely in your comfort zones for the week.
Colossus of the X-Men!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(comics)

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute – Colossus vs. TRDL’s Bellicaust
2. TRDL Tribute: Colossus
3. R3 Jam: Celestials

This week’s TRDL Friday is a whole chapter of the comic. Whee!

:::

Have you been waiting with white-knuckled anticipation (or dread) all year for a new chapter of Finit-e? Wait no longer…

Scene 03 has been added! I hope you have a chance to check it out on the TRDL Site… then let me know your thoughts, here when you can!

Annotations for the first two chapters are now available, in the Finit-e Comments section of R3. Annotations for Scene 03 will be up in a spell…

Please note, I am no longer publishing low-rez versions of the comic, so if the higher rez version is too fat for your monitor (or not fat enough) download the PDF instead. The PDF now includes a glimpse at the character matrix as well.

Thanks for your patience, my R3 Army…

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. Finit-e Graphic Serial: Scene 03 Now Available!
2. TRDL Finit-e Graphic Serial: Scene 03 Comments
3. TRDL Finit-e Graphic Serial: Scene 01 Comments

Have you been waiting with white-knuckled anticipation (or dread) all year for a new chapter of Finit-e? Wait no longer…

Scene 03 has been added! I hope you have a chance to check it out on the TRDL Site… then let me know your thoughts, here when you can!

Annotations for the first two chapters are now available, in the Finit-e Comments section of R3. Annotations for Scene 03 will be up in a spell…

Please note, I am no longer publishing low-rez versions of the comic, so if the higher rez version is too fat for your monitor (or not fat enough) download the PDF instead. The PDF now includes a glimpse at the character matrix as well.

Thanks for your patience, my R3 Army…

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Update: Finit-e Graphic Serial Scene 03
2. TRDL Finit-e Graphic Serial: Scene 03 Comments
3. TRDL Finit-e Graphic Serial: Scene 01 Comments

Annotations for Finit-e: Scene 03

I’ll be posting a selection of thumbnail sheets in this Annotation section, so you can see how the pages mutate and recombine as I get closer to final pencils. You may note some panels move around, and others are fairly consistent with the early roughs…

Pg. 22, p1: We have an idyllic island facility here. This predates the show Lost, though it was one of the first coincidental similarities to cock my eyebrow since starting production of the comic. In early drafts, the Arges Group was headquartered in Switzerland, but I changed it to Vancouver, because having Swiss in-laws, I didn’t want the attention. The original draft of this scene specifically occurred at the Arges Group campus, not the remote RAES facility we see now. However, it was to similar to a later scene, so I moved the action to the Caribbean to tell this part of the story. Originally, this whole exchange between Darville and Samsel was to occur off camera and merely be referenced in dialog between Samsel and Royal. Parish, and the Sokak Corporation, weren’t even referenced in this part of the Finit-e story initially. But as I realized I wouldn’t even remotely live long enough to tell the full planned story as originally conceived, I decided to start condensing and and overlapping some of those threads. Thus, Parish is along for the tour, and the intent of the field visit is to give Samsel his kiss-off early warning, in favor of Sokak’s initiatives. Previously, it was merely Darville gloating overconfidently about the US’ self-management of Project Cabinet. What is Cabinet? We’ll see.

This plane is an example of where I’ve introduced a more futuristic technological element to the nearly-now context of Finit-e. This is a VTOL swept wing supersonic jet. Note that logo on the tail? This isn’t a US military aircraft, but a private jet supplied by the unidentified independent security contracting firm whose troops are here guarding and escorting Darville on this visit. This is an important distinction: Darvile is discussing American military and defense contracts with an independent, non-nationally-aligned corporation, on foreign soil, without official military escort. I wanted to show that more and more of the contemporary military and defense needs in Finit-e are outsourced to private corporations. This is a long-running theme in cyberpunk literature, as is the corporate city-state, which, in Finit-e’s case, includes Arges/RAES (In the Finit-e story continuity, Vancouver is an independent corporate city-state.) Here, it’s interesting that Darville is criticizing outsourcing intelligence services, but is relying on outsourced defense resources. Since Finit-e was being written, the war in Iraq brought to light the real-world reliance of the Bush Administration on independent contractors like Blackwater, as troops on the ground not beholden to American military command. I was stunned. I had no idea independent contractors in wartime had become a reality. To me, it was still a figment of cyberpunk literature, the corporate army concept. So, when rendering this Scene, I played to current events quite a bit, and stylized the private corp supplying these troops after a certain major controversial company in our Iraq troubles.

Instead of Blackwater’s five-toed bear claw icon, I’ve got something a little more brand-aware!
One of many ways art imitates life imitates art, in the seemingly endless production of Finit-e.

RAES is not really a subsidiary of Arges Group, a highly efficient independent corporation that focuses on intelligence gathering and interpretive analysis. Arges as a whole offers technology-minded advancements in many different fields, all within the context of intelligence gathering, and relies on the semi-autonomous Research Arm of Emerging Sciences [RAES] which in analogous to DARPA. While RAES operates as a lean, self-sufficient operation, they are beholden to Arges’ Executive Council, which approves it’s budgets and greenlights operational experiments. RAES vets new technologies and then feeds them into the Arges programs for deployment worldwide, either on loan to client nations, or for internal use. Arges is based in the corporate city-state of Vancouver, which is an autonomous entity from Canada and is the home of severallarge post-national corporate powers. RAES itself exists in a short string of satellite instalations in remote geographical locations, simply constructed but highly secure.

Arges is not a weapons manufacturer or defense contractor in the conventional sense. Their mandate is to manage and provide independent intelligence available to client nations, in order to mitigate some of the grevious intelligence gathering and interpretation errors of the recent past that led to disastrous foreign policy problems, largely by the United States. It is an emerging reality in Finit-e that private corporations are relied upon by financially strapped and understaffed government programs as outsourcing service providers where traditionally, in the real world, we would hope to never do (though the Blackwater thing reminds us that it’s more a part of our reality than I would prefer.) Outsourcing intelligence is a scary concept, and one that General Darville here, a member of the old guard, is highly uncomfortable with. But privatization of not only government services, but provisions for them from sovereign external corporate city-states, like Arges, are the way of the future in Finit-e.

We are meeting a number of new players here. Ted Samsel, General Grover Darville and Roland Parish can be explored in the Finit-e Character Matrix.

Pg. 23, p4: It’s been obvious, so far, that Roland Parish isn’t a part of the US military, and is accompanying Darville on this RAES facility tour as a contract partner. Here we see that he is an Enhanced human, specifically with regards to his cyberoptics seen here. It may seem hypocritical of Samsel to be condescending and critical of Parish’s reliance on these enhancements, when RAES is the experimental arm of Arges that does also explore similar technologies. The fundamental difference is that RAES researches biological and engineered technology modifications specifically in order to further the gathering and assisted interpretation of intelligence, as well as other services of interest to intelligence operatives in the field. They are always about the intelligent use of information, Sokak, Parish’s employer, is a full-tilt future technology company specializing in offensive and defensive combat schema. They are far less interested in, in fact don’t even understand, intelligence gathering. They provide the toys. While Arges coexists with companies like Sokak in providing outsourced services to mutual client nations, and in fact many RAES technologies are employed in Sokak designs in the sensor and communication AIs, they are always fundamentally at ideological loggerheads, Best use of intelligence precludes the use of the weapons and equipment Sokak provides, and vice versa. This conversation is implying a policy shift back towards armament and away from cautious intelligence reliance.

Pg. 23, pB: We are shadowing one of several deployment teams in the Kittering Tower stairwells. These are not the only guys climbing the tower, as you can imagine.

Pg. 25, p1-2: Samsel’s observations here about Parish are completely fabricated. I don’t even smoke. But I have noticed the different ways smokers hold their cigarettes, and I have also noticed differences based on country of origin, growing up, so I played that up here. Samsel’s comments are about interpreting behavior. Parish’s response is typical of the specialization divide between them: it is focused on data gathered from his cyberoptics. Samsel may or may not have a heart condition. It is interesting to me that this is Parish trying to play the intelligence game with hard tech, where Samsel merely observed his rival’s body language. It should be obvious that biometric data can be masked or manipulated, rendering Parish’s intelligence false, while Samsel’s observations, especially when trained to look for falsified behavior, can focus on non-voluntary responses. Still, this last jab at Samsel on the way onto the plane strikes it’s mark. Sokak are in favor with the US, and this means bad business for Arges, bad politics for RAES internally, and dangerous trends in international issues.

Pg. 25, p3: Enter Stanford Royal. Through this Scene, I’ve tried to start by showing him as a second to Samsel, with the appropriate vocalized respect and positional deference: standing behind Samsel, absorbing information, and supporting his boss. However, as we proceed through the Scene, Royal is testing the water for his pitch.

Name root: Stanford Royal’s name is meant to invoke his increasingly-obvious appetite for control. Royalty. Etc.

I thumb all the bottom panels independently from the top, and in sequence…

Pg.26, P2: I’ve never tried to draw rain STARTING before. One of the fun, but challenging, aspects of sequential art is the implication of the passage of time. Scott McCloud’s books talk a lot about the action between panels, and how different this medium is from any other. Working in a film-like panel style, I often don’t use sequential art cues I might otherwise use in a different style, that make it easier to suggest the passage of time. In my case, I use scale. In each of these Scenes, where people are walking and talking, we have a mental image of the speed of walking (3-4mph, statistically) and the way we enter and exit spaces as we go. I tried to use the backgrounds to suggest pacing. The environments seen are largely consecutive. This is walking pace. If I wanted to show time having passed, I would exaggerate the differences in each background panel, so you saw it as snapshots along a longer journey. Anyway, here, I wanted to show that tropical rain condition where it starts and stops on a dime, and the weather can change dramatically at various times of the day. We see here that there are a few drops in panel 3, and rain proper by panel 5. I used the opening of the umbrellas and the fact that they are still standing there, to show this came on fairly quickly. A warm, predictable tropical shower. Royal has come equipped with umbrellas for the both of them, which is a planning detail I wanted to show. It’s not the assistant bringing the boss a coffee, but rather bringing them BOTH the umbrellas. It is meant to suggest that Royal is tending to Samsel, as is his job, but is always tending to himself as well.

This is a pic of the FAMAS – F1, a modified version of which is the rifle that the infiltration team is carrying.

Pg. 26, pB: I love showing data without showing data. If you see someone get a note passed to them near you, it’s human nature to want to peak at it. So, this is a pretty simple narrative device, sort of like the gun on the mantle, but you can’t really make out the model. I suppose you can safely infer that this note is important. Also, eagle-eyes have seem this guy before.

Pg. 27, p1: We’ve seen RAES security staff here and there, but not many. Here, they are standing within the lobby to the facility, but not an overt visual barrier at the exterior, as you might find in other types of operations. RAES does employ security, both fixed and roaming (like we saw in panel 1 on the first page, and would be seen in this panel, had they not been covered by a word balloon.) But overall, security is handled electronically, and is passive. A lot less pressure when you are a remote island. Then again…

Pg. 27, p4: What’s with the pompadour? This is an old design cue from my D:HT campaign days. You will see many characters with this sort of hairstyle in my earlier material. I established a design style for young, upwardly mobile corporate alpha-males as suits with old world collars and tight ties or ascots, and pompadours. Weird. It all boils down to digging on the Smiths, I have to admit. Since Finit-e is spiritually, if not in-continuity-connected to my cyberpunk stuff, I’m not going crazy with these designs, but I do show select corp individuals in Finit-e wearing this style. I consider it A trend in city-state corp culture, but not yet THE trend, as it was in much of my campaign material. Go check out those game characters, and you’ll see what I mean.

Who is this guy, and why does he seem to be taking orders from someone else, and in a power position over these operatives?

Pg. 28, p1: I wanted to show that Samsel was putting on his game face before, but is demoralized. He’s seen this coming for a long time, and knows his career won’t recover if he’s blamed for losing this contract and giving the Americans too much control over Project Cabinet/ Chrysalis. Even though Arges made that deal in the first place. Also, that guy handing Royal the file? For one thing, this shows Royal timed this moment to make his play. For another, this is a cameo: it’s my close personal friend Blake Simmons, himself involved in emerging biotechnologies in the real world.

Pg. 28, p2: Yep, there’s a telltale neck tattoo on this guy walking away from you in the foreground. It’s not relevant to the story. It’s a Heroes homage.

Pg. 28, p3: I struggled with this room forever. At times, it was very stylized and futuristic. It then devolved into looking deceptively like a simple conference room. I thought from a design perspective, despite being more boring than I’d like, it’s more consistent with the level of passive tech in this facility. Not to say that there aren’t areas of the RAES station that look high-tech… but not in these above ground, office/admin/executive program areas. So, it’s conference room. The White Room is basically a transmission shell. N signals in or out when the countermeasures are active. This is the sound-insulated conference room concept, brought into the future tech intelligence world.

Pg. 29, p1: I’m not certain this comes across, but I was trying to show Royal instinctively using the sub-conscious body language of moving to an alpha position by owning the physical space of the other. This can come in various forms, both intentional and unintentional. We experience it with bodyguards and bouncers who insert themselves in our way, with thugs who step too close to set you off your comfort zone, and with flirtatious people who touch or tease gently with intimate motions intended to seduce passively. Here, Royal went to put a hand on Samsel’s back, as if to guide him to a seat in that way one does as a host, with a guest. Samsel stopped him in his tracks.

Pg. 29, p3: Project Draco’s symbology is kanji for, yep, dragon. And a detail that amused me and probably no one else, I made the pages non-repro salmon color. The reason I had to laugh was that this is merely the by-produt of the photo-reproduction age we live in today, and are slowly leaving. I scan red-page documents when I need to. There’s no reason to assume this level of security really makes any sense, other than habit and protocol.

Pg. 30, p4: This panel was a stylistic detour for me. Certainly I’ve played with backgrounds here and there, moving away from the literal detail, when needed for composition or for tone. But here, I’m trying to suggest that our attention is exclusively on Royal, the way Samsel might, as the viewer, become a little hyper-focused. As I’ve moved through this Scene, I’ve tried to show Royal becoming more and more confident in his body language as he makes his pitch to effectively save Samsel’s career, sabotage the American Project Cabinet program, and then bail out their client with a newer, better, faster version of the program, but one that RAES retains complete maintenance control over, and oh hey, that client is the largest superpower on the planet, squeezed into complying with the new agreement terms out of embarrassment, political humiliation, and operational risk. This is a very dangerous game, to borrow from Rucka. And the whole thing was hatched, researched and developed behind Samsel’s back. So by this panel, Samel is effectively being informed that his second is about to make a power play, and that he’s being politically blackmailed into approving it. So, Royal’s getting aggressive, like the young power broker that he is, and POINTING at his boss.

Pg. 30, pB: What’s the note say? GAH!

Pg. 31, p3: I used this view to show that Samsel, in digesting the brief, and reluctantly playing ball, knowing full well he’s been cornered, is now at the planning table with his nominal subordinate. They are no interacting as if equals, from a body language perspective. Sansel’s a smart guy, but a tired career man. At this point, he’s had to move past the shock and betrayal of Royal’s surprise pitch, and is now looking at minimizing his risk, and, I’m sure, looking for ways to wrestle this thing back from Royal if it’s actually successful.

Pg. 31, p4: At the end of every Scene, I go back and do a few sweeps for continuity checks. Usually I’ve gotten everything nailed down by this point, having drawn in all the digital details and edits, and caught any major omissions or gaffes. This time, however, I discovered I had Samsel’s watch on the wrong hand, and had to do a lot of digital corrections to make it work.

Pg. 32, p1: Royal’s pitch was a success, and his plan was executed precisely as he intended. He got Royal’s approval to proceed with his scheme. He made some assurances, and obviously, by the size of that brief, he’s simplified the details, and streamlined the data to a modestly sensitive ‘deniable’ level of complexity, so that Samsel could beg off criticism and some degree of responsibility, if things go terribly wrong. Documented briefs have been written for deniability, I’d wager, for as long as pen has been put to paper. Not that Royal won’t have ways of latching his scheme to Samsel and RAES as a whole, like a giant squid, so it Samsel doesn’t have the protections he may think he has, based on the brief. But of course Samsel knows this, too.

The verbal command here is a nod to my favorite (and one of the only) details from the Demolition Man film: Wesley Snipes, after taking control of the building, curled his fingers and said "Illuminate." and then "dilluminate" to control light levels in the room. I thought it was awesomely paced dialog delivery. Verbal commands to automated systems aren’t new. But I always took away from that film the coolness of that scene. So, Royal’s command ‘Fenestrate’ reveals the passive complexity of the technology in this room. The opaque panels behind him throughout this Scene have been the glazing system on this exterior wall, in the White mode, but this command causes the transparency of the film to change. It was awesome in Blade Runner when they used the roll-down translucency, but today, we actually have dynamically-adjustable translucent panels which change based on an electrical impulse in the film on the panel, so I tried to treat this technology with some subtlety, as something very common and taken for granted. Additionally, the transmission shell is deactivated with a verbal command; this is actually using passive voice recognition technology. A janitor couldn’t walk in and verbally deactivate the shell.

Pg. 32, p2: Royal’s command into his phone suggests other players have been waiting for confirmation on the results of his meeting. There’s more going on here than Samsel imagines. And the schedule, and intensity of the operation, is much more aggressive than Royal presented it to Samsel.

Pg. 32, p3: This is a homage to one of my favorite shots from Heat, where Neil leans against a column in his beach house, looking out at the pre-dawn ocean from a dark interior. This shot was one of the principle inspiration elements Mann brought into the visual tone for Heat, based on a painting by Alex Colville called Pacific 1967. So cool.

Pg. 32, pB: This operative has command control of the Lobby infiltration and detainment team, as you can infer from the dialog and his special cowl. However, he doesn’t know who the pompadoured corp is from the preceding panels.

End of Scene 03

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Related posts:

1. TRDL Finit-e Graphic Serial: Scene 01 Annotations [BONUS]
2. TRDL Finit-e Graphic Serial: Scene 02 Annotations [BONUS]
3. TRDL Finit-e Graphic Serial: Dossier – [Samsel]

If you followed this link from the button in the Finit-e comic reader, then please do post your thoughts on what you’ve seen in Scene 03. I know it’s sure to be frustrating, to get into a string of sequential pages and then have it end… that’s the downside to publishing by scene or chapter instead of single pages… but understand that each Scene will be published in it’s entirety. Some are longer than others, and as you go, you may, I hope, be compelled to go back and re-read earlier Scenes. There’s straightforward storytelling and then there’s Finit-e. Hopefully, you enjoy the book and find the journey worth taking, as it’s definitely a journey book more than anything.

If, on the other hand, you HAVEN’T read the comic yet, and came here looking for it? Visit Third Rail Design Lab and click away!

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Related posts:

1. TRDL Finit-e Graphic Serial: Scene 02 Comments
2. TRDL Finit-e Graphic Serial: Scene 01 Comments
3. TRDL Update: Finit-e Graphic Serial Scene 03

You can now visit these threads below, to read the Behind-the-Scenes commentary on Finit-e Scene 01 and Scene 02, including seeing what didn’t make the cut, looking at roughs, supermodels, and the like. I hope you enjoy it, and if it encourages you to reread those first two scenes? That might not be a bad idea. Because Scene 03 is on approach…

Scene 01 Annotation:
viewtopic.php?f=44&t=5265

Scene 02 Annotation:
viewtopic.php?f=44&t=7585

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Just got back into town, so we’re starting late int he day on this one…

this is a DESIGN CHALLENGE. Design a SuperYOU. It’s you. A self-portrait. As a superhero. Be farcical, be realistic, make up your powers, use your farowite wished-or abilities, whatever. Lets make this one fun!

If you need power ideas, you can make a random superYOU here:
http://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/xmanalb/M … rator.html

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