#oc: solimar

[meldoesthedraw]

💚💙🎲🎶 hey guys check out my new otp - Solimar x Dr Tongue AKA Solitongue!!!

(oh gosh that sounds like a pokemon xD)

inspired by this comic panel from Issue #2 of the Muppets: Four Seasons comic, which featured a character named Dr Tongue as a one-off gag. I got to thinking of him as an AU version of Dr Teeth and wanted to draw him,,, and of course, what else could I do but sketch an AU Marisol to keep him company? <:3c big thanks to my sister for helping me finalize the details of her design~

[the-navistar-carol]

who is an OC that is near and dear to your heart? What is their story?

The obvious answer that everyone would know would be Kelly “Vacay” Savannah, because she’s the main character of “Aftershocks” and there’s a fairly good chance people would know who I’m talking about. However, the obvious answer is wrong.

Long post ahead lmfao, this is your fair warning.

I will elaborate on any of these characters if someone asks.

From an old writing project I scrapped, the dragon princess Birch and her half-demon girlfriend Twilight mean so much to me. They’re the epitome of crossing every border of perception. Erika Heiden, the woman who grew to love a power that was forced upon her, the one became a storm incarnate — Alessia Rybak, the illusionist who turned from Cold War Soviet spy to an underworld-famous one of six, protecting instead of endangering.

Sakura Arai, the writer who gained her confidence, and Daiyu Cheung, the one who was forced to learn power wasn’t everything.

From the Miraculous RP server, Valérie Levi, for who she became. She was me, in the most human and fulfilling sense of the word, and if she could rise to greatness, I could, too. Jamie Lee, my outstretched hand to every fallen friend, was my reassurance that my actions mattered. Eva Sepal, my self-loathing, became a better person, though that rocky road never let up. She had friends, at the end of it all. Friends who would help. Kacie Lee, my naïvete, was my reassurance that just because I didn’t know something — it didn’t mean I was any less off for it.

To Aidan Fierro, who did his best with what he had; to Nagihiko Fujisaki, who was loyalty in a way very few can be; to Colin Strami, whose patience could outlast the world; to Victor Guzman, whose anxiety was never taken as a joke; to Tina Zaipe, whose trauma was taken seriously.

From my own private and unpublished Star Wars writing projects, Jeena Tika, for standing her ground. Jamille Klaskoll, for pursuing what — and who — she wanted, even in the depths of it all. To Shaari Sandspear, whose occupation as a seamstress became a silent cry for rebellion against slave-masters. To Silja Sykemi, the Clawdite spy who, somehow, managed to juggle optimism, too. I have some snippets that I might post on Ao3.

From my Star Wars RP server set in the Clone Wars, I love Nima Choko wholeheartedly. Nima, whose epithet became one of the matched "Twin Suns," who refused to let a war dictate who she was -- Jedi or General. To Nol Solga, the Shadow who did not lose himself to the Dark inherent to his profession. To Indali Solimar, the Jedi Initiate who has not overcome her fear over her own abilities but gets up anyway. To Luviel Homa, the inexperienced Senator who used connections available to her friends as her own. To Karis Stoclo, she who was taken from her family but made herself a new one. Pix Mitraza, the man who believes himself as no better than his profession -- a headhunter -- and does good anyway. To Bracer, Livewire, Lock, and Burner: clone soldiers, copies by nature, but each all irrevocably different. And Jhati Jessot, the woman who never should have had to become who she is, but also the woman who will make the world her own.

For Aftershocks 'verse, I love Kelly "Vacay" Savannah for how she loves -- without question or doubt. I love Marisol "Floodgate" Carter for how I wish I could do what she does in how she refuses to stand for anything less than her own standards. For Ezekiel "Twister" Morris, when he appears, for being more than his past mistakes.

I could go on about more characters than just these.

But they are all me, when it matters.

[ghostwise]

ch 1 :: the tonitrus

It was not immediately clear what had occurred, but Solimar relied on a keen intuitive sense which told them that the ships crowding around the mass relay were all wasting their time, and that in all the confusion following the inexplicable destruction of the reaper forces, there was a hidden possibility for reward; it was only a matter of where, and how.

Astrophel was less optimistic.

“I hate this. We still don’t know what’s going on,” he said, glaring at the control screens of the shuttle as he maneuvered them over city ruins. “We should just leave while we can, before something else goes horribly wrong…”

“You worry too much,” Solimar said with a grin. “Trust me. I got a feeling that relay isn’t going to budge anytime soon. And what’s the first thing everyone will want when they realize it?”

“Um…”

“Supplies!” Solimar tapped the viewscreen, making Astrophel jump. “These warehouses used to be full of rations… we might find something interesting while everyone’s distracted, yeah?”

“But… why did the reapers just keel over out of nowhere?” His mandibles flared, he shook his head. “No. Something’s wrong. It could be a trap. It doesn’t feel right.”

“I don’t know why the reapers do what they do, Astrophel. But shit’s already hit the fan. There’s no cleaning it up, so let’s just do what we do best and try and salvage what we can.”

And though Astrophel could think of ten more reasons why Solimar was wrong, he couldn’t bring any of them out of his worried mind. So, he flew the shuttle, in uneasy silence.

The red sun was setting over Benning when Astrophel set them down on an old abandoned courtyard. The city had long been evacuated, leaving them alone in the rubble.

“Stay put!” Solimar grunted, tapping a few commands into their omnitool and opening the hatch as they landed. “Should be easy for a coward like you, anyway!” In a burst of blue biotics they sped off.

Astrophel’s mandibles flared in irritation. He soon followed at a run.

.

In any war the front lines were never clearly delineated; they wavered, changeable as air currents, and a city street could just as easily be a battlefield the next day. However, there was a predictable standard of deviation to war, and Sol knew it well.

Things were kept mobile. Portable servers, comm devices, makeshift hospitals that could be packed up in minutes. As a professional profiteer, Sol didn’t know what to search for, but they’d know it when they saw it.

Flitting across the landscape they scanned their surroundings, while Astrophel puffed along behind, out of breath simply due to his nonstop bitching.

When the turian finally caught up he opted simply for shooting a steely glare at his companion. Solimar grinned at him.

“Good, you came after all! Did you notice comms are down?”

Astrophel’s expression softened to one of confusion. “How can that be?” he asked, opening his omniscreen. “Even through the worst, Palaven was still getting comms through. Benning wasn’t hit that badly was it?”

“Dunno. But whatever’s going on, it won’t be long before someone comes along to secure everything. In the meantime…” They nodded at the scraps of metal they’d found.

“A drone?” Astrophel’s eyes lit up, despite his unease.

Solimar nodded. “Here, reroute some of your omnitool’s power and help me get it back.”

“No.”

“Astrophel, c’mon!” Solimar threw their hands up, exasperated. “We don’t know how much time we have! This is important!”

The turian glanced back, raising an eyebrow plate. “What exactly are you hoping to gain?”

“Information,” The asari tapped gently on the drone’s shell. “It’s going to make all the difference in the next few months. Don’t think of it as stealing, think of it as… recovery!”

“I wasn’t-” Astrophel wheezed a little, an odd sound, coming from a turian. “I wasn’t thinking of it as stealing. Soli, are we stealing?”

“Of course not!” Solimar said all too quickly. “I wouldn’t—psh! No!”

“But-”

“Recovery, Astrophel. Recovery.” Solimar smiled at him. “Then we can get back to the shuttle, alright? What do you say?”

Astrophel regarded them for a moment, then sighed.

And so the two turned their attention to the dented little scrap of a drone, salvaging what they could.

.

“Well, shit.”

Astrophel looked up at the words, watching as Sol scanned the drone’s contents. They had both downloaded the information to their omnitools, and now perused the files individually.

“I was hoping for something like supply routes or Alliance secrets. This just looks like some kind of… computer program.” Closing out of the files, they sat back on their heels and sighed. “Waste of time.”

“Maybe.” Astrophel’s eyes scanned the lines of code thoughtfully. The work had calmed him down considerably; moved him from fretting about the possibilities, to wondering about them. “Maybe. Maybe not…”

Solimar rose to their feet, glancing upwards at the sound of ships passing by. “We won’t be alone much longer,” they said. “Cerberus and the Alliance have been scrambling over these ruins for months. With the reapers down something’s bound to give, and I don’t wanna be around when it does. I’m doing one more run before heading back. You coming?”

“In a bit,” Astrophel hummed. “Gonna spend a bit more time on this one,” he added, subharmonics already taking on a dreamy tone, the kind which indicated that he’d fully absorbed himself in his work, and would not be moved until he finished.

Solimar rolled their eyes. “Sure, now you want to focus on the drone,” they muttered. “Suit yourself. Comm me when you’re finished.”

.

It figured that Astrophel only cared about something when it proved to be incomprehensibly dull and pointless. Still, Sol wasn’t complaining. They moved faster alone anyway.

Already, the asari had returned to the shuttle twice, each time carrying a load of supplies. They searched for more drones, or perhaps a data terminal, but found none. Food, however, had been easy to locate.

The cities of Benning had boasted automated agricultural centers since their founding, but the war had decimated the population. Following that, evacuations and Cerberus raids took care of the rest. What this would mean after the war remained to be seen; there’d never been a war quite like this, after all, and the planet’s fate seemed precarious.

The crumbling granaries made an enticing and easy target for Solimar. It was a shame that they wouldn’t be able to share with Astrophel. This had been a human colony, after all. No turian food.

“All for Solimar, none for Astrophel,” they hummed cheerfully as they worked.

An unfamiliar stillness had descended on the planet, punctuated by the sound of distant ships passing by. Setting down the knapsack they’d been carrying, Solimar opened up their omnitool once more, only to realize, with a jolt of uneasiness, that it was still offline.

It was literally unheard of. In all their years, the extranet had been a steady and reliable presence. Outages, though rare, usually lasted mere minutes. Not hours. Not this.

Had local communications been altered? Following that hunch, Solimar made an adjustment to their omnitool, in order to pick up internet as well as low frequency radio waves. The screen immediately lit up with transmissions from the planet’s surface.

“There we go…” they whispered, tapping at volume controls and listening. “Sounds like a party.”

News reports from local agencies, maps, and most importantly, radio messages: a look into what was currently going on in the area. Solimar grinned, suddenly feeling less alone. These transmissions were coming from someone. Most of them were encrypted, but an exchange of information was happening in real time. Decoding the transmissions seemed worthwhile.

As they worked, events were being set into motion that would impact all their lives for years to come.

The effort to rebuild was already underway, and while many knew of the Crucible, of the thousands of hours of labor that went into winning the war, and of the implications in the destruction of every mass relay in the galaxy, most people on the ground still weren’t sure if the war had been won at all.

This information would ultimately impact who lived and who died.

As the first transmissions began to clear up, Solimar leaned in and listened closely to the choppy voices coming through the comm.

“… Hostile vessels incoming … … all stations, impose radio silence …”

A military transmission, by the sounds of it. Solimar raised a brow, sensing, once more, that intuition that had guided them onto the planet’s surface. Only now it was telling them to go.

And they would have gone, immediately, had it not been for the transmission that followed.

“Mayday! … coordinates as follows … … medical officer of the Tonitrus requesti…”

“… impose radio silence …”

“Mayday…”

“… hostile vessels incoming …”

“Requesting immediate assistance… please!”

“This automated message will repeat.”

.

With his companion gone, Astrophel was content to sink into the lines of code for a while, pondering over their meaning. Something in them felt vital, like there was a revelation waiting to be stumbled on… but then again, they were in a war zone, and maybe he was just paranoid.

Glancing up nervously, he looked to the horizon where a reaper had fallen. He felt fairly confident that this particular one was no longer a threat, but then again, there had been a hell of a lot of reapers. After nearly a year living in constant fear, he was not prepared to drop his defenses after a few hours of quiet. Unlike Solimar, who seemed to just shrug and carry on regardless.

More ships passed overhead, adding to a din that was getting closer, not farther. What was that Solimar had said? That they wouldn’t be alone for long? Perhaps they should head back to the shuttle after all.

It clicked then, suddenly. The idea that had been percolating the entire time he’d been working on the code.

Astrophel scanned the information a few more times and yanked himself to his feet, stunned by his realization. It was a hell of a lot of data. In retrospect, he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t noticed it sooner.

“It’s for a ship… a ship’s navigating program,” he said out loud.

This could prove to be useful after all.

.

Evenings on Benning were odorous, not poetic. Agricultural waste and warfare made for pretty sunsets, though, and Solimar wished they had time to appreciate the view.

Sprinting in a streak of glowing blue across the ruins, they caught up with Astrophel right where they’d left him, still analyzing data and mining information from his screen like a mad scientist.

“Cut the nerd shit for a moment and listen to this!” Solimar said. Ignoring Astrophel’s protests, they played the transmissions they’d recovered.

‘Attention. Hostile vessels incoming. All stations impose radio silence until further notice. Instructions from Alliance Command will be forthcoming. This automated message will repeat.’

“Radio silence…” Astrophel repeated carefully, listening. “These are all on local frequencies? Is there anything from outside the system?”

“No. Everything’s local, and hella encrypted,” Solimar said simply. “Comm buoys must’ve taken a beating during the last attack because there are no off-planet communications coming through at all. We’re cut off.”

Astrophel suppressed a shiver at the thought.

“Go back to that first transmission,” he said after a moment.

“The mayday? What for? There’s nothing we can do without the coordinates.”

“But you have it saved, right? You don’t have the right encryption key, but I could probably get the coordinates if you pass me the file.”

“Come again?” Solimar scoffed.

“The Tonitrus is a Turian frigate. It should be the same codes the Havincaw, which I served on.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, simply yanking Solimar closer so as to patch into their omnitool. Solimar meanwhile had taken on a rather deflated look, sinking to a crouch as Astrophel worked.

“Huh? Sorry? What’s happening?” they asked. “Since when do you know anything about military encryption keys? You can’t say shit like that and just-”

“Got it!”

Astrophel clapped his claws together, letting out a celebratory shout. “I have the transmission, the coordinates, and best of all...” At this point his grin turned towards positively revolting, all needled teeth and gaping jaws. Solimar winced a little.

“... Best of all, I have the ship’s missing navigation program. Let’s go! We have to hurry!”

Turians shouldn’t grin, Solimar mused as they followed them back to the shuttle, still baffled. Looks like a thresher maw with a Glasgow smile…

But they ran after him all the same. A profiteer and a war deserter, racing against nightfall, and whatever followed.

[ghostwise]

aaand a close up of these jerks

I made them look marginally cooler than they really are, seeing as Soli is basically your local weed man and Astrophel is what my sister described as ‘whatever the Mass Effect equivalent of a millennial is’.

[ghostwise]

I know we see omni-tools having a very specific appearance in Mass Effect, but what if that’s just because those are specifically for military use? What if civilian omni-tools come in assorted colors and designs. What if they’re smaller and more of an accessory. With little downloadable apps. I’m pretty sure they can already be used for games, pictures, etc. What I’m saying is who’s stopping me from giving Solimar a bubblegum pink omnitool they can vape with hm?

[ghostwise]

Not anyone’s first choice of heroes--not experienced or well equipped, nor exactly ethical. But you take what you can get.

Solimar and Astrophel are my Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer OCs :^)

[ghostwise]

I LOVE SOLIMAR SO MUCH

[ghostwise]

just a quick concept for an OC

all I know for sure is their name and that they’re angry :v Solimar!

[ghostwise]

On the surface, the Citadel during war-time was very nearly the same as the Citadel during peace-time. Here, Astrophel spent his shifts preparing drinks, letting the loud music in the club drown out his stray thoughts.

The lower decks were amassed with refugees, and the Council worked hard to keep them there. Out of trouble, they said. Not enough resources to process everyone through, they said. No one wanted to think about it more than they had to.

It was below the surface of things that the war reared its head, peering at him. It delayed shipments to his place of employment, which meant half their menu items were unavailable these days. It left a mass of customers who were angrily medicating stress and anxiety, often taking their own worries out on him.

It was inside him, too. In his shaking hands. He kept spilling the drinks.

He wasn’t getting many tips these days.

Not that anyone had cash to spare anyway.

On the surface, the Citadel was an oasis of peace during war-time.

But the war raged and raged, and Astrophel clocked out at the end of the day, and walked past it, avoiding eye-contact.

[ghostwise]

Meanwhile I am playing the ME3 multiplayer thanks to my sister and tbh my main focus is on MAKING TOO MANY MASS EFFECT OCS. What am I supposed to do with these OCs?

Astrophel (the hesitant Turian soldier) Solimar (asari badass, too cool for u) Polyp (the most precious quarian) Unnamed Turian scientist lady

I love them, I’m gonna draw them.

[ghostwise]

2, 6, 10, 18, 22 for anyone of your choice?

Ahh that’s a lot! Thank you!

2. What OC has/is a mentor?

Coraline learned most of what she knows from her greataunt, Hester.

The mediumship skipped a generation, so while Coraline’s motherwas sensitive, she wasn’t able to guide her daughter through the experience ofbeing a young medium. Hester had spent decades honing her abilities andstudying them, so she quickly stepped in. She was a close family member, and avaluable mentor. And when Coraline began showing symptoms of her schizophreniashe helped her with that, too…

Hester has since passed away, and Coraline runs herbusiness out of the old house she used to live in. She spends her spare timeorganizing Hester’s notes, categorizing her collection of haunted/enchantedobjects, and engaging in a hobby of taxidermy! That’s unrelated though; shejust does that on her own.

6. What OC is the Mom Friend?

Vesna is the mom friend in that she has a habit of assumingresponsibility for EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING. If one of her friends has a problemshe is quick to step in, even if it comes at her own disadvantage. She’s nosyand she’ll tell you her opinion even if you don’t ask for it. Her friendsappreciate her more than they can say. 

She stresses out though! She has two thinning spots on herscalp where she scratches at absentmindedly when she’s anxious or deep in thought. Leading a rebellion will do that I guess. My poor weather witch ;o;

10. What is your favorite familial relationship betweenyour OCs?

I did this one for Isaya and his adopted family—but I neverpass up a chance to talk about healthy and good family relationships tbh I justlove them so much

I’m super fond of the relationship between Nousha and herfather, Reza. Their story is a long one, but for some background: There are messyfamily politics involved, a royal lineage of unicorns, abuse and betrayal. Dundun dunn, right? Basically, he was tried for treason when Nousha was a teenager,was found guilty and executed… or so she believed.

Several years passed before they reunited, and neither hadbeen aware of the other’s survival, so it was an emotional experience for bothof them. They were quick to catch up on the time they missed together. At thatpoint he was completely mute, having had his tongue removed for his crimes. Shelearned how to understand sign language, so they could communicate. He learnedhow her medicine worked in case she had a seizure while he was around. She alsogot to meet his husband (NEW DAD!) and introduce him to her wife (NEW DAUGHTER!).They stick together from that point on and are basically precious.

18. Which OCs would make the worst couple?

My gosh I have way too many OCs for this to be an easyquestion. Let’s say Morana/The Colossus because one is literally an ancient demon encased in a cursedcrumbling city of stone and bones. Plus y’know, Zi died within its confines!Not cool?

22. Which OCs spend the most time together?

I’m going to make a huge leap of genres and say it’s myMass Effect OC bunch, particularly Astrophel and Solimar! When you’re travelingthe galaxy on a tiny ship you kinda get used to being in each other’s businessat all times, that’s just the way it goes… for better or for worse. Once therest of their crew joins up it results in even closer quarters. They’rebasically this patchwork family of lost and mourning people, each impacted bythe Reaper war in their own way. Boy do they get sick of each other at times, though.