Horizon of Strange Stars: Cosmic Dump

So progress on Xanadu is going smoothly. Ideas just came flowing into my brain in one day and I wrote out like paragraphs at a time of ideas in the document. I also wrote out some stuff for the other Horizon Gates, specifically 5 and 4. Horizon Gate 2 is still somewhat hard to wrap my head around but I'm leaning towards something with an adventurous, tense feeling, like a journey in a world on the verge of exploding. Here's some art for some of the important people that will appear in Horizon Gate 1 in the meantime.

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This is Libera Echter Vondgren, a member of Elysium and the one who created this first of seven absurd, patchwork futures held together by an Out of Place Artifact. I tried to give the vibe of a tough hippy or some laid back biker for him. He's the kind of person that talks about "Peace and Love" and "Sticking it to the man" and stuff. And now he's "The Man", in a manner of speaking, as the ruler of Xanadu in the shadows and the orchestrator of this forced future. But he still goes with the flow. I drew his pose based off of Sakata Kintoki cause they give me similar vibes, though I'm still stuck in the London Singularity so I wouldn't know.

Sun Wukong ended up having a way smaller role in the story of Xanadu than I had initially planned back when these were meant to be Lostbelts and not patchwork futures. Initially, he was gonna be the ruler of a walled off, party hard kingdom ruling alongside the other demon kings who he had befriended in the first volume of Journey to the West, but things have sort of changed. He is still the lynchpin in Libera's plans for his Horizon Gate's prosperity, but neither he nor Libera are the true "Main antagonists". This will be a reoccurring thing since the main threats of each Horizon Gate will be the cataclysms brought upon these soon-to-be stagnating eras. The members of Elysium are trying to maintain and improve the futures they created to their own specifications so aside from fighting Chaldea, their plans are a bit more passive.

This is creepy guy is gonna be the center of events for Xanadu. I based his pose off of Shakespeare and he has my favorite design since Sun Wukong came out a bit disappointing. He is a Berzerker Class, despite his appearance and has voices from the dark tapestry between the stars screaming in his head. Poor guy, right? I tried to give him this "He's off his rockers" look to him. Also I tried to have the shape of his face to match the Xanadu logo a bit too, like Sun Wukong before him. Now the "Heretical Sage" thing goes two ways! Great Sage and Mad Sage!!!

This is "Carter Aldoa", the mysterious time travelling mage... again. I was dissatisfied with his previous design so I spiced it up with some extra Sci-Fi. That means more Tron lines and stuff. He doesn't appear in Xanadu either but there might just be a teaser at the end for what's going on in the other Horizon Gates... just maybe.

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The main theme of Xanadu as of right now seems to be "Immortality", or at least for the Servant roster. Not just the literal kind, but in some cases figuratively too. So people who've really left a big impression on humanity. Whether it's their ideals that carry on, whether they've left one unforgettable impression on history, or they wished to do so very strongly. Of course in the end, there ended up being a majority who were just after mere eternal youth and the likes.