azurite | Let's Play!

Royal Straight Flush by ~ the-sweet on deviant ART

Hm, DeviantART's hookup to LiveJournal doesn't seem to be up-to-date. Or maybe it's my Firefox 3.5 beta, which makes some things fabulous and other things annoying as all heck (cookie leakage and this "tag stripping"). Anyway.

Presenting, my latest and thus far possibly greatest Fan (Otaku) Senshi creation! I don't know how this originally got into my head, but once there, it got stick until I finally slapped it together the day before yesterday. The only reason why I'm sharing it here is because it's not merely a heavily-Photoshopped Sailor X v2.10 generator image, it's a plot bunny in the making.

Introducing...Royal Straight Flush! (Okay, if the "team" has a name, I don't know what it is yet.) But here's the story: when Sailor Kakyuu attacked Sailors Phi and Xi at Zero Sagittarius, one of her cards sliced some of the Sailor Crystals that the Star Gardeners had captured. Rather than destroy the Sailor Crystals, Kakyuu's power imbued each portion of the crystals to take on a new life: a life different from the one that those Sailor Crystals originally had within their host Senshi.

When the Galaxy Cauldron gets rebooted by Eternal Sailor Moon, the fragmented, would-be Sailor Crystals fly off with all the others, but have no home to go to. The planets re-form, but without a complete Sailor Crystal, there is no Sailor Guardian for at least four planets. Evolution is stunted and lives hang in the balance.

Meanwhile, the four fragments, lost in space, take the form of four girls with only limited Sailor abilities. They have no knowledge of their own, only the knowledge that is innate in all Senshi, and the memories of the battles fought by Earth's Sailor Senshi that came to them thanks to Sailor Moon's reboot. The four girls decide that, if they want to find out who they are and who "created" them, they should start with Earth.

They arrive to find a planet in chaos: the 30th century has arrived, and with it, much confusion, grief, and anger. Not everyone is willing to accept the "peace" that Neo-Queen Serenity offers, and cells of the Black Moon Clan spring up all over. With the Inner Senshi already working in Crystal Tokyo and the Outer Senshi protecting the border planets of the solar system, it is up to small teams like the RSF to help, and hope that they can find their answers along the way.

After many battles, they've established themselves with human lives that seem passably normal, and their acts of heroism as Senshi get them invited to the palace. On the way, they meet a mysterious stranger calling himself "Ace," but before he'll tell them anything about who they are, where their creator can be found, and their true destiny, he demands a message be delivered...to Sailor Venus!

Intrigue, mystery, and heartache abound in..."Royal Straight Flush!"

I did some major facial surgery on "Diamond." I flipped her for the sake of trying to have some variety, but I didn't like the way her face looked after the fact. I tried flipping her eyes back to their original position, but that looked "off" too. So I ended up copy-pasting her left eye and then restructuring it to better match her pose. I think it makes her head look a little tilted, which is nice. Her hair is also something I edited severely: I wanted to make it look like she had her hair pulled back in a clip. Everyone else's hair is as it is in the generator, though I did add some more bangs to Club.

Club is a closet gothic Loli (her bottom skirt is actually lace). But whether she started out as a Loli and became a Senshi or the other way around is unknown to her. It just may be that her Senshi persona is merging with the human one she's created....

Spade I intentionally wanted to look Irish, even though she's not even human. There aren't enough redheaded otaku senshi out there! I should have added freckles though, but I forgot. Do you like her heel-boots? I was trying to have fun with the gradient effect tutorial that *SailorXv2 posted.

I don't know if they'd actually be "Sailor Heart" and "Sailor Club" and so forth, but that is the general theme going on here. Also, I'm pretty sure Sailor Kakyuu's cards weren't even playing cards, but those "Magic: The Gathering"-type cards, but her attack *IS* "Royal Straight Flush" (if I'm not mistaken), and you can't get a Royal Straight Flush with MTG cards! Plus, there's probably a way to work that element into the would-be story for more dramatic purposes! Bwaha.

I wish I could have done a better job with Club's lace skirt. And maybe I should have done more with the gradient effects, but I knew I wanted them all to have similar Super-style uniforms (in terms of number of skirts and such), so I didn't want to give them gradient effects on that. Barring doing some crazy stuff with the hair (and I totally could have! Sailor California could probably benefit from such a re-do), that left the shoes to play with, which is why Heart and Spade have the gradient-effect shoes. (I wouldn't have done it with the suits themselves, since the background on standard playing cards is white.)

I don't think I've written any drama/action fics for the SM universe for some time, let alone one starring otaku senshi. If I wrote this, it would (fortunately or unfortunately), be epic. Gaaah. (Is it ironic that I own the Yu-Gi-Oh! Oneshot C2 on FFnet? I mean SERIOUSLY. ONESHOTS? ME!?)