Oh yeah, a little shading, and our Keelar is coming to life! While I work on my alien, I will give you some more details on the Keelars… because you know you aren’t reading the chapters of my fourth novel in my action/humor science fiction series: The Otherwhere Chronicles, which I have been posting.
But I will start that tomorrow. I have to drive somewhere, and see a thing.
Uh… why yes, I do know that it isn’t much to look at yet. All I did was take that original image, the pencil sketch of the little Keelar… the bad guys in my science fiction novels… that I scanned into my computer… this image…
…and add a very simple background color. Don’t worry. It will get better as we go. You can think of this as a how-to series of posts about using Photoshop. Or you can think of it as a bunch of funny art posts. Or you can not think about it at all. HA!
(Author’s Note)… I have given up doing the author’s notes, because nobody is actually reading this… HA!
Chapter Sixteen
After a not-very-long nap, which his friends all knew he needed, and let go on for as long as possible, Arthur woke to find that things in the universe, indeed any universe, could and did go on happening without any help from him.
The General apologized for waking him, and then filled him in on what he had missed. The General actually waved his upper tentacles with excitement as he ticked off the good news. “The whole second wave has come over to our side. Once they realized they were surrounded by the enemy, the beacon ship on this side of the gate surrendered peacefully. Well, they were tempted to try to slip away utilizing their stealth capability, but Gup convinced them that he could track them easily enough, and that was that. I have no idea if he was bluffing or not. I took the precaution of beaming robot Number Three and a Reaver to the ship to take control of it.”
Arthur was too busy waking up to respond, but he nodded and smiled sleepily.
The General went on with his briefing. “The Obama came through the gate moments ago, and that’s the last of them. We are all on this side of the gate and forming up for battle. Oh, and the Orion is going to be arriving at any minute. They have a ‘special delivery’ for you, according to our young Captain Hulls.”
“We need to save the Earth here,” mumbled Arthur wearily. “I promised them.”
“As your tactical advisor,” said the General seriously, “I advise against any kind of assault. There are, no doubt, Keelar ground troops occupying the major cities. Any fighting on the ground will result in massive civilian casualties and take a very long time. We are not well supplied with infantry or support units. The good news is that the scanners indicate that the Keelar have no ships in orbit around this Earth. They seem to be marshaling all their ships together to fight us. The bad news is that there are two other Keelar fleets besides the original third wave of the invasion. These fleets each contain 300,000 ships.”
“Nearly a million ships,” Arthur moaned, “we can’t fight against that.”
“Of course not,” said the General sagely. “But we can lead them on a merry chase so they don’t take out their frustration on any of the planets they rule.”
“You have obviously given this some thought,” said Arthur with a fond smile.
“That is my job as you may recall,” said the General smugly. “And I needed something to keep my mind occupied while you caught up on your beauty sleep. So now, as you put it, we need to cut off the head of this rather large snake.”
“Right,” Arthur agreed. “We just need to take out Fahh, and they should fall into disarray.”
“Exactly,” said the General, sounding like a teacher who was pleased by his student’s brightness.
“I love it,” Arthur beamed. “It’s so Lord of the Rings. The good guy army challenges the armies of the Dark Lord while a select group of ring bearers sneaks in the back door and brings down the evil empire. We are the perfect small band of intrepid warriors for the job, well versed in sneaking and such.”
“Also, as it turns out,” said the General, as if Arthur hadn’t interrupted, “the great Fahh has grown rather fat and no longer leads the Black Fleet in person. He is back on the Keelar Homeworld, holed up in his palace.”
“So, a single spy ship should have no trouble sneaking up on him,” said Arthur in a conspiratorial way.
“That would seem to offer our best chance of success,” was the General’s response.
Arthur glanced around the cabin of the trusty little spy ship. In one corner Number Four the robot was doing repairs on Number One. Number Two and Number Three were doing duty on the other spy ships, along with Gup and the Qualm. But he had the General and the Warlord. And there was Oox, his big, loyal bodyguard, whom Arthur had finally come to realize was a bit clumsy for a Xxo. In fact, he had secretly been pronouncing his name as ‘Oops’ for a little while now.
Arthur spotted little Frodo leaning against one of the crates of needle guns. The Hand-Friend gave Arthur four thumbs up, and Arthur couldn’t help but smile back. And there were seven of Rubar’s Reavers. Rubar and one other were also guarding the captured spy ships. The Reavers were busy checking their own needle guns, no doubt for the hundredth time. This was the crew of his little ship that would go with him into harm’s way. He felt a lump in his throat.
He got up to look over the Warlords shoulder, if I may be allowed to misuse that word, to study the screen. His fleet, so much bigger than before, was following the General’s orders and setting off slowly in the direction of the nearest Nexus Point. There were no Hubs in this reality, Arthur had been surprised to learn, but the Nexus Points would always be the focus of strategy for a war in space. He who controlled the Nexus Points could go where he wished. His fleet would not travel in a straight line, but rather in a zigzag that would keep the Black Fleet guessing about their final destination, or so the General and Arthur hoped.
The Orion is through the gate,” the Warlord passed on. “They are signaling that they are ready to receive us.” He then docked the spy ship in the Orion’s cargo hold.
Captain Kelsey Hulls was there to meet Arthur. She was calm and precise as she gave her report. “We had time to grab several thousand crates of the vortex energy weapons, as the Zitarans call them,” she finished.
“Good job, Captain,” Arthur congratulated her. “I will take a crate with me. We need to go. Catch up to the fleet and stay with them. Make sure my friend Jon gets on to the other Arthur’s ship. And keep safe. The beacon ships are shutting down and hiding, so no one is using the gate for a while.” Arthur climbed aboard the spy ship holding the crate of guns. He yelled back over his shoulder, “And Captain, pass these vortex guns out to the reaction-security forces on as many ships as you can. I suspect that the Keelar may be allergic to them.”
And the spy ship was off. They needed to hurry. The Warlord checked the scanner screen and reported, “The three enemy fleets are taking up pursuit of our units. Top speeds should be about the same for most of their ships and our ships, so as long as they don’t make a mistake and get boxed in, they should be able to stay ahead of them.”
It took three hours for the spy ship to reach the Nexus Point closest to the other Earth. That was remarkably fast. The engine was a Protek design. It seemed strange to Arthur that there was no Hub floating majestically by the Nexus Point. As they lined up to transit the point a ship, a small freighter, blasted out of it and missed smashing into them by less than a mile. This may not sound too close, but trust me, in space travel that is a very near miss.
The Warlord was not happy about using the Nexus Point with no traffic control from the Hubs, but they had no choice. Fortunately, this spy ship had traveled to the Homeworld before, and the General found the needed speed and vectors in the ship memory and they did a quick jump. They managed to transit without hitting anyone and shot out of the point closest to the Keelar Homeworld safely. And there they were, less than an hour later, in orbit over the birthplace of the Keelar race.
“How do they send communications across the universe without the Hubs?” Arthur wondered aloud.
“Gup figured it out,” responded the General. There are relay stations scattered about, another Protek device, evidently.
“What in the twelve Halls of Destiny is that?” asked the Warlord, flicking a tentacle at the screen. “It is in geosynchronous orbit over the capital, whatever it is.”
The scanner was picking up a large structure floating above the planet. “Switch on the camera mode and zoom in,” prompted Arthur. “Let’s get a look at it.”
Before the Warlord switched the screen from radar mode to camera mode he noticed something. “That is strange. Gup’s scanner, the one that detects the transport machine energy signal, he left it hooked up to our scanner. And it is picking up a very strong energy field. But it is continuous, not like the long pulses when a beam is used to move someone.”
The big screen mounted on the forward section of the pilot’s deck shifted from its blip and vector line mode used for navigation to a direct optical view. A strange gantry-like framework of octagonal metal braces supported by a spine-like beam appeared before them. It looked like a backbone with gleaming bare ribs still attached to it. At one end of the spine, like a skull on the neck, a modular rectangular environmental section had been mounted. Supposedly someone, or many someones, were living there.
“What the heck is that thing?” Arthur wanted to know.
“Maybe that is the booster station for the comm signal network,” suggested the General. “That framework may be antennas of some sort. Or maybe a small research station.”
“Zoom in on it,” said Arthur. He had a feeling it might be important. As the view expanded they spotted something green nestled in the ribs like a beating heart. The rib cage, thought Arthur, is a cage indeed.
I have been toying with this idea. We have all had guests post on our blogs, right? We have all done posts on other people’s blogs. But what if we did a group project? What if we did some kind of art village in blog form?
You know what I am talking about, I presume. Those little enclaves where artists gather in one place to do pottery and glass blowing and wood carving. We could do that in blog form. I did sort of the same thing with that post I did where we are trying to break the world record for the most comments on one blog. It is still there—> at the top of my sidebar—> with a link to the post. It has 44,656 comments on it. We turned it into a chat room on a blog… the first ever, as far as I know… and it does have more comments than any other WordPress blog post by a non-famous person. *(You should go leave a comment there, if you haven’t already… or even if you have)*
But what if we gathered a community of writers and artists? What if we shared each other’s posts, and did links, and guest posts. What if we gave tips and ideas, or had group discussions on things like developing characters for novels, or step-by-step how-to lessons on… whatever.
This could be fun. A place where painters and graphic artists and photographers and wood carvers and song writers and novelists could all showcase their work.
We could call it something like: ‘Creative Juices’… okay, we can talk about that.
Let me know what you think.
I think it is a space parrot… eating a space turtle… maybe…
Although I will admit that the first night, I forgot it was there, and when the light automatically came on, I thought I was having some kind of flashback… and that my pee was glowing green like nuclear fallout. But, other than that…
Every time I look at the fence in my backyard, I see more things hiding there. This duck-billed alien thought he could escape my notice.
Sorry, but before I shut down the picture of the alien I created for one of my novels, I had to run her through some filters…
Neon aliens… that should be a thing…
Not too bad… I like the gold colors…
Tie dye aliens!
And you know I love that flame filter!
No, I don’t mean making images of aliens… although that is fun too. When I was writing my science fiction series: ‘The Otherwhere Chronicles’, I had to create hundreds of alien characters, and dozens of alien species. It isn’t easy to come up with something new. There is a lot of science fiction out there.
Because I decided to write these novels without planning ahead at all, I would frequently throw in a new alien when things seemed to be slowing down. First, I would think of an amusing premise… a ‘hook’, as it were. Because these are action/humor novels, I would do things like creating a race of very warlike beings, but we would meet the most cowardly of the bunch. Or I would make them very cute and lovable, but they would have a dark secret. That is why we have characters like a vicious warlord who conquered his own people and many other races, but was then brainwashed so that he couldn’t condone any conflict. He could’t even argue, or play poker. I also made a character from a race of arms developers and weapon sellers, but this one had converted to Christianity.
Next, I would make a pencil sketch of a generic member of the new race. This was mostly to help me remember how many arms, toes, eyes, tentacles, or whatever, they had. Also, how big they were. This is important stuff to remember.
This is Fawnya. She showed up in book two. I know, I have two versions of her. I will get to that. After I make the sketch, I get to know the aliens. I carry them around in my head. I have conversations with them. I wonder what they would do in everyday situations. Because most aliens in this other dimension were learning English, I found that it helped to give them a voice. A lot of them ended up sounding like movie villains. Boris and Natasha, the cartoon Russian spies, were used for one character. The broken English helped make the character real.
Fawnya ended up sounding like a stereotypical Jewish mother. All she wanted was for you to eat more soup… you are too skinny… and why don’t her kids call her anymore? Then you throw in some extra, amusing details… like the fact that she and her henpecked husband live, as do all their kind, in a hollow volcano made of their own poop.
There is the original sketch I did… after I ‘fleshed it out’ in Photoshop. The two color versions were just for fun. I think the green one is the color I went with in the book. So why am I telling you all this? Because I am going to take this sketch…
And try to make it look more real. This is how I drew it when I invented the Keelar… the evil race from yet another dimension, getting ready to invade the dimension in the novels. They are small. Their bodies are about the size of an American football. They have two fleshy pads for hands. They have six eyes, and mouths that smile… but like a carved Halloween pumpkin. As I post more chapters from book four, I am going to do posts to show my progress on this little Keelar.
Okay, see you around.
Chapter Fifteen
Lim’s four little legs started to wobble, making him unsteady, though his shark-toothed jack-o-lantern grin did not waver.
“It’s all right, you will look just like the Doraimee, you just have to sound like him. Can you do it?” Arthur pressed.
“Maybe, but I not like it,” mumbled the unhappy little being.
“Gup,” Arthur said, “tell me we have a picture of the Doraimee somewhere.”
Gup pushed some buttons and a Keelar appeared on the screen. He was the most bloated and saggy Keelar Arthur had yet seen. And he was painted red from top to bottom. He was ranting into the screen at full screech. “This was in the memory banks,” supplied Gup helpfully.
The translator had difficulty keeping up with the ravings of what turned out to be the Doraimee’s inspirational speech to his troops of the first and second wave of the invasion forces. There was something about it that struck Arthur as hilarious. It was like listening to Adolph Hitler if he had swallowed a balloon-full of helium. Arthur scanned the screen with the small holograph projector. He was only getting the front view, but he hoped it would fool the monitor camera.
He gave the projector to Frak and showed him how to use it so that Lim could see what he would look like. When Frak turned suddenly into Fahh before his eyes, Lim was so impressed he literally fell over.
Arthur sent a quick secure message to the other Arthur to get his ships lined up to go back through the gate, but told him to leave room between his ship and the next in line so the Warlord could bring the spy ship through behind him. “I will be joining you shortly, I hope,” Arthur told his other self. Then he signed off and told Lim to proceed with his little one-Keelar show.
Lim turned on the projector and activated the comm channel. The captain, who was still seated at the comm station on the other ship, fell right off his seat when the Doraimee appeared on his screen shouting for him to bring his ships back. He was a little confused, because one of the Doraimee’s Ministers had just finished telling him not to do it, but no Keelar was going to argue with Fahh face to face. He trembled and groveled and that was that.
When the channel was clear Arthur thanked Lim profusely, then turned to Gup and said, “I really want you with me on the other side, but I need you to stay here to make sure we can get back, understand, buddy?”
Gup agreed with moist eyes.
Arthur called the other spy ship and told the Warlord to prepare to follow the other Arthur’s ship through the gate. “If you have any problem, call Gup,” Arthur suggested, and before anyone could object Arthur cut the line and beamed himself to the command ship of the first wave.
His other self gave him a wry smile once he was firmly in one place. “I don’t know how you did it, but we have a signal. We can go whenever you are ready.”
“Okay, let’s do it,” said Arthur with magnificent calm. “Remember, we have a stealth ship following us that won’t show up on your scanners. And don’t forget we are supposed to be damaged and running for our lives.”
“No problem there,” said the other Arthur in a voice as dry as space itself. He gave a gun-flicking hand gesture to his second in command, who told the officer at the controls to move the ship.
“Can you show me the gate?” asked Arthur, purely out of curiosity.
“You can’t see it from this side, I don’t think,” the other Arthur replied. “And on the other side, I think we should keep moving.” He paused for a bit, and then said, “You do have a plan for when we get over there, right?”
“Oh, sure, I got a plan,” said Arthur, rather convincingly. “But it’s kind of open-ended. You gotta play these things as they come.”
The other Arthur looked skeptical, but he kept quiet.
“Let me know when we get through the gate,” said the Arthur with which we are most familiar.
The other Arthur shot him a half-hearted smile. “Been there, done that.”
“That was it?” asked Arthur, feeling sort of let down.
“It’s a short, straight tube, not a roller coaster,” the other Arthur replied evenly. “You just follow the beacon. So now what do we do?”
“Just pull off to the side and try to look damaged,” said the Supreme Allied Commander.
“Oh, great,” sighed his other self.
“Communications coming in from both the beacon ship and the Command ship of the second wave,” said the comm officer. He didn’t know which Arthur to address, so he stared into the air between them as he spoke.
You’re on,” Arthur told the other Arthur. “Don’t over do it. They think the Doraimee ordered them to let you through.”
The other Arthur looked askance at his other self, and then turned toward the comm screen. “This is the commander of the first wave. I am withdrawing my forces through the gate. We have sustained damage. Hell, most of my ships are damaged. We have taken heavy losses.”
On the screen Arthur saw two faces, that of the Keelar captain of the spy/beacon ship, and, Arthur felt a surge of hopefulness, a Dram who looked very old and was wearing a big, fancy hat with a purple plume sticking rakishly out of it. His fleshy face and huge nose wobbled, and his multitude of chins rippled as he spluttered at the screen. “What has been happening over there?” the second wave commander, or so Arthur assumed him to be, was demanding to know.
“We got our asses handed to us, that’s what,” snapped the slightly thinner Arthur. “We received orders from the Doraimee himself to come back and join his fleet to protect him.”
The unhappy Keelar captain of the beacon/spy ship confirmed that the Doraimee had indeed ordered the ships of the first wave back. The black-clad Arthur signed off before anyone could object.
The young comm officer appeared confused. “I’m getting another comm from someone calling himself ‘the General’”.
“Put it up on the screen,” commanded the more popular Arthur. When he saw his friend he continued, “Well, General, you made it. Any problems?”
“No, the gate is simple enough. Just point and go, as long as you know where you are going,” said the General.
“I will be joining you in a minute,” said Arthur. He turned to the cracked-mirror image of himself. “Just form your ships up and pretend you are doing repairs. I’ll let you know what our next step is when most of our people are on this side of the gate.” And with that he beamed himself back to the spy ship.
He stood for a while behind the two Xxos, watching one ship a second pop back through the gate. He had the Warlord switch over to outside camera view on the screen, but quickly grew bored with the view of a Giant Pickle with both ends blown off spitting out space ships like watermelon seeds. They switched back to flight view with its blips and vector lines, and he kept an eye on the huge mass of blips that floated nearby, the 28,300 or so of the second wave that had not surrendered. It would take him an hour just to get 3,600 of his own ships through the gate, but at least they were flowing out of his universe and not in to it.
He thought of something else as he stood there. Before the hour was over he would need to decide how many ships he would need to leave behind to guard the second wave ships on the other side of the gate. Were those captains of the ‘trusted’ races going to betray that trust and join him? He could only sit and wait. They needed a little time to make such an important decision. He sat wearily in one of the sturdy seats in the cabin of the remarkable little spy ship. He was asleep in moments, drifting off as he wondered why the seats were obviously meant for someone who was very human-shaped and sized.
He slept for all of thirty minutes before the General woke him. “You have a comm from the second wave sub-commander,” the General informed him.
The Dram called Vitar something-or-other the 47th made his message short and sweet. Very sweet. Arthur had new allies.
“Start funneling your ships through the gate with the human first wave ships. I want you to come first and as soon as possible. Maybe you can convince the second wave commander to see the light,” Arthur instructed the Dram Captain.
“See the light,” replied the Dram. “I like that expression. I may indeed be able to persuade the Grand Commander. He is my uncle.”
Not only that, but it turned out that Vitar Nomsinica Devleonis the 47th was the Prince of the Dram Systems. His uncle, Vinar Nomsinica Preyastener the 212th was Regent and brother to the King, Vitar Nomsinica Devleonis the 46th.
The King, and I use this term even though obviously the Dram had their own words for Kings and Princes and Regents, and the Monarchy does not work exactly as one on your Earth might, was very old and in poor health. He was on the Dram Homeworld confined to his bed chamber.
To make a long story short, (I love that expression even though I seldom take it to heart, as I’m sure you have noticed), as the second wave ships came back through the gate, and their captains spoke with the captains of their own races, it didn’t take too long for the idea to spread through the mass of second wave ships who hadn’t gone through the gate that this might be their one and only chance to get rid of Fahh. By the time the last ships of the Allied Fleet were passing through the gate, Arthur was in command of 33,300 ships, not to mention the Obama, the Orion, two spy ships and his own Reaver ship nestled in the Orion’s hold. Arthur was unaware of these developments because he had fallen asleep in the comfy chair again and missed all the excitement.
Hit this button!
Click it! Just do it!
Click to go to book page with links
A book for kids... Click to go to book page with links
Otherwheres Collide-my newest book
My latest novel
Pouring My Art Out by Arthur H. Browne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Based on a work at https://pouringmyartout.wordpress.com/.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Pouring My Art Out 