This isn't exactly going to be a weekly thing and technically it's still Tuesday but I figured I've got a few minutes to kill so why not answer one of the many questions that nobody ever asked: What's the deal with Cayes's shell?

So first things first on the creative side of things I have to give credit where credit is due. The seed of the idea for Cayes was first planted when I came across this image by  chochi http://www.furaffinity.net/view/11152558/ of a Rule-63'd set of Ninja Turtles. That picture mixed itself together in my head with my desire to take an otherwise "ugly" species and anthropomorphize it into something beautiful. Toss in my love of corsets and a few other factors I might talk about in a future journal and the character that would become Cayes was an inevitability.

But, as I do, I couldn't just will her into existence without some kind of back story to explain how she came to be who she is. She's a turtle who doesn't look like any other turtle, and that's exactly the kind of thing that demands an explanation.

So the story is that she wasn't born that way. She was born with a pretty ordinary shell as turtles go: pale and flat on the front, coloured and domed on the back. But she lived in a society of mammals, who valued things that mammals value: soft curves, boobs, and looking good from every angle. The social pressures through adolescence were pretty rough to deal with. While the mammals told her she'd never be able to be beautiful in their eyes, the turtles told her that her beauty lay in who she was and that she should adjust her vision of what beauty was.

But Cayes didn't take kindly to being told to just give up on her dreams of achieving her personal vision of beauty, which was heavily influenced by the mammalian form. She wasn't going to give in to those people who told her that her opinion of beauty was invalid, and she wasn't going to give in to those people who told her she could never achieve it. It was only when she came upon the body-mod community that she finally found people who truly understood her, and reassured her that whatever her vision of beauty was, it was not only valid but she could achieve it.

And so she undertook a multi-year body-mod program which involved a slow process of repeatedly applying chemical softeners to her shell and then binding it with forms to reshape it, later followed by fine sculpting, polishing and redying to bring out the lines and make the front just as flashy as the back, and then topping it off by installing a set of pierced grommets up each side to hold the corset-style laces.

It was an empowering moment for her when she completed the transformation, one that cast the mould that would shape her persona for the rest of her life: She had taken full control of what everyone told her was uncontrollable, and made it her own.

That same drive to tame the untameable was what eventually lead her to take an interest in dominating Nicoya, the unruly hentai tentacle kitty. She saw the challenge and knew immediately that her place in life was to rise to it and conquer it utterly. But that's a story for another time.