Remembering a lost world


After more than a month i simply got enough of drawing this image.

I added two additional images relating to this in my scrapbook:
A GIF animation showing how it was made.
The cheetaans in their original size (The image is truly 2560x2048!)

The inspirational sources:
Towards the third milleneum
The city of death
Outlook by zarathus for the awesome water effect.

Click here for more info on the Cheetaan story

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An another realization of the cheetaan story, again the sun, and a decaying city.

But how those cheetaans come to live in such a rusted human city? Maybe this is also a good place to tell some about the original story, and the cheetaan itself.

Cheetaan is a lot different creature than anything living on Earth. They have a shape after which human named them cheetaan, that they resembled earthian cheetahs, but nothing is common otherwise than that.

The most important feature of cheetaan is that they have no age. They don't born and neither die the "usual" way, neither do they mate in the earthian sense. This comes from that they among some other creatures on their homeplanet had a different evolutional path: they evolved to be able to "understand" their genetical code, or better to say they have the alibity both to mix genetical code with others' and to spread the new genome in their body. By this they also came to understand more or less of the genome for which a complete new brain developed under their shoulders.

Due to this they and some other creatures sharing the same traits on their planet became extremely durable due to this new method of evolving. They developed such features that human wouldn't even dream of. Their skin is almost impossible to pierce and still they are very light, and are able to run very fast for long times. Even if they hurt badly they wouldn't die, providing the energy it is possible for them to recover from almost any damage.

These differences also affect much the culture. They are not affected by death and birth, so they never needed written literature. Their body is durable and it is possible for them to develop the way they wish, so they never really needed technological civilization (However with an athro-like creature on their planet they built one). Due to the way they live it is hard for them to give birth to new cheetaans (they don't even have normal reproductional organs), so killing is the greatest sin for them. They accept, however, deaths by "nature" (There are carnivores on their planet who are large and swift enough to grab some careless cheetaan and eat him).

Then comes human. The picture portrays an Earthian scene, not one on their home planet. A few cheetaans originally were taken to Earth to show them how advanced human civilization is, hoping this would make it easier for human to settle on their planet. They didn't really aperciate the human ways. To the end, human tried to simply get rid of those cheetaans, but then they didn't knew how hard is to destroy this creature. The result is this: they bred to survive, ended up only vaguely remembering a green home planet. The cheetaans who originally came to Earth didn't even tell the newborn that they once had a home. They couldn't know if there is anything left or not. They couldn't know if they are the last of their race looking back thousands years remembering something they thought eternal, but lost for ever.

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For DavidN's suggestion I also included the story snippet which I talked about on the creation's comment list:

And now for the story which gave the idea.

I have an old rather crappy sketch with two cheetaans on the top of some building watching the sun going down behind two abandonned skyscrapers. An another very similar theme I never released anywhere was drawn some time after that eleventh September, more on this one after the story.

The story itself involves a younger cheetaan, or in some variations a poor teenager from the slum, and an elder cheetaan, not necessarily from the homeplanet, but who knows the origins. One day the elder cheetaan tells to his adopted "child" that now it is time for him to know. They start a long trip through the abandonned slums where they live, where the clouds of smog never clear up, where they only vaguely know if it's day or night, and only a few remember what causes the cycle of dark and light. Most parts of this slum is even under an overworld where the rich live, and there due to the artifical lighting above day and night don't even exist. It is always the same faint light penetrating the eerie fog of dust.

So they walk and walk, out form the inhabited area, through the long abandonned factories, through many half collapsed buildings until they reach the ship graveyard at the edge of the sea. The elder cheetaan jumps on the nearest hulk. "Where are we going?". "Follow". They get through many old piles of metal junk until the elder cheetaan sits down on the stem of probably the farthest half-sunk ship from the shore like if the voyage ended here.

"What unholy craft is that?"

Asks the young pointing to some vague round shape behind the curtain of smog just above the horizon.

"That's the sun."