So I decided to read Ken Penders echidna stuff, well the bulk of the important stuff anyway, and yeah, it's pretty fucking bad. If I'm honest it's kind of so bad it's good territory if you ask me. The story starts out reasonably coherent, nothing groundbreaking but not horrible apart from the bas character designs and uncanny art. But after a while it just devolves into this incomprehensible mush at points, there were moments so bad and ridiculous they almost killed me, I didn't know if I'd die laughing or crying while reading this mess. That said, there were some things I noticed and thought were tiny nuggets of a good idea. There's sincerity in Penders work and I do appreciate that even if the skill isn't there and there's some obvious daddy issues being worked through and themes about family cycles that could have been interesting in the hands of a better writer.

So I decided to redesign Laura-le and Locke for the Reborn universe and write a story with our boy Knux inspired by Penders story, the plot basically combines a few different echidna stories and changes A LOT but these two stick fairly close to their original Archie counterparts in terms of personality and the over all family dynamic. A lot of what changes with them as characters is how the story frames them. Cause I'm sorry, Locke is a fucking asshole and not a good person, not so shit as to be entirely irredeemable but he doesn't get to be a hero in my book. I actually liked Laura to my surprise she and Julie were some of the most enjoyable characters in my reading session to my surprise.

Redesigning these guys was a lot of fun. Teoxochitl (or Teo for short) is from the north side of Angel island winch is a dessert region with more Egyptian style clothing and architecture (though I still use the Aztec language Nahuatl for both sides of the island and they share the same gods with the same names) while Tlatilo is from the south side which is more Mezo-American inspired. Since Laura was always wearing lots of yellow I wanted to give her a lighter color pallet that gave a similar vibe and while testing out colors stumbled upon this shade of peach and fell in love with it and just kind of based the rest of the colors around that. I was less sure at first what I wanted to do with Tlatilo's colors since Locke is just Knuckles with a neck beard glued on and a white coat. He did get a redesign later and I took some inspiration from that design. While fiddling with his colors I made this red orange combo that looked like lava to me and felt compelled to make the cloak a dark brown to match with that molten magma look. It felt like a nice nod to the fact his name can mean hidden or burned. Of course a name that means hidden just felt unbearably perfect for a Locke redesign. As for Laura-le's new name Laura comes from Laurel with is a plant native to the Mediterranean and significant in roman culture, since obviously the Aztecs wouldn't have a word for a plant that grows on the other side of the world I decided to look through words for different plants and flowers and "godly flower" stuck out to me since Laura was characterized as very devotedly religious.

So new story for these two. Hundreds of years ago Pachacamac tried to use the master emerald as a weapon and brought the wrath of chaos upon their people and they were almost entirely wiped out like in the game. When Tikal put Chaos to rest she disappeared along with most of the population of the island. However some people who lived on the fringes survived and continued to live on the island but their population dwindled over time without enough people to sustain it. Eventually a family from the north came to the south side looking for other people as they were the last people left on the north side, their family found Knuckles family who agreed to take them in. Tlatilo wasn't found of accepting northerners but his father encouraged him to try and get along with them. Eventually Tlatilo would fall in love with and marry the northern families daughter Teoxochitl and they would eventually have Knuckles who they names Cecepoctli (which means knuckles, he anglicized his name upon realizing most surface dwellers had a hard time saying his name) By the time Knuckles was a tiny bean the only remaining islanders were him, his parents and his father's father. Then one day his parents disappeared leaving him with his grandfather who would raise him until he died of old age when Knuckles was 8.

As it turns out the echidnas didn't all die, when Tikal prayed for their lives she created a sort of small pocket dimension where the echidna's continue to live the last 10 days leading up the the apocalypse on repeat. Tikal can be found inside this time loop but it's only an imprint of her and you can't actually talk to her, she's properly dead and her soul is out there in the real world. You can talk to the others though but they will forget anything you tell them with the time loop resets. Knuckles father was always rather brilliant and obsessed with the lost science of his ancestors and their mysterious disappearance. He discovered the pocket realty and convinced his wife to go with him to try and find out what happened and attempt to bring the other echidna's back. Unfortunately they got stuck there as once inside they couldn't leave. Now they continue to live inside this time loop though unlike the others their memories don't reset. Suffice to say over the years they've been stuck in there their relationship fell apart and these days they tend to largely avoid each other. Tlatilo continues to try and find away to break the loop and save everyone but Teo has largely given up after so many years and is just trying to make the best of her life there.

I won't spoil where the story goes from there but there's our setup for my little Penders rewrite. God this was a long fucking description. I just had a lot of thoughts to share.