Music can typically take you into another world, but this is getting onto a whole other level. Let's see Encom try to create a grid like this; they really should've cracked it by now from hiring experienced techno musicians to score the last two Tron movies.

~~

My writing mojo is all over the place. I can have rich details and notes for a story that take years to fully finish, but also get a burning passion of a mood where I can crank massive epics out within days or weeks. This certainly wasn't what I expected to be working on this week (trying to finally chisel through the DLU backlog, for one. Maybe this counts as a Digimon story if you squint right?), but when the impetus for this self-imposed challenge hit, I put on a game face and dug in hard, and this is the diamond that gleamed out of the results.

The seeds for this odyssey was germinated long ago when both I and my partner-in-antics metroid711 were made aware of
this little sequence drawn on commission by PixTFs back in 2023, and as a fan of pyramid head shapes this neon-colored creature design lingered in my subconscious mind for quite a long while. Cut to this Sunday where I was eating tacos and salsa while chatting with Metroid, bringing up an idea about envisioning becoming two of these sphinxes as temple guards of sort (shoutout to anyone who remembered Legends of the Hidden Temple while reading that), and he shot back with both hype and a suggestion of the "One lies, one tells the truth" guard gimmick. The brainworm was fully set in and we wanted to leap on the idea, but it felt more like a traditional story than anything more collaborative, and while I've paid Metroid to bring stories to life before, felt like my turn to do the work this time. So once I got home I immediately got to work outlining and sketching, and fortunately I had a few days worth of free time with no IRL distractions to hinder me, and so it was off to the races to synth up this transfigurative wave.

While I made it clear between the thumbnail and the drinking-game-worthy keyword use that I enjoy the memes around synth/vaporwave style stuff (i'm sorry about the quality in that link I swear there used to be a better upload out there], my understanding of the genre is admittedly limited, to the point of having trouble separating the two music types before figuring out the flow for the latter. I'm not even that familiar with such music in general, and while I had a good time looking around for different tracks as mood-setting for my writing, I'm ashamed to admit I wasn't watching out for genned slop enough so it took until doing my "post-production" stuff to find quality content. Still, my efforts kept me in the mood enough that I observed and envisioned enough mental imagery to translate into words eventually create pretty art for in the thumbnail that led you to this description. At the least I'd sure like to explore my Vaporwave world more: not sure what I'd fine but I'm sure it would be engaging.

OccPix's original art didn't provide a full view of their vaporwave sphinx design, so in writing my transformation I had to improvise a bit in imagining what the rear half of the digital/mythical creature looked like (I did draw a sketch for it, and hopefully I'll remember to upload that at some point. Really underusing the Scraps upload feature here, half the pages of my sketchbooks could go there). Was an interesting study experience, and I was surprised and impressed spotting the detail of the arm cuffs midway through the writing. Maybe could've added more Egypt-esque jewelry in that and the collar's vein, but there's something to be said about minimalism dressing, does kinda fit into the abstract looks of 80s synth stuff anyway, you could say. The triangle-tipped tail was a small but fun highlight I came up with, does seem logical with what's going on here. In terms of colors I worked off Metroid and I's preferences, trying to mix things up from the original TF as to not borrow too much from the anonymous sona featured in the sequence. Hopefully that worked well, but if not I can always fix things up in post-post. Past the physical features, definitely enjoyed tapping into the feline habits and cracking into the personalities and quirks of Prism and Crystal's speech: latter was definitely a challenge, but well worth it, I definitely need to practice with that more on my own.

And yes, there is a "subtle" easter egg for a certain character created by a friend of my friend that could perhaps explain the cause of these shenanigans. Granted, pure vaporwave is a modernist approach to 1980s nostalgia that's arguably outside the scope of the more "authentic" experience of Hollycroft, but I'd like to believe that perhaps its benefactor can offer a diversity of options for fulfilling retro experiences, or at least that the magic behind her has a sort of extensive variety going on. Hope you appreciate the homage either way, AxiomTF.

Right, there we are. Pure TF shenanigans finished in a week, how about that? Kudos to Metroid for enabling me to make this tale happen (and of course them having a positive reception to it!) and a generous thanks to OccPixTF and the commissioner of the original sequence for giving their okay to this endeavor, hope they enjoy it too. I'm certainly feeling satisfied by it myself: fantastic to have some more content for respectable forms of triangle heads out there.