Buckle up, kids, this is gonna take a while...

SO, as I stated back when I uploaded "Toa Kehotay" eons ago, my son and I had been working on a BIONICLE fanstory called "Legend of The Lost" centering around Kehotay's quest to find any M.I.A. Toas who might still be alive and bring them back to help rebuild the ruins of Metru Nui. The story ended up being broken up into different "Books" with a number of MOCs and characters created to be introduced in each one.

In this case, at the beginning of "Book 3," Kehotay and my son's Toa, Makuhiva (as well as Maku's pet Rokko) had been separated from the other "Toa Absentia" and were believed dead, only for that part's lead to discover at the end of it that they were still alive. This would lead into "Book 4" and their adventure on what was, at the time, ever-so-creatively called "The Isle of Shadows," home of the mad scientist C'baal who, in his efforts to "ascend" to the Brotherhood of Makuta, had tapped the comatose body of one of the Makutas and used it to conduct experiments. The island was, therefore, populated with a number of bizarre creatures: the Swamp Walker, the Kraatorans, Steelbahk, various mutated Toas and monsters...and Giiku, a reptilian woman who would act as Keho and Maku's guide in exchange for their oath as Toas that, should they manage to escape the insane island, they would take her with them.

Also, as mentioned before, it was in the middle of making MOCs and planning the story of Book 4 that the infamous "Mistika Reveal" about the true nature of the Matoran Universe happened, totally torpedoing "Legend of The Lost" out of existence. The result was that I had a whole slew of now-homeless/storyless MOCs that, honestly, I just didn't have the heart to disassemble.

Jump ahead about a year and a half: BIONICLE has been cancelled and the first line of its replacement, "Hero Factory," has hit the shelves. Keep in mind, the first series of HF was practically "BIONICLE Redux," since the sets still used the same parts as the previous line (to its detriment in some cases, since the last 2-and-a-half years of BIONICLE were plagued with quality control issues that saw pieces breaking and becoming useless sometimes the first time they were used...Giiku here is actually way different than her original configuration due to parts breaking and being replaced in the time between "Mistika" and HF), the radical revamps and new pieces the line is known for not being introduced until the following year.

Still, I was excited...as much as I love BIONICLE, a little bit of bitterness still remained over the death of my son's and my epic fanwankery (and ALL THE FUCKING BREAKING PIECES...), so I was ready for a fresh setting, particularly one that seemed so similar in theme and construction to BIONICLE. In fact, they were so similar that I realized I could use many of my homeless "Legend" MOCs in the new setting with a minimum of effort as "criminals" for the Heroes to fight. The problem, however, was Giiku here. I was extremely fond of her, but her scale dictated her being a bad guy (at the time, Heroes were the about the size of Matoran mini-kits, while the villains were the size of the Toa kits). That's when the same kind of thought process that created Jefferson Tracer in my previous upload kicked in again: if the Hero Factory were cops, then what would be THEIR equivalent...to bounty hunters?

As the Rescue Rangers theme put it, "sometimes some crimes go slipping through the cracks," stuff too small-scale for full Hero missions or just overlooked by the Factory, stuff like car (spaceship?) thieves and break-ins and petty shit like that. Enter the bounty hunters: inspired by stuff like Brian Michael Bendis' early works "Jinx" and "AKA Goldfish" and my son's youthful love of the "Dog the Bounty Hunter" show rather than the "Star Wars" take on the profession, the bounty hunters of the Hero Factory universe are basically skip-tracers and licensed vigilantes who hunt the small fish of the criminal underworld for pay and prestige. As revealed by the bios of the villains, not everyone in the setting are robots so aliens like Giiku were commonplace...suddenly, my homeless lizard had a home AND a job!

The double-barreled handguns she has may ring a bell for long-timers; they originally were on Kehotay's hips in his pic as part of his "Book 4" upgrade, but I felt they fit a sci-fi bounty hunter better than a Toa, and Giiku's trademark twin sabers attached surprisingly well to the holsters to boot.