Some people put a lot of time and effort into their characters' appearances in EVE. And sometimes, they achieve something that is really quite good. Although EVE toons are really just animation, sometimes they come out quite attractive, even what some people might term, "hot." Some have focused on crafting enigmatic and attractive faces for their characters. Others seem to also focus on certain (ahem) bountiful feminine assets. Some of these implants are clearly not just neural! This likely represents the generally repressed male hormones of the non-alpha males who are typically designing these female characters. Well, a geek can dream can't he? That's what EVE is all about! And honestly, kudos to CCP on their character creation system. I have never seen a better one. So without further ado, here are some well designed EVE characters - to all here shown, well done! Brave Bewbies and all!
The oddly shaped tritanium hatch shifted minutely, and then slowly opened with a hiss of what might have once been breathable gas, and a low groaning rumble of protest. Considering the hatch had not been opened in somewhere around ten thousand years, Vica LaRousseau was impressed with the engineering. She was tall and shapely, with bright red hair, pale skin and long legs that were the legacy of her mother, and the keen brain and blue eyes she had inherited from her half-Caldari father. She had given up her life as a planet-borne nanotechnologist long ago, along with her mortality. She sometimes wondered if her family were still alive.
The point Dustie jumped through the hatch, his weapon with its laser targeting beam probing the darkness beyond, leaping in before the hatch had time to fully cycle open. Around Vica, the rest of her merc squad stood alert and tense, with the same barely restrained violence instantly at the ready that she always saw in her hunter Hounds back home on Corufeu. Ready and eager if given any opportunity. They were loyal to her, and a small comfort in a universe full of terrors. Vica stepped through the hatch as it opened fully, scanning with her specially modified datapad. Illegally acquired and assembled semi-sentient drone processor systems, with biotechnology (without doubt formerly human) sensor systems, being caught with this datapad would get you instantly jailed for a very long time back in Gallente space, but here in Wormhole space, they were an absolute necessity, all ethical concerns aside. Knowing that her datapad had on the one hand once been part of a murderous sentient rogue drone, and on the other hand likely contained parts of some poor individual’s vivisected brain and nervous system, did not improve her mood, but Vica was a pragmatist, even though she knew in her heart that her situation often forced her to make compromises that once would have made her shudder with revulsion. The scanner system was excellent, however it had been built and acquired, and her low light display lit up with tantalizing data as she and her squad of Dusties proceeded down a dark corridor that had not known the footfall of humankind in an aeon. Killing the drones that had guarded this place had been a serious challenge. The weapons systems that the Ancients had possessed far outstripped the best advances of New Eden’s science, Vica knew. And she realized, as did most other pod pilots, that if the Sleepers ever awoke, if their drones were to be guided by sentient strategy instead of sub-sentient automatic defense routines, sites like this one would become all but inaccessible. Her fleet waited outside, floating silently in the void. Some of them would be salvaging the Sleeper wrecks, she knew, looking for useful ancient parts and components. But the real work, she would carry out, here within this ancient tomb of a station. It had taken years to develop the skills necessary to slice into Sleeper stations without activating the local automatic defense systems, and years more of searching to find a Sleeper base that just might contain something… special. And this site was very, very special. The configuration of the Sleeper station was unlike anything she had seen before. Elements of what might have been Talocan engineering were evident in its construction. The Sleeper drone contingent guarding it had been large and very well equipped. She had lost two ships. This had better be worth it. She felt a chill of excitement run down her spine and rest in her gut. This was it. It had to be. Ahead the point Dustie had stopped, staring into a cavernous room at the very center of the station. Vica’s scanners went wild – near data overload. Vica hastily shunted storage over to her own cerebral interface, rapidly saving the data in unused genetic storage within her brain for analysis later. The wireless interface could barely handle the data flow. At the very center of the room, an odd triangular shaped plinth stood about ten meters high, with a curved spiral walkway built into its sides and leading upwards to a small platform at the top. Suspended there, seemingly in mid-air, was what could only be described as a glowing, blue, bubble. The glow was faint, almost like the bioluminescent glow worms of the oceans of her native Corufeu, at once beautiful and ethereal, almost unnatural. Vica’s breath caught in her throat, and her heart began to pound a staccato rhythm. She had found it. She had found it! Slowly, the tall red haired scientist climbed the spiral walkway, until she stood, her scanner fairly screaming, within arm’s reach of what the Sleepers had spent a thousand years to achieve. The computer in her datapad had the evidence – it was the Sleepers’ penultimate achievement, the substance they had referred to as the Essence – the ultimate form of nanotechnology ever developed by the hand of man. Her Dusties had arrayed themselves around the base of the plinth, backs to her, alertly scanning the semi-darkness of the gigantic room for any potential threats. Vica removed a specially designed container from the tool pouch at her waist. Packaged, the container was only a few centimeters long and wide, and wafer thin. Expanded, it grew large enough that Vica could have fit two of her Dusties inside. The material was nano-diamond, painstakingly grown and adapted with a biological process. Harder than steel and more durable, despite its extremely light weight, and near impermeable, the container was the perfect tool to transport the ancient wonder that she had just discovered. Vica attached a small anti-grav device to the base of the container, and then carefully placed it beneath the floating blue bubble, which pulsed and coalesced with faint blue light, bulging with the ancient Sleeper nanites within. Slowly, she raised the container until it surrounded most of the bubble, and then raised it just a bit higher, ready to close the top tightly around her prize… The darkness of the room was suddenly lit up with a harsh, fiery orange light, as an impossibly loud klaxon began to wail. From the ceiling, turrets began to descend from the hatches where they had been hidden thousands of years before. With a scream, one of her Dusties disappeared in a mist of catalyzed blood and tissue as one of the turrets locked on to his body and fired. Chaos reigned as laser and plasma fire began to shred everything in the room. Her remaining Dusties scrambled to find cover behind some of the ancient equipment that was strewn about at the base of the plinth. Vica hit the deck, inadvertently bumping her now mostly expanded container. The side of the container struck the bubble floating over her head, knocking about a milliliter of the material out and away from the nanite cluster. It formed into a small, perfectly round drop, and unbeknownst to Vica, landed with the minutest of splashes right in the small of her back. Plasma fire scorched the side of the plinth, and Vica rolled off the side of the platform, preparing herself for the impact with the spiral walkway, three meters below. She struck the hard surface with a clang and a very unladylike grunt, and rolled again, tensing for the impact as she fell another three meters to the next stage of the walkway below. This time her roll was awkward, and she badly sprained her shoulder as she hit the unyielding surface. Vica yelped with pain. But now she was very close to the base of the plinth, and the turrets had not yet tracked her position. Below, two more of her Dusties were disintegrated by the withering fire of the security turrets. Her point man saw her hanging from the side of the plinth, and made a dash for the base of the spiral ramp. One of the turrets almost hit him, but he made it to the relative shelter of the base of the plinth, and dashed up to her side, barely pausing before grabbing her unceremoniously and slinging her over his shoulder. He leapt from the platform, repulsors in his armored boots absorbing most of the shock of the three meter fall, and ran with all the might of his muscled legs and the reinforcement of his cybernetic armor, heading for the large door leading back the way they had come. Only after they had slid at full speed beneath the rapidly closing blast door did Vica realize that had they tarried just a few moments longer, they would have been trapped inside, like the rest of her Dustie squad, the last of whom was at that moment being immolated by the turret fire. “The nanotech!” She screamed, as the blast doors closed with a resolute clang. “No time,” the Dustie yelled, yanking her to her feet. “Run!” *** With her Dustie pushing her ahead of him, she had just barely made it back to the boarding shuttle. Just as he had shoved her through the doors, some turret fire had finally found him, and he had disappeared in a bright red haze with hardly a grunt. Fortunately, the cybernetic relays had worked, and shortly her Dusties were born again in new freshly cloned bodies, mostly none the worse for wear. But Vica had sat at the rear viewport of her boarding shuttle and wept silently as the Sleeper station self-destructed behind them. When she stripped off her boarding party armor, she did not notice that the molecular structure of the armor, at the part covering the base of her spine, had been slightly disrupted. She walked naked from her armory into the pod chamber, rubbing and rotating her sprained shoulder, and settled into the dark comfort of the pod interface. Vica closed her eyes as the pod goo flooded over her. The neural interfaces attached, a flood of painkillers entered her system, and all at once, she was again Home, in comfort, at one with her ship. The blackened space of the void stretched out all around her, impossibly far into the distance. Far off, the wormhole system’s star burned sullenly. To be so close! And to fail! Her heart brimmed with grief and frustrated rage. So the Sleepers had seen fit to place redundant security systems around their prize. The next time, she would have to be more cautious. She berated herself for her overeagerness. Had she been more cautious, perhaps… But all this was immaterial. The past was done. She could only move forward. Unknown to Vica, deep within her body, ancient nanites spread and multiplied. One by one they clustered at her nerve endings, and thousands more flooded into her brain, swarming around her cybernetic implants. Some invaded her digestive tract, consuming molecules from her body’s waste and converting them, restructuring them, into still more Sleeper nanites. In the space of the few hours it took her to fly back to Empire space with her fleet, her body had become host to millions of tiny machines, all working in unison. Then the dreams came. The dreams of the Ancients. Long lost memories of far off systems no human had seen in ten thousand years. Ships floating in the darkness between galaxies. Crystalline shrieks as horrors were perpetrated against the sons and daughters of Taloc, atrocities committed in the name of science and of survival. Swarms upon swarms of drones, let loose upon an unsuspecting galaxy by a people who, in the quest to regain their humanity, had forever irretrievably lost it. As Vica had now lost hers. My Mattcave is nearing completion, we had a major renovation over the past couple of months due to a minor basement flood. So here it is: an EVE Online command center (and my home office.)
(Author's Note: I like to write, and have recently heard about an EVE Online fan content contest that is running on PodandPlanet. So, without further ado, here is my submission: the Salvager and the Dancer.)
THE SALVAGER AND THE DANCER "Docking request accepted; your ship will be towed into the station." Another run... It had been a long month. But Arcturus had made it back to his home base, safe and sound, once again. High sec piracy was getting worse, much worse, he realized. Concord was about as useless as a screen door on an airlock. But Arcturus was careful. He'd managed to deliver his precious cargo, and complete the mission. As always he shook his head at the thought of working for the Khanid. Gallente working for Amarrians were few and far between; once, he couldn't have imagined in his wildest dreams running missions for the Khanid Navy. But here he was, far from home, and now likely to be never again able to return home. The path had been long, and the decisions he had made were in the past, beyond changing now. There was nothing to be done but to go forward. The docking bay stank of ozone and leaking plasma coolant, as always. There, in containers piled high throughout the deck, were the fruits of his long labors - stacks of salvaged components and ship equipment, in and on the crates, and spilling out onto the oil-stained steel and tritanium deck. Arcturus wasn't even sure what all exactly he had. Sometimes even he was surprised by what he found, stashed away, parts he had pulled from some deadspace wreck and stashed away, and then forgotten, even if he had noticed what they were at the time he found them. Running tractor beams and salvage rigs had become almost second nature to him; he could salvage a wreck without even taking his eyes from the tactical display, a skill that had allowed him to survive when others he had known had died many times. Some could handle the consciousness transfer; others had left the life of a pod pilot. Some had decided they could not go on, and had allowed themselves to drift off into the ether, surrendering immortality in favor of the peace of the Void. As always, after detaching his body from the pod, he walked through the piles of stuff, a datapad in hand, deciding what to keep and what to sell. And as always, he stopped by the cryogenic chambers. There were a lot of them, every one discovered in the wreck of some ship or destroyed habitation module, encountered by chance or after some long grind of a strike mission. So many faces, partially obscured by the frost that crept inexorably across their viewing screens, the unknown in cryosleep, likely never to wake. Janitors, freed slaves, militants, commandos who had been en route to a battlefield they now would never reach... So many collected, and stacked in his cargo bay, collecting dust. He was no slaver - that far was his line, and he would not cross it. He had learned long years before of the dangers of opening these pods. For one thing, some of the pods might be slightly damaged. Repairs required highly specialized training, skills which Arcuturus lacked. And he lacked the resources to hire someone. He would not recklessly try and open the pods, only to kill the unsuspecting sleeper within. And as well, you never knew just exactly who somebody in a cryo-pod might be. One of the freed slaves he had let out, so many years ago in Parses, had immediately done their very best to slit his throat. The slave had nearly managed it, too; and since then Arcuturus always, without exception, wore a small handheld blaster on his hip, no matter where he was or what he was doing. He had beaten that one's brains out with a hydrospanner, while desperately trying to keep the tip of the slave’s blade from slicing into his neck. For Arcturus, one bad experience was enough. And yet he could not, would not bring himself to simply terminate them. And so they waited, in suspended animation, lined up in their dusty cryo pods, so many pale faces within a dreamless sleep, unknowing where they were and what had happened to them. Sometimes, Arcturus wondered if they had families, who either thought they were dead or wondered what had become of them. Did they have fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, children? There was no way to know, and advertising their existence would do nothing but blow his cover with the Khanid Navy, something he wasn't prepared to do. And so they remained. But still he tortured himself with them; he could not stop himself. He could not prevent himself from walking down the corridor, on either side of which the containers were piled, as he always did. He could not prevent himself from finding that one chamber, and looking in once more, at that face. Her face. He remembered the cargo container, expelled from a destroyed pleasure hub, how long ago? Years? A decade? He couldn't remember how long it had been. He remembered the humming of the engines, the whine of the salvagers. The container had been marked "Exotic Dancers." He had since surmised that it must have been an as yet unopened shipment of dancer slaves, selected for their grace and beauty from the slave pens, to be used in whatever way their purchasers in the pleasure hubs saw fit, most likely used up and then discarded and replaced. Slaves, and human life, were cheap out here in Arniri. Maybe everywhere in human controlled space. He had gotten the salvage and the components home that day, and had sorted everything out, leaving the cryo pods to last. He remembered the first time he had looked through the glass viewing plate, the first time had had seen her face. She was beautiful, pale with heavy lidded eyes, and long dark hair that flowed in a frozen cascade around her pretty face and down past her shoulders. The delicate lips were parted just a bit, as though the cryosleep process had taken her by surprise; otherwise the face was serene, at peace. He had memorized every square inch, from her delicate nose to her high cheekbones and soft chin. As always he stared for a long moment, his heart in a vise. Who was she? How had she come to be packed up this this pod, like so much trade goods, frozen in cryosleep and sold to the highest bidder? From the first moment he had seen her face, Arcturus had been in her thrall. He was in love with her, this frozen princess, this slave girl he had never met. An impossible thing, a sad hope, but here he was. He could not change it. He had lived a solitary life; there had been no time for wife or family, and then when he had come to know himself better, had a change of heart and realized such things were truly what he wanted, it had been too late. And besides, he was a scarred, old, grizzled and lumpish Khanid Navy ex-pat, with limited prospects and no home to ever return to. He was a pod pilot, but a pod pilot on the lower end of the scale in the bigger picture of things, and he knew it. What girl would look at him twice? As always, he berated himself for a coward for never having the courage to try and get her released from her icy prison. But what if he were to release her? Would she stay with him, a Gallente traitor, a scruffy scrap salvager with oil-stained hands and limited prospects? There was no chance. He had no chance. Likely she would try and slit his throat as well. He could not imagine the prospect of never being able to see her face again - the thought caused him so much pain he had to force it away from his mind. And if she were to die in the extraction process - no! She was safe in her cryo pod, where he could come and visit her, whenever he came back from his missions, and gaze upon the face that he loved past all hope, but could never touch. Slowly a tear crept from the corner of one slitted eye, and he turned away, wiping it out. Arcturus walked back down the corridor, and away from her. There was the bar, or the pod. He could not face the bar. The pod called to him. In the silence of space he could find solace. Arcturus settled into the soft interior, felt the cerebral harness and body interface reattach, felt the pod fluid flow over his body, and closed his eyes. As always, her face glowed there in the darkness. "Dock with the Gungnir," he said quietly. The pod's docking mechanisms began to whirr as the pod was lowered into the Ashimmu. With a final clang, the pod doors closed, and he reached for the docking clamp controls. Time to get back to work. |