Scale Sheet 1

First scale sheet for my characters.

EDIT: Since I started doing these I've also been working on a 'bible' of sorts in order to follow who's who and what's what in this world of mine, so, without further ado...

JAWS CHIPTOOTH

Jaws Chiptooth is a most reluctant defender of the realm. Dependent primarily on his super-human abilities and his wits, Chip will resort to any tactic imaginable to combat the supervillains threatening the free world. He’s a smart-ass and talks like one, otherwise he lets his actions do the talking for him. Despite the fact that he operates totally outside of the law, there are certain lines that Chip will not cross...but only because of the consequence to himself if he does. He won’t kill his enemies, but sure as hell he’ll bash them to a bloody pulp before it’s all over. His mentality against killing one’s enemies has less to do with being humane and more to do with the philosophy that if you kill your enemy, they will not suffer for what they’ve done to incur such a wrath.

Chip is not very book-smart, to be sure, and the cacophony of downloaded knowledge that was poured into his mind just prior to his reincarnation only works in a sporadic, spur-of-the-moment fashion, usually when his gilled neck is on the line against some super-powered foe. Still, he has an enhanced perceptiveness, whether his own or brought about by his sharkoid sensory abilities, and this registers prominently in his adventures. Chip is also a little anti-social, and this has led his supervisors to force him to confront these tendencies by planting him in Thunder Road Amusement Park under the guise of being a costumed entertainer whose job is to pacify little darlings who would just as soon kick and scream to go on a roller-coaster or for their Daddy to win them a stuffed crocodile at the ring toss. On the surface, he detests this vocation and seems to barely tolerate it...but then, as he’s on the job for a while, he begins to make the most of it, often leading the wee ones in some insurrectionist agenda as much meant to provide hearty belly-laughs throughout the park as it is to tick off the park administrators.

Physically, Chip’s sharkoid body affords him powers and abilities significantly enhanced from those of a normal shark of the same size; he can lift a whole speedboat over his head with a little effort, can bend a street lamp if he puts his arms into it, can swim in excess of 55 miles an hour, and his skin is impervious to most commercial rifle fire. He's not entirely powerful or invulnerable - this guy gets his ass kicked as thoroughly as so many ‘80s-era movie action-heroes before him, but he still keeps coming. His bite force is such that he can chomp shotguns in two like a big piece of black licorice. His sense of hearing and smell have also been ratcheted up to insane levels as a result of his mutated form. His fighting style is something of a mix of various styles that were programmed into him -- that is, when he doesn’t just lunge at you and take a bite out of your firearm.

As his adventures begin, Chip is still getting accustomed to his newly-nonhuman disposition, and is heartily at odds with more than a few authority figures on Taylor Island. Few besides Dr. Lantieri and Captain Wills are even willing to accept the formidable ally the citizens have in Chip. As for Chip’s life prior to his being turned into a man-fish...well, there isn’t any story there to tell. The life he once had wasn’t much of a life to begin with, so being mutated was probably the first interesting thing to ever happen to him. The alias he’s given as a cover at Thunder Road, Shade Wakefield, is nothing more than an alias to him, necessary to propagate the illusion that he’s just a guy in a shark suit and not actually a half-shark mutant; it’s not even a dual identity - he IS Jaws Chiptooth, night and day, day in and day out.

Women are an enigma to him and always have been...and then he meets Mara Lantieri, who’s in a class by herself. She alone seems to hold sufficient sway over him to cause him to assess situations, to reconsider the harsher course of action. She’s really the only who seems to be able to tell what he’s thinking at any given moment, which humbles him in her presence -- she’s perhaps the one character for whom his natural irreverence seems placated. There’s sort of cloying relationship between the two that has more in common with Nick and Nora Charles than Beauty and the Beast; he may deliver a barbed remark at her in certain situations, but she always comes back tenfold...and truth be told, they both seem to get off on this. But, of course, this is one of those things that requires extreme care when writing...she’s a human, he’s a fish, and that’s really as far as it can go -- for now.


DR. MARA LANTIERI

Born to a Naval lieutenant and a veterinarian, Mara Lantieri became infatuated with the ocean almost from birth. In spite of losing her father, Lt. William Lantieri, in the initial haywire rampage of the botched war machine Poseidon, and against her mother’s wishes, Mara continued to delve into the aquatic sciences, refining her acquired expertise in genetics into skills which she would dedicate towards the preservation of marine life-forms endangered by the ravages of man. Brilliant and maybe a touch eccentric, Mara had already virtually completed her high-school requirements by the end of her sophomore year and, after a rough start, quickly proved her academic achievements were no fluke in college as well. She became a star intern at Woods Hole and Scripps, her growing proficiency in marine biology quickly surpassing many of her mentors.

Following college, Mara pursued a recommendation to work with the reclusive, controversial biologist Evan von Rofstader at his installation in Minas Gerais, Brazil. But what started out as a window to a completely new level of genetic engineering quickly disintegrated into madness and chaos when Mara didn’t share her new mentor’s deranged sense of ethics; when certain discoveries were made about von Rofstader’s gruesome background in vivisection and biochemical munitions, Mara tipped off the one man who’d been wary of her involvement with von Rofstader from the start - Captain Wills. What followed was an ugly siege on von Rofstader’s estate in which Wills and Mara barely escaped with their lives. Realizing that her connections to von Rofstader now added a new level of controversy and possible danger to her chosen vocation, Mara underwent self-defense training under Wills’ personal tutelage, becoming as deadly a combatant as she was unparalleled as a geneticist.

Through it all, Mara always holds a generally upbeat outlook, which is not to say she’s completely carefree. The price of success has been high for her: the falling-out with her mother reverberates to this day; not to mention that she’s also the object of a certain amount of jealousy and enmity from her only sibling, her twin sister Abby. She has also been struggling to maintain custody of her niece Patty, after Abby was institutionalized. And when Mara reorganized a fledgling genetic engineering facility into the Aqua Medlab Marine Bioengineering Institute, more than a few staffers came to believe that Mara’s creation of a human-shark hybrid with a human mind came not so much from the pursuit for a cure for cancer, as it did her own sense of longing for the company of someone who’s felt as isolated as she has.

Her relationship with Chip is the one thing that grounds him firmly in what humanity he has left. Having reviewed his psychological case history from dozens of ‘candidates’ (re: accident victims whose brains were essentially put in cold storage), and having observed his behaviors and actions first-hand, it is quite likely that she knows him better than he knows himself, particularly now that he’s a man-fish. Though his purpose at Aqua Medlab has since been extended to general security capacities, he is, unofficially, Dr. Lantieri’s personal guardian, a distinction she finds flattering and disconcerting all at once. There is a deeper connection between the two that even the most oblivious bystander would have a hard time missing.

Mara’s decision to create a sharkoid did test her bond with Wills, who’d been present the last time a Lantieri had to fend off a faux shark, but since Chip has turned out be something of a diamond in the rough, it has seemed to strengthen the surrogate father-daughter bond between them. Mara has since become one of the Navy’s foremost contacts in matters regarding marine security, and more than once will Chip be called in to provide aid in situations beyond the control of the best of the best.

For Mara, it’s also become fairly concrete that money is simply a means to an end...even if it really belongs to someone else. It’s this somewhat-casual financial attitude -- and the fact that she has circumvented their pull with the Navy by becoming the Navy’s direct go-to girl -- that has stoked the ire of the suits of Neptune Solutions, the pharmaceutical conglomerate that has held corporate control over Aqua Medlab. The Board of Directors, headed by the firm’s ice-queen CEO Claire Millard, is not amused by having their own agenda for the sharkoid project subverted, and even less so by the string of humiliations they’re forced to endure at Chip’s finny hands...a string that begins when Chip co-erces the board into re-instating Mara as supervisor of Aqua Medlab after they fire her for her deviance. It’s in this regard that Mara finds her sharky protector’s intervention particularly gratifying, even though it probably means her superiors may be resorting to enlisting Chip’s arch-enemies to get even.

Incredibly analytical, coolly deductive, and a master biologist and chemist, Mara is also well-versed in multiple hand-to-hand fighting styles and highly resourceful when it comes to turning anything in reach into a weapon. She’ll be able to get herself out of a jam just as many times as she’ll need the big lug with the razor-sharp teeth to bail her out.


POSEIDON

The first villain to step forth in Chip’s Rogues Gallery is among its most powerful. Uncle Sam’s original intent with Poseidon was to use him as a more stealthy form of blockading water routes. But the equipment used to program him was substandard, and when he was initially activated he failed to respond properly to verbal commands, so the presiding lab techs tried to deactivate him. He took this for an attack and retaliated, and in the carnage most of the operations team assigned to Operation Crimson Surf, as it was euphemistically called, was slain, with only one senior scientist -- Dr. Takashi Hirata -- and two security transfers, Lieutenants William Lantieri and Reggie Wills, left standing by the time Poseidon got them in his crosshairs. Hirata and Wills were seriously wounded but would survive (though Hirata would have to have his arm amputated and replaced with a cybernetic prosthesis); Lantieri, however, knew quick action had to be taken to sever Poseidon’s power linkages and, taking one round after another throughout his body in his rush toward the beast, had enough strength remaining to cut the linkages before he died on the scene.

Poseidon was subsequently encased in a giant block of cement and dropped into the Atlantic not too far from where Aqua Medlab would ultimately be situated, but two ignorant high-class coral thieves who happened upon the block and decided to take a chunk of it as a souvenir with the aid of a depth charge would be the first in a new line of victims for the reactivated mechashark, who now became convinced that the whole of humankind was too dangerous to be allowed to proliferate any further, and must be replaced with a more stable dominant life-form - like himself and such mechanicals, even if that meant creating them himself. And though Jaws Chiptooth at this point had been created strictly as a specimen to study in a bid to use shark physiognomy as the basis for a cure for cancer, it became clear to now-Captain Wills that Chiptooth, with his exceptional abilities, could be the only hope of averting whatever catastrophe Poseidon was cooking up.

Since that time, however, Poseidon has re-emerged, having rebuilt himself with cybernetic technology of alien origin after his original CPU was blasted into space. And he won’t rest until he’s reduced the sum total of Earth’s organic population back to protoplasm, starting with its would-be champion, whose initial victory over him he chalks up to meager random luck. Normally cold and relentless, Poseidon’s obsession with Chip’s destruction is destined to overtake even his hatred of humankind -- an obsession fueled not only by the fact that Chip has begun to serve in a capacity that in essence replaces Poseidon, but also that Chip was brought to life in this form by the daughter of the very human who first disrupted Poseidon’s existence, and that both are under the tutelage of one of the two humans to escape Poseidon’s initial wrath. For a being not designed to experience human emotions or feelings, Poseidon is quickly becoming acclimated to the concepts of rage and vengeance.

In his original form, Poseidon existed in a mechanical shark body installed with hidden cannons; his rebuild has allowed him a more versatile humanoid form replacing the primitive projectile weaponry with energy-based hand-mounted weapons that, in essence, makes Poseidon an evil robotic alternative to what Chip might have been like if he’d been created by more militaristic hands. For Poseidon, human civilization represents nothing but the natural entropy of organic life, only now the human race is damaging the planet and its natural resources faster than it’s able to replenish them. Basically, he’s passed his judgement already: Earth has already become a waste of valuable space, and needs to be purged of its infestations before it becomes completely useless for any purpose. Poseidon actually believes he’s trying to save the world, which unnerves Chip because even Chip is hard-pressed to look at humankind’s collective actions as a species and come up with more worthwhile aspects than wasteful ones.

Even with his super-computer brain, subsequent adventures start to reflect Poseidon's newfound grasp on a more proactively negative attitude toward organic beings. Even in his more aggressive frame of mind, though, he is not prone to the sort of over-the-top swarthy quality of countless comic-book villains before him. Poseidon, more than any other of Chiptooth’s enemies, is the one who constantly feels like an unnegotiable, unstoppable threat. That is not to say that he remains devoid of personality, however. Even with an apparent lack of wit or a physical ability to emote, the character’s actions have some darkly comic, macabre touches that serve both as a reminder of how formidable an opponent he is, and as a way of getting a good laugh out of a character who is decidedly NOT played for laughs -- it’s like when Vader Force-chokes another pompous-assed Imperial officer, that kind of vibe. Poseidon is one of those villains who’s REALLY going to challenge Chip to rely on his wits and his senses to prevail, because Chip’s nowhere close to Poseidon in the brains department. Poseidon will easily be the most incalulably intelligent of all Chip's villains, and he will be the one least likely to lower himself to ‘teaming up’ with another of Chip’s Rogues to get anything accomplished. That is not to say, though, that he won’t recognize potential in some of the other Rogues (like Highroller), but it will be for his own purposes and in pretty much all such cases, there will be no ‘partnership’ or even footing of any kind between them: Poseidon will clearly be in command.