http://yerf.com/vernursu/pignlizard.jpg
Result of the latest art junkying–a ferocious warrior of the great Piggy-Wiggy tribe, and the small and foolish lizard attempting to collect taxes from him.
The odd thing about this was that about two thirds of the way through, I said to James, “Hey, how’s my pig and lizard looking?” And the phrase “pig and lizard” shot through my brain like and arrow, and a long-buried chunk of brain woke up and went “AAAAIGHGGHHH! NOOOO! Not the pig and lizard!”
I’d painted it without ever thinking about it, but hearing the words out loud brought it all rushing back.
Once upon a time, in a long ago Shadowrun campaign, I played a scruffy, depraved Jackal shaman who’s livelihood was made by scavenging dead bodies for spare parts. Occasionally she would…err…generate a fresh supply of dead bodies. She was a bit of a weirdo, but a dab hand with a scalpel, believe me.
The campaign, however, was beyond weird. We were trapped in some bizarre hallucinatory computer system (or something) although we didn’t know it. All we knew was that we were driving a bus full of the Hawaiian Tropics Bikini Team from point A to point B. This was an odd job for shadowrunners, but we weren’t going to argue.
Obviously, we didn’t make it to point B. We were hijacked by rat people, tied to a stake, and they summoned an Elder God, which ate the Hawaiian Tropics Bikini Team, and left behind two giant…creatures.
A pig and a lizard.
That friggin’ pig and lizard chased us for what was at least six months of game time, an absolutely baffling death march where the universe changed randomly at odd intervals, the world kept shrinking, the laws of physics went wonky, every person we met appeared to be rotting from the inside, and the only constant was that damn pig and lizard. They changed appearance occasionally, but we always knew who it was. If they had names, we didn’t know it–they were just “that damn pig and lizard.” Along the way we had some very bad encounters, lost a character to vampirism, briefly lost Jackal to having been turned into a large dog (who then guarded her teammate’s coffin faithfully for a week until the rest of the team came in. On horseback. With a bunch of Knights Templar. Yes, this was a Shadowrun campaign, but it’s all kind of hazy.)
The worst part was that we somehow got out without ever finding out what the hell the pig and the lizard WERE. We just got captured, (in the city powered by the dead dragon, later immortalized in art that people still bitch at me for) and it just became one of the random oddities of our campaign–that damn, mysterious, pig and lizard.
Hadn’t thought’ve that for years.
Oh, and yesterday I doodled up “The Tengu Are Amused” at
http://yerf.com/vernursu/urstengu.jpg but it’s more of a random silliness than anything else.
