'Feel the warp-fields wash over you. Breathe the electricity, listen to it crackle in your lungs. Allow your body to drift as its particles accelerate, separate. A pleasant sensation, soothing, like dreaming awake. Like dying in your sleep - only to be reborn!' - Sergeant Adelaide describing a 'Jaunt' to her newest combat team member.
Terror and teleportation: the horror of 'Lugal' begins with a frantic distress signal broadcast from a scientific research colony on an alien world. The message, cryptically warning of 'creatures that prey on unwary travelers to the Other Side', terminates in screaming. Immediately, an Intergalactic Expeditionary Corps combat team is sent to planet Gvakin to investigate the call - and discovers that the colony has been laid to waste and the colonists disappeared without a trace. Soon it is revealed that the colonists were the victims of a scientific experiment gone horribly right...
And the Madness of Lugal has been unleashed.
Artist Louis Carter has taken my script and created from it a wonderfully alien landscape full of weird beasties and strange characters (both human and inhuman). Nothing about planet Gvakin is familiar to human eyes: trees wriggle like tentacles, vines slither across the earth like worms, bizarre rock formations rise from the oozing jungle floor like spines.
Next step - finding 'Lugal' a home in print. I'll be sure to update the blog when that happens. Update: 'Lugal' will appear in Temple APA #8.
Nice panels.
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