jimmyzimms wrote:
So your
victim / volunteer appears to be Stygian. I expect that's a stand in figure but I'd really suggest some poor trapped soul striped and forcibly inserted to the machine before battle. This thing should be the most evil thing you ever make (unless you do undead space robots
)
You are one sick puppy.
I like it.
I like this stygian figure a lot but I agree that it isn't Eeeevil, just the diet pepsi of evil. More like badass upgrade, like a PA suit, rather than what I envision with a parasite engine. If you don't do THIS concept as your parasite engine, please do it separately as a super-powersuit.
I'm w/ Jimmy on this. Some questions I think of when I think parasite engine. First, does it corrupt people and turn them into slaves? Or is it a war machine that is just powered/controlled by a mind-controlled slave who is attached off-camera?
If it's a corruption engine, then you really want it to look like the machine is designed primarily to catch, restrain, and convert people. Kind of like the scene in the Dark Crystal. Or the scene in the Black Hole when they realized that the "androids" were mind-wiped humans. Or the "kill... me..." scene in Aliens. Or the Borg from ST:TNG. That's what I initially envisioned. Lots of evil tentacles for catching people, spider-leg clamps for holding victims still while they're being converted, and tubes/claws/needles sticking into the victim's head and torso. Plus a few post-conversion victims with horrified faces (hollow out the eyes entirely so even at scale they look sunken, slack jaws, wrinkles, an exhausted slouch, etc). Post-conversion, you can stick cyber-mods on them, or bio-mods, or just leave them as zombies.
If it's a war machine, then you're very much on the right track, though again I agree w/ Jimmy that you might not want to make the victim a stygian. Instead, look to the Shadow ships in Babylon 5. Or the "attic" in Dollhouse. Where you have this menacing clawed monster with an innocent person strapped down and wired into it, their brain helpless to resist the controls that make them evil. (In turn, of course, we have to give this device a rule providing a random chance of the victim breaking free of their conditioning and going berserk.)
As it stands, the "driver" appears to be A) a stygian, B) willing, and C) only a pilot rather than wired in. Whereas the horror factor goes way up when it's an unwilling innocent human victim who's been irreversibly wired into the device. And preferably showing signs of being in enormous pain and/or horror (not easy at that scale).
