Axugaem2 Teaser - Cross, Knight of the Four Winds

He just flew in from Skycastle and boy, how about that airline food! Give him a hand, folks.

I'll most likely be going back to this piece every so often between now and the update's release, just to tweak a couple things and add any other details that come to mind, but for now this is the definitive Cross. I'm not gonna add a lore blurb here since he gets plenty of time to wax poetic about himself in game, so instead I'll add a couple notes about the design process.

Armour is not and never will be my forte, but with the air elementals I at least feel less pressure to make it super-realistic since it's' not made to fit on a human frame. Instead, I get to have a little fun with it. For this piece, I stopped myself from worrying too much about some of Cross's 'joints', such as his knees and knuckles for instance, and instead tried to convey how he doesn't really have joints at all. I wanted the armour to feel like it was being moved by a stream of sentient air rather than a person, so his supposed limbs and digits can bend in ways they normally shouldn't. This was hard for my brain to accept since it meant parts of this pose were going to look janky no matter how I looked at them. And it's not like the entire pose is janky (I don't think >.> ) so these parts stick out even more. But I feel this represents Cross well: he's a sturdy and disciplined elemental with a little quirkiness, rather than a whole wiggly bendy marionette, so I imagine his uncanny bendy joints would only really be apparent in instances of quick and dramatic movement, such as when he's pushing his palm forward or pulling a leg back mid-turn. In these instances, his limbs behave sort of as though he were an ARMS fighter with invisible slinkies, with some elasticity and delay to them. Hopefully some sense of this comes through in the finished piece without the help of this paragraph-long justification!

I decided to keep the actual armour simple and not highly decorated, not just because Cross is a mid-ranking knight but also because he's not super showy. This was partly inspired by the design of Nimbus, who also does not have super-detailed armour (partly because I didn't feel like adding intricate details at the time). Nimbus values practicality and duty, and having ornate armour isn't necessary for either of those things, so I think her design holds up. And since Nimbus is setting an example as Duchess of Air (and Cross would be the absolute first person to follow that example like the good white knight he is), I wanted Cross's armour to be comparable to hers in intricacy or lack thereof. For most of the design process, I had Nimbus' reference image next to this one, to make sure the two looked good together. That said, this process has tempted me to go back and gently update Nimbus' design in one area, which I'll get to now.

Cross's cloth adornments were one aspect of his design where I decided that detail was very much needed. His tabard in particular just did not look right until I added sufficient detail to it. This was fine, as I had intended to add these kinds of details somewhere on his design, and it allowed the cloth pieces to stand out from the rest of the armour. The runes on the tabard were based on runes I'd scribbled onto the tip of Cross's blade, Pendlegust, in a previous design, and I fleshed them out here with some semblance of Air Elemental culture in mind. For those who are curious if the runes mean anything, they do, but they don't constitute letters that can be deciphered or anything. They're looser symbols referring to certain concepts in Air Elemental Culture. One rune might stand for the element of Air itself, whereas another might stand for Lord Zephryn specifically. Another still might stand for the concept of knighthood. I say 'might' here knowing full well that these aren't just random examples and in fact are meanings I assigned to specific runes visible on Cross's design, but I'll let you try and figure out which runes those might be, and if there are meanings you can glean from any of the others.

From the tabard outward, I made triangles a recurring motif because a triangle with a line through it is the alchemical symbol for air (fuck it, we referencing alchemy now), but also because triangles can serve as directional arrows. The most pervasive element of Air Elemental culture in my mind is the direction of the wind, with the four winds being referenced quite frequently (this is also why cross imagery comes up so often with them, as it represents the convergence of the North, East, South, and West winds.) I realized that if I added a little triangle to each type of rune on Cross' tabard, I could use its direction as a feature of Air Elemental language, like an accent of sorts. A downward pointing triangle inflects a rune with the South Wind, which has varying connotations among Air Elementals, certainly different from those the North Wind might invoke.

Runes aside, I hid a bunch of triangle shapes elsewhere in Cross's design to reinforce the shape's importance. I also added some crosses throughout, for obvious reasons. All in all, I challenged myself to make this a meaningful design with relevance to the game's world and story, rather than just something I was doing because one of the characters who isn't a QT monstergirl needed a lower body. I'm not saying it should have taken this long to do or anything, buuut I hope it was worth the wait, and I'm excited to implement it into the game!