Project: SPAI

What is Project: SPAI?

Spai started out as a simple character design practice I did at 3AM, hyped up on cafe sua da. Sometime along the summer I got obsessed with removable body parts and corporate espionage stories and as a result I think I got Spai? I had a pretty good draft of a story that started somewhere along the lines of:

Corporate espionage was easy. It had two steps: get in and get out. The only hard part was step 1.5: take something. It didn't matter what - a conversation, a pen, a document - everything was fair game in Spai's line of work.

Or something like that. It wasn't the best intro for what I needed, but I liked it to the point I tried it until I was forced to rethink my entire story. Everything really came down to how many pages I could write and to be fair, I could easily write another novel-length story, but I didn't want to - I told myself under 20pages or bust. 

Anyways, tl;dr: Spai is a simple character I designed and redesigned and learned to love to the point I turned them into a short term project for class.

Update 11.5.17: I made it under 20pages and proceeded to come at my own self with a knife and stabbed both myself and this story 400times. 

Character Concepts:

I wanted Spai to have a very round and friendly design. I wasn't really sure where I wanted to go so I just went and designed Spai to have what I considered spy-like qualities. Most of my design choices are based on practicality. Bird/Catlike legs for speed and jumping ability, usb shaped fingernails to hack into computers, etc. Before I really designed Meridian, Spai's body ended up having very Earth qualities like their solar powered legs and needing to be plugged in.

Their detachable head is my personal touch in that I enjoy the removal of body parts in a lot of fictional settings. Decapitation and neck breaking are a personal favorite for me and I decided to incorporate it into the story but with a more practical use. So Spai can remove their head with a neckbreaking crack and use it like a drone. In this draft I imagined Spai's head to do a lot more rolling and flying.

Bonus outline I scribbled on the side. I didn't really expect to write Spai for class, but I feel that I'll keep this outline for future use if I ever decide to go through with Spai's full story. Which is unlikely because I'm more interested in writing other things at the moment, but you know. If I'm alive for it, maybe.

Current Design: 

Spai's current design is a lot more gray and colder. I wanted them to appear more neutral than anything as a burglar/mercenary/spy type of character. With a binder-like armored vest and a utility belt, Spai seems to have a lot more tricks up their sleeves. Their head also gained a sharper and robotic look, influenced by many one-eyed frame type robots like the frames from Titanfall or Destiny or even Shot from DC's Under the Red Hood. 

Note: Partway through designing this new look, I got it into my head over how interesting it would be for Spai to get rid of bodies by devouring them and using them for fuel. A gory image sat in my mind and I decided to draw a small concept on what they'd be like if they weren't just robotic but something biologic too. There's just something interesting about organic robots these days.

Spai can remove their head to sneak into smaller spaces. Small and spiderlike with sharp legs to stab. Also comes equipped with a laser that comes with a limited power supply as Spai's head/SpaiBall is more like a drone. Their main body contains most of their energy so whenever they run into trouble, Spai is most likely to use their laser/stabby-legs to buy time and summon their main body to their location/rendezvous with it.

In a way, Spai's AI is mostly uploaded onto a cloud or some sort and when their head is destroyed their body can replace it (kind of like object-heads). In previous drafts, Spai had an incredible alien (or maybe cyborg human, who knows) engineer for a roommate...I would have liked to write them in but...I didn't have a name for them and the story would have become extremely long at that point.

Fanart of characters: Raijzin (Left), Spai (Middle), and Fiallae (Right); Artist: Tam Nguyen

Raijzin: Created by my friend Tam when I asked her if she wanted to add anyone into the story. She knew I didn't want any human characters and ended up asking for a "buff tiger" that I lamented over. Ended up loving him though, he's a very interesting character. In a way, I felt like he could have been the main character of the story, but well, it's called Project: Spai for a reason. I actually asked Tam how she felt about me telling the story from Raijzin's point-of-view and she said she felt like he was more of a side-character/accomplice type, which I agree with. Although telling the story from his point-of-view would have been interesting, Spai was the one who moved the story along. Not to mention I'm a huge fan of main characters who fade away so side characters can bloom.

Fiallae: Not mentioned in the actual story, but I wish I had the time to give him a short cameo as Raijzin's roommate and Spai's knife dealer.

Meridian:

The planet Meridian is one of the few leading planets on technological advancement. To protect itself from invasion, the planet unanimously voted to turn itself inside out - it converted its liquid, bio-luminescent core into energy that cycled throughout the planet. The planet itself is split into two parts, separated by different gravitational fields - Outer Meridian (top) and Inner Meridian (bottom). 

There's a lot to it - from corruption to a strange economic system to a variety of species and cultures  inhabiting the planet to commentary on the planet's infrastructure to things that don't matter because they're not important to the story I'm currently trying to tell.

The original concept was somewhat based off of Final Fantasy 7's Midgar, as I wanted an underground/slum type of society, but partway through, I played Destiny 2 and fell in love with the inner city that's clearly inside of the Traveler and then my brother told me about the Micro Dyson Sphere from Halo and I got even more interested.

With that new kind of structure, I thought about Meridian's size. It was a dwarf planet and had a limited population, so I wanted it to be overcrowded and glowing like cities in Japan, Hong Kong, China, and Vietnam. As time went by, I got a bit obsessed with physics and gravity and ended up bringing in a gravitational field and splitting the planet. A lot of the mechanics were based off of Gravity Rush and Inversion.

As a result, Outer Meridian got stalagmites/stalactites depending on your perspective and Inner Meridian got sleek and techy.

Notes:

• I made Spai with the idea that they'd be a video game. I expected lots of stealth (slam O for neck breaking stealth kills), wall running and grappling (square/square+X), and a lot of other things. It would have been open-world on the same level as WatchDogs2 with tons of sidequests/meeting compelling side characters. In a way, I feel like I didn't give Spai much personality because as a gamer, I'm not a fan of characters who talk too much or have too much personality unless it's very well done. Between taking a risk with an interesting main character in an open-world type game, or having a quiet character with small characteristics, I ended up going for what I felt more comfortable with as a player rather than a writer.
• The story I turned in doesn't quite focus on Spai as a main character, but rather focuses on a possible ally for the future. 
• Lack of human main characters. I felt that a lot of sci-fi I read was too human-centric and I wanted to take a step away from that. On one hand, I felt like Spai as an actual nonbinary human would be a huge piece of representation since it would validate not only myself but others who often see non-human nonbinary characters and thus feel less human/valid. On the other hand, I like robot characters. I like nonbinary robots. I don't really like writing human characters into my scifi because humans end up ruining everything. It's more fun for me to write robots. Plus, considering the way some people are, they're more likely to accept Spai as an "other" figure rather than realizing they are, in a hypothetical sense, a nonbinary human. People are fucked up like that. More likely to accept the supernatural and impossible than an LGBTQA+ character/POC in space.
• I got tired while writing and copped out 20000000times. I really wish I made it longer so I could add hotter scenes and more interactions.