The Rilovians, Chapter 4: Gelaeus

The entire planet of Rilovi rejoiced as militaries disarmed and former warriors took up civic duties. Everyone was completely convinced that this was the right thing to do, and strict laws and procedures were created to ensure that this peace would never fail.

After three generations, the warrior class had dwindled to a small, scattered assortment of local police and rangers; armies were no more. This thought did not rest comfortably in the mind of a Nofi giant named Gelaeus.

An unsung, visionary hero in Bionicle history, Gelaeus was a veteran Great Engineer who specialized in the design of advanced agricultural equipment. His varied inventions helped to grow, harvest, or process nearly one-fifth of all foodstuffs produced on the planet. Early in his career, he had suffered a tragic accident with a malfunctioning harvester prototype that severely damaged both of his legs, requiring a double amputation. He was fitted with artificial limbs and though these worked perfectly well and restored full mobility, they didn't fully satisfy Gelaeus. With his engineering knowledge, he began modifying and upgrading his own prosthetics in his spare time, improving his speed and flexibility alike. Though eventually he became happy with his limbs, he still wanted to do more, and began experimenting with Bionicle-form robots. Here is one of his first:


It was a fairly simple creation, remote-controlled and capable of not much, but if you've been following the story since the beginning, you know that there's something very wrong with this picture. Do you see it, yet? The Rilovians, remember, thought of the use of energy weapons as sacriledge. Gelaeus agreed with this belief, but with a... catch.

This giant of the Nofi celebrated and praised the worldwide disarmament as sincerely as any other self-respecting citizen. However, he feared it had been taken too far. Surely, Rilovians would never again war with Rilovians. But, what of others? What of villanous beings from another world, of threats to Rilovi of which no Rilovian knew or ever could know? Gelaeus believed that the disarmament left the planet in grave peril. There had been dozens of contacts with outworlders in Rilovi's history, but all had ranged between delightfully enriching and brief & uneventful. If, Great Beings forbid, the next encounter were to be with an invading force, the planet would surely be overrun.

Gelaeus pleaded his case to elders from all five regions and though they allowed him to continue his research and experiments on his own time, they did not fundamentally agree with his viewpoint. Furthermore, they plainly refused him permission to fit any of his creations with either working energy weapons or any artificial intelligence that could be used for combat.

Frustrated, but not deterred, Gelaeus pushed on with his designs, building harvesters by day and robotic Bionicle warriors by night. Here is his half-scale prototype of a lightweight mechanized walker:


This next curiosity combines a 4-legged walking weapons platform with an independent driver 'bot that could be programmed to operate many different types of equipment.

As decades passed, Gelaeus never received the clearance he needed from the elders, yet his concern for the safety of his planet, his beautiful, peaceful home planet, grew each and every day. As a Great Engineer, he commanded a great salary, yet he lived a very modest life, allowing him to accumulate a significant pool of currency. Much this lifetime of savings would be spent purchasing a parcel of pristine protected land from the governmental council. He said it was to be a place of meditation, to experience the plants and the rahi in a sliver of rare, untouched habitat. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.

Gelaeus obeyed his sworn oath to leave the landscape untouched, but at night he and a small band of anti-disarmament sympathizers tunnelled from an unassuming small cave entrance at the edge of the property. They went first straight down, and then horizontally beneath the terrain to form an elevator shaft and an absolutely enormous underground cavern. I actually believe most of the work was done by Gelaeus's robots, but that is neither here nor there. In this cleverly hidden space, the giant and his supporters built a prototyping lab and a small factory to proceed with the secret development of more complete and capable war machines, along with energy weapons for them to use and artificial intelligence programs to give them autonomous "life." Next to the lab he hollowed out yet another open cavern, this a testing and training zone for scaled-down versions of his creations. His plan was to develop a cohesive range of finely-tuned defense machines programmed to be incapable of aggression against Rilovians or any other peaceful beings. With real, working examples, he hoped to be able to finally persuade the elders to sanction his research and allow him to begin official production for planetary defense in the event of a hostile incursion.

He just had to develop those perfect examples...

The Rilovians, Chapter 3: The awakening

Looking straight up into the sky, a casual observer would have called it a perfectly beautiful Autumn day. The view at ground level, though... was far from delightful. A patch of savannah in a valley no wider than a small city block had been fought over by Rallo & Foran warriors for over eight months. The line of skirmish would move 50 paces in one direction one day, then nearly the exact distance in reverse the next. The prisoner situations on both sides was beyond critical.

A construction supervisor working on the newest Rallo prison, a stone's throw from the battlefield, was surveying the work in progress, verifying dimensions of the skeletal structure in preparation for the walls of the second floor to be erected. As he gazed through his optical measuring device, he realized he was looking directly towards the battlefield, and in a moment of curiosity he recalibrated the device's focus to have a look at goings-on over on the Foran side. He noticed the makings of a brand new structure not far off in the distance, and started looking for clues in its design that would indicate its purpose. As he scanned slowly from side to side, investigating the foundation & frames, he noticed a Foran worker carrying an expensive toolcase up a ladder, and he decided to follow this fellow for a bit. The Foran carefully made it up to the second floor, which appeared to be nearly ready for its walls to be raised. He opened his toolcase, and what emerged but an optical measuring device and a tripod; what a coincidence. More curious than ever, the Rallo surveyer adjusted his focus ever slightly better to get a perfect view. The Foran got fully set up and began taking measurements until, facing towards the battlefield, something caught his eye in the background; a new building in the making. The Rallo's breathing became heavy and panicked. He had realized something but did not want to believe it. He pulled away from his scope for a moment to look across the way with his naked eyes, then turned his attention back to the device. The Foran did the same. Completely shocked, they each looked over the other's site again, now immediately recognizing eerie similarities, then returning stunned gazes towards each other. They were both construction supervisors, and they were each building prisons to house captives from the other's military forces; forces that were fighting just between them.

The account of this astonishing encounter spread quickly among the Rallo & Foran civilian populations, but when it got to their armies, the result was profound. Opposing warriors met at the line of skirmish in that small valley and before engaging in battle, began to speak of the recent incident and pause to ponder its significance. The clashing of weapons and shields that had gone on continuously for the better part of a year, stopped completely in a matter of minutes, replaced by pensive murmurs. Workers at the prison sites noticed the change in the air, and they, too, ceased their activities and started slowly walking down towards the battlefield with puzzled looks on their faces. It was the beginning of the end, for a world-wide Bionicle war of which there could never have been any winners.

All across Rilovia, military commanders met, truces were declared, and prisoners were exchanged. I am particularly fond of a quote from one Mikau elder who said,

"I always told them they should stop [fighting]. Now, see? This is much better."

Such a simplistic view on it all. Such... profound wisdom. At last, with this new peace, the citizens of Rilovia saw fit to follow the guidance & leadership of the elders again.

It is unfortunate, most unfortunate indeed, that this would be their undoing...

The Rilovians, Chapter 2: The lunacy of war

The warriors of Rilovi were amongst the most honor-driven I've encountered in the vast Bionicle universes. Though they were fiersome in battle, a strict code of ethics governed their every action. To begin with, all Rilovians believed that the use of any form of energy device (such as a blaster or even a charged staff) against a living being would be utterly uncivilized and barbaric. Thus, warriors fought hand-to-hand on the battlefield with only conventional weapons such as metal and ceramic swords and spears. Hundreds of years of refinement of many of these types of primitive weapons rendered them fairly equal in combat effectiveness, leaving the outcome of any individual clash up to a combination of warrior skill and stamina. With combat training from one region to another being as finely evolved as their weapon design, luck was frequently the deciding factor in a long, gruelling battle between two proud warriors.

To the Rilovian, to win a fight was not to slay your opponent. To win was to establish irrefutable combattive dominance. Deaths in battle were rare and generally the result of carelessness brought on by fatigue. The typical battle ended when one warrior found a weapon to his throat, forcing him to surrender. His weapon would be collected and he would be personally escorted by the victor to a forward base, where he would be processed as a prisoner. As a prisoner, he would be ensured satisfactory shelter and sustinence, the right to pray how and when he chose, and regular remote communciation with family members.

The irony of it all is quite obvious, in hindsight. There were too many inhabitants for the land, so they would go to war with their neighbors. Then, instead of slaughtering eachother and thus actually helping with the problem, they would merely trade places in large numbers while requiring the construction of huge prison complexes that wasted still more land. Making matters still worse, a warrior captured in battle would have to be replaced. It was an utterly ridiculous, viscious cycle.

My Bionicle-building style

While I did jump into Bionicle building suddenly and head-first, I've actually set a few parameters or guiding principles around all of this activity to make sure there's some method to the madness.

• Keepin' it original. While there are a ton of very talented Bionicle MOC'ers out there who do some amazing work, I respectfully make a very conscious effort to ignore every one of them. I strive to make every single thing I create (not just in the Bionicle world) truly unique. To help with this, I seek inspiration not from other builders, but from nature, everyday objects, and individual Bionicle parts themselves. Many of my creations, in fact, were designed & built around a single piece that I randomly looked at and decided I had to use for something, anything. If you see a torso or foot design in one of my MOCs that looks eerily like someone else's, take my word for it, it's pure coincidence. I can't copy what I haven't looked at!
  
• Keepin' it Technic. With the probably tens of thousands of System parts Lego has created over the years, it's posible to create some stupidly amazing MOCs. Collecting, organizing, & storing a huge variety of System parts, though, can be incredibly expensive in both time and money. Frankly, I'm not committed enough to take that deep of a dive, so I'm trying to stick to Bionicle & Technic pieces only, with the very rarest of exceptions.
  
• Bionicle world only! To maintain a little bit of focus, I'm sticking to building things that feel like they could be Bionicle "canon." I'm avoiding medieval lore-derived dragons, Anime-styled mechs, and reality-inspired vehicles like the plague. Perhaps when/if I get a little bored with the Bionicle stories & styles I'll consider branching out, but that surely won't be anytime soon.

Welcome, fellow Bionicle lovers!

Greetings! Thank you for stopping by! Zeyek's BIONICLE: Untold is my latest Internet venture, a log of fictitious stories I created to breath a little extra life into my newest hobby, building Lego Bionicle MOCs ("My Own Creations," literally just custom builds). Speaking of stories, allow me to tell you the completely true story of how I got into Bionicle building to begin with.

I originally played with Legos as a young child. In fact, the very earliest set I remember having was #6383, Public Works Center, at the turn of the 1980's. I did a bunch of tinkering, but eventually moved on to bigger & "better" things like slot cars and HO scale trains. It wasn't until the turn of the 21st century that I made a long-overdue return to the wonderful world of Lego, using over 12,500 parts to build a long cityscape display along a wall at my place of work. You can see more about all that at my homepage. I pretty quickly took the plunge into Technic, eventually buying two original Mindstorms sets and several of the add-on packs to mess around with autonomous vehicles & walkers. Just when I was picking up steam with the 'bots, though, again I took a detour, this time getting into pro-level radio-controlled (R/C) racing & engineering (more about that on my numerous RC sites). All of the Mindstorms stuff went up on eBay, and my remaining System parts went into buckets to collect dust in the garage while I went off gaining a little bit of fame & fortune in the surprisingly vast & vibrant RC world.

In early 2009, I was working as a senior designer at PayPal. You know, PayPal, that site you can use to pay for stuff on eBay & thousands of other places, or to send money to friends & family online. I had taken on the task of designing small pieces of web pages (we called them "standards") that could be assembled together to build complete pages and even whole new PayPal products. It was kind of like designing Lego blocks, and teaching people how to use them. Well, there came a point where I had to give a big presentation to over 100 people in my department to explain what I was doing and why it was going to make all of their lives better. Rather than doing the usual boring, dreary, endless PowerPoint slides full of text that just put people to sleep, I decided to use a Lego theme and present almost exclusively with colorful pictures that I'd narrate in free form. Out of the garage came the buckets of System pieces at last, and I even made a trip to Toys R Us for some newer additions. I created & photographed all of the scenes for the presentation over the course of a weekend, and it was a raging success.


One of the lessons I wanted to teach in this presentation was that for a building block system to work, all of the blocks have to be from the same system. To put this in picture form, I made a couple of scenes featuring parts & creations from different construction toy sets, including Lego System, Duplo, K'Nex, and Magnext. I also threw in a Bionicle set for kicks, because it was cheap and, to the untrained eye at least, its parts clearly wouldn't play well with the others.

I actually took some evil pleasure in poo-pooing on the idea of Bionicles in addition to the other non-Lego System parts. You see, I always hated Bionicle. I hated the whole concept. I saw the original sets in stores back in 2001 and they infuriated me with their special parts and departure from the classic interlocking brick setup that made Legos, well, Legos. To me, any Lego product that wasn't strictly based on the brick system was blasphemy, taking creativity out of one of the most creative toys ever devised.

The particular Bionicle I picked to use in my presentation was the Agori Atakus, from the Bara Magna storyline. I got Atakus in particular because at least the assembled figure looked pretty cool, if you could ever get past the fact that it was a Bionicle and thus a disgrace to the world. It looked cool enough, in fact, that after the presentation, I brought it in to work to add to the decor of my little area of the office. Bad move. Within a few weeks I had bought yet another one of these evil things, Solek the Matoran this time. Then I picked up a Zesk. When I next bought Tarduk, I recognized that I had the start of a collection on my hands. At the same time, my originality instinct started kicking in hard-core, and I itched to create some custom Bionicles, though at that point I had never so much as heard of the term "MOC."

My next Bionicle purchase was on eBay (and paid for with PayPal!). This time instead of buying a set, I bought five or so. Pounds. It was the partly-assembled Bionicle collection of some kid who had already outgrown them. Then came another 5 or so pounds, and another 3, and another 7. By the time I slowed down purchasing these big lots of parts, I had more legs, heads, and ball socket pieces than I thought I would ever be able to use. In the meantime, I had disassembled all of my pre-built sets and done my first dozen or so MOCs, and the rest was history.

As of this writing, I have nearly 60 custom creations ranging in height from 2 inches to 2 feet. Some of these builds are my own personal takes on official ("canon") Bionicle characters, but most were completely made-up, so it was only natural that I would create unique back-stories for them. To avoid conflicting with any of the official storylines, I've devised some new planets and new timeline events, and you'll be seeing some well-developed new civilized races as well as species of Rahi, all told from the viewpoint of Zeyekti-Iiloptinous Mazzourel, the oldest of all Bionicle chroniclers.

I hope you enjoy following my work even a fraction as much as I enjoy doing it! Please do leave comments! I'm unfortunately an unusually busy guy, so I won't always be able to directly respond to individual comments, but I can assure you I'll read every one, and you'll definitely be seeing some responses and follow-ups appearing in future posts.

Just be aware of one thing, though. If you post on Zeyek's site, you'll only ever get responses from Zeyek, not me! ;)

The Rilovians, Chapter 1: Colors of life

The planet is known as Rilovi. Its soil is incredibly rich with iron, magnesium, and sulfur, painting the ground a vibrant, burning reddish color. A warm world, its landscapes range from rocky deserts sprinkled with hearty plants to lush tropical rainforests. Snow and ice are only encountered at the northernmost tip of the planet, and for no more than one-third of the year.

In my earliest studies of Rilovi I found the planet's Bionicle civilizations to be exceptionally diverse in both appearance and societal roles. A very religious population, the Rilovians aligned themselves into five regional groups, each revering a different aspect of existance as they knew it, and each adopting distinctive regional markings:

• Rallo, followers of the Sun (yellow)
  
  
• Nofi, worshippers of the vast inland Syanic Sea (green)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Foran, who revered the soil (red)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Tiallo, worshippers of the air (blue)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Mikau, believers in the forests (brown)
  
  
  
  
  

Across all of these groups ran one other axis of distinction between individuals, a class system that could most easily be recognized by differences in size.

• Like any typical Bionicle society, the majority of the population consists of upright-walking average citizens (of modest size). On Rilovi, these commoners had no particular title as a class, and the overwhelming majority of them worked in agriculture or construction.
  
  
• Warriors (slightly larger) were selected at a young age for their physical potential and trained to live a full, long careers of military valor. I will speak more of this class... later.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Elders (smallest in stature) among the Rilovians were known for their wisdom, but not their knowledge. To use a term you may be more familiar with, these were no Turaga. With advancing age, their intellectual capacity receded, eventually rendering them... simple-minded, as some may say. This, though, was exactly what brought the elders the highest level of respect from all other classes. Their minds were pure, their thoughts uncomplicated, their decisions fair and unbiased. This made them natural leaders among the very moral populous, and elders served as judges, mayors, counsellers, and priests.
  
• Lastly, there were the largest members of Rilovian society. It was once estimated that for every 1,000 Rilovians in existance, a mere 3 were Giants. Though the smallest giant could rest his chin on the head of the tallest warrior, these were no brutes -- they were giants of intellect! These were the architects, the medical scientists, the inventors.
  
  
  
  
  

With rich, fertile soil, a fantastic climate, and a myriad of motivated workers, the Bionicle planet of Rilovi provided ample food and a hospitable environment for every citizen that could set a foot upon the land. The problem was, there existed... too many feet... but not enough land for those feet to to set upon. No giant thoughts nor elder wisdom could prevent the inevitable border disputes, and as these disputes grew and itensified, they escalated to perpetual civil war.

Hence, the warrior class...

Zeyek, Chronicler of Bionicle

My name is Zeyekti-Iiloptinous Mazzourel. You may call me Zeyek... for short.

To the best of my understanding, I am the oldest living chronicler of Bionicle, though not the longest-living. I've died, you see. Twice. Minor inconveniences along the way, you might say.

I have visited 113 planets and traversed seven different realities. I'm growing rather fond of this reality here. It is... peaceful, relatively speaking.

I have been seeking out adventures, documenting events, and archiving histories for countless years, and I have divulged factual accounts to willing ears in numerous galaxies. Alas, I feel the time has come to disperse my gathered knowledge across a... wider audience.

Gather here and I will teach you the untold legends of Bionicle, of other worlds and other races of beings. I will fill in some inconvenient gaps in the history you may already think you know, and I may perhaps even correct some blatant errors and misconceptions in popular lore.

I do hope you will find at least some of this information useful, if not enlightening.