I am sure many of you know about the secret project, but now it it time to find out what it is. The secret project started back in about November of 1997 when Quu (aka Patrick Bohnet) wanted to enlist my help in pulling a prank on Jean. Quu said that Jean had a real thing for Totoros, and wanted to use this "fetish" as Quu called it to pull a prank on him. At first I was a bit leary of helping Quu, but he eventualy convinced me to do it (its amazing what a broke student will do). Quu came up with the idea of making a Totoro Gear to be used at a con to freak out Jean. He let me use my own evil creative ideas to make the gear, so long as it remained "cute" with a definate Heavy Gear look to it, also it must be in scale with the RAFM minis (as you can see above, with a RAFM Predator Jaguar mini in the middle) needless to say Quu was quite impressed with the out come.
The Totoro gear started out as a small easter egg, I added milliput and extra RAFM mini parts to construct the mini. I used an extra V-engine form a Rabid Grizzly (its nice to have 2 come in a blister), a DPG off one of its arms and the feet off its legs, both of which were defective (it was one messed up mini). The Vibro blade came from a Kodiak mini. I scratch built the rocket pod, and hand molded everything else out of milliput.
After fixing it up and giving it some paint it looked much better. Painting it was not too much fun, for some reason the brown paint I was using changed color to a lighter shade, making touch up spots kinda visible. Optional Light Feild gun showen at lower right
Quu couldn't leave well enough alone (actually I think Jesster had somthing to do with the second bit), so he asks me to make a Sailor Moon gear that would be about the same size as the Totoro gear. The reason for this being that our good pal V-Man is a big Sailor Moon fan. So I went out and bought a Sailor Moon super deformed figure to use as a base for the evil mini. I then scratch built a V-engine, rocket pod, feet, and eye cover out of milliput and bits of things lying around my house. After adding these I attached a G.I. Joe shotgun to the arm and made a base out of aluminim. I then painted all of the parts I had stuck on.
Quu and Jesster were supposed to get Jean and the V-Man to go to Toronto Trek. Once there they were going to spring the trap, by getting Marc and Jean to play a game with the evil minis. But alais... Jean didn't go. V-Man's reaction was of shock, or so I am told (I wan't able to go to Toronto Trek). V-Man took the Totoro gear back up to the DP9 office to show Jean, and well I shouldn't be expecting to get any Christmas cards from Jean this year, unless they tick :) .