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(I've had these finished for a while and THOUGHT I'd posted them already, but the search engine can't find them.) In the ancient days when the Solar System was young, the Martian Empire spread far and wide through the local outer spiral arm before the Veiled Catastrophe ended their hegemony. They built miracles and left behind marvels. Sometimes they left behind colonies. A few of these, such as the ancestors of the Andromedan Dominion, flourished. Others saw the colonists die off, to be replaced aeons later by evolved descendants of flora and fauna brought along during the terraforming (Martiaforming?) process. Still others suffered resource collapse, and the colonists relapsed into centuries of barbarism. Witness one such case. Here are representatives of the Skull-Fang tribe, wielders of the sacred xolchu knife-axe (similar to our huckable Earth mambele knives): And here their great rivals, the spear-wielding Moonspike tribe. Skirmishes between the two are a way of life since time immemorial. Only the greatest warriors go without a shield, preferring instead to dual-wield their own weapons and those taken from the enemy. Even in their reduced state, though, they have not lost the Martian intellect. Between clashes their bards create great sagas and carvings of incredibly advanced mathematics. Their shamans have deduced nuclear and relativistic physics from first principles. There simply isn't enough smeltable metal left to put their designs to use. Three local years after the disastrous First Contact with outward-expanding Earth forces, a temporary alliance of the tribes managed to build a working hyperdrive out of scrap metal bits and a stolen ray gun. Since then, their ballooning fleet of pirated ships has been kept in check only by internal struggles. Kinetic projectiles on gravity-slingshot orbits are their specialty, and the shock of having your ship depressurized by a knife thrown from several light-seconds away is one few spacers are prepared to deal with.

A return to the hallowed, mouldering halls of Miskatonic University, this time to check in on the professors of Marine Science and Oriental Studies! Here's 50046, Dr. Ervin Friedman. A classic mad scientist sculpt; love the dynamic "Eureka!/I'll show them, I'll show them ALL!" pose. Friedman looks like a chemist, but I had the tank from 77493, Brain-in-a-Jar and some little fish from a craft store lying around and made another fishtank. Click for more angles. I imagine he gets on well with his colleague Dr. Froschmeister. Next up, the Professor from NorthStar's "In Her Majesty's Name" line. An academic in the humanities, an eccentric genius with very good fashion sense. I will fix that smoking jacket one day, but it's tabletop ready for now. He's got a very expressive pose and I can just imagine him dilating on abstruse facets of the art traditions of forgotten empires and smell the pipe-tobacco and old leather.