Now I present my first exercise in toy customizing: Kehotay, Toa of Earth. I actually made the original version of this guy a good year before the Heckfire fig, but he's been through a couple of upgrades as the years passed.

See, my cynical/sardonic idea was that since every Bionicle fan seemed to have their own "Toa Sue" character, I'd make my own to sort of poke some dark fun at the whole deal (as if his name wasn't a big enough hint of the initial satirical nature of the character). Much like his namesake from La Mancha, Kehotay was the last of his kind and, aided by his clueless but loyal servant, a reprogrammed Vahki named "Pon-Zaa," he ended up coming to an inglorious end, either alone and totally forgotten after bringing down the other malfunctioning Vahki only to be overrun and devoured by the oncoming Visorak hordes or mutated by their venom into a mindless Rahi.

However, since I'd created him just after finally moving into my own place following the separation, I ended up becoming much more sentimentally attached to him than intended, especially after my son fell so thoroughly in love with him and insisted/begged that I make HIM a "Toa Sue" to be Kehotay's best friend. So, what started out as a bitter and cynical spleen-venting project turned into the mechanism by which my son and I were able to reconnect following the divorce and all the crap I'd put him through as the marriage was falling apart, and the two of us ended up building this huge ongoing story called "The Legend of the Lost" about our two Toa and their growing adventures.

Kehotay's revised origin is that he was an Onu-Matoran whose job was exploring the deepest forgotten tunnels of the Great Archive of Metru-Nui to recover lost exhibits and lore, which is why he wasn't rounded up and put into stasis like all the other Matoran when Turaga Dume revealed himself to be Makuta Teridax in disguise. However, he hadn't been forgotten and was in fact cornered by a squad of Vahki robots when the Great Cataclysm hit, burying them all alive in a forgotten chamber that also held a container of energized protodermis that ruptured and mutated Kehotay into a Toa. Once the bioquake ended, Kehotay, not realizing what he was now, built an intact Vahki out of the remains of his pursuers and some of the prototype equipment in the exhibit room he was trapped in and named it "Pon-Zaa" after an ancient word for "loyal servant," then set it to digging them out. The rest of the story of their escape from the ruined city made up "Chapter 1" while the next 3 chapters centered around his quest to discover the fates of "The Lost," a list of missing-in-action Toa he recovered from the remains of the Tower of Toa (where he also got his tools), in the hopes of finding any survivors and enlisting their aid in retaking Metru-Nui and rescuing the lost Matoran.

...then came the big "Mistika" revelation about what the world of BIONICLE actually IS, which torpedoed our whole narrative into unworkableness, so we turned our attentions to the Transformers. I wonder how many other fan projects were 'sploded into bits by learning the whole thing took place in Mata-Nui's gut..?

Anyway, this is his most recent upgrade during Chapter 4, "The Isle of Shadows" (OK, so originality wasn't our biggest concern, I admit). Like I mentioned, he's a Toa of Earth, since my favorite Kanohi mask at the time is black (as you can see); it's also not a "replica," it's actually supposed to be a legit Kanohi Pakari/Mask of Strength, BTW. His tools are a pair of Aero Slicers he wears solely as wings in order to navigate terrain impassible even his elemental powers and strength and an as-yet STILL unnamed sword-shield combo that can absorb enemy attacks (with the shield, natch), channel their energies through his body to the sword which then can use them against the attackers (which is very painful and damaging; he's the first Toa to be able to use the combo without being horribly killed by its first use). As of "The Isle of Shadows," he added some upgraded armor and a pair of Cordak Pistols, short range handguns that are like the flintlock versions of the massive six-barreled Cordak Blasters: inaccurate, clumsy, and horribly short of range, but better than nothing. I designed him overall for poseability and to not hog all the "good parts"; ironically, near as I can tell, that's what makes him a highly "defective" design by other MOC-ers' standards, since I tried to keep him as close to a canister set as possible and not to "over-build" him. Hey, I'm not made of money, here, after all, some of us can't afford to put a hundred dollars worth of LEGO parts into a single creation.

He's still one of my favorite creations.