Examples / P-05
The Hour Shrine
In world
The surveyor's field notes for this entry are short and the handwriting gets worse toward the end.
A helicopter went down here, probably during the panic weeks after the Silence, when everything that flew came down at once. The tail boom broke off and landed forty feet from the cabin. Somebody stood the boom upright, packed stones around the base, and made it a pillar.
The cabin is the shrine. The doors are gone. Inside, where the seats used to bolt down, there is a floor of flat river rock, and on the rock there are candles, and behind the candles there is a clock face pried off a courthouse tower and mounted on the bulkhead. The hands are set to 4:11. That is the minute the Silence began, and every Thornband shrine in the world is set to the same minute.
They come at dusk. They wear long coats sewn from tarpaulin and blanket wool, and they hang small metal things around their necks, mostly circuit boards and cut up hard drive platters, the pieces of the old world that stopped working. Dead things. That is the point.
The Thornbands believe the Silence was correction, not catastrophe. That the world got too clever and something reached out and turned it off. They think the machines coming back are the same mistake happening again slower, and they are not entirely wrong about the pace of things, which is what makes them dangerous rather than just strange.
They do not usually break machinery. Mostly they stand around a stopped clock and sing.
The surveyor's last line reads: They let me photograph the shrine. They did not let me photograph them. I did not push it.
Reference images
Out of world
What it is
A wrecked aircraft turned into architecture, plus converted figures. The hardest build in the set, and the one that teaches the most.
Donor kits
- Structure: Academy 1/35 UH-1 Huey. Any large 1/35 helicopter works. You are going to break it, so buy it cheap and damaged.
- Figures: any 1/35 figure set with standing poses. AK Interactive Technical Riders (AK35017) gives you civilian bodies that rebuild well into long coats. Civilian, resistance, and modern infantry sets all work once you redo the clothing.
- Sculpting: two part epoxy putty, greenstuff or Milliput, plus lead foil.
- Details: real circuit board scraps, cut small.
The build
- 01
Break it properly
Do not cut the tail boom off cleanly. Score it, then twist until it tears, then clean up the tear with a scalpel so the metal skin peels rather than slices. Plastic tears in a way that looks a lot like sheet metal if you let it.
- 02
Peel the skin
Sand the broken edges thin from the inside, then bend them outward with tweezers. Thin edges are the difference between a wreck and a broken toy.
- 03
Rebuild the figures with putty
Sand the original uniform detail off, then lay long coats over the top in thin sheets of epoxy putty. Work in two sessions, torso first, then sleeves and hem, so you are never pressing on something soft.
- 04
Use lead foil for hanging cloth
Anything that hangs loose, a hood, a hem, a banner, is easier in lead foil than putty. It holds whatever shape you bend it into and it takes glue fine.
- 05
Swap the heads
Nothing changes a figure faster. Even a head from a different set in the same box breaks the look of everything having come from one sprue.
- 06
Cut real circuit boards
Snip the tiniest fragments off a dead board with sprue cutters and hang them as pendants. Real electronics at 1/35 look like nothing else you can paint.
- 07
Light it low
Candle level lighting from inside the cabin, warm and dim, with everything above it in shadow. If you are photographing the build, shoot it in near dark and let the camera do the work.
Make it yours
A wrecked kit is more useful than a finished one. You do not have to build the aircraft. You can build what people made out of the aircraft forty years later.