(See more images here)
Pronunciation: na-RAHNG-gee, BAH-too
Bio:
The matoran duo hail from the jewel of the Old World, Metru Nui. Narangi, a Ga-matoran hydrologist, and Batu, a Ta-matoran metalurgist, first met when recruited with several other specialized matoran for a highly secretive tunnel construction project under the city shortly before the Cataclysm took place. On its face the project was led by a minor Turaga named Mahane, but it was impressed on the recruits that their task was directly sanctioned by the Brotherhood itself, a claim backed by the official Brotherhood Seal that Mahane kept on his person. Its supposed purpose was to be the first step in a risky but necessary city-wide defense infrastructure transformation. Although most further details were withheld - including where such a tunnel was even leading - it was made clear that its completion would mean unparalleled prestige for its builders as well as the personal acclaim of the world’s highest authority. Led by duty or ambition, or both, all of the team’s recruits were sworn to the utmost secrecy and committed themselves to the next several months underground.
The proposed tunnel construction was uniquely challenging, taking place far deeper than even the lowest reaches of the Archives…so deep in fact that the construction team was unexpectedly met with a near impenetrable barrier of unknown metallic composition or properties. Through great skill they managed to penetrate the barrier but beneath that was something even more disconcerting: previously unknown structural architectures of unimaginable scale, and a dangerous security-like apparatus which increased in intensity the further the team approached their unknown destination. By now the matoran were fully aware they were involved in something far more dangerous than what was initially proposed, and after the crew first death a furious Batu violently demanded answers from the Turaga, only to be stopped by the prompt arrival of Rahkshi. Their presence was as much for the team’s protection as to now prevent any from fleeing; the only way out was to finish the tunnel.
In truth, the matoran were creating a backdoor into the processor housing of the Great Spirit Robot for Teridax. Its secrecy was not only to escape the detection of the Universe’s other rival factions but also the members of the Brotherhood itself. Teridax ferociously guarded any knowledge of such a key instrument of his grand designs; access to the mind of Mata Nui would be his alone, and even its existence would be kept permanently from his brothers. It was further to maintain the illusion that Teridax’s former intimacy with the Spirit was much more than it was, that he alone knew of Mata Nui’s vulnerabilities. It was a lie that made his personal leadership of the Brotherhood indispensable. Teridax would use his secret backdoor to initiate the Cataclysm, and return once more at the end of the War with the Brotherhood to fully integrate his essence with the core processor.
The tunnel makers however would never see the inside of their final goal. Standing in front of the last wall protecting the titanic machine mind, a terrified Turaga Mahane seemed to recognize something about its strange symbols and turned to weakly beg the matorans’ forgiveness, before being cut down by Rahkshi. The matoran had barely time to react before they were knocked unconscious. When they awoke, it was on the island of Karzahni; Teridax had hidden them away somewhere the curious eyes of the other Makuta would not look, in case of future need for the only people with knowledge of the exact layout and structural intricacies of the tunnel. Narangi tried to explain to the island’s steward that their group was not broken and that their arrival was a mistake, but Karzahni only cackled and assured them that if their bodies were not broken then something deeper in them was. And that in time, he would mend that too.
For weeks while the tunnel makers awaited Karzahni’s twisted craft, three mustered the courage to plan an escape - Narangi, Batu, and a De-matoran named Upura. The three had grown close in the tunnels; now they were preparing tools and studying the island, waiting for an opportunity to flee. That opportunity came during the unexpected chaos of the Cataclysm, and the three friends, failing to convince any others in their crew to join them, fled for their lives. Before they were clear however, they stumbled across some of the island’s security scurrying to maintain order. Upura would give his life during the confrontation to afford his two friends the chance to continue on. Narangi and Batu, two of the only known matoran to have escaped Karzahni, would go on to live out the rest of the Old World in a wild, obscure part of the Universe hidden from the searching eyes of Teridax.
In the early post-Reformation, expeditionary teams of toa, glatorian, and others began to push deep into the ruined matoran Universe in order to scavenge useful resources and rescue any still trapped or lost in its ruins. One such team eventually reached the matoran pair, who by this time were languishing in a collapsed pocket of the Universe. Brought onto the surface of Spherus Magna, the two were overwhelmed by the dizzying flood of world shattering information that had to be explained to them about the previous several years. But one fact was understood perfectly - Teridax was dead.
Narangi and Batu, free finally of the last many years of hardship, sought to pick up their old lives in the new society around former Tesara that was constructing en masse to build a new civilization. But they were dismayed to see so many of their old acquaintances now unrecognizable, and unable to recognize them. The former inhabitants of Metru Nui - friends, comrades, brothers and sisters - had been robbed of their memory during the Cataclysm. Their time on the island of Mata Nui had changed them, their culture and their behavior. They no longer knew life in the Old World, and they no longer knew these two displaced matoran returned to them - one final, cruel blow to the pair by the hand of Teridax. Standing in a sea of familiar faces, Narangi turned to Batu and proclaimed sardonically that they were now “the last matoran of Metru Nui”.
Their only consolation came from an unfamiliar but sympathetic Turaga named Vakama who suggested that they, the protodermans, were now all a displaced people in this new world, and that the two matoran would never be alone in the struggle to forge new destinies. Narangi and Batu appreciated their time with the Turaga, but ultimately found it too painful to live among so many old faces and chose to head out east. Once again their final destination was unclear. What was clear was that where one went, the other would follow.
In the two and a half centuries since their rescue, the pair would make their way across much of the east and south of the former Great Barren taking up many odd jobs along the way, still carrying their old weapons from their time on Karzahni. They eventually settled into the caravan trade networks making their circuit around the meeting place of three borders - the Toa/Glatorian dominated lands of the former Great Barren in the west, the steppes of the nomadic Ouscurii Glatorian in the north east, and the rugged cliffed highlands of the Zanite/Vortixx territories southeast. For a while life proceeded in regular fashion for the two, until an unexpected meeting with a Zanite group that wanted their help reentering the broken AI housing of the Great Spirit Robot.
By the middle of the 3rd century post-Reformation, many nations were unnerved by the sudden reemergence of Energized Protodermis from the core, but they were truly alarmed by the massive crystalline spirit-like entities that seemed to accompany it, later to be known as “Sephids”. The aberrant creatures and their space warping properties began to wreak havoc wherever they appeared. So when a potential connection between them and the now dormant Great Spirit was identified, several of the leading nations planned a cooperative expedition to recover still surviving records of Mata Nui’s knowledge in reserve memory banks under Metru Nui. Led by Turaga and former archivist Whenua, the large team of Toa, Glatorian, Zanites, and many others at first began their attempts from the lowest levels in the Archives. Constant threat of collapse and continual attacks by strange rahi or haywire autonomous security proved a smaller problem than the multiple dead ends the team ran into. Everywhere more twisted metal and an impenetrable barrier, nowhere a break or a weak spot in the architecture underneath. The expedition stalled.
As many began to rethink their approach, the Zanite 10th Ordimat unit - led by a commander named Nerix - gathered information on rumors of two Karzahni escapees who had been involved in…something, underneath Metru Nui. After investigating details of their activities, the Ordimats pieced together its full implications and realized there was a potential shortcut to the reserve memory banks hidden in the wreckage. But due to increasing mutual distrust among the factions, Zanite authority chose to act on their new information separate from the Tesaran Toa and Glatorian; the Ordimat teams agreed.
When Nerix’s 10th Ordimat tracked down Narangi and Batu, their request to help navigate the hidden tunnels was met with outright refusal; the two matoran would die before heading back into those wretched tunnels. Pressure mounted from increasingly nervous Zanite higher authorities for Ordimat 10 to move on to more coercive means to make the two cooperate if necessary, but Nerix insisted on a different approach. After hearing their full story the commander realized she might have something to incentivize their cooperation - she offered the potential for information on the whereabouts of Upura, the De-matoran friend who had sacrificed himself to help the two escape Karzahni. Nerix surmised the dead matoran may have resurrected on the Red Star, which had been deliberately crashed onto the surface of Spherus Magna during the conflict with Velika in the first year of the Reformation. Whether he was there and if he was one of those teleported out before the collision would have been recorded by the last remaining entity to have synced with the Red Star’s systems during the conflict: the semi-sentient Vortixx Progenitor, for which the Zanites were now stewards.
The offer to find or meet closure on the matoran friend to whom they owed their lives weighed heavily on the two. Batu continued to refuse, but Nerix gave time to allow Narangi to persuade her friend otherwise. In the end the pair agreed to the deal and led the Zanites back into the tunnels. Though they couldn’t know it at the time, the information they helped retrieve would spark the flashpoint to a conflict that been long brewing among the new nations of Spherus Magna, and one that began to increasingly align itself along protoderman and non-protoderman lines…
Personalities:
The two matoran first met as recruits of the tunnel crew; neither particularly liked the other. Frank to a fault and too quick to speak her mind, the matter-of-factly Narangi often rubbed her peers the wrong way despite her well meaning intentions and was considered awkward or, more generously, simply tactless. At times she could be the clearest eyed of their group while at others she came across as an emotional brick wall. Conversely Batu, though occasionally crass and too eager be a dominant force, was often well liked by those in his orbit as most appreciated his devout loyalty to those he considered friends, although his bullheaded nature often impeded his ability to change his mind or see other perspectives. Both could be too stubborn for their own good, and both believed too often that they were right, seemingly more so when they were wrong.
The two clashed frequently in the beginning of their long tunnel project, but eventually came to know each other more deeply as friends, along with their late friend Upura. By the end of their harrowing journey through the matoran Universe the two had become inseperable, and their mutual companionship would make it that much easier to move on from the painful disconnect with their former world.
Scale:
A size comparison of my matoran next to a few others mocs. I’ve tried to normalize relative scale among my mocs to be internally consistent, at least to my own preferences. G1 always felt all over the place due to getting new body types for canister sets every few years. Not that I’m complaining; the inika introducing full standard articulation was one of the best things that ever happened to G1, but by 2008 the average little dude species of a given year was nearing the height of the old Toa Mata. What my mocs have turned into is roughly 3 height classes - smol peeps, canister sets a head above that, and common titan races a head above that. Anything taller, ie Artakha or other giant one-off characters (god help us, Botar), I consider in a potpourri class of its own.
For reference, the toa here are roughly inika height. Like a smidge taller.
Studio File:
Download here.
*Substituted parts are in purple:
- Narangi: 3L bars in lower leg are supposed to be 1L cut bars
- Batu: Lhikan’s mask is substituted for Photok’s mask (60905)
There aren’t enough realistically proportioned small mocs around.
I’m still hoping since the contest is over you’ll consider repurposing at least some of your Artakha into an epic Lord of Jungle moc.
. I don’t think you need to ship yours off to an alternate universe though, people making their own versions of canon sets is more than half of all mocs anyway.
. I’ve got at least two more I’ll be bringing at some point; one old and one new. And thanks.