This’ll likely get buried under everyone mass uploading their contest entries that are useless to them now, but why wait?
So, back during the Great Disruption, we know Toa Jovan traveled with his team to Karda Nui to resurrect the Great Spirit, and afterwards he stayed behind on the Southern Continent as a Turaga. However, something I’d found a little bit questionable was, why didn’t he stay behind as a Toa to protect the Southern Continent? Perhaps he gave his power away to create a team of Toa to do the job, and he could comfortably retire and guide them as a Turaga? And if he created this team, why haven’t we heard from them? Where are they? All that and more will be answered.
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Meet the Southern Continent’s very own Toa Team, the Toa Sinis. Quite a colorful bunch, are they not? I tried to include a wide variety of builds and colors, and as a bonus, with the exception of one specific piece, everything here is completely purist.
Now let’s meet our contenders one by one, shall we?
The leader of the team is Toa Padjal, the Toa Sinis of Plantlife (pictured here without her signature cape). As a Matoran, Padjal was native to the Southern Continent, being the de facto leader of the village from which Vican also hailed. As there were no Turaga on the Southern Continent before Jovan, Matoran from all over the continent, not just the village, would come to Padjal for advice, and she became regarded as a wise figure, which likely played a part in Jovan choosing her to lead the Toa Sinis. Padjal uses her Kanohi Miru to glide from tree to tree in tall jungles, and her protosteel shears allow her to hack her way through dense foliage, or she can recombine them into a bow to blast her enemies from afar.
Hasic is the Toa Sinis of Fire, though he uses his power over his element to quell fires rather than start them. As a Matoran, he lived through a traumatic experience in which a wildfire resulted in the deaths of many of his friends, after which he swore to save as many Matoran as he could, a dedication which no doubt landed him a spot on the team in Jovan’s eyes. Hasic’s Kanohi Kakama and twin axes both serve the purpose of moving fast through danger to rescue anyone who might be helpless against it. In a pinch, the axes may also be thrown like tomahawks.
Cousea, the Toa Sinis of Water, always loved to explore, and even after being “repaired” by Karzahni and sent to the Southern Continent, she only saw the experience as a great adventure. Having drawn maps of much of the continent’s land is no doubt a feat that attracted Jovan’s attention when looking for potential Toa, and her transformation into such only allowed her to explore the deep waters of the continent and its surrounding area as well. In the depths of the ocean, Cousea uses her Kanohi Ruru to navigate in the dark, and her finned tonfas help her steer while swimming, and slice up any aquatic Rahi that may mistake her for dinner.
The Toa Sinis of Iron, Iomman, is also the physically strongest member of the team. Having always been more interested in music than craftsmanship, the former Nynrah Ghost left his home island to become a wandering bard, taking odd jobs as a bodyguard to travelers from island to island to make enough widgets to maintain his instrument, eventually landing on the Southern Continent. This quirky nature and uncanny ability to defeat far larger and more threatening adversaries were sure signs to Jovan that he must be a worthwhile addition to the roster of Toa. Though Iomman claims his Kanohi Arthron is for “acoustics”, its true purpose is to let him see threats coming from every direction, only to meet the business end of his bladed pendulum - which on a good day can double as a guitar, eliciting dulcet tones that bring the team together.
Socha was another Matoran to have the misfortune of passing through Karzahni before becoming the Toa Sinis of Stone. In his hometown of Metru Nui, Socha loved to goof off and toss disks with his friends instead of doing his job as a carver, which eventually ended when an accident sent him to Karzahni to get fixed. Socha saw his botched repair job as a punishment from Mata Nui and after arriving on the Southern Continent, he dove fully into his craft, filling an entire valley with massive carvings of various Kanohi. His commitment to duty did not go unnoticed by Jovan and landed him a position on the team as a result. While not as physically strong as other Toa of Stone due to the modifications he received from Karzahni as a Matoran, Socha is lighter and more agile, allowing him to dole out swift strikes to his opponents with his giant chisel; his two smaller chisel-daggers, fashioned from the original carving tools he used on Metru Nui, let him climb cliff faces, or can be thrown, or wielded alongside or in place of his main weapon, as he sees fit. His Kanohi Hau, meanwhile, helps him compensate for his relative physical fragility.
Sadly, the team met their end during the Toa-Dark Hunter war in Metru Nui. When Naho sent out the distress call, Socha begged Padjal to let him go defend his homeland; Padjal refused, stating that they would all go, since they are a team. The Toa Sinis arrived to Metru Nui ready to fight the oncoming Dark Hunters, but the Hunetrs had brought their best, and overwhelmed all five of our contenders with guile, trickery and sheer force. After the fighting subsided, only four bodies were found; it is believed that Socha was personally disintegrated by the Shadowed One, though many dismiss this claim as mere hearsay. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, it is clear that the war was the final chapter in the book of the Toa Sinis.
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Well there you have it! I’d love to do turnarounds and such for each individual build as I normally do, but that’s a lot more renders than I have the patience for, and only one of these is built as a physical MOC in my possession (though potentially all of them could be). Still, I want to talk about the builds and my creative choices at least a little! The main concept going into this was to create a Toa team based on the 5 Chinese elements - earth/stone, fire, wood, water and metal. And yes, stone should be earth, but I built Socha before this project even began and just retroactively fit him into it, with the justification that earth and stone are just two aspects of the same thing as far as the Chinese elements are concerned anyway. Plus, like I said earlier, I wanted some vibrant colors on here, and I can hardly do that with blacks and greys now can I? Their builds being different (and for the most part not really based on pre-existing sets) can be explained by them being from different walks of life before converging as a Toa team, and therefore each of them would have had a different idea of what a Toa should be. Plus, two of them are Karzahni-toran, which I just kind of assume has some kind of effect on what you end up looking like once you become a Toa.
Padjal’s build was technically pre-existing in two senses, since her main construction is copied from my Toa Gavla moc (thread TBA), while her character begun as a Turaga whom I built first and then retroactively created her Toa form from that, trying to keep in with the color distribution as I went. (“But Tai, how is she a Turaga if she’s dead?” I’ll explain later, now shush.) Because of color availability, I had a very interesting time trying to think of ways to armor her, the results of which paint a… pretty interesting final picture, to say the least. Not to mention the trans neon green Miru, a necessity since her Turaga form uses a noble Miru which only comes in lime, and you know what I mentioned earlier in this paragraph about color distribution consistency between the two forms… Regardless I’m quite pleased with the outcome.
I went into Hasic with one single idea in mind - to build a Toa of Fire that uses blue in the color scheme. I went with trans blue, to better illustrate the concept of “blue fire”. The whole firefighter motif only came about when I decided to use a Kakama for him; the overall build isn’t super unique and wouldn’t really look out of place among the canister sets from the 07-08 era, save for the use of mata red. Given, however, that the other 4 have varying builds, it basically leaves Hasic as the token Inika of the team, so he doesn’t seem generic for using it when placed in the lineup of them.
Cousea was very interesting to build, for many reasons - I knew I wanted to use the Hordika torso, and to attach turbines to the “backpack” bit of it specifically, I knew I wanted to use a color that’s not normally seen on water characters, and I knew I wanted to use the Ruru. That’s pretty much what I went in with when building her, and the result turned out better than I expected, to be quite honest. She looks a bit ramshackle for a Toa, but that can be chalked up to being a Karzahni survivor, as can the asymmetry and turbines on her back, the latter of which is a more G2 addition, but as I said, Karzahni. Her weapons I’m not too proud of as they were basically tacked on last minute, and if I’d thought about them a bit more for a minute or two, I might’ve included a way to attach them to her feet to form a sort of mermaid tail, like Gali Master has. Still very proud of the build regardless.
Iomman… honestly I just wanted a Toa of Iron who plays metal. Sound Toa shouldn’t be the only ones allowed to wield musical instruments! He also features a Metru torso, though no gearbox - his torso armor’s attachment kind of supplanted that possibility. His color scheme is a very interesting point, as it came about pretty much entirely as a result of me wanting to use orange for the Toa of Iron, getting stuck on mask choices since I didn’t want to use a Noble mask or yet another Kakama, and landing on the Arthron, which forced me to incorporate metru red. It honestly looks good though, has a bit of a rusty quality to it; he’s still recognizably a Toa of Iron, given that gunmetal and orange are more prominently featured on him than the red is. Also I’m really proud of how I built his shoulders specifically, they’re just really tight.
Socha, or as he’s known as an in-joke in Tammy Calamity’s server, “Chocolate Banana”, was the first member of the team conceived, as I mentioned earlier; I wanted to build a Stone Toa with keetorange to use some of the numerous keetorange parts in my bin, pretty much, which is how his color scheme came about; his build, meanwhile, resulted from me wanting to build a more agile looking Toa of Stone, almost like a ninja - and I dare say I succeeded there too. He also features the only non-purist piece in the whole collection, a trans black eye stalk, which is something I’m getting custom printed. Oh yeah, he’s the only one of these that’s actually physically built. Why would I only build him when I said he got disintegrated earlier though? Or did he? I guess we’ll never know! Or I guess we will, eventually. But not in this thread!
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Anyway, that’s the team. As always, I welcome any compliments, comments, critiques, or whatever other C-words you feel appropriate to inflict upon me. I will also provide .io files upon request (though I recommend having the Biopack and Colorpack installed before you mess with them).