Zance, Toa of Iron (Original + Remake)

[TheJerminator]

While not on purpose, I suppose this is kind of a 10th Anniversary post for Toa Zance. Zance is the second-oldest MOC that I have any evidence of, and the oldest that’s still intact. While I don’t have any pictures of the physical model, I’ve recreated him in stud.io from memory, and have even shared him here before, albeit not in his own post:

Zance’s primary weapon is a large serrated sword, but he also carries a small Lightning-charged tool capable of delivering small electric shocks (or, in layman’s terms, a taser-stick). In one of the few updates to the build, the Zamor launchers that make up his forearms were outfitted with actual firing capabilities around 8 years ago, giving him an additional combat tool.

Even after a decade, I can still remember that Zance was my first foray into making “custom” builds and creative uses of parts, rather than just using the prefab Inika-build parts. This can be seen in the use of Zamor launchers for forearms, Metru heads for hips, and Visorak torsos for shins.

Obviously, though, this MOC has room for improvement, both in terms of articulation and shaping, and that brings us to the main point of this post. I don’t know why it took me so long to think to do this, but I recently thought to remake him in stud.io, with roughly a decade of extra experience and without the limitations of my physical collection (though this remake is still purist):

Orthogonal Views

Right away, I knew what I wanted to keep, and what I wanted to get rid of. The large shoulder panels were an easy keeper, and I managed to get them at a somewhat more natural angle using some funky Technic geometry. As you can see below, virtually nothing in the torso is an a “proper” angle, but I’ve mathematically confirmed that there are no illegal connections:

(And, of course, I kept the Metru-head hips)

Another keeper was the Climbing Claws on the legs, and I managed to make a pretty cool pattern on his shins:

I would have liked to keep the Zamor Launchers in his arms, but the part was just a bit took awkward to make work. However, he still has some firepower in his arms, in the form of small fold-out stud shooters:

Another big upgrade is his hands. Not only does he have double-jointed fingers, but his thumbs have a swivel in the base, thanks to Part 18764:

Of course, both of his Toa Tools also received substantial upgrades. Originals on the left, remakes on the right:

Both iterations of Zance are capable of carrying these tools when not in use:

As big as he looks, the upgrade actually scales pretty well with an Inika build, which tends to be the case for most of my MOCs:

[Enbeanie]

Matoro has been working out
this moc is pretty good, but i can’t help but feel some other colours would make the techniques used here a little more visible. plus, i don’t think a single ball joint could support his beefcake arms IRL.

[TheJerminator]

@Enbeanie

this moc is pretty good, but i can’t help but feel some other colours would make the techniques used here a little more visible

I agree with this, though I’m not sure what colour to use; I wanted to be as accurate as possible to the original, and the original is pretty monochrome. I had tried introducing a bit more tertiary black during the design process, but it didn’t quite look right.

How would you recommend introducing new colours (preferably black) to make the techniques more visible?

@Enbeanie

plus, i don’t think a single ball joint could support his beefcake arms IRL.

You’re probably right about this as well. If I were ever to try building this in real life I’d use the CCBS-style sockets which are a bit stronger, but even then it’d probably be pretty close.

[Eilrach]

Super cool hand build

[WaterGafna]

The build is very cool, a very imposing Toa resembling a BIONICLE version of a Frankenstein Monster, given the stature, the color, and the mask. Do you have a backstory for Zance? If yes, I am interested in hearing it. If no, I can offer you some ideas if you want.

[TheJerminator]

@Eilrach

cool hand build

Thanks; it was nice being able to work at a bit of a larger scale for the fingers, given how big his hands are, and I’m happy with the poseability of the result.

@WaterGafna

Do you have a backstory for Zance?

I didn’t really have anything special in mind; I’ve never really imagined him as anything beyond just another Toa (if a large one), and didn’t come up with any of the specifics of his backstory. Given what happened to the Toa of Iron, I’d assume he’s probably currently either dead or a Turaga, but I don’t have anything concrete, and I’d be interested in hearing what you’ve come up with.

EDIT: Actually, I can offer one very specific piece of information from Zance’s history based on a small scene I built to go with the original model: at some point, he fought a Guurahk in a sandy region, and he eventually defeated it and captured its kraata in a metal hand summoned from the ground as it tried to tunnel away.

[WaterGafna]

Here is my idea. It is heavily based on him being Toa of Iron wearing Tryna, and also his electrically-charged tool. We had a Toa who wore Tryna, but tried to avoid using it, but what if there was a Toa who actively used the Mask of Reanimation? Add into that him being Toa of Iron and looking somewhat sinister, and we have basis for my attempt at making backstory. I am rather tired, so it may be nonsensical. Note that this does not fit official chronology.

Basically, Zance survived the killings, becoming a mad scientist. I do not have lot of details about his life before, but I can expand on this later.

• Before becoming Toa, Zance was toolsmith and occasional mask-maker and inventor. After becoming Toa he forged his primary Toa tool himself. He later integrated the launchers into his armor.

• Already dexterous due to his work, after becoming Toa, Zance learned to create and control a hand of metal like his own, once using this skill to grab a fleeing Kraata.

• It is unknown whether Zance originally wore Kanohi Tryna he wears currently or a different Kanohi mask.

• When Brotherhood of Makuta decided to eliminate all Toa of Iron, Zance managed to survive their attempts to kill him, eventually hiding on an abandoned island with ruins of a former Brotherhood laboratory. Zance managed to secretly carry several bodies of Toa of Iron who did not escape the killings to the island, hoping to find some means to revive them.

• The Makuta sent to track and get rid of Zance was not the most loyal. He faked Zance’s death, thus saving Toa of Iron. He did this not of compassion, actually being one of more selfish Makuta, but because he hoped to steal Zance’s research and use it to become immortal. If this Makuta openly pursued research, he would have to share it with rest of Brotherhood, and it was easier for him to leave the work to a Toa presumed dead to draw less suspicion upon himself.

• Zance is not aware of this protection from wrath of the Brotherhood, thinking that he somehow managed to hide his trail from his unknown pursuers.

• Zance’s methods in attempting to revive the dead included among others using his own Kanohi Tryna, and application of electricity to the corpses. For this purpose he uses both his secondary tool and a great network of lightning rods he constructed with his powers.

• Zance often experiments on Rahi carcasses, using his elemental powers to work with their armor, and his primary tool to cut the organic parts.

• The methods Zance used saw limited success, through he (and the Makuta) remains hopeful. Lightning alone only makes the corpses shake uncontrollably. Giving the dead a Mask of Undeath does not work, since to be reanimated, the wearers needs to wear it in life. Tryna can reanimate the corpses for time but not truly revive them. Other methods have similar level of success when used alone, and Zance is yet to discover the right combination.

• Recently, Zance managed to accomplish actually reviving a corpse for few seconds, using a specific combination of methods including usual Kanohi Tryna and electricity, but also more obscure methods such as giving the dead Kanohi made from unnatural Kanoka and reusing remains of an old Makuta experiment.

• During this state, the corpse speaks in an unknown language (likely Agori) before returning to being dead. Zance thinks he made a breakthrough, as does the Makuta. For Zance, this possibly opens road to undoing the killings. But to the ambitious Makuta, it is crucial step on path to immortality. And once he becomes immortal, the world is his to take.

• If everything goes right…

What do you think?

[Rukah]

Ooh this new moc/upgrade looks really nice! Very imposing, and I quite like the little details like the climbing claws and shoulder armor. Really cool moc.

[TheJerminator]

@WaterGafna

What do you think?

I really like it.

The entire concept is really good. I love the way it manages to tell a unique story without relying on the introduction of a bunch of new in-universe concepts and plot conveniences; the Makuta’s motivations are realistic, and Zance’s experiments are all based around existing Bionicle technology.

The neat thing is that we already know full revival of Matoran Universe beings is possible using the technology on the Red Star. So, to add to your story, I would go on to specify that, during the briefly-successful revival of the corpse, Zance had accidentally recreated the method used to revive beings on the Red Star. This would explain why the dead Toa spoke Agori, as if Zance had activated some kind of “factory settings”.

Then, if we care about the exact science behind it (which I like to think about), I propose that the reason the reanimation failed so quickly is because the power source that Zance had cobbled together was unstable; stability is canonically known to be an issue with the power sources of both the Matoran Universe and the Red Star. The Great Beings stabilized it with Energized Protodermis, but Zance has yet to figure this part out.

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There is, however, one potential canon issue with this backstory, and it’s a pretty big one: any Toa killed by the Makuta should have been revived on the Red Star, leaving Zance nothing to experiment on.

Admittedly, I’m not 100% sure on how the Red Star works. I know that it can’t revive anyone whose mind is too damaged, but does that simply mean that the reanimation procedures won’t work, or that the Star won’t bring them up at all in the first place?

The only way Zance could have any corpses to work on is if the latter were true, but, if we take that to be the case, then the minds should have been too damaged for even a partial revival.

However, the rest of the backstory is so good that I might be willing to introduce a bit of a plot convenience; perhaps, in addition to a bunch of unknowingly-unrevivable corpses, Zance lucked out and found a Toa who was damaged in just the right way to allow for revival, but to also prevent the Red Star from teleporting him up, and it was this Toa that Zance was able to temporarily revive.

Or, if we assume that the Red Star teleports beings up regardless of whether or not they can actually be revived, then Zance must have found a corpse with barely enough brain still attached to be revived, with the rest of the brain having been taken to the Red Star to be unsuccessfully revived (or maybe successfully; that has cool story potential in and of itself).

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This story also has a lot of potential in the future; Zance could eventually figure out how to stabilize his machines and successfully revive the partial-brained Toa with the rest of his body rebuilt as well, probably cobbled together from various loose body parts that Zance took when recovering corpses.

And what about on Spherus Magna? Will he find a Great Being lab with even more technology? Or, since his machines are powered by the same thing that powered the Matoran Universe (albeit on a much smaller scale), will he find a way to keep the universal life support running around his island and stay in the Matoran Universe indefinitely with his revived assistant, unaware that the rest of the universe has died around him?

I personally prefer the second option, though maybe he’ll eventually wander outside long after the Battle of Bara Magna and find some Great Being tech.

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Finally, there’s one other tiny change I’d make:

@WaterGafna

It is unknown whether Zance originally wore Kanohi Tryna he wears currently or a different Kanohi mask.

While Zance was originally designed before I knew about the concept of immoral Kanohi, it’s bugged me more recently that, in theory, no Toa would wear that mask. Intentionally wearing it to revive his own brothers, though, is a pretty good reason, so I’m going to say that Zance did not originally have a Tryna, and he only obtained and used it to begin his experiments. Maybe he found it in the abandoned Brotherhood lab?

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EDIT: I also have an idea about Zance’s pre-Toa backstory: someone doesn’t just start doing this kind of stuff out of the blue, so I would propose that, even as a Matoran, Zance had some degree of interest in revival. I’m going to borrow a concept from @Willess12’s canon continuation stories and say that this interest was sparked when Zance heard rumours of Toa coming back from the dead:

@Willess12

“And who’s to say that the revival tech works?” Chiara pointed out. “None of us have seen someone come back from the Star, so clearly something went wrong with it.”

“I have,” Orde said. The rest of the group turned to him. “Since I never heard of anything like it again, I thought it was just a legend… a team of Toa who were slain in battle, but came back to conquer their foes. But that was over 80,000 years ago…”

“Okay, so we know it might have worked at some point,” Chiara said. “That still doesn’t help us now.”

After hearing this story (or a similar one), Zance had always wanted to figure out the secret, and the deaths of many of his fellow Toa finally pushed him to take steps past what Matoran society would consider acceptable.

[WaterGafna]

I am really happy you like this so much, and that this works so well in your eyes. I was not sure about the idea when I wrote it, but it seems I succeeded. I really like your ideas how the revival would work, especially the bit about him recreating red star technology.

Re: Red Star

I always thought that Red Star scanned the mind/took the soul of the dead and reincarnated them in new body. I looked it on BS01, and seems I was wrong. (It seems to be weird hybrid of reincarnation and revival: the dead are revived in their old body, and then placed into new body)

If my scenario was correct the Red Star could work like this. There are burial sites all over Matoran Universe. These are actually teleport devices which teleport the corpses to Red Star to be reused to create bodies for the revived. At different places all over Matoran Universe, the reincarnated are supposed to emerge out of ground.

In the universe this would be explained as the simpler solution: it is more efficient to have designated teleport places than to have an universal teleport device for something as frequently used as Red Star, because there are less destinations involved. The red star would be still designed to scan the brains of dead anywhere in universe, both because otherwise it would not work properly, and because teleporting information/souls is lot easier than teleporting material, at least to the Great Beings.

In this scenario, the bodies would still be in Matoran Universe, because they were not buried. But if Red Star directly teleports the corpses as is apparently case in canon, your point is very good. I am sometimes confused about how things work in BIONICLE. Until very recently I thought that Jaller’s crab in Mahri Nui storyline was called Hannah Crab, and that Brutaka had four arms.

Re: Future of Zance

Great thoughts. Both ideas are great, especially the second one.

Re: the Change and the Matoran Backstory

I think it could potentially work both ways, reason why I left it unclear.

If Zance wore the Tryna before the Makuta initiated the killings, it would be as a test of his will. He was not supposed to ever use it. But even iron will can be reforged in fires of tragedy. The killing of (almost) all other Toa of Iron left Zance convinced that the evil must be undone, and only way to undo the evil was to use the mask and other methods considered dubious.

But I like the version about him adopting Tryna he found from Brotherhood’s lab, and having a different mask before, more than the other version. Especially with the idea of him being interested in stories about revival even as Matoran. That really fleshes Zance out.

[TheJerminator]

@WaterGafna

the dead are revived in their old body, and then placed into new body

I don’t know why BS01 phrases it like this, but it’s wrong. If the original body can be repaired and revived, they’ll be sent back in that; there’s no body swapping unless the original body is damaged beyond repair.

@WaterGafna

In the universe this would be explained as the simpler solution: it is more efficient to have designated teleport places than to have an universal teleport device for something as frequently used as Red Star, because there are less destinations involved.

While this would make sense, I don’t think it agrees with canon, which is something I want for Zance’s backstory.

My own theory is that, somewhere in every revivable being’s brain, there is a piece of technology (organic or mechanical) that “tethers” a being to the Red Star, and the teleportation only transports whatever is still attached to this “tether point”. So, if a being’s “tether point” were to somehow be removed (probably due to severe head injury), none of their mind would be taken.

There is some basis for this, as Greg has hinted that the Red Star only takes the part of a corpse containing the mind. There are also many cases throughout the story where a being’s Kanohi is not taken if it is separated from them in death, despite the fact that Kanohi are treated as part of the body in many ways, and are taken up when they are being worn in death. So, my explanation is that Zance was, by chance, able to find at least one Toa of Iron who had been killed in a way that removed the “tether”, without causing too much damage to the rest of the brain.

@WaterGafna

Re: Future of Zance

I’ve thought about this a bit more, and I definitely want to go with the explanation that he stayed in the Matoran Universe for at least a few years, powering the gravity and other life support with his own power source.

For starters, this would be really cool visually; Teridax is shown to have collapsed face down, so, once the artificial gravity turned off, gravity would seem to reverse from the perspective of someone inside the Matoran Universe. Not only would Zance be living on an island of normality surrounded by inverted gravity, but any salvage teams exploring the universe would see an island appearing to float upside down on the ceiling, perhaps even partially inverting gravity for them as well.

Then that brings me to how Zance would eventually decide to leave. I’m sure that, at some point, he’d see and hear the salvage teams and, even if he hid from them, he’d recognize the language as the same language that the corpse had spoken before, except this time he’d be able to understand it as well (since Mata Nui gave everyone the ability to speak and understand Agori). This would eventually lead him to leave the universe and explore Spherus Magna.

However, this discovery of the inverted island would also be a pretty big deal for everyone else as well; not only does Zance have a functioning copy of the revival technology that’s been broken for 80,000 years (and doesn’t work at all on Spherus Magna), but he also has a copy of the power source that the Element Lords have been trying to get ahold of for the last 100,000 years.

[TheJerminator]

What are the thoughts on this Matoran version of Zance?

The legs are copied from the Matoran base I originally made for Gaardus. The arms are the part I’m the least sure about; are they too long?

[Enbeanie]

@TheJerminator

What are the thoughts on this Matoran version of Zance?

absolute unit

[Rukah]

Looks neat but yeah I think the arms are too long. The Toa moc has them go to the knees, but on the Matoran they go to the feet. Other than that though it looks good.

[TheJerminator]

My goal is to get the upper arms like how his right arm is here:

Not only would it shorten his arms, but it would also make the armour slightly more visually similar to his Toa form. The only issue is that this current assembly is completely impossible to do physically.

[Rukah]

Hmmm, maybe make it so the mahri shoulder pads can move up and down?

[TheJerminator]

The ones on his arms or on his torso?

[Rukah]

The torso plates.

[TheJerminator]

They actually can move up and down a bit, as they’re attached to the socket by a bar. The only possible issue is that I mounted his back armour on them as well:

A physical build would have enough slack for them to move out of the way, but it would technically be an illegal connection:

At the end of the day, though, I’d rather go with the arm-shortening solution, as it also addresses the overall length issue and is more visually similar to the Toa form.

[Rukah]

Yeah, that’s probably a better idea given how the torso armor is constructed.