#tf2artcomp

“Made for the Mental Health category, with the section of Phobias, specifically arachnophobia, featuring Spy - and his attempts to get help to get rid of the pest.

While Heavy probably came over as teasing, he didn’t mean it, and would probably go out of his way to bat away any spider webs he sees in the future, even if it goes unnoticed. 

Sniper on the other hand would insist the spider is harmless, going as far as poking it and letting it walk over his hands and arms, all the while everyone else nearby has mutually agreed that they wont rush into his camper van any time soon.

Pyro has fixed everything with fire, Spy probably assumed they were going to light only the spider on fire.. He was wrong. 

Demo claims his way is the best and quickest way about it, laughing the moment he turns up in respawn with Spy. Spy doesn’t seem so impressed and just hopes his floor has not changed to more of a black colour after the explosion.

Last Spy heard was that Medic used bird blood in an operation, that time Scout had and actual bird in his chest, and another time with a rat. He decided that it was best to not even ask for his help in the first place.

Scout claims his baseballs are lethal to enemies, so what’s the difference with a spider?  Apparently they are lethal to windows. Not long after had Scout “fled the scene”.

Engineer had been working on some new blueprints so offered Spy the box at the corner of the room while he was busy, saying it was the easiest thing to use. Later on he would turn up to see how it was and spend the next ten minutes trying to understand how Spy constructed the sentry so poorly.

As for Soldier, no one trusts him teleporting anything except for himself, after the incident with creating the bread monster, his suggestion was quickly turned down.

I think I recall another artwork around showing how Spy was scared of spiders (I haven’t been able to find it since) and I’ve been amused with the idea and decided to expand on it.

Amusingly enough I am also scared of spiders and more than once while drawing this did I have my own ominous visitors appear next to me, if I had not of known better I would say they had known what I was drawing”

We believe the artwork you’re referring to is this one by @karuuhnia?  When Ugg saw that, she sent it to Red– because Red is arachnophobic too!  Which is ironic because when Red gets to writing horrific, gory scenes, it makes tough stomachs squeamish.  Also, why does it only seem to be Spy?  Wethinks it might be the idea of inner!Spy screaming high enough only dogs can hear.

The characteristics in this are spot-on!  We cackled like merry witches over every panel.  Poor Spy, he’s surrounded by idiots.  

Red would like to add: I’m totally not arachnophobic, they just have too many legs and too many eyes and asdfghjk;; *twitch*

That said, the panels with Sniper and Medic are my favorites, because you KNOW Medic would end up giving the team spider-powers (or breeding spider-doves) and Sniper would totally name the spider Dingo and keep it in his van and feed it treats.

Short notes

First off, I’m proudly writing in joeHand3, aka Spy’s canon handwriting. Second, the costume and setting of the image are based on Ezio’s trilogy, mainly Renaissance/II and Brotherhood, since these are the games I’m most familiar with. The pose is just some generic mashup of the squatting pose (personal fave) and the pose that Ezio always has with his dual blades. The reason I chose to just do Spy for this is mainly because of the stock knife reskin, the Sharp Dresser. Plus, Spy and the Renaissance seem to go pretty handily (at least better than the other mercs within the setting of the games until Black Flag).

Headcanons

In this AU, no one knows why the Spy still wears his mask under the hood. It serves no purpose, and is actually quite stuffy during hot Italian summers. Spy doesn’t know why either, he just wears it.

Of course, Leonardo is in this AU (how can we be Assassin’s Creed Renaissance without the favorite Renaissance man?). The two of them hang out a lot more than Ezio did in the canon (which I am angry about), and Spy actually treats Leo well, such as actually buying him that really nice wooden mannequin *coughs*.

Spy’s family came from France, and through an incident similar to that of Ezio, he loses his family and their connections, and turns to life as an Assassin to get vengeance on his family and get to the bottom of the plots to root out the Assassin’s Brotherhood in Italy.

It me, Ugg Zombi!  This is the first time I regret not pre-ordering Assassin’s Creed… then again Spy isn’t my strongest character (also, I got into AC quite late).  This submission means so much to me, I’m tearing up here.  Ezio’s signature squat went generally unnoticed (by me), until one time when two dudes were talking near a ledge, and I got on that ledge and crouched, and they completely ignored me, just carried on talking.  So Assassin!Spy is perfect!

That headcanon, though.  Spy.  Please.  Take off the mask.  Please.  You’re making Leo sad.  First you don’t hit the hug button fast enough, now this??

Red would just like to step in here and say... of course he doesn't take the mask off! He is one with the mask. Think of the monk tailors! :P

I’m pairing this one with Venice Flight because this song impressed my coworker who usually scoffs at my videogaming.  Not because Spy deserves it.  He’s too adorkable!

“saw-ry, I am still working on my English cuz it's not my native language so I hope you'll understand my discription :3 

Let's say Medic couldn't help doing some experiments on TF classic members while he was working for them. So one day he understood he miss the Spy's head badly. It was always in Medic's fridge and he decided to find a new one. That's why he brought classic Spy to his operation room and did this crazy medical thing. Medic had a wide range of stories to told and classic Spy's head had to listen to it cuz... It had no choice, it's just a head lol. It was really terrified of these crazy speeches and espacially of the "That's how I lost my medical license" one. And classic Heavy was just furious.”

First of all: yes, we understood your English!  It’s really good, keep at it!  Red is bilingual and Ugg is trilingual, so we know exactly what it feels like to use a language you’re still learning.  Oh, the stories we could tell you... but maybe later.

We love Medic’s ~unique~ sense of humour, and we can totally see this happening in the pages between all the action.  Even more reason for Classic Heavy to be so angry!  Also, your attention to detail is excellent- Archimedes, the horrified look on Classic Spy’s face, the surgery, everything!  Great work!

Of course, only one song is the perfect fit for this.

The Ap-Sap they’d gotten a while back was apparently named Wheatley, and didn’t really qualify as an artificial intelligence— “artificial idiocy” would have been more fitting. Which is why Dell Conagher was less than thrilled when he was given more contraptions from that same science facility. The accompanying documentation didn’t do much to make him feel better either— apparently, the efforts to make them function properly were so futile, the scientists just gave up. How bad could these bots be, considering that Wheatley was considered a success?

There were so many boxes. Was there a mistake? It had said that there would be two robots, and nothing else. Dell did not want to have to work with more defective machinery than he had to.

He opened a box and found… what looked to be a leg. Pausing, he lifted it up. Yup. Just a leg. Another box showed a nicely-assembled hand, but nothing more.

This was… exciting. He tore through the boxes faster. There were all the advantages of starting from scratch— a chance to determine the main structure of the bots, perhaps tweak their programming— without having to struggle with small nuts and bolts for hours on end, trying to mimic a shoulder joint. Contrary to what some of his teammates thought, that was not the part that Dell enjoyed about being their Engineer. It was designing, upgrading, all the things that his education made him an expert in.

Quickly opening a box, he did not be expect to see, sitting in a round metal sphere, a glowing blue iris. He was staring at it, and it was staring intently back at him. It even blinked several times, as though the sudden light from being unboxed had stunned it.

Carefully, Dell checked the label of the boxes, something he hadn’t bothered to do. “Atlas Core” it read. The other boxes had similar labels. “Atlas Left Left”, “P-Body Hand Right”. He hunted through the boxes until he found the one marked “P-Body Core”. If he was right…

Yup. Another eye, looking back at him. This one was orange, housed in a slimmer elliptical case.

After opening everything and sorting through the labels, Dell could only shake his head at the mistakes the original makers had made. The individual parts were decent enough, but the overall design couldn’t have been worse. Dell thought of the tweaks he would make; attaching the legs at a slightly different angle would make a world of difference, and the same thing went for the shoulder plates—

A slight mutter startled him. It must have been one of the cores. They didn’t talk, from what Dell could tell, but for some reason they seemed just as sentient as that sapper Wheatley— and in all likelihood, smarter.

Another mechanical chirp brought Dell back to his senses. Why was he just thinking and theorizing about these robots, when he could actually mess around with them?

A toolkit, that’s what he needed.

Dell wasn’t quite sure how much time had passed, but the mass of boxes and detached mechanical limbs had became two robots, with arms, legs, and one large eye each that functioned as a head, which also functioned as a body. He’d even taken a poke around in their programming— they were just fine, except that the coding designed to let them move their arms and legs had been flawed. A little tinkering with that, and—

Falling flat on their metal faces. Of course.

The explanation was simple, really. Think of a toddler; it has all the proper wiring to walk and jump and even dance, but it needs practice to get those habits into its brain. And the same went for these robots. Just as Dell suspected, they could think. That was interesting, and exciting, but it also meant that he couldn’t just directly program in commands.

Luckily, these robots seemed to pick up on basic motor skills much faster than the average toddler. It took only two tries before “Atlas” could stand up and take a few steps without falling over. Not long after, both of them could walk at a decent pace with little wobbling.

Not bad, Dell thought, nodding his head.

P-body— a.k.a. “the orange one”— paused when Dell made the gesture. An awkward attempt to mimic the head-nod had the robot stumbling.

“Now, that’s interesting,” Dell said to himself.

More time passed— the rest of the team might have been concerned, if they hadn’t known that a shipment involving robots of some sort had just come in. Whenever that happened, they knew Dell would go into his workshop and not come out for a good long while.

And a long while it was. Dell decided to teach them every trick in the book, just for the heck of it. By the time he was done, these bots could not only walk, but also run, jump, do cartwheels, salute (he figured Soldier would like that one), and give a firm handshake— to gain instant respect among any gentleman they happened to run across, obviously.

“Follow me, boys,” he said to them. They most definitely understood him; the proof was right there when they kept pace behind him, as he walked to where he knew his team would be gathered. Sure, maybe their eyes glazed over when he got into the details of quantum mechanics, but no one would be able to ignore this. This was impressive. This was engineering. This was… Aw heck, it was just plain awesome, and it was impossible to resist bragging.

Dell paused. “Y’all ready?”

P-body gave him a firm salute, as Atlas went in for a strong handshake. Just as Dell had taught them.

“Perfect. Let’s go blow some minds.”

This submission was such a pleasant surprise, as we’re not very familiar with the in-game items– that’s where you, the lovely community, comes in with information.  We giggled over Spy and Wheatley, and it just so happens Dell being able to tinker anything into behaving is one of our well-established headcanons!  We could just see him reverse engineering them and building more and more until he walks around with a robot army and–!

Wait, are we sure that's not how Mann vs. Machine happened...?

Anyway, that’s how Ugg remembered this song about robot armies.  Jelli, this was delightfully mischievous, thank you so much!