Snidean Battle - Cut Scene

This is one of my biggest projects ever, and it is a Gift Art for *Verdokai - my teacher, inspiration and most beloved friend.

We have a roleplay together called A Fool's Luck, and more than once we have referred to it as a video game, which has resulted in many fun pictures and scenarios, and one of them was the second confrontation they had with *Verdokai's mad scientist Michael Snide.
Many of you might know him by now, and yes, he was evil in the beginning and tried to kill the rest of the cast - or at least capture and experiment on most of them, espeially the shapeshifter Mirage (my character)

This resulted in a nerve tingling adventure in Snide's gigantic laboratory, where the rest of the party tried to escape and save both their lives and sanity.
Now, imagine that this is a video game - like Final Fantasy or such - with long dark corridors and a shrieking alarm that tells you that Snide's guards will soon find you...
The specific scene seen above is then the cut scene just before the big, final confrontation with Snide - that you've tried to avoid for hours by then
(If you play a lot of games you will probably get the right feeling, and if you don't, you might still be able to enjoy it from pure comic perspective... I hope >_> )

The roleplay did not exactly look like this, meaning that the script has been changed somewhat to fit a video game better, but *Verdokai didn't complain, so I guess that it is close enough ^_^

I... cannot describe in words how much this picture demanded of me >_> Not only because it's nineteen panels - meaning nineteen pictures in one - but because I needed to plan things like angles, backgrounds, expressions and lines.

One example is how much I had to focus on making Snide so evil. He was not this cool in the roleplay, but for a video game he of course had to be
I mean... the reason why you don't see his face until the very end is because he looks like a... well... not very evil anyway, unless he is pissed. So there was a lot of evil angles and planning behind it >_>
Behind it all really.
When it comes to mood as well...

And yes, in case you wonder about Trick's strong reaction, it is because he and Snide were best friends while young. No one would be happy to notice that their friend had turned into a freak scientist...
I love Trick ;___;

By now I find many mistakes on this picture, but... I can't help liking it. Since I know for a fact that I put both effort, love and emotions into this.
I was so into the emotions that I wanted to portray that I shook while drawing it - from fear and all that which the characters on it feel.
So it was a fascinating picture to draw, and I learned a lot too.

So in short I love it.
All of it.
So don't talk shit about it. Then I will break down and cry.

As said, Snide (the blond) - as well as Shard (the black haired guy) and Scat (brown hair and purple eyes) - belongs to *Verdokai, while Trick (the guy with the hat), Mirage (the one with white long hair) and Phoenix (grey hair in a ponytail) belongs to me.

Enjoy ^^
Let's not even count how many hours this took...
Or how much fun I had with all the details