So I watched it. In the climax of Tormak's story arc, the undead sabertooth Sir Fangar tricks him into trying to remove the chi artifact from the pheonix temple. It explodes, burning his tiger fur black and imbuing him with its energy. Welp.

Even after all that, I was willing to believe it was all a long string of funny coincidences. Until I picked up this set, 70222 Tormak's Shadow Blazer, which changes from a tiger to a black panther version. (Or more accurately, a dozen copies of this set, because that's who I am as a person)

Shthach, god of time and fate, doesn't have an ice army. No mammoths, no vultures, nobody. He's just one extremely angry guy who's locked in the instant of having half his body blown off and who then had that instant spread backwards over eternity into the formless chaos before time had a name.

In the closing act, we meet the ultimate antagonist Shthach, the undead half-skeletonized sabertooth tiger from the oil painting. He was the disguised stranger who jacked the dying Torgar up with chi at the beginning of the story, and has been waiting since prehistoric ages for his time to shine.

Haghar didn't become a masked Speedor racing champion, because there are no Speedorz in this story. But I think it's funny that I gave Lavertus that same grin and personality on all his cards though, years before I found out they're the same guy. It may have been his original face print.

In the second act of the story, his assassin consort has abandoned her calling and escaped to seek out his banished uncle. Torhaghar was framed for treason a generation earlier and escaped to the outlands, where he built himself a secret fortress to survive the deadly creatures living there.

He survives, and the lizards don't, but it's okay. Later on they're best undead friends and philosophical foils when he escapes from capture to raise their dried corpses from the desert sand to invade the temple with him. It's a whole thing.

Our hero Torgar leads the remaining cat soldiers. Through priestly sabotage, he's quickly ambushed and killed by a lizard patrol. He gets hit with chi as he's dying. And like Cragger in the Chima pilot, instead of powering him up, it briefly turns him into a manic Tasmanian Devil tornado of chaos.

The cats and lizards are at war for control of the temple. The surviving cats have retreated to a fortress outpost in the crater wall around the desert. Once a kingdom of lions, the temple priests' black-ink sorcery has marked the cats with tiger stripes and quietly ushered in theocratic control.

Over centuries, like a black hole, the orb drained all possibility and life from the surrounding plains, reducing them to a sunken desert waste. To stop the damage from spreading, a lizard army armed with steel came down from the mountains to eject the cats from their temple city.

700 years in the past, lion cats found the red chi orb at the center of the world, and built a great temple and an empire around it to control the flow of chi. The orb allowed the temple priests to carve fate and rewrite the nature of the world, staining themselves ink-black in the process.

For the stuff I did include, a lot of elements mapped pretty cleanly. The world ran on chi. Not the chi of nature, but the chi of causality, possibility, and fate. Creatures were elevated and transformed by how they got caught up in it. They were colored and marked by their relationship with it.

After LU shut down, I went to LEGO's U.S. headquarters to take charge of Chima card illustrations. The TV show was still years away, so all I had to work with were prelim product schematics and character briefs. I wouldn't learn the story until years later. www.mikerayhawk.com/chima_cards....

So I spent a couple of years on the LEGO Universe team, including graciously enduring the orientation meeting about myself. I got my first taste of Chima shortly before the studio closed, putting together concepts for procedurally adaptive Speedor race levels.

So in 2006 I set up two new pages on my website, titled it "the cats and lizards project," and put them where visitors from Billund couldn't avoid seeing them. One worldbuilding page about cats, and one creature design page about lizards.

But flat-broke LEGO had a hard time keeping the concept office open. Managers would leave for better-paying jobs at Mattel, or decide to move back to Europe, or never arrive in the first place. The last straw was when the final manager snowboard-vacationed himself into a tree. The office closed.

At graduation, when LEGO came to recruit designers to replace the Galidor team, my friend Jeff misdirected them away from the product designers and over to my exhibit, where this painting of a prehistoric undead sabertooth was hanging next to the BrikWars illustration that got me hired on the spot.

That'd've been 1999. Once I was in art school, I leaned away from using those giant orangutan-cheek-flap-looking eyebrows and more often towards regular cat heads instead. I point them out because those eyebrows might help explain the odd shape of the head crest and hair on Chima's lion figures.

A few years later, I applied to design school with unlettered pages from my amateur Khuar comic book project. The portfolio judges made fun of my perspective and anatomy skills but let me in anyway.

I applied to my fancy-pants arts high school with an illustration of a cat guy contemplating a chi orb. I put another cat guy in Mona Lisa's cheek when they let us paint on the school walls. It's still there, faded and peeling. Nobody taught us about durable mediums or protective varnish back then.

In the 80s, D&D was the hot new thing, and my 6th-grade teacher Mr. Lewis tasked me with creating a fantasy world. I was big into D&D's tiger rakshasas, so I started there and ran with it. The internet didn't exist yet, so I didn't know about furries or how this would look to the 4chan generation.

To get a sense of the timespan, here's two versions of the same scene from different years. In middle school it was all colored pencil illustrations on an engineering pad. By college, I was transitioning to digital work.

From 1989 to 2002, years before Chima was an oddly Fabuland-shaped gleam in LEGO's eye, I was a schoolkid filling stacks of notebooks with sketches and stories and comic pages about an animal world where cat and lizard people battled over the great temple that controlled the flow of chi.

Learning a lot about the strict standards of European fashion. If the potatoes you stick up your nose aren't from the Fries region of France, they're not french fries, they're artisanal nostril chips

Couldn't decide whether it was funnier to travel all the way to Germany just to get Burger King or just to get Dominos. "It'll be just like home!" Reader,

Stopped in Hamburg to check out the latest innovations in hamburgers. Looks like we've entered our Modest Proposal era.

Lost a Brikwars battle last night as my T-Rex was an inch from escaping with the loot. He tanked an enemy hero's last-ditch sniper shot from an extremely jury-rigged artillery piece, only to succumb to emphysema (he'd tried to smoke a tank earlier) Moral of the story, smoking kills 🦖 🚬 ☠️

When I started at LEGO in 2002, all they could afford for our studio was a dank concrete cell in the sub-basement of an abandoned industrial brewery complex. I'm experiencing so much nostalgia right now

It's finally happened, they've sent me to prison. Took longer than expected, tbh. Horsens Prison maps cleanly enough to Folsom Prison that I'm spending the day with a head full of Johnny Cash. Could be worse.

While I was painting up the Supernova Squad for LEGO Fortnite, I had to remember one core truth: The heroes rise up against Mask Maker Daigo not because he's evil, but because there's only one Mask Maker and Daigo isn't him