I’ve been working on a secret project this last year to celebrate MaskOfDestiny and BIONCLE’s 20th anniversary, and I am now ready to reveal it to you. I intend this to be an ongoing project, I plan on improving on it over time as I think of new ideas and get feedback from the community.

Presenting, until I come up with a better name, “The Uberonicle”.

Note: I will be updating this post throughout the next day or two with new details, as my day job’s scheduling department kinda changed my schedule and didn’t ask or tell me, giving me an unexpected work day and leaving me without that vital last day to get the final touches done and the details written up.

The story so far:

Somewhere within the BIONICLE fan Multiverse, there existed a particular universe where the events upon the now re-united worlds had concluded, but the people looked to their past, and were afraid that this, or something worse, could happen again. The astronomers were convinced that in billions of years, if not thousands, their world would eventually face such peril again. They began to plan for the worst.

Many thousands of years later, as they began to master what they knew, and learn more about the universe, they created something much bigger than Mata Nui. Where he had walked upon worlds, towering over the landscape, this new creation towered over the planets themselves. This new creation, empowered by science and the billions living on the world in his heart, could terraform entire planets in mere hours, and refine them into a paradise over the course of days. He only needed to reach out and hold his fingers over the planet, the power from each element flowing through a finger to alter the planet as needed.

As they searched out planets to terraform, and galaxies to experiment with, they found many other races. Often, they faced similar perils to that which they were now capable of solving. Wherever there was a race facing planetary extinction, they could repair their world, correct it’s orbit, or move it to a new sun. If there was conflict between races or factions on a world, they could make a new continent and give them space. If that wasn’t enough, they could scoop up a distant uninhabited planet or asteroid belt and make a new world for them. The management of this creation once again instilled in them the three virtues, as they thought of it as their duty to help others now that they had this power. Helping the other races gave them a unity, not just among themselves, but one spread across their universe with those they had helped and inspired. As they went planet to planet, helping others to survive and prevail, they considered this the fulfilment of their purpose, and their destiny.

About the Uberonicle

The Uberonicle stands just over six feet tall, making it taller than myself by an inch or two. When I was running the idea through my head, I wanted it to be fully articulated, and not just a static mannequin with worm gear joints to lock it in place. I wanted to pose it like I would any other figure, just on a larger scale. Simply grab and bend the limb where I wanted it to be.

I quickly figured out how to make the skeleton, but the joints to support the weight would be tricky. I spent more time thinking about how to make the joints work than anything else. I eventually decided to order a bunch of the turntable gears, which I’ve worked with successfully in the past for large creations, and as I had hoped, they worked for the joints here too. Had they not, well, I couldn’t go wrong with 50 spare turntable gears. I decided before I even started to put this together that I wanted to embrace the skeletal design, and instead of trying to armor it up and worry about supporting the extra weight and cost of getting the parts to “make it pretty”, I could instead use power functions to operate various internal mechanisms to act as decoration.

I eventually decided on having planets rotating around inside the torso, and based the story around that idea. I originally envisioned three of the star wars planet balls circling around the sun, but after some discussion with members of the NCLUG, the local LEGO AFOL club, I tinkered with and came up with a counter rotating mechanism to make something spin the opposite direction around a smaller planet. I had hoped to have a ring around the sun, but decided it was a good opportunity to have two small moons orbiting it to mimic the “Unity Duty Destiny” symbol’s three dots.

As for the head, I intentionally designed it to be about the width of a normal human head. This was so I could put a full sized wearable mask on it, like the ones inspired by the build-a-mask competition hosted by The LEGO Group a while back. I hope to build a mask just for this creation, and with any luck the LEDs from one of the power functions kits should light up a translucent pair of eyes nicely.