Yeah, fancy name, I know. I said I'd create another story for Berlin, but I never expected myself to come up with this.

So. Basic premise is that this is set some way into the future, with space travel and neighbouring planets discovered and all that bumf, and every country now has a leonine delegate, AKA a lion ambassador. The planet is evolving, and lions are rivalling other creatures for being the nearest to human intelligence, so we humans have seized upon this opportunity for exploitation and, with the aid of some uber-cool technology that I'm just not cool enough to think up, we have raised the chosen lions' intelligence levels to something very near our own (dependant on the individual's own innate intelligence). We have rigged them up with the same devices that now enable us to translate languages on-the-fly to anyone wearing the same device, to render them, in a way, capable of human speech.

There is one of these lions for each country with one in-training each, alongside a human ambassador. Seems innocuous, but the presence of the in-training replacement hides a reason that dates back to their original wartime creation. The lions' original purpose was as Expendable Ambassadors; countries' delegates that could go into warzones and there would be no tragic loss of human life if there was an accident. The lions were very much still treated as animals, never really as individuals, and this is evident in their naming; each is named after the capital city of the country they serve, regardless of how many different lions have in fact served the position.

Now there is no war on, their original purpose is obsolete, yet the custom has become somewhat ingrained and they continue to serve alongside their human counterparts. Technically, the humans outrank the lions, but many duos have become happily equal colleagues or even friends. Centre right is one of these pairs, Jack and London. Jack is also top centre.

The lion with the most drawings of him (centre left and centre and bottom centre) is Berlin, and this is where he fits in, as leonine delegate for Germany. (I'm disgustingly inconsistent with scars, and wasn't even looking at my own ref when I drew these, so go figure. ) He's retained - roughly - the first part of his original backstory, up to where he is found in the ravine, where he is instead picked up by Germany's relevant lion-finding-team-thingy. Obviously it's not Mufasa and Taka, either, but some random cubs...

Berlin, his human oppo, Jack and London are the main protagonists in the story, but obviously there are many more characters. Stockholm (top left) of Sweden is young, intelligent and enthusiastic, though not particularly experienced. Moscow (top right) of Russia is an adult in his prime, like Berlin, but does not really have enough self-esteem. Vienna (bottom left) of Austria works closely with Berlin but is largely undeveloped.

(I'm not making any political statements in my lion designs here...they're like people; all different and probably even less reflective of their countries than people.)

Holy crap, that's long.

All of them characters and this concepty thing are © to me (=apocalypsebunny)