ToddAndTheShiningSword's Dappy

What the heck is Dappy?

Dappy is an animal that can run really fast, scale walls, and sting people. He's very agile, and very intelligent for an animal. Want to know more?
Part 1: All Dappy
Dappy's main ability: speed and agility. He runs REALLY fast. He can use full-blown retractable spikes on his feet both as cleats, and to increase damage when kicking people. Imagine getting kicked in the face. Now imagine the thing kicking you has six feet to do it with, and it can use them all because it's doing a handstand. It can keep kicking you. Now imagine it's feet are covered in little spikes, and that those spikes are covered in tiny, spikes. And those tiny spikes are mildly poisonous stingers, like bee stings. So you're getting rapidly combo kicked in the face by a six-footed creature that's fast with spikes on it's feet that have spikes on them and bee stingers. Getting kicked in the face by Dappy feels bad. Dappy can also use just the microscopic stingers on the bottoms of his feet to increase friction- great for running on smooth surfaces. Not ice though, and there're reasons for that. He can do something in between to make little hooks under his feet to cling to walls like an insect. The problem he has with that though is that he's too much bigger than an insect for that to work right. He really needs suckers. No Nucaryote is constructed in a way that lets them make the kind of airtight membrane they'd need to grow suckers, so that's one thing he needs he couldn't have. He runs fast enough and gets enough traction that he can be like Sonic The Hedgehog though: He may not be able to STAND on the wall, but with a running start he can RUN all over it! The stingers on his hands are useful in helping Todd fight too. He can use the stingers on his feet and hands to stand on a person's chest, then slap them in the face with a stinging hand!
Dappy's got a lot of energy, but normally he controlled and calm enough. If he sits still too long though, he becomes uncontrollable. Can't even control himself. Plus he burns through calories pretty fast and Todd can't really feed him, so even thought he's always with Todd, a lot of the time no one can see him because he's run off somewhere. Todd just lets him run around wherever, doing whatever and searching for food, counting on being able to call him whenever he wants to using a special item, The Dappy Whistle.
Want to know the long background for why this creature is like this?
Part 2.
Well, long ago, back when I was in high school I was making up a planet, and I wanted lots of plants and animals to inhabit it. I didn't want to just create them all from scratch either. I wanted to make an entire evolutionary history for the planet, where I started with single celled creatures, then started making them evolve into other things based on where they lived and what they already looked like, and what other things looked like! It was a long, complicated process where that planet went through all the era or whatever that Earth did like I'd (then) recently learned in biology class. Hmm... let's remember... PreCambrian, Cambrian... can't remember any more Paleozoic without Google... Skip to Mesozoic Era... Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous... Got all three... and for the Cenozoic I'm drawing a blank. See? I remember something from high school.
That long process led me to a world that was still populated by fantasy creatures like I wanted it to be, but it made a lot more sense than anything I would've come straight up with. Then... I picked out things that were awesome. Things like Dappy! I think I must know how the creators of the POKeMON anime felt when they went through all the POKeMON and picked out Pikachu! I NEVER would've come up with Dappy without that very, very long process. I was able to finish the whole evolutionary history because I needed the planet I was making for what were supposed to be the adventures of Todd and The Shining Sword, but I made the planet for it but never made the comic... I didn't figure out what to do with Todd enough to make a comic for him until the present day, and I dug Dappy and the whole planet up along with him when I called him out of "retirement" to fight Kim for the OC contest I was entering. Dappy still hasn't gotten any action yet, ever, but I did draw him and Todd on a Mother's Day card I made as a teenager. Mom said that was her best Mother's Day gift from me ever.
Part 3
Dappy's Evolutionary line started in PreCambrian times with this crazy idea I got for a one celled creature. You know how (well, maybe you don't) some things like jellyfish have some kind of cell (I think) that has a stinger in it that it launches when agitated? I made up one from another thing, and I looked at how different it was. I was surprised at what I'd created. I didn't even realize what it was going to be like until after I'd drawn it- like I do with a lot of my drawings today- and I was like "What will happen if this thing that is so different from every other cell becomes it's own kingdom?" I already had bacteria and then eucaryotes- plant and animals, then one of my eucaryotes had evolved into this. What if there were multicelled animals that were made of a totally different kind of cell? That cell was going to keep becoming different anyway, so I used my artistic liberty as creator of the planet to make those cells into their own kingdom. I think I called them Nucaryotes...
So the thing about Nucaryotes is how major the stingers became. They were originally spikes that could shoot out and then retract, and they were then usually inside the body and they were originally to kill and for defense. Multicellular Nucaryotes use the stingers to hold their bodies together! So that means they're held together like, MECHANICALLY, not, like, chemically like "regular" multicellular organisms. The cells are attached to each other with weird barbs. One thing I didn't consider until just this moment that I type this is how cells connected like that would move signals and fluids and such around in their bodies. That'd be a cool thing to think about. If anyone has an idea on how a body made of cells that were held together by barbs should move fluid, food and nerve signals, tell me what you think! I would've been cooler maybe if I'd though of all that in high school, but then maybe not
Part 3
I actually have all the old drawings I used for shaping the life of that planet. Maybe if I look through them I'll be able to remember what the planet was called, lol! I could actually scan them all and show you the entire evolutionary history of Dappies going all the way back to the first cell but that would be a zillion deviations, and too much of your time!
The fact that all Nucaryotic cells are equipped with super stingers- although they've been adapted for many purposes besides stinging things now- and the way they're held together give them cool abilities. Practically powers. Being bound together by retractable hooks instead oc glue means that some of these creature can separate their bodies into parts and come together whenever, they can sometimes heal from cuts and such instantly and two or more of them can come together to form a larger thing (a la those old Voltron style Transformer toys where, like, five robots would come together to form a super robot). Some of their body cells can protect themselves from larger germs without needing the immune system for that... in fact, some of them can hunt germs that get into them, turning the tables on those germs and turning THEM into energy! (I know we can sort of do that, but that's just out white blood cells eating germs amoeba style. I'm talking about waiting for germs to get in so they can eat them on the inside and make energy!)
Some of these creatures can shoot their microscopic stingers over a relatively long range- like a foot or so- and firing them all at once practically gives them a magical-seeming stinging force field-like power. And some of them are just really toxic. And there are other things that these creatures can do. No one of them can do all these things though! So which of these things can Dappy do?
Part 4:
(more coming)