Pikestaff the character was born when I was about 13 or 14 years old and the Internet, as we know it, was juuuust starting to catch on.

Back then the interwebs horizon was filled with names like Altavista and Hotbot, and one of the very first things I did was go searching for “Redwall“.

See, back then I was super in to the Redwall series, a set of books that was about anthropomorphic animals in a sword & sorcery fantasy world who spent their time solving riddles and fighting bad guys. Pretty much every single book had the exact same plot (just with different names) and I just ate it up.

Apparently so did a lot of other kids my age because I stumbled across a very living world of Redwall roleplaying message boards.

Obviously I had to join in, so I invented a character named Pikestaff– a hare (my favorite species from the books) who was a big goofball and possessed a voracious appetite.

Now I have a confession to make. It make shock some of you who didn’t know this before.

Ready?

…

I was baaaasically a cross between a troll and the living personification of Goldshire. To me, the funniest thing in the world was showing up in the middle of someone’s super serious RP and attempting to subtly turn it into Pokemon or the Matrix. At least I was classy about my trolling, I guess, because it wasn’t a game to bother other people with as much as it was a game to see how much I could get away with. I invented other characters who served similar purposes, such as the SCV of Death or a dragon named Windshifter who would become rather prominent in my life later, but I digress.

Whether because of or despite of my notoriety, Pikestaff the hare became a rather well-known character across the Redwall forum-o-sphere in the late 90s, and occasionally I’d even set aside the humor and actually do some “real RP”. Occasionally.

I didn’t get to spend as much time on the Internet as I would have liked to, and eventually the “InsideTheWeb” software powering some 95% of Redwall message boards went kaput, so Pikestaff didn’t stay in the psuedo-RP realm for very long. I incorporated her into stories (mostly satire), and sort of turned her into a general all-purpose alter-ego, signing up for things as Pikestaff or Pike.

That’s where the name came from.

The persona remained a hare for a long time, although it never felt quiiiite right. Anytime I drew a “self-portrait” of myself, for years, it was usually some sort of cartoon android or robot, not a hare. But then when I sat down to actually come up with a robot character for myself, that never felt quite right either.

Then, a revelation!

What if I combined the two?

Thus Pikestaff the Clockwork Hare was born.

These are the voyages (extraordinares)…