Ciem 3 (disambiguation)

The following is about the canceled sequel to Ciem 2 in the 2007 narrative Gerosha universe continuity. For its 2010-proposed, alternate-continuity counterpart, see Ciem: Condemnation.

Ciem 3 was to be the third installment in the Ciem Trilogy, which would have dealt with the tenure of Candi Flippo-Levens-McArthur as the Dozerfleet Comics superheroine Ciem.

The story begins with Candi McArthur and her husband Donte enjoying the temporary peace in Dirbine that has followed the recent death of Duke Arfaas, leader of the Hebbleskin Gang. Kolumn and Milp join forces to strike hard, capturing Candi and forcing her family-friend Dolly Malestrom to make a terrible choice if she wants to save everyone.

Much of this story's plot is now being considered for Ciem: Condemnation, so many original in-depth plot points once mentioned on this article were removed to prevent possible spoilers for the book.

Plot
Lloyd Kolumn helps the scattered and disorganized remains of the Hebbleskin Gang regroup after Arfaas' death makes them appear weak. They create their first successful werewolf named Lobe, and unleash him on Dirbine. Meanwhile, Kimiyato "Milp" Hiriyama abandons her post in Tokyo in pursuit of Ciem. Charlotte "Mukade" Yamamura heads to California in pursuit of her, but gets captured by Kolumn shortly after teaming up with Kyle "Meerkat" Freneti.

Candi and Donte begin enjoying the short-lived peace that Ciem has brought to Dirbine, while they raise their children Charlie and Frank. Candi gets a job at a bar, and Donte prepares to take Frank with him as he goes to see Ploribus for cancer treatments. As he leaves, Candi stays behind to watch Charlie and prepare Charlie for starting school.

Jeral "Botan the Plant-Man" Cormier also returns, as he and his new wife Emily seek out Candi's help to free him from being a plant-man. Kolumn and Milp, in spite their disagreements on the Hebbleskin Gang's future, team up to scatter the city's heroes and capture Candi in their secret facility in California, where they plan to execute their prisoners.

As Kolumn begins his campaign to collect prisoners and execute them in a mass drowning, Milp begins terrorizing Dirbine in Ciem's absence. Henry Malestrom, Jeraime's nephew, is captured and turned into a second Musaran after Lobe is killed while battling Botan.

Ploribus, fearing that he is going to die himself, refuses to take action. Dolly Malestrom grows frustrated, and vows to save everyone herself. She steals a suit with Meethlite AI in it from Ploribus' underground lair, and becomes the Earwig so she can do Candi's job and rescue Candi after.

However, things take a decidedly dark turn when the AI in Dolly's new suit reveals that it has its own agenda.

Characters

 * Candi McArthur/Ciem: A superheroine, graduate of Viron University with a degree in forensic investigation and criminal profiling. Due to a flooded local market, Candi is forced to take a part-time job as a bartender until she and Donte can move to Kentucky.  After the events in Ciem 2, Candi finds herself the mother of two children.  She is eager to semi-retire from being Ciem so she can focus more on her family; but not all her enemies are willing to let her pass into retirement.


 * Donte McArthur: Candi's cancer-plagued husband. Once the mighty superhero Emeraldon, Donte's cancer has weakened him and nearly crippled him.  He needs treatments from Ploribus to survive long enough to be there for his children.  However, he fears that he and Candi will never have any more children.


 * Henry Malestrom/Musaran II: The nephew of Jeraime and Dolly Malestrom, who despises Ciem for blinding his uncle. Meethlites kidnap him while he is lost in thought dwelling on his hatred, and attach an AI backvisor to him to make him the new Musaran.


 * Celia Winehart/Taterbug: A troubled, rebellious teenage girl whom Ciem had been working to reform. Ceilia is immune to centipede stings and has a history as a troublemaker.  Not happy with her falling out at home resulting in her trying to survive on the streets as a petty thief, she tries devoting her life instead to thwarting off Meethlite activities.  This, of course, makes her a target for Kolumn's agenda.


 * Terry Silverberg: A cocky news reporter for H. Harvey Hensons's TV studio. He urges Candi to show up at the mayor's parade and be honored for working with Ciem to keep the city safe.  He argues that it is only logical, since Ciem herself would want to be honored by the mayor on the mayor's birthday.  Candi argues that Ciem is not that self-centered, and argues that she herself will not go because she is too interested in staying at home with her son.  Physiologically designed to resemble a teacher at Ferris State University, Terry's personality is a parody of Will Farrell's role as Ron Burgundy in the film Anchorman.


 * Harold Harvey Henson|H. Harvey Henson: The friendly-but-senile owner of a local TV station. He briefly appears in the bar and Candi serves him a drink.


 * Jeral Cormier/Botan the Plant-Man: A victim of illegal experiments by the Phaelite rebel faction known as the Phaletori, Jeral is a botanokinetic being capable of shaping himself as any plant and generating plant matter at will from the ground. His botanokinetic antics have drawn to him the ire of many, including his own family.  This has forced him to become a fugitive as he has to sometimes kill in self-defense.  By the time of Ciem 3, Jeral has a new wife named Emily; and the couple are desperate to find a cure for Jeral's condition.


 * Kimiyato Hiriyma/Milp: Candi's archnemesis since childhood and her former psychic tormentor. Milp was once a telepathic witch from Tokyo, who believed it was her mission to slowly wear down Candi's mind.  However, when Angie Levens was born, Kimi's powers were destroyed.  She has since devoted her life to hunting down Candi and getting her revenge.  Her villainous alter-ego is shorthand for milpiés, a knock-off of "Ciem" being a shorthand for ciempiés.  Her name is also regarded as a shorthand for Milthuen Prototype, the type of Meethlite experiment that she is.  Her suit is the result of stealing a prototype Imaki Izuki had made of the Ciem suit and reverse engineering it to a millipede theme.  Aside from her skilled swordsmanship, she is only an average fighter in hand-to-hand combat.  Unlike Candi, Kimi cannot sting enemies.  However, her millipede powers do allow her to stick to walls, a power Candi does not possess.


 * Lloyd Kolumn: A former National Security agent and now Arfaas' heir-apparent. After Kolumn's plans were ruined by Ciem two years ago, he has resurfaced in search of revenge.  He proves to be more efficient at research than  Arfaas and company were, and quickly deduces Ciem's true identity.  He wishes to fulfill Arfaas' wishes by capturing and ceremoniously beheading all of Shalia Flippo's daughters.  Candi quickly becomes the prime target for his plot when he discovers that Miriam and Marina have no powers and are therefore not a threat.  He now runs an undercover prison facility along the coastline of California, where he captures and imprisons political prisoners of interest to the Meethlites.  His eventual plans after Candi's execution include setting the facility to flood itself with its reserve water, drowning the remaining prisoners.

Development
The story as a whole took a long time to organize plot elements. The battle scene planned for the story's end, where the Milliblob and Forest Funnel Town structures fight Ciem and her new friends, was originally going to be a construction site. It was expanded to an entire block of downtown Dirbine, as the construction site idea was thought to resemble Spider-Man 3 a bit too much.

Screen capture
Plans for screen capture of Ciem 3 were to imitate the techniques used for Ciem 2, but with more emphasis on special effects and on high-contrast lighting. There were plans to employ the use of a real-world camera and employ texture substitution for some of the scene composition, such as when the Earwig and Botan battle underground. This story would have employed extensive uses of pseudo-chroma key, a feature that was being used heavily in Ciem 2 but which is mostly absent in Ciem. Principal screen capture was planned for March of 2010, but both Ciem 3 and Ciem 2 were canceled due to health and scheduling issues.

Effects
In addition to the visual effects mentioned above, extensive work was planned to improve the special effects for Botan. The character's suit was relatively simple in Ciem, as Plant Sims are a paranormal state in Seasons that is easy to unlock. With this option missing after Seasons was uninstalled and the machinima studio was reverted to Nightlife accommodations, Botan had to be completely re-designed. A skintone file by HystericalParoxysm at Mod The Sims was reverse-engineered to work with Nightlife as a custom skintone. With a few added adjustments to the facial genetics, Botan was ready to go except for his hair. A Maxis mesh was used as the base and a green repaint was used to produce the reference base for Botan's hair. The idea was that his leafy hair would then be painted into each frame with Photoshop and overlayed on top of the "grass" reference base.

As would have been explained in the story, Milp created her suit to be an evil version of the Ciem suit after reverse-engineering its design from Imaki Izuki, accentuating her lifelong obsession with Candi. Little was done to the suit save to alter the chest centipede to a millipede and recolor the orange theme to purple. Initial promotional work showed the Milp suit as lacking a septagon weaving pattern, since the Milp suit was originally built on the first Ciem suit rather than the one from Ciem 2. After transforming into the Milliblob, Milp would have been able to project globular representations of her former self in multiple places at once. These would've lacked the septagon weave texture on purpose, as they are to be semi-liquid projections rather than a still-human entity.

Kyle used the same skintone as Captain Aardwulf, with one major difference being that he did not use the aardwolf facepaint that Aard used. Charlotte's suit was actually a two-piece suit, and was among the more difficult pieces to edit in Body Shop. Lobe, given that he is a werewolf in a version of The Sims 2 that does not have Pets installed, uses a basic version of Abragon's Werewolf Warrior skintone from Mod The Sims. Only Lobe's clothing and hair are deviations from the original design by MTS user Abragon. This is in contrast to Kyle and Capp Aard, who are brown-tinted variations on Abragon's design.

Music
Main article: Music For and Inspirational to Ciem 3