THE BALANCE BREAKDOWN

When I think up my weapons, I spend a lot of time designing them and drafting them to make them as perfect as they can be. I have a 3D Printer for making sure the concepts work before they even get to the final creation. I have spent MILLIONS of my hard earned cash on a weapon before, only for it to fail at the last hurdle of quality control, and end up dumped in the trash never to see the light of day on the battlefield.

For me, one of the most important things with weapons is to get the balance right. The first step to a weapon that works right is a weapon that feels right, and so I take my time on the shapes, the contours and the materials, just to strike that perfect balance. Balance is essential in all walks of life. Day needs night. Heart needs head. And yin needs yang.

I see my weapons as a physical embodiment of Yin and Yang, if just one piece of it is out of place or out of shape then it throws off the whole concept and it no longer works, instead causes an imbalance, or disharmony.

And that’s how it will be this week. Me and Zane don’t see eye to eye, we probably never will, but we understand how this dance works. We know that we need to coexist just for now, for the sake of the bigger picture, so we will find a way. Even though we are opposite in many ways, Zane represents yin – the black side with the white dot in it, and I represent yang, with the colours reversed.

Yin Zane is characterised as passive, and takes pleasure when the moon is out and the night is in full force, whereas Yang Mysterion is focused and active, making sure things happen, and is associated with fire and passion. But when we tag we will create a full circle, and spin smoothly as a top, only to be stopped by external force.

But Troy and Nightstick are a failed attempt, like one of my weapons cast into the trash. Before, Nightstick would have represented yin, and Troy Solveig yang, but the sword through the chest changed all that and bent their parts out of place, so their spinning top lurches rather than spins, and stops itself before external forces need to consider it.

You don’t need to be friends to make a team work. But it’s probably a lot harder to maintain that balance when one of you has killed the other. So this week, when the gloves are off and the war paint is on, and one side stands with a perfectly balanced weapon, contoured flawlessly to meet the demands of the battleground, and the other side stands with a jumbled heap of metal, who would you trust in the gunfight?

Friendly fire has happened once. Odds are it will happen again, as the bullets ricochet from the carcass of the once great idea of a weapon and explode through the skin of the two men who use it.

Friendly fire. Man down.