Fun fact: In order to write this, I tried to actually reference the actual Book of Genesis so I could get a good sense of the diction I should be using, but my internet was bad that day, so the pdf wouldn't load, so I gave up and wrote it how I would write a creation story. It's probably better off this way, since, while I often joke about this religion being Fantasy Catholicism(tm), I do want it to have somewhat of its own identity outside of being a thinly-veiled allegory for Christianity, and it's similar enough to the Book of Genesis anyway, without me emulating the diction.

I really wanted to make this room look both overwhelming and hostile, and remarkably empty (for a bedroom) at the same time. I'm not quite sure how well the vibe gets across. I also specifically wrote in my script to make the door seem menacing, like it's looming over this fellow here.

I was not happy with the imagery of the marionette puppet and the chessboard, because to me it felt very cliche and edgy, but I couldn't come up with anything better, and it's definitely very fitting for the circumstances, so I called it a day and figured I could do some more interesting visual literary devices later. I do like how it fits on the composition of this page, though. The page would be very boring without it, and it adds a nice bit of intrigue. Also don't ask me why the black pieces moved first, that was an oopsie.

I would like to formally apologize for the way the text is formatted on this page. I am aware that it is somewhat evil and hard to read and that is 1000% an oopsie on my part. I swear that none of the pages after this are so much of an eye-ache to read lol.

Everyone say hello to the Safe of Plotholes, located on The Page That Should Have Been Two Pages! Whose safe is it? Presumably his father's, but then why would it be so small? How does this fellow know about it? I have no clue. Why is the passkey to the safe just sitting on the table? I did not even consider that. This safe will never show up again, and holds no significance to the rest of the story, but it makes me mad anyways! I literally created it specifically to solve the conundrum of "hey, where did he get all that money?" and it created like twice as many plotholes as it solved.

Not that I think plotholes are a particularly big deal, it's just that I was very, very intentional with all of the elements on the surrounding pages, and the way this is executed is very slapdash and didn't have a lot of thought put into it. There's almost no significane to the imagery on this page; it only serves to get the character from point A to B. And, while there's nothing inherently wrong with that, I think if I'd just sat down and thought about it for like five more minutes I could have done that, and put a little more meaning there, too.

Also, yes, this does mean that I'm not really a "the curtains are just blue" kind of writer/artist. Feel free to read into and analyze as many insignificant-looking details as you want! Even if the interpretation you come up with wasn't strictly what I was intending, it will still make me very happy to see people thoughtfully engaging with my work, as long as it's in good faith.

Please, for the sake of both our sanities, ignore all of the continuity errors to come regarding which of this fellow's wrists are injured. It switches like, every page or something.

Did you guys know it's really hard to give a character a white undershirt when their own skin is barely a shade off from white?

Also I have been having bizarre wrist and joint pain lately and I think it's probably a combo of me holding my pen in the Most Wrong Possible Way, being sick recently, and having been dehydrated lately, but I may have to skip next Wednesday's page for the sake of letting it recover. I'm not sure yet, though, I'll confirm that on Saturday.

Okay, my wrist, thumb, and entire forearm are fine now. Miraculously, almost as soon as I posted the last page, they stopped hurting. I do, however, only have four pages of buffer left, so I will be skipping this Wednesday, for the sake of catching back up, and giving my drawing hand a bit more time for rest and recreation. This means the next page will be posted on October 2.

I feel like I should apologize to Celadon for how I drew the buildings on his pages, compared to how they're drawn on some other (to be introduced) characters' pages. He'd be very sad to see it. I guess for this page, though, I can kind of justify it? The Cirpour estate is supposed to look like it used to be a beautiful baroque palace, but then basically got sad-beige-ified by Celadon's dad and his dad, so it now looks very dull and empty in a lot of places. This is why Celadon "never did like His (his father's) aesthetic sensibilities." Celadon doesn't necessarily have like, super lavish taste or anything-- like, he doesn't feel like he needs to live in a fancy baroque palace, but he's a very big architecture nerd, so it spiritually hurts him whenever historical buildings get defiled.

Also, yeah, I'm referring to him by name now. I was like "Oh dear. I forgot to have him like, introduce himself by name until the end of the freaking chapter! Now I have to refer to him by an alias until he does, so that no one will be confused." And then I realized that I already had his name listed on the character page, so it's not like it's a secret, or anything.

Hey wait, who's this guy and why isn't his line art all chicken-scratched? Why are the gutters suddenly WHITE? Why is the wordcount for this page so low? And, most importantly, why is the art file for this page FORTY-EIGHT LAYERS?

For the record, I was averaging like, 30-35 layers per page before this, and on pages with WAY more complicated layouts, no less. 1-1-4 only has 30 layers.

Don't worry about his head; he has a thick skull.

Sorry I'm like, an hour late, by the way. I have NOT been getting good sleep recently so I gave myself an extra hour to sleep in this morning.

Why list all five of your siblings by name (or worse, refer to them as your siblings, implying that you feel a sense of familial camaraderie with them) when you can assign them a disparaging collective moniker, like "the Brats," or "the Five Worst People in Existence," or "the Actual Demons Sent from Actual Hell to Punish Me Specifically for Sins I Must Have Committed in A Past Life?"

Surely, this behavior is an example of healthy and normal familial relationships. test

Houughhh this page is so cursed. Not, like, "cursed image" cursed, but like, I went through all of the trials and tribulations while drawing it. I couldn't figure out the panelling, I couldn't find references for the backgrounds, this was the page I was drawing while my wrist was hurting, I couldn't get most of the panels to look the way I wanted them to, I straight up got a new computer halfway through it, on which I did not at the time have the files with this character's color palette yet, so everything looks slightly off... etcetera.

It took me forever to finish it. Like, over two weeks. In fairness, that was partially because I forced myself to take a break from drawing for like half of a week, though.

Actually, this page (+ that forced break) straight up destroyed the buffer I had before. I'm down to two-ish pages of padding between here and my last finished page, which is NOT ADEQUATE, considering that finishing a page and a half per-week is somewhat challenging for me already with the other stuff I have to do in my schedule and the amount of detail I put into these pages. Therefore, I have made the tragic executive decision to change my update schedule back to once per week on every Wednesday. I really want my extremely lengthy story to be progressed in a timely manner, but I also want to be able to sleep and I am unwilling to compromise on my creative decisions, so this is how it's gotta be for now. I will very likely update more than one page on some weeks, but not for a little while yet as I still have to rebuild my buffer.

Sorry about all the inconsistencies with scheduling. This is my first time doing this and actually taking it seriously, so it's sort of new territory for me.

I hope it's actually understandable where I explain what a Null is here. It's not all that uncommon of a fantasy concept but I have had people show confusion over it. I'm not sure what I could have done differently to make this more comprehensive besides breaking the tone of the story (more than this page already does).

Anyways, old man Marigold has a combover because I figured he wouldn't let his hair grow out (it's considered unseemly in this country for men to have hair longer than the middle of the neck, and even that's kind of pushing it), and he would look a bit strange as an elderly person with the aggressively 15-25 coded haircut he has lol. Not that you can't wear your hair like that if you're old, but Marigold is definitely way too judgmental for that. Did you guys know that it's hard to draw an old version of a character who is like, sixteen?

On this day, I have finally eclipsed the pagecount I managed to reach the first time I tried to make a webcomic! Counting the prologue pages, anyway. Not counting them, I surpassed it four pages ago. I remember I used to post two whole pages per week, which feels utterly insane to me now, but it is occurring to me that I put considerably less effort into those pages than I do for these, and that they definitely had a lower average amount of panels than the pages for this one. And also that I only ended up posting thirteen pages total because I gave up after that lol.