Comic for Monday, July 20th, 2020
First week of retirement"... least we are well on time. Pretty sure sometime this week will we back to buffered updates on patreon. Admittedly last week was not quite as productive as I'd hoped, but it was my first week of retirement" and I had some things to sort out, so there's that... and had quite a bit owed on other fronts of things I'd said I'd do and had to do. But we are getting caught up.
Sort of hard to tell with the style I draw the comic in, but Eliana does look fairly similar to Ila (though Ila appears younger, obviously); Eliana suspects Arkady would notice because Arkady knew Eliana when she was Ila's age. If Arkady thought that or not, who knows... though he does seem to have some degree of suspicion around Ila, there are a lot of potential reasons for that given his day.
As to why Eliana trusts Naomi when she doesn't really think her Family would, there's a few reasons...
Eliana knows Naomi at least by reputation from Arkady, and is aware while Naomi may or may not be on her side, Naomi would be unlikely to be particularly duplicitous about it, while Families and their spying and infighting habits tend to have their default suspicion set quite a bit higher. Eliana doesn't necessarily trust that Naomi isn't up to something, just that Naomi isn't up to anything that particularly concerns.
Eliana herself isn't necessary what I'd call normal anyway... she tends to hold her own council on many things. She seems to have never shared that Mium used to hang out on their roof despite seemingly knowing that and having encountered him there. She tends to avoid talking when large groups of people are involved, though has no problem talking to just a few people. She is also fairly at ease around Naomi because Naomi isn't from the Families, and is impressed by tactical mages only in so far as hey that's cool", which is not how Eliana is used to being treated. In a way, Eliana admires Naomi's powers, as Eliana, who has trouble doing things like walking, would have some degree of envy of someone whose powers seem to involve being able to run and jump however they seem to think they should be able to, rather than how physics seems to think they should.