Comic for Monday, August 24th, 2020
Sorry this turned out a little late. I will continue to blame moving, though there were several factors. Fortunately we do have a buffer again, so next week we should be set.
The speech bubbles are also a little awkwardly placed as I ended up re-scripting parts of this page. This happens occasionally, but this time is a little more awkward placement than usual, but as I was running late didn't want to redraw too much. Re-scripting doesn't necessarily mean changing the pages plot, but just sometimes I find the characters say too much or too little, or just don't necessarily sound in character after rereading it, and here I wanted to do a little tweak.
I am somehow still not done with moving hassle stuff. There's a lot of hoops to jump through this time. Moving the stuff has turned out to be only 2/3 of the battle and the world is remarkably good a inventing new hassles. Still... almost there.
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It can be a little confusing to remember who has met who, and who knows who. For example, Tyler and Naomi have only actually met a handful of times, and while Tyler knows who Arkady is, he doesn't know Arkady particular well. Amy knows both of them much better, but isn't close to Naomi like Mione is. And we haven't actually seen Mione for awhile, so who knows when the last time she and Amy talked (though clearly they talked after Mione unproductively interrogated Naomi on why she was working with Peter).
Consequently, Ashvalt knows Naomi better than Tyler does, really.
I will note the it if it seems like the MSB has relatively few true Family scions in it, that would be an accurate perception, and puts Tyler's comment in some context in the 4th panel. He views Ashvalt's comment (not entirely inaccurately) as that the Families are taking a more direct interest in Naomi (which is true, though they've had some interest in her for awhile, which is what Amy is referring to obliquely via the comment on sports). Tyler is worried someone else is going to recruit Naomi before him, as he doesn't seem to count her working for Peter already as a conflict of interest there.
I suspect that Tyler views the MSB as something of his base of power as he is in a unique and awkward position of being part of the Families now, but lacking a Family. There are precious few people that would represent a real basis of power he could recruit to bring them more onto the level of the Families, if he wants them to be taken seriously by the Families in the terms the Families tend to understand (powerful mages).
Perhaps he could recruit Ila with cookies though.