Comic for Monday, July 13th, 2020

And we are back. This is a little later in the day than I was expecting, but the good news is I have a bunch of the process steps set back up - a working copy of Photoshop, etc. There's still some stuff with brushes and text, but I think overall it should look much closer to the normal pages.

Admittedly I did sort of have to remember how to draw... I think that I may have actually gone backwards some in the recent months, but hopefully we'll get that sorted out.

Today was my first real day at my new job - making stuff like the comic. I will say in the short term at least, I quite enjoyed it. I won't call it stress-free as I am still dealing with the credit card fraud thing (but that should all be sorted out too now, everything seems to be going along smoothly there again), and of course there's a lot to hammer out and do.

But getting up this morning and not having to immediately check what people had broken over the weekend and what projects had moved into the red category... not having a full plate of emails by 7am... well, I can say I whatever else comes I won't miss that.

I won't make any promises too fancy yet. I'm going to aim to rebuild the buffer first, load balance the various things I want to work on during this time, and then we'll see how we are doing. I will at very least get back to weekly; I expect we can do a little better than that in time, but this won't be the only thing I'll be working on (I'm just glad I can be working on it more - and I really do appreciate all the folks that have stuck around all this time to make that possible).

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About the actual comic... I think I've mentioned that Eliana and Naomi have met before. They would likely have overlapped at the Levenworth, but moreover Arkady's family and Eliana's family are fairly close, and Naomi would likely have met her through Arkady. Additionally, as we saw with the Consul meeting Naomi, Naomi is relatively well known in some circles for her athletics accomplishments, something that would have made many Levenworth students at least passing familiar with her, and likely through that be on the radar of the Families to an extent, though not in the capacity she might be as things have been going lately. It's fairly common for youth from the Families to be involved in magical sports at a pretty high level due to their tendency to be skilled mages.

Naomi tends to stand out among people that meet her because she's a bit of an oddity, particularly if they become aware of her powers; while those that her know her powers the best tend to be more impressed by them (such as Mione) even those less familiar tend to take some note. Naomi is pretty competitive (as we've seen) which leads to her displaying some degree of implausible talent on a rather frequent basis in sporting competitions.

That said, the vast majority of the people in Malsa wouldn't have any real idea how far those powers tend to go - being able to seemingly shrug off being shot is a good bit more unusual than the degree of power most of them aware of.