Comic for Monday, April 26th, 2021

I think the Families have something of a fondness for alliterative names (Artem Ardunni being the latest example). If one gets the feeling that...

• Artem is not excessively fond of Camilla.
• Naomi is riling Camilla up in the 3rd panel.
• or Artem is trying to get Arkady in trouble in the last panel.

...all of those feelings would be entirely correct.

I feel like I should also mention that the condition of Artem, while meriting going to a hospital, is not as dire to them as more normal person would treat it. He is kid, but he's also a full blooded member of the Families, and at minimum they are fairly resilient. As Arkady sort of interjects, they should be taking him to the hospital rather than bickering, but I don't think it would be as urgent in their minds as it might seem like it should be to a reader.

The politics of the situation are somewhat complicated. Camilla drastically outranks Artem as she is a Family head and he isn't even the heir of his family, but for various reasons it would be fairly impractical for her to pull rank on him or want to cause trouble with the Arduni family, which Artem knows. Arkady is also not the heir the of Ardunni, so while he's Artem's older brother, he doesn't necessarily outrank him in a political sense. It's mostly just the case that Artem knows he can get away with saying basically whatever... he is technically correct, and given the circumstances, Ashvalt would be incredibly unlikely to hold basically whatever against Naomi... and Artem thinks basically the world of Naomi and Kally right now, given that not only did they help him, but as far as he is concerned Kally is essentially untouchable - while he was initially more than a little scared of Kally's dragon, after riding it he mostly just impressed.

That said, technically Naomi did not punch a Family heir through a wall. Artem is exaggerating somewhat, I just feel I should point out his an intentionally unreliable narrator there to avoid confusion.

As can probably be gathered from the context here, Artem wasn't the only person attacked; Arkady was also attacked, and it seems like Camilla was too, though Camilla's assessment is probably accurate - unless she was attacked by one of the family heads, the goal would just be to slow her down, as there's only a handful of rogue family members that'd pose much of a threat - even in terms of just assassination she'd be a pretty horrible target without more of a plan... at very least they'd have more important targets with higher success chances.

I suspect we may see another instance of this soon...