The following should be treated as the concept art version of novelization. Strictly speaking I would not consider it “canon”. All text exactly matches the text that appears within the comic. This covers, I believe, the first 3 pages. This was just something I wrote on a lark, and I do not know if I will continue or not. Anyway, enjoy:
Arron knew who was approaching before they spoke. This was not because Arron had particularly astute hearing at his age or spent any great effort remembering the gaits of his subordinates. No, rather there was only one person that walked with the angry stalk of a wet cat wearing army boots in his department.
He suppressed a smile as he glanced at the young woman. Kallisto Summers was an atypical IDS Agent perhaps, but a talented one. Unfortunately her expression hadn’t been north of a scowling glower in some time, and was currently scowling glower with a few degrees of worry. That probably wasn’t good.
As she drew up besides him, she started talking without preamble.
“Two updates from Corporate Affairs, Director”.
He sighed. It was a bad habit of his. One shouldn’t sigh infront of their subordinates.
“How bad are we talking about here?”
That the news wasn’t good was something to take for granted. Leaving aside the mood of the young agent at his side, good news was not something one recieved from the Corporate Affairs branch.
“They agreed to share their information on the whirlpool virus…” she started.
A sure sign they had none, he mentally noted.
“…but one of their suspects is Peter.”
“Then I suppose we hope he stays off the radar as thoroughly as he as been.”
At least some good would come of the fact that his nephew had, by the account of one most thorough intelligence agencies in the world, vanished. He’d had an update just a few days ago warning him he should consider that Peter might be dead.
Of course, he did not, for more than a passing fancy, believe that. No, the facts could point to it, but he did not believe it.
It wasn’t just that he didn’t wish death upon his nephew, no, his belief had little to do with sentimentality. Peter was just not the sort to die. That boy could only be considered reckless by someone that had never glimpsed the depthless clockwork contraption that served for his brain. Incredibly aggravating, yes. Reckless…? No.
Kally, however, was not finished giving her report.
“Unfortunately… that’s the second item. Peter showed up. He… well, he enrolled in a school.”
Arron sighed again. The lines of age etched across his face growing ever so slightly deeper. Age… age he could deal with. Peter, well. Peter would be the death of him.
Kally trailed him as he walked down the corridor, and through the door into his office. Likely she understood why Arron was reluctant to continue this conversation walking down the hallway. Anyone here would have the necessary security clearance to overhear the conversation. Very few of them would have the necessary discretion to not feed the water cooler chat any scrap of news their favorite folk (if now rogue) hero.
He settled behind his desk, eyeing the young Witch. She made no motion to sit, a coiled spring of discontentment did not sit. Rather, she stood with her arms crossed, eyebrows furrowed, and mouth bent.
“He enrolled in a… school?”
Arron emphasized the last word. Getting Peter near a school was something he would have thought best left to a team of particularly stubborn tractors with ropes and pulleys. Heavens only knew what fresh hell this heralded.
He continued, slowly martialling his thoughts.
“Here. In Malsa? With his real name? Our best agents were starting to tell me he was probably dead.”
Kally’s scowl could not deepen further, so she had to make due with flicking her head irritably to show her displeasure.
“Are we ruling out insanity?” she said with thoroughly discontent. “This is him we are talking about after all.”
She had, over the months, honed the word ‘him’ into some form of curse. Perhaps a hex. Maybe Peter experienced a cold shiver every time she uttered it.
Objectively speaking as her boss – and, for that matter, Peter’s former boss – he should probably not find any amusement at all in the situation. As an old man who’d had a front row seat to their youthful bickering for years, however, he couldn’t help it, and barely suppressed a wry smile that wouldn’t have helped his professionalism or her temper in the slightest.
Still, insanity? No. Peter’s mind was a meticulous thing of gears. It did not have room for insanity.
“He’s not insane. Not like that anyway.” He added the amendment on the end. Few, after all, would call Peter particularly normal. He continued, “You know what he’s like. There is a reason for this.”
Arron let his own speculation wander for only a second, but only a second. Yes, this certainly was Peter’s opening move to some new game, but he frankly guessing at this juncture would be about as futile as it got.
“We need more information. We can be certain that he did not enroll out of scholastic enthusiasm, if nothing else, but we will need more.”
Kally seemed to be pouting. Ah. He should probably make some note of arresting his fugitive nephew, as hopelessly implausible as that was.
“I will see if we can get him extradited to us… but I wouldn’t count on it. I doubt he appeared like this carelessly.”
Honestly, if he could find a reason to arrest Peter through an official channel, he wasn’t sure if he would do it. Not out of sympathy, but out of the sheer certainty that an obvious opening would by far the most dangerous sort.
Arron had served a full career in the military. He was now the Regional Director of Interdimensional Criminal Investigations. He had survived the Incursion. He had seen a world burn. He was standing across the table from a mage that was probably in the top hundred most lethal people on the planet.
His nephew’s clockwork mind still unnerved him.
What was ticking through the mind of the subject of Arron’s thoughts was unknown, even to its erstwhile owner, as Peter was sound asleep.
Noon had come and gone, but the sun and Peter had, at best, a relationship of some ambivalence. He was not, like some of his colleagues, entirely opposed to the concept of the sun. No, he just found that his needs and its astronomical habits of spinning through the sky had little in common.
Unfortunately for his continued rest, the sun had found an envoy with far more direct impact in his life, and that envoy barged into his room loudly.
“Good afternoon, Peter!” It cried out, with a surplus of enthusiasm.
He opened one eye, skeptically observing the envoy. If he hadn’t lived here several years finding someone with striking purple hair standing over his bed would be a sure sign that something in the wake up procedure had malfunctioned horribly.
Here in Malsa, however, Naomi with her purple eyes and hair stood out less than him with his mismatched blue eyes and brown hair, neither of which were natural to the natives in his hues, nor would they be the telltale markers of a designer child, like the entirely too enthusiastic presence that had thundered into his room.
He closed the speculative eye.
“If you’re waking me up instead of Mium, there is clearly no good reason for it. Shoo.”
It was a gambit with a probability of success in the the fractional percentage points. Naomi was neither repressible nor particularly dissuade. While her presence her was almost certainly not a herald of anything important – Mium really would have woken him up in that case – it likely indicated something even more likely to impact his continued sleep plans. She was bored.
She moved around the room, bringing infectiously restless and irrepressible sleep destroying energy into the room. Sunlight, as she opened the blinds and peered out the window.
“You know, a schedule that includes actual mornings is looming large in your future, Peter. Consider getting up in the afternoon a warmup!”
She was of course referring their enrollment into Levenworth. Well. He’d done less pleasant things for worse reasons. Frozen hells only know why she seemed to be genuinely excited about it. Maybe that was something they’d figured out how to add into these Designer Children, though, if they had found a way to control preferences and attitudes, he could only Imagine Naomi was what passed for a factory reject. A useful factory reject though.
He yawned widely.
“I was up late last night. Doing work.” It was an appeal to an entirely apathetic jury.
“If you get up now, you might still be time to get some done tonight, too!”
She smiled broadly.
Of course, she almost always smiled broadly.
Loading ...
I noted a couple of things this read through…
First, one does not become The Regional Director of anything without having a specified region. People in that region may leave off the region. But I’ve heard from several Regional Directors that a Regional Director is very well advised to never ‘The’ their title unless they include the region when they’re thinking to themselves. So Arron should either be ‘a Regional Director of Interdimensional Criminal Investigations’ or ‘the Regional Director of Interdimensional Criminal Investigations in _name of region_’.
Second, there’s a ‘the the’ in there.
Third, Peter’s morning wakeup routine here reminds me of my morning wakeup routine of late. My morning wakeup routine does involve actual mornings, at least in the sense that that’s when I’ve been able to get to bed. I’m somewhat guessing that Peter’s here might as well.
Honestly, these days I read more webserials than we comics, and this has a well written core (that needs editing).
A fun read and an increase in perspective.
Glad you enjoyed it 🙂
This was a very fun read. I especially that third sentence. Absolute gloriousness. (Actually, most of these extra descriptions that are hard to see or can’t show up in comic art are wonderful. Like the sun and Peter having little in common, and…everything to go with that. And Kally turning “him” into a “curse”. Wonderousness.)
(PS: “on(e) of their suspects”, “incredible aggravating” (incredibly, no?), and “frozen hell’s” doesn’t feel like correct use of an apostrophe, though I may be wrong on that one. Also, the spacing feels…weird, so some things look wrong though they aren’t, like “useful factory” looks like one word, though it isn’t. Still a wonderful read, though, wouldn’t mind if you did it for the rest. I do know a comic that does both, with the textual version underneath each page, and I typically forget to read it, but as a separate thing might work better, or both spots for per-page updates and the overall thing too, though that’d probably be a lot of work…well, continued later on not, this was great. Not sure I’ve said it enough times, was that interesting.)
It’s a very fresh perspective on the characters. On the one hand, interpretation can be important, but on the other, spelling it out means you can get triple-extra creative with everything. (For example that third sentence.) This was awesome!
This was copy pasted into from what I use for writing stuff, which doesn’t have spellcheck (because I don’t typically publish anything I write, and spellcheck’s tendency to underline all the names and words I make up annoys me :P) – this has been mostly conquered in the main timeline (the one where I made this a comic instead of a novel…) but this was just sort of a pet project I decided to put up on a lark, and didn’t really remember that we used to have this problem with words even worse than we still do 😛
I fixed the ones you noted as well as bunch of just spelling errors, but something this long, well, probably has a ways to go 😉
If I did the rest of the comic, I’d probably do it separately, because I don’t think I’d follow word for word, just because that gets a little awkward. Also I’d probably cut things slightly differently – it’s my assumption that book readers are typically more interested in character development, exposition and world building, so I’d probably uncut a lot of the exposition about how technology and magic work as well as internal thought processes. Even in this clip we probably get more about Arron’s state of mind than we do from the first 100 pages of the comic, which is just the nature of book vs comic.
That said, I don’t currently expect to publish a book; just like with comic writing, I’d have a lot to learn, and books are even less forgiving of iterative process than comics (when you don’t have editors and things to do all that before you launch it out into the big bad world), and getting anyone to read an amateur published e-book is, well, super hard. There are even more of those than amateur webcomics, and less people reading them. We’ll see, though.
If it’s something people express more interest in, it’s more likely to happen, if it’s something people express less interest in, it’s less likely to happen. I’m always trying to find ways of polling what people are interested and what I can deliver and how, even if I don’t per se do any of this for money (not that I don’t like money, I just find this to be a really hard to way to make money :P), I still want to spend more time on more what people are interested in / engaged with.
What, like taking the Erfworld approach? Text updates that may or may not overlap with comic updates, and aren’t necessarily required to still enjoy the story but are there for those who want to read them anyway? (Or maybe not so optional to understanding the big picture? Up to you.)
I would have zero issue with that, and reading those text pages a lot. It’s nice for a different perspective, and nice change of pace. For a more visual thing, can do a comic page, and for a more expository thing, well, you’ve got something that might be considered better for that. (Plus if there were any mechanics details you wanted to spell out, like more on how magic works, that’s pretty text-heavy and tricky to figure out what you’d want to put for visuals, so a text page would probably work well for that. Even the details more like side notes would work well, just an extra little thing for information that may or may not come across very well in a comic page.)
But hey, it’s your story. How it gets shared/shown is entirely your decision. (On the one hand you’d have less art to self-critic into oblivion. On the other, you’ll just hate grammar and spelling more…and take just as long to be sure of how you want to word something…..and hate every time your brain knows what you want to write and your hands write something else, or your keyboard doesn’t quite catch what you wanted properly….eh. There’s pros and cons to both sides.)