The Far Side of Utopia

So, first of all, a bit of an apology. I had intended to do some Halloween sketches, and even solicited ideas from you wonderful folks, but here we are without Halloween sketches, and I feel a little bad about that (and there were some good ideas), but ultimately I was running out of time and decided to prioritize the comic update.

I probably owe a bit of explanation to how I was running out of time – as someone of you know, I have another hobby of making custom stuff for D&D for people – tomorrow was supposed to be the first day of a Kickstarter for a book related to that particular hobby, and work had piled up. There’s a terrifying amount of stuff to prepare for doing something like that it turns. However, I decided to postpone that till December or January (the timing didn’t end lining up well – those of you that follow that sort of stuff will know there is another official book for D&D is coming out mid November, and it ended up getting leaked early, so it just seemed like an unwise timing). Long story short, I ended up delaying that, but I only made that decision a few days ago, so I’d been fairly focused in on that and another of my projects (unrelated, a small contractual thing, small and fortunately done now).

I don’t know if I’ll go back and do the Halloween sketches this month, though I’ll be doing some sketches probably. Since I’ve already underdelivered here, I don’t want to overpromise 🙂

But, we still have a comic, so there’s that.

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For those that are keeping track, the person they were probably expecting would be whatever they’ve stuck V.I. Mium in (or whatever we are calling him), after it was separated from Miko. We know that V.I. Mium can run on Ila’s system, on Miko’s system, but could only run on the main MYM system while the AA System was active, which was mucking things up as running that system places major limitations on the whole system, and that it doesn’t seem to want to delete itself.

We can assume that what Miko and Avon did was transfer it to a Prototype or something like that, and that it was supposed to still be “sleeping” peacefully while its systems were analyzed.

Miko is mostly still Miko, though her ability to interact with computer systems seems to much better, and she seems to have developed a somewhat dissociative relationship with her actual body, though arguably that’s nothing particularly new (she referred to it as a separate an annoying entity quite a ways back), though from what we’ve seen so far, she likely still requires it alive and functional. How much VI Mium running on her system and what he left behind to make her interface function correctly is up for some speculation (I mean, I know, but the answer isn’t revealed yet); there seems to be a second copy of Miko running on Miko that is also Miko and thinks it is Miko and not an interface. Apparently humans find having two of themselves confusing, so that Miko doesn’t seem to think there is two Mikos, but it’s unclear if that Miko and the original Miko who is Miko is the same thing. It all makes perfect sense if you’re not a human. It’s just being a human that makes it seem complicated.

It can be safely assumed that Peter is somewhat keeping his own council on some things here.

To be clear as the characters would all this, Mium/MYM still exists outside of whatever has been transferred into the new system; what its relationship with Mium is currently unknown though (as in if it’s integrated partially or fully to his systems, or not at all), though we’ll get some answers to that in time.