I know that Arron’s habit of slipping into the third person talking about himself annoys some of you, but blame him, not me. He’s an odd chap sometimes. He is a Kepler after all.

Panel 10 is a little odd, because I tried to be slightly too ambitious with body language. The consul is checking with the pink haired girl to verify if she is currently in danger, which is why her first point is somewhat inane, as she’s stalling. As we’ve sort of seen suggestion of, the Family’s representative sort of serves as the Consul’s not-entirely-formal bodyguard.

Arron really isn’t all that suited to diplomacy, but in the context of his peers I suppose he’s really the star student, just because he has a dash of common sense, restraint, and general lack of desire to see the world descend into strife. I reckon he has a pretty fair reason for not following the Consul suggestion of using a telephone, though I also doubt he really considers slipping past her security to be all that big a deal. Arron has a habit of going wherever he feels he needs to… it’s a side effect of his nature, I suppose.

Lastly, I would note as I occasionally do on pages containing expounding exposition, that many of our actors here are, at best, unreliably narrators. In the case of Ryn, well, perhaps the only character less reliably a narrator would be Peter, and well, no one trusts Peter. Ryn also may have developed something of a bias in regard to the IDS, given that he suspects they are trying to kill him. He’s a tad paranoid. Also probably right, about the part where they want to kill him anyway.

Ah, and I should probably note regarding Ryn’s last point, that Resh and Orin (the likely source of any Orish Warmages) have been at war of varying degrees of hotness or coldness sense time immemorial. This has come up before, but as it’s sort of a comic politics trivia point I figured I’d point it out here πŸ™‚

Anyway… it’s been a lot of words. I promise, something blows up next page! πŸ˜€