It is the end of December 2018 and I have finally finished the covers for both sides of this story, so I am back-dating them to make them show up in the right place. Best wishes for 2019, everyone!
Back to this side of the story for a bit. Weird ancient architecture and a weird spiky robot-thing.
If you are beginning to get the feeling that Olivia is maybe a little overconfident, then you are probably correct. Surely this will not get her in trouble in the future.
24.3.6: Ye Beastie.
- Be forthwith and unafraid of the luminous angels you may meet. You can recognize them by their colors: white with a blue-and-silver halo, black with a halo of golden spiderwebs, and maroon with a small measure of crystalline halos are the most common. Refer to appendix 24.18 for further details on less-common tranches of angels.
- Thou wilt know the Keepers by their blue-and-silver halo. Keepers may assume many forms during the course of their duties, and are like the furnace of a star if not pacified. To greet a Keeper, vibrate S?QGt’VGOOf, and pet its snoot in your friendliest manner.
— VX6, Codex Serenissima, Fourteenth Revision (completely depreciated in VX8)
I just want to say that I am having a lot of fun straddling a line between making this ancient robot be both a friendly doggo and a scarily large piece of machinery.
giant doggo is friend to all tiny mice
or at least all tiny mice whose tiny kitty friend knows the Ancient Words
It took me a while but I finally figured out what to make buildings inside the giant space station look like. Basically I looked at the sixties SF cover work of Richard Powers, thought about how he was probably going about making it happen in paint, and tried to do the same kind of thing in Illustrator.
I may be going back into previous pages and redoing some of the buildings before I declare this chapter well and truly “finished”.
This is the page where we remind you that Olivia has gotten here thanks to mysterious family secrets that she refuses to go into, and that the Baron is only going to let her get away with that so much longer.
Olivia has a big dose of that kind of impetuosity that usually only works out if you’re the heroine of a YA novel. One of these days it’s gonna backfire on her.
The bottom panel owes a ton to the cover illustration for a Tim Zahn short story I read in the eighties. Standing at the center of a big X of alternate versions of yourself was a side effect of a warp drive in this story.
We keep on going back and forth on whether this works better with or without the words formed in the panel borders. I probably just need to tweak them a little and make the white lines thinner.
Walt Simonson does this all the damn time and he makes it look so easy.
You may be interested to know that in our relationship, I am definitely the Olivia, and Nick is definitely the Baron. Though we usually put it in terms of me being the Yogi and him being the Boo Boo.
Acting like you’re the heroine in a YA novel is dangerous stuff.
Back over to Olivia and the Baron for a while!
I wanted to acknowledge that Olivia’s cool prosthetic arm comes with a cost here. It can do things a flesh arm can’t but it also has problems like “sometimes the ghost of her original arm starts itching like crazy and won’t stop”.
That’s it for this batch of Vexalyne pages right now. Maybe there will be more coming by the time this goes up about a month after I’m writing this. Maybe there will be more Mixolyne pages instead. Maybe we’ll be on hiatus again. Who knows? Well, you’ll know if you’re supporting us on Patreon.