Always Far From Home

For the Give Away I did a while ago, I got to draw the wonderful and cool Nisha for @kerra-and-company! This was a super fun drawing to do and I loved doing the detailing on xer armour and trying to think of a background that fit the story this piece was a part of!

Surprise! Happy birthday! 🥳 🎈

@sidewinder30k is another year older and wiser!

Capturing all these different folks in one space was a challenge, but I’m happy with the result! I hope you all are too 💖

Him: I’ll put your bag in the trunk. Me: Oh, there’s no need.  Him: I’ll just put it back there.  Me: I prefer to keep my bag with me.

I was also still holding onto it so he couldn’t just grab it, and when I said “I prefer to keep it with me” this cloud of rage crossed his face.

Him: Then get out.  Me: Excuse me? Him: Get out, I don’t want your bag fucking up my upholstery.

Now, this was a weekender – essentially an upscale duffle bag. Small, almost brand new, easily fitting on the middle-seat beside me. I don’t know if he was just really intense about his upholstery or if he was running some kind of scam, but either way I now DEFINITELY was not going to let him separate me from my bag.

So I said “Okay,” and I picked up my bag and got out, took out my phone, and cancelled him as my driver.

He looked at me like I’d grown a second head. There was this moment of total disconnect in his face, and then he started ranting about how someone had damaged his upholstery and they needed to put their bags in the back and he wasn’t going to have me getting his upholstery dirty. 

I said, “I’m out of your car. Drive on, I’ll get another,” and held up my phone.

This had clearly never happened before – it looked like plenty of people had thought “This guy is crazy” but went the “so I’d better let him do what he wants” route instead of “so I’m getting out of his car”. Which is totally normal! We’re socialized to prioritize “not making a scene” over personal safety. But when you do call that bluff, when you defy the social convention that the other person is counting on to make you do what they want you to do, they don’t know how to react, which gives you time for a clean getaway. And maybe he thought I was a dickhead but what do I care what an asshole thinks of me? 

Anyway the moral of the story is yes, you should know that you can almost always leave a situation and often it’s in your best interest to do so. 

PAIN RESPONSE; Trait: Major, Training: Acrobatics Gain regeneration and remove damaging conditions when struck while below the health threshold.

Full resolution: https://www.patreon.com/posts/30174802

I know the Almorra comic is officially the first one I showed to the world (both finished and in early preview), but this is the first one I conceived, all the way back some four years ago. Not much has changed on the comic side of things, really. I added a few panels here and there and tweaked about two more, but art-wise, it’s pretty much exactly how I planned it (which is why the anatomy’s much further on the human side).

Writing, however, changed a lot. And I have to say I quite like what I arrived at in the end at least in this department.

Snarl and Galina have always been my most favorite charr ever since I started the game and got to join the Vigil. I usually avoid couples that are based on the tired concept of “I hate you but then I love you”, but this is one of the few exceptions. I think it’s mostly due to how it’s built over time and how it plays off well-established interlegion rivalry rather than some contrived personal slight, and that the characters themselves don’t “change through the power of love”, but rather learn to see past the attributes they despise in one another and later make it click not in spite of their differences, but embracing them.

When Heart of Thorns was released, I was relieved to find these two were confirmed to be alive. And even though the game outpaced me (again) and had them appear during the Drizzlewood campaign, the details of their Maguuma adventures went unexplained, giving me just the right wiggle room.

I hope you gain at least a sliver of joy I had when writing this.

This work was created under the banner of ArenaNet partner program and is considered sponsored content by ArenaNet. This comic is unofficial and therefore not part of the actual game’s canon.