i draw whatever enters my brain

bonus: fooling around with designs and painting styles. also a lot of old man yaoi

zao zhenyong is the court official helping to oversee various adminstrative affairs in a southeast asian purgatory. he’s been there ever since he died, yet thanks to his stoic exterior, no one can really tell if the five centuries he’s spent have taken its toll on him.

being sent to purgatory usually means unresolved emotions, or being at the wrong end of a local spirit’s wrath (in keika’s case). it’s usually the job of the local court to help people process said unresolved emotions so they can be sent off to the actual afterlife they’re destined to face. however, in order to make the process easier, purgatory is set up such that people who end up there have their memories erased, so they won’t be burdened by their pasts as they sort out just their emotions (their memories are returned when they leave).

this isn’t the case for zhenyong.

sometimes the higher gods beyond purgatory’s borders will grant a blessing to visitors they favour to entice them to “get over it” faster by giving them a taste of what lies beyond. unfortunately for zhenyong, said blessing is to remember everything from his past. retaining the painful memories of being killed by someone he used to trust and never having closure for what happened to his sister and her children after dying in front of them basically makes it impossible for him to rest in peace. ever since his death, he’s stayed on to help the local court out of gratefulness for taking him in, but he’d end up spending that time trying to convince himself he isn’t lonely being the only permanent human resident. burying himself into fluffy gay romance novels certainly helps.

it’s also impossible to talk about zhenyong without mentioning the next human resident to come in, myeonghoon. for anyone who’d been watching them since myeonghoon’s arrival in the 1800s, it’s hard to imagine how their present relationship even came to be. they used to be quite hostile to each other due to perceived personality clashes, and even when their fights dwindled years later, they were still quite cold to each other. now they’re basically inseparable husbands. because he’s the more outgoing one on the surface, everyone assumes that myeonghoon was the first to fall in love. this very much annoys zhenyong, given that he’d been hiding his love for myeonghoon for a full century. an uphill battle thanks to myeonghoon’s ability to read minds by contact, and the fact that it took myeonghoon a century to realise he was allowed to like men.

“keika tatsuya” (as her intended vtuber name goes) is an indonesian trans girl in a southeast asian purgatory who has the power to shapeshift! only, she hasn’t fully mastered it yet, and the most she can do without overexerting herself is to stretch her arms out to reorganise bookshelves.

in the living world, keika was a huge fan of vtubers and japanese pop culture and wanted to become a vtuber herself, drafting up whole designs of her vtubersona, names for her fans and entire lore. she grew up in a rather conservative neighbourhood so the only person who knew keika as a girl was her best friend. eventually, driven by dysphoria, she tries a ritual she read online that could supposedly summon a wish-granting demon. it does summon a demon, but it ends up dragging her into purgatory alive. it does grant her wish of wanting to change her body though, by giving her transformation powers she struggled to control.

being in purgatory ends up being better for her, as the few permanent residents there are more accepting and help her control her powers just enough to settle into a form comfortable for her, specifically the vtuber design she drafted in the past. it’s not completely perfect though, and she gets a job in the local court’s library sorting records to help her get used to the mushy tentacle-arms she got out of her powers. one day, she won’t need the seal to help her control her powers and she can finally match her full megabat-inspired vtuber design.

purgatory also happens to have an internet connection, for some reason, and as keika is the only one who knows how to use the internet (everyone else is either from the 1500s, the 1800s or is a nature spirit who doesn’t concern herself with modern human technology) she’s been abusing her Internet Privileges by streaming on youtube. the only reason no one realises that she’s streaming from the afterlife is because everyone thinks the whole purgatory thing is just a lore-related bit.