Second Vineyard Story for June 2022 (ft. some new characters!) (Patreon)

This one was interesting. Being a fight scene honestly made it a bit less engaging than the other story - I don't do fight scenes very often so I'm still not used to them, which does make it a little harder to get super excited about - but it was still fun to work on and it's opened the door for some new fun things to build on from here.

I needed a more freeform magic system than the elemental one Toravon works on, so I went ahead and just made a whole new world entirely. I'm not sure just yet why practically-naked mages duel with full bladders for spectators, but since I have the world and characters established, I have plenty of room to explore that. Plenty of room to explore other stuff the magic system can do too, since I didn't really get to show off very much of it here.

The hardest part of writing this was naming the characters, though. I eventually managed to settle on naming characters after birds, which I think is pretty cute - and anyone who's read the Warriors series might even pick up on a bit of influence from there on the actual structure of character names - so when I do stuff with this world in the future I don't need to worry about naming conventions and can just go look up different types of birds to see if any would make for a good name. Could even just name everyone in this world after animals and just use different types of animals for different cultures, and there's a surprising amount of stuff I can do with that. In this case, we're mostly following someone named Sparrowclaw, and her opponent is named Swanwing. For now, anyways - if conventions change later, I'll come back to this and change their names out for the new ones, but I kinda like them so I think I'll be sticking with this general naming scheme.

Anyway, yeah, here's this. Took longer to get out than I was hoping (but creative energy never really works how you want it to anyways) and definitely not my best work, but it was a very fun foray into writing fight scenes, which are rare for me, and it's introduced a fun new world. This, like the Seren and Kira one, is something I'd like to revisit later for a more feature-length recounting of events, but that's not going to be for a while since I need more practice writing fights first.

(Also I'm pretty sure I said I would have Serenade finished before putting this out, which clearly didn't work out. Hoping to get it done soon-ish, though, but we'll see how the universe feels about that or whatever.)