Afterword - Book 1 - Chapter 23 (Patreon)

Chapter 23: Heart & Home (Original Chapter title: Old Encounters, New Encounters) I feel like it's worth pointing out that I added VERY

Chapter 23: Heart & Home

(Original Chapter title: Old Encounters, New Encounters)

I feel like it's worth pointing out that I added VERY little to 22 or 23, the original chapter was just a monstrosity that needed to be split in half.

Way back when I was trying to figure out what sort of housing Ranthia would get, I decided to tie it into her Adventurering (that's a word now). The ideas escalated rapidly while I wrote it up. It's a bit silly, yes, but I think(/hope) it works. The 'it's worth it' 'it's not worth it' 'it's worth it' personal journey for Ranthia is fun too.

[Stylists] are a bit of a weird thing in BtDEM. I haven't actually had this conversation with Selkie before, but I kind of feel like they're a half-exception to vitality defense? Realistically, to me, affecting hair or skin like they do should be hitting vitality defense. The Water [Mage] that does skincare for the Sanctum really felt like it toed the line, but in the end I left it in place. I like the scene and it's easy enough to imagine "this Skill cannot possibly do harm" ending up with at least a partial exception. It worked, the scene stayed.

While doing my final read of this chapter before posting I actually fell into a ~two hour research hole. Recentishly it came up on Selkie's discord that oil and coal aren't on Pallos, yet I had written Ranthia using oil to burn the rat/dino bodies in this scene (this is the only place this came up in the draft, hilariously). Resin, tallow, olive oil, and more were researched for flash points and how they burn. I pulled research papers about Ancient Roman fuels. And then I realized I was an idiot and just swapped in charcoal instead of trying to find some weird justification to keep 'oil'.

Sometimes you go through a LOT of effort to notice a super simple solution. Roman olive oil lanterns were cool to learn about though.

I've always liked the date scene. I try to balance slice of life/character moments with the story, but these little character moments are precious to me. They feel so important. Ranthia's a badass Adventurer, yes. She's a [Mage]/[Warrior], yes. But she's also a teenager with a tendency to fall fast and deep in love. These are all important aspects of her as a person.

Even if I robbed her of her big heroic moment at the end, by making it a decoy pouch. Hexara's lived in the capital for years! She knows how things work.