Feb. 11 Update

Feb11

Feb. 11 Update

Posted In: Blog

Wanted to try and mix things up a little this week so I threw this comic together. If you’d like to see more similar comics make appearances here, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. Percy already set up the sequels after all.

Speaking of extras and your thoughts on them: what do you think of the new vote incentives? The plan is to upload a new “verse of scripture” randomly every few days. Last week’s stayed up a little longer since this is something new and we wanted to make as many people as we could aware of it before we kicked things off full swing. And, yeah, a new one is now up and in a few days, it’ll be replaced by another. Just my not so subtle way of asking for more daily votes so we can fight our way back into the Top 100.

Oh, and before I sign off, I should probably mention one tiny, itsy bitsy little thing:

NEW PAGES START AGAIN NEXT WEEK!

See you next Monday,

http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Cass/100002356705670 Mike Cass

Welcome back.
waterstiller

Hello, I like the story. And I want to see more of it. Now on this data: only 900 ?
How you can feed them ? Who does all the work all the repairs of the machinery where you get the source of energy? As I see it that community is isolated so no imports/exports i did not see any fields for crops and anyway who works on them? I think its a miracle that they survived for 100 years. There are too few people and too few resources to make it an autonomous society.
fred thorp

I’m afraid I must agree with waterstiller. 900 is much to small of a populatioin for the social/ technical level of these people. Simple to fix though. 9,000 is much more believable.
The agri. base is harder to finesse. The farmers could live in the city and travel to the fields each day. They have powered vehicles so the workers wouldn’t have to walk or ride to the fields. Possibly fortified farm communes with militia defense backed up by heavy forces from the city. They would certainly have some form of rapid communcations; heliograph, semaphore. telegraph.
fred thorp

(Hit enter too soon.)
In any case I ‘m fascinated with the characters, social order and plot. I will continue to follow as long as you keep posting.
dredogastus f
http://www.thebecomingcomic.com J Alan Shelton

While Bellac is most certainly xenophobic, even they understand that incoming and outgoing trade is a necessary evil to maintain their way of life. However, that is not to say they are entirely dependent on trade; they actually do have resources of their own within – and outside – the city perimeters. We just haven’t had a story reason to see any of that yet. In fact, we really haven’t seen that much of Bellac at all when you think about it. And If all goes according to plan, you’ll have most of the answers to your questions in volume 2.
http://www.thebecomingcomic.com J Alan Shelton

While the exact number is obviously something we can play around with in the future, the idea is that they have lost a significant amount of their population during the “Black Blood” incident referenced in Chapter 1. In fact, I’d consider it a fairly important plot point that they are a mere fraction of what they once were. We’ll touch on this and more when Bellac’s ambassador is about to leave for Julian in Vol. 2.

Fortified farmlands do exist outside of Bellac and actually end up being a plot point in Amelia’s story later on, somewhere around the tail end of Vol. 2 or very early Vol. 3. The farmers live on the farmland and have regular rotations of Disciples backed up by skeleton crews of BDL for defense. Other than an occasional band of ghouls or that “other” thing we’ll learn about very soon, it’s relatively safe.
http://www.thebecomingcomic.com J Alan Shelton

I’ll keep posting until the story’s been told – see you at the finish line!
http://www.thebecomingcomic.com J Alan Shelton

Good to be back!
waterstiller

Thanks for the answer. What I like in this webcomic (beside of course the story) is that the community is so responsive. So to continue my point. If it is a self-sustaining society meaning that they are not dependent of outside help (I mean here not commerce but humanitarian aid ) then they need a big percent of their needs to be fulfilled locally. I think 900 people are to few for this even with machines.
The food with big enough fields is manageable (if they use machines) but the machines are the problem.
First problem: raw materials. They need metal a lot and some energy source (maybe coal or oil) to work with it. So where they get this? If it is commerce they have to give something in return.

Second problem: qualified people. I saw just one and they need a lot more if they build as many machines as we see.

Third problem: resources. As I said with raw materials even if they can obtain them with commerce they have to give something in return. As we can see there are no visible resources to give (maybe machines?)

Even the existence of the villain is improbable in 900 people would be so easy to catch him. And the ease which they kill a man. They need qualified people like air and they kill and adult just for fun (I know I know they had reasons) but at the end there is a dead specialist and you need years to train another.
And many more problems rises from the fact that they are so few and so isolated. And yes I would like to see what is the secret of Bellac what gives independence for that community.
http://www.thebecomingcomic.com J Alan Shelton

Bellac has two very desirable resources to offer:

The first is protection. As has been mentioned, there are a lot of reasons to be afraid of life outside the city’s walls and having a Disciple or 2 stationed within a village to discourage attacks by ghouls and other horrors can be
nice.

The second is knowledge. The communities outside of Bellac are not that well developed and have limited to no educational system. Bellac offers both spiritual and
practical educational needs to these communities by stationing a Chief of Medicine and 2 of his apprentices there on a multi-year rotation. Some of the best “students” are eventually offered a chance to join Bellac, but we’ll get into that in the comic later.

[Extra bit of trivia: in an early draft of The Becoming, the story began with Oscar and his father returning from one of these rotations, marking Oscar's first time in Bellac – this was back when he was originally going to be much younger than he is now.]

We’ve seen 2 “qualified” engineers so far in Amelia (okay, her skills are debatable lol) and the younger Barnes brother, who while technically holds the title of “Operator” is and has to be trained in the event his machine breaks down in the field. However, if they weren’t imperative to the story, we wouldn’t have seen any – but that doesn’t mean they’re not there waiting to be called on when the time comes; we just need a reason to feature them.

Now, regarding the unlikelihood of a villain within such a small population. Let me tell you a story: I live in what is technically a “village” due to our low population. Everyone knows everyone, generations have gone to school together, yadda, yadda. Over the course of 6 weeks, our bank was robbed THREE times by the same individual. The police couldn’t catch the guy. He was only apprehended when he tried to take his five finger snatch act out of town and even then it took them some time to catch him. And, yeah, it was one of our own that everybody knew and couldn’t believe it was him. You can blame police ineptitude for how long he managed to evade capture if you like, but surely you can’t tell me you have more faith in Investigator Dumas’ skills at this point. The CPV is there mostly to handle the “little stuff” like drunk and disorderlies, civil disputes, etc. – out and out criminal activity is pretty foreign to them.

But, like I mentioned to Fred above, the number of people living in Bellac is definitely something that I may review and adjust in the future. It’s just very imperative that the point be made that Bellac is only a fraction of it’s former self their own once great resources are now at an all-time low after the “Black Blood” incident mentioned in Chapter 1. This event wiped out a significant portion of the population and how it was handled was certainly a factor in the people turning against Captain Belmont’s father who was chancellor during that time period.

Anyway, I hope the above answers make sense and
are satisfactory.
waterstiller

Thanks for your quick response. Only problems I still have is the source of energy and the raw materials. And yes is surprising for me that a community in this unforgivable environment could be so incompetent. The military are babies with guns, the police does not have any field experience, the machines can kill people but cannot wash the dirt from the wall. And on top of that there are some powerful people which can kill left and right. What I feel with this story is that before they had some very competent and smart people and after some dying the knowledge remain only in books (maybe not even there).

The Becoming

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Feb. 11 Update