Holidays In The Sun

Holidays In The Sun is a short story that I wrote over the course of July to September of 2021. Effectively the third installment in a series of works inspired by Dungeons & Dragons (which should get a proper name at some point...), Holidays In The Sun takes place many years before the previous two works in the series, centering on the travails of Saeros Elendil, mercenary-for-hire sent on a mission to capture and interrogate a merchant after the sudden disappearance of an elven banker. When he finally gets to a small hut far from the edges of town, however, he not only learns more about the mysterious disappearance, but he also learns far more about the merchant's miserable life and her ailing daughter, and also ends up having to fight for them in the end.

Holidays In The Sun can be read right here. It's about 7500 words long.

The above image was drawn by Jun, whose art can be found here. While the figure above doesn't appear to have the pointed ears associated with elves, I liked the design enough to want to use it as a token for Roll20.

Some author's notes can be found after the jump, but keep in mind that they contain spoilers for this work.

This story was partially written as a farcical response to a friend unrelated to my real-life Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Amid his joking remarks that I should stop making female characters, Saeros was designed to be different from either Silifrey Helder or Katalia Rhoeas beyond being male, such as his focus on direct fighting and more direct speech. As a further in-joke, I named this story after the Sex Pistols song of the same name, to not only evoke the word "sun" as opposed to "night", but also because it was a much more well-known song than those used in the previous two works.  

Saeros Elendil himself was designed to be another potential replacement character for Silifrey Helder in the real-life campaign like Katalia Rhoeas before him, though this time around, Silifrey herself has since left the campaign to return home to Helder Orphanage. Saeros was actually one of two finalists I was seriously considering playing as moving forward, but I ultimately decided against the idea, due to reservations I had with the fighter class, and Saeros's quiet, stoic demeanour and backstory as a deserter being too similar to one of my friend's characters, a warlock named Orden Reffalt.

As previously posted about in the author's notes for Late Night People, Katalia's original surname was supposed to be "Rahom"; this story gave me a good opportunity to re-use this concept. Both "Catherine" and "Leily" were also seriously considered as names for the sorcerer that became Katalia. Catherine's appearance was further based on this image drawn by Necro (some not safe for work content on page), which itself was supposed to be Katalia's original design, but I dropped the idea after learning it's actually a drawing of Touhou character Renko Usami. 

Elizabeth Rahom's backstory of being a struggling merchant came from Katalia's originally intended background, "Failed Merchant," before it was changed to "Haunted One". As one final note, the reason for Katalia's absent father, alongside her snapping at the group of ruffians in Late Night People after being sexually harassed was to create the impression that Katalia was a child by rape; this backstory was ultimately nixed for being excessively bleak and vulgar, so it was changed to having her father abandon her because of her draconic curse instead, though Elizabeth's attempted assault by Krenko was a remnant of this idea.