No Regrets

No Regrets is the seventh installment for the series of works inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, taking place some time after the events of Among The Living. Focused on the talented, traveling musician Gilbey Jenevere, No Regrets follows Gilbey's dispiriting return to his dreary residence, the vivid memories of one of his biggest and greatest performances playing in his mind as he tries to keep pressing on with his otherwise dreary life. En route to his flat, however, he comes across another traveler who has taken an interest not in his latest performance, but instead, how they can use his knowledge for their own ulterior motives.

No Regrets can be read here. 

The above image was drawn by Kakihito, whose online portfolio can be found here. 

No Regrets was named after the song by alternative hip-hop artist Aesop Rock; the track itself samples The Kiss by Trevor Jones, as featured in the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans. The latter track has always stuck in my mind ever since I first heard it performed by a high school orchestra in 2005 when I was in elementary school.

Readers with particularly astute memories will recall that Gilbey was one of several friends Katalia referenced in Holidays In The Sun, alongside Soryn. Intended to be a couple of throwaway names, I figured I'd have a bit of fun with them, with Soryn having already gotten his day in the limelight in Falling For You and Here's To Life, now followed by Gilbey. Gilbey himself was named after a bottle of gin I had on my desk, with his surname coming from the French term for juniper, a chief flavouring component for gin. I initially envisioned Katalia referencing various childhood friends she grew up with, but as time went on, Gilbey got aged up to become several years older than either her or Soryn.

Gilbey himself led to an interesting writing experience; given his status as a bard, I knew he would struggle to fight any capacity, and in tandem with this, I wanted to avoid the somewhat archetypal "plucky, free-spirited bard" by making Gilbey more resigned in personality, as well as being tethered to his current situation. It was also a challenge to figure out how to get Ravana, himself mostly focused on research, to have a plot alongside Gilbey, but it worked out well enough, even if I wish I could've focused more on this angle for Ravana, beyond just the implications of the work's ending.

While Toro's name and those in Fir's Gallows were simply taken from a list of random names online, Aldrich Anhera was named after Aldrich Hazen Ames, a former CIA agent known for compromising innumerable assets to the KGB in the Cold War (and because most other names for traitors came across as either too obvious, such as Benedict, Vidkun, Brutus, etc., or too foreign, such as Mir, Jingwei, Wanyong, etc.); the characters of Aaron Anhera and Emma Galan were named after three different schoolyard bullies I knew while growing up. And as outlined before in Here's To Life, Anhera was an inadvertent corruption of the Maori word for angel: "anahera."