Sword of Heaven

Author notes

Track Seven, Page 10

Blackmoon

on June 16, 2008

And that's it, the end of our long, character-developing chapter.
You might not have guessed, but that guy is Karasu's "associate" Qingting mentioned back on page 3 or 4, also a professional assassin. Since he is ostensibly Lihaii- if you'll remember, from Lihai, our fictional analog of the ancient wuxia style China always depicted in cool kung fu movies- I thought it would make sense for him to throw out a Chinese phrase there at the end.
It translates literally to "Lose the lady and the soldier," and describes a scenario in which someone tries to take advantage of the situation but ends up suffering a kind of double loss instead of securing victory. In other words, what he's saying is "You guys tried to stow away on the ship, but then you messed up and I'm gonna kill the two of you."
The little Japanese phrase Hotaru uses in the beginning is "kuso yabai!", which is a sort of… "shit! I f*cked that up!" kind of thing, if I remember correctly.

I figure, hey, Darth Mongoose gets to put in random Japanese phrases in FanDanGo, and her characters aren't even Japanese, so why shouldn't I?
(I think I might've just alienated one of my only readers…)

I'm also gonna start to change how I do Hotaru's hair and gi- I'm changing from just tone to tone over a dark gray like it is in the TnK banner.
Whew! That was a lot of author's comments. I'm gonna update three times over the next week (whoo), two of those updates being the fanart I got for my birthday a few weeks ago, and then the chapter art for chapter 8, after which I'll move the fanart to the other "comic" on my profile, The Receptacle. That way, they'll be out there for everyone to see, but they won't interfere with the flow of the story for people reading from the beginning.