Kyn: What about Efa? (V2)

VOTING ===>> https://forms.gle/d5Yf1ZLwP4HBrkxh7 <<=== GNITOV

Sorry for a second attempt. Big thanks to Dargon for pointing out a load of things I completely missed. I've fixed nearly all the stuff they spotted, but unfortunately, I've managed to already lose the original version of the final scene, and don't want to be redoing the whole scene, so apologies for the last part.

This will properly go out sometime during the week. Blender is fighting against having a filesize of less than 150Mb, so that's fun.

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You are Kyn.

Let's be honest. When you answered your messages, literally the last thing you expected was to be given only a few minutes to be ready for extraction. This is probably the most unwelcome news you've had in a while. Even without Efa showing up, you were enjoying your holiday. She's the icing on the cake. You knew from the start that eventually you'd have to deal with telling Efa you had to go.

The message from Roane has you worried though. Usually the bridge doesn't have so many flashing warning lights, and she's normally not so shouty. Something big is up and you're not sure what.

You could just walk out now. Efa wouldn't know where you had gone. She certainly couldn't follow you. Maybe it would be easier for her this way. Then you realise that actually it's just easier on yourself and she deserves better than that.

You go to tell her you need to leave, but she has a knack for grabbing your attention and also other bits. Eventually, you manage to wrangle her into a position of listening, and tell her. On the downside, she doesn't seem to be processing it for a few seconds. On the plus side, she hasn't just exploded with rage.

Unfortunately, there's a bit of an argument. She doesn't get why you have to go, and you really haven't got the time to explain. In the end, she's still from a jungle tribe, and there's no way to explain some of the concepts of your day to day life without a lot of time that you don't currently have available.

In the end, there's no clear winner of the argument, though you still feel like you lost. Hard. Time is running out though, so you leave her in the bathroom and go to get dressed. However, at the back of your mind, the unknown situation with your friends is getting you really worried. Could whatever is happening up there harm Efa down here? You'd like to think she's safe, but given she has a habit of getting enslaved, falling off things and attracting wolves, you're not too sure she won't somehow end up on the receiving end of whatever unpleasantness is happening.

You decide to ask her if she'll come with you. You feel guilty asking her the question though. She doesn't have the full facts to make an informed decision, and you're fairly sure you know what her answer will be.

You decide to ask anyway.

Turns out, Efa has seriously pre-empted you. As soon as she opens the bathroom door dressed up, you know exactly where this is going. You are correct. She's already decided she wants to come with you, and it's what you wanted anyway, so fuck it. Time to rock.

With a few minutes left until Extraction, you unlock the shutters, letting Efa see out into the Ring of Fire, not a euphemism, and your timetable sort of takes a complete shit.

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Sorry. This has taken so fucking long to do. Just over 4 months in fact.

Everyone loves maths, so the breakdown of voting from the mists of time are:

Leave her: 10.5%

Ask her to come with you: 87%

Other: 2.5%

For the 85% saying to Ask her to come with you, there was a second question:

It's sad, but time to part ways: 3.6%

Ask him to stay here instead: 8.8%

Go with him: 86.1%

One of the big timesinks here was having to redo both Efa and Kyn. Hopefully you'll be able to see the improvement in their models in the second half of the episode, and I've been experimenting with mouth movements on Kyn as well. They're now both rigged in a way that makes animating much easier, and has allowed me to start figuring out Non-Linear Editing, which is interesting.

This episode was also meant to be much longer. Where this one ends is only halfway through the episode script, but it was getting close to 5min long and needed to be split up. This doesn't mean that voting this time is meaningless. We are on a slightly linear path for the next episode, but the responses should help answer whatever questions people have, and I find that my scripts don't survive for long after people start making suggestions.

I know what the next few major story beats need to be to progress, but it's all the fun stuff around the edges that makes it more interesting.

Thinking about it, maybe I should have waited for another 3 weeks before releasing this. The last episode was New Years Eve. Scotland has been in full lockdown since then, and restrictions start to ease end of this month, so it would have had a nice symmetry to it!