Blood & Chlorophyll Ch. 14 - Reflection

One of the fun things about my choice of protagonists is the discrepancy of their sleep schedules. With this chapter, and with several others, I've been able to start off mere seconds after the end of the previous chapter, along with a POV shift from Alicia to Katrina. This certainly makes it easy to choose who to focus on, even if it makes tracking time a little difficult.

The other benefit to their differing sleep schedules is that it's incredibly easy to find time for them to be apart. I can show Alicia training during the day, as Kat's asleep, and I can show Kat taking care of random chores while Alicia's asleep.

Here, it was a blast to finally return to Kat's local clinic. We haven't seen this place since the first chapter, and I found it pretty cathartic to show exactly how much has changed in the intervening week. Can you believe it's only been a week? I could barely believe it myself when I finally threw together a timeline, but it wasn't too surprising in hindsight.

I loved how, this visit, Kat was effortlessly upbeat and happy, whereas last time she had to force the smile for the sake of appearing cordial.

After returning home, (well, back to Alicia's place) she takes time to just enjoy her music, which I felt was a very important addition. I'm all about the mental well-being of my characters, and I'm trying to avoid the tropes that LitRPGs fall into where power progression is the only thing that matters. Of course, she still spends a bunch of time learning new spells, but that's not the ONLY thing she does.

I end the scene with Kat facing the morning sun, and Alicia running down in a panic. This is a scene that, honestly, I had trouble deciding which POV to show it from. It ultimately made more sense to choose Kat, since we were already following her, but I briefly considered switching over to Alicia to get a better picture of her thought process as she wakes up. Obviously that didn't happen, but I think we still get plenty of insight into Alicia's thought by her reaction to seeing Kat staring down the sunlight.

Once Kat is finished sleeping, we get to jump into some more sparring practice. I always love when Kat shows off her spells, and today she managed to do it without hurting anyone!

Fun fact: in the original version of this scene, Kat made an illusion of Tabitha, not Alicia. A certain wonderfully talented Otter pointed out that this felt strange coming after the happy couple's recent talk about jealousy, and I felt pretty silly not realizing it myself. In a way, I fell into the same trap Kat does; getting so caught up in delving practicalities that she forgets to step back and see how her actions might affect Alicia.

Of course, than it's time to learn a bit more about Tabitha. She's absolutely a character that keeps growing in interesting ways as we learn more about her, but I always intended for her to be knowledgeable about the Guilds.

I think it's a fun way to introduce the larger world of Chicago that exists in the setting. Should there ever come a day where I write a second book in this series, the Guilds would certainly play a bigger part than they do here. In the meantime, I'm happy to get the action focused on my little group.

That's pretty much it! I end the chapter on a tiny bit of a cliffhanger, because I'm a mean terrible person, and then it's off to the story tag with Alicia.

Nyx <3