Basically Ingsol is saying that if you’re planning on enslaving humanity or something else dramatic that will blow the show for everyone else, like trying to wipe out another Council race in a loud and bloody war, either get it done before the Council finds out or, well, die. Possibly you’ll go to supernatural Sing Sing, but if the Council has to mobilize forces against you, it won’t end well.

That’s why there is an uncommon civility among the representatives. The biggest troublemakers over the centuries have been dealt with, or at least they manage to keep their murderous biases to themselves. That isn’t to say there aren’t disagreements and shouting matches at meetings, or even violence outside of the meetings, but they know if anything happens on a scale that taxes the Veil’s ability to conceal their activity from humans, the council will shut them down with extreme prejudice. Newly made supernaturals, in the case of Vampires or any other propagating race are given “The Speech,” something actually rather similar to what Maxima said at the press conference. “You’re a Vampire now, congratulations. I know you feel like a big bad ass, and compared to your average human you mostly are, but believe me, there are bigger and badder things out there, including other vampires who have centuries of feeding and experience on you, and they can and will kick the shit out of you if you go try and feed on some anchor during the 6:00 o’clock news, so mind your P’s and Q’s.”

That would sort of suck, becoming a vampire with all those amazing powers, mwoo hah hah! But then finding out you’re just at the bottom of a whole new food chain. I guess that’s kind of the point of a whole lot of supernatural fiction… except for the kind that involves the newbie being “the one” cause their great great grandfather was a mummy and their grandmother was Demeter’s niece and their roommate got a blood transfusion from a cloned dinosaur or whatever.

I’m not sure if I’ve broken some rule of good sequential art storytelling by having the three in the gallery jump in to the conversation like that, but then again maybe I’m too used to the Sydney meet and greet method of introducing characters. Sometimes people jump into a conversation before she gets to spend two pages grilling them. Anyway they’re proper character we’ll meet later, I didn’t just stick them in to nudge the conversation in the direction I wanted.

So sigils. The word sigil, it turns out it means… you know the fancy pentagram people draw when showing a spell, plus all the runes and designs? Apparently that is a sigil. Probably not a big surprise to most of you, but I always thought a sigil was a building. I’m not sure why, maybe cause it sounds like vigil, and someone in a watchtower is vigilant, or at least should be. I don’t know. Anyway, in my story they’re that fancy spell design stuff, and a kind of building, or at least a part of a building. Which I’m sure can be confusing to the people who maintain them, because the Sigils are covered in… well, not sigils, but runes. Still, you can’t see the floor in panel 4, but I bet there’s a big fancy sigil on the floor around the base of that pillar.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon as soon as I get up. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :)

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.