This won’t be the last time that the young sky elves just kinda…keep hanging around after they’ve been dismissed in conversation. It happens often enough that it feels less like a goof on our parts and more like a trait of theirs.

I don’t remember when we decided that the winter elves would be part of the final act, a necessary source of information before the finale. At one point in our outlines, I think, trauma and/or meditation was going to lead the Five to an awareness of their  tubed counterparts, and they would’ve had more interactions with HR. Those things would answer at least some of the questions Syr’Nj is laying down here. But as the series developed, HR became even more of an unreliable narrator, and the idea of the Five knowing their tuber counterparts became more unsatisfying to us as the Five got more real in our own minds. Explanations like “berserking exists because some guy in a tube wanted it to” are no longer sufficient after you invest in Byron emotionally. Since we’d dropped references to winter elves in Chapter 1 and the Ask an Adventurer series, they seemed like potential payoff on early planting. So they came to address the needs that HR and the Five could no longer fulfill on their own.

And we”ll get to that. But first… didn’t there used to be a dwarf main character in this series?