Thief 13
The relationship vibe between Rana and Yalaria was a bit challenging, and we had to edit out some dialogue that just didn’t fit that well with their established voices. As I said earlier, Yalaria comes off as not too bright even though she’s a capable guard and warrior, and that’s partly because she’s a chatterbox with a not-quite-right quality to much of her language. Rana comes off as smarter, but his tendency to use only as many words as necessary may lead us to overestimate him the way we underestimate her. Both of them are a bit lost in the world of the groundlings; sometimes the only things that make sense to them are each other and the sky.
Phil’s original climax here had Isidro giving up the Egg just so it could heal Rana, but it seemed to me that he wouldn’t relinquish his prize quite that easily, especially when there was the much more appealing option of healing Rana and then running away with the egg while Rana staggered back into consciousness. So we added the plague to the revised draft to give him a starker choice. Having now realized what the egg can do and having caught his breath enough to contemplate the implications, Isidro has realized that stealing it would be like stealing MRI machines from a third-world hospital that couldn’t hope to replace them.
This relatively benign encounter won’t match any other information that Rana and Yalaria get about humans until Chapter 44 or so, so in the end, it won’t inform their opinions much. That might seem a little cognitive-dissonance, but if you eat one mushroom that DOESN’T make you vomit and all the others do (and also imprison, separate, and execute you), you’ll still conclude shrooms are bad.
I think it’s her facial features/expressions, as much as or more so than her language, that make her seem like a dim bulb (at least in this story). The large eyes give her a childlike appearance, which is reinforced by her simple vocabulary.
The reference to plague was such an incidental detail that I wouldn’t even have connected it with Isidro’s decision to return the egg if you hadn’t pointed it out.
Your observation about her eyes is interesting, and one I hadn’t considered, but I think I buy it.
I agree on the plague idea not carrying over to this page. Maybe if we’d heard Yalaria start to cough a bit in the preceding page and we saw Isidro react to that it would have made the connection clearer?
I probably got ahead of myself a bit with that annotation; Isidro covers this in the first frame of the next page.
It’s a shame, that such an encounter -capable, with build up, of changing these people’s perseption over humans- goes to waste at the end, given where life takes this couple. It is totally legitimate, it happens all the time in the real world as well. But still, a shame.