I started this project with a third-person perspective, as an observer like any other viewer. So the author starts by interviewing an inmate, which is the main character in my story, General Kai, who is now anonymous. The author doesn’t know, the audience doesn’t know, but someone knows what happened that put two characters in this spot.

Explaining the reason why. An unidentified creature, out of imagination, or anyone’s recognition of their world. A destiny-changing event, where the author is no longer a low-level hard worker anymore. The audience’s curiosity is synchronized with the authors, as the story goes.

Chapter 2, the attitude changes, but everything has a prize. The author realizes he had become involved with something that he can’t get a hold of. But in the meantime he and the audience are getting information. Huge, life-changing information. At this point with the excitement of the process, we also empathize with the author: this is getting out of control.

We dive head-first into the new situation. Whomever this general is, he’s something big. In this scene, I used the author’s perspective to help the audience get to know the character. I used a classic prisoner-visitor relationship that I adapted from ‘Silence of the Lambs’, where agent Starling first met Dr. Lector. The initiative that bounces between the two characters is the one key clue of the story. Why would a prince be willing to lower his level to visit an inmate? Why is the general not willing to get out of the bars when everything indicates that he can? Like when he squeezes those teeth into a Calcium crystal.

In these two pages, the scene seems relatively finished. At the ending panel I gave a small glimpse of what the world has become in the story, indirectly explaining why these characters exist. Conflict, the chain of hatred, the injustice. I always believe in stories that derived from conflict, it’s the most extreme problem that any character has to face in story creation.