First out is the heroine of the tale, ms. Catherine Hoxley. I'll be honest. Her character design is not at all my doing. When I started the process of planning the comic, I hired the artist Arthur Wang to do the cover pages for the three chapters. For Rai, the male lead, I had specific requests, but for Catherine, I gave him complete freedom to go where he wanted.

The story first came about in a writer's workshop I participated in a few years ago, and the first chapter is more or less exactly derived from a short story I wrote there. In a first draft, Catherine was there alone, the last survivor, and it was more of a introspective tale of regret and courage in the face of an even more ambiguous threat that had consumed her life in the wake of an unknown tragic incident 10 years ago. So if you think I am conservative with my info now, you should have read the first attempt at the story. Subsequent drafts eventually saw both Rai and then Ansgar added.

In the beginning, Catherine was for me a flailing attempt at capturing the elusive "Strong Female Character" that everyone keeps talking about. I've later come to the realisation that it is more important to just write well fleshed out characters, no matter their gender. It is important to me to let the characters have their weaknesses and flaws, than creating overly powerful characters that can be role models. That's not what I proiritise. Catherine has her flaws. She is quick to anger, she has an addictive personality and like the others, she has done something terrible to land her in the predicament she is in. She carries great guilt, and is often not strong enough not to let it impede in her life.