Operation Fidelio Vol. 2

Or. 

The hosts.

Or. 

The hosts Vol. 2

Previously in The Whisperers.

Edited: Added Pictures

Nicole warns Ignacio for him and Veronica to get out of the building, noting that the ghost hunting kit they're armed with is will not be enough for the situation.

Ignacio protests this idea, worrying for the safety of the other guests. “But Nicole, at some point the vampires are gonna take these people to their room, they're gonna suck their blood and then they're gonna suck the… wait, it was the other way around”

Needing a way to make the guests leave the party, Ignacio runs across the crowd to warn Veronica of the danger, only to find said danger wrapping its arms around her already.

Ignacio tries to separate Vero from the demonic host even though he does not seem interested in that idea. Thinking quickly on her feet, Vero convinces Arséne that her pretend partner requires some help at the restroom. Not wanting to hear the details, Arséne lets them go. And they do so unaware that they're being followed.

Once thinking they're safe and while in the search of a private place for him to warn her, Ignacio reproaches Vero seemingly forgetting the stakes of her mission. An annoyed Vero tries to dismiss his comments until the supernatural nature of their host is made clear to her. 

They begin developing a plan without knowing that the walls surrounding them have ears and they're immediately attacked by one of the vampiric hosts who had followed them from the dance floor after Ignacio accidentally elbowed her before.

With Vero on the floor and Iggy contemplating the fauces of death, a new character appears on the scene. An armed party goer who went looking after her dance partner who suddenly disappeared only to find her turned into a monster.

Unfortunately his weapon of science has no effect on a being of the occult and he succumbs to her fangs.

Being saved, for now, by Veronica who managed to separate the vampire from him before his injuries became worse.

Veronica struggles under the vampire until Ignacio now makes the save by pouring holy water that had been previously disguised as a flask as part of the team's basic ghost hunting kit. 

With the radio broken after the attack, their attacker now seemingly dead and after treating the armed party goer’s injuries to the best of their lacking medical abilities, Vero and Iggy note that for now and until Nicole arrives with a plan, they are on their own and is up to them to save the guests, so they try to formulate a plan.

They note they're clearly at the vampire’s territory, the doors made of compressed wood and all the furniture and artefacts made of iron.

With their weapons reduced to a fire gun, 112 milliliters of holy water, and a small wooden crucifix that could also be turned into a tiny wooden stake if necessary.  Ignacio pitches soaking the gun’s bullets in the holy water and shooting them at the vampires, but they remain unsure of the effectiveness of that idea. 

They're ignorant as to if the bullet could absorb the holy water’s antivampiric properties as any trace of the water itself on the bullet would evaporate the moment this one is shot. But more importantly, they run the risk of getting the powder wet, thus discarding two of their three functional weapons.

After discussing it they arrive at the only plan they could come up with with good enough chances of working. Even if it's still a gamble.

Veronica and Ignacio appear once again over a staircase next to the dance floor, carrying the body of a vampire and dropping it in the floor before shooting the gun into the air seeking to cause panic and hoping no other attendee is armed as well.

…

See, I started with the voice of The Super Friends’ narrator telling the story in my head like last time but around the middle it turned into the Hunter x Hunter’s narrator and that's why the style became more descriptive. 

And honestly I kind of like that one better for this. Before posting all of this I want to change the narration of the first part to be like that.

It also has the effect of giving me more things to explain visually, which ended up making this volume bigger than the first one. Which actually surprised me because I hadn't realized I had made so many pictures until I saw them all together here before posting them.

It also depresses me a bit because, like with the last batch, there's some pictures that I want to go back and add retroactively. Like Ignacio and Nicole talking through the Radio, and of course the Nicole, Ian and the doll’s B plot where they front the problem of not having packed enough sandwiches and ordering a pizza or something. That is before finding out the magnitude of the problem their friends are in of course.

The thing is that before that I wanna make sure I have the overall structure of the story.

That's actually the reason why there's two versions of one picture. The third one, in which in one version Vero and Iggy discuss the cold facts of the situation.

While in the following one, we can see they're doing the same thing but in a more confrontationional fashion (I changed the eyebrows lmao) as it follows the suggested subplot that so far exists only in writing where Vero is kind of mad at Ignacio for some stuff he said before. 

Which also explains why she made up an excuse for the vampire to leave her and Iggy go, so embarrassing for Ignacio.

And at the same time Ignacio is kind of mad at Vero because while he was risking his life doing Sherlock Holmes stuff she was apparently dancing and laughing with some rando who, besides all that, also happened to be the enemy. 

Which is true but also not really because she was actually trying to gather Information, and she did. Having fun in this case was purely incidental. Or at least that's what she’d argue. 

But don't be confused, she's a pro. As soon as Ignacio dropped the V-Bomb she put all that to the side so they could immediately start working on a plan. 

Unfortunately, the V-Bomb was also the sign that Elmira, the vampire gecko, was waiting for to attack them. Because at that moment it was clear that both of them knew too much. So that plan had to wait. 

An important detail that I'm just now realizing I have to emphasize later is that Elmira went for the jugular immediately with both Ignacio and Richie, her former dance partner, but not Veronica. 

Big mistake.



There's another alternative version of one of these pictures and it's the Vero vs Elmira one. I changed it because I made it before I had decided the lighting at the hallway scenes would come from foot lamps and not from lamps on the ceiling.

I'm glad I did it because it makes the scene look more dramatic but I still like how grounded the harsh lighting made it look. 

I also corrected Elmira's dress to be the same one from the other pictures.



So yeah, we're back with our heroes in what's clearly their biggest adventure yet! And it's getting bloody. And I mean yeah, it's vampires, go bloody or go home.

Actually, one of the challenges for me in this project is, with my style being as “cute” as it is, finding the right amount of blood to give the story a good enough horror texture without going into “edgy DeviantArt art furry artist” territory. Am I succeeding? I don't know. 

Another reason I have avoided vampires until now is that I felt they would look too goofy in my style, in a way I didn't like. But that's because I was being a semiotics nerd and thinking Bela Lugosi as a dog with a cape or something. 

It was until recently when I finally thought of making them more monster-like a la From Dusk Till Dawn just to quote an example. And use the anthro animal thing to make them more beast-like.

Is it still silly? Yeah, duh. But in a way that amuses me more.

Speaking of. Yes, now I regret having posted the unfinished picture in the last post because in retrospect it was very obvious how to repurpose it. And one of the minor changes I did besides slightly changing the expression for Ignacio and Vero so she looks more confused and more comfortable, and he looks more scared, is a couple of twitches to the host’s design.

I wasn't completely happy with how he looked in the previous pictures and I actually intend to retroactively change them later, but basically I feel like I made him look a bit too old. 

And that was me being a semiotics nerd again. “🤓☝️:he’s ancient, so he must be old” I thought to myself.

But I mean, he’s an immortal shape shifter creature trying to score, why would he allow himself to look that old? 

He still has to look evil so he wouldn't be baby faced, but still I think I overdid it a bit. 

It also has something to do with me thinking “Nosferatu” when I drew him I think.

Speaking of Nosferatu, a thing that has grown on me is the style I settled on for the less detailed pictures of the series. The mostly monochromatic almost storyboard like ones between the more detailed ones.

A fun fact about them is that they're inspired by the tinted copies of Nosferatu, the original one. Though I'm using colors based on the colour of the rooms instead of night and day.

Though with the way the characters are casting the shadow over the background independently of the supposed lighting on the scene makes me think I'm also inspired by the tinted copies of Prince Ahmed.

Anyway, having probably saved the guests from danger, but now facing the party hosts. How will our heroes get out of this one alive?

Discover it on the Next episode of Ignacio and Vero’s Bizarre Adventure.