Operation Fidelio - Vol: 1

Ian chose the name. Nicole hasn't actually seen the movie he’s referencing.

Ian chose the name. Nicole hasn't actually seen the movie he’s referencing.

Edited: Added Pictures

…

In the last episode of Whisperers.

Strange figures have been extending invitations to couples in bars and clubs to an event in a mysterious mansion and vanishing into thin air. 

With one of the invitations in hand the FPI decides to investigate.

Veronica and Ignacio were dropped at a parking lot close to the event so they could infiltrate it under cover as a young couple armed with communication devices and a basic ghost hunting kit.

Nicole and the rest of the team supervise the mission from their mobile control center AKA Ian's uncle's van that he borrowed in exchange for the process of helping him move next week.

The undercover team entered the mansion expecting to find a recruitment ceremony for a cult but they found themselves surrounded by something more sinister. A swingers ball.

They were instructed to split in order to cover more terrain. Veronica stays in the ball room attempting to gather information from the guests but before she can help it she finds herself having fun. 

Enough fun for her to get careless and just careless enough for her to not notice she's been watched by a dark figure among the crowd.

Meanwhile Ignacio looked around the place, pretending to have allergies to enter the kitchen and then sneaking into the hallways. 

After not being able to find anything that seemed out of place he suddenly stumbled into a secret passage that led to a series of catacombs below the building.

Upstairs in the main floor Veronica is approached and invited to dance by a tall and charming man who has been giving an eye to her all night. 

She accepts as to not attract too much attention but as they talk on the dance floor she realizes she can't help but feel attracted to the man’s almost supernatural charisma. 

Is right in that moment when Ignacio still below in the catacombs happens, after several tries to open the right door in order to uncover the vampiric identity of the host of the party who right now has one of our heroes literally on his hands.

How will our heroes get out of danger?

…

I guess we'll find out in the next episode…

Well I had a lot of fun imagining all of that in the Justice Friends narrator's voice but the Neon Genesis Evangelion “on the next episode” preview style also works for me. 

Well here's part of the thing I've been working on this week between commission work and all of that. 

For some time I've been talking about expanding on the whisperers adventures. 

With how episodic they are, usually I just do one picture and a synopsis and that usually works because they tend to be simple. But I guess here I'm experimenting a bit on how that could be done with pictures. 

There's some stories with these characters that I'd like to tell in a more fleshed out way like The Saint arc, or the Lucy chapter, and of course I think there's more to Donnie's haunted house. 

Ideally I would just do a whole comic but it took me a year to take The WornDown Children on a shopping trip so I'm looking for something between the one picture and that.

Something of an upgrade of the one time I did tell a story with a series of pictures and that’d be the Doll arc. Featuring btw what was until this year my most popular piece of personal artwork in the initial cursed doll comic. 

Also I'd like to have this one for October. 

Actually I wanted to have it all for this week and that's why I wanted to make it a series of simple pictures with one main one that has the full render treatment here, but there was a problem. 

I was having too much fun with the environments. 

Instead of a series of simple pictures with one well done main one here are three well done and a half* some simple ones and a main one that's not even here yet. I haven't gotten to that part. But I will just need to work on some commissions first.

I may also be over compensating with the “simplicity” of the “simple ones” now but I do like the colour themed narration on them. 

When coming up with this adventure I realized that I've had some Nicole solo adventures and even some Nicole and Ian adventures but never really a Vero and Ignacio one so that's why we're focusing on them to this day. 

Even now this part of the story so far is tentatively incomplete. There's some parts that are not really necessary but I wouldn't mind seeing later like a couple of scenes that could apparently even fit the slice of life genre at first like the characters joining Iggy and Vero to buy the clothes for their mission. 

I like to imagine even Donnie joining to get something nice for Ignacio. Not for a mission of course, as far as he knows Ignacio is helping Vero by being her +1 for a friend’s wedding she didn't get a date for.

That's a lie they came up with that was believable but I don't think she liked the impression it makes her give.

I mean, she could get a date for a wedding, if she really needed it, right?

And I'm sure she could but I guess that moment of self doubt could have made her be in the right state of mind for her to be able to be “seduced” by a vampire.

But don't give her that monster fucker permit just yet. Let's see how it all ends first.

*: You noticed before that I mentioned I had 3 and a half completed pictures. With a half I meant this scrapped one. 



This picture was for the dance floor scene at a first moment when I thought the vampire would try to make a move for both Vero and Ignacio, more as a swingers thing than anything else but seeing what happens. I mean, at the end of the day, is there something more bisexual than a vampire?

The reason I scrapped it is because at all times I knew Ignacio would not be interested and during the process I realized, then what's the point? Unfortunately that realization came late as the picture was practically done by then. Only the background was missing

Though who knows, it could be repurposed for a different moment later into the story so who knows, here it is just anyway just in case. 

For these pieces I sort of vandalized some paintings to make them “apt” for this universe. As in I made furry versions of them.. Though it’s not visible in all of them. Here’s a list of the painting I included in some of the backgrounds. CW: some of them may not be apt for the faint hearted:

• The harem by Pablo Picasso 
  

• The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers by Jan de Baen
  

• The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger
  

• The nightmare by Johann Heinrich Füssli
  

Also just in case, Here’s the first half of the story in case I do finish writing it like an actual narrative. I’ve been discovering that is very easy for me to set a mystery but let’s see if I have the time for writing out the rest of the adventure…

…

“You two are invited” said the front face of the card and then nothing else. That besides an address, a date and a suggestion for arriving in the afternoon in the back.

The card got to the hold of the FPI, also known as the Whisperers, from the hand of a very scared young woman who, for her part, received it last night while partying like crazy at a club with her boyfriend, who she just had that night, from a couple that she had noticed eyeing them all night. 

At some point on the dance floor they just got close to her while dancing, handed her the note and whispered “Panoccio” and went away. 

The girl was freaked out after this encounter and she would have been speaking with the police right now instead of paranormal investigators if it were not because of what happened after she tried to pursue the stranger couple to the back alley behind the venue, when she, right before catching them, saw them vanish into thin air. 

A story like that, and specially considering it's own preamble, would immediately be discarded as an alcohol induced hallucination by mostly anyone, and the Whisperers were surely tempted to do so if it were not because they are familiar with the concept of people vanishing into the blue, thing that if the rumors are true, have been happening often around town lately.

But more importantly, because of the hard evidence now on their hands. A red carton card in which there's printed an address for a really big and fancy house on the outskirts of the city that has been recently bought after the previous owner disappeared in mysterious circumstances and that has been going through an extensive process of remodeling that apparently has been no estranged to weird happenings and apparitions and allegedly disapparitions according to some construction workers involved.

It was clear that they had a mystery in their hands and now also a place, a date and a way in