Arigah Egronai weaves into ‘Milhamah’

As concept work on “Milhamah” Issue #3 continues, here is another character who readers will meet: Arigah Egronai.

Arigah Egronai holds her weave shuttle.

Arigah is a low-level glossarist and lexicologist who works in the Holy Tongue Society’s Department of Semantics. She does most of her work in the Society’s underground Oger Reservoir, where she does intelligence research based on Bavel’s destroyed equipment and scrap.

Her main interest is reverse-engineering Bavel’s censored letters and speech balloons into armor and equipment for the Society. In order to do this, she wields a giant weaving shuttle that spins material for her creations. It makes a good double-edged spear too!

At heart, Arigah is a hoarder with a billion different plans and projects, most of them incomplete and in need of more funding. Fortunately, she hired and trained an army of Oger hamsters to do the grunt work. (You’ll meet them soon!)

Her main shoresh root is ארג, which is tied to weaving. By permuting the shoresh letters, she also has אגר characteristics of collecting, letters and wages.

How will Arigah mesh with Shem and his friends? That’s just one of the mysteries that Issue #3 will unveil…

Creator’s note

Arigah is part of the first batch of characters I have made with the latest version of Adobe Animate.  The updated brush features should make a difference in rendering hair, fur and vegetation, though it’s performance-heavy on my current computer.

Lately, I did a series of Adobe Creative Suite tutorials to catch up with newer features and techniques. So hopefully I can keep a balance between getting work done and raising the bar on quality.

I also experimented  with making Shem and Tiqwah black and white, manga-style, as a way to speed up story production. Not sure I’m satisfied with it, but I’ll keep playing with it.

On the side, I also have about 35 pages more done on the Milhamah RPG that I introduced in April. It will need revising to streamline the rules and make them both comprehensive and consistent. But I can’t wait to sell the final product — hopefully next year if the pandemic dies down by then!