End Of Part 2 Author's Note

Holy shit that took so much longer than I planned for.

I promise you that I did not intend to make part 2 into a 190,000 word long thing, but it kinda just happened that way. There was a lot I wanted to fit in to this part, and with trying to have the characters make realistic connections and decisions, it kinda ballooned a little bit past what I intended. I had to push back a bunch of relationship development stuff because I realised it wouldn’t make sense for stuff to happen this quickly, as much as I wanted it to.

I had a few main goals in mind when writing part 2, with one of the main goals being to establish exactly how dangerous and fucked up the abyss in Sydney really is. It got very real, very quickly. The main way I tried to achieve this was through them visiting the city. It became very clear to me early on that this was needed.

They needed a wakeup call. Things had gone too well for them at that point, and they were becoming somewhat complacent. The way I’m trying to write Gemma specifically is that she’s growing into the role of a leader, and she is smart, but she’s also a little rash and sometimes prone to not thinking everything through as best she could. She’s still learning, and she makes mistakes along the way.

She made the mistake of going to the city without proper backup prepared and Mia had to intervene to save them. I’d been setting up Mia breaking the Burgess neutrality for a while and it was bound to happen sooner or later. With that, we also got the introduction of one of Arc 1’s main antagonists: The Enforcer, or Max as I just revealed in the last chapter.

Writing the chapter from his POV was kinda fun in a weird way. It gave me a chance to show just how much of an evil bastard he really is. He is completely and utterly rotten in some of the worst ways a human can be. Writing characters like that is fun, if slightly disturbing at times.

As I’m sure most of you have guessed by now, Arc 1’s other antagonist Mathias is not that straightforward. Much more will be revealed about him in part 3, including what his ultimate goal is. I’m very much looking forward to writing about all of that.

One of the other main goals of part 2 was to introduce the rest of the main characters for this arc. You’ve met them all for now, there won’t be any more main characters introduced for a while. Where their bonds and goals take them is another question of course.

I’m not sure if I’ve said before, but the biggest goal I set for myself when writing this story as a whole is that I wanted to make all of the characters feel unique in some way. Gemma is driven, Mia is upbeat, Paige is shy, Ivy is nurturing, Skylar is careful, Olivia is formal, that kind of thing. I really hope I’ve succeeded in that.

It’s been brought to my attention that Paige joining their relationship was really fast in the sense that they never really went out on any dates. It’s kinda been that way for some of the others, but I guess it stuck out a bit with Paige. Things have been kinda sunshine and rainbows with their polycule so far, which has been nice but maybe a bit unrealistic.

I can say that part of the reason it was that way for Paige is because she’s never really had any massive struggle or trauma in her life. Not in the same way Gemma or Skylar have. She hasn’t really had to deal with things being *not* sunshine and rainbows. She’ll have to deal with that one day, and I look forward to writing about it.

There was so much that happened in part 2 that it’d be tedious to list everything, so I’m just gonna talk about a few other particular things:

Meeting Olivia and finally seeing her fight properly was super fun to write. The idea behind her fighting style is that she normally is so poised, elegant and refined, but she fights with a brutal and crushing style aimed at overwhelming and tearing apart her opponents, sometimes literally.

And yes, one of you picked it up when she was explaining it (Shout out Rad_Matter), but her monster forms are referential of Ben 10. The Tetramand is a cross between Four Arms and Humungosaur, the Pelarota is Cannonbolt, the Aeroray is Jetray (I didn’t wanna copy directly but couldn’t come up with something decent and scientific sounding), the Petradon is Diamondhead and the Angler Shark is Ripjaws. You can expect more Ben 10 aliens to show up in the story as monsters.

I tend to reference things I like a lot in Kingdom, both in subtle and not so subtle ways (not me slipping in MCU and Star Wars quotes randomly, oops). In hindsight, having Skylar call her wolf Dave was a bit silly, but it’s a reference to Beast Boy’s pet wolf of the same name in Teen Titans Go. I’m not sure anybody picked up on that, but now you know why I called him that.

Sol and Luna are partially a reference to Funatic’s characters of the same name in his branch of The Gamer. If anybody else has read the branch and knows those characters, I thought it was a little funny to think about the paralells between his characters of that name, and Gemma and Ivy’s tiny kittens.

Writing part 2 has been a bit of a slog in some parts. I put in too much about them training I think. I was also writing about their entire days for a while, which has stopped now. I didn’t used to divide things into chapters until when I was ready to post them, which came as a result of me writing everything that happened every day we were with them.

Now things are separated into chapters as I write them, and I’m only writing the important bits, not their entire days, so I’m hoping things feel a little more streamlined in that sense.

I also want to apologise for the “Mentored Training” series of chapters. I thought they were fine when I wrote them, but when I was posting them, it became pretty clear that they dragged on way too much. I wrote those chapters at a point where I was pretty focused on trying to set out the rules and boundaries of each of their power sets.

One of the biggest problems I found with writing magic that way (besides the fact that it can take a really long time to explain the exact rules), is that the rules change the more they grow in strength and power, especially for characters like Gemma and Ivy, who have pretty consistently defined jumps in power, so the long drawn out explanations end up becoming obsolete within a couple dozen chapters. I’ll try to avoid writing like that again in future.

I’ve said before that Gemma is a self insert, and that’s pretty accurate, although I have changed some things. I use models for my other main characters to help me visualise, and the model for Gemma is myself. It’s been up for a while, but I’m not sure if many people have realised: that woman in my profile picture? That’s not any random woman, that’s actually me. That’s roughly what Gemma looks like (although she has bigger boobs than I actually do) (also Gemma doesn’t have tattoos - yet).

As it currently stands, Kingdom has a length of 315,857 words. Thank you so much, all of you who have stuck with me so far. I’ll do my best to keep writing a story that you all enjoy.

My current posting schedule is one chapter every 5 days, which is to try to help prevent burnout on my end. I do have a Patreon for those who haven’t seen, where I keep it 2-5 chapters ahead, depending on the tier, which is roughly 10-25 days ahead of the posting here.

I currently don’t have much support on there, and I would really appreciate it if any of y’all did go and subscribe. If I see enough interest/support, I may try to resume posting once every 3 days. We’ll see how it goes. I write because I enjoy doing it, but it would go a long way for me if you did subscribe. I love y’all either way though <3

https://patreon.com/icequeen52

I’ve also prepared a survey for anybody who wants to give me feedback on Kingdom, it would be incredibly helpful. It’s currently the 22nd of May 2025 as I write this. I’m not sure when y’all will see this, but I look forward to seeing all your responses.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd_7muXtkIuncn_CpJPc9lIXk4knF10FF6HHIc_QBYMiKMb6A/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=103004103074772330679

Part 3 will be called “Darkest Before The Dawn”, and is planned to be the final part of Arc 1. Here’s a little teaser:

“It’s not fair. I didn’t even get to try to help. I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

Take care, I love y’all! <3

-Icequeen52