Hi! Let's start with the Q&A, assembled from the Chumcord, the website, the comments here, and my private messages.

  

  wow incredible first arc!!! I have several questions but I think the biggest is: does an activation event require physical harm? does something like, for instance, getting chased through the woods by wolves, where you absolutely will die if nothing changes, but there aren’t currently any problems with you, does that count as a near death experience for the purpose of an activation event?

  Yes, that counts as “near death”, you dont need to be actively injured, just in a situation where if nothing changes you will die.

  

  Question: Will we ever meet Daisy’s parents or learn about them? I’m very curious about who they are and how Daisy got her powers.

  Yes. The Zhens are still alive and will be being introduced either in the next Daisy interlude or the one after that. They have been looking for their daughter for quite some time.

  

  question: why would someone at the kingdom tell people not to kill Sam.

  This is actually a question I think about often that I think has a good non-bullshit answer. Part of the reason why the state apparatus of violence allows the existence of "Youth Vigilantes" at all, a patently ridiculous category, is that, to be blunt, they are all sort of... hostages? Any sort of retaliatory action is allowable in response to learning that someone has killed a child or teenager, which allows adults to launder investigatory actions or even outright offensive ones through these young superheroes. This means that supervillains dealing with young vigilantes are at an extreme disadvantage because, well, if you know they are kids you can't really do anything about it unless you're willing to deal with the long arm of the law.

  There’s no rule against killing Sam because "villains don’t kill kids"—it’s because the law has set up a perverse incentive structure where leaving her alone is actually the smarter move. It's not an accident that until Maya's ordinance, youth vigilantes have been allowed to exist and have gone relatively unmolested. I think strategically from her part what she did was quite smart because it begins a process of removing that grey zone to turn it back into shades of black - if an *illegal* youth vigilante gets KIA, you can at least make the argument that they were asking for it by picking fights with criminals in abandoned warehouses, wheras if you kill a sanctioned one that's sort of publicly unforgivable.

  At least, that's how I see it. But, believe me, there are internal factions in the Kingdom and in the criminal world in general that do chafe against this (chiefly Mr. Nothing, as you've seen before - he was perfectly willing to shoot Playback in the face), and I think that it won't be long before criminals start bringing genuine lethal force against youth vigilantes. The wheels have to come off eventually.

  

  Question: Be honest, is Mudslide actually hot?

  As a person who is attracted to men, I think Mudslide as a character design has a very classically attractive face. Working as a villain has hardened his features a little muscle wise but he's broad-shouldered and has a classic mobster face, sharp jawline, dense eyebrows, nice hair. I would say for most people he would be considered "conventionally attractive".

  

  Q: be honest, was the spoon and bird guy not at the zoo raid because they were taking on the main Kingdom force outside of the zoo?

  Sure, that's canon now.

  

  Q: Does Kate have permanent damage from the drugs that gave her powers?

  She only ever took a single pill of Jump. Any damage that she got from that has likely filtered out of her system by now - you only get the weird blood while the Jump is active and it only sticks around if you use it chronically. What's more worrying about her in the long term is the

  REDACTED REDACTED CENSORED CENSORED

  ;)

  

  Is Soot Kate?

  What do you think? Soot's identity was never intended to be a huge major mystery. The intrigue comes from what Sam is going to do about it.

  

  Are there really 26 members of the Kingdom of Keys because the alphabet has 26 letters?

  Not at first there weren't, but then I decided it would be funny, and then there were. Then, I just sort of built the idea around it - what sort of leader would feel the need to have such a silly theme for their extremely serious criminal enterprise? The answer is Mr. Antithesis, who you will get to know much more clearly in Act 2. He is the opposite of a silly person.

  

  Where did the name "Chum" come from?

  It's a shark-themed rip on Worm.

  

  Where did you get "Sam Small" from?

  Classic comic book superhero name. Alliterative, heavy on the mouthy, powerful consonant sounds and a/e vowels. Peter Parker. Clark Kent. Samantha "Sam" Small. Fun fact! She was, in fact, originally supposed to get a shark-themed name and identity too, but I thought it'd be a fun first-episode twist that her teammates see the teeth, the blood smell, and the horrendous stubbornness and go "oh, okay, a wolf". She will be getting a proper shark-themed alter ego at some point.

  

  Are Playback and Puppeteer okay?

  They are currently apprenticing for a PI in North Philly. They will be re-entering the story reasonably soon. Marionette/Puppeteer is being tapped to take over the agency already when the guy running it retires, she just needs to be properly licensed first.

  

  Who are the strongest characters we've met?

  In no particular order per tier;

  S-Tier: Mr. Antithesis, Daisy

  A-Tier: Porcelain, Captain Plasma

  B-Tier: Rampart, Patches, Mr. Tyrannosaur, Citizen Zero, Professor Franklin

  Major cities like New York, Chicago, London, LA, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc. have a lot more A-listers and are much closer in power scale to Worm or more traditional superhero comics. Philadelphia seems like a gritty Daredevil-esque street level thing because it's a small pond, and A-listers have no real reason to be here.

  Yet.

  

  Does Sam have a rogue's gallery yet?

  Yes. I would consider (in no particular order) Patriot, Mudslide, Aaron McKinley, Mrs. Zenith, and Daisy to be very important and particular enemies. Illya sort of counts here but he was never really a villain villain. Soot is Sam's Catwoman.

  

  Will Elias ever come back?

  Maybe! He was actually supposed to be part of the zoo raid sequence - he had apparently been shapeshifted into a rhinoceros the whole time and was hiding out there this whole time - but I determined that was both a: silly and b: added too much complexity to the entire sequence. I would definitely like him to come back - I never write a character intending to never use them again. If a character has shown up, they are fair game to return. I'm sure Derek is still looking for him, they're very close in a possibly not heterosexual way (up to your interpretation).

  

  Why was that one interlude in third person?

  To show the level of everyday dissociation that Victor Blanc goes through and grew up in. He is extremely detached from his own emotional processing, and has what I'd affectionately refer to as "turbo autism" (this does not make him any less reprehensible as a person, but it's not because of the autism). You'll meet him soon enough!

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  

  Is there a reason you keep bringing up monkey smiles and monkey grimaces or is that just an author tic?

  Monkeys = unrestrained violence. It is an extremely intentional motif. Monkey Business is an intentional subversion of that motif (for now).

  Let me tell you a little bit about Chum.

  Chum was born as an idea when I was like... eight? Nine? Like many young autistic children I would invent elaborate fantasy scenarios in my head and then run around the room play-acting them out and throwing myself against every surface available. The seeds of what would eventually become Chum were this one particular idea-plex about an escaped government experiment named Twitchy Dan, whose power was being extremely fast, having super long, extremely sharp talons, and just generally being an unkillable murder machine. I was very into stick figure animations at the time, so I liked to imagine these long, elaborate fight scenes featuring Dan just bodying hundreds and hundreds of faceless mooks before a fight with a big red devil guy.

  This Big Red Devil eventually evolved into the first antagonist of Chum's prototype ideas - Harris Beelzle (very subtle). Harris had been sort of a recurring character through my fantasyscapes, always the BBEG, always part of a decades or centuries long conspiracy behind the setting's settingness, and always with the appearance of a mild-mannered but red-skinned individual in formal businesswear who was secretly ripped as hell and had crazy super strength. Around this time I also started getting extremely into running quests on /tg/, back when I cared about 4chan - Harris, in one way or another, meandered his way into my quests, which never got anywhere because I had all the follow-through of your average 14-15 year old.

  Around this time I also did my first of four NaNoWriMos. They all sucked and I don't have any of the files for them anymore, but this one was about a young technopath in a post-post-apocalyptic (i.e everything had rebuilt normal now but people had superpowers) city. Harris, in this particular story, was the guy who set off the antimatter explosions that spread "exotic particles" through the atmosphere resulting in the birth of superhumans, and his big scheme was that he had the power to radar detect other people's powers, and would capture, kill, dissect, and replicate the useful ones for industrial/capitalistic purposes. Brutal!

  Also around this time, my fantasyscape had evolved significantly due to my growing interest in things like comic books and anime, giving me a broader range of stylistic sources to draw from. With like 8 years between Twitchy Dan's first appearance and then, of course, there were many many evolutions, but now it was basically a generic superhero setting featuring a girl whose power was to get stronger the more injured she was - this was the prototype Sam Small. She also had many teammates, the only one that I can concretely remember being a guy who could control his own personal gravity and did so to fly - the power would get recycled in Moonshot (one of the Tacony Titans) but the guy himself has long since vanished into my idea ether. This nameless girl had two primary enemies - "The Berserker" (a very unimaginative supervillain name), a sort of hit the decks everyone's fucked Jack Slash type whose power was that he got stronger for every bleeding person around him (and he could smell people's blood loss), and used a big fuckoff waraxe as a weapon. The other was Porcelain, who... basically survived completely intact 13 years later throughout the ideation process, which is extremely rare for my ideas.

  At some point, my questing experience - hold on, for the unfamiliar; Quests are basically reader driven stories where at the end of each chapter or post or whatever the Quest Master, or QM, polls the collective readership for what action the protagonist should take next, and then they write that. Okay. At some point, my questing experience had me starting a quest of which the name I can no longer remember, which was the true prototype for Chum, featuring Sam Small with shark powers in Philadelphia in a street-level, "realistic" superhero setting.

  That lasted all of like a week before I got bored (I had an extremely bad habit of starting and never finishing quests because I have very poor follow through and really bad adhd). Sam Small was always the opposite of a typical superhero protagonist, with a big friend group, a loving family that was never intended to die, no interest in nerdy things, and being a sporty athlete type. She was never the underdog, except in the way she was thrown into the deep end. Harris Beelze was the main antagonist doing basically the same thing he was doing in the previous superhero story. Liberty Belle still had basically the same role in the story as the mentor who Sam smelt the stomach cancer on, but Sam did it at a public gathering instead of Liberty Belle approaching her due to serendipity. Chernobyl was named "Chernobyl Tank" for reasons I don't recall, but was also otherwise the same in terms of like... everything else. And, finally, Miasma was intended to be Sam's main mentor figure, and was a much less developed character philosophically. Porcelain was sort of intended to be introduced but it never really got far enough. Sam's best friend was a guy named Sebastian, who was the Proto-Marcus and Proto-Kate - a nerdy guy with all the interest in superheroes and intelligence who sort of was Sam's "guy at the desk", and who would eventually get superpowers and become villainous or antiheroic after a bad falling-out with Sam. The difference got split here.

  Then, I finished college, got a job, moved away from my parents, and was in a stable, secure enough environment to think hey. What if I just wrote that again. But this time I had some actual follow through and just like... wrote it. Really wrote it. So then I did, and now we're here.

  There isn't really an "original draft" of Chum and I write as I go along. I have the general idea of a beginning, middle, and end of the story, and points I'd like to hit along that journey, but when it comes to planning I usually plan one arc at a time. I enjoy the process of writing myself into, and then subsequently, out of a corner, and I find this facilitates my enjoyment most efficiently. Let me end this diatribe by giving you some trivia about things that did and didn't happen.

  -Kate was always going to become Sam's Catwoman but the exact how was always very variable - I didn't have her powers locked down at all until it came time to start planning Arc 9.

  -The Kingdom of Keys was originally keys like for doors, not keyboards (and still probably is in-universe). Mr. Bomb was the original Mr. B, but I had another draft villain named "Black Velvet" who I thought would be better as Mr. A's right hand woman so I switched them out, realized too late that referencing "Mrs. B" after "Mr. B" might be confusing, and then wrote it so that Mr. Bomb was fucking dead. Problem solved! This is also basically what happened in-universe, too - Black Velvet got recruited and became Mrs. Blue Velvet.

  -Relatedly, I only made it an alphabet thing once I realized Mr. Polygraph, Mr. Nothing, and "Mr." Mudslide made MNP and I was like hah. That's funny. What if there was one for each letter of the alphabet.

  -Rogue Wave was designed with four main members in mind - "The Alchemist", "The Businessman", "The Doctor", and "The Muscle". They were unnamed and undesigned until basically the chapter before it was time to introduce Monkey Business. The Alchemist, Businessman, and Doctor all had their powers already fully fleshed out, because The Businessman's contract geas was extremely important to foreshadow, but The Muscle (who became Birthday Suit) was not fleshed out in the slightest. Rush Order and Dead Drop came after. I knew there had to be six members but the last two had to take some thinking and were not part of the original pitch, so to speak.

  -Red Calf was originally called "The Group" and was otherwise unchanged. However, the Kingdom of Keys member Mrs. Venom (who you haven't met yet and might not) was originally a member of proto-Red Calf during planning. I decided "The Group" as a name fucking sucked.

  -The three main villain groups (The Kingdom, Rogue Wave, and Red Calf) are themed after the three Buddhist poisons - Greed, Delusion, and Violence. Not in-universe, just out of universe, and it's pretty loose themeing. Don't read into it too much.

  -Moe was not part of the original story and sort of sprung to life in Chapter 2. He is loosely based on my own grandfather (extremely loosely). However, Sam and Sam's Parents are not really based on me or anyone in my life in any way at all. Schlemiel is based off a good friend's cat.

  -The Young Defenders were more or less invented on the spot, and were not a part of the original outline - before, as in the prototype quest version, Sam was training directly under Liberty Belle more or less as her apprentice, and Liberty Belle operated solo (albeit with an agency behind her, like a talent agency for superheroes sort of thing).

  -Jordan was always intended to be extremely divisive. I did not anticipate just how successful this would be. Hopefully if you're this far in the story you have come to appreciate them a little bit.

  -Jordan's assigned gender at birth will literally never be revealed. Whatever you think it is, it's probably the opposite of that.

  -Aaron was never intended to return like in a real sense. As I mentioned before - I like to keep a well-stocked zoo of characters so I can reach in and grab one if the need arises, but he was sort of intended to be a one-shot filler villain to demonstrate Sam's growing comfortableness with vigilantism, and then someone on the Discord mentioned, like, hey, if Aaron is a big time drug dealer, those aren't his drugs that he's selling - he's selling for someone else and they aren't going to be happy that he lost them. That put a spark in my brain of directly connecting him to the Kingdom, and one thing led to another, and then he's burning Sam's neighborhood down in revenge a year and a half later.

  -Originally during their first fight, Aaron successfully lit Sam's eyes on fire and she had to handle the rest of the fight using only her other senses and her blood sense. This version actually got posted, but I decided it was a little too cruel for 14 year old Sam (fair game now) and edited it quickly out.

  -Beelzle doesn't really exist in the setting anymore - his DNA got absorbed into Monkey Business, for the most part, as well as bits and pieces in Mr. Antithesis.

  -The original plan with how Hypeman was manufactured was answering a question that Mrs. Xenograft had about herself - can she use her animal mixing powers on Mr. Tyrannosaur if he's shapeshifted into animal form? The answer was "yes", she would've used Elias or some newly introduced MacGuffin person with shapeshifting powers along with bees and modified Jump/Fly to produce Hypeman. It felt at once too convoluted, too Golden Age, and too edgy - I hated it, really - so the idea got drastically simplified down to the poison dart frog heist, which felt much more... interesting and not garbage.

  Annnd I think that's all the interesting information about the story!