Lucas

Who better to start off with than our main character? This Lucario boy seems to have a bit more than a screw loose, but what's really going on with him? He probably has the most backstory of any character, most of which is neglected to ever be featured or explained. It's hinted at a few times, such as the fire being reflected in his eyes when he realises who Nocturne actually is, but you have exactly zero context for this if you've only read the comic.

Lucas's backstory really starts out with his parents' deaths. When Nocturne arrived in the past, it was actually around the time when Lucas was a child, and he apparently tried to kill him by burning his house down, hence the fire. Lucas ended up escaping from the fire, but his parents were crushed under the house collapsing from the fire burning it down, I guess? I wrote some shitty supplementary story about it in the comments of this drawing.

For some reason, I thought it would be cool and ironic if the reason for Lucas's son in the future going crazy was related to this fire incident. I had this idea that the reason for his insane outbursts you see when his eyes turn red was caused by him getting infected with... something after he ran away into the wilderness from the fire. This would mean that the entire reason Lucas gets this weird red eye corruption and passes it down to his child is all Nocturne's fault for burning his house down. I guess I'll confirm this as indeed being the case, even if it's kind of a dumb weird backstory.

You get some peeks about his past in the comic, like in Chapter 6 when a literal flashback happens. I'm not entirely sure what I thought the point of this flashback was, because at this point we already knew Lucas would occasionally go sicko mode on people. The only new information we get from this sequence is that... Lucy kissing him would calm him down from his enraged state? I hope that was implied well enough, because it sure looks really awkward otherwise.

Pre-TCoS, Lucas was a more minor character in Pokécom who would show up every now and then but much less often than Dan and Nick. Strange how he ended up becoming the main character after that and not one of those two. He was generally shown as having an irritable personality, snapping at Dan for getting into his antics. Lucas is kind of an asshole, honestly. I ended up disliking him by the end of TCoS, even though most readers seemed to love him. You might think that's the reason he gets killed in the final chapter, but I actually always planned for him to die.

Lucas's 'noble' sacrifice. He kind of just lets himself get killed by Nocturne, but not before uttering the name "Nathan". What? Nathan? That's actually Nocturne's real name, how Lucas could possibly have any idea what it is is something I could not tell you. I never thought of an inkling of an explanation. It's just kind of for the dramatic effect. There were a couple of things that implied Lucas would end up dying, like in this picture I drew sometime during the creation of TCoS. It's a parody of a fighting game, and if you look closely at the UI drawn at the top you can see that it says "ROUND 2", and Nocturne appears to have won the first match if you look at the score counter rectangles. Lucas's health bar is also missing a bit of damage. I don't think a single person caught this detail, it's kind of weird and obscure to think that it would mean anything anyway.

Adam

This is the real best boy. I love him dearly, with all my heart. He is my son. Like I went over earlier, Adam has some kind of ambiguous goal involving exploring the cavern. I'll leave this up to interpretation what the truth is, but he does have a bit of backstory that isn't gone over.

Keep in mind this is Adam's backstory in relation to TCoS. If you know me well, you might be aware that I'm making a sort of reboot involving the characters originally from TCoS. (much like how Shinka did, funny how that works out with my inspiration) Adam has a completely different story in this reboot, so don't take this as meaning anything if you're curious about him in said reboot.

Adam showed up to Veden some time in the past, not really specified how long. It was here that he met Kaori like, inside a restaurant I guess. The funny original backstory was that he forgot to bring money with him to pay for the food, and then Kaori stepped in to help him out because ooh Absol boy is hot. (he is hot) They apparently like, started dating in this time before Adam decided he had to leave town to go party in a cave on the other side of the river. He may be stupid.

Adam used to wear a fucking fedora when I made him up for Pokécom.

Rosa

Rosa is a weird case to talk about. When she's introduced in Chapter 2, it seems like she's going to be some kind of bubbly annoying character, but I quickly decided to do almost a complete 180 on her personality from Chapter 3 onwards. She becomes the more serious person of the group, quick and snappy but not in a dickish way like Lucas.

She was originally conceived in Pokécom as a character who inexplicably had a crush on Dan, which befuddled all the other characters because they all thought of Dan as being kind of annoying. Why would Rosa be in love with someone like that, they thought. It's pretty obvious from her introduction that she's into Dan, but then there's this weird part in Chapter 8 where she seems to lament the fact that she can't express her feelings for Dan even though... in her bubbly introduction she asked him to go on a date with her. I said she was a weird case to talk about. She doesn't really have any backstory to go over, unfortunately.

Dan

The comic relief character. After flipping through the comic, he gets a lot less screen time than I remember. I probably imagined him as having more of a prescence considering that he was practically the main character of Pokécom and Coventure. There's not a lot to say about him that hasn't already been mentioned before. He's the weird jokey slightly annoying character who's around to be a dumbass. It is kind of heartwarming in the end how he glomps Rosa when she comes to save him and Nick, and you can see Rosa's blushing little face as he hugs her. He may be stupid, but he cares about his friends a lot, even trying to comfort Nick when they're trapped together.

Nick

I guess he's a main character? There's kind of this bit where he is literally forgotten about for a couple chapters where he's finally brought back after seemingly being left in Rosa's car overnight. This was actually completely unintentional for him to be gone that long, I straight up just forgot to include him for a while. Honestly, he probably wouldn't have added very much to the story.

In Pokécom, Nick was supposed to be this like scientist inventor type guy. He had a lab in the basement of the house which always ended up with Dan fucking around with stuff he made and getting into trouble. Dan and Nick kind of played off each other in a goofy comical was, which was fitting for Pokécom was going for. Maybe one day I'll scan all those old comics and put them up somewhere.

Kaori

Our precious Vappy girl who apparently has such a horny dream in the middle of a chapter that I needed to dedicate half of the chapter to it. I don't know why I did that. The phrase "Chapter 5" became an injoke with my friends to refer to something that was unnecessarily horny. She did not deserve to almost get cut in half by Lucas. Lucas is an asshole.

I made Kaori up sometime between adding the additional characters to Pokécom that included Adam to making an internet prescence for myself on Colors! 3D. She was conceived just to be a love interest for Adam, to be honest. Fun fact about her is that I almost named her Kairi, after the character from Kingdom Hearts, however I forgot that Kairi's name was Kairi and thought it was Kaori. So that's what Kaori's name ended up becoming.

Some future ideas were that, after Adam returned to live with Kaori they would eventually have a kid together, an Eevee named Alex. This is more of an Adam fact than a Kaori fact, but the reason the kid is named Alex is because Adam's name didn't actually used to be Adam, it was Alex. At some point I changed his name, but then decided to reuse his old name for his kid.

Hikaru

Kaori's father, because her entire immediate family is featured at some point. He's a kind old man, almost suspiciously so with how quickly he is to forgive Lucas for almost killing his daughter. The most backstory you'll get out of him is related to the fact that his family's names are obviously in a different language than everyone else. You see, TCoS takes place in the country of Alagia, but Hikaru's family is not from Alagia. They immigrated there from an island country called Sajagia. They moved after Naomi was born, but before Kaori was, so Kaori was born in Alagia. The reason for their immigration is left completely up in the air.

Mai

Oh boy everyone's favourite horny sex demon, or so it might appear. Kaori's mother doesn't actually appear in the comic at any point, at least not in the flesh. The only time you ever see her is in Kaori's dream sequence, where Mai seems to be very intent on setting her daughter up with that handsome Absol who just passed through town. Maybe this is a projection of Kaori's mind thinking that her mother is indeed trying to set them up, but that's not really elaborated on. I kept trying to remind people that the Mai whom Kaori sees in her dream is not a reflection of the personality of the real life Mai, because oh my god imagine your mom acting like that all the time. Maybe some of you don't have to imagine. I hope that's not the case.

The particular image I chose to represent Mai in this essay was one that became a bit of a joke with some of my friends. *snap*

Another fun tidbit about Mai is that I basically used her as my sona for a while. At the time I was still figuring out my gender, so my old original sona had to be dropped because he was, y'know, a dude. I didn't get around to making a new sona for a while, so Mai stood in for me as a placeholder. I didn't really know exactly what I wanted to be called yet, so I asked everyone new I met to just call me Mai, because that's who my icon and placeholder sona was. This Leafeon helped me find out and become comfortable with being trans.

Naomi

Kaori's older sister is also some kind of techy person like Nick is supposed to be. It's kind of weird and borderline creepy how Naomi can grab Lucas's DNA off his sword and plug it into her computer to find a fuckign tracking beacon on him? That's definitely weird. Also in one of the pages you can see her computer it has the word "sex" written on it in the old Alagian alphabet I made up which you see throughout the comic. You can see the translation guide for that here.

The only really fun fact about Naomi is that I decided she was a lesbian at some point, just because.

Lucy

Lucas's love interest actually has more of a backstory than you might think she does from this comic. The thing about her backstory is that uh, it's not relevant at all to the plot of TCoS. Because Lucy is a Ninetales, she's over 200 years old (I think I decided it was exactly 236 at some point) and all her backstory stuff happened over a hundred years ago. There was some story with her dating an Arcanine and having a kid with him, where the Arcanine was a dick and left her for some reason at some point. There is a picture I drew that implies he burnt something she cared about. I guess that's something Lucas and Lucy have in common.

The offspring of Lucas's that Nocturne refers to at one point is in fact the child of him and Lucy, I don't know if that was ever obvious. Unfortunately that child will never exist in the current timeline, and maybe that's a good thing based on how shitty this kid apparently is according to Nocturne. There is another picture of her shown to find Lucas's body with Nocturne's knife still buried in his chest. Ouch. Kind of amusing that someone in the comments on that post commented on how cute my art is, on a picture of Lucy mourning her dead boyfriend.

Nocturne

Finally onto the antagonists. Nocturne, Nathan, or "Noc" as I have occasionally called him and will refer to him as such from now on, is from the future and as such hasn't really been born yet in the time that TCoS takes place. He says that his wife in the future is the granddaughter of Carolyn, but he doesn't mention the fact that he and her granddaughter had a child together. He doesn't so much as even mention his wife's name, whihc, for the record, is Amelia. The kid's name is Zane. They're both dead in his future timeline though.

It's left unclear what exactly Noc does after killing Lucas in the present. Does he return to the future? If so, then how? Once again, I have no idea. I think at some point I made up an idea that he had a time limit on how long he could spend in the past, and would get sent back to the future when his time was up. Maybe it was related to him being born in the present, so two of him couldn't exist at the same time. We'll go with that. Let's hope he doesn't get fucking arrested when he gets sent back to the altered future for stealing that time machine. Though, I guess he didn't steal the time machine in the new timeline? Let's not think about that too hard.

A funny joke if you, for some reason, decide to read the comic on Colors! 3D instead of on ComicFury is that after a certain point, every single fucking page that Noc is on has me making some remark in the description about him being sexy. This joke started because on the page after Rosa cuts his eyes, he falls onto the ground and lands in a slightly suggestive pose. I overlaid some text onto it to make a meme editing saying something like "Noc is sexier than you".

Carolyn

I'm not sure how entirely Noc managed to recruit Carolyn to join him, considering the fact that he didn't actually explain why she was important to him until the middle of the comic, after he had recruited her. She experiences another personality flip like Rosa from when she was introduced, but this time it's more explainable. You probably know what I mean if you read the comic. I'm not sure why I made her so horny in the fight against Adam though.

Like Adam and Kaori having a kid in the future, Caryolyn and Geoffrey also eventually have one together. Well, actually they had twins but one of them died in a car crash. This was supposed to be part of the plot to the sequel to TCoS, Another Story, but I decided to cancel that comic about halfway through it. The surviving kid, Harry, was a main character in Another Story.

Geoffrey

There's not a lot to say about Geoffrey, honestly. I already went over his future while talking about Carolyn. He, similarly to her, seemed to have been recruited to Noc's cause for no reason whatsoever. Maybe he's a merc for hire or something. When he showed up in Another Story, there was a part in which he had shown to have been evolved into a Gengar. I wonder who traded him.

A really, really stupid fact about him is related to the weird glowing tentacles he seems to be able to summon. I don't remember where I got the idea for this power, but I guess it's kind of neat. The stupid fact is that someone asked me, seemingly just to be funny, what the tentacles would taste like if you were to fucking eat them. I said strawberry. Dan is pictured eating it here.

Edward

I feel kind of weird about putting Edward here, considering that he wasn't actually my character. He was a cameo from a friend who I am no longer on good terms with. If you ever somehow find this page, I hope you're doing okay. Edward was added as part of a fanart contest I did, where the top two winners got a cameo in the comic. Unfortunately the artwork that was drawn for the contest has been deleted.

Edward manifested as some part of Lucas's subconscious making him fucking hallucinate that an Eevee was talking to him to try help him cope with his weird rage. I'm not sure that it did too great a job helping him with that. Edward is actually the first of two cameo characters, I'll talk about the second in a bit.

Petronella

Okay now we're getting into the tier of super minor characters, but at least Nella appears on a handful of pages instead of just one or two. The only thing I can really say about the inn owner is that he's a trans dude. I'm not sure when I decided that he was, but it's a little detail about him that isn't mentioned in the comic.

Icari

This is the second of the two cameo characters. Icari belonged to the second place winner of the fanart contest, and you can see the piece here. It's pretty cute. The artist tends to go by Balloondra nowadays, but be careful if you decide to search that name up because their art tends to mostly be fetish stuff. (you can guess what based on the name) I don't really have anything to say about Icari.

Golduck

This guy's sole purpose in life is to get absolutely fucking demolished by Lucas.

Lillith

This is just the receptionist at the hospital Kaori gets admitted to in Veden. Apparently I gave her a name, which I didn't know until I went back and looked at the page she appeared on and I mentioned her name being Lillith in the description. Yes, with two L's.

Jane

Oh hey it's Nick's wife who you literally only get to see the back of her head in one single panel. She's actually a Gardevoir, but you couldn't tell that from the picture. Her role back in the original Pokécom comics was incredibly minor, only showing up very infrequently. She played a bigger role in Coventure, but that was mostly because she got kidnapped and Nick and Dan had to come help her. Too bad she kind of got replaced by Rosa in TCoS. I kind of like Rosa a lot though.

Joltik

You thought I forgot about the single most important character in the entire comic? Without this Joltik, Adam would be dead! Truly the biggest hero in the entire story. Technically, this Joltik does in fact have a name, however it's a bit of joke. At the beginning of Chapter 9, Adam is digging through his fur to search for his lighter, only to pull out this Joltik instead. He then says "You're not a lighter." and thus the meme was born. This Joltik's name is "Not-a-Lighter". Thank you for your service in protecting Adam, Not-a-Lighter. It is unclear what happens to Not-a-Lighter after the story, if it gets left in the cave or tags along with Adam to escape the cavern. Let's hope it was the second, because Not-a-Lighter is too perfect to get left behind. We don't ever see it in Another Story, though. Maybe it grew up into a Galvantula.