As usual at the end of summer the plains were scorched by the merciless sun. As it often happens in that season the weather changed rapidly. It started from a huge scary black cloud, fierce thunderstorm and hail. Then the rain was pouring for several days, flooding large area of the plains. The ground soaked up the water and turned into impassable mud. The elves who happened to be away from their forests became stranded on small islands of dry ground with no reliable shelters where they could hide. After the deadly thunderstorms and hail, the usual pouring rain seemed a relaxing shower.

And then the sun was shining again, bringing new wave of heat. The ground was drying slowly, and the girls' stocks of food were running low. The girls had no other choice but to find a way back to the forest. The air was hot and humid, the sky was covered by clouds formed by all that evaporating water, and each depression on their way was dangerous because of the deep mud.

The three girls hesitantly waded into a wide depression. They had to cross it - a kilometer of thick, sticky mud. The way around the depression would take the whole day or two. At first the mud was ankle deep, then it gradually reached the girls' calves. Walking in such thick mud was very hard. Of course the girls could not wear any kind of shoes - each step was a struggle to pull out their feet. The depression proved to be wider than it seemed, there were no dry places to make a stop for the rest.

But what was the worst - very slowly and almost unnoticeably the mud was becoming deeper and deeper. When the girls thought that they reached the middle of the depression the mud was still below their knees, and they gasped with relief - despite the tiredness they believed that now the mud should become more shallow. But that was not the case. The treacherous bottom teased them, lured them further and further, and only when they were in just two hundred meters from the dry land, the bottom decided to drop down. Still slowly, but now steadily the mud was becoming deeper and deeper. The girls noticed it when the mud reached above their knees.

They stopped to make a decision. The dry land was close, the shore that they left was far away, they were tired to exhaustion. Turning back would kill their motivation and would not bring them any additional powers. Most likely, they would not be ably to return back that day. The way forward was much shorter. The mud should not become much deeper, the only problem was the exhaustion - would they be able to reach the shore? Just last effort - and they would be there!

Unfortunately, they were wrong. The mud did become much deeper, and the girls all of a sudden found themselves unable to make the next step. Myra (Mee-Rah), the curly blond, was carrying the only basket that survived the fierce hail when her legs suddenly sank all the way into the mud. Her brief struggle only made things worse. She quickly took off the basket from her shoulder and put it in front of herself to lean on it. Gangling Lana (Laa-Nah) rushed to help her friend, but her tiredness played a cruel joke with her - she stumbled on the deepest spot, possibly an old burrow filled with liquid mud. Dana (Daa-Nah), the always cheerful swarthy redhead, was standing on her left leg that sank to the top of thigh into the mud keeping her right leg on the surface. Seeing how both her friends got stuck in mud she tried to get closer to them. However all her attempts to pull her left leg out were futile. As a result of her efforts her right leg got stuck, too, She then tried to lay on the mud and crawl, but then her arm got stuck.

"Come on Lana, grab me and pull yourself out!" Myra said. "I am leaning on the basket."
"No way... I can't get my arm out..."
"We are so tired, we are not getting out of this," Dana said then. "Let's have a rest."
"If we stay still here for awhile, the mud would harden around us. We must try to get out now or we'll never do it."
"But Lana, we can't! Can you?"
"... sob ..."

Myra turned to Lana in surprise. Lana was the oldest and the most experienced of the three. Her tears were unexpected... and inappropriate...
"Lana... What's with you? Look, the shore is near. The girls will come here to look for us. If we won't get out themselves, we will scream - and they will hear us and rescue us. It won't be too bad!"
"It... is... embarrassing... so stupid... I had to foresee such a possibility..."
"It will be okay..." But the younger girls supposed that if Lana was sobbing than it may be not okay... It was not the best time to ask Lana though...

What the girls did not know, and Lana did not know it as well, the dry land in several dozens meters in front of them was not the shore. It was another island, which was hiding them from the actual shore. Their friends would not come there soon, and they had a very poor chance of being heard and spotted.

---

Be damned the Damned Planet that is going to kill another three girls... The sequel to this story is supposed to be... some day.

---

This picture has a long story! My previous two submissions ( 

Mature Content

and 

Mature Content

) were the first two things drawn by me from scratch in MyPaint and Krita and finished to the state of submission. In fact, however, the first of them was drawn in Krita from start to finish, while the second one was started in MyPaint earlier. But it was not the first one. The first one, now finished, was this one, with helpless elves. It was started as my attempt to try brushes emulating oil painting. Obviously, it is the basket that was drawn that way. Though I didn't manage to finish it as I wanted, it still keeps a lot of "oil paint" parts. The first two girls were also sketched and painted in MyPaint. The blond, who now was named Myra, was also painted using "oil brush", and I found it pretty inappropriate for coloring the delicate girl's flesh - it was too rough. I had to correct it later. The second girl, Lana, was also sketched then, but I used totally different brushes to color her - in her case, I tried "markers", but then switched to "basic digital brush". The third girl was not planned from the very beginning. When I realized that she must be in the scene I roughly doodled her pose - and then switched from MyPaint to Krita.

In Krita I seriously reconfigured the scene by moving and rotating all three girls. I corrected lines for the first two girls - those "pencil-like" lines are good for sketching, but then they discord with the digital coloring. The third girl was made in more traditional for me "photoshop-like" technique where I first paint flat color and then lock the opacity of the layer and make shading with airbrush.

I made some experiments with various brushes when painting the background. As usual, and just like in Photoshop, it is hard to find good brushes to achieve the desired mood. I guess I'll have to do the revers thing - to paint some pictures and to see what comes out - to find what those brushes are good for... I also made some "grass" brushes for Krita. They worked, but I was surprised to find that despite the advertising of much more sophisticated algorithms of brush effects in Krita in comparison to Photoshop, many things proved to be not that bright. In fact the options for brush behavior are very limited, and some things that were easily achieved in Photoshop proved to be impossible in Krita (or at least I could not find a way to make such settings and/or to make some settings to work as I expected).

Okay, the result is before your eyes - not quite what I wanted (as always), but not bad as well. I return to my old tradition to submit the "no background" picture showing girls only (with the basket though).

Mature Content

The scene was initially thought to be a part of a triptych... or in simple words - the first panel of a three-panel comic page. One day I plan to do it - this picture should be the most detailed, the other two are going to be much simpler.

One more thing that I was considering were the clothes. The elves (my elves, I don't speak about any elves in other realms) are often ignore them, but they surely have some clothes when they go for a long trip. Though, in a hot and humid day when the sun is covered by clouds they very likely won't put on anything. So, their nudity is justified (to cover up my inability of drawing clothes).

AAAAAAAAND - This picture is devoted to my kiriban - 250,000 page views. Because you guys are awesome!