Yes, those are pork rinds. No, you can’t have any.
The room in Panel 5 is the same room we began this chapter in, the public sleeping quarters, this time from a different angle (and with the perspective all crappy, because I suck). When it’s time for sleep, the common rabble who can’t afford private rooms get to fight over who sleeps closest to the fire.
It’s strange that my pages have a tendency to “slip,†with new scenes beginning around panel 6 or 7 instead of on the next page. Part of this is an attempt—however clumsy—to maintain a sense of drama by ending each page with at least a mild cliffhanger, and it’s partially the result of my editing the script all the way down to the wire. This chapter originally had two “alternate†endings that I weighed in my mind all the way up to the previous page, one involving misadventures with poison, the other magical rocks (it totally made sense). But I decided to just call it a wrap: Deemo is outclassed mentally, legally, and physically, so he slinks away. No reason to drag it out.
Perhaps the alternate ending can be fleshed out in the Director’s Cut dead-tree edition. Or would that be too Wayne’s World 2?