The Bird and the Garden 3: The Final Adventure

Final Notes

Hey guys.

What a journey we've been through together, huh? Five years since the first chapter of The Bird and the Garden. Five years of writing out this trilogy. There were some bumps in the road, but we finally got to the very end and see our beloved heroes reach their happy ending - along with the bad ending and the neutral endings.

I really enjoyed writing. I think I found my passion. That's why I'm working on converting the story into a game. I still need to figure out how to compose music and put emotion into it, as well as get a digital art tablet - seriously, those things are expensive. Ultimately, when my finances are a bit better than now, I might hire someone to help me out. I'll still draw concept art for characters though. I've already drawn a few for the spin-offs, which will end up as DLC in the games.

I mean it though. I'm glad you guys were on this journey with me. Knowing people liked what I put out, it made me happy to read your comments and see your votes. Words can't express how happy you guys made me. Just thinking about how much you guys liked my writing helped me through some of my darker moments, helped me continue. Which I don't normally say because I feel like it guilt-trips people, which is why I'm saying it now at the end of the trilogy.

Now... Let's begin our little final note, huh?

The Spin-offs (Sapphire Spin-off)

We'll start with the spin-offs I was talking about. There are two of them.

One features Sapphire Primary as the primary protagonist and focuses mostly on her. Vao is also there as the deuteragonist, due to sharing her ability to never die of old age.

I got the idea for it when I was writing the scene where Yin and Vao talked about how they were never meant to be happy in TBatG3. Vao says that he didn't think things through when he became a dullahan, and how he'll outlive everyone. This made me think about a potential story before I realized Sapphire would outlive everyone too, and she was planned to survive to the end.

So I thought about where to start, and it struck me. Mono's decision to leave in search of a cure for Blood was what kicked off the final battle against the First Vao. Jack even mentions it when he explains that she was the only thing stopping the Blood from fully taking over. Mono was so important to the First Vao that he could still remember her, even when he could barely remember his own name.

If she never left, he'd never have attacked the Royal Capital. So in the Sapphire Spin-off, Mono chooses not to leave Grimmore and stays with the First Vao. It leads to the Heroes winning over the Royal Capital, and the Timeline continues. The Cult abandons Grimmore to find a new place to live in safety, and the centuries pass.

The spin-off takes place sixteen thousand years into the future, where the battle for the Royal Capital is known as 'the Freedom War', and kicks off the Golden Era, where the nonhumans live in peace alongside humans.

By now, most of the original cast is long dead. Yin, Salem, Verde, Sasha, Jasper, Tourmaline, Violet, Midori, Agot, they're all dead. Hekue dies differently; it was said in Neutral Ending One that she was also immortal, and shouldn't have died of old age. I already have that all planned out, but I'm not spoiling it.

Sapphire is our protagonist. I feel like having autistic characters in stories is rare enough. So I thought about it and decided, why not have an autistic protagonist?

Besides, the last three stories focused on FRSB as main characters, with Salem coming in on the third. I figured it would be nice for you guys if we had a new protagonist.

As for Sapphire and Vao, Sapphire is roughly the same as she was. She suffers a bit of depression, which will be acknowledged in the story. Her appearance is the same as it was as a fairy and as a doll, with the exception of being much taller. For my American readers, she was around three feet tall when she was a doll in the third story. In the spin-off she has a new body, and stands at six feet tall.