A few days ago, the last of my “Adam: The Beekeeper Chronicles” chapters went live. That means 100 chapters, each exactly 100 words long, can now be found in its own section of the site. They tell the story of three of the characters from Secret Government Robots as they figure out what the next part of their lives will be.

With those Chronicles now concluded, those characters don’t have an ongoing home for the first time since SecGov began back in 2010. That doesn’t mean their stories are over. I fully intend to touch in on them again, hopefully even before the year is over, but there is no ongoing outlet for their tales currently planned. We, like those characters, will just have to wait and see what’s next.

After the events of the Stanislav Day Massacre, the Secret Government became a subsidiary of the massive international corporation called Technolocorp. While the government had a lot of problems finding the budget to keep all their robots employed, that doesn’t fly in the private sector. So now, a lot of SecGov’s formerly unemployed robots have been sold off to work for various Technolocorp affiliates. The idea for today’s sitcom is that a bunch of these robots are now working for a condiment company.

Justine Red

When Justine was unemployed in SecGov City, she loved her life. Sure, she had to live in Cheap Robot Housing and was berated by most of the populace, but she had time to pursue her interest. She spent a lot of time at the SecGov Library or wandering around thinking about the universe. Now she works on an assembly line assembling those squeezeable bottles for condiments. She is forced to stand there and work for twelve hours a day and she’s bitter about it. Only navigating the world with sarcasm and acerbic wit get her through this fresh new life.

Iris Yellow

Iris was also unemployed back in SecGov City, but she was more bothered by it. She wanted a purpose in life, and now she’s found one at the condiment factory. As the company’s receptionist, she has the most contact with the outside world, which she uses as an excuse to elevate herself above the other robots in the company. Still, the company’s robots are a secret, so she can only communicate with humans over the phone, and has to settle for the robots she looks down on for companionship.

Egbert Green

Doing the company’s office work, Egbert just wants to get through his days without have to put up with the bickering that Justine and Iris bring to the table. He would provide the company with exasperated sighs and his catch phrase “Oh, great. Just what we needed.”

Ms. Secret Prime Minister

The former Prime Minister of SecGov, the PM was as incompetent in that role as most of the SecGov higher ups were. But she still thinks of himself as a big shot. Now that she’s stuck working on the assembly line next to Justine, she has to remain quite deluded to get through the day without suffering a lot of embarrassment. Luckily for her, her sense of delusion is quite up to the task.

Paco Green

Paco was the PM’s personal assistant and bodyguard, and was the only reason she survived the Stanislav Day Massacre. Paco is not officially employed by the condiment company, but refuses to leave the PM’s side, so they let him work as a janitor while the PM is doing his shift.

Carrie Weaver

Carrie is the manager of this factory, and the only human that is still working there. To compete with the company’s other locations, she has used her family’s connections to Technolocorp to buy these robots (and about half a dozen others) to run the whole factory. Essentially, she is a slave-owner, but she doesn’t yet realize how alive the robots are. Maybe she’d learn that as the situation goes on, but for the meantime all she’s concerned with is cutting costs and showing up the other factories.

I suppose this one isn’t all that much a play on sitcom cliches as it is just fleshing out my SecGov universe a bit more. I have a tendency to do that sort of thing. Honestly, this doesn’t seem like it’d be that great a sitcom. I don’t see it being picked up past the pilot. Anyway, notice that we’ve got a red (ketchup), yellow (mustard), and green (relish) robot working at the condiment company. Isn’t that… something…

Hey look, a new form of content has begun on the Book of PDR. It’s Adam: The Beekeeper Chronicles. This is going to continue the story of Adam, the Beekeeper who played a minor but pivotal role in Secret Government Robots, as well as some of the other cast members from that comic. But now they’re in prose! Neat!

Specifically, I’m going to do chapters for this as drabbles, the type of story which is exactly one hundred words long. Easy to read, right? Everyone wins. I figure I’ll do a hundred chapters of it, then see where I feel like going from there.

I noticed that the last page of Secret Government Robots has finally flopped up onto the site. That webcomic is now entirely done. Neat.

Gonna have to change the design of the site around now, I suppose. And also, get more things going up.

Hey, now that we’ve begun the last chapter of the story, I might as well reveal that I have completely finished Secret Government Robots. And it’s only about five years late and about four years after I lost interest.

The fact is, I enjoyed writing SecGov a heckuva lot more than I ever enjoyed drawing it, so once I had plotted out the end of things, I barely wanted to put the effort into finishing the art. This is especially true because my limited artistic skills I often had to cut things that I would have liked in there, but which I simply didn’t have the skill to draw. Things were simply a lot better in my head and it was disheartening to see the final product.

Not that it went the way I expected while writing either. The very original concept for the strip was just a gag strip through which I’d secretly build up a bit of lore for the fictional universe that is home to other story ideas I have. That quickly morphed into an idea focused around SecGov City, where I originally planned to tell different stories related only in that they were set in the same Robot city. Instead, I came up with an overarching plot and ruined that plan. Typical PDR. I did build up some of that lore I originally aimed for, though more clumsily than intended, because I had to drop big ideas without spoiling the stuff I want for those other stories.

Still, I don’t fully hate it or anything. I’m glad I got the thing concluded. There are characters in there I would absolutely like to revisit. I even have an idea for a spinoff that would be more focused, but there is no way I could draw it, so it will likely never manifest.

Anyway, SecGov is basically over and that’s good. Maybe someday someone will read it.