It started with an idea I had a couple years ago: a heroine with her sidekick embarking on an adventure in a fantasy world based on computer science concepts.

The protagonist (let’s call her Cshell) descends from a long line of proud C++ programmers. The programmers are akin to magicians in a medieval fantasy world - they possess the ability to conjure things and modify reality as they see fit, to some extent. Cshell could deploy such spells as skip list and overclock, or attacks such as return from libc hacks. She even has a tribal tattoo on her left shoulder, marking her as a C++ programmer.

So Cshell has a cat sidekick. She and her sidekick would traverse treacherous terrains such as binary forest (populated densely with information-rich binary trees), x86 protection rings (i.e ring 3, 2, 1, 0) where the Hypervisors reign supreme in those domains, or crossing network protocol boundaries to deliver important parcels to a certain program, etc, all so that she could make it to kernel land to make an important request to the all important kernel lord.

Feeling good about the potential, I drew just one page to see how it felt as a story (reads from right to left):

That came out OK, but on second thought, this is a load of work, like seriously a lot of work. I wasn't particularly gifted at storytelling or character building. My attempt to flesh out further details hit some hard walls. I guess this endeavor will have to wait another day.