Final thought: I giggle at the thought of Keepers getting to make car noises at their table. There's a fun kind of ridiculousness of grown-ass adults making car engine noises. And that's kind of it! Thanks for reading! And I hope you enjoy Pale Horse. If you run it, please let me know how it went!

Lastly, I talked to my parents. I vividly remember one night I was chatting with my mom, and I was like, "Hey, what do you know about the Chevrolet Chevelle SS?" Chat, no lie, my mom's eyes LIT UP. We talked for an hour about cool cars from her childhood. I still don't know jack about cars.

I also just googled what cars were street racing cars in the 80s and 90s. By the 00s, the scene had changed a lot and it's hard to find any iconics there, so a lot of my "racing cars" are really cameos from other media. (Death's Mustang Boss 429 is John Wick's car, in case you were wondering)

Basically I looked at a bunch of movies I know and music videos I like featuring cars and I googled "What car was in [x]?" There are some cars I call "hero cars" because they're as much characters as the people driving them. The Chevrolet Corvette Stingray from "Turbo Killer" stands out.

Anyways, that's the heavy stuff. I sometimes hear people say, "I'm not a car person." Want to know a secret? Neither am I. When I order an Uber or Lyft, and it's like, "Your driver will be in a Toyota Camry" I'm looking at every car like, "Is that a Camry?" I did a ton of research for Pale Horse.

There is something wide-eyed and earnest in the thought that we can beat Death. There is no actually beating it, in the long run. Everyone dies, so how does anyone "beat" Death? And what does it even mean? I think Death isn't always an adversary, and dying isn't always Death "winning". Explore that.

I think, framing the return of Death's Agent around this situation where the Latchkeys are fighting for their life, maybe the most dangerous thing they will face in Deep Lake...yeah, it has a sort of "Fast and the Furious" moment, but to me, it's One More Day with someone the Latchkeys cared about.

There's a scene in Gurren Lagann where a character who you maybe thought had plot armor, and then died, comes back for a sort of "one last hurrah". And he comments on how his "little brother" is suddenly all grown up. No sugar coating it: I ugly cry right there. God, just one more day. Right?

But there's the other half of the Special Rule, too, where the dead character comes back as Death's Agent. Have you ever had someone who died and thought, "God, if I could have just ONE MORE DAY with them"? The Latchkeys exist in a magical place, and I wanted them to have that.

I'm a storyteller. I want dramatic last words and teary goodbyes, and that's not how it happens sometimes. Sometimes you just wake up and someone else didn't. That's terrifying to me. Letting Latchkeys see someone they care about through a screen, unable to stop it, that's terror, to me.