You did. You plus the covid pandemic. I was stuck half a world away and needed a project to while away the hours of solitude, so I started drawing cartoons for you. I had never told you about this set of characters before, but I'd always meant to, so I finally did. I had little intention of writing it all down. It did occur to me every now and then, but I couldn't find the right format. It's really supposed to be a TV series. Comics will do.

This doesn't strictly satisfy the prompt, but I was recently sharing the cake on the door scene with someone, and she loved it. https://www.patreon.com/alienromance/posts/alien-romance-on-77083443 It's lore now - both with me and my longtime readers, and with my characters. "Cake on the door" is an in-joke in Alien Romance Land now. The "that thing" in question is an expensive fancy wheelchair that Jon was fitted for and then refused to get, so his sister and father bought it for him and gave it to him as a birthday present. He was not pleased. He blew up at his father and then threw the cake at him as he was hurrying away.

Ren and Cathy. Ren's chronic depression only manifested a year ago. Now he's reaching the point where his friends are starting to notice. He's had a few psychotic episodes, too, but so far, the cat has been his only witness.

Maurice: "Ren and I can answer together." Ren: "Yeah! I was a year behind Maury but we did everything at the same time, practically. What was the best thing? We did a lot of things. Snow forts on the playground?" Maurice: "Ren and I lived close to the school, so whenever we had a good snow, we'd go down to the playground with Sara and 'Cole and Lil Debbie--" Ren: "And Pretzel and Bog--" Maurice: "And we'd build a snow fort--" Ren: "Or two, and test them out, and then when school opened, the forts were there for the kids at recess. Not even for ourselves, necessarily. The last one we did was 1986, and we were close to being done with high school by then. I had a year left and you were getting ready to graduate." Maurice: "I didn't build the fort that year. You didn't invite me." Ren: "I'm pretty sure you were always invited. What kind of invitation did you want?" Maurice: "I dunno. I think that whole year was my worst. You all kinda lost interest in me. You were working on Jim and Joy's farm, there were all those barn parties I wasn't going to, and then Doug and them took up shoplifting as a hobby so I ended up almost taking his head off, and just losing friends left and right." Ren: "Sorry about Doug. I didn't know what he was up to." Maurice: "Digdug was a worst memory for sure." Ren: "Mine was probably gym class." Maurice: "Kinda ironic. You look like you woulda been Coach Budd's star pupil." Ren: "Not even close. All Coach knew was football, and he'd insist he was gonna whip me into shape in one breath and say I ran like a little girl in the next. All I wanted was one unit of basketball!" Maurice: "Coach was actually pretty cool with me. He decided I was too small for football..." Ren: "So he made you a ref. Right. And then he bullied the rest of us into not giving you grief for it." Maurice: "I was still scared you were all gonna gang up on me with ref abuse. So I ended up being a rotten ref. But refs can't win; they're always ruling against someone." Ren: "Not like getting your athletic skills criticized."