Arms, Boxes and Bubbles

This sketch was started more than half a year ago and got finished right now. (It's working title was Job Application Fatigue, for reasons irrelevant now.) After the colourful thing last week, I used it to make something in a lower key. I kept the lines and the background, already in my favourite sepia...

...and with a few alterations, such as more bubbles and another arm, I added a little mottling electric pastel -- creating, I hope, a dampened but not entirely lifeless palette.

-- Do you know why the arms are eagerly rising from the boxes, perhaps with some kind of lofty credentials in hand? And why are there hints of slugs crawling about? (Are they slugs?) What happens if one cynical hand makes a bubble burst? If you know that... then you know more than I do.