Edit: Okay, I fixed the typo in panel 2, and I did another pass on the looked-like-a-strap-on in panel 3. It was admittedly a little distracting once it was repeatedly pointed out. I don’t blame you guys. It did look like Sciona was about to give him what for.

How do Sciona’s bangs get longer when her hair is down? Magic, probably. Don’t worry about it.

Deus sure gets a lot of mileage out of that “I’m going to be a jerk but it’s because I respect you so much” bit. He used it on Maxima, though I honestly couldn’t tell you what page that was. Ironically, the more intelligent the person is, the fewer times he could pull it off with them, even if he was being mostly sincere.

You know, if Sciona… sorry, if Escorpia really was a sicario/narcotraficante, she probably would have had a lot more tattoos than just the… temple tattoo? It’s more like a “mohawk negative space tattoo.” Not that I’m aware of any comprehensive audit of female merc/drug runner tattoo coverage. I guess Sciona lucked out that Escorpia was content with just the one on her skull. Presumably if she can permanently change her hair color and length with a spell, she could probably remove or at least hide tattoos. Really the only reason she still had the one on her head under the hair she was growing out was for you guys’ benefit. (guys’s?)

Sciona usually does not “take smug.” She’s murdered for a lot less than that. But Deus is too important of a potentially exploitable resource to her. He’s also pretty good in bed, which isn’t a deciding factor, but it is a factor. She knows that if she killed him, the Alari from the colony ship would almost definitely assume control of Galytn, which would probably be both good and bad for her plans, and Deus can more or less run interference for her regarding them.

Sciona’s original final line was “I am seriously reconsidering fucking you.” Which I think is more pithy than what I changed it to, (Actually the very first draft read “sleeping with you” but that didn’t feel right either) but the more I thought about it, the more it sounded like she was planning on sleeping with him for his sake, like some sort of transactional reward. I suppose for being good at it the last time, maybe? So not some selfless sacrifice on her part, certainly, but there was something vaguely “It’s a man’s world, and I’m very sexy, which is mostly for the benefit of men, and he deserves his prize” in the sentiment. Yes, it’s possible to over analyze these things, but it doesn’t hurt to occasionally step back and do a paradigm check. The comic is mostly female characters, and while I certainly can’t claim any special insight into the female mind, I do at least attempt to consider that perspective… Even if a lot of them do have fairly typically male behaviors and hobbies. But I write what I know, and would the comic would be any better if I did some deep dive into typically feminine hobbies so Sydney could launch into the occasional dissertation about… quilting? Not that women couldn’t be into literally any hobby, of course, but the point of all this would have been to “feminize” some of the female characters, and saying that Harem is into restoring vintage tractors doesn’t really accomplish that. Although… she was raised on a farm… Hmm.

Anyway, I edited Sciona’s lines mostly because I don’t want all the characters to sound the same, and my first draft felt more sit-commy, and less “sociopathic blood mage.”

I sort of feel guilty when I post a page with only 4 panels. I mean, not that guilty, but for all I gripe about cramming way too many panels on a page and having to draw tiny faces, when I get to the occasional page that just wouldn’t benefit from wedging three more panels in there, it does feel a bit… light? Oh well, I’ll get over it.

Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude! Well, eventually. The nude part of the interview, as well as the version that includes shading will be coming soon. Of course, you can view the interview in the nude now if you take your own clothes off. You know. Technically. Just put a towel on your chair first.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

She likes him because he challenges her. And by “likes,” I mean she hasn’t killed him yet for challenging her. Or for being an arrogant ass.

No, the story about the MIT/CERN kid isn’t Deus’s backstory, but it apparently is a not-uncommon arc for child prodigies who grow up surrounded by a bunch of average brain types, then finally settle into some bleeding edge profession, and learn that they’re in the 50th percentile of the intelligencia 1%.

I think exponential intelligence is genuinely incomprehensible, because individuals or groups at one intelligence level really lack the tools to understand a group that’s, for instance, ten times as smart. Of course, “ten times” is impossible for us to really quantify anyway, because “ten times” what? The word “intelligence” is really poorly defined in absolute terms. I mean, if you’re good at math but can’t remember dates and anniversaries, are you smarter than someone who struggles to add 15 and 7, but has an eidetic memory? Or is the world’s best astrophysicist smarter than the world’s best diplomat? One can figure out what dark energy is, the other can save hundreds of millions of lives by preventing wars. How much does emotional intelligence factor in? Without it, we’d have a world of sociopaths. At a certain point, information throughput becomes a limiting factor. Is a once-in-a-generation genius who secludes himself and occasionally publishes some revolutionary mathematical proof “smarter” than The Machine from Person of Interest (which was a show where a massive supercomputer processed every video and phone call and text message, etc, and alerted the Feds to terrorist plots – which sounds terribly dystopian, but the inventor (the glasses guy from Lost) made it a closed system so the government couldn’t use it to spy. The bulk of the episodes revolved around the fact that it could also detect people plotting non-national level crimes like murder, so the inventor put a backdoor in that would spit out a Person of Interest, and they wouldn’t know if it was the perpetrator or the victim. Anyway, I thought it was an entertaining show.) You’d probably say that The Machine in this case wasn’t intelligent at all, but throughout the series, it demonstrated an ability to learn and had a non-human intelligence that allowed it to stay ahead of the evil government agencies and corporations that wanted to abuse its abilities.

The point is, actual capitol-S Super intelligence is one of those things that are on Archon’s short list of Apocalypse level threats, because it’s very likely that the individual with that ability could out plot, plan, and prepare the entirety of the rest of the human race. If Deus built a suit of armor or a rocket powered paraglider and wore a goblin mask so he could rob banks, no one would give a crap about him on the macro level. Instead, he has the resources of a medium-sized-and-growing country and access to alien technology and probably demonic magic. So he’s being watched by a lot of agencies and interests. Some think he might become an exploitable resource, but they’re dumb. I mean, literally, compared to him, they’re very very dumb. Of course, that’s not to say he’s the only super intelligence on Earth. But most of the known ones are more like Digit. Focused on tangible sciences and engineering, not his broader approach to economics, diplomacy and politics.

Obviously Deus has some broad-spectrum approach to resisting chemical influence in place. After all, he’s the leader of an up-and-coming, expanding nation, and seems to be, on the surface, doing a good job for the people under his administration. And he’s making enemies of every surrounding country and eventually he’s going to start hitting countries that third parties have financial interests in. Third parties like diamond oligopolies, mining consortia, all kinds of larger criminal organizations, and eventually, whole countries. Not to mention the Alari colony ship. They’ve agreed to live under his rule, but what that really means is they do whatever they want within their little fiefdom, which amounts to the area they’ve expanded their ship into, plus some extra land they negotiated with Deus, but outside of that, they’re subject to the laws of Galytn. They would immediately assume authority if something “happened” to him. That’s assuming they could keep Thothogoth from using Galytn as a foothold for his own conquest, or that either of them could stand up to the Supers in Deus’s military.

So Deus has some preventative measures and contingencies in place, they’re just not super overt like most comic book Super Smarts do. You know, an army of Deus-bots, or a metal throne room with Kirby-esque pipes and energy fields full of dots that project force fields that can only be deactivated after he delivers a monologue.

Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude! Well, eventually. The nude part of the interview, as well as the version that includes shading will be coming soon. Of course, you can view the interview in the nude now if you take your own clothes off. You know. Technically. Just put a towel on your chair first.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

Well of course there’s unknown chemicals, he’s only got 5 test tubes full of “stuff that reacts a certain way when you stick a specific other chemical in it.” There’s probably a shorter name for that. But it’s unlikely that her hypno stuff is just chemicals that have obvious “turns blue when exposed to ethyl-bethyl-jethaline” reactions.

Sciona herself isn’t a chemist. An alchemist probably, but that’s magical nonsense – combining chemistry, botany, a little kind-of-sort-of metallurgy, and mana, and that all gives you very different results than chemistry alone. But she is from a space faring race, so she certainly understands elements and molecules, but she’s never taken the time to analyze the bizarre substances her body can produce.

I’m pleased with Deus’s oxymoronic statement in panel three. My first draft had him saying something far more sensible, but there’s some process in my brain that automatically runs most of the stuff I hear through the humorizer, in some sort of semi-real time movie-but-also-real-life riffing sequencer. So after I write a page and am laying out the panels and word bubbles, I replay and tweak the scene in my head and make edits. Honestly it’s a little surprising there are any serious conversations in the entirety of the comic, but I suppose I have some sort of limiter engaged, even though I’m sure it’s hanging on by its last coupler, rattling in the electrical maelstrom that passes for my consciousness.

Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude! Well, eventually. The nude part of the interview, as well as the version that includes shading will be coming soon. Of course, you can view the interview in the nude now if you take your own clothes off. You know. Technically. Just put a towel on your chair first.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

References: Sciona used a cut-out-the-distance-between-things artifact stolen from the Twilight Council’s black vault to create the Skybreaker, which Deus, by way of Vale, stole and turned in into the backbone of his not-a-Stargate program.

Full disclosure, everything I know about antagonistic sexual relationships I learned from TV. Personally, I don’t get hate-fucking. It feels made up. Like, I’m sure it happens, IRL, but it’s probably over-represented in media. Though I’m fairly sure it would be difficult to compile statistics on comparative rates of IRL vs. media instances.

That said, I think Deus and Sciona’s relationship is fairly asymmetrical.  There’s some respect there, but she mostly hates him. He digs the bad girl vibe, but doesn’t approve of her… more sociopathic tendencies. You know… I think he might have an idea about reforming her? He already has a bit of a collection of bad-girls. I mean, Vale… inhabits a shell that definitely looks female. Which isn’t to say she isn’t actually female. Or possibly was, depending on how she came to be what she is. Or maybe eldritch hungering void beasts are all female. If that’s what she is. I’m not confirming either way. Cthillia… well, she uses female pronouns. I have a full body model sketch of her somewhere, and I’ll just say she’s not a candidate for a vote incentive. Not a sexy one. Hmm. Although, maybe that would be an amusing change of pace every once in a while. Lorlara is the most normal female of his entourage, and “normal” is not an adjective I usually associate with her.

I realize that a “hydro-magneto” power generator could very well just describe entirely mundane generators powered by gravity or steam motivated water, but what I was picturing when I started writing Deus’s explanation before letting it veer into facetiousness, was something akin to some sort of metallic hydrogen convection dynamo. Metallic hydrogen is one of those theoretical things that seems to have been more or less confirmed, though it’s hard to keep a sample of it in a jar, since it requires something like 4 million atmospheres of pressure, or 400 Giga Pascals, at which point it would become (or at least exhibit the properties of) a conductive liquid metal. Why using something like that would be better than regular hydropower is not immediately clear, but it’s weird and exotic, and a power source based on it is (at this point) entirely made up, so no one can tell me it wouldn’t work.

Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude! Well, eventually. The nude part of the interview, as well as the version that includes shading will be coming soon. Of course, you can view the interview in the nude now if you take your own clothes off. You know. Technically. Just put a towel on your chair first.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

When Maxima came back from her first… well, not date, I guess. After she ditched the bar with Rowan. “Date” to me implies a prearranged thing, but whatever. They met at the bar, then went to a second location, so maybe that counts. Anyway, when she got back from that, she asked Dabbler to fix up the choker so her skin would feel less “weirdly silky and slippery,” so it’s obvious the second phase of that encounter went pretty well. It’s also possible that Max’s teammates are right and she’s a little pent up because she doesn’t seem like the kind of woman that would wind up making out with a guy after meeting him at a bar and only knowing him for… let’s say two hours? Doesn’t mean Rowan immediately got to second base, but even some kissing with his hands grabbing on to her waist under her shirt, he still could have been like, “Wow, uh, what kind of skin cream do you use?” Changing how Max feels to the touch is well outside the scope of what that choker was originally intended for, but Dabbler is super invested in getting Max laid, so she put some extra magical elbow grease into it.

What we’re seeing on this page is a previously unrevealed outing, since her trip to the fire station was cut short. I’m not sure when it took place… I think it’d have to be after the firehouse… yeah, maybe the day before they left on this trip? They were trying to keep to a tight schedule to minimize Max and Sydney’s “thousands of light years from Earth” time. Cora mentioned the tournament with about a week before she knew they’d have to leave for it, since she knew there’d be some hemming and hawing and possibly even some bureaucracy involved, but Max and Faulk made up their minds pretty quickly, giving them a few days to prepare.

Max is definitely not a “boobs to the face in public” kind of gal usually, but being in disguise can be fairly emboldening. And that park is weirdly bereft of other picnicers, extreme Frisbeers, kite flyers, and other couples sneaking in some second base time. Also, I think she really likes Rowan, and I assume if you’re a gal who likes a guy, at some point, maybe you want to smoosh your boobs in his face? Especially if he’s been missing more subtle signals. I’m just saying, it’s a potential weapon in the arsenal. But also in a general “I like you, so please enjoy this boob” sort of way.

In any case, despite their continued awkwardness, they might be rapidly approaching the point where Max will have to sit him down and have that dreaded discussion about chokers and why she’s always wearing one.

Finally, here we go! I took the suggestion that I just use an existing panel for a starting point, thinking it would save time… I guess it technically did, but a 5 character vote incentive just isn’t the way to go.

Patreon, of course, has actual topless version.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

A normal 2 handed sword weighs 5-8 pounds (granted, there’s a very broad range of what constitutes a “two handed sword”), whereas a bearing sword weighs 14-15 pounds, and are roughly 7 and a half feet long, including the handle. Not impossible to swing, of course, but probably foolish to actually wade into a battle with one, since even regular sized weapons and moderate armor will sap someone’s endurance pretty quickly. Bearing swords are, as far as I’m aware, purely ceremonial.

At least on our non-magical Earth. The Grrl-verse clearly has demons, oni, aliens, were-dinosaurs, all kinds of things that might actually be able to wield a sword on that scale. Dabbler’s “Soulreaver” sword is technically a vierhander (man, it’s been a while since she used that) since the handle is long enough for her to really apply some leverage on it if she needs to, but I’m not sure if mechanically, gripping a sword or a bat with 4 hands would really give you a lot of extra striking power, or if all those elbows would get in the way on the windup or backswing.

The sword Maxima is using was sourced from Dabbler’s treasure horde, and clearly didn’t come from Earth, so it’s hard to say who it was originally forged for. All we can really tell about it is that whatever it’s forged from, it’s probably not all that heavier than an equivalently sized steel sword (and it’s definitely not made of steel) because Sydney can lift it. IIRC, I think I said that the other sword Max picked out was made of Ultronium and weighed about 40 lbs.

As someone with ADHD, I know I can be distracted in the middle of a sentence when someone is talking to me. It leads to a lot of “Uh, yeah…” or “Oh… what?” responses, and has definitely made people think my hearing is a lot worse than it is. And if someone is giving me directions that are more complex than “last door on the left,” they may as well just pull a series of random words from the dictionary.

On that front, Sydney is actually usually pretty focused. It’s possible her meds are wearing off for the day and it’s getting close to bedtime.

Finally, here we go! I took the suggestion that I just use an existing panel for a starting point, thinking it would save time… I guess it technically did, but a 5 character vote incentive just isn’t the way to go.

Patreon, of course, has actual topless version.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

See, page title comes from Maxima being shown at three different ages there across the bottom of the page. Granted, the older version is a bit speculative. And sure, there’s more than just the three ages. Maybe 9 year old Maximillia got up to some interesting adventures. Like she was some sort of neighborhood pre-teen Nancy Drew, solving the mystery of the missing cookies, the missing homework, the dog that had a lot of paper in its poop, stuff like that. I’m not saying that’s the case, just that Maxima probably had some “ages” before she got gilded.

I vaguely remember in D&D… I think 3rd edition, possibly others, haste potions were supposed to age your character a year every time you used one. Which is a terrible trade off considering they only lasted 10 rounds. So for 60 seconds, you get one extra attack and can run twice as fast. And in exchange you lose a year of life? Granted, a speed potion could definitely be the deciding factor in a life or death fight, but unless you’re an elf or a dragon (or possibly a vampire, not sure about that one) that’s definitely a tactic of last resort. (Dragons become more powerful with age, so it actually benefits them. Vampires probably have to be feeding regularly to benefit from age, but since humans don’t starve to death after using a haste potion, I assume it has no detrimental effect on a vampire.)

I think they changed the after-effect to losing a round to exhaustion, because otherwise, that’s a little terrifying. A few year-sucking potions could cut decades from a human adventurer’s career, and I think halflings and half-orcs have shorter average lifespans than humans. In “realistic” superhero novels and some of the more grim comics, super speed is one of those powers with such terrible drawbacks that as soon as you realize you’re aging faster, you’d basically stop using it. Granted, judicious use of super speed wouldn’t really add up to all that much. You get into a fight, use super speed for 10 seconds of your local time, and win the day, easy peasy. The problem comes from when the super speed character runs across the country, or reads every book in the library to find the clue. Running east to west coast across the US took one ultramarathon runner 42 days. Reading every book in a library could potentially take months, or possibly centuries, if they have a comprehensive copy of the Tax Code, or any book they asked us to read in high school. Seriously, Bleak House, go fuck yourself. I mean, it’s called Bleak House. I could barely get through the cliff notes.

Anyway, if the super speedster experiences time in real time local to him no matter what speed he’s going, and Batman says I have to run across the country to get the disarming key to a Joker bomb in time, I would quit the team. Okay, I’d probably go and disarm the bomb, but I’d steal a bicycle, and that’s assuming my powers can’t be extended to cover the Batmobile, cause if they could, I’d fucking steal that. But then I’d quit.

Finally, here we go! I took the suggestion that I just use an existing panel for a starting point, thinking it would save time… I guess it technically did, but a 5 character vote incentive just isn’t the way to go.

Patreon, of course, has actual topless version.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

The sword I designed for Max isn’t the one she chose when she visited Cora’s Starforge. That one can accept channeled power to increase its cutting ability. This one is the more defensive mana eater that had been discussed briefly. It’s a bearing sword, which is a ridiculously sized ceremonial sword that usually looks like a 7-foot long greatsword or claymore. I’m not sure I have the proportions quite right, and they traditionally have a much larger cross guard as well. I am attempting to build it in Blender, so I can place it with a consistent design in the comic, but I’m sure at least some of you are aware of my failed attempts to learn the program previously. Still… it’s a sword, not the rifling on the inside of a barrel or something relatively complex, so maybe I’ll be able to figure it out?

Maxima is a surprisingly competent marital artist. Nowhere near Math’s level, but early on, she became determined to not only rely on always being faster and stronger than her opponents, and learned a bunch of martial arts fundamentals, joint locks, jujitsu holds and redirect-your-opponent’s-strength/momentum stuff like Aikido. What she really needs is someone to teach her how a martial art that is designed for someone with super strength/speed/armor.

I think most of the Marvel movies are pretty good, especially up through Avengers: Endgame – actually, I think most of them are amazing and a lot of people have gotten spoiled/jaded on what a good superhero movie is, which is a little weird, because most of the time Marvel was doing their thing, Zack Snyder was making sure people didn’t forget what bad superhero movies looked like.

Anyway, my point is that as much as I enjoy those movies, there’s still a lot that can be nitpick. For instance, in Endgame when Thanos was standing over Thor, pressing Stormbreaker down into his chest, well, Thor can toss tanks around. Thanos doesn’t weigh that much, and doesn’t have any sort of rooting or gravity powers, and in fact, neither of them weigh an extraordinary amount. Maybe more than a similarly sized human, but still, like, maybe 1,000 pounds? (Okay, 985 according to a quick search) So an actual super fight between the two of them would obviously look very different. With strength like that, punching someone simply isn’t your best move. I think I’ve talked about this before, but high strength doesn’t necessarily convey high damage with a punch. A punch is about the mass of the fist hitting you, and the speed at which it hits. Yes, the strength behind the fist is important, but only in that it will mitigate the speed from dipping when the mass of the fist (and arm) intersects your skull. Obviously given the choice between getting punched by a powerlifter or a pro boxer or a Karate champ, I’d rather not get hit by either one, but you can start to see my point. Strength doesn’t scale infinitely into punch damage. That graph levels off fairly quickly I think.

Think of it this way. A guy puts a boxing glove on the end of a broomstick and jousts at you from on top of a moped. The average punch clocks in at about 25 mph, so yeah, that’s going to sting when it hits. Now consider the same setup, except the boxing glove jouster thingy is mounted on the front of a car, which, again, comes at you at 25 mph. That will probably hurt more, not because there’s more kinetic energy in the hit, but there’s more inertia behind it. Now imagine you’re standing on a pier, and the boxing glove thing is attached (at face level) to the front of a battleship, which hits you at 25 mph. No one would expect your head to explode because there’s “so much strength” behind the punch. I don’t think there’d really be any difference between that hit and the one from the car.

The calculus changes completely if you have someone pinned against a building or a mountain, then the hits go from kinetic transfer to crushing damage. But, if you have them pinned against the ground, the 300 pound guy who can bench a tank punching down at someone without somehow bracing himself is going to launch himself into the air like he’s doing a Hulk super leap.

So a martial art that really takes super powers into account would have to be extremely flexible and situationally aware. A fight between the Hulk and Superman or Maxima, realistically… well, realistically, why would either one of them engage him in a melee fight? Supes and Max both have ranged options. But they also have near Hulk level super strength (at least until the Hulk gets especially angry) and super speed, which means the Hulk’s punches, if he ever could connect, would realistically just knock either one back a dozen feet until their flight overcame it, while they could both deliver tungsten-rod-from-orbit levels of hits.

All of this is to say, Maxima does have some of the fundamentals of footwork and spacing down, so when learning to fight with a sword she’s not starting from absolute scratch. But… not all that far off, either.

Finally, here we go! I took the suggestion that I just use an existing panel for a starting point, thinking it would save time… I guess it technically did, but a 5 character vote incentive just isn’t the way to go.

Patreon, of course, has actual topless version.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

Honestly if Sydney had gotten an 11-alarm Indian dish like atomic lamb korma, her body might not have even noticed the meat. I like a little spice when I get Indian, or a little heat on my Thai Fried Rice or Pad See Ew, but honestly, it’s easy to cross a point where the heat gets to the point where you can’t really tell what you’re eating. Is it lamb korma or chicken korma? There’s usually a slight texture difference, but if the flavor is so overwhelming, that gets to be the only difference.

I’m sure there are tales of de-vegetarianizing out there. It’s probably best if done gradually. Sydney will have it relatively easy since fish and eggs and cheese are still a part of her diet. I imagine a vegan diving straight into a juicy burger would experience maximum distress. I’ve been on various diets in my life, including some very low fat ones, and I can tell you, 4-6 weeks of low fat followed by a cheat day starting with a big plate of bacon leads to… well, not-half-measures on the toilet.

Personally my favorite “diet” was busting my ass in the gym during my thirties, but I’ve fucked up my shoulders badly enough now that I can’t do about half the exercises I used to. I miss military press. :/

Finally, here we go! I took the suggestion that I just use an existing panel for a starting point, thinking it would save time… I guess it technically did, but a 5 character vote incentive just isn’t the way to go.

Patreon, of course, has actual topless version.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

…She drinks a cinnabar drink, she drinks a hydrargyrum drink… And oh, look, even in the rare cases where she gets knocked down, she does get up again.

I should note that inducing vomiting if someone swallows mercury is not necessarily the recommended procedure. I googled it to see what the proper medical response should be, and most results just said “call poison control.” But basically, getting it out of the body is a good thing, only in the process of vomiting, it could cause vapors to get in the lungs, which is where the real danger happens. And also, since mercury is probably heavier than most anything else that’s likely to be in someone’s stomach, vomiting may not actually expel all of it. I suspect either a stomach pump or a “ass higher than your head” vomiting position is required, and I imagine Downward Dog vomiting could lead to a lot of stomach acid in the sinuses, which would probably suuuuuck.

So when the doctor here panic-ly says “We need to induce vomiting immediately!” He’s probably going to go run into the next room and grab his “Big Book of Medical” and double check the proper procedure. That is, after he watches Max crack open that blood pressure thingy (sphygmomanometer) and hold him at bay with one arm while she glugs down another slug of quicksilver.

Max doesn’t actually have a whole weird shopping list of exotic nutritional requirements, but she also hasn’t gone around trying a sampler platter from the Periodic Table, either. Mercury is the only one she ever felt the urge to eat. She and quite a few others suspect that she could probably eat a whole lot of stuff that would be bad for humans, but she also isn’t in a hurry to do so. For all she knows, swallowing Antimony or Tantalum could cause her to have a bad case of “organs on the outside” or whatever the opposite of Scurvy is. Which… I guess would be Vitamin C poisoning.

Finally, here we go! I took the suggestion that I just use an existing panel for a starting point, thinking it would save time… I guess it technically did, but a 5 character vote incentive just isn’t the way to go.

Patreon, of course, has actual topless version.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.