Sydney definitely would have forgotten she was wearing holo-boobs before heading back. The question is, what did she have on under them? Well, the answer is, she did actually take off her shirt, but still had her bra on. Which she was okay with in the, let’s call it the sex positive environment of Cora’s ship. Appearing in the break room of Archon HQ would have been one of those moments she’d have nightmares about basically forever.

For those of you wondering though, she wouldn’t have appeared there. The last time she used the Aetherium Causeway, she invoked it to head back to Fracture Station. That was when they were fighting Vehemence in the quarry.  She basically pushed the “take me to the last place the gate was open” button. But if she uses that same button now, the last place the gate was open was in the quarry, so she’d pop out there. That quarry isn’t so far from the base, but she’d need to fly a few dozen miles in just a bra and jeans to get to the base, which is probably another thing she’d have nightmares about. Although I guess she could wrap herself in the Lighthook, but then she’d get windshear all over her face while she flew since she wouldn’t be able to use the shield.

Healing potions are basically the most common drop in most video games (or plates with steaming hams on them, like the street thugs in Final Fight were on their way to thanksgiving dinner) because action games are a lot more exciting when they have lots of action, and that means that most players will take a lot of beatings along the way. But as soon as you slow down and think about what “healing” is, you realize it probably needs to be more complex than a think that just refills a healthbar. Unless you’re in a world where everyone is not a biological being, but some sort of mana construct, and “health” is more of a coherence field holding it all together, like in many LitRPG and cultivation novels, when they try to explain exactly how high level characters are so tough. As they rank up, their biology is more or less replaced with magic. I read one where a character realizes this to the point that he allows his head to get cut off in order to deliver a fatal blow against some high-ranked monster, knowing that he has more “lifeforce” than the damage decapitation conveys. He also happens to have monstrous regeneration, so decapitation is just a momentary inconvenience. For the high level characters in books like that, they really do just have hit points, and no vital areas like a brain or heart or kidneys.

But in the Grrl-verse, while there are things like cultivators, 99% of the population needs healing potions that affect living biology, which means you don’t want to take one that merely speeds up natural healing while you have a compound fracture or a barbed arrow still stuck in your back.

90% of Maxima’s disguise is holographic, but she does have nipple and crotch… pasties is the wrong word. It’s more like printed latex… okay, pasties might be appropriate, but it’s only like latex if latex was made from kevlar and carbon fiber and some kind of nano goo to make it comfortable and extraordinarily sticky. Those pasties are also covered by the hologram, so no one can see the seams. She also has a mask that’s stuck to her face in the same way, because chemical warfare it totally okay in the tournament. Want to make a bioweapon that has acid for blood and hope anyone attacking it gets a lung full of aerosolized acid? That’s totally okay. Want to make a warbot whose primary exhaust is mustard gas? Go for it. Maxima’s mucus membranes aren’t mucusy anymore, but honestly, why not have a mask that can filter out at least some nasty stuff and can also shield her non-mucous membraney eyes? She also has hearing protection, but that’s separate from the mask.

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I found an audiobook series that I enjoyed, called “Mother of Learning.” It has nothing to do with mothers. Instead, it’s a magic academy novel mixed with, get this, Groundhog Day. The MC winds up having to live the same month over and over while he tries to figure out what the heck is going on. Doing a hundred pushups each day isn’t going to help him obviously, because his body is reset at the beginning of each loop, but his memories stay, including his accumulated magical knowledge, and since his mana pool is tied to his soul, that continues to develop as well. So obviously, he goes from not-especially-weak-but-certainly-not-exceptional to wildly OP over the course of the books. Well, OP compared to his fellow students, but the forces arrayed against him are still daunting. Anyway, if you have an Audible membership the first audiobook is free, so you can check it out and the only thing you have to spend on it is time. There’s 4 books, totaling about 100 hours of narration, so if you’re a long-haul trucker, you might enjoy filling time with this.

Ah! I thought I had more time till March. I’m bad at looking at dates apparently. The new one is underway. I should have a draft ready to go for the next Monday comic?

Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.

I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.

Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.

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