Grrl Power #1436 – Hot tip
I think the most revelatory thing about this page is that demons have commercial brownie mix. I know I’ve shown succubi shopping before, but that was a little tongue in cheek. I was really thinking the store would really have been more like a society with alchemy, but also modern supply chains. Parfait said the biggest difference between Earth and demon society was that demons lack suburbs. That doesn’t mean that Demon Lords’ Keeps can’t have grocery stores. Really, I guess there’s no reason that a star faring species like demons couldn’t have any modern convenience they want. They could all very well have cell phones and wi-fi hotspots. They could. They have a lot of magic based infrastructure, and replacing all of that or even supplementing it all with copper wires would be a considerable undertaking, and given the feudal nature of demon held worlds, that sort of stuff is vulnerable to anyone with a shovel or a horde of burrowing demons. That’s not to say that some Demon Lords haven’t experimented with mixed infrastructure, or that newer colonies, especially one with mixed populations, don’t have a combination of tech going on.
There’s nothing suspicious about a surge of people suddenly placing large bets on “Ixah” after she trashes a bunch of competitors that had higher odds than her going into the first round. Of course, as a total unknown, anyone with a prior association with the U.C.B.A. would have better favorability. Well, maybe unless they really biffed it last time, I guess. I don’t know how odds-makers do their thing, but it seems reasonable that someone who got evaporated in the first 10 seconds the last six times they entered would have a negative chutzpah factor in the odds equation, whereas a total unknown would be chutzpah neutral. Can you tell by my vocabulary I’m an expert on statistics?
That isn’t to say that rumors of Ixah’s identity won’t spread outward from Tom’s inner circle, especially as he has interests on many planets. It’s not going to lead the Xevoarchy straight to Earth, of course. Anyone who does well in the UCBA will have a lot of mentions on Gal-net, including people and groups boosting whatever their favorite theories are. The signal to noise ratio has to reach a certain magnitude before the millions of A.I.s out there tasked to watch such things start to care.
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.







![The Lost Fleet: Dauntless by [Jack Campbell]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51p-qaYLuvL.jpg)


