Don’t worry about UMBRage. He’s a remote piloted bioroid. Like a mecha, only organic and the pilot is somewhere off-table in an advanced V.R. suite.
Was there a part of me that considered ending the tournament with Maxima losing and Cora and crew winding up in a tight money spot? (Despite having their own starforge, it is shared between several adventuring crews.) It wouldn’t ruin Cora, she’s not dumb enough to risk that much, but… she might need to take a questionable job that turns out to be a double cross, forcing her and the crew to survive as soldiers of fortune, and then people with problems that no one else can help with could contact them, assuming they could find them… maybe they could hire The C-Team.
…I mean, they already survive as Soldiers of Fortune/Adventurers, so…
So, yeah, there was a part of me that considered that route. I’m not sure I want to spend the next, what, 100 pages on arena battles? I do want to get better at drawing fights scenes, and as we saw with this round, it doesn’t all have to be just the fighty bits. Plus I think I have some amusing bits planned, so we’ll have to see how it all plays out.
Man, pixie sticks… Some candy inventors were sitting around some day trying to come up with a new candy and a theme to go with it, like “Oh, I know. There’s already Mars bars, why not have, like, a Saturn bar, and it’s all a bunch of different flavors of cotton candy all compressed into a bar, and we could do a Neptune one, and that could be like those horrible Nik-L-Lips, like a liquid candy, but we’d put it in plastic tubes so it doesn’t taste like, well, like Nik-L-Lips.”
“Uh huh. You want to do planet themed candy?”
“Yup!”
“What’re you going to do for the Uranus bar?”
“Uh… Chocolate covered raisins? In bar form?”
“How about we eschew a theme and just sell flavored sugar?”
“Like in… dime bags?”
“Eh, tubes. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. It’s sugar. Kids will eat it.”
“I guess. Is it possible to buy stocks in “Dentists?””
Ah! I thought I had more time till March. I’m bad at looking at dates apparently. The new one is underway.
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)


