Some of the stuff pulling Max’s attention there in panel 2 might be explained… eh, no, probably not. I mean, maybe way down the line, but I’m not going to detour this encounter into a Stygan culture crash course. I feel most of what Max is looking at probably isn’t self explanatory, but should be enough for you guys to guess at reasonably well. None of it is critical to the scene, I wanted to show that Max isn’t jumping into a fight without having some idea of what she’s doing.
The “shimmering crystal shield” on Max’s arms is just an effect Cora programmed into her Glowbod in case there was a need for Max to explain away her ability to take a hit. Max didn’t rove out looking to get into a duel, but she understands serendipitous comic book tropes well enough to not have put some preparation into her disguise.
The glowbods the team is wearing are solid projections, for reasons previously explained, but they’re not like Cora’s hard light rig. Cora’s is properly battle ready and requires quite a bit more power and computer cycles to run. The glowbods do offer some actual protection, but it’s about like motorcycle “armor.” It’s not going to stop a bullet or blade with any real skill behind it, but the illusion won’t shatter if someone trips on a curb or bumps into a lot of people in a crowd. Maxima’s personal fortitude field actually protects the parts of the glowbod that are nearly skintight, so probably not the pauldrons, horns or the leather vest she has over the cuirass. Or the hair. All the girls are wearing their hair pinned up, because trying to track and cover the movement of hair with the hologram is just asking a little too much of the glowbods. It’s fine if the hair is mostly just hanging there, but if someone gets caught in a windstorm or starts headbanging, it’s just not going to be able to keep up.
But for Max, if she’s deflecting hits on her arms, then her disguise should be able to weather almost anything she’s likely to encounter on the station.
BTW, I don’t know what happened to Max’s funnel cake in panel 7. I guess she dropped it into her left hand so she could pinch the bridge of her nose, or rather, of her glowbod’s mask’s nose, which would probably be odd looking behavior among always-wearing-masks-Stygans, but then she transferred it back to her right had to toss to Sydney. Look, if I’d drawn her doing the nose pinch with her other hand, it would have covered up too much of her face, making her expression harder to convey. Don’t think about it too hard.
Ooh, look! A new vote incentive! And it’s updated with color!
Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.
By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.
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)
