Under normal circumstances, blowing up the thing that’s obviously the power source is a terrible idea. Under a severe time limit? Blowing it up may be the best option. It still might be a terrible idea, I’m just saying a time limit might eliminate other paths all together. Blowing it up might be the only option.
Maxima’s blue word bubble and slightly squareish text represents that her voice is disguised. I’m thinking Sovereign, but somehow feminine. Like, 1 octave higher, and her “I’s” have little hearts instead of dots. You can totally hear it in her voice!
If Bluce and Gail didn’t know Ixah can talk, I have to wonder what the sign up process for the tournament is. Like, presumably, the competitor or a representative has to fill out some kind of form, even if you don’t necessarily need to put your real information on it. They don’t care who’s competing, whether you’re the heir to a powerful dynasty or a secret science project or a member of an unknown species, but they still need to know what name to call you. I guess Cora taught Max to write “Ixah” in galactic standard, then she just stared menacingly while they tried to ask her questions, and eventually, they were like, “Fine, you’re entering late, so you’ll need to show you can hang in the Elimination Battle Royales, so go qualify for that by fighting a bunch of battle mechs with laser halberds and oh, you’ve already broken all of them. Okay, you’re good to go! Be at the transit pad at this time.”
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)


