The room is still lit with red, windy light (windy light?) but I’ve color corrected (and wind corrected?) it for your viewing convenience.

Is this torture? Considering this is something Sydney might eat anyway, no? Except Lapha is obviously experiencing it differently. Like if Sydney really liked cilantro and Lapha really hated it, like the smell of it made her nauseous and dizzy, would it be torture for Sydney to eat a bowl of the stuff? Honestly, it seems to me that Lapha would like or dislike whatever the host liked, at least in terms of “if they have that gene that makes cilantro taste lightly lemony and not like if you mixed bitterness incarnate and a bag of fresh lawn clippings up in a transporter, and also maybe some soap.” Lapha would likely have some independent thoughts about texture and wiggling stuff like gagh, but the genetic stuff would be determined by the host.

In the case of spice, I guess I’m implying that heat tolerance is something that can be trained. While Lapha might be enjoying the presumable deluge of endorphins the dish is triggering in Sydney, she can’t get over what feels like Sydney gargling a mouthful of yellow-hot iron filings.

Aetholiths weren’t designed to fight existing control systems, which is why they have about a 50% control over a conscious person. Sydney trying to get her mouth around that fork was like if she had a mouthful of negatively magnetized braces and the fork was also negatively magnetized. And like, strongly enough that she really had to concentrate on what her neck muscles were doing. Although if she had powerfully magnetized braces on the top and bottom row of teeth, she would have difficulty closing her mouth, which is something that Dabbler might be into, so I guess it’d be more like she just had the braces on the lower teeth, because Lapha waving her jaw around and clamping her mouth shut, but in the end she finally got a few mouthfuls.

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The new vote incentive is up! This is a bit of a weird one as it’s a character that hasn’t appeared in the comic.

It’s my Ifrit Pathfinder 1e monk, Fray! Ifrits don’t really make great monks in Pathfinder, as player characters they get a +2 to Dex and Cha, but -2 to Wis. For monks, Dex is good, Cha is largely irrelevant, but Wis is important as it can add to your AC and also has something to do with Ki points I think. But I didn’t care. I wanted a character with dark blue/gray skin and glowing orange hair, so that’s what I picked. (I don’t think Ifrit even really have dark skin, so maybe she’s 1/4 Drow? Don’t care. I think she looks cool.) Will she show up in the comic? I mean… maybe? Probably in a Dabbler flashback, but who knows?

As usual, Patreon has her in delicto flagrante.

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