Dire complication! Ooh! Lookit the view! What? A competitive orgy?

Sydney, focus!

In her defense, a floating island with a lava-fall might be a little more distracting that a squirrel. But it depends on what the squirrel is doing, really.

Seriously, how do floating islands always have infinite amounts of liquid falling from them? I’ll tell you the only way it’s possible. Portals. Or it’s possible people only bother photographing/filming them when there’s fresh meltwater or rain overflow or… well, the lava’s a lot harder to explain. What’s impossible is that it’s just infinitely generated water/lava/other assorted liquids, because the world would completely flood in a matter of decades. There’d have to be some balancing force that destroys an equal amount to what falls. Or just portals. That would be insanely dangerous, because it’d be like every lake with a matching island has a portal that can suck through any fish or swimmers and also an infinite amount of sediment, meaning the islands would eventually just get clogged up but they’d also steal massive amounts of nutrient dense silt and lower the farmability of all shoreline property. It also means you could go swimming, get sucked through the big drain in the middle of the lake, and if you didn’t drown, you could find yourself flung off an island 600 feet in the air to your near certain death. The best placement for a lake portal would be in the center, not just as far from every shore as possible, but also centered floor to surface, so it’d pull in the least amount of sediment and probably a lot fewer swimmers. It also depends on the size of the portal, really. Something a foot across wouldn’t cause an eternal whirlpool, at least not in something the size of a great lake I wouldn’t think. Maybe in your average local 10 x 5 mile branchy lake it’d cause a consistent slow pull toward the center.

A 1-foot diameter portal might not be enough to account for the waterfalls usually depicted in movies, and certainly wouldn’t be enough to squeeze through some viscous magma. An acre sized portal (which, BTW if you didn’t know, acres are an insane English measurement. They’re one “chain” by one “furlong,” which is of course 66 by 660 feet, we all knew that, or 1/640th of a square mile, because that’s all completely sensible.) Anyway, an acre sized portal would let through plenty of magma, and cause even a great lake to develop a deadly whirlpool.

So yeah. Floating islands.

Speaking of distractable, today I learned what a “settee” is. I’ve literally only ever heard the word once from MST3K, and once in an episode of Monty Python, but they pronounced it “seh-TEE!” Or maybe it was more like “seh-`EE!” I thought it was a weird way to say “tea set” but a settee is in fact a small-ish couch which is somehow different than a loveseat, or is maybe a sub-category of loveseats? Maybe it’s the other way around? Dunno. This has nothing to do with the comic. Just thought I’d share.

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If you like long LitRPGs with weak-to-strong-to-arguably-OP progression, but think Jason from HWFWM has too much personality, boy have I got a book for you. “A Soldier’s Life” The MC of this has almost no personality. His backstory consists entirely of “he’s out hiking.” That’s it. He falls asleep in a barn, and wakes up naked in a barn in the other world, gets chased out and is falsely accused of assault and attempted rape and winds up press-ganged into that world’s version of a Roman Legion, and has basically no reaction or indignation to any of it, not even internally.

Honestly, I’m taking the piss a little bit. It just feels like the author just wanted to get the story rolling, and I wouldn’t recommend a book where the story was nothing more than “numbers go up,” which is what a lot of LitRPGs I’ve started to read seem to think constitutes a plot. Still, the MC of this doesn’t develop much agency for quite a few books. I think the reason I like it is the worldbuilding eventually reveals itself without getting mired in politics, and as an Outworlder, the MC has vast potential, most of which he tries to grow into while having to hide the true extent of his abilities, because Outworlders tend to get taken before the Emperor and are never heard from again. There is some narrative dissonance as the MC is constantly machine-gunning basic-ass questions, and even though he plays it off as being from some backwater village outside of the Empire, it seemed like people on the lookout should have keyed on him right away, but whatever. It’s not Mark of the Fool or Delvers LLC or HWFWM, but I enjoyed it enough to go through all six books, which, importantly, all have audiobook versions, and I pre-ordered the 7th.

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Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. The NSFW version is finally up at Patreon. Plus a bonus pic.

I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.

Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?

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