page 1336 – Cleaning Up After Your Meal
…well, it’s not as late as LAST week’s page. So at least there’s that! Yeah, sorry about the delay. Remember last week when I said I’d toyed with the idea of showing Tabitha running around in the background with tools and stuff? Well, when that got axed from the previous comic, the idea kind of metastasized into this one. Because the idea was (relatively) last minute, however, I didn’t have things planed out very well, and actually wound up throwing out the art for the second panel and starting all over again. Obviously, that really put me behind schedule, and that eventually resulted in me getting into one of those early-morning “I can get this done before I fall asleep I just need to power through and stay awake long enough to finish this- ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzz” situations. Yadda yadda yadda, I really should have just queued up a rough draft of this page to go live while I was polishing up the final draft. Oh well.
By the way, there’s some in-jokes to the recent TWC Voting Incentives in this one, if you’ve been paying enough attention to catch it. AND SPEAKING OF WHICH, if everything goes according to plan (ha!) we should be having the last of the Stilez & Tax Adventures over on TWC later this week, and a whole new Incentive series starting up next week! Place your bets on which characters I’m always talking about wanting to do more comics about will end up staring in THIS series!
EDIT: That TWC finale is up!
That method of repairing the floor is… surprisingly sane and normal.
…I wonder how long it will take before she decides she needs to put her Zombie Children to bed, and automates the other five to the number of “X” floors. And how it either becomes a problem, or prevents a problem by distracting Stillez at an opportune time.
…I’m near-half expecting a “holding my tongue” to this one, while also slightly-less expecting a “need to remember that to steal the idea”. The first one’s more likely simply because it seems like it would be a short turnaround before the predicted outcome comes to pass, so it should already be planned. Even if some of the specifics can be modified.
The real question is “Will Blitz get apprehensive at the prospect of writing a joke that might nail down exactly how many levels the ship has, lest that might back him into a corner later?”
Which is why I’m expecting a “Mad Science Robot” to be created after she completes at least this floor. That way, all the floors are fixed, and we don’t get to find out how many there are.
…though, thinking about it, you could just have her give the ship Fey-style Brownies through Tabitha’s Mad Science. Brownies are a type of fey that like cleaning and repairing things, but don’t like being seen. They hide away from people, but help around the house when they’re asleep or the house is empty.
That way, you can have a few scenes where the Captain’s goes to clean/fixed something, only to be shocked that it’s been cleaned while they were getting the cleaning supplies.
I’m just surprised she’s using an ordinary 20th century tool rather than something future sciencefictiony.
Of course the thing she’s holding, on the other hand, is an authentic madsciency hypersonic hammer, which has thousands of various functions as the plot demands, one of which may or may not be hitting things. My expectation is that while it may appear she’s doing some sort of manual labor type repair, after she’s done fixing the one top floor, she hits it with the hypersonic hammer and the “fix” ripples down like a wave through all the other many floors using the hypersonic hammer’s causal duplication setting. (insert infinite looping gif of floors spontaneously repairing themselves downwards)
Actually, now that I think about it…
I am honestly worried about how Marshall’s reacting to being called a friend. He’s older than he looks, is a nitpicker (trainee) and so should take “friend” at word-value, and is acting like a male early teen who was received an offer to lose his virginity by the two-year-older school-beauty. How socially deprived is he to have that reaction!
I almost suspect that Avi and his friends may only have a similar amount of blushing if they walked into her showering (not actually see her naked, that would cause at least one of them to faint from excitement, if not all of them. For some reason I feel like Tarkus and/or Hiro would be the most likely to stay conscious. Tarkus because he’s always worrying about everything, so doesn’t go into the shower room in the first place, and Hiro due to the communal changing rooms in sporting arena’s causing him to have a slightly higher resilience to seeing naked human bodies (and so that someone can drag at least Avi, and probably Lynne, out of the bathroom before they’re caught).