It’s funny for all the research I’ve done in to guns and military stuff in general, I had to make quite a few assumptions about makup here. I asked around a little about it, but Maxima’s skin is a unique situation. It’s smooth like glass, so makeup can actually be applied quite nicely, but it doesn’t stick the same way. It tends to fall off in uneven clumps. Anything more oily that does stick like lipstick or grease paint smears that much easier. It’s also flexible like skin, so if she covers herself in grease paint then applies powder makeup over that, it will still wrinkle and crack in short order. When Max was younger and got her powers initially (a story I’ll tell eventually) she spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to pass unnoticed in public. (She’s supposed to look 15-16 in panels 4 and 5 which is pretty tough to draw. A baby, that’s easy, but drawing the difference between a 16 year old and a 34 year old is trickier, especially with odd angles or expressions.) The closest she got was latex house paint with various makeup applied over that, but it wouldn’t pass close inspection. It made her look like a mannequin with the skin of a 70 year old. By the time the paint dried acceptably it wrinkled unnaturally and even began sliding off her slightly. The complication she didn’t understand until later was her personal, nearly cellularly tight forcefield which makes it so nothing sticks to her for long. Even if she keeps her actual force field to a minimum, that force field is the scaffolding all her powers are channeled through, so using her strength or flight or anything will hasten the degradation of any disguise she’s using.

The little outtro gag at the bottom of the page, some sort of latex appliance, is legitimately her only non-magic option for trying to pass as normal, but you’ve all seen those behind the scenes docs about how Worf or Quark needed to show up for work 4 hours before everyone else to get their faces put on. By the time someone can get a prosthetic face on Maxima, it’s already in danger of starting to slough off, so her window for moving around in plain sight is pretty slim.

We’ve already seen that Arc-DARK has spells which can entirely disguise someone, but they can’t hand those out willy-nilly. I’ll get into the why’s of that eventually as well. I haven’t decided if Dabbler can disguise others. Her glamour is self only, and she’s not much of an illusionist. If it has to happen when I get to that moment in a storyline, it will be severely limited, like it only lasts a few minutes or she has to actively maintain it and stay within line of site of whoever she’s disguising.

The site will almost definitely switch hosting this weekend, so there might be some interruption late Saturday and into Sunday depending on how quickly the DNS servers catch up. Hopefully it will go smoothly beyond that.

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.