So yeah, they missed something fairly obvious there, but they didn’t have much time to experiment. And when Sydney was saying “no whammy” she was hoping that Varia didn’t get feces-kinesis powers from her, projectile mucus, super miasma, or something else awful. Feces-kinesis would be a pretty awful power to have to fight against though. I’m pretty sure I’d surrender right away instead of facing some sort of poopocalypse.

Varia obviously answered some but not all questions about how her powers work, notably whether or not it’s always on when she’s touching someone and if it lasts after she breaks contact, but like I’ve said before, I’d like to get out of the habit of making sure everything gets explained right as it’s introduced. It’s fine to leave stuff for later, and that includes Vance’s introduction for the moment, what with the team leader popping in.

My original draft of panel 3 had Varia just saying “you’re adopted” and the girl with a surprised look on her face, but Xochitl isn’t a dick like that, so I changed it so she’s saying it to a kid who obviously already knows. That said, using her powers to tell if a child is related to their parents is trickier than telling if a brother and sister really are brother and sister since they would have fairly similar DNA, whereas their parents (hopefully) don’t. (Insert joke about the American deep south here. Or European royalty I guess.)

I’ll be at A-kon starting in the late morning. There’s not much going on Thursday, but I work with guest relations and help bus guests in from the airport and all that sort of stuff. The plans for a meetup this year besides trying to bump into each other at one of the webcomic panels is 8pm Friday in front of Media, which is a bar and grill in Atrium II (the main… well, atrium.) Follow me on Twitter if you aren’t already as it’s the easiest way to keep up while I’m at the con, assuming T-Mobile gets reception there. Sprint was mostly no bueno but I’ve switched now. I think I’m going to actually wear my battle pie chart shirt on Friday as the one Grrl Power shirt I have isn’t in good shape. I usually think about getting a new one made when it’s only 3 days to the next event when I’d want to wear it.

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.