For those of you who don’t quite follow the gag here, it’s a call back to page 218. Obviously Sydney has been brought into the fold and she’s on board. Max has gone quite easy on Sydney thus far – it’s questionable how much Sydney realizes that, but she’s smart enough to know not to get on Max’s bad side. However this game seems harmless to her. I assume the further up the chain of command someone gets the more problem they might have with it. I can only image doing stuff like this in the other branches of the military could get you into a good amount of trouble. Disrespecting a senior office or what have you.

This duress code is one of two Sydney will get. Vermillion is the one the rest of her team knows, but she’ll have a second one only the top brass knows, in case someone lower in the pecking order is ever compromised or revealed as a turncoat. Of course if everyone on the team knows that everyone else has a secret second code word, and turncoat would be listening for “rare” words to pop up in that sort of call. For that reason the secret duress code word has to be less rare, and the team members have to just condition themselves not to use it in daily conversation.

This process requires that Sydney memorize the rest of the team’s duress codes as well. Lots to do as a fledgling superheroine. Hiro, Max, Arianna and Zephan have to memorize both sets of code words. It’s got to be tough considering a situation like that is probably going to be a rare occurrence.

By the way I call Harem “part Irish” in that one panel. I started thinking about it and really she’s probably mostly Irish. She’s a befreckled red head and her last name is DeShantis. There’s a few other nationalities mixed in to her heritage, cause that’s just how people do, but yeah, mostly Irish.

I’m experimenting with something in that middle panel – the captions are character coded by hair color, since in this case the two speakers have different hair color, go figure. This won’t work if Arianna is talking to Vogue Harem or Anvil with Heatwave. When I originally started the comic, I considered briefly color coding the speech bubbles the way Flaky Pastry does, but I was concerned that could lead to some difficult to read color combinations. Obviously everyone notices the pretty word bubbles, but correctly associating them with offscreen speakers is something only really astute readers pick up on.

I have a NSFW surprise for you. (Softcore, nothing too crazy.) A supporter over at Patreon commissioned a picture of Dabbler and Maxima doing, let’s say, non-canon things. He didn’t commission it from me, as I don’t have the time for stuff like that unfortunately. Instead a guy who goes by Mikiron did it, and it’s excellent. So check it out and check out his page as well.

By the way, happy Overwatch day. Supposedly the game should unlock today at 4pm PST. I still plan on drawing a Zayra + Peggy pic, but ironically the release of the game may slow that process down somewhat. I’ll try and have it ready as the next vote incentive.

Patreon supporters can view this page at twice the size! (as soon as I wake up and post it then immediately go back to sleep since Patreon doesn’t have a way to schedule posts yet.) $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :)

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.