It’s a really good thing Decollete didn’t do the hypno voice in front of Maxima. While Max understands that monsters got to monst, and The Twilight Council polices themselves, mind control is way over the line, even if those dudes would have 100% definitely raced to buy some drinks without the nudge.

Would Max be okay with Dabbler using it to interrogate someone? You know, in one of those ‘time is running out and if I was Jack Bauer I’d shoot you in the knee’ situations? Jury is out. Honestly she’d probably be okay with it if it meant saving a bunch of people and the interogee was a real tool.

Normally, telling someone they have a ‘wonderfully distinct face’ is a bit of a stealth burn, but Decollete means it sincerely.

I’m not 100% sure if YukiAkuma’s version of Tamatha is quite this naïve, but I thought it’d be funny, so here we are. Actually, in the Grrl-verse, succubi tend to mature quite quickly once they hit puberty. At 14, Tamatha would be a very late bloomer, but now that things are starting to happen, they’d progress quickly. Like, if she was strictly my character, if Sydney met her again in 6 months, she’s look a lot more like Harem than she does now.

This all isn’t some stealthy way to introduce a creepy lolita thing into the comic, it’s just the result of thinking about how the biology of other races would work. Over the last few pages, there have been quite a few comments about the age of consent for different races like elves for example. If high elves live to 1,000 and don’t start puberty till they’re 45, then the 18 year old age of consent we’ve arbitrarily picked for ourselves simply wouldn’t apply. Conversely if… I don’t know, gnolls only live to 60, and they start puberty at the age of 8, then 18 might not be the right number for them either.

So succubi, with their tantric energy needs, have a different number than humans as well. Even if they can live for several centuries, they develop quickly.

All that said, don’t worry, Tamatha isn’t going to get up to anything inappropriate. When Decollete says “top up by proxy” she means to stand outside the bathroom and feed through the wall.

Books!

Michael-Scott Earle’s next crowdfunding project is up. This time it’s for the next Space Knight. This series is very LitRPG, but thankfully it’s not set inside a video game. I can’t stand books like that. I honestly can’t think of lower stakes than fictional characters playing videogames – unfortunately this means that 85% of LitRPG novels are of no interest to me. But Space Knight is dudes in space killing monsters and getting loot, they just happen to have a way to scan the loot and get stats off it through an Empire spanning database. It’s a very action heavy series, but MSE writes good, clean action, which is unfortunately a somewhat rarified skill among pulp novelists.

I’ve never specifically recommended Space Knight before. I never connected with the characters in it like I did with Tamer or Star Justice, but if you’ve read Tamer and thought, “This could use 100% less base building and 100% more action.” then you might dig Space Knight. If you want a taste of it, the first book is available for free at his website.

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