And there we are! The new character joining our story is “Avie”, Fris’s friend-and-definitely-not-assilenz.

By looking at the weird symbols on the character cards right next to both of their names, we can now also finally confirm that Fris is, in fact, a Ko, while Avie’s quite clearly a Kaeh. But we’re not dealing with just any type of Kaeh here, either. We’re looking at a seemingly very vindictive, fully virtualized instance of a Kaeh currently serving as Flick-Integrated Computing Systems Control.

This very jumbled mess of words serves to let us know that Fris is currently getting dunked on by the sapient computer of his spaceship, which is a rather cruel fate for any ryka stuck in space without long-term survivable means of escape. In such situations, one has to really wager his odds. The vacuum of space may be a cruel mistress, but so is a spiteful FLICS…

Website-Exclusive Author’s Note:

I really, really hate this page.

Every single pose on this page just sucks, and while I’ve preached extensively about how you should just re-draft your sketches if the first ones don’t work out, life has just decided to make that idea untenable.

With a recent accident in the family, Uni ramping back up, work on that secret video game project starting proper and also me having to work on my stupid Bachelors Degree, I’m really having no luck finding any free time for this comic right now. Things will probably get better in a few days or weeks, but for now, I just wanted this dumb page to be done and over with, which it is now.

It’s out, it sucks, but that’s fine. The next page will be less awful, hopefully.