Grrl Power #1229 - Half-napped

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The lizard guy is Garamm, from the fight with the space mercs that took place in NYC, and it should be obvious by now that the one running Tenri's body is Lapha.

You can't just grab an Ætholith off of their own head and just balance it on the nearest cylindrical object. Well, first off, you can't grab them at all. You need special magical wand-caliper thingies, and if you're caught with those things and no license for them, it's assumed you're up to nefarious intent. There are a few legitimate reasons to have them, and every other reason is criminal. One you've plucked your Ætholith, you can't just stick it in your bag or leave them floating over a tabletop. They need a sort of external life-support system, which is the function their bodies perform. Their bodies need oxygen and food just like normal organics, but the Ætholith itself doesn't. It does need a mana source and a kind of data feed which might be explained later on in the comic. Hence the Ætholith-mate, which just happens to look suspiciously like a certain dark tower from a unnamed movie franchise (Admittedly the "Ætholith-mate" text on the base of the tower is way too small to read. I'm not even sure it's legible in the double sized Patreon version.)

Lapha has some ethical shortcomings, what with the, you know, kidnapping and impersonation and identity theft and all that, but as an Ætholith herself, she wasn't about to snip Tenri off from her body and chuck her in the bin to slowly burn out. That's the line for her. Though it might have been Garamm that insisted they get a deluxe Ætholith-mate so Tenri would at least be, well, as comfortable as an Ætholith can be when disembodied. Granted, most of the advanced features aren't available if it's not connected to Gal-Net, but he's not about to hook up his kidnapping victim with about 600 ways to contact the authorities.

I do wonder how long Garamm's been sitting there. Glibph complained that "Tenri" had been acting weird ever since Brelx announced they were going to retrieve Parfait, and Parfait hasn't been away from Thothogoth for very long, (and Brelx definitely didn't want to tangle with Tom.) But Sydney summoned Parfait last evening, then stayed the night and now it's just past lunch? Maybe 1-2 pm? Still, maybe time flows a little different on other planets because of relativity and their positions in the Milky Way, or, Brelx has been waiting for Parfait to be "in the open" for some time, which means Garamm might have been hiding in Tenri's dorm room for... well... Hmm. Parfait wasn't collared by Tom until after his encounter with Dabbler at the quarry... Uh, let's say a week, tops. Probably less than that, a few days at most while Lapha went and attended Tenri's classes to maintain the ruse. Whether or not she took good notes for Tenri is yet to be revealed.

In any case, the sudden uptick of PortalDash food orders to Tenri's dorm room that include space-reptilian fare might get someone suspicious if they were looking in the right place. Not to say that an Ætholith can't or won't eat from the Insect-and-Grub-Garden, or McCrawlies, but the sudden palate-shift could cause an alien-equivalent of an eyebrow to quirk.

So you might think it's weird that they're having this conversation just as Lapha makes her move back on Earth, so let's just assume this is actually a mini-flashback to like 10 minutes after Lapha pilots Tenri's body out the door for her Space Accounting 201 class.