There's a lot of ways to write antagonists. Delving into people's self-justifications for petty bigoted behavior can be engaging even if it doesn't remotely put them in the right, and the ways they clash with protagonists can reveal a lot about the assumptions of the characters and their society.

Finally caught up on crossposting these, aiieeeee. The "tertiary" here mostly refers to the recombinations of 3 different digit states to reach 8, as the combinations are ordered in a way that feels mechanically intuitive to an avian and not by typical base-overflow rules.

Does Talita's body make her an inherently more dangerous person than the human actively assaulting her? Should he be frightened of her for the theoretical violence she could commit?

The square cube law is not in the reader's favor here, sadly. Mars has a huge battle mech scene. They can get away with heavier bot designs at 0.38 g, and have thousands of kilometers of uninhabited desert on which to stage battles far away from structures that could get obliterated by shrapnel.

It's another GMO pet. The genetics are slurry of hundreds of sources. They are part of an older strain with a longer lifespan that escaped on Earth and established invasive breeding populations in the subtropics.

Man-made horrors beyond comprehension, and an extremely deep lore callback. Readers of this comic often ask the characters about their favorite animals, likely because they are Creature Enthusiasts, but Idrisah is the only one of the main cast who is a fellow Creature Enthusiast.

Tod uses this story to scare the internal mechanics team interns into traveling in pairs and logging where they're planning to go in the plant at the beginning of the work day.

One straightforward answer and one much more complicated one.

This isn't the primary reason Gillie wanted Talita to sign for her, but it wasn't helping.

Think raccoon-sized.

Generally it's eaten like how we eat scabs, callouses, and boogers. Not exactly a "dish" with "preparation."

Yum, raw hairy skin covered in blood!

Electrowetting screens are real, by the way: youtu.be/Bf1GjCaYzYg

The tail on the speech bubble there looks (to an avian) a bit like a lip corner. Or, if the whole thing is interpreted as a super cartoony earless head, the tail is a neck.

The "meatballs" menu symbol in web design also looks like eyes to avians. Ohwitiil probably thinks it means "look inside"...

for @jayeatonart.bsky.social !

Dr. Henriques is used to centaur patients who may not be fluent in English or Shess, may or may not understand what a vaccine is, may or may not be used to injections, and may or may not be cooperative. Caring for Talita is EXTREMELY easy in comparison, even if she's a bit of a whiner.

Sensitive hearing can be quite a curse at times.