So long as it doesn’t directly contradict anything that happened in the first one then I’m right there with you on the phrasing.

Feels as right as anything.

I hear ya.

It would, indeed, be interesting to see the fledgling Sol System representation as a real Galactic Empire before the Council be undermined by a series of what amount to space personal injury claims. Would be even funnier to see the new We-Do-What-We-Want X-Men beaten by a giant chameleon in a cheap suit.

Aw, come on, Jen was always a pretty highly competent lawyer. It was just pretty much every other aspect of her life outside of her day job and side hustle as a ‘cape’ that was a mess.

Yeah, mythological Loki shapeshifted into all sorts of things and genders and even gave birth to a few different creatures/monsters over the millennia. You’d think most of the variants had at least considered the option at one point or another.

One or two universal reset buttons ago I thought he was classified as a mutate who had rewritten his own genetic code to add an X gene where one hadn’t been before, but I’m a bit out of the loop on the state of the X folks since the end of the last Secret War, so maybe this version was always a mutant?

Not gonna lie, I was sort of hoping at first that it was a version of Fin Fang Foom that just hadn’t finished ‘growing up’ yet.

I mean, MS still owns the lion’s share of the PC OS market anyway, so putting games there still means they get to sell on/in an environment they effectively control and directly profit from.

So, this sim is assuming that the civilization doing the colonizing here has transcended flesh and are now machine intelligences or uploaded consciousness?

This almost feels like - Design Engineer: “The boss wants something ‘different’, fine, I’ll give that asshole ‘different’.”

And to his credit, Jobs was always pretty upfront about building a successful business by ‘borrowing’ ideas and repackaging them.

I mean, there’s the WiiU, but we don’t like to talk about that one...

It’s the Smoke Ring from Niven’s Integral Trees.

Tax would be better than philanthropy. Philanthropy, by its nature, tends to be specifically targeted and has little to no oversight, meaning the actual people that need help in society in general may see no benefit at all.

Honestly, I think it would be a pretty cool twist here if instead of fighting Jen as metahumans, Jen was her court-appointed defense council in an upcoming trial.

They’ve already cast John’s great-great-great grandmother (or whatever relation she was), so it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that some version of him shows up here.

Hank’s always had it in him, he’s just been better about keeping that side in check usually.

The stories all tie in much later in the series, but where they fall in that overarching chapter of the story is mostly to show that, as aloof and detached as Dream would like to pretend to be he does make very real, very strong, and very human connections with mortals, and that he really does care, in his own way.

I thought it would be hard to out-do the comic with that chapter, but then I listened to the radio play on Audible and... shit... it was actually so much more horrifying listening to the cold narration and hearing the individuals all breaking down as the day wears on.