The Monster From About 20 Fathoms – Chapter 7, Act 3, Strip 12

Unfortunately – or fortunately, your mileage might vary – we shall never learn what K’ip and Si’ri happened upon after brutally slaughtering the elf on the shelf. A new threat rudely interrupts Si’ri’s reverie and brings our heroes back to the present – a shocking present.

It’s another sea monster! This time, it’s clearly not Scotch at all (notice the absence of tartan, beard and bagpipes), rather it’s quite clearly Japanese. And, yeah, given the varied parts tentacle monsters play in Japanese popular culture, I could have taken this into a different direction, but I instead went with the safest and most benign variant: Tako Luka*

K’ip and Si’ri will certainly be appreciative of that decision, whereas the crew of their chartered vessel might be less so: While it removes the worst aspects of the sea monster’s attack, the choice of Tako Luka also prevents K’ip from defending the ship – Tako Luka is just too kawaii for a hero to attack. Too bad for the ship.

And thus, our heroes’ ship journey ends prematurely, and exactly in the way that K’ip dreaded it would end from the get-go: with him getting wet. You can imagine his felines..uh, feelings about that. It was a near-miracle that Si’ri convince him to set paw on a ship in the first place, given his race’s feelings about water…now that that all ended in exactly the way he expected it to, she’ll definitely never be able to talk him into something like that again.

On the pro side, the loss of the ship means that they won’t have to pay the second half of the fare. (Although they typically wouldn’t be short on cash at their current experience level, anyway.)

More on Thurs…uh, Monday.

*Benignity does not apply to business practices.

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