De Mon Be Shrewd

[Crescentmoon76]

Mike's becoming a real student of the game. I'd ike to see other honest tradesmen though

[Captain Mike]

Oh there are other Honest traders out ther.
However, on the fringe of known space where Mike takes most of his work there aren't a lot of honest traders.

Even Mike isn't always COMPLETELY honest.

Just wait till you see tomorrow's comic.

[Crescentmoon76]

Ah very interesting! So it was a huge generator eh? That's a new one, you come up with clever missions for this crew.

Oh and Yukio looked great in the second panel of 06/02's strip

[Captain Mike]

I thought the generator idea was a good one myself.
I was trying to think of reasons why someone would go to all the trouble of trying to capture such a LARGE piece of equipment. I mean lets face it the thing was huge and a pirate would normally go after small portable wealth.

Sure a power generator is worth a lot of money but it's not exactly cashable like jewels and stuff. Besides if they weren't trying to capture it they'd have just tried to blow Mike's ship.

Since Mike owns a TRANSPORT ship it's not going to be able to avoid being taken by a pirate's ship. Or for that matter it wouldn't be able to survive a hunt and destroy kind of mission where its the target.

Figure out why someone wants their cargo can sometimes be the hardest part of coming up with the story.


"Oh and Yukio looked great in the second panel of 06/06/02's strip"

Thanks I really liked how she came out in that strip myself.

[Crescentmoon76]

This is great stuff! I was a little bothered that the crew kept getting so many easy wins, but now I see what you're doing.

[Captain Mike]

The crew tended to get easy wins mostly just so I could get a feel for what I was doing.

Things are about to get a whole lot more difficult for everyone.

MwwaaaHAhahahahaha!!!!!

[Crescentmoon76]

"...do I still get the 10% discount?"

That was great!!!

[Captain Mike]

I'm glad you liked it.

When I was thinking up this portion of the story I realized that Doc Finklestien would be on several governmental watch lists so i had to come up with a way for him to buy or build a weapon without bringing various government agents down on the crew. Setting it up this way it shows a little bit of how the crew has come to view Doc.

Yukiro is not in the least bit worried that Doc is going to be building a very powerful weapon. She and the rest of the crew just naturally assume that he'd never use it for nefarious purposes. That's where today's joke started.

Doc trusts the crew enough to tell them he's building a weapon but smart enough to realize that not many other people would want him to be doing something like that. So that gave me the opportunity to play the old worlds wear smart guy off against the some what nieve young woman.

Part of me wanted to build the weapon out of a toaster and maybe a few other kitchen appliences but I don't see how you could do it. But if you stay tunned in tomorrow you get to find out how to build a weapon out of those little household electronics.

[Captain Mike]

There we go all done building a nice new weapon of mass dystruction.

Personally I wanted to draw them actually building and installing the thing but I couldn't make it look "right".

Well plus I wanted to keep the story moving. This new weapon is almost secondary to the plot. Comes in handy later on though.