Thanks for helping the process along, you gripers. Miyamoto couldn’t have given Byron a better opening if they’d rehearsed, and Annunziata… well, we were already planning his star turn in the next chapter. Let’s just say the others aren’t going to be rushing to agree with him about what military resources are most valuable.

I suspect that Syr’Nj coached Byron thoroughly on what immediate reactions to expect from the Heads, considering how ready he is in panel 3. But this was also me and Phil trying to cover our bases, knowing that a speech scene needs to be entertaining but that even remotely informed government needs data modeling.

At the time I was getting these pages, I was still impatient to get this chapter done, but in retrospect, there needed to be a few pages of discussion and consequence for this to feel at all like a tale of government. It’s the middle part that I think we should’ve tightened up.