Fortunately for us, the story mostly works fine whether you picked up on Syr’Nj’s intended crush on Best or not. Looking at it objectively, I have to say there’s nothing related to that crush that couldn’t be easily attributed to something else. Nothing, that is, except the glare she gives Byron in panel 3 when (ironically) he’s just trying to help. Since Byron and Syr have just been friendly to each other and will be again soon, it’s hard to make sense of her stink-eye, unless Best and Frigg’s hookup has stung her worse than Sting’s sting did. “Is everyone DRESSED? GOOD.”

But even that anger can’t mute her awe at the unexpected.

After we got focused on developing Arkerra, I dropped my fairly cursory studies of World of Warcraft. I knew very little about specific Worlds of Warcraft adventures and still don’t know very much, but I know Phil based aspects of this story on the Deadmines, another scene of underground ship construction. Though it wasn’t mentioned in the script, Erica definitely knew about this source of inspiration. Sting and Butterfly were related to enemies in that campaign, and this is the most obvious visual callback to it.