Panel 1: And Emp’s tango partner appears! I believe that this exoskeleton dealie first appeared in a Dirty Pair sketch commission—of a “WWWA damsel in distress” nature, natch—long predating Empowered. I’ll address this matter later on in this story, but most of the wacky restraint technology on display, here, was originally created for the last published Dirty Pair story—the miniseries Run from the Future—as I worked up a whole arsenal of non-lethal hardware that Kei and Yuri could use to incapacitate the criminal “perps” they were targeting. Using crazy-ass future-tech to just poke holes in people like modern-day guns struck me as a bit of a waste, not to mention procedurally and ethically questionable; but after a while, as one goofy drone-based idea after another piled up, it began to strike me just how vulnerable normal humans—even heavily augmented ones like my version of Kei and Yuri—would be in a future tactical environment swarming with blindingly fast, AI-driven machines. Yikes!

-Adam Warren