Panel 1: Believe it or not, folks, here I briefly considered showing a goofily “just like it sounds” image of Emp being “hoist with her own petard,” in the entirely mistaken belief that the original, literal meaning of the phrase referred to a tragic catapult or trebuchet-related mishap.  Imagine my chagrin when a bit of cursory research informed me that, per Wikipedia, “[t]he phrase's meaning is literally that the bomb-maker (a “petard” is a small explosive device) is blown up ("hoisted" off the ground) by his own bomb”. 

Panel 3: And yeahp, the second part of this story’s title (“Of Clingy Monkeys and Negative Excrescence”) has appeared.  As I’ve mentioned before, I get almost all Empowered story titles from terms or phrasings in the dialogue that especially strike my fancy; until then, the stories often have entirely different working titles as I’m scanning and uploading ‘em page by page.  (No recollection what this chapter’s original title might have been, though.) 

-Adam Warren