Starting in panel 3, behold a surprising rarity: For once, one of the “fingers” of Emp’s supersuit has been torn, teasingly revealing the pertly nubile flesh of our heroine’s oh-so-sensual right index finger. Hawt, eh? Seriously, one of the unarticulated “rules” of how Emp’s fragile supersuit shreds and tears is that, for reasons I’ve never deigned to consider, the hypermembrane’s “gloves” may tatter when exposed to critical kinetic or thermal energy, but rarely the gloves’ “fingers.” (The same phenomenon seems to apply to the suit’s “feet,” by the way.) My working theory holds that, as the supersuit dwindles while expending its mass to protect Emp, it prioritizes its remaining surface area to cover her face, hands, feet and, uh, “bikini areas,” the latter based on the embarrassment-based stress level it detects from her. The real question would be, if the suit were to continue to shred down from the “bare minimum” state I’ve described, what are the last parts of Emp would it choose to cover? Would it prioritize shielding her identity, preserving potential glove-based VORPP functionality, or concealing her naughtiest of naughty bits? Good question! What’s the answer? If I may quote Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, “I’ll tell you: I don’t know.”

In panel 4, please note yet another one of the wacky little idiosyncrasies inherent to my depiction of Emp’s mysterious and enigmatic supersuit: When she cries with the suit on, her tears roll directly out of the headpiece’s “eyes,” rather than trickling out from under the mask’s cheeks as one might otherwise expect. Then again, this isn’t a terribly difficult conundrum to No-Prize away, given that effecting variable levels of porosity wouldn’t be much of a challenge for the unearthly hypermembrane. I vaguely recall intending to handle her tears differently for a later scene in which our heroine cries while cosplaying as herself in an ersatz, latex-based version of her supersuit for her part-time job—as first seen here—but I very likely forgot to do so. (In theory, her tears should have leaked out from under the mask of a cosplay Empsuit, of course.)

Gasp! What happens after panel 5’s reasonably startling cliffhanger image, might you ask? SPOILER ALERT: Angry King Tyrant Lizard bites off Emp’s head on the next page, sending the series off in a truly shocking and unexpected direction! Or have I perhaps just issued a FALSE-ALARM SPOILER ALERT? Well, let’s find out for sure in the next thrilling installment of Empowered!

-Adam Warren