1 Quercus: {a huge tree man} Hi, I'm Quercus. I'm here for the assistant engineer position.
2 Spanners: Um. Can you crawl through plasma coolant access conduits?
3 Quercus: No, but I can change a hyperspace skew generator singlehanded, while restraining two other crew members from interfering.
4 Spanners: Report to the Legacy, landing bay 34, first thing tomorrow morning.

Quercus is a tree-alien. I'd come up with some cool-sounding name for the planet he's from, but it's rather late at night as I type this...

This is a tree-man miniature from Games Workshop, which I originally got to use as part of a Blood Bowl halfling team. Although the halfling team really, truly sucks in Blood Bowl, they are so much fun to play. And yes, the paint job is mine.

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2015-10-28 Rerun commentary: The name of Quercus's home planet would be revealed in a later strip.

Blood Bowl, for anyone who doesn't know, is a stylised fantasy board game version of American football. Two human players (called "coaches" to distinguish from the in-game players) command a team of football players each, who compete to carry a football to the end of the field defended by the opposing coach's team. The team members are all members of various fantasy races. For example, you could have one coach command a team of elves, playing against an opponent commanding a team of dwarves, or orcs, or undead, or whatever.

Any actual resemblance to football is fairly minimal. The game is really more like a skirmish level wargame, except that attacks are merely "tackles" and not to incapacitate or kill. (At least not deliberately - players can be injured or killed through a sort of critical hit mechanic.)

It's a well designed and fun game, and I've enjoyed playing it for many years. Anyway, the point of introducing all this is to explain what a tree man is doing on a halfling team. The halflings are statted to be significantly slower and weaker than most of the other races, which makes winning a game with them extremely difficult. But, they have the advantage that they can recruit a tree man or two to play for them. Besides being hugely strong and difficult to tackle, a tree man has the advantage that not only can they throw the football, they can also pick up and throw a halfling! Better yet, a halfling who is carrying the football.

So the most likely way for a halfling team to score a touchdown is for a halfling to grab the ball, run over to the nearest tree man on the same team, and have the tree man throw the halfling as close as possible to the end zone, where the halfling will (hopefully) land on his feet and run in for the score. This is actually somewhat risky, as there is a good chance the halfling will not land safely, and will fumble the ball.

But at least it's spectacular!