1 {scene: cyberspace}
1 Spanners: All right, I'm deactivating the cyberspace link. Prepare for the return to reality.
1 Iki Piki: Holding breath!
2 {scene change: back to reality! The bridge of the ship}
2 Paris: Hi guys. What took you so long?
2 Serron: Paris! You're alive!
3 Paris: Yeah, I saw Iki was about to laser sword me and pulled out my neural interface just in time.
4 Spanners, Serron, Iki Piki: GM cop-out!

Paris was killed in cyberspace way back in #716, almost 100 strips ago.

I wanted to make sure before returning to realspace that readers knew Paris was expected to be dead, thus the change I made to the script for #808 that I mentioned back in the annotation for that strip, but that I didn't want to reveal then. The original script for #808 was essentially Spanners' opening line of that strip, followed by the last three panels of this one.

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2014-06-05 Rerun commentary: And if I'd read ahead this far when I wrote the rerun annotation for #808 I would have realised that a future strip might have revealed what it was that I couldn't put in the original annotation back then.

Oh well! It's more entertaining watching me make a fool of myself than not, I suspect.