©2007 by Peter Bernhardt. All rights reserved.

Author's Notes:

Oh boy, that final test looks like a real DOOZY! Forget rusty spears and darts; a living rock monster that only lives to smash you will definitely get the job done! Yes, Captain Strathclyde and his friends will surely die. This is how I've chosen to end the series: the Captain gets crushed to death by a big rock in the biggest anticlimax in webcomic history! This is worse than Oregon Trail, when you are 10 miles from Oregon and your whole family dies from a combination of diarrhea, snake bites, and yellow fever. And then all the wheels on your wagon break. And then you write a string of profanities for the epitaph on your tombstone.... "Here lies @#$%&*#*@$!"

Obviously, I have too much respect for you, as readers, to do that to you. And you know that, too. So really, you already know what's going to happen. I am bound by a combination of duty to the audience and literary convention to deliver the main characters from harm in this scenario. So next week, obviously, you're not going to be tuning in to see if our heroes live or die. You will, however, likely be interested to see the manner in which they walk away with their vitality still in tact. Or maybe I'll just throw you a curveball and have Granitor maim and kill them. Then he can be the main character of the comic, after he kills the rest of the crew and smashes the ship. But then I'd have to rename the comic "Granitor-something-something," and I'd have to register the domain name "www.granitor.com" so it's probably not going to happen. But IT COULD, just remember that.

As an afterthought, I titled this comic "Sisyphus Had It Easy." Just to clarify this for those of you who aren't up on your Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the poor bastard who had to roll the boulder up a hill for all eternity. But that guy had it easy! His boulder didn't fight back! It was just a boulder! Of course, the Captain doesn't have to deal with a hill, but I doubt he's going to have an easy time at this anyway...