Left to right: Butter, Leo, Belle, Sam, Mia, Ardo, Emmi and Jean.
VHV
is a Science Fantasy webcomic by Daniel Frederick about a quartet of kangaroo-like adventurers (plus their neighbors) on a backwater colony world — where they get paid in an artifact that transports their leader, named "Buttercup Cookee," to a planet-sized library where she discovers a strange prophecy straight from the gods.
We'll have to see if they can stop arguing enough to fulfill said prophecy.
In 2023, the author decided to rework the entire comic. Version 1 can be found on the author's deviantart, while the website currently hosts version 2.
Tropes:
- Adventure Guild: Butter's crew isn't affiliated with a guild because she had some trouble with the Dungeon Crawling Health and Safety guidebook, so they stick to minor jobs like foraging and clearing out the local Red Magus branch's basement.
- Barefoot Cartoon Animal: The characters are fully clothed except for shoes. This causes Ardo to get a burned foot during the library fire.
- Child Mage: Emmi is the only mage of the main characters, and a kid.
- Cuddle Bug: A defining trait of embis is their need for physical contact, some rumbah characters have compared the embi obsession with cuddling to the human obsession with... something else.
- Death World: Beta-4 is filled with hostile fauna of a variety of shapes. The original colony had a population of 200, and has presently stabilized at 42.
- The Empire: The Unified Galactic is a fairly benign monarchy, though some nobles go rogue and cause trouble, while Glorinesh is a fascistic dictatorship.
- The Fair Folk: The fae staffing the Tomeatorium insist that the cruel tricksters are a different faction they fought a civil war with.
- The Federation: The Galactic Councilship, a loose galactic polity governed by one representative from each member species.
- Funny Animal: Embis look like a wide variety of anthropomorphic animal depending on their subspecies. Rumbah look like small kangaroos. Cessip are lizard folk. Furtums look like some cross between panthers and giant weasels, and without the ability to vocalize and their quadrupedal stance might be hard to tell they're sapient.
- Happily Adopted: Ardo and Emmi by Mia.
- Interspecies Adoption:
- Leo (a rumbah) was raised by humans, which might be why he's a little weird.
- Mia, Ardo, and Emmi are all embis, but Mia is based on a fox while the twins are squirrels.
- Kangaroo Pouch Ride: Mia's kids like to ride in Butter's pouch, which has a Bag of Holding enchantment on it so they can both fit, though the magic drain puts them to sleep for the duration.
- Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!: Humans in this setting originate from the same planet (called Irtum) as embis (a collection of anthropomorphic animal subspecies) and rumbah (short kangaroo-like sapients). And the three species comprise the majority population of Beta-4.
- Magical Library: The Tomeatorium, only accessible by Ancient Artifact, staffed by fae, and estimated to be the size of a planet.
- Non-Humans Lack Attributes: Embis are of the "covered by fur" variety when seen nude. While furtums don't seem to wear clothes at all.
- Physical God: The gods are demonstrably physical beings known to visit people in need on occasion, as happens to Butter in the Tomeatorium.
- Punny Name:
- Buttercup Cookee, Annabelle Rinnin, and Sam Aritan. It's a rumbah tradition, and they've been known to change their kits' surnames to make a better pun, which can play havoc with geneaology as noted by Butter in her first appearance.
- Leo was raised by humans so his full name (Leonardo Damien Andreas Lysander) isn't a pun, but he usually shortens it to "Leo Lys."
- Religion is Magic: The Red Magus dedicated to the Mother Goddess Niemah are the galaxy's magical powerhouse.
- The Runaway: Belle's backstory, she stowed away on a supply ship to escape her rich parents who didn't care about her save as a means of furthering their estate.
- Spaceship Girl: Jean is a gynoid based on a red panda embi designed to help run The Ladder to Heaven, unfortunately the crew were forced to abandon ship and had to leave her behind, and its crashed on Beta-4.
- Starship Luxurious: The Ladder to Heaven has a swimming pool and a basketball court among other amenities.
- Swallowed Whole:
- Rose often eats Yamri when she's being annoying, or just wants to cuddle, and Yamri has been known to jump down her throat to use her as a living sleeping bag when she's cold. Fortunately Rose's species has voluntary control over digestion and tracts lined with fur.
- Gervukks, one of Beta-4's many predatory species, have a habit of swallowing their prey whole. Sam has apparently been eaten by them multiple times, the first two pages of the reboot show Butter yanking him out of one.
