!#$!@# I was going to go try that out. ;) When doing the Chaos/Order stuff, the decompression was about half the CPU cycles, so thinning that could help.

Fwiw, the encoding I used wasn't VByte; because I was doing strict increments, I knew `0` wasn't a valid value to see, and used it to encode variable byte lengths (number of zeros: number of valid data bytes). Not smart, but easy to hack up, and gave me back 128-255 in one byte. I'm curious to check this out, now!