Well, first the exciting news – we hit the next goal on Patreon ($90), so a new bonus series will start there again. Same as last time, eventually it will make it’s way to the main comic or otherwise be posted once it’s done, that said, voting will be up to the Patreons on what it’ll be.
We are out of buffer once more, but hopefully this week will be less silly than last week. I don’t have great confidence in that, as that’d take require intelligence decisions to made higher up the corporate ladder than intelligent decisions are usually made.
Maybe I will reduce panel count for a few pages, this one sort of got away from me as they tend to do 😛
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Or she could just ask Mium. He seems to have a bit of a soft spot where she is concerned. Nothing like his relationship with Naomi, or Miko, for that matter, but certainly better than his view of Tyler. Besides, she might ask better questions. 🙂
Do these characters have names, or are they just generic IDS people?
Also, although I do appreciate the “IDS” t-shirt [presumably to indicate where we are, in IDS headquarters], I can’t help but think that IDS is hardly the sort of organization that would hand out t-shirts telling everyone who worked there…
They are sort of background characters at this point, but they do have names. We’ve seen them a few times, but to honest rarely enough that I’m not entirely confident their appearance doesn’t fluctuate somewhat.
I try to not go super crazy with the character count, but it depends. I could, technically, have recycled the IDS Analyst pair people are more used to, but it upsets my internal verisimilitude (if likely no one else’s) that they’d be here currently.
Realistically what I should do is update all these people onto the character page, even if we technically don’t know their names yet, just put them there. The reason I don’t is mostly because I’m lazy (or busy, depending on how you believe), as in this case it wouldn’t really be a spoiler.
It might help if they were on the character page. But it is still hard to keep track of the cast size. Peter’s been on ~2-3 pages out of the last 30, and Naomi hasn’t even shown up lately. It is just sort of odd given they are the main characters. I think a lot of it is narrative focus, something they teach in creative writing courses.
I just found where I remember Ervon coming from (from two pages when Nathan says “I, Fifth of Ervon, seat of Summers…”
It is from the Lore pages, specifically the only mention I can find is:
“And one, perhaps one of the greatest of them, the Ervon Magical Society, a global presence that had played a vast role in containing the continued secrecy of magic, they could simply not remain spectators to this level of devastation. While the others waged war against the invaders on their own, the Ervon Magical Society stepped forward and turned over their magical knowledge and resources to the desperate collation forces.”
Ervon Magical Society was the one that seems to have broken the masquerade (though I suppose it was already broken by that point) and thrown their lot in with the IDS (or its incursion era predecessor).
This means that Summers are probably an old school magic line, which may explain why they seem to be natural mages in the autocaster heavy IDS.
An interesting question is whether Nathan’s remark refers to that society or to some thing (artifact/entity/whatever) that the society is named after… I could see it going either way.
It is really is not much to go on yet, but it is something. I think it is a good a clue to why Kally is a natural mage of her caliber when we do not really see that from the IDS for the most part (and it looks like Nathan might be too).
@Amaranth: Have I ever mentioned how impressed I am with your diligence? It is the level to which I would aspire if I had the ambition. ^^
I have a lot of time between updates to circle back on things. Not a complaint, but at two pages a week it gives me a lot of time to investigate. And there is a lot to investigate. The comic setting is more unique and detailed than anything I have seen outside of novels fantasy novels, and those are less easy to read while procrastinating on the internet than just clicking my bookmark for the comic again.
I suppose I really like the magical science fiction aspect, which is usually done not so well. Usually if there is magic in a science fiction setting, it is compartmentalized from the science (like the Force in Star Wars). It is unusual for a setting to dive into “uploading spell books onto computers” fiction. I do not even know what the proper genre for that would be.
You know what they say about sufficiently advanced technology, right?
Magic here is almost just another science. But it messes with physics in a way that’s incompatible with, well, physics.
Uploading spellbooks onto computers is a pretty standard urban fantasy trope, but it’s a matter of convenience; the interactions between computers and magic are not well explored.
Sounds like she is trying to track MIUM, but he is through enough that the information she is looking for is at the very least tagged so that he will know if someone is looking at it. It might be interesting to see where this develops.
Ahh, the reminder that Kalli isn’t really a spy. She’s the person who makes problems go away, with explosions. That said, she isn’t stupid either. I imagine spending some time with Peter taught her at least basic skills.