Comic for Friday, February 12th
This comic may give the wrong idea – Naomi is not really using the same ability we’ve seen Mium do. While the end effect is similar in this case (using compressed mana break apart Eidos form – think of it as using a sandblaster on an engraving, the less deeply it’s written, the easier it is to blast away) the mechanics are fairly different.
Naomi’s tactic here is different in several ways – first, it’s using the ball as focal point. Like a ‘burst’ round, she dumping a huge amount of mana into a physical object causing it to scour Eidos objects near it out of existence. Second, she’s just relying on applying more mana to a point – in this case as Kally made the barrier across the entire court, overwhelming it at a point isn’t phenomenally hard; concentrating mana in general is hard though as it tends to diffuse.
As the thought bubbles may indicate, Naomi spends little time considering these factors.
On the bright side, I think I’ll be able to get Monday’s comic on this time. Have a handful of things to do this weekend, but it’s not super packed.
Here’s to hoping that that’s a sign of better times of comic stability, and appreciate y’all sticking with it and being understanding through the bumpy bit here 😛
Loading ...
Naomi and scary expressions… I half expect there are villains who want her as a expression tutor.
Sooo… Kally put up her barrier just inside her side of the net, making it (mostly) legal.
Since Naomi couldn”t attack Kally’s barrier directly without fouling, she hit the ball with a blast of mana before it got to the net, which charged the ball with enough of an “aura” to disperse Kally’s barrier as the ball got to it. For someone who keeps disparaging her own abilities, Naomi can think with lightning speed, weighing variables and making decisions.
Ask any professional: It’s not so much how many tools there are, it’s how well you use the tools you have.
Er, um, your across-the-board silence had me worried. I know you’re super busy with work and certification, but ….. I even did a google obituary search, just in case. O.o
The vexing part is that if the barrier is close enough to the net, the ball never crosses the net meaning you’ll run afoul of the 15 second rule and lose the point.
One of the tricky steps of magic is envisioning how you want to rewrite the material world and believing that you can actually do it. Peter speculated way back that the second part is why AI tend to fail to use ‘real’ magic, since there are too many unknown steps; mechanically there is still something missing between the logical understanding of how it works and the fact that it actually works.
Naomi is not very good at calculating the what change she wants to make, but operates on a very strong phenomena interference; whatever that missing step is, she excels at greatly. As long as she can clearly enough focus on what she wants, she has a good shot of being able to do it.
Notable this doesn’t really work with things like what Kally was doing (changing properties of material objects and the like), as the change has to be specifically calculated to be maintained once the flow of mana stops enforcing it, but when working with pure mana or with her own abilities, she tends to excel.
… Ah… I did the page long comment again… sorry… 😐
Anyway, sorry for the worry. I do see the comments the on my phone typically, but typically don’t reply till I’m back at a computer. Even for me this would take a long time to type out on a phone… 😀
As a joke this is a massive not a missive. For something like this instead of typing I talk and let Google fill in the blanks. Sometimes though there’s no choice but to edit by hand. Speech to text cannot detect punctuation, and as a human I am NOT used to saying it.
So my question is, we see purple sparkles around Kally. Is that Naomi sandblasting the letters off Kally’s magic circle like Mium does, or is Naomi acting on the ball only?
Naomi is acting the ball only.
The pink/purple sparks around Kally are from Kally’s magic – it was one of my more regrettable decisions on how I draw magic that I will probably revisit someday, but frequently* (not always because I’m fairly inconsistent) anytime anyone uses magic they start having pink/purple sparks around them.
However, as since Mium’s ability has the effect of surrounding the target in purple/pink sparks and Naomi in general is associated with purple/pink magic… I can see where that would not at all be clear 😛
I have a lot to learn about drawing things even beyond learning how to draw things 😉 we’ll get better special effects someday too as I come up with ’em.