Comic for Monday, April 24th, 2023
Apr24
on April 24, 2023
at 10:54 pm
As is tradition for Interludes… two characters we’ve haven’t met yet. This will probably be a longer interlude, though still seeing how much I’ll condense down or skip.
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I’d say “May the fourth be with you”, but I think on Malsan time, it’s already May 5th.
¿Feliz Cinco de Mayo?
Here’s some idle speculation on the two characters being introduced in this comic. We can mostly make assumptions on who these guys are NOT. NOT IDS since the “old guy” speaks of the IDS as a group he is not part of. NOT related to the Kepler’s. NOT military since there are no uniforms. Old Guy is important enough to rate an assistant. Perhaps a council member and a senior council member? Your thoughts?
Old guy is a council member. Less old guy is probably an assistant, likely a very long time assistant and possibly close friend.
Civil Service and Military both seem to have regard for the Keplers, so these guys likely don’t have fingers in those areas. They seem to dislike Kepler abilities to the point where it is reasonable to assume they have no ability to point any of the Keplers at an enemy.
That doesn’t rule out IDS completely, but it seems likely they control something else with some significant weight.
Another thought.
Given what we now know about how the IDS and Peter operates, those CI agents who couldn’t believe he actually went rogue really were right in most ways. Plus, Query is a valuable asset that they would have been fools to not use.
Ironically, I actually think Peter is very reliable. He might not do what you want or expect him to do, but if your goals align with his he’s a valuable ally. Plus, the tools he comes up with are very good.
Doesn’t everyone love Raymond?
Raymond, Raymond, The take down of councilor Raymond…
did we learn that story?
Not the full story, but he has been reference before: https://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-thursday-january-18th-2018/
Thank you for the link. As usual, I had to keep reading more comics. Only read 1/2 year’s worth this time. Before I quit clicking for the next comic, Comic for Thursday, July 5th, 2018 was the page title and the comic was about Rovak talking to Dr Martin. It was also nice reading again about Mium being able to boot on the Consul guard’s phone. (grin)
Smart man. He met Peter once, found out he’s in the country and said “Yeah, he did it.”
Well, he met Peter once. Councilor Raymond told him, “Don’t worry about anything, Peter Kepler’s taking care of it.” And then Councilor Raymond was found with the incriminating documents hidden in his own desk, under a stack of papers that Councilor Raymond would never think to look under, but anyone looking for incriminating documents would.
It’s unclear to me whether this assistant merely happened to be working for Councilor Raymond at the time and was ruffled a bit by the at least risk of discontinuity of pay, or if this assistant was actually involved with the stuff Councilor Raymond was doing that Peter took him down for.
“But Peter let him get away. Clearly he wasn’t doing anything illegal.”
Peter’s after the big fish, and doesn’t really care about the little ones so long as the ones ordinary law enforcement couldn’t handle are taken out. The councilor’s personal assistant is in a gray area that probably merits more scrutiny than Peter would give it. Such people *do* get caught by ordinary law enforcement from time to time, but it’s often to act as a scapegoat for their employer. When they’re not acting as a scapegoat, they are remarkably resilient to law enforcement, even if it’s just due to the association.
I forget so much that I need to read that again. A link or general time frame would be appreciated. This will provide an hour or so of reading pleasure since I always get caught up in a forgotten storyline.
Thank you.
I think links are more my thing than Some Ed’s thing. But I’m pretty sure he wasn’t quoting the comic, merely suggesting what could have gone down. At least, if he *was* quoting the comic, he was doing it entirely wrong, as this is the first time we’ve met these two.
I think they look a bit familiar; it’s possible one or both have had a non-speaking role in a prior update, but I’m leaning towards no. The guy on the left vaguely resembles an advisor to President Kokato in profile (interlude 4, page 7), however he doesn’t resemble him that much head on. The guy on the right bears some resemblance to one of the talking heads, possibly named Jaron, but I don’t think he’s the same person. Jaron? appears to be a Malsan news anchor, and I suspect that the guy on the right is an IDS councilman. I think he’s not Councilman Dan Brassford, and I’m not aware of any other councilmen we’ve seen.
You’re overthinking guilt.
It could also be that he worked in the same building as Raymond did, or interacted with him regularly. Presumably this guy is on the council, so his assistant working in the same building as Raymond makes sense.
Alternatively, he could have been involved with the investigation.
I didn’t even mention the ‘g’ word. I was trying to get into Peter’s mind, which is a complicated place.
You’re correct about how else the assistant could have been involved. But I feel like just working in the same building would be less likely for him to get a proper sense of Peter. “Involved with the investigation” could be any number of things, but for some reason I don’t see him as one of the investigators. I guess part of the reason for that is it seems less common for a former investigator to become a high political figure’s assistant.
Maybe I’m thinking about it from the wrong perspective. There are how many hundreds of thousands of investigators, but not nearly as many congressional aides. I know a lot of congressional aides start their congressional aide career after graduating with a poly sci degree. But I don’t know if that’s most or just many, and I don’t know how many of those poly sci majors were older students who had careers as investigators first. I also don’t have any real idea about what the breakdown of the other backgrounds congressional aides tend to have instead of poly sci.
I believe I spied a typo:
“But you aren’t you older” –> “But aren’t you older”
Second panel
I read that as a sort-of mental stutter. He *started* to say “but you are older than them”,
but stopped before finishing the (impolite) sentence, edited that internally, and turned it into a question:
“But you . . . aren’t you older than them?”
and was interrupted before he could even complete the sentence.
Hey, could be, but if so I think your punctuation would make the situation much clearer. 🙂
Yes, but some people don’t pause that long for such realizations, and the punctuation choice indicates that.
“But you . . . aren’t you older than them?” indicates a fairly long pause.
“But you – aren’t you older than them?” is a shorter, but still significant pause.
“But you, aren’t you older than them?” is a barely noticeable pause.
“But you aren’t you older than them?” is not a noticeable pause.
“But y- aren’t you older than them?” is quicker, as the second word didn’t get entirely uttered. This is about the fastest they can be at this realization and still have people notice.
This indicates to me that the assistant is relatively quick on his rewording choices. He’s been around this guy a fairly long time, knows what he’ll take offense to, and how to change what he’s saying to not draw ire with a fair degree of confidence.
“But. Aren’t you older than them?”
“But – aren’t you older than them?”
“But, aren’t you older than them?”
keep getting faster, but nobody besides this assistant knows what’s going on there. The grammar checker is certain this is a mistake, despite the fact that it’s indicating *something*.
“But aren’t you older than them?”
Now we’re so fast that nobody can tell there was anything but the uttered thought. Or maybe there was only ever the thought uttered.