Comic for Monday, February 11th, 2019
…and so we meet Eliana, tactical mage of Malsa.
So I am for once a bit ahead of the sisyphean stone, and we actually have a buffer of one again! Hopefully that will grow, and we can get further and further ahead. It actually goes a bit further than that, fortunately – I actually sat down and roughly outlined/storyboarded the next 10 pages over the weekend. This is something I used to do, but had fallen to the wayside in recent times, and I think was causing a dip in actual quality. In the long run, I would like to storyboard whole chapters before I start drawing them, as I think sometimes the cut from the outline to the story board leaves me in awkward spots with information I didn’t want to cut getting cut, etc.
Ultimately I’m just going to try a little harder, as I was fairly unhappy with the last page. Even if you are all wonderful patient people, ultimately I think I can do a little better – I already ask a lot of you all with the cast size and plot structure being what it is that we don’t need a confusing presentation added into the mix 🙂 I’ve just had a bit too much schedule disruption, encroaching other hobbies, and the endless toll of the day job all kind of circling for my time like vultures, so it was time to beat them back and bit and carve out more time for this, and I’ll try to keep that up moving forward at least until the buffer is solidly rebuilt.
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First, panel 5 “Its turned back around on our perimeter”.
Here is one of the reasons Peter and Mium aren’t worried that Atter might take over Kallys dragon. Eliana turns out to be not quite as powerful as implied. When she creates the sprit beast she draws together mana from several other mages and coordinates turning it into the construct. Such a beast will have 5 or 6 times the attack surface for corruption or infiltration.l And even if Atter can or must posses one of the mages he can attack the weakest link. A construct generated by 1 person can have much tighter control. This probably is not the only factor but probably is decisive. Apparently Central has tried this tactic against a demon before with catastrophic results.
Also Eliana appears to be crippled and may be in a float chair or mobile platform that might contain a first gen boost engine? Maybe she developed new tactics because she was crippled.
I *like* the huge cast and plots within plots, surrounded by subplots.
The intricacy of your story and its people are the second best part of it for me, with the twisted mind of Peter being the best. (I love the supporting cast, but… the other two are _amazing_!
Agreed. If I wanted face rolling derping I’d read LFG. Well, I do read it as well, but I only support one on Patreon. Speaking of which, if Past Utopia made a $5 tier and labeled it, “Same as $3 tier, just more money for me,” I’d drop two of my $1 pledges to reach it.
So, um, FYI, Patreon doesn’t require you to pay at a tier these days. They haven’t for as long as I’ve been a patron, though they did make a change recently to allow you to eschew your tier rewards if you pay off-tier.
Basically, you click the menu button at the top right, go to ‘your memberships’, click ‘Edit’ for the right artist, click in the box that currently says 3.00, change the 3 to a 5, and then click update. It’s possible there might be something slightly more involved after that; I’m not going through that process again because PastUtopia is already ridiculously far down on my list because of editing the payment… there is, incidentally, that side effect; the updated artist goes to the end of your list. I don’t know if that’s a problem for you, but it kind of bugs me – the one I’m most likely to click to select to just view their stuff is a page down the list, rather than at the top, even though everyone else just gets $1-$3…
It used to be more complicated than that, because you had to select a tier and then click a link that said you wanted to contribute more, and I think there was an extra confirmation or two.
Found it, thanks! You edit your payment and then it’ll show your current tier and says, “The minimum amount for this tier is $3.00.” You update the actual donation field and save and you’re good to go.
And caught back up.
Now that I remember all the comments about Atter being “the demon” and recognize who’s saying “this battered shell,” I think I have pieced together the rather obvious thing that’s going on. Good news for Eliana: he probably can’t possess more than one construct at a time!
I do still wonder if Peter “rebooting” Mium sabotaged whatever Miko was up to, or if it worked according to one or both of their plans.
Also, even reading through, I don’t recall seeing the time when Arkady was, to paraphrase Ila, nice to Ila by choice. It’s nice that she considers him a friend, but….
Arkady bought her _tasty food_: http://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-friday-january-1st/ – that seems to count for a lot with Ila…
+shortly after that he played Airball with her (and lost horribly offscreen, it seems) which probably also scored points.
Ah! Apparently, he got engaged between those moments, since the braid signifying it isn’t present in the old one. Interesting. I didn’t recognize him, or if I did, I didn’t parse that as “being nice to Ila” specifically.
Thanks!
He actually did have the braid, it just use to be harder to see/further back, but you can see it here:
http://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-friday-january-15th/
Art Evolution in this comic is a hell of a thing.
Its not specified that he lost just that he forced her to use a greater verity of magic than an android would presumably be capable of. I took that to mean that he gave her a run for her money. 🙂 .
Just checked it was more varied than an inate user” not android.
I modified this comment slightly to fix a broken link, let me know if I changed anything incorrectly.
No problem you got it though the unpaired ” might bother some other readers ocd. I’m self taught with bbc, and was modifying someone else’s example when i run out of edit time. I was worried i might of accidentally messed up the whole page or set off antivirus alarms. If i get over shyness and post more often i will remember how to do those things.
I wouldn’t be so sure on that “good news.”
Given that (as we’ve seen) he’s able to summon more, I wonder if those other ones are also perhaps “stolen” in some sense (and whether “stealing control” is independent of “occupation”).
Could go either way, I think, depending on how the magic works.
Okay, starting to get a feel for why Peter chose Malsa. So many people here make the (generally) right call.
Hmmm. Eliana has the same color hair that Mium had when we first saw him, with the same white streak in it, and wears a scarf. And if I want go one more step meta, that scarf looks like a lot like the one Ila is wearing on the cast page.
…time to head for the wild theory booth, did not see this one coming.
Panel 3: “why do you have to save who-?”
Fixed, thanks 🙂