The Far Side of Utopia

That looks like it might just have concluded the longest fight of the comic… Only 4 pages, but in this business, 4 pages is over a week… all the more reason to head up to the patreon link and support daily updates! 🙂

Stylistically this panel does some things. I’m not sure if they are good things or not, but I think its more interesting that way, and emphasis the fact that a fair part of the fight takes place beyond simply punching people – experimenting with how to draw these sort of scenes is important, as some mages are less active than our purple haired friend here.

Since it isn’t clear from the outcome, the trap that Mr. Orange (whose name we shall learn shortly, I promise!) is referring to is that his calculation would complete much faster than Naomi is anticipating, as an autocaster assisted function (you can see them glowing on the last page) – however, since Mium shuts it down before it finishes anyway, the speed didn’t matter much.

 

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Magic is accomplished by calculating the difference between the state you are trying to invoke and the current state of Eidos. A natural mage is someone that can do that without assistance of an autocaster.

There are three steps: Use the Eidos Key to access Eidos (the plane of information, form, etc), Calculate the spell you want to in-act, and supply the mana (or psonic particles, same thing, different world’s words for it) to make the change.

In being able to activate the key, most humans are equal – it comes easier to some than others, but ultimately any home can be taught to do it; thus mages are primarily judged on their amount of on hand mana (how large a change they can power) and complexity, speed, and number of simultaneous calculations they can do. The calculation metric however is not a straight forward linear scale. Calculations become exponentially more difficult the further from the caster they are – for example, its far easier to create a fireball in your hand that you than launch at someone, than create a fireball five yards away. Further, they are harder to closer to someone else (unless they on the casters own key, which is sheltered from that sort of interference).

Lastly, in brief, mana interference is a loose term – what it typically refers to is the increased difficulty of casting when there is a lot of stray mana – this is an usually circumstance at best to start with – but is not accurately what Mium did, since that alone wouldn’t break an autocaster assisted calculation ring, and Mr. Orange knows that, but Mium’s technique isn’t common enough to have a proper name.

While I (obviously) have no problem talking to myself, if there is ever a subject you’d like to request more information about in the comic world, feel free to let me know in a comment below or via twitter (follow me on twitter above the comic to the right!)