Comic for Monday, January 11th, 2011
As a general rule of thumb, magic doesn’t work on creatures that have an eidos key, but as we also know, that’s just a rule of thumb, not a rule. We’ve seen almost this exact thing happen before way back here. There’s been various other iterations of it (like Tyler’s magic) but the one back there is closer to this in functionality (though not the spell Kally is using here, which is a fair bit more complicated one we’ve seen her use a few times). I’ve mentioned before that Kally’s greatest property as a mage is how strongly into Eidos she writes data (perhaps tied with the complexity of single equations she can write), though she a very large capacity handling mana (and manage storage, though that tends not be a relevant stat as mages almost always use ambient mana, or at least pull it in as fast as they use it, which is why exhaustion from calculation is usually a more relevant factor of fatigue than running out of mana). Kally tends to be somewhat weaker on running a bunch of calculations at once (relative to her other abilities), and her calculation speed is only fairly good outside of one notable expectation to that regard which she has specialized in to a degree that’s closer to what innate mages can do than most natural mages.
In this case what Kally is primarily controlling is the gun, but her magic is beginning to pick up the whole person – precession isn’t necessarily one of her strengths. The magic isn’t necessarily safe to use due to that – sometimes things get accidentally broken. It’s not too different than how Tyler’s power bleeds into things he’s not targeting when he starts to ramp it up, though he has considerably less targeting control. Tyler can actually use a magic quite similar to the one Kally is using, which he’s used in conjunction with his innate power several times.
It is intentionally that Kally doesn’t have her hair tie on anymore; the first panel was originally her removing it, but drawing that was harder than expected. Why that is, well, that’s a story for another comic panel, and partially gives lie to something she says here, though I suspect she’s convincing herself as much as anyone.
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For those that didn’t see the comment the last time, in the other land where I where a different hat of working on 3rd Party D&D stuff, I launched a Kickstarter. It’s doing well. If you ever want PastUtopia works on when not trying the comics here, well, that’s one of the things. I mostly share this as this little box under the comic is half commentary and half general life blogging, but I do know there’s some small overlap between the audiences 🙂
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I’m 68 and have problems recollecting having recollections.
By removing the immediate threat to the hostage, Kally now has options and can give the hostage-taker a choice: release the hostage voluntarily or release the hostage because his arm has been severed from his body.
Summoning the dragon now might scare off the people who are coming to transport the hostage-takers. The most effective time to summon the dragon might be just after the aircraft lands.
There is also a good chance that Naomi and Kally will meet the policeman they talked to earlier. It will be interesting to see the policeman’s reaction when he sees the dragon.
I still think Fluffy needs to eat… He looks hungry.
Incidentally, while I assume it’s a typo for ‘precision’, I do find myself curious what ‘precession’ means in the context of magic. Does magic have a spin quantity, and if so, is it conserved?
Wow, I hadn’t considered that anything other than precession at intended. I saw Kally coming up from behind, and assumed there must have been some accounting for precession because of the dude spinning around.
Precision makes more sense. Between Kally at least being willing to try to snipe a moving HVM shot and recent comparisons with Naomi’s brute force approach, my brain was unwilling to see precision as something that Kally wasn’t good at.
One aspect of precession used to be one of my strengths. My mother had been a beautician before she was a mother, and she figured one great way to save money was to do haircuts at home.
When she first had that thought, she’d been inside the box for long enough that included buying one of those barbershop chairs. But the thing about them is they’re bulky and intentionally hard to move, even without reflecting on the fact we’re talking about late 1960s technology. (I was not the firstborn.) Over time, she came to realize using a stool and just walk around it was much easier than bringing that thing out and then putting it away every few weeks.
So it was relegated to the basement, where it became a toy for her kids to play with. We had competitions to see who could make the others dizzy the fastest, and by corollary, who could handle the most dizziness without letting it show. We got to be pretty good at it.
Based on the expertise I gained doing that, I feel like the amount of precession that the guy experienced turning around with a kid under his arm was probably not so significant as to present a major challenge to Kally, unless she needed to maintain a really tight focus on exactly where the gun was as he was doing it. But if she’s notably poor at precession, it’s possible that it did still present her a challenge, so it was probably a good call on her delaying triggering her magic just a bit so she could correct her aim after he finished moving.
These days, I’m a different kind of precession expert, and it feels like Kally probably intentionally failed in terms of that sort of precession. I think I may have even commented on it already on this story line. <looks down> Oh, looks like it was comment 60177 here on this page. That said, in so doing, I’m pretty sure she followed good precedence.
@PastUtopia this idea occurred to me out of the blue yesterday. Is Tyler’s last name from the SI derived unit of magnetic flux?
Oh and it looks like the magic goon is going to shoot himself in the head if he doesn’t drop the gun.
Have we seen anyone other than Kally who has the glowing outline/halo around their person when they are casting? I think she had the same effect happening when she was fighting Voltron-Atter and the Kor’s World soldier a while ago.
Great work on this page, Past, (and the last few as well) the dialogue and character movement is excellent! Kally is Full Badass here and she has her action hair on so things are going to go down!
-SneakyBex
I want to say we’ve seen Tyler glow blue when he’s got his mojo cranked high, but I might be mistaken.
I admit, I laughed out loud when I realized that the tactical mage used a stage magic trick to completely derail the hostage situation.
She learned from a master, by which I mean Peter.
I like it. It shows the influence that working with Peter had on her (as I suspect Peter is who she is talking about there). I think we are starting to see yet another side of Kally we have not seen much.
We have seen “just Kally” who tends to be somewhat awkward and seems to like sugary cereal.
We have seen “the Red Dragon Witch” who tends to stomp around and destroy anything that stands in her way.
I get the feeling this sort of who she was when she worked with Peter, as she is sort of returning to that role.
She’s actually talking about two people here.
Y’all got Peter, but there’s a part of this she learned from Camilla.
No, she wasn’t in that fight, but I’m sure word got back to her. Possibly through Peter, which would make it seem more like she learned all of it from him. But it seems like most people don’t believe in independent discovery of ideas, so chances are good Past had an information chain in mind for how Peter got the idea.
There’s also the aspect that Peter mostly seems like a two trick pony; one of them is being good with computers, and the other is being good with information management.
Um, I think I might have accidentally used a couple too many ‘o’s up there, I’ve come up two short. Oh well, I’ll find some mre somewhere r other to compensate.
Yes.
I hadn’t been tracking this effect. It doesn’t happen often.
The last time was Dragon, back in chapter 14.
Other people who have done this include Naomi (who did it a whole bunch in the last half of chapter 4, a little before that, and a bit in chapters 6 and 7), and Mione, who did it once in chapter 6. Ila may have done it near the start of chapter 6, but that might have just been color blur due to rapid movement.
These glows tend to be purple, though Naomi generally glowed a little bit more of a lavender, and Dragon apparently was glowing “thistle” according to my “nearest color” script. For what it’s worth, “thistle” apparently has a fair amount of red and blue, with a bit less of green, so it’s somewhere in the whole `sort of purple` vicinity that all the rest are, except for Ila’s if she has an instance of doing this.
Naomi glows in 9.25% of the updates she’s been in so far. Dragon glows 3.7% of the time. Mione glows in 2.7% of her updates. Kally glows less than 1% of the time. If you consider Dragon a mere extension of Kally, such that those glows also count for her, then she’s up to 1.39%.
For what it’s worth, I probably looked through tens of thousands of panels to determine all of that, I’m not going to do a recount any time soon. Just sayin, in case you’re curious. Sure, it was probably tens of thousands of interesting panels, but it’s still a lot to go through.
On the plus side for the kidnappers: Ila (who has neither patience nor reluctance to kill people) isn’t here.
God help the kidnappers who ever try to kidnap Ila. There will be a single look of confusion as to why they would try to do that, and then a lot of murdering.
Goddess really help any who try to kidnap the Miko. (especially after her cooling system upgrade)
After having their ears melted off for being stupider than a stupid rock…
“They arrived turned inside out…. and then they exploded”
I’m imagining Ila in a “Ransom of Red Chief” scenario.
The gun itself is the threat. Saying things like “I’m not bluffing” and “stop or I’ll shoot” are both bluffs of someone who doesn’t want to shoot, and are also the reason that the most common thing someone says before getting shot is “well go ahead and shoot me then” said sarcastically. Since that breaks down the resistance to doing the action. Its the reason why anyone utilizing a firearms in a domestic crime is charged with attempted murder, and why police shoot people who begin to point guns of any type at them. Its also the reason you speak slowly, keep your hands visible and tell police what you are doing before you do it. They get less fidgety and treat you better if you make them feel safe.
The trouble with a hostage that you have only one of is that you have no way to prove you “mean it” without also losing your leverage in the worst possible way.
The only reason it works at all is because the hostage dying is a lose-lose for all sides.
I like this side of Kally.
Just imagine if someone tried to kidnap VIMium it would be the worst of both Miko and Ila! The snark alone probably has the equivalent damage of an HVW strike.
Edit: Oops, that was supposed to be in reply to BuilderOfCastles comment above…
And how for more recognition checks from local villains. Or maybe its an insight roll at this point, either way continuing the conflict is a bad idea, and I don’t think they are both going to get the message.
Oh, I DO hope not. Its been a while since we saw fluffy 😀
I don’t expect to see Fluffy. Comic timeline was he was out yesterday. Kally and Niome slept in. Both were very active yesterday as Niome mentioned during the breakfast scene a few pages back.
Kally, is being smart here, she actually isn’t controlling the mage, she is moving the gun. Because the mage has the gun, and because of the misdirection of the snap the mage is not using magic on the gun, but instead trying to physically move it, which is futile since magic overrides physics.
Because of her Enforcement class, Kally has likely dealt wIth true hostage situations before and knows calculations for this exact scenario to disable the trigger. The snap sound could have for instance been the cover for her engaging the gun safety and locking it in place, then all that would be required is positioning for the barrel of the gun which could be handled as the position of a cylinder of space. If you embed the object partially in a hunk of a magic form, and then manipulate the form that would drastically improve your ability to affect reality.
Panel 7 clearly shows a failed trigger pull. I’m sort of hoping Kally just welded the gun together. A gun without moving parts is just a stage prop. Or a clumsy hammer at best.
Think what that means as the magic bleeds into his eidos form. Elbows and wrists that flex are SO much more useful than ones that don’t flex.
So I guess Naomi can get back to what SHE was doing then?
I actually snap with my index finger instead of my middle finger, but snapping with the middle finger is more common, so I went with that.
Hmm. I seem to snap my middle finger against my index finger held up by my thumb …?
In limited testing just now I get more volume from my ring finger, and the least from my pinky. The noise comes from the impact with my palm.
I was probably 15 before I realized there was some way other than index and thumb. No claim to brilliance here.
I’m surprised no one commented on the missing hair band. Past even hinted at it in the commentary.
Magic has a flair for the dramatic. This is why Mium’s scarf grows longer and Tyler’s trench coat flares. Kally knew better than to try to place too many constraints on her magic. She relinquished control of her hair in order to better control her target.
It was a good trade.
Either that or Kally uses a Boost engine for a hair restraint or possibly it has some properties that make it able to be more easily linked to the gun.
Maybe I’m slow, but I don’t see how either of those “partially gives lie to something she says here”.
What does she even say here that could be construed as even a partial lie? “I calculated my magic”?
I think the part it gives a lie to is when she says “just Kally”. I think she associates the hair tie with being off-duty. We have seen a few times the hair tie is probably more significant than just for tying hair. My guess is that Peter probably gave it to her at some point.
By taking it off, she is going “on duty” and acting more as the Tactical Mage Who Shall Be Obeyed rather than “just Kally” here to help her friend.
That is my (likely overthinking it) take.
I think it’s either that, or the lie is that she’s not really quite as powerful as she claims – it’s her hair that is that powerful. She just knows how to let it do its thing.
Except the lie she is telling herself is that she was not going to get involved in local matters (yeah right) until he went full villain and made justification easy.
I agree with Samantha.
Sometimes you don’t need a reason, you need an excuse 🙂
Sometimes, you can recognize a situation will progress to a point where you will need to take action, but you can’t take action until it progresses to that point. This is especially common in law enforcement jobs, such as Kally’s former job.
So you wait, but you also prepare.
That said, there’s preparations that you can do, and preparations that would also be problematic. Like if she summoned Dragon while she was waiting, that would have potentially generated the same sort of negative outcomes of having rushed in with Naomi.
I mean, it’s clear that it’s still something that happens with her current job, it’s just not clear whether her current job is law enforcement.
Unless Fluffy is silently descending behind them, while Kally is being distracting?
I find snapping with the ring finger works about as well as with the middle finger, except for the fact it sets you up for doing an immediate snap of similar quality basically immediately. If, for some odd reason, you need finger snaps quicker than you can move your fingers back into place, it can be helpful. Not that I recall needing that since high school.
…. I’ll bite. Why did you need to snap your fingers quickly in high school?
I mean I’m pretty sure I’ll regret having asked. But sometimes you just got to know.
If you are cast as one of the Jets in “West Side Story.”
I’m 48 years old. I really have absolutely no recollection anymore.
See what I mean?