To be honest, I’m not really sure if this was supposed to be part of the Interlude or the start of Chapter 14, now that I think about it. Let’s go with start of Chapter 14, which makes the Interlude pretty sure, but hey, it’s just a mostly meaningless categorization in my futile attempt to make sense of a chapter structure anyway!
Hopefully it’s fairly obvious these are Arpon Soldiers standing in the wreckage of certain recent events. I considered using the “ui tags” again, but not sure how much I want to use those yet.
I am going to try to reopen the wiki for open editing again. Let’s see how that goes (I expect this will likely be as short lived as the previous attempts, but we’ll see 🙂 ). I will try to update it this week for some of the new characters and things, but I’ve been meaning to do that for awhile, and, well, haven’t, so… no promises.
Last week ended up being pretty busy. Work has been pretty good this year so far, but they found a real… problem case… of a problem to give me last week, and it took up most of my productive thinking cycles to fix that. I’ve mentioned before that raw hours of time is not really the resource required for tracking, but it’s like… kilowatts of motivation? Motivation isn’t quite the right word either… hmm, Caffeinated Thoughts Per Week? The actual useful work hours of a week. We are still ahead on buffer, and now that that problem is mostly solved I have a week before I have to travel, so I think we’ll keep updates steady, but I’m a bit behind on the various tidbits of things I should be doing here and there. I was hoping to update Tyler’s story before I have to travel, but it will certainly get updated during travel, as all those hours in airplanes and hotels aren’t really good for much else.
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Do the timelines match up for the “Doll of Destruction” to be Naomi’s early career? We know Ila was apparently imitating her style for this fight.
It almost certainly refers to Camilla, the pink haired girl that follows the Consul around, as she was called that once before by one of Malsa’s ministers.
Hmm, well it seems like someone in the invading army is getting properly paranoid and on top that bringing up that the troops are getting spooked.
It is not paranoid to assume the enemy has weapons at least on par with those you have already seen. Most would call that “obvious”. The commander here is an idiot.
if I remember the Malsian plan correctly, they are falling back to a different location in order to entice the Arpon field units into a kill box.
And this Commander’s sole reasoning is they can’t have something like they used to have. I’m sorry that just doesn’t work in the military when you find something that works really well you make another. Then you keep making upgrades. Of course 10 years is a very minor length of time for a weapon system. Avon seems to be skipping the biological component all together for Edios manipulation.
I think you’re forgetting that the “Doll of Destruction” isn’t a weapons system, it’s a person on the far end of the bell curve for magical ability. Even with Malsa’s propensity for genetic engineering and the family mages’ (implied) eugenics programs it will still be sixteen years before a successful iteration becomes combat effective. That’s without taking into account how long you spend developing failed iterations before achieving success.
“She can fly in the sense that she can get into a stolen shuttle and run away.”
(in a Tweety Bird voice) “Him don’t know her verwwy well, do him?” ^^
Gods, Peter must love having this happen; A smart soldier is getting over ruled by a veteran officer who ‘knows’ that nothing like what is being described could happen. Look someone kid like, and apparently flying, crashed your party hard. Accept it and start making plans for future parties to be similiarly crashed. Or don’t and end up wondering why you lost the war.
To be fair, I’m not sure I would call this guy “smart” so much as “paranoid”. The picture I am getting is that the Arpon rank-and-file soldiers are basically scared shitless of the Malsan Family Mages, as they view them as some sort of legendary boogymen.
The fact that Ila happens to be something that they should be scared shitless of is mostly coincidence.
That said, it really seems like this eye-visor fellow could use an extra dose of paranoia. Even the Arpon Generals were more properly paranoid than this.
I get the feeling that while we haven’t really gotten to see much of the family mages, most of them *are* something to be scared shitless about, under normal circumstances.
Take, for example, Arkady. Arkady was generally shown to be someone people didn’t think was at all dangerous. Admittedly, those judgments were being made by people like Camilla, who was a teenage doll of destruction, apparently. But… still. Overall, not viewed as a lot. But it took an actual mage to put him in his place. These soldiers couldn’t hope to do it, not even with their fancy-ass walking tanks and all the autocasters Arpon could find.
From the perspective of someone who is a mage, maybe Arkady isn’t a lot to worry about. But these soldiers? And, magic-scarce Arpon in general? Yeah, it’s smart to not want to shit with that shit.
It’s probably not smart at all to be dismissive of reports that someone could fly when it’s fairly well known there are people who can, and they tend to be dangerous, and you have a bunch of “survivors” from someone who is apparently very dangerous.
I would guess that as much as Ila talked about Arkady being upset with her for the killing, she really did him proud, and *didn’t* kill all of the people who dove for cover, dropped their weapons, peed their pants, and did nothing to attack her. And I would guess that having someone blasting everyone who threw up their hands reflexively (it looked like they were throwing something or about to shoot), everyone who was shooting, everyone who was grabbing their guns, and so fort, engaging in up to six simultaneous spells each targeting someone different and independently from all the others… discounting that *that* something dangerous might be able to do something that dangerous things are *known* to have a tendency to be able to do… that’s stupid.
Also, I have the feeling that while Arkady wasn’t the toughest mage on the battlefield this day, he *could* fly. A bit. Enough to be rather dangerous for Arpon’s politically-named air force. Personally, I feel the “Air Superiority Drones” sound very much like the sorts of names used by oppressive regimes to convince their people that they’re a real government rather than a bunch of jack-booted thugs who will be kicked out as soon as they raise enough of a kerfuffle to draw the attention of a country who matters. I would guess that’s the vibe PastUtopia was going for.
It might just be the sensible conclusion that an attacker that can fly isn’t going to need to steal a shuttle (not knowing of course that there were a whole bunch of non-fliers safely out of the blast radius when fatal errors were made….)
When you eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be ignored.
I need to remember this quote. Pure gold.