Comic for Monday, October 3rd, 2022
Oct04
on October 4, 2022
at 2:57 am
Comic.
Polls
2023 Santa Hat Poll - Who will claim the Christmas Crown this year?
- Kally Summers (9%, 32 Votes)
- Ila (8%, 28 Votes)
- Naomi Atarah (8%, 28 Votes)
- Miko (6%, 22 Votes)
- Fluffy (6%, 22 Votes)
- Miko's Avatar (6%, 19 Votes)
- The Consul (5%, 18 Votes)
- Avi Atarah (5%, 16 Votes)
- Mari Kepler (4%, 14 Votes)
- Doctor Mir (3%, 11 Votes)
- Mium (2%, 8 Votes)
- Peter Kepler (2%, 8 Votes)
- Lisa (2%, 7 Votes)
- Rovak Stas (2%, 7 Votes)
- Arron Kepler (2%, 6 Votes)
- Kyle Kepler (2%, 6 Votes)
- Camilla Canthi (2%, 6 Votes)
- Amy Selah (1%, 5 Votes)
- Magnolia Dai (1%, 5 Votes)
- Tamara (1%, 5 Votes)
- Nathan (1%, 5 Votes)
- Shitty Demon (1%, 5 Votes)
- Maia Ethi (1%, 4 Votes)
- Ashvalt Ardunni (1%, 4 Votes)
- Saria (1%, 4 Votes)
- Ashley Thomas (1%, 4 Votes)
- Artem Arduni (1%, 4 Votes)
- Alex (1%, 3 Votes)
- Arkady Arduni (1%, 3 Votes)
- Tyler Weber (1%, 3 Votes)
- Atter (1%, 3 Votes)
- Elizabeth (1%, 3 Votes)
- Ryn Koko (1%, 3 Votes)
- Toshe (1%, 2 Votes)
- Doctor Martin (1%, 2 Votes)
- Ricci (1%, 2 Votes)
- Frank (1%, 2 Votes)
- Nelson Otte (0%, 1 Votes)
- Regin Enkari (0%, 1 Votes)
- Gate (0%, 1 Votes)
- Jayce Myer (0%, 1 Votes)
- Ikirium Avon (0%, 1 Votes)
- David (0%, 1 Votes)
- Nick Otte (0%, 1 Votes)
- Joid (0%, 1 Votes)
- Yoav Cao (0%, 1 Votes)
- Biana Beyer (0%, 1 Votes)
- Vairlem (0%, 1 Votes)
- Gelon Level (0%, 1 Votes)
- Marc Idunni (0%, 1 Votes)
Total Voters: 81
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Doc Savage- and just like that I’m a kid again hiding under the blankets with a flashlight and a doc savage library book – I haven’t thought of him in a while. Thanks- those are some good memories 🙂
fifty plus years ago I’d read an occasional Doc Savage comic. Bought a few Doc books also. This was the era of the golden skinned, muscle bound, ripped shirt Doc. Earlier Doc Savage pics remind me of Indiana Jones. Google “early Doc Savage” for examples.
The mouse-over of “Not all may be as it seems…” does suggest that Peter is not all there.
Or something of that sort, anyway!
The mouseover is somewhat literal. Background lines are faintly visible in Peter’s images. He is using holograms to bait the stupid demon. Peter has used holograms to mislead opponents before. He lured a pursuer into an alley with a bomb and also faked the Consul’s death. I’m sure there may be more examples but someone would need to refresh my old memory.
Do we a Doc Savage wannabe here in the form of Peter?
Methinks Dr Strange would fit Peter’s personality better.
I agree Doc Savage always felt less risk averse.
Fortnightly (every two weeks), I think is the word you’re looking for. Bi-weekly suggests twice a week.
ETA: This was meant to be a reply to Past :/
Er, no, that’s semi-weekly. Except biweekly is so often confused it’s now both ways in the dictionary. A perfectly-fine word gone useless…it is now wrong whichever meaning you intend!
A fine kettle of fish indeed!
Oddly, only the adjective and adverbial sense have been so corrupted. As a noun, a biweekly is still a publication published every two weeks.
It is indeed fortunate that fortnightly remains immune to the confusion. It just lacks widespread modern usage, and the clear construction of bi- (2) and semi-(1/2) weekly.
I am old enough to remember when biweekly had one meaning, but not old enough to remember fortnightly being in common usage. Seriously, the only place I encountered it as a youth were Shakespeare and the force unit stone-furlong/fortnight^2. (Firkin is sometimes send instead of stone as the mass unit).
Eh, it was an inevitable confusion. People will expect “biweekly” to be to “weekly” what “biannual” is to “annual”.
Just messy design.
Where I grew up, fortnightly is still in very common usage.
Biweekly is twice a week, semiweekly is once a fortnight but you’ll get strange looks saying that rather than fortnightly like normal people.
Also, “biannual” means twice a year. Once every two years is “biennial” but most often I just see people saying “every two years” since there aren’t many things that happen every two years compared to twice a year.
Most often when I hear “biennial” it is referring to plants.
If language is what sets humans apart from other animals—we sure suck at it!
I regard the entire set of words as unusable now. “Twice a week”. “Every two weeks”. A bit longer, but so far as I know, unambiguous—for now.
Unfortunately
going to miss this weekwe’ll be on a… biweekly schedule?… this week. Sorry for the schedule slippage, just been busy over the last couple weekends which is usually when I work on the comic.We still love you.
Alright people, grab torches and pitchforks!
I’ll get the Big Bombs.
We have a problem. Everyone was assembled to get their torches and pitchforks. Mr. Bean was demonstrating how to use a childproof lighter. He dropped it. Unfortunately, the lighter exploded in a ball of flame and ignited the torch fuel. The torches, fuel,pitchforks and barn all went up in flames. We might be able to salvage the pitchforks by getting new handles but everything else is a loss. Unfortunately, the barn was not insured due to previous fires.
Marshmallow time!
that knuckleheaded Mr. Bean had ONE Job, ONE JOB, And He Blew It! Literally! *sighs*
Does anyone else find it’s odd that the other voice comes from Peter’s arm I’m not 100% sure but isn’t that where Mium’s kill switch is located?
Yeah, this does make sense if panel 2 is Mium talking.
I wondered if maybe Peter was talking to Mium via an implant in his arm and the speech bubble was just to show it to us readers – but yes, Mium talking to Peter this way makes more sense.
I have a sneaking suspicion Peter is talking (somehow) to a certain magical stick carried by Kally’s brother. Kally’s brother is the fish he refers to.
Kally’s brother Nathan, the Warden of Ervon, carrier of the Fancy Stick, is very unlikely the “fish”. I think “reel the fish” refers to luring the demon closer to the broken out window. Perhaps Fluffy will grab the demon through the window and take him to the ground before burning away a few centuries of memories. Fluffy fire in the building would endanger Peter.
Yes, I think Peter and Mium want to lure the demon out of the building before Fluffy fights him. And I think it’s not only for Peter’s sake (who certainly has a few different contingency plans how to immediately evacuate the building before it becomes too dangerous, if he’s even still in it himself), because it turned out that there are people in the building that Peter didn’t expect to be there, so he can’t be sure that there wouldn’t be casualties that he would consider not guilty enough to deserve it.
I think its telling that the character list for this page contains “Maybe…Peter… ?”
I think the thing peter stuck on the wall was a projector.
It might have also been a bomblet that shattered the window.
I think “bomb” or “bomblet” is the wrong idea. Bombs makes thinks go “boom” and stuff flies everywhere. I went with rupture device earlier… but I think “shatter device” might be more appropriate: it’s device designed to shatter the object (window?) on which it is placed without making debris fly everywhere: the broken glass falls downwards under gravity once shattered (you can see the shattered material falling in panel 3).
We see Peter use one to shatter a window when escaping the slobbering abomination (evidence that Peter does like to give things charming names!) in Chapter 10 on the 24 August 2017. I love the idea he just carries stuff like this around. At least this time, he’s not in his house.
Yes, it looks like that window shattering device. Thanks for the reference!
But I really liked the idea that we saw Peter placing a projector.
We know that Peter and his uncle are good at “ellipses”. Ellipses is apparently an ability to make things appear where they aren’t and not appear where they are. So perhaps we are seeing a close up of the use of ellipses.
An ellipses is the “…” that you see at the end of certain phrases that don’t need to be continued for us to know what is coming next. An example, “5, 4, 3, 2…”; you know what comes next without anyone having to tell you what it is.
Both of the people whom we have seen specifically use ellipses (Arron Kepler, Peter’s uncle, and Tom, Nathan Summer’s sidekick) seemed to be imperceptible in different ways when they used it, either the person was someone who belongs or nobody was there at all, so my theory is that Elipses is less of a direct invisibility type ability and more letting the target’s mind fill in the blanks… like an ellipses.
This would mean that sometimes it is better to make the target ignore the odd person by saying ‘they are ok to be here’, especially if you have to interact with them as they do something like pass a checkpoint; while other times not recognizing that someone is there at all is better. Or, at least, Tom might have thought it was better when tailing Naomi… right up until she flipped out about the strange nothingness following her.
It doesn’t seem too unlikely that Peter turned that around to get people to ignore the semi-transparency and impossible movements of his fakes. All you have to do is fill in the blanks. There is a person there who seems like they belong and is just as annoying as Peter… it must be the real Peter…
Yes. Peter wanted hard light projectors, and I think we learned why the first time he did this trick. I believe this is the fourth or fifth use, but he’s probably able to get his own now that he’s in the position of the person who provided them in the first place. Also, it’s possible that they’re not single use devices. That said, I think at least one of them was used destructively, so he’s gone through at least one of them even if they are usually a durable good.
I suspect that most of the time Peter uses Ellipses, it’s just to seem like he’s someone who should be wherever he is, possibly in preparation for such an escape if he needs it. And thus, we don’t actually see any indication he’s using it. Also, such usage would get people who could detect the effect used to it being something of a ‘trust me’ effect, so when he uses it as a ‘trust I’m still here’ effect, they don’t necessarily notice a difference.
Maybe he broke the window to lure the demon through it, so it drops to it’s death? Less magic used, so less conspicuous.
The broken window might be to let Kally know where he is since she can’t see him on the monitor. It also might be to let Fluffy know where to where the demon is that needs burning. If I remember correctly, Peter wants this location damaged or destroyed.
Demons don’t seem to be the sorts of creatures that fall to their deaths. Letting Kally and Dragon know where the demon is sounds to me like the more plausible explanation.
Yes, Peter wants this building to suffer a loss, but I don’t think he wants to be so immediately involved with it. Instead, he wants to test his theory that a particular McGuffin he picked up a while back is why he’s had an uptick in his housing explosivity rating recently.
all i can ask is: What The Bayou Is Going On Here?!?!
While I think the layout of the comic is actually quite good, it took me a few passes to understand what is happening, so I will offer my best explanation.
In panel 2 and 3, Peter is breaking a window to outside of the building. The confusing part is this is not the same as the broken window in panel 4. That was already broken and can be seen on Panel 7 of the last page. As it is interior window, it is likely that was an observation window or one way window previously (as it is implied they did some sort of experimentation here).
From there, it seems pretty clear that only the Peter in Panel 2 (and maybe 3) is real, with the rest of them being fake. Peter probably cannot use that level of magic or keep up physically with a demon, but it is probably just an illusion, and whoever is puppeteering the illusion is just moving it out of the way of the attacks in at least a semi-realistic manner (which explains the fake Peter’s comment in the last panel as from the point of view the demon is basically just swinging at empty air so is “good at missing”).
The Peter in Panel 4 is not the same one as the one in Panels 2 and 3 (in 2, it does not seem to be at all transparent and is touching something), and is casting the spell toward the demon (not out the window as panels 2 and 3 might suggest).
It seems likely to me that Mium is puppeteering the illusion. While it could pass for Peter, the look of vague boredom in the face of danger reminds me somewhat as Mium. Peter might be able to control it at the same time, but it sounds like he is giving instructions to whoever is controlling it in panel 2.
As for the golden magic circle, the only other time we have seen that was from Nathan. Than also used it to more or less unmake a demon (August 31st, 2017). Nathan’s magic circle was different, but he is the only other one that has used golden calculation rings (and is the only one that seems to cast his spells with incantations).
My feeling is that in this case it was just part of the illusion, and Peter or the puppeteer did not actually cast anything, he just wanted to panic the demon into chasing him, either to get it away from the people it was murdering earlier, or to lure it outside, or both.
Anyway, great comic, and I thought the action sequence was pretty clear, just took awhile to put together why Peter was through a broken window in panel 4, until I connected it with the broken window in last page.
The way I interpreted it:
Panel 1: Peter has backed off to a wall (or window).
Panel 2/3: Peter blows a hole in the wall, thus creating a “path” (thus “Route is open”)
Panel 4: Peter is casting something IN THE HOLE HE JUST CREATED. I’m guessing this is a connection point (thus “Reel the fish”). Now he just needs the demon to get close enough to it to be ensnared.
Panel 5/6: The demon realises too late Peter is using something he doesn’t recognise and decides to put a stop to it… but it’s too late!!
Panel 7/8/9/10: We know Peter is a master of illusion (like his uncle). Peter of course takes it to the next level: I’m guessing the demon is attacking where he thinks Peter is standing… and of course the Peter standing there is exceptionally good at dodging. Peter on the other hand is probably NOT standing anywhere near the hole in the wall.
Confused? Just think: the ONLY thing Peter needed to be near the wall for was to place the rupture device and cast his spell. After that, he probably moved away while shadow-Peter continued the conversation with the demon. I’m guessing rather than control the illusion (which would be hard), the illusion is programmed to “avoid attacks”, “goad enemy”, and “move towards trap” (all something well within Peter’s programming capacity).
I’m thinking that the Peter in 2/3 (and possibly 4) is completely different than the others, with them not overlapping at the same physical place at all, and may even be on different floors of the building or at least different parts of the same floor at this point. Peter is puppeting the fake to some degree, partially directly and partially via preprogrammed instructions. Either 4 is an illusion as well, though further obscured by the fake spell circle; or 4 is something that real peter does either as part of the puppeting or in some other way as bait for the demon.
Either that or the author forgot to apply the transparency to certain panels or got the ratios mixed up in terms of window to waist size when Peter is standing next to the window. I prefer to think that the pupeting is partially automated and partially taken directly from Peter unless something else points me different.
I think it’s the same floor and room. Peter placed himself between the demon and a window. He activated an illusion of himself and Ellipsesed out of the space the illusion then occupied, went to the window, put a device on to break the window and triggered said device. He then stepped out of the path between the demon and the window. Meanwhile, the demon never noticed that the illusion wasn’t him. Didn’t notice that the magic cast at the window was cast by someone facing away from him. But did notice the level of magic.
I tend to go along with the idea that the illusion’s not being actively piloted by Peter. He may be providing some input, but it’s mostly Peter’s computer aka Mium.
The outside shot in panel 3 means something. I’m not sure what. I keep thinking Peter is in a different building, but that doesn’t seem to fit.
… it means I’m wrong about him keeping the glass from falling outside.
True, but I think you knew that was a bit of a long shot?
Does it strike anyone else that the red portions of this demon are fading? Lighter shade? The knife in particular has gone from a bright red construct to a light salmon?
Thank you for the August 31st, 2017 reference.
I’m suspicious now that this isn’t specific to unmaking a demon, but rather to seizing control of a construct. Nathan’s asking providence to allow him to borrow a sliver of creation. It hasn’t clicked at the time (nor any of the re-reads!) but he might literally be taking control of the construct.
Ah, took me a while to find this: the other time we’ve seen yellow or golden magic rings is November 29th, 2018, where it was called a “direct zone data edit”. I think that color looks closer to this day’s color than August 31st, 2017’s does, but the backgrounds are all different and it may just be stylistic variation over time anyway. The geometric styling of all three circles is completely different though.
My guess? The magic turned the window into a broken window without dropping glass. That’s something of a direct zone data edit effect, but not at all flashy.
This is a hole to let a dragon act without otherwise damaging stuff. It’s possible that the actual glass of the window has somehow been saved for restoration later. That seems like a lot of work for a building that one is trying to get destroyed, but it could be helpful disguising that someone planted something to draw an attack.
That said, interacting with the shitty demon might also point out that someone was here. I’d guess whomever summoned the shitty demon would notice the demon suddenly not being around to anchor anymore…
Yeah, why do I have the feeling that it’s all a magic trick. We know Peter is really good with illusions, and Kally’s even commented on picking up distraction tactics from him. Heck, he’s even taken out agents using Illusions and bombs while treating it as a nothing event.
What’s intersting to me are that symbol and whoever it is that’s talking to Peter. Probably Miko, since Mium doesn’t tend to use that language. Whatever the Demon thinks Peter is doing, he really doesn’t want it to happen. How that goes with breaking the glass is an interesting question though.
I think it is probably Mium. He has had some bad influences lately. The habit of nicknaming people and repeating the nickname over and over too frequently is definitely like Mium.
The one that fits the best to me is Vium (after all he called Dendrin a “prosaic large shit” in response to being called a “poetic little shit”), but I suspect Mium has been somewhat influence by Miko after making her VI.
Mium seems to have been somewhat slipping toward being better modeling humans (for the better and the worse) since integrating the F-5 model (the first time he displayed any form of emotion). Vium is clearly more expressive and animated than Mium (as well as showing things like amusement and curiosity that Mium typically does not show), and for while they were fully integrated, and shortly after that he was integrated with Miko for awhile, before creating Miko’s VI (which is confusingly also Miko).
It could also be Miko working with Mium to imitate Peter, which would explain why it has some traits of all three. While calling it a Shitty Demon fits Miko somewhat, fake Peter is not cursing nearly enough to be Miko in my opinion, and it does not have her tell-tale tendency toward alliteration.
It could also be sort of a script of Peter’s behavior, just being modified on the fly. Peter tends to be vastly more aggravating when he is trying to be (like when he was baiting the IDS Corporate Affairs to use Skyhammer on him), so it is not really that far off Peter’s normal behavior.
But my guess is Mium somewhat imitating Peter being an asshole (Naomi was disturbed at how easily Mium was able to synthesize annoying personalities to mimic an entitled IDS agents behavior when they were disguised as IDS agents a long time ago). As I recall Mium literally broke it down by personality percentages of who he was sampling to build the perfectly annoying personality, so could be doing the same thing here.
The giving of nicknames, and rigidly sticking to them, also feels like Mium.