Comic for Monday, October 9th, 2023
Oct10
on October 10, 2023
at 3:16 am
Ya’ll grabbing pitchforks and starting fires and it’s still Monday. Some places, anyway. We may have to review your pitchfork licenses with that sort of reckless usage.
Anyway, here’s a comic. Next one should be 10/23/23
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Okay people. I smell torches and pitchforks time coming on strong!
Woohoo!
Past,
I’ve mentioned before how I like the new comic format but today’s comic has taken your art to a higher level yet. The larger amount of text dialog has enriched the reader experience greatly. Not being bound by comic frames has apparently granted your creativity a welcomed freedom. Thank you so much for freely sharing your creativity while dealing with real world issues.
Compare and contrast: Kally’s Window Making vs. Naomi’s Window Making (as it seems to be implied here she made that window).
It’s funny because Peter regularly refers to Kally as being destructive (a joke going back to their first mission together seen in Minus Years). But she’s positively restrained in her wanton destruction (until Fluffy is summoned and all hell breaks loose on that front).
I can’t recall blue constructs appearing in the comic previously. However, Kally had no problem restoring the blue wall construct after she and Peter had their look through the window.
Shields are frequently blue. Marc’s are an exception. The box the military used at the border was another.
But even Kally’s barrier was blue, during the “tennis” match. And Arkady’s when running into the goons on their way to see Eliana. Also the special agent with the monster hunters, when facing Ila. And I feel like there are other instances, but I can’t place them, so it might be my brain tricking me …
ETA: Also Rovak’s shield when facing David. And Kally’s elevator platform, when she and Peter went up that building without revealing the red dragon.
Thanks for refreshing my old, failing memory. I was thinking about gold, green and red constructs.
The color of constructs has to do with their stability. That’s not necessarily the same thing as strength, just with how much the interact with the real world, though effectively in most cases is also their strength, as more stable constructs are harder to make and tend to break through lower tier constructs.
In theory, there could be pink/violet constructs at least stable end, but those don’t interact with reality strongly enough for most of the things people use the ethereal constructs for and would be fleeting before breaking down.
From there it goes blue, green, yellow, red.
As we’ve seen in a few cases, at the top end that, things just start looking progressively more real, solidifying into actual lines, gaining shading, and eventually gaining other colors, until the become more and more ‘effectively real’ as far as the world is concerned.
Generally speaking, a construct is harder to create the further down the list it moves, but also gains more flexibility and ability to act and interact with the world.
Most of the time we see casual use of ethereal constructs (shields, umbrellas, etc), it will be blue. Typically green constructs are used for making shapes or attacks, as they are strong enough to break through blue constructs and can be more easily animated and manipulate reality as they start to interact more with physics, while only a handful of people can create the more stable yellow, orange, or red constructs.
If someone like made an umberalla out of a pink construct, it would be easy to make, but there’d be a decent chance rain would just pass through it, and it would break down quickly. It would take very little mana to create, but would take a lot of mana to maintain.
A red construct on the extreme opposite end takes a great deal of mana and effort to create, but very little to maintain, and there’d be no real chance of rain passing through it, as it will interact with reality as if it is far more real.
Thank you.
Now the question here is how much of that applies in this other place they are, because I feel this isn’t quite reality.
Are pink constructs stable enough to be used for something like cheap illusion effects?
In my head, I’m picturing a character who uses pink illusions to make fake bubbles to pretend he’s chewing bubble gum, but I imagine there are lots of potential practical uses for “dirt cheap but line-of-sight obscuring” effects.
In our world, we have the Mohs hardness scale that seems somewhat comparable to your color coded construct strength. There’s an aspect of reality that a lot of people who know the Mohs hardness scale don’t seem to quite grasp.
The scale says that stuff with lower numbers gets scratched by stuff with higher numbers. Talc is a 1, Gypsum is a 2, so rubbing talc and gypsum together scratches the talc, not the gypsum.
However, this is about point interactions at just enough force for one of them to get scratched. Given enough force… send a category 5 tornado full of talc at a diamond wall, and that diamond wall is gonna get scratched by the talc. Sure, the talc will all be pulverized, but the point is the diamond is not immune to the ‘softer’ material, it’s just more resilient than it.
Does something like that apply here? I had the impression that it does, which is why Naomi’s able to do purple magic and affect red constructs.
The purple hurricane Naomi, scratching diamond hard red constructs.
In addition to all of The Sidhekin’s examples, Oriah Nikud’s umbrella is blue. It even looks like this stuff. I think Oriah’s last appearance may have shown someone else using such an umbrella as well.
Good Monday morning, with an awesome update! Well, it’s Monday some places still and morning some places, so that counts, right? I just woke up a few hours ago and it was Monday then so it *must* be Monday morning! That’s just the way stuff works. Logic.
It is still Monday, Sept 9th at 10:19pm on Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean although it is Tuesday Sept 10th at 3:19 here in Central Time Zone.
Love it!
October 23rd?!?! WHAT THE?!?!?!?!
Today’s the 9th. Every two weeks. 9 + 14 yields the 23rd.
See, this is why I keep advocating chaining him to his desk, but NOOOOO, everyone is like, “freeeeeeee Past! Woohoo!”
He’s not an orca. We could get away with this one.
Maybe we should redirect the torches and pitchforks towards those who are causing Past problems. Don’t worry, we could save some here in reserve in case Past needs some incentive.
Past keeps running these successfull Kickstarters which hit stretch goals. Making him do more work. Hard to get too upset when the problem is him making too much money.
I’m not sure about the pitchforks. But torches will get rid of problematic paper money quite nicely.
The pitchforks can be to gather all the paper money into one nice easy pile so you can torch it more satisfyingly.
Heh. Clearly this isn’t your first rodeo. Well done.