Comic for Thursday, February 21st, 2019
So we still have a buffer of 2, haven’t quite had a chance to push it to 3 yet, but at least we aren’t losing it. I also have the next check of Tyler’s story… soon. Which isn’t really great as I intended to have it ready on Monday, and by some freak accident it’s now Wednesday, and I can only assume I am being relentlessly hunted by time portals that eating chunks of my day when I don’t pay attention. On the bright side, it’s a good bit longer than the last section 🙂
If you have a sketch request for February, get it in soon!
I’m going to be honest here, drawing the red-monster thing is really out of my league for the time I allot for it, so I’m just going to have to have to take my word for it that it’s supposed to look pretty weird 😉
I talked about this a bit on the last comic, but this generation of Family mages don’t have a whole lot of battlefield experience, and when they do, it’s usually pretty one-sided. Camilla definitely has the most, but almost exclusively on her own. Further, what the actual ranks between them are is – i.e. who is actually in command – is pretty hard to determine. Technically it’s probably Camilla, but given that she’s not really on active duty, that would probably leave Elliana in charge, but she’s not exactly suited for that. All in all, considering how multiple Family mages on the battlefield ends up, that’s probably actually Rule 1, and it probably gets violated a lot 😐
While the Consul may have had political motivations for making Tyler a Mage-Commander, she also may have had a point, as when it comes to the whole “having their shit together” he is a few steps ahead of these mages, even most of them have more combat training than Tyler does, that combat training is more why they can work together to summon a giant Ethereal Construct, not so much in the whole not acting like a moron department.
That said, quite a few of the previous generation Family mages have quite a bit more experience when it comes to warfare.
Loading ...
Panel 1 – Miss Summers dose not have a good record with sniper fire, translation she has been shot by a sniper before. Also MYM has identified possible sniper(s). Perhaps the same people that took a shot at Nathan?
Panel 4 – This sounds suspiciously like EF8 posibly indicating the prototype android project was closely aligned with Elianas family. I think that Magnolia(the commenter) was on to something. I think that EF8 is built with a lot of Elianas genes maybe when he was hiding out after the initial program was destroyed he hung around his “family home”.
Final panel – Is this the same general Yerdam shown in named in Friday-July17-2018 and best shown Monday-August-27-2018 if so he manages to get by with clean shaven avatar while he supports a beard on the battlefield.
p.s. Friday-July17-2018 link is missing from archive
Friday July 17, 2018 is also missing from my calendar. I have a Friday, July 17, 2015. That said, there’s something a little funny with my calendar, as it seems there were two October 10ths in 2018, and they weren’t on the same day of the week. And *neither* of them match either of the October 10th, 2018s in the archives for this site, so something very strange seems to be going on with my calendar. I also have a Friday July 27, 2018, which mentions a General Yendam. Is that the page you’re looking for? The general is also shown on Thursday, August 23, 2018.
I don’t think that Bluebeard and General Yendam are the same person. In addition to the difference in facial hair, the hair style is a bit different, and I think their faces look slightly different – but that could just be my mind playing tricks on me due to the lack of facial hair. Also, Bluebeared is Mage-Commander; I would think that if he were General Yendam, he would either have been referred to as General or Mage-General. Probably the former, as someone holding two similar titles like that could be confusing. I could easily see the Malsan military having a Mage-title and title track up to but not including General, or maybe a slightly lower rank, asserting that anyone who makes it to that point gets enough clout it doesn’t matter whether they’re a mage or not, or you’re a mage or not, if they tell you to do something and you’re not at least their rank, you better hustle.
> That said, there’s something a little funny with my calendar, as it seems there were two October 10ths in 2018, and they weren’t on the same day of the week. And *neither* of them match either of the October 10th, 2018s in the archives for this site, so something very strange seems to be going on with my calendar.
What happened here was that I accidentally called October 1st the 10th when I posted it:
http://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-monday-october-10th-2018/
You can see that I’ve updated the actual comic, but the URL don’t update when I fix it.
So a few days later when a comic was posted on the actual 10th:
http://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-thursday-october-10th-the-real-10th-2018/
I just called it the real 10th. Technically it was posted on the 11th at site time because that was in unbuffered days and you know things things happen stop looking at me like that. 😛
My apologies. Sometimes I go for a ridiculously obtuse form of humor. I did actually remember the October 10th thing… but didn’t remember *which* October 10, until I saw the listing in the archive while trying to find the General Yerdam person…
Yes its Friday July 27, 2018, where General Yendam is named with title, also with the missing archive link. I chose Monday, Aug 27 2018 because it had the best hologram pic.
I’m betting that Bluebeard is Yendam because he is obviously the man in charge on the battlefield though it is possible that Malsa has an additional layer of brass between the battlefield commander and civilian leadership like Sec of Defense and Theater Commander the sense I got was that Malsa is little larger than a city state and that many layers would be unnecessary. I was hoping for confirmation from Past Utopia.
Also when Ila says don’t count on Mym he is busy, its from experience. I suspect EF5 is assigned to Miko and he is using every spare cycle to repair EF8 (from nerve gas damage) to protect Peter.
ps a few seconds to late to reply to Past
My guess is that Bluebeard doesn’t necessarily outrank the others – he just happens to have actual multi-mage combat experience so knows what the heck he’s doing, and has taken charge because he has the confidence to do so. It’s even possible in my mind that Eliana outranks him.
That having been said, if I’m right… this is the sort of thing that helps one get promoted, assuming they do it right. The ability to take command when you know what to do and the others don’t is incredibly valuable, especially when the others are known for being strong willed individuals.
> p.s. Friday-July17-2018 link is missing from archive
I think I am misunderstanding. Can you clarify? I have Comic for Thursday July 19th, 2018 here.
Friday would have been the 20th, then, right? And I don’t usually update on Fridays? I think I’m being confused, but need this spelled out for me a bit more so I can look into this.
p.s. I was few seconds to late posting the reply above that contains the clarification.
Sorry I cut and pasted again its Thursday July 27 2018 not Friday
Fixed! Thanks for bearing with me here.
What happens is if I forget to assign a page to the Chapter/Comic it doesn’t get auto added to the Archive despite appearing chronologically.
I do this fairly often because I’m not very good at clicking checkboxes, but usually fix it before it gets lost.
Appreciate the help!
Ah yes, someone not too stunned/shocked to be reasonable.
How long does he last, hmm? 😉
Panel 6: “She’s not going *to* distract it forever”
Fixed, thanks 🙂
Penultimate panel: “I already told all of *you* to”
I totally want to change my santa hat vote to atters monster. And not a giant hat either. A normal sized hat perched waaaay up on top of one of its horns.
So confirmation that Ila is H.V.W. capable. Which makes Atter a might bit more scary. Also YEAH, someone needed to take command. These folks aren’t as good at tactics as I thought.
Most of them are highly powerful mages who I expect would be deployed with a handler. They probably don’t work together that much and are probably treated as human support weapons.
We saw this when the Council ordered basically one mage per facility. It looks like even if there were issues it was the right approach. The training apparently doesn’t cover teamwork in depth.
My guess: That a mage is registered, doesn’t mean they have military training, just that they have combat worthy magic (i.e. military utility). I’m pretty sure Tyler doesn’t. I don’t even know if Camilla has military training; if anything this update suggests she hasn’t, as Arkady and Ashian, who coudn’t fight their way out of a blanket fort, are singled out as having the most experience supporting her! 🙂
I read that differently than you, I read that Arkady & Ashian had most experience magically working with Camilla, not most experience supporting anyone in general.
Possibly I was overly influenced by them being her fiance & brother and was thinking about magic & “mental congruence” (though with the way the system is it might be just plain old working together rather than something more mystical).
No, we read it the same way: They have the most experience magically working with Camilla. But, to me at least, that suggests that Camilla has more experience magically working with civilians, which further suggests that she hasn’t had much military training.
Just suggestions though; it’s not as if it’s spelled out.
“Most experience supporting Camilla” is not the same as “lots of experience supporting Camilla”.
Specifically they might be the most experienced in that area available on the field at the moment.
“Most experienced” and “very experienced” are somewhat related, but not synonyms.
Where did you read “lots of experience” and “very experienced”? That’s nothing I’ve written. :-\
No, those were my words.
I was pointing out that being the most experienced present isn’t the same has having a lot of experience.
I don’t think we disagree, and I wasn’t trying to contradict your points.
If high powered mages working together works much better with familiarity, then it would seem reasonable that the biggest names in the military would have a few people they usually worked with. Eliana and the Doll of Destruction would likely have completely distinct support teams. Eliana’s support team would tend to stay relatively close to her while on duty – not necessarily tagging right with her, but their work assignments wouldn’t be too far apart. So it’s likely that the team here apart from any who were randomly assembled are from Eliana’s support squad, so they have less experience working with Camilla than the average Malsan military mage.
Considering that Camilla, Arkady, and Ashian are fairly young, it seems fairly reasonable that three people who grew up with magic could have more experience working together than most mages in the military, when the senior of the three has only been in the military for a year or two past just enough time for her to make a major name for herself. It therefore feels reasonable that they would have the most experience working with Camilla… especially since Arkady and Ashian are also in the military, and could easily be on her standard support team at this point.
I doubt Ashian & Arkady would be normal members of a squad for Camilla due to the fact that sometimes orders on the battlefield work better without strong emotional attachments, as in “ignore the most important person in the world in danger and leave life for them as chancy and take out the threat that’s going after everyone” isn’t something people expect will have a strong success rate in being followed.
I know US military has rules against fraternization which I assumed were primarily this, and maybe a little jealousy if working from assumption of imperfect gender balance (which adjusted with appropriate non-hetero ratios would be even worse if non-hetero ratio was equal between genders as it’d remove more of the scarcer partners).
That’s why I was just assuming it was familiarity/time spent together. Possibly even magical training together.
The more I think about the whole “mana interference” thing, the more I can see how the magical equivalent of teamwork practice could be real important if doing separate tasks in one area to avoid having the sum be less than the parts.
My guess that they could possibly be on her support team is from having read various other works with “mana interference”. Depending on how significant that is, it’s possible that groupings that can work together are valuable enough to tolerate groupings that would otherwise not work for the reasons you mentioned. And sometimes getting around “mana interference” all but *requires* groupings that would otherwise not work for the reasons you mentioned.
That is, if the emotions of the mages have to mesh just right to avoid mana interference, it could be that, apart from a few individuals who have better abilities to avoid interfering with other people’s magic, anyone who could avoid interfering with another caster’s magic would be close enough to that other person to invoke the rules that exist in the real world to reduce the chances of teammate emotions getting in the way of doing the job that needs to be done. Also, those people who can work with a broader base of mages, due to their ability to adjust their fields to match the other casters’ fields, would tend to get promoted, as would those who understand their ability to direct the other mages on the battlefield into a cohesive strategy is more important than using their magic that would interfere with the other mages.
And if this sounds to you like efforts to lampshade constructing a mage team that would not be put together in real life, then you have a good sense of this stuff. It’s absolutely that kind of a lampshade. My point is there are precedents for it.