Comic for Thursday, June 29th
I know that Arron’s habit of slipping into the third person talking about himself annoys some of you, but blame him, not me. He’s an odd chap sometimes. He is a Kepler after all.
Panel 10 is a little odd, because I tried to be slightly too ambitious with body language. The consul is checking with the pink haired girl to verify if she is currently in danger, which is why her first point is somewhat inane, as she’s stalling. As we’ve sort of seen suggestion of, the Family’s representative sort of serves as the Consul’s not-entirely-formal bodyguard.
Arron really isn’t all that suited to diplomacy, but in the context of his peers I suppose he’s really the star student, just because he has a dash of common sense, restraint, and general lack of desire to see the world descend into strife. I reckon he has a pretty fair reason for not following the Consul suggestion of using a telephone, though I also doubt he really considers slipping past her security to be all that big a deal. Arron has a habit of going wherever he feels he needs to… it’s a side effect of his nature, I suppose.
Lastly, I would note as I occasionally do on pages containing expounding exposition, that many of our actors here are, at best, unreliably narrators. In the case of Ryn, well, perhaps the only character less reliably a narrator would be Peter, and well, no one trusts Peter. Ryn also may have developed something of a bias in regard to the IDS, given that he suspects they are trying to kill him. He’s a tad paranoid. Also probably right, about the part where they want to kill him anyway.
Ah, and I should probably note regarding Ryn’s last point, that Resh and Orin (the likely source of any Orish Warmages) have been at war of varying degrees of hotness or coldness sense time immemorial. This has come up before, but as it’s sort of a comic politics trivia point I figured I’d point it out here 🙂
Anyway… it’s been a lot of words. I promise, something blows up next page! 😀
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Diplomacy has been called “The gentle art of sneaking up from behind”. It would seem to me that the Counsul might find the direct approach…..refreshing. 🙂
I beleive the dung has officially hit the fan.
I think the point of dung-to-fan impact was while ago, but unlikely light or even sound, dung-to-fan impact information transmits through the population of sentient individuals in the comic more slowly. I’d posit that a fair bit of the comic has been the story of more and more people realizing that (and how much) dung has come into full fan contact… 😛
Do other readers remember the strange conversation at the top of the page for April 10th? That is, the conversation between the purple-haired woman and the blonde guy? Miss Purple is clearly the one who tried to assassinate Miko as she looks the part and practically admits to such. And it seems terribly unlikely that they work for Bianca as they sound displeased at Rovak doing that. But we have had hints that Miss Purple works for “The Families”. And, from what Mr. Blonde said, it sounds like Miss Purple was the one who stole (and sabotaged) the Bridgepoint research from IDS.
I’m just wondering if Miss Purple has any relation to the woman with heliotrope (purple) hair in panel 9 (or 10, depending if you count the little box with an eye). If you’ve forgotten who she is, we last saw her representing “The Families” (of Malsa) on the page for Thursday, June 15th. She addressed Bianca, saying that they “will no longer allow I.D.S. operations” in Malsa. Figuratively, she told the IDS to take a hike and practically made it a threat.
The girl that tried to killed Miko certainly belongs to the Families (at least as per Miko, and who am I to argue with Miko), but Miko also noted surprise (or at least irritation) that someone from the Families was working with whoever was trying to kill her. I would guess not all the Family powers are aligned on this.
The warmages are only certainly playing the role of mercenary (from reading the April 10th page) so their presence in any faction doesn’t mean too much. It’s quite possible that members of the Families are also playing mercenary. They would have a lot of young, likely very powerful mages, that may or may not be content with current power structure (it’s still not clear exactly to me how the current, non-Family controlled government came into power, but it was implied that they just sort of handed the keys over. That seems unlikely though). If they are raised as weapons like Varkin suggested, they may find peace somewhat distasteful (or at least boring).
Peter mentioned a rogue element to the Families (that Mark is spying on Tyler for), so it’s also possible their hand is in this. Though Varkin accused the girl here of also wanting this to go towards war, and she was the one to throw down the ultimatum, so it’s quite possible the Families are pretty well aligned on wanting to kick the IDS out.
Like always with this comic, it’s staggeringly complex how many fish are swimming around this pond. I make a habit of keeping track of the factions and people, and even that’s not really enough to have more than guesses what’s going on.
For all we know the Families could have gone after Miko/Peter because they were suspecting IDS infleunces.
We are going to need a standardized color wheel for these characters if I cannot get my lazy arse around to putting their names in the comic… 🙂 I would call the one that tried to shoot Miko Miss Blue-ish. 😛
While I’d call the Family’s rep here Pink, heliotrope works (yes, I definitely did have to google it 🙂 , as it ranges from pinkish to purplish.
Looks a bit like RAL 4003, “heather violet”.
The consul’s just not having a good day.
I am not entirely convinced she’s regretting today, really. She seems to be chomping at the bit of a tussle with the IDS for awhile now. Likely she finds Arron (as the moderating presence) slightly frustrating. That, and that he apparently waltzed past her security has to be somewhat unnerving.
An enigmatic one, that one.
Being paranoid does not mean that they are not after you.
True enough, true enough.
We already knew that Arron could probably use Ellipses. While I have not puzzled out the details of it, it seems like it is some sort of pseudo invisibility (or even not so pseudo).
My guess is he might be warning her about the interaction between Kor’s World and a dimension gate detector? I am not sure if the IDS knows that is what caused the earlier attack, but Arron knows it was Kor’s World. If he knows, he would probably warn her about that, being that Kor’s World is his actual enemy as far as I can tell (the rest is just petty squabbling to him).
I am pretty convinced that Ryn is reading off Peter’s script. Probably literally. While he would not need much prompting in motivation, he went from balking marketing executive to string pulling puppet master too fast for Peter to not be involved.
> I am pretty convinced that Ryn is reading off Peter’s script. Probably literally. While he would not need much prompting in motivation, he went from balking marketing executive to string pulling puppet master too fast for Peter to not be involved.
Maybe, but you’re missing Peter’s true talent of correctly getting a feel for players and throwing them in situations where things are likely to go the way he wants. With that said, Peter is far from perfect.
As PastUtopia said, Ryn’s not really happy with the IDS right now, and the IDS has just been shown to be willing to do stupid things to achieve their goals.
Peter seems more concerned about causing enough conflict that nations are less likely to ally with Malsa’s enemies, and more likely to ally with Malsa. Because if it’s just the IDS and a single native patsy versus the rest of the world things would turn bloody fast. I’m talking IDS would be considered Kor’s world level of evil bloody.
Arron’s pulling his dual role for all it’s worth. I wonder what he’ll say.
I’m pretty sure Ryn’s “transformation” is less that and more a fuller exploitation of his talents. His boss seemed 100% certain that Ryn could handle this with flying colors, and Ryn’s demonstrated a great deal of competence in the field we saw him in. While that doesn’t mean that he would have competence elsewhere – marketing could have been his One True Calling – it does lend credence to a notion that he’s quite capable, in general.
He may have LIKED and been COMFORTABLE as “just” a marketing executive (who could single-handedly make a mega-corp grow by leaps and bounds and build an image that rivals that of Disney for brand recognition and popularity), but he seems the sort to rise to any challenge if convinced to accept it.
of note the higher you are in any orginization the more political one hast to act.
as the front man of avon, ryn has to wheel and deal with the best of them. from putting products on the market, to “helping” laws forward that protect avon’s intrests. so he should have at least some idea of politics.
and which is why arron is a “mere” major and section chief. hes apolitical and finds the acts that everyone else is playing at distatful at best.
imo for peter sees politics as another set of data points in behaveral subsets that have several buttons to push to elict nearly set reflexes.
Yeah, it seems like Ryn did not want to engage with the IDS and mad science in the labs, preferring to live the life of yachts, high life, and pretty secretaries that do most of his work for him, but Ikki made it fairly clearly that the “indolent fraud” persona was more Ryn’s willful act than reality. While he is probably lying about having anything to do with the technology (given the previously mentioned willful avoidance of the mad science labs until Ikki foisted them onto him), he seems like the sort that lands on his feet no matter how you throw him.
Compared to Peter whose got analytical intellect, Ryn seems to run off more of an intuitive cunning of self-preservation and advancement. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if Peter was pulling some strings here to use Ryn has a proxy of for chaos.
Ryn’s talent is in understanding people rather than inventing new things. So Ryn is a fraud in that he isn’t some brilliant inventor, but he is still just as smart as they give him credit for. They are just assigning it to the wrong category.
Peter’s talent seems to be in being able to create chaos from order and create exactly the kind of order within the chaos he needs to achieve his goals, or at the very least to help them along. So Peter’s intelligence could be considered the Machiavellian chessmaster type – though he still has some ways to go before he can actually pull that kind of thing off.
I suspect Peter made sure that Ryn would show to the conference and with certain information, but didn’t do anything beyond that – he trusted Ryn would do everything he needed him to do without further prompting.
As I said before: Ryn is a salesman. He *gets* people and he knows exactly what to say and when to get what he wants. Right now he is simply navigating the best path forward for himself and everyone else involved except the IDS – who he already has problems with.
He fears he isn’t a genius because he’s not an inventor, but there are many kids of genius, and his is with people.
Ryn is the sort of fellow whose external confidence is matched only be his internal insecurity. He’s always worried that at some point his whole facade of competency will crumble horribly, not quite realizing that he’s actually almost as good as he says he is.
That said, he has a tendency to be wrong-genre-savvy on occasion when it comes to the cloak and dagger stuff, though he’s a bit closer to his home turf now, if not quite exactly… least he’s the sort the adapts quickly.
From a marketer’s perspective, it was pretty easy to see that the way to counter IDS’s claim that it was stolen tech was for someone else to claim it. And he represented the company with the most believable ability to claim that. He’s there as “the expert” Avon rep, so it was him (and presumably his team), working with the people who have the actual product.
For what it’s worth, given what Peter needed to implement the thing… I’m pretty sure it was within the capability of the supposed joint venture project to implement it. All it required was some lateral thinking that they weren’t likely to do, and possibly a bit of magic expertise that they weren’t expected to have. Except that I think Avon might actually *have* it.
That said, the burning question I have is does Avon have a line of autocasters which apply minimalist artistic personal facial illusions? I understand that would be a different part of the company than we’ve seen. It just seems they should be around there somewhere…
Haha, would make a good in-world-gag. Back when I came up with the name, I didn’t really give thought to real world companies, I don’t think that’d be logistically possible, most 4 letter words are used by someone 🙂
Welcome to being caught up! (I saw some of your comments back on the archive 🙂 )