Comic for Thursday, November 29th, 2018
Bet you thought you’d load the page to find another excuse of why there was no page… 😉
It was a bit of a stretch, but I did want to get this page up. I ultimately did condense it to half a page, and even then it ended up being a bit of a challenge as it was a bit of a technically challenging page – in the end, things that sometimes take a long time to draw don’t matter that much, but there’s reasons!
Anyway, speaking of drawing magic effects – I should note because I have historically been a little inconsistent with it that canonically, we have seen at least one other person casting magic that had a golden/yellow calculation ring, and that was something Nathan did to disassemble Atter’s red construct. I will also note that Psonic particles is something the IDS and apparently Kor’s World seem to call Mana – likely where the IDS got the term, but they are fundamentally the same thing; the same basic mechanics have… hmm, I guess you could say that based on how different cultures discover and use it, they think of it having a different user interface, even if it’s the same underlying mechanics.
How exactly that magic was able to effect Naomi – who is notoriously immutably to external magic – is something that will almost certainly come up later.
The other thing I will mention as it sort of came up in the comments is that the way the KWS (Kor’s World Soldier) is communicating has changed – he was previously speaking out load to control, but after activating the combat interface, he does not seem to be speaking outload anymore – and is communicating much faster. Peter has noted before that KWS talking is actually pretty rare, and they are notoriously not very chatty when encountered in most circumstances…
I decided to focus on this comic instead of Tyler’s Story Part II, so that’s still coming, probably later this week on Patreon, but I figured between the comic and that, I should get the comic done first. It is mostly written though, so pretty sure it won’t be too long before it goes up.
We have 2 new patrons! Thank you so much! As the travel schedule looks fairly clear in the near future, hopefully we will have lots of content in the coming months. We are at our highest ever patron count for the comic! 🙂
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Ooo…..as Naomi’s already been up against poisoned air (though probably not this particular poison before), I wonder if she has some kind of air cleansing spell now? (At least for the air she’s breathing….)
Still, holding up against a Kor’s World guy until they have to try lethal force…I was right. He better keep hoping it’s enough. 😉
I know that talking about the art is a little bit taboo, but to be honest, the effects on this page are good. The cracks on the floor, the shattering hex shield, the mana effects, it is all pretty impressively drawn.
It is always good to see a fight where we get to both see solid action and learn more about the magic system.
It it just me, or does he look like he is sitting up to fire a red construct rod like an HVW at Naomi?
I wondered what that red rod was. I think you’re right. It’s effectively a high powered spear.
Naomi’s got a Kor’s World Soldier scared in one on one combat? DAYUM!
Naomi is super impressive here, as is the Kor’s World soldier. We now have a much better appreciation for what each is capable of.
However, saying the Kor’s World soldier is “scared” is reading too much into it. The dialog does not suggest this. Can you spot the use of even one exclamation point? He continues to speak calmly, just like on the previous page.
That said, even the Kor’s World soldier is starting to inflect or stress certain words in his report to Central to convey importance and/or surprise. I still find it hard to tell, but perhaps this soldier isn’t an emotionless AI or robot after all.
I think he’s going “Uhh… guys… I think this thing is terrifying and I need to kill it.”
if it wasn’t at least a little worried it would not be trying lethal countermeasures when it wants data.
No matter how confident you are that you are going to win, a native lifeform that just keeps standing up and trying to punching you in the face harder and harder is going to be a little unnerving.
I don’t think he thinks he’s going to lose, but I think that what he is fighting is irregular enough to be “scary”, sort of like a small rabid animal is scary.
“No matter how confident you are that you are going to win, a native lifeform that just keeps standing up and trying to punching you in the face harder and harder is going to be a little unnerving.”
Except, doesn’t that go both ways? So far, the Kor’s World soldier hasn’t tried to do much to Naomi aside from wrap some red magic ribbon around her arm to hold her. However, he keeps getting back up over and over again, shrugging off everything she dishes out. Why doesn’t Naomi seem to be scared or freaking out? Isn’t this Kor’s World soldier irregular enough to unnerve her? No matter how confident a person is of winning, you say…?
I think there are few differences. Naomi probably knows fairly well what the Kor’s World soldier is capable of from Peter. She already fought one, and it went about as well as this time. Comparatively, to the Kor’s World soldier, Naomi is clearly something of an unknown.
Plus, the Kor’s World soldier’s reaction to be unnerved or scared is to consider using a bigger hammer to smash it (Naomi) with, which if you think about it, is pretty much Naomi’s reaction to him.
The Kor’s World soldier is more like the insurmountable mountain to Naomi, more “challenge” than “unnerving” even if it’s an “insurmountable challenge”, while she is more like the rabid chihuahua to the Kor’s World soldier. Not probably truly dangerous, but sort of like… “uh… someone probably needs to put this thing down”.
Just how I’ve taken their three pages of interaction so far, it’s not a lot to go off, so it is mostly based on Naomi’s personality that we have seen so far.
It’s entirely possible that those suits are equipped with a drug that lowers or eliminates fear from the occupant. Wouldn’t surprise me if that guy is incapable of feeling fear at the moment.
Maybe Kor’s World magic feeds on fear? https://www.oglaf.com/withsympathy/
Warning: This particular Oglaf comic is probably safe to view. However, if you are the sort of person who could potentially want to unsee things, Oglaf’s site is probably not someplace you want to be browsing carelessly.
If that sort of thing bothers you, you should not browse oglaf at all. Just because something is safe for work, does not mean it can’t warp your mind. in fact, stop learning right now!
It would be awkward for the building’s personnel if this fight knocks enough of a hole through into another floor so that the gas can spread further…
That would be a problem. I wonder if they – or the building’s designer – even considered such a scenario.
BTW: I’m shocked that a military or, especially, some government facility would go so far as to use lethal gas in their ventilation system – especially in a case where they can’t see what’s going on with security cameras, nor have a report on the situation. (Is all this taking place inside Malsa’s main consulate building?!)
It makes no sense. There’s a huge risk of killing your own personnel or even important government officials. Only if this is a lab experimenting with super dangerous bio-weapons like in Resident Evil would that make sense.
If they go so far as to install gas dispersal equipment in their ventilation, then why not start with knock out gas? Granted, an overdose of knock out gas would be lethal. But at least there’s a good chance that it won’t kill your personnel. Further, they could intentionally overdose the knock out gas if they really have to kill something.
Many labs and records places have an equivalent that is meant to kill fires fast. Isolate, and then flood the area with inert gases. Which unfortunately kills people just as quickly as fires.
While this is certainly true (I recently learned that even the small liberal arts college I went to had such a system in their server room), the gas used is almost always nitrogen or carbon dioxide, neither of which could possibly be considered an “unidentified gaseous substance”.
On the other hand, that leaves open the question of why this system is in place. One interesting possibility is that it is there not as a gas to kill humans, but one to kill computers (i.e. dissolve some key hardware component or something). This would be useful if they were trying to defend against an intrusion by a SMAI, or were experimenting with dangerous AI themselves. Being dangerous to humans could just be a side effect. This would explain why the activation is manual only, and there is no override.
More sophisticated chemicals are at play in more expensive data centers, designed to consume oxygen and not merely replace it with inert gas.
Search for hypoxic fire suppression.
In real life, there is a sweet spot around 15% oxygen where human life is not at any significant risk, but fires are significantly suppressed.
I’ve worked in places where the doors will lock and a hypoxic chemical deploy in response to a fire. However an alarm triggers in advance of the doors locking, and a panic button override is by every door.
All that adds up to, I don’t think we’re looking at a repurposed fire suppression system.
It certainly could a repurposed one. As in, maybe that is what it was installed as.
It does seem like they have removed certain safety protocols and likely added deadlier gases to the mix though, as this seems intended to deal with a wider range range of problems than a fire suppression system. It would not surprise me if also put out fires, because why not? Putting out fires and removing oxygen is just a perk if you are trying to expunge a floor of intruders.
This thread has all been very interesting actually as I had never heard of fire suppression systems like that, but I do not work in IT like half the commentators (and PastUtopia). The whole concept is one of those things where you think “of course that is a thing” considering that sprinkler system would not exactly work for a computer storage room but had never considered it.
A water based sprinkler system would be about as bad as the fire to a computer system. And standard multi-grade or C-only fire extinguisher contains a dry chemical which does suppress and absorb other common chemical fire components it is also rather corrosive to electronics. Also facilities that use inert gas or Halon which was the original gas used have to prominently post that they’re using the gas and the procedures for its deployment.
All fire suppression systems try to remove one leg of the fire triangle which prevents fire. The one issue with suppressing the oxygen side is that if you don’t remove the heat side, when oxygen is restored the fire will reoccur.
As far as the KWS is concerned though, his suit is detecting the decrease in oxygen because of the other gas I may not be tricorder level of detail on which gas it is.
I’d agree – just because KWS’ suit is saying the gas is unidentified does not mean that it’s beyond Kor’s World tech to identify, just that it wasn’t a gas that was on their short list of gases to identify in the field. That would probably mean it’s harmful but not explosive. It would be different if he had been sent on a scientific expedition to study a new planet or something. But he’s a soldier in a computer room; he’s clearly not there just to learn about the environment on Palindra.
I just want to note that removing the heat side of the equation is very easy when you don’t have an active exothermic reaction. Time will do it all on its own.
Help me out here. If you don’t have an exothermic reaction, you don’t have a fire, yes? Or you are referring to the situation above where there was a fire, but is now suppressed via hypoxia?
Humans are impatient. The two situations where such systems are common are in server rooms and in archival rooms (museums, libraries, financial document storage, etc).
Those types of places have certain things in common. The risk of damage from water and caustic chemicals has already been mentioned. Climate control is also common, mostly temperature and humidity. If the air conditioning hasn’t shut off, you’ll have more than just time helping.
The server rooms in familiar with though, power gets cut automatically in case of a fire.
Well, yes, fire is kind of DEFINED as an exothermic reaction (amongst other requirements). If it doesn’t generate heat, then it’s not a fire. Catch-22: no heat, reaction stops (i.e. the heat supplies the energy for the reaction to continue).
As for fire triangles – gah!!! Nope: that’s the OLD way of thinking of it: removing one of HEAT-OXYGEN-FUEL misses the most common way modern suppression systems work: by interfering with the CHAIN REACTION that cause fire to propagate.
Traditionally the easiest to remove is OXYGEN (displace the oxygen with an inert gas, like carbon dioxide).
HEAT is harder to remove: Tyler could probably do it with magic, but in the real world, water is one of the few things that does this (it has an exceptionally high specific heat capacity) (Note: water ALSO helps remove oxygen, because it converts to a gas, which then displaces the oxygen!) (Note: carbon dioxide fire extinguishers ALSO remove heat: because as the carbon dioxide cools as it expands… but the main way CO2 works is by displacing the oxygen).
The FUEL can be removed: but not in the way you think. In a real fire, firefighters do try to move any fuel NOT on fire away. As for fuel ON fire: coating the fuel in something (like an inert foam for example) is an effective way of separating the fire from the fuel.
If you interfere with the CHAIN REACTION that is fire, then you’ve probably introduced something like a Halon, which in effect captures free radicals (bad for a fire, since it is a free radical chain reaction), in effect slowing down the reaction until there simply isn’t enough going on for the chain reaction to be maintained.
The scene with Naomi and the KWS is currently taking place the lower levels of a PACT facility, specifically their cold floor (server storage), much like the one we saw them infiltrate previously where they encountered Tyler attacking the same facility. This is something I don’t mind mentioning/don’t really consider a spoiler, as the reason its hard to tell has more to do with sparse backgrounds, the fact that most factions have similar looking minions (this is intentional, but doesn’t make it less confusing) and juggled plot lines than any plot obfuscation.
I would suspect that even by PACT facility standards, having a lethal purge protocol (or, to say, a purge protocol at all) would be considered rather extreme, and probably was not detailed in the employee handbook as such… Of course, while this PACT facility looked like a fairly normal office complex, normal office facilities are not typically being infiltrated by Kor’s World.
For what it is worth, I got that. And the red strip on the wall even reminded me of the last group of PACT chuckle-fucks discussing how fucked they were when Tyler was knocking on their gate.
It does seem appropriate given that PACT is basically corporations and while they seem to have a paramilitary branch, most of their shot callers are basically office beuacrats who don’t have the cunning to fight their way out of a paper bag if it can’t be bribed, obfuscated, complained, or powerpointed into submission.
So this Kor’s world goon is packing a lot of power. Like M.Y.M. F10 levels of power. Also Naomi confirmed to be cute Hulk. And no one like dealing with angry Hulk.
Black Widow doesn’t seem to mind dealing with angry Hulk in the current Marvel movies. She certainly seems to like dealing with Hulk. And Hulk is always angry.
Just saying, so you know.
Umar the Unrelenting does…
^_^
Epic page. Apparently Noami is one of those anime characters who can keep powering up indefinitely while fighting. But even so, she is clearly outmatched. I mean, look at all those calculation circles in the last panel. That makes Illa’s 5 circle tactical cannon look like a crude musket.
My guess for the next page is that the purge eventually knocks Noami out, and then the Kor’s world soldier detains Noami for questioning. There is also the possibility of Muim interfering, but for some reason I don’t think I’m wrong. No matter what happens, I am left confused about what Peter’s plans were for this encounter, or if he completely missed the possibility of KWS showing up, or if he assumed Muim would deal with it if it did.
It does seem like Naomi is out gunned here, but I am more convinced than ever that Naomi is not just a Booster. The fact that a Kor’s World Soldier is basically saying “what the fuck is this?” makes it pretty clear she is not anything so ordinary.
It does beg the question if he right. Naomi is a genetically engineered human. She really might be a genetically engineered weapon, which would explain some of her odd habits, like sleeping off bullet wounds and a not entirely healthy enthusiasm for fighting.
I get the impression the Malsan genetic engineering is a bit of a lottery. In a sense, all the genetically engineered mages are intended to be amazing, but they don’t have control over the end result, and there’s enormous variance in the combat ability the person ends up with. Naomi happens to be one of the lotto winners.
I’m not convinced Naomi isn’t still just boosting. While she is certainly capable of more than just boosting, her primary approach to difficulty is to boost more. Though, now that I think about it, she has demonstrated basic knowledge of how to disrupt eidos constructs during the magic tennis game against Kally.
edit: It occurs to me that basic dispelling involves flooding an area with magic. Perhaps simply pouring out power into the nearby area is sufficient to apply a form of anti-magic defense around oneself. While it’d probably be inefficient, it seems like something Naomi might do as a crude brute force defense.
MYM did mention to Ila that ‘the purple gorilla’ beats him regularly.
And we all thought that he was referring to Mario kart because of the context…
This is indeed the most basic form of anti-magic, and exactly what Naomi did to break Kally’s Eidos Form wall during the airball match – she just blasted a ton of somewhat directionless mana into the ball, causing it to act sort of like a magic sandblaster – magic effects are lot easier to “erase” with interference than reality, as they are sort of just drawn on top. One of the indications of a mages power is how deeply they can engrave their magic effects. The more deeply or completely a change is commited to Eidos, the harder it is to erase like this though. That said, controling formless mana to condense it enough for something like that isn’t something most mages can do, as it naturally disperses pretty quickly. Particularly the further from the caster mana is, the less a mage would have control over it (if they had any control over it at all, most don’t consider mana something they control, they consider it something they use).
Nullcasters have somewhat more refined techniques, but tend to rely on similar overall principle. Ila and Kally both were surprised by Mium’s ability because he was able to utterly expunge magic effects with relatively little power, as well as erase calculations almost as soon as they started – much faster than a typical null caster (and null casters themselves aren’t really ‘typical’) – targeting the calculations themselves is something that mostly only Nullcasters do.
Mana is sort of the ‘passive’ defense against magic, increasing a mage’s interference of magic from just their own form to the area around them – we saw a similar thing when Rovak was trying to generate explosions near Tyler, but the magic was simply failing without any active interference by Tyler, so he had to blow up the area around them instead.
Is Mana in a localized area something that is a limited resource? Or is it basically Limitless? The reason I ask is one way Naomi could constantly be boosting her own power capability is because she is constantly generating mana keyed for her own use and that is what her special little thing is. Both Peter and Mium have separately indicated that they don’t know her full capacity. if the manager that she generates for herself cannot be used by other people they may not actively since it even though it’s made out of the same stuff
IIRC Mana is something that a person possesses as it has been said (in comments at least) that the amount of mana a person has determines the strength of spells they can use even with an autocaster.
There may also be an amount of ambient mana that people can manipulate (not sure if this has been specifically stated/denied), but the primary source for ones magic is from themselves.