Comic for Wednesday, March 18th, 2020
Sorry for the delay folks. Page took a little longer to draw than I expected… sort of rusty when it comes to pages that aren’t just people talking I guess. Also, as usual, busy. Unfortunately my work hasn’t been shut down by the goings-on of the world, though it’s starting to become a bit of a shit show despite the fact that you’d think it’d barely be impacted… lot of people suddenly not working for various reasons, travel cancelled, schedules in chaos, you know how it goes. Plus all the wankers that normally spend all day in meetings doing god knows what are suddenly no longer occupied with their normal bullshit and are out to waste the rest of our time. Freeing middle-management lackies from the meeting-room-shaped-cages might be the single biggest productivity hit yet.
Hope ya’ll are safe and healthy. Stay inside. Read webcomics. #notbiased.
I’ll see what I can do to at least keep the weekly schedule.
As for the actual comic…
Arkady’s reaction is about 7 shots too late, but I guess it does help in the last few panels anyway. Naomi has very fast reactions, but she prioritized shoving Arkady over dodging herself; last time she got shot she went a little… crazy, but that time she was hurt a lot worse as she wasn’t really boosted much when she got hit, and it was from a much more powerful rifle. Boosting doesn’t heal something like Rovak or Mium might heal from being shot, but taken to the extreme it can partially recover and generally mitigate the damage, though as we saw there, not completely or even entirely effectively.
Despite the accusations that were are leveled about things blowing up around Peter, this time Peter wasn’t even particularly close, and things still blew up. See, it’s not always his fault.
Throwing a grenade at mages can obviously be a bit dangerous; even set with a very short “fuse” (which is dangerous on it’s own) some mages have reaction speed to use magic to repel it before it gets even half way to them (throwing a grenade at a mage like Kally or worse yet Ila would be almost entirely like just sticking it in your own mouth). The obvious counter to this is another mage or nullcaster. But generally speaking well armed or experienced people that are hunting powerful mages have better armaments for the job than a grenade. That said, explosives are always a cheap way to try to level a fight when you might otherwise not have tools for the job… just a dangerous one. In this case they got a bit lucky on the timing, though Naomi isn’t particularly good at the sort of magic that would make it a particularly bad idea.
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This looks to be entirely too shooty for how I think several people at that meeting expected it to go.
The linked page is not linked in the archive, FYI.
Odd, fixed. Looks like it didn’t have a chapter assigned.
LOL. Did someone bring guns and grenades to a fist fight?
At least from the sequence of splits… Naomi runs out of elevator and sees the grenade. I’m guessing this makes her angry with and extra side of punches… did Naomi punch the grenade?!? SQUEEEE!!!!!
Yes, the world has gone all weird. Everything is cancelled… except work… well unless you work in the travel industry (for some, the word is not cancelled: it’s redundant: ouch). Where I am there was no fresh bread or flour in the local supermarket… unless you wanted the gluten free stuff… lucky for me there were still wraps (so still eating well) (funny how the gluten free stuff didn’t get hoarded). Toilet paper is currently GOLD. Tissues are SILVER. Hand sanitiser and P2 masks might as well be UNOBTAINIUM. At least now if you want to clear a room, all you need to do is cough…
Naomi might not be good at the minds of magic that redirect grenades in midair.
On the other hand, she’s also physically a lot faster than most mages, and her fighting style is all about getting up close and personal.
So yeah, maybe she can’t necessarily send the grenade back before it explodes*, but she can definitely get outside the lethal radius, and get close enough to the attackers that they don’t want to use any more grenades because they don’t want to blow themselves up.
*especially if taken by surprise and depending on how long the grenade’s fuse has to go or if it’s impact detonated. If she were expecting grenades, she might actually be able to catch them and throw them back, if they’re not some kind of smart weapon that would go off when she tried that.
Edit: Closer review indicates that Naomi is in the fireball for this first grenade, but I expect that she’ll probably be fine since she was boosting with the expectation of combat, saw the grenade before it exploded, and the grenade had to take down Arkady’s barrier before it could get to her, which had to have reduced the impact on her at least a little.
She’ll probably be upset about the grenade, though. Poor bastards.
Agreed Naomi is clearly behind the explosion, and I think her boosting would give her the ability to survive.
The real question, from a world building stance, is the degree boosting covers possessions, such as her clothes. I guess we’ll see if the next few comics have a lot of strategically places action hair swirls and foreground objects.
I think it varies. We’ve seen that Rovak’s clothes got *entirely* vaporized when Ila unleashed the red beams of destruction on him, and he is capable of boosting in addition to instant regeneration, but we also know that clearly overwhelmed his boosting power as it did “kill” him, he just instantly regenerated.
Mium’s clothes were significantly damage from fighting Rovak, but only a bit tattered all things considered. But we still aren’t sure if Mium is technically boosting, though it looks like he probably is.
Naomi has gotten through a few fights with her clothes more or less unharmed. We’ve also seen the “purple lines” start to form on things she’s holding (like the rebar piece she stabbed Otte with).
All that aside, clothes don’t really get burnt away by an explosion that easily, and I still think she was at least partially shielded from it by shield. Even without boosting she’d probably mostly be fine. A grenade is more dangerous for shrapnel than the fiery part of the explosion I think.
Gets shot -> “I’m going to go punch them.”
Naomi logic at it’s finest.
Also:
13 Panels -> “Sorry for the delay”
PastUtopia logic at it’s finest.
Were they after Arkady or after Naomi.
If they were after him, then grenade or not, I doubt they are ready for Naomi.
If they were after Naomi, then I **really* doubt that they are ready for Naomi. And how did they know where to find her?!
I suspect this is something they walked into. Whoever the target was, neither Naomi not Arkady were it.
Also I’m not convinced that Peter wasn’t involved here, at least tangentially. Ignore what the author says. What would he know about what Peter is involved in?
I agree that they weren’t after either of them. If they just rigged the elevator to blow, they’d have killed Arkady and maybe Naomi (from what I can tell, if you hit her before she is boosted she is essentially mortal). At this point I think they are likely just pissing her off, though maybe they’ll blow up the walk way (not that it would kill her if she fell, but she has struggled with flying so far…).
My guess at this point is they were trying to break into Eliana’s tower, and they just figured they’d blast whoever showed up in the elevator and get back to it.
Maybe they were trying to sabotage/blow up Eliana’s tower rather than have a straight fight though? She hasn’t been that impressive so far, but if she’s a tactical mage, she should be pretty strong.
So, they broke into the skyway. I think I see the hole in the wall in the grenade panel …
Yeah, I think you’re right: They are about to break into Eliana’s place. Through the skyway.
And I just noticed they speak Malsan, so there’s that.
As the eternal pessimist: This assumes “they” (whoever “they” may be) are breaking in, and not leaving, by the skyway.
If they were leaving it’s more likely the one in the broken skyway window would be facing the other way for quick escape rather than turning back to face the interlopers.
Additionally we believe Eliana & Ila are somewhere on the other side of that door, depending on time sequencing with cutting Mium seems likely to be able to be back fully operational (and aside from Ila being there Eliana knows Mium from him liking to sit on her tower roof). Also there wasn’t some kind of massive noise making Naomi wary before the elevator door opened.
So I think these folks being on their way in makes more sense then them being on the way out.
Agreed. Naomi and Arkady are at best targets of opportunity and worst witnesses to be silenced.
Which does bring up opportunity cost. This operation is no longer going unnoticed. Then again, I’m not sure any method of dealing with Naomi ‘reasonably’ won’t make news, other than long range snipers. Which last I checked are hard to use in buildings.
“ready for Naomi” implies something like skyhammer.
and I am not sure THAT would do it.
Pretty much exactly this.
If they were after Arkady, then “redy for Naomi” would mean “a quick and fast getaway mechanism.”
If they were after Naomi, then “ready for Naomi” would mean “changing their minds before she saw them.”
I doubt they were after Naomi. Ferrus’s point that maybe they weren’t after Arkady, either, has something to it, but then their seeking to break into Eliana’s tower makes very little sense, too, unless they expected to get in and out without confrontation at all!
They probably don’t expect Eliana to be there. All the other mages are meeting in the council. Remember the other families commenting it was weird he didn’t bring Eliana?
My guess is this is a botched op from someone that thinks all the powerful mages are busy (which strongly implies Rogue families, as they’d know that everyone was supposed to be at the meeting).
They might expect some staff and lesser mages, but probably assumed no one important and powerful would be there.
I think what it takes to be ready for a person greatly depends on what their goals are. We have hints in the direction of their goals, but we don’t really know them.
For example, I feel I’m ready for Peter and Naomi to drop by if the impossible happened. Since my goal would be to be on relatively good terms with them, for me, my being ready means I’m dressed and I have apple cider and cookies.
We assume that these people had some kind of a militaristic goal, given their methods. But if they thought they were ready for Naomi, I think it’s likely that they’re Naomi’s suicidal and highly masochistic fan club. In that case, they were absolutely ready for her: they had a method of pissing her off that wouldn’t cause anyone long term damage, and no hope of really doing much else.
I do tend to agree with Ferrus, it seems likely that this is a rogue families operation. That said, it wouldn’t be the first time that the rogue families leaked something to the IDS if it was instead Sophie’s crew
Dressed? Right. I always forget the pants.