Sneaking
4th Aug 2016, 11:01 PM
in Season One - Part 6: Edison Endgame
Author Notes:
User comments:
5th Aug 2016, 2:35 AM
If I were giving Doc here some credit... I'd guess that the monologue is an example of Nestor messing with the people who are failing to stealthily creep up on him. Apparently he's a very old magic user who has been doing high level polydimensional magic shenanigans for much longer than Mercy has (probably) been alive. How much would you be willing to bet that he hasn't been watching her since long before she got this close, and probably continuously since her arrival at the Starry Wisdom temple? Bonus points if Mercy has a pretty-close ETA in Nestor's time-line planning charts, last revised years ago.
Doc and I have this fun game going though, where I point out and mock his abuse of clichés and he tweaks my nose back by suggesting and even abusing some worse ones. So, according to the rules of this game I'm not supposed to officially give him that much credit. Accordingly, I've gotta agree that it's pretty embarrassing that the first main boss is reading from the Evil Overlord *don't* instructions and doing it anyway.
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Doc and I have this fun game going though, where I point out and mock his abuse of clichés and he tweaks my nose back by suggesting and even abusing some worse ones. So, according to the rules of this game I'm not supposed to officially give him that much credit. Accordingly, I've gotta agree that it's pretty embarrassing that the first main boss is reading from the Evil Overlord *don't* instructions and doing it anyway.
5th Aug 2016, 3:32 PM
Time for old Prof to go back and highlight Chekov's gun (or, in this case, amulet).
Looking back at this page, panel 1, we see that Ghoul has warding, probably scry-baffling.
This page shows the creation of various charms and wards. It is very believable that similar anti-detection is in place here.
This page, panel 3 shows Sophie with a glowing amulet. What do you suppose its purpose might be?
Fromm Nestor's point of view, the only current impediment to his plan is the group of humans outside trying (unsuccessfully) to get inside. He literally needs to wait it out and he wins.
Also, to him the return of entities from beyond time and space is truly a joyous event. He wants to share it with the people he DOES know are there - the witches.
If you want to really go back a bit and see why Nestor is a little off kilter, let's look back at the end of the prologue, where he had to move up the timeline.
There is a place to get a bit of a glimpse of what his ORIGINAL plan was like here (WARNING: old art). That is a remixed version of part of the pre-reboot version of AB.
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Looking back at this page, panel 1, we see that Ghoul has warding, probably scry-baffling.
This page shows the creation of various charms and wards. It is very believable that similar anti-detection is in place here.
This page, panel 3 shows Sophie with a glowing amulet. What do you suppose its purpose might be?
Fromm Nestor's point of view, the only current impediment to his plan is the group of humans outside trying (unsuccessfully) to get inside. He literally needs to wait it out and he wins.
Also, to him the return of entities from beyond time and space is truly a joyous event. He wants to share it with the people he DOES know are there - the witches.
If you want to really go back a bit and see why Nestor is a little off kilter, let's look back at the end of the prologue, where he had to move up the timeline.
There is a place to get a bit of a glimpse of what his ORIGINAL plan was like here (WARNING: old art). That is a remixed version of part of the pre-reboot version of AB.
5th Aug 2016, 1:29 AM
Let's start with the slings and arrows:
-Stealthily creeping up shining six flashlights towards the enemy, hoping the enemy doesn't see the lights directly or notice the extra light. My response to that is to quote Wonderella, "Glowing eyes don't DO anything! They're like the bleached assholes of superpowers, people!"
-That blue circle in the last panel really looks a lot like music notation, so much that I'm wondering how you're supposed to play it and what it sounds like.
-Time for moreviolence tragedy to begin.
-Is this overconfident villain monologue just before their defeat? There's borrowing from classics, and then there's beating a dead horse. You're trying to hit rotting, chunky sludge that has already partially turned into soil here, and there hasn't been a distinct horse corpse shape to any of the remains for many millions of previous beatings. I dare you to make this slightly less boring, and have Nestor win, just for that.
Now for the roses:
-Seriously, that magic circle looks like it has functional, semantic content. I actually quite like it, that's a huge improvement over 'magic circles' which some art student used art student-logic on to make 'pretty' and/or 'cool' without considering that the people using that stuff to do magic wouldn't be, under most systems and expectations of magic, drawing pointlessly pretty pictures.
-The ziggedy-zaggedy green curves that call out to the poorly-misused or inadequate mad science equipment are appropriately suggestive of where the trio is approaching. They also suggest one of the likely sets of tricks Mercy might use to win this (reference #112).
-What's not to like about someone forcing lies to stop being lies? It's one of the best suggestions in the poetic justice handbook.
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-Stealthily creeping up shining six flashlights towards the enemy, hoping the enemy doesn't see the lights directly or notice the extra light. My response to that is to quote Wonderella, "Glowing eyes don't DO anything! They're like the bleached assholes of superpowers, people!"
-That blue circle in the last panel really looks a lot like music notation, so much that I'm wondering how you're supposed to play it and what it sounds like.
-Time for more
-Is this overconfident villain monologue just before their defeat? There's borrowing from classics, and then there's beating a dead horse. You're trying to hit rotting, chunky sludge that has already partially turned into soil here, and there hasn't been a distinct horse corpse shape to any of the remains for many millions of previous beatings. I dare you to make this slightly less boring, and have Nestor win, just for that.
Now for the roses:
-Seriously, that magic circle looks like it has functional, semantic content. I actually quite like it, that's a huge improvement over 'magic circles' which some art student used art student-logic on to make 'pretty' and/or 'cool' without considering that the people using that stuff to do magic wouldn't be, under most systems and expectations of magic, drawing pointlessly pretty pictures.
-The ziggedy-zaggedy green curves that call out to the poorly-misused or inadequate mad science equipment are appropriately suggestive of where the trio is approaching. They also suggest one of the likely sets of tricks Mercy might use to win this (reference #112).
-What's not to like about someone forcing lies to stop being lies? It's one of the best suggestions in the poetic justice handbook.
5th Aug 2016, 6:29 PM
Bah, stories end where people stop saying what comes next. I'm really interested in the story of Nestor shattering the stranglehold of the current plutocratic hierarchs of poverty and deprivation. What anarchist wouldn't want to talk about that part of the timeline of Nestor's rise? It has so many lessons about complacency and why anarchists can't afford to let themselves be 'saved' by a 'hero' that can just make themself the new autocrat.
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5th Aug 2016, 6:39 PM
The part you seem to miss is that, while Nestor's plan does, in fact, end with all being equal (a noble dream, to be sure!), it is only the same equality launching all the world's nuclear weapons or emptying the contents of the CDC vaults would give us. The dead are all equals.
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How do you suppose they can keep Nestor occupied long enough to ensure Sophie's ritual is successful?
Oh, and once again, you can see a guest page I did over at Data Chasers (part two of the previous one).
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