'Artificial Time XS is a comic created by Samuel "raocow" Tanguay and Anh-Vu "Acolyte of Death" Doan* .
The story starts when a 16 year old girl named Sheath falls asleep on a bus and awakens in the world of ATXS. She meets some people who try to kill her and she proceeds to follow them along on some absurd adventures.
It's pretty much Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo but with less Japanese.
Read Season 1 here
.
Read Season 2 here.
ATXS had stopped updating, with the creators starting a new comic known as Aricelle. However, during a break in that comic, ATXS Season 3 began being posted on raocow's tumblr.
The comic shows examples of:
- Aborted Arc: The Twilit Cabin is either this or a Chekhov's Gun. Also we're still not quite sure who Float was going to meet up with in the beginning of the comic.
- Action Girl: Since this is a World of Badass, basically every female character is one of these. Among the regular cast, the exceptions are Sheath (who's too scatterbrained to fight efficiently), Squish (who's a Squishy Wizard) and Feed (who's The Team Normal with no special powers whatsoever).
- Art Shift: This is how the comic displays reality warping effects on the characters such as during the school arc or the hypothetical world arc, compare those to the normal style.
- Bedlam House: Where the group sticks Sheath to deal with her little issue of insanity. The nurses* pump the patients full of drugs and the asylum director, instead of helping the patients, uses their mental issues as a muse to write his books. It also has a portal to other universes through which the void knights arrive.
- Big Bad: It seems that the Wasteland Police Department is shaping up to be this with police sergeant Enjoy arranging multiple hits against our heroes.
- Big Damn Heroes: Typically this is how a fight will end and has happened many different times. As an example take Drift's introduction with him destroying the robot that was preparing to kill Float.
- Cloudcuckooland: The entire setting is composed of absurd plot revelations upon absurd powers. In fact, the world is so much like this that everyone in-universe kind of just shrugs at Condemn, pretty much a god, spontaneously fixing the world from being cut in half.
- Conveniently Empty Building: Everyone in an entire city went on vacation at once.
- Cool Car: Drift owns one: it can drive on any surface including vertical ones, transform into a robot, and just plain looks awesome.
- Curbstomp Battle:
- The first fight with the void knights consists of the void knights completely ignoring the heroes attempts to be serious and overall destroying them.
- The fight with Physical God Accelerate went like this even though she was holding back the whole time.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: What Ally's Chain Reaction Bushido is all about. As the cast page states, she "inflicts dozens of small wounds on her enemies until they bleed to death".
- Defeat Means Friendship: How Sheath ends up joining Float, Tear joins the party, and in the reverse of this trope how Sheath's group joins Brake's.
- Formula-Breaking Episode:
- The Continuum quake at the beginning was this, swapping out a city for a wasteland area.
- The beginning of the second season was this with it being set in high school at least until it's revealed that Jump was warping reality to put the characters into high school to write a new book.
- Gambit Pileup: Every conflict consists of plans from multiple sides conflicting and the participants proceeding to rethink entire new plans that also clash.
- Healing Factor: Sheath is incredibly hard to kill, instantly healing from being cut in half, having her neck snapped, having her entire head blown off by a blast of fire and much more. Later parts in the comic reveal that she isn't even aware of her regeneration and doesn't understand that other people aren't like her in that regard.
- Idiot Ball: Every character at some point has held this, in fact it's probably safe to assume that only one or two characters don't have it at any time.
- Indy Ploy: Wordof God has it that this is how the comic is developed. Raocow and AOD go over basic plot points, Raocow draws the scenes, and then AOD makes text fit them resulting in their iconic, silly style.
- Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: This seems to be the distinction between characters who train their skills and those who are just naturally gifted with power. For example the physical god Accelerate was a skill user and started off as an ordinary surgeon. Essentially the characters who use skills can advance endlessly while power users eventually reach a plateau in their abilities.
- Reality Warper: Various characters use this whether it be subtle* or more outrageous* .
- Riddle Me This: The spells that Squish, the spellcaster in Shift's group, uses have to be cast using a riddle. If the target of the spell can correctly answer the riddle, the spell simply fails.
- Rule of Cool: Almost everything works this way in the comic. Float actively acknowledges and plays with it.
- Running Gag: Tear keeps forgetting about her olive oil. Eventually she remembers to buy some. Two pages later, the bottle breaks.
- Serial Escalation: Fights seem to continuously top themselves; to serve as an example one of the character's pyromantic powers evolved into her actually becoming a living star, later this proved ineffective against a new opponent and so the heroes attempted to solve it by artificially forcing her to become a white dwarf.
- Squishy Wizard: The mercenary group's spellcaster whose name is, appropriately, Squish.
- Team Mom: Tear certainly qualifies. Not only is she the oldest of the core party, but she is willing to sacrifice herself to save the others and even refers to herself as "Mama Tear" in one panel. Also played with in that Sheath actually calls her "Mommy" in one panel and Tear calling her "Dearie".
- Theme Naming: Everyone except for the three Void Knights simply has a verb as a name.
- The Team Normal: Feed, definitely. For comparison, Float is an incredibly powerful swordswoman, Tear can fly and use pyrokinesis, Drift can fire energy blasts from his index fingers, Sheath basically can't be killed and Feed is a little girl with absolutely no special powers except a knack for planning and deceiving people.
- Time Skip: The characters spend over 160,000 years in the monastery. Naturally this is fixed through the use of time travel so the current plots still have some relevance.
- World of Badass: It seems that every where the main characters go they end up in some large world-shattering battle.
