Girl Genius

I must say, I love how even random background characters in GG have their own backstories, ambitions, and adventures. It's always nice to be reminded of the fact that the world does not in fact revolve around our protagonists after all! I love it.

Monks in the tradition of the Shaolin monastery . . . with the Spark, of course.

The monks are fantastic!

What's with the insect motif? *flashbacks of Kamen Rider*

edited 30th Aug '14 2:56:56 AM by Pyrite

A Sparky fondness for bugs, I assume. They will have their little quirks, taking vows or no.

I was interpreting that as lobster. >shrug< But mostly the one on the right reminds me of The Tick. Like... The Tick a la Irish samurai.

Um... to me, it looked like somebody got heavily inspired by C16th and C17th, Germanic armour. Some of that was heavily bug-based.

All it needs is to hang out in a stately home, castle, bishopric and/or papal palace long enough to get acquainted with the knick-knacks well enough to gain a love for some of them... and hey-presto, Bob's your uncle.

edited 30th Aug '14 5:45:39 AM by Euodiachloris

And it is apparently steam-powered. Those don't seem to be plumes on the armor. So steam-knights against bears now.

edited 30th Aug '14 5:44:18 AM by blauregen

All I was thinking was: everyone is a part of the verse so why leave it to the "big damn heroes" to deal with it...

The young monk might need to see if he can bring the Moloch element which is much needed or it will be a full scale battle...

See, this is why the GG-verse would make a good RPG setting. It's chalk-full of monsters and magic items and everybody (not just the 'Chosen Ones') gets/has to have a crack at them! And be cool!

"Burning Black". I'm going to assume that that means the Schwartwalder are about to get some hot coals to the face. Followed by warrior monks in power armor. We are definitely going to see just why people don't mess with the Corbetites.

heeeeeeee!

I wonder how many of da boyz are suddenly going to appear out of the woods when the fighting starts. After all, it was clearly stated when Dimo showed up that the monks liked having jaegerkin around to give a hand whenever fighting was required. I think the bears are in for a rude shock when Agatha unleashes her latest death ray, Zeetha, Vi and Wooster in his full Battle Butler mode come boiling out of the sanctuary car and suddenly the rocks are full of jaegers. Should be fun.

edited 30th Aug '14 1:56:43 PM by OlBear

I thought "burning black" might be hot oil, which was available in surface pools in some parts of the world well before pumping underground deposits started.

(Now imagining a Sparky oil rig.)

If it is hot oil, those bears are in for a world of hurt, as anyone who's seen the effect of an oil spill on the wildlife at cool-to-warm temperatures can attest.

The fact that the monks like Jägers doesn't necessarily imply that there are any others around, unfortunately. I'm expecting everybody to be very impressive but also for the train to be forced to retreat to the fortress that they absolutely don't want to take Agatha to.

Most likely, yes. Both for reasons of narrative and because those bears can evidently take Jägers in a fight, never mind mere well-armed humans.

I figure Burning Black has something to do with coal because the monk says to "repurpose the coal hucker". So I figure either burning hot coals or maybe coal tar? Either way I figure a bunch of bears in serious pain will be the result.

So you mean launching burning coals to put the bears on fire?

Sounds effective to me.

I'm envisioning either basically a giant shotgun type thingy firing burning coals (more likely IMHGO) or something that sprays burning hot coal tar ala napalm/Greek fire. Either way not something I'd want to be on the receiving end of.

edited 31st Aug '14 1:10:46 PM by tricksterson

And in either case it is a weapon approved of by at least four of the seven popes for use against heathen.

I don't see why not. The Bible does, after all, encourage us to heap burning coals of fire on our enemy's head.^note Metaphorically speaking, of course.

edited 31st Aug '14 1:43:00 PM by CorrTerek

While it goes a lot in the other way around to put the enemies in the coals.... seems that knowing the inquisition does quite a bit...

Please note, the old use of "huck" as a verb is "to throw, chuck". A coal hucker would therefore be a mechanism that throws coal (presumably, under normal conditions it throws it from the source to combustion chambers for the boilers.)

So a coaltapult.