Girl Genius

Comic for Friday, Septembre 22, 2017

Bot down?

I believe polar is a person using a bot to detect updates. Which means life will get in the way sometimes.

That's going to be the wrong person, isn't it?

Yup. It most certainly is.

The question is... which brand of wrong?

Well going to put the most obvious call, some power spike or something which turned the PC down where the bot was running. I can figure that happening or the ISP shutting the service down for a while for maintenance. Better to think o f the non dangerous things first.

Hmm... Ivo, if you're used to suspecting the worst of people, then consider that maybe that while Charlemagne might have meant that bullet for you, maybe the shooter didn't mean that and was bumping off an accomplice to plug a leak that might otherwise get worse.

Plugging leaks does take precedence over the guy looking to poking some more holes.

Of course, once he succeeds in creating a new leak, then he'll have more problems.

@50553 - Candi

I've said before that the Heterodyne Boys were not the heroes they are remembered as.

They alienated the Castle, the Jagers, the powerful families of Mechanicsburg, and completely abandoned their people. All in the name of looking heroic.

"Look at us, being different than all those BAD OLD HETERODYNES! WE are not your enemies."

in the end, they even abandoned their own Blood.

Agatha is perfectly willing to shoulder the title of Heterodyne, and all the infamy that goes with it, and is still a better hero than her father and uncle.

Prediction: The Snail is a Cone of Silence. It was designed to hide the ruling underworld family from the gaze of the castle.

edited 23rd Sep '17 8:00:33 PM by MagusLucius

"Abandoned their own blood"? If you are referring to Agatha, we have no idea what ultimately happened to either Bill or Barry, or if it was in any way voluntary.

I do agree that Agatha so far appears to be a little more.. realistic.. when it comes to her heroism.

edited 23rd Sep '17 8:25:39 PM by Geoduck

An interesting point if you pardon the comment.

It is a bit hard to just try to be a better person or the white sheep of the family if as if I don't recall wrong they have set the page so low that not killing a civvie by accident in the first 5 minutes of rule is a good sign. The Heterodyne Boys did keep the idea of turning a new page but given the implications and other stuff there are many gaps to attend... while there are some and several gaps due to not having all the pages to the backstory but it is perhaps one interesting contrast to well... Klaus or even Othar.

The Heterodyine Boys (or just going with the HB acronym, like the pencil) did try to be The Cape and teamed up with Klaus, whom can land into a case of the cowl, to balance them out. While doing the hunt to be the perfect heroes the public in universe knows them as they forgot to balance some stuff out, sure they hated DK and some aspects of home but from what is shown even Barry was more willing to cut some deals or at least tolerate some stuff compared to Bill (namely the rebuilding of Mechanicsburg after the attack of the Other). What happened after the attack bordered between a walking the earth and a roaring rampage of revenge.

On another point the HB could have done things a lot better but we all have discussed here that long term planning and that some wisdom is highly incompatible with the Science-Related Memetic Disorder that all Sparks have. And a lot of Sparks might have Epimetheus as their patron because they just realize of the mistake AFTER they make it.

Barry is the dreaded for a reason, but there is a bittersweet reason on doing things the way he did rather than have Agatha around DK... he wanted her to have some semblance of a normal life and what the non sparks go through rather than have Agatha living with DK and a town full of minions. DK would have done a very negative influence on Agatha. That case I do admit is ambivalent but then again they could have worked and tried to fix some of DK but the piling of mad scientists work in a legacy project like DK is bound to give even the biggest spark a challenge.

Edit: Writing a brick does take time.

edited 23rd Sep '17 8:40:54 PM by Mauri

I think "hiding from Klaus" was a much bigger factor in Barry's thinking than worrying about the Castle's influence on Agatha.

Barry also didn't just drop Agatha. He left her with Adam and Lilith while he went to attend to whatever he was doing on his long journeys. This, unfortunately, is a normal, human thing when the needs of the business/government/people outweigh the needs of someone's home life.

In the novels, the last time he came back, whatever was going on important/worrisome/bizarre that he could leave only a (rambling, incoherent) letter tucked under the door; he couldn't wait to see his niece and construct-friends whenever they got home. That's pretty bad in any context.

You also need to think of it from various perspectives: we have the DC, Marvel, and other media to base our judgment off of, as well as Mahatma Ghandi, Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Mary Seacole, Fred Rogers (minister), Nellie Bly (not the around the world stuff, the reporting exposing the scum of the earth stuff), and so many more.

Europa... has had no one since the Lightning King.

The HB were good for their time and place. It's because of what they and Klaus did that Agatha has the chance to be even better.

The HB did do a lot of things well such as stamping out a lot of the troubles that plagued Europa and became an icon and had the trouble that comes with such call, the Fan Fiction that came in a side story can be an indicator, which can show how lacking Europa had been in universe in terms of lack of unifying figures. But like any hero set the HB were human and made mistakes but could make a lot more if things didn't go the ways they went.

Klaus tagged along because of the survivor part in his own past and willingness to see a "chance to do better" but as stories showed he might have been the equivalent of Batman in the Justice League. That is someone whom can go onto some extremes the capes cannot take but if the propaganda and stories that go around in universe got through did also include Klaus getting some endings where he was the Tarvek of the Gil in Paris... that is getting things done but ending in an humiliating end or doing something which could be seen like having Klaus singing a ditty in his underwear in front of an audience.

Edit: I am just thinking it might be a joke but if things are going the way they are going and the Foglios get around the HB little nickname I'm mentioning this now. We will get some Heterdodyne Boys HB pencils in store at one point. With Bill and Barry alternating sides; giant sized could be an option.

edited 24th Sep '17 4:19:23 PM by Mauri

I thought the reason for Agatha's locket was because of all the female sparks who were disappearing, whom we later found out was due to Tarvek's father.

That might have been part of it, but part of it is she began to breakthrough at incredibly young. Her Sparking all over the place would have been like a big neon sign, besides the problems summed up by Vi's comment about Olaf. (The one that ended "and absolute death to be around.")

Look at what happened when Agatha appeared, fully adult. EVERYONE wanted her out of the way or their pawn.

The locket blocking Agatha's Spark likely saved her a hundred times over. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it gave her a chance to grow up.

The novel did not say that Barry dropped off his last letter in person, but that it had made a long trip from some unknown location.

edited 24th Sep '17 5:18:06 PM by Geoduck

Why do I think the Chief may be the culprit?

about that guy...

page

Very, very wrong guy.

edited 25th Sep '17 5:31:05 AM by Candi

What can we say pages might be coming up with the REM Monitor again... Soo does that means that Old Bear and myself should start taking sleep a lot earlier doesn't it?

And that da chief is reasonable enough to give our Jager noir three days... Then he will do his fine in jailtime because he assaulted perhaps the only officer that was able to walk the streets.

I had the same thought. Wouldn't be surprised to be wrong, though.

Wrong guy? I'd say the chances of the Chief being behind all of this just shot way up.

Who else was in a position to poison all those guys?

I agree, Chief is suspect#1 - after all, the culprit is always someone the reader already knew.

Or as Fox Trot once lampshaded, "the secondary character introduced early on and then not seen again!" (Until the denouement.)

Although Jason and Marcus sort of knew the guy...

edited 25th Sep '17 3:40:58 PM by Candi

In regards to Bill and Barry abandoning all of their family's past... well, I do feel bad for the Jagers. I mean, Dimo made it pretty clear that they all loved the Heterodyne Boys, and that rejection did hit the Jagers pretty hard. And the fact is, they still love them and even (if Dimo is any example) understand why Bill and Barry did that. I think the two really could have stood to make more of an effort with them (and if Franz and the bike that Barry made for him are any indication, they certainly could have).

That said, I'm more sympathetic to Bill and Barry regarding their rejection of Castle Heterodyne. It killed their mother, and it sure sounds like it was willing to, at the very least, let their father kill them. And from what I gather, they were pretty young when that happened. I'd have a pretty hard time accepting an entity responsible for all that myself. Maybe it would have behooved Bill and Barry to have at least attempted to reprogram the Castle (and heck, maybe they did try - that said, remember that the Castle even specifically said that it hid secrets of its operation from them). That said, I can hardly blame them for rejecting the Castle.

And as I noted the case of DK it is a legacy project between the madder Heterodynes so trying to get it fixed is a pain in the buttocks. And if we recall it is the second version so they might have included some self preservation backup black box somewhere in case one of the descendants really made a gold embossed cock up with diamond studs. I wouldn't discount the rebuilders to not include that one in a "sanity has advantages".