El Goonish Shive

Why spend millions...

Comic 2271

Having the significance of an omen, or being a portent.

Which means that even within whatever the range of effect is, Sarah's spell is still of limited utility for scrying.

Yeah, I'm starting to shift over into the camp of, "I see no use for this spell OTHER than its flagrant potential for abuse."

Shive's not really selling the "totes different than at-will lucid dreaming" argument.

edited 4th Nov '16 8:39:42 AM by TobiasDrake

I just imagine the utility in corporate espionage.

"So this is the door to your R & D lab? No, no, I understand completely why I can't go in, but let's stand here for a moment and contemplate, er, science, or something. ... Holy crap, I had no idea you had... such great, uh, doors. Let's move on."

So all this buildup let to a spell of extremely limited utility, which leaves the caster vulnerable while in effect, and the only reason it matters is that this apparently uses up a huge amount of magical energy for some reason?

I have this mental image now of Shive slamming his head into his desk, yelling at himself, "Find a reason for Sarah to be in the plot! Find a reason for Sarah to be in the plot! Find a..."

*snort* Resting ominous voice...

Weird thought, but if her power briefly interacts with everything, she's essentially collapsing the quantum state of everything within range by observing them.

There's only so much benefit to being able to see things with your eyes. The biggest drawback to using her power for corporate espionage is the limitations of human memory. Since she can't take anything with her like blueprints or notes or sample pieces, she's left just trying to retain a general gist of whatever she saw for long enough to get back.

And because her spell will subjectively fill gaps, she can't even be certain of the accuracy of anything she encounters within it.

Her spell only does that if she starts changing reality. Until then everything should be as it was in reality. Just as Cranium was able to use the spell to check on Diane's roommates without knowing what to expect.

Edit: Eh, this was recent enough to not need an extra bump...

NP 534

Y'know, when you need more hijinks to make your previous hijinks work? Stop.

edited 4th Nov '16 2:15:23 PM by Daremo

Honestly, the more limits we learn about this spell, the more it seems like "you can eat magic while having a very vivid imagination".

It scans the area and lets you see things that are behind locked doors or whatever! But odds are it won't be correct because your imagination will change what it is.

You can experience the simulation faster than reality! But it's barely any faster, so who cares.

Honestly, they could find more accurate information just by having Grace or someone break down the door or pick the lock or something.

No. Going full Reality Warper mode (like "I wish Tedd was a girl" or "I wish there was a mirror in front of me") warps the accuracy of the simulation, but only for those specific elements. Pandora gave the example of snapping your fingers to remove someone's clothes wouldn't be an effective way of checking for magic marks, but switching to their body and undressing would work fine.

Also, we don't know what level is needed to resist the scan. Tedd says "is shielded," not "has magic resistance." My guess is that even in paranoid organizations like the MIB, that sort of thing is rare. That's why Cranium was snatched up; it was either recruit her or try and protect every file of any importance with expensive shielding magic.

NP 535

Sometimes changing your perspective helps you look at problems in a new light.

Page.

Being a little biased there?

Tedd just got a backhand from the last place he expected it. I anticipate a little stress related breakdown

Oh look at that. Characters naturally falling into a conclusion. Wowie.

So, if Tedd's general goals are basically going to be thwarted by a combo of Sarah and Grace, who are the two cast members who are closest to him...where does he go from here?

I have a suspicion that a certain generic title of nobility will be something he tries to claim in the near future.

edited 7th Nov '16 7:11:47 PM by TotemicHero

I don't know why you think he's going to explode. Be unhappy, sure, but the girls aren't rubbing this in his face. It's not their fault at all. Even if he's initially a little heated, once he thinks about it for a second he'll realize that he'd rather they tell him the truth than hide it because they thought it would make him uncomfortable. Grace is his girlfriend and Sarah has been his lab assistant for months. He's not going to blow up at them.

A much more likely thing that would make him explode is finding out that his father, cousin, and friend/niece/daughter/godchild/whatever all decided to keep facts about his mother secret.

Maybe in response to this revelation he'll do the long overdue hipster comparison?

This one can actually be justified by reality literally lining up the characters like dominoes to get what it wants done.

I'm just shocked that Tedd was shown to be wrong. To his face, even.

I like that Tedd leapt to a conclusion based on internal biases. He's not suspicious of Box on her own merits. He's suspicious of her because, deep down, he just doesn't want her to be right. He's grasping for datapoints to support the conclusion he desires rather than drawing conclusions from the datapoints. That's very human of him.

Well, as noted before, Tedd's not that great at the scientific method, so it totally fits that he had a conclusion and then tried to find data to fit it. This might be some of the best writing on Tedd in ages. Okay, sure, that's somewhat dampened by the fact that previous storyline dragged and it's been ages since Tedd had a significant role... but still, it's better than a lot of what happened in the last storyline he had significant impact on.

Tobias: Yeah, this was a well written strip, at least in terms of character thought.

Np 536

Still waters and that.

No comic til Friday.

So apparently Rhoda's flexible usage of her spell does not mean that she's practiced with her mark and learned the ins and outs of the spell she was given, but that she naturally has a battle power over 8,000.

Tedd's humanizing moment in the previous story comic was really good character writing. This is really bland character writing. Characters should be special for what they do, not what they are.

edited 10th Nov '16 8:05:13 AM by TobiasDrake

I think the point is that knowing the ins and outs are what make you s-rank but yeah. bleh.