Chekhovs Skill / Webcomics

• In A Modest Destiny, the main character learns how to control his shadow as a joke. It isn't mentioned again until he's facing down the Big Bad, when he uses this power to defeat him.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Roy's grandfather takes the time to teach him the Spellsplinter Strike to disrupt spellcasting while they chill in the afterlife. It later gets used against three different people: an illiusionary Xykon, General Tarquin's wizard Miron, and a vampirized Durkon. It works exceptionally well in all three cases: Xykon's spells are completely neutralized and he is killed (though it turns out to be a Lotus-Eater Machine), Miron has his defensive spells messed up, allowing the Order to wound him so much his contigency spell teleports him home, and Durkon's Destruction and Slay Living spells get messed up, allowing Roy to survive long enough to mess up Durkula's first attempt at achieving his goal.
  • Earlier in the series, when Vaarsuvius is polymorphed into a lizard, they find that only three of their spells will work in this new form: Hold Portal, Feather Fall, and Suggestion, all of which seem useless. Naturally the party find themselves stumbling over a steep slope, requiring Feather Fall, and then meet a dragon who speaks Lizard and is therefore a valid target for Suggestion. In a subversion, Hold Portal doesn't work when it could have been used because there are no portals around to hold.
    • This becomes a bit of a Chekhov's Boomerang later when Vaarsuvius is paralyzed during an attack but has the foresight to have these spells memorized just in case a similar circumstance would occur again.
  • During a planning session for a battle against Xykon. Roy asks everyone present to volunteer any skills or talents they have that haven't been brought up until now. When everyone offers up a variety of seemingly useless skills, Roy groans in annoyance as he's Genre Savvy enough to assume that at least one of those useless skills is going to somehow save them later.
• Schlock Mercenary: We learn during Schlock's origin story that carbosilicate amorphs were evolved from advanced data storage systems. This becomes important in another story arc much later when a piece of Schlock is used to rescue a rogue A.I.
  • Later subverted. Ebby implies offhand that he took Advanced-Placement Xenoanatomy to be a better killer. This later comes up when his captain needs some field surgery and the medic is unavailable. Too bad his experience with the brain was limited to textbooks.
• In Venus Envy, Zoe's Tai Chi comes in useful when Nina comes at her with a knife. Would have worked out great if not for the fact Zoe was holding something herself afterward.
• In El Goonish Shive: Early in the Sister 3 arc, Susan weaves her way through a crowd, demonstrating impressive dodging skills that she picked up because she Hates Being Touched. Later in the same arc, she uses those same dodging skills to take out a drop bear.
• In episode 176 of Roommates, we see Jamie put to use the dramatic rope skills he learned from Erik all the way back in episode 68, over 32 months prior.
• In The Fancy Adventures of Jack Cannon, the one in charge of Jack's Training from Hell was his knife-wielding mother. This finally becomes relevant on page three-hundred and fifty-eight.
  Jack: FINALLY! DO YOU HAVE. ANY. IDEA. how long I've been waiting for someone to throw a knife at me?
• Roxanne's whittling in Rusty and Co..
• In Too Much Information, we learn Ace's mom is still in the armed forces. We learn she's a language expert. We learn she's picked up a few extra languages recently. After years of set-up, we finally learn what she really does: she is on an SG team for the Stargate program.
• Minmax from Goblins knows 38 ways to kill somebody using only his thumb. It was only mentioned in a single panel in one panel way back on page 8. This becomes really important several years and several hundred pages later, as Psion!Minmax only weakness is a single number, and whatever that number corresponds with. That number has been recently changed to 38.
• In the Free Spirit (2014) pilot, Winnie teaches Gene how to bowl with a customized alley, decorated with Death Traps. In the second story, "When The Stranger Calls", Winnie bets her right to live among mortals on Gene winning a game of "agniklorvath", a magical variation of bowling that uses that same alley.
• Janet's background in gymnastics as seen in Contest Jitters will prove useful in her future adventures.
• Tally from The Weave has an unfortunate tendency to forget her keys at home and hence often has to climb into her flat through the window from the fire escape. The building's architecture makes this a dangerous act, but Tally has gotten so adept that her climbing skills come in handy when she's chased through the city by a wolf fairy and gets away by climbing up a building.
• Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: It is mentioned fairly early that Jonesy works as a butcher when not going on adventures with the Commander. Some years later she shows up on a survival derby team with the Commander's Super-Soldier siblings, having qualified on her meat-cutting abilities.
  Angel: Anyone who can field-dress a chimera is an asset to the team.
• Dregs: Mags's expertise with pneumatic weapons allows her to recognise the Baron's gun as a fairly harmless air gun and not a real threat.
• Aisopos: Daross, being a Spartan boy under training, predictably knows martial arts and he was shown to use a spear as a main weapon back when he was in the Agoge. However, it's not brought up again, until later in the series, where he makes one from cut wood and uses it to defend himself.

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