Heretical Edge wants you to laugh every once in awhile. It's got snarking, hilarious/groan-worthy wordplay, and the occasional Cloud Cuckoo Lander, and we see it through the eyes of a definite First-Person Smartass.
- Flick, in a effort to Troll her Icy Jerk of a roommate, promptly declares a rock her pet Herbie, who almost immediately achieved Memetic Badass status.
- One day, Flick sees Columbus and Shiori playing games with Shiori's mentor, Andrew. As Flick and Columbus's own mentor, Deveron, has been completely failing to teach them anything, Flick immediately says she thought the concept of a helpful mentor was a myth.
- When Heretics kill Strangers, they absorb their power. This process is accompanied by a feeling of intense pleasure. This is usually more creepy than funny, but it becomes hilarious when Flick lands the killing blow on a monster way outside her weight class and has what can only be described as The Immodest Orgasm.Columbus: I… uhh, I think that means it’s dead.Sean: You okay down there Flick? Or do you need a cigarette after that?
- Ammon tries to use his mind control powers against Flick in Visitations 5-02
. The key word is tries. It appears to be working at first, but then the doorbell rings.Flick: Whoops, hold that thought.Ammon: You should ignore that.Flick: I should ignore that?Ammon: You should sit back down and talk to me. They can wait.Flick: They can wait...Flick: Dude, that’s not how things work.Ammon: Uh, what?Flick: You can’t just leave people standing at the door ringing the bell. What’s your aunt been teaching you?Ammon: My name is Ammon. You should sit down again.Flick: Don’t worry, kid, I’ll be right back. You should eat. Lemme just see who’s there.Ammon: But my name is Ammon! You should stay!Flick: Don’t yell in the house, Ammon. It’s bad manners. Now just eat your food, I’ll be back in a second, I promise.- A few chapters later, after discovering his true nature, Flick ends up throwing him through a window.
Flick: Good thing you're invulnerable, kid. Or this might actually make me feel a little guilty. - Flick and Asenath reveal themselves to be Buffy fans when Asenath tells Flick that she's a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire.
- Twister the Pooka gives Asenath another nickname. Ol' Assy.Asenath: Okay, I’m going to go ahead and veto that particular nickname right now.Twister: Sorry, my bad. You’re not that old. Young Assy it is.Asenath: I will literally eat you.
- Twister is a shapeshifter. Her default form is that of an eleven year old girl with fuzzy fox ears. And also a tail. A fluffy tail that she usually tries to hide because most people Squee at the sight of it. Flick is among those people.
- Some of the chapter tags are hilarious, Stand out examples include:
- Flick's utter shock when she returns to Crossroads after her seventeenth birthday and Professor Dare quickly Averts There Are No Therapists by setting up an appointment with the school's on staff therapist for her.Flick: You’re sending me to a shrink? But you’re part of the great big secret magic school full of adventure and mystery. Are you even narratively allowed to know what therapy is?
- Columbus, Flick, Sands, and Scout are all very impressed when they see Nevada slaughter a horde of zombies. Some of them more than others.Columbus: Is it wrong that I’m kind of aroused right now?Flick: If it is, we’re both in reaaaaally deep trouble.
- Avalon's epic level trolling of Flick once she notices that her roommate is attracted to her. It's one of the few times Flick is caught speechless.Avalon: You want me to hug you Chambers?Flick: *Stunned Silence*Avalon: Too bad you're covered in zombie guts.
- The icing on the cake is the tag at the end of the chapter.
Oh Come On Avalon. That Was Just Mean. - Klassin Roe, the Academy's on staff therapist, comments to Flick in one of their sessions that she seems "distracted." She goes off on a mental rant about the ridiculous amount of problems she has to deal with while trying to keep a straight face.The sad part was, I was probably still forgetting something in that mental spiel.
- Once Flick starts pulling Shiori out of her funk, they develop a rapport. A hilarious and adorable rapport. The best part is Shiori's puns, which are not the "oh god why" type of puns.Shiori (after catching a falling Herbie): Wh-what can I say? I like having the little guy around. I guess holding onto him makes me feel a little boulder.
- Flick's crowning moment of First Person Smartassery comes when she walks into a room that is full of Meregan, Orcs, sand-goblin-owl things (Harabeold), wood people (Relukae), shark-men (Akheilosans), Satyrs, and a fat giant with dreadlocks.Oh yeah, and my Heretic sense was helpfully informing me that all of these figures were Alters. Thanks for that, Heretic sense. Super useful.
- Gaia Sinclaire's gentle snarking at Flick's Motor Mouth rambling.Gaia: Felicity. When I said that there are many things we need to discuss, I did not mean that each of those discussions should take place simultaneously within the next thirty seconds.
- Wyatt Rendell in 10-05, which starts with him enthusiastically interrogating Rebecca Jameson over her "stolen" butterknife, switches to excitedly talking about the jungle hikes when Flick asks him about them, then shifts to him awesomely calling Deveron out for his lack of effort into his duties as a mentor (made doubly funny because he's unknowingly Calling the Old Man Out on behalf of his sister), and finally reverts to ecstatic giddiness for the jungle hike when Deveron manages to convince him to take him on the one Flick talked him into (basically meaning that he managed to get a day with his son and stepdaughter). For a moment, Flick can only stare.Flick: The man was clearly giddy about the whole concept of taking us out on a jungle hike, and I took a second to picture him bringing the same level of enthusiasm to that as he normally brought to being a security guard. Wow. Just… wow.
- Flick, after entering a Love Triangle with Avalon and Shiori, is at one point pulled along by both girls grabbing on to her arms. Sean is impressed and probably jealous.Sean: Why do I get the feeling that, stink or no stink, she’s making out like a freaking bandit right now?
- The next chapter has Flick thinking about the Love Triangle in question for a solid three paragraphs before Avalon interrupts her and she realizes that she had just been staring off into space.
Avalon: Chambers. We’re here. What the hell are you thinking about so much?Flick: Oh, me? I was just thinking about the, umm… the quest.Avalon: The quest.Flick: Yup! You know, this whole thing is like an RPG. Dude, we even get actual experience by killing monsters. And now we’re advancing part of the story quest.Shiori: Oh, oh! Investigate Professor Tangle’s apartment. And we even went on a whole character-related sideque—ohh my god! I was the extra unlockable character! You did my sidequest!Flick: I know, right? Extra unlockable character and a quest on a whole new world semi-unrelated to the previous plot but that expands the story a bit and gives you both a new character and new, previously unseen abilities!Avalon: Gabriel shoot me. The dorks are multiplying now.- And throughout it all, Flick is just grateful that her new facial shapeshifting powers let her hide her Luminescent Blush while she and Shiori literally start bouncing up and down.
- Tristan's return stands out as one of the story's more cartoonish elements, since he arrives on a freaking meteor. And because you Can't Take Anything with You, he's completely naked throughout the ensuing drama, which Flick understandably finds extremely distracting. His utter nonchalance at this (thanks to spending too much time round the Meregan, who have no nudity taboo) makes it even funnier.
- Koren Fellows, of all people, makes a reference to The Dresden Files that flies right over Flick's head.
- Later in the arc, she makes it clear that she's sick and tired of all the chapters that end on Cliffhangers and Reveals.
Koren: Would you stop doing that?! You’re all like, ‘oooh, I’ve got this dramatic revelation. Let me reveal it in as shocking a way as possible so they all stare at me like big gaping fish because of how positively stupefying my news is. - Twister takes one look at Columbus and starts hitting on him. Columbus is discomforted by this, which makes sense because, well, she looks like she's eleven years old. Then he finds out she's also 107. And 11. And 2.Columbus: Two… eleven… over a hundred. Yup, I guess I… Nope. Nooope. Still creepy. Stiiiiiiiillll creepy.
- The fact that Flick is enough of a Geek to make references to events from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Men comics, and Vampire Princess Miyu that happened before she was born, but she fails to remember what the evil counterparts of the Jedi are when thinking about the assassin she's fighting on the cruise ship.
- The Crossroads Committee speaks to Avalon privately to reveal her ancestry (which she already knows about) to her. They choose a time when Avalon is not particularly happy with them to do this. Later...Flick: … Valley? What exactly did you say to the obnoxiously powerful people who could probably blow up our entire dorm building by sneezing in its general direction?Gaia: She informed them that they should be happy that her ancestor did not set this society up as a monarchy, because she would have demoted them to muck out the stables, since they were... How did you put it? Oh yes, since they were ‘so obsessed with shoveling bullshit.'Flick: Valley! You can’t talk to them like that.
Avalon: Pretty sure I just did. What are they gonna do, try to kill me? There’s a line. - When talking with the Atherby clan, Flick finds out that Duncan and Misty's mom told their dad he had to go on an epic quest if he wanted to sleep with Asenath. The dad recruited Joselyn and successfully completed the quest.
- The Avalon, Shiori and Choo interlude. Shiori asks Avalon for help telling the story of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. To Shiori's pet Russian Nesting Doll Lightning Pig. The first pig is Rambo and it escalates from there.
- Avalon just makes it better. Having been roped into voicing the wolf, she starts off snarking at Shiori's increasingly ridiculous additions to the tale before getting into it and trying to defend the wolf's tactics.
- In 29-02, Team Stranded goes to hunt some creatures that look like a cross between a deer and a pig. Isaac starts quoting Elmer Fudd, and Jazz plays along. Then Flick and Tabbris try to come up with a name for the creatures, eventually settling on pantlers (short for pigs with antlers).Tabbris: I'm pretty sure that what they [the team] really wanna call them [the pantlers] is dinner.'''
- How does Apollo enter the story? With a cryptic letter promising answers and snacks, signed as Uncle Satan. Way to make a first impression.
- Flick and Tabbris's quick descent into fangirlish squeeing as they watch Athena tear her way through Radueriel's puppet soldiers within seconds. Made doubly funny by the fact that they're doing so from inside Athena's head.Flick: Goddess of War, my ass. More like Goddess Of Five Hundred Guys Just Shit Themselves Because She Walked Into The Room.Tabbris: I don’t think they’d have time to!
- Gabriel Prossor melodramatically presenting Lincoln Chambers with a coffee maker in Mini-Interlude 54. It'd be a minor joke from just about anyone else, barely worth mentioning, but the mental image of one of the most powerful beings on the planet and an established stoic acting overly dramatic about a coffeemaker is inherently amusing.
- Mini-Interlude 75: Chayyiel filibusters the Seraphim with the Evil Overlord List.
