PaRARGdox 10
Last ditch effort: Well, this ain’t April 1, so you know I’m not kidding around!
Alright… admittedly this looks very, very, verrrrrry bad for our heroes (and indeed every living thing on Earth). But before you start feeling too traumatised, there will be another update… as we pop back a few hours to witness all the events leading up to this mega-ultra-super-RARGocalypse.
Patreon: By the way, should it be a thing that interests you, my Magellan patrons over at Patreon have been getting full previews three updates ahead of time. And you can too for as little as $1 a month… 😎
Families/Cемьи: New voting incentive featuring Red Vlad, Comrade Katya, Epoch, and Charisma kicks off March 1. Stay tuned!
Next update:Â Sunday, March 1, 2020: Robomat…
Huh. So Magellan Island about halfway between Hawaii and Baja California? Artificially created? Somehow I was expecting them to appropriate Midway or some other remote island.
I mean, according to History, it was an existing island. Jarvis Island is too far west… ah well, alternate universe. Different islands.
Pretty much, this world isn’t 100% analogous to our Earth… some slight geographical variances.
The end.
“Rarg rraarg? Raarg rarrrg. Rararararg!” Translation. “Magellan forever?More like 10 seconds. Hahaha ha!”
What are the purple bands? Particle jets? Exhaust of retreating Rarg? Ambience?
Just ambience 🙂
xmung would know but… I immediately thought of Vostok’s tentacles. I will feel vindicated if this is a psychic vision of the future.
ah, but Vostok is a telepath not a psychic… 🙃
I expect that little jerk to keep something like that to himself…
Probably sounded like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4MTgjNkfyI
Quick! Somebody fly around the Earth counter-spin wise REALLY fast!
…ehm, fly around the debris field?
It is a common misconception that Superman, when flying around Earth, made it rotate backwards and reverted time that way. What actually happened was that he simply flew faster than light, which made the Earth rotated backward from HIS point of view, which we were sharing. The direction he flew in was irrelevant.
You know that makes a lot more sense and actually make me appreciate that scene considerably more! A shame it wasn’t clearer.
Oh, is THAT what they retconned? On numerous ocassions, it is asserted that neither Supes nor the Flash can exceed the speed of light.
First, if it were from Supe’s perspective, Earth would have been spinning almost the speed of light.
Second, time appearing to go backwards from the point of view of tachyons involves tachyons that are moving towards or away from their relative inertial frame–NOT when on a circular path. LOTS of folks get this wrong about relativity. When you are on a circular path, you are constantly accelerating towards the center of the circle. That accelerating “spoils” the effects that people expect.
Barry Allen has consistently been shown to do absolutely stupid things to relativity and the various speed barriers. Pre-CoIE Superman had a similar disregard of basic temporal physics, being able to time travel on a whim.
It is asserted multiple times that Flash can’t exceed the speed of light, however from time to time they forgot to make the calculations … 🙂
Ah crumbs. That’s not good.
The Rargs must be pretty chuffed at that easy victory.
Due to the rotation of the Earth, when the black hole is generated in the centre of the planet, material along the rotational axis will fall in almost directly, but the stuff on the equator will form an accretion disk at the current altitude, slowly drifting inward as it orbits the singularity. The rest of the planet will be on shorter orbits and will move into the accretion disk or just fall in once the rest of the planet gets out of the way. Depending on how much mass the black hole added to the mass of the Earth, the moon will pretty much stay where it is and the rest of the solar system will be largely unaffected.
Darn, now wondering if I should change that last panel… an accretion disk would look cooool
I would also vote for being more scientifically correct and show the accretion disk.
While you are at it, an Earth-mass black hole would be about 9 mm in radius. The actual black hole will maintain angular momentum, so the Earth’s rotation of once per day will be conserved to cause the black hole to spin at about 8175 revolutions per second. The accretion disk will very quickly start glowing in x-rays through visible light as it falls in to just a few hundred kilometres from the event horizon.
Your shift from “would be” to “will be” in that statement perturbs me. What are you even up to?!
I’m one comic late with this, but… The Man Who Can, if he were there and alive, would’ve been really useful against the Rarg-device, especially if the Rarg partially used their psychic-reverse-engineering to build it. I hope that still happens in the “mulligan” that seems to be next. Stick up the ass he may have, but Gary deserves to be firmly part of the sollution for once.
let me guess sending information back to warn other iterations?
@xmung: Wouldn’t it be nice if it was April 1 though?
You could claim (with more words) “And with that the Magellan Story ends. Hope you enjoyed reading, see http://xyz for my next comic.” – Oh, that would be SO evil 😀
But boy what a start for a chapter. Leaves me with many questions and thoughts: Huh, never thought the “housecats” would be THAT dangerous. Did they reverse engineer the Jupiter Singularity to blow up Earth? With which timeline shenanigans is THAT gonna be prevented? Is that even the “correct” timeline? And so on. Which means: Im hooked up again and can’t wait to see how this foxtrot turns out. Great work as always. 🙂
I suspect I would be lynched if I did that! But one part is true… there will be a new comic starting on March 1, the next voter incentive story. Keep an eye out!
There are plenty of comic authors who would consider it worth it. However, returning to comics after long hiatus and then ending it this quickly? Suspicious.
The original war with the Rarg that the chronoers had warned this timeline about destroyed 2/3rd of New Moscow, but not all of it, let alone Mars in its entirety. That suggest they didn’t have the weapon in the original timeline, even though it was a later date*. If they have it now, then it’s likely they used that psychic-reverse-engineering skill of theirs to build it from people they’ve met. It’s not clear how their power works exactly, if they need access to the devices or their creators, but the wormhole does seem like a plausable candidate.
*Technically, original timeline Magellan could’ve stoped the Rarrg right before the equivalent moment that this comic cut to earth, after a lot of Magellan Island/New Moscow had been destroyed in the fighting but before they could deploy the device. But if the chronoers didn’t bother to mention the planet killer, they must not have found it then, so they must have stopped the Raarrg some time before they even got it in the field. It’s only 2 days from “first contact” at Jupiter to Earth Shattering Kaboom here, and that presumably includes at least some prep time from the Rarg too. I’m not sure if the Rarg-Martian conflict would have been called a war if it had lasted less than a day. So I’m still considering this weapon most likely to be exclusive to this timeline.
Also, the Rarg doomsday device kinda looks like a cross between their own spike ball boarding shuttle and the hub with four legs of that Prometheus One singularity mining drone. It could be a coincidence, the Rarg device may have had those legs simply because it needed to anchor itself on land for the drilling part, but still.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang… more like a
Gosh, we’re *really* missing Ms. Joffe now!
I was just thinking, shouldn’t some precogs have seen this coming? Joffe en Zelda couldn’t have been the only ones. Kharma as Joffe talked about how she was a short range recog, implying there’s a fair number of them to establish a spectrum of precogs variations.
But… this invasion is, as we’ve seen, caused by Kharma and Dragonclaw messing with the timeline. Zelda could no longer predict Go!Anna’s future shortly after that interference kept her alive. The question is, does the timeline ever adjust itself to “accept” the events of Bad Karma? Or are precogs going to become ever more useless as they will continue to only forsee events that are identical to those in Maverick’s timeline? Which will be less and less as time goes on. (Well, right now the fate of everyone is different, namely over, and there’s no more precogs either.)
Maybe we’ll find that out soon. The Paradox part of the story title means millions of voices crying out and then suddenly silenced when they weren’t fated to us going to tip off various precogs or others with mystical powers on the island when we “flash back” next comic. Any bets of which of the characters is going to be the Cassandra? Kaycee seems unlikely.
Well… that’s one way to end a series. Yeah, I know, to be continued.
I’m now hearing in my head the voice of Don Adams: “That’s the second-biggest explosion I’ve ever seen!”
Don Adams played secret agent Maxwell Smart in the TV show Get Smart in the 60’s. There were several running gags and one of them was he would see some incredible thing and then say it was the second-most incredible he had ever seen.
Heh, I found a web page listing some of the assorted catchphrases from the show!
http://www.wouldyoubelieve.com/phrases.html
Thanks for all the fish?
“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.” – NK Jemisin