PaRARGdox 16
BAM!: Oh dear! This one probably should have come with a blood and gore warning. And nope, not a hallucination, not a simulation, not a premonition! Today’s lesson, kids… DON’T OVERCLOCK YOUR BOTS.
At any rate, prior to his horrible, violent death, Marco is mentioning the Robomat exercises of years gone by, two years back it was Evil Weevil that those first year cadets were up against… those cadets being Kaycee and friends in Bad Karma. Check out some of that action here…
Oh, and he also mentions Sista Superior being on the loose. We did last see her kicking Charisma’s ass in Lock(e)down… see here. She was in prison then… apparently not now…
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Next update:Â Sunday, March 22, 2020: Bad. This is bad. Very bad.
They’ll be fine. #cinema_snob’d
An image of the opening sequence for the old PBS series, Mystery!, comes to mind 🙂
Well, the bot certainly has capabilities more in line with a powered supervillain. So what have we learned from this training exercise? Besides “Don’t”?
Nightmares and therapy sessions notwithstanding, those girls are very fortunate not to have been shredded by shrapnel. And hey, with the Rarrg inbound, getting some “don’t freak out at the sight of carnage”-training in will give them a useful edge.
Also good to know that, despite its high tech gadgets, Locke Island continues in the comic book footsteps of Arkham Asylum in having the supervillains break out with some regularity. Gotta say though, Sista Superior was not the first one I expected to get free. She may be powerful, but lacks subtlety and from what I remember she can’t fly (I think the Sista superbot was actually being flown by another superbot) so she’d have a hard time getting off the island.
Must’ve pissed off Brainspike that that meat head got out when he didn’t. So that’s a plus.
Yes, that’s right, the SistaBot was flown in by an EpochBot. I figure that the high ranking villains probably have cults dedicated to their extraction from incarceration… just as the Master Assassin has the Character Assassins, Sista Superior probably has minions of note. But maybe more on that later.
Minions? Really?? Are so many of them criminal masterminds?
No, but they do inspire acolytes. This is a crazy world with super people – some of them, even the villains are likely to have legions of followers.
Dang! This joint is going to end up like the old Batman series 🤪 I thought MA was the the only guy with actual minions… Maybe he’s the only one goofy enough to have factions in his followers?
He has amassed a large number of followers, many people feel their life is being jerked around by some omniscient story writer!! (mwahahaha). Sista Superior, not so many… maybe half a dozen The Sistas of Perpetual Rectitude. And hey, they miiiiiiiight even show up briefly in this story.
and, really, looking at the real world with social media fandoms and the like, it is not even remotely difficult to imagine a world where people are getting radicalized left and right to whatever extremist happens to spout the rhetoric someone personally resonates with.
The Evil Laugh ™ is a nice touch. 🙂
So, what survival rate of training is considered normal in magellan?
lol – well, generally the junior cadets wouldn’t be training unsupervised with superbots, let alone dangerously rigged ones, so one would hope minimal. Although we did see Svetlana die horribly during training in The Olaf Mystery http://magellanverse.com/olaf-mystery/03.html Magellan does have healers on hand, so that might help stem the fatality rate during training, although I doubt either of them would be able to help Marco or Eli in this instance!
I was about to say. I doubt all the king’s horses and all the king’s men are going to be able to put those two back together again. (Though that does give me a great idea for a super-powered healer who goes by the name “Kingsmen”… and with the right powers he really can put you back together again.)
Except he’s like Zoidberg and doesn’t really know human anatomy “Wot you mean your foot don’t go there??”
“But consider how much more you’ll get done with three arms!”
There should be a sign posted somewhere prominently:
___ days since a lost-time injury or fatality.
___ student fatalities this school year.
In most schools, the last number remains 0. Here, it tends to creep up from time to time. Way to instill confidence in the safety record here at Magellan High.
I wonder can Olaf help these guys or are they too far gone even for him/them?
I think a degree of intactness is required, even for Olaf!
Some of those fatalities were caused by attacks, though. Most schools would do worse when attacked by dragons.
We’ve only seen three fatalities due to training mishaps. One of them got better, and the other two are on this page–caused by students intentionally violating safety rules while unsupervised.
Well, now we know that Eli’s and Marco’s TBA powers don’t include indestructibility.
Definitely.
Maybe somebody has self-resurrection? Not quite at the Jack Harkness level, but not Wolverine-level regeneration either. That hand over there dies because it lacks the resources to build a new body, but the main torso could regenerate the rest of the body, even the head. Too bad that brain remembers nothing, and I mean nothing; that brain is a blank slate. He does not even remember the things he learned starting at birth (co-ordination, crawling, walking, running, potty-training, human communication sounds, phonemes, words, sentence structure, etc.). Now try to do that with a nearly adult body.
That was unexpected. And despite the tragic loss, I’m also happy the girls weren’t hurt (physically). They were innocent in all this.
But this makes me wonder: would an event like this cause parents to want to start pulling their kids out of the school? I can see such a storyline possibly happening. Probably not for this particular story, but it wouldn’t be out of left field to have the public outside the school begin to question whether having the school is a good idea, with all the life-threatening situations the students get into.
“Nobody expects the exploding norm bot! It’s chief weapons are surprise and…”
*BAM*💥
“…that”🥵
If they were still sending their children after the events of Bad Karma and Lockedown, something minor like this is not going to get them to pull the students out.
I guess they know they’re sending their children to a superhero academy… gotta be a waiver in the contract somewhere!! It’s not like Xavier saying, “oh yes, this is a school for gifted youngsters” without mentioning he’s also, by the way, pitting the kids against Magneto, and the Hellfire Club, etc!
Plus most of them are over eighteen, right?
As a rough guide, but not hard fast rule…
1st year = 16 y.o.
2nd year = 17 y.o.
3rd year = 18 y.o.
4th year = 19 y.o.
5th year = 20 y.o.
6th year = 21 y.o.
Is there much of a ‘mature student’ population? Presumably there are some people who only gain their Powers and/or discover their calling as Heroes later in life, but who still have the skills to qualify for Magellan-level training (and/or who are powerful enough to need Magellan-level training to help them control their Powers to the point of compatibility with Baseline Humans). And I’m not sure how best to count those who aren’t from Human stock in the first place, and whose Peoples may have vastly different maturation schedules…
A good question and one that I’ve pondered for a while without fully addressing. But agreed, what of a Reed Richards, Ben Grimm, Sue Storm, Bruce Banner, etc, etc situation – they were all adults when they gained their abilities. Let’s put a pin in it and say I hope to get around to it at some point! 🙂
This don’t look good…! Whar will this mean for the rwo surviving First Years!?!?
Valuable teaching moment here for future faculty and students (assuming there -is- a future). Humility and a deference to experienced authority can save your life.
How did the girls survive unscathed? Do they have high stamina or was it a limited radius explosion and the guys were in it?
Oh, Morgana’s not unscathed (as we’ll see next page)… but they survived obliteration because they were further back (especially Ambrosia) plus Eli and Marco were between them and the bot and took the brunt of the blast (which is also why the girls are both wearing blood and gore from the boys!).
Ah yes, in the fourth panel Marco is indeed standing approximately between the bot and the girls.
Better call Olaf.
Don’t think even Olaf could help with this one!! 😀
Surely the girls can’t get in too much trouble here? They weren’t actually complicit here. They didn’t even know the bot was rigged till about 30 seconds before it went nuclear.
Also #RedShirtsButWearingPurple
Yeah, if anyone is going to get blown up it should be someone from third year, surely!!
I suspect you are correct… but there will still have to be some investigating!!
Haven’t seen this much posting activity for a long while. I’m happy about the increased interest it signifies, but I hope it’s not a call for more such scenes 😬
It’s certainly the first time something quite so bloody has been seen. Although there have been a few other instances… Dianne being killed by the ninja, Chang being murdered by himself, Maverick “being killed”. And of course, there was that whole death of everyone on Earth a few pages back… but that was fairly distant and impersonal.