PaRARGdox 47
Next update is a couple of days late: July is, unfortunately, a burdensome month in my day job, lots of deadlines and work… meaning I’m not quite able to stick with my Magellan schedule. Anyway, the next page is underway, I’m aiming for a Friday update but will go up sooner if finished before then.
Annihilation theory: Yes, that’s right – Rochelle’s brain is her own…!
If anyone ever watched Fringe, I’m reminded of the Observers whose brains had a lot more convolutions and were therefore much brainier as a result. Not saying that Rochelle is an “Observer” but the brain structure thing is a useful analogy.
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 schedule. And you can too for as little as $1 a month… 😎
Families/Cемьи: Page 16 is now online. Page 17 will go up early July. Stay tuned! By voting you not only get a new page of this story but you help raise Magellan’s profile and help potential new readers find us.
Next update: Friday, July 10, 2020: Force Magellan responds… or not!
Are classes in making ominous pronouncements part of the Magellan curriculum? If so, Rochelle has clearly been working hard at this vital superhero skill.
Advanced Foreshadowing
It does make me think of the ridiculousness of times where a superhero team from the big two is hit by a power nullification ray and everybody is affected, without reason given as to how it is doing so to characters of a widely different power background. For instance, in the Justice League cartoon, the Justice Lords episode, just why does Lex Luthor’s de-powering gun work on all of them? Or I can think of the fact that I know there was an Avengers cartoon (the crossover with Phineas and Ferb, I believe) which had the powers of all the team nullified, despite their backgrounds being even more varied in their source than the League was in their cartoon.
At least this comic gives a more tangible reason, and also shows not everybody is de-powered anyways. There’s even the fact that winged-girl (what’s her name? I should look on the cast page, I guess) is flying in the penultimate panel, which shows it’s not just aliens and Rochelle.
Jaxine is the purple-winged second year cadet. It looks like physical powers, ones that result strictly from anatomical mutations, still work. Probably not super strength, per se, but somebody who has superior strength due to a large size should still have it. Guessing Momo’s lasers won’t work though.
Her wings are not big enough for her to fly with muscles alone, much less for doing vertical takeoff.
As I recall, the “depowerinator” took powers at the metaphysical level – including “powers” that came from your job/office (hence the plan to zap the Mayor with it, and get powers such as “open new buildings with a really large pair of scissors”)
Not sure the logic that taking out the enermy heavy hitters means they want to kill everyone follows really…
*nods* Probably more of an intuitive leap than a logical one. Rochelle could be expected to have done some extra studying for Dane’s class *maybe she has memorized Jane’s Spaceship Recognition Guide 😁* and thus might know of the Rarg’s aggressionism.
She may also know something of the Rarg, who are known for being “all in” fighters. If the Rarg attack you, do not hope they will take prisoners.
I am surprised that flying woman can still fly after the power-zapping pulse. A bird with that wingspan would be no more than 30 pounds or so. A human that size should be about 100 pounds. So the weight difference should keep her grounded.
ah, but winged creatures of her ilk are very different from avians. Her wings are not evolutionary adaptations of her arms but a separate anatomical feature that relies on sheer musculature to get, and keep, her airborne. Jaxine is not DNA+, her wings are standard for the people of her dimensional realm. (Of course, never mentioned anywhere before, although the Cast page does mention she is not of our dimension) 😁
That only means that all people in her dimension have some powers. It’s not about evolution, it’s about physics. Wings this small can’t lift enough weight with muscles alone.
Also, even if the wings would be bigger (or she really light), she just did vertical takeoff. That’s HARD.
Eh… bringing real physics into it will only lead to tears 😉
I believe Dave Barak had Sydney Scoville say it best:
“PHYSICS?!?!? B**ch, I’m a superhero!!”
(I’m adding the censorship – Sydney is pretty foul-mouthed.)
A short series with Sydney meeting a few of the Magellan crowd would be hysterical.
She jumped.
Gonna have to add in to the comments of ‘she doesn’t have the muscles etc’ for it, unless she had REALLY hollow bones, and even then, she wouldn’t be able to get far at all, and would probably need a running jump.
Of course, that doesn’t mean her species doesn’t naturally tap into said energies and don’t realise it, so SHE thinks it’s natural, and tried to take off…. and is going to find out the hard way in the next page.
Well, the Hydrogen filled lift bladders and gas filled bones really help.
“Next update: Sunday, July 8, 2020”
. . .
wut?
Didn’t you hear? We’re shortening the weeks so as to get through 2020 sooner, nobody wants to be here.
Sounds legit.
I’m guessing one or both of the ex Magellan scientists had enough knowledge of power dampening tech that the Rarg were able to copy it.
If I’m remembering correctly there was mention of them copying Martian tech in the other timeline so in addition to finding out where their “attackers” (term used VERY loosely) came from, their psychic abilities can also grab other knowledge such as tech schematics
This page makes complete sense to me. Do the math sometime to see how many cheeseburgers a superhero would have to eat just to fly his/her own body around at high speeds, let alone lift cars and punch people. Most superhero powers imply an external power source. But the “superpower” of being smart doesn’t require drawing power from anywhere.
It’s a good thing that Magellan has such a diverse range of people with such diverse powers that they even have at least one person who doesn’t have (or rely on) powers.
By the way, I hope to see the training robots mobilized as weapons against the rarg. They were a pain when they attacked our heroes during the events of Lock(e)down; let’s hope the rarg find them a pain as well.
The Robomat was severely damaged by some fool severely overclocking one of its occupants. The rest of the damage was caused by the EMP.
The brain does not do what it does without consuming a bit of energy. And I think I’ve read somewhere that it actually varies a LOT with the amount of thinking you’re doing. I think Rochelle would eat significantly more than most humans but not need superhuman energy intake.
For most humans, the brain consumes about 20% of our daily energy requirements, but is only about 1%-4% of our mass (depending on your overall-mass).
Good thing MM wasn’t visiting… the Rarg probably would have done something to both reverse the Lyons-Burns effect and disable the owl so she couldn’t trigger it again.