PaRARGdox 132
Rochelle to the rescue!: Some people were wondering if Rochelle was going to show them how to kill Rarg via her kick-them-over-release-the-helmet-latch method… but why bother, when you have a rifle? Turns out she’s a pretty good shot, but we wouldn’t expect anything less from her.
Grandfather Paradox: This was one hell of a page to draw and colour… many hours of work, but I’m glad I got it done, because the last frame of this page – and “Grandfather Paradox” – has been driving me forward to this point for many, many weeks. I’d say this is the “granddaddy of time travel paradoxes” but that would be a terrible pun, so I won’t. Anyway, Rochelle needs a paradox to prevent Ambrosia’s hours long time-slip from creating a new timeline, and the Grandfather Paradox is key to that.
Patrons: Over on Patreon page 135 is now up – page 136 soon…
Next update: November 15/16: Rarg incoming!
No, by all means go for a few bad puns.
And more than a few good ones!
. . . well.
DAMN!
Boss Kwan.
I’m thinking of a Larry Niven short story, from The Magic Goes Away series. You know the one ๐
Man of Steel, Woman of Tissue Paper? I don’t quite see how that applies here.
You forgot the smiley! ๐
That one’s from All the Myriad Ways, isn’t it? That AtMW title piece is relevant itself, but the story I was thinking of is Not Long Before the End๐
Grace, acting like you will avoid the bad pun. Really. I mean, on the page right now is Healing Hans. You can’t claim to be better than such things.
And it’s one of the things we love about this comic.
lol ๐๐
Healing Hans and Hairport!
Why stop there? We’re attempting a Kwan-tom Leap to set right what once went wrong.
lol
Long live the puns! ๐ I really don’t get why puns have such a bad reputation, I find most puns to be at least entertaining enough to be worth the effort, some downright delightful. ๐ I guess there are
many puns that are worn out, but that is clearly missing the point of puns, the point is to be creative with them. And then there’s a whole subcategory of bad dad jokes, the overly stretched puns… okay, maybe I do see where puns get a bad reputation. At least it’s not from this comic, neither its comment section!
Bad puns make me groan.
Good puns make me groan – AND smile.
You know, I’ve been wondering… what actual difference does it makes for the people of either timeline if the time slip plan create an alternate timeline or truly reset the current one?
Creating an alternate timeline: Anybody who died or will die to the rarg is still dead, but maybe there are survivors who can go on.
True reset: The version of people from the rarg attack timeline are entirely erased. They never existed. Their experiences and consciousness are lost as they’re reset to their previous version and have different experiences leading to them making different choices.
I both cases the people of the new timeline can’t tell the difference. Is it that much more comforting for the people of the current timeline to think that all the death and pain won’t matter because a true reset means the version of themselves who experiences it will never have existed?
Does the time slip make this arc mostly pointless since no one except for Ambrosia will really be affected by those events? Sure, it’ll still affect the overarching plot, but all the character development we see here is doomed to disappear.
Though I remember someone theorizing that maybe a true reset will cause everyone to get memories from the erased timeline, in which case the decisions and call people make will still affect their relationship to each other…
Ugh, trying to figure out time travel, alternate timelines, and paradoxes give me a headache. Really curious to see how it’ll be handled in the end.
It’s a good question, but one we can’t really say what the answer is, since we don’t have a big enough dataset on Magellanverse time travel. We DO know that the timeline has already been split once that we know of, and that the important people at the Academy seem to be fearful of another, for whatever reason. A reset makes NO practical difference to the people in the past, but it’s an important difference to those in the future, because a split timeline means they are all dead, while a reset means their past selves have a chance to pull their bacon out of the fire. Ambrosia’s memories become merely echoes of a possible future, that may be avoidable.
Actually we did have a small discussion about this in the first time slip story. Miasma and DragonClaw messed up their first attempt to achieve their goal and trashed their timeline. They came back into the past and created a second timeline. When the Chroners came back to stop them, I asked about this back then, because it meant the second timeline still existed and at the end they could go back to it. However, that means, there has to be the original timeline that is still trying to work through the damage they did; another timeline that we know nothing about, without the Choners, which split when the Chroners came back, where Magellan never had the assistance of the Chroners to foil them; and probably one that the Chroners came back to that caused another split. Time Travel is always nasty.
Wasn’t the upshot of Bad Karma that there were only two timelines resulting from the actions in that story? DragonKlaw and Miasma traveled back in original timeline, and immediately split the timeline (in THEIR history, there were no future versions of themselves to deal with). The Future Force heroes were able to trace D & M to the new timeline and traveled to that line arriving at a point after the villain’s incursion, which should not split the timeline again because they are not coming from the new timeline’s future. At least, that’s what I thought was going on. Time travel stories always give me headaches ๐ค
That’s three of us apparently getting headaches from thinking about time travel. We could form a club. Maybe we can get discounts on aspirin if we order it in bulk?
I think you’re right about the Miasma-Dragonklaw/Chroner time split though. THere shouldn’t be more splits since the Chroners came from the same timeline (though one could ask how they managed to time travel to the already split timeline since Miasma and Dragonklaw had already made changes splitting. It wouldn’t have been enough to go back in time, they would have needed to go like… back and a bit to the side?)
Montana-Rose did a seeker spell, which moved them out of their timeline into the earlier alternate timeline. That’s part of the reason Kaycee/Maverick and Billy/Victory-Man II decided to spill the beans on likely future disasters, since it wasn’t going to effect their own timeline.
Right! Forgot the details because it was a while since I did an archive binge.
Easy enough, it was a blink and you miss it element of the story ๐
This also makes me wonder if fucking with the Grandfather Paradox will also have unanticipated knock-on effects warping time travel in general within the Magellanverse.
Like . . . if Paradoximan pulls this off, and “breaks” the “rules” of time travel, what’s to stop this alteration from affecting the Miasma/Dragonklaw timeline? Wouldn’t it potentially “bleed in” with this reality, since the two are already linked?
What will the destruction of the Grandfather paradox do to precogs like Zelda?
You know, I expect Kwan to have considered all of these questions already . . . and if she still plans to proceed with this course of action, does that suggest that she’s determined the lives of everyone on Earth is worth the risk of potential temporal fallout of unimaginable proportions?
That is a sobering thought. I had been assuming that Reuben’s power was strictly localized, but ๐คทโโ๏ธ
I think it is safe to assume that any possibility we could come up with has already been figured into Ro’s calculations, or has been discounted.
Yeah. I most certainly don’t envy Rochelle in this chapter.
It’s by far draining enough to be thinking through all the possibilities I think through, in my life and work, which is very much safe and sheltered and of limited scope by comparison. Doing it as a superhero, with the entirety of humanity at stake… no thanks.
If the only way this works is locally and by eviscerating Paz, I think Paz will certainly have something to say about whether or not they use this reset button more than once. (If she doesn’t perma-die in the attempt.) Additionally, if Paz resets everything, then Rochelle never has cause to think up this gruesome methodology of creating the reset button. Therefore, in the new timeline, nobody will know/remember that it exists as an option or how to do it if Paz doesn’t share.
I would not be surprised to learn that Rochelle had come up with this upon reading the incoming cadet briefing for Ambrosia, and then just filed it away in long-term memory.
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS
Yeah, I’m pretty sure Rochelle’s mind went straight to “well, what this did testing miss?” when reading about Ambrosia. I certainly do that when reading about any testing of anything and most scientists are wired the same. Maybe lots of us are just trained to do it, but at least some of us seem to have been doing it since we were born – and it seems very much in line with how Rochelle otherwise thinks.
I would go “Squeee!” if Rochelle shot me!
“ร h Gud” will be better than “Min god.” because it is rare for a dane for saying “min gud.” but in return you do hear them saying “ร h gud.”
sorry for nitpicking. orwise you are doing great and keep it up.
As Edderkoppen is Norwegian I don’t know if this changes things back to Min Gud? Happy to hear otherwise. There was some discussion on the Patreon post about what I had originally chosen…