PaRARGdox 199
A split second…: Apologies, this page probably should have come with a content warning… 😬😬😬
We knew Cadet Pux was potential trouble as per page 7.193…this is what happens when you don’t listen to older cadets, Zub Pux!
But even worse, Ambrosia appears unable to slip back one minute to stop this tragedy… unlike the last time, when she was able to save Marco and Eli (see page 7.16)
Sorry, Marco, we barely knew ye. 😢
Patrons: Page 7.202 is now up on Patreon… 7.203 published soon…
Next update: May 14, 2023: Flailing and first aid.
And Pux gets his well-earned Darwin award, sadly taking innocents with him. An idiot to the end.
Ambrosia’s condition is concerning. The Rarg’s thing didn’t work against her before, so it shouldn’t have this time. I wonder if the fatal blast in the previous timeline caused this. If her temporal energy, for lack of a better term, was completely expended by her death and throwing a group of people backwards a few hours, could her power be gone for good?
The way Ambrosia’s power normally works, it can only send her back one minute, and it takes one minute to recharge. Rochelle’s theory was if Ambrosia was eviscerated, it would release more energy due to her exposed viscera…
It stands to reason that this energy having been spent, now needs to be recharged. Based on the 1 minute jump = 1 minute recharge, she is out for the next few hours, until she catches up to the time of her jump.
And in the meantime, she can’t do small jumps. My guess would be that without her viscera exposed she only has access to something like the top 1% of her energy. So even though there might already be more than enough juice already back in the tank she can’t access it yet. It does leave the possibility of another emergency jump being possible though, which might save her if she’s eviscerated again. With only a partial charge it wouldn’t send her back as far in time, and without Paradoximan it would create a split, but it’s something.
Going back to re-read Rochelle’s explanation, she said that the reason eviscerating Ambrosia could cause a large time-shift is because it would violently discharge the counter-temporal energies permeating her viscera and organs. Exactly what that means for the present remains to be seen, but it COULD be interpreted to mean that said energy, which was always contained within her body prior to that point, was then released and expended. It may not be in her body anymore.
To say it another way, prior to Ambrosia’s death the time-energy was always held within a contained system (her body). Even when she used it for her one-minute jumps, the energy still remained in that contained system. When that system was breeched, however, the energy was no longer contained and may have drained off.
We’ll have to see. Hopefully you’re more correct than I am: Ambrosia has been an interesting addition to this storyline, and I’d rather it not be the last we see of her.
Of course for pure story-telling reasons, it makes sense that there would have to be a price to be paid somehow for Ambrosia re-setting the timeline. I suspect her talents are gone for good.
Mayyybe? It looks to me like we might still need her to fix the mess that’s gonna be left.
I think you have to take into account the genre of the story though. This is a comic book superhero story. Permanently taking away an interesting superpower is not very interesting for story reasons, there are some interesting plots to do with permanently depowered characters, but most of those can be done with a temporary depowering too.
From a Doylist perspective, it makes sense to temporarily remove Ambrosia’s ability to avoid it being used over and over. But there are way more interesting plotlines to explore if she keeps her ability, including ethical dilemmas around the fact that Ambrosia can now be used to avoid great tragedies… but needs to be disemboweled in order to do so.
One also has to remember that Grace as an author has proven that Magellan is as much a loving homage to big-name hero comics, it’s also a thoughtful critique. I would not put it past Grace to retire Ambrosia after this arc, or do different interesting things with her even with her powers being completely gone.
After all, there’s the theory about her being a Disciple of the Character Assassins. Even without her powers, she might be determined enough to stick around and prove herself a worthy “norm,” like Kaycee, if for no other reason than to figure out who the Alpha Character is. And, depending on how wily and nefarious she is, assuming she’s the plant, then she may even fake losing her powers (or if she has actually lost her powers temporarily, pretend they never come back) just to improve her chances of getting what she wants.
All speculative, of course. Other than the part about Grace being a great author. That part is validated by past experience.
Actually you just single handedly explained why her powers have to be gone for good.
You can’t have a ‘get out of disaster’ free card available all the time. If killing her really does work that way she seems willing to accept the sacrifice required. The only smart thing to do would be to send her and paradox guy into some super protected fort with really good information network and all them up any time a disaster happens. Zap, disembowel, disaster averted. The ethical dilemma plot was already done once so wouldn’t be good story telling to bring up again, but besides which it is not one if she agrees to the disembowling, and she would.
No a *good* story teller who use time travel as an out in a story will immediately come up with a reason why it was a one time thing. She can’t be used to set right what once went wrong ever again or it would be an albatross hanging around the neck of the series, draining drama from every future adventure.
Now I wouldn’t rule out a possible middle ground where she somehow gains her once minute slip through time power but without the ability to every jump back more then a minute, given the genra you can’t rule out much of anything, comic books depower, reempower, and modifying powers is just such a overused trope. However, I will say if the author is any good she won’t be able to do a multi hour jump ever again, and most likely that means she won’t be able to do any jump ever again.
I look forward to seeing what strange new power she somehow manages to spontaneously develop to replace the lost one at some later point 😛
Actually, say she will need another week to recharge. And they are not sure how much back she will be able to jump next time.
Between the ethic issue, need to prevent paradox AND this, I can totally see her ability to jump more than few minutes back will be reserved only for most dire disaster. Like, this time, the whole PLANET was in danger. They won’t use her to save city next time, because then what if another planet-wide disaster happens while she’s recharging? That way there will still be enough drama, unless you insist that after storyline endangering whole planet anything smaller isn’t interesting.
Assuming her powers are recharging for the next few hours, she COULD just die because there’s no reset for her and plenty of ways to die with buildings collapsing and a Rarg ship about to hit the deck. It wouldn’t be much of a life for Paz and Paradoximan if they were stuck in Never never land for the rest of their natural lives – I would expect both to quit if that was the new status quo. Conversely, would the 6 people who knew the VERY SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES required for all of this to happen confidently claim it’s repeatable? Or just hand wave it as really lucky timing between Sista Superior’s blast, Paradoximan’s deranged ramblings & proximity to Paz. In which case, her secret may be safe with them. You would think Paz had been disemboweled by the group that tested her Magellan freed her; either she’s been keeping this secret or it didn’t actually work with more mundane methods – again, implies this isn’t an easily repeatable event.
“If killing her really does work that way she seems willing to accept the sacrifice required.”
Does she? Kaycee wanted to tell her what the plan was but she never got the opportunity. Ambrosia was killed randomly by Sista Superior and it was only luck that Paradoximan’s dying ramble coincided with her jumping back in time while being evidcerated. As far as we know Ambrosia has no idea that her death was neccessary. She doesn’t understand how she went back several hours.
“The only smart thing to do would be to send her and paradox guy into some super protected fort with really good information network and all them up any time a disaster happens. Zap, disembowel, disaster averted.”
Sure, from a purely logical standpoint that’s the pragmatic thing to do, that’s what saves the mist people… But people don’t operate on pure logic. Ambrosia was confined for years and experimented on, something that left her deeply traumatized. Do you really think she would accept being locked away in some bunker to be eviscerated in case of emergency? More importantly, do you think that Magellan, an organization that has been shown to have pretty high moral standards so far, would do such a thing?
If you stop assuming that Ambrosia would volunteer to be violently killed to resolve every crisis there’s a pretty obvious way to avoid it happening again: Ambrosia doesn’t want to. For that matter I doubt Paradoximan would be happy to put a screeching halt to his superhero career in order to just sit in a bunker waiting to be used as part of a big reset button setup. He’s already out in the world, helping people on a team. Ambrosia can only avoid creating a new timeline if he’s there. He’s not going to always be nearby, thus it won’t always be a solution.
I don’t think for good. I think for either the time it takes to catch up to the point she slipped back from, or maybe times 5 because now she also took 4 others with her in the time slip.
Based on that previous incident with the exploding bot, it’s obvious Marco doesn’t have super resilience powers, much less super resilience powers that can’t be zapped off… so yeah, dude’s gone.
Bobbi’s fate is up in the air, if she doesn’t die too fast from blood loss and/or shock they can probably find a way to deal with the wound and then if she survives the fight with the Rargs they might be able to regrow the arm later or replace it with a cool high-tech prosthetic…
There’s still no power and *presumably* no one with healing powers. Hans and the Euro team should be showing up soon.
It isn’t “get out of danger free”. They still have to beat the Rarg this time. At best, Ambrosia gives them one retry with intel. Ti preserve suspense and stakes without going too deep into the time travel aspect, the next disaster might be shown to us with the same perspective e.g. Epoch is currently working from: there is a disaster incoming and all we know is we have already failed once and we can’t afford to fail again
I’m guessing that was meant to reply to another comment?
Yeah it was meant for dsollen, up in a different thread, but the Reply button is far too sensitive on touchscreens
Hmmm, this page gave me a lot to think about. Pux’s arrogance is off the charts here. Marco and Bobbi had the situation well under control, considering it looked like they were going to be able to dodge it based off Marco’s words, and even without that Morgana’s spell would have saved them. It appears they were more interested in playing the hero than considering the consequences of their impulsive actions. I’m surprised Freya didn’t pick up that type of thinking in their emotional signature considering it’s implied she has to sign off on all potential cadets being offered a spot and that kind of arrogance would be a big red flag.
If Pux somehow survives this day (though surviving the next few minutes might be a tall order considering they just turned themselves and Marco into chunky Jello), they’re gonna be in a CRAPTON of trouble. Luke was expelled just for permanently injuring two cadets, I can’t imagine the Magellan Council going lightly on someone who flat-out KILLED another cadet and possibly permanently injured another. Plus Bobbi, if she survives, is going to need a lot of physical therapy to get her back to a state approaching normal considering it doesn’t look like any healer we’ve seen can regrow limbs, plus even more work to prepare her for a prosthetic no matter how high tech it is. In one swoop, Pux took three cadets out of the class of 2017 permanently. What a fool.
On a last note, Ken’s comments about sometimes not being able to fight your fate are ringing true. Marco already died once today and it appears the universe wasn’t going to stop until he was dead. And Bobbi already got mutilated in the first timeline, only then it was her eyes rather than her arm.
Even more damningly, they didn’t just foolishly try to do more than they could with horrific consequences, Pux did it against DIRECT ORDERS with a full explanation on what might happen if they attempt this exact thing.
Either that or they were too busy squeeing over Epoch and Bill and wasn’t listening to the senior cadets explain the situation. If they hadn’t been told (though it more than certainly has been explained in class) it might confer some protection against consequences but as it stands, this is at least manslaughter.
I didn’t like Pux before and considered them unfit at this juncture to be a hero, but now I really hate them.
It’s not entirely clear just how much authority a third-year cadet has over a first. It may be that Nadine technically had no authority to give orders to the others. Of course, listening to someone with two years more experience than you, particularly when they’re saying something reasonable and true, should be common sense. However, common sense isn’t always that common. Also, given Pux’s grumbling about being given orders, he may be one of those people whose reaction to being told what to do is to immediately do the exact opposite, no matter how stupid that may be.
Anyway, my point is that the “against direct orders” part of your response may be debated. However, the “with a full explanation on what might happen” really can’t be. He was warned against EXACTLY this danger, and still went ahead and did it anyway. If he lives, he needs to end up in jail.
We routinely have scenes of cadets thinking they know better than teachers, faculty, staff, more senior cadets, etc… It seems to be a huge recurrent theme of this universe for people with powers to assume they know better than everyone around them.
I think there should be a new First Year mandatory class run by Ken Spence called “You Don’t Know What You’re Doing Yet”. Primary syllabus topics include ‘Listening to those more experienced’, ‘Following instructions of staff and faculty’ “Listen up, you moron!” and other similar themes.
Any cadet that doesn’t pass this class gets to retake First Year once, then gets ejected from Magellan upon failing it a second time for being an idiotic danger to themselves and everyone around them.
What makes you think they don’t HAVE that class already?
Part of that arrogant and condescending attitude probably comes from the fact that, after many of them have lived with their powers for their entire lives, they feel no one can possibly know their powers and what they can do better than they can. It’s very much something that needs to be knocked out of them ASAP when they join the academy, since as we’ve seen, many people have similar if not nearly identical power sets. Letting them continue to think they’re special snowflakes is just asking for situations like this to happen over and over again.
Pux was especially idiotic considering how many speedsters there are even just at the academy at the moment, let alone in the world considering the Fast Club’s existence, proving it’s hardly a unique powerset. And especially considering how all of them seem to function with their powers in a similar fashion i.e. getting the source of their powers (supposedly) from the Streaker Synergy and having a personal inertial dampening field.
What authority would Nadine have over Pux? Perhaps the Sempai principle may apply – a term that’s seriously abused by the hentai industry, I’ll admit. In Japan, a Sempai, or older student, has a responsibility to guide younger students in their education, and younger students are encouraged to listen and obey the older students as they would a teacher. It’s always seemed to me Magellan encourages a similar concept.
Even if an upperclassperson doesn’t have formal authority (and I’d bet they do, albeit more like corporal to private than officer), Nadine’s been through both the Bad Karma and Locke Island fiascos. That experience alone means you listen to what she says. Veterans learn many lessons the hard way.
In some ways Nadine has as much, or more experience and awareness as her own upperclassmen, likely even some newly graduated heroes. I wouldn’t put her experiences above those of Epoch or Ranger Bill, but the old military phrase comes to mind; “A Sergeant in motion outranks a Lieutenant who doesn’t know what’s going on”
Fair shout. There’s nothing concrete proving she had actual authority. I’m just kind of assuming there’s some kind of an emergency chain-of-command system at Magellan given what a tempting target it seems to be for attacks and to assure that youngest or least experienced students don’t just run around like headless chickens in situations where they can’t receive direct orders from faculty.
And we refer to this scenario as “Catching the A-Train.”
Also “They got the Axe.”
I had a feeling this would be the case for Ambrosia. Her power needs at least as much time to charge as the amount of time she jumped, and it was highly unlikely this would change here.
It’s like the 1990s TV series “Seven Days”. The time machine could travel back in time seven days, but the fuel took more than seven days to regenerate. In that case it was for dramatic effect, so they only had one chance to undo whatever crisis they jumped back to prevent.
Yeah, I liked that show!
I liked the premise, but … they actually traveled back physically. There should be time machines and main heroes pilling up.
Whenever Frank traveled back in time, the past versions of him and the time machine vanished. The Sphere disappearing was how they knew Frank had arrived if he landed off target, and when they were investigating him after his very first trip, they found that he had suddenly “disappeared” from the military mental hospital he was in.
It is different in this case. Ambrosia’s time slip power didn’t keep her from using it again within the minute she slips back in time; it simply wouldn’t let her slip any further into the past than the initial slip. This was demonstrated when Rochelle used her to try different strategies to fight an individual rarg. What is different is that she is at a point in time beyond the minute her normal time slip powers work. What I believe is that her normal time slip powers will only let her go back up to one minute before the moment she was eviscerated, which is a point in time we have not reached yet.
Pux really is a brainless idiot.
He could’ve used his superspeed to knock the debris out of the way instead of trying to save people and making strawberry jam out of them.
*nods* It’s tricky to use your speed to help people in the given situation when you don’t have the expandable IDF. He could also try to come to a stop, pick up someone and accelerate slowly to less than maximum speed.
There should be rescue victim bot training practice…Cadet Pux is scheduled for earlier today… Bot training center is down due to an explosion. Bad timing. Marco had a part in his own failed rescue.
(The aforementioned schedule was not actually referenced in story.)
Heh😏…
‘course, it suffers a bit if we’re not able to make it all better at the end🤞
Well Grace! This page certainly got people talkin’! Them’s a lotta paragraphs up there.
Yes, very cool! 😀
I’m surprised that Bobbi lost her right arm there, I would’ve guessed it would be the left side since she was holding onto Marco’s hand just a moment ago.
I figured that Pux deflected after hitting Marco and took her other arm off on the way through since the impact with him caused her to turn inwards slightly… my physics anyway 😉
Can’t wait to see if olfa can rez up blended up cadets. Or do their bodies need to be more intact?
Sorry I misspelled it. I meant Olaf
OMG Wait! Does this mean…
Actual FATALITIES?? In Magellan??
*grabs popcorn*
We’ve had actual fatalities before.
Remember Detective Dianne? Not only was that a fatality, but it was for a character who absolutely didn’t “deserve” it, that the audience had some time to form a bond with (and then retroactively in a flashback chapter develop even MORE of a bond with).
And then there’s Chang . . . although it’s understandable if calling that an “actual” fatality might be nebulous.
I would absolutely call Chang a fatality. Just because he got to exact some revenge and save the day -after- his death doesn’t remove the death.
I meant more the possibility of Chang surviving in the Astral Bridge Bubble the way that Dragonklaw did. Slim to impossible, but it’s there, is it not?
It’s definitely there. In the source material, the fact that there’s no body would be a strong indicator that he would reappear eventually. He was technically revived by the Diablo-tainted blood from DragonKlaw, but I expect that if he had stayed in this realm, he would have not lasted long. In the astral realm, who knows? As capable a witch as Xian wasn’t sure, although the fact that DK could spawn off a psyche fragment while we haven’t seen any indication that Chang exists in any way makes me think he really might be gone for good😞
https://magellanverse.com/comic/trogdor/ Island Guard
https://magellanverse.com/comic/brain/ Flight Torch Aura
Not to mention Alex sister of Casey, Sister Superior’s Musical group Rampage, Karma Joffe surprise, Thieves, Ninja, and the Teens eaten by the Hybrids, Master Assassin’s bloody trail, Q’Arth demons killing Invulnerable supers, and a Superpower Nation, before the demolishing of the third big rock from Sol, not including non primary timelines and Olaf restorations.
Magellan has always been brutal.
?
Of course it isn’t.