PaRARGdox 200
Page 200!! Woo!!: So hopefully this page shows how much the speedsters can done in the same amount of time it takes for Rochelle, Ambrosia and Morgana to discuss the situation… specifically that moment just before everything reset on pages 7.155-157!
Patrons: Page 7.203 is now up on Patreon… 7.204 published soon…
Next update: May 21, 2023: Look out below!.
One of my favorite parts of this comic series is how you can progressively observe the students gaining more experience and maturity. On this page in particular you can compare the panicky Ambrosia and Morgana, the nervous but adjusting Verne and the composed, critically thinking Nadine.
After everything her year has been through, this is moving towards Just Another Monday for our favorite Kiwi.
Just shoving a guy’s organs back in, no big deal.
Remember when Nadine was freaked out about sharing living space with non-human cadets?
Poor Marco died two times in a day
It was very dumb of pux. If he survives he’ll have hell to pay, might never become a hero and might actually be made responsible and put in some kind of prison. I’m curious to see how it will work out. He for sure can’t be put back in classes with other people who knew Marco and who knows Pux killed him
I’m pretty sure Pux is going to get kicked out of Magellan if he survives… Wombat Man was expelled just for injuring other cadets wasn’t he?
If guess there could be an argument of “this was real and stressful situation, people were always going to get hurt, he was trying to help he just overestimated his ability” while I believe the implication was that Luke had hurt others in an exercise or something in that vein?
Even with that excuse, I can’t see someone like Ken accepting it as a reason for why a cadet got turned into bloody mush. Mary, perhaps, but Ken is likely gonna chew Pux up one way and then down the other before booting their ass out the door and back to their home planet/dimension/wherever they came from. They were given specific instructions NOT to do exactly what they did and caused a fatality because of it. When the Magellan Council does an investigation, as they did with the Lockedown incident, Nadine and Verne are both going to be interviewed and explain exactly what happened, thus creating no ambiguity in the matter.
Even with up to 180 cadets at any given point on the island, only ONE over the past three years has caused the death of another cadet, so I doubt even “It was just an honest mistake!” will hold much weight here.
Yeah, I don’t think it will happen either. Magellan doesn’t seem to tolerate people who get others hurt because they got cocky. Even if he’s probably learned his lesson from it I don’t think he gets to stay. Maybe he can get another job that involves saving lives if there’s ways to learn that inertia dampening field trick outside of Magellan. Superspeed is useful for a lot of things anyway.
At the end of the inquest, the full Magellan Council, wearing formal uniforms, along with an older member of Pux’s species, are sitting along the front wall of the lecture hall, turned into the council chambers. The student seats act as the gallery for the hearing, as the final conclusion of the inquest is heard.
Ken “I’m still the damn Nitroman” Spence: Cadet Pux, come forward. [ He uses a cane to walk up to the Magellan Council. Pux leans heavily on the cane as he stands in front of them. ] During the alien invasion a few weeks ago, you acted recklessly, causing severe injury to yourself and another cadet and the death of another. You had already been instructed by a more senior and more experienced cadet not to engage in rescue efforts in the manner you did, but you did anyway and caused clearly foreseeable injuries and death. This is unacceptable.
You are hereby expelled from Magellan Academy and you are turned over to your government’s civil authority, represented here by Ambassador Lon, for prosecution.
Ambassador Lon: [ Rises from the council, walks up to Pux, and puts a hand on his shoulder ] Pux, you are under arrest for the felony charges of reckless endangerment causing permanent bodily harm as well as reckless endangerment causing death. You will be given access to legal council prior to formal interrogation and during other legal proceedings. A duty council will be made available to you until you hire your own qualified legal council. The duty council will also explain the legal aid system and its requirements. You do not have to answer any questions or make any statements, but if you do, anything said could be recorded and entered in evidence during trial. Do you understand?
Pux: [ very down-trodden ] Yes sir. I understand.
The ambassador escorts Pux out of the council chambers, past Cadet Pan, who is sitting beside the aisle, with a shattered right horn and her right arm covered in a thick cast and a sling. Pux looks at her, lowers his head and keeps walking as the ambassador guides him forward.
The first part should definitely be canon. But would his home world/dimension/whatever necessarily have jurisdiction to charge him for his stupidity?
Yeah I got to agree with you. If he hadn’t been explicitly warned about this situation he *may* have had a chance. He simply has no justification outside of ego and not liking being told what to do to justify the mistake after being warned.
In fact I’ll risk going a bit farther. I herby predict he survives, and becomes an antagonist of another episode after being expelled and somehow blaming the school or Nadine for it.
After all we have to keep this comics track record of it’s own hero’s being the biggest threats (really, think about it. Mind control or other shenanigans may have been involved, but outside of this story I’m not sure I can come up with any other major story where hero’s, cadets, or failed hero’s weren’t being Faught.
Two times?
Not three?
Grim Reaper was definitely collecting on Marco today…
🤔 That sounds like a movie I saw once…
🙃
I count three deaths today: Robomat explosion, spaghettification and speedster mishap.
Yeah, 3 deaths, definitely spaghettification if he didn’t die in the initial blast that destroyed the towers.
It would appear Marco is, indeed, Fated To Die this day. For all her resets in this storyline, Ambrosia is unable to alter this basic fact.
“Make like the speedsters” seems like unusually informal diction for Rochelle.
I guess she’s upset.
It’s hard to believe that Pux never ever in their life did try to speedmove anything in their life.
Given their alien nature, it may be that in their home world or home dimension, everyone was a little more sturdy, and Pux hadn’t yet developed a reasonable grasp of Terran speed limits.
Not to excuse the carelessness which caused a fatality, but only to offer potential explanations for context.
They did. At least their clothes.
My guess is that this is about size. The intertial dampening field naturally extends a few cm outside the body, allowing the speedster to move their clothes and small objects without trouble.
But the cadets he tried to shift are large, and there was a cut-off at around the shoulder. This is also why the arm is merely ripped off, and not disintegrated, as should happen if it was slammed into at this kind of speed.
So Pux might have had reason to believe that they do have the capability to extend their field wide enough? E.g. they are used to grab their stuff?
OTOH if an arm is about 6 % of the weight (Wikipedia), that would be 4.2 kg. Many objects are heavier than that, so there must be something else. E.g. water is hard to move while school books are rather easy?
No, because Nadine asked them if they could and they said they could not.
Pux doesn’t say it, only Taylor does (https://magellanverse.com/comic/parargdox-193/), it seems to be assumed by Nadine (unless she already knows). Pux is constantly being arrogant and doesn’t seem interested in the warning. (Same with https://magellanverse.com/comic/parargdox-176/). Google does not find more pages when I search for “pux” on this site.
But since Taylor does seem to be training on her field (her words), Pux will have been training on theirs, too (assuming T. didn’t train in her free time), so they both should know their limit and both should not even need to be told to not do that. But Pux assumes that they can move one or two people without hurting them and committing suicide while Taylor seems to accept her limit.
On https://magellanverse.com/comic/parargdox-176/ everyone was still affected by the ray, but they thought they had recovered and Nadine + Verne do have their field. Charisma does rip out the door that had shielded her (https://magellanverse.com/comic/parargdox-174/). Everyone assumes they do have their usual power.
Maybe everyone (or just Pux, they aren’t human) is a bit weaker than they used to be, and even though there isn’t much difference this does make the difference here; less control, too, and they are careless. So their field would suddenly break at maybe 106 % (Pux + the arm; but any number below 200 % will do) and that will turn their body into a “van” without an airbag.
TL;DR: 1) Pux had confidence to not die, presumably by some experience, 2) the assumption that all abilities are either on or off needs to be false and 3) The dampening field needs to have a catastrophic failure; All three together can explain the outcome.
OTOH: If the runners like to be nudist (I just remembered this), touching things while running might be very uncomfortable, that would explain why Pux never touched anything besides their clothes while running. Then they can still be stupid-arrogant-reckless-stubborn and thereby cause the death.
Thanks, I think with these two headcanons to choose from my mind can accept the story.
I’m honestly surprised Pux wound up so injured; part of what typically makes speedsters amongst the most powerful supers is that they have sufficient resilience to slam into stuff without significant injury (roughly speaking, a speedster who slams into something at full speed isn’t going to be any more injured than a human who slammed into that same thing at their own full speed; indeed, they typically are better off than that human would have been). Do speedsters in the Magellanverse tend to eventually get to that level (slamming into something at 200 mph damages it more-or-less like a human body being thrown into it at 200 mph, but the speedster themselves are unharmed or comparably-harmed to a human slamming into that thing at a brisk jog), and Pux here just hasn’t learned that trick yet, or do they instead fight using some inertial dampener hijinks (basically, having their foe join them at super speed for the brief moment their fist hits the foe’s jaw, making it no more damaging to either of them than a punch at normal speed, but hard to fight against due to how quickly it can be delivered)? Or is it more variable – some speedsters have a degree of invulnerability and can just body check foes into paste, while others have to do the above inertial dampener tricks?
As a first year cadet there is probably a lot Pux was yet to develop… the potential would have been there but very raw and untrained.
I’d say the idea of using the inertial dampener being used for brief moments during fights so as not to kill their opponents verges on canon given we saw Nadine using super-speed to fight the Character Assassins in Legacy and neither of them ended up turned into mush from the punches and kicks, only receiving as much injury as they would have from being in a non-powered fight with someone.