PaRARGdox 24
Largo Castle Exercise For Dummies!: So there it is folks, what the Largo Castle Exercise is all about and why Charisma tanked it. I went with “traditional” castle tropes here, had quite a lot of fun with the decor and interior design… haven’t used quite so much grey in a colour comic in a long time!
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: New voting incentive featuring Red Vlad and Comrade Katya … page 6 up now!! Next update will be April 17 at 5pm Sydney/3am New York time – it’s a few days late, sorry… busy week at work. 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: Sunday, April 19, 2020: Force Magellan returns with a special delivery.
Ooo – Special Delivery?!
“Candygram for Mongo!” 💥
heh
Charisma isn’t as much of an unthinking brute as she’s making herself out to be, I’m pretty impressed that she actually used stealth in the exercise, I would have expected her to just fly through a wall.
Sounds like her problem in this instance wasn’t that she just charged in, but rather that she was too impatient to pay attention to the mission briefing and didn’t prioritize the right objectives.
Flying through wall IS undetected access when noone hears the noise you make doing that … OR when you disable the one who heard before he raises alarm.
Does it count as undetected if everyone is dead?
To be fair to Charisma, she does have a decent record at this sort of scenario in their earlier training (p.4.102). A better record than Kaycee does, in that particular case (p.4.85), although that wasn’t due to failings in the plan per se.
Charisma can be good at this stuff if she puts her ego aside.
The description of this “test” makes me think of a game show that has been especially popular on French TV (in France, Canada & elsewhere) since 1990 called “Fort Boyard”. See => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Boyard_(game_show)
Fort Boyard, what a blast from the past! But yes, the castle isolated on a small island setting is quite reminiscent.
Not really. The game show had plenty of rules, little actual fight, no villain and the objective was to get money. This seem to be much better though out.
“Uughhh! Could this day get any worse?” You just had to go and ask that, didn’t you? I wonder how long it will take for us and Charisma to get to “worse?”
Kaycee could point out that they’ve averaged at least 1 “bad day” a year….
The good news is that, at present course, they’ll only have one more bad day.
See?? THERE’s the silver lining!
Always look on the bright side of life 😗🎵
🙃
This is a 6-year set of studies. They are only in year 3; they can look forward to at least 4 more “bad days”. Or are you referring to the whole “6 hours to a black hole” thing? Yeah, that is a bad day.
Even worse, less than 6 hours now. Much closer to 4.
Yes, I was referring to the fact that, until we get to the alteration of the timeline, there is currently one more day of any kind left.
Besides that, there may only be one or two bad days left. At some point, Magellan’s mystics will probably conclude that Kaycee’s class is cursed, and either expell them all or graduate them early in hope of getting a quiet year for once.
The whole class, huh? Not just one person?
Kruger might provide some insight, although prolonged contact with him seems. unhealthy.
From The Master Assassin’s point of view there is only one entity responsible for all the misery… The Story Creator!
charisma has potential what she needs honestly is a personal therapist she will listen to to help her work through her issues..
Key phrase being “[whom] she will listen to.” Poor Freya …
xmung. I’m not a grammar Nazi but its imminent not immanent. I just like to see good English in a good book. I make the same mistakes myself every time! 😉
Ah yes, someone else pointed that out to me and I meant to change it. Ooops, annnnnd I forgot! Anyway, thanks for the reminder, I’ll fix it up soon.
I am (a little) and it’s STILL “immanent” 😆
Charisma definitely isn’t dumb, but she needs to focus on how to think. Sure, her actions as described in the exercise are understandable–she focused on the greater threat. But looking at the big picture can cause the little details to get fuzzy sometimes.
Overall, Charisma is an interesting antagonist in this way. She’s not Draco Malfoy–her heart is in the right place. However, she needs to understand that her arrogance is not an asset, that she needs to get over it in order to be most effective. To her credit, maybe she has realized it, and is trying to be more humble. I mean, she’s never liked Kaycee and could have gone to so many other people who might have helped her, but it possible she took the opportunity for help in her own way of trying to make steps in the right direction.
Of course, Kaycee’s mere existence will always get on her nerves, and doubly so when she’s making solid points.
And yes, I know Ken Spence has shown that her ego can be used to an advantageous situation, that threatening it can cause her to do everything to prove you wrong, but that’s not really something that one should be relied upon to do–and it’s easy for a villain to manipulate, too.
Again, I think we’re still seeing fallout from the Locke Island incident. It just happens that, in this case, part of that fallout is improving someone’s situation instead of causing it massive, crippling injuries or trauma.
To wit: I don’t think she’s entirely, consciously, realized her arrogance is a major downside, nor do I think she’s actively chosen to get along with Kaycee yet. I do think this will slowly become the ‘norm’ in terms of their interaction though, as Charisma gets used to comprehending the idea of this non-powered person having some seriously useful talents.
“If you live a lie long enough, it will become truth.” Well, that works even if the person you had been lying to was yourself.
Indeed, synapses have been adjusted, these cadets will work as required. And I think that thing about lived lies becoming truths works mostly if you’re lying to yourself, as soon as others are involved lies are more volatile.
I don’t think Charisma would have asked anyone for help until failing the exercise many more times, most likely the teachers would ask someone to help her out before she did it herself. Kaycee offered, so she didn’t have to ask. Kaycee is also a top strategist very able to work out a plan for Charisma, and the other fellow cadet with such ability is Rochelle… who is not helping. If the teachers were doing the asking I bet the helper would therefore also be Kaycee. Finally, if it came to the point where Charisma were asking for help on her own, I think she’d ask Billy who would in turn ask Kaycee. This was only going to go one way and it was probably an important point in Mavericks relationship with Charisma as well.
Or am I missing some reasonable alternative solution here?
Yes, Charisma. You could be trying to figure this out alone and gradually winding your way up to a full-blown panic.
I like how Doomsday Devices are considered a standard part of your average villain lair. It does make you wonder how Earth lasted until today.
Carefully trained and numerous super-powered heroes.
And when that fails, heroes with time travel powers.
The problem with Doomsday weapons is that the villains only need to get lucky once, the super-heroes need to get lucky every time.
Though, yes, if the heroes can effectively save-scum, that problem is negated.
Typo: “Imminent” instead of “Immanent”.
Kaycee is making this more of a D&D game….! Maybe Sydney ought to tutor Charisma on this!?!?
I see a couple of small problems.
1) Sydney is a few years older, especially considering she missed her birthday while traversing a wormhole.
2) Sydney is in a different, but related, training program.
3) Sydney is in a different universe. Mind you, I think Arianna would love the opportunity to make Sydney’s training someone else’s responsibility.
It seems unlikely that the faculty let any cadet who’s passed this exercise tutor any other cadet about it so casually, on-site. Is Kaycee helping her cheat? Or more subtly, and giving them lots of credit, is permitting this – perhaps without making it obviously available – a way for them to encourage information-sharing, familiarity with one another, brainstorming, et cetera?
We lightly touched on this in the Discussion for p22. It’s reasonable to assume the faculty knows about the tutoring session. They track the cadets movements with the wrist com devices, they have cameras all over, and Kaycee’s entry to the castle was logged. Kaycee informed some of her friends of what she was doing, and she doesn’t strike me as the type that will flout authority (plus Billy knows, and you know how he is). I wouldn’t think make-ups are the norm in these situations, but Charisma is kind of a special case that at least some folks really want to see succeed.
If Kaycee was cheating, she wouldn’t have been granted access under her own name.
I agree it’s unlikely she has unfettered access, though. She probably asked permission first.
My take, provisional as always, is that favoritism or indulgence toward Charisma is unlikely – the faculty have been openly critical of even admitting her all the way from the beginning. It seems more likely to me that they, or some of them, would permit this in order to encourage her to learn something from Kaycee, or really, from anyone, but especially from Kaycee.
That raises another question; I’ll have to comb through the archives, but at the moment, I don’t remember any “norm” being a member of Force Magellan, a member of any Magellan subsidiary, Academy staff, or even any other current cadet. The only big-name norm heroes seem to date all the way back the Victorious. If Kaycee is being considered for Magellan membership at graduation (as she well might be, considering her amazing accomplishments to date), then that’s a real breakthrough.
There are some norms on the broader faculty, those who are outstanding in their respective fields, mostly around things that don’t require powers like forensics, legal studies, finance (yes, even supers need to balance books!!), etc.
It looks like the “mystery men” of the Pulp and Golden Age eras retired or died in action in the period following the war without replacement by others. I’d hazard a guess that in Earth Magellan, there wasn’t much appeal for the younger generation to go to the effort required to match the abilities of actual supers, and the risk to reward made those inclined to fight for the greater good more inclined to join the military or regular law enforcement.