PaRARGdox 40
Did someone say “free ice cream?”: A quick return to Ambrosia, Morgana, Marco and Eli… let go from their questioning over blowing up the Robomat! As you’ll recall, Ambrosia did save the day, but not before seeing some pretty graphic gore. For both those scenes, check out the sequences on pages 7.15-18 and 7.30-31…!
Oh, yes, and welcome to the backs of most of the other cadets from the current first year. No names or powers yet… although I am working on something to introduce (some/many) of them properly.
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 14 is now online. Page 15 will go up on Wednesday June 17, about 6pm Sydney/3am New York time. 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: Sunday, June 14, 2020: What’s all the commotion?
Whelp they look happy… I wonder why this is.
First year cadets: All right! Tomorrow’s test is cancelled! At least until they fix the Robomat. We don’t have to face off against the Robo-Antipresident until next week.
Gary: Last time I was in here, well before this last week, was the graduation exercise almost 10 years ago. It felt good to actually help rebuild the RoboMat instead of trying to break it, but it isn’t really ready for prime time just yet. I have to be present just to make sure things run properly and safely.
Ted “Still the God-damned Nitroman” Spence: Well, we got a bunch of first years going through an exercise this afternoon, so keep it together!
Vlad: Are you up for this, Gary? You have been pushing yourself pretty hard this past week.
Gary: Yeah, it’s okay. Thanks for all the help moving the stuff around. We actually do work good as a team. Things will be okay so long as I keep calm and keep my head in the game.
I wonder what the limits of Ambrosia’s ability are. Could she timeslip upstream for 1 minute at a time, indefinitely?
Not really, the processing of time slipping drains her physically and she needs a short time to recover.
But as she practices her ability, she may be able to jump further and need less time to recover. But her time slipping would be limited by her own lifespan- she wouldn’t be able to jump back to before her own birth, for instance.
That’s very true – and she certainly would have a limit of no younger than a certain age anyway. Could you imagine being “fully aware” and discovering yourself at the age of 3 (or still in the womb!!) and have to live all the way through it again? In a way that sort of happened with Gola in the process that led her to becoming Olga. Younger body than her memories… she’s lucky she didn’t get aged back to being in diapers.
Which reminds me of how the poor elderly in that home went crazy after being repeatedly de-aged. Is there any risk of Ambrosia doing similar damage to her own brain?
I thought that was because she was de-aging the bodies, but the effect did not reverse the effects of dementia.
Good point, although the deaging had an effect of scrubbing memories which resulted, after a time, in a brain snap. With Ambrosia, her time slips add to her memories, but it does cause some minor swelling in parts of her mind… mini-headaches that last a few seconds as the pre-memory writes into her grey matter.
Did you explain that before? It sounds verry familiar 🤔
Pretty sure I did, somewhere!
It was discussed extensively in some previous comments, which did not survive the server crash, or at least have not been restored from back-up yet.
To be clear, I meant the bit about Ambrosia. I had just recently been thinking along those lines, and had almost convinced myself that it was an idea original to me. When Grace brought it up here, however, I was suddenly afflicted by a sense of deja vu 😵🙃
At her former apparent age,she might have been de-aged from being in diapers, but that Depends.
ba-dum TISH
So, which one of them is the Mister Assassin’s plant?
Hmm, is this the crop of cadets that started after the Master Assassin thought he wanted a spy? If so, then yeah, there’s probably one there.
Ambrossia would be very useful to him. She could sneak attack anyone. If she fails to kill them, or it kills them but the story didn’t collapse because it wasn’t the alpha character, she just rewinds and the attack never happened as far as anyone knows.
Although I suppose whomever it is has to have the ability to pass by Magellan’s empaths and telepaths. MA designated Olga as an alpha candidate, and he knows she’s a telepath.
Oohh, that’s a good lead on whom it may be. But we shouldn’t limit ourselves to first-years, he may have recruited just about anyone. Olaf maybe?
Olaf appears to have a construct mind, made of multiple partly independent parts. What if only one part of Olaf was the spy?
Interesting theory!! VileTerror has a better grasp of Olaf’s thought processes so I’ll leave that open to them.
As of our last discussion, I had indicated to Grace that it was my intent that Olaf did not contain any whole souls/personalities. While that doesn’t necessarily invalidate the possibility of Olaf working for the Character Assassins, Olaf’s motivations would have more to do with the current readership-booster story arc that’s taking place in Moscow.
Speaking of, Grace… think we’ll get to see a Soul Sphere in the aftermath of the Q’Aarth invasion there? Just an idea.
Devious… Probably none of the ones we’ve seen so far, but if I had to pick one, I’d say Morgana, although it’d be a real kick in the pants if it was Ambrosia.
Ambrossia’s powers would make for a fantastic Character Assassin. She can brute-force her way to the alpha character by simply sneak attacking all possible candidates. If the attack fails, or it wasn’t the alpha character, she rewinds and no one is any the wiser.
I suspect she wouldn’t be able to successfully kill MOST people here under minute no matter how sneaky she would be. But yes, her powers would be significant advantage.
Poor Ambrosia – from hero to Public Suspect #1 in under a minute!!
I’m like 95% confident she is guiltless wrt any collusion 🙂
What’s the security review procedures on the island? We know they do psych evaluations for incoming students, and I’d expect the same for new staff and employees. Do they do recurring evals for everyone? I’m thinking in this place, you’d want to be on guard against trusted people being coerced to work against you.
Good question. From the two that sparked the current disaster it seems the security review of people leaving the place has some shortcomings. On the other hand, simply having telepathic people around – especially Olga, with her great abilities and unfinished training – is likely to uncover bad intentions without actively screening people. Or at least any would-be villain will have to take that into account and make sure they have some psychic defenses.
The system certainly relies on good intentions backed up with legal contracts. Either of which can be broken, as seen with Beatrix Grainger and Bruce-99… but also guard Cassie (remember her!!)
Sure I do! She started as just kind of an a*****e, but turned bad in fairly short order.
Of course we remember Cassie, the one villain that haven’t had any confrontations with Magellan graduates – the only heroes she ever fought were the cadets (and in their first and second year, at that). I guess the other inmates tease her about that!