PaRARGdox 57
The big head floaty kid still has powers?: Is Rochelle being cold hearted or just rigidly over-practical? Maybe she is breaking inside too, but doesn’t want to show it. Or maybe she just is that emotionless after all! You decide!
It’s exposition time (hey, when better than just after a building has collapsed on you?)… except it’s an exposition of exposition.
Well, that’s good Ambrosia still has her power, right? Right?
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Next update: Wednesday 9 August: One lousy minute?
Where are the Rarg? I would have imagined the cadets being swarmed by now.
But the extra time, hopefully, will allow some of the heroes to get in to a more defensible position!
I’m sure they’ll show up soon. Four cadets with unaffected abilities… how handy! What else have we got?
Five now. Olaf, Sun, Yasmeen, Rochelle, and Ambrosia.
Heh… I wasn’t counting the revived (we haven’t actually SEEN them demonstrate their powers, although I don’t doubt that they are able). I was thinking Rochelle, Olaf, Ambrosia, and Jaxine.
Just because Jaxine has her wings physically doesn’t mean that there isn’t some etherics in play which allow her to defy physics.
Yeah, maybe. I mean, it seemed pretty clear to me that she was flying back on Page47… she’s over everyone’s heads, and the motion lines indicate she’s still gaining altitude… but not everyone agreed back then.
There definitely IS some etherics in play. She wouldn’t be able to fly by muscles alone. Only question is of that etherics was blocked or not.
Looking at that short list some more, I see a 3rd Year, two 2nd years, and a 1st year. Should I be anticipating at least one cadet from *each* class to have powers? 🤔🙃
Something I thought of: what if in the black hole event, Ambrosia jumps back only one minute, as per her power as already delineated, which is just enough time for her to coordinate with the survivors to stop the device? She’d know what it does, after all, which can be helpful.
It’s also possible that she’ll hop back in time quite a few times if they don’t succeed to start.
Also–the trolley problem aspect: it’s possible the winning plan involves Charisma needing to sacrifice herself. I mean, I’d want her to survive, but not everybody lives through these stories, and I would think such an event could have an air of the Flash’s sacrifice in Crisis (obviously with different circumstances).
Also, I called it a couple pages ago: Ambrosia had used her power. Or, you know, was just disoriented and it was coincidental timing, but you know, I’m still willing to give myself a pat on the back.
I thought so too, but if she had she wouldn’t have needed to test them in a minute.
You know, the passage of time gets really funky close to a black hole. At the very edge of the black hole (the schwarzschild radius), time effectively stops. A minute might allow quite a bit larger leap back. Of course, this assumes the Rarg device really made a black hole and not some other Earth Shattering Kaboom (TM). And that you can survive close enough to a black hole for the time diletation to matter.
*digs around in desk* Here ya go! ⭐ For AM, Good job! 👍
Seriously, keen insight *should* be rewarded! As for the plan, though… I dunno. I don’t think a minute would be enough time to stop the singularity generator.
You are forgetting something, as you approach an event horizon, relative time slows down, one minute to you may be hours, or even years to the outside world so ifher time slipping is affected by relativity, going back a minute at the right point could give her hours
That’s what I thought too when her power was introduced, it gives a way to retcon the event and save most if not all characters without handing out an ability that kills all dramatic tension in the future, since you need her power AND a black hole.
I did not think about this earlier, but I like it. I like it a LOT.
Hmm, I’m pretty sure that if you’re experiencing those extreme relativistic effects, you’re already dead, but…*nods* In the comics, that just might work.
If you’re freely falling into the hole, without hitting anything, I don’t see any reason why you should be. Air will be falling along with you, you’re not in outer space. If you do come to a hard stop just beyond the event horizon you’re done for, but I see no reason why you would… on the other hand, my knowledge on black holes is limited and while I do know relativity I’m having too lazy of a Sunday to work out what would actually happen to time in this case.
Yeah, I don’t wanna bore people with my own very spotty knowledge, but there’ll be extreme tidal forces, plus a lot of hard radiation from the stuff falling in. It’s not a good spot to be in. It could get hand-waved here, though.
To explain the “tidal forces” bit: the difference between gravity affecting your head and gravity affecting your foots would be enough to tear you in two.
… however, that’s for STELLAR black holes. The physics around “portable” black holes might be different – or, at least, there is a big opening to handwave that it works BECAUSE it’s not stellar black hole.
Rochelle is not emotionless. But she doesn’t know what to do with emotions: whether to show them or not, even whether to admit to herself that she has them or not. She avoids her emotions, because they are unknown variables, which get in the way of what makes her great: her logical, rational strategies. Have we not already gotten a glimpse of this in her Lock(e)down greatest fear scenario?
In this rather extreme instance she is afraid that if she acknowledges her emotions she might really break inside and not be able to think rationally, as she normally does, and therefore might not be able to help save the day. Which might just spell the end of humanity. So, dealing with emotions is normally ignored, and right now definitely put on hold – it may later turn out that she can or cannot ignore emotions about these deaths but it is certainly not the right time to try right now.
I very very VERY strongly hope that Fatima and Nadine both will eventually live. If that does happen, I hope that Rochelle looks back at this moment and sees the danger of not knowing how to handle her emotions – indeed, not knowing IF she can handle her emotions – and starts working on it. But I fear she might just put it on hold until someone dies and stays dead… which might spell the downfall of Rochelle. If you’d ask her to name her greatest weakness I think she’d say arrogance, but I think the true answer is emotions.
Well, that’s my take, feel free to concur/modify/disagree/ignore as you see fit, fellow readers and Grace as well. I very much enjoy this discussion as Rochelle is a character that I think I understand pretty well, but both when reading fiction and when experiencing real life I’ve learned that I may understand wrongly. Less often when trying to understand other people than when trying to understand myself, though (I’m guessing Rochelle will have a similar experience when/if she starts to try to understand her emotions).
Emotions and rationality aren’t total opposites, and I would say Rochelle might be in touch with her emotions here. She is attempting to focus the group because she cares about saving whoever she can. Accepting emotions doesn’t have to mean behaving in a stereotypical way, punching whoever you’re angry at and sacrificing everything for anyone you care about. Emotions create focus, clarity, and motivation, and sometimes that means leaving friends under rubble because you are trying to prevent Earth from being destroyed.
I just realized a hack with Ambrosia’s power, since she can send her consciousness and memories back one minute she has basically infinite time to study/memorize. She could read a whole encyclopedia in “one minute” by going back to when she started and picking where she left off. She could probably read a whole library in one evening and still get eight hours of sleep. There are students who would kill for this power.
Oh damn, she has near infinite time to think during tests too.
I think it was already mentioned thät she can’t do it over infinitely, but I don’t remember the exact limit.
It’ss possible I missed that, but I think you might be referring to the WoG on her daisy-chaining the use of her power. If she could immediately reuse her power she would be able to go back as far as she wants by spamming the one-minute jumps back… But she actually has a cooldown preventing exactly that, her power need an equivalent time to recharge, so she can’t go any further back than one minute (barring the potential weirdness of relative time near a black hole).
I don’t think I’ve seen any word on if there’s anything preventing her from spamming her power every time her cooldown ends to relive the same minute as many times as she wants.
Grace explained somewhere *it might have been in the Patreon comments* that the best Ambrosia can do is the equivalent of treading water, while slowly moving forward in time. Unspoken, but certainly imaginable, is that she’ll eventually tire and need prolonged rest. The implication is that she won’t be able to repeatedly jump back to the same instant. There will be a small, but measurable, forward temporal progress. And of course, any delays caused by her own reaction time will be reflected in that progress.
The cooldown was explicitly mentioned to be GREATER than one minute. And she’s probably need full rest after around 16 hours of VIRTUAL time (how much her consciousness was on) and not real time.
… she would still have more time on tests, but not that much more, and they are probably watching her closely … they already need to make sure she doesn’t just look for answer in book and then revert time.
In the comment section xmung said “It takes her about a minute to recover from a one minute jump.” and “Nope, she needs a bit over one minute to recover!” so while it is greater than a minute I don’t think it’s by a lot? My guess would be that it’s only longer by a hair’s breadth. She probably loses more time to how fast she reacts when the minute pass and she goes to use her power.
This will get explained more in the comic soonish…
I mean, if she -is- a plant by the Character Assassins, the whole “temporal” thing might just be a cover. She could literally just have the Powers of Retcon’ing!
Wouldn’t that be just their name for the same power, no matter how it works?
Too bad they didn’t think to test that less than a minute after the death laser hit. “Okay, Nadine, two steps to the left, Fatima, three… ehm, tentacle flaps to the right…”
How much useful information would she have to bring back, other than “RUN!” She didn’t know what hit her, either, and she wasn’t with them at the time. And a large number of individuals swarming out the door might’ve called for a change of target anyway.
Well, considering the name of the storyline and the only possible way out of this mess being time travel anyways, we kind of figured she MUST still have her powers, or at least get them back just in the nick of time to go back a few hours. If she actually can’t go back more than a minute, the black hole timey-wimey stuff will be relevant.