PaRARGdox 65
Run, Rarg, Run: OK, back to Rochelle, Sioni and Ambrosia who we last saw in the scene on pages 55-58. As you might note, although six pages has passed since we left them, only mere seconds have elapsed.
BTW, we saw Kaycee deploy a similar smoke screen tactic in Bad Karma – see page 4.250. So are smoke bombs standard utility belt issue? I guess so!!
Anyway, we’re about to have some real fun with Ambrosia’s time slip power.
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 16 is now online. Sorry for the delay to this… hoping to restart from September, it’s been a crazy couple of months and it’s dented my productivity. 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: Wednesday 16 September: Rochelle vs Rarg
Anyway, on to more pressing matters –
Sioni *probably* gets away
Yeesh, that is a cold, calculated plan… and an incredibly brave, self-sacrificing one.
The real sacrifice will for Ambrosia’s mental state, witnessing Rochelle getting killed so many different ways, so many different times.
Props for Rochelle’s plan but I’m predicting this is going to be some Nezumi level horror for poor ambrosia. Hopefully she won’t get overwhelmed by seeing her friend(s) get killed over and over again and possibly alert the rarg 2 Rochelle’s plan.
Ambrosia: Okay, I … Don’t use the sub-sonic wave generator on them it does nothing to their shells, but it knocks out Olaf.
Kwan: What? Oh, right. I was just considering that. Let’s try …
Ambrosia: Ugh. Um, they can deflect the sound from the hyper-sonic disruptor and everybody goes deaf.
Kwan: Right. So let’s try…
Ambrosia: Ooooh. The vertigo inducer does nothing to the Rarg, but it scrambles the brains of all the humans. My head is still spinning.
Kwan: Maybe if I …
Ambrosia: Ugh. The daisy cutter was partly successful, but they managed to turn it into those other cadets over there. Please stop; I can’t stand seeing you and everybody else ripped to pieces each time.
Yeah, Ambrosia’s gonna have some serious PTSD issues in her future.
In fact, it could make her especially susceptible to torture. Some forms of pain elicit instinctive fight-or-flight reactions – if Ambrosia jumps back to escape the pain, she’ll find herself unable to avoid it again. A “pain-loop” like that could break her in what would seem like seconds to an outside observer.
Using her ability requires focus. She may be unable to jump when tortured … or, if really instinctive, jump quickly several times then pass out.
I would say PTSD is the real danger here.
There is a risk with this. If a she gets attacked from behind and killed or stunned, she will not be able to jump.
Also, isn’t the slip 1 minute only? What if a plan backfires after 70 s?
I guess you mean if a fight between Rochelle and a Rarg took longer than Ambrosia’s slip? There’s a few things to help against that. Rochelle presumably knows the Rarg’s aggressive nature, so she can count on them not being defensive. And she knows that she has Ambrosia’s power as a safety net so she doesn’t have to hold back herself. Ambrosia is hopefully keeping track of the time also, so in case an encounter was dragging out, she would timeslip anyway and let Rochelle know so she could change her tactic.
I wonder if she’s saying “He’s capable of looking after himself” in the same way she told them about other cadets earlier. Especially given Sioni doesn’t really seem capable of doing that. He’s bound to make a stupid assumption and get hurt. We see him in the “final scene” of the series a bunch of pages earlier, but we have no idea if he has all his limbs.
Meanwhile, I hope Rochelle has a plan for dealing with the minute delay between attempts. Each time the Rarg will get just a bit closer to their hiding place.
Or is Ambrosia’s power such that she can keep attempting the same minute jump each time with her minute of recovery being essentially the same minute she just sidestepped?
From the way this has been shown so far, it seemed she wasn’t capable of making an infinite loop.
12:05 to 12:06 – bad things happen
12:06 – Retcon to 12:05
12:05 to 12:06 – new bad things happen while recovering
12:06 – Retcon to 12:05
Is that essentially the loop?
It was explicitly mentioned she needs LONGER to recover than how far she can jump back, but not HOW much longer. Maybe she needs 70s, which would mean they lose 10s every attempt …
*Waiting for update, so looking for something to do to maintain involvement* Siono is in the group charging forward in p9, and he doesn’t look bloodied so I assumed he was fine in that page. HOWEVER – When I looked at it again before replying here, I did notice some things that escaped me before –
1. Go!Anna is communicating with Magellan USA in panel 1 – How? Shouldn’t her coms have been fried by the EMP?
2. Charisma’s arm is still in a sling in panel 4, but she’s up and moving around? What is going on with her injuries?
3. Chiq is there in panel 3. What happened with his racial ability?
4. Ambrosi looks like she might be about to activate her ability in panel 4?
Also, I’d assume that certain bits of gear, like smoke bombs, would be readily available to any cadet that thinks their useful They all have belt pouches on their uniforms, after all.
After seeing Kaycee use smoke effectively, on panel or not as you like, I imagine Rochelle would have, assuming she hadn’t already considered the practical value of every piece of tactical tools available, accepted their use as a valuable tool.
Oh wow… missed punctuation, improper use of ‘their’ vs “they’re”.
I’mma go lie down now.
BTW, it’s been alluded to, although not stated specifically (when she was talking with Freya and Justine) that Ambrosia can slip back **up to** 60 seconds… so she can certainly do fewer seconds if the situation called for it.
I was going to say “But the situations where that would be tactically advisable are probably rare”, then my good sense grabbed me and shook me a bit😵
An example of where she could have used a short slip *but it seems she didn’t* might have been when she was just checking to make sure her power worked.
I can’t help but wonder: what if this isn’t actually Rochelle, but the Rargs getting into Ambrosia’s mind? Not sure what they’d get out of it, but it does come right after the warning about them attacking people’s minds.
I think that “hunt using telepathy” is not about attacking people’s minds but about FINDING people using telepathy.
Yep. Also, we know that Ambrosia has a pretty good clamp on her mind/thoughts (as per the much earlier comment by Olga).
Well, I wasn’t assuming Rochelle was being controlled, but that Ambrosia was being lead to believe that Rochelle was interacting with her when she might not be.
Why’d I make that response? Neither of you insinuated that I was assuming anything other than that.
There will be a blue moon on Halloween this year!
Wow, Rochelle really is a cold calculation kind of gal. Her statement about Sioni is patently untrue, because the boy has as much sense in him as a bag of hammers, but it’s possible she’s already considered him useless weight and therefore only useful in drawing more Rargs away from the scene until they kill him. That’s a very tough decision to make but also possibly the only logical one she could come up with to make sure at least her and Ambrosia survive when she knows all three of them will certainly die if she tries to save them all.
Also her statement about herself shows a great mental fortitude. Even if she’s not experiencing it the same way Ambrosia is, to know she’s gonna possibly be stuck in an infinite loop of injury and/or death until either they figure out a way to stop the Rargs or Ambrosia gets taken out of the equation means she’s prepared for a lot of grisly small futures coming her way.
Ah, the save-scumming approach. Time-honored gamer strategy there. Also sounds likely to be incredibly painful and mentally disturbing.
Rest well and get well, dear Grace.
Spring fever? 😕 Get well soon Grace!
Rest up grace and get well soon.
Perhaps repeated looping will help give Ambrosia some fortitude. Something akin to a (albeit compressed) training montage.
“Rarg! I’ve come to bargain!” 🙂