PaRARGdox 67
Rochelle vs Rarg… pt 2 & pt3: Despite its somewhat gory nature, this has been a fun sequence to draw. However, as with any time-loop experience – keeping it visually interesting is essential. Not that this is 100% a time loop experience, as Ambrosia isn’t resetting to the exact same spot, usually a few seconds later so that Rochelle can keep up with the previous cycle’s failure. Ambrosia can’t time slip back more than a minute, but she can slip less than a minute.
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… š
Next update: Wednesday September 23: Rochelle vs Rarg… pt 4… progress?
*This* is progress of a sort… They’re working through the progression of tactical choices Rochelle has planned. It’s something that Ro has enough trust in Ambrosia to reboot and save her after just a cursory meeting. She must have really got a lot from the new cadet brief mentioned earlier!
Also, panel 4 looks like Rochelle is starting to recognize ‘future Ambrosia’-face when it occurs. That might be a time-saver.
Not necessarily. That’s her dialogue from the first panel, interrupted.
Once this sequence is over I might draw it from Rochelleās perspective…!
Cool idea! Less new artwork required from you, less squick for the readers PLUS we get a new perspective! Maybe even add in some internal dialogue on Ro’s part?
Is that really trust or just desperation? I think that with her intelligence, she more than anyone else realizes how bad the situation is …
I do wonder how many scenarios Rochelle was able to ‘pre-program’ before she started this sequence. It will start to be time consuming to run through them when/if they are not successful and time may be Ambrosia’s enemy. If they survive this,
Ambrosia and Rochelle certainly deserve huge awards from Magellan, but how would anyone know.
Speaking of time, they’d save some if Ambrosia would time slip as soon as the attempt failed, without waiting to see the Rarg’s counterattack…
I don’t think the counterattack takes THAT long …
… and I would expect Ambrosia will get tired before Rochelle will run out of ideas.
They’d have shorter loops if they were only looking for an instant kill, which isn’t an unreasonable primary goal given the scale of the invasion. But an attack which cripples the Rarg suit’s mobility and/or fighting ability would still be a very useful alternate goal, and for that it needs to have the chance to attempt a counterattack. There’s also the factor that Ambrosia’s timeslip Power recharges no faster than it’s used, so she can’t easily shorten the loop without losing some of the time available.
Oh god this is horrid. When this is all over Rochelle owes her big time for putting her though this hellish training her power is such a pain to live though.
Despite it being Rochelle that dies on each of these failed tries, she doesn’t remember her death – Ambrosia does. I wonder if Rochelle really appreciates the stress Rochelle’s accumulating here…
You mean “Ambrosia is accumulating.”
Looking at some PTSD therapy with … Huh, Vibe is dead, ain’t she? Wonder if she’ll stay dead.
That’s a question that’s not as easy to answer as it might first appear. I have a feeling that there might be some real casualties in this storyline, even though we can be confident that, *despite Page 9*, Everybody won’t really die.
I did, yes.
You know, I’m with a lot of other people in thinking Ambrosia, assuming she survives all this, is gonna have far too much PTSD and trauma to continue being a cadet. She’s already shown to be a sensitive sort so this has to be wreaking havoc on her mind. This might be the first time we see a cadet willingly drop out and quit. Considering she’s likely gonna help keep the entire dang world from exploding, I’d say that’s enough lives she’s saved to figure an early retirement is due.
Actually, a black hole dropped into the core would cause the world to implode, not explode, but otherwise, yeah, same kind of mess in that all the endangered species on Earth go extinct (and in that scenario, everything is considered endangered).
She will be lucky if she drops out willingly. Personally I expect either she will find great strength in herself and become stronger and more cynical … or more likely, she will be thrown out based on psyche evaluation and would be completely ok with that.
I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right. Assuming Freya gets revived along with everyone else, after evaluating Ambrosia’s mind and seeing the poor girl is completely traumatized, she might advise it’s best to let her go off as a civilian, with funding for a lifetime supply of therapy from Magellan. Realistically, I’m sure there are cadets they’ve cut loose before because their psyche evals showed they were one carton of eggs away from cracking completely. Happens with soldiers a lot too.
There are only so many ways that Rochelle can attack that Rarg with her piece of rebar. What happens when she runs out?
When she runs out of options, or time *the other constraint*, they have to run away I suppose.
Swap to some other weapon? Rebar is in plentiful supply, and Humans already have a good repertoire/vocabulary of ‘attacks with heavy sticks’ which would make it easier to iterate and then communicate the plan. But if there’s anything else useful around – maybe broken glass for a cutting rather than bludgeoning weapon – it can be next on the list.
From Ambrosia’s perspective, Rochelle is a machine; just going and going and going, and failing and failing and failing, but undeterred.
From Rochelle’s perspective, Ambrosia is just giving what is tantamount of a precognitive analyse of the situation. There is no pain or trauma.
Although, I think Roch’s smart enough to realize Ambrosia will suffer PTSD, but has weighed the odds and determined that defeating the Rarg (or at least establishing a tactical advantage) outweighs Ambrosia getting to lead a normal, emotionally-healthy life.
While they talked about sacrificing one life to save countless others, and the cadets took it to mean a literal form of life in the context of the trolley problem . . . I’m getting the impression that Grace is heavily hinting to us in the audience that at a certain point; enough mental trauma is tantamount of a loss of life.
Logically speaking, Ambrosia’s power is ONLY usable in way which gives her PTSD. It might be accelerated now, but there was no way she will lead a normal, emotionally healthy life while using her power as member of Magellan.
Password/combo lock cracking is another option. She could brute-force a combination lock faster than a normal human by remembering the combinations she already tried. She could also bypass brute-force protection on electronic locks, but unless possible combinations were limited, she would still be too slow.
There may be other situations, where an outcome can be determined within a minute after decision, without any trauma.
Rochelle better find a way to destroy them before Paz gets really po’d at her!!!
Can she timeslip consecutively ? Ie. perform multiple a chain of 1 minite jumps ?
No. Grace has stated that Ambrosia has to rest for a little more than the length of the timeslip before she can do it again
*it seems to be some seconds more*
If she can timeslip for less than a minute, does she require less rest? It may come out to the same result, though, that she can’t do consecutive time slips to go back further.
Essentially she can’t lap herself – she might be able to mostly stay at a time standstill but even so she will slowly be drifting forward in time.
Do they have a super that can boost powers ?
Obviously someone is going to tinker with time.
I don’t know why Ambrosia seems so ???? about all this. Surely this basic idea is how she always uses her power and how she expects to use her power. Be in a situation where you can try a bunch of stuff and try solutions one at a time, rewinding time every time it doesn’t work. Now granted “watch Rochelle die over and over” is a pretty extreme and traumatic version of it, but that’s the basic idea.
At her tender age she probably hasn’t met anyone willing to have themselves shredded in the process of coming up with a solution.
I would say that she wasn’t really used her power that much. She was still worried she breaks time continuum quite recently …
+1 on never having seen people shred themselves to find a solution- they already established she JUST saw people die for the first time a few comics ago- so I imagine thus far she’s only had accidents which are one and done. Now she’s literally watching Rochelle PURPOSEFULLY die or be horribly injured over and over again! I imagine somewhere in the back of her mind she might also be wondering if there’s a limit on how often she can do it- because now would be a sucktacular time to discover her limit!
Damn, I was hoping the pod on the back would be a good target – apparently their suits are too-well designed.
They are designed better than Death Star, that’s not so big accomplishment. If the suits are designed as armor (and not just to protect against atmosphere), it makes sense there wouldn’t be any obvious vulnerability.
Attempt four – flip them over with a leg sweep, then try for the underbelly?
omg; poor girl’s going to have SO much PTSD!
Dang! No update for a day or two š Oh well… I’ll find *something* to talk about.
It seems to me to be unnecessary for Ambrosia to be losing precious seconds for the sake of Rochelle, who is already aware of her power and of the stakes.Better to slip back to the same point, or as close to it as she can, and just interrupt Ro to tell her the tactic that just failed. JMO
I think you’re right, but I think Rochelle failed to tell Ambrosia that she has an ordered list of things to try in her mind already so that they can work that way. Ambrosia has probably assumed that Rochelle is thinking up the next thing to try on the fly.
Good thinking! That’s probably what’s going on… There’s no reason to expect Ambrosia to know the extent of Rochelle’s mental capabilities, although I’d imagine 1st year cadets might get some kind of overview of the current student population.