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Tom Sewell

Pandora's Aberration Apocalypse

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Just now, The Old Hack said:

*adds schnapps to the offering pile*

Hey, that's strictly meant to be left on Hans Island for the Canadians!

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3 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

*adds schnapps to the offering pile*

Sadly, Viking booze technology never developed schnapps. They had to get drunk on mead, which is made from honey. And that's why newly married couples go off on honeymoons.

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2 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

Sadly, Viking booze technology never developed schnapps. They had to get drunk on mead, which is made from honey. And that's why newly married couples go off on honeymoons.

We made up for lost time since. We had a pretty good production of it going until 2015 where the Norwegians bought out our national distillery and moved the main production site to Norway. They think they are so great, they and their bloody fjords. Hmph.

 

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If anyone out there is interested, I've discovered what Dan had in mind when he set up the Spider Vampire attack on Diane in So a Date at the Mall. It's the Moser Tower, which holds the Millenium Carrilon. It has some woods nearby and is part of Riverwalk Park--very much near the center of Naperville, IL, if you search for it on Google Maps. It's also very close to Naperville Central High, probably Dan's model for Moperville South. Both are well within four miles of the Fox Valley Mall, probably Dan's model for the Moperville Mall. In fact, Moperville Central is on Aurora Avenue, which becomes New York Avenue in Aurora, and the north entrance to the mall area is on that street.

The four relevant canon references:

  1. Nanase, Diane, and Charlotte figure out a good place for one of the griffins to be found. (Panel 5)
  2. Charlotte tells Dame Tara that place has a tower, fitting Tara's guess about what her wife would need to find her temporary home again after going any distance away from it. (Panel 5)
  3. First sight of the spider vampire, sitting atop the tower (Panel 5)
  4. Diane and Charlotte arrive at the tower. (Panel 1 for a change)

I found these factoids fooling around with Nukemap, using a 164 kiloton surface burst to get a four-mile radius for the 1-psi ring from the center of the Fox Valley Mall. If you want to try out different radii, you'll have to guesstimate the yield of the weapon to get the outer radius you want; it took me about five tries to get to get a less than 1% margin of error. 

Edited by Tom Sewell
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On ‎3‎/‎18‎/‎2018 at 4:14 PM, Tom Sewell said:
On ‎3‎/‎18‎/‎2018 at 1:40 PM, Scotty said:

4. Susan and Diane get their affinity from Pandora, the question of why couldn't Adrian have summons a magic sword, it's quite possible that he doesn't have that spell, just because you have an affinity for something doesn't necessarily mean you automatically get that spell. Adrian's probably got other "bane" related spells or something that gives him an advantage when fighting aberrations.

Adrian's had hundreds of years to come up with such spells. Why did he borrow a sword from Susan? Just to make her feel better about herself? Why didn't he use one of those other spells on Gullet instead of regretting that Susan's sword was only a short-range weapon?

I've speculated before that Adrian's main magic weapon spell isn't to summon a magic weapon, but to enchant a physical weapon into a magical one. In that case, he wouldn't have to worry as much about his weapon breaking in the middle of the fight, but he would need a weapon in the first place, which he didn't have at the mall (Fighting aberrations is not a common occurrence). Though he does have at least one spell that summons a magical attack, his Murder Shroud. Unfortunately, that's a heavily telegraphed attack, so it's unlikely to work well if the target knows what the spell does.

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On 3/23/2018 at 7:14 AM, Drasvin said:

I've speculated before that Adrian's main magic weapon spell isn't to summon a magic weapon, but to enchant a physical weapon into a magical one. In that case, he wouldn't have to worry as much about his weapon breaking in the middle of the fight, but he would need a weapon in the first place, which he didn't have at the mall (Fighting aberrations is not a common occurrence). Though he does have at least one spell that summons a magical attack, his Murder Shroud. Unfortunately, that's a heavily telegraphed attack, so it's unlikely to work well if the target knows what the spell does.

Good points. And related to my theory that Susan might be a wizard after all.

I wrote one of the longer Sailor Moon fanfic series starting in the Nineties, and I decided early on that most of the magical objects and magical incantations were silly, or merchandizing gimmicks, or both. I didn't want to keep anything but the ginzuishou, so I made all the rest into learning aids that would be dispensed with as the senshi got more skill in using their powers. And that's, more or less, the mechanic I propose for Susan's conjuring fairies and magical weapons: The sign-and-chest system she got from her mark are becoming irrelevant. What's really happening is that Susan learned Nanase's fairy spell and then started modifying it. Nanase still can't summon more than one fairy and isn't conscious of her real body while she's using a fairy. 

Or is Nanase really limited that way now?

Remember Susan didn't read her spellbook for a long time before she got the idea of getting a fairy that looked like herself. Does she really need to have a fairy doll from Nanase in her treasure chest for each fairy, or does she just believe she can summon copies of all her dolls but no more? Quite awhile ago Dan did a Sketchbook showing Susan summoning a swarm of fairies, and I immediately thought of Raven's Murder Shroud.

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On 3/24/2018 at 11:34 AM, Tom Sewell said:

I wrote one of the longer Sailor Moon fanfic series starting in the Nineties, and I decided early on that most of the magical objects and magical incantations were silly, or merchandizing gimmicks, or both. I didn't want to keep anything but the ginzuishou, so I made all the rest into learning aids that would be dispensed with as the senshi got more skill in using their powers. And that's, more or less, the mechanic I propose for Susan's conjuring fairies and magical weapons: The sign-and-chest system she got from her mark are becoming irrelevant. What's really happening is that Susan learned Nanase's fairy spell and then started modifying it

Canonically, we have not been told or even hinted that Susan has learned Nanase's fairy spell at all. (Not saying it can't happen, or even that it hasn't happened.) What we've seen is that Susan, Nanase, and either Grace or Tedd (I forget which, maybe both) worked together for Nanase to make a bunch of fairydolls to Susan's specifications, and then Susan put them in her marked box and is now able to summon more than one (magical, animated copy of one) of them at a time.

We also don't know whether she can summon more than one copy of *one* fairydoll. Or if she can summon copies of two non-fairydoll objects, or a fairydoll and another object.

Another point: having specific ritual gestures or incantations can serve another function. In that, if you aren't doing the ritual or incantation, your subconscious is made aware that you aren't doing magic. This can be useful for, say, not accidentally starting fires in inconvenient circumstances.

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1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

What we've seen is that Susan, Nanase, and either Grace or Tedd (I forget which, maybe both) worked together for Nanase to make a bunch of fairydolls to Susan's specifications, and then Susan put them in her marked box and is now able to summon more than one (magical, animated copy of one) of them at a time.

It was Tedd that assisted, Grace was presumed working at the comic shop. But Susan was originally able to summon the fairy because she had thrown Nanase's doll in her summoning chest so it was assumed that Susan's summon item spell mixed with Nanase's fairy doll to give Susan a semi-autonomous fairy familiar much like Dex's, however, frequent use of Little Nase resulted in what appears to be a new spell that reflect the type of person Susan is and probably also fitting her affinity. People assumed that one it was revealed that she can summon more than one fairy, that she could used them as flashbangs to stun targets, we saw her using 1 in that way so it certainly is plausible, also someone mentioned Susan having something like Adrian's Murder Shroud but with fairies and I think that would be amazing.

We can compare Susan's fairies to Nanase's or Dex's but the 3 certainly aren't the same.

1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

Another point: having specific ritual gestures or incantations can serve another function. In that, if you aren't doing the ritual or incantation, your subconscious is made aware that you aren't doing magic. This can be useful for, say, not accidentally starting fires in inconvenient circumstances.

Rituals and incantations would seem more like Old Magic, the current system (well the system that was in place most recently) seemed more thought based, you just think about the spell and you cast it. We saw Abraham call out "sword" and "shield during the fight with Adrian, but we know Abraham was using an echanted item for that so it could be assumed that the item required spoken words to activate the various functions, but the creation of that item would likely have been no different than when Tedd made his first real wand, Adrian also called out "murder shroud" in that fight, but he didn't seem to do so when fighting the vampires so speaking it might not have been necessary. Magus though used the words "sleep" "calm" and "hold" which Dan put in a fancy font which could suggest that Magus's spells are more reliant on incantations.

We also had Andrea who made various tones when doing various effects, though Tara seemed to follow the school of using fancy attack names which may be more like Elliot's ASMA special moves like "Tamashi Gekido" so actually speaking it isn't necessary.

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13 hours ago, Scotty said:
15 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

Another point: having specific ritual gestures or incantations can serve another function. In that, if you aren't doing the ritual or incantation, your subconscious is made aware that you aren't doing magic. This can be useful for, say, not accidentally starting fires in inconvenient circumstances.

Rituals and incantations would seem more like Old Magic, the current system (well the system that was in place most recently) seemed more thought based, you just think about the spell and you cast it. We saw Abraham call out "sword" and "shield during the fight with Adrian, but we know Abraham was using an echanted item for that so it could be assumed that the item required spoken words to activate the various functions, but the creation of that item would likely have been no different than when Tedd made his first real wand, Adrian also called out "murder shroud" in that fight, but he didn't seem to do so when fighting the vampires so speaking it might not have been necessary. Magus though used the words "sleep" "calm" and "hold" which Dan put in a fancy font which could suggest that Magus's spells are more reliant on incantations.

We also had Andrea who made various tones when doing various effects, though Tara seemed to follow the school of using fancy attack names which may be more like Elliot's ASMA special moves like "Tamashi Gekido" so actually speaking it isn't necessary.

The speaking the spell/attack name might be a mnemonic safety mechanism, like what Don Edwards is alluding to. Even though a spell can be activated with a thought, if you train your mind to only activate the spell when you utter a given phrase, then you're less likely to activate the spell by mistake (Like when Susan summoned her sword after tensing up when hearing how many vampires had been in Moperville). Maybe not something that would be needed for your average mage, who only has a handful of spells, but definitely useful for a wizard, who might accrue dozens, or even hundreds, of spells over their lifetime.

I'm not sure if the object Abraham used was a pre-enchanted item or just the focal point of his spell. It certainly could be a pre-enchanted object, though it could easily be an object that the spell builds off of to get a more durable summoned object.

When Adrian was fighting the vampires, we didn't get any of the dialog or sound effects that may or may not have been there because we were getting the dialog between Zeus and Diane.

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1 hour ago, Drasvin said:

but definitely useful for a wizard, who might accrue dozens, or even hundreds, of spells over their lifetime.

It is a little late to think of that after accidentally casting Armageddon, yes. Certain things benefit from safety mechanisms, especially those whose accidental employment may result in a bodycount. :doom:

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