Comic for Monday, October 19th, 2020
I generally try to avoid copy pasting the patreon description for the comic description, but as this one was long and perhaps helpful, I figured I'd do it this time...
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This is sort of a required B-Plot of Arron returning to Central (I mean, I could have skipped it, but it's something that needed to be addressed). On Palindra Arron could act as Major Arron Kepler of the Central Military because who was really going to tell him to stop - it placed him outside of the IDS authority and rules.
However, returning to Central operating as Major Arron Kepler has natural and immediate consequences. While Arron is fairly popular in the military, they are naturally reluctant to get pulled into what they view as IDS affairs; the Central Military is on the surface of it a powerful faction, but don't have a strong role currently, as almost everything has come to fall under IDS jurisdiction interdimensional, and they don't have much of a day-to-day role in Central. Most of the military members are on loan to the IDS (or, more commonly, IDS members altogether in practice as we see with the Monster Hunter's or Kally).
In panel 5, it could appear that Arron is threatening the general, which is sort of true, but he is threatening him with political clout, not a literal jailbreak. Arron has connections to the Civil Service (Kyle) and Interdimensional Affairs (Minerva) and far more that would make it fairly trivial for him to get someone to tell the General to let him go, as both the Civil Service and the Executive Bureaucracy would be able to intervene in that; the military could try to hold him by actually pressing charges but Arron pretty clear knows they won't, as trying it would be a political and public relations suicide for them, given that he is both publicly popular and well connected; someone like Minerva could probably drum up post-facto permission for whatever he did leaving them with no real basis, which is the root of the problem - both sides can general find a legal basis for their actions and someone willing to sign off on them. Arron is using that to his advantage here, but all that's really getting him is to the equal footing Biana was already on. The trickier part is getting someone to actually say you cannot do X, and then finding a way to do something about it.
Central's government has largely devolved into a bunch of semi-autonomous subroutines running on autopilot to vaguely cross purpose goals generating proxy squabbles on other worlds. Which is to say that Arron's job here is far from simple.
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