Comic for Monday, January 25, 2021
Sorry about the site going down for a bit. There was some issue with billing, and then when it was paid the webhost seems to have decided that the site needed to be deleted in the hour between them giving me a notice there was an issue with billing and that issue being resolved. Including thinking that perhaps they should delete all the back ups too. It does not give me a lot of confidence in them, and is a little odd as previously they've been quite a solid service, but I wonder if I haven't paid attention in too long and things around there have sort of changed, as that all seems pretty sketchy. Fortunately things were able to be resolved and they had no, in fact, deleted everything yet though in their words it was it was on a verge of deletion... so the server was in limbo"... words that inspire great confidence...
That bit of fun aside...
Comic!
I noted that the magic the Family Head was using here was somewhat different than a Null Caster - in a way, it's more advanced, but related. Null casters have the ability to directly direct and manipulate mana, and they typically use it bursts, to disrupt other mages casting (or magical effects). Mages like Kally can manipulate mana in the sense that she can use it, but she cannot easily direct it that accurately. We've seen what I'll call pseudo null casting" where a mage just dumps so much mana into something it becomes difficult for magic to effect (Naomi did that once), but an actual null caster tends to have two qualities over of that - a more accurate perception and... spatial awareness of Eidos, as well as their ability to process eidos data itself to determine what sort of calculations are taking place, and the ability to more accurately direct mana. The more efficiently they can do both of those, the more efficiently they can nullify magic.
Saraine's ability - likely an innate one - is control the mana near her, not just her own. This would effectively starve out magical effects or calculations that need magic, as the mana is drawn to Saraine instead. In many cases, this would have the same effect as a Null Caster. It would actually slightly better against a booster as they would likely exhaust fairly rapidly if they couldn't draw on ambient mana - I've mentioned before that mages do have mana reserves, they just rarely matter as ambient mana is plentiful. For most mages, that wouldn't help them here as they'd have to emit that mana to calculate to fuel a calculation, but for a booster it would help them for at least a little bit until that tank ran dry, though that might happen fairly quickly as few mages would consciously keep much mana in reserve.
In the case of Kally, she cannot win a magical tug of war" with the mana with Saraine as her ability to manipulate mana itself is limited in comparison, but she simply has a massive range and capacity to draw enormous amounts of mana, pulling it from hundreds of feet around (something she does when generating the power to make a tactical level strike). So, she's essentially just flooding the area with raw mana - she's not actually using it do anything at the moment; if she concentrated it into a magical effect we'd see condense in to the more lightning like effects, but she's just essentially artificially making the local region mana soup.
This would potentially create two flaws for Saraine - if she was unable to absorb the magic fast enough, Kally would have enough ambient mana to use magic, or if she was able to absorb the mana fast enough, she'd run the risk of hitting her own limit of storage of for it as she doesn't destroy the mana, just pulls it into her own reserves.
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I decided to put this all in text as an explanation, as I wasn't really convinced the visuals on this were super clear, and it's complicated. I don't necessarily know that any of it is really important to know to the story, but I figure some folks would rather know the details here, and I wasn't sure I could render a more detailed account of what was happening - I had some ideas, but they didn't all pan out and I've been fairly short on time... (my other hobby has been insane recently when it comes to devouring my time... I guess this is the problem of a hobby becoming a job... it becomes a job... that's mostly good news though, and the Kickstarter will end sooner or later).