Comic for Tuesday, February 23rd, 2011

...pretty late. As you may guess, the same thing that usually gets me in trouble got me in trouble. I had two pages, and I was like... but what if I stuffed them both into one page...? And it took a long time because I had to rearrange and re-dialogue parts.

There's a few things I should probably point; they are things that made sense to cut from the page in various ways, but may help clarify parts:

• The light green haired girl is Elmon's heir, not Saraine's heir. Saraine's heir isn't here, though the darker green haired girl does belong to her family.
• The blue haired burau lieutenant is essentially saying we cannot kill all of them" and that I have to report this to the Bureau"; while Ashvalt is nominally her superior in the field, she does have a more civilian chain of command as well.
• Kally only recently started using the NavDragon app again. This was sort of a plot point that just never really came up - Kally found not using it a pain, but generally tried to not use it (unlike the IDS Analysts, who definitely just kept using Peter's tools). As Kally is one of the few people that understands how good Peter is at tracking people she was fairly meticulous in keeping her stuff clean; this is why it was fairly hard for Peter to find her when she was kidnapped. Hard being relatively there, I suppose. He just let Mium brute force trawl the entire NavTrans network until he could locate the auto cab that picked her up and where it was, which has been noted a few times was something that quite a few people noticed compared to Mium's generally less detectable methods. That said, as one can probably guess, her NavDragon app is very good at finding things. This makes exceedingly convenient, and it's a bit of a reoccurring thing that Kally doesn't quite understand how to use more normal navigation devices (for example, putting someone's name into a more-GPS like device rather than an address).
• One side tangent is that Saraine's heir isn't capable of using Void; Saraine is the only Maslan mage that can use it. Sometimes mages are reluctant to kill the only practioner of something as it represents cutting off a potential of magic. In this case, hearing Kally speak with knowledge of what the magic was and how it works may remove the reluctance. That said, I decided to not bring up it on the page because it didn't really factor into Ashvalt's decision here, beyond making a note that the IDS recognizes the magic and might know more about it; which is probably important, just not directly relevant. It is something Ashvalt made a mental note to follow up on, but it didn't really make sense for him to say anything about that, and he's not a thought-point-of-view character.
• Saraine was actually a generation older than Ashvalt, and fair bit older. She is generally considered one of the more powerful mages; that she was killed is probably going to shake things up slightly, as she was arguably the strongest duelist (in a way) of the Rogue Family mages, at least in terms of something other mages fear, though in part that is because she hadn't retired from the last rounds of fighting largely, so her power is somewhat more storied that known among most younger generations. Kally is probably one of the few mages in the country that didn't really fear her... Kally doesn't fear many people in the country, though there's handful that could at least rival her (like Sophie)... though I suppose she's a little wary of Mium. Kally tends to be wary of Null Casters in general as they are bad match up for her, and Mium is a somewhat enigmatic Null Caster.
• Saraine was generally a better mage than Ashvalt, she just essentially had no reason to specialize in calculation quick draw" as Void would almost always be faster - easier to deny magic and than take your time". That said, nothing is certain in a fight like that, and even without the opportunity presented here, it's almost certain Ashvalt had given a great deal of thought to how to fight her if it ever came to that. One of Saraine's obvious weaknesses is fighting a lot of mages - it would be sort of the same as fighting Kally that Void can be flooded and starts to get less effective. Kally has enough power that the number of mages where that became a problem dropped to 1".

Cutting to them talking about Kally's kidnapping may seem odd spot, but it's just sort of Naomi's way of saying these things happen"; I did cut a bit about where they were going, but that's because it seemed a little obvious by later context (to where Arkady is). Both because they want to take bring his brother to him, and because Naomi is worried about him.

Anyway... super late and I was in a rambling mood I suppose. So... long ramble. G'night. Or g'morning. w/e it is now.