THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Comic Discussion => ALICE GROVE => Topic started by: Kugai on 31 Jan 2016, 12:07
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.......... On to the fun and games for this month
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This won't end until Malice has attacked Alice with passionfruit, oranges, apples, grapefruit (whole and segmented), pomegranates, greengages, grapes, lemons, plums, mangoes in syrup, and cherries (red and black) -- and perhaps even the bah-NAH-nah.
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No more attacking, please, not even with soft fruit.
I want to know whether Malice, once totally disarmed, will suddenly turn helpful with whatever it is that Alice wants, and even more I want to know what Alice wants from her.
I'm also wondering how Gavia and Ardent are doing, though I suppose there's not much to report as the Alice/Malice gunfight has actually only been going on for a few seconds.
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I want to know whether Malice, once totally disarmed, will suddenly turn helpful with whatever it is that Alice wants, and even more I want to know what Alice wants from her.
I think that she will try hand-to-hand, fail and proceed to be a grumpy and highly-unreliable informant. Their conversation will probably imply strongly that they were comrades-in-arms once but had gone their separate ways when it became clear that the war was never going to start again, something for which the character I'm thinking of as 'Alicia' never forgave Alice.
I'm also expecting her to be very unpleasant to the Vicissitudes and whisper poisoned words to them about the monster with which they are travelling. The worrying thing, for Ardent and Gavia, will be that Alice will emotionlessly agree with her adversary that she is a monster by all the criteria that matter. She was, after all, carefully engineered to be such.
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I just want Alice's current foe to get a fucking name. Also I know Benergy's theory that Alice was designed is no less valid than my theory that she's simply an immortal superpowered metahuman, but it's still weird every time I see it.
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This won't end until Malice has attacked Alice with passionfruit, oranges, apples, grapefruit (whole and segmented), pomegranates, greengages, grapes, lemons, plums, mangoes in syrup, and cherries (red and black) -- and perhaps even the bah-NAH-nah.
What about pointed sticks?
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Just have to make sure Alice doesn't let her drag out ........
THE COMFY CHAIR!!!!!!!
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Just have to make sure Alice doesn't let her drag out ........
THE COMFY CHAIR!!!!!!!
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Nobody.
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I never wanted to be a Spanish Inquisitor. I ... I wanted to be ...
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...a wind turbine repairman?
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I re-align blades, I eat my lunch, I like to press wild-fla'rs ...
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Honestly, I find this action sequence tiring. It has fulfilled it's narrative purpose and I wish we would move on.
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New strip up! (http://www.alicegrove.com/image/138610018219)
Yeah... I remember that, when this fight started, waaay back in December, I pointed out that 'Malice' seemed to be initially shooting at Gavia, not Alice. Here we are reminded that she doesn't like the space kids for some reason.
Now everything depends on just how fast Alice is and just how quick Ardent and Gavia are to dodge a clearly very bitter and homicidal combat unit.
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That's right -- they are in hand-to-hand range. Gavia's shield can stop bullets but it can't stop Alice. If Malice has the same abilities and if Alice can't distract her this could get ugly.
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Oh shit
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Watch your language. When Malice is around, it's "Oh shoot." :claireface:
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No, Alice said not to shoot.
And for fuck's sake, Jeph, give her a name.
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Honestly, I find this action sequence tiring. It has fulfilled it's narrative purpose and I wish we would move on.
Well you got your wish. Malice is now moving on to the kids. Now I suppose it is Gavia's turn to show what she can do.
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I may be wrong, but somehow I get a vibe that the "oh, crap" means the Vicissitudes and Malice have met before?
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No, the 'oh crap' is the Angry Shooty Lady has noticed them and is shooting angry looks at them now.
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I just noticed that both Gavia and Malice (or is she Angry Shooty Lady now?) have red eyes. Though Malice/Angry Shooty Lady used to have green eyes (http://www.alicegrove.com/post/137162324429/pew-pew).
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Maybe red eyes are a sign of a person who has enhanced themselves with or is using nanobots.
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I thought their eyes were light brown. Jeph uses a similar colour for Tai, Sven, Marigold and Angus in QC based on the cast page.
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Definitely red.
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I just noticed that both Gavia and Malice (or is she Angry Shooty Lady now?) have red eyes. Though Malice/Angry Shooty Lady used to have green eyes (http://www.alicegrove.com/post/137162324429/pew-pew).
Jeph has occasionally had characters eyes go red, irrespective of their natural colour, a few times in QC. It's his way of showing really extreme rage. To me, it emphasises just how much she hates people from Gavia and Ardent's civilisation.
I strongly suspect that Alice is going to go all-out to stop her. We're going to find out just how much you have to work over someone like Alice to render them unconscious. I'm talking dropping boulders on their head, banging their heads into rock surfaces with bone-shattering force dozens of times (and the rock surface visibly coming out worse off) and the like. At the end of this violence, Alice is going to be puffing and panting something like: "For... for the... the last time 'Licia... stay... stay down!"
Prediction: 'Malice' is going to regain consciousness a few minutes later, tied to her bed with titanium tubing that Alice had torn off one of her guns with no long-term damage or even visible injuries because they're just that tough.
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Three key learnings from today's comic (2/9): (http://www.alicegrove.com/image/139005499504)
- "Malice's" eye colour changes with her mood;
- Alice's threat to 'make' molten rock is credible enough to use on someone who knows her;
- If the two women are, in fact, the same model of super soldier/android, they're tough enough to handle being dipped in molten rock and then left buried inside it after it cools; that, by the way, is very tough.
Why do I say they're sisters? Their "I'm going to hurt you lots before I decide whether or not to kill you" slasher smile is disturbingly similar.
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The molten rock thing also disproves the Jones (Gunnerkrigg Court) theory if Alice can just leave her in there. Jones has no such limitations. Jeph's comment about being able to melt rock with her glare seems to support the Weatherwax speculation, however.
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Really? I thought that Jones just sat there until it had all been eroded away.
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She did. But there was really fuck all else to do. She did tell Antimony that there was nothing (http://gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1116) aside from her own body that she couldn't break, bend, or manipulate as wet clay. She could easily have broken through the stone, but what's the point if there won't be anything to do but sit there for a few æons anyhow?
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Scary Alice is scary Alice - even in a Battlesuit and behind a helmet
I had a sudden thought, what if Alice is the 'Superior Model' of the two of them?
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Malice with red eyes... :evil: :evil: :evil:
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Malice is the second person whose eyes have been seen to change color. The first was Jack (http://www.alicegrove.com/page/124) (whose eyes are brown (http://www.alicegrove.com/page/120) in every other strip).
Both people have been looking at Alice when it happened, but since most of the strip is Alice interacting with people, that might not mean much.
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Here we are reminded that she doesn't like the space kids for some reason.
Back when this quote was first made, I didn't actually agree with it. I thought there was no evidence yet that Malice didn't like the space kids, she had merely noticed them and possibly just hated them for their association with Alice.
I have now changed my mind with the latest strip on the basis of the first panel, specifically Malice's expression. There wasn't just hatred in that expression, there was excited anticipation in causing pain. I also think it significant that after that singleminded and sustained attack on Alice (whom she clearly loathes) with progressively stronger guns, one look at the space kids was enough to make her forget all about Alice and instantly try to move on to more exciting and deserving prey.
Not that I think she recognises and hates them personally, as Gavia and Ardent. I think she just recognises them as belonging to the Praeses society, which she hates. Ardent being blue with a tail is a dead give away.
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I think she just hates everyone.
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I think she just hates everyone.
FWIW, I think that she's still fighting the Great War. Thousands of years after The Blink forcibly separated the factions and ended the fighting, she's criss-crossing the world looking for weapons that she can restore to working order so she can fight the war. The fact that there hasn't been so much as a spark of hostility in longer than humanity has had writing up to our present day doesn't seem to matter to her. She's a soldier and she's going to be prepared to fight.
I'm pretty sure that Ardent and Gavia's native culture are the distant descendants of the faction that hers were at war with. The fact that they're kids doesn't matter. They're the enemy; the first sight she's had of them for an unimaginable length of time. She is obviously eager and overjoyed at the opportunity to get back to the struggle for which she was created and bring pain, reckoning and death to the foul Tech Faction.
Insane? Yes but no-one ever said that she wasn't.
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If the two women are, in fact, the same model of super soldier/android, they're tough enough to handle being dipped in molten rock and then left buried inside it after it cools; that, by the way, is very tough.
I don't think they are. Angry Lady says "there isn't any molten rock around here"; she doesn't seem to be aware that Alice can make some, and anyway if she had the sort of powers that Alice has, why would she need guns?
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If the two women are, in fact, the same model of super soldier/android, they're tough enough to handle being dipped in molten rock and then left buried inside it after it cools; that, by the way, is very tough.
I don't think they are. Angry Lady says "there isn't any molten rock around here"; she doesn't seem to be aware that Alice can make some, and anyway if she had the sort of powers that Alice has, why would she need guns?
I think that you're missing the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm making is that they're tough enough to be immersed in lava and then survive to be buried alive in the cooled basalt that results from it. No, I don't think that Alice can easily make molten rock. The point she's making to Alicia is that, if she continues to piss her off, she'll find a way to make molten lava to do the whole 'I Must Scream' immortal buried alive under thousands of tonnes of solid rock thing to her.
It will be interesting to see if Jeph has her treat that as a plausible threat. :evil:
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If anything, you can always make a ~100 mile deep hole to get to molten rocks. Which, even if it sounds collosal at first, is probably the size of the hole Alice would make by slam-dunking her foe into the ground hard. Not only because they're both extremely strong, but also because it'd be very convenient :P
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I voted "butts" at the top, btw, obviously.
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Obviously.
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to do the whole 'I Must Scream' immortal buried alive under thousands of tonnes of solid rock thing
OK, that's apparently a cultural reference I'm missing, but I get the general idea now.
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Look up "I have no mouth, but I must scream".
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Hmm... Alice has a new hairdo and I'm thinking that this may be indicative that her entire external appearance may be something that she can shape and sculpt into various forms by force of will. This is actually something I discounted before but, if it's true, any remaining possibility of her not being some kind of AI is straight out of the window.
Meanwhile... Ardent is a naturist, isn't he?
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I think Alice is warming up to Ardent
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I'm so disappointed Ardent didn't reply with "what happened to your hair?"
if it's true, any remaining possibility of her not being some kind of AI is straight out of the window.
Since when does shapeshifter = AI?
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I'm so disappointed Ardent didn't reply with "what happened to your hair?"
if it's true, any remaining possibility of her not being some kind of AI is straight out of the window.
Since when does shapeshifter = AI?
When shapeshifter = extraordinary durable body that can be radically reshaped at will. Unless you want to invoke biological superpowers in a universe where, to date, all superpowers have had some technological explanation.
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...what other tech superpowers have we seen beside's Gavia's? And you know I'm going under the assumption of biological superpowers, at least for Alice, until proven otherwise.
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I''m starting to think that that armor of hers is kinda like the armor Voyager deployed. It's hidden within the normal overalls she wears.
Point of reference Vid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFzufch254k
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I'm rather doubting AI here, but some sort of cyborg would certainly make sense.
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You're all missing the obvious answer! Alice and her sisters are actually Crystal Gems!
... I'll just show myself out now...
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I''m starting to think that that armor of hers is kinda like the armor Voyager deployed. It's hidden within the normal overalls she wears.
Point of reference Vid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFzufch254k
I don't quite remember but going purely by what I see that armor on Voyager looks to be an extreme extension of the holo emiter technology that allowed The Doctor to roam the halls of the ship as it were.
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Here you go Undrneath, a little expanation for you from Memory Alpha (http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ablative_generator)
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Hmm... Alice has a new hairdo and I'm thinking that this may be indicative that her entire external appearance may be something that she can shape and sculpt into various forms by force of will. This is actually something I discounted before but, if it's true, any remaining possibility of her not being some kind of AI is straight out of the window.
Perhaps 'putting her armour up' implies reverting to her base form. A soldier would not be designed with long hair (cf. Bubbles). The only reason her hair was so long was because she'd been in civilian mode for so long.
Which is her true form all depends on whether she is a naturalised robot or an augmented organism. Ie. which side of the war she was on.
Does Malice have similar shapeshifting abilities? Is she a former enemy, or a grudging comrade? I think we will soon find out.
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Alice has some serious helmet hair, I think it cut off her pony tail
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And here I was thinking her pony tail was just tucked inside her armour.
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See, I was wondering that, but I often wear my ponytail tucked in at work and it doesn't look anything like that.
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Yeah, but you don't have superpowers...I'm assuming.
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COMIC.
Damn that was cold blooded from Malice.
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And yet, it's something we've speculated on here often enough.
It really does look like Alice's ponytail is gone though. The back of her hair is all bushy now, like it chopped off short by putting on the helmet.
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Nah, I meant the second part, the "Are they annoying?" question, as if that'd be the reason to "dump" them there.
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So Alice pulled an Emily.
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I took the "are they annoying" to be Malice wondering if that was part of their function, to destabilise society on the surface.
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Still a pretty sick burn.
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Isn't it odd that the fact that the Vicissitudes are... y'know... a pain in the butt is always the first topic of conversation? Isn't it even odder that Alice is never the one to bring it up but that it comes up anyway? I guess that Ardent and Gavia just have this air around them! :laugh:
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Yup
And it's nice that Alice and Malice have found something to agree on
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Everybody noticed Jeph's little hint at the bottom?
Now Malice is curious and asking questions. This bodes well for collaboration but implies she is as uninformed as Alice.
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I think it's more of a joke than a hint (although that's not to say it won't be true).
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I think it's more of a joke than a hint (although that's not to say it won't be true).
Jeph generally seems to be fairly aware of what he readers think about his stories. He must know that most of us think that they have some manner of common origin.
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Do we? I don't!
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You are all individuals!
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I'm not....
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You've got to figure it out for yourselves!
I think she just hates everyone.
FWIW, I think that she's still fighting the Great War. Thousands of years after The Blink forcibly separated the factions and ended the fighting, she's criss-crossing the world looking for weapons that she can restore to working order so she can fight the war. The fact that there hasn't been so much as a spark of hostility in longer than humanity has had writing up to our present day doesn't seem to matter to her. She's a soldier and she's going to be prepared to fight.
Hmm, that's possible.
I'm pretty sure that Ardent and Gavia's native culture are the distant descendants of the faction that hers were at war with. The fact that they're kids doesn't matter. They're the enemy; the first sight she's had of them for an unimaginable length of time. She is obviously eager and overjoyed at the opportunity to get back to the struggle for which she was created and bring pain, reckoning and death to the foul Tech Faction.
Well, clearly she didn't realize they were from orbit until they told her. I think it's more likely she just figured they weren't as superpowered as Alice, so she had a chance to hurt Alice indirectly by hurting them. The friend of my enemy is my enemy, so to speak.
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See, that's just narrow thinking. The friend of my enemy is potential fifth column.
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I just think she's angry that Alice outclasses her. Hence the collecting guns looking for an advantage, hence the malicious glee at the prospect of being able to hurt someone who's with Alice, hence the eventual just giving up when she's used up all her tricks and been forcibly reminded that hurting those people isn't a good move for her.
But it's fairly clear, I think, that both she and Alice can detect each other at a distance - before seeing each other. Alice knew to tell Gavia when to shields-up, and Malice knew when and where to open fire even before she had seen Ardent and Gavia. Which it would have been more or less impossible to see Alice without seeing.
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Well...no, not really. She could have simple proximity alarms.
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New Strip (http://40.media.tumblr.com/209922bf7a3febf175c91dfab9689bc2/tumblr_o2v7sxHEuy1tl5t55o1_1280.png)
Ardent is either incredibly stupid, incredibly naive or the product of a culture that, as a rule, doesn't have 'bad people' because there is no cause to be bad. After all, if you live in a world where you could get anything you want, just by asking the nice trees, what possible cause is there to develop any anti-social behaviour patterns except the sort of entitlement complex that both Vicissitudes have demonstrated already?
This is the moment to hog-tie him before he touches a flare launching pistol and turns it into an electro-plasma pistol.
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Where this is almost certainly going: "Hey, Ardent, touch this gun. And this one. And this one, too." :-D
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I think it's just Ardent being over trusting/having no filter between brain and mouth. If it was purely a cultural thing, then Gavia would have it as well, and she's way different than Ardent.
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Maybe Ardent has confused "she's sexually attractive" with "she seems nice". Nothing Malice had done or said could have been confused with "nice" even by someone from a benign social environment.
Random: Alice hit Ardent once, which means they were in physical contact, which means Ardent's automatic upgrade technology would have had a chance to work on Alice if she were a machine.
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Well, apart from that she's nice
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"Hey, Ardent, touch this my gun."
FTFY
Sorry, but surely I'm not the only one that was thinking that...
Oh. Okay, guess not. I'll just show myself the way out, then!
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Nah, that's Ardent's reply to Malice. :-D
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New Comic! (http://www.alicegrove.com/image/140101651109)
Okay, Jeph is definitely reading this board! He's pretty much addressed all our speculation and theories in four panels there! Heck, he took on more than half of it in just the last panel! Naturally, Ardent's mind turns to sex. It will bite him back eventually but I doubt it will be this day. :-D
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He'd probably like that. Also, is Alice's hair even shorter?
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It's just me, but I'm with Ardent on this one
:-D
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I only just noticed that Malice is wearing a sleeveless top.
Perhaps this is Jeph's way to say she believes in the right to keep and bare arms.
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(http://now-here-this.timeout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/url-17.gif)
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Indeed. Shame on you for forgetting to :claireface:!
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You are being Punished
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Any theories on thingy's eye colour? They seem to go from green to brown when she's pissed off. I searched the forum and was surprised it's not been mentioned.
http://www.alicegrove.com/page/6
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Mood ring.
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She's digging guns up rather than manufacturing them. Either she's treating them as collectibles or she doesn't have access to even 20th-century machine shop capabilities.
If the latter, she's going to have trouble keeping them in working order.
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That logic doesn't follow, really. She said that they were collectables, but she clearly keeps them in working order and has ammunition handy for them. That most likely means she is digging them up, and does have the facilities to restore and maintain them, and probably reloading tools and materials as well.
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Not that I'm very knowledgeable about guns but wouldn't repairing, maintaining, and keeping them full of ammo be much easier than building them from scratch?
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It depends; so long as the metal hasn't seriously degraded, yes. Given that they are all millenniums old, I really don't know how she's doing it!
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Any sufficiently advanced repair is indistinguishable from manufacturing.
If they are her precious collectibles, she certainly is not taking the NRFB approach.
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It's her grandfather's axe.
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Any sufficiently advanced repair is indistinguishable from manufacturing.
If they are her precious collectibles, she certainly is not taking the NRFB approach.
It's like those World War 2 airplanes that are restored to flying condition after sitting underwater / in a remote jungle crash site for 70-plus years.
Do they use anything other than the manufacturer's data plate?
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The problem is this: From where would Malice get the tools to machine high-precision mechanical parts (the minigun, for example, is as complex a bit of machinery as a motorcycle engine)? Hell, where would she get the complex alloys (which often contain difficult-to-source Rare Earth Elements)? Where would she get cordite or how would she synthesise it, let alone the high-ex and propellent for the RPG?
This is why it's sometimes a mistake to peer too deeply into creative writing. It's far too easy to break your suspension of disbelief once you push too far.
Unless Malice is a Minecrafter and she's got a full modded smelting/meltals engineering lab from Industrialcraft and Tinkers' Craft under her hut or something.
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Any time people call her Malice, I assume her full name is Malice A Forethought. Yeah, her middle name is just one letter. No period. What of it?
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The problem is this: From where would Malice get the tools to machine high-precision mechanical parts (the minigun, for example, is as complex a bit of machinery as a motorcycle engine)? Hell, where would she get the complex alloys (which often contain difficult-to-source Rare Earth Elements)? Where would she get cordite or how would she synthesise it, let alone the high-ex and propellent for the RPG?
Problem solvable by application of a sufficient length of time.
If it took her 150 years to make or recondition her gun collection (perhaps after making all the necessary machine tools from scratch) would she be that bothered?
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I imagine she mostly finds caches of weapons. I think if all-metal guns are properly oiled and kept dry they'll probably still be in working order an arbitrary distance into the future. Ammunition would be more problematic, as the propellant would probably break down over time.
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If I remember correctly, in Finland they still occasionally find old lost stashes of weaponry from the Winter War. Most of them are in near-mint condition.
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Yeah, pack machine parts in grease inside a heavy stainless drum, and you can get them out in a thousand years (or as long as the drum lasts anyway) and assemble them into working machinery - or working guns. I've also encountered survivalist stashes with drums full of shop tools, stashes of technical manuals that cover building everything up to CMOS micro-etched onto ceramic Norsam disks, etc.
Everybody thinks those guys are just about guns & military-ish crap, but some of them have seriously thought about what it takes to rebuild.
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Everybody thinks those guys are just about guns & military-ish crap, but some of them have seriously thought about what it takes to rebuild.
That's because a statistically significant amount of survivalists are pretty much that and they get most of the exposure due to wanting to gloat over their preparedness and the fact that they'll outlive us after [random demographic disaster caused by the crazy guy's favourite conspiracy theory] instead of actually getting prepared properly.
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I wonder why she has all those shelves, but nothing on them.
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I wonder why she has all those shelves, but nothing on them.
Lots of guns left in the world to collect!
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Also she just got a decent chunk of her collection destroyed, which may or may not have been on said empty shelves.
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Yeah, as I mentioned earlier when someone brought that up i think that those empty spaces are where all the guns Alice wrecked were stored.