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The Nanotech didn't quite leave Gavia...

There's trouble at the spaceport: it's no longer there.

Ardent supplies some nanotech for Gavia - it's not compatible.

Something Completely Different

Purple Monkey Dishwasher Harpoons (oops, wait, wrong comic...)

Back in Alice's village, Jack hits the Big Red Button

Detachable Felix invariably adds another poll option like they always do..

Hey, YOU try coming up with poll options on the fly.

I usually do, jwhouk

[jwhouk]

New month, new discussion, new poll... such as it is.

[Kugai]

Butts

[Neko_Ali]

The answer is always butts.

[brasca]

Probably some exposition courtesy of Alice.  It's been 3 weeks since the Night Walker shot at the moon and they seem to be in a different geographic area.  Moreover, if Alice thought it was necessary to risk traveling with a comatose companion then I imagine it's a very pressing matter. 

[BenRG]

 ALICE: "Jack, if there's nothing wrong, why did you press the button?"

JACK: "It's a Big Red Button! How could I not press it?"

ALICE: "It's... hard to argue with that position."

[hedgie]

Well, that alone would prove that Alice is not an evil overlord.

I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled "Danger: Do Not Push". The big red button marked "Do Not Push" will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it.

  -- Peter Anspatch's list of things to do as an evil overlord.

[FunkyTuba]

Definitely Chekhov's button meanwhile back there at the Town.

[ob ren + stimpy]
https://www.youtube.com/embed/knLzNk0QeoQ

[freeman]

Well, you left out the obvious "nanobot withdrawal sequence".

Or it would be like, they make Gavia walk along side the cart and she's like "see, I can do this just fine" and Alice would reply "unbelieveable, if you were baseline, you'd be bed-bound". Easy peasy, single strip exposition and the adveture can procees.

[jheartney]

Is Alice going to get Gavia a meal out of their supplies, or is she going to go find another giant lizard to kill and bring back the tail?

[brasca]

Is Alice going to get Gavia a meal out of their supplies, or is she going to go find another giant lizard to kill and bring back the tail?

She hasn't eaten in 21 days.  I would think she could eat the whole lizard. 

I was hoping for a little more exposition on what happened, but maybe there wasn't all that much to tell.

Her look at Ardent is neither forgiving nor hateful so it's probably the best one can expect for now.   

[Skewbrow]

Ok, so which former lake is this (assuming they are on Earth, and the lake exists in our time)? Talk of prairies hints at North America, but probably not conclusively. I don't think any of the Great Lakes would be this flat. Salt Lake would match the scenery well, but draining it for water would then feel misplaced? Also is it wide enough to need 3 weeks to cross?

[brasca]

Ok, so which former lake is this (assuming they are on Earth, and the lake exists in our time)? Talk of prairies hints at North America, but probably not conclusively. I don't think any of the Great Lakes would be this flat. Salt Lake would match the scenery well, but draining it for water would then feel misplaced? Also is it wide enough to need 3 weeks to cross?

Lake Erie is the most shallow of the Great Lakes so they might be traveling by the remnants of my old hometown or stopping there if it survived the centuries.   

[BenRG]

The more I see Gavia in action, the more I wonder if Alice is seeing more than a little of herself in the girl. Proud, prone to mistakes driven by anger and unwilling to apologise, partly due to pride but also due to shame and being uncomfortable with social interaction.

Alice, being five millennia old, is wise enough to know that nothing will be gained by forcing Gavia and Ardent to confront this issue. There is time enough for that later when time and distance have scabbed over the wounds a little; firstly, they have to complete their mission.

[jheartney]

Lake Erie is the most shallow of the Great Lakes so they might be traveling by the remnants of my old hometown or stopping there if it survived the centuries.   

The Aral Sea? The Salton Sea? The Mediterranean has had a history of drying out when plate techtonics closed up Gibraltar.

[brasca]

The more I see Gavia in action, the more I wonder if Alice is seeing more than a little of herself in the girl. Proud, prone to mistakes driven by anger and unwilling to apologise, partly due to pride but also due to shame and being uncomfortable with social interaction.

Alice, being five millennia old, is wise enough to know that nothing will be gained by forcing Gavia and Ardent to confront this issue. There is time enough for that later when time and distance have scabbed over the wounds a little; firstly, they have to complete their mission.

Well they are dressed similarly. 

Alice might also see in Gavia the girl she was before the blink.  Perhaps she also placed too much faith in the wisdom of the Praesides which might be the source of her grudge.  If Gavia feels betrayed by them it could be a sentiment they both share.   

[jwhouk]

From how Alice says it, the lake was probably a man-made deal for a reservoir. And since she mentioned "thousands" of years, it could be anywhere.

[mustang6172]

Those birds don't have bits in their mouths beaks.  How are they being steered?

[Kugai]

Hoo boy.  Those two are going to have to talk eventually, but not yet I think.

I don't think we're going to get an idea where we are definitively unless we get an Orbital or at least Airborne view.  I've been assuming they're somewhere on the North American Continent (U.S.A, Canada region) but I could be wrong.

[JimC]

Those birds don't have bits in their mouths beaks.  How are they being steered?

No reins at all in an earlier view. But Sedna does have a staff with a knob on the end...

On reflection I like the suggestion of Aral Sea. But the culture feels more like a descendant of North American rather than Eastern European. The research required to project a future steppe culture, plus the exposition required to explain it to a primarily western audience to whom its strange would be quite a distraction.

Ultimately though, if its your universe you can take inspiration from wherever suits you...

[USS Martenclaire]

mep

[Zebediah]

The language and culture of Alice's town seem roughly 19th-century American Midwest in origin. Which may not mean anything - that may just have been the culture Alice was trying to promote,  and after 5000 years Alice has had time to make the town's culture anything she wants it to be.

[retrosteve]

Think of ANY civilzation in history, a thousand years later. Generally unrecognizable.  A few exceptions: China is still China.  But even China in 1000 years will not look like China.

5000 years later after a purge of all higher technology and a large part of the population, this won't look much like Earth as we know it. This could be anywhere on the planet with enough territory to permit this much travel in a straight line.  For all we know, it's Antarctica, with the rest of the planet being too hot to support human life.

(P.S. I rather like this idea.)

[freeman]

For all we know, it's Antarctica, with the rest of the planet being too hot to support human life.

(P.S. I rather like this idea.)

I doubt, for several reasons.

• -Polar nights and days, meaning several months of no day or no night, this would cause extreme weather and the place wouldn't look like a typical desert; it would be bound to get some rainfall. Maybe the place would look like siberian tundra?
• -You know seasons are a big deal when planning multi-month expeditions on muscle power, even this day and even more so in a society with less technology at their disposal, if the seasons weren't bening, this fact should have been at least givena  nudge in the story or have we distanced ourselves from the nature to such and extent that we don't have to see the significanse?
• -Antarctica's ice cover has done things to Antarcticaen geology, there wouldn't be flat plains but instead ribbed plains going down to the ocean, think of fjords. Large parts of it would be submerged and there would be several large lakes too.

[cesium133]

Antarctica would also be a really bad place to put a spaceport. It's much easier to launch into orbit from near the equator (it's why the U.S. launches from Florida and the EU launches from French Guyana.)

[JimC]

There's maybe a clue in "community of archaeophiles digging up rockets way out west" in http://www.alicegrove.com/post/140340016979/it-wouldnt-do-any-good-but-shed-feel-better

West is interesting... If we assume they are travelling West to a pre blink site.  Baikonur is to the East of the Aral sea, and Vostochny even more so. You can't travel west to Florida or to Kourou, so that only really leaves Mohave/Edwards in California of current sites, but can someone suggest a lake -> Prairie candidate?

[wlewisiii]

Lake Mead.  (I wonder if anything remains of the Hoover dam or if it was destroyed in the wars? That would have been a big honking flood down the  grand canyon... )

Depending on where they started from they could cross the northern expanse of what was it to get to Vandenberg Air Force Base, outside of Lompoc, California. As well as launch facilities like those at Kennedy, they also have launch silos for various missile test launches. This could lead to there still being rockets to dig up there.  It is also the best launch site in the US for a polar orbit which is good for military uses and would have probably been the last operational launch facitily on the continent during the wars leading up to the Blink.

[Neko_Ali]

Think of ANY civilzation in history, a thousand years later. Generally unrecognizable.  A few exceptions: China is still China.  But even China in 1000 years will not look like China.

5000 years later after a purge of all higher technology and a large part of the population, this won't look much like Earth as we know it. This could be anywhere on the planet with enough territory to permit this much travel in a straight line.  For all we know, it's Antarctica, with the rest of the planet being too hot to support human life.

(P.S. I rather like this idea.)

I dare say that if you plucked someone out of a city in China in 1016 and plopped them into the middle of current day Beijing they would not recognize much in the world. Some landmarks stand the test of time, of course. But everything else would seem alien.

[JimC]

Lake Mead.

Looks a bit flat for that though doesn't it?

[Method of Madness]

Gavia seems to be ok.

[wlewisiii]

Lake Mead.

Looks a bit flat for that though doesn't it?

For much of it, yeah. Though the northern extents (by Google Maps anyway)  in Moapa Valley look possible.  Perhaps California's Central Valley instead? That's quite flat and getting drained quickly already.

[Thrudd]

On the 5000+  year timeline the Great lakes would be at best two. Superior and Huron due to their geological nature in comparison to the other three.

There have been proposals to connect Lake Michigan with the Mississippi basin and divert water south and then west. We Canadians are none too happy with that idea, but like that scurvy cat it keep coming back, wall-street bankers leading the charge. 

The other thing to note is that since the last ice-age the ground has been quickly [geological scale folks] bouncing back with the southern end of things dropping and the norther side rising.
So Lake Michigan ending up prairie is not all that farfetched.

[Method of Madness]

Five thousand years since the Blink, but the Blink isn't happening tomorrow, the Blink itself could be tens of thousands of years from now, unless there's something to indicate otherwise.

[Wildroses]

I'm a lot more interested in Ardent's character development than geography or Gavia post-nanotech. He's come a long way from the guy who demanded an apology for making him sound like a jerk from Gavia when she complained he'd ruined her life for a vacation. I suspect this is the first time in his young life he has had to face the knowledge his actions can have major detrimental impacts on people not himself, which has always been his biggest character flaw.

For all he and Gavia were constantly arguing verbally, I think this was the first time Gavia has hated her brother so much she thought physical violence the only appropriate response. Ardent's always been so good at making friends and using charm that being the target of such utter hatred must have been a major shock he is still reeling from. I got the impression Gavia was more surprised than anything else that Ardent's response to them making eye contact was to flinch and look away instead of yelling at her for bashing him up or some ham fisted attempt to be friends again.

[Method of Madness]

his actions can have major detrimental impacts on people not himself

Sure, he came to Earth/Terra/Discworld/Whatever, but he can hardly be blamed for the machinations of the Praeses.

[Wildroses]

Oh, but the Praeses had nothing to do with his behaviour after he arrived on earth. It's more his actions after he came to earth that made me think Ardent had never believed his actions could have detrimental impacts on people. There were several occasions where Alice was not mincing words about how unhappy she was at him being here potentially upsetting her carefully balanced community harmony with outright dimissiveness (Do you know any other girls Jack? This one's boring") or only focusing on how her supervision would impact on him: ("Sweet, you're my tour guide!") He also was gawking and pointing at an obviously freaked out child and mother, reacted to hearing he has to pay for things by asking Alice for money, assumed the crowd was coming to see him rather than Alice, throwing a tantrum because Alice didn't compliment his delightful tail, wanting to meet Miss Wheelwright simply because of her big bottom, and getting upset Miss Wheelwright slapped him after being asked to fuck within minutes of being introduced.

[USS Martenclaire]

Five thousand years since the Blink, but the Blink isn't happening tomorrow, the Blink itself could be tens of thousands of years from now, unless there's something to indicate otherwise.

I asked a chronological expert about this and all he said was "Don't Blink".

[Neko_Ali]

Five thousand years since the Blink, but the Blink isn't happening tomorrow, the Blink itself could be tens of thousands of years from now, unless there's something to indicate otherwise.

I asked a chronological expert about this and all he said was "Don't Blink".

Well, that's an awful wibbly wobbly answer. Who is this guy anyway?

[FunkyTuba]

guessing here ... (lucky if I hit the right order of magnitude)

5-10 mph * 8-10 hours/day * 22 days = 1000-2000 miles ... that's a pretty good chunk of land they've covered ... what man-made lakes are that long across?

or am I drastically overestimating the kind of progress they could make

[TinPenguin]

It hasn't been said that they've been travelling across the lake for three weeks, or even that they've been travelling for three weeks. That's only how long Gavia was out.

But you are also drastically overestimating. I don't know how fast those dogs move, but most beast-drawn carts won't reach much beyond human walking speed (carriages and cabs are a different matter).

[Zebediah]

Unless those birds are significantly more robust than draft horses, then at most you're looking at 20 miles per day. And that's assuming that  they've been on fairly level ground the whole time.

[hedgie]

If the birds have ostrich like legs, they'll do better than horses.  Over long distances, bipedal motion is more efficient, and ostriches have *very* efficient locomotion.

[FunkyTuba]

Update!

I think that's the first sliver of actual interest and wonder we've seen on Gavia's face in the whole comic.

[pwhodges]

And Ardent's still beating himself up over it in spite of Alice's explanation.

[Kugai]

The Reeducation of Gavia continues.  Todays lesson - Firemaking without Nanotech

Poor Ardent, he's gonna be in a funk for a while I think

[BenRG]

And Ardent's still beating himself up over it in spite of Alice's explanation.

I also think that there is a bit of blame being directed from him Alice's way too. He needn't bother; I get the impression that Alice blames herself for everything, including things that, for no sane reason imaginable, could she be responsible. I suspect that's what made Sedna leave her. She couldn't handle Alice's thundering conceit that, if only she was faster, smarter or more perceptive she would have foreseen and prevented some disaster.

I'm starting to wonder if Gavia is going to start on her very own Tech Tree. Sedna is going to teach her about the base principles that underlie science and engineering and she's going to start trying to push herself up them by pure force of will (and endless amounts of scrap stuff lying just beneath the surface).

[Zebediah]

This is actually no small accomplishment. Starting a fire with flint and steel is hard. Although much easier than even more primitive methods - try a bow drill sometime.

Gavia has to learn a whole new skill set, and she's going to discover how intelligent and skilled our "primitive" ancestors had to be to survive.

[brasca]

With every strip it appears that Gavia is not as helpless without her nanotechnology as estimated.  She seems to have physically recovered and is now mentally determined to survive.  And now she can make a fire which is something I'd have little patience for.

[improvnerd]

Although, it's going to be a little harder for her the next time someone annoys her.

"You have earned my wrath!"

(Kshhk Ksshk)

"Hang on, this may take a while...."

[freeman]

guessing here ... (lucky if I hit the right order of magnitude)

5-10 mph * 8-10 hours/day * 22 days = 1000-2000 miles ... that's a pretty good chunk of land they've covered ... what man-made lakes are that long across?

or am I drastically overestimating the kind of progress they could make

Absolutely, heavy vagons don't go much faster than a good walking pace, meaning maybe 2-3 mph on agreeable terrain. Again, when talking about muscle powered long distance travel, it's more meaningful to divide the distance traveled by day rather than hour, so you get numbers like about 20 miles on a average day.

[cesium133]

This is actually no small accomplishment. Starting a fire with flint and steel is hard. Although much easier than even more primitive methods - try a bow drill sometime.

When I was in Boy Scouts as a kid, I tried the glasses and sunlight method, using my own glasses. I'm nearsighted.

I didn't earn many merit badges....