Crustiness factor is not a reliable measurement of quality
Hi-res and textless version available for free on my Patreon!
All right, looks like everything’s up and working! I’ve been sitting on this site redesign too long, and just needed a couple days to get everything remade. And in a strange bit of good (?) timing, my Wacom tablet died a few days ago, which I assumed was the universe’s way of telling me to get off my ass and update the site already. Thankfully Wacom made a speedy repair and delivery back, so I’ve already sketched up the first few panels of the next OOPs page.
And a special shoutout to Xandispin, who first suggested a site update several months ago, then set up this snazzy new WordPress layout for me to customize (which I then sat on until this past week). Thanks man; it took me long enough to get around to it, but without you the site would still be looking like something from the early 2000’s!
Seriously, I was manually creating pages and re-entering every altered link when there was a new page, using a long-defunct version of Dreamweaver 2001. That gets tiring real quick.
Anyway! There’s some new stuff in the Art & Extras section now as well, which you might not have seen if you don’t frequent Deviantart and such.
Ahhh, yeah. Who knows what sort of things Vizlet may have given away unknowingly?
…It may be interesting for Kass to ask Viracroix about that, later. Been a while since those two have interacted, I feel.
I also… hope Vizlet doesn’t think she was truly at fault, but it sounds like she does…
I agree with all of this lol
…uh oh.
Has Raan been testing every piece of junk the trademaster traded for on his apprentices …?
I don’t think Ran would perform human experimentation on his apprentices…
… that’s what condemned criminals are for, after all.
But then the trademaster wouldn’t get to wear his special outfit…
Yeah, that’s the thing with precursor super tech in settings like this. You don’t know what any of it does or what condition it needs to be in to function, so there’s literally no way to tell what’s valuable and what’s junk at a glance.
“Oooh! It’s so shiny and it glows! This must be a powerful relic!” (holding a lamp)
“A rusty sphere? There’s a little rattle when I shake it… are we sure this is even an antiquity? (holding a thermonuclear bomb)
Fortunately, an old and unmaintained thermonuclear bomb is unlikely to detonate. Still would not be a good idea to be near one, as it would still contain radioactive material and the shielding may leak. But it’d be more “cursed item causes everyone who gets close to fall sick and die” rather than “entire city mysteriously disappear in a flash of intense light”.
“I found this cylinder of metal with strange markings.”
“we’ve managed to translate the markings! it says ‘Cobalt-60, Drop and Run'”
Ayup, precisely like that. In the BEST case.
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub815_web.pdf
The could understand from the shape that its a weapon, but something like the demon core would be deadly and you couldnt tell that its deadly by looking at it, in general i dont think they know what radiation is
The demon core itself wasn’t particularly deadly relative to the other bomb cores in the project. It was the incredibly sloppy and irresponsible handling of it by people who actually did know better but fucked around anyways that caused them to find out the hard way.
I doubt yinglets have the ability to make the neutron reflectors that made the demon core so deadly.
Thermonuclear bomb? Why not think big?
Like a magnetic vacuum flask…
…holding just a few grams of antimatter.
Okay, but imagine how different of a story this all would’ve been if Vizlet had traded away that crusty lil’ rock and it exploded in, say, RAN’s face.
He would have taken Beizels offer up in a heartbeat for one thing
I’m not convinced Beizel would’ve made that offer if Kass wasn’t trying so hard to act “manly”.
Poak still would’ve made his offer though
Oh, definitely.
I’ve wondered what would’ve happened if Brakka had managed to deliver it and it popped open in Narklet’s face.
Considering Kass bought the ‘useless piece of scrap’ from the outcast just to be nice and had no thought that it was anything more than a piece of rock, until it demonstrated that it was special, on him.
Lopin wasn’t an outcast yet at the time…
Which more frames the idea, all these outcasts are dangerous just being in the city.
That’s what I was saying, they were either mis-handling the one that changed Kass or they went out of their way to create a human/yinglet hybrid. It does show that a yinget brain can hold a much greater intelligence than most did not think it could. Perhaps Kass isn’t the first?
So, here’s my deep into the head-theory take on it: We know the “thing” generates yinglets from available biomass. My guess is that all the previous “lesser yinglets” were in fact that, small yingforms created and descended from random smaller animals. My next guess is that every intelligent yinglet we see originated from converted humans, or even that yinglets are not native to this world at all(and not just because of the pretty heavily arthropodal nature of life shown everywhere outside of yinglets and humans). It seems that whatever might have existed on a theoretical colony ship included not only stuff for colonization, but outright population recovery in the event of complete disaster. Jury’s still out on whether humans and yingets actually arrived together at all. That said, I’m gravitating towards a bit of a Xenogears scenario, where the people the system creates are intended as parts of the overall system(patriarchs and other natural-born role affinities – on that note I’m thinking Narklet is hooked up to some kind of inventory beacon, for lack of a better description, his “oracles from god” are just wifi pings). I strongly suspect that the grand poohbahs of Ying Central are entirely aware of all these facts. After these last few panels, I now additionally assume they’re making a play towards conquering the entire planet.
I feel like this only cements that Vizlet’s enclave is on borrowed time. The main question for me then becomes, will simply she and some others get shanked, will the whole enclave get taken out, or will they formally join Ivenmoth first to preserve themselves, but definitely kick off the yingwar?
Unless I’ve missed somethine, all the plants and animals on this planet, from giant insects to grassy rats, are just a little odd (or a lot odd). Apart from the humans, that is. So much so that it’s actually the humans who seem out of place there. That says to me that it was humans who came to this planet from somewhere else (or not just the humans). The almost-but-not-quite-terran nature of many of the local animals indicates a possible flawed, incomplete terraforming effort some time in the distant past.
As to a potential yingwar, i personally dont favor the central enclaves chances. Sure yinglets can mob and take down individual humans, but against a trained and equipped human army? I tend to think the Beletam army would make short work of their Great Society. And what the Baxxid or Indrel might do do them would not be pretty either.
Well, Vizlet does bring up a good point. I forgot that rock was an Antiquity.
Kass really has a unassailable and unarguable poin–
……
Well, crapbaskets.
I don’t understand what the big secret is. As Vizlet’s Socratic questioning shows, the humans /already know/ that at least one piece of antiquity junk has this magic power. So why does she expect to be squished for telling Kass? As soon as she mentioned antiquities, I was expecting Kass to say “oh, you mean like the one that changed me into a yinglet?” Or, more precisely, I thought that that was what he meant when he said “Are we talking about… antiquities?” And I didn’t understand (don’t understand) why Vizlet was making such a fuss about it.