I like to see Rikk wasn’t planning on sitting on his hands while dying slowly. I know he’s too much of a good guy to ask for miracles to bail him out, but still, it’s very nice to see he didn’t threw the towel.
His plan of giving himself a Siegfried skin treatment was very good, too. Alas, the xenochiclets don’t believe in happy endings.
BTW, if I were Rumy, I would demand a _flawless_ explaination from those floating bastards for their betrayal. Otherwise, I would probably feel too eager to show them how we humans dissect rectangles – not necessarily using geometry.
Xenochiclets are sad. Bellhop has them on a leash for some reason….
So…Instead of kidnaping Animal and port him to a secret science lab to “borrow” his blood in the name of love (thats evil because that was what the “bad guys” were doing to him), lets split him open in public with the Excalibur +12 and get his blood splattered were it can be of some use to the “good guys” (he will heal up anyway). Brilliant. Who deviced this plan? Brian Vanhoose? đŸ˜€ This is beyond true neutral and heading south. no XP’s for Rummy today.
I think Rumy just did dissect the orange xenochiclet? Animal there looks uninjured, but there is some sort of ichor splashed around. Plus, Rumy looks more horrified than startled.
“Tbe butler did it.” That’s what this makes me think of. It’s such a cliche that it’s easy to forget what it’s supposed to signify: the archetypal shocking twist. And the reason that it’s a shocking twist is that the butler isn’t even on your list of suspects. Oh, sure, if someone asked you if the butler was in the house on the night of the murder, you’d say “yes”, but if someone asked you, without reminding you about the butler first, to list all the characters who were in the house, you’d probably leave him out. Because we don’t really think of him as a character. Not until the author forces the issue.
Aegis’ entire power dynamic is going to completely change without the ability to teleport about.
….Whiiiiich is exactly what TC was hinting at earlier with Bax and Di. Dammit.
Also, is Rumy still worthy of wielding Excalibur after such a cold-blooded scheme? Look at the bloodlust in her eyes in panel 3. Does the sword ACTUALLY have Mjolnir-like properties, like Kath hinted at? Or is it just a shiny stick?
We know the blood’s only good for 30 minutes or so. So without doubt Rikk’s been teleported, oh, say, 35 minutes away. The Hand is pretty savvy, to have arranged this fatal blow to Aegis’ morale. Too bad they weren’t as clever about not getting their butt’s kicked.
@Drakkin
This whole thing has been going south since it started. I didn’t want to say anything on Wednesday because RealityCheck was trolling but everything about this from the cop implying that any teleporters need to work for the government to an open paramilitary attack on the Hand with minimal concern for civilian safety indicates that Aegis has placed themselves so far above the law, it might as well not exist.
In fact, it’s something that has been galling me ever since the Charlotte thing where Rikk was shown to be good with banning books. Yes, I realize that the books were dangerous but, to me, that was the first sign that they’re beginning to lose their moral compass. Since then, it seems that Aegis has just been going further and further south with the best of intentions. While it can always be argued that it was deemed necessary, they’ve created an agency that seems to be answerable only to themselves. This isn’t a good thing because, while Rikk, Jared and Will might stop it from going too far, you will eventually get an Aegis head who’ll say “Wow. I have all this power and absolutely no boundaries on it.”
Perhaps, if there is PR fallout from this, it might behoove Rikk, Jared, and Will to take a good look at the monster they are creating before we get to the Iron Easel timeline.
@Pyre, sometimes you have to make hard choices. The Freedom of Information Act shouldn’t be applied to E-Z Bake instructions for a nuke, and the possibility of injuring or even accidentally killing people has to be weighed against the possibility of seeing billions die because AEGIS didn’t act. And at some point, you stop getting the luxury of agonizing over those decisions every second.
I don’t mean to completely deny those moral questions’ validity– they’re what drives a lot of the stories– but I think you’re overstating the slippery-slope argument. I mean, the Iron Easel timeline was based on the Allies losing World War II and a literal Nazi regime. Godwin’s Law and all that.
I think Baf put hir finger on it. We and Aegis have watched with our own eyes as the xenochiclets took orders from Bellhop before, but because we and they were still thinking of them as plot devices instead of people, they caught us off-guard. They never even really tried to figure out why the xenochiclets said they had to obey Bellhop after the first incident, did they?
Unless the chiclet ‘ports Rikk out into a deadly environment, I still see a problem with the fact that THERE’S MAGIC BLOOD ALL OVER THE SWORD AND EVERYWHERE ELSE. No doubt that’ll be explained later, but still.
Unless I’m missing something, and Excalibur turn the blood of whom it cuts into orange soda, in which case, I want on of those swords, please. That’d be delicious, delicious murder.
Oh, come on. The guy was getting sliced to shreds two panels ago, and now he’s monitoring his teammates’ battle status, deducing his enemies’ plans from a milisecond’s worth of information and interfering by communicating complex countermands with a glance?
That is so unfair. And here I was hoping he’d be turn out to be the one cuckoo that could actually die from being cut to pieces.
Also, Rikk all but has to have been ported somewhere hazardous, or Rumi could just follow him and smear some blood on him anyway. No way that a dramatic twist like this ends up negated that easily.
@Tcampbell: One could say the same about the cops using pepper spray. In fact, they have said the same citing reasons such as “potential to riot”. Maybe those reasons are valid and they had inside information but very few believe that.
I used the book banning because Rumy’s reaction of being okay with that but then freaking out because a judge made a non-binding comment about marriage struck me as a little too “Freedom for me. Rules for the rest” but, at the time, I let it go. However, at this point, she is part of an organization that answers to noone, seems to give her the legal authority to slice-and-dice in public without any due process, yet she says that “America is freedom”. Actions speak louder than words and, in her case, her actions are shouting.
As for the slippery slope argument, except for some badmouthing in the press and the occasional picket sign, has there been any other consequences? At least Desmond Jones seemed to have some boundaries as to what the F.I.B. could and could not do. Aegis seems to have no such boundaries. If Mist or Jones had been able to operate the F.I.B. in the manner that Aegis operates, where would the FAANSverse be now?
In a way, it’s interesting to contrast early strips where Rikk and Co. would have been the ones in the crowd compared to how they are now that they are on the other side of the fence. Would pre-2008 Will be willing to accept “Someday you’ll understand” from 2011 Will (I know it was Rikk who said it but still…..)?
Perhaps I do overthink this (Plus it is your comic) but I’m reminded of what Ally said at the end of the whole God Machine arc where she realized that it’s easy to stick by principles when there’s nothing on the line but the real test is how one acts when everything is on the line.
Should information always be free? DID Rikk make the wrong choice by suppressing the magic books?
I’d say, yes. Regulate them? Sure. License them? Certainly. But ban them? Shut down websites selling them – websites not even subject to US law? It’s actually kind of scary that they speak in such a blase manner in that comic I linked to about violating international law to suppress information like that – I never noticed it before because I was caught up in the story.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to agree with Pyre on this one – I think that comic right there may indeed be a big turning point for the story. Magic doesn’t seem to be any more inherently evil then guns are (seeing as how Aegis seems to employ all kinds of mages that we never meet), and allowing people to own guns has caused some deaths – but outlawing guns never stopped violent crime. Aegis shouldn’t be outlawing magic – because it obviously hasn’t stopped magical crime. Aegis should be opening magic schools. This ‘magic for the authorities, no magic for the people’ foolishness demonstrates a certain contempt for the people who are assumed to be unable to control themselves – it’s classic authoritarianism. By making magic forbidden to civilians, Aegis ensures that the only people who HAVE magic are the kind of people that are inclined to oppose them anyway. AND they justify their own existence by being able to say ‘Look, the only other people that have magic are the bad guys!’
If magic was widely taught, Aegis possibly wouldn’t have needed to stop Charlotte, because the school’s white magic instructor would have taken her down – or the local cops’ magic squad, or whoever. Then Aegis wouldn’t have had to use Charlotte against the Order of the Dragon (which I thought was kinda cruel) because they would have had plenty of White Magic grad students to recruit. Think of how it would be – the Cambridge School of Magic! Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Sorcery! Oh, man, so cool.
I know, I know, it’s not the story TC wants to tell. Just like the reason Tony Stark doesn’t use his technology to put all the coal and nuclear power plants out of business and put a colony on the moon is because it isn’t the story his writers want to tell. But it’s a classic problem with writing comics – maintaining the status quo when paradigm-changing technology is introduced by the story. And magic – magic you can learn from a book you got off amazon.com – is paradigm-changing technology. So much of the story – the entire story – of Fans! has been keeping the magic bottled up, keeping things secret and safe. We’ve never actually seen it addressed as to WHY it still has to be done, after the secret’s out and the whole world knows that this stuff is real. Now we’re seeing the lengths that Aegis has to go to to maintain that status quo, even as we see less and less justification for it. And it’s not pretty.
@Thomas
Aegis has had Excalibur in their armory for some time. It’s not known how they got their hands on it, but here is (I think) the first appearance. http://www.faans.com/books1-6/index.php?p=1833
Remember how the strip started, a science fiction / fantasy club in what appeared to be a mundane universe, running across things that only they were able to believe, let alone handle. Then, die of destiny, aliens, alternate timelines, demons, and fighting a government agency that had been supressing all of this all along.
It’s like Peter Parker deciding to become a vigilante, not a policeman and non-lethal weapon inventor, after his uncle got killed.
Depending on the legend in question, the only “condition” applied to Excalibur has to do with whether or not a person is worthy to be King of England, and even then that only applies if the blade is embedded into a stone.
And even with that condition one can wonder about whether or not Merlin was lying about that, to ensure that only the heir of Uther Pendragon would pull the sword from the stone and thus ascend to the throne.
Personally, I subscribe to the two swords idea. Caliburn as the sword in the stone to determine Rulership and after it was broken during a battle, Excalibur as awarded by the Lady of the Lake. With the latter being unbreakable and assuring that its wielder would be victorious in battle. And the real deal clincher would’ve been its scabbard that could heal the wounds inflicted upon its bearer.
Hence why the scabbard was stolen and thus the events at the Battle of Camlann could take place.
The way I see it, as long as AEGIS, with our main cast, is in charge, there isn’t going to be any “slippery slope” to fascism, because our heroes’ moral compasses would stop that. However, I would agree that it has already gone too far in certain respects. Now when it comes to known terrorists like the Hand, full use of force is not only allowed but required, regardless of political fallout. Just make sure you can prove they are terrorists, if only after the fact. If you can’t, well this is why Batman can’t be the law-supported hero in The Dark Knight. It’s a tricky business. I still believe that AEGIS should be allowed to straddle that line, but mainly because it is essentially a war-time situation, with the fate of the nation truly in the balance, and the alternative of stupid politicians fighting AEGIS every step of the way is far more dangerous.
However, I agree with Pyre and Stevarious that outright banning of knowledge simply because it could be dangerous is way over the line. Stevarious voiced all my points already (kudos, well said), and I just want to elaborate on the superhero comparison. If the club becoming heroes and fighting the system was like Peter Parker becoming a vigilante, then AEGIS banning magic books would be like Spiderman, working for the government, helping to arrest other superheroes just for doing what he used to do. Waaaaaiiit… Heh, oh yeah, I went there.
Just to clarify, it’s not Spiderman registering as an agent of the government that’s the problem. It’s the insistence that anyone with superpowers must be attached to the government or face arrest that’s the problem. Similarly, there’s no problem with Rikk and the gang becoming government agents. But when they deliberately attempt to prevent any use of magic outside the government, that’s when we have a problem. Learning mystical stuff they weren’t supposed to know is how they got into this business, and with their banning those magic books they are essentially attempting to close the door on any who would follow in their footsteps.
Banning magical books can’t quite be compared to banning guns, though. While both are tools that give disproportionate amounts of power to their wielders, guns don’t carry the possibility of possessing the user with an otherworldly force. Magic can have a literally corruptive influence, while guns can only have a figurative one.
Comparing guns and magic is not apples and oranges.
It’s more like toothpicks and nuclear devices.
The argument here is that humanity as a whole is not responsible enough to use this knowledge well, so the fewer people know about it, the more paranoid and responsible they are about it. And as a consequence, the planet is safer.
I would not want to have step by step instructions for a tactical nuke up on wikileaks. So terrorism once again gets cleverly used as boogeyman to curtail our freedom to blow ourselves up to smithereens.
@Commiekeebler: “instructions for a tactical nuke up on..”. So I asked Google and came up with 39,800,000 links for “how to build a nuclear bomb”. You understand that the lab procedures to purify radioactive material were developed a HUNDRED years ago. The nuke was developed with the tecnology of 60 years ago and without computers as we know them. And … the basic principles of nuclear fision are teached to high schoolers this days. The recipe is not the problem, the ingredients are rare, very hazardous and extremely expensive to gather. ( kinda like magic components đŸ˜€ )Thus, you cant make a nuke without a really big operation (or stealing from a big operation). If you are not friends with USA you cant run such operation without facing all kinds of political and commercial issues. Thats the main reason there are no proliferation of nuclear weapons. Not because of some “forbidden knowledge” on how to build a nuke. There is not a “secret mechanism” that turns U235 into a nuke. So you dont need the actual blueprints of the Fat Boy to miniaturize or something. Its just expensive and complicated. Dont worry, wont happen in the garage of some OWS infiltrator. Marie Curie used 8tons of pechblenda to gather 1 gr of purified material. You would need some real big garage for you truck float. đŸ˜€ Or a secret underground base in a volcanic island. :D, and for that you need to be part of WStreet because it takes a lot of money.
So why didn’t they investigate the xenochicklets reaction to Bellhop? You would think that’s the first thing they would have done after the first time they ‘lost’ to him. Unless they only could get an “I can’t say” out of them.
Bellhop wasn’t “deducing his enemies’ plans from a milisecond’s worth of information” at all. Given that the Xenochiclets had to have been briefed on this operation same as the rest of the team, it’s pretty obvious that they just fed him the information about it beforehand. In fact, I have to assume that this is why the Hand is letting themselves get “beaten” so handily: they knew this was going to go down at some point, and so deliberately chose this particular location (very visible and amongst a high density of the general public) so as to make AEGIS look as bad as possible when they were, as far as the public perception is concerned, ruthlessly attacked in a completely unprovoked manner.
@Commiekeebler “The argument here is that humanity as a whole is not responsible enough to use this knowledge well, so the fewer people know about it, the more paranoid and responsible they are about it. And as a consequence, the planet is safer.”
Two problems with that:
1) You’re creating a false dichotomy. This isn’t a choice between ‘banning outright’ and ‘magic powers for sale at Rite-Aid next to the ‘homeopathic’ sugar pills’. It is demonstrable that Aegis believes that magical powers CAN and SHOULD be used responsibly – even the purple hate magic that Shanna wanted to find a method for blocking outright. The problem is that they have arbitrarily decided that they should be the ONLY ones to do so, and restrict access to everyone else as much as possible. This is only acceptable to us, right now, because (as LSMario pointed out) we KNOW the Fans and know that they can be trusted with this power (and with the high rate of, hrmmm, ‘turnover’ in the Fans history even this is questionable). But if this were real life, the situation would be completely unacceptable. This is clearly mirrored in the strip – Rikk was trusted by the general public because they know and love him. As soon as control was turned over Will, we saw protests – he’s relatively unknown and therefore not as trusted.
Magic shouldn’t be ‘freely available’. The teaching of magic should be regulated, magic users should be registered, abuses should be prosecuted.
2) The planet is demonstrably not safer. The rise of the Order of the Dragon was only possible in a world ignorant of magic. Lots (and lots and lots) of people died in that incident. The Order almost won, almost took over the whole world. Their deception of the general populace would not have been possible if a certain percentage of the people had a general level of education about the uses and limitations of magic. They would have reduced the world to the Dark Ages and become rulers if it weren’t for Aegis and a healthy dose of old fashioned good luck – and the help of the very thing they have been trying to suppress: other organizations (Ar’rad Ra, The Immortals, etc) with access to magic.
@IS_Wolf “Shiny stick essentially.”
I kinda figured but I guess we’ll see.
@Reikenbach “Magic can have a literally corruptive influence, while guns can only have a figurative one.”
Citation needed. And Charlotte definitely does not qualify, as she was only pretending to be possessed by a demon to give herself an excuse to act on her own darker emotions.
And even if that IS true, that’s an argument for registration and licensing, not for a double-standard banning. If magic CAN be used responsibly, then it should be legally available. If it CANNOT be used responsibly, then Aegis has no business employing it.
I love the fact that conversations like this are happening in the comments here, and I wanted to point out that we do currently ban some items for civilian use, while allowing them for military and police work. I’m thinking specifically of military-grade firearms and other weaponry. While we generally allow the general public (with certain exceptions) to purchase handguns and other smaller firearms, in many jurisdictions full machine guns or other weapons we see in common use by the military are banned. We have decided as a culture and as a nation/state/county that some things are too dangerous to have in the hands of the general public, but are still acceptable for use by highly-organized, trained groups charged with protecting us from those who would cause us harm. The magic books in question are less like the instructions on how to build nuclear weapons and more like fully-loaded machine guns being sold to anyone who wants one.
I find it interesting to see all the comments about the potential slippery slope of AEGIS’s decline, the betrayal, what they would and would not permit, without the most obvious point being raised.
Rumy just took a legendary weapon and attempted to bisect an enemy with it — albeit one known to regenerate — specifically to splash some of his blood onto Rikk and cure him of a disease that these enemies didn’t cause in him. She at the least inflicted massive pain and suffering and potentially killed a sentient being purely to heal/cure her husband.
We can debate whether or not AEGIS should have attacked the Hand in this way, but at least we can argue they were working in the line of duty. Rumy’s attack — coordinated by AEGIS — was clearly assault with a deadly weapon at the least. And Rikk participated willingly in it.
The moral high ground is looking like a pretty lonely place.
Eric – I’ve been thinking about this too. DID Rikk participate willingly? It would go against every grain of everything we know about him and have seen about his character. I understand “he’s a father now” but I truly can’t envision Rikk abiding viciously slicing open a living, sentient, being, even an enemy that will heal, to ensure his own survival. It’s TOO much in opposition to his core. TOO big a putting aside of his principles to be believable. Ultimately T can take the characters in any direction he chooses, but if this was Rikk “putting aside his morality for the sake of his unborn child” … I just don’t know… it’s a little too much to be believable.
@Bunny Suction
Oh, no, it works perfectly for me. Rikk is very highly moral, but you gotta remember, once he decides on a course of action, he throws everything he’s got into it. He holds nothing back. Sure, he’ll feel bad about it later, and he may second-guess himself occasionally during the process. But he doesn’t stop moving towards the goal, and Rikk has decided to live.
The days of Rikk hesitating once he’s decided which way is the right way are long gone.
@ Fata_Morgana – I can’t really imagine the xenochicklets explaining the plan to Bellhop. They might respond to his demands, but leaking full plans is a whole different level of treachery. Moreover, they seem pretty awful at (and uninterested in) expressing anything to anyone other than their own kind, restricting themselves mostly to listening.
It’s possible, I guess, but it’d require a fair bit of additional explanation.
Bellhop is holding someone or something hostage over them. I think their exchange in the previous fight showed him yelling about “many xeno’s”… did he threaten their way of life? Their species? Their relatives?
The fact they just screwed Rick means that this was premeditated. They feel bad about it, just like he does about the public image hit Aegis is going to take for this. Whether he feels bad about the slipping morals, or even notices how far they went to save him, is another question.
Betrayal? Where?
The yellow chiclet has ported Rikk out before he gets the blood on him.
Game over.
“The yellow chiclet has ported Rikk out before he gets the blood on him.”
And after a meaningful look from Bellhop too. Or perhaps it was Bellhop doing the teleporting?
Blue and Yellow look as though they saw it coming…
Bellhop’s teleportation doesn’t have a color, yellow did the porting.
There’s blood on the sword, why not use that?
ooooh well played, did not see that one coming. Seriously, I am in awe.
Goddamn. It seems that the Chiclets were indeed the traitors. But I am curious, what information has Bellhop disclosed to them to make them do so…
Yep, AEGIS is screwed.
ok, looks like I get to be the dork who asks: what just happened?
I like to see Rikk wasn’t planning on sitting on his hands while dying slowly. I know he’s too much of a good guy to ask for miracles to bail him out, but still, it’s very nice to see he didn’t threw the towel.
His plan of giving himself a Siegfried skin treatment was very good, too. Alas, the xenochiclets don’t believe in happy endings.
BTW, if I were Rumy, I would demand a _flawless_ explaination from those floating bastards for their betrayal. Otherwise, I would probably feel too eager to show them how we humans dissect rectangles – not necessarily using geometry.
Xenochiclets are sad. Bellhop has them on a leash for some reason….
So…Instead of kidnaping Animal and port him to a secret science lab to “borrow” his blood in the name of love (thats evil because that was what the “bad guys” were doing to him), lets split him open in public with the Excalibur +12 and get his blood splattered were it can be of some use to the “good guys” (he will heal up anyway). Brilliant. Who deviced this plan? Brian Vanhoose? đŸ˜€ This is beyond true neutral and heading south. no XP’s for Rummy today.
…Shit. Was that the betrayal?
More importantly, where did they send Rikk?
Did they just prevent him from getting a cure? Or is their betrayal far deeper?
And with them no longer helping the good guys, what happens to Jared’s “flash fry” plan?
I think Rumy just did dissect the orange xenochiclet? Animal there looks uninjured, but there is some sort of ichor splashed around. Plus, Rumy looks more horrified than startled.
I think during the previous fight Bellhop sort of threatened the rest of the Xenochiclets. Or whatever that outburst of his was…
“Tbe butler did it.” That’s what this makes me think of. It’s such a cliche that it’s easy to forget what it’s supposed to signify: the archetypal shocking twist. And the reason that it’s a shocking twist is that the butler isn’t even on your list of suspects. Oh, sure, if someone asked you if the butler was in the house on the night of the murder, you’d say “yes”, but if someone asked you, without reminding you about the butler first, to list all the characters who were in the house, you’d probably leave him out. Because we don’t really think of him as a character. Not until the author forces the issue.
Aegis’ entire power dynamic is going to completely change without the ability to teleport about.
….Whiiiiich is exactly what TC was hinting at earlier with Bax and Di. Dammit.
Also, is Rumy still worthy of wielding Excalibur after such a cold-blooded scheme? Look at the bloodlust in her eyes in panel 3. Does the sword ACTUALLY have Mjolnir-like properties, like Kath hinted at? Or is it just a shiny stick?
We know the blood’s only good for 30 minutes or so. So without doubt Rikk’s been teleported, oh, say, 35 minutes away. The Hand is pretty savvy, to have arranged this fatal blow to Aegis’ morale. Too bad they weren’t as clever about not getting their butt’s kicked.
@Drakkin
This whole thing has been going south since it started. I didn’t want to say anything on Wednesday because RealityCheck was trolling but everything about this from the cop implying that any teleporters need to work for the government to an open paramilitary attack on the Hand with minimal concern for civilian safety indicates that Aegis has placed themselves so far above the law, it might as well not exist.
In fact, it’s something that has been galling me ever since the Charlotte thing where Rikk was shown to be good with banning books. Yes, I realize that the books were dangerous but, to me, that was the first sign that they’re beginning to lose their moral compass. Since then, it seems that Aegis has just been going further and further south with the best of intentions. While it can always be argued that it was deemed necessary, they’ve created an agency that seems to be answerable only to themselves. This isn’t a good thing because, while Rikk, Jared and Will might stop it from going too far, you will eventually get an Aegis head who’ll say “Wow. I have all this power and absolutely no boundaries on it.”
Perhaps, if there is PR fallout from this, it might behoove Rikk, Jared, and Will to take a good look at the monster they are creating before we get to the Iron Easel timeline.
How come Rumy is in possession of Excalibur? Has this been shown in an earlier adventure? Can somebody please explain? Thanks in advance.
@ MST: LOL at your line about dissecting rectangles.
@ Baf: I liked your comment. Thanks for your analysis.
@Pyre, sometimes you have to make hard choices. The Freedom of Information Act shouldn’t be applied to E-Z Bake instructions for a nuke, and the possibility of injuring or even accidentally killing people has to be weighed against the possibility of seeing billions die because AEGIS didn’t act. And at some point, you stop getting the luxury of agonizing over those decisions every second.
I don’t mean to completely deny those moral questions’ validity– they’re what drives a lot of the stories– but I think you’re overstating the slippery-slope argument. I mean, the Iron Easel timeline was based on the Allies losing World War II and a literal Nazi regime. Godwin’s Law and all that.
I think Baf put hir finger on it. We and Aegis have watched with our own eyes as the xenochiclets took orders from Bellhop before, but because we and they were still thinking of them as plot devices instead of people, they caught us off-guard. They never even really tried to figure out why the xenochiclets said they had to obey Bellhop after the first incident, did they?
Unless the chiclet ‘ports Rikk out into a deadly environment, I still see a problem with the fact that THERE’S MAGIC BLOOD ALL OVER THE SWORD AND EVERYWHERE ELSE. No doubt that’ll be explained later, but still.
Unless I’m missing something, and Excalibur turn the blood of whom it cuts into orange soda, in which case, I want on of those swords, please. That’d be delicious, delicious murder.
Locke – it’s been established that Animal’s blood is only potent outside his body for a very short time.
Oh, come on. The guy was getting sliced to shreds two panels ago, and now he’s monitoring his teammates’ battle status, deducing his enemies’ plans from a milisecond’s worth of information and interfering by communicating complex countermands with a glance?
That is so unfair. And here I was hoping he’d be turn out to be the one cuckoo that could actually die from being cut to pieces.
Also, Rikk all but has to have been ported somewhere hazardous, or Rumi could just follow him and smear some blood on him anyway. No way that a dramatic twist like this ends up negated that easily.
As hazardous locations go, the agreed-upon frying location above the Atlantic would be an interesting and adequately foreshadowed choice.
@Tcampbell: One could say the same about the cops using pepper spray. In fact, they have said the same citing reasons such as “potential to riot”. Maybe those reasons are valid and they had inside information but very few believe that.
I used the book banning because Rumy’s reaction of being okay with that but then freaking out because a judge made a non-binding comment about marriage struck me as a little too “Freedom for me. Rules for the rest” but, at the time, I let it go. However, at this point, she is part of an organization that answers to noone, seems to give her the legal authority to slice-and-dice in public without any due process, yet she says that “America is freedom”. Actions speak louder than words and, in her case, her actions are shouting.
As for the slippery slope argument, except for some badmouthing in the press and the occasional picket sign, has there been any other consequences? At least Desmond Jones seemed to have some boundaries as to what the F.I.B. could and could not do. Aegis seems to have no such boundaries. If Mist or Jones had been able to operate the F.I.B. in the manner that Aegis operates, where would the FAANSverse be now?
In a way, it’s interesting to contrast early strips where Rikk and Co. would have been the ones in the crowd compared to how they are now that they are on the other side of the fence. Would pre-2008 Will be willing to accept “Someday you’ll understand” from 2011 Will (I know it was Rikk who said it but still…..)?
Perhaps I do overthink this (Plus it is your comic) but I’m reminded of what Ally said at the end of the whole God Machine arc where she realized that it’s easy to stick by principles when there’s nothing on the line but the real test is how one acts when everything is on the line.
Should information always be free? DID Rikk make the wrong choice by suppressing the magic books?
I’d say, yes. Regulate them? Sure. License them? Certainly. But ban them? Shut down websites selling them – websites not even subject to US law? It’s actually kind of scary that they speak in such a blase manner in that comic I linked to about violating international law to suppress information like that – I never noticed it before because I was caught up in the story.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to agree with Pyre on this one – I think that comic right there may indeed be a big turning point for the story. Magic doesn’t seem to be any more inherently evil then guns are (seeing as how Aegis seems to employ all kinds of mages that we never meet), and allowing people to own guns has caused some deaths – but outlawing guns never stopped violent crime. Aegis shouldn’t be outlawing magic – because it obviously hasn’t stopped magical crime. Aegis should be opening magic schools. This ‘magic for the authorities, no magic for the people’ foolishness demonstrates a certain contempt for the people who are assumed to be unable to control themselves – it’s classic authoritarianism. By making magic forbidden to civilians, Aegis ensures that the only people who HAVE magic are the kind of people that are inclined to oppose them anyway. AND they justify their own existence by being able to say ‘Look, the only other people that have magic are the bad guys!’
If magic was widely taught, Aegis possibly wouldn’t have needed to stop Charlotte, because the school’s white magic instructor would have taken her down – or the local cops’ magic squad, or whoever. Then Aegis wouldn’t have had to use Charlotte against the Order of the Dragon (which I thought was kinda cruel) because they would have had plenty of White Magic grad students to recruit. Think of how it would be – the Cambridge School of Magic! Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Sorcery! Oh, man, so cool.
I know, I know, it’s not the story TC wants to tell. Just like the reason Tony Stark doesn’t use his technology to put all the coal and nuclear power plants out of business and put a colony on the moon is because it isn’t the story his writers want to tell. But it’s a classic problem with writing comics – maintaining the status quo when paradigm-changing technology is introduced by the story. And magic – magic you can learn from a book you got off amazon.com – is paradigm-changing technology. So much of the story – the entire story – of Fans! has been keeping the magic bottled up, keeping things secret and safe. We’ve never actually seen it addressed as to WHY it still has to be done, after the secret’s out and the whole world knows that this stuff is real. Now we’re seeing the lengths that Aegis has to go to to maintain that status quo, even as we see less and less justification for it. And it’s not pretty.
I can’t WAIT to see what happens next!
@Thomas
Aegis has had Excalibur in their armory for some time. It’s not known how they got their hands on it, but here is (I think) the first appearance.
http://www.faans.com/books1-6/index.php?p=1833
Remember how the strip started, a science fiction / fantasy club in what appeared to be a mundane universe, running across things that only they were able to believe, let alone handle. Then, die of destiny, aliens, alternate timelines, demons, and fighting a government agency that had been supressing all of this all along.
It’s like Peter Parker deciding to become a vigilante, not a policeman and non-lethal weapon inventor, after his uncle got killed.
@Stevarious
Shiny stick essentially.
Depending on the legend in question, the only “condition” applied to Excalibur has to do with whether or not a person is worthy to be King of England, and even then that only applies if the blade is embedded into a stone.
And even with that condition one can wonder about whether or not Merlin was lying about that, to ensure that only the heir of Uther Pendragon would pull the sword from the stone and thus ascend to the throne.
Personally, I subscribe to the two swords idea. Caliburn as the sword in the stone to determine Rulership and after it was broken during a battle, Excalibur as awarded by the Lady of the Lake. With the latter being unbreakable and assuring that its wielder would be victorious in battle. And the real deal clincher would’ve been its scabbard that could heal the wounds inflicted upon its bearer.
Hence why the scabbard was stolen and thus the events at the Battle of Camlann could take place.
@ Stevarious: Thanks! I’m a bit disappointed that its provenance is left unexplained. Perhaps LoEG’s Orlando has been recruited by Aegis?
The way I see it, as long as AEGIS, with our main cast, is in charge, there isn’t going to be any “slippery slope” to fascism, because our heroes’ moral compasses would stop that. However, I would agree that it has already gone too far in certain respects. Now when it comes to known terrorists like the Hand, full use of force is not only allowed but required, regardless of political fallout. Just make sure you can prove they are terrorists, if only after the fact. If you can’t, well this is why Batman can’t be the law-supported hero in The Dark Knight. It’s a tricky business. I still believe that AEGIS should be allowed to straddle that line, but mainly because it is essentially a war-time situation, with the fate of the nation truly in the balance, and the alternative of stupid politicians fighting AEGIS every step of the way is far more dangerous.
However, I agree with Pyre and Stevarious that outright banning of knowledge simply because it could be dangerous is way over the line. Stevarious voiced all my points already (kudos, well said), and I just want to elaborate on the superhero comparison. If the club becoming heroes and fighting the system was like Peter Parker becoming a vigilante, then AEGIS banning magic books would be like Spiderman, working for the government, helping to arrest other superheroes just for doing what he used to do. Waaaaaiiit… Heh, oh yeah, I went there.
Just to clarify, it’s not Spiderman registering as an agent of the government that’s the problem. It’s the insistence that anyone with superpowers must be attached to the government or face arrest that’s the problem. Similarly, there’s no problem with Rikk and the gang becoming government agents. But when they deliberately attempt to prevent any use of magic outside the government, that’s when we have a problem. Learning mystical stuff they weren’t supposed to know is how they got into this business, and with their banning those magic books they are essentially attempting to close the door on any who would follow in their footsteps.
Banning magical books can’t quite be compared to banning guns, though. While both are tools that give disproportionate amounts of power to their wielders, guns don’t carry the possibility of possessing the user with an otherworldly force. Magic can have a literally corruptive influence, while guns can only have a figurative one.
Also, I notice Mumm-Raisin got his hat back.
Comparing guns and magic is not apples and oranges.
It’s more like toothpicks and nuclear devices.
The argument here is that humanity as a whole is not responsible enough to use this knowledge well, so the fewer people know about it, the more paranoid and responsible they are about it. And as a consequence, the planet is safer.
I would not want to have step by step instructions for a tactical nuke up on wikileaks. So terrorism once again gets cleverly used as boogeyman to curtail our freedom to blow ourselves up to smithereens.
@Commiekeebler: “instructions for a tactical nuke up on..”. So I asked Google and came up with 39,800,000 links for “how to build a nuclear bomb”. You understand that the lab procedures to purify radioactive material were developed a HUNDRED years ago. The nuke was developed with the tecnology of 60 years ago and without computers as we know them. And … the basic principles of nuclear fision are teached to high schoolers this days. The recipe is not the problem, the ingredients are rare, very hazardous and extremely expensive to gather. ( kinda like magic components đŸ˜€ )Thus, you cant make a nuke without a really big operation (or stealing from a big operation). If you are not friends with USA you cant run such operation without facing all kinds of political and commercial issues. Thats the main reason there are no proliferation of nuclear weapons. Not because of some “forbidden knowledge” on how to build a nuke. There is not a “secret mechanism” that turns U235 into a nuke. So you dont need the actual blueprints of the Fat Boy to miniaturize or something. Its just expensive and complicated. Dont worry, wont happen in the garage of some OWS infiltrator. Marie Curie used 8tons of pechblenda to gather 1 gr of purified material. You would need some real big garage for you truck float. đŸ˜€ Or a secret underground base in a volcanic island. :D, and for that you need to be part of WStreet because it takes a lot of money.
So why didn’t they investigate the xenochicklets reaction to Bellhop? You would think that’s the first thing they would have done after the first time they ‘lost’ to him. Unless they only could get an “I can’t say” out of them.
@Raza
Bellhop wasn’t “deducing his enemies’ plans from a milisecond’s worth of information” at all. Given that the Xenochiclets had to have been briefed on this operation same as the rest of the team, it’s pretty obvious that they just fed him the information about it beforehand. In fact, I have to assume that this is why the Hand is letting themselves get “beaten” so handily: they knew this was going to go down at some point, and so deliberately chose this particular location (very visible and amongst a high density of the general public) so as to make AEGIS look as bad as possible when they were, as far as the public perception is concerned, ruthlessly attacked in a completely unprovoked manner.
@Commiekeebler “The argument here is that humanity as a whole is not responsible enough to use this knowledge well, so the fewer people know about it, the more paranoid and responsible they are about it. And as a consequence, the planet is safer.”
Two problems with that:
1) You’re creating a false dichotomy. This isn’t a choice between ‘banning outright’ and ‘magic powers for sale at Rite-Aid next to the ‘homeopathic’ sugar pills’. It is demonstrable that Aegis believes that magical powers CAN and SHOULD be used responsibly – even the purple hate magic that Shanna wanted to find a method for blocking outright. The problem is that they have arbitrarily decided that they should be the ONLY ones to do so, and restrict access to everyone else as much as possible. This is only acceptable to us, right now, because (as LSMario pointed out) we KNOW the Fans and know that they can be trusted with this power (and with the high rate of, hrmmm, ‘turnover’ in the Fans history even this is questionable). But if this were real life, the situation would be completely unacceptable. This is clearly mirrored in the strip – Rikk was trusted by the general public because they know and love him. As soon as control was turned over Will, we saw protests – he’s relatively unknown and therefore not as trusted.
Magic shouldn’t be ‘freely available’. The teaching of magic should be regulated, magic users should be registered, abuses should be prosecuted.
2) The planet is demonstrably not safer. The rise of the Order of the Dragon was only possible in a world ignorant of magic. Lots (and lots and lots) of people died in that incident. The Order almost won, almost took over the whole world. Their deception of the general populace would not have been possible if a certain percentage of the people had a general level of education about the uses and limitations of magic. They would have reduced the world to the Dark Ages and become rulers if it weren’t for Aegis and a healthy dose of old fashioned good luck – and the help of the very thing they have been trying to suppress: other organizations (Ar’rad Ra, The Immortals, etc) with access to magic.
@IS_Wolf “Shiny stick essentially.”
I kinda figured but I guess we’ll see.
@Reikenbach “Magic can have a literally corruptive influence, while guns can only have a figurative one.”
Citation needed. And Charlotte definitely does not qualify, as she was only pretending to be possessed by a demon to give herself an excuse to act on her own darker emotions.
And even if that IS true, that’s an argument for registration and licensing, not for a double-standard banning. If magic CAN be used responsibly, then it should be legally available. If it CANNOT be used responsibly, then Aegis has no business employing it.
I love the fact that conversations like this are happening in the comments here, and I wanted to point out that we do currently ban some items for civilian use, while allowing them for military and police work. I’m thinking specifically of military-grade firearms and other weaponry. While we generally allow the general public (with certain exceptions) to purchase handguns and other smaller firearms, in many jurisdictions full machine guns or other weapons we see in common use by the military are banned. We have decided as a culture and as a nation/state/county that some things are too dangerous to have in the hands of the general public, but are still acceptable for use by highly-organized, trained groups charged with protecting us from those who would cause us harm. The magic books in question are less like the instructions on how to build nuclear weapons and more like fully-loaded machine guns being sold to anyone who wants one.
I find it interesting to see all the comments about the potential slippery slope of AEGIS’s decline, the betrayal, what they would and would not permit, without the most obvious point being raised.
Rumy just took a legendary weapon and attempted to bisect an enemy with it — albeit one known to regenerate — specifically to splash some of his blood onto Rikk and cure him of a disease that these enemies didn’t cause in him. She at the least inflicted massive pain and suffering and potentially killed a sentient being purely to heal/cure her husband.
We can debate whether or not AEGIS should have attacked the Hand in this way, but at least we can argue they were working in the line of duty. Rumy’s attack — coordinated by AEGIS — was clearly assault with a deadly weapon at the least. And Rikk participated willingly in it.
The moral high ground is looking like a pretty lonely place.
Eric – I’ve been thinking about this too. DID Rikk participate willingly? It would go against every grain of everything we know about him and have seen about his character. I understand “he’s a father now” but I truly can’t envision Rikk abiding viciously slicing open a living, sentient, being, even an enemy that will heal, to ensure his own survival. It’s TOO much in opposition to his core. TOO big a putting aside of his principles to be believable. Ultimately T can take the characters in any direction he chooses, but if this was Rikk “putting aside his morality for the sake of his unborn child” … I just don’t know… it’s a little too much to be believable.
@Bunny Suction
Oh, no, it works perfectly for me. Rikk is very highly moral, but you gotta remember, once he decides on a course of action, he throws everything he’s got into it. He holds nothing back. Sure, he’ll feel bad about it later, and he may second-guess himself occasionally during the process. But he doesn’t stop moving towards the goal, and Rikk has decided to live.
The days of Rikk hesitating once he’s decided which way is the right way are long gone.
@ Fata_Morgana – I can’t really imagine the xenochicklets explaining the plan to Bellhop. They might respond to his demands, but leaking full plans is a whole different level of treachery. Moreover, they seem pretty awful at (and uninterested in) expressing anything to anyone other than their own kind, restricting themselves mostly to listening.
It’s possible, I guess, but it’d require a fair bit of additional explanation.
Bellhop is holding someone or something hostage over them. I think their exchange in the previous fight showed him yelling about “many xeno’s”… did he threaten their way of life? Their species? Their relatives?
The fact they just screwed Rick means that this was premeditated. They feel bad about it, just like he does about the public image hit Aegis is going to take for this. Whether he feels bad about the slipping morals, or even notices how far they went to save him, is another question.