page 857 – Team Support
Yep, I’m resorting to THIS again. Sorry guys, but I really, REALLY burned myself out getting that big ‘ol Conventional Wisdom update finished, and ended up sleeping through when I would normally have been working on today’s comic. So here’s a rough draft, the finished version will be up later. And I DO have a Voting Incentive for today drawn and scanned, so that’ll go up when the finished page does.
Anyway, I’ve worked out the dialog for the next few pages enough to know how much of Mariska’s backstory ISN’T going to be mentioned, so I’ll just go ahead and fill in some blanks right here. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Nitpickers-in-training (especially very young ones) serve a sort of apprenticeship by accompanying a trained Nitpicker in the field. Normally, this is a one-on-one arrangement, but Ichabod’s was a little unusual. His Nitpicking mentor was actually married to another Nitpicker, and they worked as a duo. While Ichabod was assigned to one of the couple, Mariska was assigned to the other, and she’s basically been his kid sister ever since (I’ve got a suspicion that he doesn’t have any biological siblings, or at least none he has a relationship with)
EDIT: AND WE HAVE A NEW VOTING INCENTIVE!!!
(Historical Notes: The alt text apologizes to Future Me for making up all these names but leaving it up to my later temporal incarnation to actually make up the CHARACTERS those names go with. Well JOKE’S ON YOU, Past Me, because I totally forgot most of these names were a thing and just drew up a whole different cast of Nitpicker characters, most of whom are only just debuting in the 2020 Christmas comics as I write this! …well, okay, there’s ONE reference here that I realized I could retroactively work into the crop of new Nitpickers, but it was NOT something I planed in advance. At least 75% of the cool callbacks in Far Out There are mostly by accident.)
Is it Prince Sorbin-J, or the Xafri Twins? The Creepy Kids on Mothership Charlie are a part of a specialised division of the Nitpickers Guild who specialise in keeping all the weird and unique parts of Mothership Charlie, an entity incredible chaos applied as self-rearrangement that requires a full team of dozens of Nitpickers to regularly check everything going on in the ship and Nitpick at it simply to limit it’s changes or direct them into making sense.
In other words, Mothership Charlie requires constant Nitpicking in order to stop it from doing more damage to the fundamental rules of reality than all the Mad Scientists could conceivably do in the entirety of existence, excusing whoever or whatever brought it into existence, either through creation or summoning.
Mothership Charlie is currently docked just outside the Nitpicker’s Guild so that extra hands can be available in case of emergencies relating to nitpicking the rules of reality to it.
*frantically takes notes about Mothership Charlie to rip off later* -GAH, I mean, I’ll call myself out on which one it is in one of the Christmas comics next week!
Woo! More randomly created stuff made up as stupid explanations becoming cannon! Seriously though, it’s kind of the only reason I can think of for there to be over 16 Nitpickers & Nitpickers in Training, many of which have weird genetic modifications that mean that they are unlikely to actually show up in the comic in one place. Feel free to rip it off… and have Trigger accidentally walk in, and mess around with some of the wiring so that a wing of Mothership Charlie self detonates in a manner unexpected even for Mothership Charlie, and is thus reabsorbed back into the rest of the ship.