page 1178 – WE ARE HELPING
Oh, the kids trying to fawn over Layla didn’t go as well as they’d hoped. Hopefully the shock of this surprise isn’t too much for you to bear.
But seriously, this page is one of the rare, few pages in Far Out There that literally made me laugh out loud as I worked on it. Those are some fun expressions to draw, and there’s just something about this kind of mounting absurdity that always tickles my funny bone, especially if it’s really loud.
Oh, and guess what? The TWC Voting Incentives are back this week! And I absolutely went over board on the ethereal lighting this time, even more than usual! Before you ask, no, I didn’t leave this page black and while to balance out all the lighting on the Incentive… but it WAS a nice added bonus (For the record, the ACTUAL reason I didn’t color this one in was because I was afraid it might bog down the manic energy of the line art. I don’t get things this right very often, and I was afraid of messing it up.)
Doing everything for a person, especially things they don’t want, isn’t fawning. It’s bothering. This page shows the difference between the two quite clearly. Bothering someone when panicking about bothering them is even worse than just bothering, though, as Aci is showcasing in the last panel.
but now Trigger kind of regrets unscrewing that salt shaker cap.
And I only say it was Trigger because he’s the one that plays practical jokes and loosening a salt shaker cap is a traditional/cliche practical joke. Although Trigger’s are usually more complicated or mechanical. But if it wasn’t him, it certainly was somebody. Salt shaker lids don’t unscrew themselves. Or maybe this is a highly complex mechanical salt shaker, and Trigger rewired it to unscrew itself just at the worst moment.
he probably wired it to unscrew itself if someone other than himself or Layla used it. Figuring there was no chance Layla would allow someone else to salt her food. What are the odds of that happening?
There’s also the fact that, generally speaking, Layla would never let anybody else mess with her food in the first place. She probably made sure everything was already seasoned exactly how she wanted before she even sat down, so this would have been doomed even if the shaker HADN’T come open.
Heck, even if it was someone other than Layla, who on earth wants someone else to add extra salt to their food without asking?!?! I can’t imagine any situation in which that would be a sane action. These kids’ hormone overload has caused them to lose what tiny amount of common sense they ever had to begin with!
(Or, for that matter, it’s vending machine food, so you know it already has 100x more salt on it than it ever should have.)
This is the FAR FUTURE. Preservation Technology and Food Technology has vastly improved, meaning that the overuse of salt on vending machine food is no longer necessarily commonplace.
It’s also the Far Out There’s Universe version of the far future, so it’s not unlikely that they replaced the use of Salt with at least one thing that is just as prevalent, worse for you, but comes in a variety of flavours from “impossible to taste” to “I can’t taste the spiced jerky I’m eating, only the preservative”.
I fully admit to not even thinking about how the lid came off. But if I had to have guessed, I would have said that Hiro squeezed the salt shaker too hard and popped off the lid.
I kind of like the idea that things just have a habit of breaking whenever Hiro’s the one handling them.
Purely having “things have a habit of breaking whenever Hiro’s handling them” as a potential character trait is too devastating for a character in a sci-fi world, unless it’s a gag story that focuses on the character (Think Sci-Fi Groo The Wanderer, or Milo Murphy’s Law, both of which have regular story beats where everything’s destroyed. Specifically, Groo is a walking force of devastation who’s stupidity somehow manages to counter EVERY attempt to out think him, and Milo Murphy is a walking avatar of Murphy’s Law, causing everything around him that could go wrong to go wrong).
Instead, making it so that how Hiro interacts with his environment changes whenever he has strong feelings, typically resulting in him potentially destroying anything but Gym Equipment whenever he is strongly emotional would be a better way to go.
Gym Equipment is the one exception, where you get variations depending on the strong emotion in question. We’ve already seen that being flustered makes Hiro forget how to use Gym Equipment, so keep that. It could be considered losing all Technique on how to use the equipment. You can even twist that into why he never succeeds at Sporting Competitions, he’s always a little flustered at them, and so he loses Technique and messes up. Other emotions for Gym Equipment:
– Sadness/Depression improves Stamina at the cost of Speed. Endless bike ride!
– Anger improves Strength at the cost of Stamina. Punch a hole in the punching bag before collapsing!
– Joy improves Technique, at the cost of a little of everything else. Everything seems easier because he’s doing things PROPERLY for once!
– Fear improves a bit of everything, but can only be maintained for a short period before he’s out for a day.
– Disgust increases all his base parameters/everything, though less so than Fear, but has to be maintained while withholding the urge to run off and either shower for the next hour, puke, or both.
– He has yet to have displayed emotional responses to things like Pride or Shame yet, though. Pride because he has yet to actually feel properly proud of his actions, and shame due to him being a little kid and not really feeling significant amounts of shame for any extended periods yet.