page 1224 – the audience cheers
Heeeeeeey, remember how I said I was gonna scramble to start getting pages done ahead of schedule and build up a bit of a page buffer? Well, after a whole week of hard work, I successfully… got this one page finished a bout twelve hours sooner than I normally would have. Whee. Granted, I HAVE gotten a slight head start on penciling the next page already, but it still remains to be seen how much that’ll actually help anything. This whole linear progression of time thing just does not work well with me. But yeah, I already would have had very little to say about a page like this, since it’s so obviously setting up the next page and I wouldn’t want to spoil anything, and that just gets worse when I’m basically going to jump straight into working on the NEXT page as soon as I lode this one up. Well, actually I’m gonna go straight to bed, then get to work as soon as I wake up. Basically the same thing, right?
EDIT: Okay, this incentive didn’t take QUITE as much more time than I expected, but I definitely got way too caught up in what I was doing again. Also, it seems like iTunes shuffle is trying to establish a bit of a theme here. I might have to a bit more hands on regarding the “randomness” of the song selection next time.
I’m honestly curious as to the number of ways in which they saw Stilez destroying the ship. Not to kill anyone, just to destroy the ship for anger release, entertainment or accident purposes. Things like Stilez tearing the ship in half with her legs because she wanted to do the splits and couldn’t be bothered about the ship floor being in the way, or punching a hole in the hull because she hoped to find the source of a nearby sweet scent for a snack.
OOOoooooh… I’m gonna have to deploy a strategic *bites tongue* on this one. It feels like it’s been a while!
Or maybe, depending on how far out the perceptual distortion field extends from Stilez, what’s got them spooked is not so much seeing Stilez destroy the ship (what kind of teenage human male doesn’t like to see a giant cat-girl smashing things and making explosions??!! i’d pay to watch that! or at least i would have as a teenager.) but rather instead witnessing and/or actually experiencing their own personal horrifically gruesome and agonizingly painful demise as an unintended side effect of said ship’s destruction over and over again – explosive decompression, having your limbs severed by flying bits of deckplates, watching your buddies’ explosive decompressions and limb severings, etc. Now that’s gonna’ leave a bit of a mark on the ol’ psyche for quite a while. 😉
Meanwhile, Vengeance is watching the same thing while munching on a giant movie theater size bag of popcorn 😀
(And then at some point, much later, when they’ve gotten over some of the horror, they start to wonder why, in a trillion horrific varied ship destructions, not once did that little blonde girl ever seem to get hurt even slightly. Avi will likely form some paranoid conspiracy theory explaining it. Which still won’t be as weird as the truth.)
re: vote incentive caption – sentencing for Mad Scientists is nearly always pretty light, because for one thing you don’t want to incur their vengeful wrath when the sentence is over, which they absolutely would totally do, and even more so because today’s Mad Scientist destroying your planet’s ecosystem at the behest of your planet’s enemies may be the person you need to go to tomorrow to hire to destroy your planet’s enemy’s ecosystem in revenge – which is to say Mad Scientists are just too valuable a resource for governments with questionable morals to waste just because they sunk a continent or two into the ocean. You can always get more citizens, but a really good Mad Scientist is hard to come by.
(So basically governments of the future are pretty much just like current or past governments on earth. Just with Mad Scientists thrown into the mix.)
Re: Vote Incentive Caption:
Actually, my suspicion is that she caused the destruction of something in space, possibly a garbage hauler, and her punishment is to “Clean it all up, by hand. No protective or transportation will be provided. Failure to do so by XX/XX/XXXXY will result in having to do similar community service at additional locations, which you will be shipped to via rocket ship and will have to operate under the same limitations.”
Basically, it was expected that she’d be exiled for a crime technically not significant enough to warrant exile, but is managing to actually fulfil the conditions of her punishment due to being a capable mad scientist.
Also, the Space Trash is disposed off via burning through atmospheric re-entry. By being thrown from the bucket. It is very cathartic after the act of collecting it all. It is also not the method of disposal desired by the local government, but, as it is a normal method of waste disposal for space faring vehicles, not something they can complain about, either.
I don’t know, that seems a bit too small-scale for her, just a garbage hauler. I might believe it if it was a fleet of garbage haulers. Or an armada of garbage haulers. Possibly belonging to a civilization whose entire culture revolves around the disposal of other civilizations’ junk. I could see her destroying that, most likely by accident while unsuccessfully trying to reprogram the fleet to transform/assemble itself into a giant Voltron of Garbage Haulers.
If you want it to be bigger, remember that “space garbage” in FOT can get to the size of a space station in some places before anyone thinks to deal with it, and it’s even known for the resulting “dealing with it” is to make it a slum-habitat for the unwanted or unsociable of society. We have literally seen this in the comic with Space Station Araknil (page 629 shows the station itself), though admittedly it started as a few truck stops and the like. So the “garbage hauler” could easily have been the size of a small planet… or the size of a Gas Giant. Either or.