page 1240 – The Customer Is Always Right
See, if Marshall had been around earlier, he’d already know what a bad idea it is to take meal orders from these kids. What’s more, LAST time they were talking to Layla, so they were trying a lot harder to be on their best behavior. They’re no the LEAST bit intimidated by poor Marshall… well, okay, Avi definitely is, just not THAT kind of “intimidated.”
Anyway, sorry this page is late again. I kinda got distracted by trying to get a head start on a side-project for later, and all of a sudden I’d been fiddling with it all day, and THIS project was horrendously behind schedule. It also didn’t help that this is another one of those pages where I ended up blowing a lot of time on details that don’t really show up all that well in the final draft of the comic. Stuff like the “crazy calculations” in the background of Tarkus’ panel or the lighting on Avi. That last one was especially annoying, both because the fact he’s already weirdly colored in restricted what lighting tricks I could do, but also because I’m really quite pleased with the results… which got waaaaay less noticeable once I scaled the whole page down. I think he looks a lot better in the thumbnail image for this page than the actual page itself.
Oh, and in honor of today being Labor Day here in America… I specifically decided NOT to do any extra holiday comic. I’m already working too hard on my “day off.”
EDIT: Speaking of not doing stuff, TWC Voting Incentive is late, but it’s done!
Tarkus… managed to give information overload to a NITPICKER. Admittedly, a Nitpicker in training, but a Nitpicker none the less. Honestly, Tarkus seems the type to enjoy the company of Nitpicker’s who are actively Nitpicking (though the insanity that regularly seems to surround them is another matter. Though, given what he and his friends get up to, he might actually be suitable to become a Nitpicker himself.).
The problem is, a Nitpicker needs to be willing to tell people stuff they don’t want to hear, and stand his ground afterwards. Tarkus is far to easily pushed around for that kind of job… though as we can see, Marshall still has a way to go in that department as well.
Also, you have Wilkins as a Nitpicker. You can’t tell me he’s able to stand his ground any better than Tarkus. Though I do suspect that Claire would do it for him, when actually necessary.
Yeah, it seems like most of the people who work at Nitpicker HQ are specifically people who are still useful, but not cut out to work in the field.
Or, in Claire’s case, someone who can deal with Nitpickers themselves and the more dangerous portions of fieldwork, but isn’t actually a full-on Nitpicker themselves, and is thus relegated to protection duty.
I think that this would be the point at which to hand them each the local equivilent of an MRE and go back to the kitchen to finish making dinner for those who are going to be somewhat reasonable about the whole thing.
A braver person that Marshall probably would, but I think he also takes too much pride in his work to deliberately do a bad job, even if it’s for people who don’t deserve it.
Uh, Blitz, Macavity wasn’t suggesting Marshall do a bad job, just give out emergency-rations to those who are causing issues while actually finishing cooking for those who aren’t acting crazed/bullying/other terrible words describing those four at the moment.
Yeah, I meant it more in the sense that an earnest do-gooder like Marshall would feel obligated to offer everybody on board the best meal he could provide, equally, no matter what.
I see a couple problems with their requests:
Second panel – wouldn’t such plates (if they were available on the ship) cancel out the “making” steps, e.g. causing cooked meat to revert to raw, shredded cabbage to revert to whole heads, etc. instead of making food “fresher than it was when [he] made it”?
Third panel – wouldn’t non-combustible food be non-nutritive or possibly even non-digestible?
This is FOT, those plates exist, and were created by a Mad Scientist. The cooking is still necessary, but needs a few minor, for Marshall, adjustments in the preparatory and cooking stages in order to benefit from the use of the plates.
What the plates actually do is complicated and the description utilizes words like “Temporal Ion” frequently, but it basically ensures that the taste when the food hits the tongue is simultaneously at the optimal for flavor, temperature, and texture at the moment the food exits a 10cm field around the plate, maintaining residual effects for about a minute so that it can be easily eaten at the optimal tasting quality.
The downside of using the plates is that the food only contains about half the beneficial nutritional value that it previously had, with the other half turning into health hazards and the like.
We also need to keep in mind the fact that there are still dumb kids trying to look like the know more than they actually do. It’s possibly that this stuff could well exist, but they don’t fully understand it as well as they think they do.
So you’re saying that it could be sane science that only temporally locks the food at the moment it is placed onto the plate, so to ensure that the food is at a skilled chef’s desired state for consumption, regardless of how much time passes from when the food is served? That’s a bit boring for FOT.
…it does work for something these boys would have and have seen used, though. And potentially something only brought out for big occasions because of the difficulty of timing the use of the plates, not the mention powering them, so it could be seen as something for special meals.