page 1368 – A Girl With Simple Needs
So, if you were reading the comments to the previous page, you’ve already heard a bit of this, but this page is another one of those pages that wasn’t even supposed to be a page pages. The whole exchange at the end of this was actually supposed to have been tacked onto the end of the previous page. Unfortunately, since I was in post-anime convention scramble mode, I didn’t do a very good job working out the page layout ahead of time, and there wasn’t room to squeeze that in without cluttering everything up. And so, an extra page was born! But yeah, I wanted to acknowledge that, to you and me, Marshall just “appearing” like he does would be a bit creepy… but Layla’s not like you and me.
Well, now that THAT’S done, back to the grind of new Conventional Wisdom comics… OH! Speaking of which, I just started a new poll over on Patreon to pick what the next anime I’ll draw weekly comics about will be. Even if you totally don’t care about that particular side hustle of mine, I’d still appreciate any patrons going ahead and voting for SOMETHING anyway, just to aid in my decision making.
EDIT: NEW TWC VOTING INCENTIVE IS UP! And it may or may not have been partially inspired by conversation in the comment section!
You know who else that wouldn’t be the least bit creepy to? The rich boys. And their families. And the Hector family. At most one of them might ask if they were paying Marshall, and, if they really like the food, maybe mention that he should have a raise. None of them would consider it the least bit creepy.
…mostly because they’ve all lived in places with dozens of servants whose entire job was to do things like this.
I actually wonder if Layla’s family would have had much in the way of hired help around the house. Like, they definitely would have been rich enough where they COULD, but part of me wonders if they might have been a bit too “fast and loose” for that kind of thing. Like, I can see Layla’s Dad being the sort of guy who’d have massive riches tied up in a bunch of shady business ventures, but would actually live in a cheap apartment that he could abandon at a moment’s notice the second one of those businesses attracted the wrong kind of attention. (I genuinely don’t know, by the way. Just thinking out loud.)
A “cheap apartment that he could abandon at a moment’s notice” is for poor or moderate income criminals. The super rich criminal lives in a luxurious mansion (owned by an untraceable shell corporation of course) that he can abandon at a moment’s notice, because it’s “only” a mansion, it’s not like that’s an expensive thing!
I think the more significant reason why the Quartments had few or no servants is that the entire list of people Eric and Patty trusted was 1.Eric 2.Patty 3.Layla. No matter how much you vet your potential servants, you can never be 100% sure they’re not undercover cops looking for evidence, assassins sent by competitors or by someone you ripped off previously, random nut wanting to kidnap your kid for ransom, etc. (Maybe they could have had robot servants, but based on what we’ve seen, robots aren’t very safe either.)
The thought also occurs that Pattie seems like she’d insist on a much more stable home base than Eric, so she probably “persuaded” him to settle down more than he would have on his own.
And even if Pattie didn’t, Layla would insist on it.
No way that girl would put up with living in a rattly little apartment.
She complained the Exposition (Approximately the same length as the Starship Enterprise, and with a much larger volume) was too tiny a ship!
(And if Layla insists on it, Eric will make it happen)
Responding to your original comment to try to have space to comment in. And because it has the most I can actually talk about on.
My thought is that Eric would have preferred to live in a small & cozy house with only himself and his immediate family members, but for his scams to function properly he was effectively forced to have a huge vista with scenic views & a nothing less than twenty active servants with NDA’s. It was literally the minimum requirement to get the Corrupt Ultra Wealthy around the negotiating table for him to attempt to scam them, even if they never saw it in person.
This is also why Layla complained about the size of the ship. She’s used to having shipping vessels disguised as luxury yachts as the bare minimum, if not actual luxury yachts twice the size of a standard shipping vessel.
That’s a good point, actually. At some point, their operations would have become elaborate enough that they’d need a more convincing illusion of stable prosperity, and actually doing something for real is the most convincing scam of all.
…man, that is ABSOLUTELY a line someone in this family would say. I gotta remember that for later.
That is 100% a retconned-Pattie line if I’ve ever heard one. Let’s see…
Eric was able to scam people because he was a complete bumbling fool, and able to milk that fact in an otherwise impossible to believe way. People couldn’t help but believe that he was the innocent fool acting as the face of the company, because he honestly was.
Pattie, meanwhile, kept everything running in the background. She worked with Eric as the background girl, working the business to seem corrupt enough to appeal to those who they want to scam. Everything they do is actually completely above board and generally legal, as I’ll explain by going back to the beginning of the story.
– The negotiators buying drugs? Doing so to find and expose the source, as well as the entire distribution network.
– The fictional person department? They started as a second-chance support business, helping those who couldn’t get a job due to lack of references, and just expanded from there. They collect a surprising amount of potential blackmail on big-name individuals, but never actually have a reason to use it.
– The random-pin numbers on bank-computers? A team of professional hackers testing out both bank security, both on the individual level and the industry level.
– The Pet Recycling Center? Basically a meat processing plant for abandoned and recently deceased pets. Associated with the the Animal Shelter, and only really ‘services’ pets at the end of their natural life. Used to make cheap pet food.
– Trigger’s upbringing? One of the scams that was being run. Hell, they were still charging & getting paid right up until Trigger was taken out of the bunker.
– Layla’s firing and selling of everything she owned? Pattie realized that with Eric’s death, the entire scam-empire was about to come crumbling down. Especially since Layla was apparently still ignorant of the business being a front for tricking obnoxious rich idiots out of all of their money. Hell, Pattie was selling everything to herself at fair-market value so that when the business went belly up in a year, nobody could successfully complain about any of it. And that’s ignoring the fact that the only things under the business name were the ongoing scams and Layla’s own stuff! The income for keeping Trigger underground was the only thing making the business seem profitable to investors! Pattie sold her own shares the moment Ichabod stepped onto the planet, having legally announced the sale weeks before as cashing out as a result of Eric’s death.
…Did I just give you good ideas for how to follow through on Pattie’s Retcon in a reasonable manner when she’s eventually reintroduced? I was not expecting that when I started writing this reply.
Teenage boy goes out of his way to cater to the needs of Attractive teenage girl who not only has expressed an interest in him but specifically expressed an interest in the one favorite skill he loves and has spent his whole life studying. That’s actually the least strange thing ever.
DANG. I’m actually the one writing this, and even I’M like “Wow, that’s a good point.”