page 1403 – Also, The Paint’s Been Scratched
What’s this? Conversation in the comments driving events in the comic again? Well, sort of. This was going to come up in passing elsewhere, but the thought occured that it’d mke things a lot clearer for the reader if I went ahead and stated it outright.
Anyway, good news and bad news. The good news is I’m queuing this page up SEVERAL days early, just in case Winter 2: Frozen Boogaloo actually managed to do what part one failed at and knocks out the power over the weekend. So you’re obviously seeing this page no matter what. The bad news is, after much deliberation, I’m making the executive decision that there will be no second page this week. I know, I know, I hate to flake on the new schedule so soon after starting it up, especially since it really has been working out pretty dang well. But I’ve got a LONG convention trip this weekend, a good bit longer than what I generally travel these days. Instead of just not being here on Friday to get a page up, I’m also worried that I’ll be too burned out when I come limping back Sunday night to jump right into work on a new Far Out There AND a new batch of Conventional Wisdom at the same time. So I’m just writing Friday off and focusing on getting enough of NEXT week’s stuff done in advance to give me breathing room. Sorry!
EDIT: Okay, it’s a bit early, but I went ahead and swapped out the TWC Voting Incentive with a fresh one. So even though there won’t be a new regular comic, there’s dtill SOME kind of new content to finish out the week!
Now we just have to explain why Tabitha can’t just take her ship back out and nudge them back over.
I’m thinking that due to her engines being fast enough to cross the entire galaxy in minutes, once stopped, they require a 2 week cooldown phase before they can be restarted gain.
If the Cap’n’s Ship is THIS dangerous, there’s no way in which Tabitha’s Ship isn’t in a worse state. It likely was only designed for a singular trip, and needs months to years to get to a state in which it’s operable.
The idea was supposed to be that Tabitha cannibalized the tech in her ship to build the stuff they used to neutralize the other ship (and her subsequent experiments), so it’s not in a movable state right now. Guess that would have benefited from being said out loud right about now, huh?
It would be amusing to discover that Mad Science involves SOME level of inherent precognition ability, but it’s messed up in such a way that most Mad Scientists end up producing the effects they’re temporally, but not conciously, aware of.
For example, a Mad Scientist accidentally sets a city on fire because they know that the city SHOULD be on fire two days from when they started building the device that sets said city on fire. And why Volximor ends up producing similar things to Ventricke & Kiki.
So what you’re saying is that, if you hadn’t made or tried to shoot that device designed to catch the kids, you would have been able to easily catch the kids.
…Actually, how long did building it take? Couldn’t someone attempted to join the kids in their escape pod and pull them out?
Or they could have just shoved the pod back out into space at any time before the kids even tried to leave and the bulkhead would have dropped down to seal off the hole, and nobody would have been going anywhere.
The financial dangers of that are numerous. If THEY damage the Escape Pod in anyway, they’re likely end up liable for any and all damages, regardless of whether they are responsible for said damages or not. And that escape pod likely costs about the same amount, if not more, than Cap’n Crosby’s entire ship. Because “Richest Families In The Universe” are also the “Most Spoiled Families In The Universe”.
It’s not the kids’ or their parents’ escape pod though, it’s just a standard plan generic model bz-19/alpha pod that came with the regular ordinary cityship. Any damage to the pod would 100% easily be blamed on their pod initially impacting the Cap’ns ship, so he’s the one who is going to collect, probably double both from the kids parents and from the cityship owners whose extreme negligence allowed it to be stolen by children. As is standard practice, the rich parents’ and the cityship’s owners’ lawyers will settle out of court for a large sum because there’s Nitpickers involved, and even lawyers are scared of them.
A Standard Model that managed to get a literal Famed Actress verbally list out the “simple repair instructions”. Yeah, nah, that thing ain’t cheap. And when you’re a small business owner up against people with enough money to literally run planetary economies, you are inevitably going to lose the legal battle, particularly if your opponents want to “attack”.
Nitpickers being involved is a hurdle, but at that level of wealth the Lawyers would either have been able to be Nitpickers but chose not to due to safety concerns, are previously Nitpickers who were headhunted, or people who weren’t able to become Nitpickers due to their ethics being too dodgy.
Neva isn’t an actress, but a character – hundreds of actresses of a certain body shape have played Neva, and that just in all the authorized movies and TV specials. Probably tens of thousands of different actresses if you count all the unauthorized productions. It’s sort of a rite of passage for unknown starlets to get their first job in a Neva show.
.
In any case, that’s not even an actress in that video, just a cheap AI simulation of Neva, done by some random Joebob to present his “pod repair hacks” vid in a way that will get more hits. No way the manufacturer is going to post a hacks video on how to repair their pod with random bandages and plungers and junk, that completely invalidates the warranty – the manufacturer of the cheap junk bargain pods insists you pay for an authorized repair person from their company to be flown in with expensive calibration equipment. But since these are cheap bargain pods, most owners won’t or can’t pay for authorized repairs, thus the proliferation of these cheap amateur hack “how to fix on a budget” vids on spacetube.
Even rich people at a galactic level are wary of dealing with nitpickers.
Many a nitpicker has turned a galactic rich person into a regular poor person.
Neva would still be covered under Licencing & Ownership Agreements, so saying that someone could use her likeness for any reason without paying through the nose is still something I disagree with. As such, I still believe those escape pods are worth a fortune. Even if I was wrong about her being an actress, and she’s instead just a character. Though, she could be both, with every variation of Neva being played by one girl with green skin and blond hair.
And if interacting with Nitpicker’s is so dangerous, why did a group of Four Powerful Family Groups get together to hire one to act as a babysitter? They’re only scary to those whose authority is limited to a singular planet, once people start getting far enough past that point Nitpicker’s are an annoyance, not a threat.