page 653 – Poor Volume Control
It’s a good thing I don’t really do narration text anymore, or I’d be writing “meanwhile” every other page. But yeah, Layla and Trigger are both finding out what other people are up to, in their different yet somehow similar ways. Who knew loudly blurting out things other people aren’t supposed to hear was such a valuable negotiating tactic?
(also, it’s a small thing, but I really like how the background in the first panel turned out. It’s not even that the drawing is all that good, it’s just… I dunno, it feels more like it’s actually “behind” the characters rather than just drawn around them)
And speaking of strangely familiar situations, the new Voting Incentive takes Trigger’s flashback in a direction we’ve definitely seen before.
I guess Trigger got released from his underground hideout before he got to the part of this Sabotage Expert Training that covered “Secrecy”? (I’d have thought that part would be covered first but it’s hard to get good sabotage training these days)
On the one hand, I think Trigger’s training would have said that the best way to keep a secret from someone is for them to never know you’re around in the first place, so actual person-to-person interaction wouldn’t really be covered… but we totally saw that one VR thing with the pies, so we know this came up at SOME point. Maybe that training just wasn’t very good? (at least, compared to the sabotage stuff)
I have a feeling Trigger fast-forwarded through a lot of the parts of the training he didn’t like. I mean, realistically, training someone how to sneak into highly secure government facilities and sabotage the most critical equipment on the entire planet is going to have a lot of sections like “how to silence any unexpected witnesses” and “how to dispose of their bodies so that they will never be found”. That’s pretty much the most untriggerlike thing ever. You know he’s not doing any of those sims. So he probably fast forwarded through the “boring” secrecy parts too.