Ch3 16
Hasera knows how to follow-through on her swing. I’m pretty sure she’s as surprised as the rest of us.
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Hasera knows how to follow-through on her swing. I’m pretty sure she’s as surprised as the rest of us.
OK she got her hit, but the great Lark is going to do his heroic heroing work next page and burst out of the monster’s stomach. Heed my words!
Also first :3
I’m wondering about Lark not appearing to be carrying any weapons, not even a knife, when he was swallowed. Getting a good grip on the inside of the slippery stomach, to rip his way out, isn’t going to be as easy as cutting his way out.
Uh, no…he is going to be leaving using the “Jim Carrey” exit. Hope there is river near by.
Well, just because Lark did not appear to be carrying a weapon, doesn’t mean he wasn’t. A knife in a boot, for example, is fairly unobtrusive and fairly common for many fighting men, in any era before gunpowder weapons (and even for a considerable time afterward).
“Performance enhancing magic”? She did just call on Jer’zail for strength. Is it that simple, or did she not need the boost?
Ice is pretty hard stuff, but also somewhat brittle. Also rather lighter than most solids (density of water: 1.0; density of ice: 0.9; density of rock: starts around 2.5 and goes up from there, depending on the rock; tungsten ore is 7.3, and the word “tungsten” means “heavy stone”.) Maybe the mace needed the strength more than she did (low-weight mace).
(I’m not counting pumice as a rock, because it is not actually solid rock. It is foamed rock (and the air in lets it float on water. For a time –the air can seep out and water can get in.)
Don’t discount the fibers in the stems and petals of her “flowers” acting like fiberglass roving or Kevlar strands in a composite material.
Strength in cutting tools is always a tradeoff between ductility and hardness. Too much ductility and the tool is not hard enough to successfully cut, at least for very long. Too hard makes the tool brittle and easily broken. Proper reinforcement of the cutting edge by using multiple materials allows hard but brittle materials to be used in cutting situations. In most metalworking, steel cutting tools dull pretty quickly though they are tough and much less subject to breaking under shock loads while tungsten carbide maintains its edge much longer but, being brittle, can shatter pretty easily if there’s any kind of shock, (e.g. vibration or heat buildup from inadequate lubrication). Most cutting tools, then, are made of steel for toughness with replaceable carbide inserts to do the acttual cutting.
I should also have said something about some metals, since most mace-weapons have metal business ends. Iron and steel have densities right around 8 times that of water, copper and bronze can be about 9, silver is 10, lead is 11, and gold, tungsten, and uranium are all about 19. Aluminum is about 3, titanium about 4.5, platinum about 20, and iridium is about 21. Pick one!
Actually, my comment referenced more her ability to check headlong rush of a body of that size. Magic weapons can be of any weight & hardness combination, so that wasn’t even in the calculation (it had enough structural integrity to pass on the force of the swing; otherwise immaterial to my point). Is she that strong naturally? Did she cast a spell to enhance her strength? Was the last panel of the prior page the entirety of the spell, or was it just fluff? An object is just a tool; the weapon is the mind that wields the tool.
To send a wyrm reeling back like that? It would take quite a bite of force, yes. As we haven’t had a full-on demonstration of what kind of strength a Guardian, or Champion has, it’s anyone’s guess as to what really just happened. I love hearing all the theories you guys and gals are coming up with and I do hope that the mysteries that keep unfolding around the two main characters stimulates even more discussion as the story continues!
The head of the wurm is at the end of a longish “lever effect”. It is much easier to make the end of a long lever move than the end of a short one.
She’s a good swinger and the follow-through is good but she needs to plant her feet with her legs spread and address the ball(s) first. A little butt-wiggle helps too. That will eliminate hooking (as opposed to being a Guardian) and help her drive straight to the (raised) flag for a perfect hole-in-one.
Actually, it’s Lark who’d drive straight to the hole but that’s something else. 😉
Fore!
Wrong sport, she is playing baseball. You can tell by the arc of the swing and how she planted her feet. Swing hard and fast to knock it out (of the park).
Swing for the fences, Hasera!
Swim for the feces, Lark!
Sting for the faces, Wurm!
What are we surprised about?
Other than someone with good tactical scores closing her eyes in the middle of a fight.
>>What are we surprised about?
Other than someone with good tactical scores closing her eyes in the middle of a fight.<<
I dunno; Madeline, the Paladin from "Rusty & Company", routinely fights with her eyes closed and usually manages to kick the evildoer's butt. It's probably divine intervention. Also, I'm not sure that Hass has her eyes totally closed; it looks more like she is squinting.
As for her Ice Mace … it's a magical artifact! Comparisons and scientific facts about densities and hardness of various materials are totally irrelevant when magic is thrown into the picture.
Perhaps you are unaware of Clarke’s Third Law (from Arthur C. Clarke, famous 20th century science fiction writer)? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
maybe she’ll level, and finally get that healing spell.
>>”“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”<<
Are you suggesting that her ability to create a massive cold producing mace out of thin air is in fact based on some unknown technology, and that hence her weapon would be subject to natural law? I can easily counter that this advanced technology turns ice into a substance harder than tungsten steel.
For that matter, I can invert Clarke's proposition to state "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology". Putting the two statement together, we come to the conclusion that either mechanism is capable of producing an effect that beings of lesser ability and knowledge (namely ourselves) cannot fully explain.
The proper wording is “Any sufficiently analysed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!!!”
For millennia the word “magic” was simply a way to label some action that was otherwise unexplained. Any well-trained modern prestidigitator, sent back in time to the era of Ancient Rome, would likely be accused of performing miracles, not simply “magic”.
Even in fantasy stories like this one, what is *called* “magic” has to work according to rules, else it would not be either reliable or useful. And when one starts studying the Rules of Operation for something, is that effort not more scientific/technical than magical?
Once upon a time, lightning was greatly feared and thought to be Godly/supernatural, more than merely “magical”. Nowadays electricity is the most useful substance known, not magical (and respected more than feared). If we ever discover something that can be used the way magic is used in fantasy stories, it won’t be long before the word “magic” stops getting applied to it, too.
Any phenomenon called “magic” must, indeed, follow certain rules. If results were random, few would practice it. I concur that any investigation of such properties and laws has to be done in a scientific manner. However, the results could be quite varied.
In Fantasy literature, there are almost as many magical systems as there are authors. In general, however, we can state that magic is often able … through whatever mechanism … to produce an effect that is not dependent on “natural law”. Magic can, for example, render the unlikeliest of objects capable of controlled flight, in complete defiance of the laws of aerodynamics. A witch sitting astride a broomstick, for example.
Hence my conclusion that there is absolutely no reason that the magic of the world depicted here cannot create a weapon that, while made of ice, is extremely durable.
P.S. For an absolutely classic depiction of advanced science being mistaken for magic, I would recommend a rather old book by David Gerrold, entitled “The Flying Sorcerers”.
And I did not say that the mace was weak. I only pointed out that ice is brittle, and relatively lightweight compared to other substances. Which led to my conclusion that when Hasera was asking for strength, it could be that the mace needed it more than herself. Nothing I wrote precluded the possibility that the mace might have magical strength as one of it characteristics. Hey, “plus-something” weapons are very common in fantasy!
I did read The Flying Sorcerers a long time ago, and remember it fondly. Larry Niven was the other author of that book.
I have seen settings where ‘random’ was a defining characteristic of magic. In fact, I’ve seen essays that claim that a certain amount of unpredictability is actually what makes something truly ‘magic’ as opposed to simply being an energy source that is present in the setting. If magic is perfectly predictable, where you always get the same result if you perform the exact same actions, then that’s not magic but an alternative set of physical laws, which are no less predictable than our own (possibly more, in fact, considering quantum mechanics). Genuine ‘magic’, according to this school of thought, needs to retain some mystery and unpredictability.
Homerun!
A hit! A very palpable hit! 😎