Level 10: #3
Chapter: Comic, Level 10 — Speakeasies & Sea Monsters
Rusty & Co.
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Apparently I am first. I believe the Internettians have a cultural tradition for occasions like this….
The usual cultural tradition is banning the obnoxious poster who had nothing on-topic to say.
That does sound fun!
I particularly like Stabs’ glaring little eyes in the dark when the drawer is opened. Ha!
Pretty sure Stabs is the one sitting across the table – the one in the drawer was Anti-Madeline.
Ah, I take that back – the mysterious client did introduce herself a few pages back. Still possible that it’s stabs in disguise, but the shoes would indicate I’m wrong.
Drawer Lady is anti-Mads, but the client is a new character. Stabs is down the street in her bar, glad for the momentary respite before her least-favorite customer comes in for yet another nightcap. (*)
(*) Why is Mimic her least favorite customer, when there are so many other exasperating cast members to choose from? Easy: they are *all* her least favorites.
Stabs is neither. Boxford mentioned her as someone who had been telling him to be less of an alcoholic in 10.1.
Also both of them are wearing shoes.
I was expecting Anti-Maddie as a femme fatale, but she makes a pretty hilarious switchblade-packing urchin, too!
I don’t think Tarta’s in any actual danger here, because for Anti-Mads to actually pause and cut someone, would eat into her valuable jumping-around-on-the-table-and-yelling time.
While I liked the reasoning people had for her fitting into the femme fatale role in the noir genre, I guess she just isn’t the type for subtlety. She wants mindless violence.
and that’s the best kind of violence
Well, considering she’s an embodiment of Maddie’s evil side, being ditzy and violence-prone is perfectly in character. I mean, I can’t see Maddie as a femme fatale, can you?
Nah, too boisterous and goofy. Reckon this fits her much better.
I assumed anti-Maddie would be the client, just for the cliche: “I knew this dame was trouble the minute she walked into my office”
“She’s not actually his friend.” Well, I mean a friend is just fiend with an spare “R”.
A fiend with a spare “arr” would be Plaidbeard.
I thought Plaidbeard was a dwarf not a fiend. Or should that be dwarrf?
So without the “arr” he’d just be Plaidbead?
Plaidbead makes some very complex embroidery.
Not gonna lie, I’m feeling kinda sorry for this dwarf lady right now. It’s possible something later in the story will make me change my mind, but right now she seems like the nicest girl in the cast other than Maddie herself.
…you don’t suppose she’s the one who beat Mimic to the Belt of Genre Changing, do you? Could it be she plans on giving it to him if he indulges in her noir fantasy?
Well, it’s traditional for femme fatales to be able to pretend to be nice pretty well before their sudden but inevitable betrayal.
The nice-seeming lady being genuinely nice would actually be something of a subversion of genre norms, I think. Of course, it can happen. While the dame walking into your office is always trouble, the trouble isn’t necessarily her fault.
Personally, I think her friendly smile in panel 4 of the last comic looks a little too innocent. That kind of perfect smile, with that timing, just has to be fake.
Not to mention those big doe eyes in the third panel of this one. I’m glad you can still suspect her, because I don’t have the heart to.
“…but right now she seems like the nicest girl in the cast other than Maddie herself.”
And given the current genre, that is (very nearly) proof enough that she is either the BBEG, or his/her/it’s second-in-command.
I’m holding on to the hope that she’s the “being pursued” kind of trouble and not the “double crossing” kind.
No wonder Mimic’s in a bad mood. She’s probably been jumping around making Mario noises for days.
Is that a Maladine in your pocket or are you unhappy to see me?
Thought Mimic was neutral. Live and learn.
That’s the thing with being Neutral: you’re capable of working with either side of whichever axis you happen to be Neutral on. Now my impression is that Mimic’s a Neutral Good or at least a True Neutral, but even Good people are capable of working with Evil for the sake of a Good purpose, just as Lawful can work with Chaotic for the sake of a Lawful purpose. Granted, Mimic’s purpose for deploying Anti-Madeline here is more Chaotic Neutral than anything else, but then he’s a Mimic; just as their forms are flexible, so too could their alignments be. We know for a fact he isn’t Evil, else Maddie would have smited him. Also, he’s being influenced by the noir genre here; noir protagonists lean towards ethically Neutral alignments by nature of their profession, and often towards morally Neutral alignments as well (but leaning more towards Good than Evil).
I’m not sure any of us have a clue why Mimic employed Anti-Madeline.
Sure, a plurality of people voted for her so clearly they must have had reasons for doing so, but they’re not even necessarily all the same reasons, and they may or may not be reasons that make sense for Mimic in-character.
I’ll note that the previous chapter also never explained why Mimic/Rusty chose those partners, nor how they convinced Yvonne-Tiffany to accept the invitation, even if it worked out in the end.
I’m assuming YT was convinced by the promise of a free stay at a luxury hotel. How Rusty found her, on the other hand, is unclear. Also how he knows her in the first place, but a lot of these characters seem to meet off-panel.
As for Anti-Madeline, I’m sure we’ll find out how she got there in due time. For speculation’s sake, maybe Mimic thought she would know how to find the black market, but when she turned out to be unhelpful, he had to stuff her in the drawer just to keep her from being a nuisance.
I assume that Mimic recommended her, rather than Rusty picking her himself.
Also I do think that Rusty briefly met her during the vampire arc, though they didn’t interact much.
Oh yeah, they were in the party together for a sec at the end of that arc. I couldn’t remember exactly when he came back from Rusty Runner.
My guess is that Anti-M overheard him telling Stabs, and since he couldn’t tell a third person —
Isn’t alignment is part of the genre that the comic has just been changed from.
Mimics are part of the genre that the comic has just been changed from.
Mimics are part of the setting not the genre.
Alignment may be part of a game, because only in a game does the GM look at a list of character stats.
But the words good and evil do have meanings outside the game.
I’m not sure Madeline would have smited Mimic if he was evil, Madeline is kind of oblivious, considering even if Mimic was evil, considering how he act it would only be marginally, I could see Madeline just not noticing, it’s not like she go around casting detect alignment all the time.
Madeline doesn’t “cast” her version of Detect Evil. It’s based on smell and triggers automatically when she gets close enough to someone, even if she wasn’t suspecting anything before.
Actually she’s had to stop and sniff so it’s not automatic.
But she has stopped and sniffed in Mimic’s presence.
It seems to have triggered automatically here. She totally trusted Stabs and had no inkling that she isn’t the real Stabs, until she caught a whiff. The downside seems to be that it only works at really close range.
Maybe it works like actual smell, so the closer she is to the evil and the stronger its scent, the more quickly she’ll be able to detect it passively, and she can also actively search by sniffing.
9:25? Difficult for me to decide morning or evening—presuming the latter.
Seems safe to assume a noir story would open at night (or at least evening) rather than in the morning.
Oh wait, also, Mimic says he’s going for a nightcap, which is dictionarily impossible to do in the morning.
…. The “nightcap” reference I wholly blanked-out or overlooked. Cheers!
Anti-Mads here demonstrates the mistake way too many small characters make. If you already have very little reach, you want a long weapon, not something extra-small. Also, blade-size matters, those little toothpicks would – for some time at least – barely inconvenience any medium-sized opponents.