Magical protection for Power & Glory confirmed. I wonder if normals would notice it at all, or if the reason Cecil notices the interrupt is his own weird magics interacting with the protection. First order of business for both of them should be seeing if the protection is a full dome, since the Flea can hop into the middle and Cecil can fly. Also, binoculars would be useful.
Makes you wonder how it’s set up, specifically, do you always get dropped off at one of those two points on the sidewalk, or do you get moved past it in the direction you were moving? Would Flea and Cecil find themselves buried if they tried to jump/fly into the are?
The plus side is that he can ask Vance about it and won’t have to interrupt until the end of school. He also (presumably) can ask the Revenant if he’s ever seen something like it.
For anyone else, it’d cut about a minute off your commute if you came by this place.
Seriously? Disguising a secret building by putting a bizarre teleportation effect in front of it? In a couple of days the area will be filled with kids playing with it like the teleporting effect in the abandoned building in “Thor: the Dark World.” Look for dozens of skateboarders here tomorrow.
Why not just create a simple physical disguise, like signs that read normally to the average viewer and windows that show old shoes for sale?
A person-flipping device is like disguising a TARDIS as a phone booth and then leaving the door open all the time.
Keep in mind that this is just the current location of the teleporting doorknob — the objective is to keep non-customers out, not to stay hidden. After all, anyone who got in without P&G’s okay might just run afoul of the items that literally jump out and grab you, and no disguise will keep *everybody* out.
I’m with TB here. This protection for Glory & Power’s shop calls attention to itself whenever it triggers. It may seem not to matter where people can’t get close to the shop…
… unless you take into account that there are other people who may- and even likely- have the power to investigate and defeat this location-shunting defense. For example, don’t forget that PS238 not only has a very capable mage on their staff, but even an entire class of casters as well. I’m guessing Praetorian Academy has their own magic-users, too.*
So- a bunch of kids or people notice something weird about this once abandoned store and start playing around with it. Word soon enough spreads and some of it reaches Ms. Imperia…
Staying hidden, on the other hand, means people not even knowing you’re there. And that includes the mages as well. As for blundering past any glamors concealing the store, that’s likely to happen at a far smaller frequency than pedestrians whose route just happens to go in front of the shop who then blab about it to someone else. If any do check out the store despite the illusion in front, then it’s just a matter of secondary illusion for the inside to convince them something isn’t amiss.
* – Then again, this could be a chance to see more of the magic-user students of PS238. I, for one, would love to see Alec Kent and Satori Deacon again.
Well I don’t think that is a problem from the perspective of Power and Glory. Anyone who can break through the teleport thingy is a prospective customer. So it still works out.
You are assuming that everyone notices the effect. Remember how hard it was to notice the dimension/time loop in Koschei’s egg? Cecil has been through a whole bunch of weird magical crap and is toting around advanced tech, so maybe he notices because of one of those factors. We don’t know the basis of the Flea’s powers, but keeping things from him would be difficult because you would have to fool the bugs too. So maybe the normals are magicked not to notice.
I sometimes wonder if Cecil still counts as normal. Strip away the gadgets he’d acquired, his extradimensional transformation, his transforming winged trenchcoat… does superpower detection itself count as a power?
But this slightly digresses my point- Cecil HAS noticed, even if it’s with the aid of the Flea.
I wonder if Cecil will ever set off his own “detect super” sense? That would be annoying, like having enhanced hearing and not being able to screen out your own heartbeat and breathing.
For all we know, Cecil’s sense has been buzzing off about him since he was born- but he’s gotten so used to it reacting to himself that he doesn’t notice; he only notices when it goes off on others.
Anyway, remember at the end of “The Revenant takes Cecil out on a field trip” story? His explanation was that where superhumans emerge, with some superpowers being the product of genetics or evolution, then Cecil’s ability to detect supers is a “reaction” to such that naturally arises. It almost sounds like it’s “necessary” for PS238-verse normal humans to develop this sense, as if their survival was going to rely a lot on it.
I wonder if its means that you either a) get superpowers, or b) get this sense where you don’t have superpowers. It practically implies that the two are mutually exclusive- and that Cecil, while a sort of “advanced” human being in relation to supers, does indeed count as normal.
Cecil was never really normal, even without his super-powered people detecting sense he had an uncanny ability to deduce strange events were occurring, such as noticing that the faked events to cover up Susie’s mishaps with her powers happened primarily around her or that the gynoid at the local Quick-E-Mart was absent and the curiousness of the lab coat ‘her’ brother had hanging up when he took over for her. Now that he’s been exposed to the larger reality it’s only exacerbated that natural ability of his.
That’s not superhuman “not normal”, though. That’s “not normal” in the conspiracy theorist kind of sense. People of that type tend to notice a lot of things even if their explanations about it aren’t right.
The current volume (11) is actually at the top of the list. I seem to recall the archive drop-down working like that in the past too; the current chapter is at the top and then everything else goes down from there in chronological order.
I am disappointed in P&G, if this displacement effect is their doing. I would have expected a higher level effect of a subtly similar to the time loop in Veles’s egg.
And I agree with TB above. I think about the kids playing with the strange sliding effect on the floor in the Movie Poltergeist. Using an obvious effect like this one, is surely going to lead to the Streisand Effect and draw the very attention it was intended to avoid.
Assuming they only set up yesterday/the day before, it is possible that the tele-field is just a temporary measure until they can create something more complex.
There was no time loop, just a space loop
In a time loop they would have seen themselves in the past walk up to the loop and disappear. What they encountered was a space loop taking them across space but not time
I’m not sure it’s safe to assume that the teleportation field is to keep *everyone* out. They seem to operate as some kind of shop, and keeping everyone out of a shop is a bit self-defeating. Maybe it’s some kind of clientele-screener – if you can detect the field and make it through, they’ll be willing to talk business. If not, well, you’re not someone they ever wanted to do business with anyway.
Which would be the opposite of “let’s sell power-gear to people that don’t have powers”, that was their gimmick the only time we actually saw them in action.
Yeah. I was thinking they might try something like a teleport to an alternate dimension where they haven’t set up shop in sam’s swap shop, but this is sad.
Two speculations (not compatible with each other):
1) Knug’s phrasing above made me wonder if perhaps this is not P&G’s doing; that maybe Sarah set it up (perhaps unknowingly?) precisely to keep people away from P&G (but, as noted, it’s way too obvious and calling attention to itself to be really effective).
2) Another idea I had, though, is that P&G set up the whatever-it-is specifically to keep away people with either innate meta-powers, or in possession of sufficiently advanced magic and/or tech. Flea is thus kept out by his innate powers; Cecil is kept out by the very toys he finds so useful, especially his coat. But if someone with neither powers nor tech/magic artifacts went by, they might be able to go in with no problem. Maybe?
And just in case it’s not clear — the rationale for the latter is that someone with powers and/or tech has no need for additional power and/or glory. The fact that it’s so obvious to the metapowered could actually end up driving business to them from the non-powered who come to see what has got the metas so excited. And any metapowered who manages to bypass the blip is obviously so powerful that they really don’t need anything from P&G, and can be told so by them directly. Maybe.
Don’t forget the cloaking field likes to say were it is, sure its not active at the moment but suddenly trying to teleport it would have some effect when its powered down. that is the reason I think he tripped over, the shop defence mechanism pushed him forwards but the clacking device still wanted to keep him in place but as it wan’t active it wasn’t able to do so.
the questions are 1. “if you were cloaked would the shops defence teleport still detect you and activate?” and 2.” would Cecil stay in place and not teleport if the cloaking device was active?”
would be a easy quick thing for them to do but there is the slight chance that both bits of tech/magic don’t mix well and some for of catastrophe occurs (tear in time/explosion/interdemesional horror summoned/ect). but honestly what are the chances of that?
Doctors offices open very early, and many school districts now have split days/sessions. With recent science studies showing that kids and teens do better with late-day things (and with many jobs no longer using 9-5 only), there are schools that have late-morning or afternoon start times. I just wish they’d figured that out when I was a kid.
Touché, bug-boy, touché XD
So P&G’s Swap Shop is “invitation only” it appears … or “need to know” at least …
Jedi hand wave, “This is not the shop/building/location you are looking for
Magical protection for Power & Glory confirmed. I wonder if normals would notice it at all, or if the reason Cecil notices the interrupt is his own weird magics interacting with the protection. First order of business for both of them should be seeing if the protection is a full dome, since the Flea can hop into the middle and Cecil can fly. Also, binoculars would be useful.
Makes you wonder how it’s set up, specifically, do you always get dropped off at one of those two points on the sidewalk, or do you get moved past it in the direction you were moving? Would Flea and Cecil find themselves buried if they tried to jump/fly into the are?
Anybody else notice the Star Trek pin Cecil has?
Okay in retrospect it’s hard to miss but still, I wonder if that’s a backup comm from the Revenant.
He got that from Vance here. I notice Tyler asked roughly the same question you did….
Looks likes Aquaman’s belt buckle to me
It’s the “A” symbol of the Argosians.
The plus side is that he can ask Vance about it and won’t have to interrupt until the end of school. He also (presumably) can ask the Revenant if he’s ever seen something like it.
For anyone else, it’d cut about a minute off your commute if you came by this place.
I just have one question: Are these color comics going to be published in book form?
Seriously? Disguising a secret building by putting a bizarre teleportation effect in front of it? In a couple of days the area will be filled with kids playing with it like the teleporting effect in the abandoned building in “Thor: the Dark World.” Look for dozens of skateboarders here tomorrow.
Why not just create a simple physical disguise, like signs that read normally to the average viewer and windows that show old shoes for sale?
A person-flipping device is like disguising a TARDIS as a phone booth and then leaving the door open all the time.
Keep in mind that this is just the current location of the teleporting doorknob — the objective is to keep non-customers out, not to stay hidden. After all, anyone who got in without P&G’s okay might just run afoul of the items that literally jump out and grab you, and no disguise will keep *everybody* out.
I’m with TB here. This protection for Glory & Power’s shop calls attention to itself whenever it triggers. It may seem not to matter where people can’t get close to the shop…
… unless you take into account that there are other people who may- and even likely- have the power to investigate and defeat this location-shunting defense. For example, don’t forget that PS238 not only has a very capable mage on their staff, but even an entire class of casters as well. I’m guessing Praetorian Academy has their own magic-users, too.*
So- a bunch of kids or people notice something weird about this once abandoned store and start playing around with it. Word soon enough spreads and some of it reaches Ms. Imperia…
Staying hidden, on the other hand, means people not even knowing you’re there. And that includes the mages as well. As for blundering past any glamors concealing the store, that’s likely to happen at a far smaller frequency than pedestrians whose route just happens to go in front of the shop who then blab about it to someone else. If any do check out the store despite the illusion in front, then it’s just a matter of secondary illusion for the inside to convince them something isn’t amiss.
* – Then again, this could be a chance to see more of the magic-user students of PS238. I, for one, would love to see Alec Kent and Satori Deacon again.
Well I don’t think that is a problem from the perspective of Power and Glory. Anyone who can break through the teleport thingy is a prospective customer. So it still works out.
Well played! The “bury the sun-sensitive monolith on the Moon” trick.
The beauty of this system is that even if there are kids playing with it, those kids still can’t get in. Mission accomplished, I say.
You are assuming that everyone notices the effect. Remember how hard it was to notice the dimension/time loop in Koschei’s egg? Cecil has been through a whole bunch of weird magical crap and is toting around advanced tech, so maybe he notices because of one of those factors. We don’t know the basis of the Flea’s powers, but keeping things from him would be difficult because you would have to fool the bugs too. So maybe the normals are magicked not to notice.
I sometimes wonder if Cecil still counts as normal. Strip away the gadgets he’d acquired, his extradimensional transformation, his transforming winged trenchcoat… does superpower detection itself count as a power?
But this slightly digresses my point- Cecil HAS noticed, even if it’s with the aid of the Flea.
I wonder if Cecil will ever set off his own “detect super” sense? That would be annoying, like having enhanced hearing and not being able to screen out your own heartbeat and breathing.
(also a reply to Moe Lane.)
For all we know, Cecil’s sense has been buzzing off about him since he was born- but he’s gotten so used to it reacting to himself that he doesn’t notice; he only notices when it goes off on others.
Anyway, remember at the end of “The Revenant takes Cecil out on a field trip” story? His explanation was that where superhumans emerge, with some superpowers being the product of genetics or evolution, then Cecil’s ability to detect supers is a “reaction” to such that naturally arises. It almost sounds like it’s “necessary” for PS238-verse normal humans to develop this sense, as if their survival was going to rely a lot on it.
I wonder if its means that you either a) get superpowers, or b) get this sense where you don’t have superpowers. It practically implies that the two are mutually exclusive- and that Cecil, while a sort of “advanced” human being in relation to supers, does indeed count as normal.
I’d say superpower detection is a superpower.
Cecil was never really normal, even without his super-powered people detecting sense he had an uncanny ability to deduce strange events were occurring, such as noticing that the faked events to cover up Susie’s mishaps with her powers happened primarily around her or that the gynoid at the local Quick-E-Mart was absent and the curiousness of the lab coat ‘her’ brother had hanging up when he took over for her. Now that he’s been exposed to the larger reality it’s only exacerbated that natural ability of his.
That’s not superhuman “not normal”, though. That’s “not normal” in the conspiracy theorist kind of sense. People of that type tend to notice a lot of things even if their explanations about it aren’t right.
Does anyone else think that it’s weird that the archives only go up to March, when the last volume ended?
The current volume (11) is actually at the top of the list. I seem to recall the archive drop-down working like that in the past too; the current chapter is at the top and then everything else goes down from there in chronological order.
Well I see that, but I don’t see any actual pages listed there. Am I missing something?
Flea is SUCH a cool character!
I am disappointed in P&G, if this displacement effect is their doing. I would have expected a higher level effect of a subtly similar to the time loop in Veles’s egg.
And I agree with TB above. I think about the kids playing with the strange sliding effect on the floor in the Movie Poltergeist. Using an obvious effect like this one, is surely going to lead to the Streisand Effect and draw the very attention it was intended to avoid.
it’s entirely possible that they only noticed because of their abilities and that anyone remotely normal wouldn’t notice anything odd
True, but the time loop in the egg wasn’t noticed by several super folks. All I’m saying is that I am disappointed that P&G weren’t as subtle.
Assuming they only set up yesterday/the day before, it is possible that the tele-field is just a temporary measure until they can create something more complex.
The time loop in the Egg was created by an ancient mage as a trap. P & G are neither ancient nor creating a trap.
There was no time loop, just a space loop
In a time loop they would have seen themselves in the past walk up to the loop and disappear. What they encountered was a space loop taking them across space but not time
Same goal, though: keep at least certain people away. What can be used to trap someone can also be used to keep people away.
That said, if your defense keep grabbing people’s attention, then that significantly gets harder. Subtlety would have been better.
I’m not sure it’s safe to assume that the teleportation field is to keep *everyone* out. They seem to operate as some kind of shop, and keeping everyone out of a shop is a bit self-defeating. Maybe it’s some kind of clientele-screener – if you can detect the field and make it through, they’ll be willing to talk business. If not, well, you’re not someone they ever wanted to do business with anyway.
Which would be the opposite of “let’s sell power-gear to people that don’t have powers”, that was their gimmick the only time we actually saw them in action.
Yeah. I was thinking they might try something like a teleport to an alternate dimension where they haven’t set up shop in sam’s swap shop, but this is sad.
The problem is that rushing someone passed the building only brings more attention to what they’re trying to hide.
Now if they had an SEP generator, nobody would even notice the building was there. 🙂
Two speculations (not compatible with each other):
1) Knug’s phrasing above made me wonder if perhaps this is not P&G’s doing; that maybe Sarah set it up (perhaps unknowingly?) precisely to keep people away from P&G (but, as noted, it’s way too obvious and calling attention to itself to be really effective).
2) Another idea I had, though, is that P&G set up the whatever-it-is specifically to keep away people with either innate meta-powers, or in possession of sufficiently advanced magic and/or tech. Flea is thus kept out by his innate powers; Cecil is kept out by the very toys he finds so useful, especially his coat. But if someone with neither powers nor tech/magic artifacts went by, they might be able to go in with no problem. Maybe?
And just in case it’s not clear — the rationale for the latter is that someone with powers and/or tech has no need for additional power and/or glory. The fact that it’s so obvious to the metapowered could actually end up driving business to them from the non-powered who come to see what has got the metas so excited. And any metapowered who manages to bypass the blip is obviously so powerful that they really don’t need anything from P&G, and can be told so by them directly. Maybe.
Don’t forget the cloaking field likes to say were it is, sure its not active at the moment but suddenly trying to teleport it would have some effect when its powered down. that is the reason I think he tripped over, the shop defence mechanism pushed him forwards but the clacking device still wanted to keep him in place but as it wan’t active it wasn’t able to do so.
the questions are 1. “if you were cloaked would the shops defence teleport still detect you and activate?” and 2.” would Cecil stay in place and not teleport if the cloaking device was active?”
would be a easy quick thing for them to do but there is the slight chance that both bits of tech/magic don’t mix well and some for of catastrophe occurs (tear in time/explosion/interdemesional horror summoned/ect). but honestly what are the chances of that?
Flea is easily among my favourite characters in this comic.
He’s like Spiderman without the guilt and angst. 😀
Hopefully he’ll never have a Gwen Stacy moment.
Unlike Spidey, Flea is growing up with other supers. Let’s hope they’ll continue to be friends and protect each other from such horrors…
Wait….this all happened BEFORE school time? Are most support group meetings that early in the morning?
Doctors offices open very early, and many school districts now have split days/sessions. With recent science studies showing that kids and teens do better with late-day things (and with many jobs no longer using 9-5 only), there are schools that have late-morning or afternoon start times. I just wish they’d figured that out when I was a kid.
I’d read a series based solely on the Flea.
I assume you’ve read The Tick?
Ehh… *waggles hand* He needs some context and contrast.