I suspect that, unlike the Twilight Zone, it’s actually possible to have a good outcome from dealing with these two. That’s not to say it would be easy. I suspect they’re not in the business of customer satisfaction per se.
I think my favorite Pratchett bit (which actually fits what we’re talking about) has to be from “The Last Continent” (which ISN’T Australia… really!) A resident has given Rincewind (the world’s worst “wizzard”) a horse to help him on his quest telling him that the horse is totally reliable and he’s had him for years. As Rincewind rides off, the man is standing next to his friend (who WASN’T named “Bob,” but that’s what I’m going with;
MAN: Bob, I’ve had that horse for years, right?
BOB: Yep.
MAN: OK, but did I have him for years an hour ago?
It’s actually a reference to a Magical Girl anime, “Puella Magi Madoka Magica”. A cute little animal offers you any one wish in exchange for becoming a magical girl — basically a superhero with magical powers — who fights witches. What Kyubey, the cute little animal, conveniently leaves out is that any magical girl becomes a witch when they fall to despair, and that this is nothing more than a means his people have found for staving off the heat death of the universe. Beyond that, he really doesn’t care — the prospective magical girls are nothing more than pawns to him, and pawns are meant to be sacrificed.
H.C. Anderson’s Little Mermaid wanted an immortal soul and, in the end, earned the possibility of one. So in this case, the Faustian bargain worked, if not quite the way originally intended.
She didn’t want an immortal soul, she wanted to be with the man she loved (who didn’t know she existed). She got the soul because she chose to commit suicide, which HCA had something of a fetish for.
Had I the AMV-making chops, I’d make an AMV Hell-style mini-clip set to the last episode.
Tell me, Madoka; what wish will make your soul gem shine?
*dubbed over from Nightwish* o/~ I wish I had an angel for one moment of love–
* Cut to Kyu-bei with his oddly-shocked non-response *
— I wish I had your angle toniiiiiight! o/~
I’ve been making vids since I was in college (decade and a half ago), but there was a huge gap there before I got back into it and started my YouTube channel. I only recently learned that Blender, a free software I had for making 3d models for games, also works as a video sequence editor (VSE), and it’s easier and faster than anything else I tried, proprietary or not.
If you’re willing to invest some time, it’s not that hard to pick up on the mechanics. Plenty of tutorials online. And it’s fun to be able to make videos 🙂
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It’s a bit odd that we’ve not seen Sarah mention or be bothered by the move-along field. And why would she be asking if someone had been by looking at the thing she wants if she knew it existed and was moving everyone along?
New speculation: Maybe the move-along field is only in effect if a customer — in this case, Sarah — is already in the store? That is, its purpose is not to exclude everyone, but only to make sure one customer at a time is in P&G. So the reason we’ve seen it in effect so much is because Sarah keeps returning obsessively to check up on what she wants?
I think the intent is that it only affects those who are NOT customers, implying that anyone who would refuse the deal offered wouldn’t find the shop in the first place.
And some (weaksauce) speculation about the Manager:
Could “Head Honcho” be hint that the Headmaster is involved? I have no idea why. And it seems out of character, actually. Probably a red herring.
Maybe someone from the previous storyline?
Veles: Maybe he found that watching heroes on a quest was more entertaining than fighting them, so he decided to implement a quest-generating system.
Koshchei: Maybe he’s trying to delegate some of the tasks that Veles is demanding of him? Or maybe this is one of the tasks; Veles has the same motivation of wanting entertainment as above, but doesn’t want to bother with the details of getting the quests set up.
Baba Yaga: I note that P&G never mention the gender of the manager, so throwing that out there as a possibility. No idea why she would want to, although her spiel to 84 about the new age of heroes suggests that she might have some interest.
Could the owner be Malphast’s mom? This could definitely liven things up in her favour. Or even a new clandestine project of Malhpast’s mom and dad; are those the imp and angel that got stuck on Earth?
The denizens of chaos and order seem to lack the casual pop-culture knowledge demonstrated by Wilson in panel 3. Which is a weak objection, given that they’ve been here a while.
For the manager, I might suggest that the Determinant and/or the Balagan are also entities of order and chaos who have shown an interest in this plane of existence, as long as we’re speculating.
I know this isn’t correct because the motivations are very different, but there’s a certain non-super vigilante out there who has a huge amount of confiscated goodies including magic, tech, psi, etc. I wonder if someone stole his cache.
And thinking about it a bit more — P&G might actually only be aimed at Sarah. She’s the only one who seems to have been told of its existence, and she’s seen something in there she wants desperately — something she may well have been steered toward. And the true-but-very-misleading answers she was given in response to her questions about anyone else looking at what she wanted look like soft-sell manipulation.
P&G might not want any other customers messing up the game, hence the exclusion field. While the field is way too powerful, calling attention to the store, it might be a simple mistake in calibration, rather than what is actually intended.
Wow. that’s an angle that I wish I’d come up with. Seems to be an awful lot of energy expenditure for a single – task? soul? But as was pointed out in To Wield a Red Sword – what is a Cost, when you’re resources are infinite
If that’s the case, what’s the “move along” field for? It’d be simpler to just fix it so only she can enter… after all that door doesn’t go into the building it’s attached to.
Ah, and here I thought the crazy old scientist down the street was doing experiments involving some doohickey he thought up that he called a flux capacitor that should be able to adjust how fast you go through time or something like that. I said you can only adjust time near the speed of light and he exclaimed he could do it at 88 miles per hour. Yeah right. Crazy.
Then again they may just be what they state exactly, a store that sells powers and items that give powers for a reasonable price. It’s the customer’s responsibility to determine what they want and if the price is worth paying. Like that store in xxxholic.
(Still thinking about the exclusion effect. Really, if this weren’t being doled out so piecemeal, I would just turn the page)
Just to list everything out, including superseded speculation:
01) The exclusion field excludes everyone. Objection: Disproven; Sarah doesn’t seem to even notice that it exists.
02) The exclusion field excludes everyone-but-Sarah. By implication, P&G is a trap/scam/ruse/something meant just for her. Support: Sarah seems to be the only one who knows that P&G exist, and have the sort of thing that she wants.
03) The exclusion field excludes everyone with powers (where “powers” includes artifacts, like Cecil’s coat). Rationale: P&G don’t want to deal with people who already have stuff. Objection: Disproven, by Tyler and Ron being moved along.
04) The exclusion field excludes everyone else when someone is already in the store. Rationale: P&G don’t want to deal with customers other than one at a time. Objection (weak): Flea and Cecil were excluded before school; Ron and Tyler were excluded after school — is Sarah really there that often? Counterobjection: She’s been shown to be obsessive enough that she might be checking the store as frequently as she can. Possible Counter-counterobjection: Was Flea excluded for the first time(s) while Sarah was in the therapy session?
05) The exclusion field excludes everyone under a certain age (18? 16? I’m not sure how old Sarah is). Rationale: P&G don’t want to have to cope with kids, who are unlikely to have the ready money or abilities to acquire the artifacts they stock, and are more likely to bring unwanted metahuman attention to the store if they do try to perform the tasks (and/or succeed in those tasks).
06) The exclusion field excludes everyone male. Rationale: P&G want to only power up females, for unknown reasons (possibly managerial desires). Something something Magical Girl?
07) The exclusion field excludes everyone under a certain height, perhaps as a proxy for age. Rationale: similar to (5). You must be this tall to make a Faustian bargain; no exceptions!
08) The exclusion field is actually Sarah’s powers. What she wanted was to make everything as it was; what she gets are powers that reach into the past, keeping away everyone who might have interfered with her destined acquisition of those powers. It’s all very wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey.
Or the exclusion field excludes everyone who doesn’t have an appointment, an invitation, or at least a referral. It keeps out all those who aren’t specifically trying to go shopping at Power and Glory’s.
Good notion. But also note that this could be consistent with #2 and #4 above (it keeps out everyone who isn’t Sarah, and/or it keeps out everyone but the customers that P&G want to deal with).
And of course, Sarah got her invitation (or whatever) before P&G were even completely set up.
It may well be that if the deal with Sarah works to P&G’s manager’s satisfaction, more invitations will be issued.
09) The exclusion field excludes everyone without an invitation (as noted by Library Samurai; see also comments in reply above)
(Getting ever more conspiracy minded, here)
10) There is no exclusion field. What is actually happening is that Flea and Cecil, and Ron and Tyler, have indeed seen and/or entered P&G’s. However, if there isn’t anything you want from them, an amnesia field wipes out all memories of what you have seen after you’ve left (thinking of the Oracle in OOTS, here). Objection: I would think that if Flea and Cecil had stayed in the store long enough to understand what P&G offer, and browsed for a bit, they would have been very late for school. Similarly, Ron and Tyler would have been noticeably late getting home from school. Counter-objection: Maybe P&G have an alternate time-flow effect in their store, just like they have a bigger-on-the-inside effect?
The exclusion effect excludes anyone who already has a share of Destiny. 😉
“Destiny” is a term Aaron’s been using a lot in this comic, and it doesn’t just cover people with powers who becomes heroes or villains. Tyler, completely normal as he is, has done amazing things already, including choosing the fate of mankind or having influence over Captain Clarinet/Ron’s life. His mentor, powerless as he is, is despised or even feared by many who do have powers.
If we define Destiny as being bound towards greatness, that means heroes and villains whether they have powers or not. Power- the ability to affect others and the world around you- really gives one the capability to become great (though, as the Revenant and Tyler have shown, is not a requirement for it).
If so, one possible way to keep people who don’t need P&G’s “assistance” away is to filter by Destiny- not the Flea, who has powers; not Cecil, who can detect powers (and has accumulated a whole bunch of stuff that gives him powers); not Ron, who had powers and will be getting new ones in the future; and not Tyler, who doesn’t need powers to help people; but Sarah Bartlett, who lost her powers and is lost- she even lost part of her identity- without them.
I’m guessing the field only lets in the right people, potential customers.
The manager could be whatever is in charge of the universal plan, God type thing though maybe some entity more time related. The protection field is from the manager. This is a standard fix they often need to implement to keep things on path to the plan.
Since we have some good scenes of Sarah standing next to Angelica, here, I went back to the page where the Mysterious Customer is talking to Angelica. That… doesn’t really look like it could be Sarah. Sarah is barely taller than Angelica, while the Mysterious Customer is much taller, compared to her — Angelica’s face is about the same level as the mystery customer’s chest.
On the other hand, Aaron has made some real art goofs in character height and proportion before, so…
Sticking to my theory that it’s a woman. Perhaps Aaron is trying to mislead us with Sarah and Lester. So, maybe it’s Paula Grissom?
2016-03-30, 2016-08-2016
Maybe the Mysterious Customer actually was Charles, after all? The feminine look in that one panel might have been either an art mistake, or part of the disguise he’s wearing (androgynous blankface mask).
Rationale:
• Sarah has no problems entering the store as herself. Why would she have ever felt the need to obscure her identity?
• Charles, on the other hand, is a person of interest known to local people, and to the Praetorian Academy, and wants to hide from them all. He’s also kind of tall, and might have had an additional growth spurt.
• Charles would want things to be the way they were, in the sense that he could use his powers without being restricted.
• Potentially, what Charles might have wanted was some sort of invisibility/obscurity in addition to his teleportation. Perhaps also/instead, the ability to use his powers from a distance (which would make him effectively invisible).
• What everyone has in common that we’ve seen “excluded” from P&G (in addition to being young, male, short, uninvited, and not Sarah) is that they’ve tangled with Charles in the past. He might be teleporting them invisibly/remotely either to keep anyone from finding out that he went to P&G (not knowing of or not trusting P&G’s policy of customer privacy), or to keep them from getting anything that might give them any more advantage over him.
• He doesn’t know Sarah (and presumably doesn’t think that Sarah knows him), so doesn’t care that she enters P&G.
• His time with the Praetorian Academy in general, and his fear of being found out specifically, probably has made him a lot more circumspect in how he uses his powers, hence just moving them along.
If Charles, why not steal what he wants? Get his hands on the item under some pretense of examination or negotiation and warp away? Distance and dimension aren’t barriers to his particular teleportation ability. P&G (and their boss) would have to be ridiculously powerful to track him down and retrieve the item. By the time they did, Charles may already have control over what he wanted.
Also, I doubt Charles is that capable of evading PA. He’s likely not the first teleporter in the PS238-verse, or at least not the most experienced and powerful meta there with those abilities or similar to them. I’m guessing that he could evade PA once or twice, maybe in a blue moon, but constantly even if to enact this plan?
Lastly, when it comes to story construction, he’s sort of an odd choice in that he’s out of the blue. We’ve already been introduced to a bunch of characters for this story and, as readers, are guessing who’s who. If it’s Charles, someone not in the original list of suspects, it’d be a bit of a cheat on Aaron’s (or any other writer’s) part, requiring very skillful storytelling to make up for.
It can be him, but I feel that it’s someone else…
* – This is how I feel after reading some mystery stories, including Sherlock Holmes.
The reason I (and I guess almost everyone else) was inferring that Sarah was the Mysterious Customer was because the night scene with the Mysterious Customer is immediately followed by a scene labeled as “the following morning”. Sarah is the only one who seems to know that P&G’s exist, and she has clearly been there at least once before, and seen something she wanted. Yet, checking back, the Mysterious Customer is way too tall, and Sarah shows no need to hide herself.
Is it possible that “Sarah” is a disguise, perhaps on loan for some minimal fee (maybe even the money offered by the Mysterious Customer?), that obscures the actual individuals height and build (and gender, of course)? And it comes along with a fake background, and instructions to go to Newby’s therapy meeting and report on what “she” sees and hears?
Hm.
This has some conflict with the previous speculation. While it could be Charles in that disguise, he presumably doesn’t have any invisibility or remote abilities. But maybe he’s learned to be real fast with moving people? And the part about being more circumspect would definitely apply.
Are they really children around the age of the students of PS238? If no, what are they? Why do they have the form of children?
If yes, why do they work here? What are their origins, particularly of their powers? How did they get this inventory? Who is their manager? What is their relation to him or her?
I don’t see them as being kids at all. They’re short and young-looking, but they have the self-assurance and diction that implies experience and maturity. Also, I suspect that while kids might well know of the Twilight Zone, the modern deluge of internet social networking, video games, and other attention grabbers make it less likely to come to mind easily. Wilson’s use of it feels more like a sign of someone being at least Aaron’s age.
As to who they really are, in addition to possibly being agents of Chaos and Order, as noted above, here’s more speculation:
They’re not kids. They’re Little People. Fair folk. Fae. Their manager is Oberon/Maeve.
Or:
They’re two parts of a single entity, possibly genderless or hermaphroditic, who is the actual manager. They’re small because of something something conservation of mass.
There is also the fact that what they are *selling* is ‘Power and Glory’. They are giving people who might otherwise be nobodies the impressive mojo they want…
Y’know, speaking of the manager, there IS one previously-established character whose MO this could (very, very roughly, admittedly) fit- The Singularity (the super-duper-supercomputer that Emerald Gauntlet Jr. and 84 encountered). Its stated goal is to help the younger races avoid the pitfalls that its creators ran into; this could (possibly, hard to tell without more info) fall under that purview.
As to the childlike appearance of Power and Glory… I’m honestly a bit confused. They have the size and body type of children (as drawn by Aaron), but… well, there’s the speech patterns that were mentioned, and older pop-culture references, and there’s also their dress sense; Angelica dresses in a fashion similar to what I’ve seen small, slight women dress like because they DON’T want to be mistaken for children (well, aside from the Confederate greatcoat >.>), and Wilson… leather bomber jackets aren’t exactly common in children’s sizes, and those boots and the newsboy cap both suggest someone a bit older, at least to me.
Gonna be interesting to find out who they really are and what their deal is, for sure.
… and as a final aside, for the Mysterious Customer, the only one who fits the size and body type, at least from the ex-powered support group, is Paula Grissom; the skin tone could be a colouring error (in the first page she’s on- I am fairly sure it’s a woman), she’s got grey skin (presumably from the lighting). Alternatively, Paula could be a red herring; remember, Sarah was a *shapeshifter*- her explanation for her lack of powers is, frankly, kind of ludicrous (even for superhero-dom), and sounds like an excuse for a mental block to me. It’s entirely possible that, in her desperation to disguise herself to go into the shop, she bypassed the block without realizing it and changed into her old form(?) for the trip.
Good point about how they’re dressed more maturely that would be expected than if they were children. Another way of putting it that occurred to me is that Angelica looks like she’s dressed white-collar professional, whereas Wilson is dressed blue-collar professional.
Which lead to the thought that the way they work also looks mature. Wilson does the heavier work; Angelica seems a bit like a cross between an experienced salesperson and a museum curator. Wilson looks practiced and confident in the way he deploys and stows his tools and other equipment; Angelica isn’t fazed or overeager when money is shoved in her face. And so on.
… […], Sarah was a *shapeshifter*- her explanation for her lack of powers is, frankly, kind of ludicrous (even for superhero-dom), and sounds like an excuse for a mental block to me. It’s entirely possible that, in her desperation to disguise herself to go into the shop, she bypassed the block without realizing it and changed into her old form(?) for the trip.
Hm.
Or maybe Sarah’s shapeshifting works but has gone badly wrong? Maybe something like Element Girl (whom I only know from her appearance in Sandman #20)? (Sarah says she could “rearrange her molecules into whatever she wanted”)
Another idea that occurred to me was about PSWarp, the mind-controller; the one that Sarah says took her powers. I got to thinking about the mind controller at the Las Vegas hotel/casino, who could easily control people after just a touch. Maybe PSWarp’s mind control is still in effect? Maybe the Mysterious Customer was PSWarp, and Sarah is still acting as a mind-controlled proxy for PSWarp?
We’ve had “guess the visual reference” for some of Aaron’s pages before. The bottom left object in the final panel certainly looks like it’s meant to evoke a weighted cube from Portal, but maybe that was so obvious that no-one felt a need to mention it.
The helmet two shelves above the cube looks very familiar, from the cover of an SF novel of the 60s or 70s, but I haven’t been able to find it. Does it ring any bells for anyone else?
In regards to the apparent youth of P&G, we think them to be teens, based on the size and appearance. Yet, as pointed out by others, their speech and mannerisms suggest many years in this role.
The Norse consider dwarves to be purveyors of magical/mystical finely crafted items. Other mythologies had elves (non-Tolkein) goblins, svartavles, gnomes. All short-statured, long lived, sometimes ugly, sometimes very fair, beings providing weapons or items of immense power – at a cost.
It would be no great stretch for these two smallish folks to simply be modernized (but not perfectly modernized) versions of the same type of entity.
One more wacky speculation: Thinking about “Head Honcho” reminded me that there is a character that has manifested as, well, literally a giant head: Zodon’s AI “child”. And presumably many things have been fired from the SIITS-9000 that said “child” could grab and, perhaps, analyze and send back to earth (presumably with some of the more dangerous aspects eliminated).
Not sure where Powers and Glory would come from in this scenario. Possibly they’re constructs?
this is like a better twilight zone shop, they offer imperfect items if the price is too steep
I wonder if you can pay for multiple
My guess is that the price on subsequent items will go up.
“So I can get item alpha for x, and item beta for y-”
“Sorry, that’s ‘or’. If you want both alpha and beta, it gets expensive.”
I suspect that, unlike the Twilight Zone, it’s actually possible to have a good outcome from dealing with these two. That’s not to say it would be easy. I suspect they’re not in the business of customer satisfaction per se.
To be fair, the Twilight Zone did occasionally give out good endings. Like that one with the hobo that became Santa for a night.
Terry Pratchett wrote about shops like this. They show up yesterday but have been there forever. You know, since yesterday they were always there.
I think my favorite Pratchett bit (which actually fits what we’re talking about) has to be from “The Last Continent” (which ISN’T Australia… really!) A resident has given Rincewind (the world’s worst “wizzard”) a horse to help him on his quest telling him that the horse is totally reliable and he’s had him for years. As Rincewind rides off, the man is standing next to his friend (who WASN’T named “Bob,” but that’s what I’m going with;
MAN: Bob, I’ve had that horse for years, right?
BOB: Yep.
MAN: OK, but did I have him for years an hour ago?
Taking the deal despite knowing that it’s going to end terribly in three, two…
Getting a heavy “Monkey’s Paw” vibe here, or perhaps the payment is a task to be completed?
／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼ : Make a contract with me and become a Magical Girl!
*whimpers*
*curls into ball*
*sobs*
Yeah, that always works out so well. Reference The Little Mermaid (H.C.Anderson’s not Disney’s), Dorian Gray, Faust, etc.
It’s actually a reference to a Magical Girl anime, “Puella Magi Madoka Magica”. A cute little animal offers you any one wish in exchange for becoming a magical girl — basically a superhero with magical powers — who fights witches. What Kyubey, the cute little animal, conveniently leaves out is that any magical girl becomes a witch when they fall to despair, and that this is nothing more than a means his people have found for staving off the heat death of the universe. Beyond that, he really doesn’t care — the prospective magical girls are nothing more than pawns to him, and pawns are meant to be sacrificed.
I’m thinking Sparkling Valkyrie Girl Yuuki, who permanently “lost” some things in the process of becoming a magical girl.
Yeah, but (s)he takes it in stride. Mostly. Mostly.
H.C. Anderson’s Little Mermaid wanted an immortal soul and, in the end, earned the possibility of one. So in this case, the Faustian bargain worked, if not quite the way originally intended.
In the end, she became sea-foam, how is that any form of an immortal soul? o_O
She didn’t want an immortal soul, she wanted to be with the man she loved (who didn’t know she existed). She got the soul because she chose to commit suicide, which HCA had something of a fetish for.
Had I the AMV-making chops, I’d make an AMV Hell-style mini-clip set to the last episode.
Tell me, Madoka; what wish will make your soul gem shine?
*dubbed over from Nightwish* o/~ I wish I had an angel for one moment of love–
* Cut to Kyu-bei with his oddly-shocked non-response *
— I wish I had your angle toniiiiiight! o/~
I’ve been making vids since I was in college (decade and a half ago), but there was a huge gap there before I got back into it and started my YouTube channel. I only recently learned that Blender, a free software I had for making 3d models for games, also works as a video sequence editor (VSE), and it’s easier and faster than anything else I tried, proprietary or not.
If you’re willing to invest some time, it’s not that hard to pick up on the mechanics. Plenty of tutorials online. And it’s fun to be able to make videos 🙂
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It gives me a spot for Website URL, but doesn’t like my YouTube account for the website? What the heck?
I wonder if the Manager sit in the Booth at the End
Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth, and taste…
Nice classic ref.
The things in this shop might be a bit needful
It’s a bit odd that we’ve not seen Sarah mention or be bothered by the move-along field. And why would she be asking if someone had been by looking at the thing she wants if she knew it existed and was moving everyone along?
New speculation: Maybe the move-along field is only in effect if a customer — in this case, Sarah — is already in the store? That is, its purpose is not to exclude everyone, but only to make sure one customer at a time is in P&G. So the reason we’ve seen it in effect so much is because Sarah keeps returning obsessively to check up on what she wants?
I think the intent is that it only affects those who are NOT customers, implying that anyone who would refuse the deal offered wouldn’t find the shop in the first place.
And some (weaksauce) speculation about the Manager:
Could “Head Honcho” be hint that the Headmaster is involved? I have no idea why. And it seems out of character, actually. Probably a red herring.
Maybe someone from the previous storyline?
Veles: Maybe he found that watching heroes on a quest was more entertaining than fighting them, so he decided to implement a quest-generating system.
Koshchei: Maybe he’s trying to delegate some of the tasks that Veles is demanding of him? Or maybe this is one of the tasks; Veles has the same motivation of wanting entertainment as above, but doesn’t want to bother with the details of getting the quests set up.
Baba Yaga: I note that P&G never mention the gender of the manager, so throwing that out there as a possibility. No idea why she would want to, although her spiel to 84 about the new age of heroes suggests that she might have some interest.
Could the owner be Malphast’s mom? This could definitely liven things up in her favour. Or even a new clandestine project of Malhpast’s mom and dad; are those the imp and angel that got stuck on Earth?
The denizens of chaos and order seem to lack the casual pop-culture knowledge demonstrated by Wilson in panel 3. Which is a weak objection, given that they’ve been here a while.
For the manager, I might suggest that the Determinant and/or the Balagan are also entities of order and chaos who have shown an interest in this plane of existence, as long as we’re speculating.
I know this isn’t correct because the motivations are very different, but there’s a certain non-super vigilante out there who has a huge amount of confiscated goodies including magic, tech, psi, etc. I wonder if someone stole his cache.
Maybe revanant. Or at least he knows about it since I do remember a comment that something might be worth a few seized articles.
And thinking about it a bit more — P&G might actually only be aimed at Sarah. She’s the only one who seems to have been told of its existence, and she’s seen something in there she wants desperately — something she may well have been steered toward. And the true-but-very-misleading answers she was given in response to her questions about anyone else looking at what she wanted look like soft-sell manipulation.
P&G might not want any other customers messing up the game, hence the exclusion field. While the field is way too powerful, calling attention to the store, it might be a simple mistake in calibration, rather than what is actually intended.
Wow. that’s an angle that I wish I’d come up with. Seems to be an awful lot of energy expenditure for a single – task? soul? But as was pointed out in To Wield a Red Sword – what is a Cost, when you’re resources are infinite
If it is a Sarah-specific trap, it could be that most of what appears to be in the store is actually illusion.
If that’s the case, what’s the “move along” field for? It’d be simpler to just fix it so only she can enter… after all that door doesn’t go into the building it’s attached to.
Meanwhile, across the street, a crazy old scientist has opened a ‘curse removal’ service… just to mess with the Manager.
Ah, and here I thought the crazy old scientist down the street was doing experiments involving some doohickey he thought up that he called a flux capacitor that should be able to adjust how fast you go through time or something like that. I said you can only adjust time near the speed of light and he exclaimed he could do it at 88 miles per hour. Yeah right. Crazy.
Then again they may just be what they state exactly, a store that sells powers and items that give powers for a reasonable price. It’s the customer’s responsibility to determine what they want and if the price is worth paying. Like that store in xxxholic.
*your Damn the inability to edit
(Still thinking about the exclusion effect. Really, if this weren’t being doled out so piecemeal, I would just turn the page)
Just to list everything out, including superseded speculation:
01) The exclusion field excludes everyone. Objection: Disproven; Sarah doesn’t seem to even notice that it exists.
02) The exclusion field excludes everyone-but-Sarah. By implication, P&G is a trap/scam/ruse/something meant just for her. Support: Sarah seems to be the only one who knows that P&G exist, and have the sort of thing that she wants.
03) The exclusion field excludes everyone with powers (where “powers” includes artifacts, like Cecil’s coat). Rationale: P&G don’t want to deal with people who already have stuff. Objection: Disproven, by Tyler and Ron being moved along.
04) The exclusion field excludes everyone else when someone is already in the store. Rationale: P&G don’t want to deal with customers other than one at a time. Objection (weak): Flea and Cecil were excluded before school; Ron and Tyler were excluded after school — is Sarah really there that often? Counterobjection: She’s been shown to be obsessive enough that she might be checking the store as frequently as she can. Possible Counter-counterobjection: Was Flea excluded for the first time(s) while Sarah was in the therapy session?
05) The exclusion field excludes everyone under a certain age (18? 16? I’m not sure how old Sarah is). Rationale: P&G don’t want to have to cope with kids, who are unlikely to have the ready money or abilities to acquire the artifacts they stock, and are more likely to bring unwanted metahuman attention to the store if they do try to perform the tasks (and/or succeed in those tasks).
06) The exclusion field excludes everyone male. Rationale: P&G want to only power up females, for unknown reasons (possibly managerial desires). Something something Magical Girl?
07) The exclusion field excludes everyone under a certain height, perhaps as a proxy for age. Rationale: similar to (5). You must be this tall to make a Faustian bargain; no exceptions!
08) The exclusion field is actually Sarah’s powers. What she wanted was to make everything as it was; what she gets are powers that reach into the past, keeping away everyone who might have interfered with her destined acquisition of those powers. It’s all very wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey.
Or the exclusion field excludes everyone who doesn’t have an appointment, an invitation, or at least a referral. It keeps out all those who aren’t specifically trying to go shopping at Power and Glory’s.
Good notion. But also note that this could be consistent with #2 and #4 above (it keeps out everyone who isn’t Sarah, and/or it keeps out everyone but the customers that P&G want to deal with).
And of course, Sarah got her invitation (or whatever) before P&G were even completely set up.
It may well be that if the deal with Sarah works to P&G’s manager’s satisfaction, more invitations will be issued.
09) The exclusion field excludes everyone without an invitation (as noted by Library Samurai; see also comments in reply above)
(Getting ever more conspiracy minded, here)
10) There is no exclusion field. What is actually happening is that Flea and Cecil, and Ron and Tyler, have indeed seen and/or entered P&G’s. However, if there isn’t anything you want from them, an amnesia field wipes out all memories of what you have seen after you’ve left (thinking of the Oracle in OOTS, here). Objection: I would think that if Flea and Cecil had stayed in the store long enough to understand what P&G offer, and browsed for a bit, they would have been very late for school. Similarly, Ron and Tyler would have been noticeably late getting home from school. Counter-objection: Maybe P&G have an alternate time-flow effect in their store, just like they have a bigger-on-the-inside effect?
I have one for you, Owlmirror:
The exclusion effect excludes anyone who already has a share of Destiny. 😉
“Destiny” is a term Aaron’s been using a lot in this comic, and it doesn’t just cover people with powers who becomes heroes or villains. Tyler, completely normal as he is, has done amazing things already, including choosing the fate of mankind or having influence over Captain Clarinet/Ron’s life. His mentor, powerless as he is, is despised or even feared by many who do have powers.
If we define Destiny as being bound towards greatness, that means heroes and villains whether they have powers or not. Power- the ability to affect others and the world around you- really gives one the capability to become great (though, as the Revenant and Tyler have shown, is not a requirement for it).
If so, one possible way to keep people who don’t need P&G’s “assistance” away is to filter by Destiny- not the Flea, who has powers; not Cecil, who can detect powers (and has accumulated a whole bunch of stuff that gives him powers); not Ron, who had powers and will be getting new ones in the future; and not Tyler, who doesn’t need powers to help people; but Sarah Bartlett, who lost her powers and is lost- she even lost part of her identity- without them.
Is the shop run by Leland Gaunt, or just Mr. Needful?
Well, everyone else is making wild guesses, I’ll make a few too:
1. The Manager/Head Honcho is a construct so they don’t have to answer questions they don’t want to answer
2. The field, whatever it is, that is moving people around is not part of the shop in any way, it is simply coincidental.
I’m guessing the field only lets in the right people, potential customers.
The manager could be whatever is in charge of the universal plan, God type thing though maybe some entity more time related. The protection field is from the manager. This is a standard fix they often need to implement to keep things on path to the plan.
Why name the shop after yourselves if you’re not the ones running the shop?
Because the actual owner wants to maintain their anonymity for some reason so they have the two who front for him name the shop after them.
I wonder if the manager has a good recipe for chocolate chip cookies ?
It’s like a for-profit Warehouse 13… I like it.
Since we have some good scenes of Sarah standing next to Angelica, here, I went back to the page where the Mysterious Customer is talking to Angelica. That… doesn’t really look like it could be Sarah. Sarah is barely taller than Angelica, while the Mysterious Customer is much taller, compared to her — Angelica’s face is about the same level as the mystery customer’s chest.
On the other hand, Aaron has made some real art goofs in character height and proportion before, so…
Who knows?
IMO, mysterious customer looks like the Lester Wilcox, the guy who got his toy confiscated by Revenant.
Sticking to my theory that it’s a woman. Perhaps Aaron is trying to mislead us with Sarah and Lester. So, maybe it’s Paula Grissom?
2016-03-30, 2016-08-2016
Hm. Maybe not Paula. Different skin tones between her and the mysterious customer.
Hm.
Maybe the Mysterious Customer actually was Charles, after all? The feminine look in that one panel might have been either an art mistake, or part of the disguise he’s wearing (androgynous blankface mask).
Rationale:
• Sarah has no problems entering the store as herself. Why would she have ever felt the need to obscure her identity?
• Charles, on the other hand, is a person of interest known to local people, and to the Praetorian Academy, and wants to hide from them all. He’s also kind of tall, and might have had an additional growth spurt.
• Charles would want things to be the way they were, in the sense that he could use his powers without being restricted.
• Potentially, what Charles might have wanted was some sort of invisibility/obscurity in addition to his teleportation. Perhaps also/instead, the ability to use his powers from a distance (which would make him effectively invisible).
• What everyone has in common that we’ve seen “excluded” from P&G (in addition to being young, male, short, uninvited, and not Sarah) is that they’ve tangled with Charles in the past. He might be teleporting them invisibly/remotely either to keep anyone from finding out that he went to P&G (not knowing of or not trusting P&G’s policy of customer privacy), or to keep them from getting anything that might give them any more advantage over him.
• He doesn’t know Sarah (and presumably doesn’t think that Sarah knows him), so doesn’t care that she enters P&G.
• His time with the Praetorian Academy in general, and his fear of being found out specifically, probably has made him a lot more circumspect in how he uses his powers, hence just moving them along.
If Charles, why not steal what he wants? Get his hands on the item under some pretense of examination or negotiation and warp away? Distance and dimension aren’t barriers to his particular teleportation ability. P&G (and their boss) would have to be ridiculously powerful to track him down and retrieve the item. By the time they did, Charles may already have control over what he wanted.
Also, I doubt Charles is that capable of evading PA. He’s likely not the first teleporter in the PS238-verse, or at least not the most experienced and powerful meta there with those abilities or similar to them. I’m guessing that he could evade PA once or twice, maybe in a blue moon, but constantly even if to enact this plan?
Lastly, when it comes to story construction, he’s sort of an odd choice in that he’s out of the blue. We’ve already been introduced to a bunch of characters for this story and, as readers, are guessing who’s who. If it’s Charles, someone not in the original list of suspects, it’d be a bit of a cheat on Aaron’s (or any other writer’s) part, requiring very skillful storytelling to make up for.
It can be him, but I feel that it’s someone else…
* – This is how I feel after reading some mystery stories, including Sherlock Holmes.
OK, one more point:
The reason I (and I guess almost everyone else) was inferring that Sarah was the Mysterious Customer was because the night scene with the Mysterious Customer is immediately followed by a scene labeled as “the following morning”. Sarah is the only one who seems to know that P&G’s exist, and she has clearly been there at least once before, and seen something she wanted. Yet, checking back, the Mysterious Customer is way too tall, and Sarah shows no need to hide herself.
Is it possible that “Sarah” is a disguise, perhaps on loan for some minimal fee (maybe even the money offered by the Mysterious Customer?), that obscures the actual individuals height and build (and gender, of course)? And it comes along with a fake background, and instructions to go to Newby’s therapy meeting and report on what “she” sees and hears?
Hm.
This has some conflict with the previous speculation. While it could be Charles in that disguise, he presumably doesn’t have any invisibility or remote abilities. But maybe he’s learned to be real fast with moving people? And the part about being more circumspect would definitely apply.
A different topic:
Angelica Glory. Wilson Powers.
KIDS.
Are they really children around the age of the students of PS238? If no, what are they? Why do they have the form of children?
If yes, why do they work here? What are their origins, particularly of their powers? How did they get this inventory? Who is their manager? What is their relation to him or her?
I don’t see them as being kids at all. They’re short and young-looking, but they have the self-assurance and diction that implies experience and maturity. Also, I suspect that while kids might well know of the Twilight Zone, the modern deluge of internet social networking, video games, and other attention grabbers make it less likely to come to mind easily. Wilson’s use of it feels more like a sign of someone being at least Aaron’s age.
As to who they really are, in addition to possibly being agents of Chaos and Order, as noted above, here’s more speculation:
They’re not kids. They’re Little People. Fair folk. Fae. Their manager is Oberon/Maeve.
Or:
They’re two parts of a single entity, possibly genderless or hermaphroditic, who is the actual manager. They’re small because of something something conservation of mass.
There is also the fact that what they are *selling* is ‘Power and Glory’. They are giving people who might otherwise be nobodies the impressive mojo they want…
Y’know, speaking of the manager, there IS one previously-established character whose MO this could (very, very roughly, admittedly) fit- The Singularity (the super-duper-supercomputer that Emerald Gauntlet Jr. and 84 encountered). Its stated goal is to help the younger races avoid the pitfalls that its creators ran into; this could (possibly, hard to tell without more info) fall under that purview.
As to the childlike appearance of Power and Glory… I’m honestly a bit confused. They have the size and body type of children (as drawn by Aaron), but… well, there’s the speech patterns that were mentioned, and older pop-culture references, and there’s also their dress sense; Angelica dresses in a fashion similar to what I’ve seen small, slight women dress like because they DON’T want to be mistaken for children (well, aside from the Confederate greatcoat >.>), and Wilson… leather bomber jackets aren’t exactly common in children’s sizes, and those boots and the newsboy cap both suggest someone a bit older, at least to me.
Gonna be interesting to find out who they really are and what their deal is, for sure.
… and as a final aside, for the Mysterious Customer, the only one who fits the size and body type, at least from the ex-powered support group, is Paula Grissom; the skin tone could be a colouring error (in the first page she’s on- I am fairly sure it’s a woman), she’s got grey skin (presumably from the lighting). Alternatively, Paula could be a red herring; remember, Sarah was a *shapeshifter*- her explanation for her lack of powers is, frankly, kind of ludicrous (even for superhero-dom), and sounds like an excuse for a mental block to me. It’s entirely possible that, in her desperation to disguise herself to go into the shop, she bypassed the block without realizing it and changed into her old form(?) for the trip.
Good point about how they’re dressed more maturely that would be expected than if they were children. Another way of putting it that occurred to me is that Angelica looks like she’s dressed white-collar professional, whereas Wilson is dressed blue-collar professional.
Which lead to the thought that the way they work also looks mature. Wilson does the heavier work; Angelica seems a bit like a cross between an experienced salesperson and a museum curator. Wilson looks practiced and confident in the way he deploys and stows his tools and other equipment; Angelica isn’t fazed or overeager when money is shoved in her face. And so on.
Hm.
Or maybe Sarah’s shapeshifting works but has gone badly wrong? Maybe something like Element Girl (whom I only know from her appearance in Sandman #20)? (Sarah says she could “rearrange her molecules into whatever she wanted”)
Another idea that occurred to me was about PSWarp, the mind-controller; the one that Sarah says took her powers. I got to thinking about the mind controller at the Las Vegas hotel/casino, who could easily control people after just a touch. Maybe PSWarp’s mind control is still in effect? Maybe the Mysterious Customer was PSWarp, and Sarah is still acting as a mind-controlled proxy for PSWarp?
*shrug* still just speculating…
I can’t tell if the proprietors are supposed to be short adults or children,is anyone else having that problem?
We’ve had “guess the visual reference” for some of Aaron’s pages before. The bottom left object in the final panel certainly looks like it’s meant to evoke a weighted cube from Portal, but maybe that was so obvious that no-one felt a need to mention it.
The helmet two shelves above the cube looks very familiar, from the cover of an SF novel of the 60s or 70s, but I haven’t been able to find it. Does it ring any bells for anyone else?
In regards to the apparent youth of P&G, we think them to be teens, based on the size and appearance. Yet, as pointed out by others, their speech and mannerisms suggest many years in this role.
The Norse consider dwarves to be purveyors of magical/mystical finely crafted items. Other mythologies had elves (non-Tolkein) goblins, svartavles, gnomes. All short-statured, long lived, sometimes ugly, sometimes very fair, beings providing weapons or items of immense power – at a cost.
It would be no great stretch for these two smallish folks to simply be modernized (but not perfectly modernized) versions of the same type of entity.
One more wacky speculation: Thinking about “Head Honcho” reminded me that there is a character that has manifested as, well, literally a giant head: Zodon’s AI “child”. And presumably many things have been fired from the SIITS-9000 that said “child” could grab and, perhaps, analyze and send back to earth (presumably with some of the more dangerous aspects eliminated).
Not sure where Powers and Glory would come from in this scenario. Possibly they’re constructs?
… I am Mr Roarke, your host. Be very careful about the price of what you want…