No, I think you’re missing the point. Psion build the mental block and used her gigantic ego to hold it in place. Even with almost paralyzingly amounts of self-awareness, she’s still massively egotistical. She’s NOT cured; she just has enough leverage to temporarily slip the block.
Now, breaking the block COULD be as simple as thanking Tyler for helping her get control of her powers back. Though, if the block is still there (getting her powers back doesn’t automatically remove it), a sudden flare of egotism could ‘fritz’ her powers again. In fact, she could easily get to a state where the block is still there but not always active. Notice that the block is good enough that she hasn’t thought of simply getting another mentalist to remove it.
Side note to that, I think that her current state is actually kind of a scary one. She previously had nearly complete control of her body. Now, she has nearly complete knowledge of herself. Not only is this likely to lead to a power boost, but I feel like it could result in disabling a lot of important safeguards. “I could be that much more effective if I jettison my moral concerns about this action! Brain activity excised!”
I think I see why Tyler was willing to forgive Ron for pinning everything on Moonshadow for a while. Tyler might be the second most popular kid in his class, right after Moonshadow, but its more pity so its rare for people to point out how awesome Tyler is.
Mental Block. It doesn’t matter how many other people realize it, or even inform her of it, the mental block could make her believe that she doesn’t have powers and ignore everything that says otherwise, until she became able to circumvent enough of the mental block to comprehend that, which in turn means that she’s circumvented enough of the block to utilize her powers.
In other words, until she could figure it out herself, even someone telling her the obvious wouldn’t have an effect and would end up being ignored.
I remember there were past times it was pointed out to her. Looked ’em up and found them: 2019-03-28, 2019-11-20. For the former, she tells Lester not to talk about it or press her on it. For the latter, Lester was interrupted.
Even found one where Dynamode talks about it, meaning she’s aware of it: 2019-11-06. But in the same comment, she talks about “wallowing in self-pity”- which is likely part of Psion’s mental block.
That said, well, P&G really did give Dynamode the superpower she needed! 🙂
I hadn’t noticed before, but Tyler is wearing gloves.
Why is he wearing gloves?
Okay, I get that the chaos goop ate his clothes and he needed something to wear, but why did he put on the gloves? For most people, wearing gloves is for when it’s cold or when doing something that requires hand protection. Just wearing gloves is very ‘superhero’ sure, but Tyler isn’t one, and doesn’t particularly want to be one.
I mean, Moonshadow only shows up when Tyler doesn’t think he has any other options, so, why is Tyler wearing gloves?
Calling it now: Next Tyler will give the power potion to Lester, reminding him to play nice or he might lose those powers too.
And Cecil’s coat will eventually eat the chaos orb and level up to full blown symbiote.
I think the orb is no longer in play. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a section of shelves dedicated to lesser items. I suppose the coat could be put through a reverse process to have the orb added With less danger to others but that could have future plot ramifications.
I disagree, Lester doesn’t actually want powers anymore, so I suspect that he might be offered the power potion, and end up becoming worthy of the hammer by rejecting the power potion, so it ends up following him home. I expect it to be a “Korin’s Sacred Water” (from Dragon Ball) situation, where the Power Potion is actually just normal water (possibly dyed), and doesn’t have any actual effects itself, instead just being a McGuffin to cause results.
In something like this case (because I’m assuming a rule that everything in the store needs some sort of connection to Supers), the bottle has an effect of making people believe it’s contents have a known effect that should make it desirable, even when they don’t. In other words, the bottle is a literal McGuffin.
But why would psion do that? Even if he for some reason didn’t think to make her actually destroy her powers, why would he implement this unnecessarily complex scheme instead of just making her be a permanent, powerless kid? What benefit did it serve him to make her be an adult half the time? For that matter why didn’t he just make her kill herself?
Limits of the imprint. She can’t hold an alternate form for too long and the child version was part of ‘depowering’ her. No one would take her seriously as a child. So he set the block so she would relax back into her adult form and miss that it was her own power at work. Seriously there are people with no self reflection. I try and still miss things.
Yeah, that’s close to my interpretation, as well. It’s a combination of trolling (because being a kid only half the time is actively worse than being a kid all of the time; you can’t even have a normal kid-life) and limitations of his own mental blocks. The “wallowing in self-pity” line is crucial: by making sure she had legitimate problems to be miserable about, he strengthened the mental block based on self-pity that kept her from examining the situation.
If self-reflection can let her see the mental block, then enough time just…being a kid…might eventually have gotten her past it.
So maybe power and glory are really there to give power and glory and some educational experience to some of those depowered people going to those seminars? That’s three people from those getting back their powers right here.
When the show is over, the management will turn out to be their councellor, isn’t it?
That would be a pretty solid twist. I’m still kinda holding onto my guess that the potion Tyler got is rather mundane, maybe even soda. Bonus points if he DOES give it away and it just acts like a “magic feather”.
No, their counsellor is Dr. Newby, who has healing powers. This seems like something under the preview of a cosmic entity or two, which I would put under Order & Chaos’s authority, if I thought that Chaos would accept the consistent business model, and if each decision on what would happen didn’t need to be debated between the two of them. So not them, too complicated.
So we need someone with precognition powers, ties to both magic and technology, as well as being trusted to take in super-power granting accessories from those who wish to retire. I’m not sure if we’ve been introduced to anyone who fits that bill, particularly the last bit.
I’m not sure that last bit is necessarily the obstacle you think it is, or a necessary component. Every four years, the US gets together and votes someone in to the office of the President of the US who shouldn’t be trusted with its power. And yet we do it every four years.
It doesn’t really matter what your political party is. If you’re a Democrat, look at Obama’s Guantanamo track record. If you’re a Republican, look at Trump’s SARS2 record. If you’re neither… you probably don’t really need much help, but give the last presidential candidate you seriously thought was a good choice and give them a good look.
As far as what’s really needed – they just need to be able to *get* super-power granting accessories from those who wish to retire, in a manner that doesn’t depower the items. For some of them, that may require trust, but I doubt most of them do. Even some of the ones that ostensibly require trust have a ‘right place right time’ option after they’ve depowered or been abandoned.
The Pokeball has: The third starter. Whichever pokemon is the scissors to the rock you selected, that’s the pokemon in the pokeball. (Your rival took the pokemon that was the paper).
Sigh. I just went back and checked. The one who borked Dynamode’s ability to use her powers was called PSWarp, not Psion. Although “psion” is a generic term for someone with psionic (psychic) powers.
I realize that it’s been 4 years (!), but doesn’t that mean that there’s more time to check the previous pages?
TBH, PSWarp is a dumb name. Maybe it was a typo, and originally meant to be PsiWarp? That’s a more pronounceable, at least.
Oh, and, gaping plot hole: If she always had powers, then shouldn’t Cecil have always been able to detect them? One of the reasons I kept thinking that she really didn’t have powers, in the early part of the story, was because Cecil didn’t say that he got the same power vibe off of her that he got from any other metahuman, when it’s exactly the sort of thing he would have mentioned if it were there.
Cecil doesn’t detect specific powers, just the presence of them. Which is why he was interpreting all the signals as aliens instead of bunch of superheroes out of costume. He got a vibe off of Sarah because she had powers, but he knew she had powers from crashing the meeting. If Revenant was taking the time to train him properly, Cecil probably could’ve reasoned his way to realizing that Dynamode and Sarah had the same vibe and were likely the same person.
Sarah specifically says [2016-04-13]: “He made me use my powers to re-form my body into one that didn’t have superpowers”. She does not say that she just lacks control over those powers, but rather that she is completely lacking those powers.
And as we see further on [2016-04-27, 2016-05-02], Cecil was invisibly present, and was literally right next to her when she confronted Ron and Tyler. At any point, Cecil could have told Tyler: “She said that she doesn’t have powers, but I immediately get the vibe that she’s got something”, and it’s not a detail that he would have kept hidden from his friends. He never says that he gets a vibe from Sarah, in girl form. It’s not until adult Dynamode (whom we don’t even know is Dynamode at first) shows up that he talks about her seeming familiar [2017-01-30] — and it’s appearance that he emphasizes, not “vibe”.
I missed this: [2018-04-25] Cecil does explicitly say “Sarah and Dynamode give off the same meta-vibe!”.
This is the first we see him say that, though. I still think it’s a plot hole that he didn’t mention it before that point, but it’s not as gaping as I first thought.
A paranoid ten year old kid didn’t tell people around him everything he sees and feels? I think I would have been more surprised if he did notice it and pass it along.
There is a reason we don’t have children running things.
Cecil might not trust everyone, but Cecil already trusted Tyler and considered him a fellow agent; someone to be kept in the loop about suspicious things.
In fact, speaking of informing Tyler about suspicions, Cecil specifically mentioned that Lester seemed creepy. That would have been the perfect opportunity to add that Sarah gave off a powered vibe despite claiming to be depowered.
2016-05-02: The confrontation was pretty quick. Sarah was upset and rushed off. We know from the following page that Cecil followed her. This stopped him from telling Tyler and Ron then.
2016-11-07: She came in her child form to the party but Cecil probably didn’t encounter her until after she took a bathroom break where she presumably transformed into her adult form. By then, Cecil was detecting her vibe but it wasn’t matching the appearance he knew of her. There are real life phenomena where changes in appearance and mis-marched signals can create confusion in people, and this probably happened then. He wouldn’t put it together until 2018-04-25, and even then he was still mystified.
“it’s not a detail that he would have kept hidden from his friends.”
I really just think it’s a case of him forgetting to do so. After all, besides missing seeing child Sarah and being confused by seeing adult Sarah, Cecil- with Tyler, Ron, and the Flea were having fun at the partym had to deal with Zodon’s shenanigansm and was trying to keep Tyler’s cover as Moonshadow. In fact, Sarah re-enters the story only after Cecil and Tyler had gotten to Moonshadow’s gear and were going through the ventilation ducks. Both adults and kids can be quite forgetful and easy to distract.
You are forgetting that in 2016-07-12, Tyler discarded his invitation and Sarah picked it up. In 2016-07-25, Cecil has the invite card while talking to Tyler, presumably having gotten close enough to Sarah to sneak it from her. Cecil mentions having hacked the schools database to confirm that she’s not a student, so he’s certainly taking the time to inform Tyler of some details of having investigated her. Yet once again, the meta-human detector mysteriously fails to mention that the person who claims to have no meta-human powers, nevertheless does have meta-human powers.
It’s not consistent with Cecil’s portrayed nosiness, curiosity, abilities, and competence. It’s definitely a plot hole.
I dunno. In Wonderburg, a city teeming with metahumans, would Sarah Bartlett still registering as metahuman against her claim really be so unusual? Especially coming from a group therapy session of ex-metahumans? We did see that Cecil is sensitive enough to tell that Ron lost his FISS powers but still has something left in him; he might have thought it was a similar case with Dynamode.
Besides, in “investigating” her, her loss (or actual non-loss) of her superpowers wasn’t the real question. The question was what she was up to. Sure, it’s motivated by her perceived loss of powers, but her actually having powers would have been secondary to finding out her intentions towards Tyler.
So, her still having some metahuman abilities would have been a minor detail in the grand scheme of these events.
Also, let’s not forget that for all his astuteness, genre-savvy, and spy skills, Cecil’s just a kid. He’s easy to distract- like in the updates you mentioned, where he goes off about cooties and women’s bathrooms. And afterwards, gets wrapped up about crashing Tyler’s party.
That said, if Aaron were to address your concerns, how should he do it? An additional page? Revised dialogue? If we come up with a good suggestion to fix it, Aaron could do it when the book is ready for physical printing.
@Messenger: Yes, I think Sarah having powers when she says that she doesn’t is something that Cecil, at least, would think of as being important enough to mention. Look at how he is with Ron, informing him that there still seem to be powers that he senses, or the tension he feels between his friendship for non-meta-powered Tyler vs his antipathy towards meta-powered Toby.
The question of her intentions towards Tyler must involve the fact that she still has powers. Her entire overt self-description is that she has no powers, and her overt motive is to regain powers. So from Cecil’s perspective, her claim to not have powers is false and deceptive, presumably a deliberate lie, and her claim to desire to regain powers is therefore false as well. He would immediately wonder what purpose the deception holds, and what it hides. As we find out, Sarah is actually deceiving herself, and everything she claims follows from that, but Cecil has no way to know that at the beginning, only that a potential hostile is making an important false claim.
As to fixing this . . . well, maybe something like adding a line on page 2016-05-02 from Cecil about her lying, as well as making threats. Then, 2016-07-25 would be replaced with a couple of pages (the panels could be reused on one of the pages), and the dialog added to, with Cecil stating clearly that Sarah has powers, and he thinks she’s lying about them. Maybe it would be funny if he came up with some convoluted theory for what she’s really up to, maybe an homage to the famous lines from the Simpsons about the Rand Corporation, saucer people, and reverse vampires. Finally, 2018-04-25 needs to change, because Tyler would have already been informed by Cecil that Sarah is “pretending” to have lost her powers. Maybe the wacky conspiracy theory could be referenced.
If that was the case then entering there would mean either using the door or knowing it’s true location. That doesn’t seem accurate given how the intruders entered.
I believe it’s a combination of an automated set up and it being bigger on the inside. It may simply overlap itself onto the new location.
It seems to me like it would be possible for someone who travels via non-Euclidean paths he doesn’t understand to travel to an extra-dimensional space that isn’t actually where he thinks it is.
If Ron could only travel the way he does because he understood the interconnectedness of things, or some crazy thing like that, him not having knowledge about the P&G setup would be problematic. But his power working despite his initial total lack of understanding of how his power works basically allows it to be proof against such shenianigans.
They mention having a boss/manager, although my current theory is it’s just the two of them–no higher power, no boss to report to. They just claim that “the boss said x” to pacify certain customers.
Either way, I get the feeling we’re not going to have a reveal during this arc. We’ll get a silhouette or something at the end of this arc to theorize about for months while another arc goes on.
You’re forgetting the page from 2017-07-24 (3 years ago!), where Charles’ botched teleport into the building left him unconscious inside. Glory and Powers spoke of “management” even though there was no-one to deceive or pacify.
I had a notion that (maybe) redeems Powers & Glory a little.
Maybe their threat to toss Cecil, Ron, & Flea into the “All-Gone Box” is not actually meant sincerely, and their wood golem and battlesuit are also part of a violent-seeming drama, rather than actually meant to hurt the kids.
Maybe they’re going to these lengths of threatening the kids as part of a play meant to manipulate Tyler into drinking the contents of the flask that they gave him.
Looking back, I see that Thisfox already hinted at this idea. Oh, well.
Could be more than that if Tyler or others find and use suitable items from the shelves. Like the (so far) failed hammer use due to not being worthy. It’s to much of a set up with little reasoning but Cecil is as likely as the others Combined. Would be harder to argue the confiscated from a villain angle.
Ok, new theory: At some point Dyna-Mode leans she can now combine powers by using her shape changing powers to merge with an object and then become ‘self aware’ of the new object. Then she either gets recruited by the store’s ‘management’ or she finds a time travelling item and it turns out her future-self IS the store’s management (Self-fulfilling time loop / boot strap paradox)
Love Tyler’s shrug when Ron comments on who figured it out. I think Tyler is quite used to being the smartest one in the room – or at least the one in the room who’s ego/ superpowers doesn’t cause them to miss the obvious.
Some interpretations of Sherlock Holmes don’t have him as particularly smart, he’s just very observant, and actually bothers to think about what he has noticed and what it all means. I think that is Tyler as well. He isn’t so much smart as observant, and actually bothers to think instead of relying on powers to deal with problems.
Some would say that being observant enough and clever enough to figure things out is what being intelligent is all about. Others would say there are different ways of being smart.
I say, what does it really mean to be smart? It feels like people aren’t really very consistent about how they use the term, possibly because they don’t really know themselves. I know I don’t know for sure what it means to be smart.
I feel like most of the evidence Sherlock Homes uses is very circumstantial. There are a lot of things it could mean, and if he wasn’t a fictional character, the other possibilities would be confounding in a lot of cases.
Such as “the victim’s collar was wet underneath, as if it’d been popped in a rainy environment. But she had an umbrella with her, which was relatively dry.” This was used to determine where the victim had been the day before, because there was apparently only one place where it’d been windy and rainy, because “obviously”, “nobody” with an umbrella would not use it for rain unless it was really windy.
Except, the thing is, at college, I did that all the time. My umbrella was mostly a prop to be able to say, “No, I didn’t forget my umbrella, I have it *right* here. I just like walking in rain.” As far as the popped collar goes, sometimes, it would just happen, and I didn’t care enough about fashion or whatever to really care.
Different people are different, and Sherlock is very different – yet doesn’t really seem to acknowledge that other people may also be different. It’s just him, his brother, and Moriarty, Oh, and that woman from America. And even the four of them are still confined to be remarkably normal considering how very different they are.
I like Ron’s subtle defense of Tyler. Credit where credit is due, Dynamode!
Ron is missing the point, however.
She is exactly correct: it didn’t help when everyone else figured this out, only when she caught up.
No, I think you’re missing the point. Psion build the mental block and used her gigantic ego to hold it in place. Even with almost paralyzingly amounts of self-awareness, she’s still massively egotistical. She’s NOT cured; she just has enough leverage to temporarily slip the block.
Now, breaking the block COULD be as simple as thanking Tyler for helping her get control of her powers back. Though, if the block is still there (getting her powers back doesn’t automatically remove it), a sudden flare of egotism could ‘fritz’ her powers again. In fact, she could easily get to a state where the block is still there but not always active. Notice that the block is good enough that she hasn’t thought of simply getting another mentalist to remove it.
Side note to that, I think that her current state is actually kind of a scary one. She previously had nearly complete control of her body. Now, she has nearly complete knowledge of herself. Not only is this likely to lead to a power boost, but I feel like it could result in disabling a lot of important safeguards. “I could be that much more effective if I jettison my moral concerns about this action! Brain activity excised!”
I think I see why Tyler was willing to forgive Ron for pinning everything on Moonshadow for a while. Tyler might be the second most popular kid in his class, right after Moonshadow, but its more pity so its rare for people to point out how awesome Tyler is.
Mental Block. It doesn’t matter how many other people realize it, or even inform her of it, the mental block could make her believe that she doesn’t have powers and ignore everything that says otherwise, until she became able to circumvent enough of the mental block to comprehend that, which in turn means that she’s circumvented enough of the block to utilize her powers.
In other words, until she could figure it out herself, even someone telling her the obvious wouldn’t have an effect and would end up being ignored.
I remember there were past times it was pointed out to her. Looked ’em up and found them: 2019-03-28, 2019-11-20. For the former, she tells Lester not to talk about it or press her on it. For the latter, Lester was interrupted.
Even found one where Dynamode talks about it, meaning she’s aware of it: 2019-11-06. But in the same comment, she talks about “wallowing in self-pity”- which is likely part of Psion’s mental block.
That said, well, P&G really did give Dynamode the superpower she needed! 🙂
Must be something pretty good in that pokéball.
Knowing this bunch, it’s probably a Missingno.
Technically, a Pokèball is amazing enough tech on its own
Might be the genie from Nodwick
Moonshadow needs a mount or pet. Something thematic to him could be interesting.
I hadn’t noticed before, but Tyler is wearing gloves.
Why is he wearing gloves?
Okay, I get that the chaos goop ate his clothes and he needed something to wear, but why did he put on the gloves? For most people, wearing gloves is for when it’s cold or when doing something that requires hand protection. Just wearing gloves is very ‘superhero’ sure, but Tyler isn’t one, and doesn’t particularly want to be one.
I mean, Moonshadow only shows up when Tyler doesn’t think he has any other options, so, why is Tyler wearing gloves?
They came with the costume.
He didn’t put any of these clothes on, that’s what suit-ifier tube stuck on him.
He’s in a surplus “Blue Dragon” costume that was in the machine that ate his chaos goop for him. Two for one deal.
Fingerprints.
Calling it now: Next Tyler will give the power potion to Lester, reminding him to play nice or he might lose those powers too.
And Cecil’s coat will eventually eat the chaos orb and level up to full blown symbiote.
P.s. I really like Dynamode’s new costume.
I think the orb is no longer in play. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a section of shelves dedicated to lesser items. I suppose the coat could be put through a reverse process to have the orb added With less danger to others but that could have future plot ramifications.
I disagree, Lester doesn’t actually want powers anymore, so I suspect that he might be offered the power potion, and end up becoming worthy of the hammer by rejecting the power potion, so it ends up following him home. I expect it to be a “Korin’s Sacred Water” (from Dragon Ball) situation, where the Power Potion is actually just normal water (possibly dyed), and doesn’t have any actual effects itself, instead just being a McGuffin to cause results.
In something like this case (because I’m assuming a rule that everything in the store needs some sort of connection to Supers), the bottle has an effect of making people believe it’s contents have a known effect that should make it desirable, even when they don’t. In other words, the bottle is a literal McGuffin.
But why would psion do that? Even if he for some reason didn’t think to make her actually destroy her powers, why would he implement this unnecessarily complex scheme instead of just making her be a permanent, powerless kid? What benefit did it serve him to make her be an adult half the time? For that matter why didn’t he just make her kill herself?
Obviously, the psion gets their rocks off being a troll to people.
Well, ‘Psion’ probably just has mental powers, so putting in mental blocks is all he could do.. he probably COULDN’T actually take her powers away.
Now, the flip back and forth between adult and child probably was mostly trolling. Or at least making her feel really, really unsafe.
Limits of the imprint. She can’t hold an alternate form for too long and the child version was part of ‘depowering’ her. No one would take her seriously as a child. So he set the block so she would relax back into her adult form and miss that it was her own power at work. Seriously there are people with no self reflection. I try and still miss things.
Yeah, that’s close to my interpretation, as well. It’s a combination of trolling (because being a kid only half the time is actively worse than being a kid all of the time; you can’t even have a normal kid-life) and limitations of his own mental blocks. The “wallowing in self-pity” line is crucial: by making sure she had legitimate problems to be miserable about, he strengthened the mental block based on self-pity that kept her from examining the situation.
If self-reflection can let her see the mental block, then enough time just…being a kid…might eventually have gotten her past it.
So maybe power and glory are really there to give power and glory and some educational experience to some of those depowered people going to those seminars? That’s three people from those getting back their powers right here.
When the show is over, the management will turn out to be their councellor, isn’t it?
That would be a pretty solid twist. I’m still kinda holding onto my guess that the potion Tyler got is rather mundane, maybe even soda. Bonus points if he DOES give it away and it just acts like a “magic feather”.
No, their counsellor is Dr. Newby, who has healing powers. This seems like something under the preview of a cosmic entity or two, which I would put under Order & Chaos’s authority, if I thought that Chaos would accept the consistent business model, and if each decision on what would happen didn’t need to be debated between the two of them. So not them, too complicated.
So we need someone with precognition powers, ties to both magic and technology, as well as being trusted to take in super-power granting accessories from those who wish to retire. I’m not sure if we’ve been introduced to anyone who fits that bill, particularly the last bit.
I’m not sure that last bit is necessarily the obstacle you think it is, or a necessary component. Every four years, the US gets together and votes someone in to the office of the President of the US who shouldn’t be trusted with its power. And yet we do it every four years.
It doesn’t really matter what your political party is. If you’re a Democrat, look at Obama’s Guantanamo track record. If you’re a Republican, look at Trump’s SARS2 record. If you’re neither… you probably don’t really need much help, but give the last presidential candidate you seriously thought was a good choice and give them a good look.
As far as what’s really needed – they just need to be able to *get* super-power granting accessories from those who wish to retire, in a manner that doesn’t depower the items. For some of them, that may require trust, but I doubt most of them do. Even some of the ones that ostensibly require trust have a ‘right place right time’ option after they’ve depowered or been abandoned.
Well, Power and Glory seems to work as advertised.
Wasn’t the supervillain who limited Sarah’s powers called Pswarp, not Psion? Pretty sure it was… http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/2016-04-13/
“Psion” is a description, not a name.
The Pokeball has: The third starter. Whichever pokemon is the scissors to the rock you selected, that’s the pokemon in the pokeball. (Your rival took the pokemon that was the paper).
Sigh. I just went back and checked. The one who borked Dynamode’s ability to use her powers was called PSWarp, not Psion. Although “psion” is a generic term for someone with psionic (psychic) powers.
I realize that it’s been 4 years (!), but doesn’t that mean that there’s more time to check the previous pages?
TBH, PSWarp is a dumb name. Maybe it was a typo, and originally meant to be PsiWarp? That’s a more pronounceable, at least.
Oh, and, gaping plot hole: If she always had powers, then shouldn’t Cecil have always been able to detect them? One of the reasons I kept thinking that she really didn’t have powers, in the early part of the story, was because Cecil didn’t say that he got the same power vibe off of her that he got from any other metahuman, when it’s exactly the sort of thing he would have mentioned if it were there.
Cecil doesn’t detect specific powers, just the presence of them. Which is why he was interpreting all the signals as aliens instead of bunch of superheroes out of costume. He got a vibe off of Sarah because she had powers, but he knew she had powers from crashing the meeting. If Revenant was taking the time to train him properly, Cecil probably could’ve reasoned his way to realizing that Dynamode and Sarah had the same vibe and were likely the same person.
Sarah specifically says [2016-04-13]: “He made me use my powers to re-form my body into one that didn’t have superpowers”. She does not say that she just lacks control over those powers, but rather that she is completely lacking those powers.
And as we see further on [2016-04-27, 2016-05-02], Cecil was invisibly present, and was literally right next to her when she confronted Ron and Tyler. At any point, Cecil could have told Tyler: “She said that she doesn’t have powers, but I immediately get the vibe that she’s got something”, and it’s not a detail that he would have kept hidden from his friends. He never says that he gets a vibe from Sarah, in girl form. It’s not until adult Dynamode (whom we don’t even know is Dynamode at first) shows up that he talks about her seeming familiar [2017-01-30] — and it’s appearance that he emphasizes, not “vibe”.
Plot hole: still gaping.
Oops.
I missed this: [2018-04-25] Cecil does explicitly say “Sarah and Dynamode give off the same meta-vibe!”.
This is the first we see him say that, though. I still think it’s a plot hole that he didn’t mention it before that point, but it’s not as gaping as I first thought.
Bah.
A paranoid ten year old kid didn’t tell people around him everything he sees and feels? I think I would have been more surprised if he did notice it and pass it along.
There is a reason we don’t have children running things.
Cecil might not trust everyone, but Cecil already trusted Tyler and considered him a fellow agent; someone to be kept in the loop about suspicious things.
In fact, speaking of informing Tyler about suspicions, Cecil specifically mentioned that Lester seemed creepy. That would have been the perfect opportunity to add that Sarah gave off a powered vibe despite claiming to be depowered.
2016-05-02: The confrontation was pretty quick. Sarah was upset and rushed off. We know from the following page that Cecil followed her. This stopped him from telling Tyler and Ron then.
2016-11-07: She came in her child form to the party but Cecil probably didn’t encounter her until after she took a bathroom break where she presumably transformed into her adult form. By then, Cecil was detecting her vibe but it wasn’t matching the appearance he knew of her. There are real life phenomena where changes in appearance and mis-marched signals can create confusion in people, and this probably happened then. He wouldn’t put it together until 2018-04-25, and even then he was still mystified.
“it’s not a detail that he would have kept hidden from his friends.”
I really just think it’s a case of him forgetting to do so. After all, besides missing seeing child Sarah and being confused by seeing adult Sarah, Cecil- with Tyler, Ron, and the Flea were having fun at the partym had to deal with Zodon’s shenanigansm and was trying to keep Tyler’s cover as Moonshadow. In fact, Sarah re-enters the story only after Cecil and Tyler had gotten to Moonshadow’s gear and were going through the ventilation ducks. Both adults and kids can be quite forgetful and easy to distract.
You are forgetting that in 2016-07-12, Tyler discarded his invitation and Sarah picked it up. In 2016-07-25, Cecil has the invite card while talking to Tyler, presumably having gotten close enough to Sarah to sneak it from her. Cecil mentions having hacked the schools database to confirm that she’s not a student, so he’s certainly taking the time to inform Tyler of some details of having investigated her. Yet once again, the meta-human detector mysteriously fails to mention that the person who claims to have no meta-human powers, nevertheless does have meta-human powers.
It’s not consistent with Cecil’s portrayed nosiness, curiosity, abilities, and competence. It’s definitely a plot hole.
I dunno. In Wonderburg, a city teeming with metahumans, would Sarah Bartlett still registering as metahuman against her claim really be so unusual? Especially coming from a group therapy session of ex-metahumans? We did see that Cecil is sensitive enough to tell that Ron lost his FISS powers but still has something left in him; he might have thought it was a similar case with Dynamode.
Besides, in “investigating” her, her loss (or actual non-loss) of her superpowers wasn’t the real question. The question was what she was up to. Sure, it’s motivated by her perceived loss of powers, but her actually having powers would have been secondary to finding out her intentions towards Tyler.
So, her still having some metahuman abilities would have been a minor detail in the grand scheme of these events.
Also, let’s not forget that for all his astuteness, genre-savvy, and spy skills, Cecil’s just a kid. He’s easy to distract- like in the updates you mentioned, where he goes off about cooties and women’s bathrooms. And afterwards, gets wrapped up about crashing Tyler’s party.
That said, if Aaron were to address your concerns, how should he do it? An additional page? Revised dialogue? If we come up with a good suggestion to fix it, Aaron could do it when the book is ready for physical printing.
@Messenger: Yes, I think Sarah having powers when she says that she doesn’t is something that Cecil, at least, would think of as being important enough to mention. Look at how he is with Ron, informing him that there still seem to be powers that he senses, or the tension he feels between his friendship for non-meta-powered Tyler vs his antipathy towards meta-powered Toby.
The question of her intentions towards Tyler must involve the fact that she still has powers. Her entire overt self-description is that she has no powers, and her overt motive is to regain powers. So from Cecil’s perspective, her claim to not have powers is false and deceptive, presumably a deliberate lie, and her claim to desire to regain powers is therefore false as well. He would immediately wonder what purpose the deception holds, and what it hides. As we find out, Sarah is actually deceiving herself, and everything she claims follows from that, but Cecil has no way to know that at the beginning, only that a potential hostile is making an important false claim.
As to fixing this . . . well, maybe something like adding a line on page 2016-05-02 from Cecil about her lying, as well as making threats. Then, 2016-07-25 would be replaced with a couple of pages (the panels could be reused on one of the pages), and the dialog added to, with Cecil stating clearly that Sarah has powers, and he thinks she’s lying about them. Maybe it would be funny if he came up with some convoluted theory for what she’s really up to, maybe an homage to the famous lines from the Simpsons about the Rand Corporation, saucer people, and reverse vampires. Finally, 2018-04-25 needs to change, because Tyler would have already been informed by Cecil that Sarah is “pretending” to have lost her powers. Maybe the wacky conspiracy theory could be referenced.
* mis-matched
* with Tyler, Ron, and the Flea- was
*shenanigans,
So the real question at the end of the day is “Who owns the shop?”
The time travelling kid is my second guess, since the agreed consensus is that the Revnent wouldn’t lie to Tylor about not knowing about P&G.
It was abandoned and derelict. I’m not even sure they are paying rent.
The BUILDING is abandoned, but they’re literally just using the store FRONT! The inside is *elsewhere*
If that was the case then entering there would mean either using the door or knowing it’s true location. That doesn’t seem accurate given how the intruders entered.
I believe it’s a combination of an automated set up and it being bigger on the inside. It may simply overlap itself onto the new location.
It seems to me like it would be possible for someone who travels via non-Euclidean paths he doesn’t understand to travel to an extra-dimensional space that isn’t actually where he thinks it is.
If Ron could only travel the way he does because he understood the interconnectedness of things, or some crazy thing like that, him not having knowledge about the P&G setup would be problematic. But his power working despite his initial total lack of understanding of how his power works basically allows it to be proof against such shenianigans.
They mention having a boss/manager, although my current theory is it’s just the two of them–no higher power, no boss to report to. They just claim that “the boss said x” to pacify certain customers.
Either way, I get the feeling we’re not going to have a reveal during this arc. We’ll get a silhouette or something at the end of this arc to theorize about for months while another arc goes on.
You’re forgetting the page from 2017-07-24 (3 years ago!), where Charles’ botched teleport into the building left him unconscious inside. Glory and Powers spoke of “management” even though there was no-one to deceive or pacify.
I had a notion that (maybe) redeems Powers & Glory a little.
Maybe their threat to toss Cecil, Ron, & Flea into the “All-Gone Box” is not actually meant sincerely, and their wood golem and battlesuit are also part of a violent-seeming drama, rather than actually meant to hurt the kids.
Maybe they’re going to these lengths of threatening the kids as part of a play meant to manipulate Tyler into drinking the contents of the flask that they gave him.
Looking back, I see that Thisfox already hinted at this idea. Oh, well.
Actual link to comment by Thisfox.
What coding did you use to embed the link in the text like that?
Could be more than that if Tyler or others find and use suitable items from the shelves. Like the (so far) failed hammer use due to not being worthy. It’s to much of a set up with little reasoning but Cecil is as likely as the others Combined. Would be harder to argue the confiscated from a villain angle.
I’m really liking Dynamode and I hope we see more of her.
Ok, new theory: At some point Dyna-Mode leans she can now combine powers by using her shape changing powers to merge with an object and then become ‘self aware’ of the new object. Then she either gets recruited by the store’s ‘management’ or she finds a time travelling item and it turns out her future-self IS the store’s management (Self-fulfilling time loop / boot strap paradox)
Love Tyler’s shrug when Ron comments on who figured it out. I think Tyler is quite used to being the smartest one in the room – or at least the one in the room who’s ego/ superpowers doesn’t cause them to miss the obvious.
Some interpretations of Sherlock Holmes don’t have him as particularly smart, he’s just very observant, and actually bothers to think about what he has noticed and what it all means. I think that is Tyler as well. He isn’t so much smart as observant, and actually bothers to think instead of relying on powers to deal with problems.
Ahem, incomplete thought; Tyler is used to being the one in the room that figures things out, while others take the credit.
Actually, I think Tyler is ducking whatever hit the shelf above him.
Some would say that being observant enough and clever enough to figure things out is what being intelligent is all about. Others would say there are different ways of being smart.
I say, what does it really mean to be smart? It feels like people aren’t really very consistent about how they use the term, possibly because they don’t really know themselves. I know I don’t know for sure what it means to be smart.
I feel like most of the evidence Sherlock Homes uses is very circumstantial. There are a lot of things it could mean, and if he wasn’t a fictional character, the other possibilities would be confounding in a lot of cases.
Such as “the victim’s collar was wet underneath, as if it’d been popped in a rainy environment. But she had an umbrella with her, which was relatively dry.” This was used to determine where the victim had been the day before, because there was apparently only one place where it’d been windy and rainy, because “obviously”, “nobody” with an umbrella would not use it for rain unless it was really windy.
Except, the thing is, at college, I did that all the time. My umbrella was mostly a prop to be able to say, “No, I didn’t forget my umbrella, I have it *right* here. I just like walking in rain.” As far as the popped collar goes, sometimes, it would just happen, and I didn’t care enough about fashion or whatever to really care.
Different people are different, and Sherlock is very different – yet doesn’t really seem to acknowledge that other people may also be different. It’s just him, his brother, and Moriarty, Oh, and that woman from America. And even the four of them are still confined to be remarkably normal considering how very different they are.
She’s a super skrull now.