Not in the electro-demon way, no…
Worse.
She’s broken, ethically and spiritually. To her, Byron’s second apparent betrayal of the team (first was in Harkey’s arena) has hurt her to the core, and his destruction is the only answer.
Or, Chrissy is incredibly pissed off because “Byron’s idiot player and his stupid personal subplot just got everyone killed again.” So why not stab him a bit? After all, he’s going respawn or whatever. Or, maybe she’ll get lucky and Byron will get wiped from the server like Rachel.
The pending conversation between Syr’nj and Bandit could get very interesting.
I’m still not sure any of the non-tubed players are online for this. We know Rachel’s player wasn’t there for the pixel monster fight, and I think the way the timing works out Penk’s player was running for dear life at the time. They still don’t know Byron and the others are anything other than regular players, and this would be a massive screw with game mechanics as far as they’re concerned, far beyond what a regular player could accomplish.
well we do know all the other plot elements got added to the game.
But i wonder if essentially even though the game world really exists, if maybe the things players interact with is maybe a byproduct. Like the stuff actually happens, the computers record it and then the players play with the recording.
Cus it does seem that the player characters exist (in this world) independent of their players. But i doubt its outright possession.
There is magical madness and chaotic madness. Magical madness is caused by magic, but chaotic madness…. That’s getting the person to go insane by their self making a new recruit for the kill all cult. After all who else do you go to when you can’t figure out how to kill a certain foe?
Ouch. This is just painful to watch, in the sense that I’m not sure how anyone who was here today is going to crawl out of this and back into any semblance of rationality.
This strip is really unnerving. Seeing the happy-go-lucky Bandit yelling a deathwish at a teammate is a mindf*ck. And the twitchy eye in the last panel? Something’s broken inside her, and I don’t mean bones.
We know he has wanted to kill the five for almost forever now. Though we have no idea what the next step would be. I assume there is a next step since H.R. has not deviated from the kill them all plan even after Best’s death failed to really do anything. Granted H.R. sticking to it after that may just be because he has lost his mind.
HR was only initially trying to kill them all just so they would wake up back in Sepia. Once that failed, he was more concerned with not being as all-powerful as he’d thought. Now he’s just trying to assert his ineffable omnipotence by fucking up whatever fate has in store for the Five.
Musical cyber knight mysteriously appears and begins questing and destroying cyber-beastie after Best is “killed” by falling into a deep pit? yep. Definitely Best. Plus, his awesome-ness just oozes.
So who shot those three arrows (which we previously saw had a direct-fire effective range of about 5 paces), in a tight, simultaneous arced volley, evenly spaced and accurate to within a human limb’s thickness?
There’s no time sequence on how long that panel took. Those could easily be spaced over enough time for Syr’Nj to reload and fire. It’s not like Byron’s moving. And Bandit wasn’t paying attention either.
^ This. Plus, those lightweight medic’s crossbows probably have a much lower draw weight than regular crossbows, since only the needle needs to pierce the skin, not the entire bolt. Syr’Nj can probably draw the bow with her fingers, instead of needing two hands and a foot.
There are two things that bug me about weapons portrayed in fantasy art.
One is with archery, the arrow is usually illustrated on the wrong side of the bow.
The other is that bucklers don’t strap to the arm, they’re held in the hand (Targe’s do strap to the arm but not so as you could still use a crossbow).
I blame the late Mr Gygax.
arrows can be fired from either side of a recurve (and left and right handed people can fire from either side). Only compound bows are limited to one side.
Don’t know where you learned to shoot (firing an arrow means setting light to the end, you still then need to shoot it), whenever I tried shooting off the wrong side the arrow comes off sideways and goes way off to the right. (that said, I acknowledge the existence of the asiatic thumb release, which uses the opposite side to the finger release, could never get the hang of it though).
Compounds and modern recurves (and some traditional bows) tend to have a heavily set-back riser which would preclude sensibly attempting the “wrong” side.
True enough, but some modern experimentation into ancient and medieval techniques postulate that they may have used what we would call the offhand side to facilitate a rapid reload, as it means the archer doesn’t need to come across the bow to shoot again.
I use the asiatic release myself, and couldn’t hit a barn door at first. It’s all about practice and a little thought about how you loose the arrow.
If you take the longbow (for example) the bow doesn’t have a riser, and loosing from either side would be possible, by archers of either handedness. In the modern age we have become very set in how we practice archery, perhaps our ancestors were more fluid.
That said in modern media misrepresentations of armaments could just be down to a lack of understanding.
I learned on a cheap, ambidextrous recurve, and spent years shooting with the arrow in the right side of the bow without thinking anything of it. Left side is slightly easier to aim because you don’t have a bow between your eye and the tip of the arrow if you’re drawing to your ear. Right side is faster to reload since you don’t have an arm in the way. so you have shorter paths available for getting the arrow into position, and don’t have to put the arrow in on one side and switch your hand around to the other. (Some speed techniques have you draw with your thumb pointed downward to get around this, but personally I prefer to just put the arrow on the outside.) For female shooters it has the additional advantage that the bottom half of the bow tips away from the body so the string is less likely to snag on anything important.
Modern media misrepresentation of weapons isn’t limited to the medieval ones. Chalk it up to the average screenwriter these days never having actually used any weapons of any type and so never developing any understanding of how they work.
Soo… the character who just brought down a Berserker – which on his last frenzy terrified Harky (who on his own defeated the whole party), killed or knocked out at least two members of the party within seconds and on this frenzy infected almost a whole village – withouth even getting infected is “nothing but trouble and baggage”? Or, as you put it before: “honeslty i hope Bandit dies she’sa tool to begin with and never really did do alot for the team other than cause mischief so go byron go!”?
I have to agree with you here. Bandit’s not my favorite character but what she’s doing seems absolutely reasonable. Reasonable in the sense that I think she’s traumatized after being KILLED by Byron herself, and while knowing also that he’s been a danger for as long as berserking has been a risk.
Not to mention, I still think Byron’s very much dead at this moment in time and has been since being stabbed in the chest by the cultist leader pages ago.
Syr’nj better have some serious Res potions up her sleeve. I feel bad though, that no one witnessed Byron being stabbed and infected so it looks like there’s a possibility of Bandit being blamed for turning on her comrade for no reason.
I dunno… if bandit had died i would have stayed quiet… But isn’t it funny that she beat byron on her own? Not a single scratch? :D Oooooh here comes the zerker! -a single person stops it.
Can’t realy complain, I got my 2nd battleshire, but the “grrr I’m mad!” peeps were sluggish compared to what we saw in the savages arena.
I can understand Bragster being slow. he’s huge…
I can understand Bert ‘cos he has no functioning legs…
I can even see the gnome mage not mooving around much…
But Astoria for example would have made a perfect candidate, for the speedy kind.
Guess I’ll let the story unfold to see why they were soo damn slow.
Could just be as simple as he’s learned a lot more self-control. I mean, when Bandit jumped him, it looked like now that a lot of the rage demons had left him for other hosts he was mostly just standing there. Would not surprise me in the least if Byron was fighting this as hard as he could, and was doing so more effectively than he was in the past.
Massive and ongoing trauma of the “stabbed and pummeled and tied to a slab and stabbed some more and a few crits from Bandit before the fight even REALLY got going” variety tends to slow even the zerkiest zerker down a teensy bit. Something about all those tendons being cut.
It might be just the dramatic art style the creators were going for…
What i’m saying here is this. All you see here are solid shots of him swinging in a huge arc.
Chapter 8 page 23 panel 1 he looks like he’s doing the frenzy from dio 2. :D
Same page panel 3 to panel 4 readjust grip on axes (flips them), switches to side swings from tops and connects the blow by the time Frigg straightens her ams.
(…and that was actualy a pretty smart move for a zerker.)
The spin from Chapter 8s page 20 panel 4 that many bashed on?
Well… Not that it matters, realy. All i was saying that this time around he didn’t seem like zerking apart from the appearance. but rather just mad and trashing around. Last time he showed some level of inteligence.
Maybe it realy had something to do with all the other c.demons in him. Or just the art style.
The thing is Bandit has seen just how fast he can move, and how strong he is.
If you go back you’ll notice that frequently people who get KOd by berserkers make nasty assumptions. Like “I can talk reason into him” or “if i stab him in the neck or cut off his head he will stop moving”
If you know not to make these assumptions its all a matter of timing your dodges and stabs without the assumption that anything you do will slow them down.
Definately not possible for real humans, but adventurers are extrodionary
also, i think this needs to be viewed more as a highly contagious virus, than a tank spawner. the risk is not how powerful the enemy is, but how easily your allies can switch teams while fighting them.
Yeah i was sorta more reminded of a zombie infection by this too. Also i figured this zerker state would be more of an effect, rather than the player having control over it.
Also, byron was the only survivor of the last brawl. So not sure about the teams part. I figured they would start to infight at some point. We’ll see.
Yeah, that’s something I’ve been wondering about for a few updates now. I don’t think this is the same method by which Byron became berserk the first time and apparently not as powerful. I was kinda hoping his original berserk possessing force would shrug off the new one but its beginning to look like I was wrong even though as you say it really doesn’t look the same.
Its not the same. Brother Tom is unfamiliar with this method and at first thought that Homon was deviating from the plan. Plus the demons came from Cyberia and I believe Escape from Cyberia is a relatively new game in Sepia World.
I believe you. Though I will say its possible that game was in development at the time The Five came to be tubed and given the unique way H.R. makes games might have been running after some fashion somewhere on his own machines?
I think it IS the same method, only now, as Brother Tom said, on a MUCH larger scale. Look at Chapter 13, Page 19, when Gravedust sees what’s possessing Byron. I think that looks not unlike the electro-demons we’ve since seen, if more heavily textured and whatnot.
Mordecai – great point. Remember that one village that got destroyed back in Chapter 5 (re-read page 4). There was some “half-forgotten” magic there. Maybe that is because it was from a different game…
“Aw, c’mon Syr’nj, stop the damn RP for once! He ruined the damn raid, so I killed him. I overreacted, yeah, but we’ll rez him later, just like last time. Jeez, you’re acting like this is real!”
My guess is that *Bandit’s player* might type all that, and it’d appear in the chat window, but none of the Big Four would respond to it – as far as she’s concerned, just continuing to be RP-obsessive D-bags…
..However, in Arkera, *Bandit Keynes herself* would say something totally different, or nothing at all. In other words, there’s a magical Fourth Wall Filter in place between Sepia World and Arkera. Otherwise *someone* would have broken character by now.
(Not got time to trawl the archives for it now but I’m sure I remember that during the Guildies’ Axemas Meal in Sepia World there was discussion of how the Big FOur don’t break character “like EVER” because they’re such dedicated RP’ers, implying that that’s not the case for the whole guild… I mean, those who met up for Axemas must’ve broken character to swap contact details, but we don’t see that in Arkera)
So he’s been stabbed in a normally lethal manner, forced to fight while taking minor to middling damage for an 1/2 hour to an hour (not sure what travel time to village was), and now repeatedly slashed and stabbed in the vital organ area. I love that this can be fixed. Clearly Syr’NJ believes she can anyway. I would kind of think that we were already in Rez territory but I guess his level is enough higher than Bandit that she can stab him for a bit without using all his Health up. I wonder how her magically enforced role playing makes sense of that as a doctor? (seeing as how there are probably plenty of beings Bandit could stab once or twice and they would simply perish) Maybe she thinks the Berserk Possession preserves the dissected flesh somewhat if they treat him before he comes out of it??
Bandit and Syr’NJ might have a little future tension over this, maybe though she’s being pretty professional right now, but I don’t think Byron will have any issue with her stabbing him to “death”. Given his past actions when the same thing happened to him and his guilt over the whole berserk thing in general.
Hmmm…anyone else notice that Byron is not in the tags, even though he is at least as visible as E-Merl (who is tagged) is in the background? Omission…or hint?
And–this is unrelated–is it “Ee-Murl”, “or something more like “Emiril” (Eh-Mer’l)? Been wondering that forever…
That seems uncalled for… It’s obvious she’s not in her right mind. She probably has trauma from being killed by Byron herself ages ago, and after seeing him just infect all her friends who are now murdering each other, she’s throwing what I think to be a temper tantrum that we can’t really blame her for. This Bandit’s PTSD, so to speak.
Sure, she’s overreacting now that Byron’s down, and a demotion might be in her future and a bunch of interrogation since no one saw what happened to Byron before he showed up at the village, but she’s actually already died once. By the hand of a friend, no less. No need to go out again, screaming.
I find it stupid that shes holding a grudge against the guy who was clearly being mentally controlled by a cultist that she herself personally heard SAY THAT, and if she gave him any credit whatsoever instead of being a ass about it, would have figured ‘Hey, maybe he did not, in fact, have a choice or desire to be stuffed full of demons and unleashed on his friends.’
But no, no clearly he did it all on purpose. So yes, I stand by my prior statement of screaming and dying.
So let me get this right: You consider it “stupid”, that someone who has been killed (which should belong to the more trauma inducing ways of being treated in my estimation) by being trisected was “a ass about it”? Because she didn’t show much empathy and didn’t consider, that the person himself having executed the killing wasn’t in control?
But Wait, There’s More! Not only you think this is stupid, but your consequence is that the obviously utterly traumatized person (who, by the way has a sensible point – see ch. 36, p. 38, where it is spelled out for anyone who still didn’t get the gist) should “fuck off and die screaming”?
Wow. After you repeated this I’m assuming that, to put it mildly, neither empathy nor proportionality are your strong suits.
Yes. Because no one else has had this reaction, only Bandit. She is the one currently losing her shit over something that everyone else in the party also experienced. She is the one holding the grudge, and frankly its blinding her to the real cause of it all, which has driven her to be spending time stabbing a already downed foe while the rest of her teammates are killing and or being killed.
This is not the action of a leader. She either needs to get help, or leave.
Also yes.
And to some degree also yes. Do I care about people? Yes. I wouldn’t be a firefighter if I didn’t. Does this mean I have to have a bleeding heart for every person I meet or read about in fiction, especially if I find their actions repugnant? No.
I had been missing Erica’s art style for years… while all the time the Waltrips were incrementally improving theirs. Just looked up Byron’s first (displayed) frenzy and wow – what a huge difference. Great work!
She has a lot of anger… I half wonder if there’s some personal history beyond what we’ve seen, but she didn’t react badly tot he first beserk. I think it’s just. That feeling of betrayal still haunts her. :/ And that feeling that he’s a ticking time bomb that could destroy her friends and the life she’s managed to build.
Dang… Bandit ganked Byron… does it count as kill stealing when your team mate just wants you to not kill your other team mate?
yes. because no matter what they say, they really just wanted to kill that guy.
Everyone’s making a lot of pointed arguments.
This is going to cut into their relationship.
Pretty sure Bandit’s not even berzerk’d.
Not in the electro-demon way, no…
Worse.
She’s broken, ethically and spiritually. To her, Byron’s second apparent betrayal of the team (first was in Harkey’s arena) has hurt her to the core, and his destruction is the only answer.
being cut neatly into thirds tends to skew your world views;)
Actually…Not so neatly.
Or, Chrissy is incredibly pissed off because “Byron’s idiot player and his stupid personal subplot just got everyone killed again.” So why not stab him a bit? After all, he’s going respawn or whatever. Or, maybe she’ll get lucky and Byron will get wiped from the server like Rachel.
The pending conversation between Syr’nj and Bandit could get very interesting.
I’m still not sure any of the non-tubed players are online for this. We know Rachel’s player wasn’t there for the pixel monster fight, and I think the way the timing works out Penk’s player was running for dear life at the time. They still don’t know Byron and the others are anything other than regular players, and this would be a massive screw with game mechanics as far as they’re concerned, far beyond what a regular player could accomplish.
well we do know all the other plot elements got added to the game.
But i wonder if essentially even though the game world really exists, if maybe the things players interact with is maybe a byproduct. Like the stuff actually happens, the computers record it and then the players play with the recording.
Cus it does seem that the player characters exist (in this world) independent of their players. But i doubt its outright possession.
I agree with Loquat. I think the non-tubed players are not online.
Oh, she is. But it’s 100% organic, all-natural berserk. That’s some locally-grown unbridled rage, with no additives or preservatives.
So sad. If she wasn’t so focused on repeatedly killing him/getting revenge, she may have helped Rabbit.
There is magical madness and chaotic madness. Magical madness is caused by magic, but chaotic madness…. That’s getting the person to go insane by their self making a new recruit for the kill all cult. After all who else do you go to when you can’t figure out how to kill a certain foe?
SCIENCE SHALL PREVAIL, BANDITA. Resistance is futile.
Especially with that kind of RoF. That’s not a crossbow, it’s a machine gun. For syringes.
I so want one of those. Maybe the ‘Sharper Image’ catalog…
By the welder! You’d need it in .45
To be safer though, you should make sure that it’s all made with hypo-allergenic materials.
Potion of swiftness, as she mentioned before the medics engaged.
Ouch. This is just painful to watch, in the sense that I’m not sure how anyone who was here today is going to crawl out of this and back into any semblance of rationality.
This strip is really unnerving. Seeing the happy-go-lucky Bandit yelling a deathwish at a teammate is a mindf*ck. And the twitchy eye in the last panel? Something’s broken inside her, and I don’t mean bones.
Dunno, that could just be the anti-zerker potion. It must have some kind of anesthetic or tranquilizer to help them stay down.
I think Bandit’s twitchy eyes are due to her anger. Syr’Nj needs to tranquil-eyes her.
yeah. I still don’t see what HR gets out of this.
We know he has wanted to kill the five for almost forever now. Though we have no idea what the next step would be. I assume there is a next step since H.R. has not deviated from the kill them all plan even after Best’s death failed to really do anything. Granted H.R. sticking to it after that may just be because he has lost his mind.
HR was only initially trying to kill them all just so they would wake up back in Sepia. Once that failed, he was more concerned with not being as all-powerful as he’d thought. Now he’s just trying to assert his ineffable omnipotence by fucking up whatever fate has in store for the Five.
And he still doesn’t know that Best is not even dead. He couldn’t tell that he came back as the Cyber Warrior guy.
Wait what? O_O He came back as the Cyber Warrior guy? When was that revealed…?
It wasn’t, but it’s kinda obvious.
Not to me clearly. XD But I guess we’ll see.
Musical cyber knight mysteriously appears and begins questing and destroying cyber-beastie after Best is “killed” by falling into a deep pit? yep. Definitely Best. Plus, his awesome-ness just oozes.
One full broadside of science coming up.
So who shot those three arrows (which we previously saw had a direct-fire effective range of about 5 paces), in a tight, simultaneous arced volley, evenly spaced and accurate to within a human limb’s thickness?
They’re not arrows, they’re Syr’Nj’s … uh, syringes.
Syringe-tipped arrows are still arrows.
Actually, they are bolts, not arrows
Don’t mess with someone who’s spent their entire life competing against scientific tolerances.
There’s no time sequence on how long that panel took. Those could easily be spaced over enough time for Syr’Nj to reload and fire. It’s not like Byron’s moving. And Bandit wasn’t paying attention either.
They were all within a short enough span from each other than the motion-blur is still visible.
Syr’nj doesn’t show off her crossbow skills that often, but she really is just that good with them. :P
An expert elven archer under the effects of a potion of swiftness?
^ This. Plus, those lightweight medic’s crossbows probably have a much lower draw weight than regular crossbows, since only the needle needs to pierce the skin, not the entire bolt. Syr’Nj can probably draw the bow with her fingers, instead of needing two hands and a foot.
There are two things that bug me about weapons portrayed in fantasy art.
One is with archery, the arrow is usually illustrated on the wrong side of the bow.
The other is that bucklers don’t strap to the arm, they’re held in the hand (Targe’s do strap to the arm but not so as you could still use a crossbow).
I blame the late Mr Gygax.
I blame him for a lot of things, too.
arrows can be fired from either side of a recurve (and left and right handed people can fire from either side). Only compound bows are limited to one side.
Don’t know where you learned to shoot (firing an arrow means setting light to the end, you still then need to shoot it), whenever I tried shooting off the wrong side the arrow comes off sideways and goes way off to the right. (that said, I acknowledge the existence of the asiatic thumb release, which uses the opposite side to the finger release, could never get the hang of it though).
Compounds and modern recurves (and some traditional bows) tend to have a heavily set-back riser which would preclude sensibly attempting the “wrong” side.
True enough, but some modern experimentation into ancient and medieval techniques postulate that they may have used what we would call the offhand side to facilitate a rapid reload, as it means the archer doesn’t need to come across the bow to shoot again.
I use the asiatic release myself, and couldn’t hit a barn door at first. It’s all about practice and a little thought about how you loose the arrow.
If you take the longbow (for example) the bow doesn’t have a riser, and loosing from either side would be possible, by archers of either handedness. In the modern age we have become very set in how we practice archery, perhaps our ancestors were more fluid.
That said in modern media misrepresentations of armaments could just be down to a lack of understanding.
I learned on a cheap, ambidextrous recurve, and spent years shooting with the arrow in the right side of the bow without thinking anything of it. Left side is slightly easier to aim because you don’t have a bow between your eye and the tip of the arrow if you’re drawing to your ear. Right side is faster to reload since you don’t have an arm in the way. so you have shorter paths available for getting the arrow into position, and don’t have to put the arrow in on one side and switch your hand around to the other. (Some speed techniques have you draw with your thumb pointed downward to get around this, but personally I prefer to just put the arrow on the outside.) For female shooters it has the additional advantage that the bottom half of the bow tips away from the body so the string is less likely to snag on anything important.
Modern media misrepresentation of weapons isn’t limited to the medieval ones. Chalk it up to the average screenwriter these days never having actually used any weapons of any type and so never developing any understanding of how they work.
Called it Bandits nothing but trouble and baggage DEATH TO THE CHIBI!!!!!!!!!!!!
Soo… the character who just brought down a Berserker – which on his last frenzy terrified Harky (who on his own defeated the whole party), killed or knocked out at least two members of the party within seconds and on this frenzy infected almost a whole village – withouth even getting infected is “nothing but trouble and baggage”? Or, as you put it before: “honeslty i hope Bandit dies she’sa tool to begin with and never really did do alot for the team other than cause mischief so go byron go!”?
Your thinking seems strange to me.
I have to agree with you here. Bandit’s not my favorite character but what she’s doing seems absolutely reasonable. Reasonable in the sense that I think she’s traumatized after being KILLED by Byron herself, and while knowing also that he’s been a danger for as long as berserking has been a risk.
Not to mention, I still think Byron’s very much dead at this moment in time and has been since being stabbed in the chest by the cultist leader pages ago.
Syr’nj better have some serious Res potions up her sleeve. I feel bad though, that no one witnessed Byron being stabbed and infected so it looks like there’s a possibility of Bandit being blamed for turning on her comrade for no reason.
I wouldn’t worry to much about that – there should be still some alive who have seen Byron go full Berserk.
Plus everyone probably noted the firestorm of electro-dudes pouring out of his body a few pages back.
I dunno… if bandit had died i would have stayed quiet… But isn’t it funny that she beat byron on her own? Not a single scratch? :D Oooooh here comes the zerker! -a single person stops it.
Can’t realy complain, I got my 2nd battleshire, but the “grrr I’m mad!” peeps were sluggish compared to what we saw in the savages arena.
I can understand Bragster being slow. he’s huge…
I can understand Bert ‘cos he has no functioning legs…
I can even see the gnome mage not mooving around much…
But Astoria for example would have made a perfect candidate, for the speedy kind.
Guess I’ll let the story unfold to see why they were soo damn slow.
Each of these types of bezerkers are basically energy creatures in meat suits. They may have trouble figuring out how to move around.
“What the hell do half these buttons do?!”
“Hey guys, mine has a flamethrower!”
“Damnit, mine is broken!”
“Lag!”
I suppose thats true for the new guys… but whats “Mr i was zerkin ‘for it was cool”s excuse?
Could just be as simple as he’s learned a lot more self-control. I mean, when Bandit jumped him, it looked like now that a lot of the rage demons had left him for other hosts he was mostly just standing there. Would not surprise me in the least if Byron was fighting this as hard as he could, and was doing so more effectively than he was in the past.
Rogues are ultimate gankers. Just look at those backstabs.
Massive and ongoing trauma of the “stabbed and pummeled and tied to a slab and stabbed some more and a few crits from Bandit before the fight even REALLY got going” variety tends to slow even the zerkiest zerker down a teensy bit. Something about all those tendons being cut.
He never zerked by being filled with electro demons before. Plus HE didn’t really seem that slow.
It might be just the dramatic art style the creators were going for…
What i’m saying here is this. All you see here are solid shots of him swinging in a huge arc.
Chapter 8 page 23 panel 1 he looks like he’s doing the frenzy from dio 2. :D
Same page panel 3 to panel 4 readjust grip on axes (flips them), switches to side swings from tops and connects the blow by the time Frigg straightens her ams.
(…and that was actualy a pretty smart move for a zerker.)
The spin from Chapter 8s page 20 panel 4 that many bashed on?
Well… Not that it matters, realy. All i was saying that this time around he didn’t seem like zerking apart from the appearance. but rather just mad and trashing around. Last time he showed some level of inteligence.
Maybe it realy had something to do with all the other c.demons in him. Or just the art style.
The thing is Bandit has seen just how fast he can move, and how strong he is.
If you go back you’ll notice that frequently people who get KOd by berserkers make nasty assumptions. Like “I can talk reason into him” or “if i stab him in the neck or cut off his head he will stop moving”
If you know not to make these assumptions its all a matter of timing your dodges and stabs without the assumption that anything you do will slow them down.
Definately not possible for real humans, but adventurers are extrodionary
also, i think this needs to be viewed more as a highly contagious virus, than a tank spawner. the risk is not how powerful the enemy is, but how easily your allies can switch teams while fighting them.
Yeah i was sorta more reminded of a zombie infection by this too. Also i figured this zerker state would be more of an effect, rather than the player having control over it.
Also, byron was the only survivor of the last brawl. So not sure about the teams part. I figured they would start to infight at some point. We’ll see.
Yeah, that’s something I’ve been wondering about for a few updates now. I don’t think this is the same method by which Byron became berserk the first time and apparently not as powerful. I was kinda hoping his original berserk possessing force would shrug off the new one but its beginning to look like I was wrong even though as you say it really doesn’t look the same.
Its not the same. Brother Tom is unfamiliar with this method and at first thought that Homon was deviating from the plan. Plus the demons came from Cyberia and I believe Escape from Cyberia is a relatively new game in Sepia World.
I believe you. Though I will say its possible that game was in development at the time The Five came to be tubed and given the unique way H.R. makes games might have been running after some fashion somewhere on his own machines?
I think it IS the same method, only now, as Brother Tom said, on a MUCH larger scale. Look at Chapter 13, Page 19, when Gravedust sees what’s possessing Byron. I think that looks not unlike the electro-demons we’ve since seen, if more heavily textured and whatnot.
Mordecai – great point. Remember that one village that got destroyed back in Chapter 5 (re-read page 4). There was some “half-forgotten” magic there. Maybe that is because it was from a different game…
or because HR did it from Sepia-world
“Aw, c’mon Syr’nj, stop the damn RP for once! He ruined the damn raid, so I killed him. I overreacted, yeah, but we’ll rez him later, just like last time. Jeez, you’re acting like this is real!”
That kinda sentence is what I am waiting for like years by now. Impressive how nobody has broken character so far. XDDD
My guess is that *Bandit’s player* might type all that, and it’d appear in the chat window, but none of the Big Four would respond to it – as far as she’s concerned, just continuing to be RP-obsessive D-bags…
..However, in Arkera, *Bandit Keynes herself* would say something totally different, or nothing at all. In other words, there’s a magical Fourth Wall Filter in place between Sepia World and Arkera. Otherwise *someone* would have broken character by now.
(Not got time to trawl the archives for it now but I’m sure I remember that during the Guildies’ Axemas Meal in Sepia World there was discussion of how the Big FOur don’t break character “like EVER” because they’re such dedicated RP’ers, implying that that’s not the case for the whole guild… I mean, those who met up for Axemas must’ve broken character to swap contact details, but we don’t see that in Arkera)
Remember that most of this action occurs while Bandit is offline. Rachel was de-pixelated while her user was asleep.
Told ya bandit wouldn’t get Byroned a second time around. Syr’Njed, though… not so sure.
Oh FFS Bandit! You’re still stabbing him as if he’s going “Ow” each time! Getting Tri-Fruitcaked isn’t a good excuse you know!
So he’s been stabbed in a normally lethal manner, forced to fight while taking minor to middling damage for an 1/2 hour to an hour (not sure what travel time to village was), and now repeatedly slashed and stabbed in the vital organ area. I love that this can be fixed. Clearly Syr’NJ believes she can anyway. I would kind of think that we were already in Rez territory but I guess his level is enough higher than Bandit that she can stab him for a bit without using all his Health up. I wonder how her magically enforced role playing makes sense of that as a doctor? (seeing as how there are probably plenty of beings Bandit could stab once or twice and they would simply perish) Maybe she thinks the Berserk Possession preserves the dissected flesh somewhat if they treat him before he comes out of it??
Bandit and Syr’NJ might have a little future tension over this, maybe though she’s being pretty professional right now, but I don’t think Byron will have any issue with her stabbing him to “death”. Given his past actions when the same thing happened to him and his guilt over the whole berserk thing in general.
please… you can always to science to it
Yes, but then you do guilt to the science, and circle of kill starts all over again.
That alt text….
….over is DEFINITELY not safer. Unless you really hate your intestines.
Will the antidote work against crazy berserk as well as demonic berserk?
I don’t get why Syr’Nj wants to save Byron. It’s *pointless* now.
Hmmm…anyone else notice that Byron is not in the tags, even though he is at least as visible as E-Merl (who is tagged) is in the background? Omission…or hint?
And–this is unrelated–is it “Ee-Murl”, “or something more like “Emiril” (Eh-Mer’l)? Been wondering that forever…
He’s dead, Jim.
He’s probably okay, right?
Tis just a flesh wound!
Bandit… please. You’re above this.
*reads hovertext*
Or below. Whatever.
But yeah, all this is…
just…
-_-
There are no words.
<-
: PVP enable
: PVP ENABLE SUCCESS
: LOGOUT
: LOGGED OUT
I’d feel better about Syr’nj’s chances if she had a proper Broadhead nocked.
Guess she bears no quarrel, and all, but that’s not gonna help her here.
Oh fuck off and die screaming Bandit.
That seems uncalled for… It’s obvious she’s not in her right mind. She probably has trauma from being killed by Byron herself ages ago, and after seeing him just infect all her friends who are now murdering each other, she’s throwing what I think to be a temper tantrum that we can’t really blame her for. This Bandit’s PTSD, so to speak.
Sure, she’s overreacting now that Byron’s down, and a demotion might be in her future and a bunch of interrogation since no one saw what happened to Byron before he showed up at the village, but she’s actually already died once. By the hand of a friend, no less. No need to go out again, screaming.
You obviously don’t know the one rule of GA.
I don’t understand this dislike of Bandit. Is it because she acts like a real person? I hope you don’t talk about real people like this.
I find it stupid that shes holding a grudge against the guy who was clearly being mentally controlled by a cultist that she herself personally heard SAY THAT, and if she gave him any credit whatsoever instead of being a ass about it, would have figured ‘Hey, maybe he did not, in fact, have a choice or desire to be stuffed full of demons and unleashed on his friends.’
But no, no clearly he did it all on purpose. So yes, I stand by my prior statement of screaming and dying.
So let me get this right: You consider it “stupid”, that someone who has been killed (which should belong to the more trauma inducing ways of being treated in my estimation) by being trisected was “a ass about it”? Because she didn’t show much empathy and didn’t consider, that the person himself having executed the killing wasn’t in control?
But Wait, There’s More! Not only you think this is stupid, but your consequence is that the obviously utterly traumatized person (who, by the way has a sensible point – see ch. 36, p. 38, where it is spelled out for anyone who still didn’t get the gist) should “fuck off and die screaming”?
Wow. After you repeated this I’m assuming that, to put it mildly, neither empathy nor proportionality are your strong suits.
Yes. Because no one else has had this reaction, only Bandit. She is the one currently losing her shit over something that everyone else in the party also experienced. She is the one holding the grudge, and frankly its blinding her to the real cause of it all, which has driven her to be spending time stabbing a already downed foe while the rest of her teammates are killing and or being killed.
This is not the action of a leader. She either needs to get help, or leave.
Also yes.
And to some degree also yes. Do I care about people? Yes. I wouldn’t be a firefighter if I didn’t. Does this mean I have to have a bleeding heart for every person I meet or read about in fiction, especially if I find their actions repugnant? No.
Holy shit. Bandit is unsettling like this. She has snapped.
I had been missing Erica’s art style for years… while all the time the Waltrips were incrementally improving theirs. Just looked up Byron’s first (displayed) frenzy and wow – what a huge difference. Great work!
Now she’s going to be SUPER CALM. Watch out, Syr!
I love Bandit’s “Ow!” face.
She has a lot of anger… I half wonder if there’s some personal history beyond what we’ve seen, but she didn’t react badly tot he first beserk. I think it’s just. That feeling of betrayal still haunts her. :/ And that feeling that he’s a ticking time bomb that could destroy her friends and the life she’s managed to build.