Skin Horse
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Skin Horse by Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.skin-horse.com.
©2007-2018 Skin Horse Powered by WordPress with ComicPress
And they wonder why he fights for a future that has her in it.
“A bad vibe”? AG-I gives off an insanely incompetent vibe. That’s well beyond “bad”. Panoptica and maybe Shelby seem to be the only reasonably intelligent members, and even they still lean heavy toward clueless. All the other AG-I agents seem to have IQs that are desperately trying to catch up with their shoe size. No wonder Nick couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Granted, the SH team can make their fair share of dumb mistakes, but even Unity comes off as smarter than these guys most of the time — and especially when she’s high on brains.
The “bad” part for me is that, from the beginning, they’ve shown a distinct anti-nonhuman bias.
Definitely. It makes me wonder if they’ve even tried talking to this Sea Monster, for example.
And even a bias against normal humans.
They’re a bunch of murdering sociopaths.
Well, so is H.T. — the difference being that H.T., in comparison to these guys, is relatively intelligent.
This is why a policy of only hiring “enhanced” humans isn’t smart. Shelby’s powers are basically useless for anything other than qualifying him to be here and they’ve already indicated they need a new IT person, which position Nera is clearly overqualified for.
Besides, it’s not like “enhanced” or “modified” human status is actually hard to attain. Just go ask Marcy for an irradiated animal that you want to gain the powers of, and there you go. Alternately Dr. Lee is an admittedly less pleasant option and then there’s always the Mad Science community. Plenty of opportunity.
One would think AG-I would keep some of that stuff on hand.
Superpowers as a signing bonus would change things from discrimination to an awesome hiring bonus.
Or just have Chris and Marcie irradiate you directly.
Hmmm…. given those options, I think I’d go look up Helen and Dave and see what they could do. I’d much rather be a biochemically-engineered, morphically-unstable superintelligent gerbil or a cyborg than anything we’ve seen here. (Although if I wanted to be a cyborg, I rather have Virginia digging around in my head than Dave.)
And it occurs to me that if Helen has isolated the genetic formula for mad genius so that she could cure it, that means she could also induce it.
Why would you have Virginia do it? Have you seen her track record? Everything she creates she installs a very sensible killswitch in, and then gives it a trigger phrase related to a breakfast food.
I can’t live my life like that!
Yessss…. You make a not-unsubstantiated point. But she only installs the killswitch so her employers can control whatever it was she was contracted to design. If she was doing a free-lance job, she wouldn’t need to install that. Yeah, I know… she might do it anyway, even if only out of habit. But still, she’s a LOT better looking than Dave. I know, because I look a lot like Dave, and she’s a LOT better looking than me. And call me shallow, but that counts for something.
We still haven’t Virginia yet – maybe AG1 looked at how she used her super-suit on the Red Knight and hired her. It’d make Nick’s day to see her dressed like that again.
Nena does have a superpower, it is just not physical but mental, she is very good with computers.
Nera’s being a genius doesn’t qualify her as “enhanced”. This also applies to Chrisn’s comment above. Just because Virginia is hyperintelligent doesn’t mean she gets to join their exclusive club.
It’s the same way Iron Man and Syndrome TOTALLY don’t have superpowers you guys…
Never mind that a good gageteer is probably the most dangerous super out there. They keep on improving their gear and getting tougher, while most other powers are static. Plus, while it probably violates some rules of the Hero Union, they can give their gear to OTHER PEOPLE.
Yeah, but we’re talking about AG-I here, and Panoptica made it fairly clear — albeit only implied — that you have to have some sort of actual modification or mutation — whether it’s cybernetic like Nick, or radiation like Jonah — to be invited to join.
Which begs the question, what exactly was Red Knight’s super power? Or did they change the requirement because of Red Knight, just to make sure that their recruits had some kind of super power besides just being a super ass?
(Yes, a gadgeteer’s gear can be given to others. Conversely, their gear can also be stolen or even copied, whereas a mutant’s powers for the most part cannot. Case(s) in point — when Rhodey stole Iron Man’s suit, or when Virginia suited up with Red Knight’s spare parts.)
They had that rule long before Red Knight, it’s why they rejected Unity: http://skin-horse.com/comic/you-will-not/
Point. But then again, they said Unity wasn’t human, period. So all we know for sure back then was that you had to be human.
Tony Stark and Buddy (aka Syndrome) have the same superpower that Bruce Wayne does: they’re filthy stinkin rich.
Jonah: It’s not you.
Narrator: It was totally about her.
Unless AG-I are part of the FBI they have no authority to be running investigations of other Federal Agencies and Panoptica and Shelby infiltrating Skin Horse would be a crime. So yeah – bad vibe. I can see why Nick wanted out. If I were Sweetheart I’d be whistleblowing the crap out of this.
Eh. This is the shadow government, though. Having secret agencies infiltrate and spy on other agencies is probably par for the course.
This result pleases me.
Bad vibe, huh? Wonder if there’s any chance September really is Mr Green…
So who’s fixing Nick, and are they up to it?
Robert Nowell: They were, until some maniac ran a virus which made the tools they were using to do it malfunction.
Or maybe not.
So far, we’ve run into (1) Shelby, who can lift pencils with his mind, (2) Bubbles, who can carry water, (3) Alfie Cobra, moody adolescent, (4) Goose Girl, who can talk all in capitals, (5) Cinderblock, who can thump things to fix them, (6) Sweetdaddy whatever, Bubbles’s ex, whose main achievement involved putting oil in Bubbles’s water, and (7) Panoptica, who makes excellent bundt.
I’m not confident in their ability to fix Nick, unless a good bang on his side will take care of it.
I feel that if we’ve learned one thing from this storyline, it’s not to underestimate Bubbles.
Bubbles’s crew is able to operate an aircraft carrier well enough to make it useful to rent; I’d guess between them (including members we haven’t seen), they’ve got the skills needed to destroy Nick.
Shelby can manipulate small parts without having to remove six layers of exterior tech. Bubbles can make large numbers of people do as she commands. Alfie can relay more complex commands, and could probably slither inside machinery to check for hidden damage. Goose Girl can fly and lift Shelby to see better. Cinderblock can lift heavy objects as well as hit them, so the undercarriage is more available. Sweetdaddy has multiple manipulating limbs – when he needs a third hand, he has several to choose from. Panoptica can follow a recipe which means she can follow complex instructions reliably. Besides, cake!
Panoptica is clearly one of the ranking “officers”, so yes, she can follow – and relay – instructions. Whether she can actually bake a cake, however, is anyone’s guess. She only psychically conjured a cake for Nick – inside his own mind – proving only that she knows what a bundt cake looks like.
If she could communicate effectively with Bubbles and the Killbots by using telepathy, now that would be very useful.
What? You don’t need telepathy to communicate with Bubbles and the Killbots. They’re ever so eloquent and expressive.
Great stuff. The pause after “normal lives” says so much.