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.
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Well, now we know what became of the crew. But this brings us to the old Captain Steuben and the Love Boat question of “Who’s steering the ship?”. o_O
What type of irony would panel 3 fall under?
Probably dramatic. After all, we know that all of them destroy only the absolute pragmatic truth.
The irony bars are probably reinforced with steely foundations.
Dunno why they just don’t destroy through the irony bars…
Reinforced with powerful force fields.
Well, it appears Panoptica and her crew have now engaged in piracy. What a bunch of sweethearts!
I forget the legal term for government vessel theft…
And they aren’t Sweethearts!
This. ^
You might be looking for “forfeiture of civil assets”. Legalese for robbery, whether highway, high seas, or just seized.
“Commandeering” is when the government seizes private assets for its own use. “Forfeiture of civil assets”happens through court action condemning items as the proceeds of crime.
AG-I aren’t part of the government, though—Pan and Shelby discussed this a few comics ago.
Did they? The one I found has Pan claiming stealing the ship is “Exercising eminent domain” which, as Lord Vetinari says, “means naked theft by the government” (italics mine) and then suggesting Shelby could transfer to the FBI. You can quit a non-governmental hitsquad and join the FBI, but I don’t think you can “transfer” unless the organisation you’re currently part of is actual law enforcement, and not just a bunch of goons.
“Angary” is the term I was after.
Cerebriac’s next instructions will come from Nera, who had no doubt gained control of Panoptica’s PC by the time she checked in for new orders. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nera backtracks all the way to Mr. Green! If Panoptica protests that Cerebriac has been compromised, she’ll have to… say she saw it in Jonah’s mind. It appears Shelby and Tip must be locked up too (presumably Alfie has his own cell so Shelby can’t release his collar?), so Jonah must have foreseen some use for that wrench in foiling Panoptica’s new orders?
You’d think I’d have noticed earlier, but boy howdy – Shaenon really does have a thing for robots with weird speech related quirks.
There’s Moustachio with his old timey speech, and Hitty with her… less refined… speech. Nick sort of counts as a cyborg, though he’s not a true robot – but technically the censor that filters his speech actually is a robot of sorts. UNITY is a nanobot swarm with a speech based security code, and she jumps around a lot in her speech patterns, being pretty generally eccentric.
Then there are minor characters like Joe Lovebody, the defectively “square” clockwork owl that Tigerlily Jones made while her mojo was on the fritz, along with the various other generic robots of that series, including Chicken Jim and Cornbread Flywheel. (Assuming they didn’t get taken out at some point during the carpet bombing of the Ozarks.)
Whimsyland has a number of this sort. There’s Mary, with her jaded and bitter chain-smoking persona contrasting against her cute and cheerful appearance (not to mention her stint as a drill seargent). Gussie clearly qualifies, due to her faulty vocoders. Ditto for foul-mouthed Baron Mistycorn talking about fragging little girls on their birthdays.
And then there is Whimsy herself, a machine made out of people, communicating through a cipher constructed out of the compiled random emails of the employees of the company, written subconsciously. At least until she inhabits a radioactive fairy. And I suppose an argument could also be made for the gallery of miscellaneous animal robots who get offended by the terms “Pork” and “Mukluk”. (And that one creepy rabbit in the 1960s that says “long live the new flesh”.)
The Machine Union probably qualies, with fax machines and whatnot possessing broken and rudimentary speech.
If we include Narbonic, there’s Foot, the uh… giant robot foot.
And there’s also the army of robotic Madblood clones – who, while actually probably the most ordinary and mundane in their speech of all the robots featured, technically still qualify because they’re robotic duplicates of Madblood, and yet they lack his signature style of speech, which is weird.
In fact, probably the only robotic/digital character of major importance who doesn’t have anything weird about the way they speak is Lovelace.
Anyway, quite a lot of these buggers. And I’m sure I missed some along the way.
If Panoptica gets her orders by her PC, she may soon be getting a whole new set of orders to follow.
Still no Tip. If he turns out to be an unfired Chekhov’s gun, I shall be most put out.
If he fires, on the other hand, I shall put out the most.
“He wears the Cone of Shame!”
I really, really like panel 2. I don’t understand myself what they’re saying.
Subtle joke, the character with no arms threatening to hand out guidance.
Yeah, this is the wrong crowd to ask for clarity.