Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2019-07-23
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2019-07-23

by shaenon on July 23, 2019 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Swiftly I Glide
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Discussion (49) ¬

  1. Ysabet
    July 23, 2019, 12:16 am | # | Reply

    Ooh, burn…..

    • warpzone32
      July 23, 2019, 5:04 pm | # | Reply

      *slow clap gif*

  2. David B Huber
    July 23, 2019, 12:20 am | # | Reply

    Pre-extirpation punishments at least recycled!

    • Shadowmehr
      July 23, 2019, 9:00 pm | # | Reply

      As what? Desk decoration? I’d hate to think what was in that jar was supposed to be edible.

      • awgiedawgie
        July 23, 2019, 9:30 pm | # | Reply

        Perhaps more relevant: Why does she have it?

        • OneUniverse
          July 23, 2019, 11:12 pm | # | Reply

          Employee of the Month award?

      • OneUniverse
        July 23, 2019, 11:14 pm | # | Reply

        Titus Andronicus, anyone?

  3. awgiedawgie
    July 23, 2019, 12:50 am | # | Reply

    Tiiiiip……. Mission first. Then you can worry about the fate of the nice lady. If she’s following her training, you could be in a lot more danger than you realize.

    “Remember your three O’s: Obscure, Obfuscate, and Obliterate.”

  4. Thenardyr
    July 23, 2019, 1:08 am | # | Reply

    Tip, your job is not to be a hero and die for truth, justice, and the American way. Your job is to be a hero and let the other guys die for national security, xenophobia, and the American way.

    • BRGR
      July 23, 2019, 2:14 am | # | Reply

      His job is not to be a hero at all. His job is to be a spy, a soldier on the invisible front. His job is to decide a battle before it starts.

      That could save lives if he does a good job. Failing that, it seems to be enough to breach every enemy installation, or at least create the impression of a breach, and have Anasigma penalize them until they have razed their own troops.

      War is an ugly business. That’s why you should have let computer controlled ICBMs fight them for you. Those attack drones operated manually from behind shields of civilians have abysmal accuracy.

      • Derin
        July 23, 2019, 3:17 am | # | Reply

        Why waste good enemy agents like that? When they realise they’ve fucked up, Skin Horse can offer them the opportunity to defect. The alternative is death, so unless there’s a reason to believe they’re a danger to Skin Horse from inside, it’s free manpower.

        Of course, Skin Horse was pretty badly burned from inside by anasigma before…

        • warpzone32
          July 23, 2019, 5:08 pm | # | Reply

          If both sides truly excel at their spycraft, we predict there will only be one side in this war by 2022. I call it… Anna-Skinma!

          • Derin
            July 26, 2019, 9:17 am | #

            I hope this happens just so Sweetheart can spend hours trying to figure out a really complicated quadruple-agent/inter-loyalty flowchart. She deserves a treat.

    • Candace
      July 23, 2019, 3:16 am | # | Reply

      Well, except that Tip abhors violence, and only uses it as a last resort. He also doesn’t want to be responsible for causing the death of others. He is truly faced with an ethical dilemma here.

      I imagine there may be other reasons Tip left the Army, aside from having issues conforming to the dress code. Note that we rarely see him use “Alice,” and he only does so in the direst of situations, when all other approaches have failed, and it’s down to “Do or die.” He is not going to just “let the other guys die.” It’s not who he is.

      • David B Huber
        July 23, 2019, 7:14 am | # | Reply

        Tip is indeed chivalrous.

  5. BMunro
    July 23, 2019, 1:17 am | # | Reply

    They work for A-Sig. They’re probably pretty darn evil in other contexts.Sure, Dr. Lee isn’t (very), but she had her own sort of reality filter.

    • rinku
      July 23, 2019, 1:56 am | # | Reply

      Dr Lee is at least pre-Mad Dave level Evil.

      • Candace
        July 23, 2019, 2:55 am | # | Reply

        This.^

      • David B Huber
        July 23, 2019, 4:59 am | # | Reply

        Of which she is fully aware. Which is why she considers herself unworthy of Nick (while Nick in turn idolizes her and knows she is above him).

    • Barking Monkey
      July 23, 2019, 6:53 am | # | Reply

      Virginia is VERY evil. If there were any justice in the SH universe she’d likely be serving multiple life sentences. What she did to Nick was definitely bad enough, but then there’s the question of how many unsuccessful test subjects leading up to him there were, unless you’re inclined to believe she got human brain transplantation and machine integration right on the very first go. There’s also the fact she was willingly and prolifically producing weapons (UNITY, the combat suits, Nick (unsuccessful) and who knows how many others) for a massive, reckless, unethical and violent organization for years.

      • Hannibal's Lectern
        July 23, 2019, 8:27 am | # | Reply

        I don’t think Virginia IS herself evil; she’s just DONE a lot of evil because she’s unable to resist a technical challenge. Not unlike many, many of the scientists who work on nuclear weapons and ABMs and the like. Sure, these things don’t contribute to our safety, in fact, they make it more likely we’ll blow the whole world up, but IT’S JUST SUCH AN INTERESTING PROBLEM…

        I met my share of such people when I was working at Bell Labs in the ’80s and ’90s. Perfectly decent human beings who suffered from a particular form of reality blindness, the inability to see possible bad outcomes to the projects they were working on. Heck, I was probably one of them–at one time, I was helping to bring this exotic new technology called “cellular radio telephony” into the world, and not a single one of us thought about how it might be used for anything but good…

        • FWKnight
          July 23, 2019, 9:53 am | # | Reply

          “Cellular radio telephony”? “Celluar…..” IT WAS YOU WHO BROUGHT THIS BLIGHT ON OUR LIVES. You shall PAY… PAAAY for your innumerable crimes against…

          Wait one moment, I something buzzed… Oh, cat pictures…

        • awgiedawgie
          July 23, 2019, 10:58 am | # | Reply

          “I don’t think Virginia IS herself evil; she’s just DONE a lot of evil because she’s unable to resist a technical challenge.”

          That’s pretty much the definition of someone who is evil. Someone who is unable to resist the temptation to do evil. And unlike when you were developing cellular communication, which was intended for good, the knew she was building things that were intended for evil.

          • David B Huber
            July 23, 2019, 11:43 am | #

            Not really. Dr. Lee has her own special obliviousness every bit as severe as Nick’s brand…

          • awgiedawgie
            July 23, 2019, 2:19 pm | #

            She even admitted to being evil.

          • greenknight32
            July 23, 2019, 8:10 pm | #

            I think that the most evil people think they’re pursuing some higher purpose, that the ends justify the means. That Dr. Lee, in retrospect, sees that she’s done evil things, is evidence she’s not really evil.

          • awgiedawgie
            July 23, 2019, 9:35 pm | #

            Admitting that one has done evil deeds does not indicate in any way that they are not evil. All it proves is that they are aware of their evil.

            The fact that she has switched sides, and is now fighting against the evil corporation she used to work for… now that is evidence that she may no longer be evil.

  6. David B Huber
    July 23, 2019, 5:05 am | # | Reply

    Ironic how Unity’s moral compass is the most sensitive of the team’s…

    • Christian Rose
      July 23, 2019, 6:06 am | # | Reply

      This I have GOT to hear.

      • David B Huber
        July 23, 2019, 7:10 am | # | Reply

        She had the same attack of conscience Tip is getting around to, just over lying to the nice lady. As for her tendencies to eat puppies, babies and random brains – those are her natural foods, no more worthy of condemnation than a human eating squid. Even there she draws the line at friends (Nick-in-a-jar) and is content to substitute sammiches.

  7. Frank
    July 23, 2019, 7:58 am | # | Reply

    aww, plaid cloth lid cover

  8. Dr. Steve
    July 23, 2019, 8:55 am | # | Reply

    THEIR manager’s name was Ash.

    • awgiedawgie
      July 23, 2019, 11:00 am | # | Reply

      Well, if it wasn’t before, it certainly is now.

  9. Robert Nowall
    July 23, 2019, 12:23 pm | # | Reply

    Mmm…barbecue.

    • awgiedawgie
      July 23, 2019, 2:20 pm | # | Reply

      A little overdone for my taste.

      • Robert Nowall
        July 23, 2019, 4:19 pm | # | Reply

        It’s gotta be.

  10. Robert Nowall
    July 23, 2019, 7:12 pm | # | Reply

    Come to think of it, just who *did* Relay Station Six let in?

    • greenknight32
      July 23, 2019, 8:13 pm | # | Reply

      OSHA, maybe? Anasigma is nothing but workplace safety violations.

      • Pygar
        July 23, 2019, 11:43 pm | # | Reply

        OSHA, Avon, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. All at the same time.

  11. Shadowmehr
    July 23, 2019, 9:05 pm | # | Reply

    And once again, the law of unintended consequences comes back to bite us in the anatomy. Maybe their little rebellion will knock the Wizard out of power before extirpation can be initiated. There has to be enough paperwork involved to delay things a bit.

  12. The Occupant
    July 23, 2019, 9:30 pm | # | Reply

    What you wanna bet this is intentional guilt tripping as a security measure? I mean, we’re getting into Jewish mother level territory here, oy vey.

    • awgiedawgie
      July 23, 2019, 9:38 pm | # | Reply

      Like I said above, she may indeed be following protocol.

      • Barbara K
        July 23, 2019, 10:09 pm | # | Reply

        So, Angie, you’re saying that Anasigma is doing this “we’re nice, so you can’t attack us” stuff just to see whether their visitors have consciences? If the visitors have any moral qualms, it’s prima facie proof that they aren’t from A-S and don’t belong there.
        As far as the cakes and kitten pictures go, they “nice folks” might just be like Harry Potter’s pink-clad teacher, Professor Umbridge.

        • Barbara K
          July 23, 2019, 10:11 pm | # | Reply

          Darned spellcheck..sorry, Awgie.

          • awgiedawgie
            July 23, 2019, 11:05 pm | #

            Meh… I’ve been called worse. 🙂

  13. sweetuncleLESLIE
    July 23, 2019, 11:39 pm | # | Reply

    About the time Tip totally blows that he has a conscience, everybody’s backside
    is aligned for the lawnmower. As usual, one ethical misstep becomes a tumble down an Escher stairway into serious ‘oops’ territory.

    Suck it up, Tip.

    • Candace
      July 24, 2019, 1:34 am | # | Reply

      Tip has always had a conscience. It’s just that his ethical system doesn’t happen to exclude casual sex.

  14. Gyrre
    July 23, 2019, 11:53 pm | # | Reply

    *POTENTIAL SPOILER TO FOLLOW. READ COMENT AT OWN RISK*

    If this is Ari piloting another drone, he sure does love jerking people around.

  15. Zero
    October 28, 2020, 9:05 pm | # | Reply

    You weren’t planning on letting anybody know you infiltrated, Tip. Also, given the steps they’ve taken to get around Anasigma that means they know they’re contributing to an evil organization.

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