Monday's comic!

[murgatroyd666]

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20181217

It had been an uncolored sketch. The colored version might -- or might not -- be up soon is up. See first comment.
_______________________

Uncolored, and via Sneaky Gate. It might be in color in a couple of hours ... or maybe not.

N.B.! I'm posting this now for the benefit of people in disadvantaged time zones who otherwise would have to wait until sometime after midnight EST to read it, or possibly later. If this offends you, don't look.

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ggmain/strips/ggmain20181217.jpg

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Looks like the regular, fully colored comic now.

So either the mirrors had features which Albia didn't know about, or someone did an upgrade. The first sounds more plausible, unless there was a spark who could really understand that technology and improve it. Van Rijn, perhaps?

[murgatroyd666]

Or perhaps Mirrors and Portals use two different technologies, and the Portals were invented by humans in Agatha's world?

[jbwoodford]

I figured it was some sort of unanticipated interaction between the mirror and Klaus' gizmo, since the mirror was open and Agatha & co. were in transit when Klaus bobbled Mechanicsburg.

[bunsen_h]

That was my thought also. We already know that the field around Mechanicsburg doesn't completely stop time; it's a very high degree of slowing things down. (In this respect it's similar to Larry Niven's so-called stasis fields.) This would be consistent with changing a momentary transition to a lapse of a couple of years.

You can do all the testing you want on your company's product; there are bugs that you won't find until it starts interacting with some other company's product. Also: your company's QA people vs. regular users. Regular users are so inventive.

[spectrum_09]

"Regular users are so inventive."

As a friend of mine in IT used to say, "You can make something foolproof. You just can't make it damn fool proof."

[jbwoodford]

From Brenan Keller, over on Twitter:

A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd. First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.

A friend who does software QA added:

Absolutely correct. Alternatively, first real customer walks into the bar and walks out again without ordering anything. User is buried by an avalanche of cookies.

[spectrum_09]

It appeared that the Refuge of Storms had tapped into the Mechancicburg mirror as a one-way portal. It only worked from the Cathedral to the Refuge. But it did somehow active the Cathedral mirror.

[turbobeholder]

Or no one was quite crazy enough to deliberately try to use one in such conditions just to see what would happen.
Or at least no one on the Queens' Council was that crazy. We don't know what inspired Robur Heterodyne to try whatever he tried to do.