Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, April 17, 2023.
*note* someone pointed out that today’s strip implied that Emily’s ship had been grasper-bombed, which was not my intention (but they were totally right). I added dialogue to fix that. My bad.
The upper hand is so slippery.
Diller to the rescue?
The really annoying thing about the nasty, underhanded, backstabbing bastard Stribs is how good they are at being nasty, underhanded, backstabbing bastards. I really enjoy disliking them. Thanks Christopher.
Having a villain listen to a monologue works just as well as having them make one.
The only thing necessary for good to triumph in the world is that evil men do nothing for a few key moments.
Okay. Christopher, congratulations. It isn’t easy to come up with a new way to get mad at the Stribs every few episodes, but you’ve done it here.
And now I’m angry. That means I formally surrender my agreement to not poke holes in the story.
When the HELL did the Stribs deploy these ‘grasper-bombs’? How come no one, including Choan, saw them do it? For that matter, why the hell didn’t the Purple Bupillions neutralize them with the other stolen weaponry on the Strib ships??
I can accept the Stribs, bad sports and expert spoilsports that they are, not revealing this capability until late in the battle, but come ON! This would have been a war-winning move done earlier. Either the Stribs can’t infest all G.O.B. ships with grasper-bombs in time to change the outcome or they have decided to use their ONE grasper-bomb on Emily’s ship to convince her to surrender. Which is a bad decision on their part. They already made their differences with Emily personal; she can’t get any more determined to wipe them from the Galaxy as it is.
Damnation! And my dentist has already forbidden me more Jawbreakers to keep my surviving molars intact. I’m going to have to find something just as resistant and obdurate to chew on while Emily works this out. Grrrrrrrr!
Hey, @Pete, fair questions. Not sure why the Bupillions didn’t neutralize them, I guess for the same reason they almost forgot to neutralize the Hijan cannons, the Pelfir Rockets, and the Alfuzian laser spreaders? And as far as doing it covertly, it might not be terribly believable, but it has precedence in that when they did it before it wasn’t noticed by anyone except the members on the pungent lunger. And the reason it took so long was that before they basically flew back and forth in front of stationary GOB ships, whereas this time it’s a huge space battle, so I figured it would take more time.
Anyhow, that’s how it made sense in my head? But I didn’t think TOO too hard on it. I wanted it to make sense within the context and everything, but it’s not a huge plot point, just one of the ridiculously many small plot points. 🙂
You have to go back to June of 2021 to see Chris put Chekov’s Grasper Bomb on the mantlepiece, but he telegraphed it fair and square.
Ah. All right. Thanks, TB, and sorry, Christopher, for my display of bad temper. So grasper-bombs are not detectable by Galactic-standard scanners, their origin is unknown, but every damn’ Strib ship seems to carry them for fun. And the only way the Pungent Lunger was able to avoid getting tagged with one was to get blinked (presumably but NOT provably by Diller) several light-years away.
If there’s a counter for them, no one seems to have survived getting that information. Including Choan, who did survive by NOT getting that info. So the Stribs have effectively defeated the G.O.B.
What now? For all their thievery, the Stribs don’t appear ambitious enough to run the Galaxy. Or force enough of its peoples to be their slaves, willing or no. So what happens next? And who takes the initiative here?
Invent a small cloaking device and we’re good to go. It’s time to start boarding Strib ships. Grasp this, @#$hole.
Oo, a quick tweak of the punctuation, and we have Galactic Proctology:
> Grasp this @#$hole.
Oh dear! 😀
I think the hard-to-believe part is that the Stribs managed to put grasper bombs on half the enemy fleet and haven’t started just destroying ships yet…