#788: "Score!"
 

Black Mage was but a pawn in our mysterious stranger's greater machinations? One has to wonder when and how this'll come up again.

Um. Well, I liked the "score" remark. On another note, I'm pretty sure it was the headfirst fall that did BM in... huh.
Man, I like this Dragoon guy already~

Nigh! The Eldar will reclaim the position they once held, banish the forces of Chaos, and all that stand in our way! The Tau are merely blades of grass beneath our feet! We will crush them as we march to glorious victory!

((Tau suck >.>))

Dig the update. Made me laugh :p
Nice work!

((I kid, the Tau are ok but the Eldar are better))

Yet again, BM is caught in the act of helping strangers.

It makes him so mad when people see that his true flag waves gallantly over the lines of the good and true.

Let this be a lesson to all of you about real modesty.

I love Dragoons.


I just have to say.

This guy is almost as insane as BB... dare I say it? Dragoon is BB reincarnated.

*Drop kicks him in the throat, steps on his throat, and unloads a double barrel shotgun into his face. Then reloads and fires off again. Then pulls out an army knife and castrates the bastard.*

BB is DEAD.

black mage is starnded away from the light warriors. That has never happened before.

Only thing to do is wait until Fighter lands headfirst on him.

Tiara and all.

Dragoon has messed up black mage's direction, I think.

You either suck at sarcasm, or you don't remember when BM became Al Bundy there for a bit.

Indeed. He was happy for such a short time...

Such a shame.

The Dragoon definatly seems like a cool new char. Can't wait to see more of him. >_> Also can't wait to get a name.

I can only speculate he is of upmost importance for future questing. That is almost always the case.

I'll take suck at sarcasm for 500.

You know... Fighter's probably just going to land on BM anyway. When did Dragoon stop BM in midair by jumping up miles upon miles, talking to him, then stabbing him with his spear when he's wearing incredibly heavy armor and the lance is probably heavy as crap too anyway? Maybe the first third of lift-off? Yeah, Fighter'll definitely land on him. You know, because the whole reality thing is totally Fighter's thing. It's foreshadow that BM's going to stab him in the head for once. Yep, that's right. With his tiara. So not girly. Which is so not Fighter.

Yeah, the whole dropkicking thing Burkion said...

And even IF BB was reincarnated, he'd be just a baby, not a full grown adult.

SWB

Pff. Reincarnation so doesn't work that way. But anyway, who needs reincarnation? Dragoon's skin underneath the armor is the same as Thief's, or BB's. But more importantly, it's BB's skin color. If played the right way, Dragoon, who obviously is getting lots of positive attention, could lessen peoples' gripes about BB's death. I mean, it's still an issue that's rubbing people the wrong way. Maybe Dragoon could put an end to it all. Or maybe it'll just start a huge riot on "Dragoon is BB!" and make things worse. *shrug* But I'm hoping for the first thing I said. Lessening gripes. Because I think with Dragoon's awesomeness and Brian's talent for character-writting, I think they both may be able to pull it off.

Dragoon >= Awesome. He reminds me of Fighter in the sense that he, too, is a helper. At the same time, he seems more apologetic and, well, aware of his actions than Fighter ever has, sort of like White Mage. Has WM taken up the lance?

I don't get it, how exactly did BM help Dragoon get there? I was under the impression that Dragoon was the one helping BM.

Because they collided in midair. And did anyone else get the feeling that he was looking for the Sky Castle to discover what became of the Sky Warriors?

Sorry, but the Eldar are like flies before the might of the Imperium! The Tau are cool by us though, good allies agenst Chaos.

See theories 1 and 5 of Greed's Unified Theory of Dragoon McViolentlypenetrateblackmages Speculation

On the first part, yeah that's what I got from his character too, and it's totally awesome.

On the BB resurrection thing, Dragoon was able to locate and intercept a flying BM and then angle the fall trajectory to, I presume from his lack of frustration at the outcome, where he wanted to go.

BB could not walk a straight line without bending space-time from his confusion. He could quite possibly be BB's replacement, but it's definitely not him for any one of a million reasons.

I don't get the Fighter/BB angle personally, as I haven't seen enough of this guy's personality to make a full judgement call.

But at a guess, what happened is this Dragoon made a huge, impossible jump (as Dragoons typically do), and his tragectory intersected w/ BM.

Anyway, by using BM's mass with his own, I guess he was able to bring both of their tragectories to a sudden halt.

I'm not good at physics.

SWB

I get the feeling that without the extra wind resistance provided by BM's Hammer Pants™, Dragoon may not have survived the fall. Though it is odd that he would be thanking BM in this comic whereas in the previous one it was he who appeared to be lending his aid, if you include a lance through the abdomen in that definition.

As for the obligatory Warhammer reference, um, the Space Pirates of Chaos are far superior to the Time Ninjas of Order. Go, symbolic personification of the dichotomous nature of mankind as represented by the inherent conflict between the relative constructs of good and evil!

Well, it'd depend on weither or not WM is flat-chested or not. If she is, then with short hair, it would be a little hard to tell, and BM's hearing could also be shot from the cannon explosion, combined with the wind, thus making hearing the Dragoon talk hard.

There's only one polar region in the whole game, and that's the ice cave... Arn't they suppose to be heading to an ancient tower in the middle of a desert? Eitherway, Dragoon is awesome, if he does aid the LW's, he'll be the totally apologetic warrior who gets other characters mauled in horrific ways on accident, and then offers you a band-aid.

There were mountain ranges as obstacles however, and several mountains and passes have been settings in the comic, Dwarfland and Gurgu come to mind immediately and there are probably others.

Edit: Oh and Flare I meant 5 as a joke myself, but thanks for actually making it into something workable:D . Still my money's on 1.

I reiterate that they did, in fact, land in the desert. Either they have arrived in the vast, unforgiving salt basins of Utah or the force of the explosion has reduced BM's color palette from 8-bit to grayscale. I know this because the world of FF has no poles, and hence no polar regions. The ice cave is located near a giant volcano for Bahamut's sake, therefore it's clearly made of some other form of crystalline solid. Furthermore, those mountains could not possibly be capped with snow as the temperature difference between the base of the mountain and the grassland/forest/desert region immediately adjacent would be too extreme. If snow he did not hit, you must acquit.

I will not abandon this argument, the truth shall be revealed.

Come on, I'm the white mage lookalike. :P and with Mauve's drawing of my armor....well, why not?

Anyone else notice nights passed and none of the other LW landed near BM?
Not that I'm doubting Fighters gonna land on BM, thats pretty much inevitable... Its just odd

Well, obviously, since none of them were intercepted mid-flight by a dragoon.

This would mean that the LW would be seperated by many leagues and miles, with no way to each other to complete this vital quest with their four members.

Lemme see here...
*Pulls out big ol' list of FF Classes and marks off Dragoon*
I hope we see a Geomancer next. Or maybe a Samurai. It'd be awesome to see some jokes about the Gil Throw.

Thief probally can use that, and probally will later in the comic!
It's perfect, don't you see? He could beat Chaos single handed with that much money!

Eh, Theif's too greedy over his money to throw it. Plus He's a ninja, Gil throw is a Samurai-only technique isn't it?

Well, ninja also have the "Throw" ability, and when there wasn't a Samuari class, Ninja did have a "Throw Coin" ability.

I shall quote Bohemian Rhapsody to this response.

Good job on the comic Brian. I see elite Guard Hank has taken up a new passtime.

Maybe Dragoon will turn out to be none other than;

• Vargus, here to teach Fighter his one last skill in accordance with RPG clichés
• BM's, apparently, horrifically murdered (by BM) brother
• The Onion Kid (growth hormones?)
• A corporal form of a dark god or Dr Swordopolis

See, that's the thing, though. I'm sure he could be a character to model BB slightly, or a 'replacement' as a sixth main character, but I don't think he's an already existing lesser character. He's probably an absolutely new character that we're going to learn about. Heck, we can't even be sure if he's a main main character and he's going to leap off the screen after a hundred or so comics like the Other Warriors and then make a few cameo appearances in the future. Although, the whole BB replacement thing won't work unless he appears as frequently as WM until near the end of the comic..

But no, I doubt he's an already existing character in dragon mail. I'm betting on the brother thing, though. It could be Thief, or even BB's brother too. Remember, Brian made BM's skin the peach color instead of the yellow color (which I think BM was supposed to be). Dragoon's skin is yellow. So BM having a brother that's a different skin color than him is possible, but far off.

According to Brian, BM is wearing gloves. His skin color is the same pink as Fighter. (At least this is what he told me to explain why BM used a pink sprite when he was nekkid after the Matoya cookie incident.)

And skin color doesn't count for much in the comic. Yellow, pink & peach are the only three real options from the original game. And unless Brian feels like it, that's all you'll likely see, because except in the case of Drizz'l he usually defaults to the original skin colors.

This is because he's true to the original game format. Or just too lazy to be bothered, take your pick.

SWB

Hmm... I think that last sentence caused my brain to hemorrhage.
 

You say they landed in the desert, when in the fifth panel, the Dragoon clearly says he couldn't hear Black Mage over the mountain winds. How can there be mountain winds in a desert?

There are mountains in the Desert. There's lots of them around where I am, and it's considered High Desert.

I see your point. I just never really thought of that. And I just realized, I got nowhere with my argument. If such things as mountains made of desert exist, then I am wrong and have no way to prove to Lord Kibble they are in snow.

The white snowy background doesn't do it for ya?

I originally made his skin regular honky white (Fighter/Red Mage, etc.) but it looked ugly and washed out against the blues of the armor. Thief/BB yellow didn't quite do it for me either. I went back to the default FFIII Dragoon color and felt that it was a nice match for the blues I used -- which were, themselves, taken directly from Kain Highwind, King of Dragoons. And now you know the rest of the story.

If anything, the author's complete contradiction of my point of view only proves that I am right.

Could that be slightly altered to a future Jeff quote? I like when Jeff says stuff like that.