Ch7p42
Chapter: Paso Doble
Location: Salamanca
↓ Transcript
Vertical page.
7 Panels.
Panels 1,2: Franq takes a wire from his laurels and plugs it into a door, which slides open with a screech.
Franq: Turns out this also makes it the perfect vehicle for another project.
Nikita: And what is that, little guy?
Franq: We're calling it "The Singer".
Panel 3: The main panel is a long illustration of a tubular machine. It resembles a particle collider, with several concentric tubes encapsulated by concrete. Around it, there are additional structures stuck into it, as if meant to thread it.
Franq (offpanel): After our mission, and when I shared my report with the machines - as you probably well remember - the computers went into a sort of "transe"... Well, after a long deciphering process, the Augur Offices came to the conclusion the Gods were giving us instructions on how to convert a linear particle collider into a reality-warping machine.
Panel 4, 5, 6: Nikita looks surprised for a couple panels before finally saying:
Nikita: You're fucking kidding me.
Panel 7: Franq smiles and gestures towards the machine behind him.
Franq: Oh, it's been done before. We have the records. This one here is not the first Singer machine humanity has built.
7 Panels.
Panels 1,2: Franq takes a wire from his laurels and plugs it into a door, which slides open with a screech.
Franq: Turns out this also makes it the perfect vehicle for another project.
Nikita: And what is that, little guy?
Franq: We're calling it "The Singer".
Panel 3: The main panel is a long illustration of a tubular machine. It resembles a particle collider, with several concentric tubes encapsulated by concrete. Around it, there are additional structures stuck into it, as if meant to thread it.
Franq (offpanel): After our mission, and when I shared my report with the machines - as you probably well remember - the computers went into a sort of "transe"... Well, after a long deciphering process, the Augur Offices came to the conclusion the Gods were giving us instructions on how to convert a linear particle collider into a reality-warping machine.
Panel 4, 5, 6: Nikita looks surprised for a couple panels before finally saying:
Nikita: You're fucking kidding me.
Panel 7: Franq smiles and gestures towards the machine behind him.
Franq: Oh, it's been done before. We have the records. This one here is not the first Singer machine humanity has built.
I love how this page is set up… You only see the circles of the singer above and below for the reveal how big it really is along with the revelation on how humanity did this before!
Our beloved Singers shall Sing again, praying emoji
“It’s been done before”: So that may have been how some people began to develop special talents!
The machine seems reminiscent of the Foreigner’s more abstract appearances. Sheer coincidence…? 🤔
(Possible typo: “Trance”, probably…?)
;u; TYPO ◎ TARGETED AND DEALT WITH
Zapped indeed!
Year 510 in Medita is 2807 in Lusitania. Sounds like 2298 is a good guess for the last time a singer machine sang.
I’m curious about your reasoning
It seems like the kind of event that would clearly separate all of history into “before” and “after”, the kind of event that would lead to people thinking of time in terms of “X years later”, leading to a new numbering system.
I’m also assuming that the Lusitanians, being more religiously-oriented, retained the old BC/AD numbering.
But I might not be exactly right, the Medita Empire seems like the kind of nation that would number the years after its own founding, like how the Romans eventually adopted AUC numbering. If that’s the case, I’d expect the singer event to have occured before the founding of Medita, not after. The event would have disrupted socieities all around the globe, and eventually new nations would have emerged from the chaos. And Ch2p05 makes it clear that the ancients predate the Meditans. So sometime between 2024-2298, probably closer to 2298 because of the time it would take to develop and build a singer machine.