4/3
The Vault (PS (Droog))
He was 6’4″
The shortest guy in the group is over six feet? So PI is what, twelve, fourteen feet minimum?
“James.”
I know they have weird names but it’s still pretty annoying when they get renamed.
Find out who done it
It’s weird to have Droog talking like this, particularly when PS doesn’t.
“Feed yourself, for God’s sake. Eating some hashbrowns or not eating them isn’t going to bring Deuce back. Take your time.”
This is a weird bit. It’s not like PS was hesitating over Deuce, given he didn’t even know the guy, and Droog sounds entirely too concerned.
The only thing I knew for a fact was that he’d been a bodyguard in their old homeland before they built the city.
…yet Deuce can be just 22 and gotten involved with the mob as a kid? The exile and city building really doesn’t work with any of them being young.
He says don’t hurt me mister Droog, I’m telling the truth, I’d have to be awfully unlucky to witness such an awful crime.”
But Droog can’t hurt him in the first place, while it’s established that there’s definitely grey areas about luck when it comes to not being directly hurt. Plus it’s just generally some poor reasoning – it’s too unlucky to see who did it, but finding the body without being able to say who did it isn’t? And it’s totally unnecessary since Droog then explains they’re friends and so he’s not a prime suspect in the first place.
Iwere
Missing space.
Well, the whole PS/Droog thing seems interesting.
The Vault Ch2 (PS (PI, Snowman))
and the killer was probably a member of the Felt, considering who’d returned the kid’s body to its rightful owners
That seems counter-intuitive. If it was a member of the Felt, they’d probably want to put it somewhere it couldn’t be traced to them, not leave it around for another member to trip over.
The Felt was a strict crew, and Doc Scratch ran it tighter than Ace’s hatband.
That’s not really how it is in canon, and really doesn’t work well in a setting where they’re locked in a stalemate with two other groups rather than the uncontested champions. Even before getting into the fact they have magic powers and so far you haven’t mentioned if the other two groups do as well, they just plain outnumber the other two as well as the other two groups not being particularly focused. If the Felt are the super competent mobster gang, they should be the undisputed top group.
The recap characters to the reader thing is getting really tiresome fast. It was just barely tolerable last chapter and that was when it wasn’t mostly regurgitated off the wiki. You really, really did not need to explain the meaning of each name.
Nobody really knew what her temporal ability was
That seems really weird. If it’s the canon one, there’s no reason to keep it secret, and it’s hard to think of something else that could be used instead where there’d be any point to hiding it either.
Ace and I had a running bet that the Inspector had bought the thing during one of his paranoid episodes. So far, we were right.
I really don’t think that’s how a running bet could work.
His office had to be the absolute opposite of mine. Everything was neat and proper, and there was no butcher paper or yarn or thumbtacks or half-empty coffee cups. If my office was a toddler’s finger painting, his was the Mona Lisa. I wondered how he did it, then remember he was the most uptight horse’s hind end I’d ever had the pleasure of encountering.
That’s really weird for a character who gets introduced as incredibly drunk and likes to scribble all over puzzles.
And huh, so Snowman’s confirmed his poorly reasoned guess it was one of the Felt.
I was going down to get some wine. The Doctor keeps all the doors to the cellar shut tight, so I had Clover with me to pick the locks.
So she doesn’t have her canon power set. Does she have powers at all?
No one had witnessed the crime except the victim and the perpetrator, or perpetrators, and no one knew when it had even occurred.
Hm. But they do have Trace as well as Fin. If Snowman’s actually concerned about the crime, she would have just asked them to go down there. Or Clover could have. And if that happened she should be passing on what they know. Depending on when it happened it might have taken place too long ago for either of them to see anything useful, but that’d at least give Sleuth a ballpark for the time of death.
People never do seem to think to use the pair of them in these stories.
“Helen dumped me,” I blurted, arms crossed defensively.
That is a really weird thing to be just announcing out of the blue.
Spades Slick was a tiny, angry man with dark olive skin, like the rest of the Crew except for Droog, who somehow maintained an almost ethereally pale complexion.
I’m really not seeing why it makes any sense to have the humanized Dersites look similar except for the one, and it’s rather sketchy having the love interest be the one special light-skinned exception. All or none, really.
the a inspector Aside from the obvious error, seems like you’re basically calling PI by his name, so it should just be Inspector, with neither article attached.
and limped back to where he’d come, resting heavily on his purloined cane.
Really not seeing why he’s limping. His other injuries seem to be the canon ones and you’ve said he’s not actually as old as he looks, and we know they carry those kinds of things around to beat people up with, not as walking aids.
If he was this good at pool, he must have been one Hell of a sharpshooter with a rifle.
…the two don’t really overlap much. If PS knows Droog’s good at sharpshooting, he could make a comparison about how accurate he is in both things, but assuming one equals the other is absurd.
And Snowman was on house arrest for some reason and had to sneak out? And this is so unremarkable no one even offers further explanation.
A long, long time ago, Snowman had apparently been the queen of a place way far away from here. Or the Madam, some say. Slick, along with the rest of the Midnight Crew except for Clubs Deuce, who was still in grade school, had been her bodyguards. Slick organized a coup d’état and had her overthrown– that is, he squealed to the police about how her establishment was hiring minors– how Snow herself was barely eighteen– how the place was selling illegal substances, the whole shebang. And so she was arrested, bounced around foster homes, and Slick turned the place around. Or tried to, anyway. What he’d failed to plan for was that he wasn’t fit to rule the “kingdom” either. Within a year, all its inhabitants had either died or moved away to hide from the cops.
Hm, that’s an interesting fit for their backstory. Avoids a lot of the scale problems.
Well, Snowman and Slick are hatefully amusing.
They fought worse than Slick after a six-pack of cheap beer. Like two alley cats, striking hard and fast, one after the other. And it was worse because the Doc was like a father to Snowman and he did everything he could to kill anyone who threatened her
That is a really weird decision given that there’s no sign of the two of them having issues with each other in canon and it’s certainly not like the guy shows any goodwill toward those he is in a “fatherly” position toward in the first place. Plus by your timeline she’d have been an adult when they first met up.
The only thing Snowman had said was that it was an execution, in my experience. That ruled out hanging and the like– too slow for an execution.
I think you meant for this to be one sentence, because it doesn’t make much sense like this.
I couldn’t ask him to swat a fly, let alone help me find a murder weapon.
“No. No, you run along and get your eggs together, alright? You been through a lot, kid.”
But he could at least interview him! He’s only gotten general descriptions of the body and he knows even less about the crime scene itself. Since he’s probably not going to work up the courage to ask Snowman for more details anytime soon, and doesn’t seem to even be interested in examining the body himself, asking Clover for details is about all that’s left. Or he could ask Clover to just bring him to the room.
and something caught my eye: a horseshoe, shiny silver except for a brown stain on it. No way that was rust. Sunlight was streaming in just right, and it gleamed like an oil slick in the middle of the road. Now, a new horseshoe in a stable isn’t really all that much of an oddity, but when it’s caked in something that might be described as a gruesome maroonish-brown one can’t help but notice it.
“Holy Hell,” I breathed, bending down to examine the horseshoe. If that blood belonged to who I thought it did…
Okay that’s just ridiculous. He’s in the stables for absolutely no reason, he sees something on a random horseshoe that looks like it could be blood and this is somehow actually relevant and immediately obvious as such?
It must have been behind the mural. “We’ve got to tear this ugly mother down,” I said, gravely.
“I don’t normally condone the destruction of art, but then I don’t suppose this technically counts as art in the first place.”
But PS thought it was really awesome, that’s why he commissioned it in the first place.
Murals are generally painted directly onto the wall, not onto wallpaper. Also, the comic made it clear they don’t need to tear off the wallpaper to get to the secret passages and rooms.
His desk was upside-down and propped against the hallway door like a barricade.
Their desks are all made of planks and cinderblocks.
And now PS is calling the Felt to handle his angry ex-girlfriend? This really makes no sense at all.
the vault was charred in some places
Is there a reason he never even attempted to look at it himself?
And now Die’s just bringing him there, because he’s too terrible of a detective to have made any effort to observe the crime scene himself. If you wanted Die involved here, it’d have worked perfectly fine to have PS attempt to see the vault and be rebuffed, but this just makes him look terminally lazy.
by the tie it got reported
Time.
the City coroner would be on me like white on rice if he knew the scene had been tampered with by the tie it got reported to the officials, so I had to let it be. I wondered briefly if the coroner would even be notified in the first place.
Well, if the coroner’s never getting notified, he might as well examine the body, so it seems a relevant consideration. But then, he’d know the answer if he’d attempted to examine the body before now . Like with seeing the vault, it’s plausible he might not be allowed to, but he really should have tried.
I have a feeling we’re a couple hours afterwards, aren’t we?”
Wait…how are they there at all? Die’s power seems to drop him off where someone just died, not hours later.
The business with the mural seems to sum up a big problem this whole fic has. The author hates it, therefore the characters share the opinion. A lot of other problems in characterization likely stem from the same issue.
“Try calculating trajectory in your head while trying to shoot at someone who technically only exists five minutes from now.”
“Fin?” I ventured.
“The last time I shot at Fin I was thinking in calculus for a week afterward.”
…he just aimed at the bullet holes. Droog’s certainly clever, there’s really no need to invent stuff that contradicts the scene where we saw exactly this happen. (Plus, it’s Trace that interacts with people from the future.)
I’m not really sure what’s up with PS suddenly intuiting the math problem. Sticking nonsense into puzzles is more PI’s thing, and it’s not like Droog understands what 37 means, so it seems it ends up exactly the same as if Droog had solved the problem and was stuck on what it meant when PS got there.
And Trace and Fin have appeared! I hope they’ve got something useful to add.
He was slightly taller than his brother, and he wore a red hat. Fin was a little smaller and slimmer, and his hat was orange. They both had the reddest hair I’d ever seen, but Fin wore his a little shorter. Outside of that, if they weren’t wearing their hats, there wasn’t much of a way to tell them apart.
Their two sprites look nothing alike. Completely different head shapes, different posture – the only real similarity is that they both have visible teeth, and Fin has sharp ones while Trace’s are rounded.
“I was with him– and I can see where people are going to go, remember?”
That’s totally useless, since even if his power has no limit (and it must or they should have solved it by just having him look into the vault already) all he’d see is that, at some point, Matchsticks goes into a fire. Matchsticks can use fires to appear well after he’d actually died, so it’s not like if he saw the trail staying away from fires for a certain minimum of time he couldn’t have appeared in the vault earlier.
I’m really not seeing why Snowman would be giving PS hints instead of just explaining. If she didn’t care, I’d find it believable, but she keeps mentioning she’s upset for Clover and wants this solved.
He continued, more quietly. “We saw his future trail ending but we thought it was as a result of– of switching timelines. We never thought–”
But he should see the trail of the killer right now. If there’s some reason he doesn’t, that should at least be remarked on.
PS (Droog, PI, Snowman, Clover, Die, Slick, Quarters, Boxcars, HD, Trace, Fin)