"We're gonna run a little drill where I pretend to capture your city."

Vinny probably isn't nearly as high level as Caesar, and with a leadership bonus that's correspondingly lower.

>Won't the GMs be able to see those decrypted and intervene? I was sure it was them that croaked those casters from afar.

The bylaws of the Magic Kingdom were very recently rewritten to prevent the GM from spying. Janis expects them to take around 60 turns before they figure out how to break it.

Even so, Faq has a TINY garrison right now. This is pretty much a guarenteed win.

Oh sure, at least until Jillian sends her main army back. Or Charlie comes up with a curveball.

Unless jillian already razed ICFYS. Then she will be bringing back herself and her stack.

Given Jillian's personality, it's entirely possible she'll be continuing the offensive.

Not just this, but holding FAQ itself is a huge boon. It's impossible to get to unless you've got air units, has enough space in this closed off area to run a decently sized side and most sides aren't even aware of its existence. Sure, Vinny won't be too happy, but this is the best thing that's happened to Transylvito in a long time.

They just have to put down Albert, or at least capture him and use him to keep Jillian away, maybe even turn him since he's more attached to Vinny than his own ruler/mother.

>Gobwin Knob can't fight Jillian because of a Charlie deal
>Charlie uses Jillian to take Gobwin Knob territory and there's nothing they can do about it
>Parson uses Transylvito to fight Jillian for them by exploiting their fear of Charlie
>Gobwin Knob gains an ally
>Charlie loses another scheme
Things are looking up.

Incidentally this also means that Jillian can no longer scrap Gobwin Knob like she was planning to, because it's her new capitol.

>then I was super surprised when Wanda decrypted those barbarian casters
I was absolutely expecting the fresh corpses to turn up. That's not something you set up and leave to rot.

We saw her make plans to continue the offensive. So its going to take her some turns to turn back around.

Well, she's probably going to lose Faq's other two cities (Those farms). Raises some questions about if she can even afford her force when reduced to a single capital site and deprived of one of her backers.

She's got a huge force to maintain. Not that she needed more motivation to stay on the offensive to begin with. Jillian's sole saving grace is that she's equally aggressive and unpredictable. She won't dawdle around. She might double back, she might try to carve up Stanley more to make up the losses, she might realize who betrayed her and get pissy and invade batland. Who knows.

Charlie's going to have a rough time trying to control her, especially if albert flips sides. His loyalty is probably dismal.

I just how how much of a fucking pawn she is, utterly under the thrall of Charlies manipulations and too stupid to understand just how insignificant her own motivations end up actually being.

Losing your capital means losing your treasury.

G fuckin' G.

She might be able to take GK before she loses Faq though

Jesus, this comic is still going?

>Almost all of the main story beats (aka the comic pages) reference things is the multiple tie in spinnoff young adult fanfiction light novel... well you get the picture. It's LITERALLY a case of "you should have read (about) the (kingdom of) FAQ", but I can't bring myself to care about it.
This is why I stopped following it.

Once I had to start consuming supplementary materials to know what the hell was going on I lost interest.

Raises the question of how she knew about them, though, doesn't it? Or does she, as a master-class Croakamancer, just know where every corpse in the hex is? I seem to recall the MK is just one hex, but could definitely be wrong.

She probably does have some sort of corpse-sense, possibly enhanced further by the Arkentool which is why she could detect them below the foundation level.

How she knew who they were or that they could rescue her is up in the air, however. Having control of both of them is fucking huge though. Two casters with absolute loyalty that know charlie-hacks? Fuck yeah.

How much treasury does she have anyway though? I mean, she's being funded by Charlescomm, we don't know the exact arrangements of such, but assuming it's not some huge lump sum and he's willing to write her periodic checks, it's not that big of a deal. CK has virtually unlimited money.

Just a gut impression, but judging from her expression of surprise in the 6th panel of 222, I don't think she did. She probably just did her default "decrypt every corpse in the hex" that she can definitely do, and probably has to do it that way since she doesn't seem to have a line of sight and might not know where Marie's corpse is, and got the two of them in the bargain.

I haven't read the side story thing and I don't feel like I'm missing any important info, what are y'all talking about?

I'm pretty sure they mean the text updates in the main comic.

Yeah lemme find an example.

I tried to find a specific example but I couldn't locate the page it was on. Anyhow it might be easier to just show you the Prequel. Book 0 talks about the Kingdom of FAQ. It's important to the story but if you only read the comic pages the only thing you will know about it is that Jillian's kingdom is also named FAQ.

archives.erfworld.com/Book 0

The book is almost entirely text with a few pictures tossed in. It references events that happened WAY before book 1, back when Jillian, Wanda and Jack all served in the same kingdom together, the Kingdom of FAQ. Now I've not actually read the prologue myself because as I mentioned I ain't got time for that shit. But to give you cliff notes of the situation FAQ was destroyed because reasons. And Charlie (who is the main antagonist of the current chapter) had a big hand in it's destruction.

This is hugely important to the main story because it explains why Wanda and Jillian act strangely around each other, often in retarded ways. They have baggage for DAYS. And one of the HUGE plot points in book 2 was when Jack was killed in the fight to take Spacerock. The reason is that Wanda, Jack and Jillian were all placed under a magical contract by Charlie that was so strong it was basically written on their souls. But Jack DIED, and since he was resurrected he is no longer bound to that original contract and can now spill the beans on why Charlie is such a cunt.

See what I mean about the main story beats hinging on things that happened entirely in side stories and are never explained in the main story itself?

Don't they explicitly say something along the lines of 'We were under contract with Charlie from our days in FAQ, was hoping decryption would break the contract'

I mean, you may not understand exactly what happened, but you can infer pretty easily the parts that are required to understand what is happening in the comic.

Anyone else get the feeling that Charlie isn't actually attuned, but is using Carnymancy to trick the tool into thinking he is?

I would expect the Arkentools to be one-step up from anything a single unatuned caster could pull off.

Well yeah, but it still doesn't answer the basic question of "what the hell is FAQ and why should I care", for that you need to read a whole separate story.

It's possible to do that now in one sitting but back in the day it felt like some random sidestory that trickled in at a snails pace and was hard to care about. Especially because getting those walls of text meant you didn't get a comic that week. I know they had artist difficulties at the time but this story still needs to make up it's mind about being a comic or a book.

I hate FAQ, it's a stupid city which exists because of one stupid character, who the writers keep trying to make cool and relevant, and who ultimately just ends up distracting from the actual cool shit which Parson & Co. end up getting involved in.

The FAQ arc literally made me drop Erfworld. It was so fucking garbage and TLDR.

I found it boring, until the heroine kicked in. I think it got pretty interesting from there.

Charely does not have infinite money. He even had to spend a lot of money to get the current situation... and it is playing marryhell with his income stream in the local area. Remember he has a tiny city based income, and a fucking huge army of top tier units to support.

Luckily it was transvisto that payed for a lot of FAQ. So they are largely getting their money back.

Also, are people ready for the axis of regicide?