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Thank you for the support! You guys are awesome!

So for anyone waiting for the other shoe to drop, here it is. Granted, it's not a very big shoe, but the succubi are still manipulating people. You can call it mind control, or you can think of it as preventing a bunch of super powered individuals from developing grudges against Parfait/Sydney/Succubi in general/each other. It's clear Dabbler is doing what she thinks is best for the team.  And what she's doing is basically clipping the emotional peaks. Everyone's feelings are their own, just a little less hot. By morning everyone will be fully back to themselves, and Dabble will be sweating mana salts, like someone getting meat sweats at a Churrascaria.

She's lucky Xephan isn't there, because he might not be as okay with it as Gwen is. He might agree with it, but he's more likely to inform Maxima. Maxima holds unity cohesion as a priority, but also isn't about to put up with anything approaching mind control.

"Go away from me now." is Maxima's way of saying "Don't tell me about it or let me find out."

I decided to make them switch to another language, because it felt unrealistic that Parfait, who only started learning English after finding out her older half-sister was camping out in America, would know English words like "intransigent" already. Even Dabbler and her super brain and language skills would probably not know a word like "breviloquence," because when she copies a language from someone's brain, she only learns what they know of the language, and unless that person was a heavy "word of the day calendar" user, "breviloquence" just doesn't meet that threshold of words that the average English speaker will know off the top of their head. (It means speech marked by brevity and concision, BTW. It's not the literal opposite of sesquipedalian, but close enough.)

Not that Dabbler can't easily expand on her stolen language skills, of course, but Dabbler's the kind of super genius who doesn't feel the need to use big words to make herself sound smart. Well, usually. Sometimes she does when she wants to intellectually dunk on someone. Even in those cases, she's likely to expand her vocabulary toward scientific or socio-secual fields, not words that seem to exist simply to justify the need for the word "sesquipedalian."

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Comments

Justaguy

This feels like one of those dads: "You know why kicking his arse was wrong right? Good? Good! Okay now I can't tell you how proud I am that you KICKED HIS ARSE!" moments.

Martin Croft

That place may have needed a bone down, but Max need it too.

Mike

I can't tell who is talking to Max in panel 1, but I'm guessing Math. Can anyone confirm?

Michael Obert

You can take the girl out of the Inferno, but you can never truly take the inferno out of the girl. I had a feeling that things weren't as hunky-dory as they seemed. Ah well. (Also, super jealous of Parfait in panel 2. i know she's Dabbler's sister, but what fun place to be :) )

Demian Buckle

I wonder if they could get a Succubi on retainer at the UN, it would probably solve many issues when everyone is coming off that "Well-Fucked" high.

Torabi

"Oh no!" is right. I know that if I found out that someone had emotionally manipulated me so that I wouldn't hold a grudge against them for something they did... I'd hold an even bigger grudge for that than whatever the original thing was.

Thisguy

I see this whole event as less ‘mind control’ and more ‘drugged’. Dabbler’s aura as well. Granted, that’s not much better, but it’s more like they acted on desires they already had.

Kile Mullen

Just to be "that guy". it's "reveille" not "revelry". (Revelry was what they just had. 😉)

Shadracht

"Another visitor. Stay awhile. Stay fooooooorever!" I loved that game. Awesome to see the reference.

Stephen Gilberg

Even the hug disturbs me. Succubi might not have an incest taboo.

martin leske

i always wondered... does it hurt getting horns pierced?

Deltarno

Oh good...more mind control. "For their own good" even. I really, really hate succubi. Thankfully, it's almost over.

Eric Loken

What Parfait did is less 'mind control' and more 'accidental distribution of a stupefying substance' (not sure if 'stupefying' is the right word in this case). Her aura reduced inhibitions to a large degree, not unlike if everyone had been smoking dope or drinking a lot of alcohol, but without the other effects. Also increasing the libido - which probably didn't take much for most of that crowd. While deliberately spiking the punch is a no-no, you don't throw someone in prison if the bottle of Sprite they poured in to the punch turned out to be vodka that someone else had put into the bottle to sneak it into the dance (intent is generally an important factor). Dabbler may be more intentionally distributing a 'chill pill' to everyone to keep things calm, but again it is not really mind control. As Dave said, it's more just smoothing the edges than anything else. A better description than "that's just what I needed" would be artificially extending the afterglow period that naturally occurs after sex. Is it right? Well, the intent is to try to prevent bad feelings from resulting from what was an accident, so her intentions aren't nefarious, other than protecting Sydney and her sister from unfair judgment. Whether that makes it okay in the end is a far greyer area. I think a better description than mind control is 'emotional manipulation', with a significant power boost. And well; individuals, organizations, corporations, the media, religion, political parties, and governments perform emotional manipulation on a daily basis, to everyone they can, usually with far more selfish and even nefarious motives than this. And most of them dream of the day when they can do it with the same level of effectiveness and reliability that Dabbler does it, but to a much larger audience. And all so you will do what they tell you to do (probably involving money, or violence). Why yes, a considerable amount of money *is* spent on developing better and better ways to manipulate people. Heck... art is technically emotional manipulation, it is often said that the point of art is to make you feel something. And before anyone says "I choose to view art", yeah... no. Billboards, music over the PA system, architecture, interior decor, etc. these are there whether you want them or not, and they are all attempting to influence you.

Shremedy

Breaking down the roots of the breviloquence (utilizing a public education as it used to be) I'd thought it a freshly coined portmanteau of brevity and eloquence, not an actual (if obsolete) word that pretty much is what it says it is, "short and concise way of speaking"

Marc Vun Kannon

Parfait accidentally dropped a whole bunch of white powdery substance into HVAC and Dabbler came along after with a really good vacuum cleaner. Not much more exciting than that.

AlpineBob

Why not install a few repeaters now, instead of riding the elevator?