Jeanie Bottle 723
Feb14
on February 14, 2023
at 12:00 am
and modified on February 13, 2023. at 11:27 pm
Chapter: Story 16: I Dream of Nostalgia
Haji’s guards aren’t the brightest crayons in the toolbox, are they?
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Haji’s guards aren’t the brightest crayons in the toolbox, are they?
Ahh the old take a form and run from another plan smart. Happy Valentines Day.
I sense we’re gonna have a new genie in the comic.
I wonder… could this be Jeannie and the blue djinn’s kid? She bares a resemblance to both.
I’m not sure how the result of that union could have occurred unbeknown to Jeanie herself. But we have little to know idea how genie reproduction works, so… maybe?
We still don’t know what deal, if any, Jeannie made to escape Haji’s palace. And it’s spelled “bears” in this context, so she’s bearing a resemblance to Jeannie while baring her midriff in that outfit. But she does look a lot like Jeannie, especially her eyes.
Bay didn’t know she was pregnant until after Honey turned up…
I’m puzzled about how backward genie society is. Haven’t they considered at least adopting human technology and putting enchantments on devices, Arthur Weasley style?
This is one example where a security camera with true vision would have come in handy.
It has been established that Genies can not be depicted by cameras, whether film-based or electronic. At best the camera shows a blur or flash showing that “a Genie was here”, but with absolutely zero identifying information.
Given they had millennia of a civilization in order to develop a decent sense of security measures and after the Blue Djinn’s activities there recently, they could do better than just having a couple of guards around these high-priority areas or at least some fail-safe counter-measures for breaches.
You’d be surprised by how many people use their devices’ default passwords, or use one of a handful of easily guessed passwords, despite all the news about data breaches. And you may also have noticed that the older people get, the more resistant they are to doing things differently. Apply that to a civilization where the leaders live hundreds or thousands of years, and guess what you get?
How about a spell, so that when a guard yells, “Stop”
* a wall appears that seals off the exit; or
* a ray paralyzes everyone in the room, except for the guard who wears a protective amulet?
Another spell might summon a squad of guards to assist the one on duty.
Do genies even have spells like that?
The guard might, of course, “wish“ for that wall, but, uh, where will it disappear?
She stole a box of crayons?
@CD Rudd: Spectacular cupid Jeanie! And oddly threatening.
I am not certain but I believe that girl is a genie lord we have seen before. I say that as before now she is the only one we have seen with elf ears. Also, why hasn’t she just poofed away at this point in time?
I think the first thing they would do is set up an anti-poof damping field around the vault area. Not all genies can be trusted.
The fact that there’s a vault with doors and locks at all suggests that the Genies think that it has some measure of security compared to a simple storage room, and the fact that the intruder had to open the vault door implies that she could not simply have poofed in and out undetected.
Now that I think about it, what treasure could possibly be kept in a physical vault that genies couldn’t just conjure up on their own? Jeanie just demonstrated that she doesn’t even have to have seen an object to summon it to anyplace she wants (the pile of money, for example). Maybe it’s because she’s more powerful than a normal genie, what with all of Blue’s stollen magic added to hers, but I really doubt she ever saw that money. The cars, maybe. Maybe even the museum with the bongs.
Here’s the responses from an old Popeye cartoon, where he confronts a magical vault door in an “Arabian Nights” palace.
Popeye: Open Sesame.
Door (snidely): Says who?
Popeye (angry, raising a fist): Sez me.
The vault door quickly opens.
They do have security measures, but they don’t seem to work all that well or all the time. On page 466 Kazom was zapped by an energy field that Jehane walked right through.
Mispost.
I can’t remember the arc but is the genie in panel 8 the chinese genie that the blue denji killed by smashing her bottle?
“Haji’s guards aren’t the brightest crayons in the toolbox”
Not just the guards. The Blue Djinn, Haji’s First Wife, and Kazom are about the only ones who aren’t dumb as posts.
Why would they need brains when they can conjure up anything they want without forethought or effort? Brains atrophy just like muscles if not exercised.
Look what happens when you give your kid a billion dollars. They’ll likely grow up to be an asshole who thinks they can lie, hire someone else to take their college exams, and bribe their way out of traffic tickets and sexual harassment suits. That’s why Gates and Buffett have stated they’ll leave their kids well-to-do but will give away the great majority of their fortunes. Smart.
My hypothesis is that humanity, as specie, has progressed far more than genies precisely for lacking such advantages. Without magic, we had no choice but to study the natural world in order to come up with workarounds to our problems (aka science and technology).
Yes, but before we turned to science and technology, we spent millennia imagining Beings who had such powers and who, with appropriate sacrifices, flattery, and wheedling, might be persuaded to use them on our behalf: spirits, gods, and djinn.
We didn’t get anywhere until we quit that. Many still harbor such delusions though, fortunately, their numbers continue to shrink in many countries.
Magic, by definition, is an attempt to alter or override Natural Laws. It doesn’t work. Science is trying to understand those laws and see how (and if) we can take advantage of them.
It’s not about magic, it’s about science. You can totally apply scientific methods on magic. Understand how it works and how you can take advantage of it.
Genies didn’t bothered.
I’ve read Fantasy where scientific methods are applied to magic. By which I mean there are natural laws we simply haven’t discovered. Cause and effect apply and actions are reproducible. As Heinlein put it, “One man’s magic is another man’s engineering”.
But the instant you invoke willful entities (the spirits, gods, and djinn I mentioned earlier) that all goes out the window. If I understand Islam correctly (as taught in the madrassas of Pakistan) there ARE no Natural Laws. Hydrogen and oxygen make water because Allah personally intervenes each time you run the experiment. It’s not even the case that He’s always decreed it will happen that way. Each time, it’s an individual act.
Newton’s contribution was the realization that supernatural intervention was unnecessary. Angels weren’t required to push the planets along their tracks.
I recommend some books by Rich Cook.
You can read a couple of chapters, for free, at https://www.baen.com/Chapters/201602FT1/201602FT1.htm
Good fun.
It postulates a world where magic exists but it’s too complex, too dependent on external factors, to be used safely by most people. Get anything wrong — hold you hand at the wrong angle, mispronounce a word in a spell, Moon is in the wrong phase — and horrible things happen. But handling all the fiddlin’ little details with perfect accuracy is exactly what computers are good at. It takes a hacker from Earth to make things reliable and systematic.
It is both subtle and not so subtle but there are laws on magic and very specifically genie magic. Some laws are natural others are enforced and can be broken … but there are rules and there are laws.
Is Haji a tyrant? I mean he did do some bad things like deposed another genie and forcing young ones to serve only him.Unless I missed something?
Well… it depends on who you ask. He’s kind of a benevolant dictator, it seems, but of course, some genies won’t even put up with that.
You know, if transforming one’s self is possible (and there doesn’t seem to be a requirement for equivalent mass in both forms) then wouldn’t it be easier to transform into something much, much smaller and darker, as a form of camouflage? Perhaps an abnormally large bat (to carry the small box) into a spot not visible to the guard?
Sorry, I’m an engineer; I keep thinking logically.
She probably isn’t an engineer. Or, maybe the difference is that if they spot the bat, they would shoot first ask later, while camouflaging as young genie gives her chance to survive.
Yes, disguising oneself as a child would generally make a guard hesitant to employ violence as a first resort unless he is operating on a “kill everything which moves” policy.
Am I the only one to see the YOWZA! Jeanie header?!
Nope, that went up yesterday.
So thats where the Calamity box went from Amphibia….LOL
Unless it reconstituted itself back in a new reality after the finale, it’s not likely. Watch the show if you haven’t yet; it’s a great show.
Is that Caley?
She looks like Caley but I don’t think it is Caley.
I think the geanie in the last panel might be a shape shifter.
Sorry, double clicked