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Triangle and Robert #1573 The procedure is fairly straightforward. The anesthetized patient is lain as flat as possible on an operating table, over which is suspended an oversized anvil. / Which is then rapidly lowered onto the patient, flattening the problematic curvature? / We prefer the term"dropped". / This sounds like a rather risky and exotic operation. / It's been very well documented. A similar procedure involving a piano is the main treatment for dental tone-deafness. / "Dental"?
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Triangle and Robert #1574 We've hit a complication. / With the anvil? / No, tranquilizing the Meat Sentry. / Oh no. Her pointy things reflex. Are any nurses dead? / We saw that much coming and used a blowgun. The problem is more that the tranquilizer doesn't appear to be working. / What letter does it start with? / What? / She builds up immunities to things as a hobby. Use something that starts with T through Z. She has finished everything up to R and is working on S.
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Triangle and Robert #1575 Was that noise of impact the operation? / Yes, and it went perfectly. Come this way. / And here she is. According to the laser plane, she now has zero curvature and is two-dimensional again. / Her upper edge is ringed with a halo of tiny roast fowl. / A harmless short-term side effect of anvil therapy. I'll admit this is the first time I've seen cooked ones.
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Triangle and Robert #1576 She's coming out of anesthesia. / {{reversed}} What happened? / Turn around. / {{reversed}} What? {{normal}} Oh! My symmetries! / Assuming you don't have a relapse, we should be able to discharge you sometime tomorrow. / Great! Just out of curiosity, what anesthetic did you take me down with?
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Triangle and Robert #1577 I am prepared to return to space in pursuit of the mortal bodies of the Chosen One and sidekick. / {{annotation: (not supposed to be nipples)}} / Such mockery is uncalled for. / The pudding with which I have infused myself is sufficient in quantity for the task, although there is rather more tapioca than I had hoped for. I will be capable of little besides flight. / Tell me, will you assist me? / Only with permission. I thought you wouldn't want my help. / As yet, I do not. I will not allow pride to interfere, however, if it becomes necessary.
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Triangle and Robert #1578 I've never explained the significance of tapioca within the strip. / Do you have the words to do so? / Not with any specificity. / Then leave it. / It should be sufficient to state that it has fundamental incompatibilities with the butterscotch of which the universe was formed. / But inaccurate. / It will do for purposes of space travel and menu planning. / The fact that you're willing to use tapioca for travel at all is meaningful. / I spent billions of years wrongfully atoning for what was not a wrong. I may spend billions more atoning for that atonement.
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Triangle and Robert #1579 And so, the Pudding-Watcher or Igneous Sentry departs the Earth, hoping to return bearing the bodies of the Cartoonist's protagonists. / The MSG entity has just informed Triangle, still waiting within the mind of the entity for rescue, of this development: / WHAT percentage? / 15.7% tapioca. / What is he thinking? If he tries to match your speed like that he'll just end up exploding! He's not rescuing me, he's trying to KILL HIMSELF! / |ur hypothesis is| |consistent with| available data
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Triangle and Robert #1580 The Pudding-Watcher can only be slain by the Chosen One, if at all. I would not slay him, but if he dies coming to my aid, that could count. Well, that leaves one option. / Does it? / Eject my body and Robert's from the rocket so Orpuddex can find them at a safe speed. You'll have to return me to my body first, I know how to get back in it from being dead but getting into it from deep space might be impossible. / So he won't kill himself rescuing you, but what if he doesn't rescue you? / If he does not mean to save me, then his purpose is death. Without me it would be impossible for him to achieve. With me, he might try again.
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Triangle and Robert #1581 Hi. / Hi. / So, we're simultaneously dead. I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. / How's the rescue going? / It's up to Orpuddex. I had the MSG jettison our corpses so Orpuddex could reach them safely in space. I hope he means to.
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Triangle and Robert #1582 This is the first time I've died and not been poorly lectured at by an underprepared disembodied voice. / Service is slow. They're still dealing with the backlog of souls Orpuddex released from his factory. / Some of them are from before polygons, right? / I think there are ones from the First through Fifth races. / Polygons are seventh. Why no one from the Sixth? / The answer to that question is less important than you can possibly imagine.
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Triangle and Robert #1583 The identity of the Sixth Race has no bearing on anything which has happened in the strip wahtsoever. I'll reveal it before the ending, but just to prove how irrelevant it really was. / You can go solve some other mysteries though. / Or we can solve that one. / Or we can solve a different one. / Right. / TRIANGLE, AGAIN YOU HAVE RETURNED TO THE DEAD. / Yessir, that he did. / OKAY THEN. RIGHT.
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Triangle and Robert #1584 TRIANGLE! / Yes? / NEVER MIND! / That was extra-pointless. / Usually there's at least a token effort to pretend there's something important for me to know. / They're very busy. / Indeed. Let's go find adventure or something. / I hope we find the something.
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Triangle and Robert #1585 How do we get around without bodies? / I can use cuisine-magic. Do you remember the time you made a sheild out of text? / Yes, and the time we rubbed speech lines together to make fire. Maybe if I say enough tildes they'll work like motion lines. / That should cover movement. Navigation on the other hand... / Let's go either left or right with respect to the comic frame. That should keep us fairly straight and get us to a plot point.
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Triangle and Robert #1586 Here's a thing. / Slow down! / This must be the line for the Fifth Race. / ~ ~ ~ / Baa! / Baa. / Am fuirich sinn fada 'n so? / Baa. / Baaa? / What language was that one in the middle? / I don't know. Maybe the Cartoonist just made it up so the readers would get angry trying to figure it out. / Baa?
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Triangle and Robert #1587 So... Fifth Race. Adventure opportunities? / Maybe the Grass Sentry. / Good idea, and we know it's already learned English. / Direction and distance are hard, but if there's a Sentry around I'm guessing this way. / Hold on, I'm not sure I can go diagonally. / Hello, polygons. I feel a great power in the smaller of you two. As you surmise, I was a Grass Sentry of the Fifth Race, although your notion of "grass" is a flawed one.
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Triangle and Robert #1588 Z Z Z / Are you tired? Can the dead even get tired? / I was doing diagonal motion lines. / How delightfully abstract. / The ways of polygons are strange to me in general, but the ways of that rhombus are particularly so. / The Fifth Race were funny looking. / Robert! / It had to be said. / Aesthetics aside, our form is vastly more functional than that of the sheep of your time. Limbs are an obscure legend to you, but they were quite useful to us.
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Triangle and Robert #1589 I apologize for my sidekick. / Insulting the spirits of powerful ancient dead is where adventure comes from! / No apology is needed. Your rhombus is easily bored and desires some manner of conflict. / My rhombus? / I stand corrected, the rhombus is an autonomous being. I was thinking in terms of my own time. / You had rhombi? / We did not create geometric objects ourselves, but those which the Fourth Race left behind were known to us. They were very unlike you polygons of the Seventh Race.
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Triangle and Robert #1590 You kept polygons as slaves! / Robert... / You raise sheep for food. / Yes, and that's almost exactly the same thing! / What? / The polygons of our time were no more intelligent than the non-telepathic sheep of yours. Some could be reprogrammed over a serial connection. / Wow, that sounds just as barbaric as eating them. / Robert, are you trying to make some sort of point? / Rhombi were particularly useful for remote operation. They could store a great deal of data and had self-preservation instincts.
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Triangle and Robert #1591 The Fourth Race apparently used rhombi for special tasks too. / The ancient rhombi had special behaviour programming for humans to operate them without equipment or training. We sheep couldn't take advantage of that, but the rhombus was still an excellent tool. / The origins of the Seventh Race are certainly an important topic, but I was hoping that as a former Sentry you could tell me something about the cuisine-magic of your time. / You seem to be an accomplished chef. Perhaps you could understand something of the Fifth Race's diet, but first you must understand our culture. / First, we knew that each race came to an end. We did not harbor the Fourth Race's illusion that the work of destiny could be prevented. The great works of our species were undertaken not solely for ourselves, but with the intent of continued value to those who would come after us, whatever their form.
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Triangle and Robert #1592 In our time none of your works survive. What happened? / Our works did survive. We did not build edifices or design machines. We actually never even bothered with written language. / So that leaves... / Though individuals, we also in many ways thought as a species. Our view of time was somewhat different from yours. We shaped the world through controlled erosion. A team of a few hundred sheep, grazing in carefully selected locations / for a few hundred years, can change the course of a river. Over a few thousand years, a river can change the shape of a mountain. Et cetera. / I think I get it. / You may have noticed that you have a great deal of geography relative to the size of your planet. This diversity was the legacy of the Fifth Race.
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Triangle and Robert #1593 So grazing was your art and your architecture, not just your cuisine. / Correct. The root, the soil, the slope of the land, all this was part of the grass. We did not cook, we cultivated and we bred. You seem to have the beginnings of understanding. / So tell me of your food groups. / We knew the grouping of food to be fundamentally arbitrary, and yet too powerful a concept to ignore. When I lived the current choice of groups was grass[dew], leaves, grass[seed], other, and grass[bulk]. / Dew/seed/bulk? That doesn't feel like a trichotomy to me. / The heart of the concepts is difficult to express to your mind. My group was grass[seed] and my main focus was on the placement of defectation. Do you polygons defecate?
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Triangle and Robert #1594 You lost me at global climate models. / You lost me at dirt. / Your frame of reference differs so much from that of my people. I cannot explain any more clearly. I apologize. / It's a lot to think about, but I'm sure I can at least work it into a salad of some sort. / Foods are funny! / Triangle, your mind I can somewhat understand. Robert's mind, however, basically manages to frighten me. He is rather similar to another entity which I am reluctant to name. / Prozac the Bear? / Robert... / What? You think he'd show up in the afterlife just because I said his name? / Probability is low, but consequence is high. The risk is one I would have preferred not incurring.
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Triangle and Robert #1595 Are we in the clear? / Change the subject! If we talk about Prozac it'll just make him more likely to appear! / Okay... Grass Sentry, what do you know about the other Races? / Little. / You didn't talk to anyone all that time in the Vat of Despair? / Only a Sentry or one of similar power could move within the vat. A successor to my position as Sentry was chosen almost immediately upon my death, and so I was immobile. / The actual designation as a Sentry is that important? / Massively. The power of the food group is embodied even in the current Sentry. / An oversimplification, but yes. The afterlife is not as viscous as the Vat of Despair was, but here too I am nearly unable to propel myself. How does Robert do so?
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Triangle and Robert #1596 My special abilities are derived from the presence of the Cartoonist and the comic strip. I'm basically allowed to get away with things regardless of whether they have a physical mechanism. / Almost exactly like... / I'm still subject to time's arrow. If something happened to me in the past, it has still happened to me in the present. / Grammar's arrow is a different story. / English is a horrible language for stating axioms of temporal logic. / I'm not sure if that even is an axiom. / Anyway, I'm not a cuisine-mage but I can keep up with them most of the time. / But only through the Cartoonist's conscious or unconscious intervention.
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Triangle and Robert #1597 In a portion of deep space which for some reason is white rather than black... / It was actually a sort of beige, originally. / I suppose it would be. Anyway, Orpuddex is quickly approaching the bodies of Triangle and Robert. / I see no spacecraft. / Why do they drift without the vessel? Has something happened to the MSG? Well? / Don't worry about that. Do what you came here to do.
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Triangle and Robert #1598 This is it. If you mean to save them, save them both. If you came here to die, save the one who can kill you and abandon Robert. / Came here to die? / I know you left Earth with too much tapioca to reach the MSG rocketship. / I did? / Fifteen point seven percent tapioca. / Fifteen WHAT? / The MSG entity took the measurement, not I. / No, I believe you. I was taking it in so fast that I didn't bother to taste it... wow. I would have called twelve percent suicide. I... yikes. That's just... wow.
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Triangle and Robert #1599 Limbs would make this stage far simpler. I had hoped to grow some for the journey, but time had run short.... / You would have ended up with even more tapioca if you'd tried growing limbs with the Tetrean pudding. / I am trying not to contemplate the tapioca. / This is uncomfortable. / Hopefully you're firm enough for them to stick there.
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Triangle and Robert #1600 Is time of the essence now? / I think safety's more important. / I will return at low speed. / You have no idea just how dangerous it is to travel through space with this much tapioca. / Not really, no. / The bodies of the Chosen One and sidekick seem to be sinking into the pudding of my body. / Is that a problem? / Only as a matter of pride. I will disregard the intrusion. / Will you get able to get them back out? / Somehow.
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Triangle and Robert #1601 Orpuddex is returning to Earth with your bodies now. / I was worried. / I don't think he knew how much tapioca there was beneath Tetris. / Isn't knowing about tapioca sort of his job? / Being an ancient puddic being doesn't automatically make someone competent.
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Triangle and Robert #1602 ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ / Robert? / We've been talking to the dead sheep for long enough. Let's talk to other dead things before we have to go back to life. / He does have a point. We'll probably meet again sometime, though. / From what I understand of your comic strip, I don't doubt it.
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