Oberon wrote:
In TBfGK, however, Archons demonstrated the following powers:
Flight;
They can fly.
Power Beams of differing types;
Thats their attack. They're a ranged unit.
Thinkagrams;
A thinkamancy ablity
The uncanny ability to arrive where they were needed exactly when they were needed (We saw two examples of this: Ansom decides to contract with Charlie, and Archons shown in mountainous terrain are suddenly above Ansom's forces; Charlie asks Parson how many Archons he'd need to take out the GK garrison and the next turn that many fly into GK airspace.)
Large movement and Charlie had them in position. Doomabts could to the same.
More than enough potency to blast a Master Class Croakamancer and a stack of flying uncroaked, killing all of the uncroaked and critically wounding the caster. When it's not their turn, by the way;
They didn't actually hit Wanda, she took falling damage from a head first dive and was probably moving very quickly already. The archons managed to take out three uncroaked fliers, and two of the weakest undead. So with 30 archons thats like nine to a unipegatur and another for each rider. It looks like it takes about
9 archersto croak a dwagon. And since unipegaturs are definitly weaker than dwagons... err... thats not really impressive.
The ability to see magical compulsions (on Jillian);
Its an ablity from thinkamancy. Comes with the thinkagrams.
The ability to dispel those compulsions via a pep-talk;
I'm pretty sure anyone could do this no magic required. Well if you know about the spell of course.
The ability to see through veils (on Bogroll);
Foolamancy; comes with the viels.
The ability to grant dance fight capabilities to forces who were described as being incapable of dance fighting;
This is a shiny combination of magic, other casters can do this as well.
And they can fetch you your carpet even when they have zero move.
This is a function of flying, nothing special at all.
I may have missed some, since the list is so long. But in short, the Archons in TBfGK had the power of plot: They had whatever ability was needed at the time, regardless of whether the readers had been given any inclination that they possessed this capability. They were in essence a flying Deus ex machina, capable of solving any plot issue which needed solving.
The Archons have been less of a spoiler in this Book, which is a very good thing. But then again, Charlie has been trying very hard to operate only through puppets in order to keep his involvement a secret. Now that he has been revealed to both Jetstone and Haggar this may change.
In the first book we didn't know what they could do. So it seemed like they could do anything. In this one we know their ablities, and we also know most of them can't do everything. Archons also don't get all of the six possible ablities, only a few. They are still very powerful, and they have very useful ablities. But they can't do as much as it seemed in book one.
