Editing 241: Battle Room

{{comic
| number    = 241
| date      = March 28, 2007
| title     = Battle Room
| image     = battle_room.png
| titletext = Bean actually sabotaged it just to give Dink the excuse to make that joke.
}}

==Explanation==
The book ''{{w|Ender's Game}}'' by {{w|Orson Scott Card}} is about {{w|Ender Wiggin}}, a boy of extraordinary intelligence, who is recruited to be trained to be one of the commanders of Earth's "Defense" Fleet. The Fleet serves to protect Earth should the aliens known as "{{w|Formics|Buggers}}" invade again. (Future books renamed the Buggers to the Formics, since in British English, "bugger" is a swear word meaning to engage in anal sex, and an insult, as in "you silly bugger"). Ender is taken to a space school called Battle School. At the center of Battle School is the Battle Room, where all the training revolves (literally and figuratively) around. ''Ender's Game'' has also been discussed in later comics like  [[635: Locke and Demosthenes]] and [[304: Nighttime Stories]].

The Battle Room is described as a hollow perfect cube. "Stars" (smaller cubes) can be pulled from the walls (without changing the shape, more stars come in to fill the space where the old ones were) and can be used as obstacles in the Battle Room, as they will remain absolutely stationary, no matter what force is exerted on them. There is no gravity in the Battle Room. Most squads entering the Battle Room keep their orientation from the hallway (gravity in the hallway dictates where "down" is in the Room). Ender realizes that because the room is a perfect cube, and that even the entrances, called "gates," are perfect squares and do not give any hint about which direction is up or down, that keeping that orientation is useless. He instructs his squad to orient so that the enemy's gate is down, a line of lateral thinking that gives his team three big advantages (smaller targets, "shielding" themselves with their own feet, and unprecedented angles of attack) and leads them to a perfect winning streak.

The joke here, as made by Ender's squadmate Dink, is that the enemy's gate is "down," as in broken. A computer or a website is said to be "down" when it stops operating or is unavailable, due to a cause such as a crash, the power is cut, or it is being taken offline for maintenance.

The title text suggests that the enemy's gate was sabotaged by Bean, another, possibly even smarter, friend of Ender's, for the sole reason of allowing Dink to make the joke. This reflects the developments in ''{{w|Ender's Shadow}}'', the {{w|parallel story}} to ''Ender's Game'', which showed that Bean was manipulating many of the events of the original book.

Bean and Dink are both kids in Ender's platoon, and eventually become two of his lieutenants in the end of the book.

==Transcript==
:[A scene is depicted from the Battle Room of the novel Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. The boys are floating in a room with random cubes.]
:Dink: Sorry, Ender — seems like there were some system crashes. The battle's gotta be cut short.
:Ender: The lasers still work.
:Dink: Yeah, but the enemy's gate is down.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Multiple Cueballs]]
[[Category:Fiction]]
[[Category:Ender's Game]]