I keep losing track of whether plods move with their muscles, or by weird pymaric forces, or both. If muscles, how are they kept functioning at all?
That is in fact one of the trade secrets that plod mask manufacturers keep under wraps. I'm certainly no plodman so I couldn't tell you how it all works, and Bastion doesn't trust some Anon on Tumblr with that kind of knowledge, but Duane has long theorized plods function thanks to exploitation of DKIC, or the Deep Khert Instruction Cycle. In brief, the khert saves cognitive energy by referring to vast arrays of known interactions for much of its adjudication. To use a simple example, the khert recognises the motions and materials of a human footstep, and instead of calculating the precise interaction between sole and ground so nothing clips or explodes during a prolonged series of treads, refers to past collision instances and uses those calculations and outcomes.
Duane suspects that the khert is being duped or commandeered somewhere in this process. It's made to think that a corpse is a living human and is spurred to use saved DKIC information on it. This would be why it only works on dead human materials - it's all the mask is designed to account for. It's also why musculature and even tendons don't seem to matter; the khert is using saved interactions from a billion trillion prior adjudications to position the figure as the Mask (or in Duane's case, the Apparatus in his neck) command. It would also account for the stray biological imperatives that hassle an active plod - they are saved and manifest along with the animation, but they go haywire when the appropriate physical parts are missing (no extant digestive system, no lungs, no circulation).
And it is, of course, also why a plod stops working outside the khert. DKIC information is not local, it has to be fetched from the Universal khert. Cut off from it, the corpse doesn't animate.
None of this will ever come up in the comic :) If Duane's right, this is far too technical and not really very interesting.
