Shelly is saying that she is a mortal sphinx with a normal human life-span. Tina is having difficulty processing that claim seeing that Shelly is almost 80,000 years old according to her aura. I think in the here and now Shelly is mortal with about 60 or 70 years left. Maybe if she leaves this plane she isn’t, but here she is. That is what I get from this exchange.
I think you are correct, and that’s a good point. However, I think she is reading Shelly’s age indirectly; she’s reading Shelly’s feelings about being 80,000 years old.
I’m not following your point. First, we don’t know if that statement is true some of the time or never, but obviously it can’t be true all of the time if what Shelly is saying today is true. Even if it were true all of the time, why couldn’t Shelly have a normal 60-70 year life span if she remains in human form? Couldn’t doing that cause aging? Or perhaps it’s only being in human form on the Earth that causes aging. Why couldn’t that be the case?
^^That .Plus the simple fact that Shelly only stses “mortal’, not that it means she’ll live the average human-life-span.
She can die, but there is no guarantee that sphinx-hybrids cannot go beyond +_ 73. I’d wager that they can get really old, but are not part of the “imortal’ class.
[Whining]Ugh..painkillers start to mess wioth my typing skillzz
You know that getting a titanium implant for a canine HURTS LIKE FRIGGIN HELL!!! And I have threads hanging in my mouth Yuck!
[/whining]
Thnx. Amazing how pain can dim a brain and affect motor-skills..
Maybe a bit far fetched, but maybe, perhaps ,in a far-out way can we surmise the speed by which a Sphinx actually ages ,independent from a magic realm.
Shelly atm looks like 30-something. Soo ,maybe 81200 yeras adds 10 years to a hybrid Sphinx’ age. She could go on to be millions of years old, almost immortal ,but not quite.
Well..’s just conjecture. Nice to ponder, but probably as far from the truth as a strawberry is from a strawberry-milkshake. 😛
He most certainly has, and with each comic we get more riddles to ponder.
Teachers should use it and it’s comments. Sjeesh, we’ve had Philosophy, math, advanced calculus, chemistry, particle physics, some foreign languages thrown in. (yup, once a techer, always ateacher, despite not having seen a class fot 20 years…)
I think I might be missing something…If Shelly has always been a mortal sphinx hybrid, why did the radiation kill the other iteration(s) of her, but not this one?
As discussed above, Sphinxes are supernatural and very sturdy, and because Shelly #1 had not yet unlocked the genetic memory necessary to enjoy the powers of sphinxes, she died of radiation exposure.
Also keep in mind, Shellinx informed Shelly 31 that another version of Shelly had originally put the plutonium into the tree, so she prolly dies as well, while Shellinx lived to tell the tale…thus shellinx would already know that radiation could not kill her.
And just to clarify, Shelly #57 had already evolved over at least 1450 years before Shelly #56 showed up, so would already probably be given some measure of protection.
We don’t know what would have happened if Omega Shelly had been in human form. We also don’t know what would happen to Shelly if she were in her sphinx form on Earth.
I’d be interested in an explanation as to how the recessive gene finally got expressed…something to do with the environment in the tree realm? The sheer number of years she had to wait around? If she had done a 1200-year fast on earth would she have started to evolve?
And the odds of the exact Wapsi character with this very rare genetic makeup would end up being the bearer of the relic seems to me to be astronomical. Do you think Jin had the prescience to somehow set it up this way through knowing Shelly through her many lifetimes?
I don’t see how Jin could have possibly set it up. The relic was created long before the loops started. Jin didn’t even seem to know that the relic existed until Bud told her about it.
I also don’t think that the odds were necessarily that astronomical. The relic may have been built to work with any sphinx. Shelly might have been the first sphinx try to use it. Maybe the relic wasn’t supposed to do what it did when Shelly used it, but because she was a sphinx she made it malfunction. Maybe it has nothing to do with her being a sphinx. Who knows?
Why do you think that Shelly evolved? I agree that she might have gradually turned into a sphinx, but she might have been told how to do it or discovered it accidentally while trying to use the relic or something. Maybe she wished she could fly to take a good look at the place and suddenly sprouted wings and got furry. Who knows?
My guess is exposure to the magic forest/grove caused the expression of the genes and the resulting sphinxification. I think it must have happened relatively quickly. Maybe if Shelly had pulled an all night study session at The Library (heh) it would have happened too. 😉
if time is like a string, and the calendar created a loop in the string, but the string still has ends extending into infinity, then it would be possible for Shelly to live 40,000 years and develop into Shellinx, then become trapped in the artifact and spend 40,000 years working her way back to the “present” and bumping into herself as she occasionally visited thru the artifact the way Monica did, until the last time when she became the first to visit the forest and became trapped.
Based on some of the comments, I get the impression that many people think that Paul has been using the concept of an aura differently than what I have been thinking. I think that Paul has consistently used Tina’s aura reading as something similar to mind reading, except that it’s more about feelings and mood than what facts they know. If someone was in the mood for a certain type of coffee she would pick up on that. If someone needed cheering up, she would pick up on that, too. I don’t think that it is matter of reading something inherent about a person or their powers, as it is in some fantasy literature.
IIRC, Tina explained how her aura reading works to Monica several years ago, but I don’t want to take the time to find that now.
In other words, she can sense emotions and might even be able to get a particular visual pattern associated with them? And the presence of a sphinx has got to be pretty powerful…
I don’t know if she would sense much difference between a sphinx and a crazy person who merely thought that they were a sphinx. Sometimes Phix behaved stoically, but sometimes Phix’s emotions seemed to be out of control, so I have no idea what goes on emotionally with them.
This wasn’t what I meant, but in that one Tina draws a distinction between what the auras say and reality. Apparently, Tina picked up on doubts that Monica and Shelly were repressing in the previous page.
If -just as a hypothesis- aura’s are like bands of colour and irregularities representing a person’s current mood/status/musings, only seen by select people, they can be considered a full-fledged language that can be learnt. Coupled with the fact that Tina still exhibits the traits of a good psychiatrist, explains for me how Tina “knows” stuff from said aura’s.
And who isn’t to say that Tina, when still a “human” wasn’t also an Aura-Reader ,and maybe, just MAYBE a damn good therapist due to that odd trait, but ALSO made her connect her shell to “magic” in an autonomous way and as such an attractive haven for demons (and meddling demi-gods) capable of running off the combined energy of a demon-collective.
Bwah..I guess I am reading too much in it here…but…
SQUEEEEEEEEEELL.. isn’t this just the greatest? Demons ,Sphinxes, beautiful ladies, and magic gone haywire..what more could a geek want?? exiting
Don’t be too quick to discount any of that. After this thing with Shelly, who knows what Paul will hit us with concerning Tina’s true nature. She could have been anything, real or mythological, before the accident. In the Wapsiverse she could be anything. There has already been foreshadowing that she is involved in things beyond the current plot happenings. Things about which we have yet to learn: http://wapsisquare.com/comic/yet-to-do/
That all may well be true. Or it may be that demons inherently see auras and that helps them figure out how to push people’s buttons. Even if Monica’s demons never mention reading auras to Monica, that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it. Maybe Tina’s demons were reading peoples auras and describing them to Tina 1.0 while she was alive.
I’m glad to see that your pain meds seem to be kicking in. 😀
Yeah ,finally. Though, currently Ilook like a nasty bar-brawler: no eye-tooth, and a black eye (seems to be standard)
I had just ONE implant….imagine what Tina has endured. 😯 Breaking an arm is peanuts!!
I wonder..will TSA alarms go blaring when I’ll go to Minneapolis next spring??? It’s a big titanium screw, after all…
Being she was a recessive trait sphinx, it explains her superhuman engine blck throwing strength and her surviving a bowl ball thick headedness. I know she was knocked out but that would have killed most people.
Up next…story time with Shellinx?
She does have some ‘splainin to do.
Yes, but look at how she’s setting it off. Also notice that she had the soot on herself before setting off the explosion, so that’s no indication that she was near the grill. It was just intended to make officer tight buns think she was. I don’t see any indication there that Paul had figured out that Shelly was a sphinx yet.
Whoa, whoa, easy tiger…I was not implying that Shelly’s survival of an exploding grill –> Shelly is a sphinx, just adding another feat of strength to the examples above…
OK, now that I have read the above comment I replied to more carefully, I admit that is exactly what I was doing…but I stand by the fact that you prolly can’t stand atoo much of a “safe distance” away from the grill to push the igniter button. This things require a lot of force
No more than if you were standing right next to it. You would have to be using something that was stiff, though.
As long as you don’t have your face directly over the grill, you will probably be OK. NOTE: I am not suggesting that anyone verify that, though. Obey all warning labels!
Let alone the danger of a flying lid.
If an exploding BBQ is anything like having fun with milk-drums and CaC2 (calciumcarbide) I’d rather try to ignite the damn thing by trying to hit the ignition with a bb-gun from a respectable distance..
But , yeah, Shelly is built pretty sturdy ,with a skull-thickness aching to armour. It could be a basic trait of a latent sphinx-kitten.
“Being she was a recessive trait sphinx, it explains her superhuman engine blck throwing strength and her surviving a bowl ball thick headedness.”
I don’t think that was Paul’s original explanation. Her cast page says that she has a myostatin deficiency. That would cause her to have abnormal muscle development. (Credit to Yamara for spotting that.) I don’t necessarily agree that the bowling ball to the head would have killed her, either.
Personally, I think the human and sphinx form are two separate forms. A sphinx in human form isn’t necessarily outwardly different than any normal human.
I think that latent sphinxiousness might be mis-diagnosed as a myostatin deficiency.
Just as Huntington’s Chorea is sometimes initially misdiagnosed as other things.
And a sixteen pound balling bowl (and it would be top-weight, being it was Shelly’s) falling from a foot above directly and squarely on top of your head would almost certainly do rather more damage to a normal human than brief unconsciousness and a headache after.
At the time i attributed it to “it’s a comic strip with comic strip physics.” Now i’m not so sure.
I had a thought about how Shellinx knows what she knows now. One imagines that she grew up in a family where oral tradition and family lore are terribly important. Given 80,000 years and what she experienced with Monica and company, perhaps she sorted out what she knows about sphinxes from that. She certainly had time.
As for the sphinx genes suddenly going active, I go along with the folks who say Shelly was always a larval sphinx, or maybe always had it within her but never quite got ahold of it. It’s probably a spiritual quest as much as anything. The genes might be activated in answer to the question: what if, having merged your demons into one being, you merged that being with yourself? It might explain why Sphinxes are demon hunters too.
Also, looking back to the comic where Monica grabs the artifact, a lot of folks say the guardian there looked like Jin. But it also looked a lot like Creepy Little Girl – Shelly’s fused demons.
I was looking back in the archives for the coffee karaffe krushing comic when I ran across this one. Shelly and Tina were talking about the Relic. In Panel 5, Shelly thinking about the event leading up to it in all of the past CM cycles.
I don’t know that I would call that foreshadowing. To me, that was just regular exposition.
For whatever reason, the calendar fixers seemed to have concluded that the relic would somehow fix the calendar in the previous loops. It sure isn’t obvious how Shelly knew that they did, though.
Given that the relic never helped and that Jin could remember the failures, why didn’t Jin say, OK, this time we need to try something different? Was she always too far gone by that point to even be aware of it? She didn’t seem to remember anything about the relic when Bud told her about it.
Not that it matters, but I wonder if the recessive gene was maternal or paternal? The dollies came from mom. Were they always under the gardianship of a recessive sphinx line?
Shelly’s demons, one wonders what sort of panic they must have felt when they realized they’d been assigned to sleeping sphinx. Talk about riding the tiger.
Forgive me if someone has already said this. What if one of the conditions to become a sphinx is to condense ones demons (i.e. Creepy Girl) into one being, thus allowing one’s self to ‘evolve’ into a sphinx.
Okay, I just got up and there’s almost a hundred more comments, so if I’m retreading anything, oh well.
I’m waiting to hear Richard Whanee’s take on this. He obviously knows more than he told his daughter. His reactions to multiple seeds of what’s happened show it.
To Shelly getting lost in thought and grinding half a car off: http://wapsisquare.com/comic/03052003/
Must have been looking at the dates sideways, not caffeinated at the time. But, still we had several ‘Meh’ reactions to extreme physicality, and a freak-out when she cut her hair.
Okay, time in the Forest runs backwards. As Shelly experiences time, she encounters earlier and earlier versions of herself until, 80,000 years in the past, she meets Shelly the First, from the first iteration of the time-loop, who then dies…
…whereupon Shelly the Last instantly fast-forwards 80,000 years to back where she started?
But what if she didn’t fast-forward? What if she is *still* 80,000 years in the past, and she popped back into the regular timeline within the first time-loop, taking the place of the late Shelly the First?
Shelly is saying that she is a mortal sphinx with a normal human life-span. Tina is having difficulty processing that claim seeing that Shelly is almost 80,000 years old according to her aura. I think in the here and now Shelly is mortal with about 60 or 70 years left. Maybe if she leaves this plane she isn’t, but here she is. That is what I get from this exchange.
I think you are correct, and that’s a good point. However, I think she is reading Shelly’s age indirectly; she’s reading Shelly’s feelings about being 80,000 years old.
I don’t know about that “normal human life span”.
Remember: “Do you want to know where sphinxes come from? They’re born … as humans. Just as you were.”
I’m not following your point. First, we don’t know if that statement is true some of the time or never, but obviously it can’t be true all of the time if what Shelly is saying today is true. Even if it were true all of the time, why couldn’t Shelly have a normal 60-70 year life span if she remains in human form? Couldn’t doing that cause aging? Or perhaps it’s only being in human form on the Earth that causes aging. Why couldn’t that be the case?
^^That .Plus the simple fact that Shelly only stses “mortal’, not that it means she’ll live the average human-life-span.
She can die, but there is no guarantee that sphinx-hybrids cannot go beyond +_ 73. I’d wager that they can get really old, but are not part of the “imortal’ class.
[Whining]Ugh..painkillers start to mess wioth my typing skillzz
You know that getting a titanium implant for a canine HURTS LIKE FRIGGIN HELL!!! And I have threads hanging in my mouth Yuck!
[/whining]
Well, the normal life span remaining for Shelly is W’s theory. It sounds just as plausible as just about anything else to me.
Just to clarify, I meant 60-70 additional years in the previous comment, to match what W was saying.
Sorry about you being in pain…
Thnx. Amazing how pain can dim a brain and affect motor-skills..
Maybe a bit far fetched, but maybe, perhaps ,in a far-out way can we surmise the speed by which a Sphinx actually ages ,independent from a magic realm.
Shelly atm looks like 30-something. Soo ,maybe 81200 yeras adds 10 years to a hybrid Sphinx’ age. She could go on to be millions of years old, almost immortal ,but not quite.
Well..’s just conjecture. Nice to ponder, but probably as far from the truth as a strawberry is from a strawberry-milkshake. 😛
Sheesh. 9:30 in the morning, and already 250 comments. I think Paul has struck a nerve with this particular amazing storyline. 😀
He most certainly has, and with each comic we get more riddles to ponder.
Teachers should use it and it’s comments. Sjeesh, we’ve had Philosophy, math, advanced calculus, chemistry, particle physics, some foreign languages thrown in. (yup, once a techer, always ateacher, despite not having seen a class fot 20 years…)
I think I might be missing something…If Shelly has always been a mortal sphinx hybrid, why did the radiation kill the other iteration(s) of her, but not this one?
As discussed above, Sphinxes are supernatural and very sturdy, and because Shelly #1 had not yet unlocked the genetic memory necessary to enjoy the powers of sphinxes, she died of radiation exposure.
Also keep in mind, Shellinx informed Shelly 31 that another version of Shelly had originally put the plutonium into the tree, so she prolly dies as well, while Shellinx lived to tell the tale…thus shellinx would already know that radiation could not kill her.
urk! “31” above should be “#1”.
And just to clarify, Shelly #57 had already evolved over at least 1450 years before Shelly #56 showed up, so would already probably be given some measure of protection.
We don’t know what would have happened if Omega Shelly had been in human form. We also don’t know what would happen to Shelly if she were in her sphinx form on Earth.
I’d be interested in an explanation as to how the recessive gene finally got expressed…something to do with the environment in the tree realm? The sheer number of years she had to wait around? If she had done a 1200-year fast on earth would she have started to evolve?
And the odds of the exact Wapsi character with this very rare genetic makeup would end up being the bearer of the relic seems to me to be astronomical. Do you think Jin had the prescience to somehow set it up this way through knowing Shelly through her many lifetimes?
I don’t see how Jin could have possibly set it up. The relic was created long before the loops started. Jin didn’t even seem to know that the relic existed until Bud told her about it.
I also don’t think that the odds were necessarily that astronomical. The relic may have been built to work with any sphinx. Shelly might have been the first sphinx try to use it. Maybe the relic wasn’t supposed to do what it did when Shelly used it, but because she was a sphinx she made it malfunction. Maybe it has nothing to do with her being a sphinx. Who knows?
Why do you think that Shelly evolved? I agree that she might have gradually turned into a sphinx, but she might have been told how to do it or discovered it accidentally while trying to use the relic or something. Maybe she wished she could fly to take a good look at the place and suddenly sprouted wings and got furry. Who knows?
My guess is exposure to the magic forest/grove caused the expression of the genes and the resulting sphinxification. I think it must have happened relatively quickly. Maybe if Shelly had pulled an all night study session at The Library (heh) it would have happened too. 😉
Do you think that a many sphinx lived and died without realizing what they were because they never traveled to such a place?
Hmm..yeah..something that bobbed around in my mind too.
A “Magic-Realm” as the trigger for latent sphinxes.
😐 sounds plausible.
Does that mean that I’m stuck as a human unless I can somehow find a portal to a proper cosmos?
Dangerous thought! You could end up as a Platypus. The proof that God has a sense of humor..
I, for one, am not wagering a bet that I’ll be a cool sphinx in an appropriate universe. I think I’d end-up as an intelligent toaster.
“Yes, I do know the reason of human existence, but wouldn’t You first like a bit of toast???”
Yes, but would bmonk think that was a good or bad thing? 😛
@eschmenk: Yes.
if time is like a string, and the calendar created a loop in the string, but the string still has ends extending into infinity, then it would be possible for Shelly to live 40,000 years and develop into Shellinx, then become trapped in the artifact and spend 40,000 years working her way back to the “present” and bumping into herself as she occasionally visited thru the artifact the way Monica did, until the last time when she became the first to visit the forest and became trapped.
I just thought of something. Did Monica’s boss and Phix… well… are genes still mixing in modern times?
Well, we know that Shelly and the cop did. We also don’t know how many sphinx are around.
…and the recessive genes would still be carried by some non-sphinx, too.
Based on some of the comments, I get the impression that many people think that Paul has been using the concept of an aura differently than what I have been thinking. I think that Paul has consistently used Tina’s aura reading as something similar to mind reading, except that it’s more about feelings and mood than what facts they know. If someone was in the mood for a certain type of coffee she would pick up on that. If someone needed cheering up, she would pick up on that, too. I don’t think that it is matter of reading something inherent about a person or their powers, as it is in some fantasy literature.
IIRC, Tina explained how her aura reading works to Monica several years ago, but I don’t want to take the time to find that now.
In other words, she can sense emotions and might even be able to get a particular visual pattern associated with them? And the presence of a sphinx has got to be pretty powerful…
I don’t know if she would sense much difference between a sphinx and a crazy person who merely thought that they were a sphinx. Sometimes Phix behaved stoically, but sometimes Phix’s emotions seemed to be out of control, so I have no idea what goes on emotionally with them.
Apparently, human auras can be so intense that they have their own auras. I don’t know if sphinx auras can outdo that. 😕
This wasn’t what I meant, but in that one Tina draws a distinction between what the auras say and reality. Apparently, Tina picked up on doubts that Monica and Shelly were repressing in the previous page.
If -just as a hypothesis- aura’s are like bands of colour and irregularities representing a person’s current mood/status/musings, only seen by select people, they can be considered a full-fledged language that can be learnt. Coupled with the fact that Tina still exhibits the traits of a good psychiatrist, explains for me how Tina “knows” stuff from said aura’s.
And who isn’t to say that Tina, when still a “human” wasn’t also an Aura-Reader ,and maybe, just MAYBE a damn good therapist due to that odd trait, but ALSO made her connect her shell to “magic” in an autonomous way and as such an attractive haven for demons (and meddling demi-gods) capable of running off the combined energy of a demon-collective.
Bwah..I guess I am reading too much in it here…but…
SQUEEEEEEEEEELL.. isn’t this just the greatest? Demons ,Sphinxes, beautiful ladies, and magic gone haywire..what more could a geek want??
exiting
Don’t be too quick to discount any of that. After this thing with Shelly, who knows what Paul will hit us with concerning Tina’s true nature. She could have been anything, real or mythological, before the accident. In the Wapsiverse she could be anything. There has already been foreshadowing that she is involved in things beyond the current plot happenings. Things about which we have yet to learn:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/yet-to-do/
That all may well be true. Or it may be that demons inherently see auras and that helps them figure out how to push people’s buttons. Even if Monica’s demons never mention reading auras to Monica, that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it. Maybe Tina’s demons were reading peoples auras and describing them to Tina 1.0 while she was alive.
I’m glad to see that your pain meds seem to be kicking in. 😀
Yeah ,finally. Though, currently Ilook like a nasty bar-brawler: no eye-tooth, and a black eye (seems to be standard)
I had just ONE implant….imagine what Tina has endured. 😯 Breaking an arm is peanuts!!
I wonder..will TSA alarms go blaring when I’ll go to Minneapolis next spring??? It’s a big titanium screw, after all…
Zooooooommmm … Woooooshhhh!!!
That was the sound of the pain meds comment going right over my head.
Oops, hit wrong reply.
Well, in case it wasn’t just a one-time problem:
Jay-Em at 3:57 pm central:
Jay-Em at 4:30 pm:
Also, SoWhyMe‘s comment wasn’t visible at the time I decided to reply to Jay-Em. I might have worded things a bit differently if it had been.
Being she was a recessive trait sphinx, it explains her superhuman engine blck throwing strength and her surviving a bowl ball thick headedness. I know she was knocked out but that would have killed most people.
Up next…story time with Shellinx?
She does have some ‘splainin to do.
Sha also made her grill explode without suffering much damage…
Yes, but look at how she’s setting it off. Also notice that she had the soot on herself before setting off the explosion, so that’s no indication that she was near the grill. It was just intended to make officer tight buns think she was. I don’t see any indication there that Paul had figured out that Shelly was a sphinx yet.
Whoa, whoa, easy tiger…I was not implying that Shelly’s survival of an exploding grill –> Shelly is a sphinx, just adding another feat of strength to the examples above…
OK, now that I have read the above comment I replied to more carefully, I admit that is exactly what I was doing…but I stand by the fact that you prolly can’t stand atoo much of a “safe distance” away from the grill to push the igniter button. This things require a lot of force
No more than if you were standing right next to it. You would have to be using something that was stiff, though.
As long as you don’t have your face directly over the grill, you will probably be OK. NOTE: I am not suggesting that anyone verify that, though. Obey all warning labels!
Let alone the danger of a flying lid.
If an exploding BBQ is anything like having fun with milk-drums and CaC2 (calciumcarbide) I’d rather try to ignite the damn thing by trying to hit the ignition with a bb-gun from a respectable distance..
But , yeah, Shelly is built pretty sturdy ,with a skull-thickness aching to armour. It could be a basic trait of a latent sphinx-kitten.
Do you think we can get Mythbusters interested? 😉
Didn’t Paul say that the grille explosion was based on personal experience?
Ah – here it is. A response to this comment.
Geeze. I had to read back over a couple months of strips. What a horrible chore…
“Being she was a recessive trait sphinx, it explains her superhuman engine blck throwing strength and her surviving a bowl ball thick headedness.”
I don’t think that was Paul’s original explanation. Her cast page says that she has a myostatin deficiency. That would cause her to have abnormal muscle development. (Credit to Yamara for spotting that.) I don’t necessarily agree that the bowling ball to the head would have killed her, either.
Personally, I think the human and sphinx form are two separate forms. A sphinx in human form isn’t necessarily outwardly different than any normal human.
I think that latent sphinxiousness might be mis-diagnosed as a myostatin deficiency.
Just as Huntington’s Chorea is sometimes initially misdiagnosed as other things.
And a sixteen pound balling bowl (and it would be top-weight, being it was Shelly’s) falling from a foot above directly and squarely on top of your head would almost certainly do rather more damage to a normal human than brief unconsciousness and a headache after.
At the time i attributed it to “it’s a comic strip with comic strip physics.” Now i’m not so sure.
I had a thought about how Shellinx knows what she knows now. One imagines that she grew up in a family where oral tradition and family lore are terribly important. Given 80,000 years and what she experienced with Monica and company, perhaps she sorted out what she knows about sphinxes from that. She certainly had time.
As for the sphinx genes suddenly going active, I go along with the folks who say Shelly was always a larval sphinx, or maybe always had it within her but never quite got ahold of it. It’s probably a spiritual quest as much as anything. The genes might be activated in answer to the question: what if, having merged your demons into one being, you merged that being with yourself? It might explain why Sphinxes are demon hunters too.
Also, looking back to the comic where Monica grabs the artifact, a lot of folks say the guardian there looked like Jin. But it also looked a lot like Creepy Little Girl – Shelly’s fused demons.
-JRS
Man, talk about foreshadowing….
I was looking back in the archives for the coffee karaffe krushing comic when I ran across this one. Shelly and Tina were talking about the Relic. In Panel 5, Shelly thinking about the event leading up to it in all of the past CM cycles.
I don’t know that I would call that foreshadowing. To me, that was just regular exposition.
For whatever reason, the calendar fixers seemed to have concluded that the relic would somehow fix the calendar in the previous loops. It sure isn’t obvious how Shelly knew that they did, though.
Given that the relic never helped and that Jin could remember the failures, why didn’t Jin say, OK, this time we need to try something different? Was she always too far gone by that point to even be aware of it? She didn’t seem to remember anything about the relic when Bud told her about it.
Not that it matters, but I wonder if the recessive gene was maternal or paternal? The dollies came from mom. Were they always under the gardianship of a recessive sphinx line?
Shelly’s demons, one wonders what sort of panic they must have felt when they realized they’d been assigned to sleeping sphinx. Talk about riding the tiger.
By definition, a recessive gene has to come from both parents or else it won’t express itself. In other words, both parents were carriers.
She doesn’t look a day over 70000!
Forgive me if someone has already said this. What if one of the conditions to become a sphinx is to condense ones demons (i.e. Creepy Girl) into one being, thus allowing one’s self to ‘evolve’ into a sphinx.
Also, what if said demon becomes your counterpart. What appears to be Phix and Nudge.
Okay, I just got up and there’s almost a hundred more comments, so if I’m retreading anything, oh well.
I’m waiting to hear Richard Whanee’s take on this. He obviously knows more than he told his daughter. His reactions to multiple seeds of what’s happened show it.
To Shelly getting lost in thought and grinding half a car off:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/03052003/
And, of course, throwing the V-8…
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/04022004/
Being hit on the head by a falling bowling ball
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/05062005/
Not to mention the medical staff’s reaction:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/05022005/
And, apparently, another broken V-8
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/07122004/
Admittedly we don’t get to see this one being broken, but it’s Dad’s reactions we’re looking at.
And on top of that, look how far back the seeds of this were sewn. That’s the kind of planning that is just beyond me.
I love this strip.
i think it’s the same V-8 he’s talking about.
Must have been looking at the dates sideways, not caffeinated at the time. But, still we had several ‘Meh’ reactions to extreme physicality, and a freak-out when she cut her hair.
Pops knows more than he’s telling…
* Looks at his econo car.
* Smacks forehead
Wow. I could have had a V-8.
*plink*
I just had a bizarre thought…
Okay, time in the Forest runs backwards. As Shelly experiences time, she encounters earlier and earlier versions of herself until, 80,000 years in the past, she meets Shelly the First, from the first iteration of the time-loop, who then dies…
…whereupon Shelly the Last instantly fast-forwards 80,000 years to back where she started?
But what if she didn’t fast-forward? What if she is *still* 80,000 years in the past, and she popped back into the regular timeline within the first time-loop, taking the place of the late Shelly the First?
Ack! Update withdrawl….
Top panel, Tina grew a moustache. Cannot unsee.
And that, my friends, is what a really deep trip* feels like.
* acid or shrooms or possibly ayahuasca, though I’ve never tried that one.
Hmmm. That’s 30,000 years before I even showed up on this planet’s realm. How is a person even supposed to remember that far back?
Weird.