This is most likely the same spot she left. The same people weren’t involved every time. While Shelly was Jin’s friend in all previous iterations, Jin only discovered Monica’s importance rather recently. Thus, from Monica’s presence, we can infer that this is not #1. That leaves her own proper time as the only remaining logical candidate.
but Shelly #1 was dressed for the beach, implying she was doing the same thing in #1 as in #56. And since Monica was the one who discovered the atoll that they were going to poit to before Bud blew it up, she’d have to be there on iteration #1, wouldn’t she?
Exactly… they have done this 57 times… and the previous 56 they did without the calender??? Or were they under the assumption that they had done the job as well? But hadn’t yet? Arrgh Fast forward dangit!!!
Not if she appeared in Cycle #1. Cycle number one had the Calendar Machine cycle to Cycle #2. She’d have ended up just where Cycle #1 shelly left when she appeared in treeworld.
But she just spent 81000+ years going back through time to undo all of the mistakes made over the course of the 56 iterations. So returning to iteration #1 as a sphinx, in essence, changes history.
Please look at my comment above…now that we have confirmation from Paul that he was thinking about a particular Star Trek NG episode, I see how Shelly would return to the 57th iteration.
But it unfortunately does not explain Shelly’s appearence…if this was a purely metaphysical journey, why would she suddeny be naked with longer hair?
Who says it was purely metaphysical? Eveer seen Contact? No one saw Jodi Foster travel anywhere, but her video feed had 18 hours of static footage recorded.
Shellies #1-56 go through (with one possibly missing from this set). Shelly #57 enters, and time’s running backward.
Next event she sees, is shortly after the reset (going backward, that’s 1400 or so years, when CM un-resets), and she meets herself, learning she’s running backwards through time.
Fast-forward to her meeting shelly #1, and she’s kept track of the time to learn this is the end of the line, and can now escape. She does so, reterning to the moment she left (call it Hypermoment if you want), and is now back where she started from, 80k + years ago.
… not bad for a comic founded on the premise “what if there was no “after” 122112…
Sorry, will never agree that she was there physically for 81000 years.
Unless the relic transported her there physically, stayed for 81k years, and transported her back instantly to the exact same moment she was teleported in.
Nope, prefer to think of it as metaphysical with her metaphysical manifestation now moving over to reality.
I don’t pretend to know the mechanics of how, if she was transported physically or semi-physically, how her body could hold up for 81000+ years, although I can guess, because she evolved into a sphinx, she had to at least FEEL those physical changes, if they were to manifest in the scene today.
You forget, people are souls that have bodies, not bodies that have souls. Entirely possible for a soul to be somewhere 81,000 years since they are immortal and intended to last for eternity.
CS Lewis postulated that to (a) God, time is not linear, he does not have to answer 200 billion prayers per second, but has 200 billion years to consider each prayer individually. Not that big a stretch for someone’s “soul to spend 81000 years next to a tree and then be transported back to whence it came without a break in the linear time line.–it would be mind bending if you were to remember the trip though. . . .
Take a kitten – after its eyes open and it can more or less get around on its own, even if it does have to quickly sit down and contemplate every few steps.
Get a plucked peacock feather – you know, like you’d find in a vomitorium – and twitch it on the floor in front of said kitten.
Watch it pounce. hard-wired, instinctual behaviour.
Now put a scared (collective of) demons in front of a sphinx in human form (even if, as a sphinx, she’s never seen demons before).
Watch what happens when said demonic group twitch or try to run…
There’s one slight difference between this situation and the kitten example though. Shelly may not have had a Sphinx-awaremess of demons, but she already knows that Tina is a demon collective in a human body that is missing its soul.
If it was designed well, it should be impossible to take the cap off for safety sake. The fuel never needs to be replaced after all. But then the Lathians weren’t much for safety it would seem.
I’d think the fact that it uses the energy given off by the fuel would make for effective shielding–as long as it captures 100%. Which would allow the beryllium enhancement of radiation to be less required for the same final output, and a more efficient design.
You are also making the assumption that the plutonium is real, and not a metaphor.
Hey, if we are talking about Shelly’s soul traveling and living 81000 years in a second, then why assume that the plutonium (which we’ve established as being not really plausible) isn’t spiritual as well? A spiritual power source that is also highly toxic to spirits…
I definitely have a combination Bud/Shelly face right now.
On a different note…
Thanks for the “how to end html” stuff the other day. I think I forgot to say that before. I’ll keep at it; one day I will fix the interweb, I swears…:D
*peeks in from alternate universe where interwebs isn’t broken* Hmm.Yeah..seems like it worked..
Don’t worry, not having an “edit” function makes that whole HTML tagging-biz a bit of a hit ‘n miss.
I only got it after I killed several universe’s Interwebs
No, I am afraid that was mainly me. Why do You think we haven’t heard from other universes?????? (hint:Discontinuance in the spacial conduit, due to an infinite division by “0″ -call in some unlucky coding-experiments on my part )
well
im sorry but the apt punishment for destroying so many universes and interwebs.
you have to go in solitude to a planet and reside there alone.
Please feel free to create any hallucination you may feel to create and should a telepath come by, send her loppy by playing a song in her head *nods*
nooooo. don’t do it! in order to fix the interwebs, you’ll need to go to the dark side of the internet. nobody escapes there with his/here sanity intact(i should know i went “there and back again”). imagine: 2 girls 1 cup, goatse, lemonparty and a rickroll from hell. and multiply that by 100000^π(the number pi) that’s how bad the dark side of the internet/interwebs it.
on another note:
where can i get me a relic like that and last but never least:
SHELLY, FOR THE LOVE OF FANSERVICE: LOWER THAT ARM!
Oh lordy.. Here I was, having repressed that dark-side of the interwebs..It all comessss floooooodingngngn baaaaaack… TwoGirlsanda cu….gu gu guh goatse…..blblblblblbllblblb..
*slumps on ground ,a gibbering, drooling mess, eyes transfixed on a non-existent horizon..*
I guess one of the things they teach you in Shinx school is how to not appear all big and scary to the unprepared. I am also looking forward to her next conversation with Phix. Phix was stuck in the library about the same amount of time Shelly was stuck in the sacred forest.
I don’t think Phix was stuck, as such. Yes, she’d been made the Librarian to replace Nudge and couldn’t leave permanently. But as we saw, she could make temporary jaunts to Earth anytime, she just didn’t do it much before the CM was destroyed because she was disgusted by her own previous behavior. Shelly, now, Shelly WAS stuck…
In their last adventure, our heroines destroyed an ancient Calendar Machine that had forced the world to repeat the last several millenia 56 times. The Shelly we know and love, and who now stands naked in Monica’s living room, is from that 56th iteration — hence, “Shelly #56″. The Shelley from the previous iteration would be Shelly #55, the one before would have been Shelly #54, and so on back. Only folks outside the timeline, such as sphinxes, were aware that history was repeating itself.
When Shelly #56 grasped the relic and was transported to the place with the tree and the sword and the dubously explained plutonium, she became the sphinx. Because time flows backwards there, she had to wait once again for history to repeat itself 56 times. Each time, a Shelley would appear, and, presumably, cut open the tree and die from radiation poisoning. But, again because time was flowing backwards, the first one to die would be Shelly #55, then, many thousands of years later, Shelly #54 would appear, slice the tree open and die, and so on.
The Shelly we saw pull the sword from the stone, slice open the tree, and die on a Friday was Shelly #1 — that is, the first Shelly who ever existed, before the Calendar Machine caused history to repeat itself the first time. Only after that could the Shelly we’ve been reading about since 2001 — Shelly #56 — stop being a sphinx and return to Monica’s living room (probably at about the same time she left). Her clothes, however, were not so lucky.
I’d say that’s it – except that i suspect that each iteration of Shelly probably did something different to advance the preparation of the artifact, rather than each doing the same thing.
Yeah, I think that, too. The Shelly before the one we just saw die might have been the one who told her that getting Shelly mad will make her able to cut the tree, too, since the Sphinx probably would have forgotten about that. I also wonder if all these Shellies thought the cycles there were gonig forward, and what they were doing would help with the Calendar Machine issue the next cycle if they didn’t fix it that cycle.
But Shelly doesn’t even remember who she was with or what she was doing way back before she went to tree world, so why would she still remember that random event with Tina? That’s why I said she’d probably have forgotten about that, and had to be reminded. I figure it would have been the Shelly before the one we just saw die since Sphinx-Shelly made that “you told me that would work” comment.
Tina as a reanimated collection of demons never existed in any previous cycles. She wouldn’t have been hyper-perceptive enough to figure out what Shelly was capable of in any other cycle, by my way of thinking.
She is, but that doesn’t mean Tina is the only person to ever notice Shelly’s strength. In that cycle, Shelly might have figured it out herself or somebody else told her. And she told Sphinx Shelly. Just like in both cycles, some different string of events got Shelly to get that relic.
Tessa’s got a point. If we’re going with the theory that each visit from a Shelly to the tree involved a different stage of the artifact being prepared, it would be perfectly understandable for ShellySphinx to ask the Shelly who put the plutonium in thw tree just how on earth she would be able to make another Shelly succeed at cutting the tree down…
@Fairportfan – That was my thought all along. Somehow each visit to the tree involved another stage of the process (hence ShellySphinx saying that a previous Shelly had put the plutonium in the tree and hidden the artifact at the graveyard…obviously Shelly #1 wasn’t repeating the same action as all other Shellys if that really is how things played out).
The artifact, complete with plutonium, could have existed all along. It could have been made before the CM went buggy and would still be there after every reset. Everything, except Maya, that existed before the the CM broke would still be there in each repeat. They didn’t have to create it, they merely used it.
I have to side with SoWhyMe here. Monica, for what ever reason, was looking for an artifact that was smuggled out of Lantis, so it must have existed and been functional long before the calendar machine even had problems. It seems unlikely that Monica would have known about any tasks the Shellys were performing that were going to create something different from the original.
The tasks the Shellys performed seemed like silly tasks a bored sphinx came up with. Stick a sword in a rock. Remove the sword from the rock. Hide plutonium in a tree. Remove plutonium from the tree. Plant a flag on a mountain. Remove the flag from the mountain. I agree that they weren’t the same tasks, but I don’t see how they were supposed to accomplish anything.
This would mean that Shelly came to Tree Realm was given a quest by Shellinx, returned to their time line to gather elements for the quest, returned to the Tree and completed the quest and either died trying to complete the quest or left after completing the quest. Otherwise all of the items for the relic were always in the Tree Realm and Shellinx could have assembled them anytime and she waited for nothing.
See, the way I understood it, the plutonium was put in the tree by a Shelly so it could become a catastrophicly dangerous battery (since plutonium on its own isn’t as deadly as the battery was). This suggests a process to get all of the pieces to the state and location they’re in now.
However, I will freely admit that I’m making a lot of assumptions and guesses based on my limited understanding of what’s going on.
Um, Shelley in this version is #57. There were 56 loops, this last is not a loop, hence Shelley #57. See yesterdays explanation down near the bottom, where I explain it all.
Unless it’s a case of 56 repetitions and we’re including the present in the counting since the present was a repetition until the calendar machine was destroyed…and even so it’s a repetition until we make it past 2012.
It’s quite simple actually. Time is linear in the Tree-Realm. If you in the Tree-Realm you will experience time in the forward fashion as usual. But the flow of time in the Tree-Ream is backwards. And the Tree-Realm exists outside of the Wapsi Square world time (it kept getting reset back 1450 years).
Since time flows in reverse in the Tree-Realm, the last Shelly to use the Relic (i.e. our Shelly of the post CM cycle line, aka Shell #56) is the first Shelly to travel to the Tree-Realm. Shelly #56 is trapped, founds she can’t die, and eventually becomes the Sphinx.
OK traveling backwards in Wapsi Square world timeline, the next to last Shelly to use the Relic is Shelly #55 from the previous CM cycle. She becomes the second Shelly to enter the Tree-Realm. And Shelly #55 meets Shellinx, (and confusion reigned). Shelly #55 dies. And then the Shelly previous the 2nd previous CM reset, Shelly #54, enter the Tree-Realm, dies…and eventually get to the Shelly before the first CM reset. The original Shelly.. Shelly #1. That is the Shelly we see in the web comic entering the Tree-Realm, cutting down the tree and dying from radiation.
Consider that Shelly now has longer hair like the Shellinx wore it. And Shelly now has the same (lack of) wardrobe that Shellinx had. I’m guess she at least part Shelly/Shelllinx.
I see the tailless balloons as being A Different Voice – possibly inside Shelly/sphinx’s head – than the balloons with tails as she talks to her dead self.
But, if it’s inside her own head or something she says aloud … where did she get the knowledge about how little sphinxes are made?
Paul will often only put one voice bubble with a tail per character per panel, with the other bubbles being linked to the tailed bubble or floating if the speaker is obvious. This is even used today when shelly says “Was I alone?” And here http://wapsisquare.com/comic/just-a-scratch/ It’s most obvious when it’s a real conversation. But it was all Shelly talking to dead Shelly. As for how Shelly knew where sphinxes came from. She was a human, and became a sphinx. So she might have just reasoned that’s where all sphinxes came from.
Like others have said, Shelly is probably Sphinxified for life now. I think the question is, “can/when does she reveal her Sphinx form?” If I recall correctly, the only time we’ve seen a sphinx in it’s true form is when they occupy worlds outside of our own space/time. When Phix is walking around flirting with the museum director she’s in human form. Unless we find out otherwise, i think Shelly’s sphinx form won’t be apparent to anyone other than Tina until they poit to another dimension with her.
If you think about it this almost has to have happened for every Shelly. This is a paradox loop. How could the other world know which Shelly had to be the one to stay? Probably each one had to replay until they could return to make their attempt at fixing the CM. She wasn’t only living the time she was watching the rewind of the loop in case they did fix the machine. Then when they failed and the the loop reset the next Shelly had would show up and repeat the rewind of events. SO Phix has to know that Shelly transformed by being there long enough to become a Sphinx. These events did repeat with minor variations but the main line of events remained intact. Poor Shelly.
I do wonder what things looked like back at Monica’s house throughout all this. From their perspective, not only did Shelly’s clothing disappear, but the artifact switched hands. It was in her right hand when she went in. I wonder how long they thought she was gone.
I think that to the girls, the moment Shelly grabbed the oopart and closed her eyes, all went “POOOFF!!” with this end-result.
I am happy for Shellinx though. Back amidst her friends. Although she is still somewhat amnesiac, I think it’s going to be tearful….orrr..If the Shelly-character traits still are primed, she’s going to flip-out and get angry as a first reaction.
I’m still thinking pocket universe. The calendar machine looped outside of time and I’m sure its power source had to be placed outside as well. Now with the calendar gone, guess it was time to retrieve the battery. And who better than our very own quantum mechanic.
I wonder if Jin or Tepoz could grab Mr. Feathercloak and ask him if he’s planted any trees lately.
Anyway, I’m sure all this happened in the blink of an eye as far as everyone else was concerned, and the energy of the loop’s collapse … oh, heck. Douglas Adams explained that party trick much better.
I found her anger at not being able to remember quite touching and sad. I wonder if it was that fight to remember that sustained her throughout the cycles, ending with that plaintive “I can go home now.”
Now, where is Tepoz? I could use a double shot Blessing right now.
From their reaction Monica didn’t disappear when she grabbed the relic so I doubt they saw anything than Shelley close her eyes, then open them and her clothes go “Poof!”
Other than speculation we have no solid evidence to say she actually went there physically and not in some metaphysical/spiritual manifestation only.
We have a lot of evidence of Shellying actually traveling there. Assuming Paul’s artwork is deliberate, and not a mistake. Shelly before the Tree-Realm was holding the Relic in her right hand. In today’s comic when she left teh Tree-Realm, she is holding the Relic in her left hand. And we have the difference in her appears: Longer hair and a very distinct………(where was I?, ah yes)..lack of clothing.
So this is the sphinx Shelly who grabbed the relic then. She’s naked because the sphinx was naked. Apparently she transitioned from sphinx to human form automatically in transport. Another service of the relic or an standard result of travel from Magical Forest to earth? If she lets go and grabs it again, does she go back to the forest and her sphinx form?
It’ll be interesting to see her first reaction next comic. Will she remember or need a while to catch up? At least we didn’t have to wait until Monday for the trip back. Right now she’s pretty stunned.
Also, this would be the same Shelly who “left” this group in this cycle. She has just returned after an 80,000+ year wait in the Magic Forest. To everyon else it seems only a few minutes have passed. Shelly has just returned from 80,000+ years in hell. She may not even remember that she left from there, however.
Quite possible. If so, Shelly’s going to have a serious WTF-moment too, wondering why her hair is long again, and why she’s nekkid. (and why Tina is looking at her like -} ..)
She won’t wonder about that. She would know she was the sphinx just a moment ago and she was naked with longer hair. That part will make sense.
I guess any relic will bring the holder back to the same time and place as they left, since that relic is not the one she left with as such. The space-time coordinates must be imprinted on the person and not the relic.
Would she really remember all? How do we know 100% that:
1. She actually went there physically?
2. It wasn’t a manifestation of metaphysical/spiritual or other dream like realm where what happened had real world consequences while not physically being there? Much like her spirit journey as a child.
3. How do we know the artifact wouldn’t block or limit her memories in some fashion to allow her to function?
This is time line 57. Sphinx Shelly was the last, not the first. She has just lived 80K+ years. When she picked up the relic she returned to whence she came. Her physical appearance conformed to 57′s reality and he clothes did not survive the time eh was there. All the cycles are in the past now. No need to to spend time trying to figure out which is which as we pick back up with the current one. Now it is Shelly having to come to grips with the experience without freaking out major. You’ll notice there have been changes to her as well. Longer hair, less buffed shape, a deep sadness in her expression. She is probably tired from the long wait. Tina is across the room trying not to make a mess on the floor.
I tend to believe the “time-forest-realm” is no more (noticed the lack of background-trees and such from the moment Shelly died ?) since the paradox is fixed, “Time” is fixed, so the old, redundant system of time keeping ceased to exist.
One other thing. As I see it, what is confusing about the last few comics is that Paul was showing the first Shelly’s encounter with the magical forest. Yet he first showed our Shelly holding the relic and it even finishing her departing sentence upon arrival at the Magic Forest.
But the very next comic was NOT a continuation of that sequence as it seemed at first. It is, instead the first Shelly already in the forest. We then see her die and all the rest. We did not see our Shelly going 80,000+ years into the past to be come the sphinx. We infer it must have happened from what we do see and knowing things are backwards there. We see that sequence because that is what is happening now in the forest. And that sets up the return of our Shelly, 80,000+ years “older.”
Exactly. I showed this yesterday in a fairly long post made after everyone else chimed in with their sometimes erroneous timeline questions and theories.
In essence we’re experiencing time as:
———————————>>
Shelley just experienced it as:
<<———————————
Except there is no real indication she went there in physical form, and not in some spiritual form that had real world manifestations. To her 81k years may have passed (we'll see by her reaction tomorrow in the strip) but to everyone else her clothes disappeared in an instant and her hair grew longer.
Extremely clever move by Paul to continue our Shelley, #57 comments, with Shelley #1 comments in the initial "tree world" page.
However, she did recover some habits of thought in the transition back from sphinx to human. Naked sphinx was not at all self-conscious; Naked human form is.
I don’t think that she even knows that she is naked. I think Shelly’s body is reacting to suddenly having all of those experiences dumped into it. A bunch of brain cells must have just been rewired.
Either that, or maybe it is the shock of suddenly being in a house after thousands of years.
I guess I’ll go with my second idea. If her hair changed length, that’s probably a sign that her body and brain all went to the Sacred Forest, were changed, and came back.
I think she is going to do more than freak. I figure Thursday is Shellly’s reaction. Friday is Tina’s. For the cliffhanger I would not be surprised to have Phix arrive to brief Shelly in on the joys of being a sphinx. Since Phix is outside the time flow she knows what is happening and that this is the only Shelly to survive the relic. Can’t you see it. Phix and Shelly walking away. Phix saying, “Let me tell you how it is girlfriend!”
That would be “Coolbeans” to stay in wapsi-speak…
There is no doubt whatsoever that Shelly and Phix are going to connect. I can even see Phix take-over sort of a Mother-role for Shelly, since Shelly still reels from losing her mom.
I am still confused and trying to work this out, but could Sphinx-Shelly have encountered the relic before and was therefore, as the CM was still up and running/malfunctioning, have been taken out of the loops as a result? Where as Deceased-Shelly encountered the relic when the CM was taken out of commission, which would be the variable in this whole confoozling affair, and is why Sphinx-Shelly is the one who is there now?
Yeah, I’m still confused as to the whole multiple Shelly’s and timelines thing. But I’ve managed to simplify it into something I can understand. The Shelly we’ve been following throughout the comic was teleported away, died, and was replaced by a Sphinx version of herself that had been trapped there for thousands of years after (and this I’m still not sure I’m getting right) touching the relic herself.
Oh, man my brain hurts…
I really want to understand it all completely, but it’s so darned convoluted I just can’t seem to get it all.
At this point in the cycle, every Shelly took up the relic, and was transported to the Time Forest.
The last one to do so (ours) was also (due to the different timelines) the first to arrive and (somehow, not yet explained) became a sphinx.
(Or, perhaps, somehow, her inherent sphinx-ness was revealed.)
Each of the preceding Shellys appeared in (to her) reverse order, until the first (last, to her), and all died, each, presumably, in performing part of whatever task was involved.
When the last (first, in the outside universe) appeared (and died), the task was complete, and she could return to the exact second she left, 81,000 years ago.
Although it is possible, much as time was passing backwards for our Shelly, it may have gone more quickly too. So maybe she experienced a few hundred years of isolation, not the full 82,000. It is one thing for Jin to experience that in a world full of people, but to experience that in nearly complete isolation is almost unthinkable.
That I get; I was asking about/noting the variable of the existence of the CM as being partly at fault. Reason being that whatever Shelly that was who went through the arc of fixing/getting rid of the CM would have known it was beyond their reach, yet the one who died said she needed it, which to me seems to be the point that despite how linear it appears, denotes that the first Shelly who didn’t actually go through the CM arc the way we had thought. Then I start to wonder if we haven’t been seeing this arc from two different perspectives: first and last; and it was in fact the last Shelly we were seeing all along up until the first appeared in treeland. But then I know we have to take into account what the last said about time running weird. Again I blame the existence of the CM, though, as it would have been around with every other Shelly except the last. And impossibly the first…
Do what I finally tried. Rather than figuring out the timeline in the strip, I just read the comments backwards…backwards comments the read just I, strip the in timeline the . . .
So the one that grabbed the relic a couple weeks ago (the the bikini and t-shirt) is not the same person (and don’t get into the fact that they ARE all technically the same person, I’m just trying to sort out 57 or so copies of the same character) as the one in the bikini and t-shirt that died on Friday?
The Shelly that took the relic and closed her eyes is the same Shelly as Shellinx?
Correct, in this comic http://wapsisquare.com/comic/easier-said/ the one that we saw appear in tree world and say “done” was the Shelly of Cycle 1. And the sphinx was the one we saw “easier said than..”
It’s probably easier to image things this way. Keep everything in a linear timeline.
Shelly #1 Born -> Shelly #1 goes to Tree-Realm -> CM Reset #1 -> Shell #2 is Born -> Shelly #2 goes to Tree-Realm -> CM Reset #2 -> Shelly #3 is bored -> Shelly #3 goes to Tree-Realm … -> CM Reset #54 -> Shell #55 is born -> Shell #55 goes to Tree-Realm -> CM Reset #55 -> Shell #56 is Born -> Shell #56 goes to Tree-Realm
I know it won’t display properly but lay it out as a long line. Ok Tree-realm doesn’t experience the CM reset and it’s time flow backwards (i.e. read the timeline from right to left.).
Shelly #56 enters Tree-Realm, can’t leave, becomes Sphinx -> Shelly #55 enters Tree-Realm -> repeat until Shell #1 enters Tree-Realm completing the time loop. Which is what we say in the previous weeks of the comic.
This Shelly/Sphinx is the Shelly who left the room a few moments ago. She was transported to the Mystic Forest, became transformed into a Sphinx, and then waited 80,000 years while 56 other Shellys appeared every 1450 years. Now, she’s back and has to remember what was going on 80,000 years ago!
Poor Shellinx..soo overwhelmed with guilt, I really want to hug her and go : “t wasn’t Your fault, You got caugt-up in that blighted supernatural stuff despite Your reluctance” (remember Shelly’s reaction to the tattoo??)
Jin and Shelly became the ones suffering the longest in this whole shebash. They’re gonna connect like sisters, me thinks.
I think so, too. Jin made a point of making Shelly dislike her in this loop because she couldn’t stand loosing her best friend one more time.
And now, they have this incredible longevity in common.
Um—my B-Day was last Friday, and I’m a bit older—like two dozen years—than 29. I had Angel Food Cake, which is calorie-free like interwebcake, ‘cuz it’s made out of Angel Food and Angels don’t weigh nothin (and it’s amazing how many you can fit on the head of a pin, even if they’re dancing a Viennese waltz).
My birthday cake is not a lie. Help yourself. However, if you choose to believe that my birthday cake is a lie, then please help yourself to the pie instead.
Not to throw more speculation into this whole thing (which means I’m gonna anyways), but given that Jin was very good friends with Shelly in at least a couple of the other timelines that all ran up to 2012 before resetting, Jin experienced Shelly disappearing/dieing/poofing more than a few times now (maybe explaining why she didn’t want to get attached yet again)
What do you think Jin’s reaction is gonna be to her being alive now?
Also, great way of growing her hair out again. Hard to work in a subtle yet sustained growth over multiple comics. Easy to cut it off, hard to grow inch by inch.
This way, poof, long hair! 80,000 years and transformation into a magical immortal being better than rogaine!
As this is the same Shelley who was alive prior to grabbing the artifact, the same who helped fix the CM and had not died, I don’t think Jin’s reaction will be different than it was.
Although depending on what Shelley remembers she will have a LOT more sympathy with Jin now.
I’m still confused as all hell in some regards, but as I was reading this a very fitting song popped into my head – The Inner Light Suite, from Star Trek: TNG.
In the episodeit’s from, the Enterprise encounters a mysterious artifact, Picard gets psychically pulled in, and he lives out an entire lifetime on a dying alien world. To him, untold years, love and sorrow, life and hope, eventually nearly forgetting everything he once knew – and then he returns to the Enterprise where mere minutes have passed. He is still himself, has not aged, has not changed… but he forever after remembers that other lifetime.
after watching a clip of next weeks episode in which some sort of human skin gunk is created to make people imortal but the downside is they have to keep the humans they harvested the skin from alive and in stasis otherwise the skin goes into goo..or something..its a clip
My dad said after watching that that it has become too farfetched and that the original dr who was alot more realistic.
My words were (possibly because i have been discussing reality colisions and multiple shellys and timelines here) was “why? its totally dooable?”
*shakes head*
well these discussions DO open your mind more which is good
nah
he was designed to be human by the cybermen so he would HAVE to have all the memorys Rory had the last time Amy saw him.
BUT
Amy brought them all back from zippo (somehow).
Hmm maybe thats how it worked.
Because she brought them all back it worked the same way the cybermen bringing him back did only she brought him back human and they brought him back robot
I was thinking about that one too and the ST Voyager episode “Time and Again” where they investigate the destruction of a planet only to find that the destruction of the planet was caused by them freeing Janeway and Paris who are trapped in time while investigating the planet.
Yeah, I thought of that episode too when I thought of Shelly returning. Only worse cause it was roughly 80000 years and not only watching herself die over and over but also presumably killing lots of other random people who showed up.
nope 100% sure on this
the musical instrument was in the box of the salelite/probe thingy when they brought it on board.
Troy gave it him after they had finished ‘chatting’
The now inactive probe is brought aboard the Enterprise and the crew finds a small box within it. A somber Riker gives the box to Picard who opens it to find Kamin’s flute. Picard, now adept at the instrument, plays the melody he learned during his life as Kamin
Was riker not troy but defo from the probe
(as per Wikipedia
What to say first?
1) “DON’T OPEN THE RELIC!”
2) ” Hey guys. Did I miss anything in the last 81,200 year?”
3) “Look what I can turn into now!”
4) “BEER! ME! NOW! OR! DIE!”
I just hope she doesn’t say, “Well crap, nothing happened.” Before looking at her naked self that is. I would hate for the story to be that she doesn’t recall anything of her time as a sphinx. To me, the story will be much more interesting if she remembers what happened and is changed by it. We might miss the old Shelly, but the new one should be fascinating.
I agree; she can either use the deep sadness and incredible sense of loneliness to grow in wisdom, or the pain and amnesia scar over, hiding but not healing. She has quite a story to tell, and needs to hear old memories again. She’s in the right place – surrounded by friends.
I’d also hate if she had no memory. But I don’t know how much I like the idea of Shelly’s character so dramatically and suddenly changing. (maybe a mixture of both, where she gets her memories of time on earth back so is torn between the two memories) I’ll get used to whatever is done, though. I just hope more than anything that she can still turn into a sphinx! I will be so sad if she can’t! It’ll be like the Animorphs books where after returning from the time of the Dinosaurs they lose all their T-Rex and Deinonychus morphs. I was sooo pissed. Grr.
I believe she will slump on the floor, completely stunned and starts crying for all those lost years of perceived Hell. It would be the most human reaction imho.
The crying will stun the rest of the girls, but then Jin poits in, hugging Shellinx, saying something like:”Now do You understand why You had to dislike me?”
5: she remembers but FAKES she doesnt and that noting happened.
I would prolly have that option
after all she just watched 55 of herself die and spent 80k years in a few seconds. anyone she tells might think of her a abit whacky
6: she remembers and tells them but they tell her it was just the relic doing similar to what it did to monica
I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a similar reaction to Buffy after Willow and crew brought her back. Total Shell(ey) shock.
Also, yup, wouldn’t be surprised at an instinctive ‘pounce’ and form shift @ Tina, who right about now will be off screen trying to claw her way through the back wall, like a trapped rat.
Honestly – I think she’s going to be a little numb, probably feel things blurry. I think she’ll feel the emotions, but her brain is going to be a bit boggy/cloudy.
I don’t think a human brain has the capacity to easily put together that many years, let alone seeing herself die so much.
I agree Jin and Phix are all gonna be tons closer to her now.
I wonder if she considered telling her (last to her perspective) first Shelly how to fix the machine and go back, instead of letting her die.
ANYHOW!
She’s probably gonna be either super amnesia, super memory overflow, or (what I think makes more sense to me) a bit muddled for a bit… remembering her (to us) normal timeline, versus remembering all those hundreds of thousands of years in the forest, watching herself die.
In other news: Wonder what that relic realllly does?
?!?
she dead?
i know her and house have been ‘together’ recently from the adverts (not been watching it as last one i watched was season 4 and they’re on what..season 72?)
Oh wow….while I MAY have a slight headache from trying to keep track of the timey wimey stuff OBVIOUSLY happening from this numerous Shelly stuff, Im just jaw dropped at the whole shelly spending 80,000+ years in some forest in the blink of an eye!
No kidding. What an unimaginable hell she’s been through. She didn’t expect anything like that and nothing could have prepared her for it. Maybe she was transformed into a sphinx for her own good. A form which could withstand the ravages of such a long period of time and remain sane. I doubt Shelly, the human could have coped with such a thing. Can you imagine goimg there and slowly but surely come to realize nothing and no one is going to rescue you. You’re stuck. No poiting you out or trying to get you back because no one even knows you’re there. Can’t get back, can’t die. Worst of all, no pizza! Unless you like bark and leaf topping on a layer of pressed dirt. Maybe the occasional Shelly to munch on.
Maybe she was changed into a Sphinx a long time ago in our time line… sometime nobody noticed. Could be why she wanted to attack Tina so badly and couldn’t control it, why Tina was always more cautious of her, and why she had the strength to crush that metal thing easy. She’s always been part sphinx, just she never knew, or maybe was trapped in a human form for a reason?
This could be really interesting… I wanna go back and see if Tina ever read Shelly’s aura funny – that would be the moment. Or maybe her demon had something to do with it? Can Sphinxes even have demons? (Her little girl.)
That’s quite possible. Could be, in the Wapsiverse, there are many people walking around who don’t know they are actually sphinxes, thus never transform. At least not until something this profound happens to them.
If Shelly is now a sphinx in human form I pity the fool who would try to take the relic from her, which is probably the whole point of her transformation into a guardian.
Now that they have a powered up relic, what next?
Just what does it do?
This may be weird, but I am left with the idea that Mayahuel had something to do with the construction of the artifact. If so, perhaps this was the backup plan for plugging Jin back in, one that was abruptly aborted when Mayahuel tried to destroy the Calendar Machine and triggered an unknown and unsuspected defense.
Among other things, it would explain why Mayahuel wanted to destroy the Calendar Machine — something that has never been too clear to me. The CM would be no longer needed for her purposes, and demonstrably, it was to dangerous to leave where others could get their hands on it. It might be that a functioning artifact and CM couldn’t co-exist without some sort of interference effect, and she to needed to shut down the CM to turn on the artifact.
Yep, from the author’s mouth now. This means the 56 repeats do not include the very first 1450 year period (right after the CM malfunctioned) since that’s where the very first Shelly would have existed, ergo this is Shelly 57.
Oh, and the very first Shelly to reach the forest has to be the second Shelly to ever exist. That’s the only way to have had 56 Shelly’s go there (as Shelly-sphinx said) and not 57. That’s assuming a Shelly from every repeat cycle always went to the forest.
I don’t mind hanging off a cliff–but when the next cliff is perpendicular to the last one, and I’m still hanging, but in a totally new (and inconceivable) direction…
all you need to know is its all “wibbly wobbley, timey whimey, his first, my last” kinda stuff. only it’s not like that at all. Forget that. Where’s my Fez?
my favorite was sylvester mccoy.
for the baseball bat weapon he made to fight the darleks
well
that was until they actually started getting well..cute guys to be the doctor..
still prefer rory to the doctor this incarnation however..even if he IS married to amy
*Dalek* DA-LEK!!!!!…. Grrrr “DaRlek” is only uttered by chavz..
Nah, Tom & David were the best in my book. Both had that quick-talking know-it-all-yet-starting-to-doubt-themselves-while-talking, combined with a good smirk. Cristopher did a good job too, but he was more “hardcore-doc” He is at least the one that can be credited for resurrecting DrWho in a major way.
+ David had Freema….*sigh*..still get wobbly knees from seeing her. Those eyes..that huuuge smile *slumps in chair, a slobbering mess*
My take – Shelly/Sphinx – psyches whirled in a blender. Causing flashbacks, deja vu galore, memories, confusion and maybe a deeper sense of being. Maybe a little more self-confidence. A touch of Timothy Leary.
She still looks pretty buff. I like the longer hair. And Pablo knows HOW much you guys like Shelly – notice no frontal toplessness like the Shellinx! Hehhehheh!!
Pablo – I LOVE the implied motion and the strength of the striding paws in frame 1! Animal restlessness personified. She looks as twitchy as one of my cats slightly before the 9:00 PM zanies.
Oh YEAH!!! I’ve had cats pretty much most of my life and like someone said above instinct is strong from birth. They will hear sometimes, mostly at night, or see something thru the window in the dark and go nuts! They go twitchy, fluffy and in my case fairly vocal. Or they wind themselves up into it and chase either other around the house, over and thru anything that’ll get in their way. They “yodel” while they’re at it too. Sometimes I think they do it just for the helluvit, sometimes I wonder if they’re not seeing monsters that we can’t see. No matter why, I think it was Walt Whitman who wrote the “fog rolls in on little cat feet.” I don’t really think he ever owned a cat. It sounds more like a freight train when they get going.
ours doesnt make much noise.
we just get alot of ringing from the 3 bells on her collar. (she gets a new collar but we keep the bells. its almost like a medalion at the moment. the bells are so my mum who is partially deaf can hear her as when she was a kitten she used to run UNDER your feet just as you were putting it down)
My get neutered, asap too. But a friend of mine who has had a momma cat said the momma taught her kittens the zanies! Can you imagine 5 kittens & 1 cat whooping it up thru the house? She says the Golden Hoard would be quieter about it!
There’s ooooone thing i don’t get. Where’d the relic come from? Or rather, “How did the parts get assembled over the cylces?” Shellinx says that the previous Shelly iterations were the ones to gather and place the various artifacts. The plutonium and the blade were left in the tree-world, but the Shellinx says Shelly placed the relic at the tomb in Ireland. But we know that the CM resets everything and everyone in the “real-world” when it ended it’s cycles, meaning that whatever Shelly#X put somehwere wouldn’t have stayed there after a reset. The only things that escape the reset are things occupying a different space/time (the demon world, the tree world, and the library) Hence the whole Brandi-writing-to-herslef arc. Any thoughts?
The relic is part of a different time device, and would therefore have its own time pocket that wouldn’t be affected by the calendar machine. If the blade and plutonium capsule were attached to it when the made the trip, then they would have stayed in the time forest because they were subsequently outside the main loop. It might even have some sort of sentience attached, that subtly tells the bearer where it wants to go. Maybe the relic was the one talking to Shellinx.
The Relic may be a lot of other things, but it seems to also the “flywheel” (or differential gear?) of the Calendar Machine, seen here turning for the last time.
I’ve posted this link before, but I still think it best to allow Ms. Shelly Wahnee herself to explain:
Yep, the tree world/plane is just that. An area that is in a different plane of existence. Shelley #57, our Shelley, was the first there, and then Shelley #56 visited the area second and made changes to the relic or otherwise helped build up to Shelley #1 grabbing all the items and building the plutonium powered sword.
So the first Shelley into the realm (our current heroine), #57 in the real Wapsi world, now has an uber powered relic that can do something we don’t know of yet.
What I want to know is who figured out the relic and plutonium core was needed in the first place? Who told whoever made it, how it should be done? Was it just something created in the very first 1450 year period or the first repeat 1450 year time period and simply used in every period thereafter? I sense Maya’s doings here somewhere. Or perhaps Jin carrying on her mother’s work. Most likely someone yet to be introduced.
Come to think about it, having Maya create it would explain how it came to be in the first place. She could have made it as part of her attempt to fix the CM, but failed to use it properly and was sucked into the demon realm. The artifact would be left behind so it would appear in every subsequent 1450 time period, yet would seem to have had no origin since every repeat would start right after the the failed attempt for fix the CM. During some cycle Shelly-sphinx would, for whatever reason, have had a past Shelly take it apart and hide things, probably killing her too in the process.
Also Maya would never reappear in any other time period since she was already gone from this world prior to the CM reset point.
I don’t know if it was created by Maya or not, but Monica was looking for something smuggled out of Lantis that looked like it in order to fix Jin. That seems consistent with what you said.
Once the ShellyX brought the blade and the plutonium out of the real world, they ceased to be a part of the looping Earthly timeline.The actual relic, however, was placed in an Earthly tomb by a previous ShellyX, so that Shelly57 could eventually find/touch it. But the real world resets every 1450 years, meaning the relic wouldn’t stay where ShellyX put it. I can kinda buy it if the relic is its own little time machine, but it’s still going to need a place to go whenever time looped again…unless that’s what Shellinx meant by a “Marker”? something for the relic to hone in on once the CM reset?
Also, i’m willing to wager that the relic is a Lanthian artifact created pre-CM. Guess we’ll find out soon?
The marker seemed to be just a stone grave marker, in other words a tombstone, except it had the name Yggdrasil on it. That may have referred to the sacred tree that Shelly just cut down.
Okay, the cap for the plutonium was the pommel of the hilt (the end away from the blade). So why did she remove the blade? It would have been really cool if we’d gotten in the coffee shop a naked Shelly holding a full sword.
Well..It would be a bit awkward to carry around with the blade still attached, hm?
We are only at the beginning of the JIN-Fixing arc. They probably have to travel quite a lot, and a 2.5 feet blade is a bit of a problem without a sheath.
Mogg’s tungsten-tipped teeth! That would have been quite a scenery change for both “Shelly Prime” and the girls watching her. The next few days are going to be quite a ride as memories fade, or memories return, or both.
The commentary here is so useful for a Wolf of Very Little Brain…
Paul, I can’t say enough good about your artwork (phenomenal today) or your storytelling.
Okay, here’s an odd Question. Do all Sphinxes need glasses? Because Sphinx Shelley now has imprints on her nose, like a set of glasses were resting on her bridge.
That’s right. Shelley gets nekkid and I notice her nose.
Yep. Hero, Monster, Awake and Alive, and Forgiven are (imho) the best songs on the CD. Comatose is good too, but that’s on a different album which I don’t own yet.
Paul, I’m really disappointed. I mean, unbelievably so. So far, you’ve demonstrated excellent writing ability, so the fact that you’ve stooped to such a Marvellian tactic—killing a “clone” and replacing her with someone only marginally different—is just saddening.
Nothing is indicative of a writer’s lack of imagination and guts than “fake-killing” a character. I was legitimately excited that you actually had the balls to kill off a main character, because that’s strong storytelling. People aren’t permanent! But… you’ve just replaced her with what amounts to a carbon copy of herself. I’m sure she’ll explain how she’s not Shelly, but she’s close enough that the others are confused. And that’s close enough to defeat the drama of killing her.
Was that not your objective? Did you not see the sadness, or not care? When you wrote this, did you not think of this as the end of a character? Because the rest of us did.
She’s not going to explain that she’s not Shelly, because she is. The Shelly that we saw take the relic and close her eyes a few weeks ago is the same Shelly as Sphinx Shelly. She’s been trapped there in sacred tree land for thousand of year watching her self from various time loops die ogre and over. Why she became a Sphinx and why she was stuck there is not certain, but each of the versions of her self she watched die completed a certain task in putting the relic together.
So from what I understand, Paul never meant to kill Shelly at all. Thanks to some crazy time loop mumbo jumbo, we ended up watching the death of a copy of our Shelly on Friday, but Sphinx Shelly and the Shelly we’ve been watching for 10 years are one and the same.
Ok, yeah, that’s what I was just beginning to understand. If it wasn’t for the inverse time thing it -would- be the first Shelly replacing our Shelly, but because of the time inversion, our Shelly is the last, so she got there first. The Shelly that died was the first, who get’s there last.
Hey Paul, you’re not bad at math, or writing. Your readers are at both.
“56 cycles” means that the 57th version is no longer a cycle and has broken the loop. Not to mention you basically said that when Shelley differentiated between herself and the other versions in Mondays strip.
Shelley on Monday said “I” and “you”, not “we”. That’s a subtle but very distinct difference.
Good work in both math and writing well enough to confuse people who couldn’t tell the difference. Subtle nuances are great when people get them and they finally “click” into place and you get a very satisfying “ah ha!” moment.
Hey Paul, you’re not bad at math, or writing. Your readers are at both.
Excuse me?
As you went onto say Paul does have the ability to make his readers think about what they are reading.
Doing so and overthinking things so much that they start to turn 2+2 into 6 DOESNT mean that they are bad at maths. And how the hell you get the fact when people are confused about how many cycles there have been that that might mean they are bad at writing well..its beyond me.
And I am a person who DID say it was 57 from the beggining and changed it every time in each comment as each blinking side was so sure they were correct hence my request to paul to make a ruling on the matter.
And maths or no – its his universe. He could make 56 repeats and for this to be the 2nd Shelly if he wishes.
Ugh. I should look for Paul’s comments before I start replying to people. So the CM reset 56 times. Jin didn’t know about the CM resets until after the first. Nothing was done about the CM until after the first reset.
nerf-dweller (“Ugh. I should look for Paul’s comments before I start replying to people.”): What’s the fun of getting your facts straight before speculating?
More good discussions have been ended by a simple fact than by any other cause.
When you are done answering that maybe you would answer a question that has been puzzling me for some time now. Which came first the chicken or the egg?
Hmm
I think its the egg on that
but depends on your point of evololution.
if you think we all popped into existance ‘God’ made then the Chicken would have been first.
IF however evolution was involved then the Egg as the animal that laid the egg would have been slightly off to ‘our’ chickens
Without evolution, if an egg was suddenly created by itself, there wouldn’t have been a hen to incubate it, so it never would have hatched. I supposed God could have created the egg and hen simultaneously, though.
If the chicken was the result of a mutation, the mutation would have shown up first in the egg, which would still have been incubated by the not-quite-a-chicken parent.
The chicken is a hybrid of the grey and red junglefowls.
Therefore, a junglefowl egg was impregnated and grew a chicken. The issue comes down to whether you consider that to be the first chicken egg or the last junglefowl egg. Not really a question of the ages anymore.
The timeline of the Relic is a bit harder to answer.
OK smarty, how did “different timeline Shelly” manage to get to the artifact to be able to move it?
It’s entirely possible that some traveler, like Nudge, came by and retrieved it. Perhaps it’s regenerated back on Earth every time the calendar machine reset. I’m just wondering if we will ever find out.
BTW, there is even a worse paradox if the newly arrived Shelly was expected to know about the relic and marker in the cemetery. (Apparently she did, since she had the relic with her and the sphinx talked to her like she was expecting her to understand.) Since time is moving backwards relative to Earth, if they were already there in Earth’s past, they wouldn’t have gotten there yet by the sphinxes timeline. So how could the sphinx already have sent a Shelly to put them there? There weren’t even ever going to be any Shellys from an earlier timeline to send.
Ok, and so from what I can gather, our Shelly, the last and the first to the forest, was also the first to take the relic with the Calendar inactive, as all the others would have been wiped along with the world in the Calendar incident. They must have sought the relic prior to trying to fix the Calendar, as fixing Jin may have been sort of a red herring to the calendar problem.
But I didn’t think the calendar machine had any control over the Sacred Forest, so once there, they wouldn’t have been wiped by it and had to be killed by the sphinx, instead. I also don’t see how any of them, except the first one (in normal time) could have taken the artifact there, because the first one doing so would have trapped it there outside of the time loops.
The writer has spoken. Shelly in the comic above is the same Shelly who left in a previous comic, period. That means this Shelly spent 80,000+ years in the forest, period. Also, she is #57, period. How about just accepting those facts and move on.
The question which should be answered soon is “does she remember being a sphinx and what happened?” I profoundly hope so. But then, I’m not the writer.
I am willing to accept those facts, but I would like to know what happened before moving on. There are many unanswered questions about what that may or may not be important in the future. Even if they aren’t important, I would still like to know how things worked in Paul’s mind.
Another question is how much she will remember of what was going on here before she left. In other words, would the memories generated here be automatically restored now that she’s here or will she have to be reeducated. That may be answered quickly, too.
I’d say this is in-between Shelly surviving and dying, as if she was badly injured but came back with some handicap. I agree that just canceling a death like that would be poor writing…but a major, permanent change to a character from a major trauma is not the same as just canceling it.
This *is* the rel Shelley. This is the one that has been part of the comic since it’s inception.
You don’t think that having to spend 81k years either mentally or (as some claim) physically and watching yourself die 56 times will NOT have an effect on our ‘real’ Shelley, #57?
I think it will have profound implications both in Shelley herself and how all the other characters react once they know what she went through. That’s not to diminish at all any impact that may occur due to her having (at least in tree world) been a Sphinx as well.
Well, not all of the rest of us thought that. I never thought of this as the end of a character (and I’m sure I’m not alone). It would be cruel to the readers to give a main character they care about a comic death. And, in spite of the drama of the scene, the cross-eyed, tongue-lolling death of Shelley #1 was pretty funny. I knew more was coming because there were clues in the art.
That’s pretty much why I love comics- there’s a lot more to read on a page than just the words.
Aaaand again, I concur. x 3
I was, however too late, the comments already had proliferated like timelines in a faulty CM
[rant] You don’t like the solution? Go enjoy the other 1000-something webcomics. Quit buggering here with whining. Even better: create Your own “genius” level webcomic and see how You enjoy being constantly berated for not following some readers idea of “a good story”
@Rob Cain – I’m honestly wondering if you bother to read comments or if you only post them. The fact that “our” Shelly hadn’t died was addressed before today, and several other things you’ve gotten wrong were explained to us correctly…in the comments.
You know, it’s funny, but as much as I love this comic, I probably would have given up on it LONG ago were it not for the comments and the theories and postulations of the readers…and the occasional nuggets of information Paul dangles for us in response. I can’t imagine reading this without taking the time to read what everyone else thought or felt about it.
This comic (more than any other I read) is more enjoyable, understandable, and immersive when I read the comments…and I recommend that others do so whenever I direct people here.
As for your complaint about not killing off the main character – well, while I can understand where you’re coming from, I also think that killing main characters is becoming almost as prolific as saving them. It’s not all that special anymore. It’s just another person trying to be “more realistic” and “emotionally impactful” instead of telling the story they have to share.
Well, Shelly #fifty-sphinx is back, and she has to re-acclimate herself to the time shift. But once the shouting is over, we still have to know how the Artifact helps Jin.
Shelly is back and what a long strage trip it’s been.
From Bud’s perspective it probably looked like Shelly got slapped with Calvin’s transmorgifier.
For Shelly, it’s like visiting a relative’s home you haven’t seen in sometime. You don’t feel at home and stuff is only vaguely familiar to you in memories long ago.
So when does she sprout her wings?
A line like that puts enough money in the pun jar to buy Shelly a whole new outfit. Of course you could pay less, but the pun jar always knows when it has been shirt-changed. *tosses a few coins in the jar*
Shelly’s never struck me as a fission horse, tank top and genes type for a fast sphix, and probably with a cute little “Car <3" patch. But for a little fan service, for next Holloween, catwoman with matching radial belt.
Shelly #57 takes the relic into the tree realm and is made to wait (metaphysically, to those who are sticklers about it) 81200 years to get back after Shelly#1 dies. So if she’s picking up the Ploutonium-containing relic to get back to earth, what happened to the relic that first took her there?
I think eschmenck already posed it in the middle of a thread (slightly differently, i.e. how could Bud have found it, etc.), so I repost to a new thread for visibility!
I actually gave my theory on eschmenk’s posting. I think that not every Shelly to visit the tree has died there. ShellySphinx said that a previous Shelly had hidden the relic at the graveyard (here). The to me suggests that some of the other Shellys made it away alive. After all…not all of them were handling super-radioactive plutonium.
I have been reading back over the past comics and have a really much better understanding of what is going on right now than I did this morning. I have been reading Wapsi Square for about 9 years now and can honestly say I have enjoyed it immensely but when you read a story over this length of time you tend to forget things. I am truly impressed with your writing Paul the way that you have drawn out the story over such a long time is masterful beyond belief. The answers to many of our questions are all to be found in the previous comics going back, as far back as, to before they even went to the CM, that is over 18 months ago. Think of it dropping clues here and there, sprinkling them into the story along the way but never so obvious that when we get to the end of the story all of us are going, “Well of course who didn’t see that coming”, it is just brilliant. You are now without a doubt one of my favorite authors.
Fixing the CM wasn’t the answer. It says in this comic that Brandi fixed the CM. If the CM was fixed why was everything reset? How many times did they fix the CM and something still wasn’t right? Does 56 times sound right to anyone? So that means that Shelly was going to the tree realm to fix something else or looking for something else.
I think you misunderstood what they meant. The Brandi they are talking about figured out a plan to fix the calendar machine, but it was too late to implement it herself. She recorded the plan in her book and got demons and apparently Nudge involved, but the plan wasn’t put into action until after the calendar machine reset.
The “it” that Bud is referring to is just the plan that Shelly said is being hidden from another secret plan.
I guess my point here is that we are not in a separate story arc from the calendar machine. We are going to conclude things with the CM story shortly when Shellinx explains why the Shelly’s kept appearing time after time in the Tree Realm because that is part of the CM story. Do you agree with me that Paul had this part of the story planned out months, if not years ago? In my opinion that is what makes this a great story, the care and detail that he put into this to make us all read it anxiously every day.
@jjs56thiteration: I don’t know when Paul figures things out. I think a lot of it is figuring out how to integrate new stuff with what he has already done. But he obviously has ideas early on that he carries forward or takes advantage of later. But sometimes his ideas don’t ever get fleshed out. (We still don’t know what Monica said to Orion about ten years ago, and I don’t know that we ever will know.)
I think people think the Shellys were all trying to fix the calendar machine because Shelly said, “I need,…the calendar” just before she died. I don’t particularly agree with that. I’m not sure that she didn’t regard the relic as the calendar that she was after. I’m also not sure that she wasn’t trying to fix Jin, just like the current Shelly is.
I tend to agree with the idea that Shelly #1 was there to try and help Jin…and the calendar comment as she died might have been something else entirely. After all, if she was the very first Shelly, how would she know that the Calendar Machine needed to be fixed? Time hadn’t looped yet, so no one would know.
@Julie: I think most people have decided that Shelly #1 never went. Apparently only 56 of 57 Shellys showed up there and people are selecting the first as the one who didn’t go. The 56 comes from what the sphinx says at the very bottom here: http://wapsisquare.com/comic/so-fragile/. But if you don’t make a big deal out of the fact that the sphinx said “You’ve” instead of “We’ve” at the top, Ozymandous will be all over you for not understanding the subtlety of the difference.
Her transformation into a sphinx may have had something to do with her tolerance of both death and time.
Surely there is something altered mentally as well as physically with that change.
Ozymandous’ argument will sink or swim on whether or not Shelly is still a sphinx after having returned.
Presently she is in human form, but if Phix was in the room she would be too.
I’ve been trying to get some clarification on what’s going on with the relics. I’m not sure if the relics are traveling with the Shellys or not. Either a bunch of them have been accumulating in the Sacred Forest or the Shellys have been leaving them behind when they go. However, if the relics aren’t traveling with them, how did the Shelly that just died arrive with one and what would be the point of putting the plutonium in the relic if it would be left behind by the sphinx?
Also, how could any of the Shellys have hidden the hilt with the marker in a graveyard on Earth and have it be there for Amanda to notice a picture of it? Why wouldn’t the resets of the calendar have reverted any changes to the graveyard if a Shelly other than the current one had done it?
Txmystic already posed to a new thread for visibility a little higher up, but I replied in a new thread simply because I screwed up. BTW, his acknowledgement of my earlier comment hadn’t appeared yet.
Also it would appear that all the things about hiding the hilt and everything must have happened during this cycle since, as you say, everything reverts every reset. Of course, from the forest’s POV this cycle would have been the first cycle to have occured there. This is odd as well since sphinx-Shelly said she didn’t catch on for a few cycles. So how would she know to do that stuff on the first cycle?
Well the other thing is how could she have? She said that she was trapped. I think it would have had to have been one of the intermediate Shellys, but I can’t imagine how they could have done it, either. Maybe at some point they fired up the relic and used it as a time machine or something.
maybe the forest can be entered through a graveyard.
you can get to the library through a door on the street
why not the forest thorough a gravestone *shrugs*
would explain the tree on the gravestone marker.
A good point actually, and one I considered until I saw that Shelly #1 had the relic. So I extrapolated that all 56 Shellys had to enter the realm the same way–with the relic…
Right. A lot more could be going on than what we have seen. The sphinx just talked about number of Shellys. There could have been other visitors. At some point, someone must have created the technology used by the sacred timekeeping forest and set it up. That may have happened a long time before Shelly showed up, but somehow she learned what the forest was. Or at least, she seemed to think she did.
But as far as using the graveyard goes, it sounds as if the relic was intended to found there, so there wouldn’t have been a need for another door or anything like that there.
BTW, I wonder if this will ever tie into the issue with Shelly being frozen by ah chotski doll. Did they have an effect on her because she had already become a sphinx? Or is Shelly just naturally more in tune with things like the relic and the dolls so they work on her differently than with other people?
I think that the hilt part of the relic is necessary to leave, and that some of the Shellys might have left alive. Also, if the hilt has anything to do with the Time Forest or the Calendar Machine, it could operate separate from the loops, and therefore not disappear at a reset.
“I think that the hilt part of the relic is necessary to leave”
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand why you said that. I thought the hilt and the relic were exactly the same thing. Am I wrong? Did you mean the plutonium? Or do you think that this was the first time that someone managed to arrive carrying the relic?
“Also, if the hilt has anything to do with the Time Forest or the Calendar Machine, it could operate separate from the loops, and therefore not disappear at a reset.”
Yes, I thought about that, but the marker (a gravestone with the name Yggdrasil), which is what was in the picture, probably would be affected. Either that or maybe the gravestone is a bit of Lanthian technology that is immune, too. That sounds like one darned overbuilt gravestone, though.
Sorry! I separated the hilt from the relic in my wording since I’m now thinking of the relic as a cohesive unit that includes its handy plutonium battery.
I’m still unclear about her statement about she (sphinx-Shelly) was the last of 56. That seems to me she regenerated every cycle and that seems to conflict with the sphinx being the same physical “person” who left Monica’s this cycle (our Shelly).
I think she meant that she was the last of 56 Shellys to leave the Earth for the Sacred Forest realm (going by Earth time). I don’t think the resets apply to the Sacred Forest, just as they didn’t apply to the library. To the sphinx Shelly, a cycle was just a length of time, equivalent to 1450 years. There wouldn’t have been any need for her to regenerate.
Ah, that could be. Good points. So then she was the last of 56 to go, but the first to appear in the tree realm, becoming the sphinx who met all the rest of the 56 in reverse order. She would know how many were coming since she knew the number of resets. Works for me, thanks.
Yea, it already happened…i’ve accepted it.. XD
and in all honesty I don’t want that. I want everybody to keep thinking for themselves. Paul does too, which is why he drops hints, not answers in our speculation…
No, I am sorry but the job is yours until you have seen 56 of my theories publicly shot to hell…I’d like to claim that it’ll take about 81200 years, but at the rate I’m going, should be about 81.2 minutes…
Honestly, I kind of liked your idea of reversing everything back. It had some nice symmetry to it. The reason I didn’t buy it was because it would have undone too much character development.
One major problem is that it would have changed the relationship between the GGGs and Monica. Monica’s suicide was what gave them freedom of choice, which allowed them to escape from Tepoz’s control. We would have gained Tina 1.0 as a character, but lost Tina 2.5 and CLG. I couldn’t see Paul giving them up.
I just want to say that there were almost 200 comments by the time I looked at this comment this morning, and here it is 4:20 pm, and I’m the 365th comment. This is just amazing response!
One might…and seeing as how we’re about to hit 400 comments now that I’ve finally finished reading everyone else’s and posting my own thoughts (and reading replies to my thoughts), it was a MASSIVE nerve.
Something about such a massive character changing plot point, who’s ripples will certainly spread far and wide in the waspi-world, seeing it first hand, having that insight on a monumental change in a character you’ve read about for so long. Seems to really get people going.
Hellz yeah, I can see this gem being resolved however it will in the current scene, but then Shelly’s Sphinx-ness not come up until a really awesome moment…such as an intimate moment with officer tightbuns…
Well, if you want to to wait for that, you had better hope that Shelly isn’t thinking about how long it’s been since she has eaten, because Tina should be standing directly in front of her right now.
So okay, now that we know which Shelly pops back into our main continuity, maybe we can sort the timeline stuff out a bit more. We have two frames of reference: the main one, and the one where the trees and Shellinx were.
Main continuity:
The Calendar machine looped 56 times, and the Shelly we’ve known is Shelly #57. Shellynx is Shelly #1. Shelly #57 dies, Shellynx (aka Shelly #1) pops out 80,000odd years older, with sphinx powers, a slight character redesign, and (apparently) a more relaxed attitude about appearing topless in the comic.
FR#2 (Time goes backward,) Shellynx is the first one in, since she sees all the subsequent Shellies come in (and die). But in what order? There are several things to consider.
First, each loop of time has been subtly different, and each one has left clues for the subsequent loop, thus allowing our heroines to finally destroy the calendar machine on loop 57, restoring time to its more normal, linear flow. The loops are effecting each other.
Consider for a moment that to be in the tree timeline, Shelly has to be functioning in two timelines at once. In the previous 56 cycles of the calendar machine, she was with the crew when they failed to fix the calendar machine and were thrown outside time, stuck forever (if memory serves).
What if, instead of simply looping, the calendar machine was recursing? What this would mean is that instead of going back to the beginning of time on the same timeline, the existing timeline stops, and a new timeline, starting from the beginning, is instantiated.
Those who are stuck outside time are simply stuck in the previous timeline. They’re there, but no time is elapsing for them.
Now when Shellynx goes in, she goes in on cycle 57, but her timeline is a straight line (having not paused) from timeline #1. She dives all the way to the bottom of the recursion.
When the calendar machine is destroyed, however, things get interesting. The previous timelines are resumed, one at a time, and their contents are suddenly in flowing time again. Thus, the next Shelly that Shellynx sees is Shelly 56, then 55, and so on, until Shelly #1, our Shelly, comes through, and the events we’ve seen occur.
Thus, the following assertions: The 80-odd thousand years that Shellinx has been in the tree timeline occurred as the recursive dive through time loops /ended/ – in other words, between the time Monica et al closed the gate and destroyed the calendar machine, and when t-shirt-and-bikini grabbed the artifact.
How all the timelines get merged back together after the recursive dive, I have no freakin’ clue. It’s possible the recursion is only happening on the interface with the tree timeline rather than the whole universe, or it’s possible that the “current” timeline (#57) simply absorbs all the stuff and people from the previous ones, and everyone’s left with strange dreams and half-remembered lives of things that didn’t happen.
The story continues to whipsaw around the bends of this Pike’s Peak Race. Are we heading for the summit, or careening toward the bottom of the mountain, brakes gone, hanging on for dear life? I don’t know, but I’ll bet there’s a cushy pillow at the end. And that pillow, of course, will blow apart and then we’ll go airborne on some other wild arc.
Nope, it was a straight transfer. She never moved to anyone else in the room.
If you need more explanation than that, read everything above this post and then come back and ask more questions in an hour or so.
I was wondering what the rest of you thought about this. Do you think that Shellinx was trapped in Tree Realm because the CM was destroyed? If she was trapped because it was destroyed in her timeline is it possible that the other Shelly’s could have left and returned to their timeline since it wasn’t destroyed? That is if they were able to survive their time in Tree Realm.
My current thought about that is that she was stuck there to undo all the damage the loping did to Jin, and somehow a plutonium-fueled relic is the culmination of that, but I think there’s much more than that to fixing Jin.
for example, whatever happened to Tina 1.0′s notebook that was written in shorthand but that Monica thought might be glyph language?
Wish I could provide a couple of links, but I need a lull at work to go thru the archive and bookmark a few…
Searching for “help” found this, which is a good place to start. Jin specifically mentions Tina’s diaries about 4 pages later.
That’s all I’m going to do. Paul hasn’t forgotten that the the diaries exist, but he hasn’t seemed all that interested in using them, except as a red herring, so far. Maybe he knows what’s written there and it’s something else.
@jjs56thiteration: I don’t know why Shelly was trapped. Your idea doesn’t feel right, though, because it doesn’t seem to explain why she is no longer trapped now, but was still trapped a cycle ago.
The sphinx said that at least one Shelly hid stuff in a graveyard on Earth, but I don’t know if that Shelly left the forest realm to go do that.
For all I know, someone, like whoever runs the library might have done it for some strange reason.
“For all I know, someone, like whoever runs the library might have done it for some strange reason.”
Well, that was vague! I meant trap Shelly. There seems to be something unusual about Shelly. Not just her strength, but the way she reacted to the chotski doll when she was young and the damage she suffered on the vision quest. I don’t now if that fit into someone’s plans somehow or what.
The statement of in this comic that the title is based from, “Holy crap the relic blew her clothes off!”, both intrigue me. The fact bud says it like that, is as if she was never gone. Its like she closed her eyes, then BAM and was instantly back, but her cloths got blown off. As if that’s all that happened when she concentrated. This means that within a matter of a second from Bud’s perspective (and I’m guessing everyone’s), this happened.
I was elated when I finally decided that ‘our’ Shelly lived through it all, but I’m still nervous to see how she’ll be. Even with her being my favorite knuckle-head, she’s going to so different…
I’m looking forward to meeting her, though.
I’m almost wishing I could fall into a stasis chamber for a year or so, and have a year’s worth of Wapsi to read all at once. Waiting for more is so hard…
Best . . . relic . . . EVER!!
Blew off her clothes AND grew her hair.
Is it me, or does she have the same hair than the sphynx, now? (and wear the same outfit, as well)
I’d agree! Treeland = Sphinx, Realworld = human form.
And now, for the exposition to come!
Aw, man, Shelly, when did you get a cat? You have to learn to change its litterbox, dude, ’cause your clothes reek of–
Wait.
Quick quick!!!!!! Give the relic back to Monica!!!!!!
…hand it around! Ladies, group trip time, everyone hold on! Rrrrwawr!
Bikini and tee shirt; any average relic could do that.
Blowing the sphynx wings off her in panel 2? Now that’s relic power!
Or possibly, a careful/neglectful edit.
Still… Tearing clothes off is interesting. I have an interesting curiosity if this sphinx is as buff as the other Shelly…?
actually i think it would of been the between phases of her going through the realms losing her wings and turning back into a human
Realist.
Party pooper.
Her hair didn’t grow. She is the sphinx and that’s how long (relatively speaking) it was on the sphinx.
But from Monica’s and Bud’s POVs, her hair is suddenly much different.
My first thought, as well. Looking forward to the next few reactionary pages…
…and i thought that having a stereo loud enough to blow a woman’s clothes off was awesome…..
this is SO much more portable!!!
Shelly as a sphinx? Won’t Tina be surprised!
YES!
THAT’s what a plutonium-powered Lanthian artifact will do to you!
And so begins the chaos!! XD
Lord, this will be fun to watch…
And on a different note, I might just have to use Bud’s WTH face as my new avatar. XD
Do it. That face is KlassiK.
Done and done!! (should take effect momentarily) <3
Where can I get one?
Soooooo The Lanthians were just perverts…
Have you met Jin and her mom? When was this ever in doubt?
Umm… take a look at the shape of the relic again… Especially now that it has batteries inserted into it…
Ayay! Associations Do.Not.Want!
Vade Retro Satanas……
An atomic powered sex toy with a lethal “payoff” at climax. Yeah, that sounds like something Lanthians would make.
Huh. So THAT’s what tribe my Native American ancestors came from…
Ummm . . . with that pinout, looks like a 42 or a 45 with some kind of wave inhibitor on it.
…I wonder what happens if Monica plugs it into her stereo?
OK, so she was there physically for 81200 years, I think we can agree.
But is this the same spot she left, on the final iteration of the CM, or is this #1?
im certain to every one in the room she grabed the relic closed her eyes then all her cloths blew off and her hair grew 2 feet and her eyes opened
This is most likely the same spot she left. The same people weren’t involved every time. While Shelly was Jin’s friend in all previous iterations, Jin only discovered Monica’s importance rather recently. Thus, from Monica’s presence, we can infer that this is not #1. That leaves her own proper time as the only remaining logical candidate.
but Shelly #1 was dressed for the beach, implying she was doing the same thing in #1 as in #56. And since Monica was the one who discovered the atoll that they were going to poit to before Bud blew it up, she’d have to be there on iteration #1, wouldn’t she?
Silly man! A lady can wear beach clothes anywhere.
Besides, who’s to say that it wasn’t summer when Shelly #1 handled the relic, so poiting to a beach wouldn’t have been necessary!
OR
Shelly could have been wearing an over-sized shirt and underwear, fresh out of bed!
A woman could wear beach clothes just anywhere. A lady wouldn’t.
Exactly… they have done this 57 times… and the previous 56 they did without the calender??? Or were they under the assumption that they had done the job as well? But hadn’t yet? Arrgh Fast forward dangit!!!
Well, it’ll suck if it’s #1 because then the series would have to switch between 2 time lines.
Not necessarily. there could have been an order of events that fits perfectly with Shelly returning at this very moment, with the CM still destroyed.
Not if she appeared in Cycle #1. Cycle number one had the Calendar Machine cycle to Cycle #2. She’d have ended up just where Cycle #1 shelly left when she appeared in treeworld.
But she just spent 81000+ years going back through time to undo all of the mistakes made over the course of the 56 iterations. So returning to iteration #1 as a sphinx, in essence, changes history.
I know I’m reaching…
Actually, scratch the whole iteration #1…Paul said he was inspired by Star Trek below, which changes my view. This is still #56…
Go read my long explanation from yesterdays comic. Your base assumption is totally wrong of her being there physically and returning to #1 time line.
And this is Shelley #57, not #56. Also explained yesterday.
Please look at my comment above…now that we have confirmation from Paul that he was thinking about a particular Star Trek NG episode, I see how Shelly would return to the 57th iteration.
But it unfortunately does not explain Shelly’s appearence…if this was a purely metaphysical journey, why would she suddeny be naked with longer hair?
Who says it was purely metaphysical? Eveer seen Contact?
No one saw Jodi Foster travel anywhere, but her video feed had 18 hours of static footage recorded.
Allow me to restate:
Shellies #1-56 go through (with one possibly missing from this set). Shelly #57 enters, and time’s running backward.
Next event she sees, is shortly after the reset (going backward, that’s 1400 or so years, when CM un-resets), and she meets herself, learning she’s running backwards through time.
Fast-forward to her meeting shelly #1, and she’s kept track of the time to learn this is the end of the line, and can now escape. She does so, reterning to the moment she left (call it Hypermoment if you want), and is now back where she started from, 80k + years ago.
… not bad for a comic founded on the premise “what if there was no “after” 122112…
Where she started – all the others died, remember?
Sorry, will never agree that she was there physically for 81000 years.
Unless the relic transported her there physically, stayed for 81k years, and transported her back instantly to the exact same moment she was teleported in.
Nope, prefer to think of it as metaphysical with her metaphysical manifestation now moving over to reality.
Again, LOOK at her.
I don’t pretend to know the mechanics of how, if she was transported physically or semi-physically, how her body could hold up for 81000+ years, although I can guess, because she evolved into a sphinx, she had to at least FEEL those physical changes, if they were to manifest in the scene today.
You forget, people are souls that have bodies, not bodies that have souls. Entirely possible for a soul to be somewhere 81,000 years since they are immortal and intended to last for eternity.
CS Lewis postulated that to (a) God, time is not linear, he does not have to answer 200 billion prayers per second, but has 200 billion years to consider each prayer individually. Not that big a stretch for someone’s “soul to spend 81000 years next to a tree and then be transported back to whence it came without a break in the linear time line.–it would be mind bending if you were to remember the trip though. . . .
ooh thats a nice thought
CS lewis was a good thinker really
would explain why we dont see ghosts!
when we die our time becomes like that so to our dead peeps a second has gone by
CS Lewis’ argument assumes God only has the processing power of a human. We have no reason to know he isn’t a massively parallel system.
EPIC
now to see how her new found sphinkness and forgetting plays out
So if Shelly and the librarian get in a fight will it be a sphinx fight or a cat fight?
I think that some of us here would prefer an “au-nature” Sphinx-fight, especially if a tub of warm mud is involved.
Cat fight, sphinx fight. I’d call it Pay per View.
Where’s Tina?
Holding the camera?
In the back, with Shelly’s shredded camisole hanging over her head ,going: “Wha???”
Or… maybe she’s staring in terror off screen because Shelly is now a sphinx (maybe?). And remember she can see past the whole human disguise thing.
^^Quite possibly too.
Poor Tina ,she’s prolly’ going to need demon-counseling for a loong time, after being confronted with demon-killing Sphinxes twice..
Heh, fortunately for her, I don’t think Shellinx was ever schooled in Demon-Killing 101 during her stay in sacred tree land.
The instictual fear-of-death doesn’t change.
She’s going to need something stronger than chamomole-tea after this, I am afraid.
Heh, she might need to go to Darren’s bar. XD
That’d be great, I miss Darren.
Me too. Him and Tepoz… <3
Take a kitten – after its eyes open and it can more or less get around on its own, even if it does have to quickly sit down and contemplate every few steps.
Get a plucked peacock feather – you know, like you’d find in a vomitorium – and twitch it on the floor in front of said kitten.
Watch it pounce. hard-wired, instinctual behaviour.
Now put a scared (collective of) demons in front of a sphinx in human form (even if, as a sphinx, she’s never seen demons before).
Watch what happens when said demonic group twitch or try to run…
There’s one slight difference between this situation and the kitten example though. Shelly may not have had a Sphinx-awaremess of demons, but she already knows that Tina is a demon collective in a human body that is missing its soul.
Instinct trumps logic – especially if one is in a somewhat dazed and disoriented state
I suppose that’s true…but hopefully ONLY when one is befuddled like she looks now.
Um — is the relic still dangerous? Isn’t there plutonium inside of it now?
its shielded as long as no one opens it they should all be safe
Nah, the relic shields the radiation, as was mentioned in the strip where Shelly #1 died. As long as they don’t take the plutonium out, they’re fine.
If it was designed well, it should be impossible to take the cap off for safety sake. The fuel never needs to be replaced after all. But then the Lathians weren’t much for safety it would seem.
maybe it has a child safety lock.
OR maybe it could only be opened in another plane of existance.
which begs the question just HOW advanced were these frikkin Lanthians?
I’d think the fact that it uses the energy given off by the fuel would make for effective shielding–as long as it captures 100%. Which would allow the beryllium enhancement of radiation to be less required for the same final output, and a more efficient design.
You are also making the assumption that the plutonium is real, and not a metaphor.
Hey, if we are talking about Shelly’s soul traveling and living 81000 years in a second, then why assume that the plutonium (which we’ve established as being not really plausible) isn’t spiritual as well? A spiritual power source that is also highly toxic to spirits…
I definitely have a combination Bud/Shelly face right now.
On a different note…
Thanks for the “how to end html” stuff the other day. I think I forgot to say that before. I’ll keep at it; one day I will fix the interweb, I swears…:D
You’d better! I happen to like my Interwebs..
I made a “reads like words” tag work right on the last page, clear down at the bottom of the comments.
Repairs commencing.
*peeks in from alternate universe where interwebs isn’t broken* Hmm.Yeah..seems like it worked..
Don’t worry, not having an “edit” function makes that whole HTML tagging-biz a bit of a hit ‘n miss.
I only got it after I killed several universe’s Interwebs
I heard something a while back
It was almost as if millions of interwebs suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
I had wondered what had caused it..good to know
Um, yeah, that was me. My bad.
No, I am afraid that was mainly me. Why do You think we haven’t heard from other universes??????
(hint:Discontinuance in the spacial conduit, due to an infinite division by “0″ -call in some unlucky coding-experiments on my part )
well
im sorry but the apt punishment for destroying so many universes and interwebs.
you have to go in solitude to a planet and reside there alone.
Please feel free to create any hallucination you may feel to create and should a telepath come by, send her loppy by playing a song in her head *nods*
loppyLoopy
i mean…
nooooo. don’t do it! in order to fix the interwebs, you’ll need to go to the dark side of the internet. nobody escapes there with his/here sanity intact(i should know i went “there and back again”). imagine: 2 girls 1 cup, goatse, lemonparty and a rickroll from hell. and multiply that by 100000^π(the number pi) that’s how bad the dark side of the internet/interwebs it.
on another note:
where can i get me a relic like that and last but never least:
SHELLY, FOR THE LOVE OF FANSERVICE: LOWER THAT ARM!
Oh lordy.. Here I was, having repressed that dark-side of the interwebs..It all comessss floooooodingngngn baaaaaack… TwoGirlsanda cu….gu gu guh goatse…..blblblblblbllblblb..
*slumps on ground ,a gibbering, drooling mess, eyes transfixed on a non-existent horizon..*
Oh for heavens sake! If you want to see breasts, click back a few pages and enjoy them while she’s in sphinx form.
And here I ught this was the dark side of the interwebs. I’ve been there and back….
I guess one of the things they teach you in Shinx school is how to not appear all big and scary to the unprepared. I am also looking forward to her next conversation with Phix. Phix was stuck in the library about the same amount of time Shelly was stuck in the sacred forest.
At least Phix had stuff to read.
I don’t think Phix was stuck, as such. Yes, she’d been made the Librarian to replace Nudge and couldn’t leave permanently. But as we saw, she could make temporary jaunts to Earth anytime, she just didn’t do it much before the CM was destroyed because she was disgusted by her own previous behavior. Shelly, now, Shelly WAS stuck…
Nice twist Mr. Taylor. Very nice twist.
I’m utterly confused. Can anyone explain to me all this Shelly #1 Shelly #56 stuff?
Nope
There hasn’t been an explanation, just a bunch of speculation.
Okay, condensed version:
In their last adventure, our heroines destroyed an ancient Calendar Machine that had forced the world to repeat the last several millenia 56 times. The Shelly we know and love, and who now stands naked in Monica’s living room, is from that 56th iteration — hence, “Shelly #56″. The Shelley from the previous iteration would be Shelly #55, the one before would have been Shelly #54, and so on back. Only folks outside the timeline, such as sphinxes, were aware that history was repeating itself.
When Shelly #56 grasped the relic and was transported to the place with the tree and the sword and the dubously explained plutonium, she became the sphinx. Because time flows backwards there, she had to wait once again for history to repeat itself 56 times. Each time, a Shelley would appear, and, presumably, cut open the tree and die from radiation poisoning. But, again because time was flowing backwards, the first one to die would be Shelly #55, then, many thousands of years later, Shelly #54 would appear, slice the tree open and die, and so on.
The Shelly we saw pull the sword from the stone, slice open the tree, and die on a Friday was Shelly #1 — that is, the first Shelly who ever existed, before the Calendar Machine caused history to repeat itself the first time. Only after that could the Shelly we’ve been reading about since 2001 — Shelly #56 — stop being a sphinx and return to Monica’s living room (probably at about the same time she left). Her clothes, however, were not so lucky.
I’d say that’s it – except that i suspect that each iteration of Shelly probably did something different to advance the preparation of the artifact, rather than each doing the same thing.
Yeah, I think that, too. The Shelly before the one we just saw die might have been the one who told her that getting Shelly mad will make her able to cut the tree, too, since the Sphinx probably would have forgotten about that. I also wonder if all these Shellies thought the cycles there were gonig forward, and what they were doing would help with the Calendar Machine issue the next cycle if they didn’t fix it that cycle.
Actually, The “Piss her off, make her strong” comment was a hint back to Tina. Remember the whole coffee pot incident?
But Shelly doesn’t even remember who she was with or what she was doing way back before she went to tree world, so why would she still remember that random event with Tina? That’s why I said she’d probably have forgotten about that, and had to be reminded. I figure it would have been the Shelly before the one we just saw die since Sphinx-Shelly made that “you told me that would work” comment.
Tina as a reanimated collection of demons never existed in any previous cycles. She wouldn’t have been hyper-perceptive enough to figure out what Shelly was capable of in any other cycle, by my way of thinking.
She is, but that doesn’t mean Tina is the only person to ever notice Shelly’s strength. In that cycle, Shelly might have figured it out herself or somebody else told her. And she told Sphinx Shelly. Just like in both cycles, some different string of events got Shelly to get that relic.
Tessa’s got a point. If we’re going with the theory that each visit from a Shelly to the tree involved a different stage of the artifact being prepared, it would be perfectly understandable for ShellySphinx to ask the Shelly who put the plutonium in thw tree just how on earth she would be able to make another Shelly succeed at cutting the tree down…
Wow this gets convoluted in the explaining…
@Fairportfan – That was my thought all along. Somehow each visit to the tree involved another stage of the process (hence ShellySphinx saying that a previous Shelly had put the plutonium in the tree and hidden the artifact at the graveyard…obviously Shelly #1 wasn’t repeating the same action as all other Shellys if that really is how things played out).
The artifact, complete with plutonium, could have existed all along. It could have been made before the CM went buggy and would still be there after every reset. Everything, except Maya, that existed before the the CM broke would still be there in each repeat. They didn’t have to create it, they merely used it.
I have to side with SoWhyMe here. Monica, for what ever reason, was looking for an artifact that was smuggled out of Lantis, so it must have existed and been functional long before the calendar machine even had problems. It seems unlikely that Monica would have known about any tasks the Shellys were performing that were going to create something different from the original.
The tasks the Shellys performed seemed like silly tasks a bored sphinx came up with. Stick a sword in a rock. Remove the sword from the rock. Hide plutonium in a tree. Remove plutonium from the tree. Plant a flag on a mountain. Remove the flag from the mountain. I agree that they weren’t the same tasks, but I don’t see how they were supposed to accomplish anything.
This would mean that Shelly came to Tree Realm was given a quest by Shellinx, returned to their time line to gather elements for the quest, returned to the Tree and completed the quest and either died trying to complete the quest or left after completing the quest. Otherwise all of the items for the relic were always in the Tree Realm and Shellinx could have assembled them anytime and she waited for nothing.
See, the way I understood it, the plutonium was put in the tree by a Shelly so it could become a catastrophicly dangerous battery (since plutonium on its own isn’t as deadly as the battery was). This suggests a process to get all of the pieces to the state and location they’re in now.
However, I will freely admit that I’m making a lot of assumptions and guesses based on my limited understanding of what’s going on.
She could still be a sphinx. Just in human form. Like Phix does.
…but Phix is like eight feet tall…
because she chooses to be that tall. nudge is normally 9 or 10 ft tall, but is a little taller than Monica in the real world.
Thanks for the explanation. Now, let’s hope things don’t get even more complicated.
Silly boy (or gir?)–what makes you think Paul has any mercy?
gir?girl?Um, Shelley in this version is #57. There were 56 loops, this last is not a loop, hence Shelley #57. See yesterdays explanation down near the bottom, where I explain it all.
Unless it’s a case of 56 repetitions and we’re including the present in the counting since the present was a repetition until the calendar machine was destroyed…and even so it’s a repetition until we make it past 2012.
It’s quite simple actually. Time is linear in the Tree-Realm. If you in the Tree-Realm you will experience time in the forward fashion as usual. But the flow of time in the Tree-Ream is backwards. And the Tree-Realm exists outside of the Wapsi Square world time (it kept getting reset back 1450 years).
Since time flows in reverse in the Tree-Realm, the last Shelly to use the Relic (i.e. our Shelly of the post CM cycle line, aka Shell #56) is the first Shelly to travel to the Tree-Realm. Shelly #56 is trapped, founds she can’t die, and eventually becomes the Sphinx.
OK traveling backwards in Wapsi Square world timeline, the next to last Shelly to use the Relic is Shelly #55 from the previous CM cycle. She becomes the second Shelly to enter the Tree-Realm. And Shelly #55 meets Shellinx, (and confusion reigned). Shelly #55 dies. And then the Shelly previous the 2nd previous CM reset, Shelly #54, enter the Tree-Realm, dies…and eventually get to the Shelly before the first CM reset. The original Shelly.. Shelly #1. That is the Shelly we see in the web comic entering the Tree-Realm, cutting down the tree and dying from radiation.
Now the question is whether Shelly is now just human or is she a sphinx in human form?
That’s what I want to know! I hope she’s still a sphinx! You can bet nobody else will touch that relic!
Consider that Shelly now has longer hair like the Shellinx wore it. And Shelly now has the same (lack of) wardrobe that Shellinx had. I’m guess she at least part Shelly/Shelllinx.
We’ll soon (tomorrow or so, I guess and hope) see Tina’s reaction. Then we’ll know.
According to the Mysterious Voice yesterday, all sphinxes are born human.
So i figure that this is the next stage – she’s a sphinx permanently now, though she’ll likely spend most of her time in human form.
Wonder how long it’ll take for her to get ’round to explaining Everything to the rest of th Scoobies.
I don’t think it was a mysterious voice. It was Sphinx-Shelly still talking to the body.
I see the tailless balloons as being A Different Voice – possibly inside Shelly/sphinx’s head – than the balloons with tails as she talks to her dead self.
But, if it’s inside her own head or something she says aloud … where did she get the knowledge about how little sphinxes are made?
i think she was just assuming
she was human – she became sphinx – ergo sphinx come from humans
she had 1450 years before the 55th shelly turned up so she had 1450 years to transform into a sphinx.
if she HAD transformed by then.
Paul will often only put one voice bubble with a tail per character per panel, with the other bubbles being linked to the tailed bubble or floating if the speaker is obvious. This is even used today when shelly says “Was I alone?” And here http://wapsisquare.com/comic/just-a-scratch/ It’s most obvious when it’s a real conversation. But it was all Shelly talking to dead Shelly. As for how Shelly knew where sphinxes came from. She was a human, and became a sphinx. So she might have just reasoned that’s where all sphinxes came from.
Like others have said, Shelly is probably Sphinxified for life now. I think the question is, “can/when does she reveal her Sphinx form?” If I recall correctly, the only time we’ve seen a sphinx in it’s true form is when they occupy worlds outside of our own space/time. When Phix is walking around flirting with the museum director she’s in human form. Unless we find out otherwise, i think Shelly’s sphinx form won’t be apparent to anyone other than Tina until they poit to another dimension with her.
They can enter “real-world” as a sphinx. Phix gave Monica “The Book” for christmas ,while in sphinx-mode.
If you think about it this almost has to have happened for every Shelly. This is a paradox loop. How could the other world know which Shelly had to be the one to stay? Probably each one had to replay until they could return to make their attempt at fixing the CM. She wasn’t only living the time she was watching the rewind of the loop in case they did fix the machine. Then when they failed and the the loop reset the next Shelly had would show up and repeat the rewind of events. SO Phix has to know that Shelly transformed by being there long enough to become a Sphinx. These events did repeat with minor variations but the main line of events remained intact. Poor Shelly.
If Shelly can become a Sphinx in our dimension, let us hope Officer Tight Buns is a secret furry… ^_^
Gotta love Bud’s “down to earth charm” Whahahahahaha…
It’s one of the reasons she’s my favorite Wapsi girl. XD
And the WTF-Bud is a nifty gravatar too
Why thank you!!
Did you really expect her reaction to be any different to that?
Hey, you didn’t pay the jar for that one and I almost missed it!
Tosses a quarter, a dime, a plastic toy dime, an asprin, and two paper clips in the pun jar …that’s all I’ve got right now.
*takes out aspirin and swallows it* Pfuuuii! I needed that after yesterdays’ 56/57-mind-inside-out-bending-and-throwing-it in-the blender discussion.
Sheesh, D.A ‘s 43 has nothing on 56/57
i love bud.
I do wonder what things looked like back at Monica’s house throughout all this. From their perspective, not only did Shelly’s clothing disappear, but the artifact switched hands. It was in her right hand when she went in. I wonder how long they thought she was gone.
I’m guessing a flash of light that hides the holder in its glow. And a gust of wind.
She also came and went instantly.
(both guesses)
I think that to the girls, the moment Shelly grabbed the oopart and closed her eyes, all went “POOOFF!!” with this end-result.
I am happy for Shellinx though. Back amidst her friends. Although she is still somewhat amnesiac, I think it’s going to be tearful….orrr..If the Shelly-character traits still are primed, she’s going to flip-out and get angry as a first reaction.
I’m still thinking pocket universe. The calendar machine looped outside of time and I’m sure its power source had to be placed outside as well. Now with the calendar gone, guess it was time to retrieve the battery. And who better than our very own quantum mechanic.
I wonder if Jin or Tepoz could grab Mr. Feathercloak and ask him if he’s planted any trees lately.
Anyway, I’m sure all this happened in the blink of an eye as far as everyone else was concerned, and the energy of the loop’s collapse … oh, heck. Douglas Adams explained that party trick much better.
I found her anger at not being able to remember quite touching and sad. I wonder if it was that fight to remember that sustained her throughout the cycles, ending with that plaintive “I can go home now.”
Now, where is Tepoz? I could use a double shot Blessing right now.
“Msyendor” – Totaly strikes me as a good seed to try in MineCraft. Thanks! (i.e. sounds like a mythic place name)
add lots of underground caverns. I spent years chasing that d**n Wizard of Yendor.
From their reaction Monica didn’t disappear when she grabbed the relic so I doubt they saw anything than Shelley close her eyes, then open them and her clothes go “Poof!”
Other than speculation we have no solid evidence to say she actually went there physically and not in some metaphysical/spiritual manifestation only.
We have a lot of evidence of Shellying actually traveling there. Assuming Paul’s artwork is deliberate, and not a mistake. Shelly before the Tree-Realm was holding the Relic in her right hand. In today’s comic when she left teh Tree-Realm, she is holding the Relic in her left hand. And we have the difference in her appears: Longer hair and a very distinct………(where was I?, ah yes)..lack of clothing.
… And to think I was worried that something weird would happen. Silly me.
*tsk* You should know better…
Yeah. Know better than to worry aboput it.
Just accept that it will happen.
That way you can get right on to the question of exactly what did happen, and what’s the explanation.
So this is the sphinx Shelly who grabbed the relic then. She’s naked because the sphinx was naked. Apparently she transitioned from sphinx to human form automatically in transport. Another service of the relic or an standard result of travel from Magical Forest to earth? If she lets go and grabs it again, does she go back to the forest and her sphinx form?
It’ll be interesting to see her first reaction next comic. Will she remember or need a while to catch up? At least we didn’t have to wait until Monday for the trip back. Right now she’s pretty stunned.
Also, this would be the same Shelly who “left” this group in this cycle. She has just returned after an 80,000+ year wait in the Magic Forest. To everyon else it seems only a few minutes have passed. Shelly has just returned from 80,000+ years in hell. She may not even remember that she left from there, however.
It’s going to be interesting, I hope. XD
Quite possible. If so, Shelly’s going to have a serious WTF-moment too, wondering why her hair is long again, and why she’s nekkid. (and why Tina is looking at her like -}
..)
She won’t wonder about that. She would know she was the sphinx just a moment ago and she was naked with longer hair. That part will make sense.
I guess any relic will bring the holder back to the same time and place as they left, since that relic is not the one she left with as such. The space-time coordinates must be imprinted on the person and not the relic.
Would she really remember all? How do we know 100% that:
1. She actually went there physically?
2. It wasn’t a manifestation of metaphysical/spiritual or other dream like realm where what happened had real world consequences while not physically being there? Much like her spirit journey as a child.
3. How do we know the artifact wouldn’t block or limit her memories in some fashion to allow her to function?
7: shelly ignores everyone and tries to kill tina
This is time line 57. Sphinx Shelly was the last, not the first. She has just lived 80K+ years. When she picked up the relic she returned to whence she came. Her physical appearance conformed to 57′s reality and he clothes did not survive the time eh was there. All the cycles are in the past now. No need to to spend time trying to figure out which is which as we pick back up with the current one. Now it is Shelly having to come to grips with the experience without freaking out major. You’ll notice there have been changes to her as well. Longer hair, less buffed shape, a deep sadness in her expression. She is probably tired from the long wait. Tina is across the room trying not to make a mess on the floor.
THAT picture of Tina made me :ROFL: bad..
I tend to believe the “time-forest-realm” is no more (noticed the lack of background-trees and such from the moment Shelly died ?) since the paradox is fixed, “Time” is fixed, so the old, redundant system of time keeping ceased to exist.
One other thing. As I see it, what is confusing about the last few comics is that Paul was showing the first Shelly’s encounter with the magical forest. Yet he first showed our Shelly holding the relic and it even finishing her departing sentence upon arrival at the Magic Forest.
But the very next comic was NOT a continuation of that sequence as it seemed at first. It is, instead the first Shelly already in the forest. We then see her die and all the rest. We did not see our Shelly going 80,000+ years into the past to be come the sphinx. We infer it must have happened from what we do see and knowing things are backwards there. We see that sequence because that is what is happening now in the forest. And that sets up the return of our Shelly, 80,000+ years “older.”
Exactly. I showed this yesterday in a fairly long post made after everyone else chimed in with their sometimes erroneous timeline questions and theories.
In essence we’re experiencing time as:
———————————>>
Shelley just experienced it as:
<<———————————
Except there is no real indication she went there in physical form, and not in some spiritual form that had real world manifestations. To her 81k years may have passed (we'll see by her reaction tomorrow in the strip) but to everyone else her clothes disappeared in an instant and her hair grew longer.
Extremely clever move by Paul to continue our Shelley, #57 comments, with Shelley #1 comments in the initial "tree world" page.
I pointed this same thing out, with links, yesterday. If you demand I read your posts, you must read mine!
Notice also, the hair across her face is exactly like the sphinx.
However, she did recover some habits of thought in the transition back from sphinx to human. Naked sphinx was not at all self-conscious; Naked human form is.
I don’t think that she even knows that she is naked. I think Shelly’s body is reacting to suddenly having all of those experiences dumped into it. A bunch of brain cells must have just been rewired.
Either that, or maybe it is the shock of suddenly being in a house after thousands of years.
I guess I’ll go with my second idea. If her hair changed length, that’s probably a sign that her body and brain all went to the Sacred Forest, were changed, and came back.
even without Nudge, Tina is gonna FREAK!!!!
I think she is going to do more than freak. I figure Thursday is Shellly’s reaction. Friday is Tina’s. For the cliffhanger I would not be surprised to have Phix arrive to brief Shelly in on the joys of being a sphinx. Since Phix is outside the time flow she knows what is happening and that this is the only Shelly to survive the relic. Can’t you see it. Phix and Shelly walking away. Phix saying, “Let me tell you how it is girlfriend!”
That would be “Coolbeans” to stay in wapsi-speak…
There is no doubt whatsoever that Shelly and Phix are going to connect. I can even see Phix take-over sort of a Mother-role for Shelly, since Shelly still reels from losing her mom.
I am still confused and trying to work this out, but could Sphinx-Shelly have encountered the relic before and was therefore, as the CM was still up and running/malfunctioning, have been taken out of the loops as a result? Where as Deceased-Shelly encountered the relic when the CM was taken out of commission, which would be the variable in this whole confoozling affair, and is why Sphinx-Shelly is the one who is there now?
Yeah, I’m still confused as to the whole multiple Shelly’s and timelines thing. But I’ve managed to simplify it into something I can understand. The Shelly we’ve been following throughout the comic was teleported away, died, and was replaced by a Sphinx version of herself that had been trapped there for thousands of years after (and this I’m still not sure I’m getting right) touching the relic herself.
Oh, man my brain hurts…
I really want to understand it all completely, but it’s so darned convoluted I just can’t seem to get it all.
At this point in the cycle, every Shelly took up the relic, and was transported to the Time Forest.
The last one to do so (ours) was also (due to the different timelines) the first to arrive and (somehow, not yet explained) became a sphinx.
(Or, perhaps, somehow, her inherent sphinx-ness was revealed.)
Each of the preceding Shellys appeared in (to her) reverse order, until the first (last, to her), and all died, each, presumably, in performing part of whatever task was involved.
When the last (first, in the outside universe) appeared (and died), the task was complete, and she could return to the exact second she left, 81,000 years ago.
Got it?
Well it helped, that’s for sure. Thanks.
That’s a simple bootstrap story.
Although it is possible, much as time was passing backwards for our Shelly, it may have gone more quickly too. So maybe she experienced a few hundred years of isolation, not the full 82,000. It is one thing for Jin to experience that in a world full of people, but to experience that in nearly complete isolation is almost unthinkable.
That I get; I was asking about/noting the variable of the existence of the CM as being partly at fault. Reason being that whatever Shelly that was who went through the arc of fixing/getting rid of the CM would have known it was beyond their reach, yet the one who died said she needed it, which to me seems to be the point that despite how linear it appears, denotes that the first Shelly who didn’t actually go through the CM arc the way we had thought. Then I start to wonder if we haven’t been seeing this arc from two different perspectives: first and last; and it was in fact the last Shelly we were seeing all along up until the first appeared in treeland. But then I know we have to take into account what the last said about time running weird. Again I blame the existence of the CM, though, as it would have been around with every other Shelly except the last. And impossibly the first…
Like I said, still confused.
Don’t.Even.Try. It’s the reason I nik’d Danzier’s aspirin from the pun-jar
Heheh, too late. I’m caught up in the crazy. XD
Do what I finally tried. Rather than figuring out the timeline in the strip, I just read the comments backwards…backwards comments the read just I, strip the in timeline the . . .
That is too funny.
Mostly right, but Our shelly didn’t die and get replaced. She became a Sphinx.
So the one that grabbed the relic a couple weeks ago (the the bikini and t-shirt) is not the same person (and don’t get into the fact that they ARE all technically the same person, I’m just trying to sort out 57 or so copies of the same character) as the one in the bikini and t-shirt that died on Friday?
The Shelly that took the relic and closed her eyes is the same Shelly as Shellinx?
Correct, in this comic http://wapsisquare.com/comic/easier-said/ the one that we saw appear in tree world and say “done” was the Shelly of Cycle 1. And the sphinx was the one we saw “easier said than..”
Supid lack of editing! The one we saw SAY “easier said than…”
Well I’m glad to know our old Shelly is still with us. Possibly amnesia stricken, but still with us.
It’s probably easier to image things this way. Keep everything in a linear timeline.
Shelly #1 Born -> Shelly #1 goes to Tree-Realm -> CM Reset #1 -> Shell #2 is Born -> Shelly #2 goes to Tree-Realm -> CM Reset #2 -> Shelly #3 is bored -> Shelly #3 goes to Tree-Realm … -> CM Reset #54 -> Shell #55 is born -> Shell #55 goes to Tree-Realm -> CM Reset #55 -> Shell #56 is Born -> Shell #56 goes to Tree-Realm
I know it won’t display properly but lay it out as a long line. Ok Tree-realm doesn’t experience the CM reset and it’s time flow backwards (i.e. read the timeline from right to left.).
Shelly #56 enters Tree-Realm, can’t leave, becomes Sphinx -> Shelly #55 enters Tree-Realm -> repeat until Shell #1 enters Tree-Realm completing the time loop. Which is what we say in the previous weeks of the comic.
This Shelly/Sphinx is the Shelly who left the room a few moments ago. She was transported to the Mystic Forest, became transformed into a Sphinx, and then waited 80,000 years while 56 other Shellys appeared every 1450 years. Now, she’s back and has to remember what was going on 80,000 years ago!
That’s what I just asked Tessa. Thanks for answering!! XD
And now that she’s human, she’s covered up again. Ooooooooof course,
Stop complaining. At least Paul did give you a chance to see Shelly in the all together. I don’t think that’s gonna happen to often.
people are sexier with few clothes on than nude sometimes.
Poor Shellinx..soo overwhelmed with guilt, I really want to hug her and go : “t wasn’t Your fault, You got caugt-up in that blighted supernatural stuff despite Your reluctance” (remember Shelly’s reaction to the tattoo??)
Jin and Shelly became the ones suffering the longest in this whole shebash. They’re gonna connect like sisters, me thinks.
I think so, too. Jin made a point of making Shelly dislike her in this loop because she couldn’t stand loosing her best friend one more time.
And now, they have this incredible longevity in common.
oooh
will she be immortal now??
are sphinx?
after all you don’t see any about…
phix is but well..library etc
The nose marks are gone.
So are the claws fur and wings. She’s human at the moment.
Awww. Spoil my fun by taking a facetious remark seriously, whydoncha?
There’s a lot of that happening today…
Hey everyone, it’s my birthday! Free beer and asprins and puns! Lighten up!
gratz
how old?
29. And thanks! You get the first piece of cake.
*noms*
yay interwebscake
less calories than a real one.
less taste and reality also but still .. its cake!
But, but… The cake is a LIE!!
Um—my B-Day was last Friday, and I’m a bit older—like two dozen years—than 29. I had Angel Food Cake, which is calorie-free like interwebcake, ‘cuz it’s made out of Angel Food and Angels don’t weigh nothin (and it’s amazing how many you can fit on the head of a pin, even if they’re dancing a Viennese waltz).
Paula–if the gratz was with Shelly, it could be far older…
Erk–make that the beer–dern hands don’t know what to type anymore.
Happy birthday!
I turn 29 in August.
Happy Birthday to Danzier and Dadman!
@Dadman, cake is a lie FTW!
My birthday cake is not a lie. Help yourself. However, if you choose to believe that my birthday cake is a lie, then please help yourself to the pie instead.
Not to throw more speculation into this whole thing (which means I’m gonna anyways), but given that Jin was very good friends with Shelly in at least a couple of the other timelines that all ran up to 2012 before resetting, Jin experienced Shelly disappearing/dieing/poofing more than a few times now (maybe explaining why she didn’t want to get attached yet again)
What do you think Jin’s reaction is gonna be to her being alive now?
Also, great way of growing her hair out again. Hard to work in a subtle yet sustained growth over multiple comics. Easy to cut it off, hard to grow inch by inch.
This way, poof, long hair! 80,000 years and transformation into a magical immortal being better than rogaine!
As this is the same Shelley who was alive prior to grabbing the artifact, the same who helped fix the CM and had not died, I don’t think Jin’s reaction will be different than it was.
Although depending on what Shelley remembers she will have a LOT more sympathy with Jin now.
I’m still confused as all hell in some regards, but as I was reading this a very fitting song popped into my head – The Inner Light Suite, from Star Trek: TNG.
In the episodeit’s from, the Enterprise encounters a mysterious artifact, Picard gets psychically pulled in, and he lives out an entire lifetime on a dying alien world. To him, untold years, love and sorrow, life and hope, eventually nearly forgetting everything he once knew – and then he returns to the Enterprise where mere minutes have passed. He is still himself, has not aged, has not changed… but he forever after remembers that other lifetime.
~D.
I LOVE that episode and was thinking about that.
Heh, thank God I’m more of a Star Wars fan than a Trekkie. I think that show would just make my head explode. XD
JK. I actually need to see if I can find a channel that shows it regularly. Sounds like a fun distraction.
after watching a clip of next weeks episode in which some sort of human skin gunk is created to make people imortal but the downside is they have to keep the humans they harvested the skin from alive and in stasis otherwise the skin goes into goo..or something..its a clip
My dad said after watching that that it has become too farfetched and that the original dr who was alot more realistic.
My words were (possibly because i have been discussing reality colisions and multiple shellys and timelines here) was “why? its totally dooable?”
*shakes head*
well these discussions DO open your mind more which is good
Rory on Doctor Who – 2000 years of memories.
i STILL dont know how he has those.
he wasn’t human. he was a robot. why would human rory have memorys of a robot rory?
Same reason Robot Rory had memories of the ‘real’ Rory, who was removed from existence by the rips.
nah
he was designed to be human by the cybermen so he would HAVE to have all the memorys Rory had the last time Amy saw him.
BUT
Amy brought them all back from zippo (somehow).
Hmm maybe thats how it worked.
Because she brought them all back it worked the same way the cybermen bringing him back did only she brought him back human and they brought him back robot
Thanks
always wondered bout that now i know.
Maybe a year is the thing after the thing after a terrabyte.
I was thinking about that one too and the ST Voyager episode “Time and Again” where they investigate the destruction of a planet only to find that the destruction of the planet was caused by them freeing Janeway and Paris who are trapped in time while investigating the planet.
OK, I was thinking about that episode as well, and still laugh to myself whenever I think about how he learned to play the recorder.
And if that is your model, then I have to drop my contention that she returned to iteration#1…She’s right back to where she started.
Well then, you missed my comment from Yesterday, because that’s exactly what was running through my mind.
Yeah, I thought of that episode too when I thought of Shelly returning. Only worse cause it was roughly 80000 years and not only watching herself die over and over but also presumably killing lots of other random people who showed up.
I like how they sent him the musical instrument also.
So he can always play it.
The musical instrument is in a later episode also
The one where he gets the girlfriend 
I believe he programmed the replicator to make one for him.
nope 100% sure on this
the musical instrument was in the box of the salelite/probe thingy when they brought it on board.
Troy gave it him after they had finished ‘chatting’
eh Lied.
The now inactive probe is brought aboard the Enterprise and the crew finds a small box within it. A somber Riker gives the box to Picard who opens it to find Kamin’s flute. Picard, now adept at the instrument, plays the melody he learned during his life as Kamin
Was riker not troy but defo from the probe
(as per Wikipedia
I yield to your knowledge of Star Trek trivia.
What to say first?
1) “DON’T OPEN THE RELIC!”
2) ” Hey guys. Did I miss anything in the last 81,200 year?”
3) “Look what I can turn into now!”
4) “BEER! ME! NOW! OR! DIE!”
I just hope she doesn’t say, “Well crap, nothing happened.” Before looking at her naked self that is. I would hate for the story to be that she doesn’t recall anything of her time as a sphinx. To me, the story will be much more interesting if she remembers what happened and is changed by it. We might miss the old Shelly, but the new one should be fascinating.
I agree; she can either use the deep sadness and incredible sense of loneliness to grow in wisdom, or the pain and amnesia scar over, hiding but not healing. She has quite a story to tell, and needs to hear old memories again. She’s in the right place – surrounded by friends.
I’d also hate if she had no memory. But I don’t know how much I like the idea of Shelly’s character so dramatically and suddenly changing. (maybe a mixture of both, where she gets her memories of time on earth back so is torn between the two memories) I’ll get used to whatever is done, though. I just hope more than anything that she can still turn into a sphinx! I will be so sad if she can’t! It’ll be like the Animorphs books where after returning from the time of the Dinosaurs they lose all their T-Rex and Deinonychus morphs. I was sooo pissed. Grr.
I believe she will slump on the floor, completely stunned and starts crying for all those lost years of perceived Hell. It would be the most human reaction imho.
The crying will stun the rest of the girls, but then Jin poits in, hugging Shellinx, saying something like:”Now do You understand why You had to dislike me?”
its possible she might just think this is an advanced form of her torture.
if she doesn’t remember it could be anything to her.
from what i gather there could be 3 reactions
1: she slumps crying to floor
2: she remembers and is shell shocked (“i remember everything”)
3: she gets aggresive and punches bud out
however since paul = hat from rabbit + hats r us recently..its possibly going to be option 4..which i havent thought of yet
4: she doesnt remember a thing and doesnt know whats going on.
5: she remembers but FAKES she doesnt and that noting happened.
I would prolly have that option
after all she just watched 55 of herself die and spent 80k years in a few seconds. anyone she tells might think of her a abit whacky
6: she remembers and tells them but they tell her it was just the relic doing similar to what it did to monica
8: Shelly poits to Jins location and knocks her out
9: phix arrives
(7 is above somewhere)
10: she fakes shes fine and goes home and cries on her ‘shocked’ dads shoulder
final guess. prolly more out there but well this is infinate)
Your “3″ reactions sound rather familiar..No, Your “4″ reactions sound..no, Your “5″ reactions..
[KAZWOINGG BADU BADUM] orch-hit..
Oh noes!!! *starts running*
I think @Paula’s #5 is likely. And Shelly going to talk with Phix about happened and getting some answers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a similar reaction to Buffy after Willow and crew brought her back. Total Shell(ey) shock.
Also, yup, wouldn’t be surprised at an instinctive ‘pounce’ and form shift @ Tina, who right about now will be off screen trying to claw her way through the back wall, like a trapped rat.
Except Buffy was in Heaven and didn’t wanna go back. This is some sort of umm… Anti-heaven.
“Anti-heaven”? Oh, come on… Minnesota isn’t that bad!
Except in winter?
Honestly – I think she’s going to be a little numb, probably feel things blurry. I think she’ll feel the emotions, but her brain is going to be a bit boggy/cloudy.
I don’t think a human brain has the capacity to easily put together that many years, let alone seeing herself die so much.
I agree Jin and Phix are all gonna be tons closer to her now.
I wonder if she considered telling her (last to her perspective) first Shelly how to fix the machine and go back, instead of letting her die.
ANYHOW!
She’s probably gonna be either super amnesia, super memory overflow, or (what I think makes more sense to me) a bit muddled for a bit… remembering her (to us) normal timeline, versus remembering all those hundreds of thousands of years in the forest, watching herself die.
In other news: Wonder what that relic realllly does?
DEFiNITELY do Monica next!
<3
i love this comment
i know why you want it but you just remind me so much of 'house MD' that well..cant help but liking it
Speaking of House – no Cuddy next season.
?!?
she dead?
i know her and house have been ‘together’ recently from the adverts (not been watching it as last one i watched was season 4 and they’re on what..season 72?)
Apparently it was the choice of wossname – the actress that plays her.
x2
Oh wow….while I MAY have a slight headache from trying to keep track of the timey wimey stuff OBVIOUSLY happening from this numerous Shelly stuff, Im just jaw dropped at the whole shelly spending 80,000+ years in some forest in the blink of an eye!
talk about a mind job!!
No kidding. What an unimaginable hell she’s been through. She didn’t expect anything like that and nothing could have prepared her for it. Maybe she was transformed into a sphinx for her own good. A form which could withstand the ravages of such a long period of time and remain sane. I doubt Shelly, the human could have coped with such a thing. Can you imagine goimg there and slowly but surely come to realize nothing and no one is going to rescue you. You’re stuck. No poiting you out or trying to get you back because no one even knows you’re there. Can’t get back, can’t die. Worst of all, no pizza! Unless you like bark and leaf topping on a layer of pressed dirt. Maybe the occasional Shelly to munch on.
Maybe she was changed into a Sphinx a long time ago in our time line… sometime nobody noticed. Could be why she wanted to attack Tina so badly and couldn’t control it, why Tina was always more cautious of her, and why she had the strength to crush that metal thing easy. She’s always been part sphinx, just she never knew, or maybe was trapped in a human form for a reason?
This could be really interesting… I wanna go back and see if Tina ever read Shelly’s aura funny – that would be the moment. Or maybe her demon had something to do with it? Can Sphinxes even have demons? (Her little girl.)
GAH! WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?! -waits for tomorrow-
It wasn’t Tina she wanted to attack – it was Nudge.
And Tina reads everyone’s aura when they come in.
That’s quite possible. Could be, in the Wapsiverse, there are many people walking around who don’t know they are actually sphinxes, thus never transform. At least not until something this profound happens to them.
If Shelly is now a sphinx in human form I pity the fool who would try to take the relic from her, which is probably the whole point of her transformation into a guardian.
Now that they have a powered up relic, what next?
Just what does it do?
This may be weird, but I am left with the idea that Mayahuel had something to do with the construction of the artifact. If so, perhaps this was the backup plan for plugging Jin back in, one that was abruptly aborted when Mayahuel tried to destroy the Calendar Machine and triggered an unknown and unsuspected defense.
Among other things, it would explain why Mayahuel wanted to destroy the Calendar Machine — something that has never been too clear to me. The CM would be no longer needed for her purposes, and demonstrably, it was to dangerous to leave where others could get their hands on it. It might be that a functioning artifact and CM couldn’t co-exist without some sort of interference effect, and she to needed to shut down the CM to turn on the artifact.
“too dangerous”
Shelly’s dead? But is also the sphinx, and alive? But now is human again?
What?
What?!
WHAT?!
Ya gotta pay, I say, pay attention, Boy!
The fast ones just go right by ya!
<3
56th shelly = shellinx = ours
1st shelly = shelly in forrest = radioactive goo we just saw
Our Shelley is #57.
Yep, from the author’s mouth now. This means the 56 repeats do not include the very first 1450 year period (right after the CM malfunctioned) since that’s where the very first Shelly would have existed, ergo this is Shelly 57.
Oh, and the very first Shelly to reach the forest has to be the second Shelly to ever exist. That’s the only way to have had 56 Shelly’s go there (as Shelly-sphinx said) and not 57. That’s assuming a Shelly from every repeat cycle always went to the forest.
I was wrong on both counts before, apparently.
Man, every day is a cliff hanger this week. At least a lot has happened though.
I just breathed a sigh of relief.
she’s back. thank god for that.
now the REAL cliff hanger for friday can begin to be formed.
and if it is a good one (which it prolly will) im going to be very put out with the world ending
I don’t mind hanging off a cliff–but when the next cliff is perpendicular to the last one, and I’m still hanging, but in a totally new (and inconceivable) direction…
all you need to know is its all “wibbly wobbley, timey whimey, his first, my last” kinda stuff. only it’s not like that at all. Forget that. Where’s my Fez?
I still prefer my 3m. multicoloured scarf ,to be honest.
my favorite was sylvester mccoy.
for the baseball bat weapon he made to fight the darleks
well
that was until they actually started getting well..cute guys to be the doctor..
still prefer rory to the doctor this incarnation however..even if he IS married to amy
*Dalek* DA-LEK!!!!!…. Grrrr
“DaRlek” is only uttered by chavz..
Nah, Tom & David were the best in my book. Both had that quick-talking know-it-all-yet-starting-to-doubt-themselves-while-talking, combined with a good smirk. Cristopher did a good job too, but he was more “hardcore-doc” He is at least the one that can be credited for resurrecting DrWho in a major way.
+ David had Freema….*sigh*..still get wobbly knees from seeing her. Those eyes..that huuuge smile *slumps in chair, a slobbering mess*
im just a cruddy spelly
ive spelt that word
darlek
darlik
darlic
darlec
etc
Meaning-of-life stuff?
@Paul
So from everybodies perspective it appears that Shelly didn’t dissapear. That she was just standing there the whole time?
My take – Shelly/Sphinx – psyches whirled in a blender. Causing flashbacks, deja vu galore, memories, confusion and maybe a deeper sense of being. Maybe a little more self-confidence. A touch of Timothy Leary.
She still looks pretty buff. I like the longer hair. And Pablo knows HOW much you guys like Shelly – notice no frontal toplessness like the Shellinx! Hehhehheh!!
Pablo – I LOVE the implied motion and the strength of the striding paws in frame 1! Animal restlessness personified. She looks as twitchy as one of my cats slightly before the 9:00 PM zanies.
do ALL cats go insane a couple of times aday then?
my cat does…
Oh YEAH!!! I’ve had cats pretty much most of my life and like someone said above instinct is strong from birth. They will hear sometimes, mostly at night, or see something thru the window in the dark and go nuts! They go twitchy, fluffy and in my case fairly vocal. Or they wind themselves up into it and chase either other around the house, over and thru anything that’ll get in their way. They “yodel” while they’re at it too. Sometimes I think they do it just for the helluvit, sometimes I wonder if they’re not seeing monsters that we can’t see. No matter why, I think it was Walt Whitman who wrote the “fog rolls in on little cat feet.” I don’t really think he ever owned a cat. It sounds more like a freight train when they get going.
Or maybe it was Robert Frost…….
Carl Sandburg — though TS Eliot’s use of metonymy was better.
ours doesnt make much noise.
we just get alot of ringing from the 3 bells on her collar. (she gets a new collar but we keep the bells. its almost like a medalion at the moment. the bells are so my mum who is partially deaf can hear her as when she was a kitten she used to run UNDER your feet just as you were putting it down)
Well, until they get preggers, anyway.
oh
well…bugger
mine got done the week she was old enough TO be done.
would explain why i cannot recall our first cat (when i was growing up) ever being as loopy as this one. she had had kittens.
My get neutered, asap too. But a friend of mine who has had a momma cat said the momma taught her kittens the zanies! Can you imagine 5 kittens & 1 cat whooping it up thru the house? She says the Golden Hoard would be quieter about it!
There’s ooooone thing i don’t get. Where’d the relic come from? Or rather, “How did the parts get assembled over the cylces?” Shellinx says that the previous Shelly iterations were the ones to gather and place the various artifacts. The plutonium and the blade were left in the tree-world, but the Shellinx says Shelly placed the relic at the tomb in Ireland. But we know that the CM resets everything and everyone in the “real-world” when it ended it’s cycles, meaning that whatever Shelly#X put somehwere wouldn’t have stayed there after a reset. The only things that escape the reset are things occupying a different space/time (the demon world, the tree world, and the library) Hence the whole Brandi-writing-to-herslef arc. Any thoughts?
The relic is part of a different time device, and would therefore have its own time pocket that wouldn’t be affected by the calendar machine. If the blade and plutonium capsule were attached to it when the made the trip, then they would have stayed in the time forest because they were subsequently outside the main loop. It might even have some sort of sentience attached, that subtly tells the bearer where it wants to go. Maybe the relic was the one talking to Shellinx.
only one??
gratz
you be further ahead than the rest of us 
The Relic may be a lot of other things, but it seems to also the “flywheel” (or differential gear?) of the Calendar Machine, seen here turning for the last time.
I’ve posted this link before, but I still think it best to allow Ms. Shelly Wahnee herself to explain:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/techtalk/
Thoughts?
Yep, the tree world/plane is just that. An area that is in a different plane of existence. Shelley #57, our Shelley, was the first there, and then Shelley #56 visited the area second and made changes to the relic or otherwise helped build up to Shelley #1 grabbing all the items and building the plutonium powered sword.
So the first Shelley into the realm (our current heroine), #57 in the real Wapsi world, now has an uber powered relic that can do something we don’t know of yet.
What I want to know is who figured out the relic and plutonium core was needed in the first place? Who told whoever made it, how it should be done? Was it just something created in the very first 1450 year period or the first repeat 1450 year time period and simply used in every period thereafter? I sense Maya’s doings here somewhere. Or perhaps Jin carrying on her mother’s work. Most likely someone yet to be introduced.
Come to think about it, having Maya create it would explain how it came to be in the first place. She could have made it as part of her attempt to fix the CM, but failed to use it properly and was sucked into the demon realm. The artifact would be left behind so it would appear in every subsequent 1450 time period, yet would seem to have had no origin since every repeat would start right after the the failed attempt for fix the CM. During some cycle Shelly-sphinx would, for whatever reason, have had a past Shelly take it apart and hide things, probably killing her too in the process.
Also Maya would never reappear in any other time period since she was already gone from this world prior to the CM reset point.
I don’t know if it was created by Maya or not, but Monica was looking for something smuggled out of Lantis that looked like it in order to fix Jin. That seems consistent with what you said.
Once the ShellyX brought the blade and the plutonium out of the real world, they ceased to be a part of the looping Earthly timeline.The actual relic, however, was placed in an Earthly tomb by a previous ShellyX, so that Shelly57 could eventually find/touch it. But the real world resets every 1450 years, meaning the relic wouldn’t stay where ShellyX put it. I can kinda buy it if the relic is its own little time machine, but it’s still going to need a place to go whenever time looped again…unless that’s what Shellinx meant by a “Marker”? something for the relic to hone in on once the CM reset?
Also, i’m willing to wager that the relic is a Lanthian artifact created pre-CM. Guess we’ll find out soon?
The marker seemed to be just a stone grave marker, in other words a tombstone, except it had the name Yggdrasil on it. That may have referred to the sacred tree that Shelly just cut down.
Okay, the cap for the plutonium was the pommel of the hilt (the end away from the blade). So why did she remove the blade? It would have been really cool if we’d gotten in the coffee shop a naked Shelly holding a full sword.
Well..It would be a bit awkward to carry around with the blade still attached, hm?
We are only at the beginning of the JIN-Fixing arc. They probably have to travel quite a lot, and a 2.5 feet blade is a bit of a problem without a sheath.
Lucky thing that *poit*ing doesn’t have airport security or they’d be done for sure…
Not forgetting Monica’s metal “enhancement” in her head..would be problematic too.
I bet it’s awkward relearning not to walk on her hands all the time.
11: shelly steps forward ignoring everyone and falls flat on her face
Thank you mystical relic. Now, if only Shelly would lower her left arm ever so slightly….
Mogg’s tungsten-tipped teeth! That would have been quite a scenery change for both “Shelly Prime” and the girls watching her. The next few days are going to be quite a ride as memories fade, or memories return, or both.
The commentary here is so useful for a Wolf of Very Little Brain…
Paul, I can’t say enough good about your artwork (phenomenal today) or your storytelling.
Okay, here’s an odd Question. Do all Sphinxes need glasses? Because Sphinx Shelley now has imprints on her nose, like a set of glasses were resting on her bridge.
That’s right. Shelley gets nekkid and I notice her nose.
No, just the ones with vision problems.
Paul says those are cat-type nose marks.
I’m pretty sure Phix wears glasses because they make her look cool and librarian-y.
I wonder if the next time she meets Phix the conversation starts with “Hello, sister . . .”
that or a punch in the face.
either way should be interesting
I thought about posting this earlier, but I didn’t. So here you go: a very Shelly theme song!
Monster Song by Skillit.
You’d think I could spll the name of my favorite band, wouldn’t you? S-K-I-L-L-ET…
oooh nice song.
and i hit the corus..
dammit..another song to buy…
and the following ‘hero’ and ‘awake and alive’
these are quite good really arn’t they
Yep. Hero, Monster, Awake and Alive, and Forgiven are (imho) the best songs on the CD. Comatose is good too, but that’s on a different album which I don’t own yet.
Oh for God’s sake.
Paul, I’m really disappointed. I mean, unbelievably so. So far, you’ve demonstrated excellent writing ability, so the fact that you’ve stooped to such a Marvellian tactic—killing a “clone” and replacing her with someone only marginally different—is just saddening.
Nothing is indicative of a writer’s lack of imagination and guts than “fake-killing” a character. I was legitimately excited that you actually had the balls to kill off a main character, because that’s strong storytelling. People aren’t permanent! But… you’ve just replaced her with what amounts to a carbon copy of herself. I’m sure she’ll explain how she’s not Shelly, but she’s close enough that the others are confused. And that’s close enough to defeat the drama of killing her.
Was that not your objective? Did you not see the sadness, or not care? When you wrote this, did you not think of this as the end of a character? Because the rest of us did.
She’s not going to explain that she’s not Shelly, because she is. The Shelly that we saw take the relic and close her eyes a few weeks ago is the same Shelly as Sphinx Shelly. She’s been trapped there in sacred tree land for thousand of year watching her self from various time loops die ogre and over. Why she became a Sphinx and why she was stuck there is not certain, but each of the versions of her self she watched die completed a certain task in putting the relic together.
So from what I understand, Paul never meant to kill Shelly at all. Thanks to some crazy time loop mumbo jumbo, we ended up watching the death of a copy of our Shelly on Friday, but Sphinx Shelly and the Shelly we’ve been watching for 10 years are one and the same.
Ok, yeah, that’s what I was just beginning to understand. If it wasn’t for the inverse time thing it -would- be the first Shelly replacing our Shelly, but because of the time inversion, our Shelly is the last, so she got there first. The Shelly that died was the first, who get’s there last.
Guh that hurts.
Tell me about it.
think
‘first shall be last and last shall be first’
type thing
The Shelly standing there now is the one that left in the first place.
and since you replied here.
is it the 56th or 57th one? cuz we have been discussing this at length somewhat and could REALLY use a ruleing
I’m bad at math, but I believe that this is Shelly #57, she’s the most recent version/timeline Shelly.
Hey Paul, you’re not bad at math, or writing. Your readers are at both.
“56 cycles” means that the 57th version is no longer a cycle and has broken the loop. Not to mention you basically said that when Shelley differentiated between herself and the other versions in Mondays strip.
Shelley on Monday said “I” and “you”, not “we”. That’s a subtle but very distinct difference.
Good work in both math and writing well enough to confuse people who couldn’t tell the difference.
Subtle nuances are great when people get them and they finally “click” into place and you get a very satisfying “ah ha!” moment.
[b]Ozymandous:[/b] You still haven’t understood the entire page yet, have you? And please stop being such an ass to the other readers.
yay!
thank you
@ozymandous
Hey Paul, you’re not bad at math, or writing. Your readers are at both.
Excuse me?
As you went onto say Paul does have the ability to make his readers think about what they are reading.
Doing so and overthinking things so much that they start to turn 2+2 into 6 DOESNT mean that they are bad at maths. And how the hell you get the fact when people are confused about how many cycles there have been that that might mean they are bad at writing well..its beyond me.
And I am a person who DID say it was 57 from the beggining and changed it every time in each comment as each blinking side was so sure they were correct hence my request to paul to make a ruling on the matter.
And maths or no – its his universe. He could make 56 repeats and for this to be the 2nd Shelly if he wishes.
Ugh. I should look for Paul’s comments before I start replying to people. So the CM reset 56 times. Jin didn’t know about the CM resets until after the first. Nothing was done about the CM until after the first reset.
Yeah, now I have to give up on a timeline#1 fantasy with an alive Tina, which is really all I desired when I tried to push the theory (sigh).
nerf-dweller (“Ugh. I should look for Paul’s comments before I start replying to people.”): What’s the fun of getting your facts straight before speculating?
More good discussions have been ended by a simple fact than by any other cause.
How then did the artifact leave the Sacred Forest for Bud to be able to recover it? Is that going to be something that you will answer in the future?
When you are done answering that maybe you would answer a question that has been puzzling me for some time now. Which came first the chicken or the egg?
Hmm
I think its the egg on that
but depends on your point of evololution.
if you think we all popped into existance ‘God’ made then the Chicken would have been first.
IF however evolution was involved then the Egg as the animal that laid the egg would have been slightly off to ‘our’ chickens
Makes sense to me.
Without evolution, if an egg was suddenly created by itself, there wouldn’t have been a hen to incubate it, so it never would have hatched. I supposed God could have created the egg and hen simultaneously, though.
If the chicken was the result of a mutation, the mutation would have shown up first in the egg, which would still have been incubated by the not-quite-a-chicken parent.
I never thought about that before, though.
The chicken is a hybrid of the grey and red junglefowls.
Therefore, a junglefowl egg was impregnated and grew a chicken. The issue comes down to whether you consider that to be the first chicken egg or the last junglefowl egg. Not really a question of the ages anymore.
The timeline of the Relic is a bit harder to answer.
Tricky…
Different timeline Shelly moved the artifact…ShellySphinx said so.
OK smarty, how did “different timeline Shelly” manage to get to the artifact to be able to move it?
It’s entirely possible that some traveler, like Nudge, came by and retrieved it. Perhaps it’s regenerated back on Earth every time the calendar machine reset. I’m just wondering if we will ever find out.
BTW, there is even a worse paradox if the newly arrived Shelly was expected to know about the relic and marker in the cemetery. (Apparently she did, since she had the relic with her and the sphinx talked to her like she was expecting her to understand.) Since time is moving backwards relative to Earth, if they were already there in Earth’s past, they wouldn’t have gotten there yet by the sphinxes timeline. So how could the sphinx already have sent a Shelly to put them there? There weren’t even ever going to be any Shellys from an earlier timeline to send.
I’ve been trying very hard not to think about that part.
It makes my brain hurt.
Ok, and so from what I can gather, our Shelly, the last and the first to the forest, was also the first to take the relic with the Calendar inactive, as all the others would have been wiped along with the world in the Calendar incident. They must have sought the relic prior to trying to fix the Calendar, as fixing Jin may have been sort of a red herring to the calendar problem.
But I didn’t think the calendar machine had any control over the Sacred Forest, so once there, they wouldn’t have been wiped by it and had to be killed by the sphinx, instead. I also don’t see how any of them, except the first one (in normal time) could have taken the artifact there, because the first one doing so would have trapped it there outside of the time loops.
The writer has spoken. Shelly in the comic above is the same Shelly who left in a previous comic, period. That means this Shelly spent 80,000+ years in the forest, period. Also, she is #57, period. How about just accepting those facts and move on.
The question which should be answered soon is “does she remember being a sphinx and what happened?” I profoundly hope so. But then, I’m not the writer.
I am willing to accept those facts, but I would like to know what happened before moving on. There are many unanswered questions about what that may or may not be important in the future. Even if they aren’t important, I would still like to know how things worked in Paul’s mind.
Another question is how much she will remember of what was going on here before she left. In other words, would the memories generated here be automatically restored now that she’s here or will she have to be reeducated. That may be answered quickly, too.
These just may be points addressed by the story later.
I advise patience.
I’d say this is in-between Shelly surviving and dying, as if she was badly injured but came back with some handicap. I agree that just canceling a death like that would be poor writing…but a major, permanent change to a character from a major trauma is not the same as just canceling it.
What?
This *is* the rel Shelley. This is the one that has been part of the comic since it’s inception.
You don’t think that having to spend 81k years either mentally or (as some claim) physically and watching yourself die 56 times will NOT have an effect on our ‘real’ Shelley, #57?
I think it will have profound implications both in Shelley herself and how all the other characters react once they know what she went through. That’s not to diminish at all any impact that may occur due to her having (at least in tree world) been a Sphinx as well.
^^Dat
Well, not all of the rest of us thought that. I never thought of this as the end of a character (and I’m sure I’m not alone). It would be cruel to the readers to give a main character they care about a comic death. And, in spite of the drama of the scene, the cross-eyed, tongue-lolling death of Shelley #1 was pretty funny. I knew more was coming because there were clues in the art.
That’s pretty much why I love comics- there’s a lot more to read on a page than just the words.
scoff scoff
Aaaand again, I concur. x 3
I was, however too late, the comments already had proliferated like timelines in a faulty CM
[rant] You don’t like the solution? Go enjoy the other 1000-something webcomics. Quit buggering here with whining. Even better: create Your own “genius” level webcomic and see how You enjoy being constantly berated for not following some readers idea of “a good story”
[/rant]
Sweet rant…
*nods* Word.
bingo
what they said
…and then consider the source. :evilgrin:
@Rob Cain – I’m honestly wondering if you bother to read comments or if you only post them. The fact that “our” Shelly hadn’t died was addressed before today, and several other things you’ve gotten wrong were explained to us correctly…in the comments.
You know, it’s funny, but as much as I love this comic, I probably would have given up on it LONG ago were it not for the comments and the theories and postulations of the readers…and the occasional nuggets of information Paul dangles for us in response. I can’t imagine reading this without taking the time to read what everyone else thought or felt about it.
This comic (more than any other I read) is more enjoyable, understandable, and immersive when I read the comments…and I recommend that others do so whenever I direct people here.
As for your complaint about not killing off the main character – well, while I can understand where you’re coming from, I also think that killing main characters is becoming almost as prolific as saving them. It’s not all that special anymore. It’s just another person trying to be “more realistic” and “emotionally impactful” instead of telling the story they have to share.
^^Hm!Hm! Agreed.
And you know what goes with a good dose of perspective?
Chee-awk-lat caaake…
This cake is no lie. Check the confusion corner, and extra slices for the birthday people!
Nom! Thank you
A moment on the lips; forever on the hips.
I do love cake though…
But virtual cake is only virtually on the hips…
Well, Shelly #fifty-sphinx is back, and she has to re-acclimate herself to the time shift. But once the shouting is over, we still have to know how the Artifact helps Jin.
I think it is the self contained power source that they have been looking for as mentioned in these two previous comics.
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/plug-you-in/
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/done-here/
and I thought jet-lag was bad, imagine an 80,000 year time-lag….
How long will she take to recover, do you think?
how many demons are in Tina? 55 maybe?
maybe she is legion.
for she is many *nods*
*Grabs eviscerator shotgun* The Geth are already here???
wow that names been used a few times hmm
i was thinking of the cute-evil-guy in Ghost Rider at the time
Shelly is back and what a long strage trip it’s been.
From Bud’s perspective it probably looked like Shelly got slapped with Calvin’s transmorgifier.
For Shelly, it’s like visiting a relative’s home you haven’t seen in sometime. You don’t feel at home and stuff is only vaguely familiar to you in memories long ago.
So when does she sprout her wings?
and i yea..just noticed.
how much bigger is shellinx to shelly..
cuz the relic is in her hands at the last pannel but looks almost necklace size in the 2nd pannel?
Does this mean that Shelly’s CLOTHES-minded? (or do we re-DRESS the sitch?)
A line like that puts enough money in the pun jar to buy Shelly a whole new outfit. Of course you could pay less, but the pun jar always knows when it has been shirt-changed. *tosses a few coins in the jar*
A pun like that lies your plans BARE. It makes me want to SOCK you. Now, pay up the pun jar before I beat the SHIRT out of you…
(God, I must have put on the Angry Pants this morning…)
drops credit card into pun jar
Ugh..that’s what You get for forgetting two lousy “spaces” Another reality’s interwebs broken..
Shelly’s never struck me as a fission horse, tank top and genes type for a fast sphix, and probably with a cute little “Car <3" patch. But for a little fan service, for next Holloween, catwoman with matching radial belt.
Another question.
Shelly #57 takes the relic into the tree realm and is made to wait (metaphysically, to those who are sticklers about it) 81200 years to get back after Shelly#1 dies. So if she’s picking up the Ploutonium-containing relic to get back to earth, what happened to the relic that first took her there?
I think eschmenck already posed it in the middle of a thread (slightly differently, i.e. how could Bud have found it, etc.), so I repost to a new thread for visibility!
I actually gave my theory on eschmenk’s posting.
I think that not every Shelly to visit the tree has died there. ShellySphinx said that a previous Shelly had hidden the relic at the graveyard (here). The to me suggests that some of the other Shellys made it away alive. After all…not all of them were handling super-radioactive plutonium. 
I have been reading back over the past comics and have a really much better understanding of what is going on right now than I did this morning. I have been reading Wapsi Square for about 9 years now and can honestly say I have enjoyed it immensely but when you read a story over this length of time you tend to forget things. I am truly impressed with your writing Paul the way that you have drawn out the story over such a long time is masterful beyond belief. The answers to many of our questions are all to be found in the previous comics going back, as far back as, to before they even went to the CM, that is over 18 months ago. Think of it dropping clues here and there, sprinkling them into the story along the way but never so obvious that when we get to the end of the story all of us are going, “Well of course who didn’t see that coming”, it is just brilliant. You are now without a doubt one of my favorite authors.
uhhhhh…links?……Please?
Here is one for you.
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/all-hell-broke-loose/
Fixing the CM wasn’t the answer. It says in this comic that Brandi fixed the CM. If the CM was fixed why was everything reset? How many times did they fix the CM and something still wasn’t right? Does 56 times sound right to anyone? So that means that Shelly was going to the tree realm to fix something else or looking for something else.
I think you misunderstood what they meant. The Brandi they are talking about figured out a plan to fix the calendar machine, but it was too late to implement it herself. She recorded the plan in her book and got demons and apparently Nudge involved, but the plan wasn’t put into action until after the calendar machine reset.
The “it” that Bud is referring to is just the plan that Shelly said is being hidden from another secret plan.
I guess I should have clarified that “fix” meant remove it from our realm entirely. It couldn’t function in the demon realm.
I guess my point here is that we are not in a separate story arc from the calendar machine. We are going to conclude things with the CM story shortly when Shellinx explains why the Shelly’s kept appearing time after time in the Tree Realm because that is part of the CM story. Do you agree with me that Paul had this part of the story planned out months, if not years ago? In my opinion that is what makes this a great story, the care and detail that he put into this to make us all read it anxiously every day.
@jjs56thiteration: I don’t know when Paul figures things out. I think a lot of it is figuring out how to integrate new stuff with what he has already done. But he obviously has ideas early on that he carries forward or takes advantage of later. But sometimes his ideas don’t ever get fleshed out. (We still don’t know what Monica said to Orion about ten years ago, and I don’t know that we ever will know.)
I think people think the Shellys were all trying to fix the calendar machine because Shelly said, “I need,…the calendar” just before she died. I don’t particularly agree with that. I’m not sure that she didn’t regard the relic as the calendar that she was after. I’m also not sure that she wasn’t trying to fix Jin, just like the current Shelly is.
I tend to agree with the idea that Shelly #1 was there to try and help Jin…and the calendar comment as she died might have been something else entirely. After all, if she was the very first Shelly, how would she know that the Calendar Machine needed to be fixed? Time hadn’t looped yet, so no one would know.
@Julie: I think most people have decided that Shelly #1 never went. Apparently only 56 of 57 Shellys showed up there and people are selecting the first as the one who didn’t go. The 56 comes from what the sphinx says at the very bottom here: http://wapsisquare.com/comic/so-fragile/. But if you don’t make a big deal out of the fact that the sphinx said “You’ve” instead of “We’ve” at the top, Ozymandous will be all over you for not understanding the subtlety of the difference.
Here is one from 8 months ago who are wondering what the relic is for.
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/plug-you-in/
You can read my links from earlier comments above about what the relic is meant to be. The one is from 8 months ago the other one ties it together.
So all it took for Shellinx to forget the Pixie with the Rack was several millenia of solitude?
Didn’t she have creepy girl to keep her company? Or did she leave her conscience behind in order to be OK with watching herself die 56 times?
Her transformation into a sphinx may have had something to do with her tolerance of both death and time.
Surely there is something altered mentally as well as physically with that change.
Ah ah ah, watch out! Ozymandous will tear you a new one if you claim she’s there physically…
*giggles* WIN!
Ozymandous’ argument will sink or swim on whether or not Shelly is still a sphinx after having returned.
Presently she is in human form, but if Phix was in the room she would be too.
Also Shelly’s longer hair is an argument against Ozymandous’ thesis.
I’ve been trying to get some clarification on what’s going on with the relics. I’m not sure if the relics are traveling with the Shellys or not. Either a bunch of them have been accumulating in the Sacred Forest or the Shellys have been leaving them behind when they go. However, if the relics aren’t traveling with them, how did the Shelly that just died arrive with one and what would be the point of putting the plutonium in the relic if it would be left behind by the sphinx?
Also, how could any of the Shellys have hidden the hilt with the marker in a graveyard on Earth and have it be there for Amanda to notice a picture of it? Why wouldn’t the resets of the calendar have reverted any changes to the graveyard if a Shelly other than the current one had done it?
Txmystic already posed to a new thread for visibility a little higher up, but I replied in a new thread simply because I screwed up.
BTW, his acknowledgement of my earlier comment hadn’t appeared yet.
It’s been 81200 years. Maybe she simply misplaced hers.
Also it would appear that all the things about hiding the hilt and everything must have happened during this cycle since, as you say, everything reverts every reset. Of course, from the forest’s POV this cycle would have been the first cycle to have occured there. This is odd as well since sphinx-Shelly said she didn’t catch on for a few cycles. So how would she know to do that stuff on the first cycle?
Well the other thing is how could she have? She said that she was trapped. I think it would have had to have been one of the intermediate Shellys, but I can’t imagine how they could have done it, either. Maybe at some point they fired up the relic and used it as a time machine or something.
Unless it disappeared before Shelly #56 showed up, I cannot see a way there wouldn’t be two relics in existence in the sacred forest at some point…
if she really did take it into that forest then technically there could be a wall of numerous relics there.
maybe the forest can be entered through a graveyard.
you can get to the library through a door on the street
why not the forest thorough a gravestone *shrugs*
would explain the tree on the gravestone marker.
A good point actually, and one I considered until I saw that Shelly #1 had the relic. So I extrapolated that all 56 Shellys had to enter the realm the same way–with the relic…
Right. A lot more could be going on than what we have seen. The sphinx just talked about number of Shellys. There could have been other visitors. At some point, someone must have created the technology used by the sacred timekeeping forest and set it up. That may have happened a long time before Shelly showed up, but somehow she learned what the forest was. Or at least, she seemed to think she did.
But as far as using the graveyard goes, it sounds as if the relic was intended to found there, so there wouldn’t have been a need for another door or anything like that there.
BTW, I wonder if this will ever tie into the issue with Shelly being frozen by ah chotski doll. Did they have an effect on her because she had already become a sphinx? Or is Shelly just naturally more in tune with things like the relic and the dolls so they work on her differently than with other people?
I think that the hilt part of the relic is necessary to leave, and that some of the Shellys might have left alive. Also, if the hilt has anything to do with the Time Forest or the Calendar Machine, it could operate separate from the loops, and therefore not disappear at a reset.
*shrugs* That’s the best I’ve got for now.
“I think that the hilt part of the relic is necessary to leave”
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand why you said that. I thought the hilt and the relic were exactly the same thing. Am I wrong? Did you mean the plutonium? Or do you think that this was the first time that someone managed to arrive carrying the relic?
“Also, if the hilt has anything to do with the Time Forest or the Calendar Machine, it could operate separate from the loops, and therefore not disappear at a reset.”
Yes, I thought about that, but the marker (a gravestone with the name Yggdrasil), which is what was in the picture, probably would be affected. Either that or maybe the gravestone is a bit of Lanthian technology that is immune, too. That sounds like one darned overbuilt gravestone, though.
Sorry!
I separated the hilt from the relic in my wording since I’m now thinking of the relic as a cohesive unit that includes its handy plutonium battery. 
I’m still unclear about her statement about she (sphinx-Shelly) was the last of 56. That seems to me she regenerated every cycle and that seems to conflict with the sphinx being the same physical “person” who left Monica’s this cycle (our Shelly).
Maybe it’s “last to enter this realm” , but time running backwards, makes her meet the first to enter.
Ugh..forget it. I am getting lost again.
I just take all on face-value from now-on.
I think she meant that she was the last of 56 Shellys to leave the Earth for the Sacred Forest realm (going by Earth time). I don’t think the resets apply to the Sacred Forest, just as they didn’t apply to the library. To the sphinx Shelly, a cycle was just a length of time, equivalent to 1450 years. There wouldn’t have been any need for her to regenerate.
Ah, that could be. Good points. So then she was the last of 56 to go, but the first to appear in the tree realm, becoming the sphinx who met all the rest of the 56 in reverse order. She would know how many were coming since she knew the number of resets. Works for me, thanks.
Yay! I was *sort of* right!
Yippeee! I am so happy for you.
you do realise that if you keep being right we will start to read your comments and quoting you as 2ndry-law-after-paul.
no pressure
Yea, it already happened…i’ve accepted it.. XD
and in all honesty I don’t want that. I want everybody to keep thinking for themselves. Paul does too, which is why he drops hints, not answers in our speculation…
No, I am sorry but the job is yours until you have seen 56 of my theories publicly shot to hell…I’d like to claim that it’ll take about 81200 years, but at the rate I’m going, should be about 81.2 minutes…
Honestly, I kind of liked your idea of reversing everything back. It had some nice symmetry to it. The reason I didn’t buy it was because it would have undone too much character development.
One major problem is that it would have changed the relationship between the GGGs and Monica. Monica’s suicide was what gave them freedom of choice, which allowed them to escape from Tepoz’s control. We would have gained Tina 1.0 as a character, but lost Tina 2.5 and CLG. I couldn’t see Paul giving them up.
We need to see Tina’s responce to the changed Shelly. Demons apparently have an instinctive ability to recognize a sphinx.
And I can’t wait to see Nudge’s face when she meets the ‘new’ Shelly! Bet it is something along the lines of ‘That’s not fair!’
Well, they should be pretty much face-to-face right now.
I just want to say that there were almost 200 comments by the time I looked at this comment this morning, and here it is 4:20 pm, and I’m the 365th comment. This is just amazing response!
Might one say that Paul has hit a veritable nerve?
One might…and seeing as how we’re about to hit 400 comments now that I’ve finally finished reading everyone else’s and posting my own thoughts (and reading replies to my thoughts), it was a MASSIVE nerve.
Something about such a massive character changing plot point, who’s ripples will certainly spread far and wide in the waspi-world, seeing it first hand, having that insight on a monumental change in a character you’ve read about for so long. Seems to really get people going.
Hellz yeah, I can see this gem being resolved however it will in the current scene, but then Shelly’s Sphinx-ness not come up until a really awesome moment…such as an intimate moment with officer tightbuns…
Well, if you want to to wait for that, you had better hope that Shelly isn’t thinking about how long it’s been since she has eaten, because Tina should be standing directly in front of her right now.
Uh. Wow. Uhm. Yeah.
And here we were, all those years ago on BLC’s forums, complaining when Paul would grind the gears on the tranny of storytelling.
Now, he’s essentially taking us all on a nosedive into a wormhole at warp speed.
I’m the one in front screaming YEEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHH!!!! with my arms in the air…
So okay, now that we know which Shelly pops back into our main continuity, maybe we can sort the timeline stuff out a bit more. We have two frames of reference: the main one, and the one where the trees and Shellinx were.
Main continuity:
The Calendar machine looped 56 times, and the Shelly we’ve known is Shelly #57. Shellynx is Shelly #1. Shelly #57 dies, Shellynx (aka Shelly #1) pops out 80,000odd years older, with sphinx powers, a slight character redesign, and (apparently) a more relaxed attitude about appearing topless in the comic.
FR#2 (Time goes backward,) Shellynx is the first one in, since she sees all the subsequent Shellies come in (and die). But in what order? There are several things to consider.
First, each loop of time has been subtly different, and each one has left clues for the subsequent loop, thus allowing our heroines to finally destroy the calendar machine on loop 57, restoring time to its more normal, linear flow. The loops are effecting each other.
Consider for a moment that to be in the tree timeline, Shelly has to be functioning in two timelines at once. In the previous 56 cycles of the calendar machine, she was with the crew when they failed to fix the calendar machine and were thrown outside time, stuck forever (if memory serves).
What if, instead of simply looping, the calendar machine was recursing? What this would mean is that instead of going back to the beginning of time on the same timeline, the existing timeline stops, and a new timeline, starting from the beginning, is instantiated.
Those who are stuck outside time are simply stuck in the previous timeline. They’re there, but no time is elapsing for them.
Now when Shellynx goes in, she goes in on cycle 57, but her timeline is a straight line (having not paused) from timeline #1. She dives all the way to the bottom of the recursion.
When the calendar machine is destroyed, however, things get interesting. The previous timelines are resumed, one at a time, and their contents are suddenly in flowing time again. Thus, the next Shelly that Shellynx sees is Shelly 56, then 55, and so on, until Shelly #1, our Shelly, comes through, and the events we’ve seen occur.
Thus, the following assertions: The 80-odd thousand years that Shellinx has been in the tree timeline occurred as the recursive dive through time loops /ended/ – in other words, between the time Monica et al closed the gate and destroyed the calendar machine, and when t-shirt-and-bikini grabbed the artifact.
How all the timelines get merged back together after the recursive dive, I have no freakin’ clue. It’s possible the recursion is only happening on the interface with the tree timeline rather than the whole universe, or it’s possible that the “current” timeline (#57) simply absorbs all the stuff and people from the previous ones, and everyone’s left with strange dreams and half-remembered lives of things that didn’t happen.
Some more than others. CF: Jin.
-JRS
You also need to look to see if the author wrote anything in the comments before you go to all that effort.
So Shelly #57 didn’t die.
No. 400…
The story continues to whipsaw around the bends of this Pike’s Peak Race. Are we heading for the summit, or careening toward the bottom of the mountain, brakes gone, hanging on for dear life? I don’t know, but I’ll bet there’s a cushy pillow at the end. And that pillow, of course, will blow apart and then we’ll go airborne on some other wild arc.
YEE-HAW!
t-shirt and bikini Shelly grabbed.
FR #2=Frame of Reference #2. The tree timeline. Sheesh, I gotta write this stuff in a word processor from now on.
So is Sphinx-Shelly going to merge or replace Naked-Shelly?
Nope, it was a straight transfer. She never moved to anyone else in the room.
If you need more explanation than that, read everything above this post and then come back and ask more questions in an hour or so.
I was wondering what the rest of you thought about this. Do you think that Shellinx was trapped in Tree Realm because the CM was destroyed? If she was trapped because it was destroyed in her timeline is it possible that the other Shelly’s could have left and returned to their timeline since it wasn’t destroyed? That is if they were able to survive their time in Tree Realm.
My current thought about that is that she was stuck there to undo all the damage the loping did to Jin, and somehow a plutonium-fueled relic is the culmination of that, but I think there’s much more than that to fixing Jin.
for example, whatever happened to Tina 1.0′s notebook that was written in shorthand but that Monica thought might be glyph language?
Wish I could provide a couple of links, but I need a lull at work to go thru the archive and bookmark a few…
Well it helps if you think to search for “shorthand”.
It’s in the title of the page after this one.
Searching for “help” found this, which is a good place to start. Jin specifically mentions Tina’s diaries about 4 pages later.
That’s all I’m going to do. Paul hasn’t forgotten that the the diaries exist, but he hasn’t seemed all that interested in using them, except as a red herring, so far. Maybe he knows what’s written there and it’s something else.
@jjs56thiteration: I don’t know why Shelly was trapped. Your idea doesn’t feel right, though, because it doesn’t seem to explain why she is no longer trapped now, but was still trapped a cycle ago.
The sphinx said that at least one Shelly hid stuff in a graveyard on Earth, but I don’t know if that Shelly left the forest realm to go do that.
For all I know, someone, like whoever runs the library might have done it for some strange reason.
“For all I know, someone, like whoever runs the library might have done it for some strange reason.”
Well, that was vague!
I meant trap Shelly. There seems to be something unusual about Shelly. Not just her strength, but the way she reacted to the chotski doll when she was young and the damage she suffered on the vision quest. I don’t now if that fit into someone’s plans somehow or what.
The statement of in this comic that the title is based from, “Holy crap the relic blew her clothes off!”, both intrigue me. The fact bud says it like that, is as if she was never gone. Its like she closed her eyes, then BAM and was instantly back, but her cloths got blown off. As if that’s all that happened when she concentrated. This means that within a matter of a second from Bud’s perspective (and I’m guessing everyone’s), this happened.
I CANNOT HANDLE JUST A COMIC A DAY!!!!! Oh this is the best character plotline EVER!!! Poor Shelly!!!
Be glad you are not as wound up over one of the strips that update once a week, or less…
And, yeah, poor Shelly. I’m still having trouble imagining what kind of hell that must have been for her. It’s a terrible echo of her words here…
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/a-special-place-in-hell/
I was elated when I finally decided that ‘our’ Shelly lived through it all, but I’m still nervous to see how she’ll be. Even with her being my favorite knuckle-head, she’s going to so different…
I’m looking forward to meeting her, though.
I’m almost wishing I could fall into a stasis chamber for a year or so, and have a year’s worth of Wapsi to read all at once. Waiting for more is so hard…
I agree with you, Old Wolf, but can’t hardly stand waiting until 14 HOURS after it’s posted to read it…(current situation sucks on that)
If Mon., Tues. and Wed. were like this…
What the eff is Friday going to be like?
I dunno… I bet Paul has something mind blowingly simple planned though. Something that ties a lot together but at the same time make us say WTF?
Just gunna say it before it updates…
Bud looks like a velociraptor.
that is all.
Do you all notice that Shelly getting nekked has had as many posts as getting killed off last Friday?
Aaaaaand suddenly Shelly is many thousands of years older.
I hope this doesn’t like, drastically and COMPLETELY alter her character forever….