I was thinking that too. Mr. McEldowney got into trouble and had to remove a small line that showed cleavage for Thorax once. Wonder how many gaskets that editor would blow on seeing this on his desk?
Actually, you have a point, based on the Star Trek plot on which this episode was apparently based. in that episode, Picard was transported to the alien planet, from which he could not escape or communicate with his ship (because it was all happening in his mind). he experienced physical aging on the planet, and years away from ship and crew, only to retun and find that 20 minutes had passed. But otherwise, he was physically unaltered.
The only difference between that and Shelly’s journey is that Shelly did come back physically altered, so we’ll have to wait and see whether or not she’s still all sphinxy underneath it all…
Probably frozen is shock. In one instant her senses have Shelly change from nice human girl to a three alarm alert SPHINX. Tine knows if she runs it triggers the hunting reactions of the cat part. Tina’s internal dialogue between the demons must resemble the south Korean congress after they have been told they need to behave better.
You know it is quiet possible tomorrows strip will be Shelly spots Tina. Attacks and turns into the Sphinx form as well. Then with Tina by the throat, claws extended for the killing blow, a loud voice in the last panel says STOP! Phix enters stage right.
But I think it will be much more demure. Giving the way she looks at Monica, Id wager she’s only going to mumble :”W.w.wwho are You people??? I.i. know You..but not really…” Or she’ll break down, only sobbing “i’m back, i’m back, I don’t deserve to be back, what I did..”
If she’s only slightly like Phix, she’s going to regret all the killing she did, and not being too proud of what she was.
Phix most definitely has a role to play in Shellinx return to “normalcy” (as far as possible for weirdess-magnets like the Wapsi-clown-car)
We don’t know she killed anyone. We do know she was acting a part for Shelly Alpha. The part about killing her, and others, could just have been bravado, embellishing her part.
It resembled a punishment, therefore it must be one? That’s the best I can come with ATM.
It doesn’t seem as if it would have any sort of punishment for anything she did there, because she was already trapped there, and I doubt that is what she was thinking. However, if she couldn’t remember where she came from, she might have started thinking she did something bad in the real world.
There has to be some guilt from feeling powerless to help people who are on a fools errand, knowing you can’t stop them and knowing that they have already failed. It would have to be surviovors guilt if nothing else.
I’ll go with eschmenk at this point. She just figures she didn’t remember why she’s being punished, but she must be. Who among us doesn’t feel some guilt about something they have done in the past? Later, she figured out what was going on and realized it wasn’t a punishment but either really bad luck or predestinaion. Basically her lot in life because of who or what she actually is. After all she kept meeting herself, so, whatever it was must have been about her and something she did.
No doubt Monica remembers the abject horror of her brief experience with the artifact, and probably suspects something similar happened to Shelly. So it’s going to be a lot of “There, there sweetie — it’s all better now” type talk until the lights come on in Shelly’s memory.
Assuming that it’s not just delayed recognition, and she doesn’t remember everything shortly, the only thing I can think of related to fixing her mind would be attempting to draw out Creepy Girl. She might be able to do something. Tina could probable draw her out if she had to.
If Shelly is anything like an AS400, she’ll be non-responsive for at least 45 minutes while LDUSRDEF* is running, if not longer 😛
If I were Paul, Id gleefully go for the readers’ heartstring and do only a 3-frame close-up of Shelly’s unmoving face while one tear slowly starts trickling down….
You might be right but I am with the others in thinking that you won’t be able to get Tina to voluntarily stay in the same room with Shelly. Maybe they should get one of the other people who has lived through 80 some thousand years to help, Jin or her Mom. Of course they don’t know that Shelly has lived through a thousand lifetimes in the instant that she had hold of the relic. To them she only looks a little different, mainly they just notice she is naked.
I’m not sure that Jin would know yet. She wasn’t present for this artifact business, and the Shelly who lived 80K+ years in an instant is current run through Shelly who showed no signs of this ever before.
Phix was pretty clear that she was no danger to Tina par se. I believe that the way Tina’s demons are Tina ,and not “posessing” her, make her a rather unique entity that is “a person” to a Sphinx, thus, not “demonic” anymore.
Hmm..it made sense when I pondered it.
Let’s say “Tina is different, even Sphinxes know that”
@Jay-Em: I don’t think Tina learned that lesson that well. And the fear is instinctual. It’s like a phobia. Telling Tina to not get rattled is only going to go so far.
She forgot all about not getting rattled when Phix went after Nudge and Tina said that she went completely on instinct when she was retaliating against Nudge for that. She keeps warning Monica that sometimes she will do that.
@Paula: I think it was just about Tina and Phix. Read Sitnalta’s comment (underneath mine). Paul confirmed it. I would add that I think Phix made sure that Tina still knew her place, but also wanted Tina to not worry, as long as she did.
@Jay-Em: I don’t think that there really was a distinction between the apotropaic sphinxes and non-apotropaic ones. Monica thought of the sphinxes as being helpful guardians, rather than aggressive hunters based on the way they had been portrayed by civilizations before the ancient Greeks. When she thought of the apotropaic sphinxes, she realized that the sphinxes were capable of being very aggressive against demons, though. Nudge and Phix never made any distinction between the types of sphinxes.
Keep in mind that the word apotropaic is just a word used to classify how something is used. There are apotropaic items (garlic, silver bullets, ect.), spells and so on. Anything used to protect against evil is apotropaic. The apotropaic sphinxes seem to have been normal spinxes that were captured and used to keep evil out of temples.
Shelly is no longer a spinx… Spinx stated in the earlier comics that her guardianship of the library was a punishment. Given what Shelly as a Spinx said last week they are beings outside of time. OUTSIDE OF TIME The varoius alternate shelly’s are now all dead so Shelly could now return home.
She’s Shelly from an alternate time line.. but still human Shelly.
which goes back to the question that was asked to Spinx in the library.. what did she do? he he he
Yup ^^ But with 81000 years of experience added.
We are on a wholly new time-line, with no more looping, so who knows what’s going to happen. Even Jin has no clue whatsoever.
I am not sure she’s no longer a Sphinx… she very well may still be. And if she is, I am interested to see the first meeting between returned, Sphinx-Shelly and Tina.
phix took the library as a punishment but it wasn’t really
someone had to fill in the place as the library guardian and since it was phix who got tricked she went there.
She took it as a punishment however and assumed she had been sent there as she was the ‘lowest’ of all the sphinx.
Which is a good thing as it seemed to turn her into a better person than she used to be.
Nudge may be a trickster but well..she does seem to be on the side of good.
Chaotic-good perhaps..
I was thinking on these lines too–and then wondered if Shelly was now lower/junior to Phix as a sphinx. Which might soon lead to a new library guardian, if Phix is still mean enough to pull rank.
Shelly and “dead trees”??? I don’t think so. Only if Phix is really mean.
And remember: Both Phix and Nudge are free to leave at their convenience.(Though I think Nudge, after her whupping, is not very inclined to do so. 😆 ) The Bibliotheki stated so itself. So, no need to incarcerate someone in the library.
Since is was a Sphinx that allowed Nudge to get out. The Library said that is was the Sphinx’s responsibility to replace Nudge. Phix just happened to be low “man” on the totem pole got the job.
Phix being the one show shredded the book notwithstanding. 😉
While browsing through the archive for one of my favourite arcs (Tina punching Nudge), I noticed Shellinx now has a better than passing resemblance to Creepy Girl. Probably has no bearing here or there, though.
You raise a good point though….where IS CG anyway? Did Shelly have 81k years with her in treeworld, or did CG stay behind. If so, that’s going to be an interesting reunion.
Kind of what I was thinking as well. She was Shelly’s demons merged into a single entity, yet Shellynx couldn’t/can’t remember anything, so where was CG during those 80,000+ years? Course I forget if demons are affected by time (I’ll have to go back through the archive I suppose), but I thought demons were anchored to their host so long as the host was alive (which explains Tina). Then again, CG is an anomaly, so maybe she’s exceptions to these rules as well? Perhaps she was still behind with the rest of the crew when Shellynx went off the radar, since for them in that timeline it would only amound to a few minutes from their pov.
Don’t mind me, this is the equivalent of thinking out loud.
a) Demons are initially independent from time and hosts.
Unless:
b)when merged into one, they get attached to host&time.
c)Merging and/or control will only occur if host “dies” and lives again after that.
d)When host-mind is not there (i.e. Tina) Demons become the “person” and, as such possibly connected to time and space too.
At least, that is how I understand this whole Demon+Host interaction thing.
In the case of CLG, Shelly closed off the doorway to the demon realm that was opened when she temporarily died during her vision quest. Apparently some of the collateral damage from her doing that was that her demons got trapped on the wrong side (inside Shelly) as well as turned into one entity. That’s not supposed to happen.
Tina’s thing require an unusually strong connection between Tina and her demons. The same thing could happen to Monica. Normally the demons just give up and go on to other hosts.
It’s not unusual for teams of demons to be assigned to multiple hosts simultaneously, but with so many people, normally those hosts would never interact with each other.
stop wishing your life away 😛
but its good to wish for fridays. with fridays come less work
unless you are one of those poor peeps who have to work on saturday for which i mourn the loss of your fridays.
I think he means….
” I’m waiting for the cliffhanger and 3 days of discussing over what it means, and doing it at home, without worrying about work… :)”
Close. I’m (wanting) waiting on Friday’s bombshell cliffhanger that sure to be a…bombshell. I to see any any questions are answers. Is she Shelly or Shellinx now? Was she truely physically transport to the Tree-Realm? Or was it more like what Picard experience from the TNG episode “The Inner light”? Is her appearance after here return just a sign of what she went through (i.e. hair turning white after experiencing extreme fear)? So many questions, and me want some answers.
And Paul that that as a HUGE complement from me. It’s a must read for me. And I missed it when it’s AWOL.
It’s that pause while the current page reloads, and tries to integrate two different memory lines, one of which has 81ka stored experiences to work through. I’m thinking this might take a while.
And it’s gotta be done–remember the suffering Camber of Culdi (Kurtz’s Saint Camber) endured before he could assimilate Cullen’s memories properly.
Folks keep saying Shelly has to reintegrate two memory strings, but that may not be not true.
If (as I’m coming to believe) Shelly was truly physically present in the Forest for 81000+ years, then her memories are unbroken from the moment she went there. They’re just buried under 57 cycles worth of new memories. That’s a lot of stuff to dig through.
How well do you remember people from your childhood? Would you recognize them at first glance after 20 years? 50 years? 81,000? Would you ever recognize them at all?
Shelly may have the world”s most intense and persistent case of amnesia ever known. Monica and the rest may just be wisps of memory to her after so long. A dream long forgotten and no longer emotionally resonant. She may have to get to know them all over again.
Think how difficult that will be. Her responses to their expectations may make for quite a drama. Especially if she IS still a Sphinx…
Bud, on the other hand, is blonde. Also taller and less…abundant. She’s showing a healthy level of caution around the artifact, which is kind of too bad as Bud’s invulnerable to radiation and perfectly capable of sitting around for 81,000 playing cards with whoever passes by.
I went back to just before Shelly took the relic (there’s a back shot there, as well as here) — her hair is much shorter back then, than it is now. (Not only were her clothes blown off, her hair grew.) So — this must be Shellynx.
Oh shoot! We still don’t know if she remembers. It does look like she does, however. Well, hopefully tomorrow. Sometimes I think it would be better to check on this comic only once a week. But then I realize once I caught up, I would be right back in the same boat of wanting the next one NOW!
^^No,no…it is good that V was cancelled, now Morena Baccarin is looking for work. Now if we can just get Castle cancelled, gather everyone up, and get Firefly back on the air!
^^Well, that was in the movie…we could do a reset where it never happened. I’d also like to bring back the Shepherd, because the original series never really cleared up how he had become such a lethal fighter or how he had the pull to allow tham access to the medical ficility on the Central Planet…
Alan tudyk is very versatile. In addition to his brilliant work on Firefly, he does a good British accent (Death at a Funeral), excellent plucky comic relief (28 days), and ass-kicking sidekick (A Knight’s Tale)…
@txmystic: No. I cannot vote for Castle cancellation. Nathan can do both shows; he’s that good. But I fought too long and too hard and am rewriting my script to replace my beloved Captain Montgomery…etc… to allow it to go. I have a huge lecture on why Castle rocks, but I won’t post it here.
Yes she does. If she forgot that then she would remember where she is and who they are. Erasing the sphinx memories would reset memory to the point she entered the other place.
Yes. There was the chance she’d remember nothing of her time in TreeRealm, her memories restored to what they were before she went there, and she’d be as confused as the rest by what happened to her. But it looks like that’s not happening.
One good thing: She remembers how to walk like a human, and didn’t immediately drop to all fours and try walking like a Sphinx.
Interesting. I think if everyone slowed down a little, Shelly would start functioning again, but with all these quick moving and fast talking women swirling around, she can’t get her bearings. Remember, she’s spent thousands of years with no one to talk to except her own tragically dying self. The readjustment should take time, even if her return to human form did not.
Fatuncle: I remembered it as that they came from Brooklyn and moved West when a bunch of pushy Dutchies bought the island next door and property values dropped.
And for those still a bit in the fog about the joke – they got their name when they got lost in a fog, and the chief in those days turned to the medicine man and asked “Where da heck ah we?”
Chief Wild Eagle would come up with wise aphorisms like:
Teepee never empty when frost on nose of buffalo.
When everyone looked at him blankly, he shrugged and said “Eh – it lose in translation.”
Edward Everett Horton appeared in six episodes as Medicine Man Roaring Chicken.
Chief Wild Eagle: [when asked how the Hekawi got their name] Many moons ago tribe move west because Pilgrims ruin neighborhood. Tribe travel west, over country and mountains and wild streams, then come big day… tribe fall over cliff, that when Hekawi get name. Medicine man say to my ancestor, “I think we lost. Where the heck are we?”
Oh, I get the feeling we’ll see Phix in a very short time and that Cliffhanger, might juuust be Tina getting that “I remember you” moment just as the last panel looms…
Shelly doesn’t remember any of them at all. So she is probably sitting there to get clues as to what is going on and who is who. Maybe tomorrow is when Shelly sees Tina and shouts Demon and goes for the throat!
After all when you are dropped into a new situation with no warning you either freak loudly or get very quiet in the hopes of making sense of it all. Shelly did the second so far.
The reason why they were successful at fixing the calendar machine this time? SHELLY.
As far as we know, in every timeline previous, Shells dies in Treeland. Which means she was not there when the showdown with the calendar happened. Shelly #1 died gasping that she needed to get back because of it.
And to continue with that line of thinking, that is exactly why Jin couldn’t allow Shelly to get too close to her. In all previous time-lines, Shelly worried about fixing Jin before the calendar machine was fixed, and got herself killed in Tree land, rendering her unable to help with the calendar machine.
Jin didn’t start going crazy till the calendar machine was destroyed: http://wapsisquare.com/comic/psychological-imperfections/ So, she wouldn’t have been fixing Jin. Other than just Shelly not dying, it’s also that they didn’t find or use the relic yet. In the other cyles, around that time, Bud might have been on that Island, found Stinky, played catch, and found the sub and the relic. This is before 2012, so it would have been within the cycle. I imagine in the previous cycles they thought since it was Lanthian, it’d help fix the calendar machine. If they’d waited till 2012 this time to do Brandi’s plan, Bud could have found the object and Shelly might have been sent to tree world. I bet with Brandi’s plan being as good as it was, Shelly would have been the first there, and there’d be no more cycles. But still, it wouldn’t be part of the fix Jin quest.
Actually, it’d say it all really was because of Brandi’s plan. And this was the first year to attempt Brandi’s plan, since all previous cycles were Jin’s plan to fix it, Shelly dying wouldn’t have mattered either way because it was doomed to fail anyway.
no no
she went loopy before the calender machine was fixed
remember IN the calender machine room?
she was totally checked out then
she was loosing her grip on reality as each 14odd years drew to a halt.
Besides she pointed it out to the group before the calender machine was fixed that she would go back to how she was. Phycological inperfections and all.
… but on the other hand Jin wasn’t all that fixed by the calendar. The characters kept talking about Jin being crazy before they fixed the calendar. Here is an example. (It’s not a great one, because Brandi is lying to Monica about Jin having the right answers, but I got tired of looking.) One specific event was when Jin thought she saw a girl in the bathroom and shouted a hole in the wall.
Jin was showing signs of mental illness – probably brought on by extreme stress – before the CM was dealt with. Now, however, although the stress is gone, her schizophrenic-like condition from her youth has returned, perhaps aggravated by Crispy haunting her…
The main thing that we should make note of is that every CM reset timeline Shelly somehow also wound up with the Relic and traveling to the Tree-Realm (oh heck, I should just called it The Sacred Forest like Shellinx did). This time around the gang was searching for the Relic, and Stink wound up dropping it in their lap.
It may be that Stinky and the Sub (hrm catchy title 😉 ) are how Shelly winds up with the Relic every time. And it begs the question how does Shelly wind up putting the the Relic in a tree in Ireland, and the placing of the blade and capsule in the Sacred Forest?
Yeah, that’s bugged me a little too. Sometimes, yes, certainly – but every single cycle? Something has been playing with probability here.
Jin must have tried preventing WWII a few times. She may have tried sinking the artifact in the depths of the sea, if she ever found it in advance. Jin might have tried keeping horses out of the New World (if the Pueblo tribes hadn’t provided horses the Comanche might never have broken away from the Shoshone), or whip up more excitement in the Comanche-Mexico Wars of the 19th century (others were getting pissed about the raiding and killing; a little more and their enemies might not have stopped and taken surrender in 1875 when 1500 Comanches were still alive).
Incidentally, I really hope Wahnee is from Wai’ne (‘Hill Wearing Away’) and not Wohoi (a different meaning).
Hey I was looking back through the older comics again and I found that it wasn’t Jin who decided not to be friends with Shelly, that was Brandi’s idea. http://wapsisquare.com/comic/uponatime/
I wonder if Brandi knew that Shelly was trapped in the Tree Realm.
However that is an ASTOUNDINGLY good catch. She said she had to get back to the calendar machine. She didn’t say she had to get to the destroyed piece of popcorn that Budd threw into the sun. XD
(forgive me if I didn’t read all four hundred and twenty seven different posts from yesterday and missed this topic)
No, she said, “I need, …*koff* *gasp* … the calendar.” That could mean almost anything. Was she calling the relic the calendar? Was the calendar what she needed or was she trying to say something else about some calendar?
But Shelly Alpha was clearly driven by the need to help, and brought the Relic with her. “I take it back now, right?”
Whatever aid mission Shelly Alpha and her Alpha Earth pals were trying to achieve, I think it’s the fact that a human leaves Earth and doesn’t return is what causes the CM to “loop”. Shelly Alpha’s panic may have been more than self-preservation, as “I need the Calendar” seems to indicate she suspected the consequences of not returning.
Shelly Omega (Shellinx) is left having to ride Treeworld along its “arrow of time” as the previous Shellys arrive in order to ensure they don’t return, because unless there are time loops, Shelly Omega and her Earth will never exist.
The Relic’s calibration must be very interesting indeed, as it brings Shelly Omega back to the precise point in spacetime on Earth that she departed, with no loss of mass (less clothes, more hair).
Since no native mass has been lost, the universe is not imbalanced, and the galaxy will not implode. Correcting this implosion is what the CM kept doing by rearranging spacetime to AD 562.
So the Calendar was never broken. It was a fail-safe against disaster, like it was for Jin.
But then why did it wait until 560 AD to start having problems? Maya did something to it then and it chose that point to loop back to. Why did May get transported to the demon realm then? Why wouldn’t that be significant enough to cause its own set of loops?
[b]@eschmenk:[/b] Maya tried to destroy the Calendar Machine because she though it was too powerful to remain in the hands of who controlled it. Her trying to destroy the CM is what got her tossed into and trapped in the Demon Realm. I presume that is what damaged the CM which eventually caused the first time reset on 12/12/12. Since Jin was present in the CM room when Maya tried to destroy it, she was the only one in the real world to realize that time has reset.
@nerf-dweller: Actually, those were supposed to be rhetorical questions for Yamara. I see that they not necessarily read that way. 🙄
I agree with what you said, except I suspect that Jin remembering the resets is a side effect of whatever caused her schizophrenia. If her brain was out of synch with time, that may keep her brain from being reset properly by the calendar machine.
@eschmenk Oo! You may have hit it. It The CM does react in 562, only it compensates by mediating the expansion the universe outwards, towards 2012. This may be why it looked like it was “breathing”.
This sounds like the Demonworld’s revolving door.
Since the Demonworld is described as time-null, Maya’s absence may be less damaging to Earth’s universe. She can still communicate to it, for instance.
But to open a door there requires a sacrifice here. In historical AD 562… there was a notable sacrifice then, too.
@eschmenk Previous was a response to your CM questions; Jin’s visions and troubles seem to date back to the Lanthans.
Demonic possession and prophetic visions were reported long before AD 562. Apparently they predate the Calendar Machine itself. If Maya was willing to risk the universe to save her child, she might have been willing to war against the Demonworld itself.
By the time the demons could lay hands her, she was indestructible, so they kidnapped her instead.
But this is all speculation. Better let Paul do the writing…
@Yamara: That’s an interesting take on the time resets (CM reactiing to Maya’s atempted destruction of it by ballooning universe to 12/12/12 and deflating). But Maya was shunted to the Demon Realm after her attempt to destroying it. With Maya gone, I don’t see why the CM would balloon the universe again. Maya won’t have tried to destroy it again.
@nerf-dweller We don’t know enough about how or why Maya failed and got shunted into the Demonworld.
Since this is clearly in the realm of drama, I’m going to leave all that alone.
What I will express is that I’ve never much considered “time loop” stories to be very good time travel fiction before, as they seemed to suggest either a multiverse (so why not tell a multiverse story instead), or assume such monumental causal violations as to remove meaningful consequences and make drama largely pointless. Time loop stories are usually just a morality play with SF frosting (even the better ones like Groundhog Day & “Lucifer” by EC Tubbs).
There are exceptions. One, the 1990 short film 12:01 PM, is about being trapped in one’s own inadequacy. Another one is Wapsi, which is an examination of sacrifice.
Paul has begun to unravel the causal violations with the sacrifices of Shelly; it even inspired me to quote Inanna last week. My musings on how a time loop is even possible is new to me, and I’ve thought about time travel quite a bit in my day. It never seemed worth working out an impossibility for such a low return. But this li’l webcomic has invested some serious drama into the concept, and I very much want to see it succeed on the causal level as well.
Just had a BUT? thought. This time Jin let go of the process. Before she was trying to control everything to make it work and fix the CM. Now Brandi stepped in cause I think she got tired of trying to fix the $(@$&^ thing and said the heck with, GET A BIG HAMMER!. IT would all depend on when they went for the relic during the process doesn’t it. Before or after the CM repair try. The whole plan this time was to destroy it not fix it.
This time around the gang was prepared for the demons and reversing the portal to the demon realm that was Monica. Reversing the Demon Portal sucked the CM into the Demon Realm which allow it to be destroyed for good and stopping the CM resets.
And my “BUT” to that thought: What about what Sphinxie Shelly suggesting that previous Shellys had placed the components of the relic outside of the Time Forest? That, to me, suggests that some of the Shellys came to the forest, talked to Sphinxie, and then left alive to do things in the “real world”. Thus not all of the previous Shellys would have died in the Time Forest.
We don’t know if they did that after going to the forest. They might have done it on their vision quest or something as just a wild guess. As a matter of fact, if the Shelly the sphinx was talking to knew about the graveyard (it happened in Earth’s past), no one from the forest realm could have done that yet because the realm’s timeline was in reverse. It would have been in the forest realm’s future.
I don’t see Shellys leaving the forest realm to plant the relics could have worked out. By the time they could leave to plant the relic, the person to use it would have already shown up in the forest realm.
The Relic and Jin certainly seem to be related, and so may be sharing their timeline.
Treeworld does not “loop” but encounters all of the Earth loops. Shelly Omega has (somehow) returned to Earth at the far end of the loop cycle with the Relic that was brought to Treeworld and completed by the late Shelly Alpha.
The Relic brought to Treeworld by Shelly Omega is still unaccounted for. It (presumably) travels along the Treeworld arrow of time, and if Shelly Omega (Shellinx) left it behind somewhere, it would continue to travel along that arrow of time.
So the Relic questions now are:
1) What happened to Shelly Omega’s Relic?
a) Did someone take it from Treeworld before Shellinx leaves? or
b) Did it keep riding Treeworld deeper into Earth’s past and then get transferred to ancient Ireland?
2) Where did Shelly Alpha get her incomplete Relic?
a) And of course, what the hell did Shelly Alpha think she was trying to achieve?
How Jin’s capacity for remembering every loop is related to the Relic’s course through time, remains more speculative until we have more info.
I had kinda thought Shelly might drop the relic or have it jerked from her hand. I would want it gone and to never see it again. Not long after I would mop the floor with my “friends” for making me the guinea pig in their little experiment. I want to see lots of sympathy for Shelly. And lots of guilt for the rest for what they did. At least finally learn not to just try stuff with things like that just to see what happens. They need Maya standing by as technical consultant. At least she might have known this could happen.
Either that, or she faints, and all we’ll hear is a “THUDD” from outside the panel… Only to see Monday revealing a Tina flat on her back, completely out of it. 😀
Monica was the guinea pig though. Shelly wanted to touch the relic and the girls stopped her (initially…atfer she’d briefly touched it). I don’t think that all of their curiosities boils down to “my friends used me as a guinea pig”. Shelly is quite capable of getting herself into a mess with her curiosity alone.
Don’t be so tasty… er… hasty. Remember, not as sphinxes are demon hunters. Only the Apotropaic sphinxes. Monica goes through this back when it looked like Phix was going to Tina’s for lunch.
Ready for some more mind-bending?
If Shelly touched the artifact and lived through all the time loops to power up the machine, what about the other girls?
When Monica touched it, she saw something, which she thought looked like Jin. But what if it was Monica57??? Remember, we didn’t recognize Shelly as the sphinx ar first either.
To draw support for this, remember the Star Trek episode. Picard did not live a whole lifetime there, it was recorded, and then shot into space where he found it again. He was integrated into an existing plotline. If Ryker had touched the machine, he would have lived his life there. Or possibly Warf. Data? Who knows? Point is, that like a role in a play, it was an arrangement put there, but the individual in the role doesn’t matter (much). Had Monica been let to hold it longer, then perhaps her (mexican-?)Banshee self would have watched the death of the previous 56 Monicas.
touched?
no one touched it.
the probe beamed it at Picard.
(i assume because he was the highest rank on the ship and therefore the best person to pass the knowlege on)
(but i digress)
Tina said it was a guard-dog programme.
But hmm.. the hole in the sub…
If sphinx come from humans .. maybe one of the german guys was a human and turned into a sphinx.
still I doubt monica would have turned into a bainshee…
I don’t think SHE could. but would anyone else? hmm good point
Keep in mind Monica is part Mexican and part Irish. Her grandpa was a Sullivan, and she has naturally red hair. Banshees are Gaelic, so it would be the logical thing for her to see/become.
It’s a special kind of comic that gets your mind in a place where it seems to make sense to say “it’s logical that she [a human] would become a banshee.” 🙂
Paul has stated that “The Inner Light” episode of ST:TNG was inspirational, but this isn’t merely a recording being beamed into someone’s head. Shelly Omega returns physically changed: less clothes, more hair. For her, the journey was real.
The reason “The Inner Light” was one of the best TNG episodes was that it impacted a main character for the rest of the series. Patrick Stewart always seemed to play Picard as more philosophical, much more cherishing of children, and was often seen playing that flute in his cabin. He had lived an extra lifetime, and the entire series was affected by it.
Shelly knows she has forgotten her friends and family, and is ready to face that. But more importantly:
Shelly has returned as an ancient executioner.
I think Wapsi will never be same, and I’m looking forward to everything in store.
Actually, I believe Paul simply said he loved that episode. He did not say it was an inspiration for this series of comics. I think it’s a mistake to infer too much from that ST episode in regards to what is happening new.
Is anyone else hearing the Doctor Who “we just saved the universe but at a cost so let’s celebrate while we cry” music in their heads besides me? (“you are LATE for my wedding!!”)
Ya know, given all that’s going on in this comic series, our ancestors may not have been wrong after all. Given the galaxy altering powers and time stopping/warping capabilities we’ve seen, the earth really IS the center of the universe. At least the center of the Wapsiverse.
C.S.Lewis remarks (IIRC, in Perelandra) that every point is the center of the universe, and that it’s a failure of our imagination to believe that others cannot also be at the center–because it was created so wonderfully that law applies on every level, and that each point can be the center, and it still makes sense…
If the universe is infinite, every point is a centre of it’s own.
What I liked the most about infinite universes (and consequently ,endless variations on laws of “nature”), is that everything we think of, however far-fetched, can be real. Even the wapsiverse… How cool is that?
Up to a point, but I think the real test for centrality is it’s real influence on a much larger area. The beings on this planet can alter, even destroy, an entire galaxy. Another being (Tina) can serve as the catalyst for stopping time everywhere should she delibertly kill someone. Sphinxes, it seems, come from earth and are sent to all places in time, space, and planes of existence.
Are there other places in the Wapsiverse which can do the same thing? Maybe, but we don’t know of them (yet). The only thing we can say for certain is that those things do eminate from here.
I thought Tina’s stopping time comment was a metaphor for losing all their memories. Tina’s Demons harmed Monica and paid the price. http://wapsisquare.com/comic/notmortality/ Tina lost her memories as demons, but remembered the rules.
I have always held that every possible reality is real somewhere, and creative minds hold the keys between those realities, introducing them to each other through creative expression.
I doubt I’m the only one to think that, but I’m not about to google it and lose the only thing that makes me feel brilliant. 😉
I have to wonder how Pablo will work this out.
If Shelly really has forgotten her former life she’s no better off than any other amnesiac.
Hopefully she just needs to decompress.
Otherwise it’s going to be a long row to hoe.
Oh, no. She lasted all that time – and coming home broke her.
Well, I hope not. Beer and introductions all around, then a game of Twenty (Thousand) Questions – on both sides.
Ok. That is a HUGE number of comments in the last 24 hours! Since it looks like my last comment yesterday was wiped evil forces I will drop it here and see what you all think: Over a week ago (I can’t link, I am on my iPad and am not feeling adventurous) our Shelly was wearing a two piece bathing suit and a back pack and complaining about have the artifact yanked outta her hands. The very next day it seems we picked up Shelly #1s story as she was wearing a t-shirt and no back pack and the others seem to be wearing different clothes as well. This means that we have no idea where our Shelly gets sent too. We saw Shelly1 go to Shellynx’s tree but I would love to know where our Shellynx went…
Our Shelly was sent to the time tree forest 81,200 years ago (from earth’s POV). There she had to wait (mostly as a sphinx) until all other Shellys had gone through their respective cycles (a total of about 81,200 years) before she would be able to come back. Which she just did. Sort of waited for our time to catch with her again.
I saw your comments. They didn’t disappear. You posted them in the the previous day’s comments (two days ago now). I wondered why you did that. 😀 (I’ve done the same thing, though.)
No, I think you are wrong. She’s still wearing the bathing suit. She just put a t-shirt over it. You can see the bathing suit bottom underneath it. I don’t know why she waited until arriving at Monica’s to do that, though.
I thought that was a possibility but then also came to the conclusion (supported by what Shelly 1 was wearing) that all the Shelly’s were in Beach wear. It just explains some continuity issues for me.
But as far as being sent to a forest… the tree grew around the fuel, as far as we know she was sent to a garden center to get plutonium tree seeds.
Petulant mode: ON I just want to know what happened to our Shelly! We got a bait and switch, one minute our Shelly then the next minute another, I say it happened in the apt as per clues and simple logic but then slipping a shirt on quick to touch an artifact just yanked out of your hands is… simple?
She though they were headed to the sandbar for a day of fun in the sun. After find out that Bud blowed up Monica’s Island, Shelly and Tina put on tops.
Right, but as far as we know, she still rides a motorcycle, and the point was to get away from cold weather, and they really didn’t want to attract too much attention. A bare midriff and open jacket in March is one thing, but a bikini on a motorcycle in April is another. And they can take off the t-shirts at the beach anyway.
I realize that Paul was having a little fun, though. They looked very ready to go to the beach.
Hmmm… OK… Now if Shelly kept dying over and over in the previous cycles from the same relic. Why didn’t Jin lay in wait for the relic to show up, grab it, and slap Shelly’s hand yelling, “No! Bad Shelly! No touching!”
Because it HAD to be done. No great deed is done without sacrifice. I agree with the other on the thought that this is why Jin said she couldn’t be friends with her. Not this time.
Might i recommend, for those not familiar with it, the graphic novel Mage: The Hero Discovered, Vol. 1, which brings the Arthur cycle into the modern day, with some interesting twists. (Excalibur is a baseball bat, for instance.) I would think that it would be absolutely perfect for Wapsi fans.
One of the characters (the reincarnation of Merlin) who remembers all his past lives knows that he is again going to watch friends die, and he cannot change it and he must not tell the others in their group, because to do so would be to allow unimaginable evil free reign in the world.
once the first shelly touched the artifact it locked in the 57th shelly.
basically each shelly after the first one had to go into it to release the last otherwise shelly 57 wouldn’t be able to get out.
Of cause 57 is just when they fixed it. if it had been fixed on the 6th go around then shelly 6 would have been locked in.
Least thats how I see it.
Someone a few days back said something similar which is where I totally stole it from 😀 its a good thought tho 🙂
If that were the case, then the very first Shelly from the original cycle would have had to touch it, but there were only 56 shellies out of 57 who touched it. I like eschmenk’s answer, that Jin was too loopy towards the end to really know what Shelly was doing.
I think Tessa has a good point. Jin could remember what happened in the previous loops. If a bad thing happened when Shelly touched the relic, why didn’t she try to keep Shelly from touching the relic in subsequent timelines?
The best answers that I can think of is that Jin’s mental problems seemed to get worse at the ends of the loops (the broken calendar didn’t solve her problems completely) and Jin didn’t probably didn’t really know what happened to Shelly, just that it didn’t work and she didn’t come back. If the calendar machine looped, Shelly wouldn’t have been around long anyway, so it was worth taking a risk if they thought they could do better next time.
I think there is a deeper sub plot going on. The fact Jin didn’t stop any of the Shellys indicates she also knew each one had to do what they did, or at least she thought they did. She’s probably had to make many such hard choices for many people. Not stopping them from doing one thing or another even though it would lead to great harm for them. We don’t yet know the motives behind Jin’s letting it all happen, but, right or wrong, Jin would have had her reasons.
As I said above, it’s pushing plausibility that Shelly just happened onto the artifact in every single cycle. Jin must have tried saving her a few times; perhaps she learned the hard way that letting Shelly die was the better option – but I don’t know what dire consequences could come from saving her.
80,000 years alone in a forest, punctuated by 56 visits from yourself, who will be around for minutes.
And then you’re dumped into a livingroom filled with people.
Shellinx is suffering from information overload.
…soo given what’s happened with Shelly, what’s going to happen to Officer Tight Buns? I don’t think Shelly’s “friend” is aware of her..adventures as Jin’s and M’s SO are.
That is a conundrum isn’t it? :'( I can barely imagine being stuck in a place far away and in that time slowly forget the people you love and care for..only to see them again. (o_o)
My other curiosity is how *exactly* are sphinxes born. We know they start out human but what’s the process..?
This, of course, leads to the speculation that Shelly’s mom was a sphinx who decided to revert to human form and stay that way in order to have a normal human life. The only thing is that she died rather easily in the end. Seems like a sphinx would be tougher. Perhaps, once in human form, a sphinx starts to age and can suffer all the frailties of humans. Then again, it could be dear old dad is the sphinx. We know sphinxes are born human, but that doesn’t automatically mean they are born from humans.
…the title of comic makes me imagine it being said by the Curiosity Core in Portal. It’s also the same voice I can imagine speaking to Shelly right now. 😀
Shelly has now lived through the same amount of time and seen herself die over and over.
Now she can relate to Jin the way no one else currently alive can. It is always helpful to find someone who shared the same horrible experience that you did to talk to about it. Of course, Shelly didn’t witness the end of the world or losing many loved ones over and over, but it’s as close as you can get I think.
Huh. I think it just clicked with me. Could anyone check my reasoning?
The Shelly from the most recent timeline (#57) was the first one to go to the sacred tree, because time there is reversed. Therefore, the Shelly we’ve been following hasn’t died: she became the Sphinx, watched previous editions of herself come in, do their part, and die, and now has returned to her original place in her original timeline. She didn’t die, she just lived a few millenia (the entire calendar cycle) in what to others must have been a blink of an eye. Presumably, in other runs of the calendar she just dropped dead after touching the artifact.
This STILL screws with my head, because that would mean that number of calendar cycles would have needed to have been set in stone BEFORE it was finally fixed/destroyed… either that, or the effects of those previous trips to sacred-tree-land hadn’t been finalized until Shelly made the final trip that set up the prerequisites for them. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHH!!!!!
Damnit Pablo, you never make these things easy to follow!
Wibly Wobly, Timey Wimey. Maybe this is proof that time and causality aren’t as dogmatic as we think they are, that it’s actually all very very messy, so much that certain things need clean-up.
If .. dear God I am SO disposing the numbers .. If FINAL Shelly entered the tree microuniverse in the present and then reappeared that same moment after having resided there for .. what, hours? weeks? years? centuries? .. maybe time inside the tree place isn’t running backwards but rather upwards, up (or down if you use my flawed drawing) the coil of time loops, intersecting each time a Shelly touches the artifact in their causality.
Here’s a crazy one: Maybe Final Shelly/Sphinx Shelly/Our Shelly wasn’t simply disposing of the other Shellies, but rather getting them to dispose of the other loops, turning time straight.
That would put Shelly’s actions in the tree realm right at the nexus of the time loops, and what you are saying makes sense if by running through the 56 Shellys’ experiences in the tree realm, the damage to time (and thus Jin) is being undone.
Also, in order for Shelly to return to the same point of origin, you are right, it HAS to be looping back onto iteself, intersecting whenever Shelly comes in from earth, but in revers order of when the happened from the Earth’s POV.
I actually kind of like thought experiments involving multidimensional time…
When Jin found out Monica had created sunlight she poited in and said ‘i always thought shelly would bring the 4th light’ but it was her mum (which confuzzled me no end)
and then went and hugged shelly saying ‘we did it’
now .. why and how could shelly bring a 4th light as a human and why did Jin think that?
The calendar machine wasn’t what bolloxed up everything! It was always the ORDER that they tried to FIX the calendar machine!
They always found the artifact BEFORE they tried to fix the calendar machine, and thus Shelly kept missing the mark when it came time to “fix” the machine!
I have to wonder about fixing Jin. After all, she was broken even before the CM was built and placed into operation. All the time forest and Shelly would have done here is fix the crap caused by the CM malfunction.
In the end, what I hope the result of all this and things to come do NOT result in everything being fixed to such an extent that none of the players remember anything that occured. They all go on their merry way as if nothing ever happened because none of it did happen (where time is concerned). I hate those endings.
Well, yes, but the time problem needed to be fixed as well. So now I’m thinking Tina’s notebooks might provide more insight as to what else could be wrong with Jin.
I as thinking last night as I was getting to sleep that The Sacred Forest may have been a safety valve for all of existence. The CM was resetting time causing it to fall back on itself. When time wants to always go forward. I liken it to time overflowing the dam the CM resets cause. The time overflow poured into the Sacred Forest. Shellinx touching the Relic and traveling to the Sacred Forest allowed time to flow over the CM reset albeit in a reverse direction. If that’s anywhere near the truth Shelly’s sacrifice saved all of existence.
And yeah, my brain goes off in strange directions as I’m dozing off.
nope..not gonna touch that one for now.
I shall just let it breed at the back of my mind until it forces its way out sometime next week (or over the weekend)
These are people she hasn’t seen for 80,000 years. There’s only one perfect word that comes to mind for what Shelly is feeling right now, and it’s not a polite one, but I’ve left an embedded clue.
I wish we would have found this one when we were arguing about the 56 vs. 57 question. There wouldn’t have been any need to argue over what “repeat” meant.
Oh. I forgot about that strip. I just remembered the conversation between Brandy and Phix about them having the same conversation 56 times before. That strip could have eliminated a lot of the debate over the numbering of Shelly’s. 🙂
This is what I like about the comments…I didn’t hold on to the fact that Jin was resetting the friggin’ machine!
I been running on the assumption that the machine was skipping a beat on a gear or something. The shouldn’t have used those cheap Cogswell Cogs.
I’ve got to re-think some of my theories….
No, you were right in the first place. Jin wasn’t resetting the machine, she was trying to fix the machine. Without any intervention it would reset time anyway. Skipping a gear as you put it.
In one of the comics, it was explained that, at the appointed date in 2012, a section of the machine would appear and a repair could be performed. This never worked and finally Jin or Brandi decided the hell with fixing it, toss it into the demon realm instead.
Well, since I already hijacked txmystic’s question…
I’m not so sure Paul isn’t setting us up here. I have to agree with Julie; I’m not sure that Shelly is a real sphinx. I can’t explain how she wouldn’t be, but it seems off that she would be one. It would seem particularly off if the rest of the sphinxes are descended from humans, as the sphinx Shelly claimed.
The demons, who are immortal, have been around for much longer than the universe existed. Humans evolved very recently by that time scale. If sphinxes came even later, it seems like they wouldn’t have been around long enough to cause the demons to instinctively fear them.
@eschmenk The Library is a sentient dimension of some kind, with some convoluted rules which are, as of this date, more like a fairy tale-like than something to draw hard-headed logical conclusions from.
I’m in wait-and-see mode when it comes to regions in Wapsi that are “timeless” mixed with creatures that are “immortal”. Supernatural rules exist more at an author’s whim than capturing slices of real life, and it’s one of those things where I gotta see where the author is leading me first.
Ooops! It’s probably my fault and I just didn’t see them, but I would almost swear that those comments weren’t up there earlier, because I was surprised at how few comments there seemed to be.
I think she’ll be all right, once she gets her bearings, a shot of coffee, and a hot piece of frybread drizzled with honey. Sphinx or not, she is still Comanche, the Saiyans of the Plains.
But, does this mean she can *poit!* on her own now?
Is being a Frysian with Keltic heritage also good enough for getting said “Frybread drizzled with honey??” It sounds too munchy and delicious, You see.. I would be sorry to miss it.
Reading all the comments is one of the things I really love about Wapsi Square, but next time I shouldn’t play the 8 minute symphonic Sweeney Todd medley simultaneously. I’m totally on edge now.
Yeah, I think I need a day on the sofa as well…
Uh-oh it looks like they broke Shelly.
I must say that I am impressed by Shelly’s eloquence, and the succinct way she sums up her experience.
I wonder if she now has pointed teeth?
Did You read my thoughts? I was wondering the same . Pointed teeth and weird supernatural happenings to ladies seem to be unavoidable in Wapsi Square.
If so, she’ll get some serious double-takes from Officer Tightbuns.
(By the by.. Did You see the BUNS on Shelly???? 😯 )
Yeah, whatever else has changed upstairs in Shelly, she still has her muscle-bound physique.
I was thinking that too. Mr. McEldowney got into trouble and had to remove a small line that showed cleavage for Thorax once. Wonder how many gaskets that editor would blow on seeing this on his desk?
“A day”?????? I’d rather think “A consequtive year of sofa’s with someone sitting next to me, scribbling on a note-pad and asking about my mother. 😆
“ever meet Freud? .. comfy sofa ..”
First panel FTW!
BUNS O’STEEL ftw!
😛 yeyah…. just a bit of shock, get the coffee on!
Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t ninja my planned witty comment. 😛
You snooze, you lose.
If you insist on sleeping “regular hours” (Hah! I fart in the general direction of your “regular hours”), you’re never gonna be first around here.
I agree! It’s been a while since we’ve seen Shelly from behind (and certainly this little clothing in that view is a first). 😀
Don’t just get her a blanket though…get her a trim to clean up that hair do…STAT!
But it’s good to see Shelly with longer hair again. I loved her hair from the first strips.
It would be cute also ,if she started to wear those pony-tail/dread-lock thingies she had at the very beginning..
And check for lice and fleas…just to be sure…
Once, in an old newspaper strip, a dog mentioned that He just got a collar that kills fleas and ticks for three months.
“I like that it kills fleas, but why does it have to tick for three months?”
Old..yet… 😆 :ROTFL:
Yeh, I am a sucker for older jokes.
…It’s been a while since we’ve seen Shelly from behind …
Please tell me that pun was unintended.
And the clothing that she wore
was nothing much before
and rather less than half of that behind —
Good muscular shape. 🙂
Dude! Muscle Butt.
Even though she is dressed perfectly for it, this is definitely no day at the beach for Shellster!
Believe me on “that kind” of beaches, she would be the exeption…unless I were there too..
(hehehehehe..NOT!)
aaaaaaaaaand, I’ll ask again:
Where’s Tina?
I’ll still go with my guess of trying to claw her way through the back wall.
I wonder if I’m the only person who doesn’t necessarily think that Shelly is a true Sphinx at this point.
Well…only person who thinks that and also believes that she physically went to the Time Forest. 😛
Careful, you-know-who might be watching!
Actually, you have a point, based on the Star Trek plot on which this episode was apparently based. in that episode, Picard was transported to the alien planet, from which he could not escape or communicate with his ship (because it was all happening in his mind). he experienced physical aging on the planet, and years away from ship and crew, only to retun and find that 20 minutes had passed. But otherwise, he was physically unaltered.
The only difference between that and Shelly’s journey is that Shelly did come back physically altered, so we’ll have to wait and see whether or not she’s still all sphinxy underneath it all…
Probably frozen is shock. In one instant her senses have Shelly change from nice human girl to a three alarm alert SPHINX. Tine knows if she runs it triggers the hunting reactions of the cat part. Tina’s internal dialogue between the demons must resemble the south Korean congress after they have been told they need to behave better.
You know it is quiet possible tomorrows strip will be Shelly spots Tina. Attacks and turns into the Sphinx form as well. Then with Tina by the throat, claws extended for the killing blow, a loud voice in the last panel says STOP! Phix enters stage right.
^^Oooh..I like that!.
But I think it will be much more demure. Giving the way she looks at Monica, Id wager she’s only going to mumble :”W.w.wwho are You people??? I.i. know You..but not really…” Or she’ll break down, only sobbing “i’m back, i’m back, I don’t deserve to be back, what I did..”
If she’s only slightly like Phix, she’s going to regret all the killing she did, and not being too proud of what she was.
Phix most definitely has a role to play in Shellinx return to “normalcy” (as far as possible for weirdess-magnets like the Wapsi-clown-car)
Jus’ mah’ $0.02 🙂
We don’t know she killed anyone. We do know she was acting a part for Shelly Alpha. The part about killing her, and others, could just have been bravado, embellishing her part.
If she didn’t kill, then why the overwhelming constant sense of guilt, of being punished and feeling it is how it should be???
Sense of Guilt because she initially failed on her quest? That shoe couldn’t fix the oopart sooner? :scratching head:
It resembled a punishment, therefore it must be one? That’s the best I can come with ATM.
It doesn’t seem as if it would have any sort of punishment for anything she did there, because she was already trapped there, and I doubt that is what she was thinking. However, if she couldn’t remember where she came from, she might have started thinking she did something bad in the real world.
There has to be some guilt from feeling powerless to help people who are on a fools errand, knowing you can’t stop them and knowing that they have already failed. It would have to be surviovors guilt if nothing else.
I’ll go with eschmenk at this point. She just figures she didn’t remember why she’s being punished, but she must be. Who among us doesn’t feel some guilt about something they have done in the past? Later, she figured out what was going on and realized it wasn’t a punishment but either really bad luck or predestinaion. Basically her lot in life because of who or what she actually is. After all she kept meeting herself, so, whatever it was must have been about her and something she did.
Bud and Monica are too busy trying to figure out what is wrong with Shelly to notice that there is something wrong with Tina.
Wonder how long shelly been like that.
Couple of seconds? couple of minutes? maybe Tina went to make coffee/get help?
Given Bud’s reaction, it was practically instantaneous.
yea seems to be and judging from pauls reply below it was also.
Now the question is how to go about fixing Shelly.
No doubt Monica remembers the abject horror of her brief experience with the artifact, and probably suspects something similar happened to Shelly. So it’s going to be a lot of “There, there sweetie — it’s all better now” type talk until the lights come on in Shelly’s memory.
And then….
Assuming that it’s not just delayed recognition, and she doesn’t remember everything shortly, the only thing I can think of related to fixing her mind would be attempting to draw out Creepy Girl. She might be able to do something. Tina could probable draw her out if she had to.
Reload from backup, basically.
If Shelly is anything like an AS400, she’ll be non-responsive for at least 45 minutes while LDUSRDEF* is running, if not longer 😛
If I were Paul, Id gleefully go for the readers’ heartstring and do only a 3-frame close-up of Shelly’s unmoving face while one tear slowly starts trickling down….
Do not give Pablo Evil Suggestions.
He’s quite capable of being Evil on his own.
You might be right but I am with the others in thinking that you won’t be able to get Tina to voluntarily stay in the same room with Shelly. Maybe they should get one of the other people who has lived through 80 some thousand years to help, Jin or her Mom. Of course they don’t know that Shelly has lived through a thousand lifetimes in the instant that she had hold of the relic. To them she only looks a little different, mainly they just notice she is naked.
I think Jin does…
I’m not sure that Jin would know yet. She wasn’t present for this artifact business, and the Shelly who lived 80K+ years in an instant is current run through Shelly who showed no signs of this ever before.
If Tina learnt anything from Phix it is “Don’t let someone like me rattle Your nerves ”
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/now-focus/
Phix was pretty clear that she was no danger to Tina par se. I believe that the way Tina’s demons are Tina ,and not “posessing” her, make her a rather unique entity that is “a person” to a Sphinx, thus, not “demonic” anymore.
Hmm..it made sense when I pondered it.
Let’s say “Tina is different, even Sphinxes know that”
@Jay-Em: I don’t think Tina learned that lesson that well. And the fear is instinctual. It’s like a phobia. Telling Tina to not get rattled is only going to go so far.
She forgot all about not getting rattled when Phix went after Nudge and Tina said that she went completely on instinct when she was retaliating against Nudge for that. She keeps warning Monica that sometimes she will do that.
don’t let someone like me
could phix be talking bout shelly?
@Paula: I think it was just about Tina and Phix. Read Sitnalta’s comment (underneath mine). Paul confirmed it. I would add that I think Phix made sure that Tina still knew her place, but also wanted Tina to not worry, as long as she did.
Nah.. What I meant by that comment, is that the “predator-pounce” is not very likely. Tina’s shock..yeah well..there’s always Attends.
I am still in dubio if Tina will freak, or that Shellinx is not an apotropaic sphinx, and Tina will only be a bit apprehensive.
A predatory pounce would be rather cynical ,since she and Shelly were busy connecting so well before “The Nudge-incident”
@Jay-Em: I don’t think that there really was a distinction between the apotropaic sphinxes and non-apotropaic ones. Monica thought of the sphinxes as being helpful guardians, rather than aggressive hunters based on the way they had been portrayed by civilizations before the ancient Greeks. When she thought of the apotropaic sphinxes, she realized that the sphinxes were capable of being very aggressive against demons, though. Nudge and Phix never made any distinction between the types of sphinxes.
Keep in mind that the word apotropaic is just a word used to classify how something is used. There are apotropaic items (garlic, silver bullets, ect.), spells and so on. Anything used to protect against evil is apotropaic. The apotropaic sphinxes seem to have been normal spinxes that were captured and used to keep evil out of temples.
Shelly is no longer a spinx… Spinx stated in the earlier comics that her guardianship of the library was a punishment. Given what Shelly as a Spinx said last week they are beings outside of time. OUTSIDE OF TIME The varoius alternate shelly’s are now all dead so Shelly could now return home.
She’s Shelly from an alternate time line.. but still human Shelly.
which goes back to the question that was asked to Spinx in the library.. what did she do? he he he
No – this is the same Shelly we’ve been following all along.
Pablo said so.
Yup ^^ But with 81000 years of experience added.
We are on a wholly new time-line, with no more looping, so who knows what’s going to happen. Even Jin has no clue whatsoever.
Same Shelly, yes, hence she went “home”.
I am not sure she’s no longer a Sphinx… she very well may still be. And if she is, I am interested to see the first meeting between returned, Sphinx-Shelly and Tina.
phix took the library as a punishment but it wasn’t really
someone had to fill in the place as the library guardian and since it was phix who got tricked she went there.
She took it as a punishment however and assumed she had been sent there as she was the ‘lowest’ of all the sphinx.
Which is a good thing as it seemed to turn her into a better person than she used to be.
Nudge may be a trickster but well..she does seem to be on the side of good.
Chaotic-good perhaps..
I was thinking on these lines too–and then wondered if Shelly was now lower/junior to Phix as a sphinx. Which might soon lead to a new library guardian, if Phix is still mean enough to pull rank.
Shelly and “dead trees”??? I don’t think so. Only if Phix is really mean.
And remember: Both Phix and Nudge are free to leave at their convenience.(Though I think Nudge, after her whupping, is not very inclined to do so. 😆 ) The Bibliotheki stated so itself. So, no need to incarcerate someone in the library.
Since is was a Sphinx that allowed Nudge to get out. The Library said that is was the Sphinx’s responsibility to replace Nudge. Phix just happened to be low “man” on the totem pole got the job.
Phix being the one show shredded the book notwithstanding. 😉
While browsing through the archive for one of my favourite arcs (Tina punching Nudge), I noticed Shellinx now has a better than passing resemblance to Creepy Girl. Probably has no bearing here or there, though.
Well, bear in mind that CG is SHel;ly at fourteen.
Appearance-wise, anyway.
Yargh.
What did i DO to poor Shelly’s name?
Fairport, I love how you went from the cast of Misfile yesterday to everyone of yoru Gravatars coming from this comic 🙂
There were so many possibilities…
You raise a good point though….where IS CG anyway? Did Shelly have 81k years with her in treeworld, or did CG stay behind. If so, that’s going to be an interesting reunion.
Kind of what I was thinking as well. She was Shelly’s demons merged into a single entity, yet Shellynx couldn’t/can’t remember anything, so where was CG during those 80,000+ years? Course I forget if demons are affected by time (I’ll have to go back through the archive I suppose), but I thought demons were anchored to their host so long as the host was alive (which explains Tina). Then again, CG is an anomaly, so maybe she’s exceptions to these rules as well? Perhaps she was still behind with the rest of the crew when Shellynx went off the radar, since for them in that timeline it would only amound to a few minutes from their pov.
Don’t mind me, this is the equivalent of thinking out loud.
a) Demons are initially independent from time and hosts.
Unless:
b)when merged into one, they get attached to host&time.
c)Merging and/or control will only occur if host “dies” and lives again after that.
d)When host-mind is not there (i.e. Tina) Demons become the “person” and, as such possibly connected to time and space too.
At least, that is how I understand this whole Demon+Host interaction thing.
In the case of CLG, Shelly closed off the doorway to the demon realm that was opened when she temporarily died during her vision quest. Apparently some of the collateral damage from her doing that was that her demons got trapped on the wrong side (inside Shelly) as well as turned into one entity. That’s not supposed to happen.
Tina’s thing require an unusually strong connection between Tina and her demons. The same thing could happen to Monica. Normally the demons just give up and go on to other hosts.
It’s not unusual for teams of demons to be assigned to multiple hosts simultaneously, but with so many people, normally those hosts would never interact with each other.
poor shelly you can just see it in her face
shes trying to remember who they are but its just been so long for her
i think tomorrows strip will be them all blinking at each other until Shelly says
“who are you?”
Orrr..she’ll follow Jin’s lead and pokes them, just to make sure 😆 😆
She does have sort of the same expression in the final panel…
Whoa. Definitely total shock. Even for Shelly’s hard head, reentry was too much to take.
And now I have to ask … “Is it Friday yet?”
stop wishing your life away 😛
but its good to wish for fridays. with fridays come less work
unless you are one of those poor peeps who have to work on saturday for which i mourn the loss of your fridays.
I think he means….
” I’m waiting for the cliffhanger and 3 days of discussing over what it means, and doing it at home, without worrying about work… :)”
Close. I’m (wanting) waiting on Friday’s bombshell cliffhanger that sure to be a…bombshell. I to see any any questions are answers. Is she Shelly or Shellinx now? Was she truely physically transport to the Tree-Realm? Or was it more like what Picard experience from the TNG episode “The Inner light”? Is her appearance after here return just a sign of what she went through (i.e. hair turning white after experiencing extreme fear)? So many questions, and me want some answers.
And Paul that that as a HUGE complement from me. It’s a must read for me. And I missed it when it’s AWOL.
…this might take awhile…pretty much what I expected 80-some thousand years to do to someone.
She, uh…I might be genuinely afraid to be in the same room as her, with arms like that.
I’d back Bud in an arm-wrestling match with Phix – or Shelly – even in her aspect.
shelly has never used her strength to attack someone before. why would she suddenly start just cuz she touched a relic (from monica/bud viewpoint)
barring the bullies at her school and even then she punched them like any tough kid would have.
But them some are attracted to a fine sculpted body like that…:)
It’s that pause while the current page reloads, and tries to integrate two different memory lines, one of which has 81ka stored experiences to work through. I’m thinking this might take a while.
And it’s gotta be done–remember the suffering Camber of Culdi (Kurtz’s Saint Camber) endured before he could assimilate Cullen’s memories properly.
Folks keep saying Shelly has to reintegrate two memory strings, but that may not be not true.
If (as I’m coming to believe) Shelly was truly physically present in the Forest for 81000+ years, then her memories are unbroken from the moment she went there. They’re just buried under 57 cycles worth of new memories. That’s a lot of stuff to dig through.
How well do you remember people from your childhood? Would you recognize them at first glance after 20 years? 50 years? 81,000? Would you ever recognize them at all?
Shelly may have the world”s most intense and persistent case of amnesia ever known. Monica and the rest may just be wisps of memory to her after so long. A dream long forgotten and no longer emotionally resonant. She may have to get to know them all over again.
Think how difficult that will be. Her responses to their expectations may make for quite a drama. Especially if she IS still a Sphinx…
Oh man, my heart just dropped like a stone.
We can’t lose Shelly. Oh no…
Maybe she’ll acknowledge the others after some strategically placed beat panels…?
yes well assuming we haven’t already
then you got to wonder about the banshee that the blonde saw when she touched the relic.
Was that a time lost version of herself or was that just a hallucination meant to keep the wrong people from touching the relic.?
Despite the way that Paul shows Monica’s hair in the B&W strips, she’s not blonde – it’s sort of an auburn/mahogany colour.
Check here, for instance.
Bud, on the other hand, is blonde. Also taller and less…abundant. She’s showing a healthy level of caution around the artifact, which is kind of too bad as Bud’s invulnerable to radiation and perfectly capable of sitting around for 81,000 playing cards with whoever passes by.
the lights are on, but….
I went back to just before Shelly took the relic (there’s a back shot there, as well as here) — her hair is much shorter back then, than it is now. (Not only were her clothes blown off, her hair grew.) So — this must be Shellynx.
Well, yes. That’s what Pablo’s been telling us.
before shelly took the relic
shellinx
same shelly.
Paul 100% confirmed it yesterday (along with how many shelly there has been)
Oh shoot! We still don’t know if she remembers. It does look like she does, however. Well, hopefully tomorrow. Sometimes I think it would be better to check on this comic only once a week. But then I realize once I caught up, I would be right back in the same boat of wanting the next one NOW!
Yeah, after the buzz of commentary the past two days, a “bridge” edition was prolly to be expected.
Oh well, maybe I’ll actually get more work done later today…
I suspect several people will be more productive tomorrow then they have been of late.
i’ve been on holiday 🙂
and i must admit last fridays comic with shelly dying really made me upset than i would be normally BECAUSE i was so happy i was on holiday 🙂
V got cancelled as well last weekend. it wasn’t a good weekend really ^^
adding on the personal stuff….bleugh!!
^^No,no…it is good that V was cancelled, now Morena Baccarin is looking for work. Now if we can just get Castle cancelled, gather everyone up, and get Firefly back on the air!
Firefly on the air would be AWESOME! 🙂
I’m just sayin’.
they killed my fav char!
zoes husband 🙁
^^Well, that was in the movie…we could do a reset where it never happened. I’d also like to bring back the Shepherd, because the original series never really cleared up how he had become such a lethal fighter or how he had the pull to allow tham access to the medical ficility on the Central Planet…
Alan tudyk is very versatile. In addition to his brilliant work on Firefly, he does a good British accent (Death at a Funeral), excellent plucky comic relief (28 days), and ass-kicking sidekick (A Knight’s Tale)…
@txmystic: No. I cannot vote for Castle cancellation. Nathan can do both shows; he’s that good. But I fought too long and too hard and am rewriting my script to replace my beloved Captain Montgomery…etc… to allow it to go. I have a huge lecture on why Castle rocks, but I won’t post it here.
I meant remembers being a sphinx and all that.
Yes she does. If she forgot that then she would remember where she is and who they are. Erasing the sphinx memories would reset memory to the point she entered the other place.
it does seem like she does remember that but doesnt remember anything else.
Shoot
was hoping the relic would be kind and let her remember in small doses about what just occured.
Such as the relic has power. but she remembers everything ‘monica-related’ else.
Yes. There was the chance she’d remember nothing of her time in TreeRealm, her memories restored to what they were before she went there, and she’d be as confused as the rest by what happened to her. But it looks like that’s not happening.
One good thing: She remembers how to walk like a human, and didn’t immediately drop to all fours and try walking like a Sphinx.
Interesting. I think if everyone slowed down a little, Shelly would start functioning again, but with all these quick moving and fast talking women swirling around, she can’t get her bearings. Remember, she’s spent thousands of years with no one to talk to except her own tragically dying self. The readjustment should take time, even if her return to human form did not.
After reading, rereading, rerereading…the comic, I think by Shelly’s expression she thinking “Who are you?”
And “Where da heck are we?”
She’s Comanche, not Hekowi.
Hekawi! Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve heard that. Thanks, Wild Eagle.
Finally! I was wondering if anybody was gonna get that one.
I never heard of the Hekawi before. Anyone know where they’re from?
F Troop.
I’d alway heard it as the ‘fuh-kawi’
I got it! But I was thinking of an answer in the spirit of ” All I can Say now is “Come’on She(ll) snap out of it!”
@Jabberwonky: According to Wikipedia, the original plan was for them to be the Fugawki.
BTW, if you don’t know, a GPS does.
bmonk: New Jersey.
Eschmenk, thank you; I’d never seen that before. I think I may be speechless.
Fatuncle: I remembered it as that they came from Brooklyn and moved West when a bunch of pushy Dutchies bought the island next door and property values dropped.
And for those still a bit in the fog about the joke – they got their name when they got lost in a fog, and the chief in those days turned to the medicine man and asked “Where da heck ah we?”
Chief Wild Eagle would come up with wise aphorisms like:
When everyone looked at him blankly, he shrugged and said “Eh – it lose in translation.”
Edward Everett Horton appeared in six episodes as Medicine Man Roaring Chicken.
At IMDB.
Ah. From IMDB:
I figure the Hekawi’s biggest prey would be that infernal cross between elephant and rhinocerus: the Elifyno. :O
Oh, I get the feeling we’ll see Phix in a very short time and that Cliffhanger, might juuust be Tina getting that “I remember you” moment just as the last panel looms…
Shelly doesn’t remember any of them at all. So she is probably sitting there to get clues as to what is going on and who is who. Maybe tomorrow is when Shelly sees Tina and shouts Demon and goes for the throat!
After all when you are dropped into a new situation with no warning you either freak loudly or get very quiet in the hopes of making sense of it all. Shelly did the second so far.
Oh, man….
And the “Shelly stares blankly into space for a while” option is the one we’re going for.
And, aww, Monica’s such a mommy figure. Xd
Sorry, that was meant to be a happy face… XD
Busty mom hugs cure everything!
i knew it wouldn’t be on my list 😛
maybe my list will come into play next week? 🙂
Holy… Just had an ‘ah-ha!’ thought.
The reason why they were successful at fixing the calendar machine this time? SHELLY.
As far as we know, in every timeline previous, Shells dies in Treeland. Which means she was not there when the showdown with the calendar happened. Shelly #1 died gasping that she needed to get back because of it.
That’s likely a major part of it. Also the realization by Jin or Brandi that the CM can’t be fixed and all you can do is get rid of it.
IN B4 “it’s not 1 it’s 0” or “it’s not 56 it’s 57” XD
And to continue with that line of thinking, that is exactly why Jin couldn’t allow Shelly to get too close to her. In all previous time-lines, Shelly worried about fixing Jin before the calendar machine was fixed, and got herself killed in Tree land, rendering her unable to help with the calendar machine.
Jin didn’t start going crazy till the calendar machine was destroyed: http://wapsisquare.com/comic/psychological-imperfections/ So, she wouldn’t have been fixing Jin. Other than just Shelly not dying, it’s also that they didn’t find or use the relic yet. In the other cyles, around that time, Bud might have been on that Island, found Stinky, played catch, and found the sub and the relic. This is before 2012, so it would have been within the cycle. I imagine in the previous cycles they thought since it was Lanthian, it’d help fix the calendar machine. If they’d waited till 2012 this time to do Brandi’s plan, Bud could have found the object and Shelly might have been sent to tree world. I bet with Brandi’s plan being as good as it was, Shelly would have been the first there, and there’d be no more cycles. But still, it wouldn’t be part of the fix Jin quest.
Actually, it’d say it all really was because of Brandi’s plan. And this was the first year to attempt Brandi’s plan, since all previous cycles were Jin’s plan to fix it, Shelly dying wouldn’t have mattered either way because it was doomed to fail anyway.
no no
she went loopy before the calender machine was fixed
remember IN the calender machine room?
she was totally checked out then
she was loosing her grip on reality as each 14odd years drew to a halt.
Besides she pointed it out to the group before the calender machine was fixed that she would go back to how she was. Phycological inperfections and all.
I think the truth is in the middle.
Before the machine was fixed, Jin thought that fixing it would make her human and allow her to age and die. That’s why Monica tries to correct her on that in Tessa’s link.
… but on the other hand Jin wasn’t all that fixed by the calendar. The characters kept talking about Jin being crazy before they fixed the calendar. Here is an example. (It’s not a great one, because Brandi is lying to Monica about Jin having the right answers, but I got tired of looking.) One specific event was when Jin thought she saw a girl in the bathroom and shouted a hole in the wall.
Jin was showing signs of mental illness – probably brought on by extreme stress – before the CM was dealt with. Now, however, although the stress is gone, her schizophrenic-like condition from her youth has returned, perhaps aggravated by Crispy haunting her…
The main thing that we should make note of is that every CM reset timeline Shelly somehow also wound up with the Relic and traveling to the Tree-Realm (oh heck, I should just called it The Sacred Forest like Shellinx did). This time around the gang was searching for the Relic, and Stink wound up dropping it in their lap.
It may be that Stinky and the Sub (hrm catchy title 😉 ) are how Shelly winds up with the Relic every time. And it begs the question how does Shelly wind up putting the the Relic in a tree in Ireland, and the placing of the blade and capsule in the Sacred Forest?
Yeah, that’s bugged me a little too. Sometimes, yes, certainly – but every single cycle? Something has been playing with probability here.
Jin must have tried preventing WWII a few times. She may have tried sinking the artifact in the depths of the sea, if she ever found it in advance. Jin might have tried keeping horses out of the New World (if the Pueblo tribes hadn’t provided horses the Comanche might never have broken away from the Shoshone), or whip up more excitement in the Comanche-Mexico Wars of the 19th century (others were getting pissed about the raiding and killing; a little more and their enemies might not have stopped and taken surrender in 1875 when 1500 Comanches were still alive).
Incidentally, I really hope Wahnee is from Wai’ne (‘Hill Wearing Away’) and not Wohoi (a different meaning).
Hey I was looking back through the older comics again and I found that it wasn’t Jin who decided not to be friends with Shelly, that was Brandi’s idea. http://wapsisquare.com/comic/uponatime/
I wonder if Brandi knew that Shelly was trapped in the Tree Realm.
However that is an ASTOUNDINGLY good catch. She said she had to get back to the calendar machine. She didn’t say she had to get to the destroyed piece of popcorn that Budd threw into the sun. XD
(forgive me if I didn’t read all four hundred and twenty seven different posts from yesterday and missed this topic)
No, she said, “I need, …*koff* *gasp* … the calendar.” That could mean almost anything. Was she calling the relic the calendar? Was the calendar what she needed or was she trying to say something else about some calendar?
But Shelly Alpha was clearly driven by the need to help, and brought the Relic with her. “I take it back now, right?”
Whatever aid mission Shelly Alpha and her Alpha Earth pals were trying to achieve, I think it’s the fact that a human leaves Earth and doesn’t return is what causes the CM to “loop”. Shelly Alpha’s panic may have been more than self-preservation, as “I need the Calendar” seems to indicate she suspected the consequences of not returning.
Shelly Omega (Shellinx) is left having to ride Treeworld along its “arrow of time” as the previous Shellys arrive in order to ensure they don’t return, because unless there are time loops, Shelly Omega and her Earth will never exist.
The Relic’s calibration must be very interesting indeed, as it brings Shelly Omega back to the precise point in spacetime on Earth that she departed, with no loss of mass (less clothes, more hair).
Since no native mass has been lost, the universe is not imbalanced, and the galaxy will not implode. Correcting this implosion is what the CM kept doing by rearranging spacetime to AD 562.
So the Calendar was never broken. It was a fail-safe against disaster, like it was for Jin.
And now it’s gone.
But then why did it wait until 560 AD to start having problems? Maya did something to it then and it chose that point to loop back to. Why did May get transported to the demon realm then? Why wouldn’t that be significant enough to cause its own set of loops?
560 CE is about when the Mayan city of Teotihuacán was destroyed or abandoned, IIRC, and Tikal took over. Might these events be connected?
[b]@eschmenk:[/b] Maya tried to destroy the Calendar Machine because she though it was too powerful to remain in the hands of who controlled it. Her trying to destroy the CM is what got her tossed into and trapped in the Demon Realm. I presume that is what damaged the CM which eventually caused the first time reset on 12/12/12. Since Jin was present in the CM room when Maya tried to destroy it, she was the only one in the real world to realize that time has reset.
@nerf-dweller: Actually, those were supposed to be rhetorical questions for Yamara. I see that they not necessarily read that way. 🙄
I agree with what you said, except I suspect that Jin remembering the resets is a side effect of whatever caused her schizophrenia. If her brain was out of synch with time, that may keep her brain from being reset properly by the calendar machine.
@eschmenk Oo! You may have hit it. It The CM does react in 562, only it compensates by mediating the expansion the universe outwards, towards 2012. This may be why it looked like it was “breathing”.
This sounds like the Demonworld’s revolving door.
Since the Demonworld is described as time-null, Maya’s absence may be less damaging to Earth’s universe. She can still communicate to it, for instance.
But to open a door there requires a sacrifice here. In historical AD 562… there was a notable sacrifice then, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikal#Late_Classic
In AD 562, Wak Chan K’awiil, King “Double Bird”, was defeated and sacrificed when Tikal’s neighbors overthrew him.
And shortly before his reign, Tikal was overseen by a mysterious “Lady of Tikal”.
I thought there might be a link!
@eschmenk Previous was a response to your CM questions; Jin’s visions and troubles seem to date back to the Lanthans.
Demonic possession and prophetic visions were reported long before AD 562. Apparently they predate the Calendar Machine itself. If Maya was willing to risk the universe to save her child, she might have been willing to war against the Demonworld itself.
By the time the demons could lay hands her, she was indestructible, so they kidnapped her instead.
But this is all speculation. Better let Paul do the writing…
This time making sure to use the correct codes
@Yamara: That’s an interesting take on the time resets (CM reactiing to Maya’s atempted destruction of it by ballooning universe to 12/12/12 and deflating). But Maya was shunted to the Demon Realm after her attempt to destroying it. With Maya gone, I don’t see why the CM would balloon the universe again. Maya won’t have tried to destroy it again.
@nerf-dweller We don’t know enough about how or why Maya failed and got shunted into the Demonworld.
Since this is clearly in the realm of drama, I’m going to leave all that alone.
What I will express is that I’ve never much considered “time loop” stories to be very good time travel fiction before, as they seemed to suggest either a multiverse (so why not tell a multiverse story instead), or assume such monumental causal violations as to remove meaningful consequences and make drama largely pointless. Time loop stories are usually just a morality play with SF frosting (even the better ones like Groundhog Day & “Lucifer” by EC Tubbs).
There are exceptions. One, the 1990 short film 12:01 PM, is about being trapped in one’s own inadequacy. Another one is Wapsi, which is an examination of sacrifice.
Paul has begun to unravel the causal violations with the sacrifices of Shelly; it even inspired me to quote Inanna last week. My musings on how a time loop is even possible is new to me, and I’ve thought about time travel quite a bit in my day. It never seemed worth working out an impossibility for such a low return. But this li’l webcomic has invested some serious drama into the concept, and I very much want to see it succeed on the causal level as well.
Yeah – she was saying she needed to get back to help fix the CM. Remember – she was from one of the loops where it hadn’t yet been fixed.
Actually, when she could talk normally, she said, “I’m trying to help someone!“
Well, yes – but until they busted it, they thought that fixing the CM would help Jin.
I’m not so sure of that. Jin thought that fixing it would turn Jin human and let her die, but they didn’t trust Jin’s judgement that much.
Just had a BUT? thought. This time Jin let go of the process. Before she was trying to control everything to make it work and fix the CM. Now Brandi stepped in cause I think she got tired of trying to fix the $(@$&^ thing and said the heck with, GET A BIG HAMMER!. IT would all depend on when they went for the relic during the process doesn’t it. Before or after the CM repair try. The whole plan this time was to destroy it not fix it.
This time around the gang was prepared for the demons and reversing the portal to the demon realm that was Monica. Reversing the Demon Portal sucked the CM into the Demon Realm which allow it to be destroyed for good and stopping the CM resets.
And my “BUT” to that thought: What about what Sphinxie Shelly suggesting that previous Shellys had placed the components of the relic outside of the Time Forest? That, to me, suggests that some of the Shellys came to the forest, talked to Sphinxie, and then left alive to do things in the “real world”. Thus not all of the previous Shellys would have died in the Time Forest.
My but to your but of…
We don’t know if they did that after going to the forest. They might have done it on their vision quest or something as just a wild guess. As a matter of fact, if the Shelly the sphinx was talking to knew about the graveyard (it happened in Earth’s past), no one from the forest realm could have done that yet because the realm’s timeline was in reverse. It would have been in the forest realm’s future.
I don’t see Shellys leaving the forest realm to plant the relics could have worked out. By the time they could leave to plant the relic, the person to use it would have already shown up in the forest realm.
The Relic and Jin certainly seem to be related, and so may be sharing their timeline.
Treeworld does not “loop” but encounters all of the Earth loops. Shelly Omega has (somehow) returned to Earth at the far end of the loop cycle with the Relic that was brought to Treeworld and completed by the late Shelly Alpha.
The Relic brought to Treeworld by Shelly Omega is still unaccounted for. It (presumably) travels along the Treeworld arrow of time, and if Shelly Omega (Shellinx) left it behind somewhere, it would continue to travel along that arrow of time.
So the Relic questions now are:
1) What happened to Shelly Omega’s Relic?
a) Did someone take it from Treeworld before Shellinx leaves? or
b) Did it keep riding Treeworld deeper into Earth’s past and then get transferred to ancient Ireland?
2) Where did Shelly Alpha get her incomplete Relic?
a) And of course, what the hell did Shelly Alpha think she was trying to achieve?
How Jin’s capacity for remembering every loop is related to the Relic’s course through time, remains more speculative until we have more info.
I had kinda thought Shelly might drop the relic or have it jerked from her hand. I would want it gone and to never see it again. Not long after I would mop the floor with my “friends” for making me the guinea pig in their little experiment. I want to see lots of sympathy for Shelly. And lots of guilt for the rest for what they did. At least finally learn not to just try stuff with things like that just to see what happens. They need Maya standing by as technical consultant. At least she might have known this could happen.
Actually, I think Phix would be a better consultant for this. She’s also gone through the process of becoming a sphinx.
Once they realize they NEED Phix. The “By the way, I turned into a sphinx” story may be a ways deep in the narative…
I think that’s only one aura-reading-demon-barista scream away from entering the storyline.
In fact it’s so loud I think I can hear it across time, coming from tomorrow’s page.
Either that, or she faints, and all we’ll hear is a “THUDD” from outside the panel… Only to see Monday revealing a Tina flat on her back, completely out of it. 😀
poor Tina, as if one death-scare isn’t enough.
Thuddd!
Oh, geeze – Brandi, see what’s wrong with Tina. We gotta take care of Shelly.
Monica was the guinea pig though. Shelly wanted to touch the relic and the girls stopped her (initially…atfer she’d briefly touched it). I don’t think that all of their curiosities boils down to “my friends used me as a guinea pig”. Shelly is quite capable of getting herself into a mess with her curiosity alone.
{{blank}}
{{chirp chirp chirp}}
FairPortFan has left the building temporarily. Quick check the wallet.
No – Shelly has.
yup.
she does do an impression of ‘no ones at home’ doesnt she
“Oh, I remember you … you’re Pixie Rack! And you, you’re Sharptooth World Destroyer! And you … you in the corner … you’re … you’re … LUNCH!”
Don’t be so tasty… er… hasty. Remember, not as sphinxes are demon hunters. Only the Apotropaic sphinxes. Monica goes through this back when it looked like Phix was going to Tina’s for lunch.
Bighorn World Destroyer? Jin and Brandi are Sharptooth World Destroyer and Bigcat World Destroyer.
Pixie Big Rack, yeah…
Ready for some more mind-bending?
If Shelly touched the artifact and lived through all the time loops to power up the machine, what about the other girls?
When Monica touched it, she saw something, which she thought looked like Jin. But what if it was Monica57??? Remember, we didn’t recognize Shelly as the sphinx ar first either.
To draw support for this, remember the Star Trek episode. Picard did not live a whole lifetime there, it was recorded, and then shot into space where he found it again. He was integrated into an existing plotline. If Ryker had touched the machine, he would have lived his life there. Or possibly Warf. Data? Who knows? Point is, that like a role in a play, it was an arrangement put there, but the individual in the role doesn’t matter (much). Had Monica been let to hold it longer, then perhaps her (mexican-?)Banshee self would have watched the death of the previous 56 Monicas.
IN B4 “wrong number”
Lots of good points, but she said “Jin.” I think there’s a lot more here to discover.
touched?
no one touched it.
the probe beamed it at Picard.
(i assume because he was the highest rank on the ship and therefore the best person to pass the knowlege on)
(but i digress)
Tina said it was a guard-dog programme.
But hmm.. the hole in the sub…
If sphinx come from humans .. maybe one of the german guys was a human and turned into a sphinx.
still I doubt monica would have turned into a bainshee…
I don’t think SHE could. but would anyone else? hmm good point
Keep in mind Monica is part Mexican and part Irish. Her grandpa was a Sullivan, and she has naturally red hair. Banshees are Gaelic, so it would be the logical thing for her to see/become.
It’s a special kind of comic that gets your mind in a place where it seems to make sense to say “it’s logical that she [a human] would become a banshee.” 🙂
Paul has stated that “The Inner Light” episode of ST:TNG was inspirational, but this isn’t merely a recording being beamed into someone’s head. Shelly Omega returns physically changed: less clothes, more hair. For her, the journey was real.
The reason “The Inner Light” was one of the best TNG episodes was that it impacted a main character for the rest of the series. Patrick Stewart always seemed to play Picard as more philosophical, much more cherishing of children, and was often seen playing that flute in his cabin. He had lived an extra lifetime, and the entire series was affected by it.
Shelly knows she has forgotten her friends and family, and is ready to face that. But more importantly:
Shelly has returned as an ancient executioner.
I think Wapsi will never be same, and I’m looking forward to everything in store.
“Shelly Omega” OOH I LIKE THAT ONE!
I do too–because then we can quit arguing about whether this is Shelly #1 or #56 or #57…
That was the idea. Plus, I thought it sounded cool.
Enjoy.
Right, works for me. Do we then refer to the first Shelly to go to the tree place as Shelly Alpha?
And no wonder the second Shelly crashed–she was a beta version. . . .
[clinks in the pun jar]
*bites*
oops
ment that bite on ‘sowhyme’ above 😉
Trying desperately to remember if my tetanus shot is up to date.
Actually, I believe Paul simply said he loved that episode. He did not say it was an inspiration for this series of comics. I think it’s a mistake to infer too much from that ST episode in regards to what is happening new.
Is anyone else hearing the Doctor Who “we just saved the universe but at a cost so let’s celebrate while we cry” music in their heads besides me? (“you are LATE for my wedding!!”)
“I Found you! I found you in words like you KNEW I would! I brought back the others, I can bring you back too!”
well
he did have a gift
something old but something new
something borrowed (well stolen) but something blue 😉
And the silence from shelly is killing me!! LOL this will be interesting i must say!
Are you my mommy?
No, honey, that’s a steam shovel.
ITYM “a Snort”.
no gas mask
(damn creepy episode)
Hear, HEAR! One of the few Dr. Who shows that raised the hair on the back of my neck…
Blink
*shudder*
Ya know, given all that’s going on in this comic series, our ancestors may not have been wrong after all. Given the galaxy altering powers and time stopping/warping capabilities we’ve seen, the earth really IS the center of the universe. At least the center of the Wapsiverse.
no
earth isnt
we are
think on how everything around you relates.
It is all from your own point of view.
Therefore you are the centre of the universe 😀
(cause everyone else is the centre of their universes but well..nothing is perfect 😛 )
C.S.Lewis remarks (IIRC, in Perelandra) that every point is the center of the universe, and that it’s a failure of our imagination to believe that others cannot also be at the center–because it was created so wonderfully that law applies on every level, and that each point can be the center, and it still makes sense…
as i’ve said before
that boy is a damn fine thinker 🙂
And if you read his autobiography, you know how much he paid for that clarity of thought from his tutor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
If the universe is infinite, every point is a centre of it’s own.
What I liked the most about infinite universes (and consequently ,endless variations on laws of “nature”), is that everything we think of, however far-fetched, can be real. Even the wapsiverse… How cool is that?
Up to a point, but I think the real test for centrality is it’s real influence on a much larger area. The beings on this planet can alter, even destroy, an entire galaxy. Another being (Tina) can serve as the catalyst for stopping time everywhere should she delibertly kill someone. Sphinxes, it seems, come from earth and are sent to all places in time, space, and planes of existence.
Are there other places in the Wapsiverse which can do the same thing? Maybe, but we don’t know of them (yet). The only thing we can say for certain is that those things do eminate from here.
I thought Tina’s stopping time comment was a metaphor for losing all their memories. Tina’s Demons harmed Monica and paid the price. http://wapsisquare.com/comic/notmortality/ Tina lost her memories as demons, but remembered the rules.
I have always held that every possible reality is real somewhere, and creative minds hold the keys between those realities, introducing them to each other through creative expression.
I doubt I’m the only one to think that, but I’m not about to google it and lose the only thing that makes me feel brilliant. 😉
A classic case of PTDD : Post Traumatic Death Disorder….
I have to wonder how Pablo will work this out.
If Shelly really has forgotten her former life she’s no better off than any other amnesiac.
Hopefully she just needs to decompress.
Otherwise it’s going to be a long row to hoe.
Oh, no. She lasted all that time – and coming home broke her.
Well, I hope not. Beer and introductions all around, then a game of Twenty (Thousand) Questions – on both sides.
..
i suspect I will need beer for tomorrows cliffhanger..
Ok. That is a HUGE number of comments in the last 24 hours! Since it looks like my last comment yesterday was wiped evil forces I will drop it here and see what you all think: Over a week ago (I can’t link, I am on my iPad and am not feeling adventurous) our Shelly was wearing a two piece bathing suit and a back pack and complaining about have the artifact yanked outta her hands. The very next day it seems we picked up Shelly #1s story as she was wearing a t-shirt and no back pack and the others seem to be wearing different clothes as well. This means that we have no idea where our Shelly gets sent too. We saw Shelly1 go to Shellynx’s tree but I would love to know where our Shellynx went…
Was our Shellynx sent to the Jin-(ban)shee that Monica saw to get schooled?
Our Shelly was sent to the time tree forest 81,200 years ago (from earth’s POV). There she had to wait (mostly as a sphinx) until all other Shellys had gone through their respective cycles (a total of about 81,200 years) before she would be able to come back. Which she just did. Sort of waited for our time to catch with her again.
I saw your comments. They didn’t disappear. You posted them in the the previous day’s comments (two days ago now). I wondered why you did that. 😀 (I’ve done the same thing, though.)
No, I think you are wrong. She’s still wearing the bathing suit. She just put a t-shirt over it. You can see the bathing suit bottom underneath it. I don’t know why she waited until arriving at Monica’s to do that, though.
I thought that was a possibility but then also came to the conclusion (supported by what Shelly 1 was wearing) that all the Shelly’s were in Beach wear. It just explains some continuity issues for me.
But as far as being sent to a forest… the tree grew around the fuel, as far as we know she was sent to a garden center to get plutonium tree seeds.
Petulant mode: ON I just want to know what happened to our Shelly! We got a bait and switch, one minute our Shelly then the next minute another, I say it happened in the apt as per clues and simple logic but then slipping a shirt on quick to touch an artifact just yanked out of your hands is… simple?
DOH! It was a massive amount of posts… We can make them into a book all on their own lol
They have…
She though they were headed to the sandbar for a day of fun in the sun. After find out that Bud blowed up Monica’s Island, Shelly and Tina put on tops.
Right, but as far as we know, she still rides a motorcycle, and the point was to get away from cold weather, and they really didn’t want to attract too much attention. A bare midriff and open jacket in March is one thing, but a bikini on a motorcycle in April is another. And they can take off the t-shirts at the beach anyway.
I realize that Paul was having a little fun, though. They looked very ready to go to the beach.
Hmmm… OK… Now if Shelly kept dying over and over in the previous cycles from the same relic. Why didn’t Jin lay in wait for the relic to show up, grab it, and slap Shelly’s hand yelling, “No! Bad Shelly! No touching!”
Because it HAD to be done. No great deed is done without sacrifice. I agree with the other on the thought that this is why Jin said she couldn’t be friends with her. Not this time.
Might i recommend, for those not familiar with it, the graphic novel Mage: The Hero Discovered, Vol. 1, which brings the Arthur cycle into the modern day, with some interesting twists. (Excalibur is a baseball bat, for instance.) I would think that it would be absolutely perfect for Wapsi fans.
One of the characters (the reincarnation of Merlin) who remembers all his past lives knows that he is again going to watch friends die, and he cannot change it and he must not tell the others in their group, because to do so would be to allow unimaginable evil free reign in the world.
once the first shelly touched the artifact it locked in the 57th shelly.
basically each shelly after the first one had to go into it to release the last otherwise shelly 57 wouldn’t be able to get out.
Of cause 57 is just when they fixed it. if it had been fixed on the 6th go around then shelly 6 would have been locked in.
Least thats how I see it.
Someone a few days back said something similar which is where I totally stole it from 😀 its a good thought tho 🙂
(even if it does make your brain implode)
If that were the case, then the very first Shelly from the original cycle would have had to touch it, but there were only 56 shellies out of 57 who touched it. I like eschmenk’s answer, that Jin was too loopy towards the end to really know what Shelly was doing.
I think Tessa has a good point. Jin could remember what happened in the previous loops. If a bad thing happened when Shelly touched the relic, why didn’t she try to keep Shelly from touching the relic in subsequent timelines?
The best answers that I can think of is that Jin’s mental problems seemed to get worse at the ends of the loops (the broken calendar didn’t solve her problems completely) and Jin didn’t probably didn’t really know what happened to Shelly, just that it didn’t work and she didn’t come back. If the calendar machine looped, Shelly wouldn’t have been around long anyway, so it was worth taking a risk if they thought they could do better next time.
I think there is a deeper sub plot going on. The fact Jin didn’t stop any of the Shellys indicates she also knew each one had to do what they did, or at least she thought they did. She’s probably had to make many such hard choices for many people. Not stopping them from doing one thing or another even though it would lead to great harm for them. We don’t yet know the motives behind Jin’s letting it all happen, but, right or wrong, Jin would have had her reasons.
As I said above, it’s pushing plausibility that Shelly just happened onto the artifact in every single cycle. Jin must have tried saving her a few times; perhaps she learned the hard way that letting Shelly die was the better option – but I don’t know what dire consequences could come from saving her.
80,000 years alone in a forest, punctuated by 56 visits from yourself, who will be around for minutes.
And then you’re dumped into a livingroom filled with people.
Shellinx is suffering from information overload.
and youve shrank
to shellinx the relic was the size of a necklace.
You shrank
or
You’ve shrunk
Choose one of the reiterations above. (snerk)
Paula is probably wondering what brought that on! That was Julie who gave you the rough time for using the word reiteration. 😛
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/done-here/#comment-45892
oh is that what they’re called
learn something new each day 🙂
hadn’t the foggiest when you mentioned it the other day though 😀
you are correct though. i get annoyed at peeps using text speech in normal typing so i should really try to use the little ‘ when needed 🙂
…soo given what’s happened with Shelly, what’s going to happen to Officer Tight Buns? I don’t think Shelly’s “friend” is aware of her..adventures as Jin’s and M’s SO are.
How do you think ‘Officer Tight Buns’ is going to feel when he finds out she has very sharp claws?
Oh yes, and that she is a real man eater now?
Let alone the lion’s fur clogging-up the shower-sink.. 😆
Justin’s reaction might not be to good…
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/warning-flags/
No matter what, there’s going to be a big personality change in Shelly…warning flag?
Forget Justin, this is either his intro to the weird, or his exit from Shelly’s life.
What about her dad?
(who I suspect has some secrets, too)
..oohhh I almost forgot about *her* dad. O_O
That is a conundrum isn’t it? :'( I can barely imagine being stuck in a place far away and in that time slowly forget the people you love and care for..only to see them again. (o_o)
My other curiosity is how *exactly* are sphinxes born. We know they start out human but what’s the process..?
I guess so, he was, after all, the one that janked Shelly away from the statues when she got into a day-long trance while chanting.
His protectiveness of Shelly-beans ,even while Shelly is a grown-up, is no mere coincidence. He knows more ,as did Shelly’s Mom…
No, mr Taylor..that tiny detail did NOT escape my attention… 😛
maybe they knew monica’s gran’pa
he knew jin and went exploring a fair bit
maybe he gave them the dolls after Jin’s apparent death.
And that might explain how they wound up in Mipple City…
This, of course, leads to the speculation that Shelly’s mom was a sphinx who decided to revert to human form and stay that way in order to have a normal human life. The only thing is that she died rather easily in the end. Seems like a sphinx would be tougher. Perhaps, once in human form, a sphinx starts to age and can suffer all the frailties of humans. Then again, it could be dear old dad is the sphinx. We know sphinxes are born human, but that doesn’t automatically mean they are born from humans.
…the title of comic makes me imagine it being said by the Curiosity Core in Portal. It’s also the same voice I can imagine speaking to Shelly right now. 😀
For me, it reminded me of a certain track/music video…
np: Pantha Du Prince – Abglanz (Black Noise)
I think it’s just a real bad case of Shell-shock.
And all the gears and cogs between the Shelly/Shellinx personas have to click back into place.
This should be good!
I cannot believe you were the first person to use that pun today 🙂
you win a cookie i suspect :p
Nah – I think I gotta put a dime in the pun jar or sumthin’. But a gingerbread or shortbread cookie sounds go!
Gleah!!!! The keying gremlins got me! I meant “sounds GOOD”.
Ah. It’s wasn’t that bad of a pun. It should have been much more punny if he had said that it’s a bad case of Shelly-shock. 😀
Augh!!! Not the face! Not the face!
For that you deserve a good Shell-acking.
I’s so shell-shocked by the bad puns that i’ve become rather hard-shelly.
Shell we hold back on Shelling-out Shelly jokes?
*plink*
Henceforth, I shell!
I must have been shell-tered to not see this pun line even possible well I have now punned and need due pun-ishment.
Shelly has now lived through the same amount of time and seen herself die over and over.
Now she can relate to Jin the way no one else currently alive can. It is always helpful to find someone who shared the same horrible experience that you did to talk to about it. Of course, Shelly didn’t witness the end of the world or losing many loved ones over and over, but it’s as close as you can get I think.
And why do I wonder if our little girl Conscience will suddenly show up.
Suddenly?
I doubt she’s left Shelly’s side for 80k+ years.
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/what-are-you/
Well, except for maybe a short stint waiting in graveyards and U-boats.
Huh. I think it just clicked with me. Could anyone check my reasoning?
The Shelly from the most recent timeline (#57) was the first one to go to the sacred tree, because time there is reversed. Therefore, the Shelly we’ve been following hasn’t died: she became the Sphinx, watched previous editions of herself come in, do their part, and die, and now has returned to her original place in her original timeline. She didn’t die, she just lived a few millenia (the entire calendar cycle) in what to others must have been a blink of an eye. Presumably, in other runs of the calendar she just dropped dead after touching the artifact.
This STILL screws with my head, because that would mean that number of calendar cycles would have needed to have been set in stone BEFORE it was finally fixed/destroyed… either that, or the effects of those previous trips to sacred-tree-land hadn’t been finalized until Shelly made the final trip that set up the prerequisites for them. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHH!!!!!
Damnit Pablo, you never make these things easy to follow!
But still, you summed it up very good. 🙂
Congrats, only three days late to the party. 😉 Better late than never. 🙂
You forgot to mention she went physically to the tree realm…
poke, poke, pokety poke poke poke
behave or no more muffins when you go to confusion corner 😉
Wibly Wobly, Timey Wimey. Maybe this is proof that time and causality aren’t as dogmatic as we think they are, that it’s actually all very very messy, so much that certain things need clean-up.
If .. dear God I am SO disposing the numbers .. If FINAL Shelly entered the tree microuniverse in the present and then reappeared that same moment after having resided there for .. what, hours? weeks? years? centuries? .. maybe time inside the tree place isn’t running backwards but rather upwards, up (or down if you use my flawed drawing) the coil of time loops, intersecting each time a Shelly touches the artifact in their causality.
Here’s a crazy one: Maybe Final Shelly/Sphinx Shelly/Our Shelly wasn’t simply disposing of the other Shellies, but rather getting them to dispose of the other loops, turning time straight.
That would put Shelly’s actions in the tree realm right at the nexus of the time loops, and what you are saying makes sense if by running through the 56 Shellys’ experiences in the tree realm, the damage to time (and thus Jin) is being undone.
Also, in order for Shelly to return to the same point of origin, you are right, it HAS to be looping back onto iteself, intersecting whenever Shelly comes in from earth, but in revers order of when the happened from the Earth’s POV.
I actually kind of like thought experiments involving multidimensional time…
oh here is another thought
When Jin found out Monica had created sunlight she poited in and said ‘i always thought shelly would bring the 4th light’ but it was her mum (which confuzzled me no end)
and then went and hugged shelly saying ‘we did it’
now .. why and how could shelly bring a 4th light as a human and why did Jin think that?
A-HA! That’s IT! That’s IT that’s IT that’s IT!
The calendar machine wasn’t what bolloxed up everything! It was always the ORDER that they tried to FIX the calendar machine!
They always found the artifact BEFORE they tried to fix the calendar machine, and thus Shelly kept missing the mark when it came time to “fix” the machine!
I have to wonder about fixing Jin. After all, she was broken even before the CM was built and placed into operation. All the time forest and Shelly would have done here is fix the crap caused by the CM malfunction.
In the end, what I hope the result of all this and things to come do NOT result in everything being fixed to such an extent that none of the players remember anything that occured. They all go on their merry way as if nothing ever happened because none of it did happen (where time is concerned). I hate those endings.
Well, yes, but the time problem needed to be fixed as well. So now I’m thinking Tina’s notebooks might provide more insight as to what else could be wrong with Jin.
I as thinking last night as I was getting to sleep that The Sacred Forest may have been a safety valve for all of existence. The CM was resetting time causing it to fall back on itself. When time wants to always go forward. I liken it to time overflowing the dam the CM resets cause. The time overflow poured into the Sacred Forest. Shellinx touching the Relic and traveling to the Sacred Forest allowed time to flow over the CM reset albeit in a reverse direction. If that’s anywhere near the truth Shelly’s sacrifice saved all of existence.
And yeah, my brain goes off in strange directions as I’m dozing off.
possible-probably, my red hen
Lays her eggs in the relative when
She will not lay at all today
Because she laid them yesterday
(or somesuch misquote I may have misremembered from The Space Child’s Mother Goose)
Prequels bug me too.
Scrambled eggs is how my brain feels after reading all of yesterday’s commentary
Jam tomorrow
and Jam yesterday
but never Jam today….
…puts a band out of business…
Im pointing the confused in this direction.
you’ve summed things up very well 🙂
but was it set in stone at the begining or the end..
good point.
not sure if we will get an answer anytime soon but nice to think about 😀
I personally think the first one set it in motion and the last one solidified it.
the last one after the calender was fixed.
fixed…taken from existance…
nope..not gonna touch that one for now.
I shall just let it breed at the back of my mind until it forces its way out sometime next week (or over the weekend)
Destroying the Calendar Machine collapsed the probability function and so it was always Shelly fifty-seven who became the sphinx.
Quantum shelly-namics. Simple.
You need to Shell out some cash for that….
*drops a dollar in the jar*
These are people she hasn’t seen for 80,000 years. There’s only one perfect word that comes to mind for what Shelly is feeling right now, and it’s not a polite one, but I’ve left an embedded clue.
WapsiSquarePaulTaylorAwesome for the win!
*sigh* i sucked at the sherlock holmes novels
give me the first letter please 🙂
The first half of the word is “mind”. The second half of the word is obscene.
ahh
sorry completly missed that bolded ‘mind’
i thought it was imbeded in the
wapsisquarepaultaylorawsome for the win
part
but there was no f 😛
“mindobscene”? Is that even a word?
Probably something similar to “mindfreak”.
Shelly is rebooting right now, giver her some time.
They’re gonna need a toothpick for her hard-reset button.
I wish we would have found this one when we were arguing about the 56 vs. 57 question. There wouldn’t have been any need to argue over what “repeat” meant.
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/startingoveragain/
Oh. I forgot about that strip. I just remembered the conversation between Brandy and Phix about them having the same conversation 56 times before. That strip could have eliminated a lot of the debate over the numbering of Shelly’s. 🙂
This is what I like about the comments…I didn’t hold on to the fact that Jin was resetting the friggin’ machine!
I been running on the assumption that the machine was skipping a beat on a gear or something. The shouldn’t have used those cheap Cogswell Cogs.
I’ve got to re-think some of my theories….
No, you were right in the first place. Jin wasn’t resetting the machine, she was trying to fix the machine. Without any intervention it would reset time anyway. Skipping a gear as you put it.
In one of the comics, it was explained that, at the appointed date in 2012, a section of the machine would appear and a repair could be performed. This never worked and finally Jin or Brandi decided the hell with fixing it, toss it into the demon realm instead.
I thought the ‘Invisible Flywheel’ theory was smoke to blow up Monica’s ass to distract from the ‘Head Shank’ plan..
I don’t think it’s the Shelly we know and love that currently holds occupancy of that body.
Oh, it’s the same Shelly we know, but with an added 81000 years of solitude added… Nothing to worry about… 😀
Go read Ian comment above.
It clarifies things
So what is Tina doing? She should have been face-to-face with Shelly. It sure looks like she’s keeping her distance now. 😆
I think Tina is giving her pelvic muscles a serious work-out ,as in “trying not to loose it all”
Well, since I already hijacked txmystic’s question…
I’m not so sure Paul isn’t setting us up here. I have to agree with Julie; I’m not sure that Shelly is a real sphinx. I can’t explain how she wouldn’t be, but it seems off that she would be one. It would seem particularly off if the rest of the sphinxes are descended from humans, as the sphinx Shelly claimed.
It’s hard to think of an ancient demigod (as Tina referred to Phix as well as Nudge in the demigod strip) as being descended from humans. The library had sphinxes as guardians apparently long before the library even knew that humans existed.
The demons, who are immortal, have been around for much longer than the universe existed. Humans evolved very recently by that time scale. If sphinxes came even later, it seems like they wouldn’t have been around long enough to cause the demons to instinctively fear them.
its still possible
if the library exists outside of time (which it does) then why can’t it take a creature from the future to combat the past.
oh that reasoning it would be why they are feared by the demons.
they are ex-humans without demons but with FULL knowlege of how a demon works.
Ooh maybe sphinx are humans who have beaten their demons? Like shelly has with Creepy kinda?
Very good points.
@eschmenk The Library is a sentient dimension of some kind, with some convoluted rules which are, as of this date, more like a fairy tale-like than something to draw hard-headed logical conclusions from.
I’m in wait-and-see mode when it comes to regions in Wapsi that are “timeless” mixed with creatures that are “immortal”. Supernatural rules exist more at an author’s whim than capturing slices of real life, and it’s one of those things where I gotta see where the author is leading me first.
Whoa, there…I have exclusive rights to this question…give me your facebook info and I’ll post a license agreement to your wall…
😛
Ooops! It’s probably my fault and I just didn’t see them, but I would almost swear that those comments weren’t up there earlier, because I was surprised at how few comments there seemed to be.
Where’s Brad?! WHERE’S ANYBODY!?
… But srsly, they need Jin’s Mom and Phyx right freaking NOW!
Brad is beyond the sun…
I think she’ll be all right, once she gets her bearings, a shot of coffee, and a hot piece of frybread drizzled with honey. Sphinx or not, she is still Comanche, the Saiyans of the Plains.
But, does this mean she can *poit!* on her own now?
Is being a Frysian with Keltic heritage also good enough for getting said “Frybread drizzled with honey??” It sounds too munchy and delicious, You see.. I would be sorry to miss it.
Can I also have said frybread please.
I can claim no heritage cept well..from england.
but well..it sounds nice
*puppy eyes*
The Mandan-Hidatsas and Sioun tribes of the northern plains also had frybread. How about lunch of frybread and Corn soup?
What’s a Sphinx gotta do to get a sandwich around here?
Tina? Tina!
The only thing better than frybread and corn soup is frybread and wild rice soup with maple sugar bits for dessert.
Making me hungry, and I have the flu…dangnabbit!
But…but…
I’m so confused! Isn’t this the FIRST Shelly? The one from a completely different timeline?
Didn’t…didn’t we see OUR Shelly…die?
Read the comments (If You have the unwordly stamina) and Paul’s answers, especially Paul’s answers.
And all will be revealed…or so I was promised.. 😉
(It’s rather a Pandora’s Box. Don’t say You weren’t warned)
…particularly Paul’s comments among yesterday’s batch of 458, so far.
Go read Ian comments today
just a short trek up the page.
That’s basically what’s happened 🙂
I am still undecided if Shelly thinks:”who are You” or “I am back..I am actually back”
The Shelly you have dialed is not in effect. Please check the value of Pi and dial again.
Reading all the comments is one of the things I really love about Wapsi Square, but next time I shouldn’t play the 8 minute symphonic Sweeney Todd medley simultaneously. I’m totally on edge now.