OTOH — experiencing Phix may have sent at least one of Tina 2.0s demons into a dissociative fuge — a’la when Jin met her mom at the Calendar Machine’s destruction, and could not recognize her.
First off… this is the creepiest thing I’ve seen in… well, my short term memory is about as good as my attention span, so.. what was I talking about?
Oh. Yeah. Secondly, I think the part that makes this the worst is that the shadowy figure in the basement has about the exact same silhouette as Tina. That just can’t be good…
Oh, and third, how can someone run a business with only a single employee? Seriously. Leaving a coffee shop completely unattended any time she has to use the restroom? Tina must get robbed and vandalized a lot.
In my opinion, none of those are creepy at all. Well, okay, Shelly’s little girl is a little creepy. But the other things don’t even phase me.
But THIS? This scene of monica stumbling through the forbidden basement and cautiously approaching the Tina-shaped silhouette standing/hanging in the darkest depths of the basement that intentionally has no light source, while we know that Tina is actually still upstairs?
That’s horror at it’s finest.
You know, one thing that I keep thinking… Tina’s technically dead, right? But she still looks all lively and, err… fresh. Maybe that’s because the one everyone has been interacting with all this time hasn’t been her actual, original, physical body.
I once worked a 6a to 6p Sunday shift at a gas station, by myself, with a tiny convenience store, maybe 20X10 on the inside. There was no employee bathroom, I had to run around behind the station and use the public restroom. I always had a mental image of returning to stripped shelves and missing cash register every time I hadda go.
I probably would have thought it was Jin, except it looks too tall. Maya’s hair looked something like that when it was up, and I agree that she seems plausible, so I would guess her, too. I think Phix would be taller, plus she was wearing a skirt, while the silhouette seems to have pants. Of course, it could be a new person or something else, too.
Somehow it felt to me as if it’s could be Tina down in the basement, because the Tina with Amanda seems so off. I don’t know how that could be true, though and the hair doesn’t really match.
The other thing is that the light seems to be hitting the wall behind them, but they are still dark. Either they have eyelights, too, or they are very black. Could it be that this is the embodiment of Tina’s negativity that she keeps down in the basement out of sight?
As far as I know, the chimera still is Monica’s ward, and I suspect that if she is in real danger, or starts screaming her head off, the room will suddenly be full of guardian golems ready for trouble and on a hair trigger.
I like that! Here is where there would be a long scene of the 3 combining into one, with lots of sparkly effects and background motion for no reason. This always troubled me in the anime. Why doesn’t the villian strike BEFORE the super heros change? Why do they always wait patiently while they transform?
Cos they have to fill a couple minutes with stock footage to hold down costs. The sparkly effects and background motion are so it doesn’t MATTER what sort of terrain should be behind the transformation.
Monica can ‘poit’ out of danger in an instant (assuming she isn’t so scared she forgets how to do it). I’m a bit more concerned about how she’s going to explain the glowing eyes if the figure down there isn’t something unearthly but just a normal person like a meter reader.
(And what the heck is with all those boxes, anyway? If Tina’s got that much sunk into inventory it’s a wonder the shop isn’t belly up.)
Maybe. Perhaps that’s Tina’s other body. The one she uses while her regular body gets sent to the mortuary for periodic refurbishing. You know, change of fluids, top off the tear ducts, replace the filters. That sort of thing.
It kinda looks like it goes in the cabinet behind it. I’ll be very disappointed if it turns out to be some sort of dummy she uses on the commute home so as to use the carpool lane.
Maybe Tina has been playing around with robotics in her spare time? If she could program one to be a barista, she could take a vacation and go on a cruise or something.
Fortunately, that doesn’t look like a coffin, so I don’t think we need to worry that she’s been trying to be another Dr. Frankenstein.
OK, I think we should split up gang…Daphne, Velma and I will stay up here and enjoy hot coffee and pastries…Shaggy, you and Scooby go check out the creepy thing on the pulley in the basement…
Seeing as Tina is a collection of demons, maybe they aren’t
all suitable for use in a coffee shop.
When she comes to work, she turns on the lights, starts
the coffee machines and warms the pastries, parks demon #5
in the basement and unlocks the door.
Well, it really means it’s an individual demon, but not necessarily Nudge. IIRC, Paul was using the gray text for quite a while before we had any idea of Tina’s nature.
Does anyone else think something is a bit off with Tina in the third panel? She doesn’t seem to be looking at Amanda. Amanda seems to have her arms crossed and is looking a bit skeptical. Tina could be a bit dazed still from her encounter from Phix, or I might be reading too much into things, but that seems even more creepy than the basement to me.
Good point. It seems as if she is talking to someone only she can see (or someone out of frame) and not to Amanda, This would explain Amanda’s expression and lack of any response.
Where is Phix?
Why does this … silhouette seem to hang from the ceiling?
Why does she seem to hold a knife?
Is this the real Tina Amanda is talking to?
Why do I feel afraid that SOMEONE is going to face some REAL trouble?
Why don’t I even know who?
A: Tina, who has empty eyesockets until the rising sun turns them into furnaces, and who dwells in a mostly-empty apartment, and “sleeps” standing up, and is infested by a legion of demons, needs to use the little girls’ room?
Guh uh whuh…
B: Yes, I see a body hanging from a noose. And it’s creepy.
Well, with respect to item A, she does drink tea, but I don’t particularly believe it. As I said above, something seems off in panel 3. Her head is tilted wrong to be looking at Amanda. Maybe Tina is still so out of it that she is looking at where Phix’s head used to be, but she comes across much more like a zombie than normal. If she was in the little girl’s room, she might have been hiding in there while she got up the nerve to face the world again. The way Monica yelled, Tina had to be pretty much lying about not hearing them come in.
Amanda didn’t say, “Oh, there you are,” which seems strange, too, given how anxious Monica was to find Tina. Amanda is probably becoming suspicious, because things are obviously going on that she’s not been told about, starting with Tina reading her aura.
There’s definitely a makeshift pully system above the shadow…I wonder if Phix just left the coffee shop after her brief conversation with Tina, and really has nothing to do with this thing in the basement?
I’m gonna go against the tide, and declare that the mysterious stranger in the basement is Phix, and that she just wants to speak with Monica in private … perhaps about those mysterious circumstances surrounding Tina’s purchase of the shop … ?
And whoever the shadow-person is (Phix, imho), she seems to be standing with her back to Monica while staring at the far wall with her own night-light eyes.
You’re right, it does look like the back of someone/something standing/hanging there. And if it does have eyelights, that blows my dummy theory. Which I’m glad about, actually.
Nah, ‘course the crime scene woud’ve been cleaned up before the real estate agent slapped a for sale sign up as soon as the crime scene tape came down. But the way things won’t stay dead here, I wouldn’t be surprised if something continued to hang around.
*scrapes fingernails along the table* DaaaaaaAAAAAAAANG IT!!!!!
I don’t comment often (though I could swear I’ve commented before…), but I love this comic and I’m going to go crazy wondering what’s going to happen next.
You’re an unknown entity, messing around in the basement of a coffee shop run by a demon barista. A basement where ‘something’ happened prior to previously mentioned barista taking up residence. You turn around and…
Find a glyph reader with eye-lights all aglow bearing down on you.
I’m not sure which way you mean as “right” since it depends on whether that’s the back or front of someone. Still, I seem to see small skulls at the bottom and near the top of the inside of the cabinet. Of course people always think they see faces and shapes of people or animals (even cartoon characters) in patterns, be they symetrical or random, so it all may be nothing.
He thinks, and I agree, that it looks as if the figure may be illuminating the wall beyond them with their eyelights. If that is true, it would mean that they are facing away from us. There is a pattern in the right hand wall that looks somewhat like two overlapping faces about mid-way up. Having said that, I think he was just being silly this time.
I hate to say it, because I’m one of those people that have just got to speculate, but there are so many different ways this could go that I am just going to sit here with my mouth shut, and wait for tomorrow’s development.
Yes, but be prepared for the possibility that we might zoom back to Dietzel on the phone with the Pizza Girl…and have to wait for resolution until Monday! BWAHHHH HAHAHAHAHA!!
I think it’s Tina’s supplies. She’s been feeding her customers ‘long pig’ for all this time and this is her latest ‘special’ waiting to be prepped. That’s why she didn’t want Phix around. She knew Phix, as a reformed mass killer, wouldn’t take it well.
Ok, maybe not..
Maybe it’s really Phix upstairs with Amanda and that’s Tina after Phixie got through with her and she’s the one who’s gone ‘off the wagon’.
Ah, I’m feeling a bit morbid tonight.
Actually I think that’s Tina there as well as with Amanda. I dunno how though. Maybe it’s like the golem girls and those skeletons in Monica’s basement?
OK, good, then it is not just forced perspective screwing with only me again. Nor have my eyes gone to heck yet. It is definitely reassuring that there are other people who see a hanging, lifeless body in the second to final panel. Although, the hanging, lifeless body is not reassuring.
Ohhhhhhhhhh no…
My thoughts exactly…. *dives under a sheet and peeks out through a tiny space*
My reaction was more “Ohhhhhhhhhh sh!t”…
Sure glad I waited until the full light of day to check this one out…
D’oh ! Uh-oh .
Second that.
Thanks, now I’m creeped out right before bed.
So, she really was in the little girl’s room!
AH! IT’S A WEEPING ANGEL! Don’t blink, Monica!
and if you looked into its eyes, keep them closed! Kepp your eyse closed, Monica!
DO NOT BLINK. WHATEVER YOU DO…DO NOT BLINK.
I bet Tina will have kittens once she finds out that Monica is….down there.
ooooooooooooooooohhhhhhh she’s in for it.
MONICA STARTLED THE WITCH
*lol* Epic comment!
Ah man, I didn’t have time to line up a head shot. Hee – thanks for the laugh because that second frame creeped me the heck out.
So she was in the bathroom; so who is Monica going to see in the basement?
Amelia Earhart. 😉
+1 Clever!
OTOH — experiencing Phix may have sent at least one of Tina 2.0s demons into a dissociative fuge — a’la when Jin met her mom at the Calendar Machine’s destruction, and could not recognize her.
In other words: Dun dun DUNNNNN!
+1
More like “What is Monica gonna see?”
First off… this is the creepiest thing I’ve seen in… well, my short term memory is about as good as my attention span, so.. what was I talking about?
Oh. Yeah. Secondly, I think the part that makes this the worst is that the shadowy figure in the basement has about the exact same silhouette as Tina. That just can’t be good…
Oh, and third, how can someone run a business with only a single employee? Seriously. Leaving a coffee shop completely unattended any time she has to use the restroom? Tina must get robbed and vandalized a lot.
She probably leaves one of the group behind to scare the hell out of anyone with bad intentions.
Or this may be the first time she ever had to go to the restroom. She’s never dealt with a sphinx before.
Indeed. and only to clean up.
Since this, maybe? Or, perhaps, this?
People were talking about Tina’s eyes not containing the spirals when she was panicking after being left alone with Phix. They didn’t in those two examples either. Nor here, for that matter. In some ways that last one is the creepiest.
In my opinion, none of those are creepy at all. Well, okay, Shelly’s little girl is a little creepy. But the other things don’t even phase me.
But THIS? This scene of monica stumbling through the forbidden basement and cautiously approaching the Tina-shaped silhouette standing/hanging in the darkest depths of the basement that intentionally has no light source, while we know that Tina is actually still upstairs?
That’s horror at it’s finest.
You know, one thing that I keep thinking… Tina’s technically dead, right? But she still looks all lively and, err… fresh. Maybe that’s because the one everyone has been interacting with all this time hasn’t been her actual, original, physical body.
Did you see SoWhyMe’s answer to LW18?
I figure that if her body can incinerate spiders, who knows what it can do to maintain itself.
That third image was the face of one of the Demon Collective, and their visages are all unique.
I once worked a 6a to 6p Sunday shift at a gas station, by myself, with a tiny convenience store, maybe 20X10 on the inside. There was no employee bathroom, I had to run around behind the station and use the public restroom. I always had a mental image of returning to stripped shelves and missing cash register every time I hadda go.
I think we’ve seen this before…
Note that the shadowy figure appears to be dangling from the pulley in the ceiling…demonic piñata?
This just got 10X more interesting. I see a weekend cliffhanger coming. Maybe this is where Jin’s mom has been umm … hanging out?
Actually, now that you mention it… that’s probably about the most logical person for it to be. (Mayahuel)
…Anyone wanna bet she’s going to ask Monica WTH she’s doing talking to that demon-possessed lady upstairs?
I probably would have thought it was Jin, except it looks too tall. Maya’s hair looked something like that when it was up, and I agree that she seems plausible, so I would guess her, too. I think Phix would be taller, plus she was wearing a skirt, while the silhouette seems to have pants. Of course, it could be a new person or something else, too.
Somehow it felt to me as if it’s could be Tina down in the basement, because the Tina with Amanda seems so off. I don’t know how that could be true, though and the hair doesn’t really match.
The other thing is that the light seems to be hitting the wall behind them, but they are still dark. Either they have eyelights, too, or they are very black. Could it be that this is the embodiment of Tina’s negativity that she keeps down in the basement out of sight?
Mebee it’s the first proprietor of the coffee shop – the one who didn’t know what ‘black coffee’ was………..
Yeah, I thought it was hanging from the ceiling too… well, no sleep without nightmares for me. 🙂
Suddenly I’m scared for Monica.
As far as I know, the chimera still is Monica’s ward, and I suspect that if she is in real danger, or starts screaming her head off, the room will suddenly be full of guardian golems ready for trouble and on a hair trigger.
CHIMERA, ASSEMBLE!! Cue awesome 90’s hero/spy/GI Joe cartoon theme music and preparing-for-action montage!
ThunderChimera, Assemble!
I like that! Here is where there would be a long scene of the 3 combining into one, with lots of sparkly effects and background motion for no reason. This always troubled me in the anime. Why doesn’t the villian strike BEFORE the super heros change? Why do they always wait patiently while they transform?
Cos they have to fill a couple minutes with stock footage to hold down costs. The sparkly effects and background motion are so it doesn’t MATTER what sort of terrain should be behind the transformation.
Monica can ‘poit’ out of danger in an instant (assuming she isn’t so scared she forgets how to do it). I’m a bit more concerned about how she’s going to explain the glowing eyes if the figure down there isn’t something unearthly but just a normal person like a meter reader.
(And what the heck is with all those boxes, anyway? If Tina’s got that much sunk into inventory it’s a wonder the shop isn’t belly up.)
Was there a body switch that took place?
Maybe. Perhaps that’s Tina’s other body. The one she uses while her regular body gets sent to the mortuary for periodic refurbishing. You know, change of fluids, top off the tear ducts, replace the filters. That sort of thing.
It kinda looks like it goes in the cabinet behind it. I’ll be very disappointed if it turns out to be some sort of dummy she uses on the commute home so as to use the carpool lane.
Maybe Tina has been playing around with robotics in her spare time? If she could program one to be a barista, she could take a vacation and go on a cruise or something.
Fortunately, that doesn’t look like a coffin, so I don’t think we need to worry that she’s been trying to be another Dr. Frankenstein.
No, it doesn’t look like a coffin. It looks like a cabinet.
I foresee absolute terror in the next few days! @_@
well looks like someone hanging but appearances can be deceptive in this comic 🙂
god I thought I was the only one who saw that
Dammit I have to SLEEp now! ALONE! MAn!
I’m so glad I’m not the only one who noticed! Totally looks like someone’s barely hanging from a pulley type dealy.
Ruh-Roh Raggy!
Sorry, I had to say it.
Jinkies!
zoinks!
C’mon, everybody! We have a mystery to solve!
Darn those meddlesome kids!
Who’s bringing the scooby snacks?
OK, I think we should split up gang…Daphne, Velma and I will stay up here and enjoy hot coffee and pastries…Shaggy, you and Scooby go check out the creepy thing on the pulley in the basement…
Tina has real skeletons in her closet
Seeing as Tina is a collection of demons, maybe they aren’t
all suitable for use in a coffee shop.
When she comes to work, she turns on the lights, starts
the coffee machines and warms the pastries, parks demon #5
in the basement and unlocks the door.
Now, there’s a thought.
And things continue to get interesting–I love the juxtaposition of styles.
Am I the only one who remembers that Tina has mentioned that “something” happened in the basement? A weird stain, a fresh floor of concrete…
People were talking about it yesterday
Ah! The weird stain is in the bathroom!
The smell was in the basement.
You know, going forward a bit from there, we can see Pablo has used the gray speak for Nudge before. Interesting!
Well, it really means it’s an individual demon, but not necessarily Nudge. IIRC, Paul was using the gray text for quite a while before we had any idea of Tina’s nature.
AAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!! the suspence!!!!!!! At least it’s not Tina.
Does anyone else think something is a bit off with Tina in the third panel? She doesn’t seem to be looking at Amanda. Amanda seems to have her arms crossed and is looking a bit skeptical. Tina could be a bit dazed still from her encounter from Phix, or I might be reading too much into things, but that seems even more creepy than the basement to me.
Good point. It seems as if she is talking to someone only she can see (or someone out of frame) and not to Amanda, This would explain Amanda’s expression and lack of any response.
Where is Phix?
Why does this … silhouette seem to hang from the ceiling?
Why does she seem to hold a knife?
Is this the real Tina Amanda is talking to?
Why do I feel afraid that SOMEONE is going to face some REAL trouble?
Why don’t I even know who?
Well, Phix transformed into woman, perhaps she can assume the shape of anyone.
Remember that Shelly has a little girl in a ‘basement’ with a pair of scissors she threatened Heather with. Way back in April ’05.
Am I the only person who sees a body hanging from a makeshift noose?
A: Tina, who has empty eyesockets until the rising sun turns them into furnaces, and who dwells in a mostly-empty apartment, and “sleeps” standing up, and is infested by a legion of demons, needs to use the little girls’ room?
Guh uh whuh…
B: Yes, I see a body hanging from a noose. And it’s creepy.
Brr!
Well, with respect to item A, she does drink tea, but I don’t particularly believe it. As I said above, something seems off in panel 3. Her head is tilted wrong to be looking at Amanda. Maybe Tina is still so out of it that she is looking at where Phix’s head used to be, but she comes across much more like a zombie than normal. If she was in the little girl’s room, she might have been hiding in there while she got up the nerve to face the world again. The way Monica yelled, Tina had to be pretty much lying about not hearing them come in.
Amanda didn’t say, “Oh, there you are,” which seems strange, too, given how anxious Monica was to find Tina. Amanda is probably becoming suspicious, because things are obviously going on that she’s not been told about, starting with Tina reading her aura.
Her eye sockets weren’t empty in the Cerberus night club – but I’m not sure Cerberus is in the Normal World.
There’s definitely a makeshift pully system above the shadow…I wonder if Phix just left the coffee shop after her brief conversation with Tina, and really has nothing to do with this thing in the basement?
Wow, This is I think the first time a web comic has officially creeped me out.
it looks like her feet aren’t touching the ground Ewwwwww
I hope all the reader with basements don’t have to make a trip downstairs anytime soon!
Why on earth is Monica doing this? it seems to me like she’s losing it. Freaking out when there’s nothing to freak out over.
OH SHI-
Huh. Vaguely recall in a “Get to Know Yr Barrista” strip Tina did say something about a body in the basement when she bought the shop.
Not specifically, and if the police came, they wouldn’t have left a body down there if that’s what you are thinking.
Not the body, perhaps… BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I’m gonna go against the tide, and declare that the mysterious stranger in the basement is Phix, and that she just wants to speak with Monica in private … perhaps about those mysterious circumstances surrounding Tina’s purchase of the shop … ?
And whoever the shadow-person is (Phix, imho), she seems to be standing with her back to Monica while staring at the far wall with her own night-light eyes.
… curiouser and curiouser …
You’re right, it does look like the back of someone/something standing/hanging there. And if it does have eyelights, that blows my dummy theory. Which I’m glad about, actually.
Nah, ‘course the crime scene woud’ve been cleaned up before the real estate agent slapped a for sale sign up as soon as the crime scene tape came down. But the way things won’t stay dead here, I wouldn’t be surprised if something continued to hang around.
*scrapes fingernails along the table* DaaaaaaAAAAAAAANG IT!!!!!
I don’t comment often (though I could swear I’ve commented before…), but I love this comic and I’m going to go crazy wondering what’s going to happen next.
Now look at it from the other side of the coin…
You’re an unknown entity, messing around in the basement of a coffee shop run by a demon barista. A basement where ‘something’ happened prior to previously mentioned barista taking up residence. You turn around and…
Find a glyph reader with eye-lights all aglow bearing down on you.
Who’s really going to be the one to freak-out?
“If you’re too proud to run, step aside for a man who isn’t!”
Are there two stalls in the Ladies’ Room?
LOL Fairport, I must borrow that to use from time to time….
I swiped it from a “Christmas Carol” parody in First Comics’ old “E-Man” series in the 1980s, so go ahead.
E-Man ROCKS!
The world needs more E-Man references….
Tina’s dead body, why do you think you always see her in the collar.
I don’t know how to take your comment. Paul’s explanation is in this comment.
@Fatuncle: I used the permalink to take him directly to Paul’s comment.
@Fatuncle – But I liked your comment…
I’m in California, on the coast, it’s the middle of a bright sunny day.
Why am I hiding under the BED??
Looks like Jin to me.
And it does look like she is hanging.
The next book is gonna be a doozie…
OMG!!! There are FACES in the wall to the shadow-person’s right!
Oooh! And creepy music is playing . . . somewhere, I’m pretty sure.
I’m not sure which way you mean as “right” since it depends on whether that’s the back or front of someone. Still, I seem to see small skulls at the bottom and near the top of the inside of the cabinet. Of course people always think they see faces and shapes of people or animals (even cartoon characters) in patterns, be they symetrical or random, so it all may be nothing.
He thinks, and I agree, that it looks as if the figure may be illuminating the wall beyond them with their eyelights. If that is true, it would mean that they are facing away from us. There is a pattern in the right hand wall that looks somewhat like two overlapping faces about mid-way up. Having said that, I think he was just being silly this time.
I hate to say it, because I’m one of those people that have just got to speculate, but there are so many different ways this could go that I am just going to sit here with my mouth shut, and wait for tomorrow’s development.
Yes, but be prepared for the possibility that we might zoom back to Dietzel on the phone with the Pizza Girl…and have to wait for resolution until Monday! BWAHHHH HAHAHAHAHA!!
Hush!
I think it’s Tina’s supplies. She’s been feeding her customers ‘long pig’ for all this time and this is her latest ‘special’ waiting to be prepped. That’s why she didn’t want Phix around. She knew Phix, as a reformed mass killer, wouldn’t take it well.
Ok, maybe not..
Maybe it’s really Phix upstairs with Amanda and that’s Tina after Phixie got through with her and she’s the one who’s gone ‘off the wagon’.
Ah, I’m feeling a bit morbid tonight.
Actually I think that’s Tina there as well as with Amanda. I dunno how though. Maybe it’s like the golem girls and those skeletons in Monica’s basement?
Boy, that sure looks like a hangman’s gallows in the background…
OK, good, then it is not just forced perspective screwing with only me again. Nor have my eyes gone to heck yet. It is definitely reassuring that there are other people who see a hanging, lifeless body in the second to final panel. Although, the hanging, lifeless body is not reassuring.
Impressive headlights…figurative or literal?
Remember, the coffee shop used to be some sort of mob connection, Tina was a bosses daughter….
Shelly’s conscience…?