From the you did it and we did it. I think they were working together to accomplish something. From Shelly’s reaction we still don’t know when this was set up. So it looks like more time loop paradox’s ahead, It also is possible more than them are involved as well. We can be more than two.
Thought for you. The ‘we’ could be Tina and friends. After all they have been steering everyone now and then. Especially with Nudge in the group. Tina has always come up with the old fact that just jumps out in the conversation to stir up thinking.
The simplest explanation that covers all known facts so far is that Shelly was the one.
(Occam’s original formulation was “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”, which seems especially appropriate here, because we have all the necessary entities here present right now.)
That’s over 80,000 years long, if you include all of the time in the time loops because the Oedipus legend was from before the loops started. I think the lower bound would have to be whatever time corresponded to Shelly leaving the Forest realm, but that doesn’t tighten things up much.
If Nudge could travel to and from the forest realm, she wouldn’t even need be told anything by Shelly if Phix pr someone else told her what happened. She could just ride time backwards until it was the right time. There would be two or more Nudges on Earth for a while, though.
I don’t know how Shelly and Nudge could communicate if they weren’t both in the same place. Even if the equipment somehow existed, they would perceive everything backwards. Even if they decoded what the other person was saying by imitating people hunting for subliminal satanic messages, they would have had to have given their response before they knew there was anything to respond to.
I’m assuming that Nudge somehow visited the Time Forest. Perhaps the Library has a small annex there, and one way Shelly kept from going totally bonkers was reading all of the world’s great literature.
You are making a big assumption about what accomplishment Nudge is celebrating. The most apparent possibilities would be simply surviving the 80,000 years or being able to return or getting plutonium put into the relic or being turned all of the way into a sphinx. It could be anything else, though, including things we don’t know anything about.
Well, it’s something they both had something to do with, somehow. I’m not so sure Shelly had a clue what Nudge was talking about, though. OTOH, I’m not sure that Shelly would have remembered something they did, even if they worked on it side-by-side. 😕
One thing that seems to undermine the idea that Nudge is celebrating fixing the calendar machine (if that’s what you are thinking) is that she is so exuberant now. She has already known it was fixed, and as part of Tina, has already celebrated it. If she knew it was fixed, how could she worry that Shelly had failed? If she was worried specifically that Shelly might not have been able to return after having told Nudge what to do, why did she give herself any credit? For her to have helped sphinx Shelly afterwards would have meant doing something even earlier by Earth time. 😕
I think it’s a magic blanket. I doubt would have intentionally arranged it around her hips so it wouldn’t fall further down. OTOH, she might have decided topless was OK while she was gone.
I’ll bet Shelly has just been dying to take a nice long hot bath all ther time she’s been back. Now doubly so. Perhaps a sandpaper scrub to her left cheek.
Maybe it’s like a cats tongue, and took off a layer of grime.
(Was gonna say something about an all-over mamma kitty bath, but the mental image pushed into adults only teritory, so don’t think about that….)
I don’t think Shelly would survive. She said that she would still age and die like a human. She made it sound as if she were only invulnerable in the tree realm.
I thought she was on all fours, either like this or (more likely) in the sitting position for a dog. But that looked like a kitchen, so she must have moved. Shelly obviously didn’t move toward her.
My only concern from that is that Nudge might get *bonked* throgh the floor and basement… considering Shell’s non-Sphinx strength… So you can imagine how high her strength is in Sphinx form…
For some reason, I’m still waiting for Shelly to ‘burst’ over the sheer ‘horror’ of this recent experience (80k years of life in a second, and now she’s supposed to return to normal-Wapsi-world?), and yet everyone ‘but’ Shelly seems to be having a major reaction, positive or negative (well, sans Bud, but lately Bud’s pretty level-headed compared to the rest).
Still, admit to loving the concept that Nudge, despite all her plotting and trickery, is 100% impulse driven. Between Shelinx, CG/Connie, and Nudge, Tina has to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown now off-panel.
I’m thinking Tina’s demons got past their issues with Nudge, despite the way this looks. She’s already read pretty much what happened from Shelly’s aura and she’s already reacted to that. I’m not expecting her to be any worse than she was when Monica started to react.
Shelley had some time to mature in that 80k years, she’s probably able to recover pretty quickly from things like that now. She’s also been aware this moment was coming for awhile now.
I feel kind of sad, the old Shelley is gone, replaced by this 80,000 year old woman that used to be her, ages ago.
Are you the same person you were 15, 20, or 30 years years ago?
Our Shelly now has a more mature voice, but still overtones the old Shelly. http://wapsisquare.com/comic/just-do-it/
But I think we’ll get plenty of the old Shelly from Connie.
The old Shelly turned up a couple of notches, even
And don’t forget that CG can now step outside Shelly and actually interact with others. So even if Shelly doesn’t do something, CG might do it and it would still matter.
Personally, I doubt that we will see much of a change with Shelly. She will still have trouble fitting in. Tina didn’t change much when she lost Nudge, either.
Shelly had a real problem with talking about her feelings in an honest way in the past. It’s a basic character-trait. I guess something like that won’t change, even if there are 81000years behind it.
What she could have learned is some of the “reastraint” that she admired so much in Bud.
We can only hope that she doesn’t let her fears dictate her behaviour anylonger. Heck ,she’s almost literally been “to Hell and Back” Been “incarcerated” for aeons, saw herself die multiple times… How bad can things seem after that?
I surmise that her break-down will come in a while, in bits&pieces. Currently she is in M’s kitchen where things must seem like a whirlwind for her after aeons of relative solitude, and has had no real time to let it all sink in.
She’s basically still running on adrenaline me thinks ,and Nudge rambuctious behaviour (adoring as it is) is not exactly helping.
I think after some time to settle in, she’ll start to get her human feelings back… and then the issues will show up. But not right now.
Remember – she had forgotten her human life, and is still remembering stuff. She had to even remember Monica for crying out loud. She knows Nudge, CG, and Phix cause they were all with her.
She probably remembered Monica easily since she probably went to the forest at one point (notice her flip out about the plutonium, specifically with Monica. Or she could just deduce she died tons, lets not let Monica die.)
Still wondering why Monica wasn’t teleported, but Shelly was….
But yeah… I totally expect as she gets in touch with her real humanity again, she’ll get those angry feelings and ones of remorse. Honestly how fucked up (sorry for cursing) is it that you think your doing this five second thing of checking something out – a quick reconnaissance even by using this relic you didn’t expect to work, and are then literally TRAPPED in HELL (essentially) – seeing yourself die from a horrible, painful, gruesome death multiple times. Wonder if she was able to see the current timelines via Phix/Nudge/CG like a lil window while trapped… God knows what tricks she probably discovered or was taught…
Poor Shelly. Let’s see what focused Shelly here does next. Real curious. 🙂
Well, if she could poit, the answer would be obvious. If she can’t — I have this mental picture of Nudge unscrewing her horns, pulling on her clothing, screwing her horns back on …
Bud could easily poit to either her place or Shelly’s and grab something and poit back. I doubt Monica would be as likely to do it. BTW, Shelly needs more than a t-shirt, although I suppose a long one would be better than nothing.
Does Bud know where Shelly lives? Shelly can’t do it unless her dad isn’t home, or she’d have to explain the rapid hair growth. (Hope she keeps the hair.) And in answer to your other comment, yes, ‘poor woman’ was in reference to Shelly. I assume anyway that Nudge has fur.
She’s overwhelmed and may not even remember where she lived. I think everyone would prefer that she stays at Monica’s home until they are sure she would be OK by herself.
Beyond that, Shelly is a human/sphinx hybrid but we don’t know whether or not Phix is. Perhaps she can’t do everything that Phix can do. Other sphinxes apparently could point in and out of the forest realm, but Shelly couldn’t do that. Even if Shelly could have poited to other locations within the realm, she may not have learned how to do it if there would have been no advantage to it.
…or perhaps, so long as she stayed in the Time Forest, she wasn’t creating a doppelganger situation?
(Yes, i know that for something like 1,425 years of each cycle there wasn’t a Shelly in the Real World, but perhaps there was some other form of the Doppelganger Paradox?)
Eww? ewwww??? Whaddayamean ” ewww? Why is everybody so grossed-out? You don’t have pets? It’s just wat dogs do if they are fond of You.
I think it’s adorable. Makes me love Nudge even more. But hey, I grew up on a farm, maybe i am not as easily yucked-out as You city-folk… I wonder. If I throw a tennisball..would she be able to resist the urge to run after it? (Not indoors, mind You, 9 feet of happily bouncing Nudge could be ehrm..rather destructive..):lol:
People that haven’t been raised or lived on farms are different than those who have. Some lucky people can overcome that fact but most simply cannot deal with critters. 😉
Way back when, before regular standing armies, they had to go around and round up men to form one as needed. They would usually go to the farms first. Two reasons. One, most people were engaged in agriculture and livestock. Two, it was not as big a leap for them to go from routinely slaughtering animals to slaughtering people as it was for city folk.
Also, on farms they tended to have sharp objects like scythes and pruning hooks, which (in early days) were rather similar to bill hooks and spears–so the training time and accident rates were cut down.
I’m with Jay on this, I’ve always had pets so a lick isn’t that gross a deal.
I had a cat that would sit on the back of my couch and groom my hair. I was never sure if it was a compliment or a nudge towards the shower.
My mom has a cat that grooms her short-cut hair on her temples all night while she sleeps. She tells me it’s both adorable and painful…. I’ll add that it looks helluva funny in the morning, a patch of her hair licked all poofy 😀
I’m curious about the texture of Nudge’s tongue… is it rough like a cat’s, or soft and gooey like dog’s… or, indeed like a cow’s like suggested above. A cat-like lick would be no big deal for Shellinx -for obvious reasons.
Try an Irish Wolfhound. My aunt had one. It’s head was bigger than mine. Standing with his paws on my shoulder, he was 6ft 2″ Aaaand it was at least as rambuctious as Nudge.
Their hair is not nice to pet though, it feels like coarse steelwool..
Wellll..My ex- had a habit of doing “The Nudge” to me.. I wasn’t complaining… And to think that I am not one of the most ardent shavers.. hmm..come to think of it.. maybe that was part of the fun??? :ponder:
well a lovesick doggy is one thing, (they dont have a care in the world, just think about food, the other sexy dogs about, and their loving master…) but when they ‘seem to’ have the brain of an intentionally mischievous 10 yr kid *as well* as that.. you can see why Phix treats her like that… 😮
“Oh Dear” is a rather..ehh.. “demure”reaction for Shell. “Aw Crap” was more her thing….. She sounds rather old that way… I guess that 81000 years of relative solitude will do that.
It did improve Shelly’s bad habit to “explode” at the tiniest aggrivation
She has a dark complexion. I see her as some sort of dark rust color. Veriegated towards the tips where the fur would be more of a dull red. Not unlike a red fox, but deeper and darker coloration.
The markings on her face look more like tattoos than natural markings, so they could be any color.
It might help to leaf through some color comics of various sorts to see what you might find for inspiration.
Cool idea! Gives it a more odd-ball-super-natural feel.. I think I’ll go for that.
Currently I only have a skeleton measured-out, wired and posed. I am aiming for something in-between the comic and “real-life”.
Paul intentionally uses skewed proportions. It makes it hard for a classically trained(=indoctrinated) dabbler like me, to get those proportions right. Hands and head are huuuge. Makes for a lot of possibilities in the characterization -and expression-department though.
In the comments to the November 10, 2010 strip, I mention some artwork of Nudge that Paul was auctioning off at the time. I can’t find any other mention of it, though. IIRC, it was black and white anyway.
BTW, in the library, Nudge’s face had the same texture as the rest of her. Starting this January, she’s had splotches on her face, rather like something else that behaved in a dog-like manner. 😀
For some reason, i see her as a light-ish purple with white stripes/highlights in demon-form, and as a human form, her skin color would be similar to Halle Berry, or Jada Pinket-Smith.
but hey, why don’t we just do the obvious and ask Paul?
Oh….that.. Never understood that. Two words: Rain & Fleas.
nuff’ said…
(Although, to be brutally honest with myself, I always had a thing for girls with that almost ethereal blonde fuzz on their bodies……..ugh..what the hell does that say about me.. 😯 )
She might need to get a ladder, unless she can float even when she’s outside of Shelly. Or maybe, as other people suggested, she has a sphinx form, too. 😀
Or she jumps on Nudge’s back happily yelling: ” Do horsie ,auntie Nudge, Do horsie!!” (Like my niece when she was little..) Nudge seems playful enough to indulge kids with that.
😛
Actually, I don’t know what the heck is going on. http://wapsisquare.com/feed/ looks OK. Google seems to be having a problem with it, but the RSS feed works OK elsewhere. 😕
lets say she could leave the forest for short period of times . in this loop before it unreset back into the previus one she left found nudge without any one else noticeing then told her to lead her on the spirit quest and then go get tina from the and bring her to the city with the key
theres at least some chance that if jin hadnt been distracted that day she may have been able to save both Monica and tina but would that tina have ever moved to the city would hse have been helpful to the gang or even held on to the key to give em
She wouldn’t necessarily have to have been able to leave herself – if she was behind Nudge’s interference in her vision quest – which i’m fairly sure is going to be an upcoming revelation – then she was able to communicate with Nudge … so Nudge coulkd have been her messenger/surrogate in the Real World all along. Which Nudge, being a trickster, would likely have enjoyed immensely.
Of course, if she was the mastermind, then we’re gonna have to revise our assessments/opinion of Shelly’s intelligence.
OK, but why would the Jin’s “rogue queen” demon credit Brandi? Why did Brandi’s book say that Brandi arranged part of it? If Brandi’s book was forged, why were both Brandi and Bud convinced that Brandi wrote it? How do you get around the bootstrap paradox? Why would Shelly have told Nudge to do those things since Shelly thought Nudge was following a previous Brandi’s instructions?
A bootstrap paradox is not necessarily a paradox if you allow that time travellers can alter the past.
All it takes is one alteration and then the loop establishes itself. A standing wave.
It’s like a frequency divider circuit i studied in Navy Electronics A School. It takes a frequency (say 5MHz) created by the Master Oscillator, and feeds it through a mixer circuit where it’s mixed with a 4MHz frequency.
Mixing those two frequencies yields outputs of 4MHz, 5MHz, 1MHz and 9MHz. Run it through a sharp-cutoff low-pass filter, and you come out with 1MHz.
Now we run that through a frequency quadrupler, which yields an output of 4MHZ.
And we run that back into the mixer to mix with the 5MHz, and…
That sounds like a paradox … but it works.
It’s a paradox when you do something like Heinlein did in “…all you zombies…”, and make the existence of the narrator its own precondition.
Still, drooling Tina, catatonic, makes for a great visual gag.. :LOL:
It’s also possible she’s in the back, starting to blow steam from her ears, while watching Nudge..
Maybe I’m the only one but I feel like I’ve missed out on a big chunk of something, I’m out of the loop, or I’m not putting 1 and 1 together because I’m very confused as to what has happened.
Well, that’s the appeal of Wapsi Square, isn’t it? I don’t consider myself a dummy (but then who does?) and trying to figure out where the story is going is fun and frustrating and wonderful when the plot line reveals itself.
I guess it’s Nudge turn to explain stuff, possibly with the help of Phix.
There is no more time-line to muck-up. So even Phix can spout all that she knows.
It looks like paul is going for “explanation-week’ to get all the speculation out of the way, establish canon, and will go from there.
“Fresh start’ so to speak. On to fixing Jin (if even possible)
I suddenly thought of something: Wouldn’t it be great if we got a “Bud and Maya in the demon-realm” story?
A magician and an almost indestructable Golem up against a world filled with demons…
I’m insanely curious about what happened to Bud and Maya. But I’m fine with the story staying the way it is, too. Sometimes you just never know what happens off screen.
I’m going to say a lot of running. and running. and running. maybe some sleep, then running some more. Thinking about it, Bud was probably by herself until the last second. Since she used the portal cloth to get out, she found Maya, grabbed her, and shoved her through. Then of course ripped the ink out of Shelly…I’m guessing the scarring is gone…
I don’t know if it is intentional, but Shelly sure has some wicked-looking teeth in the third panel. That’s the first time that they have seemed to be different, though.
Actually, I’m pretty sure those’re her gums…her teeth are clenched tight (you can see a bit of the gap), and her face is being pulled up so far that you can see most of her jaw inside of her cheek. So that’s not pointy-teeth, that’s just normal-teeth, with her face getting one heckuva stretching. ^_^
You know something? I think I’m actually starting to piece this together.
Look at this as a FPS-like video game. We already know Jin’s been in one long Myst-like situation, trying to get the calendar machine fixed. At some point, Shelly may have realized that in one of the “next” iterations, she had to go into the woods on her vision quest at the same time Monica “died”, so that she would be ready when the time came to visit the time forest. To do so, she needed Nudge to “encourage” her next iteration to go on that quest.
I know, it doesn’t make sense, but then again, trying to get through Super Mario Brothers doesn’t make much sense, either (Thank you, Mario, but our queen is in another castle!).
Why assume that there is anything like that to figure out? For one thing, it’s a lot easier if you don’t. We’ve been told that Brandi figured that out in a previous loop and her “dabbling” is responsible for what happened to Shelly on her vision quest. If you assume that’s correct, you don’t need to worry so much about what Shelly did and when she did it and time going backwards and stuff like that. 🙂
If you are really want to worry about Shelly and time loop stuff, why not worry about how the last Shelly to arrive managed to arrive carrying a relic. Also, if the relic wasn’t returned, how did the previous Shelly manage to arrive? There are plenty of things like that to worry about without adding more. 🙂
I’m getting tired and I think I’ll put this down rather than waiting for an update.
Reasons for thinking Stinky = Nudge despite how crazy it might seem (some better than others):
1) Nudge took credit for helping complete Shelly’s mission. We never saw Nudge help at all, but they wouldn’t have found the relic on the sunken Nazi sub without Stinky, so that was a huge help.
2) In a previous time loop Brandi somehow told Nudge what to do. We never saw Brandi meet Nudge, but she really liked Stinky, so they probably spent a lot of time together.
3) Starting in Janurary, Nudge’s face started being covered with spotches that were similar to the ones on Stinky.
4) The markings above and below Nudge’s eyes could very roughly correspond to they way Stinky’s eyes are somewhat separated from Stinky’s face, particularly here.
5) Stinky’s fin very roughly corresponds to Nudge’s horns. Real octopods don’t have such a thing. We know Nudge can shape shift, but “actually, that’s not one of my storng points” (January 20, 2011), so Nudge is likely to make a mistake or two. OTOH, if Paul got the sub right, he probably wouldn’t have missed that. It would have had to have been a design choice.
6) It is not unusual for a trickster to impersonate a different animal.
7) Both Nudge and Stinky have similar personalities and tend to act like a dog.
hahahahaha shes like a giant puppy hahahahah
and yeah they were working togeather somehow
I does look like Shellinx put Nudge up to coaxing her (Shell) on her vision quest.
From the you did it and we did it. I think they were working together to accomplish something. From Shelly’s reaction we still don’t know when this was set up. So it looks like more time loop paradox’s ahead, It also is possible more than them are involved as well. We can be more than two.
Yes, Nudge helped, but she was told to!
Umm — told by Jin? By Brandi?
Thought for you. The ‘we’ could be Tina and friends. After all they have been steering everyone now and then. Especially with Nudge in the group. Tina has always come up with the old fact that just jumps out in the conversation to stir up thinking.
Still say it was Shelly herself.
Occam’s Razor, i think.
The simplest explanation that covers all known facts so far is that Shelly was the one.
(Occam’s original formulation was “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”, which seems especially appropriate here, because we have all the necessary entities here present right now.)
Sure, it makes sense…but when?
Well, before she was fourteen in this loop, so that sets an upper bound…
And after Nudge escaped from the Library, whenever that was, so that sets a lower one…
That’s over 80,000 years long, if you include all of the time in the time loops because the Oedipus legend was from before the loops started. I think the lower bound would have to be whatever time corresponded to Shelly leaving the Forest realm, but that doesn’t tighten things up much.
If Nudge could travel to and from the forest realm, she wouldn’t even need be told anything by Shelly if Phix pr someone else told her what happened. She could just ride time backwards until it was the right time. There would be two or more Nudges on Earth for a while, though.
I don’t know how Shelly and Nudge could communicate if they weren’t both in the same place. Even if the equipment somehow existed, they would perceive everything backwards. Even if they decoded what the other person was saying by imitating people hunting for subliminal satanic messages, they would have had to have given their response before they knew there was anything to respond to.
I’m assuming that Nudge somehow visited the Time Forest. Perhaps the Library has a small annex there, and one way Shelly kept from going totally bonkers was reading all of the world’s great literature.
Or maybe all ot the world’s great trash novels.
You are making a big assumption about what accomplishment Nudge is celebrating. The most apparent possibilities would be simply surviving the 80,000 years or being able to return or getting plutonium put into the relic or being turned all of the way into a sphinx. It could be anything else, though, including things we don’t know anything about.
It’s something they did jointly.
Well, it’s something they both had something to do with, somehow. I’m not so sure Shelly had a clue what Nudge was talking about, though. OTOH, I’m not sure that Shelly would have remembered something they did, even if they worked on it side-by-side. 😕
One thing that seems to undermine the idea that Nudge is celebrating fixing the calendar machine (if that’s what you are thinking) is that she is so exuberant now. She has already known it was fixed, and as part of Tina, has already celebrated it. If she knew it was fixed, how could she worry that Shelly had failed? If she was worried specifically that Shelly might not have been able to return after having told Nudge what to do, why did she give herself any credit? For her to have helped sphinx Shelly afterwards would have meant doing something even earlier by Earth time. 😕
Weeee! Yousa! Woo-hoo!!
If Shelly’s not careful, not only will she be topless, but her blanket will be on the floor in a moment.
I think it’s a magic blanket. I doubt would have intentionally arranged it around her hips so it wouldn’t fall further down. OTOH, she might have decided topless was OK while she was gone.
OK so now we know..that Nudge is part dog?!?
Well, she is Coyote…
Breed = Shellinx Retreiver?
Phbbbbbbttttt! That works/fails on so many levels…
Coins in the Pun Jar please —
Stinky! How did you learn how to type?
Nudge has got tongue! (schlurrrp!)
I’ll bet Shelly has just been dying to take a nice long hot bath all ther time she’s been back. Now doubly so. Perhaps a sandpaper scrub to her left cheek.
Maybe it’s like a cats tongue, and took off a layer of grime.
(Was gonna say something about an all-over mamma kitty bath, but the mental image pushed into adults only teritory, so don’t think about that….)
Eh, Monica’s is bigger.
Longer, but not bigger.
*blinks*
Bad dog! Down. DOWN! Alright who has a newspaper?
Phix may poit in with a rolled up one any moment.
Too late. Wapsi Square has offically gone furry.
Oh no! No, no, no, no! Where’s that relic? This has to be corrected!
Nudge is all Demi-goddy. I doubt the plutonium could do much to her. Only Nudge and Bud would survive… And Bud is also sometimes furry.
At this point, Shelly would survive, too.
*giggles*
she might survive it but would it make her fur fall out 😀
I don’t think Shelly would survive. She said that she would still age and die like a human. She made it sound as if she were only invulnerable in the tree realm.
here doggy! fetch the frisbee!!! 🙂 🙂
Nudge kisses!
Relief, but still a cliffhanger…
Yep. I guess this week will be spent finding out about the collaboration.
I absolutely love this. Nudge for the thermonuclear win! 😀
2nded
Eww?
I guess Monica does have those 10 foot ceilings…
We had some change in camera angle.
I think maybe Nudge is down on her knees rather than snatching Shelly up to her level.
But Nudge was standing up when she appeared.
We still don’t know who was responsible for her poit.
She looked like of hunched over…
I thought she was on all fours, either like this or (more likely) in the sitting position for a dog. But that looked like a kitchen, so she must have moved. Shelly obviously didn’t move toward her.
I think Phix sent her…Paul mentioned something about it being like a mom dropping off her kid at the mall…
I fell like I have missed something. Oh wait, I’m reading …
never mind
I think Shelly/Shellinx is starting to show her fangs unintentionally… last panel.
gums
Ewwwwww! Cannot unsee!! Teach this critter the cheek peck stat!
From the back-peddling going on in the first panel, it may not be the first time either.
Probably not. Time to transmute into sphinx form so Shelly can give Nudge a good old sphinx kabonkadonk!
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/trickster/
I still love the horseshoe in that one.
My only concern from that is that Nudge might get *bonked* throgh the floor and basement… considering Shell’s non-Sphinx strength… So you can imagine how high her strength is in Sphinx form…
ewww
That was my first thought too.
For some reason, I’m still waiting for Shelly to ‘burst’ over the sheer ‘horror’ of this recent experience (80k years of life in a second, and now she’s supposed to return to normal-Wapsi-world?), and yet everyone ‘but’ Shelly seems to be having a major reaction, positive or negative (well, sans Bud, but lately Bud’s pretty level-headed compared to the rest).
Still, admit to loving the concept that Nudge, despite all her plotting and trickery, is 100% impulse driven. Between Shelinx, CG/Connie, and Nudge, Tina has to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown now off-panel.
Tina’s probably busying herself mopping up the pee puddle.
Yeah, I’m imagining Tina about how Katherine was when Monica first took her to the library right about now.
I’m thinking Tina’s demons got past their issues with Nudge, despite the way this looks. She’s already read pretty much what happened from Shelly’s aura and she’s already reacted to that. I’m not expecting her to be any worse than she was when Monica started to react.
Shelley had some time to mature in that 80k years, she’s probably able to recover pretty quickly from things like that now. She’s also been aware this moment was coming for awhile now.
I feel kind of sad, the old Shelley is gone, replaced by this 80,000 year old woman that used to be her, ages ago.
Are you the same person you were 15, 20, or 30 years years ago?
Yeah, that’s been my fear with this little sub-arc, loosing the established Shelly and in-turn getting another May.
But, if anyone’s thickheaded enough ‘not’ to mature over 80,000 years, it’s Shelly.
Our Shelly now has a more mature voice, but still overtones the old Shelly.
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/just-do-it/
But I think we’ll get plenty of the old Shelly from Connie.
The old Shelly turned up a couple of notches, even
And don’t forget that CG can now step outside Shelly and actually interact with others. So even if Shelly doesn’t do something, CG might do it and it would still matter.
Personally, I doubt that we will see much of a change with Shelly. She will still have trouble fitting in. Tina didn’t change much when she lost Nudge, either.
Shelly had a real problem with talking about her feelings in an honest way in the past. It’s a basic character-trait. I guess something like that won’t change, even if there are 81000years behind it.
What she could have learned is some of the “reastraint” that she admired so much in Bud.
We can only hope that she doesn’t let her fears dictate her behaviour anylonger. Heck ,she’s almost literally been “to Hell and Back” Been “incarcerated” for aeons, saw herself die multiple times… How bad can things seem after that?
I surmise that her break-down will come in a while, in bits&pieces. Currently she is in M’s kitchen where things must seem like a whirlwind for her after aeons of relative solitude, and has had no real time to let it all sink in.
She’s basically still running on adrenaline me thinks ,and Nudge rambuctious behaviour (adoring as it is) is not exactly helping.
Jus’ mah E0.02
I think after some time to settle in, she’ll start to get her human feelings back… and then the issues will show up. But not right now.
Remember – she had forgotten her human life, and is still remembering stuff. She had to even remember Monica for crying out loud. She knows Nudge, CG, and Phix cause they were all with her.
She probably remembered Monica easily since she probably went to the forest at one point (notice her flip out about the plutonium, specifically with Monica. Or she could just deduce she died tons, lets not let Monica die.)
Still wondering why Monica wasn’t teleported, but Shelly was….
But yeah… I totally expect as she gets in touch with her real humanity again, she’ll get those angry feelings and ones of remorse. Honestly how fucked up (sorry for cursing) is it that you think your doing this five second thing of checking something out – a quick reconnaissance even by using this relic you didn’t expect to work, and are then literally TRAPPED in HELL (essentially) – seeing yourself die from a horrible, painful, gruesome death multiple times. Wonder if she was able to see the current timelines via Phix/Nudge/CG like a lil window while trapped… God knows what tricks she probably discovered or was taught…
Poor Shelly. Let’s see what focused Shelly here does next. Real curious. 🙂
*trapped in hell for twenty THOUSAND years. That’s like… 267 lifetimes, assuming you life to 75. >_<
*live
Sorry bonkering everywhere today. -_-
UGH! SORRY! Recalculate and add/multiple for eighty thousand years instead of twenty. ><;
Here now, here now *hands over latte* I got days like that..
Did What!?
Got Shelly safely through her 80,000-year-plus pupation.
I can’t wait to see how this unfolds.
My burning question at this point: when are they going to get that poor woman some clothes?
I doubt anything in Monica’s closet would fit.
Maybe not fit, but one of her old stretched-out tees might at least cover her.
Then again, nobody bought CG any clothes, but she has ’em anyway.
How the hell would Nudge get a T on over those horns?
Well, if she could poit, the answer would be obvious. If she can’t — I have this mental picture of Nudge unscrewing her horns, pulling on her clothing, screwing her horns back on …
Seriously, she can size shift. Think about it.
…and shape shift.
Which reminds me: Trivia time.
1) What animal has horns and sheds them every year (like antlers)?
2) What animal has antlers that it does not shed (as if they were horns)?
Didn’t “poor woman” mean Shelly rather than Nudge?
1) The Pronghorn sheds its horn sheaths annually.
2) Some Tropical deer never shed their antlers.
Bonus: the only group in which the females typically grow antlers is caribou (including reindeer).
Actually, for the antlers, i was thinking of the giraffe.
I thought giraffes had, sort of, horns…
Actually, giraffes have ossicones, which are neither. But they are similar to horns.
well she looks about bud’s size…
bud fit into monica 8 ball tshirt once if i recall correctly.
it looked very short on her but it DID fit 🙂
Short implies height so I’m not sure if that is the right word 😉
Bud could easily poit to either her place or Shelly’s and grab something and poit back. I doubt Monica would be as likely to do it. BTW, Shelly needs more than a t-shirt, although I suppose a long one would be better than nothing.
Does Bud know where Shelly lives? Shelly can’t do it unless her dad isn’t home, or she’d have to explain the rapid hair growth. (Hope she keeps the hair.) And in answer to your other comment, yes, ‘poor woman’ was in reference to Shelly. I assume anyway that Nudge has fur.
Shelly has her own place. Bud has been there before.
Dad won’t be a problem .He’d only say :”A weave??? Then why did You ever cut it and gave me a heart-attack?”
Shelly holding her composure, seeing Daddy after 81000 years would be a bigger problem..
So far we haven’t seen a sphinx unable to poit, so why couldn’t Shellinx?
She’s overwhelmed and may not even remember where she lived. I think everyone would prefer that she stays at Monica’s home until they are sure she would be OK by herself.
Beyond that, Shelly is a human/sphinx hybrid but we don’t know whether or not Phix is. Perhaps she can’t do everything that Phix can do. Other sphinxes apparently could point in and out of the forest realm, but Shelly couldn’t do that. Even if Shelly could have poited to other locations within the realm, she may not have learned how to do it if there would have been no advantage to it.
…or perhaps, so long as she stayed in the Time Forest, she wasn’t creating a doppelganger situation?
(Yes, i know that for something like 1,425 years of each cycle there wasn’t a Shelly in the Real World, but perhaps there was some other form of the Doppelganger Paradox?)
Down! Sit! Stay!
Ya know, Deitzel can only see this as a challenge….
Eww? ewwww??? Whaddayamean ” ewww? Why is everybody so grossed-out? You don’t have pets? It’s just wat dogs do if they are fond of You.
I think it’s adorable. Makes me love Nudge even more. But hey, I grew up on a farm, maybe i am not as easily yucked-out as You city-folk… I wonder. If I throw a tennisball..would she be able to resist the urge to run after it? (Not indoors, mind You, 9 feet of happily bouncing Nudge could be ehrm..rather destructive..):lol:
And the horseshoes would be bad on the – ya know, I can’t think of ANY kind of floor they wouldn’t be bad on. ‘Cept dirt.
Sawdust used to be popular.
Did you let your cows lick you on the cheek? That would be about what one from Nudge would be like, I would imagine.
Yes, and the calfs would suckle Your fingers if You stuck them in their mouths. soo adorable.. (great way to give them pulped medicine against worms.)
People that haven’t been raised or lived on farms are different than those who have. Some lucky people can overcome that fact but most simply cannot deal with critters. 😉
Way back when, before regular standing armies, they had to go around and round up men to form one as needed. They would usually go to the farms first. Two reasons. One, most people were engaged in agriculture and livestock. Two, it was not as big a leap for them to go from routinely slaughtering animals to slaughtering people as it was for city folk.
Also, on farms they tended to have sharp objects like scythes and pruning hooks, which (in early days) were rather similar to bill hooks and spears–so the training time and accident rates were cut down.
I’m with Jay on this, I’ve always had pets so a lick isn’t that gross a deal.
I had a cat that would sit on the back of my couch and groom my hair. I was never sure if it was a compliment or a nudge towards the shower.
My mom has a cat that grooms her short-cut hair on her temples all night while she sleeps. She tells me it’s both adorable and painful…. I’ll add that it looks helluva funny in the morning, a patch of her hair licked all poofy 😀
I’m curious about the texture of Nudge’s tongue… is it rough like a cat’s, or soft and gooey like dog’s… or, indeed like a cow’s like suggested above. A cat-like lick would be no big deal for Shellinx -for obvious reasons.
But with a tongue that size it’s hard to be precise with your aim. The look on shelly’s face in that last panel says wet willy to me.
Hm. Hm. Agreed.
My Labrador is huge, but still not bigger than me…
Try an Irish Wolfhound. My aunt had one. It’s head was bigger than mine. Standing with his paws on my shoulder, he was 6ft 2″ Aaaand it was at least as rambuctious as Nudge.
Their hair is not nice to pet though, it feels like coarse steelwool..
Nudge is not a pet, not a dog, not a farm animal. Therefore, Ewwwwww.
Wellll..My ex- had a habit of doing “The Nudge” to me.. I wasn’t complaining… And to think that I am not one of the most ardent shavers.. hmm..come to think of it.. maybe that was part of the fun??? :ponder:
Let’s not forget that Shelly has used that maneuver herself…
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/wake-up/
Ooh.. heh 😛 Forgot about that. Shellinx looks as if she’s smiling though, so, I guess she’s used to it, but not neccesarily a great fan of it..
That’s not a smile. That’s clenched teeth.
Exactly, Fat Uncle. I think that’s a large part of the ewww factor for me. Things in my past just add to it.
That is the most adorable thing ever! XD
Though having a demon lick you like a puppy might be a little terrifying?
Nudge is a demi-God, so, a little less scary than a demon.
Though, a tongue that size could be a bit unnerving….. 😛
well a lovesick doggy is one thing, (they dont have a care in the world, just think about food, the other sexy dogs about, and their loving master…) but when they ‘seem to’ have the brain of an intentionally mischievous 10 yr kid *as well* as that.. you can see why Phix treats her like that… 😮
Ooooh, dear.. I would soooo want to kill someone in that situation.
This entire time my only thought has been “Shelly is still naked…”
*flicks switch*
there you go. now you can go on the other track.
it was jammed.
😆 😆
With that blanket half-preserving her modesty Shelly looks like a classical statue of a goddess. Only with arms. Very big arms.
Yeah, I got the Greek statue vibe from that too…
Ditto. Paul obviously knows his classics. He did a Venus de Milo here.. at least Shell has arms 😆
The Shelly de Pablo?
Sort of want?
Damn, you just reminded me… I haven’t read Lackadaisy for ages now.
“Oh Dear” is a rather..ehh.. “demure”reaction for Shell. “Aw Crap” was more her thing….. She sounds rather old that way… I guess that 81000 years of relative solitude will do that.
It did improve Shelly’s bad habit to “explode” at the tiniest aggrivation
I mentioned it earlier, but I think we’ll get the old Shelly voice from Connie…
Sometimes profanity … or even profanity plus obscenity … just isn’t enough.
It’s kind of like a flat, uninflected “what” when something is just too big to truly comprehend at first glance…
Oh, yeah, pretty important: I started the Nudge statuette.
What colour is Nudge???? Goat-white? Coyote beige/brown? And her eyes?
What do You think?
I had a lot of trouble with her color scheme until the Coyote revelation. I’ve been leaning towards the coyote colors since then.
She has a dark complexion. I see her as some sort of dark rust color. Veriegated towards the tips where the fur would be more of a dull red. Not unlike a red fox, but deeper and darker coloration.
The markings on her face look more like tattoos than natural markings, so they could be any color.
It might help to leaf through some color comics of various sorts to see what you might find for inspiration.
Oh, and you could give her two different color eyes. Sort of like this:
http://tinyurl.com/3hna8sl
I don’t know why but I always imagine her with two different sized irises…
Cool idea! Gives it a more odd-ball-super-natural feel.. I think I’ll go for that.
Currently I only have a skeleton measured-out, wired and posed. I am aiming for something in-between the comic and “real-life”.
Paul intentionally uses skewed proportions. It makes it hard for a classically trained(=indoctrinated) dabbler like me, to get those proportions right. Hands and head are huuuge. Makes for a lot of possibilities in the characterization -and expression-department though.
What I like about the markings on her face is that it’s echoed in Tina’s make-up when they would go out dancing…
Yep. I always wondered what the hell that was all about.
Although this has some of Tina mixed in, it indicates that the markings are light colored. I would think white, but I don’t really know.
In the comments to the November 10, 2010 strip, I mention some artwork of Nudge that Paul was auctioning off at the time. I can’t find any other mention of it, though. IIRC, it was black and white anyway.
And You know what?? She mentions “Dog’ here.. explains her unrestrained licking of Shelly’s face rather nicely.
Go back and look at the arc where Phix punches Nudge out of Tina. Her body language, especially when she’s happy is very canine…
Right. I looked this up to say the same thing elsewhere, but I can’t find that post now. Oh, well.
BTW, in the library, Nudge’s face had the same texture as the rest of her. Starting this January, she’s had splotches on her face, rather like something else that behaved in a dog-like manner. 😀
For some reason, i see her as a light-ish purple with white stripes/highlights in demon-form, and as a human form, her skin color would be similar to Halle Berry, or Jada Pinket-Smith.
but hey, why don’t we just do the obvious and ask Paul?
Because he’s unlikely to answer. Someday we may be presented with a color rendition of Nudge from Paul, but until then I doubt he will say.
Oh, good. A new fetish.
❓
Furry?
Oh….that.. Never understood that. Two words: Rain & Fleas.
nuff’ said…
(Although, to be brutally honest with myself, I always had a thing for girls with that almost ethereal blonde fuzz on their bodies……..ugh..what the hell does that say about me.. 😯 )
That you’ve always had a thing for girls with that almost ethereal blonde fuzz on their bodies. So?
I, indeed, hope that’s about it. Those guys into “furries” *Cough-Twokinds-cough* creep me out for a bit.
“Fuzzy Blond Etherials”…isn’t that a grunge band out of Seattle?
It means that girls should stay away from you if they see you carrying a bottle of glue, a bag of light yellow fibers or hair and and an electric fan?
Well, she was in coyote form the “first” time they met…
so cute 🙂
i presume Shellys next words would have been ‘i was just explaining everything to everyone’
monica flipped over creepy (aka clg aka shellymental aka connie) what will she do over this?
Well, she’s met Nudge before…
And Nudge trusts Monica. Something M appreciated very much.
Tomorrow: Connie delivers (physical) smack on nose and “What the hell was that?!?” rant to Nudge.
As smart-ass as Connie is, she may laugh at Shelly.
She might need to get a ladder, unless she can float even when she’s outside of Shelly. Or maybe, as other people suggested, she has a sphinx form, too. 😀
Or she jumps on Nudge’s back happily yelling: ” Do horsie ,auntie Nudge, Do horsie!!” (Like my niece when she was little..) Nudge seems playful enough to indulge kids with that.
😛
Or Nudge just about drowns Creepy Girl by giving her a giant lick.
Eeewwww^2
Nudge hug! Nudge kiss! Scratch behind her ears and see if we can get a Nudge tail thump!
Oooh yess isn’t this a good Nudge? Yes..isn’t she.. A booo boo..
*scratch scratch…right-rear-leg starts thumping together with tail..*
I have no problem whatsoever with imagining that….
Someone needs to rub her belly.
Remove all nearby breakable objects first and don’t do it on a wooden floor. Remember, she is wearing horseshoes! 😆
Yes, horseshoes.
@Paul: The RSS feed hasn’t updated since May 25.
Actually, I don’t know what the heck is going on. http://wapsisquare.com/feed/ looks OK. Google seems to be having a problem with it, but the RSS feed works OK elsewhere. 😕
I can second that. Feedly (which runs off the Google RSS) has not been picking up the feed since May 25.
heres an idea shelly could be the master mind
lets say she could leave the forest for short period of times . in this loop before it unreset back into the previus one she left found nudge without any one else noticeing then told her to lead her on the spirit quest and then go get tina from the and bring her to the city with the key
theres at least some chance that if jin hadnt been distracted that day she may have been able to save both Monica and tina but would that tina have ever moved to the city would hse have been helpful to the gang or even held on to the key to give em
She wouldn’t necessarily have to have been able to leave herself – if she was behind Nudge’s interference in her vision quest – which i’m fairly sure is going to be an upcoming revelation – then she was able to communicate with Nudge … so Nudge coulkd have been her messenger/surrogate in the Real World all along. Which Nudge, being a trickster, would likely have enjoyed immensely.
Of course, if she was the mastermind, then we’re gonna have to revise our assessments/opinion of Shelly’s intelligence.
Or at least her deviousness.
Shall we have to changer he name to “Verbal”?
OK, but why would the Jin’s “rogue queen” demon credit Brandi? Why did Brandi’s book say that Brandi arranged part of it? If Brandi’s book was forged, why were both Brandi and Bud convinced that Brandi wrote it? How do you get around the bootstrap paradox? Why would Shelly have told Nudge to do those things since Shelly thought Nudge was following a previous Brandi’s instructions?
A bootstrap paradox is not necessarily a paradox if you allow that time travellers can alter the past.
All it takes is one alteration and then the loop establishes itself. A standing wave.
It’s like a frequency divider circuit i studied in Navy Electronics A School. It takes a frequency (say 5MHz) created by the Master Oscillator, and feeds it through a mixer circuit where it’s mixed with a 4MHz frequency.
Mixing those two frequencies yields outputs of 4MHz, 5MHz, 1MHz and 9MHz. Run it through a sharp-cutoff low-pass filter, and you come out with 1MHz.
Now we run that through a frequency quadrupler, which yields an output of 4MHZ.
And we run that back into the mixer to mix with the 5MHz, and…
That sounds like a paradox … but it works.
It’s a paradox when you do something like Heinlein did in “…all you zombies…”, and make the existence of the narrator its own precondition.
Why am I strangely intrigued and repelled at the same time? This bears investigation…
Ewwwwwwwwww, Demon drool.
Where? Nudge isn’t a demon.
We don’t know how Tina’s reacting. She could be curled up in the corner catatonic.
This has to be some kind of a bad day for her…
True, but I assumed he/she was talking about panel 3, specifically.
Still, drooling Tina, catatonic, makes for a great visual gag.. :LOL:
It’s also possible she’s in the back, starting to blow steam from her ears, while watching Nudge..
Maybe I’m the only one but I feel like I’ve missed out on a big chunk of something, I’m out of the loop, or I’m not putting 1 and 1 together because I’m very confused as to what has happened.
Well, that’s the appeal of Wapsi Square, isn’t it? I don’t consider myself a dummy (but then who does?) and trying to figure out where the story is going is fun and frustrating and wonderful when the plot line reveals itself.
Several things have happened. I’m afraid you’ll have to ask specific questions.
O//O ahem, I uhh… yeah, Mondays can be good.
“yeah! we did! um. what did we do?
I guess it’s Nudge turn to explain stuff, possibly with the help of Phix.
There is no more time-line to muck-up. So even Phix can spout all that she knows.
It looks like paul is going for “explanation-week’ to get all the speculation out of the way, establish canon, and will go from there.
“Fresh start’ so to speak. On to fixing Jin (if even possible)
I suddenly thought of something: Wouldn’t it be great if we got a “Bud and Maya in the demon-realm” story?
A magician and an almost indestructable Golem up against a world filled with demons…
I’m insanely curious about what happened to Bud and Maya. But I’m fine with the story staying the way it is, too. Sometimes you just never know what happens off screen.
I’m going to say a lot of running. and running. and running. maybe some sleep, then running some more. Thinking about it, Bud was probably by herself until the last second. Since she used the portal cloth to get out, she found Maya, grabbed her, and shoved her through. Then of course ripped the ink out of Shelly…I’m guessing the scarring is gone…
I don’t know if it is intentional, but Shelly sure has some wicked-looking teeth in the third panel. That’s the first time that they have seemed to be different, though.
Actually, I’m pretty sure those’re her gums…her teeth are clenched tight (you can see a bit of the gap), and her face is being pulled up so far that you can see most of her jaw inside of her cheek. So that’s not pointy-teeth, that’s just normal-teeth, with her face getting one heckuva stretching. ^_^
Actually, they’re fairly normal teeth – her lip is pulled up so far that you’re seeing the gum line.
You’re looking at her gums…her teeth are fitting together on a flat line…
OK! OK! OK! 😆
That’s what I get for showing up late. Those are her gums. Yeah, I know, but I hate feeling left out.
woohoo! Mission Accomplished….what were we doing again?
I like Nudge in panel 2. SELF HUG! Awesome.
Shelly knew what was coming, :”Oh, dear”…. 🙂
What would you be saying if you had Nudge bounding toward you? “Oh, dear” sounded rather restrained to me. 😆
I don’t think she needed to know anything else.
You know something? I think I’m actually starting to piece this together.
Look at this as a FPS-like video game. We already know Jin’s been in one long Myst-like situation, trying to get the calendar machine fixed. At some point, Shelly may have realized that in one of the “next” iterations, she had to go into the woods on her vision quest at the same time Monica “died”, so that she would be ready when the time came to visit the time forest. To do so, she needed Nudge to “encourage” her next iteration to go on that quest.
I know, it doesn’t make sense, but then again, trying to get through Super Mario Brothers doesn’t make much sense, either (Thank you, Mario, but our queen is in another castle!).
Why assume that there is anything like that to figure out? For one thing, it’s a lot easier if you don’t. We’ve been told that Brandi figured that out in a previous loop and her “dabbling” is responsible for what happened to Shelly on her vision quest. If you assume that’s correct, you don’t need to worry so much about what Shelly did and when she did it and time going backwards and stuff like that. 🙂
If you are really want to worry about Shelly and time loop stuff, why not worry about how the last Shelly to arrive managed to arrive carrying a relic. Also, if the relic wasn’t returned, how did the previous Shelly manage to arrive? There are plenty of things like that to worry about without adding more. 🙂
I’m getting tired and I think I’ll put this down rather than waiting for an update.
Reasons for thinking Stinky = Nudge despite how crazy it might seem (some better than others):
1) Nudge took credit for helping complete Shelly’s mission. We never saw Nudge help at all, but they wouldn’t have found the relic on the sunken Nazi sub without Stinky, so that was a huge help.
2) In a previous time loop Brandi somehow told Nudge what to do. We never saw Brandi meet Nudge, but she really liked Stinky, so they probably spent a lot of time together.
3) Starting in Janurary, Nudge’s face started being covered with spotches that were similar to the ones on Stinky.
4) The markings above and below Nudge’s eyes could very roughly correspond to they way Stinky’s eyes are somewhat separated from Stinky’s face, particularly here.
5) Stinky’s fin very roughly corresponds to Nudge’s horns. Real octopods don’t have such a thing. We know Nudge can shape shift, but “actually, that’s not one of my storng points” (January 20, 2011), so Nudge is likely to make a mistake or two. OTOH, if Paul got the sub right, he probably wouldn’t have missed that. It would have had to have been a design choice.
6) It is not unusual for a trickster to impersonate a different animal.
7) Both Nudge and Stinky have similar personalities and tend to act like a dog.
8) Stinky understands English.
Heh, #8 was interpreted as a smiley. I forgot one:
9) Bud was surprised at how old Stinky was in the page I linked to.
lights fan service cigaret… hmmmm naked cuddles…
If you realize, she has no top, only pants, he licked her, and also he said “We did it!”… You can figure out the rest…
“I’m so happy!” SCHLUUUURP! Too funny!