Outed.
—-
Got TWO amazing fanart pieces to share to day! Firstly is an acrylic painting made for me by W31rd0n3:
And Ellie drew a picture of Sai Fen and Tai Li playing, with bonus artwork of her Original Character sarnothi, a young Echo named Kin Roe:
Thank you both for the amazing fanarts!!!
Oh mah gawd, Cern, you don't just TELL people about covert ops!
Holy smokes. He’s using a thinly veiled threat of using that weapon on Canada and the US to demand the return of all the refugees and exiles, isn’t he?
I don’t see how this can be interpreted any other way, unless by some freak chance his Empire is cool with them remaining where they are, which I doubt.
Now everyone will know that these people like Benny, Pohl & his family, and Selkie aren’t just people with a rare “condition.”
This is bad. Real bad.
So these “loose ends” are, er, people?
Sir or Madam: This is my favorite-est comment of the last three weeks.
That’s right, no-one can tell! Male anorak, doesn’t get out much, grateful for all positive comments.
um is Scar, Gien, and all the others are they dead?
i think brown at least would´ve been informed if the refugee colony was anihilated – i´d say he´s more talking about slaughtering the last bits of the resistance……something i hope selkie is too young to understand the meaning of – her mom is/was? an infamous leader of the ‘rebels’ after all.
that he has the gall and call their civil war a guerrila war already says a lot – but nothign good.
They probably blew up another of those colony towers in sarnoth proper. The refugee camp is in another lake and should be fine (for now!).
Scar dying would be a personal tragedy for Selkie.
Forget going from 0-60, this just went from 0-500. Holy yikes.
Gah! As an added “bonus,” he’s just planted the seed of mistrust in the governments of both countries, as if conspiracy theorists needed any more help. :/ “They lied to you about an entirely different sentient species living and working among you, what else are they lying to you about?”
Sorry, Dude Sir, but Expats are Ex-Pats, you never get the expats back.
… Ever. BTW, very nice on the Artworks showing up. I hope there are more works … Ah, … In the Works.
I suspect Mexico may be receiving an influx of said expats. Or places like that.
No, you can get expats back, if you have evidence they committed a crime and have an extradition treaty (neither is the case here). Another way is if they’re in the country illegally (as pointe4Jesus mentioned), but it seems the cover-up includes at least a green card. The last way to get an expat back is for them to willingly return to their country of origin. Fat chance of that happening in this case.
O.0
Oh craps.
Hope the nations are strong enough to resist just handing over people. But this is gonna cause upheaval for sure.
Not to mention, those Sarnothi still living in the lakes right now may either be in danger, or be forced to no longer be allies to those who’ve made their homes on the land :[
Oh no. Well Pohl wasn’t quite right, this doesn’t look like Armageddon, this looks like the start of a holocaust.
considdering selkie´s clan is all but extinct, i´d say we´ve already had the holocaust – now we have the ugly future were the bad guys won.
actually, i just noticed that in the second panel, three among the 4 clan-banners are crossed out/defaced. so NOT a good sign!
μολὼν λαβέ
“Come and take them”, is what Google Translate says. Is this accurate?
Yup. It’s what Leonidas said to Xerxes when the latter told the Spartans to surrender their weapons.
Honestly? I like the way you think.
I second that!
Also what was said by the Texians when the ruling Mexicans tried to take a cannon back at the Battle of Gonzales in the beginning of the Texas Revolution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Texas_Flag_Come_and_Take_It.svg
Yeah. Transliterates to “molon labe”, should help with the googling.
(It’s also a favored bleating of NRA members.)
This is a serious blow to everyone. To the refugees, it means they don’t have a safety net anymore. Whereas they had the “condition” excuse, that has now been ripped from underneath them. That is going to make living with humans much more difficult.
For the US and Canadian governments, they will now have to announce what is true. If they try and cover this up, it will just sow further distrust for the governments and the refugees.
What needs to be done, from a political point of view, is the US and Canadian governments is to say “Yes, what he is saying is true, but these are innocent people who just want to live their lives in safety. They don’t want to cause problems but if this hostile regime tries and take them by force, it will be met with force.”
Politically this is a 9/11-level shock, and it has the potential for ramifications just as far-reaching. No humans have been killed by the Sarnothi, so far… but the reason 9/11 could change everything in our world wasn’t the death toll, it was the shock of stripping away a previously-unconscious sense of immunity.
Dave’s characters have been oblivious to national politics in Selkie-world. For them, at most, “government” has been represented by Agent Brown’s agency. I don’t think we even know for sure that it’s the CIA… though that’s the most likely guess. We have had hints that the agency is somewhat inflexible and bureaucratic, and that Brown has had some difficulty working around and within regulations to get to common sense outcomes.
Welp, now it’s out of the agency’s control. Suddenly it’s public knowledge, and we don’t know anything about who the players even are, at that level, because Dave’s characters haven’t been paying attention at all. We have no idea whether there are factions who will try to use this shock to gain more power. And that’s realistic — many ordinary people were blind-sided by the unscrupulous politicians who took advantage of 9/11.
I imagine Dave knows at least broadly what’s going to go on behind the scenes in high government circles and with the political opposition, because he’s going to have to show those effects when they become public… but I don’t think his focus is going to shift away from Selkie and what this is going to do to her life.
I kind of wandered from responding to your point, above. What I meant to say is, yes, that would be a good response… but I see many potential difficulties behind the scenes in the way of the American and Canadian governments issuing such a statement in a timely manner.
Exactly right.
Sadly, damage control is all the government can do right now because this guy is intentionally sowing the seeds for another war now that he just won. He never even mentioned the fact that Saronthi are divided into clans. People will panic and think that Selkie and Pohl are the “same race” as this guy at first glance and not think that Saronthi just as varied culturally as us humans. Meaning just because I’m an “alien” (because that’s what people will jump to) doesn’t mean I’m like him.
He has effectively ostracized every Saronthi and Saronthi supporter living on the surface at once with the threat of warfare by Saronthi, and by extension, encouraging discrimination of Saronthi by humans. I think we can safely agree that this guy does not have the best intentions for either species.
True, but it could end up backfiring on him a bit, depending on how well the government handles damage control. If the government response points out why there are exiles living on the surface and particularly how the Sar’Teri have basically committed genocide against the Jin’Sorai, then I’d imagine that would at least garner some sympathy for the Sarnothi exiles rather than ostracizing them.
Theoretically yes, but at this time distrust has already been planted in the mind of humans against their government – however illogical it may sound, I think many people under this situation would trust the words of the “honest evil” over those of the “nice guy caught lying”
Not! Good! O_O
To repeat what I said on Friday, oh craps…
Oh great – this better not swap from a light-hearted comic to something brutal.
I could possibly temper the brutality with more melodrama?
Dude. Ouch.
Bit late for that – the comic stopped being purely light-hearted when Selkie got bullied and almost died.
Not to mention the reveil of her background. :/
Oh boy, now we’re gonna have people scrambling to hunt them down and hand them over, people protesting for their rights and people protesting against the U.S. government for interfering with another species culture in the first place. I happen to see people often laying claim about how we shouldn’t get involved with another person’s culture because it’s disrespectful since we don’t understand it.
I wonder what’s going to go down now. Safe to say Selkie probably won’t attend school for a while. Unless Todd wants her to get hurt.
Beautiful fan art.
The banners showing the symbols of the other three clans are scratched out above him. It makes me think that they eventually went from just targeting one clan to wiping out all the other clans as well, at the very least saying ‘There is only one clan from this point forth and that is Sar’teri. Join or die’. They sure seem to have gone from the reasonable ones to the bats*** insane ones.
It’s interesting that they are the bad guys to the sarnothi – but technically good guys to the humans. Sadly “just give us all sarnothi refugees and we’ll keep minding our own business” would probably work for a lot of people.
Exactly where I was afraid this was going.
I’m genuinely stunned by how you’re handling your work man, I would love to give your novel a look, I don’t know how far ahead you’ve written it but so far I’ve seen that you write with excellence.
¿maybe consider writing a book of your comic?
WELP. We’re screwed.
He just made any survivor unsafe. Even more so than before. They might die because of this…
Oh boy. This is not going to be fun.
And something tells me Andi’s not going to get her time to process.
Oh, Crap. All the other flags have been X’ed out O_O
Good eye. I missed that.
“These refugees have something very precious to me. Someone dear that I thought had long been lost. However, reports have recently got back to me that they are still alive and being held captive by the refugees. I demand their freedom. This is not negotiable. I demand they release to me…
My darling pet eel Pants.”
…BRB, rewriting my scripts.
Best comment.
Comment above mentioned Scar, and how losing him would affect Selkie. And first I thought if Scar was gone who would care for Pants. Yeah, I was worried about scar, but wasn’t he going to make armor for Selkie from Pant’s hide?
That is some awesome fan art!
And Cern… this is not the way to go about things if you want to avoid a panic and people irradiating your waters. You should be talking to governments, not people. Individuals can be smart, but people as a whole are easily stampeded and dangerous when freaked out. *sigh*
What is with people in comments and nukes? Conventional bombs would be more than enough. What cause the most damage in an underwater detonation is the shockwave. And if you’re worried about planes shot down, then use cruise missiles and saturate the lake with those. If you nuke one Great Lake, then you poison the rest as well with the radiation
Depth charges.
I’m actually really worried about the Sarnothi that Selkie and Todd met now. 🙁
Seriously. Over and above the obvious disaster to everyone living on the surface, what has happened to the colony? 🙁
The fanart is amazing! I love the Sai Fen and child one!! Plus a great OC!
Fortunately he could not possibly be playing more into the hands of those who will try to play it off as a hoax.
Oh yes, this will turn out very well indeed.
I’m predicting an ultimatum. “Deliver all of our people back to us for ‘processing’, or else the next time you see that beam, it’ll be wiping out one of your major cities.”
I don’t *think* they can do that with what we have seen so far. As far as we know those beams only go straight. Where would they launch it from to hit a city?
What about that Hi-Tech Sarnothi who was bedeviling Agent Brown in the city. Didn’t he have some really hi-tech invisibility device? … One that could be used by agents with glowy-eyes mind powers to reduce a city to rubble? I mean theoretically, of course! No need to panic the humans right now!
Gosh, I’m getting cynical, as I get older.
Not to be a downer but Sarnoth could be utterly destroyed and every one of its citizens killed by dropping one low-yield nuclear tipped missile into the lake. Just the shockwave would turn the entire city into gravel.
Water doesn’t compress too well, meaning the entire shockwave would be transferred to the structures of the city directly.
Boom.
…i have a bad gut feeling of Amanda saying, “well just give her back, she’s not your real kid, you’ve got me”…and Andi agreeing out of fear for her daughter’s safety.
Amanda is also just stubborn enough to say “She’s my SISTER! You can’t have her!” At least, I can hope. Amanda strikes me as the kind of person to dig in her heels if she thinks something is being taken away from her. *sigh* We’ll see.
“She’s MY sister! If I can’t torment her, NOBODY CAN!”
I really, really hope she doesn’t, since I feel like that would catapult her from “understandably troubled child” to “complete and utter sociopath”.
Maybe it’s just me… but Emperor Cern is giving off a very… erm… Third Reich vibe right now. When I first read this one, I took a “give me my people back” vibe from it.
Upon subsequent readings though… referring to people as “loose ends” doesn’t exactly fill me with warm fuzzies. I get the feeling this is more of a “kill the traitors” vibe…
I hope I’m wrong.
its definitely not just you – i´m german and did my equivalent to your college degree on history, so yeah, i´m totally getting a ‘we want to punish all the rebels who got away, and those traitors of our own clan who ran rather then fight with us for noble cause’-vibe.
add the crossed out banners and i´m saying the survivors of the other two clans won´t welcome back with open arms either. odds are they´ll be people secon class or even working slaves for the sar´teri.
Oh…. oh…. I just noticed that Dave.
The banners.
Three of them have large X’s on them. The only one not crossed out is Sar’teri.
Forgive me for pointing this out if it was already discussed in comments above…
Funny thing is; Guy is likely the father/husband of that CIA/FBI agent’s adopted kid/wife.
Seems like the cliché twist and extra friction the Smiths and the Agent need right now. Oh, the drama!
That was Behn, I think, the sarnothi whose death kicked off the entire civil war. They are the same clan though, and Carrie and Benny are technically political refugees, which is still all kinds of bad.