Sorry about the half-comic. It’s gonna be a “I’ll finish it later” day. Hopefully by the afternoon.
Sorry.
-EDIT Comic and Director Commentary updated!
I'm playing with giving Tony more head stubble to make it clearer that his bald head is voluntary. He likes the look.
Selkie, Selkie, Selkie… Rocks are not the answer.
Just crush the snow and compress it until it turns into ice. Much simpler, and you can feign innocence if you happen to draw blood.
Hah, feigning innocence doesn’t always work with ice either. My boys found that out the hard way. “I didn’t know it was ice, mom!” *brother sniffling in the background* “You can’t tell the difference between a soft snowball and a hard ice ball? Really? Then, I guess I can’t tell the difference between playtime and chores…your butt is grounded.”
Meh.
When my younger brothers decided to involve me in a snowball fight against my will, I retaliated with a super-soaker. Soaked them in water in sub-zero temperatures. Naturally they all became water-battles after that.
And when they tried to involve me in a water fight in summer, I retaliated by filling my super-soaker with malt vinegar. When they tried malt vinegar, I used thin bleach. I did get in trouble for that.
… Then there were the spud-guns… and within the first five minutes I’d escalated it from one shot of potato to compressed double-shots of potato… to two parts potato and one part apple … which had longer range and hurt more when it hit.
…… and we don’t talk about how play-fighting with wooden swords escalated to bicycle-jousting. That only happened once on account of how much it hurt.
I’m surprised Tony didn’t briefly insult her in French!
Doh!
“poisson” ???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution
Fish in French.
“I may be a wuss in the snow, but would you like to see which of us fares better underwater?”
SO… euhm cold blooded watergirl getting soaked with ice water during a blizzard?? she nearly choked when driving the car, she’s going to fall down half way through the snowballfight and end up in a hospital. 🙁
Isn’t there a selkie Doctor at the hospital?
Selkie’s not just from some aquatic race is she? Her body chemistry must be similar to ours, or she couldn’t digest the same proteins, but her environment must be very different- fresh water and warmer. I toyed with the idea of a time-traveller, but the seas were already salt by the time vertebrates evolved. A parallel world with no continental land masses, only volcanic islands?
Or rivers or lakes in the tropics or semi-tropics of present-day Earth.
I could see whole tribes of Selkie-people throughout the amazon river basin. Since Selkie can clearly life on land, the people would be able to travel between major freshwater sources.
Water changes temperature much more slowly than air, so she could simply come from a local (meaning on-Earth) body of water. Her species have been stated to be hibernators, and older comics have implied they might have a city in Lake Superior (the largest and deepest of the five enormous lakes clustered together on the Canada/USA border. The Great Lakes are bordered by the province of Ontario to the north and the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Philadelphia and New York to the south.) We’ve seen at least one other of Selkie’s species interacting with humans, as a doctor/nurse/paperwork guy (it’s ambiguous) at a hospital. Almost all life forms that evolved on Earth digest the same basic proteins. There’s been much more to suggest Selkie is from this planet, rather than an alien one, and only one instance of magic being used on-panel – when Selkie’s mom conjured her hair bow in a flashback.
Squeals girlishly! I provoked a discussion!
I like the Amazon idea, Amy P and Rin. I think it only gets down to about 50 Farhenheit at night, not too uncomfortable.
Mersang- them proteins rule out an alien planet, as you say, but a parallel Earth would still be Earth, is what I was driving at. The Great Lakes could be the location of the entry point, and there’s no reaason traffic can’t be pretty frequent. But I am a Fringe nut, so I probably shoehorn “Parallels” into too many things- and the Greats are, well, Great.
But this is a whole civilisation we’re talking about. That’s a big, influential thing, with its own physical impact on the environment and a cultural impact on other peoples. Unless there’s some sort of bottleneck, this ought to be self-evidently a two-biped panet.
Still, I’m just speculatin’. No way can I shoot down your own v. well argued alternatives.
Could continental drift and geological polar shift mean that the great lakes have been farther south in the past?
Sorry, but no. If I recall correctly, the Great Lakes were carved by glacial activity; right now, they’re about as warm as they’ve ever been.
Psst, you forgot Illinois from the list of Great Lake border states – Lake Michigan has some Illinois shoreline. 😉
Oopsie. I was using a globe, rather than a larger-scale map, so I missed that. (I’m from Ontario, and a lot of maps of Canada just show the outline of the lakes south of the border, rather than mentioning which states they touch. Since I had a globe in the room, I was too lazy to look it up online, despite being on a computer.)
Anyway, Dondonesque, you have a point about the ‘parallel Earth’ theory, especially since magic has been implied to exist. That would make it more plausible that the two sentient species haven’t had a great deal of historically recorded interaction in the past. (At least, not so far as publically available human records go.) But I believe in Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster, so I’m willing to believe there could be amphibious people in the Great Lakes.
When was magic implied to exist?
I forget the exact page number – but when Selkie had her flashback to when her mom left her at the orphanage, her mom appeared to conjure the hair bow Selkie wears. (Which may have been a slight of hand trick that a five-year-old percieved as magic, which is why I say magic was implied rather than revealed.)
…did you seriously just say “the state of Philladelphia”?
Philadelphia, no double-Ls. As I said later, I was using a globe, not a map. I’m not an expert on foreign geography. Also, rechecking my globe, it doesn’t actually label the state Philadelphia is in if that’s just a city name, so I thought at the time it was the state label. Again, my error.
Challenge Accepted!
Well. This will end well. It looks like the other kids are about to find out why Selkie does not go outside to recess during the winter.
I am curious. The adults should be aware of Selkie and her condition. Why would they even let her go outside?
More like she freely chooses not to go out so they don’t have to watch her. One incident was likely enough for her. Now? Peer pressure is a b***h…
No it’s not. Peer Pressure is a terrible excuse. It’s one of the worst ever.
Maybe it was how I was raised, but I never, ever, felt the need to rise to the occasion to meet peer pressure.
It likely had to do with how you were raised, in part, but it also has to do with your natural temperament. Selkie’s natural temperament is fairly competitive, as we’ve already seen, which makes it that much harder for her to back down from a challenge, no matter how much she knows she should.
Man, I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but back when I in elementary school, we weren’t even ALLOWED to touch the damn snow! Every freezing-ass-cold winter recess session was spent on the blacktop. So I did a lot of standing and sitting around.
I don’t know why, we just weren’t allowed. It was probably some stupid rule enforced by the PTA because they didn’t want their kids damn shoes to get wet. Or because not everybody had (or could afford) snow boots. Or because they didn’t want the school caked in snow.
I REALLY hated winter back in grade school.
My school had a similar rule, though less extreme. We could touch the snow, climb on hills of it (the snowplow cleared the tarmack but left piles in the corners), even build snow men – but we weren’t allowed to lift snow off the ground. I think the idea was to prevent kids from throwing snowballs and iceballs at each other, potentially causing injury. (And yet we still had dodgeball …) The rule was generally ignored unless a teacher was in sight, but heaven help you if you got caught with snow in your hands.
If it snowed, we had indoor recess that day.
Which… honestly, considering I spent recess walking around the playground and all free time indoors (read: Most of it, I finished classwork ludicrously fast) reading? Not so bad.
It was always indoor recess for me, too, but I wasn’t allowed to read. Always had to play stupid games like heads up-seven up or watch boring old cartoons. To this day, I can not stand Popeye or the Smurfs. Ugh.
Hark! Thou hast awakened the giant! Thine peril is at hand, thine life forfeit! Under the crushing force of nature Herself thy tears shall fall, and bitter though they are, frozen they shall be, ‘ere as cold as the blood of the avenger thou hast provoked. May thine family have a grave for thine corpse, for thou shalt not live to see another dawn! AWAY! Away, I say! To the field, TO BATTLE! Let the crunch of ice and the howl of victory commence!
I’ve had Game of Thrones (the book) sitting on my desk unread for months now. This makes me want to finally get on that for some reason. XD