I take pride in the fact that I can huck my son into the water in essentially any orientation, at any speed, from (almost) any height and he comes up swimming (and cursing, now that he’s older.)
Lots of swimming lessons, lots of fish oil, and lots of playtime at the pool. Oh, and windsurfing, jet skiing, and other water sports.
I think it’s a glass a day, for the first six or seven years (after breastfeeding is done, of course). They begin to grow the gills usually during their sixth year, but sometimes they don’t develop until the beginning of the seventh year.
Oh, we flang him into the water long before he got swimming lessons– I wanted to make sure he would be OK before we put him in class with a teacher. We dropped him into a hole in the water between my arms so I could immediately pull him up. Didn’t need to, he went right into high-speed babypaddle.
We played like that all afternoon. He’s never been afraid of water after that.
Same here. was doing it since I was a little kid. Swim from my grandfathers house on browns cove all the way across Cove (about a quarter mile) then walk back (about a 7 mile walk by road) and yea Pops Flinging us off the end of the pier into the brown Riverine water of the Chesapeake Bay. Only issue I ever had was getting bit by a snapping turtle. The Snapping turtle didn’t survive the experience.
I learned to swim at about 4-5 years old, it was either learn to swim or miss out on the family trip to Florida and Disney World, My family used the same method to teach us how to swim in my grandma’s pool. They would throw us in the shallow end where it was only about 4 feet deep so we could stand on our toes. But almost everyone in my family learned to swim early and we never had anyone drown.
wait… what does selkie sound like underwater? I mean, I’m frankly surprised that she can make human sounding language underwater, but if she can wouldn’t it sound really deep or something?
my thoughts exactly – though it does solve the problem how sarnothi talk among themselves. still, it doesn´t make sense. i guess we´ll have to chalk it up to ‘comic’-science
Actually sound travels better underwater than it does in air, it just sounds horrible when we do it because the air makes it all gargled. That is why a lot of pools have speakers in them and you can hear it pretty clearly under the surface.
She should be able to talk underwater, or tensei wouldn’t exist. Obviously her vocal mechanism isn’t air-based or has some other way to make it work underwater. Hopefully Todd will acquire some kind of transducer so he can talk as well– he is wearing a full-face mask, so I assume he just doesn’t know how to work the transducer yet. (most scuba regulators are just a fitting you chomp on, which makes it hard to talk. What Todd is wearing is called a full-face mask and aren’t very common.)
I *am* curious about her wearing a one-piece, isn’t it covering her gills? That would be like trying to breathe under a blanket.
I was expecting her suit to either have side cutouts, or more reasonably, just be a two-piece. (she is a girl, after all)
from what weve seen of her gils, any “top” would block the gills at least partially, i think the only solution to blocked gills would have to be a fancy cut one usually reserved for sexy side reveals in women. that said, the native sarnathi are shown (in the 400s) to live in the water with covered, partially covered and uncovered gills, so its likely a comfort level thing
I had a side cut one around her age in the eighties. It was not sexy. Trust me, they make age appropriate swimwear that wouldn’t block her gills. I assumed she wore a one piece because it would be difficult/embarrassing to have to explain gills to strangers.
That is possible, although her talking to her dad underwater might raise a few eyeballs. Especially if there is a lifeguard we haven’t seen yet.
I would assume Avery has already vetted this place; he possibly brings his own family here as well. I *was* looking at the woman behind him yesterday to see if it might have been Carrie.
There are a lot of very breathable fabrics, and swimsuits are generally designed to be thin and let water flow through the fabric freely. I doubt they would have bought her one of those more plastic based thread ones knowing her water breathing.
Oh, I forgot that. We saw her gills in operation when she was huffing water after eating the Grapes of Death. They do indeed only flow out, so presumably she would be OK.
I was assuming she would somehow not mouth-breathe like a fish because of talking and all. I guess that nose is less vestigial than it looks.
He needs to invest in or rent one of those helmets like they use for contamination or naval divers, as they come with underwater communication systems that might be important.
Those are for commercial diving, which is typically done with an umbilical, not SCUBA tanks. In any case, he doesn’t need radio communications, he needs conversion from air-based audio to water-based audio, or the Sarnothi will need radios to hear him.
There are transducers to be had that can accomplish this, but it’s hard to talk with a regular regulator in your mouth so I would assume that’s why David has Todd in a full-face mask.
Give any sarnothi that you need to talk to a headset – though surface comms might come in handy if you run into difficulty, ranging from cultural problems to an outbreak of violence that requires the intervention of a frogman team or some such. The government program likely has those headsets on the shelf already.
Well that was a dickish move by agent Brown. There was literally no reason for him to do that to Selkie. And don’t give tell me he was trying to make her face her fears, because she never said she was afraid of pools, just that she doesn’t like them because they have a lot of chemicals. Nor does she need to learn how to scuba dive since she can breath under water.
This may be the first time Agent Brown has gotten to see if Selkie could make it to the city herself. If her gills had any issues from when she was sick, this would be a safer place for it to come out than in the middle of a lake.
“Oh, the many things Agent Brown can do. He married Sarnothi, he checks his crew. He shoves younglings whose fears need be through. Oh, the many things Agent Brown can do…” My son loves that Dr. Seuss book:)
No that’s not okay,Agent Brown. You should let Selkie go in when she wanted to. Not just cuz you’re impatient and it’s rude. Just cuz your son is Sarnothi doesn’t make it okay.
When she comes back up he better apologize for pushing her in. -__-
I do agree. He better apologize to Todd and esp. Selkie when they come up. Hopefully with an explanation of why he did it. I’m crossing my fingers that he does have a valid reason, but if it was truly just so Selkie could “face her fears” then I hope they get to push him in when he’s in his suit! (work suit not swim trunks/suit
Actually, that’s why my uncle was very careful what he wore near a pool since I had this habit of pushing everyone I knew into it when I was a child. I would wait till they weren’t expecting, then tackle! I was also 5 at the time. Damn near ruined a pair of snake skin cowboy boots that way.
I’m not sure how to feel about it. Yea it’s kind of dickish but pretty much all pranks are. I’ve been both pushed and pusher in this situation and each times we just had a laugh about it.
On another though I think it comes down to what kind of relationship they have… Like this would be pretty normal between friends or siblings but not acceptable with a stranger. Agent Brown is somewhere between that so eh, guess it depends on how Selkie will feel about it in the end.
I concur. It is never okay, first of all, to push anyone into a body of water. Sure, she can’t drown, but for humans that’s another story. Second, yes, he should apologize if he wants to maintain a decent sort of relationship with these folks. Or at the least explain why. Yes, I am one of those NOT in support of “throw them in and they’ll learn how to swim”. My kids would be long dead if that were true. Had to fish my son out of the water DURING a swimming lesson, for goodness sakes! That’s with coaches and lifeguards around. Ya just can’t fully trust anyone… Hence the need for swim lessons. Get the kid confident in the water, get them some skills, THEN make sure they can cut it.
Oh please. Selkie has already demonstrated she’s not an easily traumatized kid. This is just a harmless prank on his part. (Some children are just naturally more sensitive to things like this, so you should take it slower with them. Selkie isn’t one of them and Agent Brown knows it.)
i wonder if at some point it’d be better to buy swimsuits that leave your sides exposed, i bet they make those… can’t see it’d be easy to breath through swimsuit fabric
When fish breathe, they breathe in through their mouth and out through their gills. I believe when Selkie was doing stuff with her gills in school she did something similar. I can’t see fabric getting in the way of breathing out.
Just a quick question about the people saying that agent Brown was a dick for pushing Selkie in. Do any of you have kids? Because I have two, mine and my step daughter.
Here’s the thing, if a kid gets it into their head that they don’t want to do something, like, say, take their medicine when not only will it not hurt them but will help them, and they won’t take it for reasons that only exist in their heads, ie, it’s “yucky” sometimes the best option is to just get over it.
As an example, my daughter is currently sick and refused to take the medicine that would knock her fever out so that she could sleep. She whined about it for a solid twenty minutes. “No, it’ll be yucky! My sister didn’t like it, it’ll make me puke!”
“Have you had this medicine before?”
“No, but it’ll still be yucky!”
I finally ended up taking away all of her toys, her laptop and her books. She dumped it down her throat, took a swig of water, grumbled at me for being mean, but 20 minutes later, she was snuggled into bed watching her favorite movie without a fever.
The point that I’m making is that it’s better for Agent Brown to push Selkie in and have her angry for a few minutes, realize that the pool is not going to hurt her, and it isn’t full of anything gross, doesn’t smell bad, etc, rather than have her refuse to get in based on preconceived notions that in this case, have no basis in actuality, than it is to let her dither around for days.
That should be Selkie’s parent’s choice – not Agent Todd. You chose (and probably rightly) to use negative reinforcement to have your daughter do something that was good for her. Would you be as lenient if an adult who has met you less than 5 times tried to force her to take something that she didn’t want to? That you weren’t completely sure that you trusted and who had recently proved to be unreliable by taking away items that were very important to her without ever being able to be returned? While yes, this isn’t harmful to Selkie – Agent Brown is NOT her teacher, or her parent, and should not be able to make decisions on her welfare or how best to make her face something. Now IF he has a good reason and apologizes to both her and her family, then Todd might be able to cut him some slack. But if it was just because Agent Brown thought that Selkie should experience pool time – that isn’t Agent Brown’s call anymore.
Actually, it could be argued that in this capacity, he is acting as her teacher.
Todd is learning scuba diving in order to be with Selkie when she meets more Sarnathi, Agent Brown is attempting to instruct them on how to operate together under water, in an environment that Selkie is native to, and Todd is still learning to navigate. If they don’t work together and Selkie doesn’t keep in the forefront of her mind that her father is no where near as adept at she is, there is a possibility that Selkie, as a child without the necessary life experience, in excitement, could theoretically leave Todd behind in a “not exactly the best case scenario.”
And yes, I have had a stranger whom I haven’t completely trusted have to use negative enforcement on my child to get her to do something that she didn’t want to for her own good.
I was a single parent for the first five years of my child’s life but I still had to work to support us. She got sick one day while I was on my way to work. I couldn’t afford to miss a day, so I stopped off at the store, picked up some Tylenol and dropped her and the medicine off with the babysitter. I didn’t fully like or trust the babysitter and it actually pissed me off when the woman took her toys away when she didn’t want to take her medicine, especially since she’d lost all of her favorites when our apartment had flooded the year before.
I also understood why she did it.
You also put your children under her care – so she did have *some* authority that you trusted her with. However, that sounds like a stinky situation for both you and your daughter. It’s hard being a single parent, and you have my full respect for going through that and not just raising your child but obviously caring that she is well taken care of.
Agent Brown no longer has say over how to raise Selkie – he gave that up to Todd when he approved Todd’s adoption of her. If Todd is her legal guardian then he gets to say who does things to her. Someone can act in the capacity of a teacher – but if that person is not actually working at the school where the child is attending then they are not. Now there may be a gray area as far as how much authority Agent Brown has as a federal agent, but Selkie’s life wasn’t at risk, she just didn’t want to drink nasty water. So he shouldn’t have touched her without a parent’s permission – at least if I am remembering my rights at all.
This also doesn’t mean that the laws are different in Dave’s world and federal agents have more say than they do in the real world.
This is a bit different than pushing a human being into the water. This is her natural environment, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.
The fact that she can complain to Todd underwater proves Agent Brown’s point.
Pool safety is a big deal in my family, especially after my younger brother almost drowned to death in a swimming pool surrounded by people. (He was panicking and trying to grab on to other people to try and pull himself up to the surface, but they didn’t understand and pushed him down and he passed out. Once he went limp they realized he wasn’t playing and got him out.) So yeah: pool safety is a big deal.
By “pools smells bad and theres craps in the waters” Selkie is referring to chlorine commonly found in overpowering quantities in public pools, no? Mulm would probably only disturb her the way we wrinkle our noses when we walk past a lawn full of dog dirt. We rarely notice.
Since the water and air goes in her nose and mouth and then out her gills, I would assume the main reason many Sarnothi don’t wear a top over their gills is to prevent several quarts of slightly warmer than pool temperature de-oxygenated water suddenly pumping out under her armpits and soaking everything she is wearing. But I can breath through cloth unless it is the wrong kind of a coat, so I assume she could vent de-oxygenated water through cloth also – I mean, has anyone ever seen a whale spout? I suspect she can generate more respiratory power than a human can because water is that much heavier than air.
BTW, very much like that abdominal line of the immature child belly in the panel where she is swimming. Thank you very much for not giving her the standard default female highly toned late adolescent belly that usually gets drawn on every female character regardless of age unless she is deliberately being drawn with the only alternate belly shape which is the morbidly obese evil female character.
My parents used to yell at me for pushing people in the water, but to me as a kid it was a key part of kid life. I dunno. It was super important to me that kids be able to push each other in the water. I’m not sure why. (I didn’t mind being pushed myself. *shrug* )
Rule of thumb when it comes to body of water- If you don’t know the Condition of the water- Ie if there are tangly things like big weeds or limb-trapping debris or you don’t know the Swimming Skill of the person you intend to toss- DO NOT THROW THEM IN.
Avery gets a pass from me because this is a pool and Selkie is amphibious. Otherwise I would become a very cranky lady in a very big hurry. (I have relatives/friends who cannot swim and Family History of one relative drowning. this is a thing that concerns me on occasion)
I totally understand why the Agent Brown thing seems like a dick move, but at the same time, it kind of makes me giggle- I LOVED being pushed and tossed into bodies of water when I was little, I would harass my dad until he picked me up and threw me in.
Wait that’s not supposed to happen? That was a looot of my childhood…being pushed or thrown in…
…that is NOT supposed to happen, yes.
I take pride in the fact that I can huck my son into the water in essentially any orientation, at any speed, from (almost) any height and he comes up swimming (and cursing, now that he’s older.)
Lots of swimming lessons, lots of fish oil, and lots of playtime at the pool. Oh, and windsurfing, jet skiing, and other water sports.
How much fish oil did you have to give him before his gills grew in?
I think it’s a glass a day, for the first six or seven years (after breastfeeding is done, of course). They begin to grow the gills usually during their sixth year, but sometimes they don’t develop until the beginning of the seventh year.
At least, that’s what I’ve heard.
Oh, I hear you. It took me another ten years to learn to swim after my father pulled a stunt like that!
Oh, we flang him into the water long before he got swimming lessons– I wanted to make sure he would be OK before we put him in class with a teacher. We dropped him into a hole in the water between my arms so I could immediately pull him up. Didn’t need to, he went right into high-speed babypaddle.
We played like that all afternoon. He’s never been afraid of water after that.
That’s how I learned to swim.
Same here. was doing it since I was a little kid. Swim from my grandfathers house on browns cove all the way across Cove (about a quarter mile) then walk back (about a 7 mile walk by road) and yea Pops Flinging us off the end of the pier into the brown Riverine water of the Chesapeake Bay. Only issue I ever had was getting bit by a snapping turtle. The Snapping turtle didn’t survive the experience.
Yes, that was exactly my farher’s thinking. Pity I went against the expected and almost drowned!
I learned to swim at about 4-5 years old, it was either learn to swim or miss out on the family trip to Florida and Disney World, My family used the same method to teach us how to swim in my grandma’s pool. They would throw us in the shallow end where it was only about 4 feet deep so we could stand on our toes. But almost everyone in my family learned to swim early and we never had anyone drown.
wait… what does selkie sound like underwater? I mean, I’m frankly surprised that she can make human sounding language underwater, but if she can wouldn’t it sound really deep or something?
my thoughts exactly – though it does solve the problem how sarnothi talk among themselves. still, it doesn´t make sense. i guess we´ll have to chalk it up to ‘comic’-science
Actually sound travels better underwater than it does in air, it just sounds horrible when we do it because the air makes it all gargled. That is why a lot of pools have speakers in them and you can hear it pretty clearly under the surface.
She should be able to talk underwater, or tensei wouldn’t exist. Obviously her vocal mechanism isn’t air-based or has some other way to make it work underwater. Hopefully Todd will acquire some kind of transducer so he can talk as well– he is wearing a full-face mask, so I assume he just doesn’t know how to work the transducer yet. (most scuba regulators are just a fitting you chomp on, which makes it hard to talk. What Todd is wearing is called a full-face mask and aren’t very common.)
I *am* curious about her wearing a one-piece, isn’t it covering her gills? That would be like trying to breathe under a blanket.
I was expecting her suit to either have side cutouts, or more reasonably, just be a two-piece. (she is a girl, after all)
from what weve seen of her gils, any “top” would block the gills at least partially, i think the only solution to blocked gills would have to be a fancy cut one usually reserved for sexy side reveals in women. that said, the native sarnathi are shown (in the 400s) to live in the water with covered, partially covered and uncovered gills, so its likely a comfort level thing
I had a side cut one around her age in the eighties. It was not sexy. Trust me, they make age appropriate swimwear that wouldn’t block her gills. I assumed she wore a one piece because it would be difficult/embarrassing to have to explain gills to strangers.
That is possible, although her talking to her dad underwater might raise a few eyeballs. Especially if there is a lifeguard we haven’t seen yet.
I would assume Avery has already vetted this place; he possibly brings his own family here as well. I *was* looking at the woman behind him yesterday to see if it might have been Carrie.
There are a lot of very breathable fabrics, and swimsuits are generally designed to be thin and let water flow through the fabric freely. I doubt they would have bought her one of those more plastic based thread ones knowing her water breathing.
Gills normally flow out, so as long as the fabric is thin enough, there should be no problem.
Oh, I forgot that. We saw her gills in operation when she was huffing water after eating the Grapes of Death. They do indeed only flow out, so presumably she would be OK.
I was assuming she would somehow not mouth-breathe like a fish because of talking and all. I guess that nose is less vestigial than it looks.
He needs to invest in or rent one of those helmets like they use for contamination or naval divers, as they come with underwater communication systems that might be important.
Link of a representative model: https://www.amronintl.com/kirby-morgan-superlite-17b-commercial-diving-helmet.html
Those are for commercial diving, which is typically done with an umbilical, not SCUBA tanks. In any case, he doesn’t need radio communications, he needs conversion from air-based audio to water-based audio, or the Sarnothi will need radios to hear him.
There are transducers to be had that can accomplish this, but it’s hard to talk with a regular regulator in your mouth so I would assume that’s why David has Todd in a full-face mask.
This is one of the newest ones, which actually allows use of a regular regulator– however, it’s debatable whether a Sarnothi would be able to hear/understand it. http://www.yamagata-casio.co.jp/english/news/news_121113.html
Sorry, I meant “Dave”, not “David”.
Huh…the more you know.
Give any sarnothi that you need to talk to a headset – though surface comms might come in handy if you run into difficulty, ranging from cultural problems to an outbreak of violence that requires the intervention of a frogman team or some such. The government program likely has those headsets on the shelf already.
Well that was a dickish move by agent Brown. There was literally no reason for him to do that to Selkie. And don’t give tell me he was trying to make her face her fears, because she never said she was afraid of pools, just that she doesn’t like them because they have a lot of chemicals. Nor does she need to learn how to scuba dive since she can breath under water.
This may be the first time Agent Brown has gotten to see if Selkie could make it to the city herself. If her gills had any issues from when she was sick, this would be a safer place for it to come out than in the middle of a lake.
That’s not really a good reason to push her in. She needs for her to get in on her own time and not just cuz Agent Brown is impatient.
Agent uses “Dad move!”…it’s super effective!
“Oh, the many things Agent Brown can do. He married Sarnothi, he checks his crew. He shoves younglings whose fears need be through. Oh, the many things Agent Brown can do…” My son loves that Dr. Seuss book:)
Please, like fish don’t poop in the lake.
No that’s not okay,Agent Brown. You should let Selkie go in when she wanted to. Not just cuz you’re impatient and it’s rude. Just cuz your son is Sarnothi doesn’t make it okay.
When she comes back up he better apologize for pushing her in. -__-
I do agree. He better apologize to Todd and esp. Selkie when they come up. Hopefully with an explanation of why he did it. I’m crossing my fingers that he does have a valid reason, but if it was truly just so Selkie could “face her fears” then I hope they get to push him in when he’s in his suit! (work suit not swim trunks/suit
Actually, that’s why my uncle was very careful what he wore near a pool since I had this habit of pushing everyone I knew into it when I was a child. I would wait till they weren’t expecting, then tackle! I was also 5 at the time. Damn near ruined a pair of snake skin cowboy boots that way.
I’m not sure how to feel about it. Yea it’s kind of dickish but pretty much all pranks are. I’ve been both pushed and pusher in this situation and each times we just had a laugh about it.
On another though I think it comes down to what kind of relationship they have… Like this would be pretty normal between friends or siblings but not acceptable with a stranger. Agent Brown is somewhere between that so eh, guess it depends on how Selkie will feel about it in the end.
I concur. It is never okay, first of all, to push anyone into a body of water. Sure, she can’t drown, but for humans that’s another story. Second, yes, he should apologize if he wants to maintain a decent sort of relationship with these folks. Or at the least explain why. Yes, I am one of those NOT in support of “throw them in and they’ll learn how to swim”. My kids would be long dead if that were true. Had to fish my son out of the water DURING a swimming lesson, for goodness sakes! That’s with coaches and lifeguards around. Ya just can’t fully trust anyone… Hence the need for swim lessons. Get the kid confident in the water, get them some skills, THEN make sure they can cut it.
Oh please. Selkie has already demonstrated she’s not an easily traumatized kid. This is just a harmless prank on his part. (Some children are just naturally more sensitive to things like this, so you should take it slower with them. Selkie isn’t one of them and Agent Brown knows it.)
True. If my kid were Sarnothi, I’d be more lenient. But if it were my son or daughter he shoved in? There’d be heck to pay.
i wonder if at some point it’d be better to buy swimsuits that leave your sides exposed, i bet they make those… can’t see it’d be easy to breath through swimsuit fabric
When fish breathe, they breathe in through their mouth and out through their gills. I believe when Selkie was doing stuff with her gills in school she did something similar. I can’t see fabric getting in the way of breathing out.
Just a quick question about the people saying that agent Brown was a dick for pushing Selkie in. Do any of you have kids? Because I have two, mine and my step daughter.
Here’s the thing, if a kid gets it into their head that they don’t want to do something, like, say, take their medicine when not only will it not hurt them but will help them, and they won’t take it for reasons that only exist in their heads, ie, it’s “yucky” sometimes the best option is to just get over it.
As an example, my daughter is currently sick and refused to take the medicine that would knock her fever out so that she could sleep. She whined about it for a solid twenty minutes. “No, it’ll be yucky! My sister didn’t like it, it’ll make me puke!”
“Have you had this medicine before?”
“No, but it’ll still be yucky!”
I finally ended up taking away all of her toys, her laptop and her books. She dumped it down her throat, took a swig of water, grumbled at me for being mean, but 20 minutes later, she was snuggled into bed watching her favorite movie without a fever.
The point that I’m making is that it’s better for Agent Brown to push Selkie in and have her angry for a few minutes, realize that the pool is not going to hurt her, and it isn’t full of anything gross, doesn’t smell bad, etc, rather than have her refuse to get in based on preconceived notions that in this case, have no basis in actuality, than it is to let her dither around for days.
That should be Selkie’s parent’s choice – not Agent Todd. You chose (and probably rightly) to use negative reinforcement to have your daughter do something that was good for her. Would you be as lenient if an adult who has met you less than 5 times tried to force her to take something that she didn’t want to? That you weren’t completely sure that you trusted and who had recently proved to be unreliable by taking away items that were very important to her without ever being able to be returned? While yes, this isn’t harmful to Selkie – Agent Brown is NOT her teacher, or her parent, and should not be able to make decisions on her welfare or how best to make her face something. Now IF he has a good reason and apologizes to both her and her family, then Todd might be able to cut him some slack. But if it was just because Agent Brown thought that Selkie should experience pool time – that isn’t Agent Brown’s call anymore.
Err Agent Brown not Agent Todd – oops.
Actually, it could be argued that in this capacity, he is acting as her teacher.
Todd is learning scuba diving in order to be with Selkie when she meets more Sarnathi, Agent Brown is attempting to instruct them on how to operate together under water, in an environment that Selkie is native to, and Todd is still learning to navigate. If they don’t work together and Selkie doesn’t keep in the forefront of her mind that her father is no where near as adept at she is, there is a possibility that Selkie, as a child without the necessary life experience, in excitement, could theoretically leave Todd behind in a “not exactly the best case scenario.”
And yes, I have had a stranger whom I haven’t completely trusted have to use negative enforcement on my child to get her to do something that she didn’t want to for her own good.
I was a single parent for the first five years of my child’s life but I still had to work to support us. She got sick one day while I was on my way to work. I couldn’t afford to miss a day, so I stopped off at the store, picked up some Tylenol and dropped her and the medicine off with the babysitter. I didn’t fully like or trust the babysitter and it actually pissed me off when the woman took her toys away when she didn’t want to take her medicine, especially since she’d lost all of her favorites when our apartment had flooded the year before.
I also understood why she did it.
You also put your children under her care – so she did have *some* authority that you trusted her with. However, that sounds like a stinky situation for both you and your daughter. It’s hard being a single parent, and you have my full respect for going through that and not just raising your child but obviously caring that she is well taken care of.
Agent Brown no longer has say over how to raise Selkie – he gave that up to Todd when he approved Todd’s adoption of her. If Todd is her legal guardian then he gets to say who does things to her. Someone can act in the capacity of a teacher – but if that person is not actually working at the school where the child is attending then they are not. Now there may be a gray area as far as how much authority Agent Brown has as a federal agent, but Selkie’s life wasn’t at risk, she just didn’t want to drink nasty water. So he shouldn’t have touched her without a parent’s permission – at least if I am remembering my rights at all.
This also doesn’t mean that the laws are different in Dave’s world and federal agents have more say than they do in the real world.
This is a bit different than pushing a human being into the water. This is her natural environment, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.
The fact that she can complain to Todd underwater proves Agent Brown’s point.
Pool safety is a big deal in my family, especially after my younger brother almost drowned to death in a swimming pool surrounded by people. (He was panicking and trying to grab on to other people to try and pull himself up to the surface, but they didn’t understand and pushed him down and he passed out. Once he went limp they realized he wasn’t playing and got him out.) So yeah: pool safety is a big deal.
But in this case it is her natural habitat.
By “pools smells bad and theres craps in the waters” Selkie is referring to chlorine commonly found in overpowering quantities in public pools, no? Mulm would probably only disturb her the way we wrinkle our noses when we walk past a lawn full of dog dirt. We rarely notice.
Since the water and air goes in her nose and mouth and then out her gills, I would assume the main reason many Sarnothi don’t wear a top over their gills is to prevent several quarts of slightly warmer than pool temperature de-oxygenated water suddenly pumping out under her armpits and soaking everything she is wearing. But I can breath through cloth unless it is the wrong kind of a coat, so I assume she could vent de-oxygenated water through cloth also – I mean, has anyone ever seen a whale spout? I suspect she can generate more respiratory power than a human can because water is that much heavier than air.
BTW, very much like that abdominal line of the immature child belly in the panel where she is swimming. Thank you very much for not giving her the standard default female highly toned late adolescent belly that usually gets drawn on every female character regardless of age unless she is deliberately being drawn with the only alternate belly shape which is the morbidly obese evil female character.
I’m giving Selkie’s swimmy instincts maybe 3 seconds to kick in and steamroll her indignation.
For reference: https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie248/
I mean, obviously it’s okay if the kid can breathe water..
My parents used to yell at me for pushing people in the water, but to me as a kid it was a key part of kid life. I dunno. It was super important to me that kids be able to push each other in the water. I’m not sure why. (I didn’t mind being pushed myself. *shrug* )
I am impressed by both the thought, and ability, to draw Todd’s raised eyebrow look under a scuba mask.
Rule of thumb when it comes to body of water- If you don’t know the Condition of the water- Ie if there are tangly things like big weeds or limb-trapping debris or you don’t know the Swimming Skill of the person you intend to toss- DO NOT THROW THEM IN.
Avery gets a pass from me because this is a pool and Selkie is amphibious. Otherwise I would become a very cranky lady in a very big hurry. (I have relatives/friends who cannot swim and Family History of one relative drowning. this is a thing that concerns me on occasion)
I totally understand why the Agent Brown thing seems like a dick move, but at the same time, it kind of makes me giggle- I LOVED being pushed and tossed into bodies of water when I was little, I would harass my dad until he picked me up and threw me in.