[1116] I define myself

She is a constant and everything else is variable..?

It's interesting, though, that evolution still applies in a story like this.

I like how this chapter is ending: answers about Jones but still a mystery. The curious Jones is still curious. I wonder what Annie thinking of all this...

That green & red face in panel three is really cool!

So now she says she is unable to feel emotions at all? What is this thing with Egalmore then? her attempting to understand these emotions? attempting to feel them?

Is that a very rare misprint in Panel Four?Oops?

Perhaps the all her "emotional attachments" are merely her fitting into a missing role for others, and in all cases that we saw, she took a role of comfort for whoever she attached herself to.
She doesn't need emotions to act as a comfort, objects can be a comfort, and maybe thats what she considers herself.

I think it's her "blinker stone".

That is to say, it does nothing. It is merely a stone. Compare that to how a human can use a blinker.

Pfft. I'm not buying it. We've seen, even in this narrative, Jones act to honor the dead, fill a hole in Eggie's heart--she clearly cares about things in some way. Maybe she's not the same as a human, maybe she and we can't access what's in her black box, but if she walks like a duck and talks like a duck, she's a goddamned duck. Possibly a robot or golem or divine or time-travelling duck, but still a duck.

She might just have learned to act like she has emotions, to blend in better in human society. She has had a lot of time to practice, after all.

Yeah, the illustration for floods of human emotion look a lot like Jeanne and her Elfish lover. Very cool.

I'll lay my bet now. That black stone is probably sedimentary, and it's worn smooth and round and pockmarked, like a river stone. In other words, it is both younger than Jones and has weathered more in its life than she has, but it has undergone these changes much more slowly than a human lifetime. Jones is saying that she experiences things like a stone chipping slowly away, in contrast to the rushing flood of the human psyche.

This quote from Joseph Smith seems appropriate:

Yes, I agree. Jones has never come across as emotionless to me. Aloof, stoic, maybe, but not actually without emotion.

Even in this page she gives it away - why on earth would she care that she'd 'finally' found people like her? If she didn't care about anything, if she had no emotions, it would be 'eventually' or something like that. Obviously she was lonely. She was lonely for such a long time that she had to pretty much get over it but even so that was still a feeling she had.

I don't think she's just fitting in, either. If that were true she wouldn't have been driven out of everywhere (I think we are meant to assume that that wasn't a one off once magic powers stopped being a good thing.) She's very intelligent, a great judge of people, and completely in control of herself. Flesh and blood sociopaths do a better job than her of pretending to be human, which doesn't make sense, because Jones has much more experience of watching people, and I don't think she has sinister motives that she's covering up. So my conclusion is that Jones does feel emotions, she didn't realise at first because she had no-one to discuss them with, and she's been alive for so long that she's kinda numb. And she doesn't feel deep love for people because she knows how 'soon' they'll die, but she does care.

Probably she keeps that rock because she has this conversation once or twice per month. Each person she knows asks her this question, sooner or later, and she found this physical comparison easy to understand for her questioner.

Doubtful. Jones claimed it is unknown what Seed Bismuth actually was.

Edit: Though I looked back at it, and the exact claim is "there is no record". I assume that if Jones knows what it is, there is no contradiction. Hmmm..

You know, Jones's origin story reminds me of only one creature that I can think of in fiction: Satan in Jeff Long's novel Deeper. In that story Satan is an entity that was born in the Big Bang with all the knowledge in the universe, only to lose it all an instant later. Eons later a planet formed around him and life evolved, and he became first time aware of himself by relating to microbes, invertebrates and ultimately eventually people. At first he loved everything and mourned even a single dead spider, but then he became bitter from being trapped in the planet's core when there was so much to experience outside, and decided to take revenge on whoever would free him.

Jones has the luck of not being trapped, but she seems to have a similar conflict of trying to relate to life to her best abilities, but always feeling separate and unattached. She can count herself lucky if she doesn't have proper emotions; the alternative would probably be bloody insanity.