[2033] Goose Bone and Lake Water

[Timberwere]

Oh you want them back, do you?

[imaginaryfriend]

He'd better check them out before re-assimilating them. Coyote may have left a trick or two.

[madjack]

Pitting Annie against the interests of the Court in keeping the Forest weak?

I wonder if the trick is they are completely meaningless.

[glyphomatrix]

Someone forgot His tooth

[imaginaryfriend]

Aug 29, 2018 7:06:27 GMT madjack said:

Pitting Annie against the interests of the Court in keeping the Forest weak? I wonder if the trick is they are completely meaningless.

Well, if the trick is forgetting the Tooth and who has it, that'd be pretty meaningful.

[glyphomatrix]

Aug 29, 2018 7:09:38 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Aug 29, 2018 7:06:27 GMT madjack said:

Pitting Annie against the interests of the Court in keeping the Forest weak? I wonder if the trick is they are completely meaningless.

Well, if the trick is forgetting the Tooth and who has it, that'd be pretty meaningful.

To begin with, can the tooth be used to cleave two entities apart?

[arf]

Interesting that Loupe remembers the bone and water, but *not* the tooth?
I suspect the bone contains the memory of giving Annie the tooth, and the water a memo to Annie on what to do with it.

[madjack]

Aug 29, 2018 7:09:38 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Aug 29, 2018 7:06:27 GMT madjack said:

Pitting Annie against the interests of the Court in keeping the Forest weak? I wonder if the trick is they are completely meaningless.

Well, if the trick is forgetting the Tooth and who has it, that'd be pretty meaningful.

Why conceal the tooth's existence this way though? Loup doesn't even seem aware that the tooth was even given away, so why would Coyote feel the need to hide its existence inside another gift he was aware of? Unless the point was to send Annie on a literal wild goose chase that might put her at odds with the Court?

Edit:

Aug 29, 2018 7:19:58 GMT arf said:

Interesting that Loupe remembers the bone and water, but *not* the tooth?

I suspect the bone contains the memory of giving Annie the tooth, and the water a memo to Annie on what to do with it.

This makes sense, if the memories were intended for Annie in the first place...

Edit again: VVV this is why I think they might be completely valueless to Loup, they're purely a bargaining chip that he cannot know the importance of, but wants.

[aline]

Aug 29, 2018 7:11:12 GMT glyphomatrix said:

To begin with, can the tooth be used to cleave two entities apart?

Seeing how it cut a shadow from the surface it was on, I'm willing to bet yes. But I don't know if that's what Coyote would want Annie to do with the tooth.

The important part for now, though, is that Coyote left Annie levers to negotiate with. Loup needs things Annie can give him. No matter how big he talks, he can't just do whatever he wants with her, especially not keep her. Because if Annie doesn't come back, the Court sure as hell isn't sending anybody else in that forest. Or if they do, it won't be to talk.

That should give her enough room to go back to her friends and come up with a plan.

[Eversist]

Aug 29, 2018 7:11:12 GMT glyphomatrix said:

Aug 29, 2018 7:09:38 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Well, if the trick is forgetting the Tooth and who has it, that'd be pretty meaningful.

To begin with, can the tooth be used to cleave two entities apart?

Oh man, I like this train of thought.

[shadow3]

I wonder what would happen if Reynardine drank the lake water...?


Hmm...

[aline]

Aug 29, 2018 7:22:36 GMT madjack said:

Aug 29, 2018 7:09:38 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Well, if the trick is forgetting the Tooth and who has it, that'd be pretty meaningful.

Why conceal the tooth's existence this way though? Loup doesn't even seem aware that the tooth was even given away, so why would Coyote feel the need to hide its existence inside another gift he was aware of?

Misdirection. If you have a riddle and find a plausible answer, then you wouldn't keep looking for one. You think you already know. If you don't have a plausible answer, you'll keep thinking and exploring possibilities until you do find one.

So if you plant a wrong, but plausible answer, then you make it a lot harder to find the true answer. If Loup didn't think the lake water was the important missing piece, he'd keep thinking further back, and he might start finding hints that he's given Annie something. Ysengrin would have memories of Annie having a binding, the summer she spent in the Forest.

I do think the lake water is more than just misdirection, though. The best tacticians have moves with more than one purpose.

[fjodorii]

There could be an elemental thing here: Coyote warned Annie the tooth blade could cut the very earth. Maybe that was more than just a dramatic example. Now we also have water being somehow important. Annie herself is fire. All we need now is an air bender to make things complete and set off an escalation.

[nanning]

Coyote wanted to die. Not necessarily stay dead.

What if the whole water and bone is his resurrection game? It would be lovely when Loup would try his utmost to own his own demise, while Annie who want Ysengrin (and perhaps Coyote) back, would fight against it.

[phantaskippy]

Several things I think are important.

1. The days Coyote describes in his Goose/Bush/Lake story.
2. The fact that all three were him, but he thought he was just the goose.
3. He waited until Annie returned to state the moral, "Don't be a dead goose in a bush by a lake."

I think the tooth is a catalyst, and the gifts were given to people that would not come to the forest before Annie for a reason.
I wonder what all Coyote needs to have happen before she deals with the water and bone, after all we don't know what happened between day 7 and 100 (apart from counting stars), so there may be stuff that still needs to occur.

One thing that has occurred is Ysengrim has learned a valuable lesson about power.

[todd]

If this really is Coyote's scheme to come back to life again, I wonder if the plan will backfire on him afterwards.

Coyote's plan to experience death resulted in catastrophe to the Court, thanks to Loup threatening it (not to mention the Forest being frozen in time). It would have been bad enough if the goal was to destroy the Court, but if it turns out that in Coyote's eyes, what happened to Gunnerkrigg was just collateral damage, the Court leadership will most likely decide that they can't tolerate his existence any longer, that he's far too dangerous, that he has to be destroyed somehow.

[ctso74]

1) The bone could retain more than one memory.
2) I wonder if Coyote gave specifically Smitty the Memory Bone. Maybe, Smitty's passive power will "protect" it, or get it to the right place at the right time?
3) The water could be flat-out poison, as far as we know. Coyote said he wanted to experience Death. Maybe, he planned on experiencing it through Loup. Why kill off a main character, when you can experience the death of a new expendable character? That seems rather fourth-wall Coyote to me.

[Trillium]

Coyote has a scheme. Coyote has a plan. Coyote likes to put things in motion then sit back and watch what happens. Coyote likes to be entertained and told how clever he is. Clever, clever Coyote are you not entertained?

[darlos9d]

[philman]

Coyote believed he was dead in that goose story, and only realised on the 100th day that he was the goose and the bush and the lake all along. He seemed to forget the actual moral of the story and made up the "don't be a dead goose in a bush next to a lake" thing on the fly.

Perhaps the bone contains the memory of the true moral of the story and the reason why Coyote wanted to experience death in the first place (First by pretending to be a dead goose, and then by goading Ysengrin into killing him), the memory of which coyote lost when he gave it to Smitty before he had concluded the story, and so had to make up a crappy moral instead.

Given that Coyote was a dead goose for 100 days, it wouldn't surprise me if Smitty's powers of order end up restoring Coyote to his previous form using the goose bone 100 days after he was killed by Ysengrin as well.

[imaginaryfriend]

I suppose that it should be noted in passing that Ysengrin wasn't there when Smitface and George got the bone and lake water but he probably was close enough to overhear them talking to Antimony about the gifts.

[saardvark]

Aug 29, 2018 8:17:05 GMT fjodorii said:

There could be an elemental thing here: Coyote warned Annie the tooth blade could cut the very earth. Maybe that was more than just a dramatic example. Now we also have water being somehow important. Annie herself is fire. All we need now is an air bender to make things complete and set off an escalation.

the bone is from a flying (air!) creature... if you are on the right track, maybe all the elements are accounted for already!?

[bedinsis]

Loup called them Andrew and George? Not Mighty Eyebrows Boy and Huge Nose Girl?

...looking back over this chapter and the previous one, he called Antimony Antimony(or "My little Antimony"), whereas Coyote insisted on calling her Fire Head Girl.

I never thought about it until now, but someone probably already have pointed it out.

[liminal]

We've started to see all three morals coming into play for Coyote and Ysengrin.

Be careful what you wish for! (death; "Your strength.")

You reap what you sow! (sowing seeds of chaos, reaping an unpredictable, possibly boring end result; "I'll show the humans how weak they truly are" to the extent of taking Coyote's power, Ysengrin's identity becoming weak)

Do not be a dead goose in a bush next to a lake! (pretending to be dead/a creature not as clever as you gets boring; don't be someone you're not [Coyote])

[Per]

Storywise it would make some sense for the daggersplitting of Loup to take place here at the climax of the book, slingshotting into the aftermath in the next one. This is taking into consideration among other things Loup's seeming unpopularity, a frozen forest and kicked-anthill Court making for a somewhat un-Gunnerkriggy new status quo, and the merits of unspoken plans. On the other hand Tom probably doesn't have the luxury of polling reader reactions beforehand, nor the inclination to write based on such, so maybe he wouldn't want to repeat the structure of the Jeanne resolution.

If we're overthinking the bone and memories, I take it that either a) for the purposes of the story memories can't be hidden recursively to thoroughly obscure what was done, or b) it is not terribly clever to credit Coyote with just enough cleverness to hide a memory with a big sign saying "CLEVERLY HIDDEN MEMORY" pointing at it.

[jda]

Well, that's 2 Chekhov's guns fired, although we don't really know what their true value is yet.

[Runningflame]

"A gift from Coyote! Nothing could possibly go wrong here!"

I like where this is going. 

[fia]

IMPORTANT: rereading the Goose chapter, you can see the shards of the Forest in the background of the fourth panel.

Compare to Loup's visual description here.

[hp]

Sounds like Gunnerkrigg's version of that movie Paycheck. With Coyote in Ben Affleck's role

[jda]

So, shall we deduce that all this is just Coyote tricking even himself to Death?