[2977] "So, we tried to think of Zimmy..."

[imaginaryfriend]

Thinking about Zeta too much is never a good idea.

That might mean they weren't that far from Zeta before, when they were attacked by spiders.

[Gemini Jim]

Ah, so the conversation circles back to Zimmy again, and that leads to spider town. Good.

If they want to find Zimmy (to stop the Distortion), they'll probably have to confront the spiders instead of retreating. (* They did that with the Riddle Hamster, too.)

We've all played games where skipping levels means you lose vital bits of plot and information, right?

[philman]

I wonder who else has figured this out.

And if they found monsters when thinking of Zimmy, is the next step to think of Loup or Coyote and see where that takes them? unlikely allies?

[arf]

Maybe try thinking of Gamma next time?

[aggadahGothic]

The monster designs are very lovely. I hope Zimmy is able to sic them on Omega soon if Reynardine is correct. She seemed rather frighted when she saw one in Chapter 91.

[imaginaryfriend]

I'd try thinking of people who can help protect Gamma before collecting Gamma. Omega might try kidnapping them, though if she doesn't that might mean she thinks Antimony teaming up with Anthony and/or the Donlans is a greater threat than Antimony trying to end the distortion by herself. Maybe that means Omega is more worried about Antimony gaining access to Court resources but it might also mean that there's faster/easier ways to resolve the distortion with help. And I'm still wondering what Aata and Jenny are doing in all of this.

Alternatively, Antimony could think of Coyote. I'm sure Omega kidnapping Coyote or even a Coyotedawg would have hilarious consequences. [edit] If Antimony doesn't want to get her own hands dirty she could tell Coyote that she has strong romantic feelings for Omega. Lana would love having someone to talk to. [/edit]

[Igniz]

Hummm... If they had to "leave immediately" Annie's clothes wouldn't be burned. 

[ctso74]

I wonder if Kat would see monsters or not?

[pyradonis]

Aug 7, 2024 7:18:09 GMT arf said:

Maybe try thinking of Gamma next time?

Nobody in-universe seems to think of Gamma except as a plot device to stop distortions.

[morrahadesigns]

Aug 7, 2024 9:32:19 GMT Igniz said:

Hummm... If they had to "leave immediately" Annie's clothes wouldn't be burned. 

It shows in the panel that she had activated her fire. Probably she Flamed-On instinctively then realized how many monsters there were a split second later and bwipped out. 

[aggadahGothic]

Aug 7, 2024 13:11:10 GMT ctso74 said:

I wonder if Kat would see monsters or not?

She is unable to see through the robots' being organic in the distortion, so her magical powers of mundanity seem to have no effect at the moment.

[silicondream]

Aug 7, 2024 9:32:19 GMT Igniz said:

Hummm... If they had to "leave immediately" Annie's clothes wouldn't be burned. 

I'm not sure why they'd be burned in any case.  Annie's fire only burns what she wants it to burn, right?  Is the distortion screwing with her control?

[Corvo]

Ah, this puts a new light on Rey's spinning eyes when he and Annie showed up to take Kat.

[blahzor]

oh so Zimmy is the town of spiders and monsters as a young woman. so that makes Gamma is Metropolis

[jasmijn]

I love how much Reynard has come around on Zimmy, from the reflexive "she's a demon!" to showing pity and concern

[Gemminie]

Kat has just asked Annie why her clothes are singed. Annie replies by explaining how distortion-travel works: think of either people or locations. (Presumably one must also think of traveling to them, or else randomly thinking about people or places would cause people to BWIP around uncontrollably, which we don't see happening.) Then she explains what she did before coming to Kat: she tried to get to Zimmy directly and help her.

We see a frame in a wonderful upward three-point perspective showing us what happened then. Beneath a gray sky lies a Gothic cityscape, its buildings literally crawling with monsters looking down upon Annie and Renard. Annie is lighting up her hair and one hand with fire, so apparently there was a hot time in the old town that night. It appears that Annie defended them until they could get out of there, as Renard shows no sign of burn damage now and doesn't appear to be using fire abilities in this flashback. Tom's comment is "A quick exit was needed."

Renard comments that it was a "vile place" and theorizes that it's some sort of defense mechanism Zimmy's set up to protect herself. The spots of color distortion continue in at least the first and final frames, and possibly frame 3, as Renard's ears seem different colors there.

What are those spots? They were around at the beginning of the distortion, but they started to disappear once they began to travel for real, focusing on memories. They've been absent, but now they're back. I'd suggest that they're only present in natural landscapes, but they were still visible in the first cityscape that Annie, Renard, and the NP entered. I'd suggest that they're only present when Omega isn't, suggesting that perhaps they represent Omega spying on people, but we're still seeing them when Omega is traveling with the group of NP, and we don't see them in Kat's workshop. Are they just a stylistic choice with no canonical function, to indicate that this is within the distortion and things are weird?

[eyemyself]

Or... hear me out, Annie... your strongest association with Zimmy is Zimmyham, that's where you expect to find her, and that's why you landed there when you thought of her. If it were as simple as thinking of someone to find them, you could have just thought of your Dad and followed him to Omega when she nabbed him.

I have a feeling things are even more complicated than they seem, and that Omega has a firmer grasp of that and is counting on her relatively superior understanding to slow Annie down while she works to pursue her own goals with the useful adults. I am curious why she didn't nab Kat, too. Whatever she's up to, I suspect Kat's aptitude and interests would make her a powerful ally and Omega might be able to sway her if she could keep her away from Annie's influence.

[blahzor]

Aug 7, 2024 15:57:42 GMT jasmijn said:

I love how much Reynard has come around on Zimmy, from the reflexive "she's a demon!" to showing pity and concern

because he's seen a real demon..botbox

[drmemory]

That still doesn't explain why Annie's clothing is singed. If anything, I'd expect her to be sort of resistant to flame, if not immune! She must have gone somewhere pretty interesting next.

Something to think about - are the places inside the distortion real? Or do they only exist while the one who created them remains?

Think about the last couple of places we've seen. Tony's home looked quite normal. Tony doesn't seem to have much of an imagination. Kat's lab looked pretty normal and most of her equipment worked. Again, if she more or less conjured it up, this makes sense. Anja and Donald were found in a place that had a lot of personal meaning to them, rather than their own home - I could see them putting themselves there subconsciously.

This theory seems plausible to me, but I'm sure someone will disagree vehemently. Still, it makes a lot of sense, and even Zimmy's city fits.

Part of what I'm poking at is that everywhere we've seen was maybe created by someone via their memories or whatever. Including Zimmy's monster pen. So where the heck did Annie go that was full of fire, and where was she trying to go when she got there? Maybe Coyote but I lack a rationale for the fire.

On a related note, why isn't Renard singed?

To be clear, I'm suggesting that everyone in the distortion is manifesting places based on their own thoughts and memories. Some of them are quite similar to the real world, some are not. The others present in these... bubbles may or may not be real. In all cases, the bubbles are real enough that they can hurt you - we aren't talking simple light shows here; Jeanne was a sock puppet but still killed. So when you try to warp to a person, you are warping into their bubble, or at least the bubble they have entered themselves. Omega needs to touch someone to poit around because she needs to use their memories to do it with, as she is in a constructed body without a physical brain of its own.

I still have no good theory on why Omega is collecting geeks or parents. Maybe she's trying to get access to whatever the court has hidden from her?

[csj]

she sees herself as a monster, so...

[morrahadesigns]

Aug 7, 2024 14:33:12 GMT silicondream said:

Aug 7, 2024 9:32:19 GMT Igniz said:

Hummm... If they had to "leave immediately" Annie's clothes wouldn't be burned. 

I'm not sure why they'd be burned in any case.  Annie's fire only burns what she wants it to burn, right?  Is the distortion screwing with her control?

Her clothes were burned when she first fought the wilder forest creatures back when Ysengrin introduced her as the medium. It's quite likely that her focus fractured right now with everything that's happening. 

[rabbit]

Aug 7, 2024 9:32:19 GMT Igniz said:

Hummm... If they had to "leave immediately" Annie's clothes wouldn't be burned. 

Just because you are retreating doesn't mean you aren't laying down some suppressing fire (actual fire, in Annie's case) as you go.

I agree with others about the singed clothing - her control is probably not as fine when she is ambushed and in a hurry, perhaps.

[maxptc]

Do you suppose this confirms that Tony doesn't think about Annie?

[eyemyself]

Aug 7, 2024 19:35:57 GMT drmemory said:

So where the heck did Annie go that was full of fire, and where was she trying to go when she got there?

Ohhh, your question raises a very interesting prospect... perhaps she was pulled to the boy in the hospital from her first experience working with the psychopomps. It would be one of her formative memories.

[eyemyself]

Aug 7, 2024 13:33:36 GMT pyradonis said:

Aug 7, 2024 7:18:09 GMT arf said:

Maybe try thinking of Gamma next time?

Nobody in-universe seems to think of Gamma except as a plot device to stop distortions.

Which is fascinating when you think about it because canonically she has etheric powers...


and her connection to the ether is stronger than Annie's.

[silicondream]

Aug 8, 2024 13:11:28 GMT morrahadesigns said:

Aug 7, 2024 14:33:12 GMT silicondream said:

I'm not sure why they'd be burned in any case.  Annie's fire only burns what she wants it to burn, right?  Is the distortion screwing with her control?

Her clothes were burned when she first fought the wilder forest creatures back when Ysengrin introduced her as the medium. It's quite likely that her focus fractured right now with everything that's happening.

Ah, that's right. She must have been distracted and burning at peak intensity. Nothing got singed when she was holding Loup back from the Shadow Men, but he's only one opponent.

[morrahadesigns]

Aug 9, 2024 8:00:10 GMT silicondream said:

Aug 8, 2024 13:11:28 GMT morrahadesigns said:

Her clothes were burned when she first fought the wilder forest creatures back when Ysengrin introduced her as the medium. It's quite likely that her focus fractured right now with everything that's happening.

Ah, that's right. She must have been distracted and burning at peak intensity. Nothing got singed when she was holding Loup back from the Shadow Men, but he's only one opponent.

And she was probably already on alert in that situation since Loup is unstable at best, so her focus would have been fairly intact at that point. 

[mturtle7]

Aug 7, 2024 13:11:10 GMT ctso74 said:

I wonder if Kat would see monsters or not?

I once said that I would just copy-paste a particular block of text as a reply to every post that brought up one of two things, AND I MEANT IT. Here it is:

"What I hate is that there are two particular Mysterious Things that just keep getting brought up over and over again, and it's always because people are misunderstanding what they mean in the exact same way, and I always feel the inexplicable need to correct them in the exact same way. I am seriously determined now to create two "stock corrections" that I will just copy-paste into a post whenever I feel the need to argue with someone about one of these two things, and be done with it. Here goes:
a) Kat's "logic vision", which we first encountered in "Chapter 46: The Realm of the Dead" and later encountered in "Chapter 60: The Other Shore", does not actually apply to everything magic. I know that when we see this ability in play, it really feels like she's just seeing through all the magic, so this is still a perfectly reasonable mistake to make, but I still think it is a mistake. I say this because Kat can still see, for example, Ankou the Psychopomp as exactly the unnatural etheric creature he is. The same holds true for a variety of other magical beings & effects in the comic. I won't try to name every single one of those, the Ankou thing just makes a good example because he's a spooky guy kind of like the ROTD Recordkeeper guy, but Kat was unafraid of that guy while she was afraid of Ankou. The exact nature of Kat's ability is not exactly clear, but the common element between both times we see it in play is that it takes effects that are meant to etherically obfuscate the truth of something by making them look big, complex, and dramatic, and instead it makes Kat see them as simple and mundane things which she can (and does) easily handle with mundane skills.
b) Coyote's Great Secret, which was first revealed by Coyote in "Chapter 39: The Great Secret" and is later expounded upon by Jones in "Chapter 40: The Stone", does not actually mean that you can make anything be real just by getting a large group of people to believe in it, nor does it mean everything etheric in the world of Gunnerkrigg comes precisely from a popular myth or legend. I honestly get why one might think this, since "belief magic" is a pretty popular concept in modern media, and both Coyote and Jones' explanation of it really emphasize how much power humans are supposed to have under this theory (and in particular, how scary that power is). However, there are a lot of problems with taking this at face value, not least of which is the fact that the "Great Secret" is nothing more than wild, evidence-free, speculation by Coyote, who is not the most unbiased or trustworthy source of info. But also, Coyote himself in his point that the Ether always exists unto itself, and the only reason etheric stuff resembles human myths is because human souls are absorbed into the ether only when they die. And furthermore, lots of etheric stuff that goes on in the world of Gunnerkrigg is either wholly an original creation of Tom Siddell's, or an old myth with a very original twist on it. For instance, City Fairies have plenty of qualities that aren't normally attributed to fairies by humans, and Coyote does lots of things in the story that are not featured in classical Native American mythology (e.g. committing suicide by wolf). So it stands to reason that even if one was to deliberately convince a very large group of humans of a specific piece of folklore, and then kill those humans so they're absorbed into the Ether, any etheric creatures that may result will probably not exist or act in precisely the way you intended."

[mturtle7]

Aug 7, 2024 13:33:36 GMT pyradonis said:

Aug 7, 2024 7:18:09 GMT arf said:

Maybe try thinking of Gamma next time?

Nobody in-universe seems to think of Gamma except as a plot device to stop distortions.

In fairness, Zimmy definitely thinks of Gamma as something more than that. I suspect that she might be the only one who thinks of her that way, though, including Gamma herself. Girl seems to have a bit of a martyr complex, with all those times she just flatly refused to sleep because staying awake would help Zimmy.

[aggadahGothic]

Aug 7, 2024 13:33:36 GMT pyradonis said:

Aug 7, 2024 7:18:09 GMT arf said:

Maybe try thinking of Gamma next time?

Nobody in-universe seems to think of Gamma except as a plot device to stop distortions.

Echoed very sadly by one of Tom's old Formspring answers:

Q: "[...] Does Zimmy's possessiveness ever worry [Gamma]?"
A: "[...W]ell nobody has ever asked her."