Figgs & Phantoms is a Newberry-winning 1974 book by Ellen Raskin, in which a girl from an eccentric family must find a reason to live when her favorite uncle dies. Based on Goodreads reviews, it’s both wacky and bleak. How it pertains to Skin Horse, I guess we shall see.
OK, Ginny! Time to decide which loyalty test you will flunk and which loyalty test you will pass. As Frank Stockton might put it, “The Corporation or the Cyborg?”. o_O
It seems that Mr. Green is fond of both Nick and Dr. Lee. Perhaps it’s only a ruse to get her on board. Not that he would need such a ruse, but I can’t picture him getting rid of either of them.
When did you get the impression that Mr. Green is *fond* of Nick? I get the impression that he finds him useful, and that he appreciates Dr. Lee’s affection for him, but…
At the moment, Ira looks like a classic stalker. (I only know much about stalkers from fiction, but since this is fiction, my expertise applies.) And a classic stalker might temporarily want to grant all their victim’s wishes as part of a fantasy, but the fantasy will often involve eventually being the sole person the victim cares about. It would make perfect sense for the classic stalker to ask the victim to prove loyalty by destroying other ties.
Now, disclaimer: I don’t want to anticipate this story, since both Shaenon and Jeff like twisty storytelling and this whole chapter is predicated on a very twisty story, so I’m happy to revise this impression at any point. But unless/until this story takes a turn, that seems to be the direction it’s going.
But… is there something already in the story that I missed that already works against my stalker theory? Did Mr. Green ever show affection to Nick that couldn’t be easily explained as a benefit for Ginny?
As far as I recall, the only time Ira ever met Nick was when he was airlifted away from Moustachio’s rampage. Violet Bee, however, met Nick here, and they did not get on.
For team members experiencing qualms, Anasigma provides free access to an unethical ethicist who can help you explore the moral dimension of your choices and prove the soundness of the one required by your supervisor.
Strictly speaking, Ginny already dismantled his body once, without his knowledge or consent, and he was cool with it.
He’s a jarhead cyborg – as long as his brain remains secure, he can always get a new body. Heck, she could hook him up to any of the humanoid drones and he’d be totally functional until they figure out a suitable replacement.
Exactly what I was thinking. “Sure, I’ll help disassemble him! Where’s the tool box!” Twenty-four hours later, she’s putting the final touches on the new humanoid body she built him out of the VTOL parts – and he’s complaining about the lack of rotors. Whatever gizmos Ginny puts in the new chassis to help them bust out of here being a bonus.
Why would Mr. Green need Virginia’s help? Ordering Nick to crash at 300mph should dismantle things nicely!
Since Anasigma is behind the reality blindness it may be to cloak the eradication of the non-human community in a New War winning preemptive strike. Which would explain why H.T. needed Captain Bram’s stockpile of bioweapons to maintain a balance of terror…
And Ira got Tigerlilly to build Dr. Lee’s weather control device, using it to target each of the non-human communities with their vulnerabilities as docunented in Skin Horse’s files. Having destroyed the originals he has to take care of Nick’s backups and needs Virginia to ensure they’re destroyed (in case Nick made other backups). But Virginia plots the weather anomalies against Nick’s files and uncovers the correlations which would allow the Skin Horse team to counter Ira’s machinations…
You know, reading your synopsis makes me realize that, even though I’ve never missed a strip, I’ve completely lost my grip on the plot. I keep thinking “Wait . . . what . . . when?” I need to skim the books to re-orient myself.
David: It’s a choice. Do you want to be the person who kills Nick, or do you want Virginia to be? I’m not sure why you’d want Virginia to believe either, but there you go.
Fortunately, Virginia has already considered this situation. skin-horse.com/comic/ears-folded/ It’s not clear whether she has her wall of glinting tools here, though.
I never saw that strip as Virginia considering dismembering Nick, other than for a brief moment in reaction to Tip’s comment in the last panel. But in light of today’s strip, it looks like the third panel may have been more of a “if I were ordered to, could I go through with it?” Well, she rescued Moustachio and Hitty, rather than tearing them apart, so maybe she can rescue Nick as well.
As for why you’d want Virginia to be the one to tear him apart? It’s the ultimate loyalty test. You love a man who works for the enemy… now kill him. And while tearing Nick apart won’t necessarily kill him, as long as the brain and its tank remain intact long enough to hook it up to something else, it could put a serious strain on their relationship. If she tears him apart, while it may not change how she feels about Nick, it just may change how Nick feels about her. And even if it doesn’t, it may give her the classic “I’ve done such horrible things to him, how could he ever still love me” complex (which wouldn’t really surprise me, but it would be kind of odd, nonetheless, since she’s already done horrible things to him).
Point of order that Dr. Lee is not being asked to destroy Nick, but to dismantle him. Subtle difference. It could be that Nick is going to be taken out of an Osprey and be put in something else. like an F-4 Phantom!
Okay, probably not, but I suspect Mr. Green is up to something more than just destroying Nick.
Considering that the F-4 is a 1950s-era design (although it was substantially modified throughout its operational lifetime), that’s quite a step backward!
A cynic might suggest that she’s been using the Loyalty Pits precisely because she’s actually not very loyal to Anasigma. An even more cynical cynic might suggest that Anasigma knows this, and uses the Loyalty Pits precisely to find people who feel an enhanced need to prove their loyalty.
You have a very astute – if cynical – grasp of the loyalty pits. It could be preemptive as well… “If I spend time in the loyalty pits, then I won’t have to prove my loyalty by actually being loyal.”
Of course that would provide evidence that you’re a dishonest opportunist, possibly even a psychopath, which would make you a good candidate for promotion to Anasigma management.
Oooor…. Green has been toying with virginia’s emotions this whole time because he’s trying to drive her mad.
I’ve been seeing a lot of parallels between her and Dave, from the Narbonic days. Virginia is brilliant, already understands mad science, and can use it in a “non-mad” direction. She’s also incredibly prone to second guess herself, and has been thrown into several stressors in her personal life between Tip, Nick, and that one time Green tried to snog her through Violet.
Any time we’ve seen someone go mad in the Narboniverse, they’ve gone from clueless to levelling a small town in 0.3 seconds. What would Virginia, who already is brilliant, do if she snaps?
These are the thoughts that keep me awake at night.
These thoughts don’t keep me awake at night, but I do occasionally dream that I am actually part of the story.
As for Virginia, I have always felt that she was already Mad, but she’s just in denial. Kind of like when Agatha Heterodyne said “I can’t survive as a Spark, so I won’t.”
Green keeps tabs on all the mads. He could recruit basically any one of them that he pleased. Why, specifically, would he want to instead turn Virginia mad?
Heck, we’ve specifically seen it stated that her value is in the fact that she straddles the line between madness and sanity. That allows her to work on mad science projects without compromising her useability.
The major drawbacks to mad science are that 1) it’s basically incomprehensible to most non-mads, and 2) the people who perform it aren’t reliable.
If you hire a mad scientist to invent you a death ray, they’ll make it – but they’ll only make one, they’ll finish it on their own schedule (not yours), you won’t be able to reverse engineer it to make others, and you won’t be able to convince them to make more because they’ll be obsessed with working on whatever random whim enters their head once they’re done.
That’s where Virginia comes in. She -can- reverse engineer the death ray for mass production, and possibly improve upon the design while doing so. And she’s both not mad and a workaholic, so she won’t stop half-way through the process to go on a rampage, or get side-tracked by a random idea for a fusion powered waffle iron that makes belgian waffles the size of small office buildings.
But how do you know she hasn’t already had her breakthrough long before we met her, and she is now simply trying to hide her Madness? She is far too skilled with Mad science for me to believe that she is entirely sane.
No disassemble! No disassemble number Nick!
Any idea what the chapter title means?
Probably about us, the readers, solving a family mystery by doing extensive reading outside the actual strip.
Figgs & Phantoms is a Newberry-winning 1974 book by Ellen Raskin, in which a girl from an eccentric family must find a reason to live when her favorite uncle dies. Based on Goodreads reviews, it’s both wacky and bleak. How it pertains to Skin Horse, I guess we shall see.
Frigg Is the German name of freya goddess of forknowladeg, cough Dr. Lee. Phantom a ghost maybe like one in a shell, cough Nick.
Foreknowledge.
No, Frigg and Freya are different goddesses from Scandinavian mythology, neither of which are German.
And the chapter title is “Figgs” not “Frigg”.
OK, Ginny! Time to decide which loyalty test you will flunk and which loyalty test you will pass. As Frank Stockton might put it, “The Corporation or the Cyborg?”. o_O
Although it’s the corporation that kills you if you pick the cyborg… 🙁
(Hopefully she’s still irreplaceable at this point!)
It seems that Mr. Green is fond of both Nick and Dr. Lee. Perhaps it’s only a ruse to get her on board. Not that he would need such a ruse, but I can’t picture him getting rid of either of them.
When did you get the impression that Mr. Green is *fond* of Nick? I get the impression that he finds him useful, and that he appreciates Dr. Lee’s affection for him, but…
At the moment, Ira looks like a classic stalker. (I only know much about stalkers from fiction, but since this is fiction, my expertise applies.) And a classic stalker might temporarily want to grant all their victim’s wishes as part of a fantasy, but the fantasy will often involve eventually being the sole person the victim cares about. It would make perfect sense for the classic stalker to ask the victim to prove loyalty by destroying other ties.
Now, disclaimer: I don’t want to anticipate this story, since both Shaenon and Jeff like twisty storytelling and this whole chapter is predicated on a very twisty story, so I’m happy to revise this impression at any point. But unless/until this story takes a turn, that seems to be the direction it’s going.
But… is there something already in the story that I missed that already works against my stalker theory? Did Mr. Green ever show affection to Nick that couldn’t be easily explained as a benefit for Ginny?
Just a certain je ne sais quoi. I can’t put my finger on it at the moment. So I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.
I haven’t read through the entire archive at all in the past couple months, so some details are beginning to grow blurry.
As far as I recall, the only time Ira ever met Nick was when he was airlifted away from Moustachio’s rampage. Violet Bee, however, met Nick here, and they did not get on.
For team members experiencing qualms, Anasigma provides free access to an unethical ethicist who can help you explore the moral dimension of your choices and prove the soundness of the one required by your supervisor.
Strictly speaking, Ginny already dismantled his body once, without his knowledge or consent, and he was cool with it.
He’s a jarhead cyborg – as long as his brain remains secure, he can always get a new body. Heck, she could hook him up to any of the humanoid drones and he’d be totally functional until they figure out a suitable replacement.
Exactly what I was thinking. “Sure, I’ll help disassemble him! Where’s the tool box!” Twenty-four hours later, she’s putting the final touches on the new humanoid body she built him out of the VTOL parts – and he’s complaining about the lack of rotors. Whatever gizmos Ginny puts in the new chassis to help them bust out of here being a bonus.
Female agent looks like a teen clone of Gillian Anderson.
No, not a teen clone – it’s straight up the same design that Shaenon uses in Monster of The Week for Scully, just with color and freckles.
Basically it’s the same thing as with Konstantin looking exactly like Mulder.
So freckles are the female equivalent of goatees?
Why would Mr. Green need Virginia’s help? Ordering Nick to crash at 300mph should dismantle things nicely!
Since Anasigma is behind the reality blindness it may be to cloak the eradication of the non-human community in a New War winning preemptive strike. Which would explain why H.T. needed Captain Bram’s stockpile of bioweapons to maintain a balance of terror…
And Ira got Tigerlilly to build Dr. Lee’s weather control device, using it to target each of the non-human communities with their vulnerabilities as docunented in Skin Horse’s files. Having destroyed the originals he has to take care of Nick’s backups and needs Virginia to ensure they’re destroyed (in case Nick made other backups). But Virginia plots the weather anomalies against Nick’s files and uncovers the correlations which would allow the Skin Horse team to counter Ira’s machinations…
You know, reading your synopsis makes me realize that, even though I’ve never missed a strip, I’ve completely lost my grip on the plot. I keep thinking “Wait . . . what . . . when?” I need to skim the books to re-orient myself.
Yep, me too: “Wait… what… when?”.
Unfortunately, my profile pic isn’t as fitting as yours .-D
Apologies. I’m confabulating again. There wasn’t a single episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” I didn’t rewrite in my head…
David: It’s a choice. Do you want to be the person who kills Nick, or do you want Virginia to be? I’m not sure why you’d want Virginia to believe either, but there you go.
Fortunately, Virginia has already considered this situation. skin-horse.com/comic/ears-folded/ It’s not clear whether she has her wall of glinting tools here, though.
I never saw that strip as Virginia considering dismembering Nick, other than for a brief moment in reaction to Tip’s comment in the last panel. But in light of today’s strip, it looks like the third panel may have been more of a “if I were ordered to, could I go through with it?” Well, she rescued Moustachio and Hitty, rather than tearing them apart, so maybe she can rescue Nick as well.
As for why you’d want Virginia to be the one to tear him apart? It’s the ultimate loyalty test. You love a man who works for the enemy… now kill him. And while tearing Nick apart won’t necessarily kill him, as long as the brain and its tank remain intact long enough to hook it up to something else, it could put a serious strain on their relationship. If she tears him apart, while it may not change how she feels about Nick, it just may change how Nick feels about her. And even if it doesn’t, it may give her the classic “I’ve done such horrible things to him, how could he ever still love me” complex (which wouldn’t really surprise me, but it would be kind of odd, nonetheless, since she’s already done horrible things to him).
I was going to say, I’m pretty sure she already has that complex.
Point of order that Dr. Lee is not being asked to destroy Nick, but to dismantle him. Subtle difference. It could be that Nick is going to be taken out of an Osprey and be put in something else. like an F-4 Phantom!
Okay, probably not, but I suspect Mr. Green is up to something more than just destroying Nick.
Ditto
Considering that the F-4 is a 1950s-era design (although it was substantially modified throughout its operational lifetime), that’s quite a step backward!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-4_Phantom_II
Ira’s setting her up. He knows about her and Nick.
A cynic might suggest that she’s been using the Loyalty Pits precisely because she’s actually not very loyal to Anasigma. An even more cynical cynic might suggest that Anasigma knows this, and uses the Loyalty Pits precisely to find people who feel an enhanced need to prove their loyalty.
You have a very astute – if cynical – grasp of the loyalty pits. It could be preemptive as well… “If I spend time in the loyalty pits, then I won’t have to prove my loyalty by actually being loyal.”
Of course that would provide evidence that you’re a dishonest opportunist, possibly even a psychopath, which would make you a good candidate for promotion to Anasigma management.
Quick! Jump in, say the magic words and fly off into the sunset!
Oooor…. Green has been toying with virginia’s emotions this whole time because he’s trying to drive her mad.
I’ve been seeing a lot of parallels between her and Dave, from the Narbonic days. Virginia is brilliant, already understands mad science, and can use it in a “non-mad” direction. She’s also incredibly prone to second guess herself, and has been thrown into several stressors in her personal life between Tip, Nick, and that one time Green tried to snog her through Violet.
Any time we’ve seen someone go mad in the Narboniverse, they’ve gone from clueless to levelling a small town in 0.3 seconds. What would Virginia, who already is brilliant, do if she snaps?
These are the thoughts that keep me awake at night.
These thoughts don’t keep me awake at night, but I do occasionally dream that I am actually part of the story.
As for Virginia, I have always felt that she was already Mad, but she’s just in denial. Kind of like when Agatha Heterodyne said “I can’t survive as a Spark, so I won’t.”
What’s the point, though?
Green keeps tabs on all the mads. He could recruit basically any one of them that he pleased. Why, specifically, would he want to instead turn Virginia mad?
Heck, we’ve specifically seen it stated that her value is in the fact that she straddles the line between madness and sanity. That allows her to work on mad science projects without compromising her useability.
The major drawbacks to mad science are that 1) it’s basically incomprehensible to most non-mads, and 2) the people who perform it aren’t reliable.
If you hire a mad scientist to invent you a death ray, they’ll make it – but they’ll only make one, they’ll finish it on their own schedule (not yours), you won’t be able to reverse engineer it to make others, and you won’t be able to convince them to make more because they’ll be obsessed with working on whatever random whim enters their head once they’re done.
That’s where Virginia comes in. She -can- reverse engineer the death ray for mass production, and possibly improve upon the design while doing so. And she’s both not mad and a workaholic, so she won’t stop half-way through the process to go on a rampage, or get side-tracked by a random idea for a fusion powered waffle iron that makes belgian waffles the size of small office buildings.
Mads don’t truly unlock their full potential until they flip out. Considering what Dr. Lee can do while sane…..*low whistle*.
Except she’s WAY more useful as a reliable asset that can be reused, rather than a one-time deal.
Round up a dozen mad scientists, push them all over the edge, and have Virginia reverse engineer each new result.
But how do you know she hasn’t already had her breakthrough long before we met her, and she is now simply trying to hide her Madness? She is far too skilled with Mad science for me to believe that she is entirely sane.
Mulder? Scully?
There’s Aimee and Alt-Nick running around VR Whimsey World. If Nick kept them up to date…
I mean the only important part is his brain, so if she keeps the brain, the rest can all be rebuilt
Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.
We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster.
*hyperactive trumpet and bass*
Alfa Alfa?