Jonah Yu by Miriam
Shaenon: Inspired by a comment by Jeff about how Jonah Yu must have gotten nothing but bad rolls during his character creation, Miriam Eisfelder has drawn this depiction of his remarkable poor (or maybe just odd) luck. The poor guy is getting an alligator on his head. But at least it’s a tiny alligator.
Actually I don’t think Jonah’s so badly off. He has powers now. Time powers.
Channing: I want to hug Sad Jonah here and let him know everything is going to be all right, but I would probably accidentally kill him somehow in doing so.
“I don’t have bad luck; I have Fortean luck!”
I’d say he at least scored high on wisdom and constitution to come back from everything relatively undamaged and sane, plus he picked up on thing pretty quickly.
Yes but he must have rolled lowish on int given how many tries it took him to learn how not to die during Choose.
Not necessarily. The Anasigma facility has too many ways to die, as he put it, and a lot of those were between his save point and getting out alive with Nera. He was probably discovering only one or two new ones each time, so it took a bunch of playthroughs to accomplish what he wanted to accomplish.
Agreed, I’d say started with good Int and a bunch of unused points, picked up what’s effectively limited precognition (from a bystander’s point of view), and probably earned some Wis and skills on the way out.
The interesting thing is that he now represents an instability in the timestream as a whole — every time he dies, he (and the reader!) hops to a different universe. We’ve been taking for granted that all these timelines are identical except for his actions, but that’s not really guaranteed. (See, f’rex, Heinlein’s J.O.B.)
Nor is it guaranteed that he will play out his exit and subsequent events identically — for example, after a given point, every time he dies, he gets a chance to, say, avoid forgetting his third wedding anniversary, or not to leave the dog in the same room as the Christmas ham. On the other hand, I’m sure that at some point, he’d like to reset his spawn point to after the escape….
With his luck, that’s actually a full-sized (or bigger) alligator far behind him and coming in at a diagonal.
It was *meant* to be a baby crocodile.
Because throwing a full-grown saltie at him would’ve just been mean, that’s why.
Miriam
(Elton John: Candle in the Wind)
Goodbye, Jonah Yu
Though you won’t be gone long at all
Still, you keep on dying
And it must hurt, getting mauled
By razor-eyeball monkeys
Traps that squash you to a stain
They tripped you up so often
And they made you start again
And it seems to me you lived your lives
Like a gamer in a game
Always trying to remember
Where the monsters came
Though your deaths were all so painful
Each one moved you on a bit
Your game was over many times-
You didn’t ever quit.
Zack called, he wants his alligator back…