Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
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2016-11-21
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2016-11-21

by shaenon on November 21, 2016 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Purple Waves
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Discussion (27) ¬

  1. Sir William
    November 21, 2016, 12:08 am | # | Reply

    Or both

  2. Towering Barbarian
    November 21, 2016, 12:42 am | # | Reply

    Offhand, it looks as though she’s won fair and square. ^_^

  3. s854
    November 21, 2016, 1:09 am | # | Reply

    She came up the back stairs? I hope the Smokey Washingtons are okay.

    For that matter, I’m a bit disappointed that Tigerlily doesn’t have something keeping an eye on every little bit of the building for her. That’s surely a bog standard security system to a mad roboticist.

    • DarkStarling
      November 21, 2016, 1:10 am | # | Reply

      Mad science always, ALWAYS, has dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers oversights. It’s the nature of the thing.

      • D. Walker
        November 21, 2016, 1:28 am | # | Reply

        The mad expect everyone else to think the way they do. Thus they devise elaborate plans to foil their mad rivals, but fail to account for the ordinary actions and thought processes of normal people.

        A madman gets a soda from a vending machine by pulling out their $50,000,000 freeze ray and blasting it open. A normal person just pulls out their wallet and spends a buck fifty in quarters.

        • DarkStarling
          November 21, 2016, 7:30 am | # | Reply

          And thus they fall afoul of maxim 47: Don’t expect the enemy to cooperate in the creation of your dream engagement.

          • davidbreslin101
            November 21, 2016, 8:21 am | #

            “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.” (Helmuth von Moltke) Especially the plan is an Evil Scheme.

          • Dr. Steve
            November 21, 2016, 10:22 am | #

            No plan survives contact with reality

      • jdreyfuss
        January 28, 2020, 3:47 pm | # | Reply

        It’s like Mell said to Professor Madblood. Smart people will beat mad geniuses who think circles around them by thinking in a straightforward manner. His flintlock that shot piezoelectric fire from single use crystals was an elegant, but horribly overdesigned, cumbersome, and inefficient way to kill someone, compared to her Glock with 16 rounds in it.

        Tigerlilly and all the other guests who chose to follow the rules of the game made the mistake of assuming the rules had to be followed in order for the game to be won.

  4. codebracker
    November 21, 2016, 1:29 am | # | Reply

    didn’t she have robots guarding that?

  5. BMunro
    November 21, 2016, 1:43 am | # | Reply

    Now I’m beginning to wonder if she’s actually been a Mad all along. Just a remarkably subtle one.

  6. Manifesta
    November 21, 2016, 2:36 am | # | Reply

    Were this is the real me, I definitely would have found the back staircase. and playing “I’m just a lost tourist here” is often effective in getting people to let down their guards.

  7. nerdhoof
    November 21, 2016, 3:37 am | # | Reply

    Back staircase? Or maybe she came in through the bathroom window…

  8. OneUniverse
    November 21, 2016, 4:35 am | # | Reply

    Are those tiny screens really hip or is that just what was available?

    • matt w
      November 21, 2016, 7:11 am | # | Reply

      That top one looks like Bakelite. It is definitely hip.

    • Robert Nowall
      November 21, 2016, 7:38 am | # | Reply

      Tiny portable TVs were all the rage in the seventies.

      • Rob
        November 21, 2016, 8:25 am | # | Reply

        That orange TV set reminds me of the coin-operated TV sets you’d see at airports back in the ’70s and ’80s. There would be these chairs with little TVs attached to the arms, and you could feed it quarters to watch the local channels on a fuzzy black-and-white screen. See number five on the list below for an example.

        http://mentalfloss.com/article/57239/10-things-we-no-longer-see-airports

  9. Robert Nowall
    November 21, 2016, 7:07 am | # | Reply

    Maybe Ms. Manifesta’s funk really *is* more powerful than Ms. Jones’s…

  10. Robert Nowall
    November 21, 2016, 8:43 am | # | Reply

    Such a problem’s comin’ round about
    Gives us wonder and a great amount of doubt.
    With some seventies junk and a contest of funk—
    Pretty good far as Our Miss Jones’s concerned.

    Fascinating characters remain.
    Even with that cheesy psychopath The Dane.
    But their motives are strange and can be disarranged,
    And the proof is in this woman’s stairwell turn.

    They’re on the top of the building lookin’ down in frustration
    ‘Cause the only aberration is confined
    To a woman inbound who doesn’t want to stick around—
    It almost spins them like a top and they’re whirled.

    Something’s goin’ on that they don’t get.
    And it’s sayin’ that there’s more a-comin’ yet.
    We’ve zombies make out, and silverfish about,
    Makes the contest seem somehow bereft.

    There is only one thing she can do.
    She can give them all a vivid talking-to.
    And since she’s not sympatico, Manifesta must go,
    Just to salvage the contestants that are left.

    They’re on the top of the building lookin’ down in frustration
    ‘Cause the only aberration is confined
    To a woman inbound who doesn’t want to stick around—
    It almost spins them like a top and they’re whirled.

    —from “Top of the World,” The Carpenters. (Could I get something less funky than that?)

    • Manifesta
      November 21, 2016, 1:02 pm | # | Reply

      Brilliant, but now I’ll have the song stuck in my head. Carpenters earworm, sheesh!

  11. bergerjacques
    November 21, 2016, 9:52 am | # | Reply

    Please let the high collar enable Dr. Jones to get airborne a la Flying Nun. (Not hip, you say!? That was Sally Field, the White Queen of the 70s)

  12. butsuri
    November 21, 2016, 9:58 am | # | Reply

    So, back in April I was rereading the archives, and I suddenly realised why Tigerlily’s real name is Berenice. So I’ve been waiting for her to show up in person so I could post about it. (Maybe I’m just the only person to take six years to get the joke, but I couldn’t find any mention of it on the site or in the archive of the old site for when she was introduced, so someone might find it interesting.)

    From Ptolemy I (general of Alexander the Great) to Cleopatra VII (lover of Julius Caesar), the Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt throughout the Hellenistic period. This dysfunctional and incestuous Macedonian royal family tended to reuse the same names a lot; all the kings were named Ptolemy, and the women’s names were drawn from an only slightly larger pool. The most common of these was Cleopatra, but in second place (tied with Arsinoe, by my count) was Berenice. For example, the famous Cleopatra had an elder sister, Berenice IV.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenice_IV_of_Egypt
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_dynasty#Ptolemaic_family_tree

    Anyway, I kind of had all this in the back of my head already, but what clicked in April is that it makes “Berenice Jones” a play on _Cleopatra Jones_, the 1973 blaxploitation movie.

  13. imnotash
    November 21, 2016, 12:59 pm | # | Reply

    cheese danish

  14. butsuri
    November 21, 2016, 1:53 pm | # | Reply

    My previous attempt at posting this doesn’t seem to have gone through.

    So, back in April I was rereading the archives, and I suddenly realised why Tigerlily’s real name is Berenice. So I’ve been waiting for her to show up in person so I could post about it. (Maybe I’m just the only person to take six years to get the joke, but I couldn’t find any mention of it on the site or in the archive of the old site for when she was introduced, so someone might find it interesting.)

    From Ptolemy I (general of Alexander the Great) to Cleopatra VII (lover of Julius Caesar), the Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt throughout the Hellenistic period. This dysfunctional and incestuous Macedonian royal family tended to reuse the same names a lot; all the kings were named Ptolemy, and the women’s names were drawn from an only slightly larger pool. The most common of these was Cleopatra, but in second place (tied with Arsinoe, by my count) was Berenice. For example, the famous Cleopatra had an elder sister, Berenice IV.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenice_IV_of_Egypt

    Anyway, I kind of had all this in the back of my head already, but what clicked in April is that it makes “Berenice Jones” a play on _Cleopatra Jones_, the 1973 blaxploitation movie.

    • Stig
      November 21, 2016, 8:30 pm | # | Reply

      Great find! Thanks!

  15. Saberbeam
    November 21, 2016, 2:58 pm | # | Reply

    Should’ve taken that left at Albuquerque.

    @butsuri: I… would not have thought of that. Nice job spotting it.

  16. Shadowmehr
    November 21, 2016, 7:34 pm | # | Reply

    To use one of my favorite quotes, what an incredible stroke of inevitability.

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