1125 : Don’t Mess With a Siren on a Mission
Oct30
Considering what kind of facility this is, I get the feeling that Pearl is going to be disappointed…
Considering what kind of facility this is, I get the feeling that Pearl is going to be disappointed…
I notice in this page that when a siren makes someone answer or response to her with her siren’s voice, the targeted person’s speech and eyes changes to the siren’s hair colour. How come Honey’s eyes didn’t turn green while her speech did to Dawnie’s?
Pearl is a significantly more experienced Siren. She’s probably using her voice in a slightly different, perhaps more effective way.
I worry Dr. Gregory may be there as a patient…
And what is she doing in a care center? The last time we saw her, she’d ‘hipnotized’ 2 men to go swim off the London Bridge. Like, there isn’t really a good explanation about this character, rather than just showing what she’s doing outside the island. Unless CD explains what’s this character’s purpose, this comic series wouldn’t be over anytime soon…
Well she asked those two guys where to find this particular place right before telling them to jump off a bridge. And she asked for “Dr. Gregory”, which is the name of the HRC doctor who studied her back in the 70s (I think it was the 70s?).
Her motives are unknown, sure. But her objectives are pretty clear.
Crystal is an imperfect clone of Pearl, and she knew that Jade and Sapphire were going on a mission to Man’s World to find the defective clone Dr. Gregory began to create from Crystal’s helix. Dr. Gregory decided not to complete the process, but Honey found the data to finish it and used it on herself. To bring Honey back, Tom created a new body for Honey’s memories from her original DNA data, then gave put an artificial personality into Honey’s leftover sirenized-body, and that is what Crystal is now. Genetically she’s like a half-sister or a child of Honey’s, which makes her also Brady’s half-sister or niece, and she’s Dawnie’s aunt, or second mother.
I think we need to resurrect Escher to draw the Smith family tree.
So here’s why I think Pearl has done as she has done:
Pearl knew what Dr. Gregory was up to, but since there wasn’t any detection of an unidentified siren, she would have assumed he didn’t actually make a siren. How much chance is there that this unidentified siren could be Dr. Gregory’s. Sapphire and Jade are just interested in finding that Siren, but Pearl wants to know if Dr. Gregory did create a siren after all, or that someone else completed his work using her helix.
Or, simply put, Pearl thinks this siren just might be her child. If Pearl is good and true, she’ll do what she thinks is best for Crystal and Dr. Gregory.
On the other hand, Pearl could be more interested in cleaning up an old mess; she’s already in trouble for what she did in the Seventies. I’m not sure I like Pearl saying “My Beloved, Dr Gregory”. Could she be planting the suggestion that she won’t harm the good doctor?
Another thing we don’t know yet is why Pearl didn’t stay with her beloved Dr. Gregory. Did he dump her? Did she think he wanted her only as a research subject? Was she clued in by some mounted specimens or various organs in formaldehyde in jars? Did she just get tired of him and go home? If sirens like Jade and Sapphire were sent to find her and bring her back, why didn’t they do something about Dr. Gregory?
BTW, setting Pearl’s hookup with the young Dr. Gregory in the late 1970s instead of earlier may have something to do with the Internet. There wouldn’t be web browsers for twenty more years, but many mainframes were already connected across the world, particularly research computers. The expensive research and the costly infrastructure to do this was bankrolled largely by the US Department of Defense. The packet system was developed as a way to keep up reliable communications while we were under a nuclear attack and losing many nodes in the network because they were being vaporized. So it’s completely credible that Dr. Gregory’s study of Pearl wound up in memory banks all over the United States and the other NATO members (Canada is one of them), Japan, South Korea, and thanks to spies, the Soviet Union. C.D. may be planning to reveal that Dr. Gregory and Pearl are the reason the HRC was set up!
As if this story was not complicated enough. Thank god.
I looked up this place when Pearl asked the jerks back in #1096. The Hugh Middleton Centre is real. Here is the archive where you can check out the three previous appearances of Dr. Gregory.
I wonder if Gregory will even remember Pearl.
Probably not, after whatever Tom did to get him out of way.
Correcting myself:
Looking for the official site of the real center, I found that I got the name wrong. Or rather, the names wrong. When Pearl was last seen before in #1096, she was looking for the “Hugh Myddelton Centre” off Old Farm Road. I was able to quickly find the website. Properly it is:
Hugh Myddelton House Care Centre
25 Old Farm Ave
This time I blew it by using American spelling. It’s not the “Hugh Middleton Center,” so I couldn’t find it for awhile.
But now I’ve noticed that the sign C.D. made is for:
The Hughes Myddleton Care Center
25 1/2 Old Farm Ave
Perchance has Mr. Rudd had a communication from the Centre’s solicitors in the interval?
Pearl can’t use her Voice on girls, but that doesn’t mean she can’t handle them. Pretty good for a gal who has to be at least seventy now.
I get the feeling that Sirens don’t age at nearly the same rate as humans. Which makes me wonder… if David ever learns that, would he be willing to become Dawn again if it meant living another few hundred years? 🙂
Well, that depends on Honey’s reaction about this particular fact…
Okay, at least 2017-1979+15=63. Only three years younger than me.
You might remember Doc Hudson from Cars, but I remember riding in my dad’s Hudson.
I picked Body Swaps after quite a bit of thought. I wouldn’t be reading this, or Jeanie Bottle or El Goonish Shive or Dangerously Chloe, but I’m a sucker for body swap stories, whether or not a gender swap is included. I haven’t seen that many. Here’s the ones I remember:
It’s a Boy/Girl Thing — No name cast high school movie, but better than it has a right to be. Quarterback swaps with brainy girl next door who’s never dated. She has to play in the big game, he has to go to her Ivy League college interview.
All of Me — 1984, Steve Martin, Lili Tomlin, directed by Carl Reiner.
Freaky Friday — Jodie Foster swaps bodies with her mom. A Disney movie that came out the same year as Taxi Driver where Jodie Foster played a hooker.
Switch — A Blake Edwards production from 1991. Serial cheater gets murdered by three angry girlfriends, gets a chance to avoid Hell, comes back as Ellen Barkin, and has to make one human female really like him–um, her–whatever. How she does it I bet you’ll never guess without cheating. Yes, it’s not a body switch, but I can’t think of the first three without thinking about this one.
I meant to say, “I wouldn’t be reading (yadda yadda yadda) if I didn’t enjoy gender bending stories of all kinds…
Another senior moment.
Has there been much more body swapping and gender bending in Dangerously Chloe recently? I remember there being a little at the start, but I haven’t been following it.
Teddy is still pretending to be Chloe. Al’s been male for a long time, but Al was always gender fluid. Little Sis didn’t switch sexes or body swap, but she seems to have turned into a little succubus with wings, tail, and horns (she really likes the horns) but to her great disappointment, no boobies yet.
Oh–Eerie Chicks has finally started up again. Three or four new pages. Still in color. Enjoy.
Hours ago I made a joke about Evil Pearl planting Dr. Gregory in the garden. But now I’ve thought of a third outcome.
Maybe Dr. Gregory is already planted in the garden. The hypnotized staff guy just said the doctor was in the garden. Pearl could find a grave, or a memorial, or nothing because his ashes were scattered in the garden. The ashes seem most likely, with or without a memorial, because there are usually more restrictions on where you can bury someone.
Seems like very appropriate irony for a Halloween comic, too. I’m hoping CD thinks so too.
Maybe not quite as appropriate. The next comic will be dated at least one day after Halloween.
I’m really not trying to set a record for most comments on a comic. It’s hard being a genius, getting so many brilliant ideas so quickly they build up like rush hour traffic. Before I can finish writing one down or even explaining it with actual speech, more ideas crowd behind, and inevitably some of them try to cut ahead and there are fender benders, jackknives, rollovers…and things like remembering that it’s still Monday in California even if I’m downloading Tuesday comics from Chicago and timezones eastward.
It’s also possible that being so damned old could factor in.
Well yeah, you’ve mention that you’re 60? Am I right? From the last comment where you counted how old Pearl is?
@Echantan07: Worse, 66 rapidly approaching 67. When I was riding in my Dad’s Hudson Elvis was singing Hound Dog on the AM radio. And I was really calculating how young Pearl could be. For all we know she could have knocked sandals with King Tut.
…timezones eastward get crunched or torn off.
Hey, get off my lawn!!!
Btw, I’m Indonesian and I’m still trying to make sense out of all of these words you’ve putten in the comments. Even using google translate didn’t help much. Yet, I can still type English like this…
@Echatan07: I’m on Facebook as Tom Sewell and occasionally I even check my messages there. I play some Facebook games a lot using the Gameroom app (avoiding spam on the regular facebook pages). Maybe you could friend me for Train Station or Super City. Or ask me on this forum about the words that mystify you; I coin some of them, and it is possible I might mis-spell one someday.
I have never been to Indonesia although I’ve gotten close to Sumatra on my two cruises to the Indian Ocean courtesy of the U.S. Navy and the late Ayatollah Khomeini. I do know that most Indonesians speak Malay dialects and most are Muslim, and that Indonesia is the largest nation on Earth with a Muslim majority population, and that it was held by the Netherlands before independence, and that there is an Indonesian community in the Netherlands. Are you perhaps part of that community? You’ve made only one error in your post above. “…you’ve putten in…” might be better said “…you’re putting in…” or “…you’ve put in…”. “putten” sounds like it might be Dutch. And my girlfriend who has lived in Europe swears that everybody in the Netherlands can speak English too.
I can’t speak anything but English. Yet somehow I’m living in a place were most of the people speak either Spanish or Vietnamese.
Alright, first, about the misspelled post. I haven’t noticed it until I’ve posted it, and I just leave it because I knew that you’ll still understand what I mean by that comment. Second, I’m just a 15 year old, sitting on the 11th grade in a high school somewhere in Manado, North Sulawesi, Indonesia. I knew & study English both in school and by watching TVs shows that have Indonesian subtitles, and until now, I’m still trying to understand things like verbs, tenses, etc. And to mention, there are not many words in the Indonesian dictionary that has influences from Dutch. And by me, a 15 year old boy, I’m pretty much not a part of the Indonesian community in the Netherlands although I really want to go other countries…
Plus, I’m not a Muslim, I’m a Catholic. And the dialects in here are not entirely Malay, there are some that are completely different, like in the Province of Papua and in the provinves in the island of Java. So, to put it in this way: Indonesia is known by it’s history and it’s successes but what makes it unique is the little things that not many people knew about this country.
I knew there were Catholics in East Timor because it was a Portuguese colony–in fact I think it was still a Portuguese colony when I was in primary school. As I understand it, the Portuguese had established themselves in the 1500s but they lost most of their possessions to the Dutch in the next century, maybe during the time Portugal was ruled by Spanish kings who were more interested in the Thirty Years War in Germany and the Eighty Years War for Dutch independence than trade with your region and in paying for a navy sufficient to defend it from Dutch pirates.
So I’m guessing that your family became Catholic when the Portuguese were more influential. The Jesuit order was founded by a Portuguese and they sent many missionaries, not only to your homeland but to China, Japan, and the Philippines. They just might have succeeded in Japan if the Protestant Dutch hadn’t used their artillery to help the Shogunate crush a Catholic rebellion. In gratitude, the Dutch were only European nation allowed any trade with Japan until Commodore Perry’s black ships steamed into Tokyo Bay.
If you want to see the world, think about going to sea. I know there’s a very successful school for training merchant marine officers in the Philippines, and I have a good friend who spent a year doctoring on a Dutch cruise ship with a mostly-Indonesian crew.
And btw, sorry Robert for having both of us talking other than this amazing series. I’m just surprise because I haven’t get this kind of attention on the internet, since I started using it years ago…
Another btw @Tom Sewell, are you an artist?
Go to Deviant Art and make your own judgement.
We’re getting seriously off-topic here. If you’re on Facebook, I’m Tom Sewell on Facebook too. I don’t put my email address on forums. Another option is going to the forums for Dan Shive’s webcomic, El Goonish Shive. You can send personal messages to other forum members there.
And if you have a month or two, you can read all my posts on those forums. Three or four if you sleep and eat.
Echatan07-don’t sweat the language. America is a mix of dialicts. New England vs Texmex etc. If you have ever been to Calif. and heard Valley Girl we are the only country with a female language. It would be kind of fun to see Dawnie start spitting out Valley Girl. Keep posting, you are doing fine.
Not quite the only–in Japanese there are separate male-exclusive and female-exclusive dialects, with certain words all but taboo for the “wrong” sex to use (i.e. you would sound effeminate if you were a male using female words, etc.). This adds an extra level of humor to gender bender stories, since the bent character is fighting long-entrenched speech habits just to avoid sounding strange to others. For example, Ranma Saotome (Ranma 1/2) speaks in an extremely masculine manner even in female form, which shocks a lot of characters that “she” is not acting ladylike.