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Woah, are these two Michelle’s grandparents? Or some other type of ancestor?

It’s implied (and confirmed by Ravi) that Jocasta is Michelle’s ancestor, nothing yet about Wosret..

Also amazing page!

we know that Ravi was impressed that Michelle managed to keep the surname so it does seem to imply she ended up with Wosret. Or another wosret anyway.

It doesn’t imply anything of the sort. It’s not that she has the name Jocasta instead of Wosret. It’s that she has the name Jocasta at all. Consider how many ancestors of yours were alive hundreds of years ago, and how many of them share your surname at all, let alone females (in a culture that traditionally only passed down the father’s family name). Assuming no intermarriages between ancestors, if you look just five generations back you would have 32 ancestors in that generation, and odds are good only one of them would share your surname. If any, considering that family names can change over time.

As Ace said, Michelle is a Jocasta descendant. Not sure about any relation to Wosret, but we know that those two are plot important as they put together the plan to hide sphinxes.

I went archive diving; I believe first mention of Wosret was in Michelle’s dream vision in Fiddler’s Cave:
https://www.skindeepcomic.com/archive/issue-five-page-23/

Ravi gave us a little more on Jocasta and Wosret here:
https://www.skindeepcomic.com/archive/4711/

In that page from Orientations, Michael said the name as though it was a family name.
The Wosrets.
Same as he did referring to his family, the Jocastas.
He didn’t say the names as though the two families were already joined. So there should be another family of Sphinxes, somewhere.

I think these two randos are very important.

WHAT IF ALL OF SKIN DEEP WAS NOTHING BUT JOCASTA’S VISION HOLY HECK MIND BLOW

That is also quite the mane on her. I aspire to one day have that level of floof

… I’m not sure how I feel about someone predicting the future, it kinda cheapens the drama of stories in my oppinion.

Well in context of the present most visions wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense. You’d see images but not know what they mean, especially if they are many years down the road. Although this is a vision of the past, Jocasta’s vision of the future mentioned the Dragons attacking and burning the medallion smithy’s, and we still don’t know why they did that, or why some creatures like Harpies don’t have medallions. Jocasta, being a Grecian Sphinx, should have been in contact with Harpies who have Greek origins. Also, Grecian Sphinxes are associated with riddles.

Two pages back, page 22, in the first actual frame of the Vision, there is an Allelean Harpy among the Mythicals present, so it’s not a case of ‘should have been’. She was.
So it becomes a question of ‘why not’ in regards to the 4 Harpy species.
One possibility is that the Harpies Jocasta and Wosret were in contact with, were killed before Medallions could be developed.
Another is that Harpies were, for some reason, at odds with the Sphinxes, and being somehow enemies, were denied Medallions.
Another is that the Sphinxes were NOT the nice guys history has recorded them as being, and simply decided in capriciousness to not do Medallions for Harpies.
Right now, figuring out the why for which species got Medallions and others did not, is ALL open-ended guess work with no pointers as to what scenario is possibly more likely than any other.

Another line of speculation has been that some species were commonly guilty of man-eating or other such objectionable behavior. Thus, they were labeled as monsters before they were denied medallions (even the exceptional individuals who used meditation and vegetarianism to mend their ways; their kinfolk might use medallions to stalk their prey.)

If Michelle’s visions are any indication they rarely seem to make any coherent sense. just images of the past or future all meshed into one big blob.

Except for this one i guess but this is a vision of the past and maybe she can only see it clearly because magic egg

I so need my glasses! I thought the first line said “You’re late. We have Lasagna.” I did wonder what Mrs. Finn was cooking for dinner :3

I was confused for a second but you can see that Wosret is wearing a medallion. In the third panel you can see the string it’s on under his collar. Still makes me wonder about Dragons and Harpies though. Jocasta must have known about the Harpies so why don’t they have medallions?

I really hope the end game of this is Michelle learning how to make more medallions for people like Tony and Sam.

In Sam’s case it would be a repair job.
He has a Medallion already, and that cannot be changed. It failed to transform him into full form. It form locked him so while his overall form looks human, he permanently has yellow harpy eyes and noticeably enlarged canines, and he cannot transform back to proper human form.

For other harpies it would be quite straight forwards, a new, created from scratch, Medallion.
In Anthony’s case however, I don’t know if he could have a Medallion. It was contact with a blank Nokk Medallion which triggered the spell break on him. Now how the impact of that Nokk Medallion spell might interact with the spell on a Medallion that Michelle might craft for harpies, is NOT predictable.

We don’t really know what is involved in actually making the medallions. We know the phoenix egg is required but beyond that it’s a mystery.

They clearly cared enough to make medallions for other “mythicals”

My guess is that they were going to make medallions for the creatures that currently dont have any but were killed before they got that chance.

“Hey why are we reffering to each other by our surnames and not given names?”
“Dunno, convience probably”

im joking but dang finally learning something bout the sphinxes i have been, so incredibly curious.

soon all shall be revealed.

as a side note i love the perpetual glowing eyes they’re rocking. it’s great.

Actually in Ye Olden Days “important” people didn’t need last names to distinguish themselves from the “common” people.

And for those common people who actually made a name for themselves [heh heh] their name was appended with the town or village they originated from.
Ex. Leonardo da Vince is of course from that little Hamlet called Vince.

Mind you the Barbarians from the north were using their parents given name
Ex Erics son or daughter =P

The way I learned it in SCA heraldry classes, class wasn’t so much the issue (at least, not in Europe). Your parents gave you your first name, and your community gave you your last name, which they might feel free to change a time or two during your life. That “byname” only became hereditary by royal decrees along about the 13th century to make the census easier. (And of course the purposes of the census were taxes and conscription.)

In Japan, nobody below samurai rank (the top 6%) was allowed to have a family name until 1870. (I’m sure there must have been nonce descriptives, even if actual bynames were forbidden.) Then, as part of the Meiji Reformation, everybody was required to have one; see above for the purpose. I haven’t read anything that actually said so, but I’m sure that swarms of bureaucrats were sent out into the countryside to assign and record names. The vast majority of those peasant names were simple locatives like “Middle-village” (Nakamura) or “Mountain-base” (Yamamoto) or “Rocky-point” (Iwasaki) or “Rich-field” (Toyota).

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