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Currently On Hiatus: Please Enjoy A New Reader Question Every Weekday!

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While I think Jim is over reacting, I did not know the tall one could get so flat!

Poor Jim, I know he’s being a pain, but I can see where he’s coming from.

He had this thing that no one in the family had in generations, and that every one thought was some kind of curse, and then his little brother had the thing too. I’m sure the thought that he was going to be able to be the cool older mentor for his little brother, and provide the shoulder to cry on when the inevitable teasing occurred, and generally be the one who knew things.

Then he gets the tables turned on him, and gets told, “Actually you don’t know anything about this condition you’ve lived your whole life with,. You are wrong about this facet of yourself. Your brother is better at it, you need to learn from him.”

He’s not being very mature about it, but i get why he’s pissed.

Was it intentional for Ravi to use ‘nature’ instead of ‘life’ moments after using ‘nature’ as a synonym for ‘physics?’ If so, the use of equivocation is a nice way to show he’s not the best teacher.

Hm, that’s something fun to think about!

Water goes nicely with nature.

Wind goes awesomely (destructive) with fire.

Water and fire doesn’t get along, obviously, and I fail to see how wind could aid with nature.

What about water and wind? Hmm, there’s the whole ‘ocean waves’ and ‘hurricanes’ thing. Fire and nature? Maybe it works the other way around — nature boosts fire.

Funnily, I’ve never really given this any thought before. Thanks, Kory, for making me ponder something new!

I think wind and nature are neutral. Air nurtures life almost universally, but can tear it down. Fire paves the way for new life to grow. It can also warm nature and save it from ice.

Well fire is also sometimes thought of as the spark of life in both folklore and science.
Fire and water can mix and results in steam, a prime force used in technology.
Air and earth do mix though on a large scale it could get very dangerous – Dust / sand storms.
Then there is also the fifth element of wood / life though some think that it is just an admixture of all 4 prime elements.

There’s a widespread agreement in fantasy that each of the four elements (water, fire, earth, air) has an opponent : Water vs Fire – Air vs Earth and is either helpful (earth with water, air with fire…) or neutral with the others. This is not canon European alchemy and some writers don’t follow it.

On the interactions of air / wind and nature / life:

Aside from the need that both flora and fauna have for certain components of air, Many plants are spread by the wind, with pollen and/or seeds blown to new locations. Hedges and rows of trees can deflect or blunt mild to rather strong winds, but strong-enough winds can blow down such obstacles.

Birds, bats, and insects fly on the the wind. Others, like “flying” fish and “flying” squirrels, use the wind to lengthen their leaps. And young spiders with their silken parachutes are carried /everywhere/.

In the last panel he says had twice. I think it is a typo.

It’s not. It’s just weird wording. Had had is a weird grammar thing.

English is weird and was put together by a bunch of subcommittees where a whole lot of adult beverages were involved.

We wish that was the case. If that happened it still would make more sense then what we have now.

We are tryin to translate reality into understandable concepts with languages that started out as ways to say where the best food is. Of course it’s bleeping difficult to communicate complex truths in concise ways. Or the bigger an idea – the fuzzier the wording. And magic is a real snarly ol hairball much like basic physics.

My favorite quote about the origin of the English language is something I encountered in /Fuzzy Sapiens/ by H. Beam Piper: “The English language is the result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to get dates with Saxon barmaids, and is no more legitimate than any of the other results.”
Part of the humor is that it is an over-simplification, but not really wrong. The Saxons were mostly speaking a flavor of German, and the Normans were speaking a flavor of French. The grammar and the core vocabulary of English is still Germanic, with a heavy overlay of French and other latinate vocab. On top of that, we have a penchant for “borrowing” words from other languages (as if we’re going to give them back).
And then, Latin-obsessed British grammarians try to force Latin grammar rules (like “A preposition is something you should never end a sentence with.”) into a Germanic language where they don’t belong.

So what became of Anthony, the unhappily harpy dude?
I just ask, because I kinda think he’s actually a wingless sphinx – the missing Wosrets. We had to hide that the sphinx still lived, did we really have to hide them as humans? What if it were hidden as a species for whom the sphinx never made medallions?

First of all, it’d explain why we’ve spent so much narrative time on Anthony.
Second, it might explain how he came to be a slowly-revealed male harpy. If his mom’s line are actually sphinx disguised by magic as harpies (that they do not even know), then her harpy-to-human spell + ancient medallion could have interacted with the original spell and really messed things up. Similarly, if his dad was a Sphinx (and didn’t know?) then he’d pass that down, mom’s concealing spell would lock it all up under a layer of harpy-to-human magic… and then he touches the old medallion, dispelling the concealing spell means his non-human nature is revealed, but mom’s harpy nature is un-concealed, not his true sphinx self.

So now he needs to handle some other ancient medallions, or get his current set of messed up spells removed by the sole sphinx alive wielding the power inside a phoenix egg?

I think this might be the case, because he’s so hostile about flying. He’ll try it, discover he loves it, decide he can handle being a harpy since he gets to fly….and then discover he’s a wingless sphinx that can’t actually fly and all the dragons and demons want to kill him. That sounds about right for Anthony’s luck. that’s all i’m saying.

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