This is exactly what happened to Anthony! He inherited his mother’s “human” spell, and when it came into contact with an unclaimed medallion the magics reacted poorly together and the medallion magic wiped out the human spell, leaving Anthony as a Harpy. One of the reasons why no one has figured out how to make medallions is because the magic is super stable, and magic is inherently NOT stable, so nobody could figure out how the sphinxes did it.
Skin Deep returns March 3rd!
I’ve teamed up with Topatoco and now I have a Topatoco store!
Currently it’s mostly a few paleo art tshirts, but if all goes well there will be Skin Deep stuff up for sale soon! Check it out!
21 Comments
So we’re confirming Anthony is a harpy? Nice.
Does this mean sorcerers and such wouldn’t bother with using any spell like Baleful Polymorph to turn their enemies into frogs and lizards and such because if they have a medallion it’s just like an instant revert?
Any chance that Topatoco store could sell toddler size shirts? Especially the extinct animals of the Mesozoic/Paleozoic design?
You’d have to ask Topatoco directly, I think!
Birb Boy! :D
Could Anthony just hire another sorcerer to put a human spell back on him?
If he finds a properly qualified one, maybe? Tim clearly doesn’t feel up to it.
(And Michelle will more likely get pressured into reviving medallion production and would hand him (and Abbie) harpy medallions, rather than coming up with a special no-gimmick-required “human appearance once and for all” solution.)
I miss Anthony. I hope we get to see him in the comic again someday. Would love to see if he’s doing any better after his last chapter.
Can we see a Bouda?
Yo are Wendigo real? Or nalusa falaya? Or how about Zana e malit ( this last one might be a stretch.)
Hey Kory I was just look at pictures of mythical creatures and I thought to my ” why not use the pictures of stone gargoyles as a template to create my own oc of a gargoyle?” Then I thought about you and decided to suggest the idea to you so that we can get gargoyles in this story. They don’t even have to be stone by day. Just a suggestion.
So sufficient exposure to medallion magic would break Anthony’s mother Ophelia’s human spell as well, which implies either her first generation spell is more stable than his inherited spell or she’s been avoiding the Avalon or it would have happened already. Both make sense since she claims she’s fully embraced the human world. But her ability to track him down at the Noir house makes it really obvious that she was fully aware of the Liverpool Avalon all of the time and I find it hard to believe that she didn’t spot Blanche as a mythical the first time she laid eyes on him.
So is their proximity to the Avalon coincidence or is she one of those sad people who can’t help hovering on the fringes of the world she was once so determined to leave? Also, assuming she does learn that she can break her spell with a medallion would she be willing make the leap back in the other direction and give up her human life for Anthony, especially now that she’s older and presumably less adventurous?
Finally, has Anthony caught on the the fact that being the only male in an all-female species just might make him a very hot commodity on the dating scene? I say might because the only examples we’ve seen so far have been Harpies married to humans and there’s no reason to expect a one-gender race like the Harpies would develop any attraction to non-existed males of their species but someone’s bound to him exotic enough to be intriguing.
I wouldn’t say Ophelia was “determined to leave,” she wanted to be able to have a relationship with a human without endangering the non-human island she lived on. There was no mention that she wanted nothing to do with mythical society
I think this question wasn’t quite answered. The way I’m reading it, it’s asking if medallion magic would break a spell that causes a hypothetical -physical- transformation, rather than an illusory one.
We’ve seen shapeshifters that shift physically, and Tim’s sporting a nice set of horns, so it stands to reason that there are forms of magic that cause an actual transformation of the body rather than the ‘second skin’ provided by the medallion’s illusory magic. The question then being, would a medallion be able to break -that- form of magic.
I think she’d need to physically touch a medallion in order for it to break the spell, much as what happened with Anthony.
Given that transformation magic is powerful, but not stable, she likely moved close to an Avalon just in case the spell should fail. So she almost certainly knew exactly what Noir was when she saw him but wouldn’t have told Anthony due to the can of worms it’d open up. If her life is intertwined with human things it’d likely be hard for her to simply step away from it, though after Anthony’s transformation she may be considering it.
Presumably a male harpy would require something like the shifting magic we’ve seen, but it could be possible there are others somewhere unless Kory reveals otherwise. Should Anthony have kids, it’s possible this will introduce the possibility of maleness into the harpy gene pool, but it’d be a long time before there’d be a noticeable male population if it even can happen.
I think this question wasn’t quite answered. The way I’m reading it, it’s asking if medallion magic would break a spell that causes a hypothetical -physical- transformation, rather than an illusory one.
We’ve seen shapeshifters that shift physically, and Tim’s sporting a nice set of horns, so it stands to reason that there are forms of magic that cause an actual transformation of the body rather than the ‘second skin’ provided by the medallion’s illusory magic. The question then being, would a medallion be able to break -that- form of magic.
In Nixie Spit it was established that certain types of physical transformations are not breakable by medallions, with the titular spit itself being one of these types. Presumably this would also apply to some other types of transformation magics as well, but I suspect they’d have to be some natural talent (like the spit) rather than a spell.
Anthony’s transformation was physical! The spell on him making him human was a physical transformation, and touching the medallion broke that spell because it was weaker than the medallion magic. Anthony’s human spell had nothing to do with Medallion magic, it was put on his mother by a sorceress using a different sort of spell.
I think the question is related more to transformation magic in general. For instance, you established in Nixie Spit that medallion magic won’t work against the physical transformation it causes, so I think the question is more related to that. That is, are there other forms of transformation (like Nixie Spit) that medallion magic *won’t* work against?
You’ve mentioned before that Nemean Lions tend to be stupid durable pre-turning if they were born human, as opposed to invulnerable to all but another Nemean Lion. Do other medallion wearing races have traits like that, where when born human it functions as a tell of what they really are? Like, could an unturned Bugbear be unnervingly good at finding people?
This is fascinating bc I immediately thought of Nixie spit and if this would still affect someone’s human form