May 23rd, 2014
23 May 2014 · page 369 of 1306
An early one as I'm off to MCM Expo at the Excel centre! Come say hi either tomorrow or Sunday!
Cast: Arpana Sherpa, Dominik Voss
Comments (39)
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Ooo~ A gift shop~ I wonder if I could get Pride and Greed plushies~
Depends on which [Sins](http://sincomics.com/ "http://sincomics.com/") you're looking for...
I'm guessing this is another anchor. Interesting... can a summon at one anchor 'jump' to another? Could this anchor interfere with the one at Widdershins? Voss might not even need to go to England to mess with our daring duo's lives.
I'm sure nothing bad can happened from letting somebody with great emotions go near a magical artefact that manifests emotions into independent entities,
...I wonder if she Sees the world the same way O'Malley does.
I think her old prophetic-looking woman intuition tells her that this kid is going to screw up big-time. She's just warning him so she can say she did.
No, anyone can see that. Except Wolfe.
haha ! Wolfe is immune to bad vibes
Years later, with the possibility introduced of each anchor having its own [spoiler], yeah. Maybe she can.
North, south, east. west, I think is what you are thinking of. I think you are thinking of it because it's what I was thinking of.
Lei speaks of two other anchors in this [http://www.widdershinscomic...](http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/april-15th-2013/ "http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/april-15th-2013/") comic here, so its three verified ones. any more, they might not have been discovered yet.
Interesting how of the two we've seen, one is on top of a mountain and the other is in a deep hole.
I'm gonna wager that there's one off the coast of Bermuda, one in the Superstition Mountains, one in New York, one in Tokyo, and one in Cardiff.
Makes sense.....it's about 1/4 of the earth away from Widdershins (6 hours time difference) so 4 equally spaced around the world would do it.
Even if Mystical Old Woman can;t "see" like O'Mally can, she can probably tell that this guy seems grummpy and irritable and like the sort who woudl repress things. What she may not know is how much he is repressing or what it is. "I'm cold and I miss my Wife" is probably a safe enough thing to have near the ancor, "I'm consmed by envy" is probably not, and I doubt she has any way of knowing the differnece.
He doesn't look like he's repressing it to me. Or at least, not very successfully.
I gather you were trying to answer me, not him :D
Everest is almost five and a half miles. This mountain is around the same height!
It is Everest.
TIL one of the real names of Everest is "Chomolungma." Not only is the comic entertaining, it's educational!
What is she knitting? WHAT IS SHE KNITTING?! Is it a scarf? Is it a sweater? I NEED TO KNOW!..... Yeah... I knit....
A souvenir
I'm thinking baby sweater, maybe? It looks like there might be a sleeve coming off the side in the first panel.
I'm just relieved to see that she's holding the knitting needles as though she's knitting, not trying to get the stitches off the needles, unlike on the last page!
Pretty sure it's a scarf.
Ah, wrong shade, nevermind.
The peak of Everest is at 8,848 meters (29,029 ft/5.5 mi) above sea level, but the mountain itself is only about 3,800 meters tall, since the Himalayan Plateau, where it is located, is already at about 5,000 meters.
Still not something one man, alone, with no oxygen equipment, climbing gear, proper clothing, experience, competence or intelligence, should be tackling.
Oh boy. At least Envy won't get trapped in some clockwork armor. :P
From the Ms Harry's notes in the book version of Vanishing Act, there are anchors at Widdershins and Chomolungma (this one). There is also a third one (or at least a strong magical pull) off the coast of New Zealand but no expedition to find it has ever returned. There is also rumours of a fourth anchor, but Ms Harry is sceptical because someone would have noticed it if it existed.
You don't have a copy of the books? I hope you will be rectifying this oversight in the imminent Kickstarter!
If we draw a circle on a globe going thru these 3 points, the 4th would be around Easter Island [tho not as close as a story would like] and surrounded by lots and lots of water, great for an anchor nobody actually visits.
Of course. It's like the ultimate rule for ANYTHING. Even in ye olden days, I'd expect people would know that. sigh Voss is in for it now.
When were gift shops invented, anyway?
A fairly short time after gifts were invented, I would think.
Part of the fun for this strip for me is the little anachronism thrown in there. I can see where it might annoy some people, but I like that sort of thing It's like the suggestions and guidelines bit in Pirates of the Caribbean, or a character in Girl Genius saying "I'm good" or "I can work with that."
As there are giftshops known from ancient Egypt, and Rome, and also from several ancient Chinese sites, I take it that it was quit long ago.......
Depends on the definition. The modern term and picture is probably fairly recent, but about as soon as the first traveler got far away from home to find something exotic and small enough to bring home, the idea of this being a status symbol came to mind, and the idea of giving them to friends probably followed quickly. Once there were sorta-friendly relations with these foreigners, the locals would quickly figure out that these crazy foreigners would almost give away valuable stuff for cheap junk, and by the 2nd visit or so, they are on the way to being giftshops. By the loose definition, there would have giftshops dating back an easy 100,000 years
They couldn't specialize in being a giftshop until these foreigners reached about 1000 in number. [That's about 3 customers a day, some of whom won't buy, and others who will buy from the competition. So even at that level, the giftshop is likely to be more of a gift shelf and just a sideline to another business.] But as soon as you had a substantial number of visitors from far away, gift shops will start to appear.
Interesting that she speaks German. There must have been at least a steady trickle of Germans to the site to ensure that she speaks the language. I wonder where they all went.....
Belfast.
The European nobles of 1800 had this idea that travel was educational and sent youngsters off on extended trips, which was supposed to improve them. [Critics suggested the kids sent off were at their most irritable age, and any change by the time they got back had to be for the better.] Nepal was at the extreme of such a trip, but if we assume it was the site of mysterious magic, we can assume it was the goal of quite a few travelers.
Now there are still problems. The area was off-limits to outsiders until a lifetime later. Again, magic might work. The locals can be said to have special rules about "pilgrims" to visit the magic mountain, and merely killed or deported those who wandered off the approved route.
Another problem is why a private is being sent on this mission. It would cost a fortune to send anybody, and if it is worth doing at all, one would want to send some expert. Sending a private, one in poor standing to boot, is insane. Now government in general is insane. So we can assume some Prussian king wanted the area studied, but that king died without anybody daring to disobey his orders, and they are still sending out people to study the mountain. However, with the next king uninterested in the reports, the military has been cutting the Everest budget as much as they can without disobeying the order. So we end up with Voss being ordered to pretty much hoof it and the fact any report he might write would be unreadable would be of little concern. They had still obeyed the order.
it's funny to think that once upon a time i was so sad about the approaching end of Darken, bitter to see that story be over for good, but now i so love our widdershins characters, even the relatively new and chronically irritating voss. i will be sad if he is about to meet his end, even if he duly deserves it. i am not always a fan of change - i stopped reading the Dune books because they'd kill off all the characters every time and start with the next generation. but you've succeeded with this long con. so many threads, diverging so far from the threads of the other characters - tangents that are lost in other times and places, yet we know they are all tied to each other via widdershins. EPIC DIGRESSION. yet even the name makes sense now. keep spinning and weaving!
I had thought the anchors had been there since the beginning of the world, but it being located at the top of mount Everest makes that seem unlikely to me. It's been awhile, and I don't remember if this applies to all mountains, or just some, but jagged mountains tend to be newer/fresher than worn mountains, or smooth ones, so it couldn't have been at the same elevation since the beginning. So this anchor might have started at a lower elevation, but got pushed up by the rise of mount Everest, or moved there by the hand of some other force at a later date.
So, was the anchor just "lucky" enough to be at the site where the tallest mountain would rise? Is it the reason for said rising? Or are the anchors something that were placed/moved to these locations by the hands of some being or race?
Or maybe they are just locations where the the influence and power of spirits and magic have come to focus over the years? Possibly like holes to the place the malforms called home?
Or it could be that "anchor" is just the term for the source of the supernaturalness, and that there may be ones different in form and origin from the others.
Welp, time to keep reading, still need to read through 6 months of WidderShinny goodness.