Today’s update should hopefully answer a few questions about what Vera Salt may have been up to over the course of the last century or two and why she was at an old folks’ nursing home rather than working in a beauty parlor. Truth be told she was originally working in a beauty parlor but it seemed too obvious and added an extra two or three pages to the story – plus, given the tendency for some readers to be thinking ahead of the game I was concerned that going into a beauty parlor angle would give the game away before I even got there.
Anyway, don’t expect any of the other oldies to forming IJF-Babies any time soon… Vera Salt is no more.
So, today is the penultimate update for Redux… which brings me to Chapter 6… which will be called Lock(e)Down and a large slab of it will take place on Locke Island, the Magellanverse lock-up for all the bad guys too dangerous to be locked up anywhere else. We’ll be meeting some old, some new, some previously only mentioned in passing, bad guys and gals. Should be fun! More info over the next few days.
Will we continue to see young Gola Beh? Is she going to join the second year cadets (like Kaycee and so on) or will she start from scratch?
Have you picked up a name for her yet?
All (well… mostly all) will be revealed in Friday’s update. Stay tuned!
And Dr. Spooky was right. She, yet again, did not fully think through the consequences of her actions. Twice now she had been screwed over by not thinking through the possible alternate interpretations of her wishes, and yet she still somehow assumed she could make a general wish like that and not have it turn around and bite her.
Sad. Some forethought could have prevented all this.
I wouldn’t use the word “screwed”. She didn’t get what she had in mind, but they worked out reasonably well for her.
Well as Genies go this one is not so bad.
The first wish was granted in a bizarre and awkward way; but she got something roughly equivalent to turning back to 20 years old which is probably what she intended. If she let herself age back into infant-hood and die, well that’s roughly the same as ageing naturally from 20 again.
The second wish, also really awkward but it gave her roughly what she wanted in perhaps a less convenient form than she imagined.
This one, yeah that didn’t work too well. She could have just wished “teleport me to this place” grabbed some emergency supplies and she’d be set. Dr Spooky has her pinned, she never thinks things through.
Yeah, “I wish to be free” is such a generic wish, you shouldn’t phrase it like that ever, and especially if the genie in question has misinterpeted your previous 2 wishes. Being dead is a really stretched interpetation though. Ah well, if a wish-granting entity wants to screw you over your wording, it always can. Language is imperfect after all.
I must say for being centuries old she doesn’t look that bad. I’d expected a Indiana-Jones-Last Crusade look by now.
Dr. Spooky, prophet of Doom!
There’s also the possibility that Vera was already getting mentally tired after all these centuries – we hear this sort of thing from old people sometimes, just imagine the struggle of keeping up-to-date on everything for such a long time, slowly losing everything you liked (over and over again, in this case)… So even if she wasn’t really going to choose a (more or less) suicidal route when her business ran smoothly (which will be kinda unnatural), in a dramatic turn of events like this she might perhaps actually wish to be “free” of the curse and the associated endless struggle. Which might be even called a brave decision, except for the outcome of finding oneself in a body this old. I guess she indeed didn’t foresee that bit.
Wow, Vera deserves the Darwin award for not thinking her wishes through THRICE! I agree with the others that it’s the best outcome as she would eventually grow tired of being immortal. And after all, she could be captured again in the future without any wishes left.
(I wonder if it’s possible to have genies grant the wish for more wishes or a next bottle with a genie. Has this ever been touched upon in any story?)
It has. For an example, see “The Great Wish Syndicate”:
http://www.online-literature.com/john-bangs/the-check-book/2/
At first when I was just looking at the comic before reading I thought she aged rapidly from sucking the age from a super.
The third wish idea works too.
so she ended up to be a dried mummy? damn.
Ewwww.
I have a question why does Mr. Spooky have a cd on his chest?
it’s an amulet – I’m sure it must have some occult significance for him…
Weird, i first thought that it WAS her intention to die with that wish, in a “i wish to be free form this world” way, but yeah, i guess that a botched wish is more in line with her personality
It may have been… although sadly we’ll never know!