Skip to content


She’s been holding that in for a while, I think…

Her inability to get her Sphinx abilities to do what she wants when she wants, is frustrating her beyond her limit. This, on top of her continuing fears from no longer being ‘normal and ordinary’, it’s no wonder she snapped.
It’s good that Jim is there, and he could get her to see a positive.

Man those teeth. But hey, at least she is in the L.A. There is still the whole business of meeting Ravi and all that.

i wonder if they know Ravi is there.. or if they’ll find out partway through the story.

Well earlier on we already saw he owns Ravi’s House of Eastern Curiosities. Seen in the cover page for Hello, Goodbye.

No Arakisk.
We saw a shop called Ravi’s House of Eastern Curiosities.
We do not, yet, know if he still runs it.
Think on this: Prestor John’s is owned and run by the gorgon, Vadoma Winifred Euryale.

Well the shade of Michelle’s father said that Ravi was “still here”. So I am going to guess that means Ravi is alive. Prestor John was a figure written about as early as the 12th century. So that’s a different matter entirely.

Ravi being alive, is the way I also read what the Shade of Michelle’s father said.
But we have no clue as to *what* Ravi is.
Also, recall that in Reunion, Alec spoke of Django Reinhardt in the present tense, like he is still alive and still playing the guitar, in the Skin Deep universe.
Prestor John being a figure written about in the 12th century, in our universe. In the Skin Deep universe was he alive during and involved in the Great War?

Ravi is probably a person if he can own and maintain a shop in his name. Probably not human, but probably just another resident of the Avalon. Or maybe something more?
Somtimes people speak of a person’s capability in the present tense, and Alec’s grammar is not exactly scholar level I would imagine.
I seriously doubt that a person involved in the Great War would end up with only a store named after them.

My first thought was about her teeth also.

It DOES seem frustrating.

…I have a feeling that she is going to cure the frustration of many other people, soon, as well as her own. And change life in the Avalon forever. So this should be interesting.Heh. We fans are all “Oh well, show us more L.A., c’mon!” which suddenly feels a bit heartless.

Love Jim’s on-the-fly transformation and Michelle’s expressive range!

Jim has had 10 years to get used to doing those Medallion based transforms.
To him, doing those transforms has become ordinary, unthinking, automatic, second nature.
With the date of this story, Michelle has only had 9 months so far to try to become settled with being a Sphinx, and only 7 to become accustomed to knowing she was NEVER actually a ‘normal human being’.

Wonder if she has a midform by now…

We also have to wonder if she’ll use mid-form if she has one and how wide-spread knowledge of her being a sphynx is now she’s in the UK. Could be she’s posing as purely human whilst here (at least at the start) to keep somewhat hidden. She might have a sphynx midform but be trying to make a mid-form that’s a little more like something else to blend in (we’ve seen that midforms vary somewhat and it would stand to reason that in theory one could have more than one mid-form – although I suspect there is a happy medium where its “easy” to slip into which is what most use as a default; whilst tweaking it might take more concentration – and be difficult to maintain if under pressure – or panic attacks).

Do we even know if Jim has told his family anything more than “hey I’mma bring some friends over from the USA – er can I have some money for the tickets”.

I seriously doubt she could pass as another species in midform considering that her white wings, face structure, and fur only on her lower body and paws are not associated with any other species. The most she could do without seeming “off” would be either human or human with minor changes, like ears, claws, or tail. Also I do not think anybody woupd buy the “she’s a human” story.

Well, there’s always a winged lion…

Pretty sure most winged animals have feathers in the same color as their fur. That goes for all gryphons to date. We have not seem a single member of any lion-based species with all-white wings.

Look at that tony face michelle pulled in panel 4! she looks like she was forced to watch someone take a dump. While talking about panel four I really like the medalion effects, there is both like solid disolving and glowy dissolving bits of the illusion.

also those are some well drawn tears. big emotion, really feeling it.

Also also I like jim’s eyes in the last panel, they seem both worried and reassuring at the same time. All in all this is a great page.

Lot of frustration, lot of pain.
World turned upside down, threatened by strangers and all sense of safety and normalcy stripped away.
She learns to cope- rather well, I might add- and then she is offered a possible explanation that could sort it all out for her.
Maybe not a solution, but a chance to get her feet under her and understand whats happening at last.
Then she finally gets an answer, right away.
And its not really an answer.

And then nothing.

Oh, hell yes shes got a right to snap.


No Ironbadger. Michelle did not get an answer.
She got an all too brief glimpse of a Vision when her Sphinx powers worked for her. The shock from what she was able to glimpse of the Vision, was too much for her to cope with, and dumped her out of the Vision. And then her powers did their usual complete refusal to work.
She has no idea what information might be able to be gleaned from what she glimpsed. Right now in the storyline, what she was told by the Shade of her father, whilst she was unconscious in chapter 5 of Orientations, had more information for her than the glimpse of the Vision.
At the start of this page she is raging at not getting any REAL useful information from the Vision, and also that her powers are doing their usual of not working so she can’t go and look again to try to see if there is any useful information. She’s locked out. And on top of those two, there is the feeling of the time and effort wasted in going to the UK despite her near panic attack.

Jim has a knack for calming down kitties when they’re upset, it seems.

Also, how /did/ they get through airport security? I forget, did they have those fullbody scanners yet at this point in time? Can medallions fool those? Wouldn’t they have to take off their medallions for the metal detector? Are there mythical TSA agents who let people through on the sly?

I don’t think they have to be WEARING their medallions to look human, just use them beforehand and take them off.

Medallions must be worn at ALL TIMES. Otherwise things get bad really quick. Kory once answered one of my questions and said that medallion are not made mostly from metal. So maybe they have metal-leaf and a core of something else? But I don’t know what, because I doubt stone cored medallion would have held up for 800+ years.

Plus, most metal jewelry doesn’t set off detectors anyway. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of the type of metal (silver or gold as opposed to, say, iron) or if there is a certain minimal amount needed before the detector goes off, but, regardless, most pendents, magical or otherwise, will make it through your average security checkpoint without incident.

Well many metal detectors I have been through have detected single coins in my pockets, so I think they would be picked up by the detector. However, I am pretty sure any person can opt for a simple pat-down if they refuse to be scanned. Also, Kory at one point mentioned that 2005 was before full body scanners were implemented in most airports.

I know I asked that question of Kory, regarding Medallions and storyline current airport security. Her reply was that the Medallions do not set off metal detectors.
How things will go in the SkinDeep universe after 2007 in the US, though, is currently an unknown.

Found it.
The mid July 2014 Patreon RQs.

Well that link just sends me to the patreon home page.

To see the Patreon RQs, you have to be in the $10 or higher tiers

You’re right, Arakisk, it’s not advertised on the Patreon page for Skin Deep, if you’re logged out.
Rechecking the page, it’s supposed to be, you have to be on the $5 or above to see the RQ, $10 or above to ask RQs.

What tier are you on Arakisk?
I’ve always been on the $10.

Or maybe, you know, magic. XP

The simplest thing I can think of is that medallions come with some sort of detection-proof spell around it to avoid problems such as a metal detector

… Or maybe they aren’t metal at all? I *just* thought that. :/

Given that the medallions’ “illusions” grant quadrupeds all of the abilities of humans’ opposable thumbs (including the ability to handle inanimate objects) I doubt they would have any problems with full body scanners when the Skin Deep timeline catches up to the real world’s.

You missed the other half of that, Web_MST3K.
It’s not only what the Medallion Magic can create as part of the illusion, it’s what that magic can HIDE.
It can hide from physical existence the wings of winged creatures, the full body of quadrupeds, to the point where others can pass straight through the space which should be occupied by the full form.
So there won’t be anything other than the physical reality of the illusion for the full body scanners to see.

That won’t come into play, though, until after the US Govt security staffers working for the manufacturers of the full body scanners manage to con the US Govt into mandating the use of the full body scanners in 2007.

An illusion is by definition a false perception of a physical reality. Given that the medallions enable a thumbless quadruped to pick up an inanimate object–which is incapable of perception–implies that what the characters call illusions are something else entirely. You can’t fool something that has no mind to deceive.

Consider this: Michelle’s mother has pictures of her late husband and Michell as a child. Mindless photons flowed through a lens and caused pigment changes on a piece of mindless photosensitive plastic which was used to create an image on an equally mindless piece of paper.

Further, imagine what would happen if a bugbear in human guise tried to ride a horse. Gravity is notorious for not giving a damn about what you think or believe about mass and weight, so unless you manage to change local reality instead of fooling the observers, you end up with a horse with a broken back.

On the other hand, if the so called illusions in “Skin Deep” are something like localized patches of reality superimposed on what we call objective reality, things could work out just fine. Getting back to Michell’s childhood pictures, if the medallions can work on visible light photons, why not x-ray and microwave photons?

As of *now*, the displays of body scanners do *not* show what they pick up of the person’s actual body; they show the blobs of suspicious stuff they found, projected onto what effectively is a mannequin, to protect the scanee’s modesty.

So even *if* the scanner could pick up on their fullforms, the display would nonetheless point out the medaillon – on an abstracted human body shape.

Wow, this page really touched me… I feel so bad for Michelle! My eyes got a little watery myself.
Also, wow: the drawing style. SO PURDY.
Imagine someone who has never even heard of this comic trying to understand what is going on in panel 4… that face is funny looking.

Leave a Reply
