Ø Is For Øverwritten 43/60

13 January, 2022 19 Comments

All right, everyone who’s been waiting for this reveal, get hyped…

AN OMINOUS BASEMENT

Kiki: Atarangi, c’mon, get up!

Atarangi: Mmm . . . what’s the point.

[HEADSPACE]

Kiki: Kallie — are we gonna get the Whispers next, if she can’t snap out of it??

Kallie: It doesn’t transmit person-to-person . . . but . . .

Kiki: “But”??

Kallie: But with her and Violet down, the only way to get us out of here —

— is you, Kiki. It has to be you.

19 Comments

*Sets up comfy folding chair and grabs the bucket of popcorn*

Ready!

While this would be good, I still expect some reinforcements because https://leifandthorn.com/comic/o-is-for-overwritten-22-60/ was certainly suspicious.

Atarangi is a fire magical, and it’s been established that her sisters don’t have access to her magic…

I’ve suspected that a sister or two also had some magical potential for a while…

Kiki is also a magical then? It’s probably a safe guess that she has her own costume, and probably isn’t as high level as Atarangi.

My purely Watsonian guess would be she’s a water mage, but if I factor in the Doyleist details of we just saw a Tamaputian water mage, and that would make this problem far to easy, my bet is she’s a nature magical girl, or maybe a quirky rarity like Acai who doesn’t fit into the the usual 3 elements plus multiclassing star mages system.

“Atarangi” used water magic in Training Wreck 20/29.
But the speech bubble was another color than her usual speech bubble and it looks like Kiki’s color.

Oh yeah! Definitely overthinking things then, heh.

I wonder why she was kept off screen at the time, to avoid needing to tag the correct sister, or keep her Kiki’s costume secret!

I suspect that, while each has a unique costume, the other can ‘disguise’ by way of “handing off’ while already powered up. From a Watsonian perspective, if Aratangi changed costumes mid-Hellhound battle, someone would have noticed, as there’s no way that Kiki has the exact same dress sense as Atarangi resulting in identical costumes.

There was a flash in the first panel of this strip, looks like transforming magic to me. I think they were too occupied with the battle to notice a costume change. Plus if the headmates think of each other as a team (even if not fighting together at the same time) Kiki’s costume might be similar to Atarangis.
Water magic would be handy as Water quenches fire. Is healing magic by a water mage also be more effective curing infections caused by fire spirits?

I thought the mages who cured the whispers for the character who had the brush with the whispers before had been cured by a water mage. That could be a false memory; I haven’t taken the time to verify it. It also doesn’t necessarily say if they have an advantage, that could have just been “roll a d12, mod 3 for the base spec, and if it’s a 10, 11, or 12, it’s a star mage with the given base” that came up water.

But if I’m right, it also could have been a hint about what works best.

They were fire, because the spirits were nature: https://leifandthorn.com/comic/time-and-tides-1933/

I think she was hidden in trees. In hindsight, it does seem suspicious how WE didn’t saw her.

she was up in the tree, indeed –
https://leifandthorn.com/comic/training-wreck-23-29/ – someone that small amongst the branches would be hard to see, and only her head and arm would be shown to Thorn from that view, even if he does have that sharp of visual acuity.

and that sure is her colour on that speech bubble!

Atarangi tattoo is missing in second panel.

This is headspace. It’s my understanding that multiples tend to have more stable headspaces than most people, but it is still subject to mental state, and distressed people can have unstable headspace issues.

Atarangi’s mental state could be such that she doesn’t care enough to manifest the tattoo in headspace. On a similar note, she had long sleeves in panel 1 and short sleeves in panel 2. I feel like this is more of an accurate representation of the potential fluctuations in headspace.

I think panel 1 is not in headspace (It’s “An Ominous Basement”, after all), making clear her body is doing the same as her mind at the moment. But her mind gets to wear what she likes (a plain, “default” outfit because nude is not the Whispers’ aesthetic) and doesn’t have to dress for the cold.

Yeah, that. And I feel like the tattoo is kind of an affirmational thing for all of them, so it makes sense one effect of the Whispers might be to wipe it from her self-image.