Best Of The Unicorn Jelly Forum
Particularly interesting letters and answers to questions about Unicorn Jelly

On The Nature Of Radiation and Light In Tryslmaistan
On The Issue Of Human Skin Pigmentation On Gryrnu
On Why The Sky Is Blue In The Tryslmaistan Universe
On How Much The Author Knew Before Beginning Unicorn Jelly
How Do The Jellies Talk?
On The Internal Organs Of Jellies, And Crystal Biology
On The Symbiotic Nature Of Chou
About The Gryrnese Pentacles, And Occult Symbols In General
The Nature Of Water And Chemical Elements In Tryslmaistan
Exactly How Vlax Keeps People Alive
Why There Are Clouds In The Trslmaistan Universe
On The Statistics Of Homosexuality On Gryrnu
On The State Of Gryrnese Medicine
What Are Worldplates Composed Of?
Is There Crystal Life In The Sea?
About The Art Culture Of Gryrnu
About The Clockwork Devices Of The Gryrnese
All About The Gryrnese Bosom Sow! 
Rain, The Central Sea, And The Cycle Of Water
About The Day And Night Orbs
Details About Unicron J-L-Y
The Last Days Of Myrmil, and The Flight Of Unicron J-L-Y
Why Do The Gryrnese Accept That Their World Was Settled Only 300 Years Ago?
How Could Lupiko Know Anything About Uni's History Before They Met?
How Do Earthly Plants Manage To Grow In A Universe Of Cold Lumonic Light?
What Is 'Death' For Crystalline Life Forms?
What Does The Gryrnu Language Sound Like?
What Do Slimes Actually Do?
Why Do Jellies Only Have Two Eyes Instead Of More?
Why Chou Can Never Have A Baby
How Does The Gryrnese Government Work?
If Light Is Different In The Tryslmaistan Cosmos, How Can Humans See?
What Do The Jellese Eat?
Who Were The 'Faeries'?
How Do Jellies Reproduce?
How did the Tratonic Bomb that destroyed Myrmil actually work?
Why do the Gryrnese use a base seven numerical system?
How do Gryrnese marriage ceremonies go?
What is the species of the ants on Gryrnu?
Why is the Stormfall such a problem?
Why was Wai-Wai so hated by Neve?
Are There Libraries On Gryrnu?
How Do The Gryrnese Wipe Their Asses?
What about Menstruation in Tryslmaistan?

 

"Can't get sunburned, eh? Why is that? Just curious...and if I may add to the question (since I think the answers are somewhat related) -- just how does light work in Tryslmaistan, anyway? What is it "made" of? I recall no mention of an electromagnetic force as we know it on Earth, so I'd guess light can't be electromagnetic waves like it is on Earth. Are there trinal paravective waves, maybe?"  -Tursiops0

Radiation works differently in the Tryslmaistan Universe than in our own Mundis Universe, but ultimately serves many, but not all, of the same basic functions.

In our universe, such radiation as light, in all of its forms, such as visible light, x-rays, radio waves, and so forth, are all made of various frequencies of one thing: photons.

A photon is a most curious creature. Photons are energy, and they have a transcendent nature in that they are both particles, and waves...or, if you prefer, both and neither. They are something outside the common imagination: they are 'wavicles'.

Depending on how light is measured, it can act like a particle, like a bullet or a tiny lump or grain, OR the very same light can act as a -wave- in the fabric of spacetime...entirely the opposite thing from a particle. A wave of light can pass through two (or more) holes in a screen -at the same instant in time- just like a wave on the ocean can pass through the posts of a pier...because a wave is an effect upon something else...the water. But a particle is a discreet thing, and photons can pile up like boulders (in effect). How can something real be a thing, like a grain of sand, and at the same time also NOT be a thing, but be an effect, such as a wave, passing though a medium, such as water? Only if it is both and neither, indeed, something right outside of our common labels and definitions.

Essentially, a photon is a hyperdimensional fold of spacetime, void curled in on itself, a living variable in the equation of existence. Photons is weird stuff.

Tryslmaistan has no photons, rather it has lumons. Lumons are not particles, nor are they waves...they are lines and angles. The photon exists as two contradictory things at the same instant, because it operates under the rules of the quantum realm, and thus seems paradoxic. The lumon is also paradoxic, being that it is an infinitely straight line, and -also- an angle with -no- lines running out from it. The lumon is also infinitely long, and because of this, there are no 'speed of light' issues in the Tryslmaistan universe...sight is instantaneous. The frequency of the photon is created by its wavelength, when it is measured as a wave, but the frequency of the lumon is created by the degree of the angle, when it is NOT measured as a line.

Because photons can act like particles, they can smash through things, like tiny bullets, and cause damage. That is what a sunburn is. Cells damaged by tiny bullets of light ripping though them and wrecking things. That is why sunburns can develop into cancer...one of the things inside a cell that can get ripped up is the DNA, which is the control program for cellular machinery.

Lumons cannot act like 'bullets', and cannot punch though tratonic matter, the matter that makes up everything -including the converted humans- in the Tryslmaistan universe. Thus, no sunburn.

So, you might ask, how can lumon radiation pass though crystal, or the lens of an eye then? Shouldn't everyone be blind as a consequence?

To understand that, you need to understand that light, photonic light as in our universe, does not actually ever 'pass' though our eye lenses or through glass! That is an illusion.

In reality, photonic light is absorbed by the outer surface of glass, or your eye, and the potential energy kicks atom after atom after atom in a line, until -on the opposite side of the glass- an equal photon to the one that hit the surface is released. It isn't the same photon that hit the glass, it is another photon with the same energy, wavelength, and direction. When you see, whether through a window, or through the lens in your own eye, you are seeing a copy of the light that hit the window or your lens, not the orignal light at all. Seriously.

When lumonic light hits a tratonic window, or lens, in Tryslmaistan, it induces a planar inversion of the traton it hits. This planar inversion is passed from traton to traton, until on the opposite side, the potential energy is released as another equal lumon. Just like how photons work, in effect, but using a different methodology to achieve the same net result.

One of the first lessons Creatrixes and Creators learn, when beginning the study of the construction and design of universes, is that parallels of function are commonplace, yet the methods used to implement these functions are infinite (Aleph 0, not any multiple infinity, just standard infinity). There always has to be a system for distant perception, and ultimately, however it works, it pretty much ends up serving the function of something not entirely unlike light.

"Do absorbed lumons still create heat? As in, can I still take a lens and a piece of paper and focus enough lumons to a point on the paper to make a fire?" -Rossperk

Yes, the absorption of lumons does increase the local entropy, albeit at a reduced level than in our universe. However, the frequencies produiced by the sun and moon orbs associated with every worldplate are very visible-light range, and thus, lacking the equivalent of infra-red, or a powerful output, are like so-called 'cold light' -the kind of light that comes from charged tubes, or bioluminescence. The heat transfet is very, very tiny. However, it is the cumulative effect of this tiny amount that makes the entire Tryslmaistan cosmos have a pleasant ambient temperature.

Now, you are prolly thinking at this point, fine....tiny amount of heat from those orbs, but it is a closed universe, a closed system, why are they not broiling in a cumulative hellish inferno of heat that cannot go anywhere. Not to mention the energy released by Shatterel cycles, movement, biology, and everything else that can happen or occur?

The answer, is in the Veils....a VERY large-scale phenomena that seperate entire worldplate -clusters- from each other. The Veils, which are listed in the Powers-Of-Ten Cosmic Zoom map section, act as heat sinks due to some rather unique energy transformation dynamics. Ambient heat is taken by the Veils and converted to high frequency Tryslmeric Charge, also called 'Electanic Charge', the potential of which powers the light production of the orbs. As the orbs circle the worldplates, they broadcast light, a very miniscule bit of heat, and low frequency Tryslmeric. or 'Electanic' Charge, which builds up in the Worldplates. The Worldplates act like gargantuan crystal capacitors, and when they reach critical mass, they discharge, creating Shatterel. The Shatterel gradually dissipates into the atmospheric void, as heat, which eventually reaches the Veils. A balanced, perpetual cycle with no beginning, a perpetual motion machine, a closed energy loop. It never varies, and never changes, and is regular as clock-work.

Always, as the Jellies state. Always.

"So, is the Tryslmeric Charge capacitated in the plate itself, and discharged into the air around the plate at the breaking point?"

Yes...the discharge into the air is what causes the Shatterel to form, three times a 'year'. 

"Wait, let me get this straight: The orbs create low freq. T-charge, which the plates absorb and eventually convert to heat (via Shatterel), which is absorbed by the Veils that convert it to high freq. T-charge, which is absorbed by the orbs that convert it to low freq. T-charge again (and light, which gets back into the cycle as heat later on). (Sounds like a Dr. Alchemist strip! ^_^ )"

Correct. 

"About the Veils, looking at the 10^7 Tetra map, is it the phenomena that creates the Voids (like the Kaltis, Yumu, and Semtis Voids), or is it what seperates them into little groups of 3s? Or both?"

The Celestial Veils are wispy, curtain-like phenomena, rather like unbelievably gargantuan draperies made of cotton-candy energy/mist. They are organized in a fractal manner, so that smaller and smaller sheets 'decend' from the Great Curtains until these dinky ones ultimately invade the regions near small (3) groups of Worldplates sit. The Great Veils are like walls, dividing the Voids, as you suggest, and were a deadly nightmare to the original colonists from Myrmil. A lot of the ark-ships did not make it through more than a few Veil crossings.

"Then the various skin pigmentations are because the people's ancestors where from a planet that had mundis light? Because light rays aren't harmeful, why would different skin pigmentations evolve?" -Kaleidors

Exactly correct, Becky! One of the original groups that ended up in the Tryslmaistan Universe included a divot from what was once/will be/is now called Nigeria, in Africa. Nigerians have the most incredibly, lovely, absolutely black...almost blue-black...pigmentation. It is remarkably dark. Yet, in all of Unicorn Jelly, we see no strongly dark-skinned people. Chou is pretty dark skinned for Gryrnu, and she is a very light brown. Millian has a bit of pigment, and a trace of kinky (oval crossection) hair can be found in Zuzux. These are the last reminants of the Nigerian group, diluted and mixed with the genetics of the other groups from earth, over a very, very long time. Because radiation, at least in the usual 'punch a hole through matter' concept is not a part of Tryslmaistan physics, skin pigmentation serves no purpose...but neither is there a powerful engine for evolution either! Thus there is no evolutionary pressure to eliminate dark skin, either, other than it costs a few extra calories. As you can see, despite the limited selection, the Gryrnese are not starving. Anymore, anyway.

So that is why everyone in Unicorn Jelly appears to have such a mixed genetic background, why there are not deeply dark skin colors, and why the reminants of dark skin have not faded from evolutionary pressure (there isn't any!...well not much...).

Gryrnu is the ultimate 'melting pot' for peoples and cultures from earth. Because they only had each other, there was not room or patience for forming ghettos, for isolation, for fussing over which sneech had a star on it's belly. The were lucky to survive and thrive at all.

"Why is the sky blue?" -Rossperk

I love this question. It is oft presented as the quintessential childhood question. Here is the answer: 

The Tyndall Effect. In 1859, John Tyndall figured out that light passing though a particulate medium...say water with dust in it...would scatter light. The scattering would be such that red (low frequency) light would be more affected than blue light (high frequency). Air is basically just a very low density water, if you think about how both act, what they are made of, and how they flow.

Now for years the idea was that blue sky was caused by dust in the air, or water vapor particles...but calculations by none other than Einstein himself proved that the very particles of air alone...molecules of oxygen, atoms of nitrogen, molecules of carbon dioxide.... were sufficient to create a full-blown (pun intended) Tyndall Effect, regardless of any dust and water vapor. Atoms are particles too!

Now there -was- a bit of fuss over why the sky is not violet, which is and even higher frequency than blue, instead of just blue...and that is answered by three things. One is that human eyes are less sensitive to violet than to blue. The other is that the atmosphere absorbs quite a lot of violet light, and thus less gets through (the sun puts out white light, which just means that it puts out all the colors at the same time) you can chalk that up to the nature of the gasses themselves. The last factor is that the sun, while it does put out all colors of light, does not do so equally...it just does not pump out -quite- as much violet as it does blue in the mix of light it produces. G-type stars (like our sun) produce unique light balances due to what trace atoms they contain, beyond the usual hydrogen and helium.

So, why is the sky blue in the Tryslmaistan universe? Because the Tyndall effect still applies there too! Tryslmaistan has some odd physics, yes, but not all the physics of the Tryslmaistan universe are unique...most of the physics there are identical -or very close- to the physics of Mundus, our own universe.

However, you might notice that in all of the color pictures I have done, the blue color is not quite the same as that of our earth. For one thing, sunsets (or orbsets if you prefer) do not get all reddish, rather they tend more towards being teal or blue-green, with touches of violet. Further, the blue of the Tryslmaistan universe sky is more teal than that of earth overall, and as it darkens, becomes more deeply blue...kind of a Prussian Blue. There are also more definite traces of violet, especially off of reflected light, such as from the crystal plants in the deserts. You will see this violet hue in many of the color pictures if you look. These subtle touches relfect the unique character of the Tryslmaistan universe.

Indeed, as the day progresses on Gryrnu, the sky will shift as the sun crosses the Worldplate from a greenish teal in the morning, to a pale teal-blue at midday, to a strong teal and violet at orbset, and deep intense blue, never pitch black, at night. For a tour of this, go re-read the Great Manly Monster Slaying Expedition which shows the passing of one full day, from morning to evening, in color. This is the sequence where Yasui lost the use of his arm, by the way. Pay attention to the light, the sky color, and the way the light reflects and refracts off of objects. I am proud of that Alt Universe sequence.

Side note...yes, that is an example of an Alternate Universe event that ALSO happened in a very similar fashion in the Prime Universe story, albeit in the background because it was not important to the main plotline. Some Alt Universe stories are relfections of similar events that happen in the background of the Prime Universe. Others are utterly different from the Prime Universe. That is the nature of Alternate Universes. Back to the topic...

The Jellies actually see the sky of their universe as far more violet, almost pinkish, but humans see it as these teal and blue colors, because they have eyes that evolved on earth, and thus are limited by that evolution.

If you look carefully, you will see that I have been most careful in representing these details! 

So now you know...not only for earth, but for Gryrnu as well. 

I love answering these sorts of questions...its fun! ^.^ 

"Random question: did you have all of the unique physics, culture, history, etc. of Tryslmaistan figured out in advance from the very beginning, or did the Muse not bring all that up until the strip was already rolling? Similarly, has the Muse been calling the shots from the very first strip, or were you working alone at first?" -Bigearlx

My curious partner, my Muse, bent my head to the task from the start. 

I did not want to do Unicorn Jelly, and I all I knew was my sorrow and anger over the loss of my game project. I was miserable beyond comprehension. Then, one day, I had a kick in the pants feeling, and it nagged at me. I started sketching on napkins, and needed to start carrying a drawing book in my purse. I started making the first character designs for what would one day become all of the cast of Unicorn Jelly. Each character just popped out, and the pressure to have to act upon them built. At this time I started noticing that there were online comics out there.

I had no idea what the farg I was doing with the first Unicorn Jelly strip. At first I figured that the whole thing would be just a D&D fantasy romp. I thought it would be silly video-RPG stories about a goofy witch and her little pet. I had no idea that the guards protecting her would become so important...I named them as 'disposable' characters after all (Redcloak -'redshirt'- and FODDERman!)...I was expecting to have them constantly being killed off and suddenly back, like Kenny from South Park.

Then Chou showed up. And the Shatterel storm. Suddenly the complexities of the Powers of Ten map began to take on an eerie consistancy, and meaning. As time has progressed, more has been revealed, to me as well, and so I fel this wonderful sense of discovery of something that seems so 'already made'...as though I were just tapping into something neater than I could think up. I really like that feeling. I have come to like not knowing what the next panel will be until it is finished and I get to read it. The one time a whole set of strips was just shoved at me in my mind, all finished, it was boring to actually draw them...just work. The Way the Muse usually does things, I have this mix of terror and awe and wonder as I draw the strip....I haven't a clue what is going on, but I just try to trust that it will not only work, but make sense, include foreshadowing of future events, and create a complex, multilayered story that will 'learn me somptin' if only silly me can figure it out.

So far, it has worked, like magick if you will excuse the term, for two years. I cannot explain it, so I try not to...it is too neato to ask too many questions, you know? I have turned from begrudging the work to looking forward to it, knowing that it alone saved me from an almost suicidal despair. I suppose there is one obvious magick in Unicorn Jelly after all..the fact that it gets made at all. I am reading it along with you, as it goes. I do get more hints and clues, true, but I am always being surprized.

"How do Jellies talk?" -Bigearlx

Normally, before humans, they used the entire surface of their body to generate -and recieve- sound. They were like living monophonic speakers, vibrating.

The Jellies we have seen have all been affected by the human occupation, and conquest of Gryrnu. They are the last on 'The Rez' of their tribe, and have adopted many of the Humans mannerisms and ways. They form mouths and move them in time to their vibration-speech. They use Talcryl commonly, instead of Jellese. Many had forgotten their native language entirely, in fact. Unlike most Amerindian tribes on Earth, though, the Jellies did not lose their original religion, and kept it, as you saw with KayWai.

Jellies do not need the mouths they form...they do it because they are trying to appease a very rational terror of the Humans that came and slaughtered them for land and resources. Since Jellies are not keen on change, they fall into patterns and hold them once formed.

"I would assume that they are evolved from the crystal life within the universe, essentially they are made of the same stuff as that within the crystals, except seem to have developed a reasonably thick outer coating to prevent themselves from spilling everywhere. There has been no suggestion within the strip as to whether or not Crystal life contains any organs at all, at least that we could recognise." -Lordroberts

First up, it is a strange thing to contemplate what is meant by a true, 'steady-state', universe, which is the sort of universe that Unicorn Jelly takes place in. Tryslmaistan had no 'big bang', no origin point, no defined start. It is/as always/was. There is no natural evolution (in the way we know the term) in the Tryslmaistan universe. The advent of humans, however, has set everything on it's collective ear. Vlax acts to mutate earth life, and thus is an engine for the evolution of Red/Green life, if an odd one. And, as we have seen with KayWai and Uni, some Red/Green life can mutate crystal or White life. This has never happened before, and is unnatural to the entire universe of Tryslmaistan.

Although Tryslmaistan has no evolution, because there is no engine to drive evolution there, it does have a kind of atemporal structural progression in the sum construct of its cosmology. This can be seen in that all White life is based on a common plan, and all versions of it are extentions of that structure. The basic layout of crystal life is a denser shell covering a lighter, fluidic center.

If you remember the Great Manly Monster Slaying Expedition, when the Teal Scizzortiger was burst open, it was seen to be a hollow shell, filled with a creamy transluscent goo. This goo is what one would find inside everything from a Crystal Basilisk to a Scut-Scut on the beach...and of course, Uni. KayWai, being heavily contaminated from a diet heavy in Deifica, as well as a unique mutation, is filled with a greenish-blue jell, mush less opaque.

The goo does not have discrete organs as we know them. There is no permanent 'liver' or 'spleen' or 'heart'. As organs are needed, they form, constructed on the fly by the replicator units within the goo. When the organs are not in need, they are taken apart, so that other organs can be built. This would be ridiculously inefficient in our high entropy Mundis universe, where energy and life are so limited. In the Tryslmaistan universe, however, this system makes a sttrange sort of sense.

Now the more complex the crystal entity, the more likely that it will contain 'replicator nodes' mixed into the goo. While not precisely organs, they are pre-constructed universal mega-components that can be used to speed up the construction of any number of temporary organs formations. Universal chunks of commonly used code, for the programmers out there. Ther Slimes do not have any of these, the large crystal beasties have some, and the Jellies have a lot of them. Thus, Jellies can be killed by slicing them in half, because the goo spills out and the replicators inside cannot make use of the nodes they depend on and fail. Slimes can survive any amount of whacking because they are just a big puddle of replicators, no nodes, and thus can just rebuild missing mass...as we saw with Uni. However, being more simple, they are not capable of being as intelligent, because, in effect, they cannot process information as well.

Which brings us to how these creatures think. They do not have a discreet brain, rather they disrtibute their thought-like functions over the whole of their substance, with connections and processing systems being created and dissolved constantly. The non-stop nature of this allows memory to exist, as memory is always being copied from one transient structure to the next. In effect, they have a volatile memory...if one was ever interruped somehow in mid-process, it would likely lose its memory!

So, transient organs, goo inside a 'shell' or 'skin', and no evolution but an obvious structural 'progression' instead...at least until the Humans showed up...and changed everything.

"I got the impression, and you'll forgive the imagry, that the numerous crystals were basically maggots devouring Chou's body so they could become more Basilisks. Uni apparently has the ability to heal, but a natural ability wouldn't really differentiate. I think Uni healed the crystals and Chou at the same time, resulting in a bonding, the creation of a new life form that was at once human (elf) and basilisk. A hybrid." -Crowfrog

Crowfrog is basically bang on. The Crystal Basilisk reproduces rather like some Earthly wasps...who lay their eggs inside the living body of a spider they have paralyzed, to provide -fresh- food for hatching larva.

In the case of the Basilisk, the 'egg' is a soulution of crystal replicators...kind of like natural nanobots...that make use of the available, concentrated minerals and salts to manufacture a new, baby Basilisk. Rather than being like a bunch of maggots swarming, it is more like a single unified web, or net, of crystalline fibers and nodes growing throughout the host body. Normally the host would be a native crystal life form...like the crystal 'crabs', or other such creatures, all possessed of a hard shell and a liquid-crystal interior.

A human body is even wetter and softer and has a decent concentration of minerals in the bones...no wonder little Amalthea Yaru...eventually 'Chou'...was implanted. Pretty tempting to a Basilisk.

Uni's 'serum' managed to arrest the growth and spread of the basilisk fetus, and stablized Chou's own metabolism. A state of balance was achieved, where the two life forms, human and basilisk embryo, could exist together, equally. Since the basilisk life is alien, human antibodies and immune response is useless to eliminate it, and vice versa. The two are now a hybrid, and neither could survive if the other was removed...there is not enough of the original Amalthea left to keep her organs running if the basilisk was removed, and there is not enough basilisk developed to survive without the human support.

Chou is now a unique creature, alone in all the multiverses, alone in all of her own time and space. She belongs to a new species with a population of exactly one. Since she is sterile, she cannot reproduce, so she is all there will ever be of her life form. On the positive side, she can probably expect to live as long as her basilisk half...upwards of 300-400 years. Or more, because her own biological family is pretty long lived too. She will be alive for centuries after Lupiko is composted.

(In Response to a long discussion concerning the Gryrnese 3-sided pentacle (!), the uses of magick sysmbols in general, and the origins of their use...)

All About Pentacles, Tryslmaistan Or Earthly. 

Lots of talk about this topic, so I decided to put in my own words. It's kind of something I have studied a bit, so...

Pythagoras and his bad boy posse basically had their own custom religion going, because do-it-yourself cults were really big among the Greek philosophy otaku. For these folks, geometry was pretty exciting stuff, and they found in the study such beauty that it inspired religious feelings in them. So, to make the whole of one of the most vital elements of western culture into a pop-culture factoid, these Greek boys made a pile of dice and sat around telling fortunes with them. Those dice were later made REALLY popular by a certain pundit named Plato about 80 years later, and that is how the 'Platonian Solids' (instead of Pythagorean solids) eventually became the dice we use in Dungeons and Dragons.

Now Pythagoras and his buds also liked playing with flat geometry too, and they especially liked relating the dice they loved with flat shapes. Their fave-rave 3-D shape was the Dodecahedron..the 12-sided die. To them, it somehow symbolized the cosmos, the Ultimate, and what we might translate as god, more or less. Now a D12 is made up of 12 perfect pentagons...five sided polygons. 12 was a bigtime magic number (12 months in a year, comes from all of this) and the fact that the shape that meant 'god' was made of pentagon suggested that five was a big deal too. After all, humans -we ultimate life form types- have five toes and five fingers and stuff, so here was this uber-cool connection between god and man and cool crap like that.

So, lots of folks had lots of fun over the centuries playing around with the symbol for Mankind, the pentagon. They played with drawing lines between the points and ended up making a star shape...or rather we draw stars that way because it was all such a big cool idea at the time. That was the pentagram. They took the star and drew a circle around it and that looked REALLY cool...thus the pentacle got super famous.

Now there were these cats out in the desert, recently escaped from slavery under Egyptian rule, and they were into all kinds of mystical stuff. However, these Hebrew folks wanted their own magick, rather than all that crazy Egyptian stuff, so the created a whole form of magery called the 'Kabbalah'. Lots of magick playtime later, we have every kind of star, including the well known 'Star Of David', the hexagram.

Now some of these Jewish tribes, always on the run, went all over the place, and influenced everyone and everything as they went. With their culture came also their Magick, and this affected medieval Europe in a big way. Soon everyone from gypsies to the members of the royal court were playing with the stuff, and because the crusades caused Europeans to check out books from Islamic libraries, the western world got all the original Pythagoras stuff back too. How did the world lose all of the Greek stuff you may ask? You see, there as this little cult called Christianity, back near the end of Rome, and it got a little certain that it had the One And Only Truth. In order to celebrate this Fact, they threw a little party, and asked the proto-German Huns (who were real big on Christianity) to come over and help them celebrate being so very damn correct. Well, My ancestors being what they are, things got a little out of hand, and they basically burned down the single biggest library in the whole world, and also any others that they could get to, on the grounds that there was stuff inside that did not agree 100% with their Super-True Christian Beliefs. Oopsie! The Dark Ages, the loss of all knowledge, eating bugs and living like animals for a few hundred years, a real big setback for the west.

Anyway, the point is they all got it back, mostly, when the Crusades went borrowing books, and that REALLY made all the mystical symbol stuff seem really neato! Now it was the stuff of court and king- on the sly, of course, since being caught actually playing with magickal stuff pretty much got you burned at a stake. Until about 1959, when the Inquisition finally was officially ended. My birth year.

Still all those centuries of playing with pentacles had really gotten into the culture, and when a bunch of English-type folks started re-inventing what was left of old legends, myths and stories into the new cult on the block, the gentle nature-religion called Wicca, or Witchcraft, they naturally made use of all the best magick patterns in history, and the best looking one simply has to be the pentacle..I mean, it is SO cool Americans put the symbol on their planes in the various World Wars and minor wars, and it still is the symbol for the American Air Force. Guess why the Pentagon....is one. It just looks cool.

So what does this pentacle actually mean, anyway? The Earthly Wiccan one (as opposed to the Tryslmaistan wiccan one) has a star inside a circle. In a nutshell, the star is Mankind (kind of looks like a standing person, you know), and the power of the Will, and the circle is the Universe, Goddess, and the sacred moon. the points of the star can mean stuff too, if you like. It is supposed to be a happy symbol, meaning life, and love, and good, wholesome magick. Of course, those wacky Christians did not like this any more than they liked those Roman Libraries, so we have all the scary movies about devil cults using pentacles. Problem is that Wiccans do not believe in Christian stuff, so they don't believe in any devil at all. Satanists are really still Christians, because they still play with the bible...just from the opposite side of the book. Witches don't even care about all that god and devil stuff at all, and the bible is just a story to them. Just paper. So the real meaning of the pentacle to the people who claim it is the happy symbol for life magick.

Now, just to be contrary..there always are folks who want to be, you know?....some folks decided that all that scary movie stuff as pretty cool. What can I say? So, in order to differentiate themselves from the 'regular' forms of Wicca, they turned the pentacle 'upside down' to symbolize going with 'black magick'... magick targeted at dark purposes. Regular Wicca would see such folks as pretty silly, because one of the basic rules of Earth Wicca is that whatwever someone does, comes back to them three times over...so doing black magick would logically be pretty stupid...since the person doing it would suffer more than the target. But there ya go, humans are perverse.

OK, with me so far? On Tryslmaistan, on Gryrnu, the pentacle is a Trinary Pentacle....this means that the symbol is a triangle instead of a pentagram, but serves the same cultural purpose...a sign of magick and of life. The Gryrnu Wiccans call it that because the word has survived, barely from long ago. Indeed all the words on Gryrnu are distorted words from Earth languages....Greek, Finnish, Japanese, Chinese, English, French...and a few others too. Since you have seen Chou go on about the Alpabe runes, I think most of you have figured out that humans are not native to the Tryslmaistan Universe, and only barely survive because Vlax keeps their organs running amidst different physical laws than we have on Earth, in the Mundis Universe, where we all live.

The early people who ended up in the Tryslmaistan Universe tried to make sense of it, and in doing so, they resorted to all the stories and myths they knew...and that is why there are 'Witches' and 'Alchemists', why they believe in Magick (anything a person does not understand is Magick, or so I am told by my Steampunk-Electro-Atomic-Radio-Quantum Computron!).

And yes, the Wiccans of Gryrnu see the circle as the Universe, and also the moon orb, and the triangle as a Worldplate. it only makes sense...they are trying to make order of their universe.

Just like Pythagoras and his buds did....and we all still do...today. 

Actually, this has been addressed obliquely in several things...several Alternate Universe strips, the article on the site about the physics of the Tryslmaistan universe, and so forth.

"Alrighty!!! First, what is the elemental make-up of water in the Unicorn Jelly universe? Is it the equivilant of H20 using their elements, or diffrent? Also, I don't remember you actuly saying this (you might have) but are there atoms in the Unicorn Jelly universe? If not, or if the physical laws and elements are diffrent enough from ours to effect this, what would happen to H20 if it was suddenly transported to tryslmaistan? Would it be ripped apart from the change of physical laws, or what? How about people, or a book of advanced physics (hehehe)?" -Stevetrm

In a nutshell, the universe of Tryslmaistan is based on 'tratons' rather than 'atoms', or more correctly, tratons are the tryslmaistan version of atoms. Where atoms are closed wavicle shells surrounding a particulate nucleus, tratons are polyhedral forms made of charged layered planes of dimensional energy that exude repultractive forces.

There are over a thousand different tratonic elements on the Tryslmaistan periodic table, and thus conversion from our universe (Mundis) to Tryslmaistan is not unlike taking a 16 color bitmap and loading it into a 256 color paint program...there are a LOT of possible 'colors' to 'map' to.

In the case of air, we have seen that a universe spanning atmosphere of Tranium, Parbon, and Hurium gas dominates Tryslmaistan space. Of these tratonal elements, tratonically remapped earth life can metabolise tranium and parbon...the rough equivalents of Mundis oxygen atoms and carbon dioxide molecules.

Tryslmaistan water is made of the elements Quanogen, Norogen, and Balorium. The three tratons form a tetrahedronal molecule where the corners are Qua-Qua-Nor-Bal. This is used like water by the remapped earthly life forms, and also by the crystalline native life forms...one thing both actually have in common. Both crystal life and earthly life use the same organic solvent....which is very fortunate, because if this bit of luck had not been so, we would have no story to tell at all. It is not an unlikely thing, though, since the closest analogue to water is so common, both in the air, and in liquid form....the remapping would almost certainly find this 'color' the closest match.

By the way, Transversal Protean Cosmologic Transmogrification, or TPCT is a natural effect that occurs whenever matter from one universe is brought into another universe. It happens very rapidly, and releases a lot of energy into exterior (both Ana and Kata) dimensions when it occurs. The remapping is not deliberate, neither is it random..rather is is closest analogue based. TPCT occurs because matter is a direct expression of a given universe, so whenever matter is tranferred between universes, it not so much 'becomes' new matter as creates an equivalent expression of a specific pattern within a new cosmological medium. Thus TPCT is not true transmogrification in the deepest sense, but rather a translation of a pattern, such as matter. A better name for it is 'Multiversal Translation'.

Um, but all of that is for second semester Creatrixes (and Creators), where you have to bone up on multiversal mechanics and basic paradimensional cognigenesis. Sorry, probably boring if it is not your major.

"You have mentioned that humans are not native to the Tryslmaistan Universe, and let on that they're from here, our universe (whatever it's called) <Mundis>. You also have definitely made it clear that humans there cannot survive without Vlax. The weird part is that you said that if matter were instantly transported from here to there, it would be converted to their matter, and work for a brief instance before it completely stopped. So, I bet we're all wondering how the first humans from here to there survived long enough to get vlax in their system."

Remember back when Lupiko and Chou were making the long hike back from the Evercliffs, all beaten and hurt, passed by the secret tea growing facility, and such? They finally collapsed, because, what with everything that had happened to them, Lupiko had forgotten to bring any Vlax from the desert. It was growing all around them, but she was so messed up, she just forgot. By the time they got to the forested lands, they were in trouble. Eventually, Sisu saved them with fresh Vlax. This was our first view in Unicorn Jelly of the 'Weakness'.

Now the Weakness happens because the nearest analog (in Tryslmaistan) of our atoms of copper and iron are metallic/crystalline tratons that are almost, but not quite 'right' for the kind of bonds they have to make to terrestrial organic molecules. Hemoglobin, the oxygen carrying molecule that makes blood red, uses one single iron atom, amidst 100 other atoms....the whole molecule acts as a nanomachine: it traps an oxygen molecule (O2)like a bear trap, then releases it. The traton that replaces iron mostly works, but gradually gets unseated from the surrounding molecule.

What reseats it, and makes the molecule work again, is Vlax. Vlax molecules act like a steadying frame that hold the traton in place, but do not otherwise interfere. The body gradually excretes Vlax, over time, though.

Now it takes time for a significant portion of the molecules of hemoglobin in an animal to become unbalanced, and so the person or creature will gradually feel more and more tired for no reason. Then they get dizzy, lightheaded, and start having fainting spells. Finally, coma, and eventually death.

Now this process takes several weeks before coma occurs, so one can imagine the original transplanted humans scrambling to find something, ANYTHING to cure the symptoms. Some people, and some animals, would be affected sooner...the 'canary in the coal mine' concept. So they would be very eager to try anything to save their lives.

Eventually, they would try Vlax. Vlaxifurm, the domes that Vlax comes from, are unusual because they are soft, filled with gooey ooze, and almost seem organic in an earthly way, in some aspects. It is reasonable that the First People may have tried Vlax even right off.

This is not counting the possibility that some of the transplanted humans, who apparently came from a very high level of technology, above ours, and thus most likely from our future, might have had some sort of equipment to help them deduce what was going on as well.

As to what 'actually' happened, we can never (due to things you will eventually learn) find out for sure, but we can make these conjectures.

"Um, in today's comic (8/28/2001), uh... why are there clouds? That is, why would a world that has no other weather besides the shatterel have clouds? Unless, of course, these clouds are not made of water particles (or that universe's equivalent). Also, is it me, or do those clouds look like they're blowing? And, wouldn't blowing clouds mean the existence of 'wind', a word that shouldn't even be in their language (since the only moving air is from breathing or moving objects)?" ---Ross Perkins

Even in a windless universe, clouds would form as discrete masses of water vapor. Since there is an absolute universe-wide 'up' and 'down' the clouds would have orientation. However, they get stretched out, not by wind, but by planovective force. Planovection is one of the physical laws unique to Tryslmaistan...like linovection, the force that causes the absolute 'up and down'. Linovection is a stretching of spacetime along one single axis, with all the lines of hyperdimensional distortion being parallel. But planovection is like a universe being layered, like sandstone or a cake. If spacetime is a static 'block universe' ala Einstein, then Tryslmaistan is a crystal block that is stretched in one direction, and 90 degrees to that, layered. The result, planovective force, is what has arranged the largest masses into 'plates'...since there is no mass-based gravity, stuff in space does not normally form spheres, as in our universe.

Now planovection normally only affects objects above a certain scale, just as quantum pheneomena in our universe only really show up below a certain scale...but quantum effects are still there on the macro scale, and Tryslmaistan planovection is still there on the micro.

Since it is 'weaker' on the small scale, it can only affect tiny, loose, charged particles, and water vapor fits that bill. Planovection makes the clouds streak along flat, decrete planes, over time, but that time is longer than the clouds exist, so the result is roughly earthlike cloud formations, at least most of the time. One would think that there is no rain, because the temperature is constant in the normal Tryslmaistan universe, but rain does fall, usually only over Worldplates, due to factors of droplet size, and static charge release. There is no thunder or lightning, however. Tryslmaistan is a static universe, 'steady-state' as they would say in cosmological physics. The temperature is always the same, everywhere. The clouds form, the clouds fade and re-form, as the particles are affected by the various forces, and by moving objects causeing brief 'winds'....specifically the day and night orbs around each worldplate. These churn the atmospheric void, but collectively do not cause a uniform 'wind' that moves in one direction or another.

Shatterel is not water vapor, but the air itself, and it melts back into air, once the charge is lost. The charge comes from those day and night orbs spinning about a worldplate, acting like a dynamo. The built up charge reaches critcal three times a 'year' and disburses as an effect upon the local atmosphere next to a worldplate...Shatterel.

It is always as dependable as clockwork, always exactly the same, always the same pattern. 

Unless something is very, very, very wrong.

(In response to a discussion concerning the larger number of homosexual people in the population of Gryrnu compared to Earth, and the Kinsey Stats used in the Character Information Area)

Everyone's theories on the Kinsey scale issue are most interesting indeed! 

On earth, at least in the America of the 1950's when Kinsey and Pomeroy did the Kinsey Report, the average Kinsey number was around 2. If I remember it was something like 2.2, 2.3 somewhere in that range. Mostly heterosexual, some repressed bisesexual tendancies. very few people came up as either a 1 or a 6 (1 is absolutely het, 6 is absolutely homo).

It is true that the average Kinsey on on Gryrnu is higher than on earth, it is closer to 3.1, wich means most folks are bisexual. There are many more gay folk than on earth...the percentage on earth is around 10%. For Gryrnu, 30% of the population is gay. This is actually a significant bias.

The why of it is complex. One factor is environmental stress. Homosexuality is caused not by genes, but by prenatal homones. In a nutshell, in animals, including humans, when stress,either emotional or biochemical, is applied as specific 'windows' in fetal development. In rats, this can be done with as little stres as moving a cage from one room to another. The key is that the stress has to occur at just the right moment in brain development. There are three such windows. One controls internal gender, or gender identity. Another is where the brain develops the function if which sex it will be attracted to directly. The third determines behavoral characteristics such as nurturance behavior...in humans, what we could call core masculine or feminine traits.

Any combination is possible. You could end up with a straight man who exhibits feminine behavior, or a gay man who is tough and butch as hell. You could end up with partial results...a bisexual woman who is very feminine, or a straight woman who is very masculine seeming.

Gryrnu is a harsh environment for earth life, but there is also the matter of how tratons...the equivalent of atoms in the tryslmaistan universe work. They work almost correctly for earth life, but not quite. That is why Vlax is used. But even with Vlax, organic chemistry is just a tiny bit 'off', and this varies with Vlax dosages. So, between the high stress, and the Vlax and molecular issues, the result is more gay folks than on earth.

Something like this happens on earth too...more gay folks are born just after -or during- wartime than during peacetime. One theory is that this is a human version of the adaptations that other animals have to affect population rates...for instance rabbits will re-absorb their unborn babies in times of starvation, most cats will eat their kittens, and wolves actually enforce celebacy (the alpha male and female break up trysting wolves). There is another advantage to the human way, though.

Gay folks are, on average, one standard deviation (about 15 points) in intelligence greater than straight folks, and about the same increase in creative ability. So, not only is the chance of baby-making reduced, but the folks that are not as interested in poppping pups are smarter and more clever. That makes them useful for solving problems, finding new ways of doing things, and if they get dead while being so adventurous, the population has not lost a reproductive chance...or so it would seem to work out, back in caveman days. Now, of course, we have a different life, vastly more food, just as much or more stress, and gay folks often want children...and we have the tech to do this without anyone having to have sex with anyone they are not attracted to.

Now you know why gay folks exist in animals and humans, how they come to be, and what the evolutionary advantage is. It also explains why the percentage of gay folks in science, medicine, high technology such as computers, and all forms of art is -much- greater than in any other occupation...say driving a truck, or resurfacing a road, or sewage work. In fact...heh....(personal joke here) the percentage of gay folk in the computer industry (where I have spent most of my career) is about 30%...close to the same as Gryrnu.

"Wouldn't the environment also be a factor though? The hormones are the single best explanation I've ever heard, but the fact remains that probably ninety percent (exaggerating) of NFL fans are watching because they like to see men in tight pants touch each other's bums. Yet given a test, they would certifiably answer negative because it's been beaten into them. This world, this society, is still very puritan in many ways, and tends to be as harsh as possible to anyone living outside Stepford. On Grynu those puritan origins, while possible (hope not), would be extremely diluted by all the other cultures it absorbed. Children wouldn't have hatred and fear of gays beaten into them, so when puberty hit they'd be allowed to follow their hearts to either gender. Or both. As a result the natural thirty percent isn't repressed to fifteen. Just a thought." ~Lee

That is a good point. It is clear that as far as civil law and religious influence are concerned, being gay or straight is immaterial. Not only are folks like Yasui and Millian able to marry, this is perfectly ordinary in Gryrnese culture. There is no Bible or Koran in the Tryslmaistan universe, no Christ, no Allah, no 'sin'. There are various laws, of course, and some of the laws are pretty messed up, just like anywhere, but bigotry over sexual preference, as we understand it, simply does not exist on Gryrnu. Now, there IS bigotry over racial and ethnic boundries, as we have seen, and, as we will see, near the end...there are some folks who do have an issue of who is gay and who is not...but not out of religious reasons or reasons of tradtion. Rather the conflict that will come over this issue will be peculiar to existence within the alien realm of Tryslmaistan itself. We shall see this issue brought to light near the end of Unicorn Jelly.

(Regarding the fact that Lupiko was told that her mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage) "They can and do perform autopsies? They are able to come to *that* conclusion? (and even if it's just what Lupiko has been *told*, it has to be possible, right? if it wasn't, no one would've come up with it.) I'm not a doctor, but I'd think a certain amout of, erm, medical knowledge would be necessary. Wouldn't it?" -Ricky

Perhaps you should go back and read the beginning of the strip again.. 

The highest calling...the most elite position that Gryrnu Witches hold is as healers. Within the culture, this means that Lupiko's mother was a doctor. This is why Faelini's family, and especially Muri, her sister, pushed so hard for Fae to get her degree: a doctor in the family means money. Fae started out poor...because her sister helped elevate her, that is why they had that big house, and why Lupiko came from a rich background. On Gryrnu, the highest Witches perform the same function as doctors and surgeons.

Lesser Witch occupations go from that all the way down to growing crops and raising pigs, or performing in shows, or running restaurants. But Muri wanted only the BEST for her sister, so Fae had to become a full doctor, a full healer.

All medical proceedures on Gryrnu are by law the domain of the working Witches. The tools that the Witches use for things like surgery are built by the Alchemists, but otherwise, the witches do all the medical stuff.

If you recall, the very first job we see Lupiko doing is attempting to cure a young girl infected by Crystal Basilisk spunk...and that is how Chou came into the picture. Lupiko was trying to be a country doctor, and that is why she often quotes what medicinal compound or plant, or crystal life form should be used for whatever illness (the first Shatterel storm we saw).

However, because of the severe and totalitarian limits on discovery and invention, medical advancement is almost nonexistant, and traditional cures and techniques are all that are legally used. Some of those are very pseudo-medieval, but others are remarkably advanced, as though they had been handed down from a superior, lost technology...say Myrmil, for instance?

That is how they know about cerebral hemorrhages. It is also how the Alchemists know how to decribe things like 'tratons' (the atoms of the Tryslmaistan universe) and molecules, and other things they do not have the technology to rigthfully know...all handed down in books copied from books, copied from even older books....

Keep in mind that we are dealing with a civilization that has degenerated from a much more advanced state, clinging desperately to whatever they can save, of the glory they once possessed.

"I Wonder, (before humans made organic soil) is a (generic) plate mainly made of sand and water on its surface, and is rock beneith the surface, or is it sand all the way through (kind of like our moon)? How deep does the ocean go? Is the sea bed curved like some sort of giant, triangular bowl? (Sorry, using sea and ocean interchangeably...not that it matters there, similar to the discussion of the word 'sail'.)"

A worldplate is made of huge solid slabs of densly packed crystal on the bottom, (where by the way, an ecology of upside-down crystal plants and clinging insectoids live) which is then topped by a gravel of crystal boulders, which graduate to the sands of the crystal desert. The desert is interrupted by spikes of Crystal in places, but otherwise forms spookily regular domes or hills that follow the solid mass of the plate below. The Central Sea, which is freshwater and salt free, sits in a huge triangular bowl as you suggest. The ocean, at its deepest point, reaches halfway to the bottom of the Worldplate as a whole.

"Oh, and are there water dwelling crystal/white blooded life?" -Rossperk

Yes indeed. Vlax, for instance, uses the water for part of it's life cycle...Vlax domes produce worm-like children than dig their way to the sea. In the sea, the worms grow to form huge lantern-shaped structures that float like jellyfish do. When these reach maturity, they tear into flat ribbons, about two meters long and 10cm wide, which undulate to the shore. The ribbons wriggle across the land, excreting great amounts of Vlax as they go, until they reach the crystal desert. Some become new Vlax domes, and others keep crawling, right off the edge. It is believed that they drift to colonize other Worldplates, but no one knows for sure.

There are other oceanic life forms too. The shore has the Scut-Scuts, disk-shaped Spin-Leapers, and tiny, spike-propelled TumbleDice. The sea itself harbors the enourmous fragile, multiplaned intersecting DriftWillen, the corkscrew shaped, hollow Galascines and the Rippling DeepBottles...a kind of multi-chambered crystal whale-slug-jellyfish-abstract-art-display. This is all supported by microsopic crystal plankton.

The newcomer to the scene is the Koi fish cultured by the Humans...and there have been rumors of something else, down there, something odd, and terrible, and perhaps mutated from Koi and Goddess knows what else...but again, no one knows for sure.

Well I do, but I ain't telling. 

"Where's the Gryrnu art, music and literature!? Didn't I once hear something about the Wiccans producing plays? Or would attempts at creative expression be viewed a "new way of thinking" and thus a violation of the pact...? " -Rootstudio

Oh, there is a thriving, if somewhat institutionalized, art culture within Gryrnese society.

Traditional plays are done on stage, such as "The Goddess Song", "The Marriage of the Alchemist Kharris", and the popular "Splendor Of Myrmil", as well as comedies such as "The Lost Glasses". The latter details the misadventures of the clumsy and forgetful Alchemist Pandorotto (a favorite comedic character in several works), who works at basic construction labor. The gag with Pandorotto is that his glasses are always represented a gigantic...due to a paperwork error that can never be corrected. He hates the things (they are bigger than the head of the actor) and various slapstick in always involved. Eventually, Pandorotto takes his glasses off to do actually finish some job, and naturally loses them in some fashion. They might be taken by children ("The Alchemist's Bothersome Day"), buried in sand ("The Jelly and The Alchemist"), or sat upon all day by an enourmous Bosom Sow ("The Lost Glasses"). Pandorotto then endeavors to avoid the requisite stiff fine for not wearing his Alchemists Glasses (Pandorotto is notoriously cheap) in ever increasingly absurd and desperate ways when -of course- the council (or some official) tours his worksite.

Gryrnese culture includes a kind of puppet show of sorts, too, which is a strange combination of Kamishibai and Stick Puppets. Backgrounds, switched in and out of a picture frame, are used with flat, slightly mechanical wooden puppets in the entertainment known as 'Telets'. The Telet play is an entertainment for both adults and children, and there are even somewhat...mature.....Telets too.

Every year, the Wiccans hold an arts and crafts festival, and the Alchemists counter with a Traditional Mechanisms Show, where mechanical clocks, small toys, and permitted tools are judged.

There is also the Animal Fair, which allows the top breeders to show off their pigs, rats, crickets and chickens. In case anyone was wondering, they do not permit any animal fighting...animals are too precious to allow them to be damaged without survival based cause (such as for food).

The Wiccans are very big on dancing, and there are three main kinds of dance that are taught: Farmkint, which involves many people in large circles, High Wiccan, which involves elaborate and very slow dance moves that are more like pantomime than what we think of as dance, and Animalan, which is centered around imitation, of people, of animals, and of any other life form from a Jelly to a tree!

There is also a general art form of doing Talcryl scrolls...many of which you have seen adorning walls and rooms all over Gryrnu. Calligraphy is very big on Gryrnu, and there are contests, shows and academy courses in it.

These are some of the most notable art forms on Gryrnu...we just have not seen them in Unicorn Jelly because the characters have been too busy to bother bringing them into the action!

"<Shatterel forms in enclosed spaces of still air, and can suffocate people in their homes, so they have to go outside> So, wait... how come some alchemist hasn't yet thought of building a simple motorized fan... pardon me, an "automatic air adgitator and shattrell nullifier" and putting it in the enclosed spaces before a Shatterel storm?" -Warpzone23

As a matter of fact, rich people do have mechanical fans. They run like clocks, if rather -large- and very expensive clocks, and once wound up, can run for nearly an hour at a time, sweeping the air about at a pretty decent clip. Servants keep them wound up. Thilia, head of the Council, has no less than seven of the bloody things. She doesn't even go outside during Shatterel. But then, she is the head of the whole farg'in Council.

We have not seen one, because so far, we have mostly been following the lives of a very poor Witch and her daughter as they get chased about by mean people.

You might be interested to know that there are mechanized toys, clockwork crop watering machines, a rather top-of-the-line clockwork Bosom-Sow milking machine (which actually tends to scare the poor piggies unless they are raised with it), and the Alchemists even have -though they keep it secret- a very crude resonant crystal communication device. They use a kind of Gryrnese 'morse code' on the thing. They consider it their 'secret advantage'.

Again, we have not seen these things because...none of the characters in the story have needed to be around where these things are to be seen, or played with.

I read your comic every Mon thru Fri, and I was wondering about your bosom sow in today's comic. I am an animal science major at the college of Agriculture and Life Sciences of Cornell University, and my family used to raise swine so Gryrnu's agricultural system seems a little impractical. Specifically what is the intended correlation between the swine we raise in this country and those of Gryrnu.  Basically, are they supposed to be the same animal?  If so, I thought you should know that pigs have teats not nipples (think cow/cat/dog versus human as far as how it's illustrated). Another thing to consider is the way in which pigs reproduce.  Piglets are highly dependant on the sow, and it is not practical to raise them separate like we do dairy calves.  This is largely because piglets are not very good at producing heat, and there are a lot of them per litter.  Pigs milk is also very high in fat because of the inability to transfer fat to the fetuses through the placenta.    I'd be curious to see how you can explain this. -Helen Evans (not a forum question, but so good I had to add it)

There is an Alternate Universe Strip showing the Bosom Sow Available HERE

The Bosom Sow is the result of perhaps as much as 300,000 years of human breeding and selection. While this sounds like an incredible time period, and one in which -far- more dramatic change would be likely than the development of breast-like hypertrophied teats, it is to be understood that Tryslmaistan is a low-entropy steady-state universe, with correspondingly longer lifespans, and evolutionary change is not natural to it. Although terrestrial animals are also not natural to the Tryslmaistan universe, they are greatly affected by it, so that change is slower, overall.

Now I say that there should be much greater change in a third of a million years than what is shown, because it is to be remembered that all the extant agricultural crops, and domesticated animals of earth were selectively bred in only 10,000 years, a mere fraction of the time the Bosom Sow was developed. The current array of foods and domestic animals common to our industrialized experience cannot even be said, in most cases to even vaguely resemble the original life forms from which they were developed, and the degree of change that can make a broccoli from a cabbage, or provide for the full domestication of wild fox canines in less than 30 years shows that the effect of selective breeding should have, by all rights, done far more in 300,000 years to the pig. But, Tryslmaistan is a slow place.

Now the 'bosom' of the Bosom Sow is a bosom in name only, and are a hypertrophied teat. The swine were carefully bred for this purpose, and the fat content is quite a bonus, rather than a hardship. Fat is very, very useful in countless ways, and the Gryrnese make use of everything they have with an imagination not unlike a society filled with George Washington Carvers. They have to. It is to be remembered that the humans only have available to them 17 distinct lines of terrestrial life to work with, and have struggled to survive in an environment arguably more hostile to earthly life than frozen Antarctica. Consequently, every single animal and plant that humans can use is cultivated with a care that would be unimaginable on our abundant earth.

Bosom Sow piglets are cared for constantly by humans. A special tunic-like outfit, called a Ruklan, is worn by piglet caregivers, and when the animal is not engaged in any given activity, it is carried more carefully than a human baby, in a large pouch in the Rukan, so that the piglet is in constant contact with bare human skin. The piglets are unnaturally docile by terrestrial terms, as are the adults, another result of selective breeding...extreme passivity (this can been seen in the special miniseries strip, in that the sow shown acts more like a perfectly trained lap dog than a pig.)  It is not only considered an honor to carry a piglet in this fashion within Gryrnese culture, the job has a waiting list. The piglet is given better attention than a human child would be given, and truth be told, is actually valued more highly...a child is another mouth to feed, ultimately, but a piglet will become a source of survival for everyone. It is to be understood that Gryrnese values are not earthly ones, because of the harshness of their environment. One Bosom Sow piglet is worth several human lives.

The Bosom Sow is only eaten after it dies of natural causes, which, because of the incredibly sterile environment, are long in coming. Bosom Sows live upwards of 60 years, and that which is not converted to food is, like all organic matter including dead humans, put into the Wiccan composting facilities to help create and maintain soil. Eating an animal so old would be disgusting to we on earth, but they make quite a ritual out of it on Gryrnu, and the deceased sow is given a respect that humans themselves do not even give to their own. Needless to say, the murder of a sow is unthinkable, so much so that it is not a capitol offence...there is only a small, token fine. Anyone who kills a bosom sow is pitied in a way that is quite alien to human cultures. People try to forget such an event as quickly as possible, it is too horrible to  remember.

Sows all are named, given birthday celebrations, doted on, sleep on specially sewn beds, or, even in the bed of their keepers, are housebroken and use a litter box, and are honored guests at events. So, for Ylla to have won second place at the Fair is an event that is not like winning a prize at a state fair on earth...it would be the equivalent of winning at the Olympics. Ylla can look forward to fame, fortune, and constant requests for her and her sow PuuPuu-Ko to inaugurate projects and events, be present at state functions, and attend, together, Council dinners. No bands at the time of winning you say? No Parades?....No, because that might upset the animals. Very different mindset.

What of slaughter for male swine? Handled with a delicacy again alien to earth. They play music for them, give them a last meal, groom them sing to them, cry a very great deal, and dispatch them painlessly. More tears, and an entirely separate industry deals with carving and parting them out...the actual keepers are spared the 'horror' of dissecting what amounts to one of 'the children'.

Farmers of all kinds are very well paid on Gryrnu. They are elite, and have many privileges that even Council members do not have. The reason for this relative freedom and wealth is their animals, and the survival they represent.

The Gryrnese do not do these things because they especially 'love animals', or because they 'revere life' any more than terrestrial humans do. They do these things because they were taught to do them, because it is part of a system of survival that works for them. The Gryrnese are just folks...and they care about their own survival very much....so much that they do what is necessary, and also what has become traditional.  With so little to work with, they have made an art out of making the most of, and out of, what few animals and plants are available to them.

Do I really think that swine could be bred to have functioning super-teats, effective breasts to give milk? Yes, I do...if people had enough time for selective breeding, and enough motivation to do so...if their lives depended on it. Ultimately, both human breasts and the teats of pigs evolved on earth from sweat glands, both are hypertrophied sebaceous glands. The oils and water and protein of sweat has evolved to become milk, and in both humans and pigs, it serves the same mechanical function for the survival of young.

The Bosom Sow is just more hypertrophied yet. 

Wow, I can tell you put a lot of thought into answering my question, I must admit I expected a short response that avoided the actual question

I totally agree with you that pigs could be selected for milk production as well as decreased litter size to increase the available milk yield for humans.  It seems though, that they would have had a lot of losses in the beginning due to the way fashion in which pigs reproduce (lots of babies w/high losses, kinda like mice).  So what sets pigs apart from other livestock that they were able to survive (sheep or goats seem more practical than pigs)?

Pigs were the last thing left, along with chickens. The First People, being the usual bunch of humans, found themselves suddenly in an utterly alien and -for some- hellish universe. At least nine, and perhaps as many as 16 cultures and time periods were represented, and between terror, language and culture issues, and the sheer mind mangling horror of it all, many mistakes were made. Although many animal species came along on the divots of earth that were under the humans, as well as many species of plants, only 17 ultimately survived the initial weeks and months.

Some animals were simply eaten, without much thought, until a form of authority finally dominated, and instituted rationing, and rational thought. Fortunately, some of the divots contained the majority of entire farms, and in two cases, orchards. Of the orchards, one from China (plums), and one from France (apples), only the plums were successfully protected and survived to the time of Lupiko and Chou. Of the grains, only rice made it, wheat and barley did not.

Then came the problem of Vlax. As animals and people became mysteriously ill, weak and failing, and eventually began to die, the end seemed inevitable. While my Muse has not told me how the matter of Vlaxifurm being used came about, endless possibilities come to mind: since Vlaxifurm is the one crystal plant that contains a liquid gel, it may have seemed potentially edible to someone, or possibly medicinal. One of the divots was certainly from our future, so it may have been possible that advanced technology was used to chemically analyze it, or that, as one reader suggested, actually create Vlaxifurm in some manner as a nanoreplicating crystal machine-plant. Or perhaps someone simply noticed a hungry, lost animal surviving after eating from it. I may never know. But the need for Vlax to overcome the incomparability of earthly biology in the Tryslmaistan universe is definite, and those peoples and animals and plants that  were given Vlax survived, and those that did not, eventually died.

Between all of these factors, and adding the problem of dealing with the native sapient species, the Jellies, as well as the various chemical and salt hungry crystal beasts, the many varieties of life that came with the humans were gradually whittled down to the 17 we know in the story today. Pigs were bred for milk, bred essentially to replace cows and goats, and even to some extent sheep, because they were what was left. In short, the humans made use of what little they had when all was finally settled enough for survival to truly become established. At this point, losses would have been terrifying, so one can imagine every human in those days literally slaving for the every need and care of each individual piglet, even beyond the level of current era Gryrnu. It would have been like Cro-Magnons lost in a cave, struggling to keep their last bit of fire alive.

The story of the Gryrnese is the story of any human population forced to cope with an extreme and hostile environment.   Just as the Innuit once lived only on the flesh of fish and animals native to their hostile and frozen northern clime, or the tribal Nigerian once lived entirely off of a staple diet of cow milk mixed with cow blood, supplemented by termites and the odd edible root, so the Gryrnese make do with what they have, and bend it to their need. And, just as with the Innuit, who can tolerate a level of vitamin A (from eating the liver of the polar bear)  that is fatal -within minutes- to a European (as some ill fated anthropologists once found out...oops!), the world in turn makes changes to the people that inhabit it.

So, on Gryrnu, pigs are life, along with crickets, bees, koi, ants and chickens...because that is all there is. And the reason that there are only six animals is because it took humans time to get their act together, form some sort of strategy, enforce that strategy, and overcome terrible odds. Some of the ways I depict humans in Unicorn Jelly are decidedly unflattering, and even fairly cynical, but I also recognize that humans are incredibly inventive and heroic survivors regardless of the odds. What they cannot overcome, they change. Hence the Bosom Sow... not to mention the high vitamin-oil (E and A, in case you are wondering) content 'Color' crickets, the overly fluffy, almost hairy chickens (they have bred their chickens, though I have not yet shown this, to produce feathers that are exceptionally long and fibrous, and so forth.

"How does the worldplate form in such a way as to hold "water"? That, and what keep it from leaking out? Or is that where rain comes from? Leaking world plates?"  -Xiombarg,

The Worldplates are a solid mass of crystalline materials that are, due to the contracting and compressing force of planovection, increasingly dense towards the middle of the Worldplate. This causes a slight indentation of the plate, both on the top, and the bottom, as the matter condenses....remember that in Tryslmaistan (as in Mundis!), not all crytalline materials are hard...indeed most are of varying qualities from liquid to semisolid. Some are rubbery, and others semipermiable. This contraction in the center of a Worldplate causes the 'bowl' effect to provide a basin to collect rain into a freshwater sea...the 'Central Sea' of each Worldplate.

Water evaporates into the air just as it does on our world, and this forms clouds, and the clouds eventually rain. This is a familiar cycle. The clouds tend to rain more over a Worldplate, rather than out in interstitial space, simply because of a combination of dust, around which water vapor can accumulate, and the Tryslmaistan equivalent of static charge. Remember that Linovection, the equivalent of gravity in Tryslmaistan, has essentially no effect on objects above a certain scale, and also below a certain scale...which means that very, very fine particulate dust is essentially weightless, and thus remains airborn for a very long time, unless attracted by static charge to an object (such as another particle or a bit of water vapor, or even a wall. On Gryrnu, they must sometimes dust the walls and ceiling of their homes, not just the shelves!). Worldplates have a surprizing amount of essentially invisible airborn dust surrounding them, helping rain clouds to develop.

When it does rain, it is very, very light by terrestrial standards, and they do not have lightning or thunder, ever. The rain drops themselves are quite large, but fall slowly. It would seem surreal, almost cartoon-like to someone newly from our world and universe. Nearly half-inch wide drops, sometimes larger, falling in slow motion to a gentle impact on the ground, or, if very close to a wall, actually being pulled by static charge to hit, and run down, that surface.

The water normally flows down through the composite that makes up the Worldplate, until it reaches the dense layers, where it gradually flows into the bowl that makes the freshwater Central Sea. 

"What is it that causes the day and night orbs to rotate around the worldplates? And how did this come to be?" ~Taaminara

The origin of the day and night orbs are pretty much covered in the concept of Tryslmaistan being a steady-state universe....it always-is-was-will-be. Unlike our own Mundis universe, Tryslmaistan has no origin and no end...it had no 'Big Bang' and it will never suffer entropic heat death. It is a perpetual motion machine, which is the very definition of a steady-state universe.