When we last left our heroes...

[SDPunk]

Hmm.....

And so I go and reread the Titanomachy, and I’m even more convinced Jakob is Cronos and Adrian is Zeus.

If I’m junking up the topic too much, let me know, I can sit in a corner and keep it to myself.

[Daphne]

Oh, no! This is wonderful!

[Haight]

Hmm.....

And so I go and reread the Titanomachy, and I’m even more convinced Jakob is Cronos and Adrian is Zeus.

Is he eating his children, though? Metaphorically, at least. I suppose if Adrian is actually his child he might be eating him by disrupting his life and trying to enslave the women he loves.

[macavity]

And just to stir the pot even more, I could point out that Kearsarge is an acronym for Greek Sara and Sara (from the Hebrew) means Princess....

[SDPunk]

Is he eating his children, though? Metaphorically, at least. I suppose if Adrian is actually his child he might be eating him by disrupting his life and trying to enslave the women he loves.

You mean Cherry and Julian? Or Echo, Claudia, and Megan? Or Danielle? All Jakob does is destroy the things he creates. He couldn’t even hang on to the watch.

[SDPunk]

I remember someone had put together a timeline of the story so far. I can’t find it.

From my theatre days, tech to opening night is a couple of weeks. Which means in 1043 pages, maybe three *very* busy weeks have passed.

Am I wrong?

[SDPunk]

And I refer you to #598, if Adrian isn’t using telepathy here, I'm at a complete loss for what is actually going on.

Now, somehow Erin has been able to drag others into Miriam’s memory/Jakob’s booby trap, and somehow that impacted Adrian when he was at SJI and Erin was at the theatre. Danielle was effected as well while with the twins and Laura. Not sure how far out we are from the original Miriam ritual, but I think it’s been about 60hrs, Maybe as few as 36, but they were sense linked before this, not telepathic.  

So either the ritual woke up something in Adrian he wasn’t using before, native talent allows him to do things with the results of the ritual that aren’t typical, or Erin is serving as a bridge here. Erin is part of the telepathic conversation, so all three are possible.

Then we find ourselves at #604, Adrian’s first use of any of the red crystal based devices. My guess is when Patrick comes to town Adrian is going to learn some things.

Alright, I’ll put away my fine tooth comb eventually. SJI late-2, Erin is laying on/next to Changeling, which is decidedly not the game she was playing in the earlier flashback(guest page 2 between #117 & #118), correction, the Changeling book is on the table, but the game setup is nothing like any WoD game I’ve ever run. Glamours aren’t mind control, but they are in every way that really matters. Also, First Ed DMG, third Ed something, and second Ed Vampire, I’ll stand by my separated at birth comment.

I want to get to something that is driving me a little nuts about the timeline and villains. Right now we have three serious villains, with two peripheral villains.

1 Jakob, the True Big Bad(tm) who is responsible for all the bullshit really. Danielle plans to kill him for very good reasons. Adrian is not so sure. Also, Rain went from assuring Adrian he was responsible for making sure it didn’t happen again and she would take care of Jakob, to Jakob being Adrian’s responsibility in the matter of two or three days. Awkward.

2 Yves, who is the baddie of the Pink Clouds thread, with the manager/owner of Van Winkles as his level boss. Except because of Jakob our heroes have kind of lost the thread on this one. I suspect it will really crop up next at Mallory’s birthday when he attempts to use Pink Clouds to keep Danielle, Jacquie, and Mallory as dancers. I do not pity them when Mallory goes murder stripper on them.

3 Astrid, who may not be actively bad, but now Caitlyn is recruiting from Adrian’s harem for her. She may simply be selfish, but I suspect there will be some sort of confrontation. Coates is her willing patsy/level boss. Did I mention I think all the various layers of mind control Caitlyn has been effected by are not going to combine or end well? To be entirely clear, I have some suspicions as to how this will play out, but again, because I’m usually more accurate than most, I’ll not share them.

[SDPunk]

To finish up on my villains thought, in three weeks, give or take, we went from zero villains, well I guess Danielle was the level boss for Jakob, but because he understands strategy and linguistic loop holes the way fish understand stellar ballistics, and underestimates all women because he hates them, (long lists of Jakob’s failings to be honest), really I consider Ingrid and Yves more of a threat than Jakob can ever be. The only thing that will make Jakob a threat is if he manages to get unfettered access to family money. Which of course he may be able to do with the watch. However, I can’t imagine Adrian just allowed a fully functional watch to get on that plane and fly away, b/c talking to Rain about Odysseus and how to win unwinnable battles.

Oh gods, this is developing into a serious red string murder board, sorry about that.

Any way, in the three weeks ish since the story started we have accumulated six villains, three are still on the board, (Jakob, Astrid, Yves) and three are gone (Vik, Julian, Cherry)

Honestly the only one who doesn’t seem to have a truly fatal flaw is Astrid, but we’ve only known her about four days now I think? So I’m willing to give her time.

[SDPunk]

Guest #12 2016 Adrian is interviewing for a job and finds a flyer with Erin in a play called Betrayal

Guest #13 2020 Adrian is at Erin’s grave with Rain, she died in 2015

Guest #15 April 15, 2035, Tamara is a student at Wilmot, Erin is Alive

I think I may be losing it.

Or these are three possible futures, the first, Adrian decides to check out, doesn’t do the thing. The second they do the thing but something goes wrong and Erin dies. The third, and the only future with Tamara, assumes they win.

Adding to this due to confusion and posting a lot. During the Tits and Holes shenanigans Danielle saw the original drawing of the watch and memorized all the switch settings. Why does she call Marilyse for switch settings in #788?

I don’t even have a handle on the mind control yet. I can’t deal with time travel and the many worlds hypothesis.

Side note, looks like Hidden Knowledge is one of the books in the restricted section.

So here is a question inspired by #788. During the Tits and Holes shenanigans Danielle saw everything, all the engineering drawings for the watch. Why does she call Marylise for switch settings?

Possibly Adrian told her to ask Marylise so she wouldn’t realize they knew, so they could send a sabotaged watch to Jakob at some point, b/c we already know when this happens Jakob is supposed to be coming in tonight.

[ozymandias]

Guest #12 2016 Adrian is interviewing for a job and finds a flyer with Erin in a play called Betrayal

Guest #13 2020 Adrian is at Erin’s grave with Rain, she died in 2015

Guest #15 April 15, 2035, Tamara is a student at Wilmot, Erin is Alive

I think I may be losing it.

I have never been able to follow the storyline. Some threads, yes. The whole thing? No. Most of the time, I have no idea who the current characters are, though I can almost always identify Adrian, Erin, Jacqui, Marliese, Danielle, and Raven. And I don't take any of the guest strips as canon; I have noticed they tend to be nonsequitors.

[SDPunk]

Further evidence of Erin’s witchcraft, 674, 701, & 714

Further evidence of Miriam following in her father’s footsteps, 675 and really every single interaction with Heidi from that point forward.

The core three, Danielle, Mistress of the Watch; Erin, What people are Superstitious of; and Mallory, psychopomp, avatar or the god of the cross roads, and head librarian of the Wilmot library? Be afraid Jakob, be very afraid.

Add the rest of the Harem, which continues to grow by leaps and bounds, now including dozens more students at Wilmot. It doesn’t take many Caitlyns to make an army.

I keep reflecting on things Rain has said. I’m starting to think the first eight were hand picked by Rain manipulating events to create force multipliers in her coming war against Jacob.

[SDPunk]

List of MCC titles with direct or indirect references in SJI

Travel Plans: Patrick’s watch my finger method of hypnosis
Beyond Rubies: red crystal that controls minds and changes bodies
The Hidden Knowledge: the book is in the Wilmot restricted collection
Canadian Girlfriend: linked to THK through Levesque (I have my own pet theory about this I’m not going into here, maybe over in the Canadian Girlfriend thread)
The Ring Cycle: the ring with printed circuitry similar to the crystal
Unleashed: the book Get Girls with Hypnosis is the major MC, pops up in SJI1010, assumed non-cannon, but due to timeline is entirely possible

[jwik01]

Having just reread the whole thing in hopes of finally getting what's going on (largely successful, I think; the character tags were hugely helpful here) I have a few unanswered questions that don't feel like mysteries yet to be answered or details that I should be able to guess a plausible answer for. I had a bunch of questions along the way but most of them were eventually answered.

1) What is the relationship between Marilese and Rain? Is Mallory aware of it? One scene suggested they were intimates and then they haven't appeared together again in like a thousand pages.

2) Who sent the letter that prompted Claudia to send Derek to search one of Jakob's residences for evidence of Dani's identity? And why did Derek need to see a pair of Dani's panties to realize that the woman he'd spent some time dating in Kearsarge was in fact the woman he went to Kearsarge to search for? Why does Derek hold his nose entering that residence, when the only stinky thing we see is months-old dirty laundry which is probably not great smelling but not 'dead body' level stinky? I feel like this is a moment in the story where I've legit missed something.

3) What does Guest Page #20 show? How does it relate to #329? Did young(er) Q seduce young Miriam, or not? The only bad thing I'm confident Q does is recognize Nanti has been dosed with Pink Clouds and take advantage of it, then use it on Nanti again (once? Twice? more?) and lie to her about it, which in some moral universes would make him an irredeemable villain but in SJI makes him, like, the third- or fourth-best guy after Adrian and Harmless Polyamorous Weston, probably better than Ezra. On the other hand, Vikram seemed like a decent enough guy until his heel turn so maybe Q has just been biding his time. We still don't know why Jakob caused Miriam to testify against Q, but presumably this is a mystery that will resolved someday when Yves is revealed to have been Jakob in disguise all along, or something.

4) What was the point of the circuitry in the ring Vikram gave Amy? Where did he get it? Is it related to the technology of Jakob's pendant?

5) What's the past with Mallory that Cherry and Julian have alluded to?

6) Why does Cherry's monster-from-the-id show up at the bottom of #507? Why does it react to being shot on #514 when it didn't in #351?

I almost had a seventh question about the current scenario of chemical breast enlargement plus Miriam's uncanny power. This is in fact what prompted me to do the reread. But after the reread, it seems fairly clear that a) Miriam inherited a spooky tactile hypnosis power from Patrick, which she's only lately discovered; b) Lauren overheated a synthesis batch and created a perfume that makes breasts grow and turns some women more submissive and suggestible and others more aggressive and dominant, and c) Miriam became more aggressive and reacted to the increased submissiveness of Erin, Dani, and Raven to enslave them with her power.  Also, none of this relates to Kanti's weird encounter, despite that involving another perfume/chemical and happening immediately before the onset of the breast expansion and suggestibility spree.

Anyway if anybody is aware of answers to these questions that I've overlooked, let me know please.

[GodWilling]

1) Dunno, but note that Marliese evidently has history with Jakob, and that Adrian asked Rain for the truth about Marliese in 948, before the airport confrontation. I also suspect that Rain deliberately sent Marliese into the SJI to become enslaved on the Night Of The Watch.

2) Claudia received some kind of local property tax bill for the apartment, which alerted her to its existence. Dani hadn't visited Zenon when she dated Derek, so she wasn't susceptible to Derek's trigger then. When he was about to try triggering her after she'd visited Zenon, Adrian got there first. There may be a dead parrot (unsketched) in the apartment.

3) g19 shows Q cheating on Jacqui with a woman named Annie (who may or may not have become Katie), upon whom he had used Pink Clouds. g20 shows Miriam under the influence of Pink Clouds, no longer remembering about Annie and believing she was the one who had sex with Q.

4) Dunno, but note that Julian seems to have had an interest in Vik from the start and that the two were known to each other, with Vik trying to have Julian killed at the motel. And it's not necessarily reality, but we see an enslaved Cherry (I think) giving Vik a blow job, apparently in New York, in 823.

5) We only know a few fragments about Mallory.

6) Everybody's got to be somewhere. I'd say that Laura's bullet merely distracted the monster, and we didn't really see it reacting to Caitlyn's.

We didn't see what Kanti used on Giselle, but she was keeping Giselle sexually stimulated, which seems to affect suggestibility under the new perfume, and doesn't appear to be required for Pink Clouds. If Giselle's breasts have grown by the next time we see her then we'll have a fair idea that Laura didn't overheat anything while she was on the phone to Kanti and that the two threads are connected. If they haven't then it's more likely they're disconnected. That, of course, is why we didn't see what happened. The bulk of my money is still on Yves/Sawyer as Kanti's programmers, with Sawyer having already established that Giselle is susceptible to Pink Clouds.

[jwik01]

Okay, that all makes sense, thanks.  Q using Pink Clouds on Miriam connects to Miriam saying she'd been messed up into believing she and Q had been lovers.

W/r/t Vik on 823, I assumed at the time that was Danielle, but it could have been Cherry, sure. The thing on that page that I didn't connect to anything at the time was Danielle greeting Miel at (presumably) Jakob's door, which suggests a level of recency in the Miel-Jakob relationship that will presumably be slowly unspooled over the next thousand issues if we all live that long.

Something that I noticed on the reread but don't really have a question about: Mallory sure is tangential to all the main storylines. Despite being one of the big three SJI ladies, she's tagged on fewer pages than Jaqui or Miriam, barely ahead of Caitlyn. She's also the main cast member whose past and overall situation we know the least about, as you noted.

A little like Sue, who's been waiting patiently in the wings for her time to shine for ages.

Mostly I'm wondering how many hundreds of pages it'll be before the pole-dancing/strip club/Mallory's-birthday party, and how gigantic the Astrid's-party-where-she-attempts-to-coopt-Adrian's-harem party is going to be because it seems like every named character has been invited. And which one is supposed to happen first? The pole-dancing has been in the works for longer but the battle-of-the-harems has been scheduled for "this Saturday" since its introduction.