Much akin to the song ‘What do ya do with a Drunken Sailor?’, what exactly do ya do with a Frozen Ice-girl from the Past?
According to Aoife: you bring her home. Sound’s like the best way to help her at the moment…at least Áine seems to agree.
Bata Neart
Irish Magical Girls!
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Actually I was thinking last week that Aine doesn’t really have a whole lot of choice but to trust Ashling and Aoife. While I’m sure that this wasn’t at the top of her thinking process, I’d imagine that wandering randomly through the countryside and hoping to find people who’ll help her doesn’t seem like any better an idea to Aine than it does to me.
Look, Sister. She followed home, can we keep her? 😀
Well, listen to Ashling! She got most of the parts of speech right and in the right order. I’m feeling a faint glimmering of hope! 😀
Naah, I knew all she needed was some practice. Well done, lady!
I really like the leaves blowing around. It underscores the season, and adds an urgent chill to the atmosphere.
@Kessy: That was my thinking too. Also the girls seem to be friendly to her despite all that has happened. Safest bet for her is to tag along and hope for the best.
@Azreal: That’s going to be their next challenge…getting her into the school…we’ll get to that 🙂
@Delta: 🙂 That you Delta, I was trying to go for a bit of an autumn mood on this page, in particular in that mid-panel with Aine and the leaves. I also kind of wanted to her appear a little ‘lost’, adding to Aoife’s concern that she shouldn’t be left alone. I’m glad you liked it 😀
An autumn feel? I don’t know what the seasons are like in Ireland, but what’s the temperature? Is Aoife going to get into trouble going for a hike without clothes? Hypothermia is not your friend.
Ireland enjoys a temperate climate thanks to it being right in the Mid-Atlantic Drift (which brings warmth up from the Gulf of Mexico). Winters are very mild, and summers are rarely too warm. The trade-off is that Ireland gets the full force of Atlantic storms and tends to get a lot of rain too.
Some of the best weather in the Irish year can actually be in early Autumn, with temperatures regularly going over 20 degrees Celsius. (I think that’s 70 Fahrenheit) The south and east coasts enjoy the best of this, which includes County Wicklow (where Bata Neart is set). It’s kind of ironic that the very best weather tends to be on time for school term to start 😀
You did kind of get to the heart of the next page Kessy. You will see next Friday 😀
Well, then Ashling and Áine will just have to hug Aoife closely to keep her warm. <.< Yes, strictly for warming purposes.
😛
@Azrael: I guess so, Aoife will just to grin an bear it too 😀
Oooo OO! By the way, thank you everyone for voting for Bata Neart on TWC. The comic has been hovering near the top 200 all month, and it’s thanks all you awesome readers. Thank you so much 🙂
@ Azrael: ROFLMAO! Yes, strictly for warming purposes, and Aoife won’t enjoy it at all. Not even a little. She swears! 😉
I was also thinking a bit about what you said earlier about, “Can we keep her, Sister?” and I started realizing just how much catching up Aine would have to do before she’d be anything like ready for high school. She’s probably never even seen the Roman alphabet, and has definitely never seen Arabic numerals. And, oh yeah, the whole not speaking English thing…
@Kessy: That’s kind of where I’m going to draw a lot of the comedy of Bata Neart from in the next while.
Including what you’ve mentioned, here’s a list of things she won’t know about:
-Roman Letters
-Arabic Numbers
-The English Language
-Modern currency
-Modern weaponry
-Processed food that is readily available
-Processed Sugar or Caffeine (that’s going to be fun)
-Modern perspective of Personal hygiene
-All motorised and electrically driven technology
-Central Heating and Plumbing….
That’s the tip of the iceberg too, there’s plenty more that she won’t know about which will feature a lot for the next few chapters 🙂
I was thinking in terms of getting Aine into school, but that’s a good point. Poor Aine may as well have been abducted by aliens and taken to another planet. Even the materials things are made of will be completely unfamiliar. She’s never seen plastic, aluminum, stainless steel, porcelain, or paper. Depending on when exactly she comes from, she might not even have seen glass or iron.
There’s one other everyday thing that she’ll be unfamiliar with that it occurs to me could be a big deal: uniforms. Particularly police uniforms.
@Kessy: Poor Áine indeed, thankfully she has new friends to help her along 🙂 She’ll be very much a fish out of water for quite a while with absolutely no context for the modern world, which as you said is very alien to her.
She’s from a post iron-age Ireland, from a time when metal-working and several other crafts were practiced in Ireland. So metals won’t confuse her as much, but access to gold might surprise her (Most Euro coins are gold-plated). Uniforms and modern clothing will confuse her too.
(Clue)Although not by a lot since the Roman Empire was using uniforms during her life-time (/Clue)
As for the school…well…that’s where I’m going to extract some fun for future episodes 🙂
Ahh, so we’re talking sometime roughly 0 – 500 CE. Ireland was on the very edge of the Roman world, so it’s very unlikely Aine has ever actually seen a Roman unless she’s traveled outside of Ireland. She surely knows them by reputation and some Roman goods have probably filtered into Ireland but I doubt she has first hand knowledge. However, Roman military uniforms are quite far both physically and conceptually from modern police uniforms. The idea of a civilian uniformed police force is actually a pretty recent development of the last few centuries. And I think Roman uniforms were as much about standardized armor as identification.
While she’ll be familiar with metal, the variety and the way we use metal today will be quite strange to her. Remember, in the classical world the only known metals were iron, copper, tin, gold, silver, lead, and mercury. Aluminum will be very odd to her. She’ll be able to identify things like stainless steel and the brass alloys we commonly use as metal, but she’ll have no idea what kind of metal. And the casual way we treat metals will also be odd to her. We take metal for granted: we think nothing of throwing out things like food and drink cans, foil, paper clips, and so on. In Aine’s day, *any* refined metal was pretty dear. That’s why when you excavate ancient battle sites you almost never find metal weapons or armor. The metal was just too valuable to leave lying around.
Incidentally, euro coins do not use actual gold in them. (Except for commemorative and bullion issues, which you’re not going to find in circulation.) The “nordic gold” used in the 0.10, 0.20, and 0.50 euro coins is actually a copper alloy – essentially brass. The price of gold these days is completely absurd. As I write this, the price is 36.53 euro per gram. That’s something like 3 or 4 times the price gold was 10 or 15 years ago. Or let me put it this way: the American Eagle is a gold coin with a face value of $10 that was in circulation until 1933, They’re now selling for $685, based almost entirely on their gold content.
And of course, there’s the immediate problem of them having to walk all the way back in their underwear. There sure is a lot of awkward coming their way.
Well, except maybe for Aoife. She probably won’t care.
@Kessy: I know that the Euro coins aren’t really plated with gold. If they were I would have melted all my old 20 cent coins down years ago and lived like a king! A KING I tells ya!! 😀 None-the-less Aine will be none the wiser, and will probably think that the coins that the girls will eventually show her are made of solid gold and silver, and will be in awe of their awesome wealth (Of roughly €6.45, which is what Aoife’s got in her pouch.) 🙂
@melaredblu: Ahh, you know Aoife well. Much to her detriment, she will however soon learn why people don’t tend to climb mountains in their underwear. It’s not really wise 🙂
Actually, I doubt Aine would take modern coins for silver or gold. Copper, nickle, and other alloys used in modern coins aren’t nearly heavy enough to be solid gold, and silver coins develop a pretty distinct patina when they’ve been in circulation for a while. She’s more likely to ascribe them to some sort of alchemy. (Which actually isn’t all that far off the mark.)
Err, sorry if I’m sounding like a professor or something. My dad collected coins and I kinda inherited both the coins and the interest.
In my experience, the main reason people don’t generally go hiking in their underwear is the same reason they generally don’t go in skirts or shorts: underbrush.
Don’t worry Kessy 😀 I rather like seeing lively debate here in the comments, it often brings in new ideas. Also, Bata Neart’s previous comment recond has been smashed, now with 20+ comments 🙂 Never been that many before!
LOL, well one thing I can do is talk. I’ve been thinking about and actually I think I might have been wrong about silver. It’s hard to tell new silver and nickle coins apart, so I guess it would depend on how closely Aine is paying attention. I’m kind of going back and forth on the question. But anyway, I suspect that coins won’t be at the top of Aine’s list of the weird and alien. 🙂
Chiming in on the coin and materials debate, as I happen to study materials engineering, yes if you are familiar with gold you certainly wont mistake these coins for the real deal. The weight and the feel of the materials are instantly recognised as different in your hands. But if you have only your eyes… it is not called “nordic gold” without a reason!
As for silver, that will depend on how familiar Áine is with the metal. A silver with a patina is easily recognisable, fresh or polished silver is a different story – but if she is really familiar with it she will even by sight only identify nickel as not being silver, the colour is simply a bit off.
And the point about throwing refined materials away: absolutely bewildering. Nothing, not even wood, was anywhere close to as expendable as most things are today. Generally speaking, no item was thrown away until it was beyond all repairs and reuses. Note however those of you who live in the real world that we recycle for a reason: while our everyday items may now be expendable the materials they are made from are certainly not – probably less so than you think.
Oh, and since I was literally shut away in a hut in the forest last week…
You know what I think about breaks. This is not your job, you have no obligations here. And babies… they give you a break from your job for that. Babies are serious stuff. That said, babies are also highly enjoyable, so of course we love it if you keep us posted! Baby updates are even better than comic updates 🙂
Oh, and that whole exposition on relations and sexual orientations… yeah, all that was quite clearly spelled out between the lines in the comic already. I feel quite confident about that since I knew what the answers were going to be when I read the questions. Good job, dear comic-writer!
Also very good job on Áine looking lost and taken out of her environment in that fifth panel today. Really good panel 🙂
@O8h7w: Thank you for your continued support and understanding O8h7w! 😀 I will certainly keep everyone posted on the baby. We’re about 5 weeks from the due date now, so the birth may happen any week now. Although I know that I’ll be physically drained for a while, I remain optimistic that new life will give me even more creative energy, that will help me continue this work. Although this isn’t my paying job (would be all kinds of awesome if it was) I still feel the same amount of duty towards it, the characters, and more importantly towards you kind folks who actually read my work. So I will find a way to keep going, although there may be intermittent update breaks for the next few months 🙂
In the metal debate; I’m working on the assumption that Aine has only ever seen gold, but never touched it. There are deposits of gold in the Central Plains of Ireland, but the veins are far too thin to warrant the effort of mining it large-scale. It was however possible to find some, and craft it into jewelry which would have been the preserve of the highest nobility or royalty given how rare it was. Aine may very well mistake the shiny Euro-Cent coins as actual gold. But not only that, the coins are all minted with detailed and uniform lettering and symbols that would be far removed from the abilities of people of the time.
Either way, this will be another one of those everyday things we take for granted, that will just blow her mind away 🙂
Oooo! By the way! Another Top Web Comics milestone, and this one is a biggy! As I type this, Bata Neart is ranked 155, right in the middle of the Top 200.
Thank you all for voting! I never dared to dream that the comic could ever get that high in the rankings 🙂
I was assuming that Aine was some sort of priestess, which would imply a high social status. And while gold would have been rare and valuable, it wouldn’t have been *that* rare. Remember, there was a Roman province just across the Irish Sea, and the Romans’ trade network brought in goods from as far away as China.
Actually, the thing that I would expect Aine to have the biggest problem with in the short term is indoor toilets. Relieving yourself inside your home was considered disgusting and unsanitary by a lot of people even into the 20th century. That’s one of the big reasons it took a while for flush toilets to become widely accepted.
@Kessy: Sooooo tempting to reveal more on Aine’s background…but that will ruin an in-story reveal (or two), so I’m gonna wait. There has been actual evidence of the Romans in Ireland due to coins and other items found along the East coast, in particular in a couple of sites which may or may not have been trading outposts, or aborted attempts to build colonies. There’s a bit of historical debate on on the Roman Empire’s relationship with ‘Hibernia’ (Latin name for Ireland, ‘Hibernian’ is actually another way of saying ‘Irish’). There’s no solid theory why they never attempted to invade Ireland, but many believe that their difficulty with the Scottish Picts had deterred them from trying. I have my own in-story reason for this which I’ll work into the Bata Neart’s back-story.
You got to the heart of some of Aine’s upcoming challenges. I’m guessing that it’s fairly obvious already that Aine will end up living with the girls, and with that Ashling and Aoife will have to somehow ‘house-train’ their new friend. They’ll need to show her how to operate a bathroom, and how to use the many different hygiene items that we automatically take for granted in the modern world. Before, she might taken a dip in a stream or lake now and again, but now she’ll be introduced to the ‘Magical Indoors Rain Box’ (or ‘Shower’), which they’ll have to try to get to use more often. Feeding her will also be an interesting challenge, since the 21st Century Irish diet may take a while for her to get used to.
ROFL! “Magical Indoors Rain Box” I love that! They’re all just lucky that Ashling has a cool Mom. I’m guessing that she’s going to have a big part in house training Aine. 😉
The main reason the Roman Empire stopped expanding is simply because they were pushing the limits of their technology, logistics, and politics to govern more and more territory. Augustus realized that the Empire couldn’t handle any more territory, and asked his successors to keep the Empire to the borders he had established, which was mostly respected. In the end the Empire became impossible to govern at the size it was, leading Constantine to split the Empire in two.
Of course the fact that the Romans had to put down a long bloody insurgency after conquering Britannia might have something to do with it. Also the fact that the legions nearly mutinied at the idea of campaigning in lands across the Ocean, beyond the limits of the known world.
You mean like traditional Irish pizza? :)T
Congratulations on the Top Web Comics ranking! TWC tracks our votes in comparison to all the other votes cast per day, which means that we’re going to have to defend our spot. We need to vote every day, and those who also have access to a computer (or smartphone) on a different IP address can vote once per address per day–it’s perfectly legal. 🙂
@Kessy: Glad you liked that 😀 There will be a lot of creative re-naming of things in order to explain the modern world. Aoife is going to get that ball rolling in a few pages time. (Actually, the page I’m planning to start drawing today :D)
@Delta: Exactly like traditional Irish pizza. In particular, frozen pizza…the most traditional of all 😀
Thank you Delta. I’ve a feeling your awesome review has more than a little to do with Bata Neart’s improved TWC standing 🙂 I kinda expect Bata Neart to back down the ranking over time, but this month might work out well, since next week the comic will be joining VDSD 2015. This year, people will need to vote to see Bata Neart’s VDSD 2015 entry. I didn’t use to do that for previous VDSD, but the improved TWC rank has actually started to attract more readers. I’ve even updated the Bata Neart TWC banner with the “Promotional Aoife” image 🙂 Will be interesting to see what happens.
Ha! I should have known – “Magical Indoors Rain Box” sounds very very Aoife. Actually, this could be a commentary on how little most people understand how our modern technology actually works. It’s not actually hard to explain indoor plumbing to Aine in a way she’d understand. You have a large cistern at the top of a hill with pipes running to all the houses, and water comes out the pipes because the cistern is higher than everything else. Now how exactly the water gets in the cistern to begin with is a detail that need not be dealt with immediately. 😉
And I really need to stop overusing the word, “actually”… -_- Argh! I want an edit button!
I’m sure that Aoife will be only too happy to demonstrate the “Magical Indoors Rain Box” to Aine.
@Ray: Oh…we’ll get there. But as with many things in life, as much as Aoife may be delighted by that particular idea…reality become a little trickier 😀