Fiona’s on the case, but still many questions. Will we find out more about Aine, and we’re she is from? Watch this space to find out.
Now alas, next week there will not be a new Bata Neart. As I described back on Page 1, updates will now happen in 5 week blocks, with a week rest between.
Thus, no Bata Neart next Friday, but there will be another the week after next!
Hope to see you there 🙂
Oh yea, a little bit of an extra. I recently learned something about the Irish Navy that I thought was little funny. It turns out that 2 patrol vessels of the same class (Emir OPV) have very familiar names:
Alas, there is never an LE Aine, and Aoife was decommissioned last year and sold to Malta. So up until 2015 you might have noticed Aisling & Aoife patrolling the coasts of Ireland and Europe 🙂
I like Fiona’s Professor glasses. 😆 And my bet is on much earlier, Prof.
Enjoy your week, Rawr.
Awww, dammit Ireland, you broke-up the team. 👿
@Azreal: I know! The ships themselves are pretty old now, and LE Aisling will probably get scrapped/sold eventually too. But still…if they could have just held off a while, and then launched an LE Aine, the set would be complete 😀
If I was crazy rich I would have bought LE Aoife, and then put a massive Lucky-Star Bandau over the bridge 😀
(Not-so-secret Easter Egg: One of the vessels in the Irish Fleet was named after a future Bata Neart character. I wonder if anyone can guess the name?)
So, Rawr, did you give Fiona those glasses before or after the Velma / Scooby Doo discussion a few pages ago? 😀
I wonder, did you got Aoife’s harp bandeau from the flag of P22 Aiofe? Or is it just a coincidence (I don’t think so)? It must be fate! It is the will of Steins;Gate! Sorry, wrong comic. 😛
@Kessy: I wager he decided to add them after the discussion. He’s cheeky like that after all. 😉
@Rawr: Did the Irish Navy really get the name for their vessel from you, or was it the other way around? Either way, I’m betting the name is Niamh. Named after the daughter of Manannán mac Lir. She is one of the Queens of Tir na nÓg which translates to “Land of Youth” or Tír na hÓige (“Land of Youth”) which can realate back to Aine who has in a sense been granted eternal youth by being frozen in a block of ice for at least a thousand years.
Enjoy your week off. We’ll all be here minding the store while you’re gone.
1,000 years? Man, those human popsicles keep like crazy. She’s not even freezer-burned.
@Kessy: It had come to mind that she needed Velma-glasses, but I was thinking ‘She needs glasses for her nerd-out moments’. Thus, the reading-glasses here 🙂
@Farren: The Harp on green flag is a regularly used state-flag in Ireland.(Make the background blue and it’s the Presidential flag). In this case it’s the navy’s flag, which in turn is identical to the Kingdom of Leinster flag. It is a co-incidence that Aoife’s bandau had the same pattern 🙂
As you said to Kessy, I am indeed cheeky like that 😀 (Re: Velma)
Both LE Aoife anf LE Aisling were named 15 years before I even began Bata Neart. However it may be of interest to know that the names ‘Aoife’ and ‘Ashling/Aisling’, although exotic sounding to non-Irish ears are actually very popular girl’s names in Ireland. ‘Aoife’ in particular has been in the top-10 chosen girls names for the past few years, thus increasing the chance of encountering a real-world Aoife. (Wither or not she would be like my character, is difficult to predict)
Good guess with Niamh, but that is actually name of the girl’s short-haired friend who smokes (I realize now that I haven’t named her in-story yet, she’s a bit of an ‘extra’). The future character is another name…. ;D
@melaredblu: I know! It’s great little trope to use in bringing people from the past….if you forget all of the science stuff that would suggest the freezing itself would have killed her and that un-thawing after all that time her would have resulted in messy gloop of bones and flesh. Ignoring that disgusting little tit-bit, her skin would have been horribly frost-bitten too and not really in any state to do much…let alone have enough strength to succeed in capturing 2 people and steal their clothes. I’m also using the argument that clothing would have ended up embedded into her skin if she had worn any when frozen (thus she ain’t got none on her).
However, ignoring all of that again, I’m just going to say that ‘the ice was made of magic’, saving me a lot of hassle 😀 (Magical girl stories come lot of handy little tools like that don’t they? ;D )
Niamh? (Gasp!) The Smoking Girl has a name! But is it her real name, or just another smokescreen to keep Agent Aoife from finding the truth??
Rawr, you shouldn’t overthink the magic here. All you really need is that being frozen in a literal block of ordinary water ice would be fatal, Aine is not dead, therefore she wasn’t frozen in an actual block of ice. She was in some kind of magical suspended animation, and the details of how it works has been lost to time.
I think of it as being kind of like Aine encountering modern technology in reverse. Just like how unfamiliar things are described to Aine in terms she knows but that may leave a misleading impression, we would have the same problem when encountering techniques, devices, and magics from Aine’s world that are completely foreign to us. So I figure that the “ice” she was frozen in is actually no more ice than a shower is an indoor rain box.
Yeah, just to clarify, I was only joking about the ice thing. Really. It’s obvious there’s magic at work, or else Ashling would have been six feet under ages ago.
@melaredblu: I know you were only joking 😀 I just had a bizarre urge to explore the science-angle of it all vs. what I did in the story 🙂 I had planned for Fiona to eventually address some of these things, but since she is on-board with Ashling’s #magicpowers I don’t think there is much need to unless the plot calls for it 😉
@Kessy: Agent Aoife is never likely to give up…especially now that the X-Files has been relaunched 😀
As I’ve just replied to melaredblu, I just had an urge to mix in the facts. I don’t really want to over-think the magic beyond some of the rules of how to use it (which is more world-building for me…stuff I like to do 😀 ).
But I’m not planning to overthink it. Otherwise i’ll end up explaining that the magic is caused by Medichloians 😀