Well now….that is…erm….different…
Anyone know what to do when you encounter an ancient forest “thing” that even ghosts are afraid of?
Answers on postcards folks… 😀
Bata Neart
Irish Magical Girls!
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Well now….that is…erm….different…
Anyone know what to do when you encounter an ancient forest “thing” that even ghosts are afraid of?
Answers on postcards folks… 😀
Well, that can’t be good. Brave, brave Sir Robin time.
Welcome back, Rawr. Hope you were able to enjoy your break. 🙂
“…nothing wants to meet this thing…” An understatement,if ever I’ve heard one. O.o
Ashling has only really messed about with fire and water–and it’s unlikely that either of those would faze this spectral whatsit. Here’s hoping that Aine’s training has covered eldritch horrors. ><
@Azreal: Brave Sir Robin would have the best strategy here…probably combined with throwing his mistrals at it to ensure his escape 😀
Thanks for the welcome ;D Not as much a break than me doubling down trying to repair the page buffer. You’ll now notice a ‘Scheduled Comics’ counter up on the top right hand corner that I’m testing out. If all goes well, in future you should see at least 2-3 comics listed there. Right now theres nothing, but I hope to fix that by the end of the weekend 😀
@Delta: Gonna try to avoid giving too many spoilers for the next chapter, but Aine has seen these before and with any luck I hope I can manage to illustrate how freaked out she is to see one now.
This is the beginning of an aspect of Bata Neart that I’ve been planning since day one (over 10 years ago). Celtic mythology is choc full of horrors like this thing here, and I’m hoping to introduce a few of them in the comic 😀
@Rawr: I know a bit of Celtic mythology, and I’m having a hard time coming up with anything that isn’t dangerous/malignant. Once you get past selkies, it’s kinda all downhill from there. O.o
Something just occurred to me – Aine and Claire don’t understand each other? That’s rather counter intuitive, even if Claire only spoke English while she was alive. Ghosts (and astral beings in general) don’t communicate with speech per se – they don’t cause physical vibrations in the air in a certain pattern. The actual mechanism isn’t known, but it’s not sound. (At least not normally.) Perceptions of the astral are generally translated into a symbolic representation by a person’s subconscious, which means that different people will often perceive the same thing differently. So while Aoife and Ashling will perceive communication from an astral being as English, Aine would “hear” it as Gaelige.
To give you a real life example, a friend of mine and I once encountered a rather unpleasant astral. My friend perceived it as a tall dark cloaked figure with red glowing eyes. I perceived it as a sort of monstrous animal with claws and fangs and fur and scales. The subconscious usually reaches for the most familiar symbols that convey what it’s perceiving.
@Delta: Too true! Which is why I’m surprised that general knowledge of Irish mythological creatures rarely goes beyond cutesy things like Leprechauns and the odd chilling thing such as a Banshee. Beyond that you have cavalcade of terrifying monsters that would give Universal a run for their money!
Someone really aught to write a story with some of them ;D
@Kessy: Oooo, you’re good at probing potential spoiler stuff here Kessy 😀 You might notice that they never answer each other questions, but there’s no menton of not knowing what the question meant. I feel that they do actually know what each other are saying, because like you said Áine would actually perceive her meaning.
Interesting that you saw that ghost differently. I believe I’ve encountered the odd ghost in my time too, but I’ve never actually seen one (mostly just heard, felt, or dealt with the cheeky crap they were pulling).
Well actually on the last page I assumed they could understand each other but for some reason this page made me feel more like they’re talking past each other, which made me think about it more. What I’m really curious about is how Aoife and Sharon will perceive all of this. Especially since Aine seems to have forgotten that she’s supposed to be hiding from Sharon behind a tree.
Different people perceive the astral differently, with different senses. Some people hear sounds, or even voices or music. Some people perceive smells – usually a fetid rotting stench from something nasty or flowers from something much nicer. Some people can feel temperature swings or being touched. There are all kinds of variations. It’s hard to make generalizations, but my best guess is that the most common perception is just a general feeling – a sense of presence, feeling your skin crawl or your hair stand on end, a sense of being watched, things like that. A sense of presence is what I usually experience, although I have also felt touches and once or twice glimpsed something out of the corner of my eye.
The beastie that my friend and I encountered was something that we just felt a sense of presence, what I was describing was the general impression it gave, not a physical appearance. I also wouldn’t call it a ghost, I’m pretty sure it was never human or anything close to human. Demo and I called it a demon, although that word can carrying a bunch of implications that don’t fit it. The best way to think of it is as a sort of astral parasite – it feeds off of negative feelings and emotions and the energy they create. It can attach itself to a person and sort of whisper in the back of their mind, trying to influence them to be frightened, angry, depressed, to do self destructive things, and so on. It can’t physically harm anyone. It’s nasty but not really evil per se – it does what it does to feed, not out of malevolence. It can seriously mess up someone’s life, but it’s not doing it out of malice any more than a tick or a parasitic worm or a virus is.