Perhaps the flesh around the chain? There are too many unknowns here, but perhaps the heart could be freed from the chain, and when it hits the cavern floor, it will burst rather than bounce. For her part, Digger is probably wishing that she had been able to acquire some usable explosives.
It must be ewwwie for Ed, but imagine what it would have been like for a vegetarian marsupial to land on that big chunk of meat! o.k. Ed, remember the crowbar…
I’m not sure he still has that crowbar. Four pages or so back, he had it tucked into his loincloth strap on his left side, but now there’s no bar in today’s strip.
Ya’know, the seeress probably saw that he’d need a tool, and that it was long and metal – a sword would be a better choice for removing the linkage at the meaty/squishy connection points…hope they used hammered rivets for the junctions – hearts make for crappy working surfaces…
Without getting past the first panel, instant reaction: “Oh, poor Ed—-!!!”
I’ve wondered for a while if it wouldn’t be easier to cut the heart loose from the chain than to break the chain itself; otoh, magic gets weird, and a physical chain as a tangible symbol of magical binding would be pretty straightforward, as symbolism goes. So maybe the chain itself *has* to be broken to free the God, heart or no heart.
Also? Ed had the crowbar when he jumped; either that, or the shin of his extended-straight leg is broken most oddly; and in the second panel today, his right paw is resting on something straight that does not look like part of a heart to me.
It took close looking and going back to double-check, though.
It’s rather disturbing that after all this time, that heart isn’t all hard and dried as opposed to squa-plorch-worthy.
And unfortunately, I’ve been re-reading the Vlad Taltos books, so I have to wonder if Ed wouldn’t be better served at this point by a very large skillet, a load of butter, some onions and garlic…
You also have to wonder what would happen if they’d just lobbed vampire veggies at the heart instead…
Am I the only one thinking that if Ed does manage to break the chain, he’s going to have a bit of a problem once he does– such as, possibly falling to his death? :/
http://www.diggercomic.com/?p=802 given the possibility that what the oracle saw them needing might have been a live crow, “sword” probably wasn’t really on the list of possibilities. (and that was moderately fortuitous, I thought I’d have to search around for it, not just sub in 0 to get to the right general area…
Well, if cutting the heart, rather than the chain is the way to actually go… then Ed can use his teeth. The god is “mostly dead” so it probably doesn’t count as TOO sacrilegious even if he accidentally swallows some (although that might have some… interesting effects on his mind and body).
I wouldn’t bother with that thing. My guess is that touching it will just make
your life even worse somehow. I don’t want to tell you your business, but if it
were me I’d leave that thing alone. Do you think I’m trying to trick you with
reverse psychology? I mean, seriously now.
It looks to me like Ed is barely hanging onto the heart’ in fact, I think his hind legs are dangling off. Scrambling up (and it’s squishy and perhaps slippery) to get to the chain might be a more-than-slightly-trivial problem…. “How is Ed working on chain” might not mean “how do I break it” but rather “how do I *get* to it”….
Why would hyenas be immune to grossness? I eat meat, and I would still be thoroughly squicked here. Ed is having a typical reaction of the kind we humans would label girly, which just makes sense for a guy from a female-dominant culture.
“How is Ed working on chain?” I’m trying to remember what we’ve seen of hyena tool use. Does Ed even know from levers?
@Madam Atom: I would make a comment here that you don’t scavenge around 30% of your meat, but given that humans DID back in Olduvai the point is moot: If humans went through a stage of mass scavenging and then (largely) abandoned it there’s no reason to say that The People might also have abandoned scavenging as a meat-accusation tactic except in times of dire trouble. In which case Iād imagine Ed would be a little squicked.
Whatās confusing me is the fact the Heart seems so… juicy. Iām not saying it couldnāt be preserved naturally by the cool conditions in the cave, but if it was cool and dry youād expect it to be mummified or leathery. A cool, wet highly acidic environment could preserve it like a bog-body in a let-leathery state, but that would tend to require an anaerobic environment, and Ed and Digger seem to be breathing a bit too well for that to be a possibility. My bet would be when the heart was originally removed it was deliberately preserved somehow: Normally Iād say that would require some specialist skills and equipment that the Cold servants would not have, but deliberately inoculating it with lactobacillus and the immersing it underwater or boiling it in the rendered adipose fat from the rest of the body could work without too much in the way of training. The first would initially prevent decay as the lactobacilli took up the nice other bacteria might occupy or kills them with lactic acid, and they could eventually āPickleā the flesh- mammoth hunters used that trick to preserve meat. As for the boiling in fat, it would seal in the tissue, leaving the outer layers of fat to putrefy, hydrolyse and Saponificate with the tissues own salts, creating adipocire. If itās lactic acid, the heart will have a distinctive, sharp āsour-milkā or unpleasant yogurty smell. And that the lesser of two olfactory evils: adipocire to this day remains the single worst thing Iāve ever smell (or possibly the smell was the bits oozing out from under it: I wasnāt going back to check. Collecting modern skeletal remains to teach fledgling osteoarchaeologists how to recognise the bones from various common bits of British wildlife sounds harmless enough, but Iād advise anyone who wants a go against anaerobically excarnating your own road killed badger on the first go. Iām not sure if it was that moment, or when I saw a very pretty athletic, blond Swedish girl passing around picturesat the pub of her-self enthusiastically cutting the baculum out of a long dead seal for her doctoral thesis and personal reference collection that I realised all zooarchaeologists are beyond mortal help) . If so my deepest sympathies for Ed. As Stone In Ear put it back at Diggerās adoption ritual āsmells like itās been rolling in something dead! And not the good kind of dead!ā
And I still only rate that as the second or third best sound-effect ever: the sound of a dinosaur brain-stem flapping in the wind from Conspiracy of Mammals and “Scratch-Squlorp-squithud!” still give it a run for its money.
@BunnyRock: This heart’s not preserved, though, is it? This heart is alive. The lizards with the chains are keeping it beating. (Where are the lizards? Have they been retconned out, RL years after their last appearance, as being too cute or something?) Science isn’t any part of this heart’s equation, I don’t think. It’s all magic down here–or it will be till Ed gets going with the applied physics.
The squick of the situation for me–and for Ed, I’m guessing–wouldn’t have anything to do with “ew, dead thing”, or at least the dead part wouldn’t be necessary. It’d be “ew, exposed squishy wet inner-body-stuff GET IT OFF ME.” Live vs. dead squishy wet stuff is pretty much irrelevant.
… and I just realized that if it IS dead, and smells dead, that’d be far worse for Ed than anything nose-blind me can imagine, so thanks for reminding me about that. (Genuine thanks, not sarcasm. I do tend to forget about scents.)
See, BunnyRock, when you say “adipose” my brain goes to Doctor Who and then to some REALLY weird places afterwards. Not your fault, but I thought I’d mention it. š
And Madam Atom beat me to my theory about the squishy liveness: The heart is still beating, therefore it is still alive. Murai said it waaaaay back in the beginning(ish): http://www.diggercomic.com/?p=255
Man, Sweetgrass is hilarious. The look he is giving is just priceless.
…. *blink*
Right then. Yes. A heart would be squishy.
This is an awesome bit of mood whiplash. XD
but the crowbar! Where’s the crowbar??
“What are you doing? Get away from that!”
…When the bad guy has to say that, you know they’re going down. :3
Ewewew… Lol.
Also:
Dammit Jim! I’m a skin painter, not a chain… worker?
…
Yeah, I got nothin’.
Well that’s a disturbing noise…
“Fine. Why don’t you just rub it all over you face?”
At least it was a somewhat soft landing.
How is Ed working on chains?
I foresee your friend may have use for a crowbar.
Perhaps the flesh around the chain? There are too many unknowns here, but perhaps the heart could be freed from the chain, and when it hits the cavern floor, it will burst rather than bounce. For her part, Digger is probably wishing that she had been able to acquire some usable explosives.
This is at once an awesome and an epically horrible place at which to catch up with the narrative. HRGHHF.
A cutting torch! My kingdom for a cutting torch!!!
Ok Ed, time to remember that you are carrying a crowbar.
Time to vote, too: http://topwebcomics.com/vote/10180/default.aspx
Funny, it’s starting to remind me of GLaDOS in Portal.
I sincerely hope Sweetgrass ends up being LESS threatening than my reference.
Best. Onomatopoeia. Ever.
Go, Ed!
It must be ewwwie for Ed, but imagine what it would have been like for a vegetarian marsupial to land on that big chunk of meat! o.k. Ed, remember the crowbar…
Nobody ever said this was a glamorous job. Poor Ed! Time for crowbar action!
We’re guessing that the crowbar did not fall after the landing, or Ed was carrying it during the jump.
“Squa-plorch” has now officially entered my vocabulary.
best sound effect ever, indeed! GO ED! think big, buddy!
I’m not sure he still has that crowbar. Four pages or so back, he had it tucked into his loincloth strap on his left side, but now there’s no bar in today’s strip.
Unless Ursula just forgot to draw it in. š
@Linktoreality: Is that a lovely little Portal reference I see there?
Ya’know, the seeress probably saw that he’d need a tool, and that it was long and metal – a sword would be a better choice for removing the linkage at the meaty/squishy connection points…hope they used hammered rivets for the junctions – hearts make for crappy working surfaces…
Use the crowbar, Ed! If a theoretical physicist can do it, so can you!
“Give me a blessed plus three crowbar and a fulcrum sited on a squishy giant heart, and I shall move the world.” — ArchimEDes
Read the whole archive and caught up in about six hours, I’m pretty impressed with myself.
Now to wait.
Without getting past the first panel, instant reaction: “Oh, poor Ed—-!!!”
I’ve wondered for a while if it wouldn’t be easier to cut the heart loose from the chain than to break the chain itself; otoh, magic gets weird, and a physical chain as a tangible symbol of magical binding would be pretty straightforward, as symbolism goes. So maybe the chain itself *has* to be broken to free the God, heart or no heart.
Also? Ed had the crowbar when he jumped; either that, or the shin of his extended-straight leg is broken most oddly; and in the second panel today, his right paw is resting on something straight that does not look like part of a heart to me.
It took close looking and going back to double-check, though.
Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ewwww…
XD
It’s rather disturbing that after all this time, that heart isn’t all hard and dried as opposed to squa-plorch-worthy.
And unfortunately, I’ve been re-reading the Vlad Taltos books, so I have to wonder if Ed wouldn’t be better served at this point by a very large skillet, a load of butter, some onions and garlic…
You also have to wonder what would happen if they’d just lobbed vampire veggies at the heart instead…
Am I the only one thinking that if Ed does manage to break the chain, he’s going to have a bit of a problem once he does– such as, possibly falling to his death? :/
Use the Force….uhhhh…the crowbar, Ed!
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
http://www.diggercomic.com/?p=802 given the possibility that what the oracle saw them needing might have been a live crow, “sword” probably wasn’t really on the list of possibilities. (and that was moderately fortuitous, I thought I’d have to search around for it, not just sub in 0 to get to the right general area…
Well, if cutting the heart, rather than the chain is the way to actually go… then Ed can use his teeth. The god is “mostly dead” so it probably doesn’t count as TOO sacrilegious even if he accidentally swallows some (although that might have some… interesting effects on his mind and body).
I am all for the breaking of the chain. Symbolically it could be very dense.
I’m with Ed, though. Ewwww ewww ewwwwwwwwww
I wouldn’t bother with that thing. My guess is that touching it will just make
your life even worse somehow. I don’t want to tell you your business, but if it
were me I’d leave that thing alone. Do you think I’m trying to trick you with
reverse psychology? I mean, seriously now.
You’ve got some serious nasty when you’ve got a hyena going “Ewww, eww, ewww…” Poor Ed. At least it was a soft landing, sorta. Ugh.
Wow. What a . . .descriptive sound effect. I is in agreement with Ed here. Ew.
If a hyena is going “Eww” then it’s probably not edible…remember, it’s not just a squishy heart, it’s an UNDEAD squishy heart. Not exactly fresh…
Am I the only one here who hears Ed’s voice in my head as a less-sinister Gollum? I have no why that is, but it is.
It looks to me like Ed is barely hanging onto the heart’ in fact, I think his hind legs are dangling off. Scrambling up (and it’s squishy and perhaps slippery) to get to the chain might be a more-than-slightly-trivial problem…. “How is Ed working on chain” might not mean “how do I break it” but rather “how do I *get* to it”….
Why would hyenas be immune to grossness? I eat meat, and I would still be thoroughly squicked here. Ed is having a typical reaction of the kind we humans would label girly, which just makes sense for a guy from a female-dominant culture.
“How is Ed working on chain?” I’m trying to remember what we’ve seen of hyena tool use. Does Ed even know from levers?
I’m with Ed…ewwwww.
So this isn’t just a mercy killing, but a messy killing! š
@Madam Atom: I would make a comment here that you don’t scavenge around 30% of your meat, but given that humans DID back in Olduvai the point is moot: If humans went through a stage of mass scavenging and then (largely) abandoned it there’s no reason to say that The People might also have abandoned scavenging as a meat-accusation tactic except in times of dire trouble. In which case Iād imagine Ed would be a little squicked.
Whatās confusing me is the fact the Heart seems so… juicy. Iām not saying it couldnāt be preserved naturally by the cool conditions in the cave, but if it was cool and dry youād expect it to be mummified or leathery. A cool, wet highly acidic environment could preserve it like a bog-body in a let-leathery state, but that would tend to require an anaerobic environment, and Ed and Digger seem to be breathing a bit too well for that to be a possibility. My bet would be when the heart was originally removed it was deliberately preserved somehow: Normally Iād say that would require some specialist skills and equipment that the Cold servants would not have, but deliberately inoculating it with lactobacillus and the immersing it underwater or boiling it in the rendered adipose fat from the rest of the body could work without too much in the way of training. The first would initially prevent decay as the lactobacilli took up the nice other bacteria might occupy or kills them with lactic acid, and they could eventually āPickleā the flesh- mammoth hunters used that trick to preserve meat. As for the boiling in fat, it would seal in the tissue, leaving the outer layers of fat to putrefy, hydrolyse and Saponificate with the tissues own salts, creating adipocire. If itās lactic acid, the heart will have a distinctive, sharp āsour-milkā or unpleasant yogurty smell. And that the lesser of two olfactory evils: adipocire to this day remains the single worst thing Iāve ever smell (or possibly the smell was the bits oozing out from under it: I wasnāt going back to check. Collecting modern skeletal remains to teach fledgling osteoarchaeologists how to recognise the bones from various common bits of British wildlife sounds harmless enough, but Iād advise anyone who wants a go against anaerobically excarnating your own road killed badger on the first go. Iām not sure if it was that moment, or when I saw a very pretty athletic, blond Swedish girl passing around picturesat the pub of her-self enthusiastically cutting the baculum out of a long dead seal for her doctoral thesis and personal reference collection that I realised all zooarchaeologists are beyond mortal help) . If so my deepest sympathies for Ed. As Stone In Ear put it back at Diggerās adoption ritual āsmells like itās been rolling in something dead! And not the good kind of dead!ā
And I still only rate that as the second or third best sound-effect ever: the sound of a dinosaur brain-stem flapping in the wind from Conspiracy of Mammals and “Scratch-Squlorp-squithud!” still give it a run for its money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipocere
@BunnyRock: This heart’s not preserved, though, is it? This heart is alive. The lizards with the chains are keeping it beating. (Where are the lizards? Have they been retconned out, RL years after their last appearance, as being too cute or something?) Science isn’t any part of this heart’s equation, I don’t think. It’s all magic down here–or it will be till Ed gets going with the applied physics.
The squick of the situation for me–and for Ed, I’m guessing–wouldn’t have anything to do with “ew, dead thing”, or at least the dead part wouldn’t be necessary. It’d be “ew, exposed squishy wet inner-body-stuff GET IT OFF ME.” Live vs. dead squishy wet stuff is pretty much irrelevant.
… and I just realized that if it IS dead, and smells dead, that’d be far worse for Ed than anything nose-blind me can imagine, so thanks for reminding me about that. (Genuine thanks, not sarcasm. I do tend to forget about scents.)
Love the onomatopoeia (onomatopoeias?) in this comic.
Also love the surprisingly-expressive-for-an-intangible-shadow-creature Sweetgrass Voice.
Perhaps Ed’s worried that there aren’t enough of him for a chain gang? 7@=Q
I’m waiting for them to get past this particular muscle so they can get to the important part of the thoracic cavity contents; the [i]liver[/i].
See, BunnyRock, when you say “adipose” my brain goes to Doctor Who and then to some REALLY weird places afterwards. Not your fault, but I thought I’d mention it. š
And Madam Atom beat me to my theory about the squishy liveness: The heart is still beating, therefore it is still alive. Murai said it waaaaay back in the beginning(ish): http://www.diggercomic.com/?p=255