I wouldn’t normally call out “special” but it’s such an uncommon use of the word that you might not even find it on a casual google. I couldn’t. I asked around on twitter to make sure it really was a word. It just doesn’t come up much in a layman’s world. Of course, as soon as Earth learns of other intelligent life, you can bet “specist” will enter the common vocabulary. Because people are the worst.

Folks were asking how demons were so freely out and about. Well, it’s because Deus is super smart and everything he does advances multiply layers of his many cascading plans, and definitely not because I’m a dummy and didn’t think about it while I was writing the previous pages.

Dabbler is out as an alien. The type of alien she happens to be is “Demon,” but Demon isn’t simply a species of alien. It’s somewhere between a Class and Phylum. Demon is such a broad term because there was a long period of their history when they were Genghis Khaning their way across the galaxy, both in the areas of conquest and ensuring that demonkind has a lot of direct descendants. Even if there’s only a 1 in 1,000 chance of a demon “pillager” getting species X pregnant, in the last 30 or so millenia, there’s been a buttload of chances for that roll. Even if the resultant offspring didn’t have the same chance of passing on its DNA (or whatever demons use) the half-demon was usually still fertile with other members of its own clade. Demons have flexible chromosomes too. If a male demon impregnates a female whatsit, the offspring would be a demotsit, and if a female demon got pregnant by a male whatsit, the offspring would be a watsmon, kind of like the whole Tigon/Liger thing. So there are a lot of things that are considered “demons” even if they’re hybrids of things from well outside the usual demon orders and classes.

I decided a long time ago that there aren’t parallel planes of existence in the Grrl-verse. Demons are straight-up aliens. There’s no dimension of Infernium or whatever. There are other planes, but it’s stuff like the Astral plane, and physical objects can’t exist there. You can’t visit, because the laws of physics are wildly different. And not like, there’s less gravity. That bugs me when you see it in shows, like everything’s the same but you can jump higher. No, if there was less gravity, then stars would have to be proportionally larger to initiate fusion and it would affect their lifespans and what elements they could produce and the rate at which they went supernova and everything else about that universe would be different. Planes in the Grrl-verse like the Astral don’t, for instance, have the Strong Electromagnetic Force, so there’s no matter whatsoever, or at least no atoms, and the entire place is just two clouds of positively and negatively charged particles, each the size of half of all the matter in our universe if it was in nebula form, whipping around each other in storms that would make the troposphere of Jupiter look mild.

One thing that bugs me in fiction is the near-universal acceptance of the idea of parallel universes. Now, I’m not up on cutting-edge theoretical physics, but I’m pretty sure most fiction gets that wrong. The idea that every choice you make creates a new potential timeline where X happens instead of Y is… wildly egocentric. You’re telling me that when I eat a grilled cheese for lunch instead of a Cup-o-Ramen, that decision somehow creates ENOUGH ENERGY to CAUSE A BIG BANG somewhere else 14 billion years ago, so that now there’s a parallel universe that’s perfectly synchronized with ours at the moment I made that decision? (Talk about a lack of free will for the 14 billion years leading up to my lunch since every single other decision and grain of sand and raindrop has to happen exactly the same as our universe.) Because if that’s the case, we urgently need to recalculate the number of calories in a grilled cheese.

No, my understanding is that there are infinite potential futures due to quantum uncertainty. Any given quantum particle might spin this way or that way or go up or down or whatever, and there’s no way to know that until it happens. That doesn’t mean there is a whole universe for every single possible position and momentum state for every single quantum particle in our universe, and hundreds of millions of goo-gillions of universes are snuffed out as each particle resolves its state for every picosecond tick of the clock in our universe. It’s not a place we can go, it’s just… mathematically conceptual.

And yeah, there’s some great sci-fi out there with mirror universes and whatnot. In fact it’s kind of hard to find a lot of sci-fi that doesn’t have a “meet ourselves but we’re evil” tangent. Still, the idea that there are an infinite number of versions of the characters out there carrying on the struggle always made me feel like nothing they did mattered. Like, “Oh no, the Goa’uld invaded Earth.” So? There’s a million-billion-googillion Earths where that didn’t happen. Then sometimes I would think that American media always has the good-guys win because we only see events from the universe where the good-guys won. Like the producers are filming actual events from different universes and if something bad happens that doesn’t sufficiently provoke positive drama then they switch feeds to Universe 03840980384083-b.

I could be, and probably am wrong about how multiverse theory works, but I’ve never seen an explanation that addresses my Big Bang-generating food choices. The point is, all supernatural stuff in the Grrl-verse is either just an alien – usually an alien with some innate magical ability, or are native terrestrial entities, again with some magical traits.

Taxonomy would be a pain in the ass in a magical world. Consider that if elves are Fey and come originally from the Feywilds, and orcs come from Shadowfell and are descendents of whatever is the Fey equivalent that lives in there, (which may or may not be the case depending on the particulars of a fiction’s lore – I know in LOTR both elves and orcs had Fey origins, but Sauron got his hands on a group of elves and gave them evil cooties or something.) But for the sake of argument, let’s say that’s how it is. Chances are, elves and orcs would never be able to interbreed. Half-elves and half-orcs, sure, but not Elcs or Orves. BUUUUT, in a world with magic, the laws of nature are really just suggestions. Some mad or just slightly lonely wizard is going to make it happen if he really wants it, so what do taxonomic charts look like in that world? Half-elves, Elcs, Half-giant/half-dwarf (don’t think too hard about the logistics or the either very easy or almost definitely deadly delivery), Dwagons (half-dragon/half-dwarf, or possible half-dwarf/half-wagon), Koboltyughs (half-kobold/half-otyugh – don’t think about how that one came about either), and that one guy who is half-gnome/half-gelatinous cube. A gelatinous gnome. No one knows how that happened.

And don’t forget non-player character race mixes, like a Displacer Otyugh. I mean, that one makes sense. An Otyugh and a Displacer Beast meet each other and are like, “Hey, baby, nice tentacles you got there.” The hard part would be lining up the mating apparatus. “No, dummy, I’m over here! You haven’t even mounted me yet!” “Oh, thank god, I just thought you were super loose.” “How dare you!” *fight fight fight/eventual devolvement of fighting into mating/kids*

My point is Taxonomy would be a right mess in a world like that.

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The September vote incentive is up! Let’s call it the November vote incentive and just say I’ve still got two I.O.U’s, eh?

Well, Dabbler is doing her Dabbler things, and the Patreon version has a nude variant and a comic that… I don’t know, expounds on the goings on of the initial picture?

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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.