Chapter 16 Page 31
February 5th, 2018Vivienne escapes, but poor Jacqueline. When I was a kid, the little brother of one of my friends picked up a big pot of boiling pasta water off the stove (without permission). Since little brother was only 4 years old, he couldn’t support the weight and dropped the entire pot of boiling water onto his head. It was awful. My friend told me the smell of cooking skin was nauseating. It took months/years for him to fully recover and that was with rushing him to the hospital by ambulance. 3rd degree burns are no joke.
To see a sneak peak at the last page of the chapter, please vote for Snow by Night on Top Web Comics!
Next week we will be starting the vignette for Chapter 16! My guest artist is the incredibly talented and always sassy K. Lynn Smith of Plume. I’m a huge Plume fan and you should be too. Go check out her comic if you haven’t already. She’s done an amazing job with the vignette, and I think you’re going to really enjoy it.
I’m curious. That kind of burn looks like a third-degree burn and while that type of injury is really really serious, it’s not actually supposed to be painful. That’s because with that kind of injury (where her hands turned black), even the nerves and pain receptors gets burned off making it numb and the person unable to feel pain.
So is this a simple error? Or a special ability of Mr. Imma-burn-everything-bird?
Talons’ special ability was to cause the pistol to explode once it created an arcane connection between it and the firebird when Jacqueline was shot. After that, it’s just normal fire. My concept for this page was based on a personal experience when a brother of a friend was badly burned. While the hand would have 3rd degree burns and the nerves may be too damaged to feel pain, the arm would have 2nd degree and 1st degree burns which would hurt. That’s all I’ve got. I’m not a medical professional. I’m a storyteller and amateur historian.
that looks horrific, jaqueline. i’m so sorry. you didn’t deserve this.
This episode will be a very sobering moment for Viv. I bet we see her mature quickly due to all of this.
I think I know how she feels. I’m currently sitting around in a hospital with 2nd degree burns on both feet. I’m wondering if something that looks so … crispy can actually be healed.
With the mundane means of that time, certainly not, they’d need magic for that (which might be a thing in this world, but we don’t know yet how powerful magical healing can be). Even in our modern times, only small third degree burns would heal from skar tissue growing back in from the borderlines of the wound, for a big third degree burn you’d need skin transplant. And it seems to be not only the skin here, given that we see bones, but not much blood, the whole hand seems to be roasted more than well-done.
At first, I was glad she still seem to have all … segments? … but good point, this is not just skin and without magical healing she might lose whole hand …
… on the other hand, if the hand would be completely cooked, it wouldn’t hurt anymore.
Mmm… Jassart was able to survive pretty bad burns, but that’s because he had a powerful, expensive alchemical concoction (that he’d never been able to afford except he nicked it, lulz). I wonder if either Vivienne can get some suitably powerful stuff for J, or the army has this kind of stuff its important people?
are they going to become a lesbian power couple
a girl can dream, right?
HOLY MOLY a warning would have been nice! YIKES!
She, ah… wasn’t wearing gloves, was she… That’s.
That be bone.
…
Does she get a cool cyborg hand now???? PLEASE??!
*shifty eyes* How about an alchemical hand?
I was actually thinking “hook”
Oo, nasty. I don’t suppose limb regeneration is one of the alchemical abilities of this world? As a kid of ~8–9 I once spilled a cup of boiling water (I was making hot chocolate) on my thigh, giving me a large second-degree burn that’s still probably the worst injury I’ve received in my life. Though in my case, though it took a month or two to heal, it healed completely—I don’t even have a trace of a cool scar left to show for it.
*recoils* That does not look good. No wonder she’s crying, it must hurt like hell!
I wonder if she’s right or left handed. :/
Jacqi is right handed. She was holding her pistol in her left because she’s been trained to have her right hand free for her sabre.
Ohhh that at least is a small comfort!
Let’s hope gangrene doesn’t set in or she could lose the entire arm – or worse. Has her ladyship even noticed her henchperson is wounded?
It’s been, like, 2 seconds since Vivienne was running for her life from mortal danger. Once she’s got her bearings, she’ll be able to take notice.
“Jacqui, you won’t believe what an awful day I’ve had. Now, stop moping and bring my rifle, there’s a dear.”. :-)
Sooo….Is Vivienne supposed to look crazy self-centered here? She saw the explosion while running, so she knew something was up…and Jacqueline, from the vignette, has been her right-hand gal for a while, through thick and thin. Even while she’s gasping for breath, you’d think she’d have a quarter brain for “what happened to her?”
Viv is right now both in shock and catching her breath after the run with the scary, eldritch Phoenix.
I think she’s just taking a second to fetch her breath and understand the situation, not intentionally ignoring Jacqueline’s pain – and perhaps the creators wanted to devote the panel-space immediately after revealing J’s injury to show Mathilde and J’s emotional bond, rather to than Vivienne’s reaction. I assume we’ll get to the Vivienne’s reaction on the next page – which might be only seconds later in in-story time.
All of this. Spot on. Viv is next page.
Makes sense! Downside of a comic page by page :)
Yes, it’s the way reading webcomics “live” can twist perception in weird ways! If we were archive reading or reading a printed book, the next page would be just seconds away for us too, and then we’d never have time to even start wondering if Vivienne was going to say something before we saw her do that – or not do that. But because we’re involuntarily stopped at the end of the page, the situation there can start appearing static, even when it isn’t.
…I have always thought of Viv as self-centered, actually.
Romantically or not, it’s clear Mathilde and Jacqueline have grown close to eachother.
Also, Vivienne has now a debt of honor with her rival. I wonder how will she react to that after recovering from the shock.
Her rival is Marguerite who is down at Fort Belfroi. We catch up with her in Ch17. The injured woman is Jacqueline, Viv’s aide-de-camp.