I was going to reply something about something regarding puke and how short usable DNA would last in it considering it’s spilled in the grass… but now I can’t stop admiring the captain’s fabulous new avatar! I’m jealous, dude.
I would imagine, without looking it up, that emptying one’s stomach-contents like that would also leave behind a fair bit of stomach lining. DNA. Right there.
Not to mention whatever other cells were gathered on the way up.
Not to mention she is supporting her the heel of her right hand. That’ll probably leave its own trace.
Honestly, she is doing a terrible job of this… but then she clearly lacks experience.
There’s no way that ground takes a palm print well enough to determine anything more specific than “there was a human here.”
And I’ve got to back up Jude that leaving DNA in a pool of stomach acid, mixed with plant and animal DNA, exposed to the air, and outside is not a good way to preserve it for analysis.
You know… I thought she was driving up on a ridge above a desert. I didn’t even realize that was supposed to be water and not sand, but it’s obvious in retrospect.
Cliffs are rare without lots of water to create them by rapidly (on geological time scales) eroding the rock. Which is why very few cliffs can be found standing in deserts, *except* for river canyons.
Yeah, and here I thought my teacher was kidding when he said to me “If you don’t listen and learn how to do substrations, you’ll never know how to react when your boss murder one of your co-worker and asks you to go get rid of the corpse !” :/
Weird… “substration” is officially not a word according to several dictionaries, but I find quite a few sites using the term in place of “subtraction.” Is this a regional dialect?
I used to be bullied at school and most of my time was spent planning how I was going to kill and dump their bodies.
Once I left school I never had any reason to put those skills to the test so I guess you’re right and I wasn’t prepared for work life. But I’d have been fine in Carols place.
I was never that savvy as a kid, but as an adult I’m aware that the punishment for murder isn’t that severe before you’re a certain age. So really, dumping the bodies seems much less important. At least as long as you can stand people knowing what you did. And… uh… survive any avengers… OK, so dumping the bodies might be pretty important after all.
I’m telling you, man. No dumping required. Just get a big ol’ box of Silphidae and let nature take its course. Then all you’ve got left are bones, and those are EASY to get rid of.
Hydrofluoric acid is nasty stuff. Don’t play with it. Plus, it’s not as common as other things, and so stands out as a purchase.
Silphadae, hogs, coyotes…there’s plenty of natural means of disposal. If you don’t have those, some form of strong oxidizer (concentrated sodium hypochlorite or perchlorate) or base (lime). Even cheaper and more common, any form of petrochemical fuel can be used as an accelerant for disposal by fire.
Seriously, didn’t anybody pay attention in chemistry, physics, and biology classes?
I guess I’m the first to call and applaud the Sin City homage. I was thinking about the driving scene with Dwight just from the brown and white road scene. Yeesh.
So, his name should have been Jack. Course’ you could go for Shake it up Baby if you want to keep Ferris.
Don’t worry, Ferris, there are other fish in the sea! Just drift for a little while, don’t let your good spirits sink, and remember, just keep swimming!
It’s always at this point in this kind of story I usually feel a disconnect from the characters. Somehow more than usual in this instance. Murder at times can seem reasonable to a character within a context. Usually something is so important to them, they feel it’s worth killing someone over. Or they are so afraid of something they’re willing to kill to prevent it.
What I don’t understand here is why the ceo was willing to kill to protect this secret? He expressed concern over the state of the people in the jars, but immediately skipped to lethal force upon any form of discovery?
Why is his assistant willing to cover for him to this degree? Do either of them realistically believe they can get away with this at this point?
I think in H.R.’s case, it’s fairly clear that he’s far gone enough that logic and reason just aren’t a factor in his decisions anymore. As for Carol, I’d venture a guess that she’s pretty desperate to keep what’s happening in the basement under wraps, and it’s not as though she can undo this murder.
HR has already gone over in the mad scientist phase. Nothing can come between him and his work. As for the woman, she just doesn’t want to go to jail for the illegal stuff she’d been doing before this event. Now she feels like she’s in too deep. Besides, HR is the only person who can get the five out, from her perspective. This is one life to save 5. It’s easy to rationalize her motivations at this point because no matter what, if she’s caught, she’s going to jail for a very long time. Aside from all that, if HR was willing to kill this guy, what does she think he’ll do if she tries to bail on him now?
Well, in my opinion, H.R. has been isolated for so long that he probably did become a bit disconnected from reality. I believe they call it “cabin fever”. Normally this wouldn’t be enough on its own to drive a person ’round the bend, but when you’re also keeping a deep, dark secret that you absolutely don’t want an authority – like, say, the government – to get its hands on, which you could be locked up and have your company shut down for…
Murder might seem like the more reasonable option.
Carol on the other hand reminds me strongly of Portal’s Caroline (and, interesting name similarity there); she’s extremely devoted to her job, and not only to hang on to her employment. Likely, she is also devoted to her job to that degree because on some subconscious level she’s fairly empathic and cares about what happens to H.R. and/or the Five. At minimum, she probably consciously wants to make sure H.R. doesn’t do something… crazier to them or himself, or anyone else.
Which at this point, he now has, and the horror, shock and revulsion of how things have escalated and gone out of control is now seriously getting to her. She’s doing her best, but in the long run this is probably going to give her some kind of PTSD, especially if things keep don’t stop happening.
Also consider the fact that this came down on Carol extremely suddenly. IMO there is a good chance that she would have snapped and gone to the police about this, or at least not dumped the body herself iff she actually had time to properly digest the shock. Her mind is numb and she’s just flipped over into ‘frantic assistant mode’ once again without thinking about it, this time worse than before.
Why cut him up only to put all parts in one bag? The idea of cutting up murder victims is to hide the parts seperately so it’s less suspicious than hauling a heavy, human-sized bag around.
The pieces will fit in a smaller bag than the whole person. A stiffening corpse doesn’t fold well.
They’ll separate once they’re in the ocean. And really, she doesn’t want to be hacking apart a corpse on the beach; the privacy might not last long enough.
Also, smaller pieces are more likely to be carried off whole by ocean predators and scavengers. I’m also reasonably sure that’s a gym bag, not a body bag, so yeah, smaller space.
It just struck me how it is all going to go down. The journalist (from way back) is going to see that Ferris went missing and falsely assume (well half-falsely assume) that Ferris was killed because he let her in. And the resulting guilt/curiosity will be like having large amounts of honey in front of a dire-bear.
Ladies and gentleman, this might just be the climax of the real-world story arc.
This may be the first time I’ve been really intrigued with Sepia World that I don’t want to go back to the guildies just yet…but something tells me we will next page… :/
I don’t know why but it’s this page that made me just want to lie down on my side and cry. That this is happening in Sepia World just makes me feel like everything’s ruined and nothing is ever going to be alright.
For a moment, I thought that sentence was going to end with “I’m sure Phil and T will come up with something worse” and was torn between wanting it with a need like burning and gross sobbing into denial. But your answer’s damn good, too, and I’m reminded why you’re one of my favorite commenters.
Sorta feel the same here; it’s all genuinely horrible. Especially since I feel Carol didn’t deserve this</em to happen. On the upside though … I think they're capturing the horrible suddeness of the situation quite well, so it's all cool. And the captain probably is right! Also, uhm… the story can't get simpler from here on out… or something? OK, I am actually having a hard time being positive about this.
Looks like she opened it to either confirm it was Ferris (although, it would have been better to have done that during pick up) or more likely to dispose of the parts (although she really should be wearing gloves, not to protect against leaving fingerprints/DNA but because, you know, handling body parts!!)
Whoa! This is a real place. Real Car Real shampoo Real Fast Food bags Real Cliff. It is in Bixby Canyon in Big Sur California. I used to live in Garrapata Canyon. It took me awhile to recognize it. She is Dumping the corpse at a turn off just south of the bridge. It is 300 miles South of Los Angeles. Is that where Huricane Software is? Go to Google Maps. Enter 27496 California 1 Monterey, California. Zoom into street view. Use directional arrows to turn the view around. The view in the cartoon is from above the road so it doesn’t exactly match the picture from the Google truck. Pretty close.
John (? probably both do?) Waltrip likes to use really locations as template as he mentioned (at least) once before. That being said: Nice to know where this is from – in our world.
I feel like we need some flash back montage with internal monologue to explain how the Carol of the reporters case history transformed morally into a being capable of going along with this? (she probably thought she was saving those people up till recently??)
Yeah I know he’s threatening to drag her down with him but if she immediately goes to the police saying he killed some guy and giving evidence I’m sure she can have her multiple kidnapping sentences reduced. (and hopefully kept at just kidnapping when unplugging them kills them too) I feel this is a cut your losses moment that someone as intelligent as Carol would recognize during the hour or so it probably took to get dressed, get back to the company, load the body and get all the way out here.
Wimp. I be she watchaed all the “Saw” movies and thought they were great.
Huh. I posted but it isn’t here.
SO:
Wimp.
I bet she loved all the “Saw” movies.
Now it’s there twice.
yay!
Three cheers for redundancy!
Three cheers for redundancy!
Three cheers for redundancy!
It’s first twice! Wow
Awww, that was so sweet of her to leave fingerprints for the cops.
Prints would probably be destroyed by the salt water.
On the other hand she just puked out some DNA.
You’re all assuming they find the body in time to gather any evidence at all, either from the dump site or the bag itself.
Stomach acid is not exactly the best environment for the preservation of DNA.
Surely there’s some usable saliva somewhere in there.
I was going to reply something about something regarding puke and how short usable DNA would last in it considering it’s spilled in the grass… but now I can’t stop admiring the captain’s fabulous new avatar! I’m jealous, dude.
Dammit Jim, I’m TNG not CSI!
I would imagine, without looking it up, that emptying one’s stomach-contents like that would also leave behind a fair bit of stomach lining. DNA. Right there.
Not to mention whatever other cells were gathered on the way up.
Not to mention she is supporting her the heel of her right hand. That’ll probably leave its own trace.
Honestly, she is doing a terrible job of this… but then she clearly lacks experience.
There’s no way that ground takes a palm print well enough to determine anything more specific than “there was a human here.”
And I’ve got to back up Jude that leaving DNA in a pool of stomach acid, mixed with plant and animal DNA, exposed to the air, and outside is not a good way to preserve it for analysis.
You know… I thought she was driving up on a ridge above a desert. I didn’t even realize that was supposed to be water and not sand, but it’s obvious in retrospect.
Cliffs are rare without lots of water to create them by rapidly (on geological time scales) eroding the rock. Which is why very few cliffs can be found standing in deserts, *except* for river canyons.
Depends on how old the desert is (not to mention, plenty of man-made cliffs)
I guess this is what they mean when they say that schools don’t prepare you for the challenges of a real workplace.
Yeah, and here I thought my teacher was kidding when he said to me “If you don’t listen and learn how to do substrations, you’ll never know how to react when your boss murder one of your co-worker and asks you to go get rid of the corpse !” :/
Weird… “substration” is officially not a word according to several dictionaries, but I find quite a few sites using the term in place of “subtraction.” Is this a regional dialect?
This is french who probably misremember the right translation. :p
I used to be bullied at school and most of my time was spent planning how I was going to kill and dump their bodies.
Once I left school I never had any reason to put those skills to the test so I guess you’re right and I wasn’t prepared for work life. But I’d have been fine in Carols place.
In a way, that’s kinda disturbing…
and the oh so content frig avatar makes it all the worse
Better*
I was never that savvy as a kid, but as an adult I’m aware that the punishment for murder isn’t that severe before you’re a certain age. So really, dumping the bodies seems much less important. At least as long as you can stand people knowing what you did. And… uh… survive any avengers… OK, so dumping the bodies might be pretty important after all.
I’m telling you, man. No dumping required. Just get a big ol’ box of Silphidae and let nature take its course. Then all you’ve got left are bones, and those are EASY to get rid of.
Or just find yourself a tub of hydrofluoric acid and dump the body parts in there! Then dump the tub in the ocean.
Hydrofluoric acid is nasty stuff. Don’t play with it. Plus, it’s not as common as other things, and so stands out as a purchase.
Silphadae, hogs, coyotes…there’s plenty of natural means of disposal. If you don’t have those, some form of strong oxidizer (concentrated sodium hypochlorite or perchlorate) or base (lime). Even cheaper and more common, any form of petrochemical fuel can be used as an accelerant for disposal by fire.
Seriously, didn’t anybody pay attention in chemistry, physics, and biology classes?
i presume he meant hydrochloric acid? Hydrofluric IS really nasty stuff, but as i remember far less effective as an acid for disintegrating tissue.
“never trust a man with a pig farm”;)
I guess I’m the first to call and applaud the Sin City homage. I was thinking about the driving scene with Dwight just from the brown and white road scene. Yeesh.
So, his name should have been Jack. Course’ you could go for Shake it up Baby if you want to keep Ferris.
Yes, I am horrible at times. :/
This little caper’s in the bag.
it’s all pieced together now
In the end, Ferris really did get sacked from his old job.
Yep, he got cut.
Seems unlikely he’ll be getting a raise now.
Getting dumped can leave a man breathless.
Don’t worry, Ferris, there are other fish in the sea! Just drift for a little while, don’t let your good spirits sink, and remember, just keep swimming!
and most importantly, don’t fall apart when the seas get rough
You’ll be dismembered fondly by all.
It’s always at this point in this kind of story I usually feel a disconnect from the characters. Somehow more than usual in this instance. Murder at times can seem reasonable to a character within a context. Usually something is so important to them, they feel it’s worth killing someone over. Or they are so afraid of something they’re willing to kill to prevent it.
What I don’t understand here is why the ceo was willing to kill to protect this secret? He expressed concern over the state of the people in the jars, but immediately skipped to lethal force upon any form of discovery?
Why is his assistant willing to cover for him to this degree? Do either of them realistically believe they can get away with this at this point?
I think in H.R.’s case, it’s fairly clear that he’s far gone enough that logic and reason just aren’t a factor in his decisions anymore. As for Carol, I’d venture a guess that she’s pretty desperate to keep what’s happening in the basement under wraps, and it’s not as though she can undo this murder.
H.R.’s reaction to me was a two-parter. First, surprise and revulsion. Second, “well what did you THINK was going to happen when the guy got caught?”
HR has already gone over in the mad scientist phase. Nothing can come between him and his work. As for the woman, she just doesn’t want to go to jail for the illegal stuff she’d been doing before this event. Now she feels like she’s in too deep. Besides, HR is the only person who can get the five out, from her perspective. This is one life to save 5. It’s easy to rationalize her motivations at this point because no matter what, if she’s caught, she’s going to jail for a very long time. Aside from all that, if HR was willing to kill this guy, what does she think he’ll do if she tries to bail on him now?
Well, in my opinion, H.R. has been isolated for so long that he probably did become a bit disconnected from reality. I believe they call it “cabin fever”. Normally this wouldn’t be enough on its own to drive a person ’round the bend, but when you’re also keeping a deep, dark secret that you absolutely don’t want an authority – like, say, the government – to get its hands on, which you could be locked up and have your company shut down for…
Murder might seem like the more reasonable option.
Carol on the other hand reminds me strongly of Portal’s Caroline (and, interesting name similarity there); she’s extremely devoted to her job, and not only to hang on to her employment. Likely, she is also devoted to her job to that degree because on some subconscious level she’s fairly empathic and cares about what happens to H.R. and/or the Five. At minimum, she probably consciously wants to make sure H.R. doesn’t do something… crazier to them or himself, or anyone else.
Which at this point, he now has, and the horror, shock and revulsion of how things have escalated and gone out of control is now seriously getting to her. She’s doing her best, but in the long run this is probably going to give her some kind of PTSD, especially if things keep don’t stop happening.
Also consider the fact that this came down on Carol extremely suddenly. IMO there is a good chance that she would have snapped and gone to the police about this, or at least not dumped the body herself iff she actually had time to properly digest the shock. Her mind is numb and she’s just flipped over into ‘frantic assistant mode’ once again without thinking about it, this time worse than before.
I’m reminded of the “Re-animator” movies. Carol has become the reluctant lab assistant too scared to put a stop to the mad scientist.
hooo boy, yeah…poor thing. mayhaps she’ll be the one to finally have a moral crisis and end it? I just don’t see it happening though O.o
I guess HR keeps bodybags next to the hacksaw. That is a man who plans for every situation.
I’m beginning to wonder if HR really went home just to have ‘a shower’…
Why cut him up only to put all parts in one bag? The idea of cutting up murder victims is to hide the parts seperately so it’s less suspicious than hauling a heavy, human-sized bag around.
The pieces will fit in a smaller bag than the whole person. A stiffening corpse doesn’t fold well.
They’ll separate once they’re in the ocean. And really, she doesn’t want to be hacking apart a corpse on the beach; the privacy might not last long enough.
Also, smaller pieces are more likely to be carried off whole by ocean predators and scavengers. I’m also reasonably sure that’s a gym bag, not a body bag, so yeah, smaller space.
It just struck me how it is all going to go down. The journalist (from way back) is going to see that Ferris went missing and falsely assume (well half-falsely assume) that Ferris was killed because he let her in. And the resulting guilt/curiosity will be like having large amounts of honey in front of a dire-bear.
Ladies and gentleman, this might just be the climax of the real-world story arc.
Why did I expect H.R. to help her?
He did help her, by cutting up the body and putting it in a nice carry-bag for her (remember, she’s the one helping him, not the otherway around)
Damn Girl! Got some muscles! That is a long way to throw a bag!
Dumping bodies is such a drag.
Ha!
I don’t think you’re realizing the weight of this situation!
This may be the first time I’ve been really intrigued with Sepia World that I don’t want to go back to the guildies just yet…but something tells me we will next page… :/
I don’t know why but it’s this page that made me just want to lie down on my side and cry. That this is happening in Sepia World just makes me feel like everything’s ruined and nothing is ever going to be alright.
Don’t worry Ran, I’m sure the police will never manage to build a solid case.
For a moment, I thought that sentence was going to end with “I’m sure Phil and T will come up with something worse” and was torn between wanting it with a need like burning and gross sobbing into denial. But your answer’s damn good, too, and I’m reminded why you’re one of my favorite commenters.
Sorta feel the same here; it’s all genuinely horrible. Especially since I feel Carol didn’t deserve this</em to happen. On the upside though … I think they're capturing the horrible suddeness of the situation quite well, so it's all cool. And the captain probably is right! Also, uhm… the story can't get simpler from here on out… or something? OK, I am actually having a hard time being positive about this.
Aaand I get to make the stupidestest markup typo. Now I’m really depressed.
Maybe it’s a sign to change your screenname to PaintextMan?
*slow clap*
Rule one of transporting bags: NEVER OPEN THE BAG. Plausible deniability.
Looks like she opened it to either confirm it was Ferris (although, it would have been better to have done that during pick up) or more likely to dispose of the parts (although she really should be wearing gloves, not to protect against leaving fingerprints/DNA but because, you know, handling body parts!!)
“You looked at the package?”
Looks like he wont be singing “Twist and Shout” on parade floats anymore…
Someone is going to be needing a nother bath soon, this time with plenty of lye soap (and no, that was not a pun)
And yet it is!
The final tagging of Carol, Ferris.
I realize that with this dramatic of a strip my takeaway should be something of serious importance.
But no, thanks to the call for guest strips, it’s the Aladdin marketplace scene. “Fresh Fish! We catch ’em, you buy ’em!”
Thanks. :)
Whoa! This is a real place. Real Car Real shampoo Real Fast Food bags Real Cliff. It is in Bixby Canyon in Big Sur California. I used to live in Garrapata Canyon. It took me awhile to recognize it. She is Dumping the corpse at a turn off just south of the bridge. It is 300 miles South of Los Angeles. Is that where Huricane Software is? Go to Google Maps. Enter 27496 California 1 Monterey, California. Zoom into street view. Use directional arrows to turn the view around. The view in the cartoon is from above the road so it doesn’t exactly match the picture from the Google truck. Pretty close.
Wait, wait. 300 miles south of Los Angeles? Wouldn’t that be in Mexico?
John (? probably both do?) Waltrip likes to use really locations as template as he mentioned (at least) once before. That being said: Nice to know where this is from – in our world.
Well… that all escalated quickly.
I feel like we need some flash back montage with internal monologue to explain how the Carol of the reporters case history transformed morally into a being capable of going along with this? (she probably thought she was saving those people up till recently??)
Yeah I know he’s threatening to drag her down with him but if she immediately goes to the police saying he killed some guy and giving evidence I’m sure she can have her multiple kidnapping sentences reduced. (and hopefully kept at just kidnapping when unplugging them kills them too) I feel this is a cut your losses moment that someone as intelligent as Carol would recognize during the hour or so it probably took to get dressed, get back to the company, load the body and get all the way out here.