Annotated 48-52
FB: This approach is understandable but not recommended, no matter how frustrating it is to try to find your company’s human resources department.
I don’t know if this is just me or not, but I got a big tension-breaking laugh out of panel 3. All that guilt tormenting Carol, all that paranoia, all those efforts to prepare, and suddenly she’s like “OH SHIT I OVERSLEPT AND TODAY’S THE FINAL EXAM AND WHERE THE HELL DID MY CAR KEYS GO??” ICYMI, she’s searching or grabbing for her own gun on that table, which Xan holds up in panel 4.
We had various alternate versions of this part. Two of them involved Xan posing as a Hurricane employee who’d lost his badge, distracting the security guards inside the grounds. We decided Carol couldn’t spring for that level of security without attracting even more scrutiny, and we really needed Xan to play off Shanna and Carol…but here are a couple of unpolished drafts of that idea. One errs more on the side of action, the other on the side of comedy.
PAGE TEN
1. In a two-point perspective, two guards are checking in with Carol on the left while Shanna and Xan slip into a darkened room on the right, with a bend in the hallway ensuring that one side is invisible to another.
2. The two guards are now back out in the hall, waiting for the elevator.
GUARD 1
Sure, boss, we’ll sweep the lower floors again even though you banned all the employees from working late… Nooo, boss, you’re not paranoid at all…
GUARD 2
Dude, that’s sexist.
3.The guards have gotten into the elevator and its doors are closing. At the very edge of the frame, out of the guards’ line of sight, Shanna is advancing forward.
GUARD 1
Look, “dude,” you need to–
4. Shanna has her back to the wall and gun drawn as she stands near an illuminated doorway. She is ready for action, with none of the uncertainty that marked her first encounter with JJ. She hopes she won’t have to fire her gun here, but if the need arises, she won’t hesitate.
5. Shanna quickly turns into the doorway and takes aim, only to find Carol’s hand in the foreground, taking aim at her.’
Version Two:
PAGE FIVE
1, A flashback scene of the “Sepia Five” in a hotel room bleeds into Shanna hiding behind a corner with guards on the other side, who are talking to the open door to Carol’s office.
LIA
There are guards on the inside too?
LIA
How much shareholder money can Masters waste?
SHANNA
Less than I feared. My source says she’s only hired two on the inside–she’s worried about secrecy, no doubt.
SHANNA
Safe bet they check in with her every so often.
2. Xan holds up a phone in the flashback, bleeding into Xan planting the phone in a room behind the guards as they make their rounds.
XAN
I’ll set this anonymous phone’s alarm to go off shortly after I’ve planted it somewhere out of Carol’s earshot and in the guards’.
XAN
It’ll look like some staffer just forgot theirs, but investigating it will keep them away for a bit in case Shanna needs to get loud.
3. Full flashback. Xan makes eye contact with Chrissie, but turns his head slightly away from her as if fighting the urge to look away. The longer they know each other, the more difficult it is for him to ask her to take this risk.
XAN
Still, one more time… you know there’s a serious arrest risk here.
XAN
For all of us.
XAN
If–
CHRISSIE
I’m a black trans woman, Xan. I know what I’m risking.
CHRISSIE
For Kaye, and for everyone else.
CHRISSIE
Make it worth it.
4. Silent panel, present day. Shanna is approaching the door to Carol’s office, her gun drawn, ready as she can be to face anything on the other side.
PAGE SIX
1. Shanna comes in and finds Carol slumped over her desk with an empty glass and knocked-over bottle on it. She looks drunken into a stupor or worse. Shanna doesn’t drop her gun and doesn’t quite drop her guard, but the shock on her face is evident: she was not expecting this.
SHANNA
C-Carol?
2. Carol springs into life, lifting her head and picking up the gun that was hidden under her body on the desk. She’s really drunk, though, so the principal danger she represents is that her gun might go off by accident.
CAROL
HA!
CAROL
Didn’t expect me to GUN, DIDJA?
CAROL
I’M NOT SOME LAME-O JOR-EL LOSER! I’M VENGEANCE GODDESS!
CAROL
You try to blow up my world, I’MA SHOOT YOU IN THE NOSE!
3. Shanna arches an eyebrow. She has not lowered her own gun as she assesses Carol’s level of inebriation. Carol gets pissy in reply, resorting to physical (borderline-sexual) insults as she so often does to diminish Shanna in her own mind.
SHANNA
Maybe this’ll be easier than I thought.
CAROL
DO I LOOK EASY TO YOU, YOU CHEAP TRAMP?
SHANNA
No.
4. Shanna looks at us levelly, gun raised high enough to fire immediately if necessary. Her face, though, betrays her belief that she won’t have to fire a single shot.
SHANNA
The word I’d use is “haunted.”
SHANNA
Everything I said to your face that day is still true, Carol.
SHANNA
And your hands are shaking too much to aim.
“Take you to Human Resources? Couldn’t you just have followed the signs?”
I think of Chrissie more as a sepia trans woman.
We *know* Chrissie is BIPOC, because of her appearance in QUILTBAG, but that’s sure hard to miss in this comic. In that light, it’s of interest that Bandit Keynes is the ultimate white bread.
Being a gnome, she’s still a member of an oppressed minority group.
Are you saying that gnomes are victims of Apartheight?
There’s definitely a lot of humans who think lowly of them.
Although it’s been brought up a few times, I still think of Chrissie as female, full stop. For some reason I keep forgetting that she was not assigned female at birth, but the way she’s shown here, except in that one flashback (which is somewhat ambiguous), there’s nothing that indicates to me that her gender was ever in question.
Which I suppose Chrissie wouldn’t mind at all :)
Xan’s quote is so memorable here. And still so apt.