My take on this is that the first two panels show a young Atsali and her mother, and that her mother is referring to Castela in the third panel.
One thing that I notice: Atsali's family apparently had a room for her to go to and “push the red button”. Presumably, then, it's some sort of a safe-room or pushing the red button would somehow protect Atsali, and Atsali had been instructed on its use. What sorts of things were going on in her family's life to lead them to include such a thing in their family room?
Another thing I notice: the doorway in the last panel appears to be different from the doorway in the penultimate panel (though this could just be due to the vagaries of drawn artwork). So the action in the last panel could be at Atsali's house, or at the place where Castela is being experimented on, or some other place altogether. If it is a totally different location, then a lot could have happened in between those two panels.
Also, we know that Cricket's family and clan (or whatever sort of organisation Fae use) took part in the raid to free Castela. And here we see what appears to be Atsali's mother deciding to do something about Castela, and having had some sort of working relationship with those who created Castela. This makes it likely that Queen Foxglove knew, or at least knew of, Atsali's parents and possibly even of their daughter.
Years later, Cricket's parents send their own wayward daughter to the very school that Atsali and Castela are attending. Coincidence?
GlytchMeister wrote:And who in the world would A) have access to the paranormal world and B) want to draw from it to make weapons? Who would they use those weapons against? To fight paranormals or to outgun a normal military?
Lots of people probably have access to the paranormal world and would like to weaponise it. The Lanthian priests did both and made a chimera, though that didn't work out too great from their perspective. Law enforcement seems to have done something along that lines with vampires, judging from the FBI's hiring of Lily and Suzie and from Guidance's conversation with Georgette. Probably a good part of the MiB's job is to keep too much of that sort of thing from happening.
As for who they'd use it against: whomever they felt it would work against, I'd imagine. Many people wouldn't be too particular about such things after they'd managed to successfully make the weapons.
AnotherFairportfan wrote:Castela was, we have been specifically told, created to be a weapon against the fae, and, i think, the lab where she was created was destroyed..
Well, Cricket said that she was seen as a potential threat to the paranormal world and could hurt Fae. That's not necessarily the same as meaning that she was made intentionally to specifically target Fae, or even that she was made initially as a weapon at all (though it could very well be that she was developed as some sort of an antiFae critter). The Fae move against the lab could have been more preventative rather than preemptive.
oldmanmickey wrote:Well one thing for sure, the poor gun guy at the door is having a damn bad day.
Perhaps that's Atsali's dad come home, and that's just how his wife greets him at the door. Sort of a slightly more intense version of Hobbes meeting Calvin at the door after school.
Dave wrote:I think this flashback may be dated to maybe 5 years or so before Castela was actually born/created. Atsali here appears to be around the same age at which she was portrayed in the "Little Atsali" strips back in 2013. . . .
She looked quite a bit older when Castela first arrived in the orphanage.
At a guess... in this flashback Atsali's around six or seven? Castela is created/born/sprouted and then orphaned/abandoned about five years later, when Atsali is eleven or twelve?
If that's correct, Atsali's mother (and perhaps her father) may have been part of the original research team which was working on an anti-fae hybrid, but may not have played a direct role in the actual creation of Castela.
If I'd just gone through the trouble of removing a dangerous living weapon from a lab, I wouldn't immediately drop it off in an orphanage to run around loose with the kids there. There would likely have been a bit of an interval to make sure that Castela could socialise safely and wasn't going to go wild and kill everybody around her or anything unfortunate such as that. Castela might have been kept by the Fae for a while, or cared for by Mr. Meadows in seclusion. So if Atsali was orphaned when Castela was taken, then Atsali could have been at the orphanage several years before Castela was presented to her.
And I wonder if there was any particular reason why the two kids were put together in the orphanage? Was Atsali taking care of Castela intentional on somebody's part? And was Thana part of the whole thing, too, known by her or not?
TheOtherOne wrote:What? She couldn't have just knocked him out? If she's that powerful and quick enough to grab the gun. Maybe Paul's going for ratings.
Or she's a
very annoyed predator.
FreeFlier wrote:In this kind of (apparent) situation, you don't actually need complete silence . . . just to suppress the crack of the shot enough that bystanders don't recognize it as a shot. "Huh . . . what was that? . . . someone must have dropped something."
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There's another important reason why suppressors are often used that isn't so commonly referred to. If you're ever in a firefight in a small enclosed space (especially with automatic weapons), your conversation afterward is likely to go something along the lines of, “
HUH? WHAT? SPEAK UP! HUH?!?”. Having suppressors on your weapons helps alleviate that problem. They can be less about stealth and more about not leaving yourself dazed and deafened.
