Endtown by Aaron Neathery for November 30, 2016

It wasn’t the ship’s computer that turned evil for no reason… was it, Holly?

Well, I got one right.

Ohhhh…

Attention to detail: Holly has to sit on a stack of books to reach the desk. : )

Signed, the Ship’s Computer. (Hah! Holly’s in a pod in the cargo hold getting her life sucked away. Where do you think she’d get paper from?)

A Dear Wally Letter.

The ship give her everything what she need if she stay. And who could blame her, to change lifetime for a good life after the horror she has been gone through. But we know she lives and there is nothing lost. We hope for a comeback soon ;)

How sad for Wally, but leave him free to love Kirbee.I will miss Holly a lot. It may have happened this was how she balanced out what bad she did, and so she can finally forgive herself.If you find yourself still married with a cute child can change lives.Wally loved her so much,but Kirby can make him think of happy things and make him happy even tho nothing happens much BTW.Cuddles and nuzzlers great. But not so much for Holly it looks like somehow she was able to fix Lynn and the dead fish baby, looks like she has somehow helped reduce them, and are now both both changed back and not dead,the kid looks like her.

It’s the opposite of Cat’s in the Cradle.. this time the mouse is on the moon..

The chase that began on the bridge in Endtown… ends here? Something tells me Wally is not really open to accepting that. I have postulated “The Menagerie” similarities before but that was a situation where neither of them had anything useful in their respective realities, so the illusion was a win for both. Lyn fits that bill here, but this is more like “The Cage” from Holly’s perspective. I still doubt things just end like this. ;-(

Either she’s gotten comfortable enough in her mouse body that she doesn’t need the illusion of going back to human form, or she’s keeping that form one last time for sentiment while she writes the letter and will go back to human when her goodbyes are done, to forget the mouse.

.

She’d told Wally on the bridge in Endtown to forget his old self because he couldn’t go back, but she didn’t know that she could go back. Wally can too, but he’s no longer that person and probably doesn’t want to be. She still wants to be the old Holly, who he doesn’t know, and probably doesn’t want to.

So where is she, really?

wow. I kinda got one right!

Notice the Pic of Holly and hubby on the wall behind her.Think she’s choosing the illusion of normalcy over the reality of the outside.

Holly is experiencing a dream world. What we can see in this strip is an illusion, but happy one. At first I thought she was going to be stuck in a pod and be subjected to nightmares – for the sake of fuelling the ship with emotional energy – for as long as her starved and dehydrated body would hold out before dying and rotting. Then when I saw it was a pleasant dream, I thought she would be happy at least, until her body died like all the rest of them. Finally, seeing today’s instalment, I understand now that she had enough emotional energy to be was sufficient to top up the last of the power the ship needed to get on its way. So the ship will not kill her. It needs her long-term. She will become its captain – maybe she already is. Aaron told me the Lucranian ships are powered by the psychic emotional energy of the captain, who has to spend periodic, limited sessions in an artificial world being put through scenarios of extreme emotion. This recharges the batteries. It does not necessarily kill the captain – that would be stupid. But it’s certainly not for the faint-hearted. So I guess that Holly now will be the captain of her own ship, and with her full consent she will submit herself to beautiful and horrible realities from time to time, in order to keep it going. It could be worse. But I’ll miss her. I hope we still get to see her.More than that – I hope she is happy. What am I saying? It’s only lines on paper. She isn’t real. …….. Sob

Is she leaving, or is this a Ditto trick?!?

“Look at me. I’m the mousy captain now.”

The Last Temptation of Holly.

This makes sense, Holly relieving her former life with her husband back then. Maybe she made a deal with the ship to relive that life in exchange for her highly emotional state to power the ship. That could explain why the ship left with her. Does this make her the new captain?

I reallllly wish there was a graphic novel compilation for this.

“I am the Captain of the Pinafore” “And a right good Captain too”

OMG OMG!!!There is no mutagenic virus. Wally is a cat, Holly is a mouse.They are both captains of ships. Wally is in one of the refueling holograms and Holly’s ship had paired with Wally’s to increase the available emotional energy for recharging.The emotions got to be too much and too real for Holly so she’s ‘bowing out’. With all the energy we’ve seen so far, the ships should have gone up in a quantum explosion when their batteries overcharged.

I would like to have gotten more information from the ship regarding there not really being a mutagen!

What is floating out the window next to Holly? Is it a clue?Because I need one.

If’n ya’all think that this clears things up – you don’t know Aaron…

What’s important is that Holly is gone. She was becoming my least favorite character (though she used to be one of my favorites)

Yeah yeah, everybody’s a critic….Does she have enough stuff to sit on??

OMG! I need to stop trying to guess what is going to happen next. Aaron goes places I can never think of! And it is all FANTASTIC!

“Signed…” “Little Girl”

“for both our sakes” sounds like Holly has been threatened with dire consequences for both if she attempts to leave and reunite with Wally. I don’t think Aaron will leave her there with tears running down her little cheeks, will he?

I suspect that the computer made her sign another “agreement” again. something like (you continue to feed me, and I will give you all this, or else)She doesn’t want Wally to get hurt fighting the computer, so this may not be the last we see of Holly.

This is….amazingly sad…

Hard to grasp trying to live in an illusion.

As Loki said at 2013 Comic Con, at the arena known as Hall H… “Swear your allegiance to me…and I will give you what you need.”

As a human, she was lactose intolerant. As a mouse, she’s able to eat all the cheese she wants, and she can run like the wind. Perhaps she’s keeping her mouse form because of the greater advantages.

The thing in the window is a suncatcher. “The Thing in the Window” is also a good title for an Edward Gorey story.

My keyboard is flooding!

:-(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

That’s… really selfish (and stupid) of Holly. They could have used the ship to save both themselves and Endtown. The dittos would have stopped going mad with enough emotional energy and they literally could have disappeared from the ever searching topsiders. I can’t get over how absolutely foolish Holly is being. She’s taking a literal illusion over the reality of being able to save hundreds of people who she KNOWS. This isn’t just about her and Wally anymore. She wanted to save Clyde so badly, and yet when handed the opportunity to do something, save people, on a silver platter, she denies it and instead strands Wally, Chic, and Kirby in the middle of nowhere with no direction. Unless she is going off to save Endtown right now, she’s really being horrible.

Well, at least I was right about Holly being in some kind of control.

I wouldn’t blame her for taking the dream over reality when reality is so bleak.

Holly finally got her ship together.

So long as Wally’s not saying to himself, “Oh, good, now I can pursue my relationship with Kirbee…”

I just noticed an interesting detail in the third panel. If you look closely at the picture of her and Lyn on the wall, you’ll see that Holly is in her mutated mouse form. Her nostrils are slanted and her arms are much shorter than her human arms were.

Always thought Holly was selfish. This proves it. Apologies if this upsets you. But hey, freedom of speech.

I’m curious about what Holly means in “for both our sakes.” I wonder if it isn’t related to the emotional damage she has carried for all these years since losing Lyn and her old life. I don’t believe she really faced up to who she was, what she did and what happened to her. She spent much of her first year in Endtown in the clock tower watching everybody from a distance. When she came down, she created the Holly we (some of us, at least) know and love. A loving helpful person who did her best for those around her. I think she wanted to believe that’s who she really was. I’m guessing the reality, that her life was just a lie came crashing down on her while imprisoned during the milk trial. She just didn’t know how to deal with it and she may have found it hard to tell Wally that the Holly he knew and loved wasn’t real.

I would love to think that she has found an opportunity to come to terms with herself and heal. I fear that she may just choose to live in an illusion that her old live in Hillside with Lyn never ended. The picture of her mouse self and Lyn suggests the latter.

I still wonder if the letter is really from Holly or if we are seeing yet another fake writing the letter.

And I hope there rescue kit comes with an English manual!

I enlarged the picture and Darwinskeeper is right, that appears to be Holly as her mouse self. Look at her arm. It’s too short for an adult human female and her two front teeth are all that’s visible of her smile. Because of her closeness to Lyn and the cropping of the picture her ears aren’t visible, but the rest of her appearance is still strongly mouse-like.